Authors: Nick Cole
Where do you go now, Boy?
The road turned south and the days were long and hot. A narrow valley wound its way along the coastal mountains and would continue on all the way to Los Angeles. Or what was left of it now.
But in the days that followed, the Boy turned from the 101, limping, and climbed the smooth grassy hills to the east, soft gentle hills, rising and falling in waves of green grass.
He dragged his body over the hills, his left side aching, withered, refusing to go farther.
He continued on.
On the other side of the hills, he found a wide valley that stretched away in a brown haze to the south.
Who am I now?
He stood in the gusting wind atop the hills.
He continued down into the hot valley.
Ancient roads, ruptured and disintegrating, overrun by erupting wild growth, crossed from east to west. All else was dry and brown, hard dirt and sun-rotten dead wood.
Fires had crossed the valley and there remained little of what once was.
Rusty water towers, fallen and gouged.
Wild tangles of barbed wire.
Fallen walls of blackened stone.
He crossed the old Interstate Five and continued down into the heat of the valley.
The trees here would not grow. They were stunted and sickly and even the ground seemed either unnaturally dark or washed out and spent altogether. Thorns, of which there are many, grew in wicked profusions of ochre, sickly green or pus yellow.
In a village of adobe walls he found misshapen men and women. All of them were blind and dragging themselves along through the dirt. They ate from sickly stands of a dark green kale that gave off a foul aroma when they stewed it inside an old oil drum filled with brackish water.
They knew he was there and they searched for him, but their keening and sniffing in the dusty heat after his scent repulsed him and he went on into the silences beyond their village.
Stands of palm trees clustered in sinister groups as if talking about him and though their shade would be welcome, and maybe even their fruit, he went wide to avoid their dark and fetid clusterings.
In the night he slept in an old grain silo and thought that he should hear birds in its rafters or the bony trees outside.
He could not remember when he last heard the song of a bird.
He drank water from a standing pond because he could no longer stand the ragged dry trench that was his throat. He saw the footprints of the blind villagers in the hard-packed soil.
They too had drunk here.
Blind would not be so bad.
In the still water he saw a monster.
A monster with red-rimmed eyes that reflected no light, no life. A face and chest covered in blood and dried mud. Horse’s blood. Muddy, knotted hair and a broken feather. Lips cracked and bleeding.
A monster.
He wandered south, following the twisting ribbon of the once-highway through a silent land of rust and scrub. He caught small things and felt little desire and even less satisfaction in the thin, greasy meals that resulted.
Who am I now?
Dry wood turned to sparks floating off into the night above his fire.
What is left to do and where should I go?
And there was no answer other than his own.
Nothing and nowhere.
In the day all was hot and boiling, dry and raw. In the night tepid warmth refused to surrender until long after the bloated moon had descended into darkness.
The thin road straightened and carved its way into southern mountains.
In the road signs he spelled Los Angeles.
He remembered Sergeant Presley calling it “Lost Angeles.”
I should burn the map.
What good is it now?
Mission, not complete.
But he didn’t and he continued on toward a crack where the road disappeared into the mountains.
At the last gas station in the foothills he spent the night.
There was nothing left to find here and there hadn’t been for forty years.
In the gas station’s emptiness he heard the grit of sand and glass beneath his feet. In times past, in all his wanderings with Sergeant Presley, he had wondered and even dreamed about the people of Before. What had they done in these places? There had been food and drink, beyond imagining, Sergeant Presley had explained bitterly, all on a hot day such as this, for people to stop and come in from the road.
He spelled I-C-E C-O-L-D S-O-D-A.
I was raised in places like this. It seems as though it should feel like home to me.
But it didn’t.
And . . .
I don’t care anymore.
That night, though he did not want to, he dreamed.
Dreams, who can stop them? Who can understand them?
He and Jin walked through the streets of a city. Up cobblestone streets where people live. Happy people. He turned to a fruit stand filled with green apples. It was a market day or a fair, and he selected an apple for Jin.
In that dreaming moment he understood the meaning of the name Jin. Her name meant “precious.” In the dream he was glad that he understood this now. It was as though he had found something rare and its ownership had caused his lifelong feeling of “want” to seem like a fading nightmare. As though he had recovered a lost treasure and it changed his future forever. As though his life, their life, would be only good now.
Now that he knew the meaning of her name, the dark times were behind them.
When he turned back to her, she was gone.
A happy villager, smiling, maybe the Weathered Man, told him she was over there, with the man’s wife, looking at silk dresses for their wedding. And the smiling farmer handed him the green bottle of Pee Gee Oh full of bubbles, and they drank and the farmer encouraged him to laugh and be happy.
“It’s all coming back,” said the Weathered Man in perfect English.
And the Boy knew he meant the world from Before. That the days of road and ruin are coming to an end and that there would be homes and families now. That he and Jin would have a place in this new world that everyone was so excited about.
A place together.
He was excited. He wanted to find Jin and tell her about all the good things that are soon going to happen to them.
But his mouth wouldn’t make the words to call out her name.
He searched the stalls.
He searched the roads.
It was getting dark in the dream and the market was closing.
“We’ll find her tomorrow,” said the Weathered Man. “Come home with us and stay the night.”
Though he didn’t want to be, the Boy was led home and the dream advanced in leaps and starts as the Boy watched throughout the night, looking out a small window, looking onto a dark street.
Waiting for Jin.
He could not wait to tell her that everything good was coming back again.
Soon.
In the dream he could not wait to hold her.
In the morning, the sun slammed into his weak eyes. Tears had dried on his dusty, crusted cheeks. His insides felt sore, as though they have been beaten with sticks.
He sat up and looked toward the road and the mountains.
It was real, he thought of the dream.
The road cut its way onto a high plateau, passing stands of oak and wide expanses of rolling yellow-green grass. In a high pasture he found sheep and a man watching over them.
The man waved at him from the field and the Boy turned off the old highway and into the field.
The sheep, maybe a dozen of them, wandered and bleated absently through the tall yellow grass of mid spring. Beyond the pasture, oak trees clustered at the base of a steep range of hills that shielded any view of the east and whatever must lie that way.
“Stranger, come and have water,” called the man over the constant bleating of the sheep.
The man was rotund and dressed in a ragged collection of scraps sewn together. He carried a crooked staff and leaned on it heavily. His hair, gray, sprang from his head in every direction. His voice was a mere rumble of thunder and gravel.
“The road is hard,” he said, watching the Boy drink the cool water held in a tin cup. The water was clear and sweet.
“It’s a good spring here,” said the shepherd when the Boy did not respond.
The Boy handed the cup back.
“I have wild apples near my camp; come and have some.”
The Boy followed the man across the pasture and into a stand of wild fruit trees.
They sit in the shade, eating apples.
“Saint Maggie said that food leads to friendship.”
The Boy said nothing.
“Who might you be, now?”
The Boy opened his mouth to answer. But he couldn’t.
“Can you speak?”
The Boy shook his head.
“Then I’m sorry. The words of man are overrated. Saint Maggie again.”
The shepherd took a crunchy bite from an apple.
“I speak too much.”
Then, “That’s why I’m here. I spoke too much when I shouldn’t have. But I love to talk. Love to hear the sound of my own voice. And the sounds of others for that matter. I love talk.”
There was more silence for a while.
“Still, my words are overrated.”
“Will you stay, or are you determined to go on to the south?”
The Boy rose.
“You will find nothing worth having there!” the shepherd’s voice rose in pitched urgency.
“You will find the worst of this world and the worst that the world that died had done to itself.”
The Boy began to stumble toward the road.
“If you go west you will find life. Some. But in the south there is nothing but horror. Trust me, stranger!”
As an afterthought the shepherd said. “East. Don’t go east into the desert. That is death for sure.”
The Boy considered the high sun. Orienting himself.
He turned toward the east.
The shepherd looked at the Boy, eyes wide with amazement and then horror.
A high hill, speckled by a few gnarled oaks, rose up to the east.
The Boy began walking toward the hill.
The shepherd murmured, “No.”
The tall grass brushed against the legs of the Boy and he could hear the shepherd hobbling behind him, breathing heavily in the still air.
“Stranger, don’t go that way. I told you it was death.”
They neared the base of the steep hill as the shepherd pursued the Boy.
“There lies a desert, and it will consume you. A wasteland. You will be no more. Saint Maggie said, ‘We must do our best. We must live despite life. God will do the rest.’ Stranger, you will find no love that way. Turn west and live.”
The Boy fell to his knees and began to climb the hill.
The shepherd fell to his knees.
“I will pray for you, stranger. I will pray for you.”
The shepherd was still praying, hours later, when the Boy reached the top of the steep hill and saw the line of hills beyond, descending into the vast bowl of the desert.
W
HAT DO YOU
find when there is nothing left, Boy?
The days were brutal and there was no water. The land fell into a furnace of burning hard-packed dirt and suffocating dunes.
You left me, Sergeant.
I had to, Boy. The world didn’t need me anymore
.
I needed you.
And someone, Boy, someday will need you also
.
She’s dead.
He fell to his knees and wept.
The flat desert stretched away in all directions.
Never give up, Boy. I told you. The world needs us
.
You take everything with you
.
It’s too much, too much to carry, you and the broken places and the evil of the world . . . and what . . . and Jin.
He stumbled.
Then he crawled.
How many days?
But to think of them was to think of the pain of all his days.
And still he crawled through the days, deeper and deeper into the burning wastes.
There can’t be anymore left of me. Tonight or tomorrow, and that would be the end of the whole mess that is the world, that is me.
In the night, the stars were cold and clear.
He watched them and thought of Jin.
I am done. There is nothing left in me with which to grieve.
He felt empty.
He felt hollow.
In the morning, the sun rose from a thin strip of light.
This is my last day.
You take everything with you.
He reached for the tomahawk.
It felt comforting. As though he had been loyal and faithful to it. As though it stood as a monument, a testament even, to all his loss and failure.
You take everything with you.
His left side would not move.
Curse you then, you never helped me in life and now you won’t go with me to my death. What good have you ever been?
Then . . .
I’ll drag you.
He watched the empty wasteland ahead and knew that he would die today somewhere within it.
Five days without water. That’s the most a man, a person, can go.
He dragged himself forward.
Sergeant Presley.
Horse.
The bearskin.
The pistol that was once a rifle.
Where did you lose that?
I cannot remember. Somewhere in the poisoned valley.
The Chinese colony at Auburn.
Escondido.
The Chinese at Sausalito.
Jin.
It was a lie.
What?
He had trouble remembering. He was crawling through chalky sand. He had been for some time.
It’s so hot now, but at least I’m not sweating.
I don’t think that is good.
It depends on what you want to accomplish.
What was a lie?
That you take everything with you. That was a lie.
Oh.
Where are they now?
Sergeant. Horse. Jin.
How can you take everything with you when it is all gone?
I was lied to.
In the end, I don’t even know who I am, where I came from. Who were my mother and father? What did it mean to be an American?
Sergeant Presley called me Boy.
The Chinese called me savage.
The savages called me Bear Killer.