live.
I worry that she’ll fall asleep. That whoever caused that explosion will find us here, vulnerable kittens for the snatching. That they’ll be a monster clad in human skin. And that my instincts won’t let me see the truth. But my mind is performing one last walk-through for the night, flicking off the switches of my consciousness. Worry is for the waking. So I roll onto my side, back protected by the tree’s broad trunk, and let my mind douse the last light.
The world is ending, the population halved, then halved again. I have to get to Brindisi. I’m stuck at the airport waiting on a plane, any plane, to get me to Europe. No money changes hands; it’s meaningless now except as mattress stuffing.
“You, you, and you,” the man says, pointing to me and two others. “We’re aiming for Rome. Do you accept the price?”
I do. The price is nothing more than a bag of blood. I’ve got plenty of that.
On the tarmac, they tap a vein. My fists clenches and releases to force the blood out faster.
“Why blood?” I ask.
The nurse preps another traveler’s arm, shoves the needle in deep.
“There’s a small group of scientists who still believe they can stop this. Word is they think they can find a cure in healthy DNA.”
“Really?”
“That’s what they say. Course, I never cared much for what people say. It’s what they do that matters.” She passes my blood to someone else. The red liquid sloshes in the bag. “Have a cookie.”
Everyone ahead of me is holding a fortune cookie. We’re too dazed to eat them. My mind feels detached from my body like it’s a full step behind the rest of me, a lagging toddler trying to make sense of a much bigger, more adult picture.
There is no attendant with a breezy impersonal smile ushering us onto the plane, just a couple of soldiers holding weapons they look too young to carry. A few short years ago their mothers were tucking them into their beds, and now they’re primed to kill if necessary. The toy soldiers don’t speak as I inch my way past and drop into the nearest empty seat, but their eyes swivel, then snap to attention. I take the aisle although the window is vacant. I don’t want to look out and down. I don’t need to pretend things are normal. That kind of self-deception can only lead to madness. It’s best to accept that this
People squeeze down the aisle after me. Some have nothing. Others are minimalists like me, toting a single backpack and maybe a pillow.
A worn woman stops inches away. She hugs a small Louis Vuitton suitcase to her chest. “Is that seat taken?”
“It is now.” Although I mean to sound light, my words are pancake flat.
I swivel my knees toward the window to let her past. She settles in the seat, suitcase perched upon her lap. Strange, I think, until I realize I’m doing the same thing.
“I love Rome,” she says. “It’s romantic. More so than Paris, I believe. Have you been?”
“This is my first time.”
We are a parody of normality. Strangers discussing travel like two robots mimicking human speech.
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“You should go with someone you love. I did. My husband. Well, husbands. They loved Rome. They’re both dead now.” Her knuckles tighten on the bag’s impeccably stitched edge, white marbles beneath paper-thin skin. They barely support the nest of rings stacked on top of them. “I love Rome,” she echoes. “It’s romantic.”
We don’t speak after that. She retreats to her world, the one where she wears a haute couture dress with one ring, one necklace, where her husbands are still alive, where someone else carries her luggage. I attend to my stomach, which is launching a protest, and rip into the flimsy plastic wrapping the fortune cookie. It has snapped into pieces from the tension in my hand, which saves me the trouble of breaking it in two. The slivers dissolve on my tongue until they’re little more than the memory of sugar.
The fortune is stiff between my fingers. I unfurl it and read.
I read my fortune until I laugh. I laugh until I cry. I cry until I sleep.
FOUR
I wake in a panic, drenched in tepid sweat. It’s not rain, because it smells sour, metallic, with an underlying sweetness like fruit just as it turns. My plane ride to Rome swirls down the drain, dormant until the next time I close my eyes. I shove myself up from the tree roots and look for Lisa. She’s asleep.
When I rouse her, she barely recognizes my voice through the sleep fog.
“What?”
“You fell asleep.”
“I was tired.”
“I have to be able to rely on you.”
She leans over, vomits, heaves until I worry she’ll turn inside out. Between bouts, she manages to speak.
“I’m sorry. It just happened.”
“Come on. We should go.”
We push off from our resting place and I glance behind us, scan the land. Nothing but trees and grass. But something follows. Branches crack when they shouldn’t. Every so often I hear a step that doesn’t come from me or Lisa.
We are not alone out here.
“Have you ever turned it over?” Dr. Rose asks. “Looked at the bottom?”
I look at him, my mouth sagging softly because that never occurred to me.
It’s Friday evening. In my head I call this “date night,” because I’m not like the other people who come here. I’m not crazy. I’m not even a little off balance. At least I don’t think so. But that jar bothers me. The mystery of it curls cold fingers around my heart and squeezes until I ache.
“No. Never.”
“Maybe you should. Maybe it’s time to take action in your dream. Take control.”
“What do you think I’ll find?”
“A message. A clue perhaps. Or maybe a Made in China sticker.”
Laughter spills from my throat. “Wouldn’t that be a trip? My dream the product of mass manufacturing in China.”
We leave together. I’m his last appointment. He locks the office door while I wait, then we stroll toward the elevators like he didn’t just print me an invoice while I wrote him a check.
“Do it,” he says as the steel cables hoist the oversized dumbwaiter to our floor. “Push that thing over and inspect the bottom. Look, you’ve seen every other part of it. It’s a dream. If it breaks, I don’t think they’re going to hold you to the ‘You broke it, you bought it’ policy.”
He has a point, but not the full picture.
My voice wobbles out on unsteady legs. “I haven’t seen all of it. I haven’t seen the inside.”
A sharp ding echoes in the hall. Metal scrapes as the elevator locks into place. When the doors slide open, Dr. Rose’s hand goes to my waist and gently urges me ahead of him. His warmth seeps through my shirt. There’s a familiar smell about him that I can’t quite grasp. Trying to pin it with a label is like nailing Jell-O to a wall.
“Dreams are funny things,” he says. “All this technology, all these specialists and their experiments, and we
