Blueprints of the Afterlife

wanted—I really should wait until Chiho is here to tell you this.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t worry, man, it’s nothing bad. Just wait for the ladies to come back from their little garden tour and all will be revealed.”

Five minutes and five buffalo wings later Hiroko and Chiho came back indoors. Chiho beamed. “Did Carl tell you Roon called?”

“Yeah, he did, what’s—”

Chiho knitted her fingers together and held her hands to her chin. “Roon and Dot have a baby!”

Skinner opened his mouth to say something, stopped, looked to the others to figure out how he should be feeling. “A grandchild?” he said.

“A little boy,” Hiroko said. “He’s two now.”

In this safe place, in the company of people who loved him, bewildered and unable to speak, Skinner found tears trembling at the corners of his eyes.

Now they’d have to see Roon. Their stay would be shadowed by expectation and shot through with giddiness that they’d finally get to meet a grandchild. Skinner shook his head and gazed curiously at his open palms, as though he’d achieved grandfatherhood via some feat of manual labor. Carl suggested they go on a walk.

The path through the woods roughly followed where a sidewalk used to be. Here and there stood foundations of houses. If you kicked at the weeds or peeled back layers of fallen leaves, little artifacts of extinct Portlanders emerged. Bottles, cell phones, plastic toys partially covered in moss, the rusted whorls of a box-spring mattress. Trees had reclaimed the grid, reverting it to chaotic geometries determined by fallen seeds. Chiho loved the birds most, the wild flocks that had replenished themselves post-FUS, blotting the sky in great concentrations of feather, cackle, and wing. A woodpecker smacked its beak against a snag, probing for grubs. Amid a copse of pines rose an old McDonald’s golden arches sign, boasting of billions served. Billions! The husbands and wives walked paired down the path.

Skinner said to Hiroko, “Carl says you’re working on a book.”

“More like the book’s working on me.”

“So what’s your angle on the FUS?”

“I’m considering it by way of a neurological metaphor,” Hiroko said. “I stumbled on some research from the 1950s, two scientists named Olds and Milner who first identified the pleasure centers of the brain. I guess their most famous experiment was when they stimulated the pleasure centers of rats whenever the rats pressed a particular bar in their cage. It didn’t take long for the rats to stimulate their pleasure centers to the point of exhaustion, to the point of not eating or taking care of their other physiological needs. My argument is that in the age of Fucked Up Shit, human beings became like those rats, whacking the bars that stimulated our pleasure centers even as those very bars were what triggered our doom. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, we started to understand the terms of our self-destruction. Our rational minds argued against using fossil fuels, against overeating and too much television, against accumulating too much wealth among too few, but a more powerful part of our brains kept pushing those bars. Push, push, push. The solutions, the ways we might avoid the FUS, were staring us right in the face. It was obvious and apparent: stop using oil, stop making plastic, control the growth of the population to a logical level so we could exist within the parameters of our ecology. If we didn’t do these things, most of us would die. But we were willing to die because a more powerful part of our minds, the old mammalian limbic system, was busy pushing those bars. The more recent, less developed part of our brains, the neocortex, was waving its arms and screaming for us to stop our destructive behavior. In this war between the limbic system and the neocortex, the limbic system won, hence the FUS.”

Carl picked up a stick to walk with. “So by the time we got tangled in the FUS, who were we fighting for exactly?” he said.

“We were fighting for Boeing,” Skinner laughed.

“Yes, but more to the point, we were fighting for the limbic system,” Hiroko said. “We were fighting to keep pushing those bars. When everything collapsed, there were few bars left to push. But now the earth’s renewing itself. Look around us. There are a lot fewer people to make a mess of things. The qputers are undoing the damage.”

“Still, Phoenix gets hotter every year,” Skinner said.

“True,” Hiroko said, “because not every place is recovering at the same rate. It’s going to take some places a lot longer.”

They came to an old intercity light-rail car covered in vines. Through the dirty windows they read advertisements for colonics and undergraduate degrees.

Skinner said, “So you’re saying we fought on the wrong side, Hiroko?”

She shrugged. “In the FUS, everyone was on the wrong side. The very idea of sides was on the wrong side.”

The nocturnal animals of the forest performed their first stirrings as light seeped out of the sky. The path widened and intersected with a hard-packed gravel road. Nearby leaned a bus-stop sign. In a few short minutes a bus arrived, a shambling, multihued contraption furnished with couches and love seats, a kitchenette in the back where a woman cooked a garlicky organic meal. A few other riders, swaddled in patchwork outfits of Gore-Tex and hemp, sat reading alternative weeklies, about them hanging the whiff of weed. The four friends crowded together on a couch across from a balding man in glasses who was absorbed in a battered copy of Benjamin’s Illuminations, a scarf wrapped so many times around his neck that it appeared to be holding his head in place. The bus bumbled along the irregular road and the trees eventually gave way to deliberate landscaping and an actual paved arterial. Soon they were on Burnside through the vital guts of Portland. A block or two from Powell’s City of Books they climbed off the bus and squeezed through an alley to Hiroko and Carl’s favorite Thai place. As they approached the back entrance, a great wave of plates and cutlery crashed through the door and spilled out into the alley. Carried on this wave was a disheveled and quite stoned busboy, and close behind a chef rode a baking sheet like a surfboard, yelling obscenities at his young and now-fired employee.

“Asleep on the job!” the chef bellowed. “What kind of dishwasher are you! And you dare evoke the name of the great Woo-jin Kan!”

“Don’t worry. The food’s actually great,” Hiroko said as they climbed over the dishes, trying not to slip on a rainbow of curries.

During appetizers, Chiho proclaimed, “We’re so rude. We haven’t even asked about Jadie.”

Carl sighed. “She’s had her troubles with the Bionet. Became some sick bastard’s embodiment. We got her in a recovery center down here.”

“Christ,” Skinner said.

“It started out with dancing,” Carl continued. “She’d go to parties where everyone tried out these illegal apps, give over her codes to a choreographer and they’d put her body through elaborate moves. Soon it turned into an everyday routine. She surrendered some of her basic functions, like what time she’d wake up, when she’d eat and use the bathroom. Her DJ was good to her at first, they usually are, got her to make new friends—other embodiments—made her feel popular, put witty comments in her mouth when she was in social situations. She got a bit part in a TV show they film up in Vancouver.”

“Forensic Mindfuck,” Hiroko said.

“The one about the detectives?” Chiho asked.

“The one where they travel back in time and use modern forensic methods to solve crimes of the past,” Carl said. “Anyway. Around that time she dropped out of school, which we weren’t too keen on, but it looked like she had a real career getting started.”

“When did you find out she was getting DJed?” Chiho said.

“We were clueless,” Carl said. “We thought she was succeeding purely on her own merits. If we’d known, we’d have flown up to Vancouver and tossed her ass in a recovery center straightaway.”

“We knew something about her had changed when we visited,” Hiroko said, “but we couldn’t identify it. I thought it was the pressure and excitement of her new life. Sometimes her hands trembled like she’d had too much coffee.”

Carl rubbed his stubble. “Her show got canceled and she was out of school and looking for work. That’s when