Hieroglyph (26 page)

I had to admit he had a point.

“Look,” I said. “This is the first time anyone's tried this. Burners have been changing the desert for years. They excavate tons of the surface every year to get rid of the Burn platform and the scars from the big fires. Maybe we'll have to cap how many robots run every year, but you know, it's kind of a renewable resource. Dust blows in all the time, over the hills and down the road. It goes down for yards and yards. They mined around here for a century and didn't make a dent in it. The only thing that doesn't change the world is a corpse. People who are alive change the planet. That's part of the deal. How about if we try this thing for a while and
see
whether it's a problem, instead of declaring it a disaster before it's gotten started?”

He gave me a withering look. “Oh yeah, I've heard that one before. ‘Give it time, see how it goes!' That's what they said in Fukushima. That's what they said when they green-lit thalidomide. That's what they said at Kristallnacht.”

“I don't think they said that about Kristallnacht,” I said, and turned on my heel. Decades on the Internet had taught me that Godwin's law was ironclad: as soon as the comparisons to Nazis or Hitler came out, the discussion was over. He shouted something at my back, but I couldn't hear it over the
wub-wub
of an art car that turned the corner at that moment, a huge party bus/pirate ship with three decks of throbbing dancers and a PA system that could shatter glass.

But that conversation stayed with me. He was a pushy, self-righteous prig, but that didn't mean he was wrong. Necessarily.

IF YOU'RE A BURNER,
you know what happened next. We kickstarted an entire flock of Gadgets by Christmas; built them through the spring, and trucked them out in a pair of sixteen-wheelers for the next Fourth, along with a crew of wranglers who'd helped us build them. It was the biggest Fourth of Juplaya ever and there were plenty of old-timers who still say we ruined it. It's true that there was a lot less shooting and a lot more lens-polishing that year.

The best part was the variation. Our three basic tiles could be combined to make an infinite variety of yurtgloos, but to be honest, you'd be hard-pressed to tell one from another. On our wiki, a group of topology geeks went bananas designing a whole range of shapes that interlocked within our three, making it possible to build crazy stuff—turrets, staircases, trusses. Someone showed how the polyominoes could be interlocked to make a playground slide and sure enough, come the summer, there was a huge one, with a ladder and a scaffolding of support, and damned if it wasn't an
amazing
ride, once it was ground down to a slippery sheen with a disc-polisher.

The next year, there were whole swaths of Black Rock City that were built out of dust-bricks, as they were called by that time. The backlash was predictable, but it still smarted. We were called unimaginative suburbanites in tract-house gated communities, an environmental catastrophe—that old naked guy turned out to be a prophet as well as a crank—and a blight on the landscape.

Blight especially loved this last. She brought Maya, her daughter, to the Playa that year, and the two of them built the most amazing, most ambitious yurtgloo you'd ever seen, a three-story, curvy, bulbous thing whose surfaces were finely etched with poems and doodles that she'd fed to the paramaterizer in the 3D-modeling software onboard her Gadgets. The edges of the glyphs were so sharp at first that you could literally cut yourself on them, and before the wind and dust wore them down, they cast amazing shadows down into the gullies of the carve-outs when the sun was rising and setting, turning the wall into a madman's diary of scribbles and words.

Maya was indifferent to the haters. She was fifteen and was a trouble-seeking missile with a gift for putting creepers in their place that I was in absolute awe of. I watched her fend off the advances of fratty jocks, weird old dudes like me, and saucer-eyed spacemen dancing to the distant, omnipresent thunder of EDM.

“You raised her right, huh?” I said to Blight.

Blight shrugged. “Look, it sucks to be a fifteen-year-old girl. All that attention, it just gets in the way of figuring out who you are. I'm glad she's good at this, but I wish she didn't have to do it. I wish she could just have a Burn like the rest of us.”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that sucks.”

“It does. Plus, I don't want to get high because I feel like I've got to keep an eye on her all the time and—” She threw her hands up in the air and looked angrily at the white-hot sky.

“You're feeling guilty for bringing her, aren't you?”

“No, Dr. Freud. I'm feeling guilty for regretting that I brought her.”

“Are you sure you're not feeling guilty for regretting that you feel guilty that you brought her?”

She pinched me. “Be serious.”

I wiped the smile off my face. “Blight, I love you.” I'd said it the first time on a visit to her place just after the last Burn, and she'd been literally speechless for a good ten minutes. Ever since, it had become my go-to trick for winning arguments.

She pinched me hard in the arm. I rubbed the sore spot—every time I came back from a visit to see her, I had bruises the size of grapefruits and the color of the last moment of sunset on both shoulders.

Maya ran past, pulling a giant stunt kite behind her. She'd spent the whole Burn teaching herself new tricks with it and she could do stuff with it that I never would have believed. We cheered her on as she got it into the sky.

“She's an amazing kid,” I said. “Makes me wish I'd had one. I would have, if I'd known she'd turn out like that.”

Maya's dad was a city manager for a small town in Arizona that was entirely dependent on imported water. He came out twice a year for visits and Maya spent three weeks every summer and alternate Christmases and Easters with him, always returning with a litany of complaints about the sheer tedium of golf courses and edge-city megamalls. I'd never met him but he sounded like a good guy, if a little on the boring side.

“Never too late,” Blight said. “Go find yourself some nubile twenty-five-year-old and get her gravid with your child.”

“What would I want with one of those flashy new models? I've got an American classic here.” I gave her another squeeze, and she gave me another pinch.

“Nothing smoother than an automotive comparison, fella.”

“It was meant as a compliment.”

“I know,” she said. “Fine. Well, then, you could always come down and spend some time when Maya is around, instead of planning your visits around her trips to see her dad. There's plenty of parenting to go around on that one, and I could use a break from time to time.”

I suddenly felt very serious. Something about being on the Playa made it seem like anything was possible. I had to literally bite my tongue to stop myself from proposing marriage. Instead, I said, “That sounds like a very good plan. I shall take you up on it, I think.”

She drew her fingers back to pinch me, but instead, she dragged me to her and gave me a long, wet, deep kiss.

“Ew,” shouted Maya as she buzzed us, now riding a lowrider playa bike covered in fun fur and duct tape. She circled us twice, throwing up a fantail of dust, then screeched to a hockey stop that buried our feet in a small dune that rode ahead of her front wheel like a bow wave.

“You've gone native, kiddo,” I said.

She gave me a hilarious little-girl look and said, “Are you my new daddy? Mommy says you're her favorite of all my uncles, and there's
so many
of them.”

Blight pounced on her and bore her to the ground, where they rolled like a pair of fighting kittens, all tickles and squeals and outflung legs and arms. It ended with Maya pinned under Blight's forearms and knees.

“I brought you into this world,” she said, panting. “I can take you out of it, too.”

Maya closed her eyes and then opened them again, wide as saucers. “I'm sorry, Mom,” she said. “I guess I took it too far. I love you, Mom.”

Blight relaxed a single millibar and Maya squirmed with the loose-jointed fluidity of wasted youth and bounced to her toes, leaped on her bike and shouted, “Suck-errrrr!,” as she pedaled away a good ten yards, then did a BMX-style front-wheel stand and spun back around to face us. “Bye-ee!”

“Be back for dinner!” Blight shouted.

“ 'Kay, Mom!”

The two stared at each other through the blowing dust.

“He's pretty good,” Maya shouted again. “You can keep him.”

Blight took a step toward her. Maya grinned fearlessly. “Love you, Mom! Don't worry, I won't get into any trouble.”

She jammed down on the pedals and powered off toward open playa.

“You appear to have given birth to the Tasmanian Devil,” I said.

“Shut up, amateur,” she said. “This is what they're supposed to be like at fifteen. I'd be worried otherwise.”

BY THE TIME THEY
sent Pug home to die, Blight was practically living with me—after getting laid off and going freelance, there was no reason not to. I gave her the whole garage to use as workspace—parked my car in the driveway and ran an extension cord out to it to charge it overnight—but half the time she worked at Minus. Its latest incarnation was
amazing,
a former L.A. Department of Water and Power substation that was in bankruptcy limbo. After privatization and failure, the trustees had inventoried its assets and found that it was sitting on all these mothballed substations and offered them out on cheap short-term leases. Minus was practically a
cathedral
in those days, with thirty-foot ceilings, catwalks, even two behemoth dynamos that had been saved from the scrappers out of pure nostalgia. They gave the place a theatrical, steampunk air—until someone decided to paint them safety orange with hot-pink highlights, which looked pretty damned cool and pop art, but spoiled the theater of the thing somewhat.

Pug was no idiot—not like me. So when he found a lump and asked the doctor to look into it and spent a week fretting about it, he'd told me and Blight and a bunch of his other friends and did a week of staying on people's couches and tinkering with the Gadget and going to yoga class and cooking elaborate meals with weird themes—like the all-coconut dinner that included coconut chicken over coconut rice with coconut flan for dessert. And he arranged for me to drive him to the doctor's office for his follow-up visit.

We joked nervously all the way to the waiting room, then fell silent. We declined to be paged by the receptionist and sat down instead, looking from the big, weird, soothing animation on the fifty-inch TV to the health pamphlets that invited us to breathe on them or lick them for instant analysis and follow-up recommendations. Some of them seemed to have been licked already.

“Scott Zrubek?” said the receptionist from the door, looking from her screen to Pug's face.

“That's my slave name,” he said to me as he got up and crossed to her. “Forget you ever heard it.”

Twenty minutes later, he was back with a big white smile that went all the way to the corners of his eyes. I stood up and made a question of my raised eyebrows. He high-fived me and we went out to the car. The nurse who'd brought him back watched us go from the window, a worried look on her face, and that should have tipped me off.

“All okay, then,” I said. “So now where?”

“Let's get some lunch,” he said. “There's a chicken shack up on the left; they serve the best chili fries.”

It was one of those drive-in places where the servers clipped trays to the windows and served your food on them, a retro-revival thing that made me glad I had vinyl seats.

“What a relief,” I said, slurping on my shake. They had tiger-tail ice cream—a mix of orange and black licorice flavor—and Pug had convinced me to try it in a shake. He'd been right—it was amazing.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “About that.”

“About what?”

“Doc says it's in my liver and pancreas. I can do chemo and radiotherapy, but that'll just tack a couple months on, and they won't be good months. Doc says it's the kind of cancer where, when a doctor gets it, they refuse treatment.”

I pulled the car over to the side of the road. I couldn't bring myself to turn my head.

“Pug,” I said. “I'm so sorry—”

He put his hand on mine and I shut up. I could hear his breathing, a little fast, a little shallow. My friend was keeping it together so much better than I was, but he was the one with the death sentence.

“Remember what you told me about the curve?” he said. “Back when you thought you had cancer? The older you get, the more friends will die. It's just statistics. No reason I shouldn't be the next statistic.”

“But you're only thirty—”

“Thirty-three,” he said. “A little lower on the curve, but not unheard of.” He breathed awhile longer. “Not a bad run.”

“Pug,” I said, but he squeezed my hand.

“If the next sentence to come out of your mouth includes the words ‘spontaneous remission,' I'm going upside your head with a roll of quarters. That's the province of the Smurfs' Family Christmas, not the real world. And don't talk to me about having a positive attitude. The reason all those who've died of cancer croaked is because they had cancer, not because they were too gloomy.”

“How about Laura?” I said. They'd been dating on and off for a couple months. She seemed nice. Did some kind of investment analysis for an ethical fund.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Don't suppose that was going to be serious. Huh. What do you think—tell her I'm dying, then break up; break up and then tell her I'm dying; or just break up?”

“What about telling her you're”—I swallowed—“dying, then giving her the choice?”