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Goodnight Moon smelled just as I remembered. Scorched ozone and metal and paraffin and hope and when he was inside me it was like hearing my name for the first time. I couldn’t escape the me-ness of it, the us-ness of it, the sound and the shape of ourselves turning into our future.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” he whispered into my breast. “I can’t believe this is us.”
The lady’s voice drifted over my head. “Lamb cutlets on a bed of spiced butternut squash, wilted greens, and delicate hand-harvested mushrooms served with goat cheese in clouds of pastry…”
Goodnight Moon kissed my hair, my ears, my eyelids. “And now that the land’s come back Electric City’s gonna save us all. We can go home together, you and me, and build a house and we’ll have a candle in every window so you always feel at home…”
The Dorchester dinner menu stopped abruptly. The lady dropped to her fishnetted knees and peered at us through the glass, her brilliant glossy red hair tumbling down, her spangled eyes searching for us beyond the glass.
“Whoa, sweetie, slow down,” she said. “You’re liable to scare a girl off that way.”
All I could see in the world was Goodnight Moon’s brown eyes and the sweat drying on his brown chest. Brown like the earth and all its promises. “I don’t care,” he said. “You scared, Tetley?” I shook my head. “Nothing can scare us now. Emperor Shakespeare said he’s seen land, real dry land, and we have a plan and we’re gonna get everything back again and be fat happy Fuckwits like we were always supposed to be.”
The Peep Show girl’s glittering eyes filled up with tears. She put her hand on the glass. “Oh…oh, baby…that’s just something we say. We always say it. To everyone. It’s our best show. Gives people hope, you know? But there’s nothing out there, sugar. Nothing but ocean and more ocean and a handful of drifty lifeboat cities like yours circling the world like horses on a broken-down carousel. Nothing but blue.”
10. We Are So Lucky
It would be nice for me if you could just say you understand. I want to hear that just once. Goodnight Moon didn’t. He didn’t believe her and he didn’t believe me and all he could hear was Emperor William Shakespeare the Eleventh singing out his big lie. RESURRECTION! REDEMPTION! REVIVIFICATION! LAND HO!
“No, because, see,” my sweetheart wept on the boardwalk while the wheel spun dizzily behind his head like an electric candy crown, “we have a plan. We’ve worked so hard. It has to happen. The mayor said as soon as we had news of dry land, the minute we knew, we’d turn it on and we’d get there first and the continents would be ours, Garbagetowners, we’d inherit the earth. He’s gonna tell everyone when the Pier leaves. At the farewell party.”
“Turn what on?”
Resurrection. Redemption. Renovation. All those years behind the fence Electric City had been so busy. Disassembling all those engines they hoarded so they could make a bigger one, the biggest one. Pooling fuel in great vast stills. Practicing ignition sequences. Carving up a countryside they’d never even seen between the brightboys and brightgirls and we could have some, too, if we were good.
“You want to turn Garbagetown into a Misery Boat,” I told him. “So we can just steam on ahead into nothing and go mad and use up all the gas and batteries that could keep us happy in mixtapes for another century here in one hot minute.”
“The Emperor said…”
“He said his name was Duke Orsino of Illyria, too. And then Roderigo when they did the werewolf play. Do you believe that? If they’d found land, don’t you think they’d have stayed there?”
But he couldn’t hear me. Neither could Maruchan when I tried to tell him the truth in the peep show. All they could see was green. Green leafy trees and green grass and green ivy in some park that was lying at the bottom of the sea. We dreamed different dreams now, my brother and I, and all my dreams were burning.
Say you understand. I had to. I’m not a nihilist or a murdercunt or a terrorwhore. They were gonna use up every last drop of Garbagetown’s power to go nowhere and do nothing and instead of measuring out teaspoons of good, honest gas, so that it lasts and we last all together, no single thing on the patch would ever turn on again, and we’d go dark, really dark, forever. Dark like the bottom of a hole. They ha
d no right. They don’t understand. This is it. This is the future. Garbagetown and the sea. We can’t go back, not ever, not even for a minute. We are so lucky. Life is so good. We’re going on and being alive and being shitty sometimes and lovely sometimes just the same as we always have, and only a Fuckwit couldn’t see that.
I waited until Brighton Pier cast off, headed to the next rickety harbor of floating foolboats, filled with players and horns and glittering wheels and Dorchester menus and fresh mountains of letters we wouldn’t read the answers to for another twenty years. I waited until everyone was sleeping so nobody would get hurt except the awful engine growling and panting to deliver us into the dark salt nothing of an empty hellpromise.
It isn’t hard to build a bomb in Electric City. It’s all just laying around behind that fence where a boy held my hand for the first time. All you need is a match.
11. What You Came For
It’s such a beautiful day out. My hibiscus is just gigantic, red as the hair on a peep show dancer. If you want to wait, Big Bargains will be round later for her afternoon nap. Grape Crush usually brings a herring by in the evening. But I understand if you’ve got other places to be.
It’s okay. You can hit me now. If you want to. It’s what you came for. I barely feel it anymore.
Thank you for my instruction.
No One Dies
in Nowhere
First Terrace: The Late Repentant
There is a clicking sound before she appears, like a gas stove before it lights. One moment there is nothing, the next there is Pietta, though this is the last gasp of before/after causality in her pure, pale mind. Now that she is here, she will always have been here. Charcoal-blue rags twist and braid and drape around her body more artfully than any gown. A leather falcon’s hood closes up her head but does not blind her; the eyecups are a fine bronze mesh that lets in light. Long jessies hang from her thin wrists. This room which she has never seen belongs to her as utterly as her eyes: a monk’s cell, modest but perfect and graceful. Candles thick as calf-bones. Water in a black basin. A copper rain barrel, empty. She runs her hand along the smooth, wine-dark stone of her walls; her fingertips leave phosphor-prints. She lays down on her bed, a shelf for holding Piettas carved out of the rock, mattressed in straw and withered, thorny wildflowers that smell of the village where she was born. From the straw, she can look out of three slim glassless windows shaped like chess bishops. A grey, damp sky steals in, a burgling fog climbing up toward her, a hundred million kinds of grey swirling together, and the stars behind, waiting. Pietta remembers the feeling of the first day of school. She goes to the window and looks out, looks down. Her long hair hangs over the ledge like two thick vines. Black, seedless earth below, dizzyingly far. As close as spying neighbors across a shared alley, a sheer, knife-cragged mountain stretches up into the dimming clouds and disappears into oncoming night. The mountain crawls with people. Each carries a black lantern half as tall as they. A man with a short, lovely beard chokes on the smoke puking forth from his light, but even as he chokes, he holds it closer to his mouth, desperate to get more. Their eyes meet. Pietta holds up her hand in greeting. He opens his jaw far wider than any bone allows and takes long, sultry bites out of the smoke.
When she turns away, a bindle lies on her bed of stone and straw. A plain handkerchief knotted around a long, burled black branch. She looses the cloth. Inside she finds a wine bottle, a pair of scissors, a stone figure of a straight-backed child in a chair, a brass key, a cracked, worn belt with two holes torn through, and a hundred shattered shards of colored glass. Pietta picks up one of the blades of glass and holds it to her breast until it slices through her skin. The glass is violet. The blood never comes.
