22

 

IT’S STRANGE TO be walking in my neighborhood again. We’d tethered the horse to a road sign as we entered the suburban district, worried that its loud clip-clops might wake the light sleepers in curbside homes. We’re glad to be walking, anyway, the first time in days it feels like we can stretch our legs, get the muscles working again.

We walk in silence. This is all new to Sissy, and the scale of civilization has both spooked and awed her. She’s never seen streets aligned in perfect grids, flanked by houses that are perfect copies of one another. Never walked out so fully exposed, without protective glass encasing her, with so many hundreds of duskers in the immediate vicinity, so many millions more in every direction around her. She stares at the shuttered windows and doors, looks anxiously at the sun that will soon begin to set.

“Not much farther,” I whisper.

We turn the last bend, and now we’re on my street. Nothing has changed since the last time I was here only two, three weeks ago. But I have. The person who once walked in my skin and on these streets no longer exists. Everything is familiar, everything is alien, all at the same time.

Until we get to my house. Then nothing is familiar; everything is a devastating new. Because my house is barely there. The windows have been shattered, the front door smashed off its hinges. Even the walls have been pummeled, whole chunks of cement blocks pushed out and ground to dust. The house has been ransacked. Virtually everything has been stolen, to be later sold on the black market. What remains is only fragments, shards of glass scattered on the floor, splintered wood from the table and chairs strewn everywhere. The sofa has been gutted, and only the twisted metal skeleton frame remains. The walls, the floors, the corners where dust once gathered—all of it has been licked clean five times over by people trying to find a molecule of heper: my dead skin, my hair follicles, my fingernails, my droplets of mucus from a wayward sneeze, anything. The walls are covered with hundreds of swirls of dried dusker saliva, gleaming like prickly coats of dried varnish.

The bathroom, where I’d hoped to find the cleaning agents and shavers, is in even worse shape. Mirrors cracked, floor tiles ripped out, the secret tank of water cracked like broken pottery. The cabinet of cleansing supplies gone. Every tile, crack, line of grout, licked by hungry tongues hoping for a strand of heper DNA.

“Gene. We should go.” Sissy’s hand on my shoulder, gentle, offering solace. “There’s nothing here for us.”

I wipe at my cheeks, nod.

Before we walk out, I take one final look at the husked carcass of my home. The last few years here, all alone, were not happy years. They were not. After my father was gone—after he faked his turning and misled me into thinking he perished by sunlight—I had missed him terribly. With a physical aching. The daytimes were the worst, all alone in the house. Its empty spaces were painful reminders of my father’s absence.

In those days, to dull the ache, I had imagined him still alive. It was the only way my seven-year-old mind and heart could cope. I imagined he had somehow, miraculously, escaped to some place far away. Perhaps he had fled east, all the way across the Vast, to where the eastern mountains rose on the distant horizon. He had once flown a remote-controlled plane toward those mountains and had told me to remember that. Wasn’t it possible, my seven-year-old mind reasoned, that he had escaped there? I held on to this lie because it was a footbridge—rickety and frail though it was—across the chasm of my loneliness.

On days when the pain could not be managed (and there were many), I left the house and walked the streets. Walking for hours at a time, I would remember the way my father would walk next to me, how he would warn me to stay out of the sunlight or to hug close to the buildings. That is what I remembered most: his voice, his words. And what I had wanted was quite simple: I wanted to hear from him. I would not be demanding nor even require an explanation—a simple message would suffice, sent to me all the way from the eastern mountains on one of those remote-controlled planes. I’m alive. I’m okay. A sentence or two. That’s all.

And so, as I walked the streets, I would—despite knowing better—occasionally gaze upward. I wanted to see a tiny dot growing bigger and bigger as it sailed over the Vast, hear the small whirring buzz of its motor, see it fly between the maze of skyscrapers. Watch its descent toward me, its landing on the street as it taxied slowly toward me, to finally bump softly against my feet.

But I never saw a plane. No matter how many times I set out, how many miles I walked, how many shoes I wore out, how many times I looked up, I never saw a thing. And so I changed my expectations; I did not need a message. I would accept the mere sight of a plane; it did not even need to land. If it merely sailed in the skies above, never descending, and passed over my head, that would be consolation enough.

But I never saw a thing. I never knew what it felt like to fall under the cool, comforting shadow of a passing plane.