Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

Felixstowe, England. A Norman village; later, briefly, a resort, made popular by the German royal family; much fishing, once upon a time. A hundred years earlier, almost to the very month, a quaint flood had killed only forty-eight people. Over the years, the place had been serially flooded, mostly abandoned. Now the sad little town had retreated three miles inland and up a hill. Pop.: 850. The boy blinked twice more; he did not care much for history. He narrowed his attention to a single turd. Arenicola marina. Sandworms. Lugworms. These were its coiled castings. Castings? But here he found his interest fading once again. He touched his temple and said, “Blood Head 4.” Then: “Washington.” It was his first time at this level. Another world began to construct itself around Bill Peek, a shining city on a hill.

“Poor little thing,” Melinda Durham said. She sat on the pier, legs dangling, and pulled the girl into her lap. “Demented with grief she is. We’re going to a laying out. Aggie’s sister is laid out today. Her last and only relation. Course, the cold truth is, Aggie’s sister weren’t much better than trash, and a laying out’s a sight too good for her — she’d be better off laid out on this beach here and left for the gulls. But I ain’t going for her. I do it for Aggie. Aggie knows why. Aggie’s been a great help to me what with one thing and another.”

While he waited, as incidental music played, the boy idly checked a message from his father: at what time could he be expected back at the encampment? At what time could he be expected. This was a pleasing development, being an inquiry rather than an order. He would be fifteen in May, almost a man! A man who could let another man know when he could be expected, and let him know in his own sweet time, when he had the inclination. He performed some rudimentary stretches and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet.

“Maud, that was her name. And she was born under the same steeple she’ll be buried under. Twelve years old. But so whorish—” Melinda covered Aggie’s ears, and the girl leaned into the gesture, having mistaken it for affection. “So whorish she looked like a crone. If you lived round here, Bill Peek, you’d’ve known Maud, if you understand me correctly. You would’ve known Maud right up to the biblical and beyond. Terrible. But Aggie’s cut from quite different sod, thank goodness!” Aggie was released and patted on the head. “And she’s no one left, so here I am, muggins here, taking her to a laying out when I’ve a million other stones to be lifted off the pile.”

The boy placed a number of grenades about his person. In each chapter of the Pathways Global Institute (in Paris, New York, Shanghai, Nairobi, Jerusalem, Tokyo), the boy had enjoyed debating with friends the question of whether it was better to augment around the “facts on the ground,” incorporating whatever was at hand (“flagging,” it was called, the pleasure being the unpredictability), or to choose spots where there were barely any facts to work around. The boy was of the latter sensibility. He wanted to augment in clean, blank places, where he was free to fully extend, unhindered. He looked down the beach as the oil streaks in the sand were overlaid now with a gleaming pavement, lined on either side by the National Guard, saluting him. It was three miles to the White House. He picked out a large pair of breasts to wear, for reasons of his own, and a long, scaled tail, for purposes of strangulation.

“Oh, fuck a duck — you wouldn’t do me an awful favor and keep an eye on Aggie just a minute, would you? — I’ve left my rosary! I can’t go to no laying out without it. It’s more than my soul’s worth. Oh, Aggie, how did you ever let me leave without it? She’s a good girl, but she’s thoughtless sometimes — her sister were thoughtless, too. Bill Peek, you will keep an eye on her, won’t you? I won’t be a moment. We’re shacked up just on that hill by the old Martello tower. Eight minutes I’ll be. No more. Would you do that for me, Bill Peek?”

Bill Peek nodded his head, once rightward, twice leftward. Knives shot out of his wrists and splayed beautifully like the fronds of a fern.

—

It was perhaps twenty minutes later, as he approached the pile of rubble — pounded by enemy craft — that had once been the Monument, that young Bill Peek felt again a presence at his back and turned and found Aggie Hanwell with her fist in her mouth, tears streaming, jaw working up and down in an agonized fashion. He couldn’t hear her over the explosions. Reluctantly, he paused.

“She ain’t come back.”

“Excuse me?”

“She went but she ain’t come back!”

“Who?” he asked, but then scrolled back until he found it. “M. Durham?”

The girl gave him that same astonished look.

“My Melly,” she said. “She promised to take me but she went and she ain’t come back!”

The boy swiftly located M. Durham — as much an expedience as an act of charity — and experienced the novelty of sharing the information with the girl, in the only way she appeared able to receive it. “She’s two miles away,” he said, with his own mouth. “Heading north.”

Aggie Hanwell sat down on her bum in the wet sand. She rolled something in her hand. The boy looked at it and learned that it was a periwinkle — a snail of the sea! He recoiled, disliking those things which crawled and slithered upon the earth. But this one proved broken, with only a pearlescent nothing inside it.

“So it was all a lie,” Aggie said, throwing her head back dramatically to consider the sky. “Plus one of them’s got my number. I’ve done nothing wrong but still Melly’s gone and left me and one of them things’s been following me, since the pier — even before that.”

“If you’ve done nothing wrong,” Bill Peek said, solemnly parroting his father, “you’ve nothing to worry about. It’s a precise business.” He had been raised to despair of the type of people who spread misinformation about the Program. Yet along with his new maturity had come fresh insight into the complexities of his father’s world. For didn’t those with bad intent on occasion happen to stand beside the good, the innocent, or the underaged? And in those circumstances could precision be entirely guaranteed? “Anyway, they don’t track children. Don’t you understand anything?”

Hearing this, the girl laughed — a bitter and cynical cackle, at odds with her pale little face — and Bill Peek made the mistake of being, for a moment, rather impressed. But she was only imitating her elders, as he was imitating his.

“Go home,” he said.

Instead she set about burrowing her feet into the wet sand. “Everyone’s got a good angel and a bad angel,” she explained. “And if it’s a bad angel that picks you out”—she pointed to a craft swooping low—“there’s no escaping it. You’re done for.”

He listened in wonderment. Of course he’d always known there were people who thought in this way — there was a module you did on them in sixth grade — but he had never met anyone who really harbored what his anthro-soc teacher, Mr. Lin, called “animist beliefs.”

The girl sighed, scooped up more handfuls of sand, and added them to the two mounds she had made on top of her feet, patting them down, encasing herself up to the ankles. Meanwhile all around her Bill Peek’s scene of fabulous chaos was frozen — a Minotaur sat in the lap of stony Abe Lincoln and a dozen carefully planted IEDs awaited detonation. He was impatient to return.

“Must advance,” he said, pointing down the long stretch of beach, but she held up her hands, she wanted pulling up. He pulled. Standing, she clung to him, hugging his knees. He felt her face damp against his leg.