WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (20 page)

    “What happened with you two?” I say. I raise my eyes to her and this time she looks away, just for a moment, some first sign of weakness, and then she looks right back at me. When she won’t answer I turn to watch the dead, the movement of the camp, in and out of the huts, the bodies being hauled in curled arms, away into the forest, and some of them toward the dock.

    “You mean with him?” she finally answers.

    “There’s a story, isn’t there?” I say, even though she’s already figured out what I’m after.

    “I’m born Resistance. Some of us are. Some of us come into it. Accidentally. Or on purpose. Even some from the Fatherhood, like you, end up here,” she says. I want to ask about Garren’s past—if he’s one of the Resistance born, or if he came from somewhere else. And how he came to be the leader, in charge of everyone. How long he’s been controlling everything here on the coast. But somehow, just from her face, I know he’s an orphan, just like Maze.

    “You asked about the story. The Resistance is a magnet for everyone who doesn’t buy a story,” she goes on.

    “What do you mean?”

    “Any story about what happened before. Because our bond—the Resistance’s unity—is in knowing there’s no way to know. That all that’s left is to deal with how things are. And to avoid the forces that make the stories.”

    “But there has to be a story, you can’t say
nothing
happened before. You said yesterday to never believe in anything—that belief itself is the problem. That doesn’t make sense,” I say.

    “It
is
the problem. There isn’t belief. There is only probability. And even though there must be one true story, I’m not stupid enough to pretend I know what it was. To pretend there could ever be enough evidence to know.”

    “So you don’t believe in the tower—or the Ark—or any of it?”

    “The Ark,” she laughs. “Sid’s crazy idea? The record of the past?”

    From her words I know—that her powers aren’t all-seeing like I thought—and I don’t correct her. Just let her imagine it was Sid’s idea, as if Maze isn’t the driving influence behind all of this.  

    “If it’s all bullshit, what do your probabilities tell you then?”

    “That there was science, and there was opposition to science. Call it technology, or reduce it to metal, like the Fathers do, but it was science. And when science advanced enough, when it came to explain the last things that religion, spirituality, that all of the nonsense retained—morality, souls—there was a final struggle—an enactment of ancient texts.”

    “Enactment?”

    “Some of what the Fathers say, I think there’s the chance of truth in it. That the answer to science was Revelation, like they say. Or, that the last resort of belief, of an ancient part of our species that served its function in antiquity and had come, at last, to be checked by rational thought, was to destroy the false idol of science that had come to replace the more comforting systems. So before the checkmate of progress, Revelation.”

    “But the Fatherhood says that technology brought on its own collapse.”

    “I said that some of what they say might contain truth. Most of it, I’m sure you know, doesn’t.”

    I try to make sense of what she’s saying, but only parts of it make sense. I think of the word. Revelation. Something that the Fathers speak of, but I can’t remember in what context. And then, it’s Father Gold’s voice again cutting through my head:
It was the first Revelation that relieved us of the collective sin of mankind, whose image was God’s, yet defiled itself in materialism. And it will be the second Revelation, the final Revelation, as written in our scripture, that will reunite us with God, making us all as one singular will, forever bliss, eternally present and combined, in the After Sky. We pray for the signs…

    It’s when I get to the signs that I lose track of what Father Gold’s sermon specified—the signs he would talk about week after week. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why it’s impossible to remember them. It was the same speech I heard, along with the others, for my entire life. And just as I’m about to ask more of Gala, to dig into what she really thinks, she stands up. I’m almost alarmed because she rises so quickly, as if the Nefandus might be back, springing from the edge of the forest to attack again, but then I see what’s happening. It’s Rafe. Coming right up to us. He’s sullen and caked with dirt, his hands almost black.

    “Food,” he mutters. And then, he tells Gala that he needs to talk. She looks back at me as she leaves, smiling.

    “We share a boat tomorrow,” she says. “Save your questions.” And then, her words a taunt, proving that she really is a mind reader, she’s gone. They walk away until I lose them in the crowd. My eyes search for Maze, but she’s nowhere to be found. After another few minutes of watching the Resistance scurry back and forth, sweeping away the blood splotches that cover the sand, I rise and follow the scent of food.

When I’ve eaten so much soup and vegetables that I can’t take another mouthful, I rise and head back to the hut where we slept last night. My eyes fall to the ground, the whole camp veiled by the same thick fog that dulls my head, light rain coming down, forcing me into to the quiet dark of the room. No one is there. For a second, I want to go back outside, to inspect every hut until I find where Maze is—figure out what she’s doing—what Garren’s doing to her. What he’s changing inside her and what he’s taking away from me. But I can’t. I’m too exhausted and every part of my body, especially my head, is too heavy. I find my way to the bed and close my eyes to a vision of thick gray in the window. Somehow I remember that it’s still morning. Even though it’s dark and gray and wet out there. It’s still morning.  

Maze looks over at me from where they all stand. She turns from the fire, her conversation with Garren, and everyone else who waits for a verdict. What’s to be done in the aftermath of the slaughter? Where does the Resistance go from here? But she’s lost all concern with it, and her gaze is fixed on me, where I sit on a stump. Between us are the blood-streaked lines of sand and dirt. She looks like she’ll come.

    The fog rides in harder, thicker and fast somehow, making everything hard to see—so hazy that all I can tell is she’s walking toward me. But the fatigue and the worry and the thinning drive to strike out into the ocean has died in her, I can tell, and all of it is replaced by a warm smile, total caring, all of it bent to me. And I don’t even have to move one bit, because just like Gala, she wants me. She makes her way in so close that it’s only her face I can see now, and everything else is obscured by the dew and the gray haze of some low cloud that wants us all blinded forever.

    Without a word, she kisses me. It’s as natural as anything I’ve ever known in my life. The press of her lips comes, lights through me, all the way down my body, and then it’s extinguished, just that fast, and she reels back. One of a thousand kisses I’ve had from her. Nothing uncommon or rare about it, because it’s the only thing I have ever known of her, for her to lead in and kiss me, just to make me know I mean the world to her. And she to me. And then she asks me something. The words decay in the fog before they reach me, hard to understand, but I know—she’s asking about when we’ll see each other next. I tell her I don’t know, but that it must be soon. And her look of happiness washes out, all of it, into something like when Sid died. Something like loss and certainty wrapped up in dissolving hope. The moment freezes time. I watch her eyes peel away, roll off me and toward the heavy gloom that envelops everything deeper, harder. When I ask her—just for her attention again—so that she’ll turn and look at me, and hold the stare, and not stop looking just when I really have the sense of taking her in, she opens her soft mouth and tells me the fog words:
I don’t know if we will
. I have to ask her to say it again. Closer. You don’t know if we will what, Maze? What are you saying?

    I repeat myself over and over again, waiting, but her eyes never return to me. They are stuck to the gloom, sutured by it, hoping to find something in blindness—something far beyond my ability to know. And when my words stop making sound, my voice box broken, my throat caved in by something, completely destroyed and bent and twisted apart, the hopelessness begins to slit my mind apart, because I know her face is gone to me now. It’s nothing but a slip of the gray, a shade blended into the rest, still and unliving now. Something I’ll die before seeing again. I yell at her to tell me. What is it? And then she says—
if we’ll ever see each other again
. And it’s like, with the certainty that I’ll never know her anymore—her touch, or the thousand kisses that are commonplace—that a loud clap thunder, the fog finally showing that its more alive than either of us, rouses me, pushes me, so hard that I fall upward, toward the sky.

The confusion parts as I pass the clouds, shedding the dim gray, replacing it with new darkness where forms slowly take shape. And one of them, tall, a strident sound protruding from it, bends down to me, trying to bring me to life again. It’s my name, I finally realize, and it’s her. In the room with me.

    “Maze,” I say, sitting up in alarm. I see her sit next to me, on the bed, right there, clear and unfogged. She waits for me to wake so that she can speak to me, but the memory of her kiss weighs me to the bed. That she, just the same, only a moment ago, kissed me. That it had to have been real, as much as I know it wasn’t. When she starts to talk to me, to tell me something about the trip tomorrow, none of it makes sense because I feel her lips against mine, and see her warm smile, all for me, instead of the passionless visage holding her face hostage now. And it’s all I can see and feel, and I fight to ignore her, to stay stuck in the fairy realm, as real as God or any of the legends of the Fatherhood.

    “Are you listening?” she says, her voice softening.

    “Yeah.”

    “Garren told me that he knows a way—there’s a door Wills—a
door
. To the tower.”

    I want to respond to her, to ask her more, but for some reason, the difference between her dream form and her now, the concerned, distracted being talking about the tower, enrages me. That she could kiss me like that, so ordinarily in my dreams, and have none of that for me now. It’s like I can’t understand why there could be any difference between the two versions of her, and all I want to do is go back to sleep. When she presses me again for a response, to at least acknowledge what she’s talking about, I feel nothing but the anger. It’s more than the dream, I tell myself, because logically I know she has no power to control her presence there, in that gloomy  place. The anger is at her words, I tell myself. I think of the door, and whether there is any truth in it, and how everything she tells me is no longer the full truth like I used to think it was. It’s just as much as she sees fit to give me. Some slice of what’s really going on inside her. What she really knows and thinks and has in her heart. It dawns on me, before she gets another word out, that she must know more about the door than she will ever tell me now, more about Garren already than she will ever tell me. All of the heat inside me boils away the dream at last into something I know I must do. A fate I must claim—something to cripple myself—to at last destroy the hope I keep for her love.

    “You told me you heard me,” I say. “Lying on the table.”

    She pauses, confused because I’ve changed topics, ignored everything she’s said, and brought up something her face tells me she has no desire to speak about. But I can’t help it—I press on, fueled by the anger, the pain that makes me know I have to kill her. The Maze in my dream. I have to make her die, if I’m to keep going at all in this world. An empty world of towers and doors and lies. I push her with my words, using all the courage I can gather.

    “Heard me say I love you,” I say. The thin sound of my own voice makes me want to hide, so I say it again, summoning whatever confidence and strength I have left in me to say the words with power. And then the silence hangs, like somehow I knew it would, and there’s no reply. I feel the wrongness of what I’ve done—of the timing of it, of the admission itself. But I let it go. As if the wrongness rests with her and not me. I force myself to stay silent, to hold hard onto her face, waiting for her averted eyes to return.

    “You’re my friend, Wills. You’re my best friend,” she says.

    “So that’s it?” I say, a slip of anger.

    “It’s enough, isn’t it?” she replies in anger of her own.

    And with her question, I’m stopped. I want to wear her down, beat her into submission, but it will never work. There is nothing between us but what she sees and what I imagine. The anger, welling, is diverted to uselessness that quickly, and I sink down forever. Finally, I decide that I can’t stop yet, I have to keep going.

    “What do you know? What else haven’t you told me? It seems like you keep a lot from your best friend.”

    “Wills—am I wrong to have thought you would have given me shit for going to the scrap yard? Would you have wanted to know about Sid?”

    I try to calculate a smart response but let it fade and turn to the dark window. She’s right. I would have tried to keep her safe, tried to prevent her from going to the scrap yard. And Sid would have crippled me. She knew it. She spared me until it was necessary. All of this pain goes back to me in the end. It was my decision to leave Acadia. To chase her.

    “And the tattoo and the door and Garren? What else is there?” I say, trying desperately to smooth away the anger from my voice.

    “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

    “A door?”

    “Garren’s like me. He’s kept a lot of it to himself, but now, because of what I’ve told him—what he’s trusting me with—he’s willing to follow it.”

    “Follow what?”

    “The truth!”

    “So what does the tattoo mean to him?”

    “He thinks—” and then she stops. I watch her think through her words before she goes on. And then I know, it’s just what my fears convinced me of—she’s
deciding
. How much to tell me. How much to keep me in the dark still.