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Excerpt
The Ragpicker
I am a scholar of abandonment, I am wise in the ways of things left behind. What I am is, is a curator of decay, and at the moment I’m lying on a hillside in foothills that smell of manzanita and sagebrush.
I’m on my belly pretending to watch the house looming above me, a monument of polished stone, rectangles set into rectangles, with three high decks and a dry swimming pool that is littered with seedpods and cellophane and a topsoil scum of windblown dust from which sprouts catalina lilac or peppermint acacia. Taxonomy is not my strength, but in any case, the pool is clogged with spine-edged leaves, leaving no room for more timid seedlings to root among the cracks and buries.
I mean root like saplings not root like pigs. Pigs are feral, monstrous now, eighty generations distant from the slaughterhouse.
The point, if you are attending me, the point you’ll recall is that I’m not watching the house, the house is not the object of my scrutiny. My gaze is on the curved mirror leaning against a snail-studded stalk to my left; I am watching a blurred reflective crescent of hillside behind myself.
I appear alone but I am not.
They’ve been following me for two days.
At least two days.
Two of them, or four. Just out of sight, never drawing nearer, never falling behind. They stalked me from the reservoir through the stretched shadow of that tilted bridge and across the cloverleaf gap. The prickle of strangers’ eyes raises welts on my neck. I smell a human scent when the wind shifts, and I haltingly, experimentally record these words onto internal media for an audience that may never exist—
Wait.
Pardon me.
I’m new to this, coltish and uncertain.
Well, here’s something you didn’t expect: massive cockroach die-off in the cities after the blissful end. Though perhaps they’ve rebounded, I don’t know. I stay away from cities now. Cities are dangerous for twitches like myself, we unfortunate souls who survived the final days while trapped in terminally-compromised secondskin bodysuits that we can neither remove nor ignore.
The air in cities is full of unwanted approvals.
The air here, however, snakes through the undergrowth, and in the mottled glass of the mirror I track each individual gust of wind.
My mind fires fast.
I am optimized for irrelevancy.
I am also weary of being pursued, fretful and agitated. Unease tightens the scars on my neck into a rope. My pursuers won’t face me; they know what I am. They will retreat if I turn upon them, only to later return, so I must engineer a confrontation, an ambush of sorts, after which I’ll continue on my way.
I am heading home.
There. That is something you should know. We are heading home. This is the story of my journey home, like a classic tale of, of
At long last, we’re heading home.
I am lashed onward by the desperate hope that I’ll recover intact fragments of my husband in a hidden homestead cache. It’s not likely, mind you. It’s a remote and attenuated chance, a squeamish squirming and underfed chance but a chance—and odds are funny things.
That’s why they’re called odds.
Three years and three thousand miles away, plus or minus, I put my hand on a syncable in a gutted maintenance van. I’d been stealing eggs from the doves that roosted in the vehicle—plump graypink birds, at least—and I found there amid the weeds and guano a rugged case containing a syncable—an Arielco MT-MT Forensic Bias Syncable—of precisely the correct compatibility.
The syncable is not a cable but a squid-shaped device that transfers data—memories—across platforms, and this one boasts a self-contained power source which, even after all this lost time, positively hums with hope. So I am heading home to recover whatever fragments of Nufar still exist.
Except I cannot proceed without resolving this pursuit.
So after many idle hours I approach the polished stone house. In the colorless moment before dawn I rise with evaporative sluggishness to a flagstone path. A thicket of rosemary is rotting from the inside, dense with mildew or—no.
A human corpse is strapped to a networked lawnchair entombed inside the thicket. I don’t eat people, despite the fact that of all the animals I might consume, a human is the least strange. The meat is my meat, the flesh is my flesh, and what stronger claim do I possess than to my own species?
Still Nufar disapproves, so I hesitate to—
Wait. Perhaps I should linger a moment to explain that my husband Nufar and the other “obits”—programmed personifications of the beloved dead—exist in partial suspension in my personal digital network as does Default, a virtual assistant that stiches together information from tattered databases and wiki patches. She lost contact with the satellites decades ago and now relies upon locally-stored data, the water-damaged footnotes of a once-global network contained in the lumps on my shoulders and spine under my secondskin, the implanted grandchildren of the smartsets and retinserts that once fused humanity into a single global nervous system.
I unstrap my pack: my heart, my hearth, my husband, my hope . . . my simpleminded stratagem for confronting the pursuers, for giving them such an ambush fright that violence becomes unnecessary.
I cross upheavals of concrete and botany and prop my pack against a boulder.
When I turn toward the house, I feel my pursuers watching me. I feel their stares lifting and rotating me, examining my flayed cross-sections, straining toward me, urgent with appetite and algorithm.
The exterior glass walls collapsed long ago, to earthquake and mudslide, to roof-rat and carpenter bee and indifference. When I step inside, shards shatter beneath my boots, which reminds me of music.
Playlist, I tell Default.
Playlist not found, she tells me.
I unwrap one of the rags from my wrist and fashion a hilt for a thick wedge of glass. Knife at my belt and crowbar at my hip, yet I fashion a crude glass blade because I like the shape of the wedge and because I prefer using tools in the location from which they sprung because I, I, I don’t, in truth, trust becauses anymore; I’m only backfilling them now on account of recording this story.
There is an open space with a kitchen and a kitchen island and a dining room with a table that is constructed from some thousand-year material, though the chairs are stumps, and to my left there’s a stone wall with a fireplace.
I ignore the kitchen.
Here’s a fact about the end of the world: there is plenty to eat.
There is plenty to drink.
There is plenty.
The Earth is an endless cornucopia garden. There are fish in the streams, mushrooms in the forest, there are roots and stalks and leaves, not to mention powders in unbreached containers, game animals on every highway and meadow, and three fruit trees within two minutes of where I stand, or four if avocado is a fruit.
Avocado is a fruit, Default tells me.
Maggots add fat to our diet when avocados aren’t available but intact fabric isn’t as easy to find so I slip across the mudcaked tiles, past rotting wallboards half-concealing sheafs of copper wires, more copper wiring than makes sense, and I slink into the bedroom then shiver with fear.
I am no longer within eyeshot of the front of the house. I am no longer within eyeshot of my pack and using my pack as bait is using my life as bait. Still, what am I, what are any of us, if not lures cast into murky currents for the purpose of—
Also, my pack is too cumbersome for undetectable theft.
I will notice them making the attempt.
So I’ll make a show of discovering the liquor cabinet—liquor does not degrade—and wait for them to conclude that I pose no threat. I’ll bait my trap with the pretense of drunkenness, though first I enter a bedroom that looks like eight or seven decades of squirrels and damp and owl pellets and two corpses lazing together in a once-padded social industry settee. They’re largely gristle now, impregnated with insect eggs and elevated into ecosystems, but they died happy, that much I know, they died engaged with distant truths, which even after all this time I find a comfort.
I also find a sealed box in the closet, and inside the box there is a Daisy P sheet used to cushion the more-delicate contents, a sheet which depicts an elegant woman in a yellow dress sitting on a pink chair surrounded by flowers that make Nufar smile in my mind, so I wrap the sheet around myself and request that the obits admire me.
Opinions are divided, as always, so we talk instead about what the corpses left behind—the pool, the view, the synaptic links to society—and then I look for the liquor cabinet but when I turn a corner what I find is a bear.
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