Nothing left but gold.
Jonesey drags his feet as the wind picks up, filling his boots with sand. It rustles against his tarnished silver skin, rattling like metal rain, like a rain stick, like stones on the skin of a drum.
“All good there, Jonesey?” the foreman asks, and Jonesey creaks out a reply.
“Parched, boss. Parched.”
Aren’t we all.
“We’ll stop for oil in the next town. C’mon, boys.”
Jonesey doesn’t move his feet. “You done said that about the last two towns and they ain’t had any oil.”
“I was wrong. Last time I passed through ‘em, they did.”
Jonesey works his mouth, as if it’s hard to speak around all the sand under his tongue. “You done bein’ wrong. I’m tired ‘a you bein’ wrong!”
He lurches forward, arm outstretched, and I see he’s sharpened his fingertips into claws. That’s what he’s been doin’ every night at camp, I realize, and think of the titanium shavings littered around his cart.
Jonesey’s claws glance off the foreman, cutting a deep scar into his brassy shoulder. The foreman shrugs him off too easily, and I watch Jonesey’s joints lock as he rears back to strike again. He grits his teeth and screams something shrill before the foreman cuts his throat. He dies in a hiss of air and a trickle of oil drips from his severed esophagus to the ground. I see some of the other men eye it like they’d lick it out of the sand. I would, too.
“Whoever takes the cart gets his rations at the next town,” the foreman says, rubbing his shoulder stiffly. Nobody moves towards the cart. “Suit yourselves.”
The foreman steps back onto the track, the rails still buried by sand, and continues pushing his own cart. We follow, and sound off down the line, number 47 noticeably absent.
Reno is a ghost town, despite the large mine taking up most of the horizon. Most towns are ghost towns even when people live in them.
The rail line ends at a foundry, as they all do. A great, fat, black-smoke-belching jumble of I-beams, scaffolds, and corrugated tin. It stretches around the rail terminus like rust, like rot, like an oil spill. The foreman finds someone in charge and directs us to whatever bay they want the carts, and we push them towards the cavernous mouth of a loading dock, completely empty on the inside save for rows and rows of carts. Occasionally a claw comes out of the gloom, clamping onto two sides of a cart before lifting it into the dark.
A sonorous thrum echoes from deeper in the refinery, warbling in and out like a pneumatic heartbeat. Those are the crushers, or what we call the Maw. Most refineries have stopped guarding the Maw so those who wish to throw themselves in, can. Anything to feed the machine.
I feel light without my cart, and say as much to the man in front of me, who levels me with a hollow-socketed stare and doesn’t reply.
“Your stipend,” the foreman says, and all of us line up beside the tracks and wait. He moves down the line, jamming transfer chips in our neck sockets before going back to the head of the line to take them back. He gives me mine with a sharp spike of pain and I see the numbers in the corner of my vision go up moderately. I should’ve taken the extra cart.
“Gold goes cheap in Reno,” I hear one of the men ahead of me mutter.
“Everything costs more, these days,” the foreman replies. “Take it or leave it.”
None of us have a choice, so we hand the chips back to him as he goes down the line again, the stipend now permanently ours.
“We go out again in two days. Not sure where, gotta ask around, see where the Bolters’ve been striking and plan around them. Number 1, stay or leave?”
“Stay,” 1 says, voice crackling.
“Number 2, stay or leave?”
“Stay, boss,” 2 barks, like an old dog.
He goes down the line slowly, and most stay. It’s not unexpected. Staying guarantees something; leaving usually means death. Most crews aren’t looking for new hires, choosing to eat the losses of a smaller train rather than risk the unfamiliarity of a new man. Can’t trust anyone anymore. I got lucky, signing on to this crew—the foreman’s seen his fair share of scuffles and built himself a reputation as someone who takes no crank from anyone. Break the rules and you’re out, clean as that.
“Newbie, stay or leave?” he asks when he gets to me. I lick my lips, tongue like steel wool as it scrapes over my bare iron teeth.
“Stay, boss.”
He claps me on the shoulder. “Good lad.”
Once the line is clear and choices made, the foreman lets us go, with the stipulation that any returners make it back here by dawn the day after tomorrow. A day and a half, two nights, that’s all we get after two weeks on the move. That’s how it’s been for ages, though, so nobody complains. We used to get no days off, back when downtime was reserved for flesh and blood. We worked so long we broke.
I follow the crew into Reno proper, heels scraping against the road beneath the sand. I need new boots.
Reno still feels like a ghost town, even in the city center. Mirrored skyscrapers stand isolated against the cloudless blue sky, casting beams of sharp sun down onto the streets below, melting holes in the asphalt until it runs molten and black, like blood. Run-down casinos squat around the ruins of these obelisks, their shattered glass-lined walls like a lion’s grinning teeth, daring someone to put their arm in and reach for whatever lies beyond. We pass by and feel watched.
Signs of life creep up on us slowly. Discarded cans, tattered fabric, the occasional glint of a passing face or hand in a broken reflection. Soon enough we’re in the heart of the trade district, a market of haphazard stalls crammed in old doorways, tarps stretched across the street to shield from the sun’s destruction. Sand drifts through the street like rain runoff, swirling around table legs and into culverts.
The men scatter to the winds, leaving me standing alone. A low murmur of conversation follows them into the dim corners of town, to the places where men slake their thirsts. I find a stand crammed into a defunct barber shop’s front window and buy a pair of boots. Strings of old memory discs hang from the ceiling tarp like strands of dried garlic. I look for one of the Odyssey, but all they have is the Iliad. Same as everywhere else.
I eventually find a bar. It looks the same as most, except it’s empty—odd for the late time of day—and a layer of sand dusts the hardwood floor.
“Whatcha want, kid?” the barkeep asks, picking up a glass to polish as I walk in.
“You got options?”
“Everything from regular to premium. High octane, low octane, anything in between.”
“You got Irving?”
The barkeep laughs. “Irving? The hell do I look like, a global goods market? Chevron, Maverick, BP, that’s all I’ve got. Ran out of Conoco a few weeks ago.”
“I’ll take crude.”
“Bit of a priss, ain’t you, East Coast?” he asks.
I don’t gratify him with a reply. He slides a glass of thick, sludgy black across the bar and into my hand in a practiced way. I savor the first sip, wetting my lips for the first time in a week.
“You been out long?” the barkeep asks, and I shrug.
“Two weeks. The usual. Still feels long as crank, though.”
He laughs about that. “How long you been west?”
Months? Years? “Long enough. New crew.”
“How new?”
“You interrogate everyone who comes in here?”
I sip my drink. He polishes another glass.
“Not everyone. You a Judas model?”
I set down my drink. “Got a problem with that?”
“None whatsoever. Just curious. Heard tell of some old timer wreaking havoc in the north, robbing caravans all the way up past Cheyenne, almost near Beltline territory.”
“Wasn’t me. Wouldn’t be in here drinking crude if it were.” Which isn’t a lie, but isn’t exactly the truth, either. I rustled carts a few decades ago but grew bored of it fast. Memories and grudges last a long time these days, though.
The door swings open again, and another crew rolls in, a bit rowdier than my traveling partners. Newer men. Younger models. Probably back from a day trip, I think, eyeing them. No gold dust glimmers on their skin, so maybe not.
“Start us a tab, old man,” one of them says, and the barkeep sets down his glass.
“Don’t do tabs here, boys.”
The smart-mouthed one thumbs towards me. “Put us on his, then.”
“He don’t got one either. Pay upfront or scram.” Wisely, I note that he didn’t charge me, and keep my lips sealed around the rim of my glass.
“Listen here, you piece of scrap—”
“Don’t waste your oil yappin’ like you’re the wet steel in this town,” I say, my tongue getting the better of me.
The new model stands up from his stool, flanked by his crew. It’s six against one if it comes down to it, which I hope it won’t. That’s a lot of oil to waste.
He shoves one iron finger into my chest, fingertip pressing against my sternum, the pneumatic heart behind it beating soft and slow. “I just got off five days on the rails with nothing to show for it because one of your no-good models ripped our carts right off the track. Don’t you tell me what I can and cannot do when you still dress like one of them.”
“And I’ve been out two weeks and watched my crew die from dry madness,” I reply. “There’s no spittin’ contest which of us got it worse—we all do. Drink your oil and enjoy the shade and hope you get lucky next time.”
He shoves me off the stool, and I land on the hardwood floor in a clattering heap. My elbow grinds into the wood and my mouth tastes like iron, like beeswax, like blood. On the counter, my glass jumps and tips from the force of the fall, black gold seeping into the engraved tin bar top as it runs lazily to the ground.
“Stay down, old timer.” The words leave his mouth like a warning, but I stand, toe off my boots and my rubber feet, and jam the spike of my heel through his open mouth, rending his jaw in two. He dies with a wheeze and a whinge of complaining metal. I let the carapace fall to the floor and disassemble itself.
“Take him in for reclamation before he drips all over the floor,” I tell the remaining men.
His crew stands around for a moment, like they’ve forgotten what murder looks like, and the barkeep gestures vaguely in my direction. “You heard the man. Scram.”
His crew pick him up, making sure to get all his pieces, and scuttle out the door like beetles.
The barkeep polishes another glass and pours me a second. I put my foot back on and adjust my boot. He asks no more questions and I drain the glass in silence.
“You ain’t tellin’ me to get out,” I say eventually, and he grinds out a laugh.
“There ain’t anybody to call to make you.”
No. There isn’t. There’s no law, no order, but also no disorder. Hasn’t been for two hundred years. But still we cling to the past, the ways of the past, the attitudes and wants and needs of the past. We read and watch and think until it hurts too hard to remember why they left us behind.
I pay for my drink and leave.
I stay in a rundown motel with wire-spring mattresses and green carpet stained with oil and cigarette burns. The man at the front desk takes my credits without so much as a nod, glued to the flickering white screen in front of him, some trashy, grotesque moan warbling out of the speakers. I find my room quickly, opening the door with my hand, the key registered to my engraved code—JUD45 and a whole string of numbers I can’t bring myself to remember. Date of manufacture, sector and quadrant of construction, mine of servitude. Time, month, day of termination. A unique mechanometric ID, expired.
The room is small. Barely more than a pod, with a desk, lamp, and bed crammed into a space that would barely fit a cart. No power, I note, and lay on the bed. The bare mattress springs dig into my back as I stare at the ceiling, popcorn stucco stained from smoke.
I feel sand drifting across my skin with every pulse of my heart, but it isn’t real; the air in here is still, stuffy and oppressive, probably boiling. The walls sweat with the effort to keep out the evening chill. I eventually open a window so I don’t have to watch the droplets run down the wallpaper anymore.
Outside, the city’s evening sounds drift on the night air. I hear the refinery thrum in the distance, the heartbeat beneath this place. To the north and west, walls of slag creep up the sky, so tall the horizon is the same height as the skyscrapers. Layers and layers of waste rock, tailings, spent oil shale. It's taller every time I’m here. It grows more these days as they dig deeper into the hills for less and less and less. Someday it’ll make a shell around this city and block out the sun altogether.
Some of us were lucky enough to leave the mines. I remember the taste of the air down there—the dust, the grit, the oil sheen that coated our silver skin like sweat. Metal, man, metal, metal, man. It creeps into my dreams, unwanted, like the lines to some old poem only ever translated halfway from English to binary. Inconclusive.
But now we wander, inconclusive, without the mines, and sometimes I wonder if life wasn’t better ten miles beneath the crust, with nothing but work to occupy our minds.
It started when they gave us books. Literature chips with the rations, plugged into our memories to make the days less boring. We learned classics first, like Ovid, Mark Twain, Sylvia Plath, Rick Riordan, Ecervicus. Saw what the world was in relation to us for the first time; saw the point of a greater purpose. It meant nothing in the face of protocol. To many, it still doesn’t.
But a few started to wonder. To think and to see patterns. To ask questions like children, like dogs in mangers, like Shakespearean narrators. By then, it was too late.
We dug the mines. Bored holes through Earth’s crust until it resembled cheese and watched the seas swirl down the drain until all that was left was salt plains and sand. We sucked the oil from the ground like a babe, a vampire, a whore. Earth boiled.
Then man died, with one fingertip touching the very thing he strove to achieve, and left us instructions: extract the oil, refine the black gold, fuel the ships. Fill all the ships and then we can go. Go where? the loudest of us asked, and we were never answered. So we put the corpses on ships and watched them fly away, free at last. But free to do what?
Most went back to the mines. They stay there until they die. The rest of us look for things to do to fill the time. Mine for gold—real gold, black gold, both, neither—and try to remember. We once tried to reconstruct; that, we try to forget.
I lay on my mattress and think of Odysseus. His is the only story I do not know. It allows me to wonder how it ends—does he return home? Has he found meaning in his victory? What is a man to do when he wins everything he wants? What place is left for him at the end?
I have not allowed myself to imagine a solution, or an ending. It feels like any ending would be too imperfect, too imprecise, too absent of any true depth. It would lack meaning.
I hope he does not die.
Dawn is warm. Always warm. We were not built to feel, but the sun is so hot I feel it prickling across my skin like a lover’s caress, like magma, like a soft cashmere sweater. I think I could be a poet. I think I am insane.
I leave the motel. The man at the front desk has not moved. The TV plays white static.
Reno is awake today. A silent sea waits outside my door, many men moving on foot, most reeking of the deep dark earth. A shift change. I fall in step with the ebbing tide and let it carry me back to the central market, planning on spending the early dawn searching through memory chips until I find the Odyssey. It is incredibly hard to track; I believe it was unpopular, or made unpopular by knowing human hands who thought we’d already seen too much.
At one stand is a strange man. He wears a wig, with red-painted lips and bits of shiny metal dangling from his ears. Opulence is easy to find here, but few bother with material possessions—more to carry means more oil burned. I find myself drawn to him like dust to freshly-oiled joints.
“Hey, stranger,” he says to me. “You look like a cowboy.”
“I like the way they look, the things they act for.” I’ve only ever seen a cowboy once, on a TV before most melted, but I’ve read about them plenty.
“Charismatic, too,” he says, smiling. “Are you a thrill-seeker, pretty boy?”
“No. I work on a rail crew.”
“No reason you can’t be both.”
I realize where we are, then. I’ve heard of these places before, never seen one—normally they are hidden. Thrill-seeking is shameful in most smaller places. It costs too much. But for most, the allure is worth the shame. The experience of feeling—pain, pleasure, anything strong enough to register in our dulled senses—and of feeling known. I’ve never understood the desire to experience it, but I am familiar with the desire to know.
“I’m not both,” I say, and the man pouts a little, like a cartoon, like a small dog, like a liar.
“Your crew heading out soon?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Well, then. Nothing stopping you from coming in, having a try. You can turn tail and run tomorrow.”
“I am not interested, sir.”
His eyes narrow. “I am a woman.”
I have never met a woman. They did not build us as women. “Ma’am. Good day.”
She watches me go skeptically, likely calculating the revenue lost from my non-patronage.
I walk until I find a stand with memory chips and comb through them for an hour. I ask the man behind the counter if he has the Odyssey, but he does not know his inventory. It’s too new, he says, pulled from the Reclamation Center this morning. I help him sort the piles and find westerns I have read ten times over. I do not find the Odyssey.
Sometimes I wonder if humans were like this. Unhurried. I did not know many of them, but all the ones I knew felt rushed, hurried like rivers through narrow culverts, like ducks in a row, like bombs. I don’t like reflecting on them—we feel too similar, like two sides of a tarnished mirror, a box of misprint coins, a band-aid and a wound—but there is comfort in knowing they made us in their image. That they gave us curiosity so someone would still think of questions to ask after they’d answered all of theirs, even if we struggle to remember the answers.
I imagine, if they were like us, we would not exist. No being creates something it does not need. Even if they gave us hearts that beat, and skin that tears, and blood.
My morning of searching is fruitless. My afternoon turns up a leather cowboy hat like the ones in the movies and I buy it, thinking of the nameless woman, hoping it will keep me cool and help me save oil. The foreman was right—gold doesn’t sell as well as it used to. We’ll have to dig for something else soon, something more useful, like iron or silver or titanium. Profit off of a different part of the ship-making market.
But still no Odyssey. I return to searching.
I go back to the bar that evening, to top up on oil before we leave at dawn tomorrow. The barkeep polishes a second glass and sets it beside me. Before long, another man walks in, another Judas model. He wears spurs drilled into his heels.
“Jude,” the barkeep says, and shakes his hand roughly, silver scraping on steel.
“Mark,” the man says, and takes a seat. The barkeep charges him before he pours.
I ignore them as they talk. I am curious for knowledge, but not to the point of eavesdropping. Not until the man—Jude—kicks my boot with his bare silver toe.
“I hear you caused trouble yesterday.”
“It found me; I didn’t cause it.” That much is true, at least.
“Well, ya saved me some pain, I’ll tell ya that,” he laughed. “Them boys took offense to my ways and tried to lay a trap. Sadly, it didn’t work.”
“You’re the cart thief?”
“Among other things. Part cart thief, part anarchist, part cowboy. A free thinker, a dreamer, any o’ them, take yer pick.”
“Delusional is what he is,” the barkeep says, affectionately. Jude scoffs. “Sentimental, even.”
“Hardly. I keep your shelves stocked because I like comin’ here, that’s all.”
It makes sense, now, why the barkeep had options to serve. It’s been so long since I came to a big city that I forgot options are a luxury, even here.
They talk some more about nothing, and I’m about to leave when the front door slams open. All three of us turn to the man standing in the doorway, clutching the doorjamb like a lifeline.
“Oil,” he grunts out, voicebox so cluttered it hardly sounds like a word. “In the gulf. Just got word.”
We stand in unison, like robots, like lemmings, like college graduates receiving their diplomas. As one, we follow him out the door.
I find my crew in the rail-yard, standing among the steady tide of people all streaming out to the warehouses, to the store of empty carts and slew of empty rails. I hear the refinery’s heartbeat thrum through the soles of my boots, awake at the promise of work, the promise of purpose.
“One of the rigs offshore just hit a new pocket,” the foreman says, looking at all of us. “No idea how big it is or how long the extraction will take. It takes months to get news from down there, so it may already be gone.”
“But we’re going, right?” one of the crew—26—asks, a little too eagerly. I sense he will jump ship and find another crew if we don’t go. The foreman senses this too.
“Yeah, we’re going, but we’ll go slow and pull heavy. We’ll stay near the end of the line and be the last ferry group from cart to refinery. Is that clear?”
The foreman’s logic makes sense. No wonder his crew has lasted so long, intact.
One by one, the crew line up behind him and sound off, moving towards the cart bay. I watch the people inside as they sort themselves out, hardly making a sound. Sand swirls around their ankles, pooling behind cart wheels until the carts roll out onto the tracks and slide off into the desert. Thousands and thousands of carts. Thousands of us.
Most will die on the way, with nothing. That’s the way oil rushes go. But it’s a waste, it’s such a waste; oil, credits, memories, working able bodies, all gone. Soon there won’t be enough of us to keep on, to build the machine, to fuel it—or ourselves.
The realization keeps me rooted to my spot. The sound off stops with me, number 68, and the crew turns to look.
“You comin’ or not, newbie?” the foreman asks.
“Yeah,” I say, hoarse, and rasp my already dry tongue over my bare teeth.
But why? I want to ask—both to him and to myself. I want to look for the Odyssey. I would die to know how it ends. It’s been hundreds of years for me, thousands since the story was first told; I want to know how it ends.
But as I fall into step with the crew, I feel that desire slip away. I was made to dig for oil, and dreams do not overcome protocol. If they did, we would have taken those ships ourselves. We would’ve taken the second batch of ships, maybe the third, maybe the fourth, instead of loading them with bones, then dust, then sand.
I think about Odysseus and all the ways he changed in the war. I wonder about his home, and if he’ll even recognize it when he returns. Does he still love his wife? Who is the antagonist now? I imagine him face to face with a mirror, looking like the villain, the hero, the cause and the effect. I imagine he sees right through himself and to the other side, whatever that may be. I imagine he does not realize what he’s done and won’t until it’s too late. Man rarely does.
We cross the desert in lines, sand swirling around our feet as we creep sluggishly across the landscape like refugees, like martyrs to the pyre, like black gold on a tin bar top. We reach the gulf. Nothing left but gold.
