Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine

Author:Alex Irvine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

14

AFTER EIGHTEEN HOURS ON the road, Mo and Henry Dale camped near a freeway interchange somewhere past Des Moines, Iowa. “Crossed the Mississippi River,” Henry Dale said. “That seems like a big deal.”

“Maybe it is. I never did it before,” Mo said.

“Me neither.” They got a fire going and talked, wandering from topic to topic as each floated to mind. “You ever talk to Henry Ford before?” Henry asked.

Mo shook his head. “I heard he could tune an engine so it ran on the Boom so I thought it was worth asking. Didn’t know it would get me killed.”

“Except for the ticket.”

“Yeah.” Mo handed Henry Dale a perch and Henry tried to strip the spine and ribs out in one piece like he’d seen Mo do. There was apparently some kind of trick to it, because the fish came apart in his hands. Mo laughed, but Henry Dale wasn’t offended. If you did something funny you had to be prepared for people to laugh. Plenty of people had laughed at him for pacing off the Godswalk every morning. None of them had been called to Monument City.

Mo was free associating in his head, thinking of the truck that seemed like it could run forever, skittering from that to other seemingly magical things he’d seen the Boom do, and then . . . “I was in Ann Arbor once,” Mo said. “Doesn’t matter why.” A look on his face told Henry the reason mattered but was a personal pain that would remain hidden for now. “You know how old parking meters look like Mickey Mouse? A guy there, must have been a long time ago, painted a Mickey Mouse face on the sidewalk so the shadow of the meter would make its ears at one specific time every day. I was walking by right at that time and Mickey Mouse stood up off the sidewalk. He made that weird little hooting from the cartoons and ran off toward downtown. I stood there wondering if it happened every day, like there were hundreds of Mickey Mouses running around Ann Arbor, or if that one was reborn over and over—and if it was, did it know? How long did it have to be out in the world every day? Did it spend the rest of the time waiting? That seemed horrible to me, man, but also that’s all of us, right? Waiting for the sun to cast the right shadow at the right time so we can become ourselves for a little while and hope it’s forever?”

Henry thought about this for a while. Then all he could think of to say was, “Who’s Mickey Mouse?”

After another silence, Mo said, “I don’t know.” He broke a stick and put it in the fire. When he looked at his hands they were strange to him.

Whose memories was he having?

The Boom’s memories. The Boom hadn’t begun in New Jersey. That was where it had gone looking for its origins, soaking up all the stories it could find along the way.

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