All the Birds in the Sky(88)
“I don’t get you.” Patricia had the sun behind her, so she was just a shape. She wore mountainous jeans, with a belt buckle that looked like the square Art Deco face of the scary statue.
“Jesus, Trish. You’ve never understood me. Don’t act like that’s some big revelation.” Roberta could say things to this imaginary Patricia that she would never say to her real sister. “I tried telling you when we were kids, that you and I were the same kind of crazy. But you always had to be special. You’re never going to make it in this world if you always have to be a martyr.”
Patricia turned and kicked the hill behind her, sending sprays of sod over Roberta’s head. “All this trouble I go to, to check up on you, and you just want to bust my balls,” she said. “Fuck you.”
It came out before Roberta even knew what she was saying: “Don’t be a bitch, or I’ll tell Mom.” Then she heard herself and felt all of the air go out of her.
Patricia shrank. All at once the two women were the same size. Patricia looked gut punched, the way Roberta felt.
“Hey,” Roberta said. “You were always their favorite, you know. Even when they were torturing you and praising me. They loved you the most.”
Patricia reached out and touched Roberta’s face, palm first. “That’s so not true,” she said. “Hey, I can’t stay in your dream much longer. I’m already losing signal. But you’re safe, right? You found someplace safe to lay low? Because there are more shitstorms coming.”
“Yeah,” Roberta said. “I’m at the world’s most boring commune, in the mountains near Asheville. I’m looking after the chickens, and being super-sweet to them. Oh, speaking of which, one of the hens wanted me to tell you something.”
“What was that?”
“Basically, that you suck. That you screwed everything up. And that it’s too late to fix it.”
Patricia’s posture stiffened and her face grew masklike, too, so it was like she was turning back into a statue. Patricia let out a ragged breath.
“Tell the bird,” she said, “to get in line.”
Roberta woke up.
29
AFTER THE WORMHOLE generator went up in smoke, Laurence went back to his life. He had the house atop Noe Valley to himself, since Isobel was off doing mysterious errands for Milton. Most of Laurence’s friends had gone to live at Seadonia, an oil rig and cruise ship that Rod Birch had lashed together and turned into an independent nation in the North Pacific. Laurence received cryptic e-mails from burner accounts, telling him exciting things were happening. They were making discoveries. They were concocting plans. “Come to Seadonia,” Anya urged in one e-mail. “We’re still going to save the world.”
Laurence felt as if he’d quit both caffeine and cigarettes. He woke up a few times a night, sweating and even crying. In his f*cking sleep. He didn’t have that thing where he forgot for a second how f*cked everything was, and then remembered, and then felt his heart break all over again—that would be too easy. Instead, he remembered always. He would feel stricken, doubled over, with grief and misery—and then he would remember how bad it really was and feel worse, as his brain took on a bit more of the weight.
Except sometimes, he read an article or saw a TV report about the latest sign that the world was screwed—a wall of dead babies, piled like stones at the outer boundary of some farmer’s pasture. And he would think, by reflex, Oh, thank goodness we’re building an escape route. And then it would flood back to him, the despair. The one actual good thing he’d done in his life, and it was scrap and ashes. It was more than enough to drive him mad.
Laurence didn’t think of Patricia, except to imagine her listening to the voicemail he’d left her. And laughing at how stupid he was. Maybe playing it for the whole wizard gang, when they were drunk on mystical cocktails together.
The only other time Laurence let himself think of Patricia was when he realized he couldn’t go to Seadonia, or anywhere else. People would ask too many questions about the attack, and it would get weird if Laurence kept refusing to say anything. So not only did Laurence have no girlfriend, he also had no friends, because nobody would ever understand about his vow of silence. Only Laurence had recognized Patricia in Denver, or else he’d be in a lot more trouble.
Other than those two things, Laurence didn’t think about Patricia at all.
Laurence got a big dark peacoat and wandered around the city with his shoulders up and his head down. He made believe he was a time traveler from the postapocalyptic future, looking in on the last days of civilization. Or maybe this was the postapocalyptic world, and he was visiting from a better past. He went days without speaking to another person. He checked in with his mom and dad, who were safely in Montana and Arizona, respectively, but blew off their questions. He sat up all night trying to write a new OS for the Caddy, one that would be fully open-source and user-configurable. He went to the hAckOllEctIvE, but left if anybody spoke to him. He trimmed his beard but did a half-assed job of it, so he had a lopsided Vandyke shaped like a profile of a duck. One time he sat in a tea shop and listened to one of those new groups sing madrigals, but then he started to cry, and really, f*ck that, so he bailed.
Laurence got a job working for a bank that wanted to install a series of safeguards on its website preventing people from transferring too much of their money at once—which they were perfectly entitled to do, but the bank wanted to make it more complicated and also throw up as many distractions as possible during the process, like a series of notices tailored to the customers offering them things like painless refi or free overdraft protection. Anything to sidetrack the customers and keep the capital from flying away.