Before his flight to Earth, they had warned Jonathan about the “gangs.” Even at the Stamford Station where his shuttle had docked, even on the bullet train that spirited him north past brick apartment buildings and houses with gables and turrets, manicured lawns, circular drives, bay windows, even past the shorefront homes of South Norwalk with sailboats parked on the sand or tethered to metal docks fashioned to look as though they were made out of peeling wood, made to look as though they had been there forever, past the kayaks and the fountains and the parks populated by poplars and willow trees, they warned him about the gangs. The admonitions were grave and ominous every time they issued from someone’s mouth, but the closer he came to the frontier, the grimmer the admonition. Their crimes, their violence, their predilections grew more and more specific, the anecdotes spawning increasingly specific limbs until Jonathan was made to believe that he could discern the very contours of the lusus naturae waiting for him in New Haven. People who knew people he knew offered their numbers and their contacts, so that once Jonathan arrived, he could pass word of his safe landing. The land was red and burning where he was headed, and if he were not careful, he’d burn too.
He had thanked each and every Cassandra, noted that he would heed their advice, but inwardly, he was grinning. He was shaking his head and grinning. Among the things they didn’t know was the sheer strength of Jonathan’s thirst for shadow country, the fact that he had wanted to build something ever since the first dreams of returning to Earth had entered his head, that he had spent nearly every waking moment dissecting his plan, putting it back together, testing the foundation and the buttresses and the supports, making sure the electricity worked and that the plumbing was done with a strong enough piping. And gangs. The invariably white folk who cautioned Jonathan against youthful bravado, against infantile nonchalance, knew that gangs existed, which is to say they knew as much as anybody did about gangs, which is to say they knew nothing.
They said gang, and he knew they meant Black. They said thugs, and he knew they meant the n-word.
There were a lot of empty factories in New Haven, which is saying nothing, as Jonathan knew there were a lot of empty factories everywhere in America. When he was a child, those relatives still on Earth, old enough to be dug in at the roots and either too infirm or too set in their ways to make the pilgrimage to the Colonies, would send transmission after transmission to regale their grandson, grandnephew, old friend’s child, of places like the Rust Belt. It sounded to Jonathan like a stylish thing wrapped around the waist of a skinny guy with dark and mysterious inclinations, an aura of enticing hurt, the kind of guy Jonathan would want to fix by fucking.
Jonathan’s bees sprouted from his hair, buzzed around his head recording the landscape’s deterioration. The images beamed, as soon as they were taken, to David’s Cloud back on the Colony, a little delayed due to spotty connection.
Stories of the radiation had made their way to the Colonies and even still with the documentation, with the filtered photos on everyone’s ’grams and with the news updates and with the video taken by people on their way out, the whole thing had acquired an air of myth. It had always been something that had happened to someone else. The truth was that Jonathan knew no one still on Earth, knew no one who had stayed or had been forced to stay, and he saw it as a deficiency. Life was truly lived here, where it was at stake. The forests were bright green and, as he approached the terminus of the train line, bright red, a vibrancy nowhere to be found in space, where everything was a different shade of gray, where every panel and every pathway was drained of color and only the bricks that came imported from Earth seemed to bear any trace of having had a full and exacting life.
Jonathan collected his bags from the train’s undercarriage, then hailed a small personal transport, room for one, that took him past the Protected Zone and into some of the forest outside of Fairfield County. Prior to his departure, they’d made him print out all of his documents and when, now, his comms fritzed with static and his ’gram shots took longer than usual to make their way online, he saw why. The Soviet insistence on printing everything in quintuplet, and the months and months of phone calls and emails prior, had been meant to reassure the authorities on the Colonies that he was no longer their ward. The umbilical cords linking Earth and the Colonies had been snapped. You came here wanting to be forgotten, wearing the odor of an outlaw. The mindset up in the stars was that anyone returning, unless they were seeking to gather family, had nothing left on the Colonies, no reason to enjoy the banal comforts and the safety of the Space Station. If you were leaving, it was because you had been defeated.
There were no more pioneers left in space.
Bridgeport Harbor was now in their rearview. The bees buzzing around Jonathan’s hair beamed into his braincase information about the industrial husks that floated by: St. Vincent’s Medical Center, which, once upon a time, had been the city’s biggest employer; People’s United Bank; University of Bridgeport; Housatonic Community College; the Derecktor Shipyards. Wikis on each of the landmarks bookmarked themselves in Jonathan’s braincase, and as soon as he scanned them, they vanished into a folder waiting to be trashed. He chuckled and, under a ’gram he snapped of a row of two-story project housing, he murmured a caption in a newscaster’s voice: “And here we have Bridgeport, Connecticut, world leader in abandoned buildings, shattered glass, and gas stations without pumps. Come here to see boarded-up windows and wild dogs like no other.” Except the dogs here were larger than they were supposed to be and mixed in with all of the industrial decay was a wrongly colored forest, retaking control of the city.
They passed the Ballpark at Harbor Yard where the Bridgeport Bluefish used to play and, before long, they took the off-ramp that put them on Whitney Avenue in New Haven.
Jonathan put his palm to the cabbie’s scanner, then pulled it away, frowning, when he saw how much he’d been charged. But before he could complain, the maglev transport was stopped and his luggage was out on the street corner and he’d fumbled for his air mask, barely getting it on before the cab whirled around and sped down a side street, winding its way back onto the Interstate.
Across the street from Jonathan, on a sidewalk torn to pieces by weeds and renegade tree roots, stood what might have once been called a wild boar. This one, however, more resembled a demigod. On four legs, it rose as high as Jonathan’s chest, poked at the air before it with a snout longer than it was supposed to be. The spiny bristles ran along its back like hypodermic needles, and its pointed ears wagged to full mast then back down. The sun washed it in shades of ochre and gray. It stared at Jonathan with wild-eyed wonder. It was only after the thing had wandered away, on spindly, overlong legs, that Jonathan realized his own strangeness, the air mask affixed to his face still a foreign object and he very much a stranger in a strange land.
* * *
“NAME something that follows the word ‘pork.’” Michael sounded like he was pushing the demo-truck rather than driving it.
“Loin,” Linc said.
The truck groaned. The neighborhood was quiet, exactly how it’d sound if there were no neighbors in it. “Gimme another one.”
“Chop.”
“Brother, you hungry or something?”
“Belly. Pork belly.”
“Okay, after this house we’ll hit the bodega.” Silence. “You got another one for me?”
Linc thought. “Cupine.”
Quietus. “What?”
“Tell me that ain’t an answer,” Linc shot back.
Michael chuckling. “Pork. Cupine.” His seat began to shake. “Cu…” The rest was choked in a fit of laughter. “Cupine.” Convulsions rocked the cab of the truck. “HWHAT?” Thunderclaps of laughter. “HHWHATT? Is CUPINE?” The truck swerved, Michael laughed so hard.
“Damn, nigga.”
Copyright © 2021 by Tochi Onyebuchi
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