John Adams - Wastelands 2

Then she doesn’t think of Franny.

She doesn’t know where she is going. She is in motion.

By your first anniversary, the world’s stopped making paper, and so you can’t give your boyfriend the traditional gift. You never would have anyway, regardless of circumstances. You’re not that kind of girl. You pride yourself on your original sin. It’s the hot you trade in.

So you give him the piece of your skin just beneath your ribcage on the right side, where the floating ribs bend in. It’s a good part. Not the best. You’re like a food hoarder who pretends her larder’s empty, all the while running her finger along the dusty ledge that leads to the trick shelves that hold the jars of Caspian caviar. You’ve always been the kind of liar who leans back and lets boys fall into you while you see if you can make them fall all the way out the other side. You want them to feel like they’ve hit Narnia. You traffic in interdimensional fucking, during which they transcend space and time, and you go nowhere. When they fall in love, you Shun & Break™ them. Their poor plastic hearts are Pez dispensers topped with copyright violation Mickey mice.

Your boy’s not falling for this shit. He simply refuses. He sees through your methods. You met him in a bar on the night of the first apocalypse, just prior, and both of you somehow lived through the night.

He clocked you from moment one, when you bought him a drink and brought it to him, fresh lipstick on your mouth, altering your walk to cause him pain. He drank it. He then took the cherry out of yours and drank your drink too, looking at you the whole time like he was a prime transgressor who was going to rock your world until it broke.

“You gonna try to make me love you now?” he asked. “That your thing?”

“Brother,” you said, taken aback by the way he’d just needlessly whacked the rules of flirtation, “I don’t even know you exist.”

This would have been the end of it, except that five minutes later there was a rending, and everyone was screaming and trying to get away, and buildings were falling down, and the streets were full of the unimaginable.

You were out of your element. You loved the Woolworthing of the world before the apocalypse, the shopping mall fluorescence of flirtation, the IKEA particleboard pushing together of things that would shortly fall apart. You loved paper parasols and plastic monkeys. Everything was your toy. You killed men, but they never got anywhere near killing you.

But he grabbed your hand, and you grabbed his, and you took off running together, dodging crazy, jumping holes in the streets, not stopping to look at the people who were down on the ground already, vomiting up important parts of anatomy.

You didn’t actually see the worms that night, though other people did. That was the first anyone heard of them.

When you finally got indoors and safe as you were likely to get given the stakes, given the world situation—sex, you informed him, was necessary, because minus sex? This shit was just monsters and the end of the world.

He wasn’t so sure. He’d sobered up, considered lighting out on his own, but you insisted you were better off together. Then you tore off his clothes and climbed him like a firefighter reversing up a pole.

Maybe you love him now, maybe you don’t. You don’t trust him, but there’s nothing new about that.

The apartment you share has big windows, and no curtains. You don’t look out. The floor beneath the window has an old bloodstain, but whatever happened there happened a long time ago. In bed, you’re rubber and he’s glue, and it’s hot enough to keep you going.

“This is so you can write on me instead of paper,” you say, thrilling at your own fin du monde generosity. The rest of the world’s in mourning, but you’re celebrating your survival.

You roll over to face him. You’ve outlined the page with a razor blade. The rest of you is unmarked. There’s the promise of a quarto. Back before all this, you were both, weirdly, the kind of people who footnoted fucks. You prided yourselves on your grasp of gory details of the philosophical arguments of the 1300s. Now you don’t know what you are. Your dissertation is stalled. You used to be the cool girl. Now you’re just a live girl.

Your boy presses his cheek to your hipbone.

“You feel like a fossil,” he says. “Like a pterodactyl wrapped in fabric.”

“As long as I don’t feel like a worm,” you say.

You know very well that you don’t. The people out there who’ve died, the ones eaten by the worms? First everything liquefies. Then the worm emerges. While it’s happening, you feel it like an earthquake inside your soul. There’s a reason you’re in here. A year of that, and the worms are getting bigger all the time. They start out the size of pencils.

He cuts a word into your skin, and then another, and you gasp when the knife touches you, because here’s something you’ve never done before, and you’re a girl who does everything. You have a flash of worry about yourself. There is a distinct possibility that you’re flipping backward, your head upturned, everything sweet you’ve kept hidden sliding out into his hands.

Outside you can hear one of the worms moving through the streets, a big one, about the size of a motorcycle. You blow out the candle. It’s not like you’re scared.

“Do you remember mimeograph machines?” you ask him. You do. Your grade school had one. Once, because you couldn’t stop talking, you were exorcised in the mimeograph room by a substitute teacher using Diet Sprite as holy water. Back then, you couldn’t stop anything once you started. You revolved like a bent top, twitched, and bit boys. You cast spells. None of them worked. Now, if you were out there, it would be worse than mimeograph ink. People believe in things they didn’t.

“Yeah, I remember mimeographs,” he says, and smiles. “The purple ink. It smelled like a hot skillet.”

You flip over so you don’t have to look at him, and then you roll across the sheet to print the words he’s written, grabbing the fuck out of random religion, but isn’t everyone?

Hallelujah, Holy, Glory, Be, God, Gone, Gotten , Begat, Bore, Bear , Beginning: in the . End of days.

Out in the street there is a scream, high and wavering, which you both totally ignore.

For your second anniversary, he gives you two teeth, wisdom. The traditional gift is cotton, but you’ve sold most of your clothes. He gives you ivory instead. The teeth aren’t quite white, because of the drinking of tea, back before it all. They’ve been out of his mouth for a while. The world’s shifted away from dentistry, or rather, the world’s shifted from cosmetic dentistry into tooth-retention, but his were removed before all that. He’s lost other things, too. He has no appendix. He has no tonsils. He still owns both his kidneys, though. You only have one.

The thought that he purposefully had organs removed, and didn’t even sell them, makes you pissed off with the waste ( wastrel , you compulsively think, over and over, wastrel wastrel ) and so you carefully don’t imagine his tonsils twitching on a tonsil heap. His appendix like a tiny harp, strumming inside a bath of alcohol.

There is, by now, a black market trade in vestigials, and the wisdom teeth are worth their weight in something. Some people have their mouths studded with other people’s teeth. It’s become a status symbol. The worms, however, don’t care. People are entirely in hiding by now, and still, sometimes, a worm gets in. No one sleeps with an open mouth anymore. There are masks and door seals. If you see a worm, even a tiny one, you’re supposed to shine a light on it and stomp on its head. This is not always possible. It takes time, but eventually, the worms get their way.