Immobility (20 page)

“What does it mean?”

“In this language, nothing. In another, it means ‘name.’”

“So your name is
name
?”

“It means not only ‘name’ but ‘rumor.’ Also, ‘fame, repute, report.’ Depending on context, a few other things as well.”

“And that’s your name?”

“No, it’s not my name. It’s a compromise,” said Rykte. “Now you have something to call me, but I still don’t have a name.”

*   *   *

HE LAY THAT NIGHT STARING UP
at the ceiling, thinking. Where was he? he wondered. Who was this person without a name, this Rykte? What was wrong with him, and where was his community? He didn’t feel like he was in danger, but was he? Was he a prisoner?

“Am I a prisoner?” he asked the next day. He was feeling a little better now, could sit up with help and then stay sitting on his own. He could hold the bowl in his lap and bring the spoon down into it and then up again to his mouth.

“What? Of course not,” said Rykte. “You can leave anytime you’d like.”

“Really?”

“Really,” said Rykte. “You can leave now if you want, though I’d suggest waiting until you have recovered a little more.”

He took another spoonful of the mush, then another. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to accuse you.”

“It’s all right,” said Rykte. “We’ve all been through a lot.”

He nodded, took another spoonful of mush. “Rykte, could someone have taken me before you found me?” he asked.

Rykte stared at him. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said.

“I remember someone talking,” he said. “Two people, talking about me. They took me somewhere and then decided I wouldn’t do.”

“Wouldn’t do what?”

“Just wouldn’t do,” Horkai said. “I was wrong for whatever they wanted me for.”

“And so they took you back outside and left you again,” said Rykte.

“It sounds ludicrous when you put it that way.”

“What way should I put it?”

Horkai shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

Rykte reached out and touched him on the shoulder. “Is it possible?” he said. “Yes, it is. But I don’t know who it would have been or why they would have done it. All I know is that I found you on the freeway and brought you here. You were in a state of confusion, babbling about two women, but also about being in storage. Maybe it all happened, maybe it didn’t. Or maybe it happened but just not when you think it did.” He smiled. “You’re here now. Just hold on to that.”

*   *   *

A DAY LATER, HORKAI ASKED AGAIN,
“You’re not a keeper?”

“You asked me that before. What’s a keeper?” asked the stranger. “Do you mean it spiritually, like am I my brother’s keeper?”

“No,” said Horkai. “A keeper.” And then he went on to explain to Rykte about Granite Mountain, the records there.

By the time he finished, Rykte’s face was grave. “And this mountain,” he said, “is where you came from?”

Horkai shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was just passing through.”

Rykte shook his head. “We never learn,” he said. “What we need is not a cord tying us back to our past, to the long line of disasters building up to this last greatest disaster. What we need is a fresh start.”

“They’re not people,” said Horkai. “They’re not human.”

“What are they, then?”

“No longer human. They’re like us.”

Rykte shook his head again, stared at the floor. “You see,” he said. “That’s the whole problem. Names, categories, divisions. Once you label something, you learn how to hate it. Human, not human. If you’re not one, you’re the other, and then you and the others can hate each other.” He turned to look at Horkai. “You have to understand,” he said, “that we’re neither human nor not human.”

“What are we, then?” asked Horkai.

“We just
are,
” said Rykte. “Why can’t that ever be enough?”

*   *   *

OVER THE COURSE
of a few days, he got stronger, began feeling better. Soon he was pulling himself from room to room, exploring Rykte’s house. It was an old cinder block affair, nothing fancy, five rooms in all. Horkai wondered aloud why he had chosen it rather than something else.

Rykte shrugged. “I grew up here,” he said. “When everything collapsed, I didn’t see any reason to leave.” He looked around. “Had to rebuild most of it,” he said, “but it gave me something to do. Finding intact windows that fit was the hardest part of it.”

Besides the room Rykte had given to him, there was Rykte’s own room, which contained little more than a bed and a dresser, full of simple, practical clothes, a kitchen with cabinets packed with hardtack and preserved foods. A bathroom, with the commode torn out, was now piled with stacks of books. Rykte had built an outhouse back behind the house—though, for the time being, Rykte installed a chemical toilet in the former bathroom for Horkai. There was a sort of living room containing a couch, two armchairs. A credenza to one side of the front door was heaped with guns and knifes, a few grenades as well.

“Just in case,” said Rykte, and winked.

In the basement, Rykte told him, he was trying to grow mushrooms, something to supplement their diet. So far without much success. A shed not far from the outhouse served for storage, was filled with anything that Rykte had scavenged that he thought might be useful. He carried Horkai out to it and Horkai was surprised to see only practical things, no relics or mementos to recall past days, just tools, lumber, rope, bits and pieces of metal, rolls of medical tape, vacuum-sealed packets of freeze-dried foods. A hand-cranked distiller surrounded by canister after canister of distilled water.

“What if you run out of food?” asked Horkai.

“There were enough people around here with food storage that at first it wasn’t a problem,” said Rykte. “Can’t see that it’ll be a problem in my lifetime. Plus I’m trying to get mushrooms going in several basements around here. Should be okay eventually.”

“You’re not lonely?” asked Horkai after a few days.

Rykte shrugged. “A little,” he admitted. “But I learned early on to keep my distance. Others always want something from you, especially when they realize you can survive outside. Before you know it, they’re no longer asking you for something; they’re holding a gun to your head and trying to force it out of you.”

“Do you feel that way about me?”

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you want, if that’s what you’re asking,” Rykte said. “You don’t bother me.”

*   *   *

“WHAT ABOUT YOUR LEGS?”
Rykte asked him a few days later when he saw one of Horkai’s legs shivering. “I thought you must have been paralyzed before the change.”

“No, not before,” said Horkai.

“Well, then they’ll come back,” said Rykte. “They’re already coming back.”

“They can’t,” said Horkai. “I’m ill. If my spine reconnects, it’ll travel to my brain and kill me.”

Rykte looked at him for a long time, finally shook his head. “Doesn’t sound right,” he said. “Do you know this for a fact?”

“I was told,” said Horkai.

“Is it possible that whoever told you this might have had some reason to lie?”

“It’s not impossible,” Horkai said.

“I haven’t had even as much as a cold since the change,” said Rykte. “I can drive a rusty nail into my forehead and come away tetanus free. Early on, I lost an eye in a scuffle only to have it grow back a few days later, good as new. We age, but not very quickly, not as quickly as we did before. Whatever happened to our bodies purified them, made them no longer subject to certain conditions that other mortals face. Our bodies have been transformed, and that has made us not only very hard to kill but also very hard to injure.”

“And so I’m being lied to?”

Rykte shrugged. “Let your spine grow back together and find out. It’s worth the risk.”

*   *   *

THE BRIEF QUIVERING IN HIS LEGS
was followed by a tingling sensation, then by little jabs of pain. Over the course of a week he tried mentally to will his legs to move, found that they would but not in the way he expected them to, flopping and spasming instead.

Rykte told him not to worry, that everything would come back. He sat beside Horkai, massaging the legs and moving them carefully back and forth, up and down, helping them relearn the movements they had lost.

“What did you do before the Kollaps?” Horkai asked during one of these sessions.

“Why do you say it that way?” asked Rykte, not looking up from his legs. “Why do you pronounce it like it’s a foreign word?”

“I don’t know,” said Horkai. “That’s how they say it where I’m from.”

“And where is that?”

“I don’t know,” said Horkai. “I can’t remember things very well.”

“What did I do?” asked Rykte. “Not much. Went to high school. I was sixteen when things fell apart.”

“You watched your parents die?”

Rykte looked up, nodded. “My parents,” he said. “My friends, my neighbors, people I knew from school, from church. Those who survived the first blast were afraid of me, and then hated me. A few of them even tried to kill me. And then, fairly quickly, most of them died.”

“I’m sorry,” said Horkai.

“Why?” said Rykte. “You weren’t one of them. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

*   *   *

AFTER A FEW MORE DAYS,
his quivering legs learned to hold him upright for a moment or two. Rykte would stand him upright and he would stand there until the legs suddenly gave out and he’d go down, and Rykte would have to catch him. A day after that, he watched Rykte walk away from the house in the early morning, a rifle slung across his back, and disappear. He was gone for several hours, but when he returned he was carrying two aluminum underarm crutches.

“Was looking for forearm crutches,” he said, “but I didn’t find any. These will have to do.”

By late afternoon and after a few falls, he’d learned how to use the crutches. His sides hurt from where the crutch handles rubbed against him, and the web between his thumb and forefinger was growing sore, had perhaps started to blister. But he could move around on his own power.

He made a few turns around the house, then begged Rykte to take him outside.

“All right,” said Rykte. “In any case, there’s something I want to show you.”

*   *   *

THEY WENT OUT THE BACK DOOR
and past the shed. The crutches were a little more difficult to operate in the dirt, but he managed. Rykte took him to the back fence, then carefully pulled off three of the boards, stacking them to one side. He helped Horkai through the opening.

On the other side was a flat expanse of dirt, then a slow slope down to a drainage ditch through which a feeble stream ran. Unlike the other water he had seen, it wasn’t red. Looking up it, he could see the end of a corrugated pipe from which the water was coming. In the other direction it went straight for a while then curved before it was lost behind a fence.

“What did you want me to see?” Horkai asked.

“This,” said Rykte, and pointed at the stream.

Water,
thought Horkai.
So what?
He looked back up at Rykte. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Look closer,” said Rykte.

And so he did, trying to see what it was about the water that made it different, made it unusual. Was it a little cleaner, a little purer? Maybe, but not enough to make much of a difference. The color was a little strange, maybe, but …

And then he realized and almost fell. “Oh my God,” he said. It wasn’t the water that was a strange color but what was at the bottom of the streambed. There was a thin layer of moss, very pale but there.

“It’s very delicate,” said Rykte. “Easily damaged. But resistant to the poisons in the air and soil and water. Things are starting to come back, slowly but surely. In another five years, we might even start to see grass. A decade or two after that, and there’ll be flowering plants. Tack on a hundred years, we might even begin to see trees. All this will go on in some way or other. The only thing we humans managed to destroy was ourselves.”

“But we’re not dead yet,” said Horkai.

“With a little luck, we will be soon,” said Rykte. “We’re a curse, a blight. First we gave everything names and then we invented hatred. And then we made the mistake of domesticating animals—almost as big a mistake as that of discovering fire. It’s only one step from there to slavery, and once you think of humans as animals—as mules, say,” he said, giving Horkai a look, “we become a disposable commodity, war a commonplace. Add in a dominant religion that preaches the end of the world and holy books that have been used to justify atrocity after atrocity, and you’re only a step away from annihilation. It’s better not to let society develop at all, to leave each person on their own, alone, shivering, and afraid in the dark.”

“What are you, a libertarian?” asked Horkai.

“No,” said Rykte.

“An anarchist?”

“Who isn’t these days?” asked Rykte. “But no, no more so than anybody else.”

Horkai looked at him a long time. “You really think humanity should die out?”

“Objectively, yes,” said Rykte. “I’ve thought about it and thought about it, and rationally it seems the right thing. If we want anything at all to go on, humanity should die out.” He turned to Horkai and smiled. “But when I think about it subjectively, it doesn’t seem so clear cut.”

“No?”

“No. So I do nothing. I neither help humanity along toward its own extinction nor do I prevent that extinction from happening. I don’t slaughter everyone I meet, don’t use well-placed grenades to open the few remaining shelters to the poisons outside. But neither do I help them. What does that make me? Ineffectual? Uninvolved?”

“Lukewarm,” said Horkai.

Rykte smiled.
“So then because thou art lukewarm,”
he said,
“and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”

“I’ve heard that before,” said Horkai.

“Of course you have,” said Rykte. “It’s from the Bible.”

“The Bible,” said Horkai. “Burn that as well?” he asked.

“Of course,” said Rykte, smiling. “It’s the cause of more deaths than any other book, including
Mein Kampf.
Better if it had never been written.” The smile faded from his face. He turned to Horkai, his eyes hard and serious. “But I guess it’s different for you,” he said. “You’re not exactly lukewarm, are you.”