‘Hmm,’ she says.
I offer her my best attempt at a winning smile, stretching my lips wide.
‘Oh, God. Definitely don’t do that.’
‘Just be natural,’ Nora says. ‘Pretend you’re home at the airport surrounded by friends, if you people have those.’
I think back to the moment Julie named me, that warm feeling that crept into my face for the first time as we shared a beer and a plate of Thai food.
‘There you go, that’s better,’ Nora says.
Julie nods, pressing her knuckles against her smiling lips as if to hold back some outburst of emotion. A giddy cocktail of amusement, pride and affection. ‘You clean up nice, R.’
‘Thank . . . you.’
She takes a deep, decisive breath. ‘Okay then.’ She pulls a wool beanie over her wild hair and zips up her sweatshirt. ‘Ready to see what humanity’s been up to since you left it?’
In my old days of scavenging the city I often gazed up at the Stadium walls and imagined a paradise inside. I assumed it was perfect, that everyone was happy and beautiful and wanted for nothing, and in my numb, limited way I felt envy and wanted to eat them all the more. But look at this place. The corrugated sheet metal glaring in the sun. The fly-buzzing pens of moaning, hormone-pumped cattle. The hopelessly stained laundry hanging from support cables between buildings, flapping in the wind like surrender flags.
‘Welcome to Citi Stadium,’ Julie says, spreading her arms wide. ‘The largest human habitation in what used to be America.’
‘There are over twenty thousand of us crammed into this fishbowl,’ Julie says as we push through the dense crowds in the central square. ‘Pretty soon it’ll be so tight we’ll all just squish together. The human race will be one big mindless amoeba.’
Why didn’t we scatter? Head for high ground and plant our roots where the air and water were clean? What is it we needed from each other in this sweaty crush of bodies?
As much as possible I keep my eyes to the ground, trying to blend in and avoid notice. I sneak glances at guard towers, water tanks, new buildings rising under the bright strobe of arc welders, but mostly my view is of my feet. The asphalt. Mud and dog shit softening the sharp angles.
‘We’re growing less than half what we need to survive,’ Julie says as we pass the gardens, just a blurry dream of green behind the translucent walls of the hothouses. ‘So all the real food gets rationed out in tiny servings, and we fill the gaps in our diet with Carbtein.’ A trio of teenage boys in yellow jumpsuits hauls a cart of oranges past us, and I notice one of them has strange sores running down the side of his face, sunken brown patches like the bruises on an apple, as if the cells have simply collapsed. ‘Not to mention we’re burning through a pharmacy worth of medicine every month. Salvage teams can barely keep up. It’s only a matter of time before we go to war with the other enclaves over the last bottle of Prozac.’
Was it just fear? the voices wonder. We were fearful in the best of times; how could we cope with the worst? So we found the tallest walls and poured ourselves behind them. We kept pouring until we were the biggest and strongest, elected the greatest generals and found the most weapons, thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness. But nothing so obvious could ever work.
‘What’s amazing to me,’ Nora says, squeezing past the strained belly of a morbidly pregnant woman, ‘is that despite all these needs and shortages we have, people keep pumping out kids. Flooding the world with copies of themselves just because that’s tradition, that’s what’s done.’
Julie glances at Nora and opens her mouth, then closes it.
‘And even though we’re about to starve to death under a mountain of poopy diapers, no one’s brave enough to even suggest that people keep their seed in their nuts for a while.’
‘Yeah, but . . .’ Julie begins, her voice uncharacteristically timid. ‘I don’t know . . . there’s something kind of beautiful about it, don’t you think? That we keep living and growing even though our world is a corpse? That we keep coming back no matter how many of us die?’
‘Why is it beautiful that humanity keeps coming back? Herpes does that, too.’
‘Oh shut up, Nora, you love people. Being a misanthrope was Perry’s thing.’
Nora laughs and shrugs.
‘It’s not about keeping up the population, it’s about passing on who we are and what we’ve learned, so things keep going. So we don’t just end. Sure it’s selfish, in a way, but how else do our short lives mean anything?’
‘I guess that’s true,’ Nora allows. ‘It’s not like we have any other legacies to leave in this post-everything era.’
‘Right. It’s all fading. I heard the world’s last country collapsed in January.’
‘Oh, really? Which one was it?’
‘Can’t remember. Sweden, maybe?’
‘So the globe is officially blank. That’s depressing.’
‘At least you have some cultural heritage you can hold on to. Your dad was Ethiopian, right?’
‘Yeah, but what’s that mean to me? He didn’t remember his country, I never went there, and now it doesn’t exist. All that leaves me with is brown skin, and who pays any attention to colour any more?’ She waves a hand towards my face. ‘In a year or two we’re all gonna be grey anyway.’
I fall behind as they continue to banter. I watch them talk and gesticulate, listening to their voices without hearing the words.