his scent repulsed him and he went on into the silences beyond their village.
Stands of palm trees clustered in sinister groups as if talking about him and though their shade would be welcome, and maybe even their fruit, he went wide to avoid their dark and fetid clusterings.
In the night he slept in an old grain silo and thought that he should hear birds in its rafters or the bony trees outside.
He could not remember when he last heard the song of a bird.
He drank water from a standing pond because he could no longer stand the ragged dry trench that was his throat. He saw the footprints of the blind villagers in the hard-packed soil.
They too had drunk here.
Blind would not be so bad.
In the still water he saw a monster.
A monster with red-rimmed eyes that reflected no light, no life. A face and chest covered in blood and dried mud. Horse’s blood. Muddy, knotted hair and a broken feather. Lips cracked and bleeding.
A monster.
He wandered south, following the twisting ribbon of the once-highway through a silent land of rust and scrub. He caught small things and felt little desire and even less satisfaction in the thin, greasy meals that resulted.
Who am I now?
Dry wood turned to sparks floating off into the night above his fire.
What is left to do and where should I go?
And there was no answer other than his own.
Nothing and nowhere.
In the day all was hot and boiling, dry and raw. In the night tepid warmth refused to surrender until long after the bloated moon had descended into darkness.
The thin road straightened and carved its way into southern mountains.
In the road signs he spelled Los Angeles.
He remembered Sergeant Presley calling it “Lost Angeles.”
I should burn the map.
What good is it now?
Mission, not complete.
But he didn’t and he continued on toward a crack where the road disappeared into the mountains.
At the last gas station in the foothills he spent the night.
There was nothing left to find here and there hadn’t been for forty years.
In the gas station’s emptiness he heard the grit of sand and glass beneath his feet. In times past, in all his wanderings with Sergeant Presley, he had wondered and even dreamed about the people of Before. What had they done in these places? There had been food and drink, beyond imagining, Sergeant Presley had explained bitterly, all on a hot day such as this, for people to stop and come in from the road.
He spelled I-C-E C-O-L-D S-O-D-A.
I was raised in places like this. It seems as though it should feel like home to me.
But it didn’t.
And…
I don’t care anymore.
That night, though he did not want to, he dreamed.
Dreams, who can stop them? Who can understand them?
He and Jin walked through the streets of a city. Up cobblestone streets where people live. Happy people. He turned to a fruit stand filled with green apples. It was a market day or a fair, and he selected an apple for Jin.
In that dreaming moment he understood the meaning of the name Jin. Her name meant “precious.” In the dream he was glad that he understood this now. It was as though he had found something rare and its ownership had caused his lifelong feeling of “want” to seem like a fading nightmare. As though he had recovered a lost treasure and it changed his future forever. As though his life, their life, would be only good now.
Now that he knew the meaning of her name, the dark times were behind them.
When he turned back to her, she was gone.
A happy villager, smiling, maybe the Weathered Man, told him she was over there, with the man’s wife, looking at silk dresses for their wedding. And the smiling farmer handed him the green bottle of Pee Gee Oh full of bubbles, and they drank and the farmer encouraged him to laugh and be happy.
“It’s all coming back,” said the Weathered Man in perfect English.
And the Boy knew he meant the world from Before. That the days of road and ruin are coming to an end and that there would be homes and families now. That he and Jin would have a place in this new world that everyone was so excited about.
A place together.
He was excited. He wanted to find Jin and tell her about all the good things that are soon going to happen to them.
But his mouth wouldn’t make the words to call out her name.
He searched the stalls.
He searched the roads.
It was getting dark in the dream and the market was closing.
“We’ll find her tomorrow,” said the Weathered Man. “Come home with us and stay the night.”
Though he didn’t want to be, the Boy was led home and the dream advanced in leaps and starts as the Boy watched throughout the night, looking out a small window, looking onto a dark street.
Waiting for Jin.
He could not wait to tell her that everything good was coming back again.
Soon.
In the dream he could not wait to hold her.
In the morning, the sun slammed into his weak eyes. Tears had dried on his dusty, crusted cheeks. His insides felt sore, as though they have been beaten with sticks.
He sat up and looked toward the road and the mountains.
It was real, he thought of the dream.
The road cut its way onto a high plateau, passing stands of oak and wide expanses of rolling yellow-green grass. In a high pasture he found sheep and a man watching over them.
The man waved at him from the field and the Boy turned off the old highway and into the field.
The sheep, maybe a dozen of them, wandered and bleated absently through the tall yellow grass of mid spring. Beyond the pasture, oak trees clustered at the base of a steep range of hills that shielded any view of the east and whatever must lie that way.
“Stranger, come and have water,” called the man over the constant bleating of the sheep.
The man was rotund and dressed in a ragged collection of scraps sewn together. He carried a crooked staff and leaned on it heavily. His hair, gray, sprang from his head in every direction. His voice was a mere rumble of thunder and gravel.
“The road is hard,” he said, watching the Boy drink the cool water held in a tin cup. The water was clear and sweet.
“It’s a good spring here,” said the shepherd when the Boy did not respond.
The Boy handed the cup back.
“I have wild apples near my camp; come and have some.”
The Boy followed the man across the pasture and into a stand of wild fruit trees.
They sit in the shade, eating apples.
“Saint Maggie said that food leads to friendship.”
The Boy said nothing.
“Who might you be, now?”
The Boy opened his mouth to answer. But he couldn’t.
“Can you speak?”
