The branches of the tree are still. The lemon's ripe sour weight drags on down, but she can take it.
I remember how strong these branches are. The sun is coming up somewhere on the other side of a smokescreen. The world is lit fairly well now. A pink wan detached from any sense of softness. The rabbits will be running soon, having survived the fierce night buried deep in their warrens, snug together. A gopher pops up, his hands and head supporting a wedge of earth, like some sort of abstract backwoods Carmen Miranda. His hidden hips swaying back and forth in mesmeric rhythm inside his tunnel, his blind eyes searching the terrifying geometry of the horizon where smells travel like racehorses across an open plain. Birds have been singing since before light. Determined to establish authority over the day by waking the others up, come on, you're missing it, you're missing it, they say.
My spine is propped against this old tree. A composition of numbness and itchiness, until I move. Until the blood regains its velocity and the nerves wake up, I'm basically a human pin cushion. The kids used to tickle me when I wasn't looking to see if I could feel. Looking down, my sneakers are like year old dish sponges. They still work, but at what cost to the system as a whole? They were white just last week, or whenever that was. Now they are washed in dried and hardened biological strata. I can see patterns in the stains that probably aren't really there. A dog, a river, an old woman, a knife. The torn open leg of my jogging pants where the dust and diffused sunlight have been accumulating on my thigh. Handprints as if marked in ceremony, like leopard spots or turkey drawings by grade school children, where I've smeared myself clean. An ankle, blistered and fever red, but not septic.
I haul my corpse to stand, or lean, rather. The walking stick is nearby, and I prop it again, under my shoulder, the goose neck top fitting snugly into my armpit. Funny, it just grew that way, then snapped off at exactly the right length and lay waiting on the ground for me to be happening by with a serious injury and need its assistance.
Outside the tree, I can see more trees. They are tightly packed together, lemons pressing upon lemons in a mono-crop cornucopia of what would amount to a whole lot of cleaning product now that the market shifted to disinfectant. The drones are out in force. The farm hands can't be far behind. I begin picking fruit myself. Once I've got an armload, I step out of the foliage.
The drones ignore me. I steady myself and breathe. In and out, feeling the chi of the land, sky, and somewhere, within me a river. In my right hand, a lemon. Fingers loosely encircle the waxy leathery ball, sense the weight of about 86 grams. It rolls around my upturned palm, finding the edges of my hand and recoiling back into the soft depression. Balance. I chuck it, not as hard as I can, not in desperation, with just the right amount of energy. It takes out the propeller on one corner of a drone about sixty feet away.
The thing lurches, drops a lemon. It can compensate to a degree, but only enough to return to base empty handed. It takes another direct hit and goes spinning wildly into the foliage. I swear I hear it scream. The other drones might be trying to let me have that one. Thinking that avoiding all-out war might be their best option. That is, until I take out another one.
It flies low and close by, a payload of a perfect sour oblate spheroid dangling between its landing gear. I swing my stick at it casually and turn it into a coaster with blinking lights. The other drones all turn to face me as I hold my staff aloft by the hilt in two hands, point down, and drive it like a stake through the heart of a vampire into this helpless automaton. It goes pop. The explosions of automobiles in movies from the seventies and eighties were much more dramatically satisfying, but I'll take a pop.
Slowly they all start moving towards my position, in a 360-degree net, closing in. I've got a pile of freshly picked produce at my feet and what amounts to a long sword as far as these sensitive little guys are concerned. Lemons fly in line drive pitches from my mound and drones are tilting, lilting, and crashing into one another. The closer they get to me, the more crowded the airspace. Just add lemons and the chaos is a little more than they can algorithmically process. Now the noises are a little more satisfying, as prop blades whinge into each other's vectors shearing each other to pieces in a wheee-shlackt-brrrvvvv. Lemons concussively landing on machine cowls and splitting the fine injection molded shells, thump-clack. Juice getting inside the breadboards, fizzht-jepeeeoorm-pop. Their language is fascinating.
They do close in on me one by one, but they really aren't armed with any kind of deterrent except invasion of personal space and bumping their props into me, which hurts them more than me. Eventually, I put down the lemons and just start batting these guys out of the air. I have to duck a few times when the algorithm targets my head for a slam, but their angles of attack are all very predictable.
I send one about fifty feet into the air and it disintegrates into a shower of parts. A servo gear falling from the sky hits me in the eye. That's insulting. My cornea is covered in white lithium, and the smear cripples my depth perception, so I drop the stick and just start throwing haymakers. I've destroyed the entire first wave of attack. There may not be a second, I'm not just going to wait around for them anyway. I head East, leaving behind me the most perplexing massacre of harmless technology for the field hands to puzzle over, if there are any people working on this farm.
The walk is arduous. My eye is tearing and stinging from the tiny impact and the grease. My foot squishes in my shoe like stepping on a week-old pizza in its box. I don't think the ankle even hurts anymore, just feels really wrong. I'm wearing a girl's bedazzled denim jacket, shredded nylon joggers, and not much else. There are some spots on the jacket where the gemstones are missing, leaving blank shadows behind. Probably some of them were casualties to the drone attack. My neck is hot and red. My forehead, I can't see but I imagine is streaked like my leg with the various viscera I've been exposed to. I probably have the look of a backyard birthday clown dressed up as a Native American gone very very wrong. Like I drank a handle of vodka while getting dressed in a culturally insensitive gag costume to go to a party I wasn't invited to but aggressively pushed my way inside and did cartwheels around the back yard until I was tackled. At which point I'm sure in that fantasy I whipped out my genitals as a shield to put them on their heels. Then I'd make a speech about how they need to throw out the clutter in their lives and start naming the things around the yard which I can see that don't belong in an ordered and healthy environment for production. Starting with the happily married couple themselves, whom I observe have not held each other in protective embrace during my assault but have instead, taken up at opposite ends of the yard and attempted to prod me towards the other one, perhaps hoping for a psychotic miracle.
Another memory comes to me. This one is a little further back in my young adulthood. I'm eighteen. Just graduating high school. I had my small group of friends. We've all begun working kind of regular, starter jobs. The kind that will use you six days a week and compensate you with fucking lollipops and free coffee. We were mingling with a slightly older crowd, girls who would eventually marry out of the grind they found themselves still bound to post-college. Good looking, hot young women with nothing to lose. One-bedroom apartments where the rent was scraped together from tips and flirting, wondering what that poli-sci degree was good for after all.
It was also a bit of a party time for us. Having slightly older friends meant we aged in an accelerated fashion, were bestowed with the ability to purchase alcohol, which attracted other people, and other substances. I met Amy through some friends. She was always the center of attention in any room full of dicks. Not that she was a slut, or a tease, she was just a young woman, and men were men. I was not the picture of confidence that I have become. I wasn't very shy, but I didn't think I had a chance with her, until I did.
I remember drinking ourselves into a riot one night at her little apartment with the v-groove wood paneling and the kitchenette. I think her mother might have been visiting her, and she was a maniacal drinker who told stories all night and may have danced on the top of a two-seater breakfast-nook table, which would be a physics defying feat if it really happened.
I got so drunk that I went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet. I leaned just a little bit into a passing wave and blacked out momentarily, losing all muscle tone and folding forward and to the side, striking my temple on the toilet paper holder. I came out of the bathroom thoroughly bloody and smiling like a geek. Her mom had gone to the bedroom and Amy was blowing up an air mattress in the living room. She said, have you ever had a foot massage?
I said, not yet.
She said, would you like one?
Yeah, I guess, sure. I laid down while she talked to me and pressed her delicate fingers like stones into the pressure points of my feet, and I went somewhere. This kind of affection between a man and a woman was new to me. It was not motherly, but it was intimate. She didn't know it, but she had gotten me too drunk to fuck and I was too remedial with girls to have even considered it, but as she worked her knuckles into my soles I drifted into a world where she would always be there and we would always be best friends. After I passed out, I don't know, but I imagine her curling up beside me and snuggling, probably having a hard time going to sleep. The bed deflated and we woke up on the floor. I had what might have been my first hangover. She made us breakfast, frozen Johnsonville sausage and some fried eggs. Breakfast never tasted so good.
A few weeks later at another party she came on stronger. And I responded. We were drunk by eight and around ten took a walk down from my cousin's house to the motel at the end of the street where she worked as a desk clerk. She let us into the pool, and we swam in our underwear. She came close, this half naked five foot one-hundred-pound coaxer of manhood. We were laughing about something when she came right into my bubble, put her arms around me and kissed my laughing mouth. I was stunned, but not for long. Her taste was nothing like I'd imagined. She had been smoking cigarettes and drinking beers, deeper base notes of her microbial and fungal biome blended with these top notes of party. Her saliva was soft and the inside of her mouth warm and small. Her teeth, which I licked the back of, were smooth and clean.
Her small body wrapped tightly around mine under the edge of the pool lip, as we huddled together in a writhing breathy mess. Fingers and hands feeling each other's bodies. She felt my cock and her exhale went lower, much lower and ended in a groan in my ears which sounded so loud I thought I might have hearing damage
On the walk back to the party, the streetlights were holding their breath. A summer midnight wind blew up the street and she said, what if...
What if, I said.
Do you see those bushes right there? she said.
Those bushes? I said, pointing.
What do you think would happen if we went in there and had sex? It was the kind of drunk question only an eighteen-year-old me could have taken as anything other than sweet and shy. I worshiped her in a lot of ways. I wasn't listening to her really; my head was just buzzing from her sudden attack in the swimming pool.
I said, I wanna have sex with you Amy, but I value our friendship. Do you think we could still be friends after?
I don't know, she said. We were still walking. When we got back to the party, she went into a bedroom and lay down by herself. Looking back, twenty-two, her age was really young, especially for a girl who said, what do you think would happen if we had sex in those bushes, instead of fuck me over there, now. I had been given the invitation though, and I stood in that party a changed man. I drank everything that wasn't in someone's hand or mouth. In about ten minutes I found and guzzled all the alcohol left at the party. Then I went into that bedroom.
The next day, I called her and left a message. The day after that and so on. She wouldn't take my calls. I was heartbroken. There was this song I kept listening to over and over. It was a rock song about taking what we both wanted. The singer described breaking into a sleeping lover's house, eating her food and then slowly walking to the bedroom in the dark. It was transgressive and part of that element fit for me. Our whole thing had been a kind of tender transgression.
About a month later, it felt like years, she called. She wanted to take me out to dinner. We met at the local all-night breakfast joint. The ceilings were low slung acoustical tiles drenched in grease. The place smelled like chili and armpits. We sat at the bar, and she told me that we weren't going to be close friends anymore. Oh, and yeah, she had met someone.
I didn't drink much after that party. Not at all. I never opened up that way to a woman again either. I turned my attention to my degree, my martial arts, my future as a late twentieth century minor robber baron. I didn't need that kind of pain in my life.
The trail opens up, and the sounds of a secondary highway take me by surprise. The resonant hum of rubber tires on pavement drills into my skull like the call of some lonesome animal. I fall down the embankment, sliding on my back. My jeep is still where I left it, in a turn-out. I reach under the fender for the key on top of the tire. The hand attached to my arm seems alien. It's covered in filth and cuts. It doesn't even seem to be the right age. The tendons are all knotted up and dehydrated. My fingers feel permanently clenched as I pull the key from its shelter.
I open the passenger door. Something doesn't seem quite right, but I am exhausted. I sit down and take a big inhale and exhale. It smells like relief. My own smell, which is clean, permeates this space. I open the glovebox and pull out my phone. It is not dead, yet. Small miracle. I call Chet. It goes to voicemail.
Yeah, this is Chet, leave a message.
Hi, son. I'm out here in some lemon grove up past Bakersfield. I've been out in the elements for I don't know how long. I've been lost. I've been lost for a long time. I just found my way out though. Just got back to the Jeep, and I needed to tell you that, everything's gonna be okay, I...
Beep, if you are satisfied with your message, press one.
The interruption is comical. I press one.
To send your message with normal delivery, press one. To send your message with urgent notification, press two.
I press one. It isn't urgent anyway. The phone dies a few seconds later while I am taking a selfie of my disheveled face. My hands are shaking. I think I get a blurry shot of my rancid smile as the state trooper pulls up behind me. The screen goes unresponsive for a couple microseconds and then goes black. I look in the side view mirror and see the blue lights. I adjust the rear view and take a better look. Sunglasses, stony expression, stupid hat, yep, state trooper alright. I breathe a sigh of relief. I am rescued.
He walks up on the passenger side where I sit, in urgent need of medical assistance, and I suspect, counseling. Do you mind stepping out of the vehicle, sir? he says with perfunctory mechanism. His face is covered by a black paper surgical mask.
I can barely stand, officer, I say.
I'm a trooper, not an officer, he says. That was a strange distinction to be hung up on in this moment of crisis, but clearly, he needs it.
Sorry, trooper, I say. My words came out funny. Trooooper. Sawree. I've just been lost in the grove for some days with no food.
I heard, he says. I feel a cold sensation in the middle of my spine. Now step out of the vehicle, he says.
I look into his eyes. They are not sympathetic. I say, I'd like you to call for an ambulance, trooper... eh, what is your name?
Johnson, he says. His eyes flick to the right as he says it. You don't need an ambulance, he says. You look like Fuckles the Clown. I heard you and some other wetbacks were out here destroying drones, causing havoc.
Did he just call me wetback?
I lean my body, stick my leg out the open door, and place my hand on the arm rest. Leaning a little further on the right leg, which sears upwards with pain after sitting in a comfortable seat for fifteen minutes. My face shows pain. In fact, it shows far more pain than I am actually in. So much pain that it draws officer Johnson to unconsciously stoop to give me support to get to my feet. Which throws him off balance, a position I leverage to turn him upside down rather quickly. He now lays on his back, with his head propped inside the Jeep against the edge of the seat. He reaches for his gun, I slam the door on his neck until it breaks, and then a few more times for good measure.
Exhausted and traumatized, I slump down in the dirt next to Johnson. His face is a retarded and bloody mess, facemask slipped up onto his forehead looking like a rushed and doomed yarmulke. His leg still twitching. I lean and take his gun belt off. Once again, I am armed. I am still in the trap. There must be agents of the enemy everywhere out here. Perhaps the whole town is compromised. I think about the way my words sounded when I was speaking to Johnson, not my voice. I look back in my mind's eye to the moment I snapped my selfie, was that my face? In my memory, I can't be sure.
I press and pull myself into the seat again. rolling Johnson under the carriage of the vehicle to clear a path and make him look less suspicious. I turn the mirror and stare into Waldo's eyes. Donde esta Waldo, I whisper to my own transformed reflection.
I put the key in the ignition and turn it. Nothing. There had been none of the usual fanfare of bells and lights when I'd opened the door. Of course, the battery is dead. A quick survey shows me that the hazards were left on. They would have blinked at a steady rhythm for a day, then they'd have slowed down imperceptibly at first, but geometrically toward the end. It would have been one of those cars on the side of the road that wink suddenly and weakly at unsuspecting drivers. Then, nothing. It probably died a week ago.
I rifle through Johnson's pockets. and find his keys. Limping over to the cruiser I become a spectacle to a pair of tourists in a motorhome who appear to slow but then speed up as their better judgment takes control. His car has bio-metric ignition locks. It shuts itself off when I get in the driver's seat, and I imagine it also alerts the base. How can a shit little town like this afford this kind of tech? I have no tools and I have no time. I feel them closing in on me. There are no fancy locks on the shotgun or the trunk. So, I take everything that I can carry in the way of armaments, which, with my leg the way it is, isn't much. But I find a first aid kit, a nice one, with a big old splint and tape and I gather that all up into a bundle I roll together with a bullet proof vest. I'm contemplating whether I have time to take Johnson's pants and whether they will fit me or not when I hear the chopper.
I drag myself back up the slope and hobble into the forest grid, my shredded pant-leg swirling in the wake of my flight. They haven't seen me yet, so I stay low and under bush. Crawling from tree to tree, I am invisible, but slow. Stopping to place the splint, I hear dogs barking at the roadside. Fuck me. I wish they were coyotes. The splint is tied off tight, and the shotgun comes up just as the first K9 comes ripping into the foliage. They have no sense of danger. Trained to go balls out into conflict. They are not coyotes. There is a deafening blast, and the head of a German Shepherd turns to pink mist in front of me. There are three more. My new shotgun is a seven round semi-automatic and three more shots shatter the idyllic Currier and Ives vibe as I snuff out the remainder of the scout regiment. Well, that's gonna piss them off. Certainly, they had heard the blasts and would be holding off on rushing me again.
With the Kevlar vest in place and the gun slung under my chest, I crawl from tree to tree again while the chopper overhead, whirlybirds blindly unable to locate me with optics. My bedazzled denim jacket apparently is better camouflage than I would have imagined, that or the foliage is thicker.
I come to a place I feel like I recognize. Katrina is sitting under a tree. She is lovely and swollen and about to give birth. Her water has broken and the ground beneath her is a Rorschach ink blot of cervical fluid. She smiles when she sees me.
What did you do to me? I say, not able to whisper for my excitement and confusion and terror.
She looks calmly at me with a careful concern and says, everything is going to be alright. This is exactly as I was shown.
What the fuck are you talking about, I say, still unwilling to accept the magic I have been witnessing as anything other than the hallucinations of a dying man.
She says, come, hold my hands while I push.
I am dumbstruck. I know I can't fight off an armed regiment and a helicopter with just a shotgun and a flak jacket, and a part of me, my body, draws me to her instinctively. I crawl over to her where she leans with her back against the lemon tree. I take her hands in mine. The trees begin to change. The bright heavy fruit turns green and shrinks. The world is instantly without the sounds of the chopper and the chase. Instead, the sound of a rewinding cassette of birds singing plays at a nearly subliminal volume. It's like stepping on a trapdoor just before the stage of a theater is engulfed in flames. I look to Katrina's eyes, they are the only thing around me not moving and shaking, vibrating. I don't know where she is taking us. Back to the village? I don't have room to care yet. The fight I have just been through in the world I came from is a final goodbye to anything that makes sense. At least in her world I know what has happened to my family.
I never thought, since my thirties, that I would be without money. In some timelines, namely the universe I took to be the only reality up until about a week ago, I have eighty million dollars stacked in the bank. When you have that kind of money, and you aren't a damn extravagant fool, it's enough to last you several lifetimes, or enough to buy your kids and kids lawyers a few things after you die. It kind of defined me in a way that was invisible to me.
I was such a successful guy. I felt like I had made all the right decisions to have earned what I did. Money is a state of mind. Turns out that much money has a gravity of its own. It pulls more money into itself, not just by accumulating interest. I could live off the interest of course, but in the sense that being a businessman with capital puts me in the position to act on a good deal when I see one. I can snap up a distressed business property for short cash money, which might be a million dollars! But the property is worth three, it just needs a house cleaning.
When you're at the level of flipping pre-war ranch homes, it's a grind. When you are at the level of turning around three- and four-story colonial era brick mixed use spaces in some of the most active markets in the country, you make money without even trying.
I met Lisa at a mixer for millionaires. When you are as successful as each of us was individually, the world and its people just look different. I wasn't gonna be into dating a waitress, or a barista, or a hairdresser. They were nice enough people sure, but they had money problems. Money attracts money. I wasn't there to be sugar daddy or solve anyone's problems. I wanted someone who had figured it out like I had, who had made her own way and was looking for an equal, a companion to share the good times with. To handle the vicissitudes of old age together with, someone who was done playing kids games.
Some friends introduced us at one of these things. I had seen her name around, as she was a prominent local architect. She of course, had never heard of me. I operate behind the veil of corporate interests, though I am far from a company man. We sat down at a little table at a posh exclusive restaurant I never would have gone to for any other reason on my own. The servers carried around trays of flutes sparkling with Moet, which was just what they were offering instead of ice water. I had a tap water. There were other trays on legs carrying a spectacle of hors d'oeuvres. An empanada drizzled with bright orange sauce sat on my small plate glaring up at me. It was kind of like art. Lisa had a glass of red wine, and her delicate fingers commanded the stemware with poise, but her eyes were joking with me. She made light of how uninterested I looked at the fancy settings and food. I said, it's nice to be outdoors, I guess. It was too. The summer air had cooled into the evening. I was wearing my typical outfit. I refused to dress up for these things. Cargo shorts and a t-shirt describing some charity event or another, and a black fleece with pockets I almost never used. People who keep their pockets full are a troubled lot.
We made it through the first half hour and were having a nice time. They brought us our meal. I had the chicken. She had the chicken. We talked about our families. She had lots of nieces and nephews. I had my two kids at that point. She had never been married, was a consummate businesswoman. She wasn't socially inept like me though, she had grace and people liked her. I liked her too. We exchanged cards.
The courtship was a lot of fun. We mostly did normal people stuff with rich person carefree attitudes. We ate at the decks. I almost never went out by myself, but she drew me out of my shell. We went to York's Wild Kingdom, and she walked me through the petting zoo. I felt like I was at a conference with a bunch of touchy-feely entrepreneurs as goats swarmed us and bumped into our legs. She laughed at my face. Clearly you are in your element, she said.
I had to laugh too. I said, yehehehehehess. She burst into one of the biggest and most wholehearted laughs I had ever heard from a woman, at the end of which she snorted and covered her mouth, face turning red, body shaking from suppressing further outburst. We embraced there first, among the idiot goats and their kids. I wasn't into public displays of affection, but I couldn't help myself. I was in love. I kissed her, there while a goat ate through the pocket of my cargo shorts and ran off with the energy bar I had stashed there.
Now she was beyond my reach. Now, the money I had sitting in my accounts was going to be passed on to, who knew. How much of my family would be left to live their lives, and how long would the system stand as it was built? If the country, or even the world as it seemed, was on the brink of collapse, or revolution, how much would anything I had done to preserve myself and my family matter?
I look down into Katrina's hands in mine. She pushes. I had been present for the births of most of my children. It's a point of pride for me. Be that what it is, it couldn't prepare me much for midwifing a teenage witch in a time-slip. I am not sure what I am supposed to do. She says, are you ready, doctor? What a sense of humor she has.
I say, kind of hard to time your contractions without my watch.
She says, that watch? between sharp breaths and points at my wrist, where, of course, Waldo's arm is wearing my watch. Then I have to face the fact that even with a watch, I didn't know where to start in timing her contractions when time itself is dilating around us. We seem to be hurtling backwards in time. The lemon trees are juveniles, then seedlings, then they disappear into the soil. The landscape turns to desert. Winds blow red earth back and forth. Day and night passes so quickly that the effect is faster than a strobe, more like the frames on an old television broadcast. The picture is almost seamless.
Katrina squeezes my hands with all her might, which is considerable and draws tears from my eyes, but I don't cry out. I know my threshold of physical pain well. What I have never advanced, is my threshold for emotional pain. I am coated in Teflon around other human beings, now something about humanity has reached inside me violently, and whether this is a dream or not, I feel for the first time that I am not alone.
Lisa had given me just a taste of this through her consistent affection for my sincere fumbling. But as much as I love her, she still shielded me from the world. If she hadn't, I wouldn't have fallen in love.
Now, Katrina, in a very vulnerable place herself, is showing me my own insignificance in the stream of time once again. I remember the lives of the other people I had seen before when I first fell into the river with Mani. How much they cared about things. How often they hurt and just kept going without putting up walls or executing power moves. How brave they were, and what a coward I am.
She pushes again. My knuckles crack in her grip. I look down beneath her skirt. It is soaked in liquid, kind of pink but not bloody. I can see her vagina opening. The pulsating power of those muscles as she gives birth. The child that is emerging, I can't see distinctly. I figure I am looking at the top of its head, but its body is a blinding light. She says, catch him.
Oh shit, really?
Really, she says.
I put my hands, backs down in the dirt beneath her knees and get ready. She gives a push and a holler so great that time shakes. The desert, which has gone through an ice age and become an ocean which we are at the bottom of, traversed by waves of ripples and bubbles which illuminate the cerulean matter like a glass kaleidoscope in the sun, and this infant, covered in viscous light, drops into my outstretched wetback palms. The world becomes as detailed as a mandala, all vision repeats and falls back upon itself, becomes reflection, dilates and drops again. Level after level of fractal crenelation travels on into infinity.
The time stream collapses, with us at the bottom of the primordial ocean vaporizing into a conscious mist, mixing with the tides of eternity.