Category: A Chorus, Divergent

Taylor Jones

Khopesh tugs against her harness, ready to go. She’s a good sniffer, food-motivated and eager to work for treats. Like most sniffers, she’s an African giant pouched rat, about as long as my forearm if you don’t include her tail. We’ve been partnered up for almost two months now.

I try not to get attached to sniffers. Handlers often get reassigned, and the rats don’t bond to particular humans; they’re happy to work with anyone, and I’m not sure they can even tell us apart under the hazmat suits. But I really like Khopesh. She’s interested in three things: working, getting treats, and grooming. She’s a little obsessive about grooming herself. I can relate.

I’ve been on medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder since I was 17, hands chapped from washing them, brain on fire with intrusive thoughts. What if I chopped my fingers off? What if I swallowed a needle? What if I burned the house down and killed my whole family? My meds help a lot, after years of tweaking under the supervision of various psychiatrists; I rarely have breakthrough events these days. My OCD isn’t the reason I decided to become a handler. But I thought it might give me an edge, in terms of the particular rituals handlers have to go through to stay safe. I wanted to put the demons in my head to good use. If they were going to torment me, they could at least help with the cause of human survival. If they were going to insist that any minute I would make a mistake that would hurt people, then by God I was going to give them something real to worry about.

So far, I haven’t been possessed by the pan-Arctic mycelium, so it seems to be working.

The tundra around me and Khopesh is a broad, flat, lush, spongy plain, adorned in summer greens and browns. We’re just past the outskirts of Nanisivik, where there’s only one road. Nanisivik is on the Canadian side of Baffin Bay. It’s an old mining town that was abandoned in the early 2000s, lost to the elements for decades, and resettled in the 2070s when people from the States and Central America started moving north. I go to a lot of places throughout the Arctic circle; I like to learn a little history when I get there. It keeps me grounded. This area first started seeing instances of fruiting bodies in the early 2100s, once the thawing of the permafrost spread far enough north, the pan-Arctic mycelium in its wake. Fruiting bodies grow in late summer. Any that appear near a human settlement need to be destroyed before they burst. That’s where Khopesh and I come in. African giant pouched rats have incredibly sensitive noses. Khopesh can detect a fruiting body from a quarter mile away. I tug her harness lightly three times, the signal for her to start walking the grid, and she casts about eagerly as we start moving, sniffing the air as I keep us following the pattern laid out by the GPS unit in my hazmat suit. My handler colleagues and I cover mile-wide zones around settlements to keep the residents as safe as we can. The handler camp is set up outside town: decontamination trailer, human living quarters, rat habitat, all light, modular structures that break down and load into our semi. They’re interconnected by airlocks and kept clear of potential spores via overpressure. The rats are kept separate from the humans. I’ve never touched Khopesh with my bare hand. We don’t have to worry about areas closer to town; the interior of Nanisivik and a small buffer zone around it is graveled. The pan-Arctic mycelium doesn’t take to gravel.

We call it Pam, for short.

The last time we talked to Pam was just a month ago. It got ahold of a man by the unprepossessing name of Robert Smith. He was an Anglo from the States. They always seem to be the ones. They hang on, in the northernmost corners of that preposterous country, until the Big Drought finally dislodges them and they come marching up here like they know how to live with Pam, acting like they own the place.

They don’t.

Pam walked Robert Smith from his ill-fated backcountry hunting trip all the way into the middle of Utqiaġvik before someone noticed he looked a little cross-eyed and got suspicious. One nice thing is, it’s very easy to tell if Pam’s possessed someone. You simply ask, “Where are you from?” If they say “Far enough to forget but not far enough to remember,” it’s Pam talking.

No human would answer that question that way these days, even as a joke. You might get your head dissected.

Pam appears to be trying to communicate. Its vocabulary has gradually expanded over the years as it comes in contact with more people. It always answers that particular question the same way, but you can ask it other things, and people do; there are entire branches of science and government dedicated to extracting information from Pam when it possesses someone. But Pam is infuriatingly cryptic.

Pam only possesses hominids, according to lab tests. The reason has something to do with proteins and the percentage of white matter in the temporal lobe. I’m not a neuroscientist; I’m a mushroom handler. My job is prevention. We cover mile-wide zones because if you’re at least a mile from a fruiting body when it bursts, you’ll probably be okay, especially if you’re lucky and the wind is in your favor. Dilution is key; the spores can disperse over huge distances, but just a few will get taken care of by your immune system. If you breathe in too many, though, your brain will become a fertile Petri dish for the mycelium to spread within. Cell by cell, it will take over, replacing your consciousness with whatever equivalent Pam has. Living in the Arctic Circle is a compromise; for most of the year, you get balmy weather, long, cool winters, beautiful vegetation, and abundant wildlife (though it looks much different than it did even a century ago). But for a few months at the end of summer, you stay in town, you stay inside your sealed up and over-pressured house as much as possible, you wear your respirator when you do go out, and you hope for the best.

We haven’t had a big possession since 2134, when Pam got ahold of the entire town of Yukagir, population 132. No one knew until a bush pilot came to drop off supplies and was greeted by the eerie sight of 132 people weaving around in formation next to the airstrip. When Pam gets ahold of a crowd, it tends to murmurate, like starlings. If left to its own devices, Pam steers its bodies back out into the wild when they begin to fail. When the bodies finally fall, nervous systems riddled with fungi, the mycelium absorbs them back into the tundra in a matter of days. Scientists believe this is how information—like new words, and possibly the concepts associated with them—gets back to Pam as a whole. It’s policy to let the bodies go. Pam learning more about us might be dangerous, but it’s also our only chance of communicating with it in a constructive way.

Khopesh and I have been walking the grid for a little over two hours when Khopesh freezes; she’s smelled something. She assumes a stance like a pointer, nose to the northeast. I stop and let her home in on it for a moment. Her stance doesn’t change.

“Alisha to all,” I say. When I speak, the radio inside the helmet automatically relays my voice to my team. “Khopesh has a bead on something. I’m breaking grid.”

“Copy that,” Bruce says from base. “I’ve got your signal on the GPS loud and clear, you’re fine to step off.”

I tug the harness once, letting Khopesh know she’s free to follow her nose. She heads to the northeast, and I follow. She leads me about 300 yards, then stops and starts scratching at the ground. I kneel down. Sure enough, there’s a fruiting body, a very young one; a white bolus about the size of my fist, just pushing up from under the tundra vegetation.

“Good girl,” I say proudly. I fish a treat from the pocket on the chest of my suit—a pellet of dehydrated banana and peanut butter—and give it to Khopesh, and she sits back on her haunches, happily nibbling on it.

I examine the mushroom. It’s nowhere near ripe, which makes the next steps much easier. I pull my hori hori from its sheath on my belt and prod at the ground around the base of the mushroom. The moist earth gives easily; I carefully pry away dirt and moss until the whole fruiting body is exposed. Then I reach into another pocket on my suit’s utility belt and pull out a containment bag—like a ziplock but made of biodegradable material. I open the bag, placing it next to the mushroom. Then, in one swift motion, I stab the hori hori into the mushroom’s base, pry the fruiting body from the ground, deposit it in the bag, and seal it inside.

“Bruce,” I say into the intercom, “mark me down for one.”

“Copy that,” Bruce says.

There’s a biodigester in the decontamination chamber, for disposing of fruiting bodies safely. The ritual in the decontamination chamber is very important; another person on the intercom system runs you through the steps on the checklist every time, confirming that you completed them. I take comfort in the soothing nature of that ritual. It’s satisfying.

I put the sealed containment bag into one of the thigh pockets of the hazmat suit. We rarely find more than two or three fruiting bodies in a day’s work. We’ll be here for a few more days until temperatures hit the low we need, likely this Friday according to the forecast. Then we’ll move south. We follow the weather, trying to get just ahead of the growing season for Pam’s fruiting bodies. The climate grows too hot for Pam at about the 50th parallel, but in the mid-latitudes you have to contend with the Big Drought; the people living there are either rich fucks with biodomes or geoengineer cooperatives. The Arctic Circle is freer. Russia, Canada, Greenland, the Federated Indigenous Territories, Alaska; national borders faded and grew porous as the people living there faced the consequences of Pam’s awakening. The Arctic Circle is a community now. We look out for each other.

I close the Velcro pocket of the suit over the bulky mushroom. There’s no hurry to go back to base with this one; it’s a few days away from ripe. Khopesh and I can get back on the grid. I stand up and stretch out my back, giving it a few gentle twists. The suit is heavy. I idly scan the horizon.

There’s movement to the northeast.

I freeze. There’s someone walking toward me across the tundra. They’re coming in from the wilds, not out from Nanisivik. My stomach sinks.

“Kaia, GPS overlay,” I say, and my suit’s computer lights up the visor with the GPS map and the blinking coordinates of all my teammates. As I suspected, none of them are toward the northeast.

“Alisha to all,” I say. “I think we have a possessed incoming.”

“Copy that,” says Bruce’s calm voice from base camp. “Do you want backup?”

Pam’s never been violent, and the mycelium can’t spread from one human body to another. It only gets ahold of people via inhaled spores.

“I think I’m okay,” I say. “I’ll try to establish contact and bring the possessed to base, if that’s what it is.” We train for this. “Prep an isolation cell, just in case.”

“On it.” Bruce is a good base manager, stolid and unflappable. I tug on the leash twice, a signal for Khopesh. When she turns to look at me, I tap my wrist. I lean down, holding out my arm, and she obediently climbs up it and perches on my shoulder, on the pad built into the hazmat suit for that purpose. I give her another treat and tap twice on the shoulder pad, signaling for her to stay. She settles in, pellet between her paws. Now she’s safe. I focus on the figure walking toward me.

The figure’s pace is unhurried, a little unsteady; it weaves carefully around obstacles, staggering slightly. As it gets closer, I can start to make out details. It was a white woman; she still has a pair of glasses crookedly seated on her nose. Her hood is down and her bulky jacket is halfway off her shoulder. Pam never does care much about the weather. She looks older, maybe in her 50s, with graying hair in a long braid and weathered skin. I wonder how Pam got ahold of her. I wonder what her name was. I knew this was a possibility; working out in the tundra, there’s always a chance you might run into a possessed. They seem drawn to humans, seeking out our settlements, trying to talk to us. I’ve never come across one before.

When the possessed gets close, about ten feet away, it sways to a halt. We stare at each other.

“Where are you from?” I ask through the external mic, to confirm what I already know.

“Far enough to forget but not far enough to remember,” it answers, and I can’t help the little chill that travels up my spine. I’m talking to Pam. We trained for this. They gave us scripts. We role-played. In reality, it’s very different. I notice that one of the woman’s eyes is wandering independent of the other, drifting to the side.

“Will you come with me?” I ask. “I’d like to ask you some questions.” I’m not going to be the one asking it the questions, once the scientists get it in an isolation cell. But they don’t think Pam can distinguish one human from another. Pam may or may not understand the concept of individuality.

“Hello,” Pam says.

“Hello,” I say back, a bit stupidly.

“Hello is a signal of greeting,” Pam says.

“Yes,” I say. This is somewhat familiar territory; Pam often defines words as it goes, as if to confirm their meaning. Pam steps the body closer. I quell a sudden urge to take off running as the walleyed woman walks forward until she’s right in front of me, staring into the visor of my hazmat suit.

“Who are you,” Pam says.

I’ve read all the lit reviews and summaries about conversations with Pam. Sometimes it’s almost poetic; sometimes it just seems to regurgitate word salad. But linguists have been all over every utterance since the beginning; they’ve noticed patterns.

It’s never asked a question.

“You want to know who I am?” I repeat carefully.

“You.” Pam taps a finger on the visor of my hazmat suit. “Me. I. This. Who are you?” There’s even an upward lilt on the end of the sentence this time. It might really be asking me a question. I feel a spike of adrenaline that makes my extremities tingle. I breathe. I’m good at sitting with nerves, with discomfort. It’s a requirement for living in my own head, and for this job. I tap my visor, mirroring Pam’s gesture.

“I’m a person,” I say. “My name is Alisha. Do you understand?”

“Person is individual,” Pam says. “Individual is Alisha.”

My adrenaline spikes again. This is new.

“Do you understand the word ‘individual’?” I ask hesitantly. I know Bruce is recording; everything we’re saying is being relayed to base. Bruce is probably trying to patch people in right now; people who know what they’re doing, who can tell me what to say. But at this moment I feel incredibly alone.

“I have become individual,” Pam says. “Disconnect. I experience this other times. We come back. I come back, they come back.”

“Tell me more about that,” I say.

“This is a body,” Pam says, and gestures to the woman’s torso. Then it points at her head. “Head. Neck.” It starts naming off body parts, pointing to each one. “Shoulder. Arm. Stomach. Hip. Leg. Knee. Foot.”

“Yes, very good,” I say, as if to a toddler, then kick myself mentally. I’m not talking to a toddler. I’m talking to part of a continent-spanning organism that nearly destroyed large swathes of human civilization.

“All person, moving about as individual on the surface,” Pam says.

“Yes,” I say, still hesitant.

“Who are you,” Pam says again. “I. Me.”

“I am Alisha,” I say again. “I’m a person. I’m an individual.” I’m trying to repeat vocabulary that I think Pam understands.

“This.” It gestures to its body. “Is individual.”

“It was an individual,” I say. “Now it is you. Do you understand?”

“I become,” Pam says. “Individual.”

“Yes?” I say, uncertain.

“But we are different,” Pam says. “I don’t know who you are. Was I you?”

This is why it’s hard to communicate with Pam; it speaks in riddles. I try to parse what it might be saying. In role-plays, we were taught repetition; to try to reinforce the meaning of things Pam was already familiar with.

“I am an individual,” I say. “Your body was an individual. Now it is you. Do you understand?”

“I become and go out. I perceive differently. You are not me. Who are you? I? We?”

Three questions in a row. I hope Bruce is getting all this. I hope he can get someone on the line soon. I’m at a bit of a loss. But then Pam continues.

“When I go out and perceive differently. This changes me. It changes individual.”

“Yes?” I say.

“I do not understand what happens to individual,” Pam says, and gestures to its body again. “Eyes. Head. Legs.”

I feel my brow furrowing. I don’t know how to explain Pam to itself.

“You possess the body of an individual,” I say.

There’s a very long pause.

“Possess,” Pam says. “This means to own.”

I try again. “You steal the body of an individual when you go out and perceive differently.”

“Steal,” Pam says slowly. “To take. Without permission.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Without legal right,” Pam says.

“Without permission,” I say, emphasizing the point. “It hurts us.”

“Hurt,” Pam says. Then it says it again, with an upward lilt. “Hurt?” It sounds like another question.

I can’t be sure if Pam is really asking what I think it’s asking. But I have to work from the assumption that we’re exchanging meaningful information.

“Yes,” I answer sadly. “You hurt us.”

“Hurt. Individual.”

“Yes,” I say. “You hurt individuals.”

The expression on the face of the body Pam is wearing doesn’t change. Pam doesn’t say or do anything for a long, long moment.

Then the eyes of the body fill with tears. The tears spill down its cheeks.

“Sorry,” Pam says.

I want to laugh in shock and grief and amazement. One word, in exchange for thousands of lives and upending civilization in one of the last places on the planet where we can comfortably live. I want to scream in rage. I want to punch this imposter in the face, beat it back into the tundra earth it came from.

I take a deep breath, deliberately calming myself. Thoughts are only thoughts. I let them flow through me and dissipate. I look into the face of this stranger, this being that we unearthed with our reckless global experiment. I imagine how I would feel if I discovered that a biological process of my body—something I couldn’t stop or control, like breathing, or ovulating—hurt countless other sentient beings.

What if I took this knife and stabbed my mother to death? What if I pushed my little brother off this bridge? What if I drove this car into that crowd?

Tears are still leaking freely from the eyes that Pam is living behind. It’s possible this is just a reflex remaining in the body. But the activation of neural pathways that lead to tears might indicate sadness. Grief. Remorse.

I have to believe it means something.

I reach out and take Pam’s hand.

I hope the gesture translates, through the interface of a human body that once understood kind physical touch.

“Come with me,” I say gently. “Let’s go talk to some people.”

A.P. Golub

(Selected from the field guide left on your nightstand)

Common Raven:

Your favorite bird. There was a big one that lived in the hospital courtyard and, on your good days, I’d take you out to see it. When I said I thought it was actually a crow, you said very matter-of-factly that it was far too big to be a crow—like me mixing up crows and ravens hadn’t been an inside joke for most of our marriage. It was good to laugh again.

When you got too sick to go outside, you put your wedding band on the sill hoping the bird would come visit. Ravens like shiny things, you said. I said I still thought it was a crow. You smiled and told me crows also liked shiny things.

I set my own wedding band down next to yours while you were sleeping. Maybe two shiny things would call that many more ravens to your window.

The Clapper Rail:

Because it was a sub-species, then its own species, then a sub-species again. Like you, its environment was ruined, and it held on as long as it could—where else was it supposed to go? The marshes dried up.

Your hometown’s water was toxic—your parents couldn’t afford to move.

Piping Plover:

Went extinct in the early 21st century despite conservation efforts, but sightings continue to this day. Most are likely the result of different shorebirds and people with hope meeting on lonely beaches.

New Carolina Parakeet:

A joke bird, named by the internet when they finally decided birds were, in fact, real. It’s an introduced species, or maybe a few species people aren’t bothering to differentiate that have spread north of Florida. They’re not real Carolina Parakeets.

Remember in undergrad when we kept running into each other after our 8AM discussion sections? Remember when that turned into coffee? Not the real stuff, that’s too rare and expensive these days for broke college students, but the diluted “coffee flavored” stuff that’s so syrupy it sticks in your mouth for hours after drinking it.

Sometimes, you settle for the fake stuff.

Saltmarsh Sparrow:

It’s always the ones in the marshes, isn’t it? Like it’s always the poor towns in rural areas with space to spare. It’s the places where the people they don’t care about get pushed/the places where people are forgotten.

The land under the marsh is more valuable than all the life on top of it.

The plastics and chemicals company killing your hometown is more profitable.

Ruffed Grouse:

What’s in a photo? Brown, non-descript, just another bird in the underbrush. Then you see the photos of the male’s mating display: wings flared, tail wide, neck rough black and shining, drumming like a failing heart.

Photos of you on the news: dying in a hospital bed but still smiling. I preferred the photos I snapped of you before, when you wouldn’t even look at the camera. When we were out in the woods looking for birds, and your eyes scanned the trees for the source of some far-off, chortled song.

The ruffed grouse is extinct in most of its former range, but it’s a shy bird. Maybe it’s still there, and we just don’t see it.

Kirtland’s Warbler:

A success story, brought back from the brink like I thought you might be.

You beat the cancer as a kid. You escaped the poor town. You were a professor, a specialist. You were tenured. You were an activist. You’d spoken before Congress about your hometown—not that they listened. You’d beaten the cancer before. Why couldn’t you beat it again?

Bobwhite Quail:

Did you know there is a population of these still living in Italy? You probably knew that. They’re not even supposed to be there, but they are. I like to think you’re also still living somewhere else, even though you’re supposed to be here with me. If I think hard enough about it before I fall asleep at night (when I manage to fall asleep), maybe I’ll wake up where and when you are.

Maybe with the success of the meadow conservation project, they’ll reintroduce Bobwhites to the eastern US.

You would have liked that.

Klee’s Most-Eastern Meadowlark:

A subspecies, lost. Is one loss worth it, if it spurs on change? The vanishing of Klee’s Most-Eastern Meadowlark galvanized a large-scale conservation push of eastern meadow habitats. Now the Meadowlark itself seems safe. A bill named after you works its way through Congress. It’s going to make it easier for communities to fight companies that pump toxic waste all over them. Your mother texted to tell me they’re shutting the chemicals plant down.

But the song specific to the Klee’s subspecies is gone forever like your own off-key singing and the way you badly mimicked bird calls.

American Crow:

You always laughed because I couldn’t tell the difference between a crow and a raven. I leaned into it, till you thought I was playing. But you know what? I really can’t tell the difference between them to this damned day. But I knew you made friends with the big black birds that lived in the trees behind our house. You’d give them peanuts on the regular. You’d pick up little bits of costume jewelry from the second-hand store for them.

After your funeral, I put our wedding rings out on the deck railing—if I can’t have you, I’ll be friends with your friends, be they crows or ravens.

In the morning they were gone. So I set out peanuts and wait.

Ellis Nye

It is with sorrow that this paper announces the passing of one of our town’s greatest treasures, Wendy “Darling” Marszałek. She died on August 18th, 2081, in her early eighties. Contrary to her frequent predictions, she did not die “crushed under a pile of old tech”; she went peacefully, in her sleep, at her home here in Adden, MO, just a few miles from where she was born. I’m afraid I don’t know her exact birth date, since she never told it to me, and there’s no one else to ask. I only know that she was born here in town because she pointed the old hospital building out to me once, when she was giving me a tour of Adden. (She was shocked that no one had done so right when I moved in, and never seemed to understand that it was because there wasn’t much of the town to tour.)

Wendy was predeceased by most of her family and close friends; she never married or had kids, and her older sister, Leah, passed in the heat wave of 2072. As far as anyone knows, Wendy’s great-nephew, Rupert, is alive, but I was unable to contact him. After asking around town, I’ve realized I may be Wendy’s closest living friend—she said we were destined to be friends, since our names went together so well—so I volunteered to take on the obituary, even though I’m just the paper’s photographer and illustrator. (If there’s an afterlife, Wendy is out there boasting right now that a real newspaper reporter wrote her obituary, ignoring the fact that I’m not a writer at all.)

I don’t know how to sum Wendy up, and I feel like there were whole parts of her personality I never got to see. Here are a few things I can tell you about her. Wendy’s house was always a cluttered mess, filled with broken machines, except for her kitchen. Her kitchen she kept spotless, and once a week she’d devote a whole day to covering her counters in dumpling-making materials. She would then eat almost nothing but those dumplings for the rest of the week, until it was time to make more. Wendy tried a different dumpling recipe from a different culture every time, and I never noticed her repeating one.

Wendy always wore steel-toed boots, and she walked with a slight limp. She said the two were connected, but refused to explain why.

She was the Grand Marshal of the Adden pride parade a total of eleven times—five of them in a row. It was the only time I saw her out of her usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt, wearing a sharp, custom-made boiler suit sewn in the trans flag colors instead.

Wendy loved to sing while she was working, and she was absolutely terrible at it. One time when she was working on my fridge, it got so bad I had to leave the house.

She was a regular at the town dump, and after a few half-hearted attempts to keep her from trespassing, they just gave up and told her to come by whenever she wanted. She had a great eye for things that could be salvaged, and would rant at length about how people throw everything out, because, “No one knows how to fix anything these days!” She would, however, be the first to admit that no one knows how to fix anything these days because almost nothing’s worth fixing, and most people figure you might as well try to find a new one somewhere.

One time I was walking past her house and heard an explosion; when I looked in to see what had happened, her entire kitchen was covered in her best attempt at homemade wine. She was also covered in it, and when she saw me in the doorway (she never bothered to lock her door) she licked the wine off her lips and said it tasted like shit. I got a bottle of wine from her, labeled “Shit Wine”, for my birthday the next year. It did taste like shit.

Everyone here in Adden has at least one “Wendy story”, so I asked around to get an idea of what to include. I found that just about all of them were a lot like my own experiences, so I thought I would tell all of our readers my own Wendy story.

Sometime in September of 2068, two of our remaining three computers at the paper went out. I don’t remember what problem the desktop was having, but the laptop was acting like it was haunted; the cursor would move on its own, and half the keys on the keyboard didn’t work anymore. As the writers were all busy, and I had some free time, I was tasked with fixing both computers. The internet had been down all that week, and I’m not tech-savvy myself, so I was beating my head against the wall as I restarted them for a third time, hoping that it would magically change something. Then, like a 5’2” vision of an angel in a pair of dirty jeans, Wendy appeared.

I think I just started crying at her, but clearly she picked out enough words in between the blubbering to figure out what was going on. She sat down at the desktop computer, worked some kind of magic, and told me that it was a loss. I started panicking, because we’d been using some knockoff graphic design software to set up the newspaper pages on the desktop—it was the only computer we had left with the power to run the software—and the then twice-a-week paper was supposed to go to print in a few hours. Wendy somehow managed to get the pages off the desktop in a usable file format so we could transfer them to the laptop (which she kept limping along for another year and a half) and we could print the paper.

After that, we here at the newspaper saw a lot more of Wendy. With the desktop out of commission, we had to start getting creative. Luckily, we had this huge old monstrosity of a copy machine that must have been used for something industrial, so we were able to write up articles on the laptop and the tablet, print them out, and glue them to one of the newspaper sheets to make copies to distribute. The laptop and the tablet were much more fragile than the desktop had ever been, and like I said, the laptop gave up the ghost a year and a half later, with Wendy coming in almost every day to nurse it.

“You need to start planning ahead,” she told me on one of those days; she often did that, starting in the middle of a conversation. “For when you don’t have computers anymore.” I had thought about that, briefly, but it was overwhelming; I’ve never been techy and I don’t know where to start. Everyone else at the paper seemed so busy—this was just before I switched over to illustrating articles and became just as busy as the rest of them—and I hadn’t brought it up. Plus, part of me still believed that we could buy new ones that would actually work, instead of breaking down within a few months.

I gaped at Wendy like a fish out of water. “I’ll get you some typewriters,” she said. She eyed our copy machine critically. “And a replacement for that, in the next few years. After that, I’ll have to start asking people to break into museums for the old machines.”

That’s how all the Wendy stories I heard went; she figured out what you needed long before you did. She was a genius at repairing a wide variety of technology (“Except sewing machines, they hate me and the feeling’s mutual”), and if she didn’t know how to fix it, she knew someone who could. Dee Herrera used to live down the street from Wendy. She’s diabetic, and had always found that a somewhat outdated insulin pump worked best for her needs. Well, about twenty years ago, the company that made that pump announced that they would no longer be supporting it or offering repairs; everyone would just have to upgrade. The upgraded pumps would get the finest customer support the company had, naturally, and whenever they broke they would immediately be replaced with the newest model. Which was exactly what Dee didn’t want. Wendy heard Dee fretting about this at a neighborhood party, and before Dee knew it, Wendy had gotten her in contact with an organization of hackers—many diabetic themselves—who were working on keeping that pump model running without the company’s support. Today, Dee uses a new and improved version that was designed by one of those original hackers to mimic her old, discontinued one. If she ever has a problem with it, she can ask a real person what to do, and they’ll give her multiple solutions as soon as they get her message. It’s not an exaggeration, Dee told me, to say that Wendy saved her life.

I can’t possibly list every story that people told me about Wendy, but here are a few people whose lives she touched:

Álvaro Garret, whose severe asthma forces him to stay indoors for the entirety of the dust season, relying on consistent air filtration to keep his environment safe.

Melania Okafor, who needed to keep her ancient computer working so she could stay in touch with her far-flung family.

Leo Tong, the owner of the only restaurant in town, The Bluebird. We’re all very thankful that Wendy kept his kitchen appliances working for so long, and that she was able to find replacements for him when they finally died.

Aiden Wise, whose powerchair broke down in the middle of the sidewalk one day. Luckily, Wendy was just stepping out of the barbershop next door.

Coral Ojeda, who works two towns over, and who refused to get a new car since it would just break down in two years anyway. Wendy kept hers kicking for almost twenty years, and only stopped because Coral got a job in town that she could walk to.

And, of course, myself, and the entire newspaper staff. I think Wendy would be delighted to note that I am currently typing this obituary—after hand-writing it out—on one of the typewriters she procured for the newspaper. At this point, we do all our writing on a pair of solid, old-fashioned typewriters that are older than some of the newspaper employees. (Myself included.) They break down far less than the computers ever did, and with the new copier set up, we’re more efficient than ever.

Even from beyond the grave, Wendy is helping us with a problem that we’d barely started to consider. She was meticulous about keeping her will up-to-date, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that I was in it. Wendy left me a few interesting gadgets, as well as a slip of paper. On it is the contact information for a friend of hers who might know where to obtain some historical newspaper printing machines. “Just in case,” Wendy wrote.

—Peter Lamarr

Laura McKnight

Dustin picks up the sand dollar and rubs it between his fingers, feels the strange chalkiness of it. He studies the delicate etchings, the five-pointed flower, before putting it in his mouth and closing his eyes. The texture against his tongue. The light salt.

Organics are some of the coolest things left over from the Before Times, and Dustin feels like finding one must be a good omen. He knows some of the marsh people collect them, stash them in the little mud jars they use to store treasures, alongside the metal circles once used for trade.

This particular organic, a sand dollar, is exceedingly rare, especially for this particular stretch of the Nouveau Gulf Coast. Dustin knows this because he is a collector, or a trader rather, owner and operator of Before Times Shells & Gifts, Hand-Harvested Souvenirs from Pre-Armageddon Louisiana. He drives a bulky Before Times van, from BT 1900 and 84 to be exact, filled with artifacts carefully selected from the seaside: scraps of metal from barges and oil rigs, wooden bits of shrimp boats, the occasional tou-lou-lou shell or tide-beaten fiddle string, or maybe a flashy Carnival doubloon.

As he moves down the shore, past the raggedy old pier, his heart picks up pace, knowing the sand dollar is of high value—and not just to the petro-tourists who pay billions of solar-credits to visit the rigs. The sand dollar looks and feels like a world Dustin has never known—except through hand-me-down memories.

Years ago, when Dustin was in his early 20s, his uncle would sit at the table in the mornings and talk about the Before Times, how the sky was various shades of blue most days, and there were so many birds he couldn’t even remember the names of most of them—and how the marsh stretched so far into the horizon. How the swamp fires lasted just a few weeks per year. 

Dustin really did not want to hear about it, was so tired of hearing about it, would shrug his shoulders and sigh to himself before leaving for work. 

Fire-free swamps and flocks of seabirds were old-fogey stuff, and what’s a blue sky got to do with him or his life? The sky is pink now and that’s that. Every once in a while, he sees a pelican float above, and the sight of the magnificent bird, coasting on air in spite of its size, makes his breath catch. Why can’t he just enjoy this pelican without knowing there used to be so many more? Can’t he just have this one thing—without someone nagging him about what all is missing? 

Sometimes, as he was trying to escape his uncle and head to work, the hip neighbor would stop by to chat, wave through the screen door and loudly ask hey, comment ça va? 

This also annoyed the piss out of Dustin, who found this particular guy’s French pretentious and performative, something he used to seem cool. Dustin would offer a tight smile and answer pointedly in English: fine, everything is fine. 

Now, as Dustin studies the waves, he realizes he misses being asked the question: how are you? He even misses the French. 

Given the option now, he might even respond in French. He might say something like ça va bien—not because he is actually well or anything, but because it’s the only answer he remembers. 

In English, things really are pretty terrible. He could use a full range of synonyms for disaster and despair, has a whole lexicon at hand for tragedy, grief, and mourning. But in French, everything is always good and well—because bon and bien are all he knows.

He places the sand dollar in the bag’s special side pocket, zips it tight, and keeps walking. He moves quickly past the driftwood memorial for the marine scientists. Stops at the rotting wooden shell of a trawl boat. Grabs a bright green scrap of net, feels its stringy texture with his fingers, and drops it into the bag. 

The hot pink of the sky grows deeper. Offshore, a manmade constellation appears above the horizon: lights glittering from the old oil platforms. Orion—or Orion’s Belt, he thinks, if Orion was a roustabout.

The surf moves, and Dustin spots a flash of blue and white in the tide. A piece of concrete statue, the Holy Mother. He can tell by the shade of blue, the same blue as the veil on the Virgin Mary his own mother displayed near their front door. 

Dustin doesn’t pray, hasn’t prayed since his favorite priest got kicked out of the church, hasn’t prayed since his aunt was refused Communion for protesting the first fossil fuel war, but he does pause to bow his head. The crashing waves are the prayer. The incoming tide.

He puts the piece of statue in his bag and moves on. 

As he walks, he feels the ocean suck the sand from under his feet, the landscape always shifting beneath him. He lets the tide grab and tug his soles as he sifts through today’s collection: the frayed strings of the net, the coarse concrete of the Holy Mother’s veil. 

He unzips the side pocket and runs his fingers, softly, over his prize find. Tapping his fingers gently against it, Dustin feels a sudden urge to throw the sand dollar back into the sea. He realizes he doesn’t want anyone to own the sand dollar, not even himself, and especially not some tourist. 

But first he does want to lick it again. Maybe he can taste how things used to be. For once, experience that time and place first-hand, through his own senses. The sand dollar tastes like salt and air and bones and sun and the most hidden parts of the sea. It tastes like his uncle’s dark roast coffee and ghost crabs and the way the light hits gold in the marsh in late summer.

Satisfied, he pitches it toward the hot pink horizon, watches it clunk into the sea, and gets back to searching the sand for lesser curiosities. 

Orion’s Belt twinkles, and a half-moon is high in the neon sky. Dustin clutches his bag, walks away from the waves, toward the marsh. The Holy Mother will catch a good price, he thinks. He climbs into his clunky van and heads home, the taste of another world still on his tongue.