Chapter Text
Manousos was convinced he lived fourteen layers below hell, in a place so forsaken that an apparition of Virgen de Caacupé wouldn’t even dare touch it with a ten-foot fucking pole.
For 13 days, he wrestled with books on electromagnetism written in a language so foreign to his tongue. He has certainly done this solitary schtick before; he can do it again. A temporary change in backdrop should suffice, hence he’s in this idle cul-de-sac in Albuquerque. So, every two or three days, he would break orbit and cross next door to a house that looks less like a home than a mausoleum. It was once the dwelling of an author, so if anyone from the distant future asked about his American adventure, he could say he worked alone on saving the world in a writer’s retreat.
Most days, he would look out over the horizon, seeing nothing but the dry expanse of fragmented soil stretching towards the Chihuahuan desert. Overly saturated skies anchored by massive cumulonimbus clouds hang above him, dressing the dry air that seldom pricks his skin. When it's dark, the city pulses with bright lights. Only but the hum of thousands of power lines with no one else to service comforts him.
Then one damned Friday, said author Carol Sturka returned from the world’s worst honeymoon with an atom bomb, bringing home once again the whole world’s misery with her.
Since then, Manousos learned the pros and cons of living at the epicentre of misery to keep a fellow doomsday survivor company; he has endless access to questionably fresh Sprouts produce, top-of-the-shelf hard liquor, and the daily crooning of Boyz II Men jacked from the living room stereo. It’s like living inside paradise with an endless supply of refreshments—the finest, your most favourite beer if you will—only that it’s tepid.
Some days, he would parse endless chunks of text on how to make a Faraday's cage, and que se joda his way out of it into the outside night. The chill brings him some comfort, but animated in its own wrong way—lights going in and out like Morse code, wolves howling across the distance, and closer from the house, the raw, off-key wail of a drunk and brokenhearted Carol Sturka.
After a week and a half of hearing On Bended Knees every afternoon and walking into the astringent, potent smell of alcohol from the living room, Manousos is convinced he might get the first crack at how to blow this place up with the atom bomb before Carol could ever figure out what she wanted from it.
Today is supposed to be hopeful. Yet instead of his new alarm system blasting to wake him up, it is the sound of plastic bags rustling and glasses clinking from Carol tidying up the wreckage of last night’s self-indulgent, self-induced, most miserable party of one.
"Good morning, princess", Carol says as she passes him by, bending to pick a lone Cheeto curl beside the next couch.
He looks at his watch and sees 7:00 in the morning. He wasn't supposed to wake up until after 8:30. So he grunts with the weight of immense responsibility, the kind one gets for trying to save the human race by himself. He closes his eyes for a minute and sees vivid images of any scientific breakthrough fizzle in the darkness. Instead, his mind wanders into breakfast. Que se joda, he’ll make shakshuka today.
With Carol’s yellow checkered apron tied to his body, Manousos makes a beeline for the kitchen. He arranges everything up in perfect order—olive oil, Mediterranean spices, five eggs and plum tomatoes. As he swings for the stove, a ₲20,000 bill slips from his pocket. He should’ve handed it over at the Sprouts register before raiding Carol’s pantry. Instead, he had chosen to do something more human than feed a foreign banknote to a ghosted farmers market. He’ll drop the cash off later.
Finally, when the plating satisfies him, he calls for Carol. She joins him at the table and feasts with her hands, dragging a piece of bread through the bright spill of sunny-side yolks and fragrant red spiced tomatoes like a medicated toddler turned loose.
Carol’s about to make a final lap at it when the distant whirring of a helicopter startles them. It crescendos into a deafening roar, sending a fresh tingle up his spine. He has scratched his fork on Carol’s china many times—a futile attempt to generate some sort of new obscure noise, and they often worked, but there’s only so much he can do by himself, where, up to a certain point, making an instrument out of the china no longer tickled him.
Outside, dust reanimates an otherwise dead place; the neighbourhood foliage sways to its left aggressively, almost uprooting it. Despite feeling particles of sand enter his eye, Manousos stands transfixed from Carol’s porch.
“What the fuck,” Carol utters from behind him. Her white shirt still tinged with red splatters from bastardising his shakshuka with her hands. One spot, just below her left collarbone, is blotched particularly the darkest as if she was shot in the heart by a BB gun. This was also the second 'fuck' he had heard from her before 8 in the morning. Thirty-five more and she'll have beaten her own record.
The helicopter descends in front of them, down to this ruin, rewarding Manousos with a mirage: Zosia.
He hasn’t seen another human being in a month, but of course, this has to be Zosia—he has always seen her face, albeit moustached, plastered on the cover of one of Carol’s Wycaro books. He figured asking her about it two weeks ago, but weighed the potential waterworks and decided something better was worth his time. Zosia pulls her headset off and exhales. She doesn’t flinch; her gaze stays steady. With her hands clasped, she goes out the door and strides forward. The movement makes the hem of her light blue dress sway, revealing a deeper, bluer shade beneath.
"Hi Carol. Take me back, please—I miss you,” Zosia shoots at Carol with doe eyes. “I’m sorry for how we ended things.”
"You've got to be fucking kidding me.” Carol snipes at her.
“Everything that I said was in good faith. Once you understand how beautiful it is, you —”
”No shit, Zosia. I explicitly told you mindfuckers that I do not want to be turned. I did not and will not consent."
Manousos tries to interrupt with a finger, to tell them to speak slowly and forgo the figuratives. Somehow, after weeks of burying his head down in scientific textbooks written in the densest English imaginable, he realises the most indecipherable language of all is whatever the fuck these two have going on.
He quickly realises he’s not supposed to be here, but his feet won’t budge. Despite the early-morning mercy, the air is hot, and strangeness prickles his skin. His brain jumps a mile off, trying to make sense of this sudden quarrel, toward something singular: Zosia's mouth. The way she stutters, the way her lips are dry from either heat or tension, the way her chest rises and how it takes a beat for it to fall. How odd.
“Carol, it is our biological imperative to share this gift. It wasn’t our intention to hurt you, but you have to understand, your eggs are hardware, we —"
“Jesus, do you hear yourselves? Hardware?” Carol yells, “This world is not some fucking junkyard you farm for body parts like scraps to experiment on. You’re telling me all seven billion brains inside you, and everyone thinks like an egotistical mad scientist or some fucking doomsday freak? Oh! I know why — because you people have no regard for human life. You never had, all you do is conceal your lies. Your life is your own, you say. Such bullshit,” she continues, “You’re all just a bunch of soul-sucking ghouls arriving here on the pretence of sharing the peace, love and understanding from your planet, but nobody else knows what that really feels like because you’re all in the fucking the same! Hardware! Wow — Zosia, look, I appreciate this weird honesty schtick you people thought was so good you had to come down for, but kindly, go fuck yourselves”
Like she came off a hot pan and burned her tongue, Carol recoils as quickly as she spat the final expletive. Zosia doesn’t move. With her shoulders slack, eyes gone dull and heavy, she watches Carol.
So Carol lunges forward in panic, closing the distance to grab Zosia's face, “Shit! Zosia, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it to you like that. Hey, hey —” Her hand slides up, stroking Zosia’s cheek, trying to catch her eyes from where she stands an inch below. “Please, please be okay, baby —”
The sight of two besotted lovers in verbal combat was no rarity in Manousos’ small religious town in Colombia, so while he could barely register the words that came out of Carol’s mouth, he already knows how this plays out. Although for couples in Guatapé, nobody passes out after a one-sided argument.
But in this brief suspension of time, Zosia merely stands. She doesn’t roll her eyes back and collapse as she used to after Carol’s fit of rage.
Instead, she fixes her gaze on Carol and stutters, “Yes, that’s... that’s why... that's why..."
The hairs on the back of Manousos’ head split and stand, as if under the phantom force of the helicopter wind that had uprooted the plants earlier. He wants to run back to the house and get his radio. He could feel his fingers twitch in anticipation of tuning it to a particular frequency; he should be able to pick something up with this.
But the sight in front stumps him. Carol’s hands are attached so firmly to Zosia’s cheek, caging both Zosia in her gentle caress and Manousos in a lightbulb moment. He picks up on this strange oddity; this anomaly of a joined human, seemingly rewired to her wits, pleading for the forgiveness of an unjoined human after the discovery of her frozen eggs. It’s not rocket science, the math now adds up, and the realisation hits Manousos with such force that he takes a full step back.
“What is it, huh? Zosia?" Carol probes, her tone tinged with motherly inflection.
“Dios mio”, expels Manousos.
In this sleepy Albuquerque suburb—three heads, six ears total—no one hears what he has to say. It doesn't reverberate. The cracked desert swallows this contribution of his, throws it across the Sandia and gives him a middle finger for it.
He exhales and closes his eyes; his body language says "I just cracked something here", but he has no audience. Not even the birds, not even the Hive’s surveillance drone.
He cracks his eyes open to look at Carol, whose hands are now on Zosia’s shoulders. He wishes to pull her away from here and shake her senseless until she gets it. Instead, he looks down, inspecting sand on the pavement to zone out or sharpen his judgment before looking back up, finding Zosia's eyes on him.
Zosia inhales sharply, a sly curl forming on the corner of her lips. Her eyes lock back onto Carol’s.
“I’m pregnant.”
Inside Carol's house, Manousos’s alarm system blares. It's the sound of Asunción’s horns in its busiest streets — sharp taxi hooters bullying bumper-to-bumper gaps, long wails from buses herding pedestrians, motorcycles honking like it's about to combust if it doesn't get there first. It’s multiple blasts of horns going off at once, playing from Carol’s living room speakers, signalling the time—7:30 a.m. He sucks in a breath and prepares one more world-turning piece of information before it hits 8.
"You're pregnant", Carol replies, stoically.
"It's yours, I have it in me. That night in your room. You said it so beautifully, Carol,” Zosia smiles fully, tears forming in the corners of her eyes.
What the fuck.
"I just want to make you happy, Carol. It's all I ever wanted.”
The ground doesn't rumble under Manousos's feet. Instead, five roadrunner birds finally dart across the street. They separate as they fly across that lamppost parading a dead, bladeless drone. Out on the horizon, the sun crests in peace, casting a low, golden-orange glow. A halo seems to form above Zosia's towering silhouette, messianic and fucked up at best.
Carol peels her hands off Zosia’s arms with quick animosity, her face contorting into shock, then disgust. She retreats, and retreats until her face is fully turned from them, back into the honking house where her dead wife is buried. Her movement steals the amber spill of light from where Zosia stands. Above them, thick orange clouds surge, swallowing the newborn sun. Manousos rules out the possibility of uttering a word.
At the slam of Carol’s door, Zosia’s face collapses into tears. She weeps like a mournful widow, a child deprived of candy, a knitting mother witnessing the death of her beloved character on the TV, a pilgrim before the altar of the Virgin Mary. She is every kind of human anguish at once, and it all comes crashing in the wake of Carol Sturka’s rage.
In his mind’s feeble attempt at some sort of reprieve, he looks at the atom bomb, still parked on Carol’s porch. Its enclosure remains beige, rugged, and dust-caked. He and Carol had never actually discussed properly what to do with it. It's a pretty piece of deterrent, and maybe this is all there is to it—a thick line between quiet limbo and perpetual ruin. He once thought of requesting a helicopter and flying with it, setting it off from an altitude. He knows he could disrupt a signal if he does, and if he comes back from it with complete functional limbs, only then will the real work begin.
But when he goes into Carol’s office to borrow her fancy ballpoint pens, sees a moustached Zosia as a pirate on the cover of her Wycaro books stacked against each other, and knows that Carol’s shotgun is loaded, Manousos doesn’t indulge himself.
The new, more sophisticated bomb that just dropped from the skies this morning, standing in front of him—weeping, fragile, expectant and resplendent in blue. This one, he thinks, might not be so bad.
This one might actually save the world.