It wasn’t Hawk, though from the back it absolutely looked like her. It was a different skinny woman who wore her hair in an immaculate, if dusty, pageboy dome. Her face was framed by perfect squared-off bangs, and he immediately noticed how her long full lips curled slightly upwards at the corners. She told him her name was Jing Jing.
“I think you mean, Ebony.”
She was looking into his eyes when she answered him. “It’s Jing Jing,” she said.
Swan took a special interest in this newest straggler with the sly brown eyes. Her skin was the color of desert sand and she wore nothing but a rucksack and a rumpled pair of ancient work boots. He watched her as she tossed dust over her body at the side of the road. (She kept herself doubly covered in chalky dust). All her movements were graceful like a dancer’s, and he thought her ribs were even prettier than Ebony’s had been. He could barely keep himself from staring.
The group of eleven was now twelve, and sometimes Jing Jing walked along the road beside him. They’d take turns pulling the aqua-colored suitcase as they talked. Jing Jing was an expert in horse nettle and claimed that thistles, before you cook them, should be pounded together with blossoms of clover, or any other sort of petals you might be able to find. To Swan’s amazement, she also said that soup could be thickened with dirt. It was a sort of common clay found a precise distance below the surface. Ancient wisdom prescribed that hard things and soft things go together, she said. Swan leaned forward a little, trying to read her expression beyond the edge of her hairdo, but he was too late.
“What were you doing before we found you?” he asked.
“I was pretending I didn’t exist before you found me,” she said and began to laugh.
Jing Jing laughed easily, and smiled at Swan often, and dozens of times each day he’d look back at the stragglers dispersed along the road to see where she was walking.
Swan thought about all the women who’d been in his life so far: One had been a hallucination. Several were generated by an artificial mind. There were numerous fantasies and mirages and figments of imagination. There were dolls. The more he thought about it, the humans he’d known to be real were very few, and most of them were with him now. The only real girl he’d ever touched was Ebony, but he’d never seen her face.
After meditating on the subject for several days, he decided Jing Jing’s eyes, with their tiny flecks of gold, were the color of liquid amber.
Twelve was the tribe’s biggest number. Over the following months it dwindled. Nature’s cruelty had turned pitiless; the sun was more intense, the cloudless nights more frigid. They consumed the last of their radish pods and sagebrush. Their supply of thistle root and mallow was nearly gone. The thermoplastic sacks that swayed at the back of the rickshaw gradually emptied, and Swan needed to spoon more and more dirt into every pot of soup. The human body’s capacity to adapt to such hardships had limits, and one by one, the famished, road-weary stragglers broke down. If any among them could no longer walk, they’d lift the invalid onto the seat beside Frieda. Everyone took turns pulling the rickshaw now. If rest did not restore this person, Swan would choose a stopping place and, in whatever shady spot seemed auspicious, they’d lay down the straggler so that Frieda could tend to their stricken soul. To everyone’s amazement—even her own—Frieda had the ability to staunch pain by her touch alone. She also had a talent for coaxing a spirit from its bodily host, ever-so-gently and painlessly. During the hours, and sometimes days, that a soul’s departure required, the others would scavenge the roadside for shards or stones or other natural elements. Swan could often see animals or faces or buildings or little people in these objects and, in this way, could sense which were most imbued with reality’s power. They placed these talismans over each new body, and a mound of dirt or sand completed the grave. The stragglers would chant the name of their lost companion and shout out memories whenever one arose, and one of Jing Jing’s warbling songs would end the tribute.
Harold and Frieda had quit caressing. When Swan whispered this observation to Jing Jing she only laughed, but a few days later the old couple departed the world within an hour of each other. Frieda was the first to slip away and so didn’t have to witness Harold’s painful dying. The little fetishes were piled so high that Swan had trouble seeing over the heap, and several stragglers thought it would be fitting to leave the rickshaw astride the grave. Swan quickly overruled them. “We need it more than they do,” he said. “And Frieda and Harrold would want us to use it.”
By the time another month had passed, it was only Jing Jing and Swan, pulling their meager possessions behind them, withered by the sun, battle scarred, skin and bones. The simple reality of the planet’s imminent death as well as their own bore down upon them. They barely spoke.
Then Jing Jing believed she saw a flying insect, though Swan thought it looked more like a flake of ash. They abandoned the rickshaw at the side of the highway and walked for three days in the direction the speck had disappeared in. Dragging a few indispensable items along in Swan’s suitcase; staggering, falling, stupefied by hunger, they entered a high valley on their hands and knees. The valley was round, like a crater, where the gnarled hulks of long dead oaks, broken off a few feet above the ground, poked through piles of garbage. Near the center of this basin they found a bubbling spring and lousewort growing among some desiccated corpses. Burdock with meaty stems sprouted here and there as well. They fed themselves slowly on a hardy mush that Jing Jing made, and Swan constructed a dome from lengths of polyvinyl pipe he’d found buried amid the trash. As he covered it with scraps of polyethylene and mud, he thought of Ottala’s wikiup, and when he watched Jing Jing crawl through its tiny doorway, he was reminded of Dr Escobar’s ambitions. It was absolutely dark inside and the only sound was the patter of sand and plastic pellets that were continuously blown across the valley by the wind. It turned out Jing Jing was an expert kisser and they spent their nights practicing this lost art. The only part of their bodies not hardened and calloused was the inside of their mouths.
Cuddled naked on the sand, wrapped in the remains of Swan’s fuzzy blanket, with his wooly lamb as their only pillow, each took care not to hurt the other with a sharp hip, a rib or knee. In this little oasis at the center of a great sterile desert, two gentle tongues wrestled playfully, and a sensation of sweetness and longing flowed into their hearts like the rush of an intoxicating drug.
{End}
Happy New Year to all you "Preservationists" (fans of The Nature Preserve). I grew accustomed to the semi-weekly installments of this story over the past several months. The graphics that accompanied each chapter gave solid reference points for this unique and preposterous story. I was really hooked, so when the story was about to end, I freaked. I was experiencing separation anxiety. I called for a sequel, hoping to bring unbearable influence on our unassuming author. But in the end, he will have to decide if his concept of this story would allow it to continue. Maybe he already decided, but he also left the door cracked open. The blue suitcase has its happy wheels intact, so anything is possible.
One final thought. This novel deserves a printed version with the graphics included.
It seems likely to me that "The Nature Preserve" will be widely read and recognized at some point. There's nothing quite like it. Along with unique world-building, and throughout its playfulness and humor, it hits themes that go deep into collective awareness. I saw characters I'll never forget! Thank you, Ruben Bix.