Page 20 of Spread Me

Kinsey manages to keep it together for four hours, as the sand falls and the wind picks back up. Soon, it’s howling again, harder than ever, scouring the outside of the little wedge they all live in. She listens to the world screaming over the vast expanse of desert that surrounds the base, and she tries her damnedest to think of a solution to the problem of the lichen.

It’s the most important thing she’ll ever do, she knows. Solving this matters more than anything. It matters more than the thought of Jacques, trapped outside in all that Hell. It matters more than the fact that Domino and Saskia are just a few walls away, locked in the exam room and the lab, waiting for her.

Wanting her.

But her body doesn’t seem to share her priorities. Her skin is too sensitive, her legs restless. She can’t get comfortable in her bed. She leans against the warm wall, feeling it cool as the temperature plummets outside. She catches herself trailing fingers across her limbs, following the path Saskia forged. She strokes the tender skin of her own underarm, then the crease where her hip blends into her thigh.

They feel the same. Maybe, she thinks, they are the same. Maybe it’s not so complicated to transform one into the other, to open oneself up and become a sweet slick of invitation.

She’s going to go to the exam room, she decides. She’s going to pull the cardboard off the window and press her nose to the glass and tell Domino that she’s sorry. That they were right, and she overreacted. That she shouldn’t have told everyone to look at their mistake. It was a small mistake, she thinks, and it didn’t deserve that kind of attention. A few extra eyes, a few extra mouths—so what? What does it matter? In the face of such perfect, total becoming, who cares if a few pieces get mixed up?

At the same moment that she opens her door, Mads opens theirs, too. Kinsey freezes, thwarted. They stare at each other across the hall. Then Mads, glancing at Nkrumah’s door, steps out of their bedroom and into the hallway.

“What are you doing?”

they whisper.

“Going to the bathroom,”

Kinsey lies.

“What are you doing?”

“Same. Do you want to go first?”

Kinsey nods, biting back a swear. She pads down the hall to the bathroom. Avoids making eye contact with the double shower. As she sits on the toilet, she considers what she’d been about to do. The second she was snapped out of her own libidinous reverie, she could see how unhinged her plan had been. If she’d gone to the exam room as she’d intended, would she be able to resist going inside? If she’d gone inside, would she have been able to keep Domino contained? If she hadn’t—where might they have gone? What might they have done?

Kinsey decides that she can’t be trusted. She’s not strong enough in the face of this kind of temptation. When she comes back from the bathroom, she catches Mads by the arm.

“I haven’t been drinking nearly enough water,”

she whispers.

“When I tried to piss, my urethra coughed. Hydrate with me when you get back?”

“Sure.”

Mads looks at her with eyes that are too understanding. They think she’s afraid to be alone. She doesn’t correct them.

She waits in their room. They’ve got both twin beds pushed together against one wall, a thick stack of blankets piled into a nest to try to make up for the crack between the small mattresses. There are photos taped to the walls. Kinsey looks them over in the dim light of the single scarf-draped lamp.

There’s an older couple, one of whom has Mads’s hawklike nose. A woman, mid-laugh, holding up what looks like a plate of shrimp. A house with a jasmine-choked trellis in front. She’s still looking the photos over when the door opens behind her and Mads slips inside, carrying two enormous bottles of water.

“Is this your girlfriend?”

Kinsey asks, gesturing to the woman with the shrimp.

“Sister,”

Mads says, handing her a bottle of water.

“What’s with the shrimp?”

“It’s an inside joke.”

“I don’t want to die,”

Kinsey blurts. Heat floods her face.

“Sorry. I don’t—I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,”

Mads says. They sink to the floor, leaning back against the bed.

“Nobody wants to die.”

Kinsey sits on the floor opposite them, her back to the wall.

“Some people do.”

“Nah. Not really.”

“I think yes-really. They have hotlines about it.”

Mads crumples half their face, twists their shoulders in a pantomime of complication.

“People who want to die don’t actually want to be dead,”

they say slowly, feeling their way through the thought as they put voice to it.

“They just want something to be different, something that feels like it can’t change any other way. So the only real way they can figure out how to change their circumstances is by dying. And sometimes they’re right. Sometimes, there’s really no better option. But mostly it’s just that the other options feel more impossible than they really are. Wanting something impossibly different—that feels like wanting to die, sure. But it’s not the same as wanting to be dead.”

Kinsey swallows a too-large gulp of water, coughs. “Shit,”

she says after she’s sure she can breathe.

“you’ve thought about this a lot.”

“Yeah. I think about it a lot. Used to think about it a lot more.”

They shoot Kinsey a sidelong glance.

“The point is, nobody wants to die, but that doesn’t mean nobody has to die.”

“Maybe you have a point, though. About other options feeling more impossible than they really are.”

Mads doesn’t answer right away. They drink their water, their eyes on the floor. “I think,”

they say slowly.

“it’s different for us. We aren’t talking about dying because we can’t stand the way our lives feel right now. We already know that we don’t want to die. But we have to. It’s our responsibility to die.”

“Is that how Nkrumah sees things?”

“I think so. I don’t think she’s happy about this outcome. She’s just … certain.”

Kinsey smiles down at the water bottle in her lap.

“That’s Nkrumah. She always knows exactly what she thinks.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes, drinking water, listening to the wind. It almost seems to have a voice. Kinsey wonders if Domino is screaming in the exam room, if Saskia has started yelling for freedom again. If Jacques is still able to scream, out there in the storm. She wonders if she’d be able to hear him, if he was.

Mads interrupts her thoughts.

“Do you ever wish you had that? The certainty Nkrumah has?”

“I think I do,”

Kinsey says.

“I just don’t always want to admit what I think. But that’s not the same thing as not knowing.”

Mads regards her.

“Yeah. I think I know what you mean. I think I see that in you. You’ve got stuff buried.”

“Only a couple of feet down, though.”

A look comes over Mads, a deep consideration.

“Why don’t you want to tell us about that stuff? The stuff you have buried?”

Kinsey thinks it over.

“How much do you know about the thing we’re studying out here? The cryptobiotic crust?”

“Less than I should,”

Mads answers right away.

“I mean, I don’t study it. I just came here to make sure none of you die from diarrhea or whatever. So I know about, like, dehydration and scorpions. And Jacques told me something about algae a while ago. But I probably don’t know about whatever you’re thinking of right now. Tell me?”

Kinsey can’t help but grin. This is a part of Mads she adores—the endless curiosity, the genuine interest in other people. Mads always wants to know more, always wants to learn, never gets defensive about the things they don’t know or don’t understand.

She can’t imagine them dying. She can’t imagine that part of them disappearing forever.

The pain of that thought is ignorable, though, so she ignores it and leans forward, still grinning. She launches into her pitch, the pitch she made to each team member she hired herself. It feels obscenely good to return to something so familiar.

“Okay, so. The thing about the desert is, it’s alive. It’s—why are you looking at me like that?”

she asks, noticing the horrified expression on their face.

Mads shakes their head, takes a few short, quick breaths.

“Nothing. I just—I remembered the part Jacques told me, about all the algaes and stuff below the soil. Tell me the rest.”

Kinsey hesitates, wanting to press—but Mads gestures impatiently for her to continue, so she does. She continues clumsily, her momentum lost.

“Anyway, um. Yeah. It’s all algaes and lichens and stuff below the surface, like Jacques told you. And … it’s like that with me. If you dig up the cryptobiotic crust, it dies. And when it dies, the whole ecosystem dies. That’s part of how we got the dust bowl, you know? It was the destruction of grassland root systems, but it was also the constant tilling. The soil couldn’t form a fungal network to keep the surface soil in place, so the wind just…”

She makes a vague sweeping gesture with her hands.

“And that’s how I feel sometimes. Like if I dig all the stuff up to show people, then the stuff will die, and I’ll die too.”

Mads takes a long slug from their water bottle, wipes their mouth on the back of their wrist.

“Well. You’re gonna die anyway. You might as well tell me your big secret.”

Kinsey manages an anemic laugh.

“Hey, look. I can tell I said something that hit you wrong. If we’re going to die, I don’t want my last thought to be, what did I do to upset Mads. Will you tell me what happened there?”

Mads looks all around the room. Everywhere that isn’t Kinsey. They stand up and look at the pictures on the wall, look at the door, smooth the covers on the bed. Finally, when Kinsey can’t stand it anymore, they clear their throat.

“The cryptobiotic crust,”

they say.

“I’ve heard you guys talking about it, and I haven’t paid much attention because, to be honest, I just—I don’t know, it seems too complicated. But the thing is—fuck.”

They press their head against the wall, their voice thick. “Fuck.”

“Woah. Hey, what’s going on?”

Kinsey stands and takes a step closer to them, not sure whether or not she should reach out or leave them alone. “Mads?”

“The crust. The cryptobiotic crust. It’s a living thing, right?”

“Well—no? It’s not just one creature, it’s a whole network. It’s a living thing the way a coral reef is a living thing.”

“Right. Okay. But that means it’s all connected. Which means that this lichen we discovered—it can live down there.”

They straighten. Their forehead is red where it was pressed against the wall. Tears stream freely down their cheeks.

“It might have been living down there all along. It could be propagating all across the desert. The virus probably spread to whatever else is living down there, way before you guys dug up that specimen. Who knows how long it’s been down there. Who knows how far it’s already spread.”

Kinsey feels everything in her body go still.

“That can’t be right,”

she whispers, even as she knows that it is.

“The lichen we’re dealing with is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. It’s got to be specific to one kind of fungus, right? It’s not like a virus that size can be supported by just any network of hyphae.”

“That’s a good point,”

Mads says, letting their head fall back on a mirthless laugh. Their tears stream across their temples, soaking into their hair.

“You know viruses. Notoriously unadaptable. Wouldn’t dream of mutating to gain access to a more favorable environment.”

Kinsey feels a faint thrill of hope. Even if Mads and Nkrumah get to see their plan through—even if the three of them die and the station ends up a smoking pile of ashes—that won’t be the end of the virus. It’s a feeling she knows she shouldn’t have, but she can’t help having it.

This is why she put herself into exile in the first place. She can’t help rooting for the wrong team.

Kinsey drains the last of her water, then screws the cap onto the empty bottle and tosses it at Mads. It hits them in the arm, and they look up, startled. “Fine,”

Kinsey says.

“Everyone’s going to die and we’re all doomed, so we might as well get drunk. It’ll be easier to kill ourselves if we’re hungover. Won’t feel like much of a loss, right? Do you still have your secret stash?”

Mads looks at her blankly, then bursts out laughing. It’s the kind of laughter that comes out like vomit, a cleansing hysteria that turns into silent gasping before it eases off.

“I didn’t know you knew about that,”

they say at last.

“Everyone knows about it,”

she says, then winces internally at the way “everyone”

has diminished.

“It’s the only booze here that we can be sure Jacques won’t drink.”

Mads dives to the floor, reaches under their bed, and fishes around for a moment before emerging with a mostly full bottle of whiskey. They open Kinsey’s empty water bottle and pour in a few glugs, then take a pull directly from the whiskey bottle. The two of them sit on the bed and toast each other.

“To the end of everything we ever loved,”

Kinsey says.

Mads meets her water bottle with their whiskey bottle.

“To the end.”