NEVERMIND
Part 1
Jane stepped into the desert night, slipping out of the steady, comforting beat of the Pynk Hotel. Away from its familiar bass lines—the sounds of agitated mattresses, the deep snores, bodies pressed against doors and walls, the soft breathy melodies and grunting percussions—there was desert evening air. She missed the music of the hotel the moment she exited, even as the wind hit her face, just cool enough to mimic the feeling of misting water.
But there was still one familiar bass beat out here. Jane smiled, turning toward the sound of a steel-toed boot tapping a salvaged fender. Closer still, Jane heard the beat’s permanent accompaniment, the mid-tenor humming to themselves as they nodded off, a moment’s respite in between stripping the usable parts off a ruined vehicle.
“We heading to the Cave tonight?” They cracked one eye open curiously.
Perhaps they weren’t nodding off, Jane realized as she shrugged. “Maybe I just wanted to say hey, Neer.”
Neer snorted as they stood up. They were only a couple of inches taller than Jane, and at least half of that from the boots. Still, they tilted their head down sometimes as they looked at people, as if it made them just the slightest bit shorter. Jane didn’t comment on it all that often anymore. “If you wanted to say hey, you would have been on my ass to get to bed before you even stepped out the door.” Neer’s imitation of Jane sounded nothing like her, beyond their intonation, yet they persisted. “‘Neer, if you don’t get your Black ass to sleep, I’m going to convene the Chord and force a vote for you to go on vacation.’”
“Okay, you got me, sweetie. I could use a hand if you don’t mind.” Jane crooked her elbow, inviting Neer to link arms. As Neer complied, Jane laughed, and Neer’s smile grew. Jane got a pang in her heart, more maternal perhaps than she felt for almost anyone at the hotel. It was as rare to see Neer smile like that as it was for Jane to be this vulnerable with anyone, except perhaps …
“Thought you would have stayed in tonight, with Zen leaving again in the morning.”
There were more questions than that, hidden behind the words: why Zen wasn’t here with Jane, for one. “She needs to rest. And besides …” Jane gestured loosely with her free hand. “If she’s worried about me, she might try to delay again. And New Dawn doesn’t stop its work just because I’m having a bad night.”
Neer accepted the answer serenely, leaving Jane to her thoughts on the way to the Cave. She tried to focus on the beat of their footsteps instead, Neer’s boots clomping alongside Jane’s more muffled sneakers. Jane’s steps, despite her height, were always longer than Neer’s, surer, and gave the appearance of Jane guiding Neer into the Cave, although Neer knew the path as well as anyone at the hotel.
The pair stopped in front of the Cave, sliding their arms out of their union. Neer sucked on their teeth, looking at the entrance.
Jane narrowed her eyes. “You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to.”
Neer shrugged off the suggestion. “It’s just us and your memories, right? I’m golden.” Neer forced a smirk, and Jane could imagine that if Neer smirked at any of the other occupants closer to their age like that, Neer would be dangerously, delightfully popular. “Pynk, even.”
Jane rolled her eyes and marched inside. Just on the edge of the land around the hotel, every step deeper into the Cave turned the sand darker, damper, until green patches of moss and grass grew sparingly in the darkest soil. The walls were cold and sometimes slick with moisture; a few times water dripped down from the stone above.
She liked to close her eyes when she stepped into the Cave, although it wasn’t necessary.
When she spoke in the Cave, the echo carried the deepest notes of her voice, the reverb filling the darkness as if she were on a stage. Jane let her head drop back as she hummed a melody from before the Pynk Hotel or even New Dawn’s capturing her. She let herself sway to the dripping water until she heard a shake and a snap, and the blackness behind her eyelids turned red.
She opened her eyes and shifted; Neer had pulled out a flashlight from their belt clip, resting it on a large piece of flatter stone. It lit up the onyx-swirled gray stone, not like a spotlight but like a candle.
An intimate performance.
“Same as usual?” Neer asked. Jane nodded, slowly settling down into the dirt, kneeling. Neer took a breath and then recited the opening:
“Tell me a story you don’t want to forget.”
Jane pressed her hands against the rich soil. When she had first arrived at the hotel, she’d questioned the way that the Cave was used. This rich dirt could have been moved into the sun to grow trees and vegetables. The pushback had been immediate. It was one of the earliest things that the occupants of the Pynk Hotel taught her: this cave was growing things, was being used for growth.
Because instead of tubers or flowers, memory found purchase here.
“When I arrived a second time,” she spoke, as much to herself as to Neer, as much to plant her hands and her heat in the soil and hope to find her roots, “I knew the path by the way the sun traveled across the sand, reflected off the shitty car that we’d rewired on the way from …”
She paused. For a second, it wasn’t that she didn’t know the name of New Dawn, but rather that the feel of it was too big, too intense to come out as words.
New Dawn was at the tip of Jane’s tongue like a flame atop a matchhead. The sterile walls, the way numbered names and faces stood over her as if to comfort, as if to assure her that clean was the only thing she could ever want, desire. Cleanse the dirtiness from her mind, her lips, her tongue, the way her thighs moved, so that then—and only then—she would be something holy.
But it was the dirt in between her fingers now that was real, not their lights and dictates. Not the dirt they perceived. She reminded herself of the dirt before her, under her—the real dirt—of the way it shifted in her hands; at her fingertips it was suddenly smooth and cold, the slab they’d placed her on in that New Dawn facility. Around her wrists, dirt tightened, the straps that they’d held her down with, and she remembered that fighting against these would be fighting against the flow of memory, not New Dawn acolytes.
“From where, Jane?” Neer’s voice broke through, like it always did. They had never been at the facility with Jane, which was another reason why Jane had asked Neer to help her. Neer was part of the present.
“From a New Dawn facility.”
“Which one?”
Jane was silent.
“I’m sorry,” Neer said, “I thought … maybe you’d know this time.”
Neer wanted to help, Jane told herself. “Ché drove and Zen held me up when I could barely stand. We shredded our New Dawn clothing, tore off sleeves and shortened long skirts, making belts and bracelets from headpieces. We’d hid boots and leather jackets before we’d gone in.”
“Did you wear those when you arrived at the hotel?”
“I … couldn’t remember the drop site, which was when I got scared,” Jane recited. She felt the moment of panic in her rooted fingertips, up her arms, into her breathing. “New Dawn’s list of Standards was still too loud, shoving out memories that were mine. But I remembered …”
This was what made Jane wake up and need the Cave tonight, she realized. This was the moment in her memory where things had … cluttered, filled with the taste and smell of Nevermind, the gas New Dawn had used to try to clean her body of her soul and her memories.
She’d stared at the ceiling, unable to recall what she’d once remembered. And that was what the Cave was for.
Neer’s voice softened; they recognized where Jane needed support. “You remembered something important, Jane. Something you told me before. Do you want me to remind you? Or do you want to let it grow yourself?”
Jane wanted to seed the memory herself, wanted to push it to grow and take root and never ever let anyone pluck it away again. She took a deep breath, though; she welcomed Neer’s guidance, welcomed the way that Neer cataloged every story that Jane thought needed remembering. Healthy plants often had a caring gardener. Even as she was frustrated with herself for needing someone else. “Tell me what I remembered.”
Neer took a deep breath that recalled the one Jane took moments before. “You remembered the route to the hotel,” Neer shared, and the words caused little blossoms of recollection in Jane’s mind, in the coolness of the dirt. “You led Zen to us, sure that you would find help to clear out the Nevermind haze. You and Zen were welcomed like old friends, like old lovers reunited. It took years, but in the Pynk your mind was safe again. In the Pynk you helped us as we helped you.”
Jane smiled, because the end of her story came back to her. She welcomed it the way she and Zen had been welcomed. She focused on the warmth of that welcome, of how the Pynk Hotel was a place that opened its arms to anyone who located themselves in womanhood, however they came to understand it. “And when the gas of Nevermind threatened to come back, there was always the dirt. The solid dirt in the Cave that the Pynk Hotel shared with me, to heal.”
Jane pulled her hands out of that dirt. Black soil still clung to her fingers, and she was pleased. New Dawn labeled her a dirty computer, and so there was a certain satisfaction in this dirt saving her. It would outlast any attempt of theirs to “clean” her, to scrub away her memories.
Neer was at her side in case Jane needed help to get up. Jane had it, though, waiting until she was standing to throw an arm over Neer’s shoulder. “The dirt is still good, Neer.”
“It always is.”
JANE REMEMBERED, VAGUELY, ZEN GIVING HER A KISS AT SUNRISE, urging her to wake up, but it was another hour or two before Jane made her way out from under the blankets. She wasn’t alone, though; Zen may have already started prepping to head out into the desert, but Guitar was still there, wrapping around Jane like a lanky-limbed octopus.
“Girl, ain’t nobody trying to be up this early” came Gui’s voice, muffled by Jane’s hair. Jane thought she’d gone to sleep with it braided but … right, she’d undone it while walking back to the hotel with Neer. Foolishness, leaving it as a problem for future her to pick through.
At the time, though, it had made so much sense. The past can be like that.
“You’re right, Gui.” Jane chuckled. “But Zen’s already up, and probably packing the car.”
There was a pause, and then: “Shit. Guess we should go say bye, huh?”
“I guess.” Jane smacked Gui’s side playfully as both rolled out of the bed.
Waking up next to Gui was nice, with her strong arms and catlike stretches, but even nicer was the fact that it had been years since Jane had last woken up panicked because she couldn’t feel Zen beside her—or worse, couldn’t recall the beautiful dirtiness of what it felt like to be in her arms. She could wake up on a morning that Zen was going on the road without fear; not only was she not alone, but she knew Zen would return.
And while Zen was gone, Jane knew she could close her eyes and reminisce, something that New Dawn had once tried so fiercely to steal from her.
Gui and Jane showered and dressed quickly. Like most at the hotel, their outfits shared scraps of fabric: repurposed older clothing stitched together to make new garments and fashions, with hand-me-downs and hand-me-ups worn with equally joyous flair that reminded Jane of back when she used to be able to go to thrift shops with friends as a teenager. Jane’s shorts were cuffed with the same material used for Gui’s skirt. The wrap Jane used as a temporary fix for her hair was also a pocket on Gui’s shirt. Once put together, their outfits were castoff couture meets salvaged streetwear, their personalities and energy on display in every piece.
When they made it outside, a group was already milling around Zen’s Cadillac, the same Cadillac that once carried Jane to the hotel. Everyone had their own schedule, their own things to do for the community—whether it be farming or salvage, in addition to the creative pursuits that filled their days—but it was uncommon for quite this much of the hotel to be awake this early. Zen’s leaving was special, though, and they wanted to be able to see her off.
Jane watched Zen slam the trunk closed before stepping forward. “I know you’re not leaving without saying goodbye.”
Zen’s dark eyes sparkled with mischief. “One: I’ve never done it before and I’m not gonna start today, and two … I was about to send some of the girls to try and wake you up, Sleeping Beauty.” There was laughter over Jane’s shoulder, and since they were all in good spirits, Jane saw no reason to make a comment about it. She did raise an eyebrow at Zen for encouraging them, and Zen gave her a reassuring smile. Quieter, she said, “Seriously, I was going to make sure to see you, babe.”
Jane let Zen place her hands on her cheeks, lifting Jane’s face up and giving her a quick kiss.
“How long is this scouting trip for again?” Jane asked.
“A couple of weeks,” Zen promised. “Ché reached out about a few young computers who’d gotten away from New Dawn. Wanna give them supplies, tell them about life after the facilities …” Zen sighed, the first shadow over her cheerful mood. “And check and make sure they aren’t New Dawn plants.”
Jane shuddered. New Dawn didn’t do it often, but sometimes the easiest way to figure out where rebels were was to give them someone to save. Over the years, Ché and Zen had gotten very good at helping figure out whether they had to rescue someone or avoid a trap—and had even managed to dirty up a few of the cleansed in the process.
“You got this,” Jane said, kissing her back....
