The Only Ones

A
DVANCE
P
RAISE:

“Anyone who thinks dystopian fiction is a lemon with no juice left in it needs to read
The Only Ones
to get that tingle back in the taste buds… How can a writer this good have waited so long for her due? Carola Dibbell’s marvelous narrative has pace, emotional range, plenty of humor—some bitter, some sweet—and one of the most harshly enthralling narrators in fiction since Huckleberry Finn.”

—Adam Mars-Jones

“One of the most beautifully handled aspects of Carola Dibbell’s novel is the slowly unfolding way in which her narrator’s deadpan gradually begins to reveal deeper emotion even as her maternally dystopic world is depicted. A fine book.”

—Jack Womack

Copyright © 2015 by Carola Dibbell
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-937512-27-9
Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.

Cover:
The Virgin of the Apocalypse
, Miguel Cabrera, 1760.
Author photograph:
Nina Christgau

Printed in Canada.

No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced, with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

For my daughter, Nina

BEFORE I START, LET ME SAY REALLY FAST, DON’T worry. You’re not in trouble. I will not track you down or hurt you—nothing like that. I just got a few things to tell you that you really need to hear, and you need to hear them from me, not someone else. Ok. That’s it for now. Here we go.

1 T
HE
L
IFE

THE HYBROBUS STOPPED RIGHT BESIDE THE RIVER checkpoint, like Rauden said it will. The driver wore a mask.

They generally check your Pass real good when you go out of state, but this guy didn’t even look—just took my bus coupon and off we go. I guess whatever bad thing someone from where I’m from could have, they already got it in New Jersey. I recognized the smell. Hygiene spray and smoke. It even stinks inside the bus. Outside, the regular stuff—barricades, caution tape. I think I saw some person look out a window at us, but that’s it. No one is on the street. Me, the driver, a couple passengers all the way in back, it’s like we are the only ones even alive out here. At least I’m out of Queens.

Man! I am glad to be out of Queens.

We pass a bunch of houses burnt right to the ground. We got that in Queens too.

I am glad to be on a trip. I never even been to this side of the river. I been to Pennsylvania. Once. Well, I think I been in Connecticut. But the van they took me in did not have windows. Pennsylvania was in a Dome. I did not see a single Dome here. Maybe they keep them in some other part of New Jersey. Here is just burnt houses and smoke. Then the smoke is gone. The houses are just empty. Then no houses. It is just a road, in Jersey, or I don’t know where. The road is in good shape. Snow is melting, and everything is wet.

I woke up in a Terminal in a checkpoint called End Of Line, and outside a fat guy with a beard is standing in snow, saying to his Mobile, “She’s here,” and when he reached out to take the Pak I brought him from Queens, I recognized the hands. I saw them when he hired me. It’s Rauden. The rest of him was in one of those stupid bubble suits clients wear when they come to do business where I work. We call it the Mound. If they come by boat, they could just wear a mask.

“The dropoff work as planned?” Rauden asked. “Nobody touched the Pak?”

“Just the guy who brought it and he got off the Mound real fast.”

I am glad to be off the Mound myself. Cold out there. The girls all wear two coats because we got to stand right on the edge of Powell’s Cove, in case somebody wants to hire us from their stupid boat. They come in boats so they don’t have to go too far in Queens. Nobody wants to go too far in Queens.

There was a food stand at the Terminal shelter and after the guy put the Pak in his truck, he bought something which is called Chickn N Dumpling. I enjoy that.

I enjoy the truck! I never been in a truck. We head off on a big road through, like, snow, snow, snow. I been out in the sticks before—Pennsylvania was the sticks—but like I say, in a Dome. You don’t see much from a Dome. Here it’s mainly snow. They got a few burnt houses too.

We turn on a smaller road, with trees, then up a hill, and where a sign says, “DVM,” we turn to a really small road of dirt, and the guy gets out at a gate where there is a, like, blinking light? Stands a minute in the road, like he is listening to something, then he shrugs and works some gizmo in the gate, which opens and shuts behind us when we drive on, up dirt and snow through bushes and trees, to a clearing. “And that’s the Farm,” he says.

I heard of it. When he sent me trip coupons, he signed off like this—

RAUDEN SACHS: The Farm.

It looks like a really big dirty tin can cut in half.

“Old school Quonset,” he says.

Whatever.

It is very windy. There is a smell I never smelled.

A large woman with short orange hair and a large pink sweater is at a counter inside, watching TV and eating donuts, which are also pink. Rauden said her name was Janet Delize. Behind her was that kind of wall they call paneling, and in front was one orange sofa, plus chairs. The whole place seems to be narrow but long, and Janet Delize and Rauden and me seem to be the only people in it.

“If you’ll bear with me while I do a quick product check? And I will need your Pass and ID.” Rauden took them and the Pak and went through some door, and Janet Delize said, “Like to take a bath?” and took me through a different door past one dark room and a hall of freezers to a very small side room with a large sink right near a blinking green light. “Just climb right in.” She said she will leave a clean outfit for when I’m done and take my old dress.

She’s not taking my coat, I can tell you that. I foraged hard for that coat. Where I live it is low on people and food but forage is up the wazoo. Great big empty houses—just climb in a window, help yourself. What’s going to happen even if somebody sees? We don’t even got a working jail in Queens. Not in Bronx or Brooklyn either. It is a Hygiene thing. They burn them down.

I could hear Rauden coughing in back when I came up front to dry off in my outfit. Cough, cough, cough. He coughed like that on the Mound. I just look out the window. It is the kind that does not open. Then a phone rang and he yelled at someone.

I been looking out the window maybe ten minutes when Rauden showed up breathing so hard he got to lean his fat self on the door. “If you’ll come with me to my office?” he goes. “I’m going to run a few tests—nothing invasive. Janet!” he yells. “Hold my calls. I’ll be in the Box Room with the Subject.”

Subject? So that is news to me. I didn’t know I was the Subject. I thought I was the Courier. Courier, you take a trip. Subject, you don’t know what is going to happen.

And that’s ok with me.

ii

“I’m having some trouble calling up your files, Ms.—” Rauden pulls my ID from a pocket and reads off, “Fardo.”

So this is Rauden’s office. I had not been in an office like this. It is like a warehouse, but small. I had been in a warehouse. I had been in a tent. I been in labs and also boats, of course. This office is mainly boxes, cables, old gizmos, plus dirt, with pictures on the wall, one of someone who seems to be Rauden next to someone else who also seems to be Rauden. They are both holding baby pigs.

“I. Kissena Fardo.” He’s sitting at a desk and I am on a box, and he is reading off my ID. “What’s the I for?”

“Inez.”

“And they call you?”

“I.”

He looks up from the ID and says, “I see.” But like he didn’t.

Well, get over it. That’s what they call me. I’m lucky they call me anything.

He swipes the ID in a slot in the gizmo on his desk. “I’d like to do a little intake,” and makes a big deal of saying, “I,” then coughs, like he had trouble saying it. “It might help me access some medical information I can probably figure out on my own but this could save some time. Just basic background,” he went on, typing in his gizmo and squinting at a screen. “Where you were born, grew up?”

Intake. Ok. I was not wild about intake. They ask a lot of questions they expect you to answer for free. But it’s part of the job. Just get it over fast. I told the guy I grew up in Corona, Queens, in a basement. I didn’t know where I was born. Cissy Fardo brought me up till she died in the fire when I was ten. When I finished saying all that I just looked at the pictures on the wall.

“Well!” the guy said. He leaned back and got comfortable. “I think we’re missing a few details,” and he got so comfortable he starts scratching himself in different places under what he wore, which by the way I had not seen a Tech wear this before. They generally wear a white coat or bubble suit. This guy wore overalls. I never saw overalls so big. In forage, you generally just find small ones. You find those a lot. Nobody needs the small ones. “For instance,” he goes, starting soft, then turns his chair around to look right at me and gets even softer, “your entire life between ten and now.” Then he banged his fist on the desk. Boom.

Ok.

The phone rang.

He pushed a button under his desk and it stopped. “How old are you, by the way?”

I said I didn’t know.

“You don’t know how old you are?”

I shook my head.

He leaned back in the chair again and rubs his forehead, like I already wore him out. Well, that’s his problem. He’s the one who wanted to do intake in the first place. If it was up to me, I just as soon go straight to the so-called tests. Whatever they are, I’m pretty sure I will rather do it than intake. Let alone, sex.