That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (23 page)

I tell him we can stay here for a couple of days, so that we can both rest. He nuzzles into my belly. I tickle him under the chin and he lifts his face up. He
’s getting a black eye, making him look half ’coon. It’s hard to imagine what he’ll look like when he grows up. Not that I can see me ever finding out. Something will get one or both of us before then.

He holds out his hand for the remote. I give it. He sits down on the sofa and starts mashing the buttons. He points it at himself. Dog, he says. He curls his lips and snarls, then giggles. He points it at me. I
’m afraid he’ll say cat, but he says pig, so I get down on all fours and make oinking noises. I pretend I’m falling down a meat hopper until he covers his eyes and squeaks at me to stop.

I turn him into a volk and he marches around squeaking purity slogans. He turns me into a bactyl and I stick my butt in the fridge pretending I
’m oozing out of it. I do a floppy, writhing bactyl dance in front of the TV.

When it
’s his turn again he says, Now you’re Potatohead.

But he says it in a cute, funny way. There
’s nothing mean in his look. He’s just playing. I lie down obediently on the floor and spread my arms out.

He squats over me, pokes me in the chest and says, Are you dead?

Yeah, pretty much.

Then how come you can talk?

Maybe I’m not quite properly dead. It’s hard to tell with angels, remember?

Well, you can die properly, now, he says. But there
’s still nothing nasty in his eyes.

I lie stiff for a bit, sticking my stubby mouse legs in the air. That makes him laugh
.

Since he
’s starting to look tired, I herd him outside to go to the toilet before he gets really sleepy.

Carrying my gun and pack, I march us for about ten minutes so that the smell will be a reasonable distance away from the hut and supervise him digging a hole with his hands, which are more like paws than mine and have pretty strong claws. We both use it, then fill it up and cover it with leaves.

The afternoon light is sloping through the tree trunks as we return. He’s got a real shiner. I refuse to let myself feel bad about it. He has to learn self-control, and he has to remember that I’m his guardian and teacher, and that he’s damn lucky to have me.

We eat our pig. Inventory of all supplies is now: Twenty
-five tins. Ammo: six 30-round magazines. First volk I killed – with my old Dirty Harry gun, before it went down the rabbit hole – I took his AK. Since volk all have exactly the same firearm, picking up ammo is no great problem. Three litres of stream water. Water sanitation pills: nineteen. Worm pills: sixteen. Bennies: twelve. Flashlight batteries: four. Antiseptic: not much. Antibiotics: none.

I figure I
’ll have to work for about a month to earn enough to trade for meds. If there are any meds. Last place, the farm store had nothing. The mom and pop were waiting for new stocks to punch in.

The light
’s low now, marshalling gold in the trees – what I think of as the unknown soldier’s prize for lasting another day. I sit on the floor to first pick my teeth with a twig, then clean my gun, listening to the pleasant evening bird chitter.

As for him, instead of sleeping, he plays with the turds, arranging them into patterns that apparently mean something to him. Art isn
’t dead.

I look over and see he
’s made a neat little pyramid. That’s good, I say. Real good.

He clenches his fists and jiggles them in the air, cheering for himself. He gets up and checks that the remote is still where he left it on the sofa. He can
’t find it, of course, because I hid it when he wasn’t looking. I shrug like I don’t know anything.

It
’s a little test, to see if he can tell I’m kidding around. Can he put himself in my head, or is he really only ever in his own head now?

I can
’t say that I get an answer. He goes scrabbling between the cushions like he did before, and eventually finds the remote, and gives me a gopher’s vertical grin.

But the remote isn
’t all he’s found. He gives me something he’s holding in his other paw.

It
’s a torn off corner of printed paper from a TV program guide. My best guess is that it’s just part of the decoration. If there are other huts, there’ll be identical scraps of paper caught in their sofa cushions.

Or it might be a leftover. The whole hut might be, even. I suppose that
’s possible. It took about a year for all the farms and rally halls and highway towns and all the accessories like AKs and pickups to punch in, and by then just about everything else was gone, but maybe there are still a few drops to shake off.

I sit him down on the sofa, put him on my knee, and read out what
’s on the paper. Football, news, current affairs, cartoons.

You remember cartoons? I ask.

Maybe, he says. Then he points to the word. I spy, he says. C.

You can read that?

He gives me a look like he isn’t sure what I mean, but he points to the letters in the words and says them. He mostly gets them wrong, but he knows they’re letters. Maybe I Spy has somehow kept the letter pictures as well as the sounds alive in his head. There’d be no point in trying to teach him to read properly, though. The only thing left to read is what the floor boss maryjanes write, and they just use tally marks.

B, he says. D, I correct him. Documentary, I read out aloud. The Land of Samurai.

Might as well be the Land of the Pus People for all it probably means to him.

His memory of before definitely isn
’t as good as mine. Your maryjanes, moms and pops, deros, trogs – they don’t remember anything. When you try to talk to any of them about the past, it’s like they hear you saying something else, and they respond to whatever they think they heard. I don’t know about volk and the rest, but I assume it’s the same with them. Something like a bactyl probably doesn’t have thoughts at all. So if me and him really are unique, we might be the only critters with memories, and his is only half a memory. Not that it matters in the big picture. If there are others like us, I bet they’re just as dead-ended as we are. No reason to suppose they’d be good eggs, either.

I sometimes wonder if we
’re dreams, but if we are, we must be the smallest, weakest, least scary fucking dreams in this world.

I
’ve never bullshitted him. He’s never asked where we’re going and I’ve never said anything about it. I always figured that if he asked I’d tell him the truth and say we’re going nowhere in particular. I had an agreement with myself that I wouldn’t bring the subject up, but that if he asked, I could consider him ready to share my burden of knowing we’re going nowhere except the next farm, the next cold night in a ditch or a dero town, the next struggle with evil. And ready to understand me better because of that.

But now something gets a hold of me, like that belief
-shits again, as if I’m possessed and talking in tongues and I say, Hey, have I ever told you where we’re going?

He shakes his head
.

I can
’t help myself, the bullshit flows.

I tell him we
’re going to the land of samurai, where there are no pig farms, just rice farms and orchards and trout streams. And all the people there are real people, with proper faces and brains. Every person there is a samurai, strong in body and spirit. They don’t need bennies, and they can eat all kinds of food.

I tell him the most important thing a samurai needs is discipline of the heart. To endure, to be alert, to think of others. And to feel nature in your soul
– to be reconciled to the life that falls and melts, and comes back again, but not as what it was before. I kind of start to explain a personal philosophy, putting into proper words the things that go around and around in my head all the time, but that I don’t say all the way clearly, either because I’m trying to dumb things down for his benefit or because I’m too done in or strung out to think straight enough. But it’s flowing from me now. Truth all mixed up with crazy talk.

In my mind, this AK here that I
’ve been cleaning is a sword. A very clean sword now, but I’m still cleaning it in my mind. I’m not just cleaning a sword, I’m cleaning my spirit, keeping it in working order. Making it as clean as the water in my made-up land.

I don
’t know where this urge to talk through my ass has come from, but the more I talk, the more I like what I hear myself saying – even despite the fact that like a lousy hypocrite I’m breaking my own rules.

He
’s looking at me, but I don’t know whether he’s taking any of it in, the sense or the nonsense, until he asks if his mama’s there, in the land of samurai.

Of all the questions he could have asked, naturally it had to be that.

Yeah, I blather, she’s there. She’s got a job, finally, too. Queen of the samurai. Doesn’t get much better than that.

What the hell, if I
’m going to talk bullshit, it might as well be gold-plated bullshit trailing clouds of glory.

III.

That
’s nice, I say, giving the shrine a glance. Real pretty. Yeah, fuck me if he hasn’t made an altar to her. On top of the TV. The plastic shoe, raised on two empty meat tins: that’s her throne. The fox turds, neatly piled, which he says are her food, and some flowers and feathers and a leaf skeleton, standing for her clothes and whatever other shit he happens to think she needs.

We
’ve been here two weeks. I did a stint at a farm, got meat and meds. I figured he was big enough to work, and he did, and he didn’t do too bad. The deros and trogs picked on him but he just kept his nose down and shovelled like I told him to. I hardly dared think it, but suddenly he was acting like I’ve been trying to raise him to act. Sensibly, with his mind on what has to be done.

I guess I was feeling soft on him, since when he begged to go back to the hut I said yes.

It’s stupid to stay put. Something will sniff us out. But right from the start, this place seemed to wake up his mind and his will, so that staying here seems worth the risk of trouble coming sooner rather than later. And I swear, I’m feeling sharper since we’ve been here. Maybe it’s just because I’m not tired from walking and stiff from sleeping on the ground. There’s a stream in the next valley, so we don’t have any worries about water, but I hit on an idea to save on sanitation pills. When it rains, I take the covers off the sofa cushions and put them outside so that they fill up with clean rainwater. I don’t think I’d have thought of doing that before.

So we
’re both sharpening up. But now I can see that while he’s regaining an ability to focus, what he wants to focus on is her. For example, he thanked her for the rain.

He
’s gotten right into being a samurai, as much as he thinks he knows what a samurai is. He doesn’t believe his mouse dad can keep the bad things away, but the queen of samurai can. Kid’s getting religion, ancestor worship. He thinks this is the discipline of the heart.

I can
’t see myself in him. Her I can see. She was into shit like that. Astrology, superstitions, angels. Stuff that doesn’t require discipline to adhere to. Faiths with zero level of difficulty. Too bad she didn’t live to see what angels turned out to be like.

And yet, I can
’t help seeing this wacky shit of his as a kind of progress. It’s imaginative. And imagination is the beginning of compassion. I’m hopeful that one day, if I wait this out, he’ll start imagining how it is to be me. I’m also hopeful that he’ll get bored. Right now, it’s as if she’s his favourite toy. But kids get sick of their toys. I’m telling myself to wait and be patient, because he’ll outgrow her. Eventually he’ll start to really think deeply about his mouse dad. And whereas she can’t ever be more than what she was, and can’t talk to him or show him anything new, I can always be interesting. I think he’ll see that. He just has to muck around with this little-kid magic stuff first.

He
’s stopped wanting to play the game with the remote buttons. Instead, he comes out on patrols with me. That’s when the samurai business has practical use. He actually tries to do a job out there. He listens and sniffs, and peers into the dark woods, though I don’t suppose he sees any better than I do. I won’t turn on the AK’s flashlight unless I have to shoot something. Most of the time, my whiskers save me from bumping into trees. He does okay in that department, too. I set a slow, almost creeping pace, partly for safety, partly for him to practice moving quietly in the dark. I’ve told him how it’s all a matter of control: controlling your body, controlling your fears.