“How are you feeling?” he asks. He knows I can cut him to pieces.
“I feel infinite and excited and ready to do anything and everything,” I say. I give him a hug.
“Great. I’m thinking maybe we watch the day end. Together. You know, on the wall.”
“Def,” I say. We don’t talk about him cutting my neck open. He never apologizes with words, but he’s always trying his best.
“Okay, Mama Ama,” he says. Then he touches the tray again. To tease me, he genuflects before he leaves the room and walks back downstairs. When he’s down there, he sits on the kitchen chair with the wobbly leg, and he starts to cry. I’m really good at telling where people are. I can almost see them just by paying attention to the sounds of a house. My senses are a blessing.
I take my tray of pancakes back to Ike’s room. He’s dressed in sneakers that light up when he steps and a blue T-shirt with a cloud that has a smiling face.
“I think this might be a legitimate anomaly, Ama,” Ike says. “I want you to be sure, though; was it a dream sustained before you restarted the Loop, not something you thought of when you woke up?”
I look at Ike all dressed up. “Yes!” I say. I’m almost sure.
It didn’t happen all at once. It was forever ago. I realized Ike was speaking like an adult. That was the first thing I noticed. That was the first thing that helped me put the days together. That’s when I started keeping through the Flash. It’s like realizing you’re in a dream except no matter what you do you can’t wake up. Daddy didn’t start remembering through the Flash until much later. By the time I started to keep through the Flash, Ike was already smarter than everybody. That was the first anomaly, asymmetrical retention through Loop expiration, that he explained to all of us. Which meant, for reasons we still don’t know, we each came to realize we were replaying the same thing over and over, and the realizing happened at different times for everyone. It was a pretty alarming thing. To see you’re trapped in infinity and know that no one can explain exactly how or why.
We tried running, like maybe if we ran far enough we could escape.
There is no escape.
So, to ease the transition, we’d throw a party each time somebody kept through. Those were good times on the grid, the space we live in as designated by war-effort planning. The last one to keep through the Flash on Grid SV-2 was Mr. Tuia. We had a big party the day he came through. There was barbecue and music, and Ike danced, and the Poples danced, I danced, and Mrs. Nagel waved her arms from a lawn chair, which was like dancing for her, and my father laughed and laughed. Mr. Tuia mostly cried. It’s very hard at first for some people. But then if you figure that you are infinite, you are supreme and therefore the master of all things, and it’s silly to be sad about things like how much your hip is always going to hurt or how you’re so old that the flu means life in a bed or how gone forever your mother is.
The second anomaly Ike and Robert, who was a marine biologist before the Flash, explained to us was how, individually, some of us were “developing and accruing attributes.” Accumulating, they’d said. Some people were accumulating differently. Ike’s brain was storing facts and stuff better than anybody’s. Lopez on Hark Street was all right on the clarinet before, but now we’re pretty sure he’s the greatest musician to have ever lived. I got strong, fast, precise. I became the Knife Queen. We have a pretty interesting grid.
I don’t know much about the other grids in our state block, because way before the Flash came, the soldier-police—the state-sponsored war-coordination authorities—took away everyone’s cars. Their slogan—“For us to serve and protect, you must conserve and respect”—is emblazoned on posters in the school, on the windows of some people’s homes. The Poples pretended they were proud when their son was shipped for service. The poster in their window shows the soldier-police slogan in big letters stamped below men with puffed-out chests proudly holding the flag and guns, their faces hidden by the black visors of their helmets. Back before the Flash ever came, a lot of people actually loved the SPs. They thought they were keeping us safe. People believe lies, believe anything when they are afraid. That’s another thing. Aren’t we lucky that before the Flash all the soldier-police were deployed elsewhere?
Still, even if you bike as hard as you can in any direction, only stopping to drink water, even if you pee and drink at the same time, you can only get so far before the Flash takes you. Even if you train for years and years. I’ve tried, and if anybody should have been able to do it, it’s me. I use my body better than anyone. I can jump Olympic. I can break grown men with my bare hands. When I have a knife, I’m basically the queen of the world. Or the old me was. Now I let everyone be their own royalty.
“I want to discuss this with Robert,” Ike says.
Then the Horn comes. Three hundred and sixty-seven drone birds all over the area screaming together. It’s like a bright light for your ears. It’s the right sound for what it is. It means defenses have been breached and the world is gonna end today. It lasts for two minutes. One hundred and twenty seconds. I close my eyes and wait. Ike does the same. Then it stops. The Horn is the exit point for many. It comes, and they just can’t take the sonic bleed. So they take whatever they have handy and jam it into their neck. But if you close your eyes and breathe, if you expect it and welcome it even, it’s still terrible, but the kind of terrible you can take.
The quiet after the Horn is sweet and lush. It’s something you don’t want to let go of. But we have work to do. “Okay,” I say after we appreciate a few moments of silence. “Let’s go see Robert.”
“I want to be inside before the rain,” Ike says.
“Maybe we’ll do that; maybe we won’t. We’re supreme and infinite,” I say, reminding him that rain is a small thing for infinite beings.
“Yes, so I’ve heard, Ama. I’d still like to be inside before the rain,” he says.
“I’ll go grab the stuff.”
“I’ll be waiting.” Ike pokes a fork into my pancakes.
I get ready in my room, then I jog downstairs and head outside. Two houses down I see Xander strangling his dog on their green lawn. It weeps and yelps, and its tail flaps around like a helicopter blade until it stops.
“Hello, Xander,” I say with a big wave. Before, he had been a friend of my father’s, and like my father, he was too old to fight. There aren’t any men left from age twenty to forty-five.
“Hi there, Ama.”
“What did poor Andy do today?”
“What do you mean?” Xander says, then he goes back in his house.
I knock once on the Poples’ door. The big window where they keep their soldier-police poster gets smashed every morning, so the poster is facedown, hanging in the shrubs, dressed and stabbed with glass. It’s the first thing the Poples do most days. Smash that window that reminds them of how gone their son is. When the door doesn’t open fast enough, I kick it open. Mr. Pople is naked on his couch, drinking a glass of something. His skin is flappy and foldy.
“Hey, Mr. Pople.”
“Ama Knife Queen Adusei,” he says slowly, smiling and raising his glass and bowing his head.
“Just Ama,” I say. Not in a way that’s threatening, but just to remind him I don’t make people say that anymore and haven’t for a while.
“Ama,” he says very slowly. He looks into his cup, then drinks from it. His hands head down toward his waist.