Maybe it’s my eyesight, but even though we’re getting close to the bus, it still seems very distant. As I walk toward it, I find I don’t care about the bus. I don’t care about what’s inside the bus. Because this isn’t my world. This isn’t real.
When I was growing up, my teachers and guidance counselor talked about “the real world” as if it were a distinct existence, something separate from school. Same thing in college, though I was living on my own in a city of eight million people. I never understood that. What is the real world if it’s not the world one exists in? How is being a child less real than being an adult? I remember prepping dinner one night of group camp: Amy working the tip of her knife into a rabbit’s naked shoulder, separating the limb. The care she took, the time, dividing the meat equally among our cooking pots. “I thought it would be different here,” she said. “I thought…” Her hesitation, I thought it was because her knife struck bone. “But turns out it’s no less fucked up than the real world.” This didn’t seem like such a strange thing to say, then. Those Challenges had frames: beginnings and endings that were easy to identify, a man shouting “Go!” and “Stop!” I miss that. Now it’s like everything is fake and real at the same time. The world in which I move is constructed, manipulated and deceptive, but then there’s that plane, and the trees, and squirrels. Rain. My maybe-late period. Things too big and too small to control, contributing and conflicting all at once. This empty world they’ve made is filled with contradiction.
We’ve reached the bus. My skin prickles. The bus’s yellow front bleeds into the building’s gray, but I think there’s room to pass behind. There has to be.
“Mae, let’s go around,” says Brennan.
“I am going around.”
“Around the block, Mae.”
I know that’s what he meant. I walk toward the back of the bus.
“Mae, please—don’t you see them?”
He’s talking about the props spilling from the bus’s rear emergency exit. I see five or six, and there are probably more inside. I smell them too, like the others but with charcoal.
I look at Brennan. He’s shaking, overdoing it. My high school friends were more convincing.
“Just get it over with,” I say. I cram my hand into my pocket, rub my glasses lens, and walk.
Brennan follows in silence. These props are swollen and bursting, blackened with rot. A pile of newspapers and trash has coalesced like a snowdrift along the bus’s rear tire. I step on a paper bag and something mushes beneath my boot. I feel a fleshy pop and something thin, long and hard against my arch.
It’s nothing. Don’t look.
“Mae, I can’t do it.”
I’m past the bus. I don’t want to turn around.
“Mae, I can’t.” His voice has heightened in pitch. I force myself to turn back. I look directly at Brennan, tunneling my vision. He’s a brown and red blur, recognizable as human, but barely. “Mae, please.”
He’s just another obstacle, another Challenge. A recording device creating drama.
“Cut it out,” I say.
“But I—” he interrupts himself with a sob. I can’t see his face, but I’ve seen him cry so many times already. I know how his mouth twists, how his nose leaks. I don’t need to see it again to know what it looks like.
Leave him.
I can’t.
You don’t want to.
They won’t let me. They want him with me. He needs to be with me.
“You can do it, Brennan,” I say. I force softness into my tone and use his name because names seem to calm him. He calls me Mae with nearly every breath, so much so that I’m almost beginning to feel as though it’s my real name. Real. There it is again. When the unreal outweighs the real, which is true? I don’t want to know. “They can’t hurt you. Just come quick and we’ll get out of here.”
He nods. I imagine that he’s biting his lip, as he tends to do.
“We’re only a few days away,” I say. “We’ll be there in no time.”
I see his arm move toward his face, and then he’s getting bigger, clearer, approaching. The black and white stripes of the pack hugging his shoulders. A moment later he’s at my side and I can see that yes, he’s crying. He’s also pinching his nostrils shut with his thumb and forefinger.
“Let’s go,” I say.
Within minutes, we clear the worst of the destruction. We’ve returned to simple desolation. All that work, all that money, and all we had to do was walk by a bus. Not that it was easy, but their wastefulness irks me.
“Mae?” asks Brennan. “Why don’t we take the highway?”
His question rests atop my lingering unease. It’s like he’s trying to get me to break the rules.
“No driving,” I say.
“Oh.” A beat of silence, then, “What about to walk on? It’s gotta be quicker than this.” Is this a Clue? Have they closed down the highways too? That’s big. Too big. I don’t believe him. “There’s a sign for it right there,” he says. “It’s close.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I can’t answer; I don’t know the answer.
“Mae, why not?”
I keep walking.
“Mae?”
The name burns through me.
“Mae?”
I can feel his fingers crawling through the air, approaching my arm.
“What did I say about touching me?” My voice shudders with all that I’m keeping inside.
He draws back, sputtering an apology. For a moment it seems that he’s let his question pass. Then he says, “So, the highway?”
“No, Brennan.” My frustration is building, turning to anger. “We’re not taking the highway.”
“Why not, Mae?”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Why?”
“And stop saying, ‘why.’?”
Agitation speeds my steps. Why is he challenging me like this? Why doesn’t he have any regard for the rules of the game?
Why?
You know why.
I grasp my glasses lens, tight. My thumb’s callus catches as I rub. I remember all Brennan has said about quarantine and illness. I remember the flyer, a house filled with blue, so much blue, as blue as the summer sky and just as clear. I remember the teddy bear, watching me.
If I allow myself to doubt, I’ll be lost. I can’t doubt. I don’t. It all makes sense. Metal and fur, a drone far above. He’s a cog like everything else. Like me. His rules are just different.
I’m walking carelessly, faster than I should be. My foot catches on nothing; I stumble. Brennan reaches out to steady me, but I pull away.
“Mae,” he says.
“I’m fine.” I set my blurred gaze to the ground, start walking again.
“Mae, what’s that?”
He’s looking ahead. I try to see what he’s seeing, but the horizon is a fuzzed mass. I thumb my glasses lens, harder, creating heat. “What’s what?” I ask.
Brennan looks at me. His eyes are huge. He looks terrified. I feel my chest tighten.
Whatever’s up there, it’s not real.
But even if it’s not, it is, and contradictions can be dangerous. Remember the fine print. Remember the coyote. Teeth and gears and blood and fear. The doll’s pursed lips crying for Mama.
I pull the lens from my pocket and wipe it on my shirt. I close my left eye, hold the lens up to my right.
Suddenly, the trees have leaves. Crisp, singular leaves. The guardrail to my left has dings and dents and dots of rust. There are lines of white paint edging the road, faint but there, and a squashed frog has dried to jerky not three feet from where I stand. How much subtlety have I missed since my glasses broke? How much roadkill?
I look at Brennan. He has freckles, and a small scab on his cheek.
I look away, look ahead.
A fallen tree blocks the road. A white sheet is tied into the branches so that it falls flat like a sign. There’s writing on the sign, but it’s too far away to read, even with the lens to my eye. Another Clue, finally. I march forward.
“Mae, wait,” says Brennan.
“Can you see what it says?” I ask.
“No, but—”
“Then come on.” I open my left eye; clarity and ambiguity mingle in my vision, and I weave slightly, adjusting. Within seconds I can begin to make out the letters on the sign, the shapes of the words. There are two lines. The first is two words, maybe three; the second line is longer, giving the overall text a plateau shape. Runs in the paint further confuse the letters, but after a few more steps I can decipher the first word: NO.