All the Birds in the Sky

Oakland glowed pink. Patricia could glimpse a panic attack coming out of her blind spot, but as long as she didn’t look at it directly, it would never arrive. Except that just as she hatched that notion, her bag made a loud klaxon blast, like she was in a submarine that was venting water. She jumped up and nearly took a spill over the railing. The alarm was her Caddy, which was displaying a “New Voicemail” message at the center of its swirl of spokes. The voicemail was not new, it was one that Laurence had left her right before the attack on Denver, which she had later found and deleted without listening to it. He had left it on her phone, not her Caddy, so her Caddy shouldn’t even have it. She put the Caddy back in her bag and watched the red blanket creep toward the AT-AT shipyard, while an orange thumbprint grazed the horizon. The alarm sounded again: “New Voicemail.” Once again, not a new voicemail. She deleted it a second time and turned her Caddy off for good measure.

Color returned to the world, cone time replaced rod time. Patricia thought about what it would be like to suffer Priya’s fate forever. She tried not to feel sorry for Theodolphus. She thought about Dorothea, getting her brains blown out. Her mouth tasted foul.

Her bag vibrated, then rattled and shrilled. The Caddy had turned back on somehow and was, you guessed it, trying to get her to listen to an old dead message.

“What is up with you?” she said to the device.

“You’re going to want to listen to this,” it said aloud, in its directions-to-the-airport voice.

She deleted the message again.

It came back again, with the same obnoxious noise.

She’d saved some childhood pictures on this Caddy, or else she would have lobbed it off the hillside. And anyway, whatever, it was a voicemail, how bad could it be? She pressed “listen.”

At first, she just felt disconcerted, listening to the Laurence of another time line talking about a future that had been erased. Poor dumb alternate Laurence. But then he talked about her dead parents, as if they’d only just died — whereas Patricia had been thinking of her parents as having died many, many years ago. First there had been no time to grieve for her parents, and then she had decided that she’d already grieved enough. In fact, her parents had died recently, not years ago, and she had given them short shrift except for a pang here and there, and one messed-up dream talk with Roberta. She’d buried the grief, the way she buried everything. Now her head was full of decapitated sandwiches and sandpaper shirts, and her father’s kisses on the bridge of her nose, and the canary-yellow frosting on the seventh-birthday cake her mom had baked her, and the way the “o” in “disown” became a diphthong under severe strain, and her mother’s broken arm.…

She was never going to see her parents again, or tell them she loved them, or tell them they ruined her childhood. They were gone, and she had never even known them, and Roberta had insisted they’d really loved her best in spite of all their cruelty, and Patricia would never, ever understand. The not-understanding was worse than anything else, it was like a mystery and a wound that couldn’t heal and an unforgivable failure.

Patricia broke down. She fell on her hands and knees in the dirt at the road shoulder, facing the blinding sunrise, and she started shaking and scrabbling in the ground and her eyes blurred from the overflow. She wiped her eyes clear as her vision fell on a single yellow flower beyond the metal fence, and just as Ghost Laurence said the words “emotional phototropism” the sunlight hit the flower and it actually raised its motherfucking head to greet the sun, and Patricia lost her shit all over again, the tears just cascading out of her as she clawed at the ground she was salting.

The message ended and vanished forever and Patricia kept weeping and digging the stony dirt with both hands, until the sun was upon her.

When she could see again, still dry-heaving and bawling a little, she looked at the Caddy, which was perched in the grass looking innocent, and she had a pretty shrewd idea who this was but that was the least of her worries. “Fuck,” she said, “you.”

“I thought you needed to hear that,” the Caddy said.

“The trap that cannot be ignored,” she said, “is fucking bullshit.”

She sat, head on dirty knees, looking out at the city. She felt like there was nobody in the world she could talk to about how she was feeling, as sure as if a plague had killed every other human. This thought led her back to the Unraveling, the way every thought eventually did.

She banged on Laurence’s door, not knocking and pausing and then knocking again, but rather a steady pummeling that says “I’m going to break this door down.” Her hand bruised up and she kept going.

This time, Laurence had probably been asleep. He looked even more disheveled than before, and way more disoriented. He had one sock on and an arm through one T-shirt sleeve. “Hey.” He squinted.