The Imaginers
ANTHONY CORREALE
In the Bubble, fertility accorded Ell a position of respect. She had been named Summer Clearance Event Debutante two years running, a red slash across her chest declaring “Everything Must Go!” The title landed her a coveted appointment tending The Mall as a Bath and Body Works Clerk. Mornings and evenings of each day, citizens would be allowed to enter The Mall and stroll its wide avenues perusing the shops, free to choose where they would pray. Ell met them at the front of the store and welcomed them with a “How may I help you?” repeated so many times that it acquired the maddening musicality of a jingle, the meaninglessness of a benediction.
In the early years, samples would have been given, dabs of perfumed soap and lotions, and the shoppers would be led through the expression of their wants. They would collectively imagine their homes, a bounty of plush towels in lilac and dove-gray, light and open to the wind, curtains billowing, letting in the sweet scents of Jasmine or Mango Champagne.
But by the time of Ell’s Clerkhood, the supplies had dwindled. Many of the products had hardened or separated, breaking down, reverse engineering their synthesis and becoming again their foul-smelling constituent parts, the disembodied phonemes of a dead language, the coiled polymers of human ingenuity unkinking. They had lost the art of Foaming Exfoliating Action, Microbrasion, Anti-Aging, Volumizing Silk Proteins. Only the candles remained intact, so Ell would lead her shoppers between them so that they could engage in the imagining together—this was a “Crisp Autumn Morning,” this was “Salted Caramel Chococcino.” They passed the candles around and envisioned the places that belonged with the smells, the impossible reds and yellows on their labels a guide, an almost incomprehensible plenty of color. Each shopper would be allowed to light a single candle, watch the wax soften and the scent warm, and when there was enough to dip their finger in, they would daub themselves with a bit of that lost world—a single drop of “Winter Sunlight” or “Seafoam and Cedar” or “Margaritaville” on their forehead to armor their hope.
Swaying, their eyes squeezed shut with the force of imagining, Ell studied them skeptically. What was “Lemon Orchard Dew” to this man, really? Most of the shoppers were older than Ell, but they remembered even less than she did. They had been early admits, the children of shareholders given over for safekeeping. Their parents had thought they’d follow, but everything had happened too quickly, and the Bubbles had been put on lockdown when the program was still in trials. The promotional materials, still prominently displayed on the walls of each bungalow, declared the Bubbles “Humanity’s Great Hope.” Stocked, they claimed, with “The seeds of tomorrow!” The shareholders, though, had jockeyed for all of the slots, and nepotism had filled the rest. After all of the bribes and falsified medical documents, this Bubble—maybe all of the Bubbles—had locked down with a fertility rate barely better than the global average.
Ell had long grown sick of the Bath and Body Works, the glitter that never washed off, the smells coagulated into a single stench, like someone had tried to put out a plastic fire with vanilla extract. Ell had never found the imagining comforting. Unlike the imaginers, she hadn’t chosen the Bubble. The others called her a late admit. Kidnapped, she corrected silently. Now, staring out toward the food court at where the Orange Julius stood empty, she knew she needed to get out.
“What is this about the smell? You should take that up with HR. Why haven’t you coupled yet? You are putting the long-term viability of this venture at risk.” The Chief Executives were displeased. They hemmed and hawed, fingered the gold tie clips bearing their titles in blue enamel, leather squeaking as they shifted in their seats. Yes, they agreed, you are free to make your own decisions. No, you have not violated the Corporate Code of Ethics. But. “Perhaps,” said the COO, who had owned a ranch in the last years and looked at her the way he might have once looked at an uncooperative heifer, “we need to rebalance the incentive structure?”
Ell was in her mid-twenties—she couldn’t be exact—and she saw that they would not allow her to remain uncoupled for much longer. Recently, words like freedom and choice had acquired a nasty ring.
Ell had coupled, though. Unauthorized. He was gone now, and if it was discovered that she had coupled with him, she’d be quarantined. Probably incinerated.
It had been the guy who tended the PacSun, in his pookah shell necklace and polarized wraparounds and torn boardshort vestments. Every day on her way to the Bath and Body Works, she passed him practicing his hacky sack routine in front of the Orange Julius. “Hang ten,” he would say. She thought he might be winking behind his sunglasses. She was not interested. He was a regular at the Bath and Body Works, stealing in for a quick imagining on his fifteens. He would sit cross-legged in the aisle with a candle pressed between his flat palms, face a caricature of profound serenity. His candle: “Zen and Wet Stone.”
Always, he prayed alone. Ell couldn’t tell if it was by choice. The other shoppers were skittish around him because he was the nephew of someone who had been discontinued. A rare enough event, but this was an exceptional case: his uncle had been the CTO.
The PacSun guy persisted. He appeared for his imaginings shirtless, strutting down the aisles. In spite of herself, her eyes followed the ripple of his abdominals, gleaming from a liberal and not-recommended application of expired suntan oil. “How may I help you?” she asked him, perturbed. He’d been rooting through the loofahs, soiling them with his greasy fingers.
“I know you don’t belong here,” he said. “I can tell. I don’t belong here either.” He had leaned toward her conspiratorially, but now, pleased with himself, he struck a pose. She recognized it from the PacSun displays—a bare-chested man with a surfboard under one arm surveying the surf and the swimmers frolicking there, cocksure, mouth just slightly open. The imitation was good, but his sex appeal was limited by the reek of spoiled coconut. Ell ignored him and retreated deeper into the Bath and Body Works.
“Hey,” he’d called after her. “Call me KJ!”
Ell should have expected that the Chief Executives would rebuke her. After she lodged her complaint, they reassigned her to the nursery. “We apologize,” said the COO, officiously tapping the brim of his Stetson, “for having promoted you to the level of your incompetence.”
They said: we think this position will allow you more time for personal development. They said: the matter is now closed and all further inquiry should be routed through HR. They said: be sure to wear your Debutante sash.
The nursery was a squat bubble within the Bubble, the epicenter from which the bungalows and Champotater beds radiated outward. To enter, Ell had to pass through an extra-precautionary decon cycle like those that the incinerator crews who regularly suited up and ventured out to burn the jungle back did: bite into the oxygenated mouth-piece, close her eyes while blue-white powder sifted across her body, was vacuumed, sifted again, vacuumed, and finally a steam cycle. An acrid taste lingered on her lips and when she absentmindedly licked them, her tongue went numb.
The inside of the nursery was optimistically vast. Eerily empty with only five children in residence. One side of the structure was dedicated to the birthing rooms, but they were locked up now. Five years had passed since a birthing room was last used and there were no current pregnancies. Despite their mandated hours in the skylight room, the children were pale enough to recede into the milky walls. All of the citizens were a little pale, the Bubble screening them from much of the sunlight, but the children, who would not leave the nursery until after puberty, were flittering phantoms. One looked particularly sickly.
“Weak heart,” a man confided. “He’ll probably die soon.” He was stroking his long tie—red to denote viable sperm count. Ell turned to look at him, and he unfurled a wide, sharky smile. The nursery was a cautionary tale. This, the Chief Executives were telling her, was why she needed to couple. Here, wearing a boxy suit and hair so shiny he must have lacquered it with product after completing the decon, was how. She supposed this was their attempt to reason with her and she was free insofar as she chose to interpret the warning.
After coaxing the children to breakfast on their bowl of pureed Champs, they showed instructional cartoons on a screen hooked up to an old DVD player. The schedule posted to the wall mandated they show the cardinal rules after breakfast and before bedtime. There was “Stay Out of Trouble, Stay In the Bubble!” and “Boil Before You Drink!” and “Watch and Report!” The last was the longest, displaying a series of known threats and their identifying markers: this was a slipworm larva, these were the early symptoms of a silverpin infection. Ell had never experienced those, but she tensed when the segment on Jasper Beetles ran: a little boy extends his hand to a beetle and gently spoons it a single drop of porridge. The beetle trembles a moment and then, with a pop! multiplies into a swarm. The frame zooms out and pop! the swarm doubles, filling the entire bubble. The mass of beetles pulses, straining, and then pop! blows through the bubble, dispersing and leaving nothing but shuddering skeletons and empty frames that sway a moment before collapsing onto the scraped-clean earth.
Her family was one of the first to leave in the Flight, so early that it was not even called that yet. So early that they were considered kooks. Her father, with his minor leagues cult charisma and his trailing prophet’s beard had stood atop the roof of their Subaru Outback, immovable in their driveway for want of fuel, and declared that he was leading his people into a northern wilderness untainted by the evils of civilization. The other families, gathered in their suburban cul-de-sac to hear him, shuffled uncomfortably and shook their heads. The next morning, though, as Ell and her parents shouldered their packs, a handful of other families appeared, and they set off as a caravan. Her father led, making up pilgrim hymns as they trekked.
Ell was ten—the last age that she could remember marking, the last age she could be sure of. The Corporate calendar was so different, omitting seasons in favor of Mallidays and smoothing the years into a blur, that she did not even know her birthday anymore. That long journey north was difficult for her to recall, the transition between one life and another, undefined by any logic that she could discern. Weeks of walking, the adults thinning beside her, faces roughening. What she remembered instead was listening for the sound of the Jasper Beetles’ approach. They were an elemental force, forming tidal waves that crashed across the land, so tightly packed that the friction of their chitinous bodies presaged their arrival, a grinding roar. The swarm was the weather they feared most, the distant rumble enough to send them scrambling for shelter.
She remembered walking onto a farm somewhere in the middle of what had been Minnesota, scorched-looking after the swarm had mowed over it. The farmer had been left beside his ruined crop. She’d seen plenty of dead bodies by then, and she’d thought, at first, that he had begun to bloat. But his corpse had been heavy with beetles, and as she approached, she saw them spilling from his mouth like slithering jewels, topaz and tiger-eye.
Her mother told her that the beetles’ nerve columns were gnarled into fists that no poison could unclench. Humanity, her father added in his sermonizing voice, had been so self-involved, so small-picture, that it had initiated a biological arms race that it could not possibly win, and when it hesitated, when it teetered—just an instant—it had fallen impossibly behind and been swallowed. Another of the adults crossed her arms and muttered something about vaccines, a third rolled his eyes and the assembled group was off, barking at each other and stamping their feet.
They were prone to arguing about these things, the source of civilization’s ruin. Sabotage. Hubris. Sin. Microwaves. Only Ell’s mother did not participate in these debates. “Utopia has to figure out its original sin before it knows what it’s built around,” she told Ell once. She was cracking sticks and arranging them for a fire while Ell’s father polemicized. “But they haven’t realized yet that we’re not utopians.”
“What are we?” Ell had asked. But her mother hadn’t answered. All of them had quieted and were watching the evening sky. The horizon popcorned with exploding satellites, countless of them, their fragments streaking to earth.
Sometimes the adults told the children in the nursery scary stories. It was rumored that one of the other Bubbles, Conagra maybe, or Unilever, had collapsed after a slipworm outbreak. The CEO’s wife had been pregnant, and when she gave birth they had realized that the child was too still, but they were hopeful: it seemed to be trying to open its eyes. Looking more closely, though, they saw that it was only a boil of worms writhing behind the closed lids. The worms had somehow infiltrated their water supply and spread into most of the population (Boil before you drink! the children chanted) before they were caught. They tried to quarantine, to burn it out, but within a week, everyone in the Bubble was sterile. After that? The children asked, What happened to the people? But no one knew. Ell liked to imagine them simply opening the doors of their Bubble, letting the outside air in. They would tie their dresses and suit pants around their heads and scamper into the jungle in their underwear. If there was nothing to hope for anymore, what was there to fear?
When they were not being instructed, or cajoled to eat their Champs, the children played games. They’d choose a victim, usually the sickly boy, and they’d dance in circles around them, chanting the names of the plagues—Rotslick, Medusa Liana, silverpins, slipworms—and they’d wriggle their fingers all over the victim, whose job it was to kneel and display the symptoms: vomiting, lung-dredging coughs, seizures. The sickly boy did not like playing, did not want to act as though he was wasting away from Rotslick, or stagger drunkenly as though silverpins had penetrated his brain, but they forced him. It was their favorite thing to do and they could play for hours, departing from the known threats and imagining their own horrible recombinations and monstrosities. When the adults wanted them quiet, they gave the children charcoal and paper and they sketched their monstrosities. The walls of the nursery were papered with wasted grayscale landscapes of insectile giants and writhing boils and grotesque things for which only the children had names.
The minders sat idle at the periphery while the children entertained themselves. Everyone studiously avoided looking at Ell, leaving her to the attentions of the sharky man who insisted on wearing his power tie and shellacking his hair every day. He tried to make small talk while the others flipped through the official circulars that the Chief Executives released weekly. Their headlines declared atmospheric scrubbing underway, experiments with resistant corn seeds promising, yields increasing. In too-loud voices, the minders spoke about them to each other while the man went on schmoozing Ell.
“The Polar Realignment should be near finished. Then it’s only a matter of time—maybe three or four years—and things will be back to normal.”
“Yes, partnering with Boeing too. They know what they’re doing.”
The sharky man cleared his throat. “So,” he said sporting his toothiest smile, “are you ovulating?”
“There’s been a quarterly uptick in fertility rates,” they were shouting. “Teste parasites are at a five-year low.” Just then, the sickly boy broke down, wailing, and Ell rushed over to stop the game. The man stayed behind, smoothing his long red tie impatiently. According to her chart she should be ovulating, but she wasn’t. She’d been off the chart completely for weeks.
The next time that she had seen KJ, he’d motioned to her from the Orange Julius’s kitchen as she walked past. “I have something to show you,” he said.
She shook her head. “I’m not going in there with you.”
He looked pained, but he tip-toed out into The Mall’s wide corridor anyway, a sheaf of circulars in his hand.
“I found these in my uncle’s things,” he stage-whispered. “Check it out.”
Ell didn’t recognize the headlines. What he was showing her, she realized, were intended to be the last circulars, the run that had announced the dissolution of the Corporate Bubbles. The language was cheery. There were even sidebars with motivational quotes: “Failure is the mother of invention!” and “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!”
The Chief Executives had never distributed them, he said excitedly, choosing to wipe all of the dates and rerun the circulars starting from the beginning. “They’ve been lying to us all along!” he said. “There’s no venture. The corporate charter is void. We’re just prisoners. Who knows what’s really out there!”
Ell studied him, the eager, open face. He was a little dumb, she thought sadly. That the Bubble had long since lost contact with the outside was no secret. The recycled headlines—they all recognized them. Everyone was pretending. Still, she stepped into the kitchen with him and leafed through the circulars. The Orange Julius somehow still exuded a faint scent, uncorrupted by the years, that she identified as “Dreamsicle.”
“My uncle,” KJ said, “he thought we gave up too easy. He thought we could harness it—the plagues. Make them work for us. We were focused on hiding, on cleaning up, but he thought we needed to embrace it. After we lost contact, he wanted to open the Bubble up.” A rare cloud passed over his features, not brooding exactly, but not quite pouting. “I wanted him to take me with him, but he said I was too young and naive. He promised he’d come back for me.” KJ grasped her hands in both of his. “I have a stack of CEO Gold Cards hidden away. I can get us out.” She nodded along encouragingly. Because she did not belong; because she had thought many times of escape. And here was an accomplice.
“Wow,” she said. He grinned and shrugged modestly, bouncing the hacky sack from one shoulder to the other.
“You’ve been out there,” KJ said to her, “you must know. There’s something. Right? A safe place?”
Yes, she’d said, thinking of the cabin her mother had built, the community they’d founded in the wilds but never managed to name. Never mind that she’d last seen it aflame—if she escaped, she could push even farther north, to the boreal forests. There had to be other isolated places.
They began meeting at the Orange Julius in secret after The Mall had closed for the day, fantasizing and planning for their escape. She came to understand that he believed the world he imagined in the aisle of the Bath and Body Works was still out there just waiting to be reclaimed. He was naive. But who was she to interrupt his imagining? It was there, on the tiled floor, beside the gleaming industrial-sized dishwasher, with Dreamsicle perfuming their nostrils and the hope of their utopias quivering separate but unburst between them, that they coupled.
Biting back nausea as the children slurped up their Champs, slipping away to the nursery bathroom to stealthily vomit, Ell worried that soon she would begin to show. The standard-issue dresses clung, and there would be no hiding it. Assessing her, the sharky man would notice the swell of her stomach, and just like that she’d be reported—an unregistered coupling. On her way home, she’d hear an insistent hiss and the Recall team would be darting after on their sharp black Segways. They’d quickly extract the name of the father from her, and that would be that.
KJ had been stupid. According to her meticulous arrangements, they would sneak out at prearranged times using one of the Gold Cards, and stash pilfered supplies in staging areas within a mile or two of the Bubble: vacuum-sealed Champotaters, spare clothing, water purifiers. At his insistence, he snuck out alone, a gallantry she allowed. But he was ill-suited to the subterfuge. Returning inexplicably late after one foray, he startled an incinerator crew and they had torched him, as simple as that. The Recall team in their pop-eyed masks, the ventilators bulging over their mouths like raw, exposed organs, went to work: his quarters were searched, dismantled, burned out, all mention of his name erased from the manifests. Ell feared that they would find something that would lead them to her. She could not sleep through the night, palming the keycard she’d insisted KJ give her for safekeeping, listening hard, plotting the quickest route to the exit. As though she could outrun the black Segways.
In the weeks after, deviating from her cycle chart, Ell hoped fervently that she had just gone sterile, but pregnancy was an unavoidable possibility now. The Recall teams remained wary and this time there was no preparation, no meticulous plan. She dressed as sensibly as possible, but she’d been off of manual work for so long that her wardrobe only held an assortment of summer dresses, printed with flowers and the Corporate logo. She chose the longest—just past her knees—and her only pair of closed-toed shoes. She gathered what else she could—sealed bags of Champotaters and water, a change of clothes—into a sack and snuck out of her bungalow before dawn. She swiped through the unguarded triple gates, each sealing behind her with a kiss of suction, and she was out.
Even in the dawn coolness, the air assaulted her bodily: a dull slap of heat and then the humidity clenching her in a tight fist. She panicked—she had no physical memory of heat like this, of air so dense that it lumped in her throat and caused her to gasp wetly. She stood on a loading dock chewed at the edges by the encroaching jungle and scorched black from regular burnings. An umbilicus of asphalt, edges indiscernible beneath the crowding vegetation, twisted off. On the lip of the loading dock, she looked back at the Bubble. Craning her neck, she could barely see where the thick, moiré-patterned dome began to curve away. The jungle surrounding it was all untraceable knots and hooks trembling with malevolent intelligence and shot through with the hysterical chittering of alien life. Directed, it seemed to Ell, at the walls of the Bubble: the jeers of an invading force encircling the besieged.
To avoid brushing the feelers of jungle that strained towards each other over the once broad road, teeming with what she could not imagine, Ell had to fold tightly in on herself, sometimes turning sideways and awkwardly pliéing with her sack balanced atop her head. Her summer dress was wrinkled and sticky against her and she felt as though she were in a steam cooker. She feared the inevitable moment when the thin blade of cleared road vanished, the jungle knitted solid.
Instead, all at once, the jungle growth ceased without apparent reason, clearing the road and leaving the ground naked and fuming, the same sulfur-yellow as the sky. The soil seemed to breathe, damp and halitotic, and she instinctively brought the sweat-soaked collar of her dress up over her nose and mouth. She was approaching a T-intersection, this road even wider than that which led to the Bubble. Ell had seen maps in the papers KJ inherited from his uncle—all burned now—and knew that this was the ring road that circled the Bubbles. Through the bare streak of blight, she could see some of them littering the horizon, dull golf balls in the rough.
Though the rising sun was difficult to locate behind the petroleum smear of sky, she oriented herself to keep it on her right, approximating north. To her left, she saw the Spires, hazy in the distance. Taller than the Bubbles, bent over and spinning in an unnatural way that repulsed the eye, seeming to twist and break and lurch upright again. As the road circled the Bubbles, the Spires described another circle, a protective barrier. Though she thought she could detect something off with a couple of them, something off-kilter, and were those gaps in their line? She had no idea what lay beyond. Ell squatted in the road to rest, hypnotized by their motion.
She remembered passing them in the chopper. The sky had been black, stippled with funnel clouds, and as she watched, one of the Spires lassoed a nascent tornado and pulled it down, spinning impossibly fast, a filigree of lightning crackling around it. It had seemed to drink the tornado from the sky, and when it stopped spinning at last, the storm had calmed.
Ell hadn’t truly known what to expect outside of the Bubble. She’d read the reports but she hadn’t known what to believe after so many lies. She was startled to realize that somewhere deep she had secreted the hope that she would walk out into the neatly ordered world of her childhood, all squared off and smoothed over, the colors tamed, deliberate, like the houses and yards glimpsed on the candles’ graphics. Her last impression of the outside had been from the belly of the chopper that took her to the Bubble, she the prize of their last search for late admits. The patchwork landscape below was emptied but still recognizable—silvery veins of highway supplying the branching fronds of suburban neighborhoods, occasionally even fields farmed recently enough that their herringbone patterns were still discernible. All of it there, if rapidly splintering at the edges. Still recoverable. She wished now that she knew how many years had passed. It didn’t matter: enough that everything was unrecognizable.
The Corporate search team had found the community that her parents had formed, hidden in the cold temperate forests in the north. A virgin community, it was classified, because they’d managed to outstrip the most virulent of the plagues and their disastrous remedies and establish themselves in an ecologically isolated safe-haven. But the company men had landed en masse and herded them into the wide bellies of their choppers, and whisked them to a field hospital for decontamination and processing. Ell and a handful of other children were separated out from the adults and placed in a nursery much like the one in the Bubble.
After a week there, becoming accustomed to the papier-mâché texture and flavor of Champs and leading the other children through nursery rhymes adapted from her father’s prayers, the corporate men had sealed them into hazmat suits and divided them, one into each of the choppers waiting to distribute them to the Bubbles. Discontinued, they had said, when she asked about her parents. Discontinued. She couldn’t remember when she stopped having to ask what that meant, just that it had been after she realized she’d never see them again.
A few hours on Ell was flagging badly, everything swimming nauseatingly through the amniotic air. All of her imagining had failed to anticipate what had become of the outside, and she was beginning to panic. Several Bubbles were set close enough to the main road that their loading docks were visible, and she began to wonder if the keycard, still in her sack, would grant her entrance into their cool interior. Once, jogging by a Bubble, her flimsy flats already rotten in the humidity and flapping, an incinerator crew emerged. They wore slick black hazmat suits over their standard-issue polo shirts and summer dresses, Dow Chemical decaled in red. She wondered if their Chief Executives had run the last circulars or held onto them like hers, if they maintained the same blind hopes or if they had formed new ones. She wanted to ask, but she couldn’t of course or she would die like KJ. The incinerator crews were on strict orders to burn anyone who approached them, even to burn any one of theirs that might be thinking of running. The jungle was nearly up to their loading dock, and as she trotted out of view, she heard a sound like the intake of breath as the flamethrowers started up.
Another Bubble had been impaled by a Spire. A storm must have uprooted it, hurled it like a javelin. The Bubble still stood, but it was fractured and jungle had already begun to scramble across it like a trellis, reaching all the way to the protruding Spire’s end and hanging it with vines, like a pennant.
She guessed that it should be approaching noon, but the sky had soured, its yellow browning, and as she paused to try and track the shift, the whole canopy bowed heavily and began to fall. The first bit settled over her shoulder, kelp-like, wet and gluey and the same rotten avocado the sky had become. She’d peeled most of it off when a broad sheet landed on her bent head. She looked up, stupidly, and it adhered to her face, covering her eyes and nose and mouth, sealing her in and suffocating her with the smell of scorched rubber and plaque. How she wished for a huff of “Seafoam and Cedar” now. Or no, not that—the smell of snow. She would collect snow to melt for drinking water, and she loved nothing more than to rest her face in the bucket and breathe in the cold of it.
When the choppers had come, her father climbed atop a boulder and spread his arms in defiance, bellowing. He posed as though imagining himself illustrated alongside his words. Ell’s mother gathered the children and herded them through the trees. They stumbled through the forest, slapped dizzy by wet branches, lungs aching from trying to swallow their breaths, for half a day before the Corporates captured them. As they were closing in, Ell’s mother gathered the children. “Believe whatever they need you to,” she said, her eyes on Ell. “Until you need to believe something else.” Only later would Ell begin to think that it was in answer to her question.
She opened her mouth wide for air, but the gunk stretched without breaking. Only after clawing at it for a few panicked moments did she puncture the seal, and still it was in her eyes, burning them. Sheet after sheet parachuted slowly down. The road ahead of her and the jungle beside gradually lost their shape and color until everything was diffuse, dirty light like the first eyes must have seen.
She staggered forward, hand cupping her mouth, occasionally shaking the built-up goop from her head. The surface of the road was gummy and sucked at her feet. The sheets wrapped her legs, shortening her stride. If she fell, she would be buried. Soon she was stooped and shuffling under the increasing weight, the light dimmer and dimmer, drowning in ooze like some reverse evolution. Headlines lifted from the circulars carouseled madly through her brain—Biomass Carbon Sequestering! Stratospheric Scrubbing! Coke Makes Progress Partnering with Nestle to Deacidify the Gulf with CleanCloud!
Her throat was clotted and her breathing whistled. She fell to her knees, hands butterflying desperately over her mouth to keep it clear. The pressure increased, swaddling her.
“Hold still,” a muffled voice instructed her, “get a large breath and hold still.”
The goop was sliding off of her, light, almost the viscosity of water. She cleared her eyes and blinked. Her vision bleary, brain thin from the noxious fumes, she thought she saw the artificially bronzed and glistening stomach, the leather-thong flip-flops, an expression almost too goofy to be handsome, so oblivious it seemed invulnerable, before she made out the figure of a girl standing over her. The girl worked the handle of a gasoline pump, producing a fine mist that dissolved the slime into a sudsy mass of brown bubbles. She wore an emergency blanket foil-side-out, neck and arm holes cut into it, and on her back a massive plastic reservoir filled with the liquid.
The sky had nearly stopped falling, and once the girl had cleared to her satisfaction, she openly studied Ell, taking in the flower-print dress with its Corporate logo cheerfully reproduced at the center of each bouquet.
The girl pointed the nozzle at her. “You’re a corpie cow,” she said. Ell opened her mouth to speak and the girl clicked the trigger, spritzing her. “Swish and spit,” she said.
Ell spat, coughed painfully. Her voice was reedy. “There are people out here?”
The girl snorted. “More or less.”
“Where are your parents?”
The girl frowned at her. “I’m not a child. Those of us who grew up out here, the Soothsayer says we don’t have much in the way of an endocrine system. But I’m OK. You should see the giants.”
“Soothsayer?” Ell asked.
“Yes,” the girl said, helping Ell to her feet. “He’ll want to meet a corpie.”
Ell, still woozy from the fumes and with one eye on the still-peeling sky, obediently followed as the girl took her to the edge of a city, its busted skyline all broken teeth. Picking across a field of rubble, the girl located a set of stairs that opened into a maze of tiled hallways, more stairs, up and down and up and up again until they arrived in a vast arcade, the high-ceiling above them inset with intact but scummed-over glass. Art had been exhibited on the walls, and Ell guessed that the building must have been a museum. The labels on the canvases were “Cypress Swamps” and “Redwood Forest,” but the paintings themselves had been pentimentoed over by new landscapes, leafy blue molds and reefs of woody fungus. The room was filled with salvage: boxes of batteries, split and foaming, a cracked gumball machine, a pyramid of computer monitors—there was no logic that Ell could see. In the center, atop the washed-up carcass of some behemoth engine, ventricles and cavities agape, stood the Soothsayer, a staff of twisted metal planted beside him.
He wore a red knit cap and a red kerchief wound about his mouth and throat, the rest of his face obscured by sunglasses, their huge globed lenses fractured and glittery like compound eyes, a blue duffel bag at his feet. His head swiveled side to side, surveying them, and after a moment he raised his staff and pressed it against his throat. When he spoke, his voice was a distant tremolo, like the radio broadcasts her family had huddled in to hear every night as they trekked north, fainter and fainter until they were only lapping fizz.
“And so,” he warbled, “you have emerged at last.”
The girl, squatting on the chipped tile, raspberried in exasperation and held her face in her hands. The Soothsayer had fixed his gaze on Ell, in her tattered flower-print dress. An iridescent cloak of metallic orange shifted uneasily across his shoulders. He raised his eyebrows at Ell’s shock-blank stare and the cloak flickered across a spectrum from burnt orange to a yellowy green and back with a sound like marbles clicking in a bag.
“What is it you want to know?” he asked Ell.
“I’m not sure,” Ell said, glancing uncertainly at the girl and readjusting the sack, stalling, “I’m just following her.” The Soothsayer spread his arms and the cloak began to crawl and chitter. Beetles, innumerable, draped in sheets across his body—Jasper Beetles Ell realized with panic. The Soothsayer swayed and ululated, the machine shearing the heights of his voice flat and dull, and the mass of insects rippled and vibrated, thousands of wing casings snicking open and closed.
“He’s just showing off,” the girl whispered. From her knapsack she withdrew a candy bar, still wrapped, liquid from the heat. With her eyes steady on the Soothsayer’s, the girl tore the package, squirted a gooey jet into her mouth, and then tossed the remainder at his feet. In a mad boil, the beetles abandoned their formation and fell upon it, blotting it out. The Soothsayer stood naked, slicks of oily black formed concave sores across his chest and legs.
“Nasty child,” he said. The sores wriggled with fat translucent larvae. Several plopped to the ground and he bent with startling agility to tweeze them gently from the ground and replace them in the nursery of his chest.
“Gross!” the girl declared, pointing.
The Soothsayer glowered at her. “Your ignorance is unbecoming.”
The Soothsayer reached into his duffel bag and withdrew an assortment of junk—circuit boards and resistors, LEDs, the small bones of animals, the hollowed carapaces of insects, nuts and bolts—and rattled them in his huge cupped hands like dice. The beetles obediently rose and helixed around him.
“Now, seriously, ask me the question,” the Soothsayer said. “I am attuned. I can give you the answers that you seek.”
She clenched her dress—silverpin, slipworm. She squeezed her eyes and thought of the forest—how many miles? “No. Whatever it is, don’t tell me,” she said. But he resumed his ululations anyway, body jackhammering as the beetles twisted around him faster and faster.
He flung his hands wide, spilling their contents onto the floor, an incomprehensible jumble. Just as they were crescendoing, his wails were lost in hail of glitches and quarks.
Abruptly the Soothsayer stopped, the thrown bones and components forgotten. The beetles broke formation, forming agitated spicules that stabbed testily at the air. The girl stood as erect as an antenna, the gas pump’s nozzle pointing upwards, turning slowly as though scanning the blank sky.
“Interference,” she said. The Soothsayer was still, but his voice equipment squealed and clicked like a metal detector. “There’s something coming.”
“Yes,” the Soothsayer agreed, voice steel wool on a washtub, “we are being stalked. A hoarder of knowledge, an amasser of keys. It is close on our heels, shod in darkness. It feeds on words, splits them like atoms and leaves a rippling slag of logorrhea in its wake. Knowledge melted incomprehensible. Glyph and symbol without interpreter. And when there is nothing left, we will be left to slowly die in a world that we cannot remember creating.”
The beetles pulsed for a few moments, whingeing like a strained engine before returning to their host. The Soothsayer groaned and began to flail again, his voice tugged as though by some magnetic force into a theremin keening. With a final, desperate whine, the sound cut. His erratic movement shook his kerchief loose and it unwound, revealing a red power tie. A CTO’s gold tie clip sprang loose and clinked into the recesses of the engine. Rotslick had consumed the lower portion of the CTO’s face, and as she watched, maggots began to froth out of what remained of his mouth.
She fled through the galleries, the canvases—“Great Plains” and “Florida Keys”—gleaming wetly with their brainless new growth. Past heaping bins of salvage, some of it looted from the Bubbles, down seized escalators. Deeper and deeper. This, she realized, had not been a museum but an airport. She found herself in the bowels of some long-dead transit system, running along the tunnel. Faint tissues of light settled on the edges of things and other people, child-sized like the girl, crabbed along beside her, their bodies whispering against each other. She heard the clink of a hammer, growing louder. A regular flash of sparks.
As she passed, Ell saw in the spark light a ring of blank-faced, child-sized people squatting silently around a man who, even kneeling, was as tall as she was. They watched intently as he hammered the track flat. The dull shine of beaten metal extended past them as far as she could see. If KJ had followed her out, he would have died a dozen times already on the way, but she longed still for his blind optimism. On the day he was incinerated, she’d been summoned outdoors by a contamination alarm. They’d all been in line, waiting to undergo an emergency decontamination. The Recall team had collected KJ’s body and paraded it past the line in a clear plastic sheath, a warning. He hadn’t even had time to wipe that idiot grin off of his face. It had burned there.
She emerged from the tunnels through a terminal of steel struts glittering with clinging glass, like the skeleton of a rolling wave. Overhead, the sky had been replaced by some awful kind of weather. It approached in jerks, an injured creature dragging itself. Something strained from behind it, a darker shape resolving. The enormity of the motion made her stomach twist, a little flip.
Ell unslung her sack and opened it. The vacuum-sealed plastic was torn and beetles tunneled merrily through the Champotaters. She withdrew one, antennae waggling from half a dozen holes, and bit into it. How many things did she already carry within her, she wondered, chitin crunching between her teeth, an acrid squirt of something peppery. She took another bite, considering the lurching sky.
ANTHONY CORREALE is a writer from California and a lecturer at Clemson University. He holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. His stories are forthcoming from The Georgia Review and have been published in The Journal, Day One, Redivider, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
