“Okay,” said Hot Sauce. Then: “I promise.”
“Okay,” said Nona.
She was very touched when Hot Sauce got up and wriggled out of her jacket, and made to put it over the thin slippery blanket. Nona said, “Don’t, give it to Kevin,” and so Hot Sauce put it over Kevin. Kevin did not move, and for a moment Nona panicked that Kevin had died from eating the insides of five sandwiches. But Kevin made a sort of puppyish snuffling sound and wriggled underneath the blanket where the jacket was, so that was all right. Nona felt a great sense of peace and calm when Hot Sauce came and lay back down beside her: she let her eyelids flutter down, and was annoyed when they did not want to flutter back up. She struggled heroically to keep them open, even using her fingers, until Hot Sauce stopped her.
“You can sleep if you want,” said Hot Sauce. “I’ll be here.”
“You won’t tell, will you, Hot Sauce?”
“No,” said Hot Sauce. And: “I’m here, Nona. I’ll look after you.”
“I love you, Hot Sauce,” she said.
Exhausted, Nona felt Hot Sauce touch her hand, very lightly, very gently. The last thing she heard before falling asleep was Hot Sauce saying, “Don’t be soppy.” But it didn’t sound like she meant it.
JOHN 8:1
THE ASH NEVER made them feel too sick for long, but sometimes they blacked out together. Only for seconds, really no time at all, but he didn’t like it. He’d never liked losing control. He’d never liked losing consciousness. In the dream she knew he could not be coaxed to sleep unless she stood in the doorway, or in the worst times stroking her thumb between his eyebrows, down the bridge of his nose. In the dream she did not fear sleeping, but she did not know how to do it herself. Her body was a mystery to her. She did not understand what it meant or signified. She would suddenly collapse and sleep where she fell, shocked into unconsciousness by exhaustion, and wake wherever he put her, in whatever makeshift bed he had been forced to cook up: sometimes old stained mattresses, sometimes baby-soft skin hammocks.
They had to trek all the way back down the hill on the side where the waters weren’t rising and back up the road to a crumble-down concrete building he’d found. All day they transferred their things. Their meat. Their buckets of water. Their soggy blankets that they pinned up to dry so they would have somewhere to sleep. It took them multiple trips.
They didn’t bother to start a fire. They weren’t really cold. But it was dark, because the ash kept falling, and he set up a long line of torches, putting them on windowsills and balancing them upward so that their thin yellow light was strung across the room. This highlighted his face in strange ways. It made his brown skin bluish, and the white ring around his black iris a satiny gold.
When they were settled he said: We got some attention up-front, ’cause people thought we were trying to get media jobs with some excellent deepfakes. They thought we were playing a game or giving people a puzzle, maybe doing some branding. Branding, then? Talk about late-late-stage capitalism, right? How far can consumption as praxis go? But I mean, fair enough. It didn’t look real.
He said, Result was that nobody turned up to take us away to Area 51. Almost nobody even noticed us. We were just one voice in the wilderness, and all the other voices were louder. It was original, at least, you know? We got a handful of conspiracy theorists, some sceptics, and some locals who thought it was a joke. M— said, Invite them in to see. So we did. Taped them. Said they could do whatever tests they wanted. Showed them everything, got it on camera. Managed a crowd of about five. Five plus us and Ulysses and Titania and all the other corpses I had up and walking around. More people there were dead than alive.
He said, Two of the audience members walked away afterward. One didn’t say anything. One freaked out and said he was calling the cops. Only one of them accepted it. Turned out he was one of those Flat Earthers who still believed despite the Mars installation. Nice guy. Drank a beer with us before he left.
He said, Then we took off. Thread after thread on message board after message board. People wanting proof. People asking what the fuck it meant. People talking about the LUCIFER telescope and saying we were aliens. People calling me the Antichrist, which was a trip. People writing up these long posts on how the trick was done, how I got the meat into the pie. Was I fake? Was I real? If I was real, what did it mean? Suddenly there were hundreds of people, all there at our front door. They came in caravans, they were sleeping in their cars or putting up tents. A hell of a lot of them had flown out internationally.