Des(s)ert
The sun was yet to rise, but the heat felt thick and settled. Radish walked west down the shoulder of I-475, gravel under his boots as loud and unpleasant as grinding teeth. Surveillance drones occasionally buzzed overhead. In the books Radish read as a teenager, taking the main roads was always a bad idea. People were sectioned off in districts or factions or cults and warned to remain off the beaten path, to stay out in the unknown, the unmapped, wilderness as sanctuary, but the truth was the highway was as safe as anywhere. Yesterday, Radish had trekked through Toledo, empty and caked in grit. No way to tell time, phone long since dead, but he estimated he was now nearing what was once the Michigan-Ohio border.
Ten miles a day. All he needed to do was ten miles a day. Radish felt a strain on his calves as he climbed a steady uphill stretch. His ice cream had worn off during another sleepless night. He had rolled around drenched in sweat, throat prickly and parched, skin flush and itchy. The unfamiliar beard tore at his neck. Each morning, he reapplied the cream over his sore thighs and chest and arms and felt as if he had rolled in fresh snow. The abrupt change caused him to shiver. He knew he wasn’t supposed to dip his internal temperature that fast, but there was no way around it if he wanted to get a head start on the day. That morning, he wore a damp, hole-ridden t-shirt and khaki cargo shorts, the tube tucked into his back pocket, hiking boots laced all the way up his ankles. By the time he reached the upper peninsula, the total trip would be nearly 1,500 miles.
Three hours later, Radish crossed the state line under a blue sign that reminded him of a longstanding tourism campaign that was popular when he was growing up. His father used to scoff when the outdated television commercials aired. He hated the forgotten celebrity who served as Michigan’s voice. Nothing is pure anymore, his father would say, there was too much pollution and disease, a miasma over the whole country. They only lived easy because they were rich, and they were only tolerated because they were rich, but Radish’s father warned that their situation could change anytime. When they run out of scapegoats, they just find new ones. Our money won’t protect us forever.
Ahead, five lean deer clopped across the interstate. Those motherfuckers could survive anything, Radish thought. An eight-point buck was at the head of the herd. When the buck saw Radish, he paused. Radish came to a stop and felt the weight of his bag fall heavy over his shoulders. He didn’t have a gun or flare, nothing more than a hunting knife that wouldn’t do much if the buck made a run at him. Radish thought about making noise to try and scare them off, but before he could find his voice the buck galloped in his direction. Radish stood stock still. The buck lowered his head as he neared and presented his rack of sharp, bony points, but at the last second, he veered right and turned back toward the herd. The deer scrambled together back into the deserted forest. They maneuvered through a row of gargantuan dead birch trees. Radish adjusted his shoulder straps and continued north. By noon, he yanked the reflective tent from his backpack, a magician unfurling an enormous handkerchief.
The days passed that way, endless and silent, torrid as hell. His whole trip was routine but interrupted by nature’s resilient miracles. Three mornings after his run in with the deer, Radish gathered from the road signs he was nearing Ann Arbor. Michigan highway 23 was a straight shot and kept him from having to wander through Detroit. He was curious about The Oasis, the elite environmental safehouse downtown founded by a corrupt real estate billionaire, but knew they’d never let him inside. It would be a fruitless boondoggle. The day—unrelenting, typical. The concrete was wavy with heat. Most of the trees were snapped, probably torn apart by tornados. It was a matter of cheap luck that Radish had not yet encountered high winds. He didn’t like walking at night, but he always finished his miles before the sun rose too high. The ice cream was less effective during the noon hours. UV rays harsh as laser beams.
Radish heard the creak of a bunker hatch from somewhere off the main road. Months ago, he had read an article about how some midwestern communities survived by transitioning to a subterranean lifestyle, the northern weather still cool enough that they could sneak out for bathroom breaks or quick errands without succumbing to the heat. They tunneled between a network of dank basements and shelters. Radish walked in the direction of the noise. Maybe he could at least walk underground for a day or two. Conserve his energy, cool in the darkness, rediscover an ephemeral sense of peace.
Off the path, the forest was sparse. Radish had become accustomed to how the woods could look monumental even if they were bare. The trees were spread out and devoid of low branches. Any foliage was high and scant. It was like walking through a field of forgotten pillars. About twenty yards away, a man in a blue, flower-print Hawaiian shirt and denim shorts pissed on a massive stump. Beside him, there was a rusted tunnel latch the size of a manhole. Twigs crunched beneath Radish’s boots. The man zipped his shorts and turned toward Radish, a silver, rust-pocked, cowboy pistol in hand. He had a white mustache and a wide face, flush red in the heat. His shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a hairy, sunburned potbelly and a leather shoulder strap for his weapon.
Radish raised his hands, “I’m unarmed.”
“What difference does that make to me?” the man asked. His voice gave away the poor air quality.
“I’m hoping enough,” Radish said. He hadn’t realized the raspy quality of his own voice from the weeks out of the cool and filtered air of his house. He hadn’t had a reason to speak aloud in weeks.
The man assessed Radish’s soiled shorts and t-shirt. “You’ve been on the road a while.”
“A month or two.”
The man walked to the latch and stood over it. “If you’ve been out here that long you got ice cream.” Not a question.
“About half a tube left,” Radish said. He reached down and removed the tube from his pocket for the man to see. It was rolled at the end in a spiral. The same way he made sure to squeeze out every last speck of toothpaste. Radish had half a dozen unopened ice cream tubes buried at the bottom of his pack. He was done for if those were taken from him.
“You must be a rich man walking around with that. Though I thought that stuff didn’t work on a man of your complexion.”
“Was a rich man,” Radish said. He kept a smile on his face. He was being goaded. After meeting emergency FDA approval, ice cream had always been a luxury of the ultra-wealthy, but the pharmaceutical manufacturers colluded with the government and insisted the compound did not work for people with high levels of eumelanin. Four years ago, that’s how Radish’s father died. Three doctors said his skin was too dark for the cream to be effective, even after they were offered extra under the table. No one would write their family a prescription. One day, his father’s vintage electric car—desperately in need of a new battery—died on a short drive to the grocery store. He tried to walk the final two miles home. Heat stroke.
“I’ll take that,” the man said. Radish wagered he was in poor enough territory that no one would imagine him having more than what was in his pockets. He lobbed the tube toward the man’s feet. “Samuel, by the way,” the man said. He opened the latch and kicked the tube of cream into the mouth of the hole.
“Is that the cost of entry? I’m Radish.”
Samuel giggled and his mustache waggled like a fuzzy slug. “Your people will just name you anything, won’t they?” Samuel took his time to descend each rung, but he kept the pistol aimed at Radish until he was buried to his neck. “Aloha, Radish.” The latch squeaked on its hinge and clanked to a close. Radish was alone.
***
Throughout his childhood, and right up until the moment he left home, Radish lived in a Florida mansion with a backyard swimming pool shaped like an ice cream cone. The property once belonged to the family founders of a soft-serve empire before being briefly inhabited by a tech bigwig before his parents bought it when they immigrated from the Middle East. They never told Radish his ethnicity. We don’t want you to get distracted with all that, his mother used to say, it’s all the same to them anyway. By the time Radish reached adolescence, most of the rich had migrated north. His parents were wealthy, but they believed in the wonders of science and thought things would get better. They refused to leave the Sunshine State.
Even though his parents were of the miniscule percentage of the population that could afford meat, they were vegans for environmental reasons, so Radish was raised on healthy, colorful dishes, abundant greens in every meal. He was named after his parents’ favorite vegetable, gone extinct in the natural world a week before he was born. Now, the lone place to find genetically engineered radishes were in the federal greenhouses near Lake Superior. He hoped if he survived the trek, he could someday taste his namesake. But, growing up, Radish also had a sweet tooth, and there was a chest freezer in the pool house next to the foam beach toys and his father’s colorful kites that was full of dairy-free ice cream and popsicles, assorted frozen novelties of every texture and flavor. Radish would sit with his feet in the water and devour these treats before they melted, the sun in those years as dangerous as ever, but manageable with excessive sunscreen and breaks in the shade. If he ate the frozen desserts too fast, his mouth and stomach would throb from the cold and his body would shake. Once, he chipped his tooth on a chocolate éclair solid as a rock. The pearl of enamel bounced across the tile deck and plopped into the pool. His mother drove him to the dentist that afternoon, where Radish was poked with a local shot of Novocain to numb the pain, but his gums pulsed with a new kind of chill, a dull separation from his body he would recognize two decades later when he covered himself head to toe in ice cream on the day he too fled north.
Radish’s mother died less than a week after his father (a menagerie of pills, a doleful note, an airtight will for her only son). Left alone, Radish squandered much of the remaining family fortune. Not enough to be uncomfortable, but as the heat index climbed and the price of resources skyrocketed, he soon realized he should have been more frugal. He remained holed up indoors even as more people scrambled toward the poles without plans. He watched passively as Canada was flooded with climate refugees and closed its borders. His bank accounts plunged. By the time he agreed to sell the property to the government in exchange for a few essentials—a meager supply of ice cream, gas, safe food and water—the world had unraveled. Everything upended faster than Radish imagined. Who knew why the feds wanted a useless mansion? The whole state was like a shallow pan of boiling water.
Radish’s car carried him the first 700 miles on empty roads until the tank ran empty and the battery died. He ditched the car north of Knoxville and went on foot. The early days were a learning curve. Radish was in shape but had never backpacked or camped. His feet blistered within an hour. His back ached all through the night. He applied more ice cream than planned and knew that moving too slow would prove fatal. He didn’t want to die the same way as his father, a body burning under the unbearable heat. He didn’t want to die at all.
***
In his tent, sprawled out like a ceiling fan, Radish wondered what would happen if he dabbed some ice cream on the roof of his mouth. Would it provide the numb feeling of the dentist’s chair or the deep overflowing burn that followed an enormous spoonful of Rocky Road? Brain freeze was a sensation he had not experienced in years. He was still a month’s walk from Lake Superior, 300 more miles of empty roads and bony forests, limbless trees in every direction. A landscape of beiges and browns. Radish thought of the wacky backgrounds illustrated in the books his parents orated to him over and over when he was learning to read. The country had turned into a vast cartoonish wasteland. Lake Superior, the last refuge. A sanctuary for the elite. Radish didn’t have a plan for what to say when he arrived at the big bridge. He knew there was no reason for them to allow him over.
He reapplied his ice cream, took stock of his iodine tablets and water filters, calculated his caloric intake for the day, and stepped out into the low morning light. He knew he needed to refill his water supply to last at least five days before moving on. According to the green highway signs, he was sixteen miles south of Flint, which had been a ghost town since being evacuated more than a decade ago. No one would be holed up there, but there was nowhere else to refill either.
After packing his camp, he followed signs north toward a small lake named after the town nearest him. A deserted Dairy Queen devoid of windows stood guard off the approaching highway exit. The red lemon-shaped sign was faded pink, the white lettering smattered in dirt. Not a soul anywhere around since he ran into Samuel. A hawk circled high enough in the sky as to be nearly unidentifiable. Radish wondered how it was surviving. There couldn’t be much to scavenge. The hawk hovered in place and it reminded Radish of when his father used to drive them to the gulf and string windsocks to the line of one of his massive multicolored kites. He would unroll the string and add the windsocks until the kite was high into the air. When the line was full of fluttering tails, he would hand Radish the spool and tell him to hold on tight. As Radish gripped the handles, his father would run into the water and splash in the shallows until he was in the shadow of the kite, like he was going to catch it if it fell. By the time Radish was old enough to fight the waves, the water was riddled with toxic bacteria and decaying fish and deemed unsafe.
Insects buzzed around his head, but never landed. The ice cream deterred them to prevent the spread of disease. Radish had read multiple conspiracy theories stating that the government released billions of mosquitos rife with viruses to purge the population before the climate became truly unlivable. A silent, untraceable genocide.
A squirrel as skinny as a hotdog scampered out in front of him. The hawk curled into a dive and plummeted down at breakneck speed. Radish jogged to get out of the way, but his backpack bounced up and down and left him off balance. His boots weren’t tied tight enough. If he rolled his ankle the entire journey would be for nothing. Radish could feel a gust overhead as the hawk glided past and downward toward easy prey. Radish coughed. His lungs were on fire. He sobbed as he caught his breath, watching the hawk soar upward, the squirrel limp in its talons.
His body pulsed with heat. He hadn’t run far, but it was enough that now he needed to stop and rest. The hawk had ruined most of the day’s progress. There was no good way to cool back down. Radish found a flat clearing on a patch of dirt and began the arduous process of unpacking his camp. He knew he would not sleep. There was little hope of calming his mind.
***
The morning Radish sold away his inheritance, the pool house caved in. The small structure had been in disrepair for years. Between humidity, mold, pests, and natural disasters, it was a matter of time, but Radish found the timing tritely ominous. A foreboding collapse. Could the platitude not be left alone? That was the first time he tested the ice cream. Radish layered up until he felt like a toothache, then wandered out to the rubble. He pushed aside warped wood and drywall to open the abandoned chest freezer. He found a box of melted popsicles sticky and brown in the bottom corner. They must have been ancient. He imagined the long-since-melted rainbow sludge inside.
Radish packed and left the house behind that afternoon. A pair of government drones hovered over the property to witness his exit. All he had now was the car and his backpack. Food, water, the tent, a few survival tools. There was nothing to do but begin his lonely migration. Once the car was loaded, he turned on the automatic driver so that he could sit and rest. As the car maneuvered out of the driveway, the mansion became less imposing in the distance. The white Roman columns were dilapidated and covered in black streaks of dirt. There was nothing beautiful about it. Numb and exhausted, Radish watched the distance grow between him and the sole home he had ever known. Now, it was nothing more than a hollow, gaudy monstrosity, left to deteriorate on its own. Who knew how many years it would remain standing, waiting for any inhabitant at all, in its dusty and decrepit state? Was it any different from the world’s other forgotten wonders? It meant nothing to anyone except for him. It was another insignificant, obsolete structure. An unmemorable ruin destined to erode into the earth or be swallowed by the rising sea.
***
It took weeks, but when Radish finally saw the Mackinac Bridge, he pumped his fists. He walked down the road past a line of abandoned fudge shops and t-shirt boutiques, a novelty kite store that filled him with a pang of grief for his father, until he was at the water. It was nearly sundown. Two days earlier, Radish had felt a shift in the temperature. At first, he didn’t know whether the chill was a passing fit of weather, some serendipitous fluke cold front, or if he had crossed some invisible border into a livable climate. Now, he was certain he had reached a true promised land.
At the center of the bridge, a black wall stood erect. A few soldiers paced atop the barrier, rifles in hand. Wind zoomed over the water and Radish felt like he could lean into each gust and remain standing. Lean the other way, he’d drift off into the sky. At the base of the wall, a man sat at an enormous wooden desk. He was young, maybe Radish’s age, somewhere in his late twenties, and wearing a red floral Hawaiian shirt. Teal plastic sunglasses protected his face from the setting sun. Here we are, Radish thought, the border. As he walked toward the desk, the red dots of several scopes flashed across his chest and stomach. They didn’t bother him. He had walked so far. There was no reason for them to shoot him. Even if they did, there was nowhere else for him to go.
“No backpack,” a soldier shouted from above. Radish shook the pack loose and let it fall to the concrete.
“Shirt too,” another added. Radish pulled his t-shirt over his head, exposing his wizened flesh, and let the wind carry it away.
Radish approached the desk. The man in the floral shirt had a nametag on that read CHAD in all capital letters. Chad was eating a kale salad out of a large blue ceramic bowl. Over the years, Radish had searched the Internet enough to recognize the transparent, pink-rimmed discs on top of the greens. His whole life he had wanted to try one.
“We’ve been waiting for you for a while,” Chad said.
“The drones?” Radish asked.
“Sure,” Chad said, “but also where else were you going to go once you sold everything to us?”
Radish winced. He was sure they could even guess how much ice cream he had left. Maybe they had a tracker on him the whole time. Hell, he would bet even the salad was planned. All part of an opulent act.
“I don’t suppose you’ll let me try that, will you?”
“Help yourself.” Chad opened a desk drawer and found a set of flimsy white plastic silverware wrapped in cellophane. He tossed it across the desk. Radish banged the bottom of the fork against the table, so the tines poked through the wrapper. He tore away the film and jabbed at the salad. The vegetable glistened, drenched in oil and vinegar. He stabbed three slices of radish and raised the fork to his mouth. They were crisp, but bitter and tasteless. A limp, watery crunch. Had his parents really named him for this bland vegetable? Had they thought so little of him?
“Not much to them,” Chad said. “Sorry to disappoint.”
“What did you want with my house anyway?”
“That’s classified.”
“Is it really?” Radish chuckled. “What’s the point?”
Chad laughed. “You got me there.” He yanked off his sunglasses and set them on the desk. Radish was surprised by the kindness resting in his blue eyes. Chad was serene. They were two old pals sharing a meal. “The truth, Rad, is that we want everything. And we can have everything. It belongs to us and our people.” Chad leaned back in his chair. “I tell you this as a friend. From day one, we’ve wanted to have it all, if you understand me. Intuitively, that means you can’t have any.”
Radish glanced over his shoulder. His backpack and t-shirt were gone. Presto. It was as if they had melted into the dull gray road. Radish turned a full circle back to face Chad. This whole magic show just for him. “So, what now?”
“What do you think?”
Radish laughed. His long beard itched at the top of his chest. “You could let me in.”
Chad grinned. His teeth were full of kale gristle. He bent down and opened one of the desk’s bottom drawers. It whirred like a refrigerator. “I have something for you.” When Chad sat back up, he was holding a rectangle of silver foil in his hand. Radish had not seen an ice cream sandwich in at least a decade. Chad reached across the desk. “Something for the road.”
Radish accepted the gift. He crinkled it open and took a gigantic bite. The vanilla hit the roof of his mouth and he felt his mind go numb. A wave of nostalgia, comfort in the familiar pain, a fond memory reawakened. His last brain-freeze.
One time, when Radish held the kite and his father swam, the seaside breeze disappeared. The windsocks stopped spinning and the string went slack. Radish screamed as the kite entered a free fall. His father splashed around in the shallows, arms out wide, ready to catch the kite, but at the last minute the wind returned, and it veered back toward its peak in the sky. The kite held steady at its acme for the rest of the afternoon. They reeled it in at sunset and drove home, fatigued and happy.
Radish didn’t wait for his brain freeze to subside. He devoured the second half of the ice cream sandwich in one bite and wiped his fingers on his shorts. He tried to talk, but his mouth was too full. He swallowed and forced the glob of cookie down his throat. “You can’t have everything,” Radish said. Chad squinted in the final rays of daylight. “The wind won’t blow your way forever. Eventually, you’ll run out of what you need.”
Chad sighed, amused. “You’ll never know I guess.”
“It’s something we all know,” Radish said. “Intuitively, if you understand me. Nothing is forever.” Free of his possessions, Radish jogged along the wall toward the edge of the bridge. He imagined being free to hover in the air, uninhibited by the unyielding force of gravity.
“Every damn time,” Chad groaned. The soldiers laughed. Radish broke into a sprint, the wind against him like a warm blanket. His lungs burned. The sky was a melted swirl of Creamsicle orange and Neapolitan pink and grape purple. The lush colors so thick Radish could imagine landing in them and floating across their surface. At the edge of the bridge, nothing but sky.
With a leap, Radish soared.