Chapter 4 – Surviving, Special Things…
Mallory knew a difficult day waited for her when she woke late in the morning to the sound of her father’s soy pancakes sizzling in the skillet.
“I know you’re not feeling well, Mal, but you’re not going to regret getting out of bed today. I’ve got something wonderful to show you, something that will make you feel better.”
Mallory swooned as her father lifted her out of bed and set her into her wheelchair. She feared she’d lost any semblance of freedom from the chair. She realized her sickness increasingly weakened her. She could keep little in her stomach, and the scent of those soy pancakes made her noxious, no matter how she had cherished their smell when she was a younger girl, when her mother was still alive to properly mix the batter so that the cakes were not doughy in the middle. Mallory’s fever refused to break, and yet it took her thickest blanket to keep her from shivering. She wanted to recline back into her bed and sleep, but her father forced her into that wheelchair.
“You’re a terrible liar,” Mallory whispered. “You might do better lying to others, but I’m your girl, and you do a terrible job of lying to me. There’s nothing wonderful left in the world.”
“Perhaps, but there remain special things.”
“All the special things are gone.”
Ryan frowned. “Arguing with you is a waste of time. You’re too much like your mother. But trust me, girl, there are special things remaining to the world, things you must understand.”
“Things I need to understand before I die?” Mallory asked. “I know I’m dying. I can feel it. That’s why the doctors don’t visit me anymore. It’s why none of the doctors stop by any longer to read books to me, or to give me candy.”
“You’re right, Mal. It breaks my heart that you’re right. But you still need to understand.”
Curiosity didn’t inspire Mallory to bear her pain when her father pushed her wheelchair into the cloudless sky that burned her skin. She long ago lost her curiosity. The world held such ruinous nothing that whatever curiosity was born to boy or girl shriveled. Mallory bore the discomfort because she loved her father. He was honest with her, and that was the motivation Mallory needed while her father pushed her wheelchair down the lonely and cracked streets of her empty neighborhood. They soon enough reached the corner depot, where the automated bus would arrive to carry them to whatever destination her father felt was so important for her to see.
They were the only commuters on that empty transport. Robot transports would roll through their circuits for days without accepting a single passenger. Enough population no longer remained to create traffic or crowds, and there was seldom a purpose for anyone to leave their rotting homes. No one had any place to go. No one had any business they needed to tend to. Dying was the only enterprise the world might any longer offer.
“Can you imagine how it must’ve all looked before all the glass turned so dirty? All the towers outside the window sparkled once. Would you like me to tell you a story about how it once had been? I could tell you about the circuses that travelled during your grandfather’s time. I could tell you about all the songs, and all the colors and all the animals the circus used to bring into town.”
Mallory rolled her eyes. “Animals?”
Her father winked. “Incredible animals, Mal.”
“All the animals were incredible.”
“Oh, but the circus brought different animals than just a domesticated cat or dog. There were monkeys dressed in red vests, elephants that danced on stools, lions that bowed to women with whips.”
“That’s fantasy.”
“No it’s not.” Ryan laughed. “It was all very real. Those creatures were not unicorns and dragons. They were all very, very real. There were cobra snakes that danced to a piper’s melody, and horses that could add and subtract. There weren’t enough colors for all the birds.”
“Why tell me these things?”
Ryan looked very hard into his daughter’s eyes. “Because you must know.”
“Why? So that after I die I can tell all the angels about what’s been lost? Even if there is a Heaven, don’t you think lots of boys and girls before me have already told the angels what humanity’s done to the Maker’s creation?”
“Perhaps, Mal, but that doesn’t mean you should no longer scream.”
Mallory’s father left her alone after those remarks. The sway of the transport worsened Mallory’s nausea, but her stomach, like the rest of her body, remained too tired to revolt. The transport’s cushions felt cool, and Mallory slumped against the chair in front of her to cut the heat that pulled sweat from her forehead. The world passing outside the transport looked like a smear of a shadow. Rubble crowded all the alleys and sidewalks. The skyscrapers rising in the distance might’ve once been graceful, but they now looked haggard, metal and rebar peeling away from the frames that used to hold everything together. The city seemed but a layer of fungus and moss, mushrooms and ivy sprouting upon civilization’s corpse. Mallory couldn’t fall asleep despite her swooning head, as if her sickness fought against even the comfort of dreams. So Mallory kept staring out the transport’s windows, wishing she might spot some rabbit jumping from one pile of busted concrete to another, or perhaps some squirrel sprinting down a cold power-line spanning across the rooftops. Her mind warned her she would see no such life. Her mind tried to remind her that whatever shape she might think she spotted amid all those empty buildings could be nothing more than a specter.
Much time passed, and Mallory couldn’t recall an occasion when she had strayed so far from her neighborhood. The city dwindled behind them, and its towers buried themselves beneath the horizon and gave way to an empty landscape of barren space. Mallory couldn’t help but think of so many of those vistas the vision chamber knitted for her. She thought of those golden, swaying fields. She thought about green valleys, and of cold streams. She thought of pictures of sailboats on lakes. Yet nothing more than dust and ash met Mallory’s eyes. All that remained was dirt too poisoned to help any seed grow.
Her eyes ached by the time the automated transport lowered into a subterranean garage where cool shadow replaced the glare. A trio of orderlies dressed in blue greeted her when her father pushed her wheelchair down the transport’s ramp, and those orderlies treated her so gently that Mallory didn’t feel any pain as they transferred her into another wheelchair. Just like all the other orderlies Mallory had ever known, they said nothing as they pushed her down the dark and narrow hall. The orderlies never said anything. Unlike the doctors, the orderlies never gave a diagnosis or a name. Mallory wondered if they were intelligent men who simply regarded her small body unworthy of their effort to shape words, or if those orderlies might’ve been born with some kind of affliction for silence, without some organ that was vital for speech. She wished she knew. She wanted to know if she should’ve felt ashamed, or if she should’ve pitied those men dressed in blue who devoted themselves in a dying world to pushing children in wheelchairs.
The orderlies rolled Mallory through a pair of glass doors into a reception area in which a massive, holographic orb floated above the chamber’s center, an image of Earth as it once had been, a blue Earth before humanity faded everything into gray.
“Welcome to our museum, Mallory Cane. Welcome to our gallery of folly.”
The woman who limped to Mallory and her father wore a doctor’s white coat. Mallory guessed the woman likely near her father’s age, for a little youth and health still glowed in the woman’s eyes, a combination that suggested she belonged to her father’s generation. The doctor’s eyes might’ve been healthy, but Mallory noticed how sickness clutched that woman as well. Her head was bald, and it peeled and molted like the skin of some snake seen in the vision chambers. The woman leaned heavily upon a cane, and she coughed so hard that Mallory feared the woman’s spine might crack. Mallory suddenly then realized how much weight her father had shed during the recent months, and of how pale her father’s skin turned. She r
ealized that her father’s fingers had begun to uncontrollably twitch. She realized that her father was also very ill, and she felt ashamed for failing to recognize his symptoms because she had been too absorbed within her own.
“My name is Dr. Mines, Mallory. Do you think I look unwell?”
Mallory thought a moment before replying. “You look no sicker than the rest of us.”
The doctor smiled. “I can tell you’re a very clever girl.”
“What is this place?”
Dr. Mines knelt next to Mallory’s wheelchair and took the girl’s hand. “This is the place we have built so that we will not forget. Come with me, and I will show you why you are so sick, and why our world is dying.”
The orderlies again pushed Mallory forward after Dr. Mines turned to approach the hall on the far side of the chamber. Mallory gripped her wheels and resisted when she noticed that her father didn’t follow.
“It’s fine, Mal. I’ll be right here after you’ve seen it all. There’s no where else for me to go.”
Mallory took a breath and let the orderlies push her forward. She doubted she would see little wonder where Dr. Mines took her, thought she would see nothing like at all like the animals the vision chamber painted. Her heart quickened. Her eyes widened, and Mallory feared she was about to view pictures mixed with more shadow than light.
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