Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 7

ABBY.

I feel so alone, so lost and confused.

I certainly hope I don't get abused!

The front doors popped open and out pranced two younger Federicos playing the older Federicos who'd greeted Abby upon her arrival a few days prior. They hurriedly dressed the stage Abby in the bunny outfit as stage elements rolled into new configurations, forming a mirror-image version of the auditorium they now occupied. Her back to the real audience, the Abby onstage addressed a painted backdrop of faces as a staticky, poorly recorded laugh track guffawed.

ABBY.

You've got me mistaken for someone else! I'm here to see the archives!

After which she collapsed, was dragged stage left by a Federico, and dumped on a bed on rollers. Ominous music! From the rafters, on wires, descended a Federico made up corpse-like, costumed in billowing white organza.

ISAAC.

Hey, baby. Show me a little skin.

Stage Abby woke with a start.

ABBY.

Who are you? What is this place?

ISAAC.

I'll tell you all the secrets of the Seaside Love Palace if you flash me a nip.

There followed an industrial-metal number in which the ghost of Isaac Pope, joined by the ghosts of other dot-com CEOs, sang about rounds of financing, server farms, and the importance of accepting cookies and clearing one's cache when encountering a technical problem. Then, with barely a transition, stage Abby sang a duet with a Federico costumed as Kylee, to the great amus.e.m.e.nt of the audience. There was a death scene with the suicidal Federico, who took his life via this house's preferred method of Red Bull/Mountain Dew OD. There were several Kylee costume changes. It seemed to the spectator Abby, shocked at watching events of her own recent experiences poorly dramatized, that the dramaturge had run out of time and lost control of the mise-en-scene, resorting to cramming scenes together with little transitional tissue. Unpracticed players blew lines and missed cues. The orgy sequence erupted in a chaotic whirl of puppetry and full-body nude-colored suits. There was the arrival of the baby Federico-all of it hurried, half-a.s.sed, blurry with a score that couldn't figure out what time signature it wanted to be in. Then came the scene that had happened little more than an hour before, with a Federico playing the wheelchair-confined archive whispering the transcript into a microphone. Federico-as-Kylee appeared and summoned her to the theater. A chaotic reshuffling of scenery later, Abby now watched her avatar watching a puppet version of the performance she had just seen. The same meeting with Bickle, the boat ride, the dressing up as a bunny, ghostly visitations, dance numbers, etc., except at half the previous scale. In this iteration even more lines were blown, even more cues missed, even more dramatic corners cut, the action sped up to an amphetamine hum as the Federicos in the orchestra pit sawed madly at their stringed instruments, everything faster, miniaturized, coming to the point in the story again when the puppet version of Kylee summoned Abby to the theater, upon which an even smaller puppet theater appeared within the first puppet theater. Abby could barely make out the little figures dancing within. Finally, the spectator version of Abby, overcome with nausea, turned to Kylee and asked, "How do I make it stop?"

"It's easy, young thing," Kylee smiled, snapping her fingers. "You wake up in a field."

Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 2.

How you feeling this morning, Luke?

I'm okay. Ready.

When we last spoke we ended with your discovery of Nick's father's shop.

That was the summer after I graduated from high school. I was supposed to go to college in the fall but decided against it. I was still living in the VW van in the muddy yard outside Star and Nick's shack. I used a little camp stove to make oatmeal and boil water for ramen. After I discovered the contents of the shed, I spent hours in there looking over the blueprints Nick's dad left behind. And I decided to start cleaning the place up. I took the seats out of the van and made trips to the dump, hauling away all the garbage that had acc.u.mulated around the property. I cleared brush, swept out the shed, and cleaned the tools. With some of my life insurance money I bought a few tons of gravel and had it poured down the driveway and on the muddy ground outside the house. It became a full-time job, maintaining that place.

What was Nick doing when you- He decided to call Dirk Bickle. He'd saved the card from the science fair. Since they didn't have a phone, Nick walked to a gas station one day and called the guy on a pay phone. Apparently Bickle told him a car would show up for him the following week and they'd put him on a plane to the Bay Area. He'd live on a campus, get all meals and expenses paid, and pull in a salary of $30,000 a year. This blew our minds. It was a lot of money at the time. All Nick had to do was come up with new inventions.

What was the organization called?

We didn't know at that point. They said Nick had to commit before they really told him anything of substance. That afternoon after the call Nick walked up the driveway in a daze. I was chopping wood and I stopped and asked what had happened. He told me about the conversation and looked at me sort of embarra.s.sed. Of course I was happy for him, we celebrated with a bottle of wine, but part of me couldn't help noting how much our fortunes had reversed. Just a few months before I had been the kid bound for college and success and he'd been the one with no future. Nick made up his mind, he had to see where these shadows and secrets led. And I think, too-this is just my theory-that he looked at what his old man had been trying to accomplish-some kind of crazy speculative civil-engineering project-and realized that his dad had never had the chance to develop it to the fullest. Now Nick could pick up where he had left off. What were Nick's prospects? He could have stuck around Bainbridge and worked at McDonald's. He could have moved to Seattle and become a street punk. He hadn't even bothered applying to colleges. He left himself with the options of a life of poverty or plunging into something cool and mysterious. Who wouldn't have made the same decision?

So a week pa.s.sed and sure enough here came a taxi, rolling up to that little shack. Bickle climbed out, walked across the yard, knocked on the door. Star asked that she speak to him and Nick together, alone, so I went out to my van and probably buried my nose in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. About an hour and a half later, they came out. Star had been crying. Nick carried a duffel bag, that was it. I hugged him for a long time. He pulled me in tight and said I was a brother to him. Then he got in the cab and left.

Star didn't cope well with Nick leaving?

Not at all. She was a serious mess. I had to convince her to eat. I kept telling her Nick would visit soon, that he was going to become really successful, etc. Nothing consoled her. I spent the next couple weeks getting the place in order. I mowed, weeded the garden, rented a high-pressure sprayer and blasted the moss off the exterior of the shack, then repainted it. Mostly, though, I spent time on the beach where my house used to be. Sometimes I found things that had belonged to us, burped up from Puget Sound. One of my mom's shoes washed up with the tide, a spatula, the kind of guitar pick my dad used. This slow distribution of broken objects teased me in little bursts almost too painful to bear. I found a Strawberry Shortcake doll with my sister's initials on it, wedged between two pieces of driftwood. Shards of a bowl I remembered from our kitchen. I went there every day sifting through whatever the tide brought, collecting what used to belong to my family in plastic milk crates I stole from behind Safeway. Worse, on the spot where my house once stood a new house was rising. I'd gotten the proceeds from the sale of the land, sure, but the sudden appearance of new construction offended me. Within a few months the place was finished and a new family with three kids moved in. Around that time the tides stopped bringing tokens of my family's existence. Winter was on its way.

We received letters from Nick every couple weeks. He wrote to us about all the things he was learning-chemistry, physics, heady theoretical stuff. We thought he sounded upbeat. He was surrounded by freakishly gifted people like himself for the first time in his life. One time he sent a picture of himself with some new friends at the Grand Canyon. Three geeks wearing gla.s.ses and Nick looking all goth with his jet-black hair in his face, but smiling. I missed him.

So when did- I know what you're going to ask. Coming here this morning I knew we'd be talking about it. Here's what happened. I had managed to clean the place up pretty well and this made Star happier. She joined a dance group for hippie women in town, started studying reflexology. And for the first time she talked to me about her husband, Marc, and about the construction accident that killed him, how she had discovered him with his head bent back at an impossible angle. On her birthday I surprised her with a cake and bought her a new dress. We were sitting in the shack, eating the cake, laughing about something, I don't know what, and I convinced her she should try the dress on. A few minutes later she came out of the bedroom wearing it. I told her she looked beautiful. It just came out, I wasn't even thinking. We stood there and felt this heavy, h.o.r.n.y moment and both of us seemed to get the same thought at the same time: Why not? Then we were kissing. My mouth behind her ear. I lifted her up, carried her into the bedroom. I'd never touched skin this old with l.u.s.t before and the strangeness and beauty of it pulled me inward, into this s.e.xual place I'd been unaware of. All the girls I'd slept with up to that point, all those f.u.c.ks were about surface sensation. This was a longing that pa.s.sed through me like twine through a bead, tethered to some distant point in my past. I sucked her long nipples thinking, Nick fed from these and almost came. She smelled ripe, sweaty. She had hair under her arms and unshaved legs. I knew I could have as much of her as I wanted, that I'd be able to live here with her and f.u.c.k and f.u.c.k and f.u.c.k. She lay naked on the bed and opened her legs. Her l.a.b.i.a were larger than any I had ever seen, like something you'd find at a butcher shop. She spread them against her thighs like she was opening the covers of a book. I was in her, no protection, straining against a river of images in my head: the mud slide, blueprints, objects was.h.i.+ng up on the sh.o.r.e. When she came the first time she asked me to call her mommy. Everything about this was so wrong, it was precisely the worst thing to say but it was like she dragged a heavy, rusted chain out of my entangled guts. Grief so unbearable I thought I was being electrocuted. I unloaded in her, six or seven shotgun blasts of come.

How old was Star?

She would have been thirty-seven. Thirty-eight maybe.

So this became a regular thing.

Constantly. Sometimes four, five times a day. We did it in the woods a lot. On the roof of my van. In the shed with the blueprints. We lived in our own little erotic bubble. She turned me on to psilocybin mushrooms and we spent days tripping, naked, running around the property. I had unlimited money in the bank and all we really spent it on was groceries. Our own personal rabbit hole.

Did you ever talk about what Nick would think if he found out?

Yeah, but we were so naive about it. At least I was. We thought Nick would come home for Thanksgiving dinner and we'd inform him we'd become lovers. And that's basically how it went. I picked him up from SeaTac and it was as if we'd both expanded these weird corners of our personalities. He struck me as preppy, an Izod-s.h.i.+rt-wearing nerd with his hair cut short. No more b.u.t.thole Surfers concert Ts for him. And since he'd left I'd grown a big, gnarly beard. I was probably wearing Birkenstocks and Guatemalan-print shorts. When we saw each other at the gate, we both burst out laughing. On the way home he just blabbed about how cool the academy was, how he was learning about chaos theory and neural networks. I could tell he wanted to impress me. I kept having this uncomfortable thought that my parents would have been more proud of what Nick was doing than what I was doing. But I was cool with everything, asked a lot of questions, said "wow" a lot.

We'd had this plan, Star and I, to reveal our love to Nick during our Thanksgiving feast. Nick showed up the day before, so we had a whole day where we were going to supposedly keep it cool. So Nick comes home and his mom is crying, she's so happy to see him, and he gives her some chocolates he got in San Francisco, and we're all laughing and having a good time. Remember, the shack was small, one bedroom, and Nick had grown up sleeping on a futon they'd dragged out from behind the couch every night. So there's this awkward moment where Nick is standing with his luggage, looking around, trying to figure out where to put it, and Star blurts out, "You can sleep in our bed."

At first this sort of sails right over Nick's head and he says, no, no, the living room's cool, but his mom is grabbing his luggage and putting it in the bedroom. Since the place is so small, you can pretty much stand in the living room and see the entire bedroom. Nick is looking into the bedroom and he gets this weird expression. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get him to retell some story he told me on the way over. When I notice his face I follow his gaze and see that there's a pair of my underwear sitting on Star's bed. They're obviously my tighty-whiteys. Plus, uh, there's a big bottle of olive oil on the bedside table. And okay, this is ridiculous, I know, but a copy of the Kama Sutra. We're all quiet a second-Nick, his mom, me, underpants, lubricant, Indian s.e.x manual. Then Nick looks at me and says, "What the f.u.c.k is going on here?"

So Star, true to her flower-child roots, says something like, "We were going to tell you tomorrow during our feast-Luke and I have become lovers." And she goes on and on about how the age of a soul is different than the age of a body, like how our souls would be in the same grade if they went to school together, and Nick is standing there, looking aghast at my stained underwear, then at me, and he yells pretty much the only thing a guy in his position is capable of yelling at such a moment. "You're f.u.c.king my mom?"

Then it's my turn to get into the lovey-dovey-peace-brother talk and Nick isn't having any of it. There really isn't room to pace, so he sort of bounces between two walls. He keeps saying, "Dude! You're f.u.c.king my mom!" It doesn't help matters when Star says, "Please, Nick, call it lovemaking."

After that we went out to dinner. None of us spoke on the way to the restaurant. Mexican food. I tried to keep the conversation on Nick and what he was doing in his teenage think tank. He kept his answers short. Clearly he didn't know how to handle this development. Then he said it again, this time not so angry, just bewildered, "Dude, you're f.u.c.king my mom?"

You have to understand something about islands. The social psychology is different. And on Bainbridge there was this whole cadre of moms who were constantly up in everyone's business, formulating opinions about you all the time. So I can't overstate how devastating it was for Nick to say this in a busy, public place. You could almost visualize the whispered lines of communication flowing from table to table. And Nick wouldn't f.u.c.king shut up. He just kept saying it, emphasizing different words. "You are f.u.c.king my mom?" or "You are f.u.c.king my mom?" Imagine what it's like to be in the middle of a room of people pretending not to stare at you in silent, shocked judgment. And remember what I looked like and where I'd come from. Only a few months prior I'd been college-bound, l.u.s.ted after by the female half of my cla.s.s. An impeccable academic record and a solid reputation on the playing field. Now I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant wearing hippie clothes that hadn't been laundered in a month, attempting to grow dreadlocks, sporting a Jesus beard, having my s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p with the town's potentially mentally disturbed woman made very public. Within a week this cadre of in-everyone's-business moms had formed a narrative about what was going on between Star and me. It went like this: Luke Piper lost his family in a tragic accident and the unstable mother of his best friend took advantage of his grief by entering into a borderline-statutory-rape-type situation that wouldn't have been so borderline if he hadn't just turned eighteen. How sick was it that this unhinged woman was probably giving herpes to this poor, grieving boy who used to be Ivy League material? Keep in mind that these were the same women having affairs with members of the local clergy. The same ones who were drinking at 10 a.m. and downing pills but who had nonetheless been granted the supernatural ability to determine how other people should raise their children and live their lives.

Did anyone in the community confront you directly?

Of course not. Are you kidding? Someone wrote CRADDLE ROBBER on Star's mailbox. Cla.s.sic Bainbridge pa.s.sive-aggressive bulls.h.i.+t. They communicated their disgust through glares in the supermarket checkout line. It was a pretty miserable Thanksgiving. It rained real bad and the shack's roof got a nasty leak. It was the first Thanksgiving I hadn't spent with my family and you could have dropped me into an abandoned mine shaft and I would have felt about the same. Not to mention Star and I momentarily nixed the f.u.c.king. Nick and I barely spoke. Miserable.

I want to change the subject a minute and talk about this academy that Nick went to.

Sure. Turns out it did have a name-the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. Founded in the eighties in Silicon Valley with the first wave of software wealth. Supposedly headquartered in San Jose, more like an estate than a campus. Nick showed me a brochure. The place looked nice. They had about a dozen buildings, play fields, woods, a small organic farm. Only about a hundred students in attendance at a time, every one of them courted heavily by the Fortune 500 upon graduation. The place was supposedly an incubator for ideas and innovations that entered mainstream culture ten, twenty years later.

I was jealous. Doesn't every high school nerd wish that someone will discover his hidden genius? Nick was especially susceptible to this kind of thinking. But the more I thought about the academy the more it seemed like bulls.h.i.+t. So Nick builds some kind of contraption for a science fair and some guy in a business suit sees it and gives him a business card? That's all it takes? The place sounded too good to be true.

SKINNER.

Al Skinner, witness to the bloodiest wars forged by man's satanic imagination, presently feared forgetting his shoes. He kept his eye on them, brown Hush Puppies with Dr. Scholl's inserts, paired on the bedroom's spiral rag rug in his house in Scottsdale, Arizona. When you walked outside without your shoes in this neighborhood, you were on your way to a.s.sisted living. Sammy, a retired security contractor like Skinner, from two blocks over, had one morning walked without his shoes all the way to the combo Taco Bell/KFC. Later, at the country club, gray heads slowly shook and the mouth parts of those heads gummed the words, "They found him with no shoes on." Soon thereafter Sammy was ushered from this community of retired military personnel to a fortress of a.s.sisted living where one's brain wasn't expected to put on much of a show. Skinner didn't want to end up at one of those places, shoeless, separated from his wife, eating apple sauce and watching the Smiling People channel.

Her name, the wife's name, was Chiho Aos.h.i.+ma. Skinner watched Chiho move about the house and their life with precision and purpose. It had all culminated ridiculously in this house with two bedrooms, an upstairs and a downstairs, air-

conditioning, and a gla.s.sed-in porch with a view of a sand trap and the seventh hole. She pressed oranges into juice in the morning and poured him gla.s.ses of strawberry soy milk at night. He opened the mail with a sword-shaped letter opener bearing the insignia of his company, the celebrated and bedeviled 83rd Section, aka a bunch of dirty m.u.t.h.af.u.c.kin newman-killing sunza b.i.t.c.hes, aka the rats' a-holes, aka the only men he could claim to have ever loved. Love: it was something more ludicrously huge than the destruction of entire continents. Love: the only thing that atrophied the d.i.c.k and b.a.l.l.s of warfare. When he'd offloaded his worst memories he'd worried that some of the love he remembered would go with them, despite the technicians' a.s.surances. Gone into data storage were the mutilated streets of former Chicago, legions of semirobotic Chinese marching in formation through polluted exurbs, millions of hectares of inhospitable wastes stretching across geography like the pustulent crust of a chemical burn, traces of human tissue in underground torture chambers as elaborate and equipped with amenities as a cruise s.h.i.+p. He'd chosen to forget these things. What worried him were the things he'd chosen to remember.

Chiho didn't appear to suffer from these worries. Even without enhancement she would have been in fighting form. Walked five miles a day, swam on weekends, and could still pull out a jump shot when occasion called for it. She appeared far younger than her 170 years. As she'd aged she hadn't put on much weight, keeping her coat-rack frame. She still slithered into bed on top of him from time to time, tugged at the flesh of his jowls and rapped on his forehead like it was a door. He brought her a blanket or a cracker blobbed with cream cheese. She took care of the bills. He gave the most heartwarming toast on her 150th at the country club. Once a year she polished her sniper rifle. Chiho Aos.h.i.+ma: Al Skinner's will to live.

Today they were waiting for the hibernation crew to show up. Two guys and a truck. Outside in the driveway in 120 Fahrenheit their freshly washed RV, stocked with supplies for the summer, sparkled and appeared to sweat. Half of greater Phoenix had emptied by now and in another month only 5 percent of the population would remain, bunkered beneath the surface, suited up and equipped and tucked away for the season's punis.h.i.+ng inferno, sticking around to tend to infrastructure.

"Do we have everything?" Skinner said as his wife's shape pa.s.sed before him in the living room. How many times in the history of elderly-person road trips has that question been asked? Skinner spoke it ritualistically, not really minding when no answer came. Chiho whispered to herself, her bottom lip quivering with traces of speech. She was in her head again, probably plotting the logistics of their journey. By now it had become second nature, sixty years of migration, popping north before the sun landed its hammer blows on their gated community.

The hibernation technicians showed up at noon. A couple of young fellows with Latin America in their veins. While Chiho signed the paperwork, Skinner shuffled one last time around the house wondering if there was anything else he might toss into the RV. Ballpoint pen? He pocketed one just in case. Extra bottle of antacid? Can opener? He pulled open the top drawer of his file cabinet where he kept a stack of memory cards. They deserved to be hibernated. Come on, old man, just let them be. He put them in his breast pocket.

Back in the living room the tech guys were explaining their process, blurting it out perfunctorily, required by law to recite how the house would be sealed and filled with a proprietary, nonpolluting gas that, using a common field generator, would be kept at a steady 72 degrees for the duration of their absence. Their house had pa.s.sed inspection and was considered airtight but an additional nonpermeable membrane would engulf the structure and essentially shrink-wrap it. Chiho nodded, initialed, and signed. They grabbed their house keys and followed the techs outside. A great deal of tubing and rolls of the nonpermeable membrane were produced from the hibernation crew's truck. Soon Skinner and Chiho sat beside one another in the c.o.c.kpit of the RV, watching the techs pump the proprietary nonpolluting gas into their home through a conduit designed specifically for this purpose.

"You really want to stick around and watch the house get wrapped?" Chiho asked.

"We can go," Skinner said.

Chiho put the RV in gear and backed out of the driveway, then headed down Ironsides Avenue, through their mostly abandoned community. Up and down the block houses had been entombed until their owners returned in the fall. Once in a while stories surfaced about pets or occupants who accidentally stayed in their house during the hibernation process, to be discovered months later, perfectly preserved as if they'd died mere minutes before. The proprietary gas was that good. You could even leave food on the counter and it would still be edible upon your return, though this wasn't recommended. House condoms, Skinner called them. Soon they were on an arterial, then the stop-and-go highway, the exodus in full swing.

"I always miss Arizona," Chiho said.

"I miss Arizona even when I'm here," said Skinner.

Chiho had packed the RV as securely as she could but something still rattled in the back. Rattling noises hurt her teeth. Maybe it was a jar of marmalade jiggling in the pantry. Or the coffee pot. Skinner rode shotgun, lost in road signs. A hundred miles could pa.s.s like this.

"I brought some memory cards from home," Skinner said outside city limits. "I thought you should know."

"Well that'll be fun," said Chiho. She knew what I thought you should know meant. War memories. Would Skinner come out and say this? She gave him an opening. "We can pop in the memory of that camping trip when my shoes melted."

"I don't know if that one's in there." Skinner was quiet for two minutes by the dashboard clock. Then he said, "I brought a couple cards of war memories. I thought I'd share them with Carl. If he wants to."

"This is supposed to be a nice visit."

"I'm not asking you to approve. I've got some memories I need to go over with Carl. I promise to be on my best behavior."

The rattling. Maybe a spice bottle.

"You can do whatever you want with your own memories."

"I know."

"So what are you asking of me?"

"I'm not asking you anything. I'm just telling you."

"You're asking me to wake you up when you resurrect those nightmares."

Skinner sipped his root beer, returned it to the cup holder. "We'll be careful. We'll stagger the memories, do it in doses, alternate innocuous memories from when I worked for the auto dealer or our trips to the Olympic Peninsula. We're not going to go too deep."

"Why is it that I forgot the same war but you insist on revisiting it?"

She had a point, and Skinner didn't have an answer. In their worst arguments over the years he'd insisted she had no way of possibly knowing what he'd seen, having spent the war gazing through the scope of her rifle or via remote cam. He'd witnessed it on the mud and the blood and the s.h.i.+t level, the severed heads and disembowelment level. The last time this line of reasoning trotted its diseased self in front of them he'd had a couple drinks.

"I promise I won't muck things up by drinking," Skinner said.

"You say that."

Up ahead on either side of the freeway, behind chain-link barricades and a few dozen riot cops in full gear, had coalesced two groups of that rare Arizona breed, pedestrians, bearing signage. A hundred or so total. Skinner and Chiho couldn't read the signs yet but knew what they were about. Traffic slowed to a ten-mile-per-hour crawl as drivers pa.s.sed angry human beings filtering their frayed-voice accusations through staticky megaphones.

"It's worse than last year," Chiho said.

"These losers just need to get jobs," Skinner said. "Look at them. They're perfectly capable."

"I don't understand how they expect anyone to offer them a ride when they're behaving so poorly," Chiho said.

The messages on the signs came into view. An egg cracked on the RV's winds.h.i.+eld. Skinner opened the glove compartment and located the Coca-Cola 9mm beneath a stack of expired insurance cards. It was an old firearm, an early model from when c.o.ke, Nike, Sony, Verizon, and every other major conglomerate seemed to be rus.h.i.+ng into the business of arming America. c.o.ke eventually stopped manufacturing this model, returning somewhat sheepishly, post-FUS, to its core business of delicious sugared beverages. Skinner rubbed the faded red-and-white grip with the dynamic-ribbon logo.

"You're being overly dramatic," Chiho said. "Put that away."

"I just want them to see that I've got it," Skinner said, pulling the microphone out of the dash. He flicked the ON switch and his voice blasted out of two loudspeakers mounted on the roof. "Warning. We are retired security officers who served in the Boeing militias. We are armed and won't hesitate to blow your f.u.c.king heads off."

A couple riot cops saluted or gave a thumbs-up. The crowds screamed anew and threw themselves at the barricades, their faces sore-covered and contorted. If they were lucky they'd get arrested and tossed into the air-conditioned underground clink. Maybe that was the whole point. Soon the traffic picked up and there was nothing but saguaros, p.r.i.c.kly pear, and distant scorched hills. Occasionally they pa.s.sed a lone hitchhiker waving pathetically or pointing frantically at a water jug, begging for a refill. A man and a boy solemnly shoved their belongings along in a shopping cart. Skinner shook his head. What made it impossible for some people to prepare for the changing of the seasons?

Some memories were more painful than those forged in war. They'd once been a family of four sharing a home in Portland, Oregon, with a yard and a dog. Take a picture and upload it. Picnics, football games. Their son Waitimu Skinner was born first, then , three years later, their daughter Roon Aos.h.i.+ma. Two handsome kids with good grades.

At nineteen Waitimu enlisted in the same firm his dad had served in and s.h.i.+pped out to Detroit during the lingering days of the FUS. Swiss-cheesed by roadside-bomb masonry screws during a routine security sweep. What remained of Waitimu was buried on Vancouver island.

Roon now lived in Seattle with her wife Dot, working in a vague capacity for one of the contractors transforming Bainbridge Island into Manhattan. Skinner and Chiho hadn't spoken to their daughter in five years and here's why: Thanksgiving, too much sake, money, politics, yelling, a broken heirloom candy dish.

These stories aren't uncommon-an older child dies and the younger one can never live up to her imagined legacy. Skinner and Chiho kept the Waitimu memory cards in a safety deposit box in Phoenix and avoided talking about their confounding, troublesome rift with Roon.

Maybe the rattling was a spatula.

America didn't used to look like this, Chiho thought from behind the winds.h.i.+eld. There used to be people in all these houses. People shopping and walking their dogs. People yelling, "h.e.l.lo, neighbor! Can I borrow a stick of b.u.t.ter?" San Diego scrolled beneath their tires, the first of three urban dots one had to connect to experience coastal California. What remnants of old civilization lay between these points were scavenger-picked and surrendered to nature. Incredible how quickly trees invaded pavement, foundations crumbled, brambles engulfed cars. They saw crows appear to dismantle a motorcycle. Whenever they pulled off the highway to stretch their legs they tried to park near the ocean. Skinner wanted to see the beached aircraft carrier. A couple hundred miles south of San Francisco it lay jutting at a nutty angle on the beach, like a sunbathing skysc.r.a.per. They stopped in Oakland, in what was trying to become Little Boston. Fenway Park was half-finished, and a few blocks away there was a lackl.u.s.ter attempt at Harvard Yard. Skinner bought a Red Sox hat from a street vendor who promised it had been manufactured pre-FUS in Boston itself.

"Want to stop at Hearst Castle?" Chiho wanted to know.

Skinner shrugged. Might as well. They parked the RV at the visitors center and boarded the shuttle. A pleasant way to kill an afternoon. Skinner took a picture of his wife standing beside a statue of Poseidon by the grandest of the pools. The fact that one man had ever ama.s.sed this much wealth inconvenienced Skinner's sense of logic. That this magnitude of fortune paled in comparison to the wealth attained by certain pre-FUS oligarchs was almost metaphysically impossible to comprehend.

Carl and Hiroko Taylor lived outside Portland in an A-frame home amid thirty or so former suburban acres of new-growth cedar and hemlock. Carl was negotiating with a solar panel out front when Skinner and Chiho rolled up the driveway. He didn't look like a soldier anymore, just an old black dude with white hair wearing a plaid flannel s.h.i.+rt and suspenders. Hiroko came out onto the porch clutching a mammoth mug of tea. Carl grabbed Skinner as soon as he had clambered out of the RV and the friends slammed their hands into each other's backs.

"You dirty old fossil," Carl laughed. When Carl laughed, his smile hung around on his face like the last guest at a party.

"Let me get some of this," Hiroko said, separating the men to embrace Skinner. Carl lifted Chiho off the ground and the four old friends stood laughing and grinning, antic.i.p.ating rich, copious food and stories, late nights of movies and video games. Skinner knew that the presence of their friends would put a damper on his and Chiho's bickering. They were never as loving toward one another as when they were in the presence of friends. Spirits lifted, the four repaired to the kitchen where Hiroko zapped buffalo wings and Carl pulled out some blue potato chips with blue cheese dip. There were crudites and smoked salmon, huckleberry scones and homemade preserves, coffee.