The World Gives Way: A Novel Page 28
Simpson put the car in park, and an explosion of car horns offered its response. Tobias still had his hand on Simpson’s shoulder. He pulled Simpson into a hug, which Simpson allowed. The hug was stiff and unnatural, but Tobias held on anyway, because Simpson was someone he could touch, might be the last person he touched, ever, in his life. Simpson heaved a deep sigh that Tobias could tell was meant to keep tears at bay. He pulled away from Tobias, gripped him by both shoulders, and looked him in the eye.
“Take care, kid.” He gave Tobias a sad smile. Tobias pulled his bag from the back seat, unlocked the door, and swiftly exited the car before any bystanders had a chance to jump in. He watched Simpson relock it promptly and continue driving away. He kept his eyes on the portion of Simpson’s face he could see in the rearview until it too got lost in the crowd.
29
THE BORDER DESERT
When creating an artificial world, it is important to hide all wires and scaffolds, to tuck the seams behind the backdrops. It was important, especially for that first generation who left the old world behind, that this place should really feel like an open-air landscape and not a tin can people were trapped in. To prevent the potential claustrophobia, the designers of the world (the ship) created the Border Desert, which, as the name suggests, borders the landscape of the world on all sides and puts an inhospitable environment between the population of the world and the walls of the horizon. This way the horizon would feel ever distant, the way it was meant to be.
The desert itself is simply sand. Lots and lots of sand. Due to the natural weather patterns that have formed in the ship (the world), these outer regions also experience high wind levels and low precipitation. It is a harsh place. Though it is meant to keep people out, a few scattered, stubborn people do homestead among the dunes. One thing that is true about humanity: there will always be those who push the limits of stability and survival just to say they can. They scale the unscalable mountains, they dive to the impenetrable depths, they love the unlovable person, they will live in the unlivable desert.
The dunes themselves are something of a draw for the occasional survivalist tourist. Each hill and crest, formed in a wavelike shape by the turning winds, is built upon sands of blue, green, white, and brown. Thus the desert itself, at a distance, actually looks more like waves on a sea than mounds of sand. There is a very utilitarian reason for the unusual colors: when designers were tasked with producing miles and miles of sand, the most practical and economic way to do it was to grind up glass. Billions of wine, beer, soda, and water bottles, not to mention the occasional discarded car window or mirror, were transformed into grains of sand, which forever altered the glass from something with sharp and slicing edges to something pillowy and soft. Different-colored pieces of glass often have different masses, so, over time, with the spinning of the ship and the winds that roiled around, the different grains of sand started separating and clustering into different colors on their own, forming monochrome dunes.
When the world gives way, not many people will die in this desert, because not many people live here. The grains of sand, however, will lift into the air and form funnels that swirl toward the sky. Once the atmosphere is gone completely, what sand is left inside the shell of the world will cluster into clouds; ice will crystallize and form around each grain. If you were to stand in the center of the desert at this time it would appear as if all around you, millions of snowflakes were swirling and falling upward in reverse.
Let’s examine that concept of reverse, because while the death of everything is in some ways tragic, there’s a magnificent feat we can bear witness to if we reverse the entropy of this moment and play time backward to the origin of an object. Take this thing floating around in the deadness of space, this tiny speck that looks like a snowflake. Twist back the hours, and the crystals of ice shrink backward toward a core, the core grain of sand drifts back toward the shell of the ship. The ship mends itself, which is something too, but let’s keep our eye on the sand. The grain of sand rests itself back on the tip of a mighty green dune, and over a century the dune collapses and the grain of sand sifts back in with a multitude of other grains, until the sand has traveled back through space and is back on the old world, the single grain rises in an arc back into a landscaping truck, which reverses back to a recycling factory where the grain was once ground up. The grain meets its brothers and, speck by speck, reassembles into a beer bottle, which in turn refills and returns to a bar somewhere outside Cincinnati and is redeposited into the hands of a woman breaking up with her lover. And that is the miracle of time, how a bottle of Rolling Rock can travel from a dive in Cincinnati through space, through light years, through forms and functions, to one day become a snowflake in a distant galaxy.
30
MYRRA
Myrra raced away from the hostel and Rachel’s bloody, angry face, her mind alight with desperate possibility. Rachel had mentioned a word: escape. It was easy enough to jump from there to the notion that there was a way off this world. A shuttle, perhaps? Cryogenic freezing of bodies?
Sure, nobody had ever made the freezing thing work; Marcus used to laugh at the sci-fi shows she watched while cleaning and show her hard data, calling her stupid. But maybe they’d worked something out, now that the world was on the line.
And sure, Rachel had then said that everyone was going to die, but what did she know, really? A petty woman, stewing in anger and self-loathing. She could just as easily be wrong as be right.
And sure, Myrra also thought about Imogene and Marcus. If there had been any hope of escape, any chance of them buying their way to survival, why would they have jumped? But there was always the chance that this was a survival plan that had been concocted after they died. A chance.
There would be no escape for her, she knew. But Charlotte belonged to the rarified classes. She was the heir of the Carlyles, the richest of the rich. If Annie qualified for whatever this was, surely Charlotte did. Then even if Myrra died, at least her death would have been for good. At least Charlotte could go on and on.
She knew believing in this was all wrong. It was crazy. But Kittimer was falling apart; she had nowhere left to go where she wouldn’t be surrounded by desperate, panicked people. She needed something to chase. Myrra hung her hopes on something thin as string, fragile as a fly wing. She hung her hopes on a word. Escape.
If there was any chance that people were leaving the world, they would have to head toward the hull of the ship. Myrra didn’t know the geography of the world in great detail, but she knew that to get to the edge of the world, you had to go through the Border Desert.
The dunes started small at first, then increased in size until there were some as tall as a three-story building. Myrra followed narrower and narrower roads out of Kittimer until eventually the only road left was a hard dirt path labeled “Service Road,” which wove in and out between the dunes, deeper into the desert beyond.
The road curved constantly, surrounding her with hills of sand so tall it was impossible to see what was beyond each turn. Gusts of wind came at them from one side and then the other, constantly changing direction. An hour into the drive, Charlotte fell asleep with the sound of the motor; Myrra could feel the vibrations of her snores against her chest, even if she couldn’t hear them over the din of the scooter and the howling wind. Hours and hours of driving, and all she saw was more crests of barren sand, in alternating shades of blue, green, brown, and white. She’d never seen such sand. It was a landscape to get lost in.
Day stretched out longer when the surroundings were as repetitive as this. It might have been wishful thinking, but the sun looked a little lower in the sky. Myrra was starting to doubt her decision to come out here. The desert hadn’t seemed this big from the top of the mountains. Maybe the road had curved sideways; Myrra’s aim had been to drive directly away from Kittimer toward the horizon, but the road could have turned somewhere, maybe she was traveling parallel to the mountains; there was no way to tell. But this was the only ro
ad she’d found. So she continued.
A motor sounded out in the distance, ahead of her somewhere, getting louder and closer. Myrra stopped the scooter and felt around for the knife she had stashed in her bag just as a truck emerged from behind the nearest dune. It was a utility vehicle of some kind with a canvas roof. Just one man inside, wearing denim coveralls, a wild, panicked look in his eye. He didn’t even stop as he passed, but yelled out the window, “We’re all fucked! What’re you going that way for?”
The truck disappeared behind her, and she stayed still, listening to the sound of the engine as it grew softer and softer, dissipating until it blended into the sound of the wind. On one hand, she was relieved that the man had kept driving—she didn’t want trouble. But on the other, he could have offered her some guidance, told her what to expect, how long the road was at the very least. And if she was honest with herself, she would have liked a little conversation to break up the monotony.
The sun was definitely getting lower now. And as Myrra turned another corner, a surprise: just ahead, a tall metal structure, gleaming impossibly in the sun. It was simple enough, just two thick metal poles, each about ten meters tall, propping up a catwalk that passed over the road. Myrra stopped at the base of one of the poles and stared up at it as though it were an alien being. She couldn’t discern its purpose. A sign hung off the edge of the catwalk on one side. It read “Checkpoint 4.” Myrra wondered where she could find Checkpoints 1, 2, and 3.
She found a ladder on the opposite side. Leaving her bag and the scooter behind, and checking to make sure Charlotte was still safely tied tightly around her, she climbed up until she emerged on top of the catwalk. From up here, she understood. This must have been a watch post.
Up here the desert unfurled before her with layers and layers of color, blues, greens, hints of white and brown, each dune cresting behind another like a wave on a sea. Myrra imagined a boat cutting through the sand, sending up showers of white like sea foam. It wasn’t a boat she’d ever seen in person, but rather one she’d seen in a painting Marcus kept in his office. Instead of an engine on the back, the boat had sheets tied to it, stretched out on three tall poles that towered up from its decks.
Marcus had caught her staring at the painting one day when she was supposed to be dusting. “Do you know what that is?”
“No,” she answered truthfully.
“It’s a very old type of boat, from the old world; it’s called a frigate. This was a ship in the British navy seven hundred years ago.”
Myrra rolled the word over in her head: frigate. It sounded like machinery.
He pointed over her shoulder at the blotch of black paint that was meant to be the boat: “The ships themselves were made of wood, and these”—he raised his finger to gesture to the squares of white—“these are the sails.”
Marcus was in professor mode. Myrra ventured a question.
“What are the sails for?” she asked. They were such a dominant part of the thing. The ship seemed more sail than anything else.
“They catch the wind,” he said. Myrra couldn’t fathom how that would be useful to a ship. Marcus walked around to stand beside her, pushing his face close to the painting, his eyes poring over the brushstrokes. This was about a year and a half before his suicide, so he was still calm and collected, no sweat soaking through his shirts.
He glanced sideways at Myrra, and she must have looked confused, because he elaborated: “The sails catch the wind the way a kite would—you’ve seen the ones in the park before?”
Myrra nodded.
“Well, they catch the wind, and the wind pushes them forward, like a kite, and then the sailors angled the sails so that the wind pushed them in the direction they wanted to go.” He nodded and smiled at her, satisfied in his own knowledge.
“That sounds like a lot of work.”
“It was.” Marcus’s eyes turned and rested once more on the ship. “It must have been a glorious time to be alive.”
Myrra nodded, though she privately disagreed. Marcus often expounded on the glories of the past, but it seemed to Myrra that the past involved a lot of tasks that took longer and involved a lot more complications than in the present. In Myrra’s experience, working harder for a thing didn’t necessarily make it more rewarding. A pie wasn’t better baked if she’d had to spend half a day making the dough from scratch. She’d take a boat with a motor any day.
Charlotte cried out and wriggled against her, breaking Myrra’s train of thought. She was squinting, and she kept turning her head this way and that—the wind was much harsher up high than it was down near the ground.
“Shhh… I’m sorry, sweetie,” Myrra cooed, and she adjusted the scarf to hide Charlotte’s face. Then she climbed back down, leaving the imaginary boat on its imaginary sea.
Later, as the scooter puttered along and the sky grew darker, Myrra kept thinking about sails. She remembered the diagram on Marcus’s computer: in all the bits of terminology, Myrra remembered seeing the phrase solar sails. Myrra couldn’t begin to imagine how those sails worked in space, but she did like the comparison. Her world was a frigate too, just like the one in the painting, bobbing up and down in an uncertain sea.
Myrra came across three bodies on the side of the road, two men and a woman. Stopping to investigate, she saw that the sand was overtaking two of them, only their shoulders and heads visible. Their clothes were in tatters, covered in grease stains, and their skin looked so sallow that Myrra immediately imagined the smell of rotten milk. They were unnaturally thin—Myrra could see their bones protruding—and their skin flaked away on their lips. Must have died of thirst, Myrra thought.
Their arms reached out down the road, toward Kittimer. They had been traveling in the opposite direction, she realized. Wherever she was headed, that’s where they’d escaped from. It was possible her destination was just as dangerous as what she’d left.
Myrra looked ahead on the uncertain road and then looked down again at the bodies, at the pale skin on their faces. They must have looked dead even when they were alive.
She got back on the scooter and kept driving. If there was an escape plan, where were all the others heading to the hull? Possibly there were other roads.
Thoughts like this terrified her, but whatever awaited them, Myrra felt it was inevitable now, as if her path were on rails: no alternate routes, no reversing course.
There were places where the road grew treacherously narrow, where the slopes of sand on either side encroached and threatened to swallow the path completely. It felt to Myrra like a smaller version of what was happening with the hull of the world: slowly and inevitably, the universe was seeping in.
Near sunset, Myrra felt another earthquake shudder under the wheels of the scooter. The quake was small and didn’t last long, but Myrra was astonished to see a dune she passed collapse on one side, the sand cascading down in a tiny stream at first, and the stream then getting larger and wider, falling faster as it barreled toward the bottom. By the time everything settled it had taken out a third of the road behind them. The dunes were magnificent, but they were lying in wait to swallow her up.
It was getting cold, and it was getting dark. The wind felt especially wicked. Myrra decided to make camp by the side of the road, in a small wedge of space between two hills, where the wind felt a little lighter. She sat Charlotte down on the ground next to the scooter and dug into the bag, looking for diapers.
Charlotte began shivering the second Myrra sat her down. She didn’t have Myrra’s body keeping her warm; they needed something to battle the cold. They needed a fire. She had a lighter, but nothing flammable. It hadn’t really occurred to her before, but it was probably deliberate on the part of the government, to keep wood and paper scarce. If the world was one big closed system, large fires could be disastrous.
Myrra looked around her for a twig, dried leaf, anything, but all she saw was sand. She rifled through her backpack: some of the clothes she’d stolen from Imogene might do, silk would probably
burn, and the wool sweaters. From the outside pocket she pulled out her Gertrude Stein book, and she felt a stab through her heart at the thought of burning it. But Charlotte was shaking, and the temperature was only going to drop more as the night wore on.
She would just burn part of the book, for survival’s sake. Each page tearing felt like a death, and she couldn’t tell if her eyes burned from the wind or her grief or both, but no one was around to see her cry anyway. There would be no one around to judge.
The flames caught, and with the scooter propped up to provide a little shelter, the fire kept burning. She fed in a couple of Imogene’s sweaters, for more fuel. Myrra pulled out the thick green blanket she’d stolen back in Kittimer and wrapped it around her and Charlotte. She was asleep within seconds.
The fire only lasted half an hour before the wind changed. Myrra woke to Charlotte crying—grains of sand pelted her face like a swarm of stinging insects; it was impossible to see. Myrra felt around for Charlotte and realized she was still lying next to her. She held her close and tried to shield her face from the worst of the storm around them, tucking her into her shirt. Myrra raised the blanket—it nearly flew out of her hands as it caught the wind, but she held on tight—tied two of the corners to spokes on the scooter, and weighed down the other corners with bottles of water, whatever she had that was heavy, trying to create a tent. Charlotte screamed against her shoulder, the sand assaulting them from all sides. She let go of the blanket and sat back to see if it would hold; the fabric billowed and bucked against the wind, but the knots held firm. Then, dumping whatever clothes she had onto the ground under the blanket, she climbed in, pulling Charlotte inside with her. It was the tiniest pocket of shelter, but it kept the wind out and a little heat in. Myrra thought of their little fire, now reduced to ash buried in the sand. That was half of her book, gone. And for what?