Edie sighed. I love him, she told herself. I do. I do.
The store inside smelled oppressively old and musty in contrast to outdoors, despite the evidence of regular and recent cleaning. There was a faint odor of burned wood and of something fleetingly but recognizably musky or uric—maybe the promised chemical toilets, maybe the lingering scent of the rats and raccoons that would have bedded down here in the years of the store’s abandonment. Andy wasn’t exaggerating, though; the store was remarkably well preserved. And remarkably . . . strange. Where to begin? Where to lay her eyes? There were obvious gaps in the wares, items that had been lifted over the years, or thrown away because of rot, or chewed up by animals, but still, everywhere she looked, junk: piled up on tables, strung by wire from the ceiling. A bicycle, marked Schwinn, dangled above her head; elsewhere hung other items, each random and not just old but used-looking: a battered aluminum fuel can, tennis rackets, a gas lamp, a rusted mailbox. Stuff that would have been antique by the early twenty-first century.
At eye level was the merchandise. The table facing the front door displayed a set of plates glazed with the old American flag pattern. Nearby was a pyramid of once-white boxes, each marked with the faded, peeling images of the product they contained: “Elegant Christmas Angel,” the photographs depicting porcelain yellow-haired women wearing ruffled blue gowns, their faces blank and unsettling, red lips rounded like a sex doll’s. A display of yellowing cardboard, slumped with dry rot, advertised “Music by Today’s Top Artists Only $14.99,” and Jesse, wagging his eyebrows at her, flipped through the slim square packages and read names and album titles aloud. “Mercy on Me by Alan James Flint. Never heard of him. Get a look at the costume.”
“He was a country singer,” said Edie, thinking of her father and the music he’d always played in his pickup truck. “That’s the kind of thing they wore.”
“Albums,” Jesse said with a laugh. “Can you imagine? What an arbitrary way to put out songs.” He flipped to another disc, mouth tucked around the nozzle of his juice pouch, and Edie wandered to the next table. More plates, though these were merely decorative, edges scalloped, resting on little gilded easels. They were printed with a portrait of a long-ago British royal family and their handsome children. She stared at the image until her vision blurred, imagining the person—the people—who would patronize a place like this, an Old Country Store, but also cared enough about the British monarchy to purchase a commemorative plate in their honor. It made her suddenly and inexplicably sad.
When she was sixteen, her high school class took a field trip to Washington, DC, to tour the old American capital landmarks, some museums, various memorials. The centerpiece of the trip was supposed to be the Memorial to the Lost Republic, a two-acre park, flanked on both ends by infinity pools symbolizing “the shining seas,” with fifty sculptures, each completed by an artist from every state of the old republic. Edie and her classmates were given some nominal assignment—choose a sculpture, document it, describe it, analyze its significance—but most of them spent about five minutes taking pictures and jotting down notes in their tablets, then gathered in clumps out of the teacher’s line of sight to talk and smoke. Edie and her best friend, Sasha, had staked out a good hiding spot behind the Kentucky sculpture, which was an abstract representation of the log cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born, and passed a joint back and forth. The sculpture is significant, Edie had gigglingly written in her report, because it is shaped like a box and boxes contain things like important ideas and memories. She got a B+.
She hadn’t felt anything at the Memorial to the Lost Republic. The old United States was long gone—c’est la vie—and the people who had known the people who died in the epidemic or got shut out-of-zone were long gone, too, with the exception of a couple of senile old crones who were interviewed each year on the local news feeds. Only now, contemplating this cheap novelty plate, did Edie feel a stirring of what she was probably supposed to feel at the memorial. So many people gone. A whole way of life reduced to a roadside novelty.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to look around anymore. She didn’t know if she had the stomach for it.
“Jesse,” she said. “Hey, I need to go to the toilet.”
He was holding what looked like some kind of an old-fashioned puzzle: wooden, triangle-shaped. He moved a plastic peg from one hole to another, removed the peg he’d jumped, and paused, then cursed. He replaced the jumped peg and moved the other peg back to its original position. “Umm?”
“Bathroom,” said Edie.
“I’ll be right out here,” Jesse said without looking up. He moved another peg. Edie noticed that his Stamp wasn’t in its designated holster-pocket and was instead jutting out of the hip pocket of his microsuit. “Ten feet away. Just yell if you need me.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Go do your business.”
He’d missed the point again. But there were plenty of people nearby, and she didn’t suppose that the chemical toilet would be tick central. She hoped not.
The bathroom smelled strongly of cinnamon deodorizer and, under that, the chemicals. The shit. It wasn’t a place you’d want to linger, and so Edie made a beeline for the first empty stall, not registering, until she was unzipping and hanging her bottom over the toilet seat, that Anastasia, who had been examining the reflection of her bare stomach in the mirror over the sink, was not wearing her microsuit.
“Uh, Anastasia?” she said. “You OK out there?” She finished as quickly as she could and arranged her microsuit back into place, heart pounding. Lifting a shaking hand to her waist, she felt for the hard line of the Stamp in its pocket. “Anastasia?” she repeated.
“I’m fine,” Anastasia said with a tone of casual distraction. When Edie snagged the Stamp and exited the stall, arm raised at the ready, Anastasia caught her eyes in the mirror and laughed. “Seriously. You can put that away.”
“You’re not wearing your suit.” Edie let her arm drop. The suit made a pool around Anastasia’s boot-clad feet; she hadn’t even stepped out of it. Her boxer shorts were pulled down a little, exposing the ridges of her hip bones, and her tank top was rolled up to rest under her breasts.