Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 9

Skinner said, "I remember holding her little hands. Giving her sh.e.l.ls and sand dollars. Your story breaks my heart."

They moved on to discussions more germane to their surroundings. Skinner fingered the memory cards in his pocket, wondering at the horrors preserved in their wafer-like forms. Why punish himself like this again? Other retired private contractors, sitting in their deck chairs flipping channels and keeping their bowels operational with concoctions of herbs, didn't seem burdened by the same obsessive need to recontextualize their former lives. For Skinner's neighbors at the shrink-wrapped retirement community, the wars moldered. They were content to follow college football and steady their swing at the driving range. The FUS was to be actively avoided in conversation, not sought out. Skinner almost admired their ability to evade the terrors of their pasts. On his worst days he prayed for the strength to do the same. But his earlier life on battlefields demanded accounting. This need was so consuming that the only way for Carl to remain his friend was to humor him and take part in the trip, to follow him down that flaming hole of c.u.n.t-s.h.i.t-molten-f.u.c.k. But now-this was a surprise-Skinner'd found some new psychic armor with which to fortify himself. He had a grandson.

Skinner took the cards out of his pocket and set them on the table. The other three regarded the cards with visible sadness as Skinner separated them into piles of innocuous memories and memories of war, the innocuous ones outnumbering the wartime ones three to one. Then, with the bottom of the pepper shaker, he smashed the war memories into pieces. When he was done, Skinner exhaled and fingered his fortune cookie, reluctant to find out what it revealed about his future.

"You did it, my friend," Carl said. "Good for you."

Chiho rubbed Skinner's shoulder and kissed his weathered hands. He swept the pieces of the memory cards into his palm and sprinkled them atop the remnants of his panang curry. All that remained now were memories of ba.n.a.l civilian life and the one memory from the war he refused to destroy, the one piece of unfinished business: the memory of the day he came back from the dead.

The next day after breakfast, the women left the men reclined on plush furniture beneath portraits of Carl's and Hiroko's ancestors that went back generations, to slaves and dynasties. On the coffee table were arrayed bottles of water and an Apple memory console, a black lump of elegant industrial design about the size and shape of a baseball, smashed in on one side.

"Sure you don't want to watch the NCAA semifinals instead?" Carl asked.

"Plug us in," Skinner said, closing his eyes.

Carl pushed the card into the slot. A little pinwheel icon on the display indicated that the console was recognizing and syncing with the whatzits embedded in their skulls. This reality hung on for a while-the books on the shelves, the red rug. The scene trembled a bit at the edges as the stored memory worked to displace their surroundings. At this in-between stage, inanimate objects a.s.serted more emphatically what they truly were. The water in the bottles wanted desperately to escape the plastic, yearning to become lost again in oceans and clouds. Skinner drew a Pendleton blanket around his shoulders, listening to individual wool fibers creak, snap, and whisper memories of ewes grazing in valleys. Carl reached out and took Skinner's hand, squeezed it to remind him he was there. A few minutes in, the living room went into rapid retreat. The effect was like looking at a department store window and not knowing what to focus on-the objects on display or the reflection of the street. Slowly their senses adjusted to perceive more acutely what lay beyond the pane. They were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. A percussive frozen rain raked at them as clouds merged with plumes of smoke rising from all over the island.

"Carl?" Skinner said. He was trying to pivot his head but it was as if his neck was in a brace.

"I got you," Carl said behind him, or beside him, or both. A representation of Carl sidled up, his old-man face superimposed on his younger man's body, a weird bug in the software. "We're in, man."

"Jesus, the smell."

"It's always the smell that's the worst."

"I can smell the bodies."

Younger Carl spoke, his voice fuzzy. "At least the smell of bodies don't make you cough up your d.a.m.n lungs. It's those other smells we got to be afraid of."

Up ahead in a pile of rags a baby cried beside its mother's detached bodily components. As Skinner veered toward the baby a greasy hand dug into his bicep and yanked him around. Malmides, his direct supervisor, barked into his face, "Keep moving, s.h.i.tstain."

Skinner saw that he was in a vast video game of men that stretched back through Brooklyn, bristling with weaponry and trudging into death. He didn't march so much as let himself get carried along. He looked down and watched his legs flop r.e.t.a.r.dedly forward, unable to stop. Piles of refuse burned in the East River, decapitated bodies swung from the bridge supports like demented mobiles. He strained to take in the magnificent destruction ahead. Here, on the bridge, all was panorama, but soon those buildings would entangle him, a grid turning into an unforgiving labyrinth. Inexplicably, a herd of goats ran bleating past them, their hides scorched and speckled with boils. One of them sported an eyeball dangling from its socket. At the little park on the other side of the bridge he found himself in a congregation listening to the director of operations, a bull of a man with prosthetic eyes and a voice raspy from inhaling the particulate of decimated signature architecture. Castiliano was that b.a.s.t.a.r.d's name and this was his rallying moment, a little rhetorical propane to get the soldiers hard.

"We bring death today to those who claim to become G.o.d! We slaughter under the banner of Christ! We butcher the hordes who've come to rape our children! Root them out, grab a limb, rip it off! Coat your faces in their gore! Stomp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins, Boeing army fighters!"

A great cry went up and Skinner, queasy, broke off into a unit with Carl and five other sick motherf.u.c.ks, as it were, guys with faces and names and homes that had been erased from Planet Earth. Supposedly they were to head west and root out a couple remaining pockets of newman resistance.

"I don't think I can do this," Skinner said in his memory.

"f.u.c.k you, Skinner. You were born to do this," Carl said.

One of the other guys in the unit looked exactly like the pre-FUS comedic actor Will Ferrell. Another bug in the program. Apparently if you remembered a person as looking sort of like someone famous, the famous person tended to show up in your memory instead. "Guys?" Will Ferrell said, his voice cracking. "Maybe we should just find a Starbucks and get lattes? My treat? What do you say?"

Carl whispered in Skinner's ear, "Come on, dude, you're in command."

"Listen, you sick h.o.m.o sapiens," Skinner said. "The heavy lifting's been done. We're basically the janitors, scrubbing the newman s.h.i.t from this G.o.dforsaken island. Let's quit f.u.c.king around and move!"

They pa.s.sed through acrid manhole steam and subway entrances piled with rotting body parts swarmed by mutated, screeching larvae. Skinner glanced down to see a woman's shoe with the foot still in it, toenails painted lavender, sliced off at the ankle so cleanly it could have been done by a surgeon. It wasn't the enormity of it all that f.u.c.ked you, it was little s.h.i.t like this. A headless body slumped in a doorway beneath an advertis.e.m.e.nt for Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy II. An arm protruded from beneath a flaming and overturned taxi. Everywhere burned the obscene carbon stench of manufactured goods and organic forms returning to the elements. Will Ferrell had begun to whimper comically, eyes darting left and right. Carl slapped him on the back of the head.

In the East Village they came to a cafe, still operational amid the rubble. Everything above the second floor of the building looked to have been vaporized. Within the ground-level walls baristas steamed milk and a sound system blasted fusion-era Miles. In a corner, under a painting of flames, the scarred remnants of a company of mercenaries sat drinking. Seven guys speckled in concrete dust and dried blood, knocking back coffee spiked with scavenged liquors. Their eyes barely moved when Skinner and his crew arrived, stepping over dead laptops and brick chunks.

"We're the Boeing 83rd," Skinner said. "What company you all with?"

"Who wants to know?" said a man in the rear. Jet-black hair, gla.s.ses, untangling a Rubik's Cube.

"I'm Lieutenant Al Skinner."

Carl said, "They're the Pfizer 190th. The insignia on their gear."

"I thought Pfizer ran screaming from this s.h.i.t," Skinner said.

"We are the s.h.i.t," Rubik's Cube said.

Will Ferrell ordered a grande nonfat decaf mocha.

"This all that's left of your company?" Skinner asked.

Cube said, "You want to know the difference between a war and a war game? A game comes with a reset b.u.t.ton. But the only way to access that b.u.t.ton is to die. Want to test this theory?"

Skinner said nothing. Cube shrugged, asked his command, "Who would be willing to blow his f.u.c.king brains out to see if there's a reset b.u.t.ton?"

A young, stone-faced soldier drinking a cappuccino unholstered his sidearm and pressed the barrel under his chin.

"You don't have to prove anything to me," Skinner said.

"This is the f.u.c.k and death party," Cube said. "You don't wanna see the death? How about some of the f.u.c.k? We've got a surprise downstairs. You fellows can help yourselves to the leftovers. We've had our fill. Go on ahead, indulge."

"You don't have girls, do you?" Carl said, his face falling.

"No, man, we're following the code. We got 'droid p.u.s.s.y."

"Tell that idiot to holster his weapon," Skinner said.

Cube nodded. "Goldberg, we don't need you to hit the reset b.u.t.ton just yet." He turned back to Skinner. "You look like you've been at this for a while, soldier. Tell me, do the newmans make any sense to you? Has killing them made it any easier to determine whether they're the human beings or if we're the ones who come out of factories?"

"I kill what I'm told to kill," Skinner said. "I don't give a f.u.c.k if it's got guts or chips."

"Good for you," Cube smiled and tossed his toy to Skinner. "Now mess this puzzle up and solve your way out of it."

An iron stairwell led to a bas.e.m.e.nt. The stairs opened into a dim, low-ceilinged s.p.a.ce that smelled of opium smoke and industrial-grade lubricants. A soldier elbowed past them on his way out, zipping his fly. The 83rd turned on their beams and swept the floor with light. The room appeared littered with dissected mannequins. An arm crawled out of their way and hid under a sofa as they advanced. They followed the sound of s.e.x groans to a curtained alcove. When Skinner swept aside the curtain they found a fat, naked man on his back on a couch. Skinner blinked, trying to figure out what exactly he was looking at. As best he could tell, it was the lower half of a male newman, the legs wearing fishnet stockings, mounted on the fat man, rocking back and forth while the man stroked the thing's artificial c.o.c.k. Where the torso should have been was a mess of organic newman technology, cords and sacs, severed tubes spurting clear fluid. While this half of a newman got f.u.c.ked, a severed newman head of indeterminate gender licked the fat man's b.a.l.l.s.

"Hey! Can't a dude screw in peace around here?" the fat man complained.

"My G.o.d," Skinner said. (Decades later, in Carl's living room, Carl said, "Yeah, that s.h.i.t was sick. And you don't even remember it as gross as I remember it.") "Identify yourself," Skinner said.

"And you are?"

"My name is: I've got a loaded Cherry Coca-Cola and your d.i.c.k is up a robot's a.s.s."

"Name's Caponegra, senior regional manager of the Pfizer 183rd."

Will Ferrell spoke up. "Guys? Is it considered a threeway if two of the partic.i.p.ants used to be one person? Just wondering."

"Shut the f.u.c.k up, Ferrell," Carl said.

"We're sweeping the 'hood for insurgents," Skinner said, yanking the newman body half off Caponegra's lap. "And you're going to data dump all your intelligence on us."

"Dammit, fine. Let me rub one out and I'll brief you upstairs."

Upstairs, over coffee at a table freckled with cigarette b.u.t.ts, Caponegra, now mostly clothed, told stories of raids, ambushes, casualties received and delivered. Skinner divvied the info into little piles, separating a soldier's braggadocio from strategically relevant data. Caponegra's bl.u.s.tery yarns did support the case that the newmans were in full retreat, escaping into the forests upstate where they were burying themselves under trees to hibernate.

"They're like bears," Caponegra said. "I got a report from a scout in the Glaxo-Wellcome 3rd infantry that they cornered four of them up near Saratoga Springs, all huddled in a hole in the ground, skin going pasty from lack of sun, eyes glowing red as they went into sleep mode. Interrogation revealed they had no power-up date. Meaning someone would have to come along, find them, and manually turn them back on."

"We're sweeping west through Soho," Skinner said. "What can you tell us."

Caponegra rolled his eyes. "You guys got the easiest job in the world. There's no one left out there. We practically bleached the place."

"So what are you doing hanging around here?"

Caponegra gave him a look. "There's somewhere else?"

They came to a building halved vertically by an explosion. Looked like an NYU dorm, a cross section of what appeared to be, more or less, normal collegiate life, a couple dozen hive-like stories of beds, computers, desks, a Jules et Jim poster, microbiology and civics textbooks with pa.s.sages highlighted in pink and yellow, the pillowy forms of bags of popped but uneaten microwaved popcorn. Paper drifted in the smoke. Here and there a fire. In one of the exposed dorm rooms on the second floor, a girl sat hunched over her desk, head in hand, reviewing self-made flash cards.

Carl consulted his handheld. "She's human."

"Hey you! Student!" Skinner shouted. "What are you still doing up there?"

Visibly annoyed, the girl called down, "Leave me alone! I'm studying! Midterms next week!"

"You need to evacuate asap!" Carl replied. "This ain't the time to study! Come on, we'll set you up in a library where you can study all you want!"

Somewhere on the island another building fell, rattling the earth beneath their feet and the teeth in their jaws. Helicopters in formation sliced across a sky too grimy and chemical-burned to be of any use to anybody.

Carl said to Skinner, "We got to get her out of there. She's in shock, obviously."

"Stupid b.i.t.c.h," Skinner said. "Let's save her a.s.s."

Skinner put Will Ferrell in charge of the unit while he and Carl climbed over the rubble looking for an entrance. The comic actor called after them. "Guys? This is against protocol, you know? Shouldn't we all stick together?"

"Go f.u.c.k yourself, Ferrell," Skinner said. "We're getting this chick out of here."

(Years in the future, in the living room, Carl said, "Not exactly how we remember it."

"Yeah, but here it comes," Skinner said.) Carl pushed aside a Foosball table, found the stairwell. Walls covered in anti-newman graffiti. Skinner doubted many of the students who'd screwed and crammed and gotten ripped in these dorms had made it off Manhattan alive. Rifle drawn he kicked open the door to the second floor, exiting into a dark hallway where postpsychotherapy Metallica played faintly from ceiling-mounted speakers. In a corner beneath a fire extinguisher lay a wounded Christian American soldier. Looked like a contractor from Toys "R" Us. Hard to tell exactly where he'd been hit; his whole torso was caramelized in b.l.o.o.d.y goo. Carl bent over him with the handheld and got his vitals.

"Soldier, where you from?" Carl said.

"Huh?" the fallen man said. "Who the f-f-f-f.u.c.k are you?"

"We're the Boeing 83rd. We're going to fly you out of this joint."

"The college chick-" the soldier said. "They're using her as bait."

"We got nooms up in this s.h.i.t?" Carl said as a round pinged the fire extinguisher over his head, unleashing a cloud of white vapor. Down the hall dorm rooms cracked open and out stumbled half-obliterated newmans wearing the collegiate T-shirts and hoodies of their victims. Carl's face a.s.sumed the intensity of a man a.s.sembling a particularly tricky piece of furniture as he raked the hall with ordnance. Skinner's head rolled to one side and he caught sight of a Mohawked, child-sized newman wearing a Led Zeppelin SwanSong T-shirt and nothing else, its crotch smooth and plastic with the absence of genitals, round after round perforating its jerking, humanoid form, an arm shot off in gouts of purplish lubricant, its cat-like eyes glowing yellow in the fire-r.e.t.a.r.dant haze.

("Here it comes," Skinner said in the living room.) There it came, a round ripping through his chest plate, which put the kibosh on the velocity enough so that it lodged in his trunk without splattering out his back. Then another one to the leg, a kind of afterthought. He plunged into a pool of blood where all sound disappeared.

In Carl's memory he dragged Skinner by the leg down the hall, unloading at other newmans lurching out of dorm rooms. The memory fritzed out a second, flipped perspectives, then Skinner had a close-up view of a busted iPod, its mysterious guts revealed. Rounds whanged off metal, the elevator doors. His eyes fluttered and in the living room one hundred years later Carl squeezed his hand so hard it went numb. Here we go.

Skinner trudged in tattered fatigues across the mesa, the vista meticulously hi-res down to individual grains of sand. His peeling skin and the rasp in his throat seemed to imply he'd been out here for weeks. Up ahead, far enough away that he could pinch the whole scene between forefinger and thumb, was some kind of encampment. It was near twilight, the sky awash in pollution. A wall of furnace-intensity wind. Closer still, through eyes squinty and dry, he made out a refrigerator standing inexplicably amid the desolation. And piles of things nearby, a human form bent before a meager fire. Some guy? Some weird guy with long hair and a beard, near-naked in these punishing elements? It seemed improbable, but it was true. The old man didn't look up until Skinner was standing, bewildered, a few feet away. The man gestured for him to sit on an old bald tire. Nearby a full-length mirror reflected the sun back across the horizon. There was a pile of kids' stuffed animals and a pile of books. Skinner tried to speak. The man waved his hand as if to tell him not to bother, then rose and opened the fridge. Wisps of cold vapor rolled out and Skinner almost cried to see it stocked full of food.

"BREWSKI?" the old man said.

Skinner nodded, tears beading at the edges of his eyes. The old man cranked the cap off a bottle of Pyramid Hefeweizen and handed it to him. Skinner trembled as the cold beer foamed in his mouth. He sucked it down so fast some came back up. The old man handed him another, then offered a sandwich. Skinner ate, moaning through his full mouth.

"Who are you?" Skinner asked finally, burping.

"I AM THE LAST DUDE," the old man said.

"What is this place?"

"THIS IS THE END OF THE ROAD."

"How did I get here?"

"I CALLED YOU HERE."

"Why?"

"YOU MUST f.u.c.k."

"Huh?"

"REPRODUCE," the Last Dude said. "NOW SCRAM."

A murder of crows materialized and lifted Skinner into the sky. The old man's encampment grew smaller beneath his dangling feet as the temperature dropped and wind sc.r.a.ped out the insides of his ears. As he rose sunward the desert floor widened like a spreading stain. Far below, methodically piled stones spelled what appeared to be an unfinished message to the heavens: THE W.

Here the memory faltered into a blue screen then snapped back to full resolution with the sound of a helicopter. Skinner looked around trying to find it, seeing only the digitized gray fatigues of his company colleagues, realizing before he pa.s.sed out again that he was in a chopper, there was a mask pumping oxygen at his face, and the world below smelled of death.

Wood smoke curled around evergreens. Chiho followed Hiroko up the muddy path to this place of astonishment, a whole college campus suspended in the trees. Through the mist the Douglas firs appeared to wear skirts; these were circular houses built around their trunks, linked by a network of rope and cable bridges. There were hundreds of tree houses of various circ.u.mferences and elevations, whole multistory platforms held aloft in the triangulations of trunks, students traveling from one cla.s.s to another by rope swing and zipline. Hiroko showed Chiho to a rickety elevator and they rose into the canopy where curious squirrels and robins perched, coming to rest on a platform that seemed to float on a pillow of fog. In this creaking, crescent-shaped, wind-swayed structure was a lecture hall where several tiers of benches faced inward toward a lectern. A couple dozen students had already gathered, notebooks ready, sipping chai, bringing the low murmur of chatter to a close as Hiroko took her place behind the microphone. Chiho found a spot in the back row.

"Let's get settled, everyone. Today I'd like to talk about Malaspina, the Roving Glacier of Death. I'll take questions afterward. Stragglers, please take your seats. In the early years of the FUS, with polar ice rapidly retreating, as great famines and genocides swept continents, one meteorological oddity perplexed the world's climate scientists. While glaciers melted, exposing mummies and mastodons, one glacier appeared to not only not shrink but, in fact, grow larger."

Hiroko pulled down a pre-FUS world map, demarcated by long-obliterated political boundaries, and tapped Alaska with her pointer.

"Here, in the southeast portion of what was then the state of Alaska, the Malaspina glacier appeared to be reversing a decades-long process of melting. At one time the glacier was forty miles across, twenty-eight miles long, and some six hundred meters thick, with an area of fifteen hundred square miles. During the early FUS, while other glaciers melted, it appeared to grow by 0.3 percent daily during its peak growth. This caught the attention of the Climate Crisis Control Center, or C4, who initially viewed it as an opportunity to establish a polar bear refuge. As you know, the retreat of arctic sea ice led to alarming polar bear drownings and cannibalism. The C4, who fed rescued polar bears with air-dropped loads of fish compacted into frozen bales, studied the air currents around the glacier and the geology of the region but nothing could explain why it continued to grow. By all measures it should have been melting. Soon it grew to subsume a small nearby village, which was heralded as a promising sign. If it were to melt, you see, Malaspina alone would have contributed half an inch to the level of rising seawater.

"Various climatologists including Dr. Stephen McDonough-Hughes at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Drs. Fran and Regina Kroll of Oxford's Climate Response Committee believed that the secret to reversing this warming trend may have been contained within or around Malaspina. It seemed that the growing glacier in southeast Alaska might be cause for hope and optimism about the future of the climate.