MARTians (6 page)

“She isn’t going to call,” says MORTimmer.

Then he leaves like that’s all there is to it. Like he knows me, my AnnaMom, or the future.

When the door closes behind MORTimmer, I know I can just walk out the door myself. I can leave. Nothing is stopping me. Except — I don’t know what I would do once I passed through that door and it closed behind me. I want to be home, but I don’t know how I’d get there. So I sit down on a stiff plastic chair and stare at the screen. There are many things happening in the world; I see them, one after the other, and the words crawl by. I imagine very hard that I am at school. That whiff of bad water, the screen, the crawl of words along the bottom. It is easy to imagine that I am really, truly in Room 2-B and everything is not changed.

For the first time in days, my knotted thoughts untie. For the first time in days, I feel comfort. I let the screen tell me about the world. I open my eyes and that’s all I have to do.

The numbers fly past so quickly I can’t begin to read them, which makes me nervous. But I don’t need to process those numbers; they have been understood by the expert who explains it all using animation.

I recognize the phenomenon: It’s called feedback runaway. Sometimes people call it a chain reaction, but a chain reaction just plods along. Feedback runaway is explosive, especially in human beings. When people fall into feedback runaway loops, there are boom-and-bust cycles in the markets. People rush to the stores to buy three lifetime supplies of vacu-packed dehydrated celery. But this is not about people and money; this is about satellites.

A golden wing is in the path of another satellite. Smash! The mechanical butterflies collide, shatter, and fall, a sparkle party in the dark.

The screen goes blank and fills with static.

At the hour, the cycle begins again: the same stories in the same order — only the ads have changed. This hour they are all for Bats of Happiness, the genuine guano fertilizer. Perfectly organic, perfect in every way: Bats of Happiness.

I remember the day AnnaMom and I planted the daylilies in front of our house. She spooned dark dirt out of the bag with the red bats printed on it.
This will feed our flower babies, ZeeZeeBee. Do you want a bite? NO! I don’t want the flowers inside you to grow out of your ears. And also it’s bat poop. Bat poop is good food for flowers, not my Zoë. You should eat sugar violets and vegetable puffs.

After that, I look at the screen, but I don’t see anything.

Timmer carries food when he returns from work — a paper Eateria bag full of burritos. He hands one to me. It feels heavy, damp, and pretty sad. Timmer folds a foily paper wrapper back, takes a bite, and swallows without chewing. Then he tears open a little packet of hot sauce and squirts it on the food. 5er unrolls his burrito bundle and picks through the rice, looking for beans. He has the posture and table manners of a wild ape. I’m not hungry. It seems like I ought to be, but I’m not. I just stand there, holding the burrito, which isn’t hot or cold and doesn’t demand immediate attention.

“How did you find this place?”

“I didn’t find this place. Raoul found it. Then Raoul found me. I was still waiting for them to come back. I still thought that was the deal. So I was living there in Terra Incognita right across from your beiger-beige house.” He looks at me like I’m supposed to say something. But what? That I never noticed that he was there, not ever? Not when he had a family, not when he didn’t. That if you asked me last year who else lived on Terra Incognita, I might have said,
The people next door have scary dogs,
but I didn’t know their names.

“For a while I just took care of things, you know? I still had school. I’d already got the family hardship waiver job at AllMART, so work felt like normal. But then, there were hours and hours of being alone. The first days, it was okay. My Grammalita, she never threw any food away, so there were all of these little lumps of leftovers in the freezer. I’d microwave those and the house would smell like dinner, sort of. But it was so quiet. I could leave my shoes in the hallway and nobody yelled about how that could kill Grammalita if she tripped on them and broke her hip, and how she would suffer and die, and how that would always be on my conscience. So there was no yelling, but there was nobody to talk to either. Man, I hated being home. I hated it so much, sometimes I just slept in my car in the parking lot. But then I’d go rushing back to the house the next day because — what if they came back? What if they came back and I wasn’t there?”

Those words echo inside of me. Yes, what if AnnaMom comes back? She might come back. What if she comes back and I’m not home?

Zoë-woey, I’m not worried. Don’t you worry.

But what if?

Zoë! Shush! Don’t think about that. Don’t you say one more word about that!

“It still sucked, sitting there in that house with nobody else. And when the bus stopped running, then I needed more money for gas. I was just lucky I had the car. You know? Without the car, I woulda been screwed.”