{This is chapter 12 of my serialized, illustrated novel. You can read previous chapters here.}
Terence was my oldest friend, the person I trusted most. He was the only person I’d talked to about crossing the river to the west to find my parents. It felt so good to see him and Joe talking, getting to know each other. Sharing a friend wasn’t a feeling I’d had before. Just a warmth of connection that also made me realize how few friends I had ever had in my life. There just weren’t that many people around.
This sadness, too, was a new feeling – I hadn’t ever had the chance to compare. It was a good sadness, rich and textured. Sitting at a table in the corner of The Libray, under a leaded glass bay window, I opened a manila folder Terence had given me.
“You’ll want to see this before you travel,” he said. “I’ve been saving it for you.”
The folder held pages dotted with a lovely lettering that triggered a sensation of familiarity --- I couldn't say why. Then I realized it was the same lavender ink my mother had always used. The letters, the words, the dots, the sentences, all my mother’s hand. I leaned forward and took a deep breath.
The final page was a short note, in black ink rather than the lavender. Clearly a last minute addition. The writing was scrawled, hurried.
“Darling,” it read.
“I’ve asked Terence to hold this letter until the time is right…that moment when you are old enough to understand, or maybe that moment when you are still too young, but you have decided to search for your father and me and you’ve let it be known that no one is going to stop you!
“I picture you now, 15, 17, 20 years old! Reading my letter from so long ago. I picture you and all that I’ve missed. And I hope this makes the blood rush to your neck and heart and fingers and belly, I hope it fills your body with steamy warmth, because that is what I feel for you right now. You are my only, my beautiful child.
Xxxoo Mom
The document itself was more formal than the note.
“Dear Sarah,” it began. No date. No place. Just “Dear Sarah.”
“I hope you never have to read this. I hope that I return safely from The West and never leave you again. That is my plan. But in case I don’t:
“First, let me say how beautiful you are. You are the most beautiful creation in history, the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me and your father. Know that I love you with all my body. And that I will feel you in me till the end of my day.”
I almost fell over reading this. Just a rush of warmth, and anger too. Where the fuck was she?
“It is 2053. I’m now 40 years old (you are five as I write this!)
“The split between East and West began when I was still a teenager. A new virus, Lispenard 080, appeared suddenly – no one had tracked its evolution, or knew if it was a Chinese chicken problem or an Iowa pig issue or something else entirely. It came from nowhere and proved to thrive on hard plastic surfaces. Thus the extreme contagion from brain phones, helmet pads and other devices, as well as, of course, bathroom sinks, vehicle seats and other things we all loved. A friendly deadly nightmare
“Some days I’d walk out onto one of the Avenues and find bodies just left at the curb, or vehicles that had driven dead passengers until their batteries died and then stopped in the street, parked catawampus to the corner.”
I paused, looked out the window at the clear sunlit day. I heard a buzz and noticed a drone hovering over the church across the way, a bird drone. Without thinking, I waved it away with my hand as though it were a bug, and off it went! When it landed on a parapet I realized it was a red-tail hawk, not a drone in sight. The street was empty, as usual. Just vehicles there that hadn’t moved in decades. So many of them didn’t even have steering wheels, and I always wondered how these ones ended up all over the place. Terrence said they were supposed to find their way back to the garage when their batteries got low, but so many of them hadn’t. Their failure to dock felt very sad. So many blocking the streets that there was rarely a true clear path in the road, still. The vehicles blocked everything, rusting and dusty and sometimes holding delicate pigeon bones, whole human skeletons, other objects. Turquoise and rust colored stains from battery leaks dotted every road. Though I’d figured out a lot about traffic from looking at the vehicles and the rusted street signs, it was still hard to imagine how the whole system had worked. No parking 9-10:30 am M.W.F. What the hell was M.W.F.? Autonomous Vehicle Parking Prohibited. A funny sign Terrence said you could read with your brain phone. Another flurry of wings, and the red tail flew away. I returned to Mom’s description, horrifying as it was. I read on.
“The stores all closed pretty quickly, just a few hustlers on each street hawking clean water, medicines (useless pills and potions, easy to sell to desperate people, myself included – I wore a face mask for four years to protect myself from invading germs), food and cigarettes. And of course, we’d loot stores whenever we needed anything, as long as it lasted. Some people were consumed by greed and stocked up on things they didn’t need – a neighbor who had hundreds of umbrellas, just in case there would be more rain in the future and fewer people making umbrellas. But the dead kept falling, rain or not. Commerce pretty quickly gave way to collections – of bodies and food. Sometimes I’d follow my parents as they carried bodies to the river. I can’t even describe the stench, the gross, decrepit decayed bodies we hauled over there. I remember piles of bones sticking up from the shallows of the Hudson, like artificial reefs. My dad told me they’d be good places for the fishies to make their families.
“The city was coated with a harsh feeling that you just couldn’t wipe away. A feeling that something terrible beyond the virus was happening. I remember it as blame. Many people blamed whomever they could. And when Washington announced that the virus originated in the rat population of NYC, where it had been introduced by Chinese agents, or French oligarchs or Venezuelan digital money men, no one was sure, and she said that the people of NYC now perpetuated it, we became the target of the nation. Millions who had survived fled the city, even though the virus was just as strong on the plains, in Texas, on the West Coast. The President called them diseased. She encouraged Americans to shun New Yorkers.
“It didn’t matter that the government didn’t really know where the virus came from. It didn't matter that they’d decided they needed to blame someone and chose us.
“Suddenly, to be a New Yorker was to be reviled (this, after decades of being held up as the greatest city in the world). That is, unless you were a New Yorker. Those of us who stayed were proud. We worked together, helped each other, lived peacefully through the mourning years of our incredible losses.
“After they declared us plague rats -- that’s what the president actually called us -- we had little contact with those across the river, as they feared “our” virus too much. They saw the Hudson as a safety line that the virus couldn't cross. And when anyone dared go over the river they’d be tormented, tortured, or killed, their boat burned (the Verrazano and GWB were sabotaged, explosives blowing gaping holes so vehicles couldn’t cross). These fanatics took over the Western government with their long code of laws and the emphasis on rebuilding society as it was before (really, as they thought it should have been before, a place of restrictions, money-lust, a place lacking in love and happiness).
“First, they cut the east bank of the Hudson off from all commerce. And then when people persisted in violating their restrictions, they built a wall, much like the one that separated Mexico from the US, only much taller and vastly more complex, with tunnels, and dormitories for guards. It went up deep into the Jersey side of the river as far as Lake Champlain.
“The problem was, they took my own mother and father -- your grandparents -- to their side. Jerry and Melinda were their names. They took them behind the wall. Your grandparents were technologists, and the Westerners needed them to keep their society growing. I haven’t seen them since I was 23, when they were taken away in a helicopter. One year ago I received a message my mother had given someone to smuggle out. In it she pleaded for me to rescue her. So that is where your father and I have gone. And if we don’t return, please forgive me. I need to see my mother and father.
You are my love,
Mom
Wow. The letter was weird. So stiff. I didn’t like it.
I had always thought that my mother had been kidnapped. But it was my grandparents. The story I’d always been told was false. My mother had chosen to leave me, in order to see her own parents. I had grown up without her. I had grown up thinking she would never have left me had a Hard Fork priest not forced her. Now, I was wrong. I’d been betrayed. My aunt and uncle had lied.
And here I was getting ready to do the same to them -- leave them to suffer by my choice, just as my mother had done to me.