Blueprints of the Afterlife

After that we went out to dinner. None of us spoke on the way to the restaurant. Mexican food. I tried to keep the conversation on Nick and what he was doing in his teenage think tank. He kept his answers short. Clearly he didn’t know how to handle this development. Then he said it again, this time not so angry, just bewildered, “Dude, you’re fucking my mom?”

You have to understand something about islands. The social psychology is different. And on Bainbridge there was this whole cadre of moms who were constantly up in everyone’s business, formulating opinions about you all the time. So I can’t overstate how devastating it was for Nick to say this in a busy, public place. You could almost visualize the whispered lines of communication flowing from table to table. And Nick wouldn’t fucking shut up. He just kept saying it, emphasizing different words. “You are fucking my mom?” or “You are fucking my mom?” Imagine what it’s like to be in the middle of a room of people pretending not to stare at you in silent, shocked judgment. And remember what I looked like and where I’d come from. Only a few months prior I’d been college-bound, lusted after by the female half of my class. An impeccable academic record and a solid reputation on the playing field. Now I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant wearing hippie clothes that hadn’t been laundered in a month, attempting to grow dreadlocks, sporting a Jesus beard, having my sexual relationship with the town’s potentially mentally disturbed woman made very public. Within a week this cadre of in-everyone’s-business moms had formed a narrative about what was going on between Star and me. It went like this: Luke Piper lost his family in a tragic accident and the unstable mother of his best friend took advantage of his grief by entering into a borderline-statutory-rape-type situation that wouldn’t have been so borderline if he hadn’t just turned eighteen. How sick was it that this unhinged woman was probably giving herpes to this poor, grieving boy who used to be Ivy League material? Keep in mind that these were the same women having affairs with members of the local clergy. The same ones who were drinking at 10 a.m. and downing pills but who had nonetheless been granted the supernatural ability to determine how other people should raise their children and live their lives.

Did anyone in the community confront you directly?

Of course not. Are you kidding? Someone wrote CRADDLE ROBBER on Star’s mailbox. Classic Bainbridge passive-aggressive bullshit. They communicated their disgust through glares in the supermarket checkout line. It was a pretty miserable Thanksgiving. It rained real bad and the shack’s roof got a nasty leak. It was the first Thanksgiving I hadn’t spent with my family and you could have dropped me into an abandoned mine shaft and I would have felt about the same. Not to mention Star and I momentarily nixed the fucking. Nick and I barely spoke. Miserable.

I want to change the subject a minute and talk about this academy that Nick went to.

Sure. Turns out it did have a name—the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. Founded in the eighties in Silicon Valley with the first wave of software wealth. Supposedly headquartered in San Jose, more like an estate than a campus. Nick showed me a brochure. The place looked nice. They had about a dozen buildings, play fields, woods, a small organic farm. Only about a hundred students in attendance at a time, every one of them courted heavily by the Fortune 500 upon graduation. The place was supposedly an incubator for ideas and innovations that entered mainstream culture ten, twenty years later.

I was jealous. Doesn’t every high school nerd wish that someone will discover his hidden genius? Nick was especially susceptible to this kind of thinking. But the more I thought about the academy the more it seemed like bullshit. So Nick builds some kind of contraption for a science fair and some guy in a business suit sees it and gives him a business card? That’s all it takes? The place sounded too good to be true.

SKINNER

Al Skinner, witness to the bloodiest wars forged by man’s satanic imagination, presently feared forgetting his shoes. He kept his eye on them, brown Hush Puppies with Dr. Scholl’s inserts, paired on the bedroom’s spiral rag rug in his house in Scottsdale, Arizona. When you walked outside without your shoes in this neighborhood, you were on your way to assisted living. Sammy, a retired security contractor like Skinner, from two blocks over, had one morning walked without his shoes all the way to the combo Taco Bell/KFC. Later, at the country club, gray heads slowly shook and the mouth parts of those heads gummed the words, “They found him with no shoes on.” Soon thereafter Sammy was ushered from this community of retired military personnel to a fortress of assisted living where one’s brain wasn’t expected to put on much of a show. Skinner didn’t want to end up at one of those places, shoeless, separated from his wife, eating apple sauce and watching the Smiling People channel.

Her name, the wife’s name, was Chiho Aoshima. Skinner watched Chiho move about the house and their life with precision and purpose. It had all culminated ridiculously in this house with two bedrooms, an upstairs and a downstairs, air-conditioning, and a glassed-in porch with a view of a sand trap and the seventh hole. She pressed oranges into juice in the morning and poured him glasses of strawberry soy milk at night. He opened the mail with a sword-shaped letter opener bearing the insignia of his company, the celebrated and bedeviled 83rd Section, aka a bunch of dirty muthafuckin newman-killing sunza bitches, aka the rats’ a-holes, aka the only men he could claim to have ever loved. Love: it was something more ludicrously huge than the destruction of entire continents. Love: the only thing that atrophied the dick and balls of warfare. When he’d offloaded his worst memories he’d worried that some of the love he remembered would go with them, despite the technicians’ assurances. Gone into data storage were the mutilated streets of former Chicago, legions of semirobotic Chinese marching in formation through polluted exurbs, millions of hectares of inhospitable wastes stretching across geography like the pustulent crust of a chemical burn, traces of human tissue in underground torture chambers as elaborate and equipped with amenities as a cruise ship. He’d chosen to forget these things. What worried him were the things he’d chosen to remember.

Chiho didn’t appear to suffer from these worries. Even without enhancement she would have been in fighting form. Walked five miles a day, swam on weekends, and could still pull out a jump shot when occasion called for it. She appeared far younger than her 170 years. As she’d aged she hadn’t put on much weight, keeping her coat-rack frame. She still slithered into bed on top of him from time to time, tugged at the flesh of his jowls and rapped on his forehead like it was a door. He brought her a blanket or a cracker blobbed with cream cheese. She took care of the bills. He gave the most heartwarming toast on her 150th at the country club. Once a year she polished her sniper rifle. Chiho Aoshima: Al Skinner’s will to live.

Today they were waiting for the hibernation crew to show up. Two guys and a truck. Outside in the driveway in 120 Fahrenheit their freshly washed RV, stocked with supplies for the summer, sparkled and appeared to sweat. Half of greater Phoenix had emptied by now and in another month only 5 percent of the population would remain, bunkered beneath the surface, suited up and equipped and tucked away for the season’s punishing inferno, sticking around to tend to infrastructure.

“Do we have everything?” Skinner said as his wife’s shape passed before him in the living room. How many times in the history of elderly-person road trips has that question been asked? Skinner spoke it ritualistically, not really minding when no answer came. Chiho whispered to herself, her bottom lip quivering with traces of speech. She was in her head again, probably plotting the logistics of their journey. By now it had become second nature, sixty years of migration, popping north before the sun landed its hammer blows on their gated community.

The hibernation technicians showed up at noon. A couple of young fellows with Latin America in their veins. While Chiho signed the paperwork, Skinner shuffled one last time around the house wondering if there was anything else he might toss into the RV. Ballpoint pen? He pocketed one just in case. Extra bottle of antacid? Can opener? He pulled open the top drawer of his file cabinet where he kept a stack of memory cards. They deserved to be hibernated. Come on, old man, just let them be. He put them in his breast pocket.

Back in the living room the tech guys were explaining their process, blurting it out perfunctorily, required by law to recite how the house would be sealed and filled with a proprietary, nonpolluting gas that, using a common field generator, would be kept at a steady 72 degrees for the duration of their absence. Their house had passed inspection and was considered airtight but an additional nonpermeable membrane would engulf the structure and essentially shrink-wrap it. Chiho nodded, initialed, and signed. They grabbed their house keys and followed the techs outside. A great deal of tubing and rolls of the nonpermeable membrane were produced from the hibernation crew’s truck. Soon Skinner and Chiho sat beside one another in the cockpit of the RV, watching the techs pump the