Matthew Tysz - The Last City of America

“I’m well. And you?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Maggie stepped shyly toward his bed and sat. He joined her. “I never got a chance to say how proud I feel to have someone like you around. Even Adam isn’t as brave as you, and I always felt safe with him around. All the buildings talk about you, and how grateful they are.”

“Thank you.”

Maggie looked down as she played with her dress. “I used to watch you, you know. As we were growing up. I still remember the first time you went out to work the farms. I waited all afternoon for you to get back.”

“I never knew that.”

Maggie slid her hand over his, caressed it with her thumb. “Adam told me you think the world can be mean… When I was upset about something, or scared, he’d stay with me. It always made me feel better.”

He turned his head up to her, ready to thank her no. But then Adam Velys sprung into his mind. And instead of telling her he wanted to think alone about tomorrow, he turned the light out and drew her in. He was clumsy with his clothes, and she was reluctant, as though articulating through body language that this was not what she intended. But she didn’t fight him.

He took her in his arms, squeezed, pressed his body flush against hers to no complaint.

It hurt for young girls, but she would hold her silence as he pressed her face down into his moldy mattress, engorging her with his body, paralyzing her.

He conjured Adam bouncing up and down on her, cluelessly trying to please her, hoping for babies, thinking she was his, her legs spread all the while to all of Manhattan.

She only spoke when it was over, something he would have never expected to hear at that moment. She asked him if he was okay. The question made him feel strange, a dizziness came over him, but it soon passed.

He held her tightly as he drifted into sleep.

Frowning, he knocked on her door a third time. “Maggie?” he opened it slowly, looked around. Where else could she be? Maybe she was baking with her mother. She should be back soon if she was. Adam walked inside.

He rarely got the chance to look closely at the kingdom of dolls that filled her walls and furniture. Partly because he didn’t want to seem invasive, but really because he’d be busy talking to her. Some of them were given to her by her mother and aunt, many by her father who used to seek them out in abandoned homes and shops. She loved them all. It was a magnificent collection.

Only one of them was from Adam. But it was the one she loved the most.

When he was thirteen, Adam made a special doll for her twelfth birthday. A goofy thing. He still couldn’t figure out what creature he was aiming for… a monkey, or person, or an over-decorated egg. His favorite shirt went into crafting it, among other things he liked. He used his pillow for the stuffing, and went without a real one for almost two years. When he was finally done, he gave it a big kiss, and gave it to her. She fell in love with it immediately. She put it on a shelf above her bed, where it remained. It was the only doll on that shelf. The first time she kissed him was when he gave it to her. He still remembered how wild it was. A cloud came over him and his eyes went numb. He did everything he could since then to earn that from her again.

He reached high above her bed and brought the thing down, stared into its big, crooked eyes.

Wow, he definitely overdid that tongue. Crap. He never realized he made her a horny lima bean man.

He laughed, pressed the soft thing to his chest, relaxed on her bed, noting how small of an affect Maggie’s tiny body had on the mattress. It was like new.

He remembered the last time he was in this bed. It was a while ago.

Maggie had fallen into a depression waiting for her cycles, waiting to find out if Hephaestus had taken her dreams away. She was losing sleep, which only made it worse. Desperate, her parents pleaded with Adam to make her feel better, any way he could, and to keep at it if he failed. One of the things he tried was a sort of sleepover. He talked with her, made her laugh, made promises he had no right to make. He cuddled with her as she slept, smiling for the first time in months, that silly egg-man thing with the stupid tongue looking down on them from the high shelf.

He rarely thought about doing much more with Maggie than her wild kiss. Farther than a kiss, and Adam would be expected to provide something he was terrified he couldn’t.

Maggie wanted to be a mother more than anything. If she finally decided to love him in the way he loved her, after all this time… and he couldn’t give her that… then maybe he had no right to love her at all.

The only way to be sure was to check. But he was too scared. But how long could he put himself through not knowing whether or not he deserved her? He put it out of his mind. The topic came far too often lately, and he had enough. He wanted to think about Maggie without the complications his love for her invited. Just Maggie.

His face sunk into her pillow, and he breathed her scent in deeply. His eyes closed, and he let himself fall asleep, the doll still perched in his big arms. He knew she’d wake him when she came back. And he wouldn’t mind if she didn’t.

The host, poor man, he needed attention like a toddler with autism. Confused and uncertain, so in need of something to hold on to. Very much in common with the city he ruled—never given the time nor the dignity to figure out who he was.

A man is given time in this world to study himself. Some men struggle with this until they grow old. The lucky one discovers who he is early on. Grakus knew for a very long time who he was—as far back as his memories could take him. How? Was it luck? Grakus didn’t remember. He didn’t care. What mattered was what he had learned.

Grakus was not the only person to be cast out from his tribe, but he was the only one not to receive a clear reason why. The elders realized this, which is why they let him go with some of their greatest treasures, such as the clothing and the red car. Most of these were already spent, but more than made up for.

Grakus knew that if they hadn’t cast him out, he would have left on his own. And he would have ended up in the same place. Chicago needed him. He needed it. He inferred a lot before he arrived here, and staked his life on many of these inferences. But now he didn’t need inferences, skilled though he was at drawing them.

He had Teddles.

Grakus could see him at any time to learn something new. When it came to the people of Chicago, Teddles knew almost everything. Equally incredible was how the government found most of what he knew to be irrelevant.

Were Teddles to discover a small bit of information that could bear no meaning on its own, Chicago disregarded it. If information from four tortured people each provided a quarter of something interesting, something critical, the state would never know. Meanwhile, the information Teddles gathered mounted to a divine awareness in his photographic mind. The simple act of putting it all together gave Grakus information that the host could never imagine. He learned that there were more important things than some ridiculous Rebellion.

There was this place called Rush.

It seemed that the scientists in this university had mastered, or were close to mastering, the manipulation of the human gene.

Grakus never doubted that someone was responsible for the apocalyptic Hephaestus virus. And as he learned more and more about Rush, he began to develop a theory. If he was right, coming to Chicago was an even better idea than he thought.

The only flaw in this theory was that Rush only existed as it was since the early 2060’s, more than forty years after the virus spread. But Grakus found a way to address this flaw.