Love after the End Read online

  “The only ones still left on Earth are,” she counted them off on her fingers, “the elderly, the sick, the undocumented, the paranoid, and the working poor.”

  “And NDNs,” I said.

  “That’s what I said. The poor and the paranoid.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said flatly.

  She pushed her tongue against the inside of her cheek. “Earth is the past, Em. The New World is the future.”

  “What about Asêciwan?” I asked.

  “She’s a kid. She’ll do what she’s told.”

  She waited for me to agree. I looked down at the floor. Thorah took a breath, winding up for a speech she had clearly been preparing to give. “The daily news blasts have made it clear: with cities shutting down power grids all over the world and global warming far past the point of no return, to stay on Earth is to die.” Thorah crossed her arms. “Travel to the New World is the only way for any of us to survive. You know I’m right.”

  I didn’t look up. It was futile to search for the words to object to something so fundamental.

  She took my silence as agreement. “The New World is a blank page.” Thorah smiled, “we can make our story there, anything we want.”

  We booked our tickets through the portal the next morning. That afternoon, Thorah had the radio on. We were sorting through everything in the house, deciding what was precious enough to carry with us to the New World. Milk, glass candy dishes, bone-handled knives, and pilled handknit sweaters. Thorah said that if we cradled each item in our hands one last time, we could focus on releasing the object’s energy from us. As if we were tethered to the earth by our soup spoons and embroidered pillows, and that somehow without them we would float up like hot air balloons, unencumbered by their memories. I lifted my great-grandfather’s beaded gauntlets and held them to my nose, drinking in the scent of smoked hide and sweat like a mouthful of strong tea. It warmed me with the memory of his big nose and barking laughter.

  The day before we left, a voice came on the radio with an official update from the New World provisional government. The once-frequent data dumps had recently dried up and been replaced by advertisements showcasing the bounty of the New World. Glittering settlements that shot up overnight in New Miami, emerald oceans teeming with fish that leapt into fishermen’s boats, mountain streams littered with nuggets of gold, fields exploding with new kinds of flora, apples that taste like strawberries, deer as tame as dogs! And, most importantly, no history. No history except that which the people brought with them. But that day, after the ads, came a bulletin:

  The United Governments of the New World were rocked yesterday by an audio communication from an underwater species that bears a striking physical resemblance to Earth’s extinct manatees. New World pioneers have begun referring to them as the Mermaids. Our United Governments have not yet revealed the content of the message, but they assure us that it contains a single non-threatening phrase repeated on a loop. Citizen academics from disciplines as far-ranging as musicology, cryptography, theology, and engineering are claiming to have decoded the Mermaids’ message, have released various translations. The first interpretation was published as, “Your circle is not round.” A rival group of scientists claim that the phrase translates more accurately as “All beings require more than one tide.” The latest and perhaps most cryptic interpretation states, “Even desert animals live underwater.”

  The radio went back to advertising New World condos. I dropped into a chair, dizzy, as if the ground beneath me had become the sea. Your circle is not round.

  The Mermaids’ message called to my blood, tugging me backward through nimosôm’s stories, flashes of history like shards of glass pushing out through old scars. My vision blurred. Screams rushed toward me like wind, getting louder and closer until they cut through me, everywhere at once. Screams of anger; cries rising from unmarked graves, from bones under schoolyards, from drummers stripped of songs, from praying mouths stuffed with dirt. I saw flashes of hollow eyes and tiny ribs. Saw nehiyowak, their blisters bubbling under their skins. Saw scalps shaved. Saw names on stacks of paper, fences of paper, gates and cliffs of paper. Dark hair chopped at the neck; round bellies cut open and made barren. Children yanked up into the sky and never seen again.

  “EM?” THORAH WAS GIVING ME A WEIRD LOOK from across the room.

  I put my hand out for the velvet shoulder of a chair. “It’s not empty,” I said. “The planet was never empty.” My face crumpled with involuntary anger. “How could we be so stupid?” I imagined the underwater whispers of the new people echoing, How could we be so stupid? How could we be so stupid, how could we be so stupid?

  Thorah pushed a coppery wisp of hair away with the palm of her hand. “Well …” she said, “we knew there were other animals.” A Christmas decoration that Asêciwan made out of Styrofoam and mini marshmallows dangled, hideous and perfect, from her fingers.

  “They have language, Thor.”

  “Yes, and?”

  “Don’t be obtuse. They’re people. Not like us, but still. Some kind of people.”

  I imagined myself the way she saw me: the wide planes of my cheeks and the corners of my eyes gone slack, offering nothing, not even a challenge. “A face like a concrete wall,” Thorah liked to say. “Better a wall than an open door,” I once shot back.

  Thorah sighed and locked her gaze on mine, as if daring me to waver, but she was the one who could never face the truth for longer than it took to put on a smile. She cleared her throat and turned away, feigning interest in a pile of books. “I don’t know, maybe we’ll draft treaties with them,” she said, “real treaties. That’s possible, isn’t it?” I let my silence roll around the room. Thorah chewed at the inside of her cheek, irritated. “I don’t know, Em. There has to be a way for all of us to move forward together. What else can we do, but try?”

  We could dig in. We could stay, I wanted to say. Instead, I gestured to the room around us, our home of twenty years, spilling over with evidence of the life we built together. The same home that housed her family’s Christmases and birthdays.

  Thorah rolled her eyes and tossed the books aside. “If we stay, we die. Asêciwan, our daughter, dies. With current levels of contamination, life expectancy for her generation is fifty at best.”

  “We don’t know if that’s true. But we know that those governments aren’t going to let anything or anyone prevent them from carving up that land.”

  Thorah took a moment to read my face, then gave me a pitying smile. “How can you give up on peace before there has even been any conflict?” She reached for me as she crossed the room and drew me into her. She held the back of my head with one hand, pressing my face into the nape of her neck. She always smelled of raw onions and coconut sunblock, no matter the season. “This trip, from one universe to another,” Thorah said, “is the greatest adventure in human history. I want us to do it together, as a family. Don’t you?”

  I willed myself to stay in her arms. “Haven’t you wondered why they’re so determined to get more of us over there?”

  “Not really. Building something takes work. The government needs people to work the land, to make something new. I know it won’t be easy, but we’ll make the most of it.” She gave my arm a painful squeeze. “Why can’t you give yourself permission to dream, Em? It could be amazing.”

  I shook my head. “This isn’t theoretical, Thorah. It’s not a dream.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s no more real for you than it is for me.”

  My hands swept the air, as if fanning out a deck of cards. “Only a white girl could step into a completely unknown universe with the blind faith that everything was going to work out.”

  Tears stood in Thorah’s eyes, ready to let loose. “Being an Indian doesn’t give you any special insight here, Em.”

  But it did. I could see her better than she could see me, better than she could see herself. Even as young activists, she had to be chair of every committee, leader of every picket line—the loudest vo
ice in the room. She wouldn’t say she was better, just “better equipped.”

  “Ekosi. I can’t go,” I said. “I won’t.”

  Thorah wiped the tears away with a brittle laugh. “Fine. Be stoic. Stay and die. Asêciwan and I will go without you.” There was an edge of hope in it, as if leaving the door open for me to rush in with an apology.

  When her eyes met mine, the look between us was a crackling thing. It split open and exposed the frayed ends of a decade of swallowed arguments. Like in the old commercials when they turned on a black light in a gleaming kitchen and revealed swarms of glowing bacteria on the countertops. We always knew what was there between us, hiding in plain sight, but it’s different when the lights come on.

  “Can we stay?” Asêciwan asked. She was standing in the doorway, chin thrust out like a fighter at a weigh-in, trying to look taller. No matter how close I watched, I was never able to spot the changes as they happened in her. By the time I noticed it was always too late. And here she was, eight years old. Brand new again.

  I smiled. “Hey, buddy.”

  Asêciwan’s bright eyes darted between us. She managed to keep her tumult of feelings sealed up, almost-but-not-quite out of sight. “I want to stay here,” she said flatly.

  “Oh, honey, I wish we could,” Thorah half-whispered. Asêciwan and I exchanged a conspiratorial look. It was clear she had heard everything. I felt a rush of both embarrassment and pleasure at shutting her mom out of our unspoken understanding. It had always been that way with Asêciwan and me. She had grown in Thorah’s body but the egg that made her came from mine. We were tied by blood and spirit and iskwewak fire.

  “How are you doing on packing?” Thorah asked Asêciwan. “Can you give us two minutes and then I’ll come check on your room?” Asêciwan inched down the hall in tiny backward steps, making it clear that she was resisting as much as possible while still following orders.

  “Asêciwan, go!”

  When her door clicked shut, Thorah said, “We’re leaving tomorrow, with or without you.”

  “You’re using her as a pawn.” I said. “It’s not fair. You heard her. She wants to stay too.”

  When Thorah stood up, her knees popped as if making a point. “I’m trying to save our lives.”

  I made my bed on the couch with a flannel sheet and my day clothes wadded into a ball. It was impossible to picture what it would mean to stay, to live alone, to abandon Asêciwan. We had already declared our departure to the authorities and surrendered the house for reclamation. Come tomorrow afternoon, the place would be scavenged for materials and stripped, with everything useful shipped to the New World. I lay awake, scrolling through pages of information about the underwater people on the New World, returning again and again to the phrases: “Your circle is not round. All beings require more than one tide. Even desert animals live underwater.” That night I dreamed of drowning and woke gasping on the couch. I closed my eyes until sleep pulled me out like a tide, only to wake minutes later, parched and choking.

  IT WAS STILL DARK when I checked through the items in my survival bag. I put coffee and eggs on as the first flash of sun cracked over the rooftops. A knock came from the front door. I used the doorsteel to open it, just wide enough for conversation. A round-bellied man stood with a crew of salvage workers.

  “Morning. We got a lot to get to today, so we want to start outside early. That okay?” The salvage crews weren’t supposed to arrive until the afternoon and I knew Thorah would be irritated that they were here. A friend told me that unscrupulous salvage unit bosses would pay city data workers for access to information on which houses were scheduled to be evacuated. The practice had led to crews poaching other crews’ jobs. Bitter rivalries developed and there had been increasing reports of violence and salvage-gang murders. I nodded to the men that they could begin work, then closed the door.

  Thorah didn’t speak directly to me, but communicated through Asêciwan. The house shuddered and shook with the crew’s activity outside. “Ask Mama if she has everything I told her to pack for the trip, or if I need to put some things in my bag,” Thorah said.

  Asêciwan looked questioningly at me. “Yes. No need to ask.” I said. “I have everything from the list.”

  “Oh, good. I wasn’t sure if Mama was still coming with us, so I had to ask.”

  “Yes. Of course I’m coming.” I tried to level a look at Thorah but she was already out of the room.

  Asêciwan spooned cereal into her mouth, keeping a wary eye on me.

  THE STATION HAD THE YAWNING OPULENCE of its former days as a hub for trains of all kinds. For two hundred years, this spot connected the city to a network of rail arteries that cut every which way across the turtle’s back, hauling lumber and produce, soldiers and grain, children and businessmen. Now that the trains had stopped and the station had been made over as one of two Canadian-controlled portals into the New World, the wide atrium was hushed.

  On this day, the flow of people was orderly and calm. It was nothing like the hysteria of the first few weeks when the portal opened, where throngs pushed their way through the doors in an attempt to be the first to settle the New World. Journalists at the time had compared it, with enthusiasm, to a gold rush.

  We arrived at the front of the line. A flashing red light indicated that we should approach the corner wicket. “Passports?” the woman asked. Thorah silently passed them under the glass barrier that separated the teller from us. “You didn’t leave yourselves much time. Boarding begins in a few minutes.”

  “Kids. You know how it is,” I ventured. Asêciwan raised an eyebrow.

  The woman entered our names into her system. “Do you understand that once I check you in and confirm your passage as booked, you will not be allowed to rebook passage? This is a one-time one-way ticket.”

  “Yes, we understand.” Immigration had taken this measure after too many people got cold feet and abandoned their seat in the portal’s shuttle at the last moment. After the government lost hundreds of millions to half-full shuttles, they declared that each citizen would only be allowed one confirmed ticket.

  “Please sign the declaration at the bottom of your receipt.” The woman handed Thorah a sheet of instructions. “When you reach the New World, look for the family desk. It will be immediately to the right when you leave customs. It has a bright yellow awning marked with an arrivals sign.”

  The waiting area was a dingy grey box lined with linoleum tile. A single bench sat to one side as an afterthought. Signs on the walls asked that seats be given up for the elderly and disabled. Pregnant women were barred from entering the portal until their children were born. No one knew why. Looking around, I estimated that there were about four hundred of us waiting. Most stood with their regulation-sized bags, watching the wall-mounted screens deliver entertaining bits of information about the New World. Did you know that residents of the New World experience a 40 percent reduction in asthma and respiratory illnesses, due to the improvement in air quality? Did you know that New Mount Everest is almost five hundred metres higher than Earth’s Mount Everest?

  A voice came over the loudspeaker. “Good morning, passengers. We will now begin preboarding for those who require special assistance, including those with very young children. If you require assistance, please approach the shuttle gate.”

  “That’s us.” Thorah started moving to the front.

  I looked down to take Asêciwan’s hand, but she was gone. “Asêciwan?” I scanned the crowd of shuffling bodies for her purple T-shirt.

  Thorah turned around and looked back for us. It took a moment for her to register Asêciwan’s absence. “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The room was chaos. She could be anywhere. At one end of the room, opposite the portal gates, was a set of bathroom doors. “Stay here. I’ll go look for her,” I said, and pushed my way toward the bathrooms.

  Inside, three teens huddled around a mirror, checking their looks. I crept low to get a look at the fe
et of the people in the stalls. They were all too big, and none had gold shoes. The voice on the loudspeaker came again. “We will now begin boarding for Elite class passengers only. General ticket holders are asked to stand behind the yellow line.”

  I dashed out of the bathroom and back into the crowd. The room was squeezed with tight-chested travellers pressing toward the gates. The shuttle itself was hidden by the long hallway that led beyond the gate. I shoved my way through the crush of bodies, ignoring the grunts and curses rising up around me.

  Thorah was near the front, hands clenched around the handle of her suitcase. “Did you find her?”

  I shook my head. “She’s not here. I think she might have left the departures area.”

  Thorah gave a frantic glance at the line of people passing through the shuttle gates. “Shit.”

  “I’ll check the main hall if you can talk to security.” Thorah grimaced, her eyes on the swarm of bodies moving through the doors.

  “I …” She pulled Asêciwan’s passport out of the waist pouch that she always wore when travelling, and pressed it into my hand. “I’ll save a place for us,” she said.

  “You’re getting on?”

  Thorah’s eyes darted to the gate. “I don’t want to go alone, but someone has to make sure they don’t leave without you two.”

  “What if I can’t get her in time?”

  “You will.”

  She was lying. Every muscle in her body was clenched.