On the Dunes

I remember this beach. My Vera is one. She sits there eating sand, kneading it with her chunky baby hands, her golden curls shining in the sun. My mother is there, laughing, the sand plastered to my daughter’s face like a mask.

Today, the lonely Pacific groans and heaves upon an abandoned shoreline, battering itself against an empty strand reaching to the horizon.

I walk up from the water and sit, working my feet beneath the frigid sand. The wind moves across my skin, fine hairs on end. The gusts blow, shifting over the surface of the coastal dunes. I shelter my face in the collar of my t-shirt. Below me, the sea marks time as waves advance and retreat as they always have. Remnants of a eucalyptus grove stand in the distance, a spectral reminder of some other time, leaves long since ground to sand, like most things. My shoes are next to me, the cuffs are worn threadbare. They were mine in a former life, a token of an era when the sound of seabirds and children building sandcastles echoed up from these shores.

Next to the shoes is the backpack they gave me. A bit of water is pooled in the bottom. A framed photo of my Vera and me is set on the sand. It's her eighth birthday, one where money was short, and her happiness flourished despite our poverty. A silver locket is around my neck. A token from my mother.

*

I take my place in line. Six others from my section await their turn ahead of me. We’re all dressed in our administration-standard navy coveralls, fitted waist, and button closure shirt. Every eleven seconds, I hear the little chiming sound, a discarded glass vial clanging around in the collection bin. I look down at my bare feet, cold against the white tile. Behind me are several more pairs of bare feet in varying states of anticipation. I explore a grout line with my little toe while I wait.

Here, the administrator says, for your safety. For your protection. I take the vial engraved with my ID number and drink. I toss the empty glass in the collection bin, where it chimes around before settling. I walk out with floating gait, the narcotic warmth of the medication hitting my brain, euphoria coming on.

*

The wind eases as I walk inland, the Pacific at my back. Dead vegetation and brittle eucalyptus limbs rustle against themselves, the sound of a rattlesnake’s tail. Time passes. The sand thins, derelict blacktop showing through where Highway One must have been.

I let my thoughts wander to my Vera and to my mother. It’s funny, worrying about whether someone might be alive or not. It's the possibility, I guess. The chance that The Administration might be taking care of my mother, that perhaps my Vera is happy and living in some capacity that gives her life meaning or renders her existence necessary, indispensable. I’m learning, now, that mine is not.

*

My apartment is three floors above the workroom. There is a tolerable bed, a sink, and a countertop made from one continual aluminum sheet. There's a solitary chair next to a card table. My closet holds four sets of navy-blue coveralls, exactly like everyones. There are no windows.

My evening vial waits for me on the counter. The vial is always cool to the touch, smooth glass. Nathalie, from Admin service, always leaves it in the same place. Her predecessor, Jon, I think, has been gone for a few months now. I drink and wait.

On my bed, I hear the sound of complete silence. No shuffling feet from upstairs. Tina, who lives next door, has stopped talking to herself. The glug of water in the building’s pipes has ceased. Even the air is still. As far as I know, every resident of my building is, at this very moment, doing the exact same thing I’m doing. Lying supine on our beds, alone, quiet, and high, accompanied only by the sound of our own pulse, the epistemological indicator that, indeed, we are still alive.

*

As I continue to walk, I offer my face skyward to the noontime sun, eyes closed, as though awaiting some benevolent gift from on-high. The sun’s warmth cuts the wind, and I feel a brief quiet, a stillborn moment, a temporary void. Time passes. The road veers further inland, across what were once coastal marshes. These wetlands have long since been subsumed by the expanse of the pacific dunes complex, rolling and endless. The ruins of a gas station appear, marking an intersection. I leave the highway and turn toward the mountains. Night comes and goes.

The morning sunrise filters in through the pine boughs in shafts of light as I reach the top of the Coast Range. Below me is the western edge of the Central Valley, now a basin of shifting silt and poisoned alkali rivers, the first victim of The Administration’s agricultural reforms. As I descend, conifers give way to skeletal oak trees rising from a hillside sea of yellow grass. The Pacific wind is replaced by the shimmering warmth of the year-round Santa Anas.

*

Laying on the floor below the message slot is an envelope. It's from Kenzi, my unit administrator. I slip my little finger between the seams and tear it open. I recognize the orange paper by reputation.

Outside my door, Kenzi greets me with a smile. She accompanies me through a foreign, grey hallway. She wishes me a sincere happy birthday. Number forty, she says. I wouldn’t have had any idea. As we walk, she expresses gratitude for my work and what I’ve contributed to The Administration.

Kenzi directs me through a door and hands me a backpack. She asks me to leave my coveralls on the wall hooks. In the room are my old clothes. The ones I wore on the day of The Collection. I enter the room as a member of The Administration and exit as an aged version of the twenty-seven-year-old who went into the building at Changeover.

Now changed, Kenzi guides me by the elbow. I’m struck by the sunlight permeating a set of windows; the first I’ve seen in what I've just learned is thirteen years. Motes of dust drift in the air as we move into the light. Kenzi stops short. Go on ahead, she says, with a little wave of her fingers. Go on out. I say nothing and walk toward the door. I don’t even consider protesting. Instead, I step into the vestibule, a no-man’s land. And then the giant step out of the building.

The force of the wind knocks me sideways. The worn cotton of my t-shirt ripples like a flag, hair blown straight across my face. I move through the shape of the old parking lot, the suggestion of cement curbs and parking blocks still visible under the blowing sand. I hear the surf breaking somewhere below.

*

My hometown is tucked in at the base of the Coastal Range. It was an agricultural town, almond orchards stretching across undulating hills adjacent to the California Aqueduct. The summers were hot, the winters mild. There was an annual bike race and a rodeo. It’s where my Vera was born. The town wasn’t large enough to be involved in the preliminary skirmishes or the secondary skirmishes, but eventually, The Changeover came. We were split up and moved to different Administration Centers. I was twenty-seven, my Vera was eight.

As I walk down the mountain, I see the gridwork of the old street system. The orchards are gone. The aqueduct is dry and buried in silt, the tops of the old wire fence barely visible, echoing some idyllic farmland blanketed with drifted snow.

In town, the buildings still stand, mummified and preserved by the heat. Nothing grows anymore, no vines to infiltrate the stonework, no insects to infest the drywall or chew away the stucco. The sun, eternally beaming, begins its wrathful, downward arc toward the crest of the mountains and the sea. Time passes.

*

The Pacific stretches before me now, an infinite vastness. I wonder if whales still beach themselves or if there are still penguins in Antarctica. I reach the water and feel the cold current lap against my bare feet. The wind blows a spray of seawater over my face each time a wave breaks. I lick my lips in the hope of tasting the ocean before it evaporates. I’m somehow less alone here, with the organism of the sea for company. I work my toes around in the mud, feeling the loose pebbles and bits of dead coral tumbling against my feet. I reach down and pick up a fist-sized rock and toss it up onto the sand. And then another, and another.

A small, silver locket is in the pocket of my jeans. A token from my mother. I can see the heart-shaped outline where it presses through the denim against my thigh. I set my tennis shoes next to the rock-pile, the laces knotted for easy carrying. Inside the backpack is a framed photo of my Vera and me, taken on her eighth birthday, one where money was short and her happiness flourished in our poverty. Three vials of medication lay zipped inside a plastic interior pouch. I’m beginning to understand that the Administration meant them as a retirement gift.

I pull out the photo and study my Vera's face for a while before setting it next to my shoes. The vials gleam in their translucent pocket. I loop the locket around my neck. And then the first vial. I chase it with the second and the third. The empty containers tumble from my palm, planting themselves in the sand. I begin to fill the empty backpack with rocks. One after the next, I place them in, wondering if I’ll be able to heft the thing when the time comes.

The weight of the rock-filled backpack cuts at my shoulders. I’m ankle-deep in the sea, and the drugs are kicking in. It won’t be long, I think, and continue to walk. The cold of the water is overwhelmed by the narcotics. Everything is warm; everything is perfect. I’m waist-deep as the first wave breaks over my head. I’m submerged a moment, my eyes open in the sea-green gloom. The surf recedes, and I get a breath. I think of my Vera then; I see her face, the wrinkle of her nose, the one incisor smaller than the other. The next set of waves roll in. My body sways, anchored by the backpack.

*

On 8th Avenue, between the Miller’s and the Foster’s, is my house. The one I came home to as an infant. It stands before me, a quiet monument to a foreign time, a foreign life. The front walk is buried in the shifting silt, like everything else. The front door is ajar, and I push it open with my fingertips. It swings silently on ancient hinges, if not in years, then certainly in experience. The house's interior is tidy, the shroud of dust limited to the entryway and the windowsills. In my childhood room, the lights are on, the carpet clean. I see my mother there, reading. She looks up and welcomes me home as though time had ceased. She folds her book closed over her thumb and asks if I need a drink. I hear my Vera in her room, talking to herself. I open the door and find her on her bed, cross-legged with a cotton ball soaked in acetone, dabbing the paint from her fingernails. Mom! She greets me, standing up on her bed, her arms held out. I run to her bedside and bury my face in her hair. This is real, I think. This is real.