What you've all been waiting for
So I get to stay in my workshop class. We realized that I had only been late (true, by an hour) one class, and he didn't change the mark from absent to late.
This is amazing, not only because I will graduate on time, but also because I will get to subject my prudish peers to
I still haven’t seen an atomic mushroom. Mia saw one, she says. The target was probably the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. According to Mia, she was hiking in the Needles, part of the Organ Mountains that border the range, when the bomb exploded. It was evening. I can imagine it, like a vacuum had suddenly been opened up right in the middle of the desert, sucking up the blinding brilliance of the valley’s sand dunes, sucking up the incineration of the setting sun.
I like thinking of her standing on an outcropping of rock, while the cloud mushrooms silent and brilliantly orange-and-white beautiful behind her. She’s in profile; the force of the distant explosion beats her hair against her face, the distant glow smolders in her cheekbones. There is motion - the infinite rippling outward of her hair and the mushroom behind her - but it might as well be a still frame for the way that the hugeness of the spectacle behind her makes the minutiae of her face expand until it fills up the entire lens: each freckle on the bridge of her nose, the sharp contour of her cheekbones - her angularity wrenching your gut because how will she, so slight, shoulder this world she’s inherited? - her lips parched, her eyes large enough to accommodate the mushroom, each green flame of the iris a valley wide enough for it. I once asked Mia if she was scared, and she said, no, part of her thought it was beautiful and the rest was trying to keep herself from thinking that. She only got scared coming back, when it started raining high up in the mountains and she, scrambling back to her car, imagined the radiation in the rain burning tiny holes in her insides. I understand that. I could have even been up in the mountains myself if Trent hadn’t kept me at NMSU that weekend. There’s no real reason, then, for me to distrust her story. I just sometimes wonder if Mia is lying to me.
This plan, for instance, to get up to Canada was her idea. She escaped there, she says, after the military started drafting, gave a ferryman a blowjob for the ride across the river. I was bothered by the logistics: why didn’t she just register at university to avoid the draft? With only two months between the first draft calls and bomb droppings, how, why did she get back to the States so quickly? It was so improbably coming-of-age-epic that I could see the gritty cinematography that would imply impending rain, suggest the taste of semen and cowardice in her mouth (or semen and self-sacrifice, if the film was trying to present her as a conscientious martyr) as she looked toward the Canadian shore. Mostly, I’m bothered by the thought of her beautiful mouth on some old guy’s cock. He probably hadn’t even taken off his government-issue cap, probably had merely dropped his government-issue trousers. Mia was casual when she mentioned it, while I almost gagged wondering whether he had pubic hair - he was old, of course he did, although I never brought myself to verify his age - whether he had grabbed her head, shoving her deeper into his hair. When she’s between my legs, her beautiful mouth fluttering on my clit, her fingernails raking the insides of my thighs so gently I am sand in a meditation garden, I try not to wonder where she placed her hands on him. His shins would be ok. His thighs not ok. Spread palms on the back of his ass. Christ.
She says that Canada doesn’t have any nuclear facilities, so it wouldn’t have been targeted. She says it’s green and lush there, with miles of fields running into the sun, and the only silos are those that hold grain. This is the image I keep in my head as we flee northward: a farm somewhere in central Canada, Saskatchewan maybe, where Mia and I would hide out, baling hay in the day, pushing each other in a tire-swing in the warm, mote-lit twilight. We’d sleep in the loft at night, the door flung open to the constellations and the acres of quiet, and I’d brush fireflies out of her hair. Some of it is from an insurance commercial, the Good Hands Company, but they had to film the commercial somewhere. Somewhere that tree exists against that ridge, against that gold, leaf-spun sky.
##
We’re at the Grand Canyon now. When I was a kid, Dad entered us into the National Park Lottery every year, but we never won entrance to any of the parks. Now there are no patrols on the park border, and the canyon that loomed mythical and unattainable as Eden in my childhood submissively opens its mouth to the sky to accept the sifting ash and the tainted rain. Nobody leans over the stone ledges to gape into the canyon. Nobody clings to the telescope mounts to observe the birds falling radioactive-sick from the sky.
We’re here because Mia said there would be food in the lodges. I said there wouldn’t be any people, that everyone now is so terrified of nature - forgetting that atoms don’t mix themselves into elements heavier than water - that of course they’d avoid a natural wonder. When we arrive here, at the sight of all the electric trams ground into silence, Mia grabs my hand and squeezes it, “You were right, Sam, one of the eight wonders and there’s nobody here.” I’m suffused with pleasure that she remembered my contribution, and I kiss her in the winterized sky and the leaves that rattle by like teeth on the empty promenade.
There are crates and crates of canned peaches and pears in the kitchen of the grand hotel. Also canned broths and pasta and flour, which I say we should leave but Mia insists we should take, because, as long as we can get our hands on some eggs, she knows how to make two-ingredient pancakes from when she and her mom rode around the country raiding coops with the Hell’s Angels. Before I can ask if they let kids ride with the Angels, Mia laughs, “they’ll be mutant eggs when we find them. Our pancakes will have legs and we’ll have to chase them around the yard and cut their heads off before eating them.” Her laughs practically have bookends. They don’t build slowly or trail off. But between the abrupt starts and stops I think must lie the meaning to everything.
Mia says we should leave the food source to be safer. It’s when we’re stuffing as many cans of broth and fruit as possible into our bags that the stainless steel door of the kitchen bangs. I’m so startled that I let slip a can of pears. It rolls out from the shelves we’re crouched between, into the aisle leading to the doors, rattling around and around its bottom rim. Only when it finally stops do the footsteps shuffle forward. I look in abject desperation at Mia, but she’s scanning the shelf in front of her. She seizes a can in one hand and mouths “crate” at me. She quietly rises to her feet, and I have to grab a crate and follow her. We are still behind the cover of the shelf when we hear the unmistakeable cock of a gun and a man’s voice, “Come out of there with your hands up.” I take a step forward, terrified, and Mia grabs me. She shakes her head no. The voice, now a little higher, says, “Come out now.” Mia looks at me, her gaze almost sinister in its detachment from me. In this moment, I am nothing to her except the hand that clutches the crate. I don’t even know what she’ll do with it. In this moment, all I can think is “gunslinger girl” and how stupidstupidstupid I am.
She’s leaping beyond the shelf, her teeth bared, her arm stretched razor sharp in the hurling of the can. Now she’s wrenching the crate so hard and quick from my grasp that it leaves a long rut of peeled skin in my palm. Then she’s screaming “Sam, get the gun.” There is a moment when it seems physically impossible to step beyond the shelf into the aisle, then I wrench myself from it and scramble out for the gun that had slid down the aisle when the can hit his shoulder.
“He’s just a kid,” Mia says, the crate poised over him as he lay on the floor. It seems funny to me to call him a kid; he looks our age.
“Please, please,” the boy is crying, “I wasn’t going to hurt you.”
Mia beckons for the gun I’m training on him. She twirls the revolving chamber on the antique thing.
“Empty,” she says in disgust. “What are you doing in here with an empty gun?”
“I thought whoever it was would take all the food.”
He has the looseness of someone who used to eat better than he’s eating now.
“How long have you been here?” Mia asks.
“Two weeks. I was in the canyon for three months. When I came out, everything was deserted. I didn’t know what to do, all the phone lines were down, I didn’t have a car, so I’ve just been staying here.”
##
His name is Paul. His story is practically the same as mine.
In the heady days that preceded the bombing, Trent and I would go to class in rooms where the insulation hung from the ceiling in pink coils and the light fixtures in the back had been stripped of their halogen tubes to preserve energy. At one point, the water main burst and the classrooms on the lower levels were all flooded. All of us - even Professor Berch - sat cross-legged on top of our desks, talking from our little islands above the water about the distopic/post-apocalyptic elements in Kubrick’s films. One day a rat had dropped from the gutted ceiling into the water. A couple of the girls screamed. I don’t know why; they weren’t the ones squealing to death in vaguely waste-smelling water. I actually laughed; it was so deliciously Orwellian; Kubrick would have approved. The truth is that there were dry classrooms, but as high as we were on the prospect of apocalypse, we might as well have scattered the glass ourselves, gutted the electrical wiring, peeled the plaster for our mise-en-scene. Trent and I would fuck all over campus, under the eaves of the languages building, on top of the parking garages, in the stairwell to the chem building. Self-satisfied afterward, we’d go to the coffee shop and half-jokingly work on our post-apocalyptic screenplay, sometimes try to get people to talk abstractions about war and death with us.
Trent died in a mysterious raid conducted on the campus after the first of the New Mexico bombings. He got crushed when an RPG was sent into his dorm. Lou, Paul’s backpacking partner died climbing. He slipped and a defective carabiner couldn’t hold his weight. Somehow Lou’s death terrifies me even more than the death of someone I weighed the consequences, a couple times, of saying I love you to. Death is arbitrary now. But here’s the thing: Lou died an arbitrary death that had nothing to do with nuclear war. This means arbitrariness is even more arbitrary than I thought. I can’t even impose reason on things by allowing that the madness of the bombs means there is no reason anymore. I don’t even know what I’m saying except that things don’t make sense, although now it seems the nonsense is so much more far-reaching that I had thought. Christ. I was waiting for Trent under the eaves of the languages building, so I saw the forces swarm into the buildings, saw the explosions, saw everyone still alive - Professor Berch, which makes me glad - herded out and into the waiting lorries. Later, I tried searching the rubble for Trent, but it was impenetrable. That he wasn’t there with Berch and the others is the only proof I have of his death. Sometimes it seems substantial enough; other times it’s just a dark screen onto which I can unreel my vision of him back in New York, where he came from - no matter that New York was probably one of the first hits - running through the streets, his hair free, his jaw set as he flies through the crosswalks. Because I had been saved by my position atop the languages building, I returned there, only venturing out once a day for food. Like Paul, I had been found by Mia in a kitchen.
##
Between Mia and me and Paul, we move all the food we can fit into Mia’s Jeep. We drive far up the rim before we stop to make a fire and eat. This is the first time I’ve seen Mia talk to anyone else, and I savor the opportunity to merely watch her. When I become aware of my face helplessly sinking into the formlessness of admiration, I think of Mia charging into the aisle. In my head, I slow her movements to capture their clean sharpness, to remove her from reality, make her gunslinger-untouchable. I become aware of something dark moving to the back of my mind, and, though I feel I shouldn’t, I chase it. My momentary immobility in the kitchen maybe because my scrambling would clutter the space occupied by her exquisite sequence of movement. No, not quite it. Did I just want to watch? Now I remember the sinking feeling in my gut in those few seconds I only watched. Somehow the sinking feeling in the gut is the key. Not sinking because she was leaping into danger, might die even, but because she was leaping into glory. And if I could keep myself out of the space she had taken possession of forever in my head, if I could just watch her, then I was her. Her bared teeth, my teeth. Her taut throat, shoulders, my throat, shoulders. Her clean corners, my elbows, knees.
Mia suddenly turns to me, “Sam, you ok?”
I hadn’t even realized that I had shuddered.
“Yeah, I was just thinking about the kitchen. It was intense.”
I’m at once appalled at how easily I can encompass both truth and falsity, but Mia takes my hand tenderly and kisses it where the skin got torn away, “You practically got your hand ripped off.” I am almost obliterated by her kindness in making the subject of the sentence “You” not “I,” sharing her immortality with me, and for physically claiming me in front of Paul. Understanding dawns in his eyes, and his glances at Mia become more furtive. I look at her too - flickering in the firelight, become beautiful beyond what I can tolerate - and I don’t feel threatened; I only feel a strange sympathy with him.
Later in the night, we douse the fire and Mia and I make love on an outcropping of rock beyond the wall. Mia is on her back and I kiss the insides of her feet and up her legs, licking into the creases where her calves join her thighs. A few flecks of ash dust her thighs; I can feel them dissolve on my tongue - try not to taste the charred remains of cities - as I kiss into her interior. While my mouth lingers on her lovely transition from thigh to labia, I can smell her wetness. It’s not just my cheek nuzzling open her outer labia, the tentative explorations of my tongue past her inner labia, not just my left hand softly kneading her breast, it’s also the moon spilling - brilliant, the last unpolluted thing - onto us, the miles of mounted telescopes that line both rims. Mia’s told me that she’s had sex in the Seattle Space Needle, that she’s had sex in Lincoln’s lap in D.C., that she’s had anal-sex in a glass-bottomed (ha ha) boat, her nipples and cunt splayed on the glass for all the Moby Dicks (ha ha) and the Jacques Cousteas in the ocean to see. With my hand, I hold back her clitoral hood, and tongue her clit - my tongue a hummingbird on her pink flower - so fast that she moans. I almost bring her to orgasm and then I wrench her around so that she is on her hands and knees. She gasps. Mia is my first female lover. I’ve always been timid with her, surprised at her hardnesses, nervous with her softnesses. Until tonight her body has always seemed lesser than a boy’s - not merely in mass, but, ironically, in openings, accessibilities. Now she is suddenly substantial, so real, so unfurled, that I could cultivate pleasure in every one of her millions of pores. I spit on a finger and ease it inside her ass. I massage her clit with my other hand, so her body is supporting my whole weight. I bite her neck as I slide another finger in. She is so strong, the framework of her bones spread beneath me substantial enough to be the underbelly of the earth, how did I never know she was so strong, a little perspiration pools in the hollow of her neck, flaming up her hair with the smell of her, Mia, Mia mine, my Mia, and I’m saying “Say my name, say my name.” It’s meant to be dominating but comes out pleading. And she breathes a sentence from my name, “Sam, let me make you come too.” We lay, then, face to face, electricity produced whenever our nipples touch, and we make each other come.
Dressed, we sit backs against the wall. Mia has a hand tangled in my hair; it’s not moving, just hanging there. I want to yell “I love Mia” into the canyon. They’d do it in a movie, to show how unloosed - unleashed - undone love can make one. But if she doesn’t say it back, my vulnerability will just echo again and again in the silence. Then there’s Paul, asleep somewhere beyond the wall. While I consider these difficulties, Mia starts talking about the encounter in the kitchen today and how we really should get some weapons. The thought had surfaced almost lazily during our lovemaking that she remembered my prediction about the Grand Canyon being deserted because she recognizes how normally useless I am. Now anger slivers into my well-being: I’m always the fucking female. I don’t know if Mia sensed it, but she laughs, “You’ll have a hand-held cannon. Cannon Sam.” You gorgeous, generous girl, Mia of mine.
##
With Paul, we continue northwards, avoiding the Interstates, where mercenary bands sometimes set up blockades and take travelers’ cars. Paul is surprisingly useful. The Jeep quit working near San Diego and again near Eureka - a radiator, I think, and a fan belt - and he somehow fixed it both times. He reminds me a little of Trent, in a highly desexualized way. His parents had operated a theater. It was an indie theater, so they showed a lot of foreign stuff, artsy domestic stuff, and all the classic films from the 1980’s and 1990’s. We’ve had terrific debates about Scott vs. Cameron for the epic, Kubrick vs. Lynch for the most psychotic director, Waterworld vs. Postman for the worst post-apocalypse. He actually gets my Mad Max references. Mia doesn’t really know anything about films. She says she was too busy motorcycling and growing marijuana in her mom’s commune when she was a kid to watch any, although the self-importance in her references to the Angels and the neo-hippies has something of the defensive to it.
Camped in the Mohave Desert in California, Paul and I had tried to compile a list of the top six best Simpson’s episodes. We were arguing over whether the last spot should belong to the Monorail episode or the Whacking Day episode, when Mia exploded, “Get off it, you self-important bastards. Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter any more. Doesn’t. Matter. Anymore.” She muttered, “As if it ever did.” Paul tried to convince her that the Simpson’s was the highest form of art ever produced by Western Civilization - he has a better sense of humor than I do, I think. I stared shaken into the miles of cool, self-contained sand and the umbrella of sky above us - seemingly even more remote and hermetically sealed, though the atmosphere is probably ribbons by now. She’s right, maybe. Paul and I, maybe we’re stuck in a cultural framework that doesn’t even exist anymore. If it’s true, we’re probably not the only ones. So here we all are, bereft of the physical framework of the past but still bound to its invisible structure. I think of myself wobbling in transparent jello and feel queasy, but my head kicks in and I think, first, “The matrix has been blue-screened” and, second, “Oh god, for a camera on this conversation.” Then, “Fuck.”
We’ve been skirting destruction for a while now, passing silently around the monumental graveyards of our civilization: Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland. But Mia says she wants to go into Seattle. She has friends there; we need more people, she says. We’re in the Cascade Mountains, mere hours away from Seattle, in a campground that was once run by the Forest Service, now a refugee camp of sorts. Families huddle in RVs. Some people, like us, have only a car. Some have makeshift shelters - wood and tin, stripped from the bathroom roofs, salvaged from the dam structures a couple miles away. Over all of this squalor, red and yellow leaves fall and white moths wheel. Shafts of sun pierce the tree cover and illuminate the countless wings and Mia’s face as she and I talk.
“Mia, it’s too dangerous to go into the city. Aren’t you always saying that?”
“Yes, but it’s dangerous being just the three of us. We need more people.”
I don’t know why I keep making her saying that. Every time she says we need more people, I feel a little chipped away, even though I know I shouldn’t. Months ago, none of us knew the others existed, yet, in the enormity of the landscape, we’ve found love and friendship. And it’s our land, left to us. We’ve, with our youth and with our love and friendship, shaped beauty out of the wasteland, tore it out of the sky, uprooted it, made it ours. Only when she says we need more people, do I realize that I feel this way, that I’ve fashioned a place for myself in a moronically epic saga. Only when she says it, do I think maybe she doesn’t view it the same way at all. Maybe to her, the coffee-house on the fringe of Portland that the owners wouldn’t shut down because they were 80, goddamit, and had been running the shop for the last 40 years, maybe the chickens all three of us chased around for an hour in that soaking field, maybe the way we stole the guns from the men who’d tried to hold us up, Christ, maybe even the Grand Canyon hadn’t been testing times, the strengthening of our band. Maybe, to her, they’d been, at worst, dangers to be dealt with, at best, a bother. Because thinking this hurts me, I say,
“They’re probably all gone from Seattle or dead.”
“They’re resourceful people.” I take it as an insult.
“You know what, if I’m such a goddamn burden on you, then why don’t you just leave me. Gunslinger girl and mechanic boy ride off into the sunset.”
In the silence, I watch the moths drifting in the leaf-fed currents. My insecurity is ridiculous - it hangs heavy with stupidity in the air - but for all of that, I’m suddenly terrified that it can’t be taken back, that it will have consequences I can’t even foresee. She mouths “gunslinger girl,” like she likes the way it sounds. She laughs, “No no, Gunslinger girl and Cannon Sam ride off into the sunset.”
##
Paul and I talked about those disaster movies, a lot of them from the 1990’s, the night we drove into that church, and slept there with the Jeep’s grille jammed into the broken pews. Mia was asleep. The next morning we fucked on one of those pews. Stained glass love. Paul thought the worst one was Dante’s Peak. They were all irredeemable to me. Every one of them had a scene where some character sacrificed himself for the sake of everyone else. Acid. Nuclear reactor chamber. Fucking incinerator. They knew what they were doing. Conscious choice between cowardice and heroism. I’m guarding the car. Drive-by shooting. Lou-like irony. Real disaster doesn’t allow choices.
I want Mia here. She’d try to stop up the fatal wound, though there’s no hope. She’d cry, sob that it was her fault. She’d confess to me we ventured into this wasted city to bring her sister out or something. God, don’t let her have come for her Space Needle lay. I would tell her about the tire swing in Saskatchewan. She’d tell me she had the same vision. Thank you, Good Hands company. Christ, why didn’t I scream I love you into the canyon? If only I could film them - Mia and Paul - picking their way through the shattered city. Sun rising. Orange gleaming. Right before they passed from the camera’s reach, it would capture Mia’s face. The angle would reveal her strength. The light would consecrate her. The camera would say what I couldn’t, can’t. And then cut.
that has such complex character development and true emotional insight that no one will dare to so much as squeak the words "genre-fiction" and/or "hack."
At least, this is what I'm hoping. If these words get mentioned and/or people politely inquire if I am a lesbian, things could get incredibly awkward.
This is amazing, not only because I will graduate on time, but also because I will get to subject my prudish peers to
I still haven’t seen an atomic mushroom. Mia saw one, she says. The target was probably the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. According to Mia, she was hiking in the Needles, part of the Organ Mountains that border the range, when the bomb exploded. It was evening. I can imagine it, like a vacuum had suddenly been opened up right in the middle of the desert, sucking up the blinding brilliance of the valley’s sand dunes, sucking up the incineration of the setting sun.
I like thinking of her standing on an outcropping of rock, while the cloud mushrooms silent and brilliantly orange-and-white beautiful behind her. She’s in profile; the force of the distant explosion beats her hair against her face, the distant glow smolders in her cheekbones. There is motion - the infinite rippling outward of her hair and the mushroom behind her - but it might as well be a still frame for the way that the hugeness of the spectacle behind her makes the minutiae of her face expand until it fills up the entire lens: each freckle on the bridge of her nose, the sharp contour of her cheekbones - her angularity wrenching your gut because how will she, so slight, shoulder this world she’s inherited? - her lips parched, her eyes large enough to accommodate the mushroom, each green flame of the iris a valley wide enough for it. I once asked Mia if she was scared, and she said, no, part of her thought it was beautiful and the rest was trying to keep herself from thinking that. She only got scared coming back, when it started raining high up in the mountains and she, scrambling back to her car, imagined the radiation in the rain burning tiny holes in her insides. I understand that. I could have even been up in the mountains myself if Trent hadn’t kept me at NMSU that weekend. There’s no real reason, then, for me to distrust her story. I just sometimes wonder if Mia is lying to me.
This plan, for instance, to get up to Canada was her idea. She escaped there, she says, after the military started drafting, gave a ferryman a blowjob for the ride across the river. I was bothered by the logistics: why didn’t she just register at university to avoid the draft? With only two months between the first draft calls and bomb droppings, how, why did she get back to the States so quickly? It was so improbably coming-of-age-epic that I could see the gritty cinematography that would imply impending rain, suggest the taste of semen and cowardice in her mouth (or semen and self-sacrifice, if the film was trying to present her as a conscientious martyr) as she looked toward the Canadian shore. Mostly, I’m bothered by the thought of her beautiful mouth on some old guy’s cock. He probably hadn’t even taken off his government-issue cap, probably had merely dropped his government-issue trousers. Mia was casual when she mentioned it, while I almost gagged wondering whether he had pubic hair - he was old, of course he did, although I never brought myself to verify his age - whether he had grabbed her head, shoving her deeper into his hair. When she’s between my legs, her beautiful mouth fluttering on my clit, her fingernails raking the insides of my thighs so gently I am sand in a meditation garden, I try not to wonder where she placed her hands on him. His shins would be ok. His thighs not ok. Spread palms on the back of his ass. Christ.
She says that Canada doesn’t have any nuclear facilities, so it wouldn’t have been targeted. She says it’s green and lush there, with miles of fields running into the sun, and the only silos are those that hold grain. This is the image I keep in my head as we flee northward: a farm somewhere in central Canada, Saskatchewan maybe, where Mia and I would hide out, baling hay in the day, pushing each other in a tire-swing in the warm, mote-lit twilight. We’d sleep in the loft at night, the door flung open to the constellations and the acres of quiet, and I’d brush fireflies out of her hair. Some of it is from an insurance commercial, the Good Hands Company, but they had to film the commercial somewhere. Somewhere that tree exists against that ridge, against that gold, leaf-spun sky.
##
We’re at the Grand Canyon now. When I was a kid, Dad entered us into the National Park Lottery every year, but we never won entrance to any of the parks. Now there are no patrols on the park border, and the canyon that loomed mythical and unattainable as Eden in my childhood submissively opens its mouth to the sky to accept the sifting ash and the tainted rain. Nobody leans over the stone ledges to gape into the canyon. Nobody clings to the telescope mounts to observe the birds falling radioactive-sick from the sky.
We’re here because Mia said there would be food in the lodges. I said there wouldn’t be any people, that everyone now is so terrified of nature - forgetting that atoms don’t mix themselves into elements heavier than water - that of course they’d avoid a natural wonder. When we arrive here, at the sight of all the electric trams ground into silence, Mia grabs my hand and squeezes it, “You were right, Sam, one of the eight wonders and there’s nobody here.” I’m suffused with pleasure that she remembered my contribution, and I kiss her in the winterized sky and the leaves that rattle by like teeth on the empty promenade.
There are crates and crates of canned peaches and pears in the kitchen of the grand hotel. Also canned broths and pasta and flour, which I say we should leave but Mia insists we should take, because, as long as we can get our hands on some eggs, she knows how to make two-ingredient pancakes from when she and her mom rode around the country raiding coops with the Hell’s Angels. Before I can ask if they let kids ride with the Angels, Mia laughs, “they’ll be mutant eggs when we find them. Our pancakes will have legs and we’ll have to chase them around the yard and cut their heads off before eating them.” Her laughs practically have bookends. They don’t build slowly or trail off. But between the abrupt starts and stops I think must lie the meaning to everything.
Mia says we should leave the food source to be safer. It’s when we’re stuffing as many cans of broth and fruit as possible into our bags that the stainless steel door of the kitchen bangs. I’m so startled that I let slip a can of pears. It rolls out from the shelves we’re crouched between, into the aisle leading to the doors, rattling around and around its bottom rim. Only when it finally stops do the footsteps shuffle forward. I look in abject desperation at Mia, but she’s scanning the shelf in front of her. She seizes a can in one hand and mouths “crate” at me. She quietly rises to her feet, and I have to grab a crate and follow her. We are still behind the cover of the shelf when we hear the unmistakeable cock of a gun and a man’s voice, “Come out of there with your hands up.” I take a step forward, terrified, and Mia grabs me. She shakes her head no. The voice, now a little higher, says, “Come out now.” Mia looks at me, her gaze almost sinister in its detachment from me. In this moment, I am nothing to her except the hand that clutches the crate. I don’t even know what she’ll do with it. In this moment, all I can think is “gunslinger girl” and how stupidstupidstupid I am.
She’s leaping beyond the shelf, her teeth bared, her arm stretched razor sharp in the hurling of the can. Now she’s wrenching the crate so hard and quick from my grasp that it leaves a long rut of peeled skin in my palm. Then she’s screaming “Sam, get the gun.” There is a moment when it seems physically impossible to step beyond the shelf into the aisle, then I wrench myself from it and scramble out for the gun that had slid down the aisle when the can hit his shoulder.
“He’s just a kid,” Mia says, the crate poised over him as he lay on the floor. It seems funny to me to call him a kid; he looks our age.
“Please, please,” the boy is crying, “I wasn’t going to hurt you.”
Mia beckons for the gun I’m training on him. She twirls the revolving chamber on the antique thing.
“Empty,” she says in disgust. “What are you doing in here with an empty gun?”
“I thought whoever it was would take all the food.”
He has the looseness of someone who used to eat better than he’s eating now.
“How long have you been here?” Mia asks.
“Two weeks. I was in the canyon for three months. When I came out, everything was deserted. I didn’t know what to do, all the phone lines were down, I didn’t have a car, so I’ve just been staying here.”
##
His name is Paul. His story is practically the same as mine.
In the heady days that preceded the bombing, Trent and I would go to class in rooms where the insulation hung from the ceiling in pink coils and the light fixtures in the back had been stripped of their halogen tubes to preserve energy. At one point, the water main burst and the classrooms on the lower levels were all flooded. All of us - even Professor Berch - sat cross-legged on top of our desks, talking from our little islands above the water about the distopic/post-apocalyptic elements in Kubrick’s films. One day a rat had dropped from the gutted ceiling into the water. A couple of the girls screamed. I don’t know why; they weren’t the ones squealing to death in vaguely waste-smelling water. I actually laughed; it was so deliciously Orwellian; Kubrick would have approved. The truth is that there were dry classrooms, but as high as we were on the prospect of apocalypse, we might as well have scattered the glass ourselves, gutted the electrical wiring, peeled the plaster for our mise-en-scene. Trent and I would fuck all over campus, under the eaves of the languages building, on top of the parking garages, in the stairwell to the chem building. Self-satisfied afterward, we’d go to the coffee shop and half-jokingly work on our post-apocalyptic screenplay, sometimes try to get people to talk abstractions about war and death with us.
Trent died in a mysterious raid conducted on the campus after the first of the New Mexico bombings. He got crushed when an RPG was sent into his dorm. Lou, Paul’s backpacking partner died climbing. He slipped and a defective carabiner couldn’t hold his weight. Somehow Lou’s death terrifies me even more than the death of someone I weighed the consequences, a couple times, of saying I love you to. Death is arbitrary now. But here’s the thing: Lou died an arbitrary death that had nothing to do with nuclear war. This means arbitrariness is even more arbitrary than I thought. I can’t even impose reason on things by allowing that the madness of the bombs means there is no reason anymore. I don’t even know what I’m saying except that things don’t make sense, although now it seems the nonsense is so much more far-reaching that I had thought. Christ. I was waiting for Trent under the eaves of the languages building, so I saw the forces swarm into the buildings, saw the explosions, saw everyone still alive - Professor Berch, which makes me glad - herded out and into the waiting lorries. Later, I tried searching the rubble for Trent, but it was impenetrable. That he wasn’t there with Berch and the others is the only proof I have of his death. Sometimes it seems substantial enough; other times it’s just a dark screen onto which I can unreel my vision of him back in New York, where he came from - no matter that New York was probably one of the first hits - running through the streets, his hair free, his jaw set as he flies through the crosswalks. Because I had been saved by my position atop the languages building, I returned there, only venturing out once a day for food. Like Paul, I had been found by Mia in a kitchen.
##
Between Mia and me and Paul, we move all the food we can fit into Mia’s Jeep. We drive far up the rim before we stop to make a fire and eat. This is the first time I’ve seen Mia talk to anyone else, and I savor the opportunity to merely watch her. When I become aware of my face helplessly sinking into the formlessness of admiration, I think of Mia charging into the aisle. In my head, I slow her movements to capture their clean sharpness, to remove her from reality, make her gunslinger-untouchable. I become aware of something dark moving to the back of my mind, and, though I feel I shouldn’t, I chase it. My momentary immobility in the kitchen maybe because my scrambling would clutter the space occupied by her exquisite sequence of movement. No, not quite it. Did I just want to watch? Now I remember the sinking feeling in my gut in those few seconds I only watched. Somehow the sinking feeling in the gut is the key. Not sinking because she was leaping into danger, might die even, but because she was leaping into glory. And if I could keep myself out of the space she had taken possession of forever in my head, if I could just watch her, then I was her. Her bared teeth, my teeth. Her taut throat, shoulders, my throat, shoulders. Her clean corners, my elbows, knees.
Mia suddenly turns to me, “Sam, you ok?”
I hadn’t even realized that I had shuddered.
“Yeah, I was just thinking about the kitchen. It was intense.”
I’m at once appalled at how easily I can encompass both truth and falsity, but Mia takes my hand tenderly and kisses it where the skin got torn away, “You practically got your hand ripped off.” I am almost obliterated by her kindness in making the subject of the sentence “You” not “I,” sharing her immortality with me, and for physically claiming me in front of Paul. Understanding dawns in his eyes, and his glances at Mia become more furtive. I look at her too - flickering in the firelight, become beautiful beyond what I can tolerate - and I don’t feel threatened; I only feel a strange sympathy with him.
Later in the night, we douse the fire and Mia and I make love on an outcropping of rock beyond the wall. Mia is on her back and I kiss the insides of her feet and up her legs, licking into the creases where her calves join her thighs. A few flecks of ash dust her thighs; I can feel them dissolve on my tongue - try not to taste the charred remains of cities - as I kiss into her interior. While my mouth lingers on her lovely transition from thigh to labia, I can smell her wetness. It’s not just my cheek nuzzling open her outer labia, the tentative explorations of my tongue past her inner labia, not just my left hand softly kneading her breast, it’s also the moon spilling - brilliant, the last unpolluted thing - onto us, the miles of mounted telescopes that line both rims. Mia’s told me that she’s had sex in the Seattle Space Needle, that she’s had sex in Lincoln’s lap in D.C., that she’s had anal-sex in a glass-bottomed (ha ha) boat, her nipples and cunt splayed on the glass for all the Moby Dicks (ha ha) and the Jacques Cousteas in the ocean to see. With my hand, I hold back her clitoral hood, and tongue her clit - my tongue a hummingbird on her pink flower - so fast that she moans. I almost bring her to orgasm and then I wrench her around so that she is on her hands and knees. She gasps. Mia is my first female lover. I’ve always been timid with her, surprised at her hardnesses, nervous with her softnesses. Until tonight her body has always seemed lesser than a boy’s - not merely in mass, but, ironically, in openings, accessibilities. Now she is suddenly substantial, so real, so unfurled, that I could cultivate pleasure in every one of her millions of pores. I spit on a finger and ease it inside her ass. I massage her clit with my other hand, so her body is supporting my whole weight. I bite her neck as I slide another finger in. She is so strong, the framework of her bones spread beneath me substantial enough to be the underbelly of the earth, how did I never know she was so strong, a little perspiration pools in the hollow of her neck, flaming up her hair with the smell of her, Mia, Mia mine, my Mia, and I’m saying “Say my name, say my name.” It’s meant to be dominating but comes out pleading. And she breathes a sentence from my name, “Sam, let me make you come too.” We lay, then, face to face, electricity produced whenever our nipples touch, and we make each other come.
Dressed, we sit backs against the wall. Mia has a hand tangled in my hair; it’s not moving, just hanging there. I want to yell “I love Mia” into the canyon. They’d do it in a movie, to show how unloosed - unleashed - undone love can make one. But if she doesn’t say it back, my vulnerability will just echo again and again in the silence. Then there’s Paul, asleep somewhere beyond the wall. While I consider these difficulties, Mia starts talking about the encounter in the kitchen today and how we really should get some weapons. The thought had surfaced almost lazily during our lovemaking that she remembered my prediction about the Grand Canyon being deserted because she recognizes how normally useless I am. Now anger slivers into my well-being: I’m always the fucking female. I don’t know if Mia sensed it, but she laughs, “You’ll have a hand-held cannon. Cannon Sam.” You gorgeous, generous girl, Mia of mine.
##
With Paul, we continue northwards, avoiding the Interstates, where mercenary bands sometimes set up blockades and take travelers’ cars. Paul is surprisingly useful. The Jeep quit working near San Diego and again near Eureka - a radiator, I think, and a fan belt - and he somehow fixed it both times. He reminds me a little of Trent, in a highly desexualized way. His parents had operated a theater. It was an indie theater, so they showed a lot of foreign stuff, artsy domestic stuff, and all the classic films from the 1980’s and 1990’s. We’ve had terrific debates about Scott vs. Cameron for the epic, Kubrick vs. Lynch for the most psychotic director, Waterworld vs. Postman for the worst post-apocalypse. He actually gets my Mad Max references. Mia doesn’t really know anything about films. She says she was too busy motorcycling and growing marijuana in her mom’s commune when she was a kid to watch any, although the self-importance in her references to the Angels and the neo-hippies has something of the defensive to it.
Camped in the Mohave Desert in California, Paul and I had tried to compile a list of the top six best Simpson’s episodes. We were arguing over whether the last spot should belong to the Monorail episode or the Whacking Day episode, when Mia exploded, “Get off it, you self-important bastards. Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter any more. Doesn’t. Matter. Anymore.” She muttered, “As if it ever did.” Paul tried to convince her that the Simpson’s was the highest form of art ever produced by Western Civilization - he has a better sense of humor than I do, I think. I stared shaken into the miles of cool, self-contained sand and the umbrella of sky above us - seemingly even more remote and hermetically sealed, though the atmosphere is probably ribbons by now. She’s right, maybe. Paul and I, maybe we’re stuck in a cultural framework that doesn’t even exist anymore. If it’s true, we’re probably not the only ones. So here we all are, bereft of the physical framework of the past but still bound to its invisible structure. I think of myself wobbling in transparent jello and feel queasy, but my head kicks in and I think, first, “The matrix has been blue-screened” and, second, “Oh god, for a camera on this conversation.” Then, “Fuck.”
We’ve been skirting destruction for a while now, passing silently around the monumental graveyards of our civilization: Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland. But Mia says she wants to go into Seattle. She has friends there; we need more people, she says. We’re in the Cascade Mountains, mere hours away from Seattle, in a campground that was once run by the Forest Service, now a refugee camp of sorts. Families huddle in RVs. Some people, like us, have only a car. Some have makeshift shelters - wood and tin, stripped from the bathroom roofs, salvaged from the dam structures a couple miles away. Over all of this squalor, red and yellow leaves fall and white moths wheel. Shafts of sun pierce the tree cover and illuminate the countless wings and Mia’s face as she and I talk.
“Mia, it’s too dangerous to go into the city. Aren’t you always saying that?”
“Yes, but it’s dangerous being just the three of us. We need more people.”
I don’t know why I keep making her saying that. Every time she says we need more people, I feel a little chipped away, even though I know I shouldn’t. Months ago, none of us knew the others existed, yet, in the enormity of the landscape, we’ve found love and friendship. And it’s our land, left to us. We’ve, with our youth and with our love and friendship, shaped beauty out of the wasteland, tore it out of the sky, uprooted it, made it ours. Only when she says we need more people, do I realize that I feel this way, that I’ve fashioned a place for myself in a moronically epic saga. Only when she says it, do I think maybe she doesn’t view it the same way at all. Maybe to her, the coffee-house on the fringe of Portland that the owners wouldn’t shut down because they were 80, goddamit, and had been running the shop for the last 40 years, maybe the chickens all three of us chased around for an hour in that soaking field, maybe the way we stole the guns from the men who’d tried to hold us up, Christ, maybe even the Grand Canyon hadn’t been testing times, the strengthening of our band. Maybe, to her, they’d been, at worst, dangers to be dealt with, at best, a bother. Because thinking this hurts me, I say,
“They’re probably all gone from Seattle or dead.”
“They’re resourceful people.” I take it as an insult.
“You know what, if I’m such a goddamn burden on you, then why don’t you just leave me. Gunslinger girl and mechanic boy ride off into the sunset.”
In the silence, I watch the moths drifting in the leaf-fed currents. My insecurity is ridiculous - it hangs heavy with stupidity in the air - but for all of that, I’m suddenly terrified that it can’t be taken back, that it will have consequences I can’t even foresee. She mouths “gunslinger girl,” like she likes the way it sounds. She laughs, “No no, Gunslinger girl and Cannon Sam ride off into the sunset.”
##
Paul and I talked about those disaster movies, a lot of them from the 1990’s, the night we drove into that church, and slept there with the Jeep’s grille jammed into the broken pews. Mia was asleep. The next morning we fucked on one of those pews. Stained glass love. Paul thought the worst one was Dante’s Peak. They were all irredeemable to me. Every one of them had a scene where some character sacrificed himself for the sake of everyone else. Acid. Nuclear reactor chamber. Fucking incinerator. They knew what they were doing. Conscious choice between cowardice and heroism. I’m guarding the car. Drive-by shooting. Lou-like irony. Real disaster doesn’t allow choices.
I want Mia here. She’d try to stop up the fatal wound, though there’s no hope. She’d cry, sob that it was her fault. She’d confess to me we ventured into this wasted city to bring her sister out or something. God, don’t let her have come for her Space Needle lay. I would tell her about the tire swing in Saskatchewan. She’d tell me she had the same vision. Thank you, Good Hands company. Christ, why didn’t I scream I love you into the canyon? If only I could film them - Mia and Paul - picking their way through the shattered city. Sun rising. Orange gleaming. Right before they passed from the camera’s reach, it would capture Mia’s face. The angle would reveal her strength. The light would consecrate her. The camera would say what I couldn’t, can’t. And then cut.
that has such complex character development and true emotional insight that no one will dare to so much as squeak the words "genre-fiction" and/or "hack."
At least, this is what I'm hoping. If these words get mentioned and/or people politely inquire if I am a lesbian, things could get incredibly awkward.