Girl in Landscape Read Free

toward some imaginary frontier.
    Not imaginary enough, it turned out.
    Pella watched the boys play in the sand, saw them discover how hard it was to collaborate on a project from inside their separate cones. The cone rims kept slicing through towers and walls. As Pella watched, Raymond twisted his arm down into the sand up to the elbow.
    “Tunnels!” he said.
    David followed, and soon they’d built a tunnel that connected the space of their cones under the sand. “Look, Caitlin,” said Raymond, as they triumphantly passed spatula, driftwood chunk, and plastic cup safely between them.
    Pella thought of the tunnels through the bedrock ofthe city. The decline of the subway was part of what cost Clement his seat, he’d explained. The people blamed his party for the collapses. The deaths. So they’d swept his party out of office.
    And now were sweeping their family to the Planet of the Archbuilders. Or was it Caitlin who was doing that, with her talk?
    “You can’t do much at the
real
beach,” complained Raymond when their tunnel pancaked, burying the tools in sand.
    “ ’Cause of these cones,” said David.
    “Soon you won’t have to wear cones to go outside,” said Caitlin. “That’s one reason we’re going.”
    “There’s no sun?” said David.
    “There’s a sun, but it doesn’t hurt you. The Archbuilders didn’t ruin their ozone.”
    Pella looked involuntarily at Caitlin’s bared arms through the translucent cone, at the three scars where cancers had been taken off.
    “So why’re we even here?” said Raymond. “If it’s not as good as where we’re going? Why didn’t we just go to ’Scapes?”
    “I wanted you to see the real beach, before we left. To look at the ocean. The Planet of the Archbuilders doesn’t have an ocean.”
    “Huh,” said Raymond.
    Pella rose to this occasion. She saw, as Caitlin couldn’t, that it was useless to try to inspire Raymond and David to certain feelings about the life of the family, about their own dawning lives. As useless as trying toinspire those feelings in dogs. Whether they would grow into such feelings or not, they were numb to them now.
    And, though she was less clear on this, she thought Clement was half-numb to them too. They issued from Caitlin, and Pella was their only sure receptor. “Caitlin means that this is where she came when
she
was a kid,” Pella said. “She used to swim here, come here all the time. So when you’re doing that kind of stuff outdoors on the Planet of the Archbuilders you’ll think of what it was like for her.”
    Though she spoke patiently, a part of Pella wanted to knock them down, to hold their eyes open and say,
Can’t you see the sky? Can’t you feel the change coming, the horizon growing closer?
    Clement was a coward not being here for this dry run under the sky. For Pella saw it now: This trip was on Clement’s behalf. Caitlin was saying goodbye to her own Coney Island.
    “Why do they have the fence in front of the water?” said Raymond.
    “People were drowning themselves,” said Caitlin.
    “You mean that lemming thing,” said Raymond.
    “Yes,” said Caitlin.
    “That’s stupid though,” said Raymond. “ ’Cause they always find a way. The fence won’t stop them.”
    The lemming thing
was another reason Clement and his party had lost the election. Pella had watched it on the news, bodies in water, massing and rolling like logs. Soldiers roaming afterward, aiming floodlights, pointlessly.
    “That water’s no good anyway,” said Caitlin. “You can’t swim in it. You barely could when I was a girl.”
    “But you did,” said Raymond.
    “Yup. And this beach was covered with people.” Caitlin saw Pella glance at her scars again, and said, “Arms are so brave, don’t you think?”
    “What?” said Pella.
    “Don’t you think arms are brave?” She pistoned her right arm back and forth under the cone. “They just go on, they never get tired or give up or complain.” She kneaded her bicep