Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

Genres: Literary Fiction; Apocalyptic; Dystopian

Synopsis

From the author of the critically acclaimed literary SF novels Spaceman Blues and Liberation comes an incandescent and thrilling post-apocalyptic tale in the vein of 1984 or The Road.

In the not-distant-enough future, a man takes a boat trip up the Susquehanna River with his most trusted friend, intent on reuniting with his son. But the man is pursued by an army, and his own harrowing past; and the familiar American landscape has been savaged by war and climate change until it is nearly unrecognizable.

Lost Everything is a stunning novel about family and faith, what we are afraid may come to be, and how to wring hope from hopelessness.

Lost Everything is the winner of the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: April 10, 2012

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 304

Sample

The River


THEY SET THE CRATE in the belly of the boat, pointed the bow south, and floated on the thick current, under the broken arches of the bridges. Passed City Island, the flooded marina. The stadium overgrown with trees and split by shells. The baseball field now a cratered forest. Depressions filled with water from the rain, the river pushing out of the ground, flooding the roots of monumental maples. The whole place, the whole city, going under, for too much at last had been asked of it.
Reverend Bauxite looked away, then forced himself to look back. Smacked his lips and pulled a pipe from his jacket. Packed it with bits of dried apple, scraps of tobacco. He had not lit it in fifteen months. He missed the smoke, but the smell and taste of it were still there, a tang in his mouth. The feel of the bone against his teeth and tongue, and he was in his rectory again, years ago. The stained brick, the stone stairs. The dusty scent in the hallway, a hint of impending mildew. He could never figure out where it came from. In his office, blue carpeting, white linen curtains for the bay window. He was leaning against his desk, his fingers following the deep scratches in the top. Talia sat in a faded pink wingback chair, legs crossed, examining her nails. Speaking to him in a singsong voice, a lilt of minor thirds. Reverend, she said, your parishioners, myself included, think you should do more services around Lent. She was in the third row on the aisle every Sunday, fixed her eyes on him from the first word of his sermon to the last, closed her eyes when she sang. Always looked at him as if she already knew a truth that would take him years to discover.
The war was so distant from him then. Reports of small calamities from people moving north on the river. There's been some blood down there, they'd say. A couple towns burned in Georgia, North Carolina. Outside the rectory, they were celebrating the end of the monsoon. Boys beating on boxes and trash cans. Sixteen of the people in the choir singing and clapping their hands. A small mob in the street, shaking and shuffling, just glad for the sun. The church rising behind them, straight and serene. The light falling all over the city, taking the water away. It rose in columns of steam, as if Harrisburg was on fire, but when the mist dispersed, the city was still whole. That day, it was possible to imagine it always would be. For the city was weathered and sparking, a place of chipped houses on narrow streets, and you could read on its face what it had seen. During the Civil War, it saw soldiers and munitions heading south on the trains, corpses heading north, while young men trained for more slaughter in a camp on the edge of town, parading with bayonets before rows of white tents, as if they thought the war would be orderly. During the Cold War, it got a small dose of what everyone else was so afraid of. Not an explosion, but a meltdown, emptying the streets and houses, the people thinking about giving up on the place. But they didn't, not yet. Once, before Reverend Bauxite was born, even before the rivers rose and the trees came to swallow everything, when the last factories were not quite dead and the capital was still the capital, Pennsylvania still Pennsylvania, old men in wool jackets smoked in the bars of hotels with wrought-iron porches. On a sunny summer evening the streets teemed with people. A handsome couple rode in a red convertible with whitewall tires, a cooler of beer hanging open in the backseat. On a night of torrential rain, a slack teenager with long oily hair served Middle Eastern food to three out-of-towners, who could not keep a straight face at the things he said. Is the food any good? Because I've never eaten here. Here—bringing some fruit on a platter at the end of the meal—he told me to give these to you. The out-of-towners talked about him for years afterward, wrote it down in their diaries, and it fixed the city in their minds. Kept it alive for as long as they were, and after they were gone. Had the Confederate army come to Harrisburg instead of Gettysburg, had Three Mile Island been worse, Harrisburg might have died sooner, and I would not be able to tell you anything about it. It is gone now, and my memory of it, from before the war, before everything else, is all I have. If I had known when I was there that it would be gone so soon—if I had known all that was coming—I would have tried harder to remember more. To write it down then, instead of now, when I have forgotten so much.
They drifted past the islands off Steelton, under the broken span of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Rounded the bend in the river near the blasted runway of the airport, Sunny Jim steering in the back. The destruction all seemed remote from them. Reverend Bauxite was always seeing it, the world without the war. Had to believe it would end, for all things passed, did they not, save one? On the land were burnt houses, the remains of firefights. Women kneeling in the street before a relative, bleeding away. Scorched trees, black vines, hanging over the current on the shore. Dogs in the leafy darkness at night. And in the river, fish hovered, water striders rode the surface. Herons stalked the shallows. As if the war had never begun.
Reverend Bauxite had seen it even the night Aline left. All along the Harrisburg shore, human screams and the roar of explosions. The end of the world for them, an end in fire. But all around him, mayflies rose in the air, trout leapt to catch them before their flight. He waded into the water, lifted his arms, and the flow of the Susquehanna whispered around his calves. It flowed as the bridge fell into it. Flowed as it put the fires out. We put our dead into it, our dead and mountains of slag, and still it flowed, Reverend Bauxite thought. We dug tunnels beneath it and it broke its way in, filled them, and flowed. It could wash away anything in time, without hurry or judgment, as it did before we ever saw it, as it would when we could not see anymore. But he was not consoled.
Evening was falling into night by the time they reached Three Mile Island. The river, a thin skin over the drowned causeway. Plants pulling down the rusted fence at the periphery. The road in the facility cracked by grass and saplings. A huge pine had burst through the pavement and shot for the sky, half its head knocked off by an errant shell, but still alive. The cooling towers spilled over with vines that ran in veins down their hourglass sides. Once they had been the house of the angel of death, who spread its wings over the city, getting ready to sweep everything up into it. Now they were filling with soil that trees took root in, braiding their branches together, competing for light. The cries of animals echoed inside. Keening bats, chirping birds. The hoots of small mammals. Someday, Reverend Bauxite thought, the towers would fill up all the way, the vines would cover all of them. Or the soil would be too much for the concrete to bear, and the towers would crack in two, the earth rumble out. Turn this island into a hill. He could not decide if that would be the end of us or the beginning. The glimpse of a revelation.
They lay down to sleep in the towers' shadows, in a rusting trailer crawling with honeysuckle. A single copper cable, insulated with green plastic, jumped from a hole in the side, slithered into the river. Inside the trailer, two bunks, a big blue phone. A plastic bag with three changes of clothes. They had been moving ever since the resistance lost Harrisburg and the occupying army moved in. No more than two nights in any one place, stringing up a pirated telephone line in twenty minutes that could be taken down in ten. Floors of wet concrete, warping walls losing their plaster, spun with jagged cracks. They stared at the water damage, squinting their eyes. Played a game with each other that they used to play with Aaron. It looks like a big maple, Reverend Bauxite said. No, like a bunch of lightning bolts, said Sunny Jim. Like an old hairbrush. Like a dried-out spider. Both of them missed the boy so much, though the games brought him closer. Then Sunny Jim slept. Almost every night, Reverend Bauxite lay awake for too long after that, returning to the day his church fell. He had been outside when it happened, saw three holes appear in the tiled roof, a fourth in the wall. Heard the incoming whines of artillery a beat later. Then a bright light from within, a tremulous roar, and the church folded in on itself, became a pile of burning stone. There were forty-eight people in there, his parishioners, who had come to him for refuge. He did not know how to get them out.
When he had celebrated with his congregation before the war, their voices had multiplied on the ceiling in song. The echo when they were finished never sounded like dying, only like the sound was moving away from them, out into the world. Their voices must be moving still, Reverend Bauxite thought. Understood that believing in their persistence was a matter of faith. But he still longed to see his people, to know that they had lifted themselves from the fire. He had asked his God to grant him this, even though it meant that his faith was wavering. That he was not as strong a vessel as he wanted to be.
The toes of animals tapped on the metal roof in the dark. You should go get your boy, Jim, Reverend Bauxite wanted to say. Aline is not coming back. But Sunny Jim was asleep then, listening only for her.
* * *
REVEREND BAUXITE MET ALINE two months before the front came to Harrisburg. A meeting in the capitol building, with the mayor, several clergy, and four resistance leaders talking about what had happened in Baltimore. Horror stories. A vision of hell, Biblical violence, a village burned to nothing, people suffering an angry God's wrath. Brother will betray brother to death, Reverend Bauxite thought, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next. For truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes. Gray light poured through the windows. The pulsing wind rattled at a crack in the glass. The light bulbs in the ceiling had burned out long ago. After the speeches, Aline came over to Bauxite, smiling her sideways smile, her hand extended. Her palm a pad of callus. Something sharp embedded in the skin, a stone, an erratic jewel of shrapnel. She did not even know it was there.
"The war's coming this way," Aline had said. "You planning on taking a side, Father?"
"I'm on the Lord's side."
"And what side's He on?"
"The one that helps those who suffer, and causes the least of the suffering."
"And where was He in Baltimore?"
"I told you I'm on His side. I don't pretend to know His mind."
"You're making God sound like my husband."
Sunny Jim seemed half gone already when Reverend Bauxite met him, a stained photograph of another man. Said little. Never made eye contact. His thin fingers working. Reverend Bauxite thought maybe he was sick. Then he met the three of them together—Aline, Jim, and their boy—and understood. Aline and Aaron, flush with color. Aline's big voice, Aaron's shout. A spindly kid hopping up the stoop on one foot, jumping back down in a single leap. A run at the telephone pole to shimmy up it. He could bite electrical wire in half, Reverend Bauxite thought, send off sparks and swing out over the rooftop. Aline laughed, her elbow resting on the butt of a machine gun. Then Sunny Jim smiled and Reverend Bauxite saw it, a ray of warmth passing from husband to wife, father to son. Sunny Jim drew it from somewhere else, took just enough to keep him here, gave the rest to them. Did not mind the cold that came after.
"That's why I'm here," Sunny Jim had said. "I don't care who wins the war. I just want it to end. I just want to get them through it."
"And then what?" Reverend Bauxite had said.
"Does it matter? As long as I'm with them?"
They split a bottle of bitter whiskey that night in the kitchen of a brick house near the shell of an old factory. A candle on the table, the flame burning low and slow. The smell of a fire outside seeping under the front door. Aline out. Aaron asleep in the dark room above them. The talk between the two men was easy and expansive. It was talk before wartime, but something else, too, the sense of a common soul between them so strong that, after only an hour or two, they were telling each other things they had never told anyone. Sunny Jim had been looking for the man to replace him if the bullet, the shell, came for him, knew they were both staying out of the fight. Decided there was no time to waste.
"You'll take care of my boy with me?" he said.
"Of course," Reverend Bauxite said.
"Until Aline can do it?"
"Yes. I promise."
Two days before the war came to Harrisburg, the resistance was massing weapons in the street in front of the church. Stacks of rifles, jumbled boxes of ammunition. The guerrillas working in eerie quiet. All thinking of the noise to come. Of crouching in a ditch while the earth exploded. Clothes wet with blood, urine, gastric fluid. Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim stood on the steps with Aaron. The boy wanted to carry one of the rifles, wanted to know how to shoot one. Sunny Jim's hands were on his shoulders, fingers tight.
"I don't want any part of this," Sunny Jim said.
"Me neither," Reverend Bauxite said.
But then the church fell, and Reverend Bauxite found Sunny Jim and Aaron in a slumping apartment on Agate Street. The son playing with a yo-yo that the father made from a spool. The father watching the street for violence. Reverend Bauxite gray with ash, on his face and hands, worked into his clothes.
"They knocked my church down," he said.
"Sit," Sunny Jim said. Shook his head. Thought for a few minutes without moving, because he did not want to lose this man. Could not afford to.
"I guess you have to do something about it," he said.
"Yes," Reverend Bauxite said. "If only to end the fighting sooner."
"I understand." Then: "No guns," he said. "There are enough already."
But there was so much else to do. Engineering and sabotage. Said they were there to install a generator, robbed power from battalions. Clipped cables. Filled frequencies with noise. Kept lines open for guerrillas huddled in apartments carpeted with shattered glass, rifles angling from empty window frames chipped by enemy fire. Listened on headphones so Sunny Jim could hear Aline's voice, know she was alive. They worked in the day amid fires, the rush of falling shells, rising smoke. At night, under the stripes of tracers, pink arcs of flares. They always took Aaron with them. Kept him where they could see him. We need to keep him safe, they kept telling each other. But even Grendel Jones, their commander, noticed how the boy seemed to be good luck, how the fighting never touched him, like a blind giant groping for a wily insect.
"The war can't find that kid," Grendel Jones told Sunny Jim one night. "Won't find you or the priest either, as long as you're with him." She did not finish the thought out loud, how Aline would have to fend for herself. For Sunny Jim would never take his son to the front's annihilating edge, and Aline would almost never leave it. There was so much about Aline that Grendel Jones could not understand. Why, when the fighting started, a spark lit inside her. Why she had a family. Why her family wanted her. She could not see into that, or get Sunny Jim to explain. So she never learned how Sunny Jim and Aline had pulled each other through and away from the leanest years of their lives. How, when the war came and everyone else panicked, they looked at each other and nodded, recognized the shapes of their own pasts in the face of the war's violence, knew what it was, even as it began to pull them apart.
Perhaps that was why the boy was the charm he was. He was the best of both of them. He warded off the mayhem, just by breathing, that his parents had taken years to learn how to survive. Aaron, Sunny Jim, and Reverend Bauxite had shacked up one night in a burned-out apartment building near the state capitol, moved out at dawn. That afternoon, a flurry of mortars leveled the building. A firefight broke out on a busy street only twenty minutes after Aaron left it, killed forty-seven people, too many of them children, but left him unharmed. The boy played amid cracking masonry while his father strung wire to a satellite dish on a factory roof. Sat in the bottom of the boat when they crossed the river. Slept through bombing raids and firefights, woke up hours later, blinking and yawning. He did not know what power he had.
Didn't, until six months ago on North Second Street. There had been a market there in full bloom, vegetables and animals amok. The sweetness of picked fruit, sourness of butchered flesh, tang of hay, flowing together in the air. Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim passing through, cable slung from Jim's hip. Aaron zigging and zagging, curb to curb. Then a shell, a bomb—they argued later, for they never went back—and everything was quiet but for the moaning. They were far enough away to only be thrown, knocked down. By the time Reverend Bauxite could see, Sunny Jim was already cradling his son, a dirty hand over the boy's eyes.
"Dad, come on, let me see."
"No. No."
Soot was snowing on a wide wound in the pavement. The skin of people blown back and away. A slurry of blood and dirt. A knee on the sidewalk, disconnected from everything else, a scrap of denim wrapped around it.
"We have to get Aaron out of this place," Sunny Jim said.
"Where can he go?" Reverend Bauxite said.
"My sister'll take him."
"Your sister can protect him?"
Sunny Jim just looked at him. Ended the discussion. Reverend Bauxite acquiesced, and Sunny Jim sent the word up the highway to Lisle, thirty miles over the border into New York. Merry was there within two days for the boy.
"We won't be able to talk," she said. "Just come and get him when you're ready." They turned to go, but not before Aaron hugged both men. It was then that Reverend Bauxite understood how the past few weeks had changed him, how the duty Sunny Jim had given him had become a mission. He thought he had begun to see a tiny fragment of God's plan in the boy, let himself hope that maybe there was one, even if he could not say what it was. Aaron had given him some of his church back, and now he was losing it again.
Merry and Aaron were gone before Aline returned. The mother railed when she found out, screamed for three hours.
"How could you leave him with her?" she said.
"The reverend and I talked about it. It's the best we could do."
"The reverend is not his mother. I am. You should have asked me first."
He glared at her. You should have been around to be asked. Why the hell are you doing this, anyway? When Aaron was born, when the war began, he'd thought that both their fighting years were done. She'd known all along that only his were. He was so angry at her for that, yet still loved her so much. The two were chained together. Then: "You're right. I'm sorry," he said. The apology offered only because it did not matter anymore—Aaron had been sent away, and there was no getting him back unless they went for him themselves—and Aline knew it. What Sunny Jim said next, he would regret for the rest of his life, for it was as if he had been given powers of prophecy for that moment and failed to see it, could not hear his own message.
"We'll go and get Aaron when you and the war are done with each other," he said.
And since the Market Street Bridge, since Aline left, Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim had been having the same conversation in their heads again and again.
We should go get your boy.
No. I have to wait until she comes back. Then we'll go get Aaron together.
She's not coming back.
Yes she is.
How do you know?
I just know.
Nothing of it spoken between them. They could read it on each other, their faces wrinkled pages. Words hiding in the folds of their clothes. She was made of letters then, as all of us are now. Here, in these words. Us and the city and the towns and river, and everything else, too. All that we know, and everything—everyone—we wish we knew.
* * *
ALONG THE RIVER, THE market was already coming back, growing up around the ruins of the day before. The singsong calls of vendors, the shrieks of birds, gutter talk of larger animals, goats, cows. A troop of monkeys patrolled the dark, dank aisles, turning wares in their hands. The occupying soldiers were off the ground, standing in the backs of jeeps, behind weapons of comical size. The vehicles verging on tipping over. Propaganda barking from a loudspeaker planted on the roof. We are a force of peace. It is the resistance that fights us. Sunny Jim was already watching the soldiers' eyes, was gone before Reverend Bauxite knew it. Sunny Jim's gift, he thought, was to become invisible, granted because there was so little keeping him here. He watched a soldier watching him, a woman with a ponytail sneaking out from under her helmet. The helmet too big, the jacket too small. The soldier turned to Reverend Bauxite, eyebrows raised. Seemed to see in him, then, all that he had done, for he was not like Sunny Jim. He was an open man, his passions playing in the air around him. The same thing that made him a fire, a beacon, in the pulpit, made him a failure at espionage. They should have left days ago, he thought. Gone north and found Aaron, then west, across all that land. The war could not have broken it all. They still could go, he thought. Change their clothes, their hair, their names, until Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim were just two more men who died somewhere back in all that fighting, and their new selves were free.
That night they hid in the last building standing on the block of Peffer and North Seventh, a red brick house that used to lean on its neighbors, but had nothing to lean on now. The stairs falling off the porch. Window frames angling with rain and gravity. A kitchen half-gutted by rot, a gas stove with no gas. Across North Seventh, the railroad tracks were torn up in twelve places. They could see the remains of the capitol from the roof, burned down again. They drew the place where the building's dome had been in the air with their fingers. They listened to the howling of monkeys in the houses near them, sirens from the other side of the bridge. There were alarms all over the city that night. Neither of them knew why.
Their phone rang again after midnight. Reverend Bauxite had his speech prepared. We can't do your work anymore. Aaron can't lose a father, too. But Grendel Jones's voice on the other end was small. Something has happened to the west and north of us, she said. No. Something is happening to the west and north.
"What do you mean?" Reverend Bauxite said.
"You won't believe me when I tell you," Grendel Jones said. She was right. Reverend Bauxite argued and shook his head. There must be some mistake. Nothing like that can be happening. Nothing.
"What are you talking about?" Sunny Jim said.
There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth, distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves, Reverend Bauxite thought. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.
"You won't believe me," Reverend Bauxite said.
But Jim believed every word. He stood there nodding and frowning. Aaron. My favorite boy. Why did I ever let you leave me?
"We can get on the highway now," he said. "Get there as fast as we can."
"No, we can't," Reverend Bauxite said. "The war is there. And the army is looking for you. They're looking for both of us."
All because of Aline. We never should have gotten involved.
We didn't have a choice, Jim. Not a real one. Not one that was right.
There is always a choice, and we chose.
"How are we going to do this, then?" Sunny Jim said.
Reverend Bauxite looked out the window, toward the Susquehanna. The long meandering stripe through the Pennsylvania hills that drowned the railroad track, spread into valleys. It could take them all the way to Scranton, ahead of the war, without the army ever seeing them. Maybe all the way to Binghamton. Lose a few days, but it was worth it if it meant staying invisible. They would get there just in time, before the storm hit. The Big One, Grendel Jones was already calling it. A storm as wide as the horizon. Maybe as wide as the sea.
"We could go up the river," he said.
"Nobody's going up the river now," Sunny Jim said.
"Someone must be."
"How do you know?"
"I don't," Reverend Bauxite said. "But someone has to be. Don't they?"
His faith again, shaking. He tried to keep his voice from doing the same.
* * *
DO YOU SEE? HOW the world is now? Nobody can say quite how it came to be this way. There is too much. There is not enough. It started generations ago, and so much has been lost, and even all that I found does not help. You wake up and the country is on fire, as far as you can see. How can you find the match that started it?
Our great-grandparents told our grandparents that things were different once, when they were children. A little colder. Simpler. Not as many people were dying. That the change was slow, slow enough to argue about it. A gradual, creeping shift. A field full of cars, grown over with grass and stalks of trees. The plants tipping the cars over, breaking them apart. A massacre three decades long. In West Virginia, we had leveled a green range of peaks into a gray waste, spotted with the rusting yellow metal of abandoned machinery. In Pennsylvania and New York, we had drilled for gas until the rock broke and the water went bad, and the towns that used to drink it died. We burned and we burned, until there was more smoke than fuel, and then things started to come apart. The roads breaking into rifts of jutting asphalt. Libraries with caved-in roofs, full of decaying books and dead monitors. We saw these things and yelled at each other. The system had been built on argument, believing that any problem could be fixed, explained, weaseled out of, with enough money, the right words. Until the problem was physics, and then there was only what we did and how the planet responded. It did not matter what we said after that, though we kept talking anyway. As if it was all we had.
There must have been a day, a single day, when it was too late, when we could not go back, but nobody can remember when it was. The storms started coming, more and more of them. A typhoon walloped in from the ocean, put an entire city underwater, and the water tore half the place down when it receded. Tornadoes swept across towns that could have lasted for centuries more, turned houses, fences, and cars into giant fields of shredded wood and metal strewn with the dead and everything they had loved. The bare trunks of dead trees that the wind had snapped in half and stripped of bark reached for the sky like scorched hands. The survivors staggered through the broken streets, stunned and shouting. Far away, there was news of entire countries flooded. Places where people had been for thousands of years, gone. In Richmond, Virginia, I found photographs in the basement of an apartment building showing a massive fleet of dilapidated ships arriving at a port, maybe in New Jersey, maybe Maryland. Maybe everywhere. Old cruise ships streaked with oil and smoke, tankers of rust, dropping sheets of corroded metal into the sea when they shuddered to a stop. Filled with people with clothes rotting off their backs. In those pictures, the seawalls our great-grandparents had put around the cities were still there. The ocean knocking on the door, about to let itself in. It took maybe seventy years. A growing beat, they say, of stronger and stronger storms, a long chain of hurricanes, until the walls gave way and the streets went under, buildings fell. Savannah. Atlantic City. A freak storm in Boston. A ragged swath carved out of New York. The remaining cities cringing with every change of season, every gathering of clouds, waiting for the Big One. A tide of survivors inland, looking for things that were not there. The government able to do less and less, until it was just men in frayed suits, arguing in buildings where the power kept going out, whose surroundings were turning back to swampland. The borders on the maps of America getting hazy, the names and the boundaries becoming lines and letters of no significance. Then there were just the cities and the towns, and the land all around. As though the planet was taking it all back from us. You could almost see it happening before your eyes, our grandparents said. The trees rushing over empty fields, year after year. Jumping from one dead farm to the next. The diseases followed, one after the other.
The war, the war. There was no Fort Sumter, no Pearl Harbor, no moment that we all understood at once that we were fighting. No one to tell us things had changed. There must have been a first shot fired, perhaps two men—it must have been men—arguing over where one's land began and another's ended, a first bullet flinging a ribbon of heat through the air. Another one shot back. But I have to believe they did not know what they were starting. If they knew, why would they have shot? An army was raised, a resistance arose. By the time Charlotte, North Carolina, burned, nobody was asking what it was about anymor