After saving the world, I check my phone for any unread text messages, not expecting much but also not expecting nothing. Dad would’ve at least asked when to pick me up from the airport. And mom would want to know what to prepare for lunch because I must be hungry after all the hard work. Would I want bitter melon with eggs, spicy garlic shiitake mushrooms and glass noodles, or just a banana to save room for our first family meal in a very long time? I know to avoid saying we’d been eating rice and oil and sugar for the past few months, and how it really wasn’t that bad because we passed our time playing Go Fish. We were good liars which made the game fun. I was always rubbing my eye or scratching my nose even when I told the truth. It’s comforting in the same way rubbing your cheek against a Pusheen is comforting, and where else are you supposed to find comfort when you’re on a mission to save the world besides maybe discovering wild blackberries even though no one has the guts to eat one since who knows what fungal diseases the air and soil and water have carried—we’d been mentally prepared to die from saving the world, not from eating an contaminated fruit. Even so, the brambles excited us: how something grew from between cracked plates of soil, over dented rifles and decomposing biological matter.
I don’t have any new text messages, but I suspect my carrier plan was terminated since I haven’t been paying the bill and I don’t trust my parents to be tech-savvy enough to resume my auto-payments, assuming my bank still operates. I loiter around the airport, mostly empty except for a few mosquitoes. Only the bookstore is stocked with old newspapers and picture books and a few novels with those covers no one notices. The salad bar and Japanese restaurant and Burger King are empty; even the glass display counters with fake plastic bento boxes contain nothing but a stain of soy sauce and smear of wasabi. If I were eleven, I’d hoard all of the books into my pastel pineapple patterned backpack and dash past the restaurants. Kids are like that, greedy for stories before they’ve realized their own narrative is a dumpster fire. I suppose I had it easy, not having to soul-search or anything. Here is a world and here is the problem; please save it—was our mission from the beginning.
Naturally, we fantasized about other occupations. I was told I’d make a good firefighter, but isn’t that more or less the same as a world savior? We wanted (or at least, liked to think we wanted) changes in pace, epiphanies and new directions. I think I would make a good sushi chef if I could find someone who’d accept me as an apprentice. I like observing chefs interact with the fish, slicing chunks thick enough to preserve flavor, thin enough to roll with ease. Everyone said I had good observation skills because I always found signs of landmines first. It wasn’t a testament to my physical awareness. I was just the only one who bothered to learn about ground-penetrating radar and set them up to collect scans at regular spatial intervals. That was the easy part; the tough part was making sense of the information, and I’d recalled learning about classifying data via supervised algorithms which meant I remembered vague A-scan and B-scan graphs but that was it, so I ended up just eyeballing the data for the highest amplitudes and gesturing somewhat ambiguously to areas we should avoid. I suppose it was more luck than my observation skills, that we never got caught by a landmine. But surely skills translate, and if I could learn to make the perfect sushi rice, how not to over vinegar it, how to avoid a soggy mess, the years required to climb the chef hierarchy seem worth it. These aren’t fantasies. If we finish our jobs successfully, we get to be whatever we want with a generous stipend to live the rest of our lives comfortably too. Enough money to buy more land so mom’s vegetables stop growing over each other, to afford health insurance even after mom and dad have retired and lose their company plans, to indulge on first-class airplane tickets and finally get to sleep while zipping through the air.
You see, we weren’t smart. Actually, that’s not fair: we were smart, but only for our job. Where money comes from, why it’s valuable, how to retrieve our payments after mission completion—these were questions we never considered. I go from ATM to ATM, hoping one of them might recognize my pin. The machines stay dark. I punch the buttons and attempt to rattle the number pads, hoping one will wake one up. These things should at least be easier to pry open and retrieve the cash from the cassette. I don’t remember why I’m so determined to find cash. I can’t use it on the train which isn’t running.
When I was little, I was told I’d defeat Evil whom we named Garfield, or Garf for short. This was the adults’ way of motivating us to work harder. I think about this as I walk down the hall of the airport, going from one terminal to the next, wondering if Garf is beneath my feet, elongated by the sun, accompanying me as I find terminal 3 empty as well.
We learned we needed to estimate mineral reserves and resources with a rock hammer and hand lens. I failed our lessons on evaluating the composition of corals and cracking limestone to expose carbon. I stumbled over rock more than I split it open to trace evidence of the enemy presence, so I got assigned to record-keeping: tracking the time we had left of training, how long it took us to sprint from the bedrooms to the gym to waiting grounds, when we’d arrive at our destination, the singularity, the convergence of what they called bad spirits. We believed we were going to slay a creature who ate humans and worse yet, canned spam which we’d been fed for months before we departed. In retrospect, I imagine it’s easier to indiscriminately destroy. I no longer remember which parts of him were born from our constructs and which had been taught. We decided Garf liked whatever we did not like: hiking without showering for days, the excruciating pain of a stomach bug on an empty stomach where there’s nothing to vomit out and nothing to take in, mornings because they meant waking up, nights because they meant sleeping between a sticky, sweaty sleeping bag. What we liked and disliked changed as easily as our fear.
Garf likes Peet’s coffee. Hates beer. Likes the noise-canceling Bose headphones that feel like pillows hugging your ears. Hates the sound of an airplane engine or any engine rumbling as the vehicle shrinks and shrinks until the horizon has absorbed it into a thin line dividing sky from earth. Likes walking with purpose, strides long and fast so it looks like gliding, more ghost than demon. Hates sitting in a loveseat in the lounge, waiting for no one to refill this near-empty glass of cucumber-infused water, clinking ice like bells. I remember the lounges, watching people flash their heavy metal credit cards and enter sliding doors before the doors closed as I tried to glimpse what was inside.
After saving the world, I’ve become less imaginative. I still think practicing as a sushi chef would be fun, but I have no appetite for seafood, or more accurately, for plucking critters out of the ocean and learning to split them and scrape them and feel for the single connection of bones to remove in one go. I think Garf has lost some of his personality too. I ask: how do we get home? He says: where? I reply: wherever mom and dad are. He says: why?
I try, but not very hard, to escape labyrinths of dead terminals, to find mom and dad, to make myself found. If I were more of a problem solver, more proactive, I might be able to find a way back home—wherever that is, whatever that is—and ask mom and dad how it feels to live in a world that has been saved.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Protean, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere, and was selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and Best Small Fictions 2021. She is losing sleep over a novel. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.