Текст книги "Warm Bodies"

Автор книги: Isaac Marion

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

Julie stands up quietly, moves towards the front door.

‘You’re all her, Julie. You aren’t me, you’re her . How could she do it?’

I open the door and back out. Julie follows me, soft steps, no sound.

‘How could she be so weak?’ the man says in a voice like steel melting. ‘How could she leave us here?’

We walk in silence. The drizzling rain beads in our hair and we shake it out like dogs. We come to Colonel Rosso’s house. Rosso’s wife opens the door, looks at Julie’s face, and hugs her. We walk inside into the warmth.

I find Rosso in the living room, sipping coffee, peering through his glasses at a water-stained old book. While Julie and Mrs Rosso murmur in the kitchen, I sit down across from the colonel.

‘Perry,’ he says.

‘Colonel.’

‘How are you holding up?’

‘I’m alive.’

‘A good start. How are you settling into the home?’

‘I despise it.’

Rosso is quiet for a moment. ‘What’s on your mind?’

I search for words. I seem to have forgotten most of them. Finally, quietly, I say, ‘He lied to me.’

‘How so?’

‘He said we were fixing things, and if we didn’t give up everything might turn out okay.’

‘He believed that. I think I do, too.’

‘But then he died .’ My voice trembles and I fight to squeeze it tight. ‘And it was senseless . No battle, no noble sacrifice, just a stupid work accident that could have happened to anyone anywhere, any time in history.’

‘Perry…’

‘I don’t understand it, sir. What’s the point of trying to fix a world we’re in so briefly? What’s the meaning in all that work if it’s just going to disappear? Without any warning? A fucking brick on the head?’

Rosso says nothing. The low voices in the kitchen become audible in our silence, so they drop to whispers, trying to hide from the colonel what I’m sure he already knows. Our little world is far too tired to care about the crimes of its leaders.

‘I want to join Security,’ I announce. My voice is solid now. My face is hard.

Rosso lets out a slow breath and sets his book down. ‘Why, Perry?’

‘Because it’s the only thing left worth doing.’

‘I thought you wanted to write.’

‘That’s pointless.’

‘Why?’

‘We have bigger concerns now. General Grigio says these are the last days. I don’t want to waste my last days scratching letters on paper.’

‘Writing isn’t letters on paper. It’s communication. It’s memory.’

‘None of that matters any more. It’s too late.’

He studies me. He picks up the book again and holds the cover out. ‘Do you know this story?’

‘It’s Gilgamesh.’

‘Yes. The Epic of Gilgamesh , one of the earliest known works of literature. Humanity’s debut novel, you could say.’ Rosso flips through the brittle yellow pages. ‘Love, sex, blood and tears. A journey to find eternal life. To escape death.’ He reaches across the table and hands the book to me. ‘It was written over four thousand years ago on clay tablets by people who tilled the mud and rarely lived past forty. It’s survived countless wars, disasters and plagues, and continues to fascinate to this day, because here I am, in the midst of modern ruin, reading it.’

I look at Rosso and don’t look at the book. My fingers dig into the leather cover.

‘The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.’

I split the book open to the middle. The pages are riddled with ellipses, marking words and lines missing from the text, rotted out and lost to history. I stare at these marks and let their black dots fill my vision. ‘I don’t want to remember,’ I say, and I shut the book. ‘I want to join Security. I want to do dangerous stuff. I want to forget.’

‘What are you saying, Perry?’

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘It sounds like you are.’

‘No.’ The shadows in the room pool in the lines of our faces, draining our eyes of hue. ‘There’s nothing left worth saying.’

I am numb. Adrift in the blackness of Perry’s thoughts, I reverberate with his grief like a low church bell.

‘Are you working, Perry?’ I whisper into the emptiness. ‘Are you reverse-engineering your life?’

Shhhhhh , Perry says. Don’t break the mood. I need this to cut through .

I float there in his unshed tears, waiting in the salty dark.

Morning sun streams through the balcony window of Julie’s bedroom. The green constellations have faded back into the blue sky of the ceiling. The girls are still asleep, but I’ve been lying here awake for all but a few uneasy hours. Unable to stay motionless any longer, I slip out of the blankets and stretch my creaky joints, letting the sun baste one side of my face then the other. Nora sleep-mumbles a bit of nursing jargon, ‘mitosis’ or ‘meiosis’, possibly ‘necrosis’, and I notice the dog-eared textbook resting open on her stomach. Curious, I hover over her for a moment, then carefully lift up the book.

I can’t read the title. But I immediately recognise the cover. A serenely sleeping face offering its throat of exposed veins to the viewer. The medical reference book, Gray’s Anatomy .

Looking nervously over my shoulder, I whisk the heavy tome out into the hallway and start flipping through its pages. Intricate drawings of human architecture, organs and bones all too familiar to me, although here the filleted bodies are shown clean and perfect, their details unblurred by filth or fluids. I pore over the illustrations as the minutes tick by, racked by guilt and fascination like a pubescent Catholic with a Playboy . I can’t read the captions, of course, but a few Latin words pop into my head as I study the images, perhaps distant recalls from my old life, a college lecture or TV documentary I absorbed somewhere. The knowledge feels grotesque in my mind but I grasp it and hold it tight, etching it deep into my memory. Why am I doing this? Why do I want to know the names and functions of all the beautiful structures I’ve spent my years violating? Because I don’t deserve to keep them anonymous. I want the pain of knowing them and, by extension, myself: who and what I really am. Maybe with that scalpel, red hot and sterilised in tears, I can begin to carve out the rot inside me.

Hours pass. When I’ve seen every page and wrung every syllable from my memory, I gently replace the book on Nora’s belly and tiptoe out onto the balcony, hoping the warm sun will grant some relief from the moral nausea churning inside me.

I lean against the railing and take in the cramped vistas of Julie’s city. As dark and lifeless as it was last night, now it bustles and roars like Times Square. What is everyone doing? The undead airport has its crowds but no real activity. We don’t do things; we wait for things to happen. The collective volition bubbling up from the Living is intoxicating, and I have a sudden urge to be down in those masses, rubbing shoulders and elbowing for space in all that sweat and breath. If my questions have answers, they must certainly be down there, under the pounding soles of those filthy feet.

I hear the girls chatting quietly in the bedroom, finally waking up. I go back inside and crawl under the blankets next to Julie.

‘Good morning, R ,’ Nora says, not quite sincerely. I think speaking to me like a human is still a novelty for her; she looks like she wants to titter every time she acknowledges my presence. It’s aggravating, but I understand. I’m an absurdity that takes some getting used to.

‘Morning,’ Julie croaks, watching me from across the pillow. She looks about as un-pretty as I’ve ever seen her, eyes puffy and hair insane. I wonder how well she sleeps at night, and what kind of dreams she has. I wish I could step into them like she steps into mine.

She rolls onto her side and props her head on her elbow. She clears her throat. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Here you are. What now?’

‘Want to… see your city.’

Her eyes search my face. ‘Why?’

‘Want to… see how you live. Living people.’

Her lips tighten. ‘Too risky. Someone would notice you.’

‘Come on, Julie,’ Nora says. ‘He walked all the way here, let’s give him a tour! We can fix him up, disguise him. He already got past Ted, I’m sure he’ll be okay strolling around a little if we’re careful. You’ll be careful, right, R?’

I nod, still looking at Julie. She allows a long silence. Then she rolls onto her back and closes her eyes, releasing a slow breath that sounds like consent.

‘Yay!’ Nora says.

‘We can try it. But, R, if you don’t look convincing after we fix you up, no tour. And if I see anyone staring at you too hard, tour’s over. Deal?’

I nod.

‘No nodding. Say it.’

‘Deal.’

She crawls out of the blankets and climbs onto the side of the bed. She looks me up and down. ‘Okay,’ she says, her hair sticking out in every direction. ‘Let’s get you presentable.’

I would like my life to be a movie so I could cut to a montage. A quick sequence of shots set to some trite pop song would be much easier to endure than the two gruelling hours the girls spend trying to convert me, to change me back into what’s widely considered human. They wash and trim my hair. They wear out a fresh toothbrush on my teeth, although for my smile anything above a coffee-addicted Brit is not in the cards. They attempt to dress me in some of Julie’s more boyish clothes, but Julie is a pixie and I rip through T-shirts and snap buttons like a bodybuilder. Finally they give up, and I wait naked in the bathroom while they run my old business-casual through the wash.

While I wait, I decide to take a shower. This is an experience I had long forgotten, and I savour it like a first sip of wine, a first kiss. The steaming water cascades over my battered body, washing away months or years of dirt and blood, some of it mine, much of it others’. All this filth spirals down the drain and into the underworld where it belongs. My true skin emerges, pale grey, marked by cuts and scrapes and grazing bullet wounds, but clean.

This is the first time I have seen my body.

When my clothes are dry and Julie has sewn up the most noticeable holes, I dress myself, relishing the unfamiliar feeling of cleanness. My shirt no longer sticks to me. My slacks no longer chafe.

‘You should at least lose the tie,’ Nora says. ‘You’re about ten wars behind the fashion curve in that fancy get-up.’

‘No, leave it,’ Julie pleads, regarding the little strip of cloth with a whimsical smile. ‘I like that tie. It’s the only thing keeping you from being completely grey.’

‘It sure won’t help him blend in, Jules. Remember all the stares we got when we started wearing sneakers instead of work boots?’

‘Exactly. People already know you and me don’t wear the uniform; as long as R stays with us he could wear spandex shorts and a top hat and no one would mention it.’

Nora smiles. ‘I like that idea.’

So the tie remains, in all its red silk incongruity. Julie helps me knot it. She brushes my hair and runs some goo through it. Nora thoroughly fumigates me with men’s body spray.

‘Ugh, Nora,’ Julie objects. ‘I hate that stuff. And he doesn’t even stink.’

‘He stinks a little bit.’

‘Yeah, now he does.’

‘Better he smell like a chemical plant than a corpse, right? It’ll keep the dogs away from him.’

There is some debate about whether or not to make me wear sunglasses to hide my eyes, but they eventually decide this would be more conspicuous than just letting that ethereal grey show itself.

‘It’s actually not that noticeable,’ Julie says. ‘Just don’t have a staring contest with anyone.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ Nora adds. ‘No one in this place really looks at each other anyway.’

The final step in their remodelling plan is make-up. As I sit in front of the mirror like a Hollywood starlet getting ready for her close-up, they powder me, they rouge me, they colourise my black-and-white skin. When they’re done, I stare at the mirror in amazement.

I am alive.

I am a handsome young professional, happy, successful, in the bloom of health, just emerging from a meeting and on my way to the gym. I laugh out loud. I look at myself in the mirror and the joyful absurdity of it just bubbles out.

Laughter. Another first for me.

‘Oh my…’ Nora says, standing back to look at me, and Julie says, ‘Huh.’ She tilts her head. ‘You look…’

‘You look hot !’ Nora blurts. ‘Can I have him, Julie? Just for one night?’

‘Shut your dirty mouth,’ Julie chuckles, still inspecting me. She touches my forehead, the narrow, bloodless slot where she once threw a knife. ‘Should probably cover that. Sorry, R.’ She sticks a Band-Aid over the wound and presses it down with gentle strokes. ‘There.’ She steps back again and studies me like a perfectionist painter, pleased but cautious.

‘Con… vincing?’ I ask.

‘Hmm,’ she says.

I offer her my best attempt at a winning smile, stretching my lips wide.

‘Oh, God. Definitely don’t do that.’

‘Just be natural,’ Nora says. ‘Pretend you’re home at the airport surrounded by friends, if you people have those.’

I think back to the moment Julie named me, that warm feeling that crept into my face for the first time as we shared a beer and a plate of Thai food.

‘There you go, that’s better,’ Nora says.

Julie nods, pressing her knuckles against her smiling lips as if to hold back some outburst of emotion. A giddy cocktail of amusement, pride and affection. ‘You clean up nice, R.’

‘Thank… you.’

She takes a deep, decisive breath. ‘Okay then.’ She pulls a wool beanie over her wild hair and zips up her sweatshirt. ‘Ready to see what humanity’s been up to since you left it?’

In my old days of scavenging the city I often gazed up at the Stadium walls and imagined a paradise inside. I assumed it was perfect, that everyone was happy and beautiful and wanted for nothing, and in my numb, limited way I felt envy and wanted to eat them all the more. But look at this place. The corrugated sheet metal glaring in the sun. The fly-buzzing pens of moaning, hormone-pumped cattle. The hopelessly stained laundry hanging from support cables between buildings, flapping in the wind like surrender flags.

‘Welcome to Citi Stadium,’ Julie says, spreading her arms wide. ‘The largest human habitation in what used to be America.’

‘There are over twenty thousand of us crammed into this fishbowl,’ Julie says as we push through the dense crowds in the central square. ‘Pretty soon it’ll be so tight we’ll all just squish together. The human race will be one big mindless amoeba.’

Why didn’t we scatter? Head for high ground and plant our roots where the air and water were clean? What is it we needed from each other in this sweaty crush of bodies?

As much as possible I keep my eyes to the ground, trying to blend in and avoid notice. I sneak glances at guard towers, water tanks, new buildings rising under the bright strobe of arc welders, but mostly my view is of my feet. The asphalt. Mud and dog shit softening the sharp angles.

‘We’re growing less than half what we need to survive,’ Julie says as we pass the gardens, just a blurry dream of green behind the translucent walls of the hothouses. ‘So all the real food gets rationed out in tiny servings, and we fill the gaps in our diet with Carbtein.’ A trio of teenage boys in yellow jumpsuits hauls a cart of oranges past us, and I notice one of them has strange sores running down the side of his face, sunken brown patches like the bruises on an apple, as if the cells have simply collapsed. ‘Not to mention we’re burning through a pharmacy worth of medicine every month. Salvage teams can barely keep up. It’s only a matter of time before we go to war with the other enclaves over the last bottle of Prozac.’

Was it just fear? the voices wonder. We were fearful in the best of times; how could we cope with the worst? So we found the tallest walls and poured ourselves behind them. We kept pouring until we were the biggest and strongest, elected the greatest generals and found the most weapons, thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness. But nothing so obvious could ever work .

‘What’s amazing to me,’ Nora says, squeezing past the strained belly of a morbidly pregnant woman, ‘is that despite all these needs and shortages we have, people keep pumping out kids. Flooding the world with copies of themselves just because that’s tradition, that’s what’s done.’

Julie glances at Nora and opens her mouth, then closes it.

‘And even though we’re about to starve to death under a mountain of poopy diapers, no one’s brave enough to even suggest that people keep their seed in their nuts for a while.’

‘Yeah, but…’ Julie begins, her voice uncharacteristically timid. ‘I don’t know… there’s something kind of beautiful about it, don’t you think? That we keep living and growing even though our world is a corpse? That we keep coming back no matter how many of us die?’

‘Why is it beautiful that humanity keeps coming back? Herpes does that, too.’

‘Oh shut up, Nora, you love people. Being a misanthrope was Perry’s thing.’

Nora laughs and shrugs.

‘It’s not about keeping up the population, it’s about passing on who we are and what we’ve learned, so things keep going . So we don’t just end . Sure it’s selfish, in a way, but how else do our short lives mean anything?’

‘I guess that’s true,’ Nora allows. ‘It’s not like we have any other legacies to leave in this post-everything era.’

‘Right. It’s all fading. I heard the world’s last country collapsed in January.’

‘Oh, really? Which one was it?’

‘Can’t remember. Sweden, maybe?’

‘So the globe is officially blank. That’s depressing.’

‘At least you have some cultural heritage you can hold on to. Your dad was Ethiopian, right?’

‘Yeah, but what’s that mean to me? He didn’t remember his country, I never went there, and now it doesn’t exist. All that leaves me with is brown skin, and who pays any attention to colour any more?’ She waves a hand towards my face. ‘In a year or two we’re all gonna be grey anyway.’

I fall behind as they continue to banter. I watch them talk and gesticulate, listening to their voices without hearing the words.

What is left of us? the ghosts moan, drifting back into the shadows of my subconscious. No countries, no cultures, no wars but still no peace. What’s at our core, then? What’s still squirming in our bones when everything else is stripped?

By late afternoon, we’ve come to the road once known as Jewel Street. The school buildings wait for us ahead, squat and self-satisfied, and I feel my stomach knotting. Julie hesitates at the intersection, looking pensively towards their glowing windows. ‘Those are the training facilities,’ she says. ‘But you don’t want to see in there. Let’s move on.’

I gladly follow her away from that dark boulevard, but I stare hard at the fresh green sign as we pass. I’m fairly sure the first letter is a J.

‘What’s… that street called?’ I ask, pointing to the sign.

Julie smiles. ‘Why, that’s Julie Street.’

‘It used to be a graphic of a diamond or something,’ Nora says, ‘but her dad renamed it when they built the schools. Isn’t that sweet?’

‘It was sweet,’ Julie admits. ‘That’s the type of gesture Dad can manage sometimes.’

She takes us around the perimeter of the walls to a wide, dark tunnel directly across from the main gate. I realise these tunnels must be where sports teams once made their triumphal entries onto the field, back when thousands of people could still cheer for things so trivial. And since the tunnel on the other end is the passage into the world of the Living, it seems fitting that this one leads to a graveyard.

Julie flashes an ID badge at the guards and they wave us through the back gate. We step out onto a hilly field surrounded by hundreds of feet of chain-link fencing. Black hawthorn trees curl towards the mottled grey-and-gold sky, standing guard over classical tombstones, complete with crosses and statues of saints. I suspect these were reappropriated from some forgotten funeral home, as the engraved names and dates have been covered over with crude letters stencilled in white paint. The epitaphs resemble graffiti tags.

‘This is where we bury… what’s left of us,’ Julie says. She walks a few steps ahead as Nora and I stand in the entry. Out here, with the door shut behind us, the pulsing noise of human affairs is gone, replaced by the stoic silence of the truly dead. Each body resting here is either headless, brain-shot, or nothing but scraps of half-eaten flesh and bones piled in a box. I can see why they chose to build the cemetery outside the Stadium walls: not only does it take up more land than all the indoor farmlands combined, it also can’t be very good for morale. This is a reminder far more grim than the old world’s sunny yards of peaceful passings and requiem eternum . This is a glimpse of our future. Not as individuals, whose deaths we can accept, but as a species, a civilisation, a world.

‘Are you sure you want to go in here today?’ Nora asks Julie softly.

Julie looks out at the hills of patchy brown grass. ‘I go every day. Today’s a day. Today’s Tuesday.’

‘Yeah, but… do you want us to wait here?’

She glances back at me and considers for a moment. Then she shakes her head. ‘No. Come on.’ She starts walking and I follow her. Nora trails an awkward distance behind me, a look of muted surprise on her face.

There are no paths in this cemetery. Julie walks in a straight line, stepping over headstones and across grave mounds, many still soft and muddy. Her eyes are focused on a tall spire topped by a marble angel. We stop in front of it, Julie and I side by side, Nora still lingering behind. I strain to read the name on the grave, but it doesn’t reveal itself. Even the first few letters remain out of reach.

‘This is… my mom,’ Julie says. The cool evening wind blows her hair into her eyes, but she doesn’t brush it away.

‘She left when I was twelve.’

Nora squirms behind us, then wanders away and pretends to browse the epitaphs.

‘She went crazy, I guess,’ Julie says. ‘Ran out into the city by herself one night and that was that. They found a few pieces of her but… there’s nothing in this grave.’ Her voice is casual. I’m reminded of her trying to imitate the Dead back in the airport, the overacting, the paper-thin mask. ‘I guess it was too much for her, all of this.’ She waves a hand vaguely at the graveyard and the Stadium behind us. ‘She was a real free spirit, you know? This wild bohemian goddess full of fire. She met my dad when she was nineteen, he swept her off her feet. Hard to believe it, but he was a musician back then, played keys in a rock band, was actually pretty good. They got married really young, and then… I don’t know… the world went to shit, and Dad changed. Everything changed.’

I try to read her eyes but her hair obscures them. I hear a tremor in her voice. ‘Mom tried. She really did try. She did her part to keep everything together, she did her daily work, and then it was all me. She poured it all into me. Dad was hardly around so it was always just her and the little brat. I remember having so much fun, she used to take me to this water park back in—’ A tiny sob catches her by surprise, choking off the words, and she covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes plead with me through strands of dirty hair. I gently brush it out of her face. ‘She just wasn’t built for this fucking place,’ she says, her voice warbling in falsetto. ‘What was she supposed to do here? Everything that made her alive was gone. All she had left was this stupid twelve-year-old with ugly teeth who kept waking her up every night wanting to snuggle away a nightmare. No wonder she wanted out.’

‘Stop,’ I say firmly, and turn her to face me. ‘Stop.’ Tears are running down her face, salty secretions shooting through ducts and tubes, past bright pulsating cells and angry red tissues. I wipe them away and pull her into me. ‘You’re… alive,’ I mumble into her hair. ‘You’re… worth living for.’

I feel her shudder against my chest, clinging to my shirt as my arms surround her. The air is silent except for the light whistle of the breeze. Nora is looking our way now, twisting a finger through her curls. She catches my eye and gives me a sad smile, as if to apologise for not warning me. But I’m not afraid of the skeletons in Julie’s closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.

As she dampens my shirt with sadness and snot, I realise I’m about to do another thing I’ve never done before. I suck in air and attempt to sing. ‘You’re… sensational…’ I croak, struggling for a trace of Frank’s melody. ‘Sensational… that’s all.’

There’s a pause, and then something shifts in Julie’s demeanour. I realise she’s laughing.

‘Oh wow,’ she giggles, and looks up at me, her eyes still glistening above a grin. ‘That was beautiful, R, really. You and Zombie Sinatra should record Duets, Volume 2 .’

I cough. ‘Didn’t get… warm-up.’

She brushes some of my hair back into place. She looks back at the grave. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a wilted airport daisy with four petals remaining. She sets it on the bare dirt in front of the headstone. ‘Sorry, Mom,’ she says softly. ‘Best I could find.’ She grabs my hand. ‘Mom, this is R. He’s really nice, you’d love him. The flower is from him, too.’

Even though the grave is empty, I half expect her mother’s hand to burst out of the earth and grip my ankle. After all, I’m a cell in the cancer that killed her. But if Julie is any indication, I suspect her mother might forgive me. These people, these beautiful Living women, they don’t seem to make the connection between me and the creatures that keep killing everything they love. They allow me to be an exception, and I feel humbled by this gift. I want to pay it back somehow, earn their forgiveness. I want to repair the world I’ve helped destroy.

Nora rejoins us as we leave Mrs Grigio’s grave. She rubs Julie’s shoulder and kisses her head. ‘You okay?’

Julie nods. ‘As much as ever.’

‘You want to hear something nice?’

‘So badly.’

‘I saw a patch of wild flowers by my house. They’re growing in a ditch.’

Julie smiles. She rubs the last few tears out of her eyes and doesn’t say anything more.

I peruse the headstones as we walk. They are crooked and haphazardly placed, making the cemetery look ancient despite the dozens of freshly dug graves. I am thinking about death. I’m thinking how brief life is compared to it. I’m wondering how deep this graveyard goes, how many layers of coffins are stacked on top of each other, and what portion of Earth’s soil is made from our decay.

Then something interrupts my morbid reflections. I feel a lurch in my stomach, a queer sensation like what I imagine a baby kicking in the womb might feel like. I stop in mid-step and turn around. A featureless rectangular headstone is watching me from a nearby hill.

‘Hold on,’ I say to the girls, and begin climbing the hill.

‘What’s he doing?’ I hear Nora ask under her breath. ‘Isn’t that… ?’

I stand in front of the grave, staring at the name on the stone. A queasy sensation of vertigo rises through my legs, as if a vast pit is opening up in front of me, drawing me towards its edge with some dark, inexorable force. My stomach lurches again, I feel a sharp tug on my brainstem… I fall in.

I am Perry Kelvin, and this is my last day alive.

What a strange feeling, waking up to that awareness. All my life I have battled the alarm clock, pummelling the snooze button over and over with mounting self-loathing until the shame is finally strong enough to lever me upright. It was only on the brightest of mornings, those rare days of verve and purpose and clear reasons to live that I ever sprang awake easily. How strange, then, that I do today.

Julie whimpers as I extract myself from her goosebumped arms and slip out of bed. She gathers my half of the blankets around her and curls up against the wall. She will sleep for hours more, dreaming endless landscapes and novas of colour both gorgeous and frightening. If I stayed she would wake up and describe them to me. All the mad plot twists and surrealist imagery, so vivid to her while so meaningless to me. There was a time when I treasured listening to her, when I found the commotion in her soul bitter-sweet and lovely, but I can no longer bear it. I lean over to kiss her goodbye, but my lips stiffen and I cringe away from her. I can’t. I can’t. I’ll collapse. I pull back and leave without touching her.

Two years ago today my father was crushed under the wall he was building, and I became an orphan. I have missed him for seven hundred and thirty days, my mother for even longer, but tomorrow I will not miss anyone. I think about this as I descend the winding stairs of my foster home, this wretched house of discards, and emerge into the city. Dad, Mom, Grandma, my friends… tomorrow I won’t miss anyone.

It’s early and the sun is barely over the mountains, but the city is already wide awake. The streets are crawling with labourers, repair crews, moms pushing knobby-tyred strollers and foster-moms herding lines of kids like cattle. Somewhere in the distance someone is playing a clarinet; its quavery notes drift through the morning air like birdsong, and I try to shut it out. I don’t want to hear music, I don’t want the sunrise to be pink. The world is a liar. Its ugliness is overwhelming; the scraps of beauty make it worse.

I make my way to the Island Street administrative building and tell the receptionist I’m here for my seven o’clock with General Grigio. She walks me back to his office and shuts the door behind me. The general doesn’t look up from the paperwork on his desk. He raises one finger at me. I stand and wait, letting my eyes roam the contents of his walls. A picture of Julie. A picture of Julie’s mother. A faded picture of himself and a younger Colonel Rosso in proper US Army uniforms, smoking cigarettes in front of a flooded New York skyline. Next to this, another shot of the two men smoking cigarettes, this time overlooking a crumbled London. Then bombed-out Paris. Then smouldering Rome.

The general finally sets down his paperwork. He takes off his glasses and looks me over. ‘Mr Kelvin,’ he says.

‘Sir.’

‘Your very first salvage as team manager.’