proprietary nonpolluting gas into their home through a conduit designed specifically for this purpose.
“You really want to stick around and watch the house get wrapped?” Chiho asked.
“We can go,” Skinner said.
Chiho put the RV in gear and backed out of the driveway, then headed down Ironsides Avenue, through their mostly abandoned community. Up and down the block houses had been entombed until their owners returned in the fall. Once in a while stories surfaced about pets or occupants who accidentally stayed in their house during the hibernation process, to be discovered months later, perfectly preserved as if they’d died mere minutes before. The proprietary gas was
“I always miss Arizona,” Chiho said.
“I miss Arizona even when I’m here,” said Skinner.
Chiho had packed the RV as securely as she could but something still rattled in the back. Rattling noises hurt her teeth. Maybe it was a jar of marmalade jiggling in the pantry. Or the coffee pot. Skinner rode shotgun, lost in road signs. A hundred miles could pass like this.
“I brought some memory cards from home,” Skinner said outside city limits. “I thought you should know.”
“Well that’ll be fun,” said Chiho. She knew what
“I don’t know if that one’s in there.” Skinner was quiet for two minutes by the dashboard clock. Then he said, “I brought a couple cards of war memories. I thought I’d share them with Carl. If he wants to.”
“This is supposed to be a nice visit.”
“I’m not asking you to approve. I’ve got some memories I need to go over with Carl. I promise to be on my best behavior.”
The rattling. Maybe a spice bottle.
“You can do whatever you want with your own memories.”
“I know.”
“So what are you asking of me?”
“I’m not asking you anything. I’m just telling you.”
“You’re asking me to wake you up when you resurrect those nightmares.”
Skinner sipped his root beer, returned it to the cup holder. “We’ll be careful. We’ll stagger the memories, do it in doses, alternate innocuous memories from when I worked for the auto dealer or our trips to the Olympic Peninsula. We’re not going to go too deep.”
“Why is it that I forgot the same war but you insist on revisiting it?”
She had a point, and Skinner didn’t have an answer. In their worst arguments over the years he’d insisted she had no way of possibly knowing what he’d seen, having spent the war gazing through the scope of her rifle or via remote cam. He’d witnessed it on the mud and the blood and the shit level, the severed heads and disembowelment level. The last time this line of reasoning trotted its diseased self in front of them he’d had a couple drinks.
“I promise I won’t muck things up by drinking,” Skinner said.
“You say that.”
Up ahead on either side of the freeway, behind chain-link barricades and a few dozen riot cops in full gear, had coalesced two groups of that rare Arizona breed, pedestrians, bearing signage. A hundred or so total. Skinner and Chiho couldn’t read the signs yet but knew what they were about. Traffic slowed to a ten-mile-per-hour crawl as drivers passed angry human beings filtering their frayed-voice accusations through staticky megaphones.
“It’s worse than last year,” Chiho said.
“These losers just need to get jobs,” Skinner said. “Look at them. They’re perfectly capable.”
“I don’t understand how they expect anyone to offer them a ride when they’re behaving so poorly,” Chiho said.
The messages on the signs came into view. An egg cracked on the RV’s windshield. Skinner opened the glove compartment and located the Coca-Cola 9mm beneath a stack of expired insurance cards. It was an old firearm, an early model from when Coke, Nike, Sony, Verizon, and every other major conglomerate seemed to be rushing into the business of arming America. Coke eventually stopped manufacturing this model, returning somewhat sheepishly, post-FUS, to its core business of delicious sugared beverages. Skinner rubbed the faded red-and-white grip with the dynamic-ribbon logo.
“You’re being overly dramatic,” Chiho said. “Put that away.”
“I just want them to see that I’ve got it,” Skinner said, pulling the microphone out of the dash. He flicked the ON switch and his voice blasted out of two loudspeakers mounted on the roof. “Warning. We are retired security officers who served in the Boeing militias. We are armed and won’t hesitate to blow your fucking heads off.”
A couple riot cops saluted or gave a thumbs-up. The crowds screamed anew and threw themselves at the barricades, their faces sore-covered and contorted. If they were lucky they’d get arrested and tossed into the air- conditioned underground clink. Maybe that was the whole point. Soon the traffic picked up and there was nothing but saguaros, prickly pear, and distant scorched hills. Occasionally they passed a lone hitchhiker waving pathetically or pointing frantically at a water jug, begging for a refill. A man and a boy solemnly shoved their belongings along in a shopping cart. Skinner shook his head. What made it impossible for some people to prepare for the changing of the seasons?
Some memories were more painful than those forged in war. They’d once been a family of four sharing a home in Portland, Oregon, with a yard and a dog. Take a picture and upload it. Picnics, football games. Their son Waitimu Skinner was born first, then , three years later, their daughter Roon Aoshima. Two handsome kids with good grades.
At nineteen Waitimu enlisted in the same firm his dad had served in and shipped out to Detroit during the lingering days of the FUS. Swiss-cheesed by roadside-bomb masonry screws during a routine security sweep. What remained of Waitimu was buried on Vancouver island.
Roon now lived in Seattle with her wife Dot, working in a vague capacity for one of the contractors transforming Bainbridge Island into Manhattan. Skinner and Chiho hadn’t spoken to their daughter in five years and here’s why: Thanksgiving, too much sake, money, politics, yelling, a broken heirloom candy dish.
These stories aren’t uncommon—an older child dies and the younger one can never live up to her imagined legacy. Skinner and Chiho kept the Waitimu memory cards in a safety deposit box in Phoenix and avoided talking about their confounding, troublesome rift with Roon.
Maybe the rattling was a spatula.
America didn’t used to look like this, Chiho thought from behind the windshield. There used to be people in all these houses. People shopping and walking their dogs. People yelling, “Hello, neighbor! Can I borrow a stick of butter?” San Diego scrolled beneath their tires, the first of three urban dots one had to connect to experience coastal California. What remnants of old civilization lay between these points were scavenger-picked and surrendered to nature. Incredible how quickly trees invaded pavement, foundations crumbled, brambles engulfed cars. They saw crows appear to dismantle a motorcycle. Whenever they pulled off the highway to stretch their legs they tried to park near the ocean. Skinner wanted to see the beached aircraft carrier. A couple hundred miles south of San Francisco it lay jutting at a nutty angle on the beach, like a sunbathing skyscraper. They stopped in Oakland, in what was trying to become Little Boston. Fenway Park was half-finished, and a few blocks away there was a lackluster attempt at Harvard Yard. Skinner bought a Red Sox hat from a street vendor who promised it had been manufactured pre-FUS in Boston itself.
“Want to stop at Hearst Castle?” Chiho wanted to know.
Skinner shrugged. Might as well. They parked the RV at the visitors center and boarded the shuttle. A pleasant way to kill an afternoon. Skinner took a picture of his wife standing beside a statue of Poseidon by the grandest of the pools. The fact that one man had ever amassed this much wealth inconvenienced Skinner’s sense of
