“What happened to ’em all?”
“They died…what do you think? Either they was killed or they just gave out. Then there’s some caught a ride over Yonder’s Wall.”
“Them mountains, you mean?”
“Yeah, right. ‘Them mountains’.” She charged the words with disdain.
“You don’t like me very much, do you?” I said.
Annie’s mouth thinned. “Let’s say I ain’t disposed to like you.”
“Why’s that? I ain’t done nothin’ to you.”
She twitched her head to the side as if she’d been struck and kept silent for four or five seconds. “You don’t have a clue who I am, do you?” she asked finally.
I studied her for a second or two. “I never seen you before in my life.”
She fixed me with a mean look. “My train name useta be Ruby Tuesday. I rode the southern line mostly, but there was times I rode up north.”
“Ruby?” I peered at her, trying to see in her face—a face that radiated soundness—the wild-haired, grimy clot of human misery I’d known long years before.
“It’s Annie now,” she said. “I cleaned up. Same as you. Only difference is, I been living clean seven years, and you been doin’ it for a day.”
I couldn’t believe it was her, but I couldn’t disbelieve it either. Why would she lie? “What’d I do to piss you off?” I asked. “Hell, I rode with you when you’s with Chester the Molester. We had some good times together.”
She gaped at me, as if stunned. “You don’t remember?”
“I don’t know what you got in mind, but there’s a whole lotta things I don’t remember.”
“Well, you gon’ be doin’ some serious rememberin’ the next few weeks. Maybe it’ll pop up.” She spun on her heel and walked away.
“Hey, don’t go!” I called after her. “I don’t know where the fuck I am! How’m I gon’ find my room?”
“Look for it,” she snapped back. “I ain’t about to stand around and hold your dick for ya!”
I did, indeed, do some serious remembering over the next week or thereabouts. Days, I fed fish heads and guts to the dogs—must have been around sixty of them all told—and carried messages and helped dig new latrines. Nights, I sat in my room, closed off from the rest of Yonder by two blankets that Pieczynski had lent me, and stared at a candle flame (candles also courtesy of Pieczynski) as the stuff of my life came bubbling up like black juice through the shell of a stepped-on bug. Not much I remembered gave me pleasure. I saw myself drinking, drugging, thieving, and betraying. And all that before I’d become a tramp. I could scarcely stand to think about it, yet that was all I thought about, and I would fall asleep each night with my head hurting from images of the bedraggled, besotted life I had led.
As the days passed I became familiar with Yonder’s routine. Every morning small groups would head upriver to fish or out into the jungle to pick berries and other edibles, each accompanied by a handful of dogs. The rest took care of their work in and around the tree. On the landward side of the tree, a space had been cleared in the jungle and that’s where the food preparation was done—in long pits dug beneath thatched open structures. There seemed only the loosest possible sense of community among the residents. People were civil to one another, but generally kept to themselves. At times I would wander about the tree, looking for company, and while some would say “Hi” and introduce themselves, nobody invited me to sit and chat until one night I ran into a skinny, intense kid named Bobby Forstadt, who shared a room on the fifth floor with Sharon, a blond punk girl who was decorated all over with self-applied tattoos—black words and crudely drawn flowers and the names of boys.
When Bobby found out I was new to Yonder, he invited me in and started pumping me for information about the world. I proved a major disappointment, because I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to current events the past few years. I wasn’t even sure who was president, though I told him I thought it was somebody from Texas. The governor, maybe.
“Bush?” Bobby arched an eyebrow and looked at me over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. He had a narrow, bony face that peeked out from a mass of brown curls like a fox from a hedge. “Hey, I don’t think so,” he said. “What about Gore?”
The name didn’t set off any bells.
“Fuck! Bush?” Bobby appeared deep in thought and after a bit he said, “You musta got it wrong, man.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But I was jungled up with Kid Dallas right after the election and he was shouting, ‘Yee-ha!’ and shit, and goin’ on ’bout some Texas guy got elected.”
“Bush,” said Bobby, and shook his head, as if he just couldn’t get his brain around the thought. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor behind a desk he’d made from a tree stump; a spiral-bound notebook was open atop it, and there were stacks of similar notebooks in one corner of the room, separated by a couple of rolled-up sleeping bags from stacks of regular books, mostly dog-eared paperbacks. One wall was dominated by a hand-drawn map constructed of several dozen taped-together sheets of notebook paper. I asked him about it, and he said it was a map of Yonder.
“It’s probably not accurate,” he said. “I just put together everybody’s stories about how they came here and where they’ve traveled since, and that’s what I ended up with.” He cocked an eye toward me. “Where’d you catch out?”
“Klamath Falls,” I told him. “Weirdest thing, ’bout maybe ten minutes out we started goin’ through these mountains. Big ’uns.”
“Everyone sees the same exact stuff,” Bobby said. “First the mountains and the marshes. Then the hills.”
“You sayin’ everyone who comes to Yonder goes through the same country, no matter where they catch out?”
“Sounds fucked up, huh?” Bobby scratched at his right knee, which was poking through a hole in his jeans. He also had on a black Monster Magnet T-shirt. Circling his wrist was a bracelet woven of blond hair that I presumed to be Sharon’s. “This whole place is fucked up,” he went on. “I’ve been here going on four years, and I haven’t seen anything yet that made sense.”
With little prompting, he went off into a brief lecture about how various elements of the ecology of the place didn’t fit together, using terms with which I was mostly unfamiliar. “When I first arrived,” he said, “I thought of Yonder as Hobo Heaven, y’know. A lowball version of ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ Everything but the cigarette trees and the free beer. But you know what the place reminds me of now? It’s like the terrain some software guy might write for a computer game. The trains and all the bizarre fauna…I was so freaked out when I got here, I didn’t question any of it. But you examine it and you find out it’s really stupid. No logic. Just this insane conglomeration of irrational objects. But it’s a landscape where you could set a cool war or a puzzle game like Myst.”
“That what you think Yonder is?” I asked. “A computer game?”
“Yeah, why not? An extremely sophisticated one. And we’re the characters. The algorithms the real players inhabit.” He gave a shrug that seemed to signify cluelessness. “What do you think it is?”
“Best I can come up with, I figure we’re dead and this is some kinda test.”
“Then how do you account for the fact that people die? And that some of us travel back to the world?”
“Never said I knew what the rules was for bein’ dead,” I told him. “Maybe it all fits right in.”
He sat there for moment, nodded, then hopped up and went over to the stacked notebooks. “I want you to check this out,” he said, digging through the stacks. “Here!” He came back to the desk and tossed me a ratty notebook with a red cover. “Read this when you get a chance, and let me know what you think.”