Ivyland

© 2011 Miles Klee

Published by OR Books, New York and London
Visit our website at www.orbooks.com

First printing 2011.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-935928-61-4 paperback
ISBN 978-1-935928-62-1 e-book

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The U.S. printed edition of this book comes on Forest Stewardship Council-certified, 30% recycled paper. The printer, BookMobile, is 100% wind-powered.

“.  .  . and yet it does not matter that he's all in bits  .  .  .
in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages.
But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose
you couldn't get back, out of the chaos  .  .  .”

—Aldous Huxley,
The Doors of Perception

HECUBA /// IVYLAND, NEW JERSEY

forget all the progress we've made. The Van Vetchen procedure, a minimally invasive surgery that has saved untold millions of American lives, is now available through mobile immunization centers crisscrossing the country. You can't miss ‘em! Flag one down and put your mind at  .  .  .

She'd meant to see the miracle tree. Lenny passed it on a morning run to the nameless liquor place just beyond Ivyland's border and had nothing to report save the drive-by profanity he'd loosed on the jobless and devout gathered there. Hecuba laughed at that tossed-off barb, but more at his faked ignorance of the situation. If he hadn't known, why call them
that
? It wasn't the lucky marriage of enemy and epithet Lenny described, because he wasn't deaf to people's fascinations, no matter how little he listened.

With Hallorax gas, a cutting edge anesthetic, it's the quickest errand you'll run all week: you're awake the whole time and back to normal in minutes. A small incision is made here, at the base of the neck, where Endless's patented bodyguard solution is injected. Should you be exposed to H12, molecules from this reservoir will bond to the foreign particles, making them too large to cross the barrier from bloodstream to brain. Without Van Vetchen surgery, H12 can eat away at a brain's frontal and temporal lobes, disrupting speech, reasoning, memory, sleep cycles and cognitive stability over the course of a day, a month, or possibly years before a fatal brain…

The radio would've been preferable. “Recharging America” was on Storm 89.9 right now, in-depth stuff on the Zeller Bridge collapse or, even better, maybe the moon mission. The run-up to launch had lent her a risky hope not known since DH found his way home. He was asleep face-down on the pullout when she left that morning, and she wondered how he'd cracked his insomnia. Cocooned in a blanket, her son still looked cold. She rolled him onto his back, finding the puzzled face of chemical naps.

New strains could be engineered to make mental decay long-term and less traceable, meaning prevention is no luxury; it's essential. That's why Congress and President Fullner have renewed the Healthy Bodies Act, keeping the Van Vetchen procedure mandatory for citizens age five and .  .  .

The bus she drove wasn't subtle. ENDLESS ENDLESS ENDLESS, it said on each side. END, read a pair of seats along the aisle. LESS, read the trio opposite. END LESS. Lest we forget whose money kept Ivyland afloat. It's not enough to clamp down on the booze, Lenny would say. Gotta shove their crap in my face and lecture me on the crap besides. He'd done a few months in Whitman max instead of a full year in Essex min—crowding or some quota shuffle—but missed the transition anyway, hearing only distorted prison rumors. Hecuba had quickly accepted the shift along with a job from Second Chance, shocked that they'd let her near a bus again, and carried on much as before. With Lenny back, though  .  .  .

I think it's nice what they're doing for the town, she told him a week after he got sprung and found corporate Ivyland creepier than convict gossip supposed.

“Only here cause Jersey's made for tax dodges,” he'd said, scratching a scar that ran with his jawline and hadn't been there when he began his sentence. “Don't give a shit about your second chance. You and this town are just cheaper, more desperate. You trust easy. I mean fuck: you trust
me
.”

He went for a kiss after that.

Not all. We've turned the tide in the War on Drugs, our isotope signature research allowing authorities to stamp out origin and distribution points for many illegal intoxicants. Our innovative development team has produced Belltruvin, the most successful over-the-counter anti-anxiety medication in history, and Adderade, a groundbreaking beverage that spells the end of unfocused energy. We have entered sure-footedly that transhuman era when at last we can break free of DNA, change our bodies at will, revolt in earnest against aging and decay, ugliness and mental anguish. But we've done so with a noble, feeling soul. Here we stand, engineers of a sustainable global village, awaiting a brighter  .  .  .

She made a third left in a row, noticing Fong Friday's new graffiti: someone had turned squat Chinese characters into a pudgy gang, adding heads and guns and those angled snap-up sneakers, complete with subtle E.Clipse logos. Not bad, she decided, checking the dash clock. Nine minutes till she was due at the day's first stop—yes, the miracle tree had to wait. It would give her time to think of a prayer. There was a static click, and the not-long-enough silence.

Welcome aboard and enjoy your ride, courtesy of Endless Nutraceuticals. As you can see, we've made a few changes around here.  .  .

Wouldn't kill them to update the video loop. Everyone knew this one by heart. Hecuba killed time by reacting with mock surprise to the mezzo soprano's recycled urgings. Ask my
doctor
? Still, when she turned the ignition, she was happy to hear a confident woman start speaking mid-sentence, exactly where she'd left off the night before. Hecuba liked to say, “Hold that thought, honey,” as she put the bus in park and the screens powered down.

Fourth left in a row, a wide turn onto Mytrex Street. Still seven minutes. Idling at the Pureol Ave stop made sense. But certain parts of Hecuba weren't ready to face the route. She'd circle the block one more time.

.  .  . know that life can be hard. We're here to help. Slowly but surely, things will get better. In the meantime, don't forget all the progress we've made. The Van Vetchen procedure, a minimally invasive surgery that has saved untold millions of American lives, is now.  .  .

CAL /// IVYLAND, NEW JERSEY ///
TWENTY YEARS AGO

Thanksgiving.

Sitting on the front lawn, the grassy precipice of a grassier hillock. Formal. Distracted. Fingering the waxed, prickling leaves of a manicured bush. Some older cousins wrestle and throw each other down the steep, tiny incline, staining khakis green. Across the street, the emptying of a peeled house by people in white biohazard suits and gas masks. Two of them try to force a pink couch through the door, slapping it when they pause to regroup. A third is on a ladder, boarding up windows with a nail gun.

Seven or eight: the age at which curiosity fades. Taking this bush apart, twig by twig—something Mom and Dad tell me not to do, like bite my nails or leave lights on when I leave a room. Conserve. I try.

The pink couch finally pops out, scudding onto the porch. One mover turns and slips back into the house. The other stalls, sits on an armrest, bent forward with elbows on knees. There's nothing about him except exhaustion. No face. His mask a staring question mark. Some weaker cousin is crying now.

Mom told me I couldn't eat the berries off of this bush, they're poison on purpose. To keep deer from eating them. I'd thought only things packaged in bottles and boxes could be poison. How had the toxic element escaped? When I get hold of a berry, I crush it between my thumb and index finger, wipe the goo on my blazer. I prick my palm (long overdue) and suck off a metallic bead of blood. I look up again. The man on the couch is waving at me.

My brother Aidan is beside me, wearing my old church clothes, waving back.

“Don't wave at him,” I say.

“Why not?” he asks.

“You don't know him.”

Aidan turns to me, still waving. I seize the hand and bunch its bones. He shows baby teeth and starts to whine. But the small hurt sound, bucking history, eases into a smile instead of a yell. I consider what he deserves for that.

There's something foreign at my back. It wraps my torso, fills the slender ribcage grooves, a finger settling in each one. A realization, quick crystal. That's why Aidan smiled. I let go.

Dad's huge hands toss me up, and when I come down we're face to face. He laughs; I laugh and panic. He spins, needing no reason. I'm his helpless satellite. We're weightless. Everything is spun and the light. I piss myself.

Aidan stands close by. I see him vanish and appear again over Dad's shoulder, watching. A blur that knows, and this heart rolls an inch. My water cooling as it travels. Pure release, and Dad shines on. I love him. He loves me.

He's making me fly.

*

Mom has the next day off; she takes me to the doctor for VV.

“We're giving you the gas now,” the doctor says, “so breathe deep.”

“You'll feel sleepy, but you won't be asleep.”

AIDAN /// SANDPIPER, NEW JERSEY /// SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO

Henri and I met as kids one summer. Nothing's changed.

I'm re-peeling salty swim trunks off a scorching vinyl bus seat, stewing over something unfair, when the boy with a scarily huge birthmark on his neck sits next to me.

“My VV incision got infected, want to see?” he asks breathlessly, jabbing a thumb at it. Guess it's not a birthmark. Cal is silently laughing up front that this freak has joined me, turning back to whisper with Phoebe.

“H'lo I'm Henry, nice to meet you,” is the rehearsed intro he blurts when I say nothing.
Fuck you, kid. That's right: I say the F word.
I face the window in my best antisocial hunch, which poses the difficulty of being heavily interested in a beach slum whizzing by and later, the faceless Jersey Dunes.

“It's garbage.”

“What?”

“The dunes,” he says. “One big landfill under the sand.”

“I know.”

“When did you get VV?” he goes.

“I never did.”

“They make you. Maybe when you were born. What's your name?”

“Aidan.”

Henry, chubby-palmed, sweating excessively, taps his fingers on hard plastic, hands laid atop a personal lunchbox cooler screaming HENRI ACTON (not ‘Henry,' I note disgustedly) in blue marker. Like what my Uncle Karl uses down on the shore for beer. He pushes the white peak of the cooler back until it clicks, revealing fat translucent blobs sloshing in an inch of seawater. Suddenly I'm struck by a summer memory of standing in the shallow bay at Cape May and noticing slimy pink alien tendrils plastered to an ankle. Then shimmering, electric pain.

He must see my apprehension, because he's quick to assure me that these are the White Ones: harmless. White Ones don't even have tentacles, they're just sort of crazy big cells. Henri touches to demonstrate, even picks one up. I can't tell if they're alive or dead or how one could be expected to tell the difference. Their middles have small concentric circles, more clouded but still see-through. Get close enough, you see they're made of lines all shooting out from the circle's center. I'm finding it pretty damn impressive, really, that Henri's gone about collecting these nasty creatures with no concern for the trifling matter of What Will Mom Say When She Finds These In My Lunchbox?

“Here. Feel how slippery?” I'd rather not but try to be macho, half gripping, half poking one with three fingers and a thumb.

“Know'd be funny? Throw it out the window.” I release a high-pitched yelp/laugh. “Do it,” he prods.

“I don't think—”

“Watch.”

We do an intimate dance to switch seats, trying to avoid skin contact in the rank humidity, or pouring jellyfish brine into our laps, and Henri has window adjacency. He gives me a second of eye contact, a covert
here goes nothing
, but he's visibly happy with what he's attempting, confident that only good will result. My brain sort of unhinges calculating the audacity, one eye beginning to warble back-and-forth superfast, knuckles gripping seat flesh with rapturous dread, every uncertainty attached to this thick slab of clear gelatin Henri is now hefting in his hand, having determined it to be the biggest. He fondles it a bit more to get his grip right and, not even checking for counselors, flips the jellyfish into an arc over his own buzzed head and out through the upper rectangle of window.

Flight barely registers before it's out of immediate view, but we stand and whip our heads, hearing a meaty
thwap
, as though a superhero had decked a crappy henchman, that announces contact between the creature and the windshield of a black convertible in the left lane, followed by the fatal high-pitched
skreeee
of this car's total swerving, a maneuver that makes the jellyfish do lazy migrations across the glass, trailing slime behind it and obscuring the bewildered driver's all-important view even further. At last the sparkled behemoth slides free and is airborne for one ludicrous ripple before the sizzling asphalt claims it.

It's a question of when, rather than if, someone tells; and dumb ponytailed Phoebe, wearing adult perfume that precedes her physical presence by quite a bit, the long-ago rat who snitched to our first grade teacher when I showed the class my new Spider-Man underwear, is instantly at the front of the bus with an eyewitness account. Next, the swarm of gray-shirted counselors, monochrome YMCA rainbows stamped on teenage chests, encircling Henri off the shoulder outside to get visual confirmation on the tossing of his gelatinous family into a sandy ditch as Ms. Hecuba, the same spacey woman who drives the regular schoolbus, buries her face in the steering wheel, trying to muffle her gaspy laugh.

“Don't worry,” Henri says before he's yanked into the aisle, “I'll tell them it was just me.”

It should seem hollow. I've done nothing. But there's fun in the conspiracy. He's playing with me; I know how to play back. Barely have to.

When Henri re-boards, he's beaming. He flops down next to me, shiny and wild-eyed, snorts as he tries to keep from cracking up. Laughter punctures him anyway.

“Good news,” he hisses through giggles. As he slowly opens his cooler I recognize the contour of one last jellyfish, salvaged and smuggled.

Henri's shaking with anticipation. He's fluttery as a ghost.