IT’S LATE JULY, and the average temperature hovers around 120 degrees. Humanity has had a few generations to adapt to the new climate, but everyone in the stadium still drips miserably. My ravaged body has been too busy relearning the more essential functions to bother with sweating, so the heat bakes my unmarinated meat. For once I’m grateful for the crush of the stadium’s slum towers. The five-story apartments of moldy plywood and rusty sheet metal bathe most of the enclave in shade, which turns the oven down to a more livable 100.
“I wish I could be clearer with you,” Rosso says as our boots slap and peel away from the melting asphalt. The “street” is really no more than a crudely paved footpath, too narrow for us to walk abreast, so I follow behind him and can only guess at his expression. “All I can say is that I believe you’re important.”
I say nothing.
“That is to say you represent something important. You and the others like you. And I’m very interested to find out what it is.”
I remain silent. He glances back at me. “Am I overwhelming you?”
I nod.
He smiles and turns back to the path. “Sorry. I’m sure you’re going through enough right now without me dumping some half-baked hero’s journey in your lap.”
“I’m not important,” I say to the back of his head. “I’m . . . impotent.”
“Why do you say that, R?”
I hadn’t intended to elaborate, but something in the soft sincerity of his tone makes it bubble out of me. “I can’t read. I can’t speak. My fingers don’t work. My kids won’t stop eating people. I don’t have a job. I can’t make love. Most people want to kill me.”
He chuckles. “No one said life is easy.”
“Does it ever get easier?”
“No.” He looks back at me again. “Well, in your case, maybe a little. But I wouldn’t wait around for it. The day you solve your last problem is the day you die.”
We pass the Agriculture building, a cluster of hothouses rising five stories high with hazy clouds of green visible through the translucent walls. A steady procession of workers pours out from the bottom floors, their backs bent under sacks of fresh vegetables. All this effort manages to supply about a third of the stadium’s food needs. A nice little organic supplement to the steady diet of Carbtein cubes. What will these people do when the old world’s leftovers run out? The medicine? The bullets? No one here knows how these things were made or has the resources to make them. The enclave works hard to build an illusion of self-sufficiency, but like all enclaves—and the cities and countries that preceded them—it relies on a thousand veins pumping lifeblood from the world outside. What happens when the heart finally stops?
“I believe in hard truths,” Rosso says after a few blocks of silence. “But I have to confess I’m doubting my advice right now.”
“Why?”
We pass a block of foster homes and he looks up into the windows. Nearly half of them frame a child’s forlorn face, chins buried in folded arms, eyes scanning the streets for any hint that their lives might change. “I had a similar conversation with another young man not long ago.”
My step falters and I briefly fall behind him, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“He had a very different life with very different struggles, but he asked similar questions, and I gave him similar answers.” He drops his eyes to the ground, watches the steady procession of garbage passing under his feet. “He died soon after we talked, and I believe it was by choice.” A beer can. A bullet shell. A fruit too rotten to identify. “Perhaps you shouldn’t listen to me.”
I feel a heavy stone in my stomach. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of Perry Kelvin. In all the joy and terror of my new life, it was easy to forget the life I hijacked to get here. The taste of his brain. The rush of his memories. His wry voice in my head as we guided each other forward, unlikely partners on an inner expedition.
Rosso walks in silence, perhaps expecting a reply. As always, it’d be best for me to keep my mouth shut, but this is a good man living a pained life, and the knowledge I have might comfort him, no matter how horrifically I obtained it.
“You meant a lot to Perry,” I tell him. “So did your advice.”
He glances back at me.
“He was on a path. You almost swayed him. It was just . . . too late.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Rosso says, looking straight ahead. “I can believe Julie talked about him a little . . . but not that much.”
“I . . . read his book,” I say, searching for a way around the full truth. “The one he was writing before he died.”
“I thought you can’t read.”
“I . . . skimmed?”
Rosso walks for a while, then shakes his head. “I didn’t know he was writing a book. That’s even sadder.”
“Sadder?”