Jessie / Gretel deVoid
The thing’s breath, hot and foul, touched the back of her neck. Her muscles tensed as adrenalin kicked in. The predator’s shadow, crouched and still, hung just off to her right. She tried to judge the distance, but the other shadow, a little further out and behind, complicated the calculation. What had they taught her? Triangulate. She sensed the vircat tense, its movement nearly imperceptible. Perspiration rolled down her forehead. Time to decide. Now. She jumped, whirled around, swinging her long knife point forward toward the vircat. Miscalculation. The thing’s huge claw came down on her shoulder with a terrible ripping sound, and Gretel deVoid fell hard under the full weight of the cat.
The vircat disappeared, and Gretel stood, shaking her head. “Damn, I don’t think I’ll ever get this right.”
“You’re doing just fine, Gretel.” Toxine’s voice came from nowhere and everywhere. “Your calculations just need to come more quickly. Practice. Shall we try again?”
“I can’t. I have homework tonight.” She couldn’t believe she was saying this, she had never let homework decide her path before. But this was different. This homework meant something.
“Very well,” said Toxine, as the nighttime forest, with its two moons, faded, and the classroom at Universidad de Simon Bolivar appeared around them. Toxine looked at Gretel approvingly. “You are a brave girl, you know, going off to a new world, forging into the wilderness.”
Self-conscious, Gretel looked at the floor.
“How are things going with your dad?” Toxine asked.
“I haven’t told him yet. I still haven’t figured out what to say.”
“That will come too. Now off to your homework, eh?”
“Thanks, Toxine,” said Gretel.
Jessie Larivee, aka Gretel deVoid, zoned from the grid and sighed. Since classes began three months ago, a silence had grown between herself and her father. She had let it go too long. Now, when she played the scenario in her head, she could hear his voice saying, “It’s impossible, you can’t get to another planet on the grid,” or “You’re only fourteen. You’re too young to make these kinds of decisions,” or maybe he would stand there, slack-jawed and silent before sending her to her room. How could she possibly convince Joe Larivee, the proud luddite, that yes, you can go to another world, and no, I’m not too young, and yes, I would like you to go with me, Dad, but whatever you’re decision, I am going.
Talking to her mother would be so much easier. Jessie had neither seen nor heard from Jolene in nearly six years. How could she possibly care one way or another?
Toxine had urged her to speak with both of her parents. “You know,” she said, “you may be leaving them forever. You need to say your goodbyes.”
Jessie didn’t know Toxine’s real world name, only that she lived in Montreal; but she trusted the older girl unquestioningly. Toxine was at Masters Level and had taken Gretel on as her protégé, helping her through the tough exam preparation. The Sweetland sim was as close to the real thing as a sim could come, and with the new citspec mods, you could smell the odors and feel the ground beneath your feet as though it was some solid, real thing. Even the claws of the vircat ripping through her shoulder left a lingering discomfort; not pain, exactly, but more like the scratchy stinging that comes when you reach barehanded through a blackberry bramble. Most sims had yet to be programmed for the new mods, but it was only a matter of time before almost every sim on the grid would be hyper-sensed.
Pox Americano, Toxine’s younger brother, claimed to have worked on the Sweetland sim, but Jessie didn’t know whether to believe him or not. She thought he might be a bit of a braggart. “You should try the glitch sex script I wrote for the Sweetland sim, cherie,” he had said earlier in the day in his cute Quebecois accent, and she laughed at him.
“I suppose you want to try it out with me?”
“You know, as the designer, I could show you how to get the most out of it.”
“A product demonstration. How romantic,” she replied, laughing. “Well, it so happens that I plan to remain a virgin until I marry.”
“You are a virgin?” He pretended astonishment. “What a pity.”
Jessie shook herself out of an evolving fantasy. Dinner. Homework. She had a bunch of homework for her immigration classes. Hormones would have to wait.
—
“Jessie,” Dad called from the living room, “please take out the recycling.”
“In a minute.” She shut down the grid and waited for his objection. It came like lightning.
“Now.”
Recycling as the Titanic is going down was how she thought of it. When you are drowning, why the hell are you taking time to sort the garbage? But in reality she knew her futile resistance was a habit from childhood when occasionally she got out of some onerous task or another. No more. And yet she couldn’t help herself. “You have a stubborn gene,” Grandma Amy used to say. “Got it from your Grandpa.”
Jessie sighed and marched to the kitchen with heavy feet to the nook where the recycling containers spilled over onto the floor. She rounded up the stray cartons and bottles and fitted them into the bins as best she could, leaving a scattered few behind. Then she carried them down the hall to the back door. The grimy door to the alley stairway was reinforced with thick steel plates, and the lock disengaged with a heavy thunk as she turned the knob. She dragged the bins out onto the landing.
The mist that had been falling earlier in the day had subsided, and the Portland sky showed signs of clearing. The alley was wet, and standing pools of rainwater filled the depressions in the aging pavement. From the shadows came a voice she recognized, but the words were muddled and incoherent. She heard a rustling sound at the garbage dumpster. If not for the familiar mumbling cadence, Jessie might have thought rats were scuttling through the dumpster. She stopped at the top of the stairs so she wouldn’t frighten him. “Alan,” she called, “are you hungry?”
“Jessie,” came the pleading reply, “I’m looking for something to eat. You got something for me to eat?”
She still couldn’t see him, but the edge of his cart protruded from behind the fence that shielded the dumpster from the street. She set the recycling bins down at the foot of the steps. “If you’ll put these bins out for me, I’ll go get something for you.”
She returned to the apartment and tiptoed back into the kitchen. Dad was oblivious on the couch. She worried about him. Nearly every evening, he came home and fell asleep or stared off into space. He might as well be a gridhead. At least on the grid, you could learn things and interact with people.
She opened the fridge quietly. She couldn’t let Dad know about Alan. She had promised. He was one of Joe’s old school buddies. She had met him for the first time when when she was eight, shortly before he had joined the army and gone to fight in Africa. He had come over several times that year, and he had seemed to the little girl a kind, easy-going, witty young man. He always stayed late in those days, talking into the night with Joe, Frank and Amy. They would argue about capitalism and the wars and whether it was better to work inside the system or out, whether or not joining the military was morally defensible. Amy attempted to dissuade Alan from signing up, arguing that war is never ethically defensible, but Alan insisted that his options were limited.
“What am I going to do if I don’t join up. I got no work. I got no skills. I got no education. The army will pay for college.”
“It’s a chimera, Alan,” Amy said, prophetically. “I’ve seen those kids who come back. They’re too damaged to go to school.”
In the end Amy lost the argument and Alan shipped out to Azania. Then one day about six months ago he had shown up again at their door while Joe was working. Alan had lost all of his quick-witted charm, and seemed dull and confused. “I been out of work,” he had mumbled. “I thought maybe Joe could help me…it’s all a mistake. I don’t want Joe to see me like this. Please don’t tell him, Jess. I should never have come here. Promise me.”
Jessie had promised. It had been easy at the time, because she had a secret too. She had been skipping school, and it was a whole lot easier to just forget the whole thing than face getting caught. Then a month later she had seen Alan again in the alley, rummaging through the dumpster, and she offered him some food. She suspected that Alan was schizophrenic and maybe mentally impaired, but he seemed harmless enough. He began coming around on recycle days, and Jessie had taken to feeding him leftovers, if they had them, heating them in the fred. Sometimes she would take him a new carton of beans or a peanut butter sandwich. Then they would sit on the bottom step and talk while he ate.
Today there were leftovers, and Jessie heated the sautéed veggies with tofu on brown rice, careful to remove it before the fred’s alarm sounded. It was some disgusting pre-packaged dinner, therefore uneaten. She was well aware of the irony—that the world was starving. that her friend Alan was malnourished, that there were days at the end of every month when she and her dad went without, and yet she could still be spoiled and picky.
“Got a nice hot dinner for you tonight, Alan,” she said as she descended the stairs. She noticed that the recycle bins were still at the bottom of the steps where she left them. She would have to remind him.
“Alan.” Why didn’t he answer? Had he moved on down the alley?
“Just put it on the step, Jessie.” The voice came from behind the dumpster. “I’ll get it in a minute.”
Something was wrong. Alan didn’t just come around to eat. His loneliness was as acute as his hunger. If he hadn’t told her as much, she could see it in his face, hear it in his attempts to hold her attention. Many nights she awkwardly found herself interrupting him, saying, “Goodnight, Alan. Dad’s going to get worried about me.”
She put the dinner on the step and picked up one of the bins, carrying it around to the pick-up area. Alan stood in the shadows, unmoving, except for his hand, which he instantly raised to cover his face. But not before she caught sight of the split eyelid and swollen, mangled lip. One side of his face bore a huge purple bruise.
“Alan, what happened to you?”
“I don’t want you to see me like this, Jessie. I don’t want to scare you.”
“What happened to you, Alan?”
“Some fucking gestapos beat me up. They kicked me in the face. They said that I was sleeping in their place. But I been sleeping there, Jessie. I been sleeping there since summer, fucking bastards.” Alan punched a fist in the air above his head, staring wildly at some phantom opponent. His voice was intense, but barely above a whisper. “Who had a fucking election and elected you fucking assholes dictator of the fucking planet? I didn’t have no chance. The bastards come down on me like a fucking blitzkrieg from the USA fucking air force. Like I was some fucking peasant in fucking Afghanistan or something. Jesus Christ, take me to Sweetland. Jesus Christ.”
Jessie stepped back. She had never seen him so angry before. “Take it easy, Alan,” she croaked weakly. He wrapped his arms around his torso and said, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,” over and over, rocking on his heels until the rhythm of his mantra seemed to calm him.
Finally, Jessie extended her hand. “Come. Dinner’s getting cold.”
He refused to take her hand, but he followed her to the back steps. She brushed away the flies and pushed the plate at him. He grabbed it and began shoveling the now-cold food into his mouth, wincing at the pain from his injured face. She made a few attempts at conversation, but he stared down the alley blankly, his eyes glazed.
Then he vomited. The dinner he had just eaten spewed over the apartment stairs, mixed with blood and reeking of alcohol. “God, Alan,” she said, “you need to get some medical help.”
“No, no. Leeches won’t help me. They use leeches. Suck your blood dry. That’s what they do. They suck you until you’re dead. Fucking hospitals. Fucking doctors. Just wanna go to Sweetland. Can you help me go to Sweetland, Jessie?” His eyes were glassed over in a teary film.
“Alan, let me talk to Dad—you need help.”
“No, Jessie. Don’t tell Joe I been here. You promised. Remember.”
Jessie’s stomach knotted, and she was becoming nauseous from the stench. Think. What can you do? Her own eyes were tearing now. Take some time to think this out.
“Wait here, Alan,” she said. “I won’t tell Dad. I gotta go get a mop to clean up this mess. I’ll figure out something.” She ran up the stairs to the building’s custodial closet on the second floor and grabbed a bucket and mop. As she filled the bucket, her mind raced. How can I convince Alan to find help? Is that free clinic on Burnside still there?
She dragged the bucket back down the hall to the rear door and pushed it open. Alan was nowhere in sight. She left the bucket and bounded down the stairs. “Alan,” she called. She looked into the dumpster cage, then ran down the alley to the street, searching for his cart, calling his name. He had vanished.
—
Jessie ate dinner in her room, picking listlessly at her food, Alan foremost on her mind. Dad would know what to do, but she had promised. Alan didn’t want Joe, his old school friend, to know what had become of him. Don’t be ashamed of mental illness, she wanted to tell him. But it would do no good.
Then there were the goodbyes to come: Jolene, Mel, maybe Dad. What would she do about Dad? Pushing her food aside, she lay face down on her bed, clutching her pillow tightly to her chest. The sound of a drum circle drifting in from St. Francis Park seeped through her cracked window, comforting her. She tried to remember the first time she heard the drums—maybe last year, maybe before. At some point the rhythm became a nightly event. Whenever the drumming faded, other drums in the distance called back, saying, “You aren’t alone. We’re here with you.”
Her thoughts took her to school, real world school, pit school, where she hadn’t been since early September. She didn’t want to return, it felt like going to a foreign country, but she had to say goodbye to Mel. Melissa Monroe had been her best friend in eighth grade, and over the summer Mel had lived off-grid in Eugene with her father. Jessie felt as though she had abandoned Mel. Something about the whole Sweetland thing had made her withdraw from her old friends; the decision had been too monumental, too life-changing, too sudden and unexplainable. Now she felt guilty. If school seemed like a major distance, how could she measure the journey she was about to undertake? The enormity of her decision once again overwhelmed her, and she couldn’t think any longer about the life she would leave behind—about the possibility that her father might be lost to her. Instead, she closed her eyes and lulled herself with the drumming, until she drifted off to sleep.
—
She could have made the call silently from her room, but it never really seemed private with Dad in the apartment, so she slipped quietly away to the downtown library. She biked across the Morrison Bridge, stopping at the top to survey the barren landscape—it was one of her rituals. She remembered when the city had been part of a vast urban forest; when everything greened in early spring, the dogwoods and cherry trees blooming, Dad walking her to school along sidewalks covered in a magic carpet of pink and white petals; and later, as summer approached, the bumblebees emerging from their earthen hives to swarm around the lavender and rosemary Grandma Amy planted in the front yard, everything smelling so wonderful. This time of year, mid-October, the leaves would begin to drop, and there were so many leaves that the city sent out trucks to help residents clear the streets so that the drains wouldn’t clog and cause flooding when the rains came. Mountains of leaves by the curbs, smelling sweetly of decay.
The first die-off came when she was seven. Dutch elm disease, spread by elm bark beetles, left dying trees throughout the city. A few years later, the city’s black walnuts had mostly died, destroyed by a twig beetle which carried the spores of a deadly fungus. By that time the bees were gone. And the cherry trees. The die-offs continued throughout her young life, the horse chestnuts and oaks and more exotic, imported trees first, then the evergreens. Now there were only patches of trees left on the west hills and some higher elevations, like the Alameda ridge and Mount Tabor. Forest Park had been decimated. The path of destruction left a massive scar where the big fire had traveled up through the hills to the park, turning posh houses and everything else in its path into embers. Now, the West Hills were beginning to green again—from invasive ivy, which competed with thickets of newly immigrated kudzu, strangling anything in their paths. Only the native willows and dogwoods survived in abundance, spontaneously springing up in the alleys and along the river, like weeds. If anything will survive, she thought, it will be the grass and the dogwoods.
At the library she found a quiet corner and put on her citspecs, transluced, set the visuals to real world, and opened a comlink to her mother.
“Hello?” replied a strange voice. Jessie panicked, nearly shutting down the connection. The voice repeated, “Hello?”
“Mom?” Jessie’s voice tentative, barely audible.
“You have the wrong party,” the woman said.
“Mom,” Jessie repeated, a little louder. “It’s Jessie.”
“Jessie? Jessie? How did you get my number?” Was that all her mom had to say after so many years?
“I’m sorry,” Jessie said, “I think I made a mistake.”
She was ready to cut the link, when Jolene said, “Jessie, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. I just wanted to say goodbye.”
“Jessie, what are you talking about?” Her mother’s voice had an edge of panic. She would need to explain.
“Mom, I’m not going to off myself or something. I’m leaving, and I thought you should know.” Jessie felt six years of anger and confusion bubbling to the surface.
“Jessie, what do you mean? You aren’t making any sense.”
“Mom.” She raised her voice, almost hysterical. “Six years. Six fucking years. I cried the first two, every single night. And then, I just got pissed. And now I just want to frigging say good bye.” I will not cry, she told herself. I will not cry.
“Well, I can see your father taught you how to swear just like him.” Jolene was cold. “So, where are you going?”
“You won’t understand,” Jessie snapped. She remembered her surroundings; looks of disapproval penetrated the thick air, and she glared back in defiance. Go ahead, get the gestapo.
“Try me,” challenged Jolene.
“I’m going to Sweetland.”
Through a long silence, Jessie could hear her mother breathing on the other end. Finally, “What did you say?”
“I said Sweetland, Mom. I’m going to Sweetland. And I told you that you wouldn’t understand. I just had to hear your voice before I left.”
“Sweetland. But what is Sweetland?” Jolene’s tone had changed, softened, became the sound of a mother suddenly interested in her daughter’s life.
How was she going to explain Sweetland?
“It’s a place—there’s a community in the forest,” she said. She left out the part about the two moons. “It’s a kind of environmental community. There’s no grid or any way to stay in contact with—” She almost said the Earth, but thought better of it. “—with you.”
“Is this your dad’s idea?” Jolene queried.
“Not exactly. I learned about it on New Life.”
“You have a New Life account?”
“Of course,” she said. “All the kids have one.”
“Why don’t we do lunch or something, and you can tell me more.”
Sweetness and concern. Jessie was confused. Why was Jolene making nice all of a sudden? “After six years, just like that, you want to have lunch?”
“Isn’t that why you called? To say goodbye.”
“Sure, I guess. I’m Gretel deVoid. You can message me inworld.”
“Okay, I’ll do that. My handle is Su Ato2. Thanks for calling, sweetheart. Talk to you soon.”
Silence. Jolene had discon’d.
Jolene
Jolene Cheng disengaged from the grid and cried. After one minute and twenty-three seconds, she determined that an appropriate amount of time had passed, and abruptly ceased. Not that she watched the clock, or anything so crass as that. She did have feelings. It was precisely because she had feelings that she had maintained complete distance from her daughter. Her responsibilities were too great. She was far too important to the firm to be distracted by sentimentality.
She went to the kitchen and poured the morning’s second cup of coffee. She didn’t need this. She really didn’t. But the kid said she was going to Sweetland. This could be important. It didn’t surprise her that Jessie would be involved in this Bolivarian shit. She was Amy and Frank Larivee’s grandchild, after all. And Joe, the spineless bastard, was no different, deep down beneath that quivering surface. He was weak, was all. But her ex be damned.
What Jolene wanted to know, what the Anti-Terrorism Office wanted to know: just what the hell is Sweetland? For the last six months a cloud of lies and misinformation had descended on the grid, on New Life –a cloud so thick, it reeked of black ops. It didn’t help that the corporate world had moved in and co-opted it, adding a whole new layer of obfuscation. Something was up. Something big. It could be theirs, it could be ours, but it was big. She would get to the bottom of it, one way or another.
She just didn’t need any emotional garbage screwing up her investigation.
©2008–2011 by Duane Poncy
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