Cassandra Khaw
Gerard hated the Midwest. Well, not the Midwest, per se. He held no animosity towards the region itself. What he hated was driving across the Midwest. He resented seeing the swathes of dead farmland, soil so wrung of nutrients and its bacterial ecosystems, it’d be entire lifetimes before anything would take root in that brown dust again; the dried-up lakes; the ghost towns, haunted by debris; the cars abandoned along the broad highways like picked-over skeletons, scabrous with red-gray rust. Gerard loathed knowing there’d been more here once, that there was grass as far as the eye could see, and cornfields with their lion-colored harvest swaying gently under an oiled-silk sky, and monarch butterflies and coyotes and bunnies and bison. That it had held life enough to sustain a whole country.
Gone now. All of it.
Yeah. Maybe, that was his problem with the Midwest. The knowledge of what it was and could still have been. That and understanding the policymakers responsible for this unholy waste were as dead as the land they’d fucked over. No matter how angry Gerard got, he would never be able to do more than piss on their graves, something he’d tried once when he was younger and inchoate with fury at the world. It had done nothing but relieve the pressure on his bladder, had left him feeling impotent and puerile, embarrassed at his outburst and the stinking yellow mess dribbling over the faded tombstone. There was only going forward: thinking, looking, moving forward. No point in nursing those old wounds; a new generation was depending on them.
Still, every time he took an assignment in the Midwest, Gerard still wanted to scream. He wouldn’t, though. Not with Bourbon and Rye riding in the tonneau: they’d lose their minds and start barking until the heavens calved like a glacier and a piece crushed them flat. Instead, he lit a cigarette and let his arm flop out the truck window. The vehicle grumbled under him. It was a relic, like he almost was: both its engine and the chassis straight from the before times. The marigold upholstery and the leather steering wheel—those were new, as were the alterations he made to the truck bed. Between him, the dogs, and Betty, Gerard had to be clever. There’d be no space for them otherwise, not unless he intended to sleep in the cabin with a dog heaped over his knee, and at forty-six, that wasn’t going to happen. The thought alone made his back hurt along three different vertebrae.
He adjusted the rearview mirror. Rye stared back at him through the mirror, her gaze calm and wise, the line from the bridge of her muzzle to her tail as perfect as a soldier’s posture. Bourbon, as always, was busy with more nonsense: this time, it was ineffectively grooming the quadrupedal robot lying docile between her and her sister. Behind them: the sky deepened in hue, the bright celadon darkening to a bruise.
Illinois stretched on like hope. Gerard did the mathematics in his head. It couldn’t be much longer now. The town was probably another six or so hours away if he pushed, which he would. Sleeping on the road was a risk. Even now, after the end of everything, there’d be people who’d take umbrage at Gerard for having the temerity to be a color other than pink. That said, the whole ordeal was as much his fault as anyone else’s. The higher-ups had very delicately suggested he only take coastal assignments, but Gerard had insisted. He felt like he owed something to the people who lived here: the immigrant families, the poor who had nowhere to go, the folk who carried the bayou and the prairie, the corn and the endless skies, in their bones and wouldn’t give up the place of their births just because a racist said leave.
He was born at least a hundred years too late to save them, but their stories—well, that was different. That he could do something about.
The hours flattened into a steady featureless continuum: no before, no after, no sense of time elapsing, just the unbroken now. Twice, Gerard stopped to let the dogs stretch their legs and let Betty investigate the remnants of a farmhouse. Once so he could make a meal out of a positively antediluvian packet of MRE. They drove through rain and a bout of unseasonal hail, the latter leaving Gerard cursing but the dogs happily ensconced in the truck cab with him, the air inside smelling of rain and damp fur. And night kept seeping across the horizon, the shadows growing bloodier with every mile. Soon enough, the world contracted to the headlights of Gerard’s truck, and this was a good thing as he would have driven himself right off the road in shock if he had beheld in its entirety what he found at the mouth of the town.
Green. Green everywhere: green weeping through the cracks in the asphalt, green in the boughs of the saplings bracketing the road, green in the absolute mess of earthen pots jumbled around a convoy of vans, their occupants unloading agricultural tools when Gerard arrived. Thrown into relief by his headlights, the people arrayed there seemed unreal, ghost-like in their starkness.
One threw their forearm over their eyes and barked, “Turn that fucking shit off. You’re blindin’ us.”
Gerard obliged, too dazzled to do more than behave as told. Once he had killed his headlights, he opened his door and stepped out of the truck, his dogs pouring after him. Rye growled a warning at the strangers but quieted when Gerard stretched a hand to her. She pushed her skull into his palm, her snarling thinned to a whine, only relaxing when he stroked her ears. Bourbon stayed behind them both, flank pressed to the back of Gerard’s knees. His vision swam in that sudden dark. Everyone had become silhouettes and Gerard found himself regretting his earlier compliance, wishing for a firearm.
“Who the hell are you lot?”
The telltale noise of a shotgun racked, ready to go.
“Who the hell are you?” a masculine-sounding voice, coming from someone just out of sight.
“Jesus,” said the first person—a woman if Gerard had to guess from the voice—who spoke. “Can y’all wait for a second before choosing violence? I swear to god, testosterone is why we’re all in this mess to begin with.”
“Amen,” a third voice, higher, sweeter, exquisitely androgynous.
The crowd laughed.
Gerard raised both hands slowly, still reeling from that revelation of green life. He could even smell it in the air, cutting through the dust and the old death. He wanted to drink it down. He wanted to roll in the scent until it soaked into his skin and he could carry it like a second heart.
“I’m not here to hurt nobody.”
“But are you here to take anythin’?” asked the one with the shotgun, swaggering into view. Beside them, someone else raised an oil lamp to head height. Its dim light traced the hungry lines of a man’s face: he had deep-set eyes, dune-colored skin, thin lips, a nebula of scars that contorted his mouth into a permanent sneer. Illuminated, the keloid tissue shone pink and almost wet.
“Just knowledge,” said Gerard. He could make out scaffolding along the wall of a nearby building, tarp stretched over where a roof should have been. After a moment, he added, “I’m a Starik.”
The name unlocked the air and the tension leached away, subsiding into thoughtful murmuring. The man lowered his shotgun, the caution gone from his face.
“Lonely work,” he said in lieu of apology. “Can’t imagine doin’ it myself.”
“It’s a lot of driving,” said Gerard, bobbing his head. He wasn’t raised male but after thirty years, he spoke the vernacular as well as anyone else.
“Can’t be easy.”
“Nope.”
“I’d like to apologize for my friend Jacob over here,” The woman who had spoken earlier strode up to the pair, lightly punching the scarred man in the shoulder. She was taller than he was and pale enough to be white, as much muscle as she was fat. “He has a tendency to holler first and ask decent questions later.”
Jacob wilted under her words. “Better safe than sorry, Dolores.”
“Safe shouldn’t involve other people bein’ dead.”
“Well, better them than–”
“Hush.”
Jacob went red, the color surfacing in uneven splashes until the entirety of his face was suffused in crimson. He did not protest, however, only ducked his head like a petulant child. Gerard realized with a start that Jacob was much younger than he initially surmised: in his late twenties, at most, for all that he carried himself like an angry old man of eighty-two. While they bickered, Gerard took the opportunity to put a number to the figures arrayed in the gloom. He counted twenty-five silhouettes, but he suspected there were more out of sight, perched in the dark, waiting to gun down any threats.
“Alright,” said Dolores, nodding to herself. Her accent was pure Georgian molasses, heady and low. She was the most gorgeous woman Gerard had ever seen in his life. “You gonna tell us why you here then?”
“He’s a Starik—” Jacob began.
“Was I talkin’ to you or was I talkin’ to him, huh?”
“Sorry.”
Gerard hid a smile. “Like I said, I’m a Starik.”
“Do me a favor.” Dolores flashed him a perfect white grin. “Explain it to us like we’re all five. What’s a Starik?”
She had an incredible stare, a gaze that bored through skin and muscle until it found the heart trembling under its roof of bones. A gaze that said she wanted a precise taxonomy of his experiences, that she yearned to know everything he carried in him. Under its attention, Gerard felt utterly exposed, raw, exhilarated.
“A Starik’s what they call people in the project,” he began slowly, shedding his usual diction for the oratorical voice he used when giving a performance, accent smoothing, anonymizing. “Probably because it was started by a man called Frank Starik. He was a poet in the early noughts who thought it was a disgrace that there were people out there who died alone and forgotten. So, he started this project—”
Gerard recited the story with the ease of practice, having repeated it so very many times to so many people, and he knew the precise sequence of expressions that would follow: curiosity giving way to tenderness and then to something more ineffable, something like wonder as Gerard explained how Starik’s Lonely Funeral worked—Dolores sniffled unabashedly at the description of a poet standing over a stranger’s casket, cantillating the highlights of a life that would be forgotten by everyone but this one volunteer biographer—and how it was revitalized after the end of the world.
“—a what now?” said Jacob, midway through Gerard’s account.
“Mobile robot.”
“As opposed to?”
Dolores chuckled. “Stationary robot, I reckon.”
Gerard laughed. Jacob didn’t.
“It’s the term they used for those robots who had sensors with which to analyze environmental hazards so they could move around freely,” said Gerard. He added after a moment as a dour aside, “The military loved them.”
His new acquaintances traded dark looks. In Jacob’s face, he saw renewed suspicion. In Dolores’s, nothing but cordiality and weapons-grade charm. Their gazes wandered to Gerard’s truck and the tarp he had laid over Betty. He wondered what they envisioned was hiding under the rain-slicked sheets of IKEA-blue vinyl.
“We repurposed whatever we could scavenge. At first, it was so we could have some way of scarin’ off raiders. But then about fifty years ago, someone was like, ‘What else can we do with these robots?’ So, the great minds of the Lonely Funeral Project got to thinkin’ and decided if we just rejiggered the hardware a little, trained up a language model, it might be able to help the poets with their research.”
The word poet made Bourbon look up at him, hopeful. Three years and Gerard didn’t know why that combination of sounds made the dog think there’d be a treat at the end of the sentence.
Jacob had his tongue cleaved to the top of his mouth, the tip a pink hyphen peeking from his incisors. He stood silent for a minute as Dolores honked her nose on a scrap of fabric, clearly wrestling with his thoughts. Most of the crowd had dispersed by then, their interest slaked. Gerard was no longer a curio, no more a potential threat: he had become some guy in their eyes, for better or worse. They, however, remained a subject of Gerard’s curiosity. He watched them disperse, taking note of how unbothered their movements were, how at ease they seemed with their surroundings, and how many were involved in the work of rehabilitating the ruins. There was fresh paint on some of the walls, he realized with a start, as strings of lights were lit. This was more than a camp.
They were making it a home.
“That’s beautiful,” said Dolores, sinking to her knees, a hand extended to Rye, who fixed her with a coal-eyed stare as if to say, I can’t believe you’d even try. Bourbon, who took her lead in all things, shrank away from Dolores, growling half-heartedly.
“Thank you,” said Gerard.
“Okay,” said Jacob, no longer at war with himself. He perched the heel of his hand on the butt of his shotgun, the muzzle thrust into the asphalt, and frowned at Gerard. “So, I just want to clear a few things.”
“Mhm.”
“The Lonely Funeral project, it’s all about poets readin’ up on the anonymous dead so they can write a poem that they’d then read at the funerals, right?”
“Yep,” said Gerard. He knew people in his vocation who filled every available silence with words, like athletes stretching to keep their muscles warmed and limber. But he wasn’t one of them. Gerard preferred to be frugal with his speech.
“But everyone’s dead,” said Jacob. “The kind of dead where even the bones have been taken by the coyotes. There’s nothing here to bury. I don’t get it. Unless this is a ritualistic sort of thing, I don’t see why a Starik would come here. Who are you even looking for?”
“Not who,” said Gerard, “but what. See, I’m here for the town.”
When the convoy discovered he had cigarettes on his person—real cigarettes, the sort produced in a factory and boxed up in paperboard—he was suddenly the center of attention again. Everyone wanted to trade. The youngest to proposition Gerard was a boy of fourteen, who told him he would teach the older man to hunt in exchange for one of his cartons. It was him being generous, he explained, standing hipshot and proud. Ordinarily, it would cost Gerard his entire stash for a single lesson, but just this once, because Gerard was new and he was feeling exceptionally generous, he would lower his asking rate to one measly pack. Gerard said no.
“You know those shorten your life, right?” said Jacob, coming up to Gerard as the boy stomped into the night.
“Figured it doesn’t matter,” said Gerard. He peeled a fresh carton from its plastic wrapping and angled the open container at Jacob. “What with the fact we no longer have a health care infrastructure.”
Jacob demurred with a raised hand, stepping politely upwind of Gerard.
“Don’t smoke,” he said.
“Your loss. These are actual Marlboros,” said Gerard, joggling the pack until a single cigarette slid out. With a practiced motion, he pulled it the rest of the way out with his teeth. “They don’t make them like they used to anymore.”
“Thank god,” said Jacob. “We could do with less cancer in the world.”
Gerard lit his cigarette. “Mm.”
He counted the seconds under his breath, taking a drag whenever he hit a multiple of ten. At the two-minute mark, Jacob said:
“You got family?”
“Nope.”
“Not even cousins?”
Gerard considered the question. It woke a familiar evanescent sadness, as quick to surface as it was to dissipate but no less sharp for its brevity. He waited until the ache subsided before resuming the conversation, ashing the cigarette onto the dirt.
“Statistically speaking, I most likely do.”
An easterly wind stripped the moon of its clouds. Bereft of its cover, the moon seemed abnormally large, a dead god’s eye looking over the world it had abandoned.
“Oh,” said Jacob, finally cottoning onto the situation. “Oh, fuck me. I’m an insensitive asshole. Dolores keeps telling me I need to think before I talk. Look, I’m sorry.”
“Water under the bridge.”
“But it ain’t, is it? I just went in there—”
“You want to tell me about what y’all are doing here? I already told you about my work.”
“I still don’t understand it,” said Jacob. “I mean, I get why someone who had ties to a place might want to do it, but you don’t.”
“Nope.”
“How’d you even find out about this place then?”
“Old records. Maps. You’d be surprised how comprehensive they are.”
“Why bother, though?” said Jacob.
“Let’s pretend for a second you didn’t get as lucky as you did. Didn’t find Dolores. Didn’t get set up with the life you’ve got here,” said Gerard, alarmed at how unconscionably ancient he felt. When did that shift happen? he wondered. When did he go from being the angry young man who needed lecturing to the one dispensing lectures? It seemed almost criminal that such a significant transition had taken place so invisibly, but that was life, wasn’t it, and aging besides. No one ever saw it coming until it was late. “Then somethin’ happens. You get sick, you get hurt. Somethin’. After a few weeks of suffering, it becomes clear you won’t survive and that no one’s goin’ to hold your hand when you die. Wouldn’t you want someone to at least remember you lived?”
Jacob said nothing at first, his face gone strange and ashen. Gerard felt a throb of guilt, but he smoothed it down. That way lay too many feelings, too many conversations he didn’t want to have, knowing he’d be gone soon enough.
“Yeah,” said Jacob, and fell into a deep wincing silence again.
“It’s what I do. I learn about people and the town they lived in. Save everything I can, everything worth remembering so they’re not just bones. Anyway,” said Gerard, clearing his throat, “I feel like I’m the only one who’s been answerin’ any questions tonight. Your turn: What are y’all doing here?”
Jacob had worked himself into such a lather of misery, his shoulders were practically bunched up at his ears, face palsied in a grisly expression of self-hate. The scarring along his jaw was even more extensive than Gerard had initially thought: his neck was webbed with a fretwork of faded stitches. Someone had tried to cut Jacob’s throat.
No. Not tried, Gerard amended. Succeeded. It was still possible to see where the knife had traveled, how deeply it had sunk through his flesh. Whoever had done it to him had known what they were doing, had not acted out of impulse, had been controlled with their movements, precise.
“Makin’ right old sins,” said Jacob.
“Whose exactly?”
“All of ours,” said Jacob. “We did this to the planet. Seems right that we try to fix some of it.”
“Soil is dead as dead can be, though. Unless y’all invented a miracle, there ain’t no way anything’s growing in this dirt. Not for a long time, at least.”
“Guess we came up with a miracle then,” said Jacob, a boyish joy kindling in his eyes, and in that instant, he looked unbearably young, the scars and his leathery skin purely cosmetic. “It’s all because of Dolores, honestly. The worms love her. The compost they make for her is black gold—”
It was as if a dam had broken. A river of words spilled out of Jacob and wouldn’t stop, not that Gerard would have tried to impede its flow, struck as he was by the younger man’s feverish excitement. He told Gerard everything, every detail of Dolores’ crusade to restore the soil. Not just in the Midwest but elsewhere as well. She had plans, Jacob confided with a fierce fraternal pride. Plans to optimize the processes they were using, streamline them, make it so they were so simple, so irrefutably necessary to daily life that everyone, no matter age or descent, would feel compelled to do the work.
“She’s even got a breeding program for her worms. The idea is that in ten years, when we’ve got enough of the soil mended, we’ll put batches of them in the earth and let them do their thing.”
Gerard, who had never spent much time dwelling on the subject of worms, nodded, swept along by the voluble flood. Pity Dolores hadn’t been born a generation earlier. Her mule-headed ambition and pragmatic genius might have been able to stay the earth’s death sentence. He wasn’t naive enough to think their present could have been averted. Even if there’d been a hundred Doloreses working in concert, the world’s coffers at their command, it would have been too little, too late. But it might have been a slower death, a gentler one, drawn out long enough to permit for more than a handful of survivors.
The night had a sweet, cold scent. It wasn’t raining, per se, but a fine mist clung to the air, beading Jacob’s flyaway hair and dampening Gerard’s collar. Around them, Dolores’s crew worked tirelessly, hollering to one another, passing boxes and plastic barrels heaped with compost. They set down trellises, tilled the dust, spread humus over the parched earth. Then: seeds were sown in some places, saplings in others. What really impressed Gerard was how carefully Dolores had set up the shifts so there was time enough for people to sleep, to socialize, to eat, while allowing them to work across every spare hour of the day.
He watched them as Jacob continued his lecture, marveling at the camaraderie. Dolores did not lord over her people. She was there in the literal dirt, working alongside them, hands gloved in bright yellow rubber.
“She’s pretty, ain’t she?”
Gerard jolted at the words. “What?”
“Dolores,” said Jacob, tipping his chin in the woman’s direction. “I said she’s pretty, ain’t she?”
“You think you’re a clever bastard, aren’t you?” Gerard snapped, more perturbed by the teasing than he expected himself to be.
To his increased vexation, his ire was greeted with laughter, Jacob tossing his head back as he guffawed.
“You like her.” It wasn’t a question.
“Dolores is impressive,” said Gerard.
“You like her.”
“Whether I do or do not, that’s between me and the powers that be. Nothin’ to do with you, and will you quit laughin’ already—”
No amount of swearing and seething warning could dull Jacob’s amusement after that. He met every one of Gerard’s threats with another outburst of laughter, eventually folding into a crouch, arms wrapped around his ribs. Gerard stared helplessly, face burning with emotion he refused to interrogate.
“What’s so funny over there?”
Gerard whirled around to see Dolores unbending from her labor. Sweat welded her hair to her face and molded the men’s button-up shirt she wore to her body, leaving absolute jack to Gerard’s imagination. It occurred to him then that it had been years, no, decades, since he had sought out intimacy with another human being, preferring instead the ascetic’s lifestyle.
Was it preference, Gerard? Or was it just safer? A little voice needled in his head.
“Gerard?”
Wild-eyed, he stared at Dolores, a deep whud-whud-whud roaring in his ears. The sound encased him in a not-unpleasant haziness: he felt drunk or maybe stoned, certainly some kind of chemically altered. It took longer than he should have to realize he was embarrassed to sin and back. That he had felt this exact same way more than thirty years ago when he’d walked up to Jennifer Lee’s front stoop to ask if she would share a milkshake with him. Chagrined by his very adolescent response to the situation, Gerard did the only thing he could.
He ran away.
Well, not ran.
Walked with uncustomary speed and a clunky, stiff-limbed gait that he was sure made him look as though he had cement for legs. Gerard was too old and too exhausted from driving like a man possessed to actually sprint through an unfamiliar darkness. The thought of falling and ultimately twisting something was untenable: it’d most likely involve Dolores coming to his rescue and god, he wasn’t sure if he’d survive that humiliation. Thank god he had unloaded Betty before Jacob roped him into conversation. If he tried that now, he probably would have broken a bone somehow.
His escape carried him straight into what Betty had identified as the town’s library: a squat, warehouse-looking building extending from the ruins of a school. The walls were rimed with muck, an inch-thick skin of grayish particulates that came away if he so much as breathed in its direction. What remained of its roofing was largely intact save for an area in the back that had staved in, giving it the look of a cracked skull, a hinge of bone bent inwards into the brain. A rusted metal door stood at the front, barely tethered to its equally corroded hinges, and hanging slightly ajar.
Gerard let himself in.
The air smelled of mold and dust but also of old books and uniquely, an excess of plastic. Librarians, especially those in the twilight of all things, were fastidious people. No matter their background, their individual quirks, they seemed to share a certain phylum of behaviors, most of which involved how best to care for and maintain their collections. This occupational zealotry had meant everything for those who came after. Misinformation had been endemic in those last days, and little on the internet could be trusted. But the records those last librarians kept, their archives, those were rational and clear, if abundantly annotated. From them, Gerard and his generation learned to rebuild, to solder together the artifacts of the past into new means of survival.
Gerard raised a flashlight and scanned the interior, landing immediately on a message chiseled onto an adjacent wall. It said:
If seeking knowledge, go to aisle with dragons.
Hastily scrawled under it was another message, this one in sharpie:
Brian, it’s fine if you don’t like Pratchett and it’s absolutely okay that you ran away into the night, but you didn’t also have to take the goddamned book. Please return it to its shelf if you come back and I’m dead and/or missing.
P.S. You might want to try Mort instead if you didn’t like Soul Music.
“Librarians,” said Gerard fondly.
He’d made the acquaintance of more than a few living librarians and every one of them had been the same: avid readers, obsessed with organization, as in love with the written word as zealots were with their worship. Had Gerard not fallen in with the Stariks, he might have endeavored to join their ranks. Regardless, he felt a certain kinship with them. His work was not dissimilar. Theirs spanned the lifespan of humanity. His, a single individual or town.
Gerard glanced at his tablet. Betty’s telemetry sensors remained perfect: the entire topography of the library was modeled on the screen, with a green dot bobbing through the aisles, indicating the robot’s position. As Gerard watched, a row of amber markers flared into view, delineating where records of the town and its notables were kept. She’d done a lot in the two hours since he’d set her loose in the library, more than he or any human could, and not for the first time he wondered about how her image recognition algorithms were used in those last terrible wars—and decided again, as he always did, that he had no real want for an answer. He looked up and around, then continued his foray into the library. Passing a switch on the wall, he gave it an experimental flick. Overhead fluorescents coughed to asthmatic life, convulsing for a half second before giving out with a distant bang, startling Gerard enough that his hand leapt to the revolver at his hip. When nothing followed, he decided it was a generator letting out its death gurgle, and resumed his study of the space. Most of the shelves were swaddled in tarps or sheets of matte plastic, painstakingly strapped down to minimize the risks of water exposure. Giant plastic containers littered the floor space, their lids crammed with more writing. And the walls, they held either inscriptions of varying sophistry, or panels of laminated paper.
Whoever had been here must have made the space a safehouse, Gerard concluded. No way any of this could have been done quickly. It must have taken months, years even, to orchestrate this. He wondered if the library’s caretaker was still here, tidily settled in a corner so the effluvium from their corpse wouldn’t contaminate the books.
A low hum of machinery drew Gerard from his reverie. He looked up to see Betty turning a corner, the sound of her hydraulics edged with a whine: it was past time to take her in for maintenance. Gerard filed the thought away with the dozens of other things he’d indefinitely postponed. The closest Starik encampment was several states away, and he was both exhausted and discombobulated by Jacob’s teasing.
“You did a good job, Betty,” said Gerard, aware of how he might have sounded to an onlooker, a middle-aged man offering compliments to a machine. Then again, NASA once sang birthday songs to a robot on the moon.
She bent one of her forelegs and lowered herself to the ground: the robot’s equivalent of a curtsey. Not for the first time, Gerard found himself wondering how advanced Betty’s language heuristics were, if the little genuflections she sometimes extended to him were meant with sincerity or sarcasm. He refused, however, to think too hard on what both those possibilities implicated. If Betty was sapient, capable of autonomous reason and able to develop opinions, all he could hope for was to provide her with a kind impression of his species. Gerard had watched the old movies. He knew what angry AIs could do.
“Sleep mode,” he said then. “Until I figure out where the computers are and if we can wire you to them.”
Gerard advanced and laid a hand on the chilly metal of her back. Betty was all torso and eerily articulate legs, her chassis pitted with grooves and overrun with unused moorings, showing where someone might have anchored a weapons turret or set a laser sight. Even without her munitions, she was an imposing sight.
Lights flashed along Betty’s sensors in an illegible pattern before the robot settled itself on its haunches. When Gerard was sure Betty had fully deactivated, he patted her gently, the way he would pat Bourbon when she was being restive. Then he pressed on, finding his way to the speculative fiction aisle where, to his abundant lack of surprise, he uncovered a series of instructions carved onto the flooring.
If you can carry more than one box of books and have queer children, please take the box on the left.
If you can only take one book and are an adult, consider the anthology I have kept in the glass box on the third shelf of the rightmost stack.
If you are a kid, I have some legos in the cleaning supplies cabinet. I also want you to take the box in there. I wish I could hug you. I hope someone is there with you, making sure you’re safe. Tell them a librarian said to take care of you. I love you. Be careful.
The arrows intaglioed into the linoleum were numerous enough to be dizzying. They spiraled in every direction, fern-like and strangely beautiful. Under their mantling, the shelves held more abrupt edicts, noting which books were at risk of mold, which had to be preserved at all costs, which could be sacrificed if the librarian had miscalculated and there weren’t enough desiccant packs to go around, which the librarian would miss reading for the hundredth time.
In one example of the last, Gerard found a bookmark fossilized in the pages. A message had been written along its length, so discolored by time, it was nearly unintelligible.
My name was Jana.
The was drowned Gerard in sudden agony. A sob fought itself loose from his mouth, and he hugged the book—carefully, so the pages wouldn’t disintegrate—to his chest as he wept. Was, not is. Jana knew no help was coming. His imagination gave contours to the blank slate of her past. Gerard pictured her as an older woman: someone in their youth wouldn’t have so much fortitude, wouldn’t have been able to navigate their impending end so calmly. His mind gave her dark hair and a loquacious manner. He pictured her in soft cardigans; horn-rimmed glasses; billowy linens when the weather turned scorching. Jana, he decided, was someone who talked the ears off every visitor, and who kept a special collection of titles for those kids who’d been warned against the literature that would save them.
Irrationally, Gerard worried about whether Jana had been alone during those last moments, wishing desperately then for some magic or piece of technology with which he could reverse the decades—and what? He didn’t know. All he could think of was her alone in the library, furiously gouging messages into the walls in the event her books would be found one day.
“Gerard?”
It was Dolores.
“Here,” he croaked and waited in the dark until Dolores found him. He winced as she shone her flashlight into his face, but did not move, not wanting to risk the book still tucked against his ribs.
“Did I interrupt a nap or somethin’?” said Dolores, squatting down a polite distance from him. A smudge of dirt ran across her right cheekbone. In that near dark, her eyes were a resinous umber. “Don’t mean to. It’s just that you stalked off so quickly earlier on. I was worried Jacob spoke out of turn. Again.”
She was giving him an out, he realized.
“I found—” Gerard swallowed, tried again. “I am coming to realize I’m a sentimental motherfucker who cries way too easily.”
“You? Sentimental? Could’ve fooled me,” said Dolores, one corner of her mouth creeping up into a smile, cheek dimpling as it did. “Can’t imagine someone like you being sentimental. What with all your unsentimental interest in writing poetry for the dead.”
Gerard said nothing. He knew if he tried, what would emerge from his throat would be an animal howl, a long unrelenting wail of grief for a woman who had been dead longer than he had been alive, and the sound would go on until something in him broke irreparably.
When it was clear Gerard had no plans of responding, Dolores said:
“It alright if I sat next to you?”
He nodded. Dolores placed herself beside him, knees drawn to her chest. She smelled of sweat and good dirt.
“My family used to live here in the before times,” said Dolores. “Great-grandma was Sioux. Her husband too, even if his daddy was white. According to my mom, they didn’t have the best time here, what with it being a red state and all. But they fought anyway, to make the place safer for their children.”
She held out a hand to Gerard, palm up. Her nail beds were encrusted with dirt. Gingerly, he laid his own hand over hers and stared, uncomprehending, as her fingers twinned with his.
“They tried so hard. Back then, you couldn’t go online without running into people claiming there wasn’t anything of value in middle America, but they knew different. They knew there were good people in the Midwest and the South and all those places that weren’t the coastal cities. Someone had to fight for them, though. So they did.” Dolores trailed to silence, eyes fixed on nothing.
“That what got you started on the saving the world thing?” said Gerard.
“Yeah,” said Dolores with a musical little laugh. “Apple don’t fall far from the tree. If somethin’s worth doing, best do it yourself. What about you?”
Gerard rubbed listless circles into her palm, luxuriating in the small intimacy, the sensation of someone else’s skin.
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” said Gerard truthfully. “Chance, I guess. Met a Starik when I was about twenty-two, right after I started feelin’ good about telling the world I was a boy. She blew into town for a few weeks, and we got to talkin’—”
“Well, someone’s a ladykiller.”
He laughed. “Not like that. We—she—I don’t know, maybe it could have been a thing, if I wasn’t scared shitless of everything back then—we just talked. She told me about all the towns she went to, all the places we forgot. How she carried them now in her heart. And I thought about the people like me—”
“Like us.”
Oh, thought Gerard, reassessing the dimensions of Dolores’s frame, the gorgeous shadows her bones painted across her face.
“—like us, and I wanted to make sure they weren’t forgotten.”
“People who were displaced, forgotten by the world.”
Gerard nodded. “Yeah.”
Laid bare like such, his motives seemed so quixotic, so simple, a child’s quest with a child’s ideals. Egoistical too, hissed that mean little voice in Gerard’s head. Especially when measured against Dolores’s altruism. The words had been said, however. Wish as Gerard might, he couldn’t take them back. He might as well try to rewind the years to save a lonely town librarian from whatever waited for her at the end. Gerard swallowed around his shame and drew his shoulder blades back, intent on salvaging what dignity he could.
“You’re allowed to laugh,” said Gerard stiffly.
Her grip on his hand tightened.
“Nothing to laugh at,” said Dolores, voice so quiet her words carried like prayer. “Stories matter. The AIDS epidemic left a whole generation adrift. There weren’t enough elders to go around after that. Some, but not enough. Not as much as our community deserved.”
“I can’t believe you know about that—”
“You’re not the only nerd around here,” said Dolores, brows raised to a theatrical height. When Gerard did not immediately laugh, she waggled them until he did and did not stop until he was knuckling tears from his eyes, the librarian’s book set gently to one side.
After Gerard could speak coherently again, she said:
“So, how’s the poetry going?”
“Been distracted,” said Gerard. “There’s someone I gotta find first before anything else.”
Gerard had been right.
Jana was precisely the kind of punctilious to set a tarp up for herself in the supply closet, the canvas lashed carefully around her feet and legs–the right leg was broken and Gerard would have bet all his rations that was why she never left—so as to trap, Gerard supposed, any runoff from decomposition. It’d been long enough that there was no longer any smell, no organic matter for bacteria to spoil: nothing they could use, at any rate. Slathered in silica gel, the torn packets strewn around her, Jana was mostly bone and dried skin, delicate as vellum. Through some miraculous alchemy of circumstances, Gerard could still see a ghost of Jana’s expression when she passed. To his relief, she seemed at peace. Asleep, rather than in pain. God knew he’d seen a lot of tormented corpses: those final years had killed people in a hundred ways.
“This Jana?” said Dolores.
“I think so,” said Gerard, at a loss for anything coherent to say.
A shiver trilled down his back: he wasn’t afraid of Jana, wasn’t afraid of the death on display, wasn’t upset by it. After all, he had seen too many bodies at this point to feel more than a forensic curiosity.
But most dead people didn’t talk back.
It was disorienting to see her like this—inert, still—when she felt so present, her voice preserved in the notes she had hidden across the library. Up until that moment, a part of Gerard was convinced he would find her in the town somewhere, alive if not entirely well, excited to provide additional commentary.
Laid across her chest, the lapels of her cardigan studded with enamel pins, was a laminated paper. Gingerly, he lifted it and began to read Jana’s last letter to the world aloud.
I don’t and can’t know who you are, or if you read the language in which I am writing. I could only preserve for the future with the resources I had at hand. You owe me nothing, but still I hope that perhaps if you have found yourself here instead of the supply stores that maybe, just maybe we are alike in some ways—
Gerard turned the plastic.
—if perhaps you are looking at this with an eye toward historical analysis, then I feel the pressure of my own education to warn you against applying my own beliefs and thoughts to those of all people during my time. I was not necessarily indicative of the majority of my fellow thinking beings in my own time. Or maybe I was and I was alone only in my own foolish mind.
There was marginalia bracketing the paragraph, reams of half-finished thoughts scribbled down at random angles, cramped bullet lists supporting one supposition or the other.
You’re the one in the future with a far more representative sample of the thoughts and dominant cultural themes of my time. Or at least I hope you are. I hope you aren’t grasping at straws. I hope this isn’t the last little bastion of human knowledge remaining. Surely more whole and representative collections survived. All I have is the most structurally sound portions of this old school library. I’m sure within thirty years this roof will cave in without some intervention. That’s why I kept the critical things in the corners. They sank steel into the reinforced concrete there. It should stand up the longest. I do hope more of my comrades made it past that first worst part of the end. Caroline, she was with the archive in Kansas City. If you are hunting for a larger collection, something that’d allow you to accrue a better swathe of data points, check there.
I marked it on the maps. It was one of the last ones I was able to laminate before I ran out of gas for the generator. No, dear reader, that just sounded better. I laminated the maps to the libraries first, but it sounds more dramatic if I say it was one of the last. You can hear that drama ringing in your head, can’t you? I apologize for the deceit.
(Although if you are a younger reader it is important to remember that narrators can be unreliable.)
“We have to do something,” said Gerard, detaching the pins from Jana’s body. Fabric disintegrated in his hands. Thank god, the enamel badges held. Gerard didn’t know if his heart could take losing those too. He ran his fingers over the surface, tracing the stripes along the gilt-edged badge: pink, pale blue, and white. “We can’t—I can’t leave her like this. She doesn’t deserve being stuck in a supply cabinet forever.”
“We won’t,” said Dolores.
Outside, one of the dogs began to howl.
Gerard wouldn’t let Dolores or her crew dig Jana’s grave: that work he kept for himself, shoveling the packed dirt until his palms blistered. He should be working on the town’s records, filtering through Betsy’s finds. Jana wasn’t the only one who died in this town, but Gerard couldn’t bring himself to do anything else until she was at proper rest. Jacob made one abortive attempt at offering to help, stepping away when Dolores set a hand on his shoulder and shook her head.
They searched, of course, for any posthumous directives. Jana had been amply clear about what she wanted done with her stacks, but apparently had applied no thought at all to the disposal of her own corporeal form. It made sense. At the time, there’d been no guarantee of survivors. If anything, likely she had been assured of the reverse.
So, they decided on a burial, though none of them knew any funerary rites, not even Gerard. Jacob led six men in constructing the casket, a crude makeshift thing. When they were done, Jana—carefully and fully swaddled up in a tarp so there was no risk of her being damaged, the thought too miserable for any of them to bear—was taken by a procession to her final resting place. They’d chosen the largest of the soil beds that Dolores’s party had made and dug deep. Jacob promised there would be flowers to keep Jana company.
“She really liked those books,” said Gerard, half defensively, lining the interior of the casket with paperbacks before they laid Jana inside. “I figured she might like having them as she goes on her next journey.”
“I think she’d have appreciated it,” said Dolores, adding a pill bottle to the pile. “One more for the road, sister.”
One by one, the others brought their own gifts: Jacob, a rose as red as heart’s blood; someone else, two bright pennies they laid over her eyes; a harmonica, a wooden carving of cat, a half-finished bottle of bourbon, the label long since lost.
“Can’t believe they’re gonna just toss it away like that,” said Gerard, half in jest. “When you got people like me so thirsty for a good drink, we’re naming our dogs after the things we want.”
“I’d name a dog Dumpling,” said Jacob. “Had some about five years ago when a Chinese family rolled through our town. Blew my goddamned mind.”
“Well,” said one of Dolores’s men, so old he was little more than an ambulatory mound of wrinkles, “if that’s how it works, I’d probably name a pupper my wife’s—”
The ensuing roar of laughter drowned out what the man would have said, and Gerard thought Jana would have loved the camaraderie. As the guffaws stuttered to a halt, a girl began to sing a dirge in a language Gerard couldn’t put a name to, her voice as lonely and silver as the moon. In that lunar glow, they all seemed ethereal, ghosts themselves.
One by one, they placed handfuls of soil over Jana’s casket until it was gone from sight.
“Your cue,” said Dolores.
Gerard nodded. It wasn’t in his nature to be spontaneous. Like Jana, he favored thoroughness, contingencies for every occasion: a thousand charms to protect against disaster, but dawn was approaching, and there was work to do and the living needed their sleep. Gerard cleared his throat and began to speak.
“Let me tell you about Jana.”