Becky Hagenston

Becky Hagenston

Everything Must Go

Of course you will miss your belongings, but what is need vs. want? There isn’t room for your old sneakers, tenth grade French book, postcards from Swansea, not even for your first child’s last baby tooth. No, not even that.

Not even if you cry and beg and show how it fits in your hand, or your pocket. There will be no need for pockets.

You will create your own digital museums, curated from photographs and videos, saved and uploaded.

Leave your Earth trash behind on the trashed Earth. You don’t have to go. But if you do, there are rules.

My husband Louis and I have moved a lot, so what’s one more time? “One last time,” he pointed out.

Yesterday I came home and found him scanning an image of the woman he dated before me. I’d never seen her before. She’s tall and red-haired with a hooknose, forever twenty-five, wearing a stupid one-shouldered pink dress. When Louis saw me, he looked startled. Then he said, “It’s just for my museum.” What else would it be for? I almost asked but didn’t.

The little girl next door is obsessed with sex. “My mommy and her boyfriend do it,” she informs me, when I step outside to check the mailbox. There isn’t actual mail anymore, but sometimes we get fliers from crazy people or from the government. The girl is maybe eight years old, and every time I see her, she tells me about her mother doing it with some boyfriend. This boyfriend has a handlebar mustache; the previous one had an Amish-looking beard.

“Okay, thanks for the information,” I say. There’s a flier in the mailbox that says repent or die, with a picture of a snake that has a weirdly human-looking face.

“I have to go outside,” she says. “While they do it. Will I ever do it?” She seems sad as she asks this, even though I don’t know if she knows what she’s asking. Probably just: Will I live long enough to grow up and make my own bad choices with boyfriends? I don’t know the answer to that, so I don’t say anything. I don’t like lying to children. Louis and I didn’t have children because we didn’t want to answer these kinds of questions.

The little girl holds up her phone at me. “Say cheese.” I don’t say cheese. “You’re going in my museum,” she says, and I have the urge to hug her, so I go back inside and shut the door.

When I was a child, I lived next door to a cemetery. My parents liked to make jokes about the quiet neighbors, but they weren’t actually quiet. From my bedroom window I could see shadows moving between the tombstones; I could hear murmuring, laughter. Once, I heard a small scream. Once, I saw a flicker of light that seemed to dance in the air. I never told my parents what I saw. Then one summer night when the moonlight draped across the cemetery, the shadows turned into people, the lights into cigarettes, the laughter into my sister’s voice. I caught her coming in the basement door, stinking of weed. Her feet were filthy.

Last week another tornado swept through five states, including mine, carrying debris for hundreds of miles. There’s a doll in a palm tree at the end of the block; a boat on top of a house. Photo albums burst open like dandelions and sent pictures of proms and weddings floating through the sky. There’s drone footage of flat, splintered earth that used to be houses and trees. Interviews with stunned survivors saying how grateful they are that they’d already uploaded their prized possessions into their museums. Interviews with stunned survivors saying how much they regret not uploading their prized possessions into their museums. I watch an interview with the hologram of a woman who’s been dead for half a century, reminding us all that some things can last forever.

My sister left six months ago. She says living in space is not that different, except there’s more recycling. We FaceTime every couple of weeks. “The food’s not bad,” she says, shoving noodles into her mouth. “And from here, the Earth looks almost pretty.”

A flier in the mailbox announces that shuttle buses will arrive in a week, to take everyone in our town to the rockets. You don’t have to go, the flier says, but if you do, there are rules. Leave everything behind but the clothes you’re wearing. A new wardrobe will be provided. Don’t worry, the new clothes won’t be too stiff or too stretchy. They will be available in four colors: silver-gray of a dove’s chest, blue of a butterfly’s wing, orange of a just-ripened tangerine, green of an Irish winter.

A woman is waiting for me by the mailboxes. It takes me a moment to recognize her as the little girl’s mother. She’s wrapped in a sweater even though it’s hot. “I’m pregnant,” she says, and her eyes are scared so I don’t congratulate her. “Outer space is no place for a baby,” she says. “Will you take care of Denise?”

I never knew the little girl’s name, because I never asked. The woman says she knows I’m in Denise’s museum, so she trusts me. “Just get her there,” she says. “Take her with you.”

I want to ask if she really thinks Earth is a good place for a baby. “Let me think about it,” I say.

“No,” says Louis. “And what’s wrong with this woman? She’s going to stay behind and send her daughter off to space with strangers?”

“I’m not a stranger,” I say. “I’m in her museum.”

Louis is in his study, uploading his childhood. I recognize his pet turtle, a 3D image crawling across the floor. I want to ask how he’s arranging his museum: chronological? Based on order of importance? Or maybe by category: Animals, Places, People, etc.? Will I get a category of my own? We met at a march to save the wetlands, and I loved his braided hair and his big laugh, and even though we didn’t save the wetlands, we stayed together. When wildfires came to our town, we moved; when the lakes dried up, we moved again.

I haven’t started curating my museum. It all seems so overwhelming, and I’ve already gotten rid of so much. Our cups and saucers and half-empty bottles of booze, alarm clocks, throw pillows and board games. My journals from childhood: I burned them. Everything I wrote about the cemetery next door: gone. My parents died in a wildfire and everything in our house burned, too. I feel so light that I could almost start levitating. I threw everything out on the lawn for the trash truck to pick up and take to the dump, which is creeping closer and closer to the town, to all the towns.

My sister says, “You don’t need money here, which I guess is nice, but I kind of miss it.” She says, “There are assholes here, but there are assholes everywhere.”

From my kitchen window I can see the woman’s boyfriend loading trash bags into his pickup truck. When I go outside, he steps toward me. His mustache is gone, and I feel sorry for him, seeing his naked face. It’s puffy like a boy’s. His nose is all wrong. His lips are small.

“I have too much love inside of me,” he says, and I think I understand what he’s saying. He’s trying to give some of it away, so I kiss his small lips to take away some of his too-much-love.

But he steps back quickly, goes into his house and shuts the door.

I’m about to go back into my own house when the door opens again, and he shoves Denise outside. “Fine, fine,” the girl says. “Go do it, whatever.”

She’s wearing a plastic tiara and a bunch of paperclip necklaces and a woman’s red skirt pulled up to her chin. “This is my favorite outfit,” she tells me. “Do I look pretty?”

“You certainly do,” I say, even though I don’t know how to talk to children.

She hugs me around my waist. “Let’s go to the dump,” she says.

“Is that where you got this stuff?” I ask. She’s already on her pink bike, riding away, the dry road making clouds behind her. I stand there until she disappears.

When you vacate your home, you are leaving it forever. Your house is a shell, a grave, and like a grave, it will be left for the living to claim. Weeds and animals and forests. When you stare down at Earth from your new home, you can be proud of what you’ve sacrificed. If you have a good imagination, you can imagine Earth’s creatures waving up at you with their little paws and claws and fins and hooves.

“What will we do when we get there?” I ask Louis. I want him to say that we’ll love each other and find a way to cherish what little we have, but he says, “We’ll spend every day at our museums, and then we won’t be lonely or afraid.”

This is taken word for word from one of the fliers that came in the mailbox. “We’ll look down at the Earth and think of the creatures waving back at us,” he says, because his imagination is better than mine.

One of the other things that burned along with my parents and the house was my fifth-grade report on the seahorse. I traced a giant seahorse on bright yellow construction paper. I wrote my report on notebook paper and cut it up and pasted it on the seahorse. Seahorses have eyes that can look forward and backward at the same time. The female and male change colors as they approach each other. The female transfers her eggs to her mate, and he carries them in his pouch. They do not have scales. What I’m saying is: the Earth is full of wonders.

* * *

Before I met Louis trying to save the wetlands, I was married. My first husband was a decade older than me, and I met him when I ran away from home as a teenager. I told him about losing my parents in a fire and my sister calling me a coward for running away. We got married by a bearded man in a ski cap. There are no photographs. There are no 3D scans. If I could peel off that layer of my brain with those months in it, and leave it for creatures to devour, I would.

Humans take seahorses out of the water for medicine and trinkets. They leave them to die in the sun. They sell them as souvenirs. When people take seahorses as pets, they rarely survive more than six weeks.

Of course, there are theories and rumors. That there are no rockets. No space stations. All the FaceTimes faked, all the humans sent into orbit to float around forever. That there’s no outer space. That we look up and see a lie. That the sky is not the sky, that when we look up, we’re really looking down.

The shuttle buses are lining up on the main road. Heaving gray things, rumbling, doors gaping. I watch the people of my town standing in a queue that stretches past my front door. No luggage, no purses. They are hot and thirsty, because we’re all always hot and thirsty. They don’t know what to do with their hands. The children are crying for their pets. A man takes something (a gerbil? A kitten?) from a sobbing boy and sets it loose on the ground.

And then I see Denise, her mother and the boyfriend step out of their house and join the line. So, they’re going after all. I feel my heart inflate with relief.

There’s no pushing, no shoving.

“It’s time to go,” Louis says. “Do you have everything?” “Of course not,” I say, because it’s a ridiculous question.

We leave the doors open for the birds and the raccoons. I think I see faces peering out of some of the other windows on our block: humans who are staying behind, good luck to you.

When Denise sees me, she waves. Her eyes are red. “I can’t take my bike,” she says. “I can’t take my necklace. I can’t take my red dress.”

“You’ll have a new bike,” her mother says. She looks at me. “Right? Tell her she’ll have a new bike.”

“I don’t know if there are bikes,” I say instead. The boyfriend is ignoring me. I wonder if he found a place to unload his unwanted love. Louis is standing back and looking at us like he’s trying to upload us into his museum, then he’s looking at us like he’s changing his mind and deleting us.

“I have to pee,” Denise says, and her mother says, “Be quick,” and Denise disappears into her house.

The line has started to move. Far ahead, I see the first of the shuttles drive away.

“I hear the food is pretty good,” the woman says to us. She’s holding the boyfriend’s hand; her other hand is on her stomach even though there’s nothing to see yet. I wonder what made her change her mind, but I don’t ask.

I’m the first to see Denise pedaling away on her pink bike.

“For fuck’s sake,” says the boyfriend. He’s still holding the woman’s hand and when she tries to run, he holds her tighter.

“I’ll go,” I say, the words out of my mouth before I can think. Louis says, “We can’t wait for you,” which I already know. But I’m fast. I’m good at getting away from places. I race through the backyards like there’s a wildfire chasing me. There’s a shortcut to the dump and soon I see it, a mountain. The dump is bigger than the town now, but I spy Denise on her pink bike parked at its smallest foothill.

“I need to find my necklace,” she says.

“You’ll get a new necklace,” I say, and I don’t know if I’m lying. “And the food is pretty good there. Everyone says so.” I want to tell her to look up: there’s a daytime moon, hanging in the sky like a shiny thing we can keep.

A long gray line of shuttles is moving in the distance. On the ground beneath me: a blue sneaker, a French textbook, a postcard featuring a beach and green cliffs, something smooth and bone-white like a child’s tooth. I lean down and pick up the postcard and read it: I can’t tell you how much I miss you, so I won’t even try!

“We need to go,” I say, but Denise is bent over searching the ground, and then I am, too, even though I don’t know what I’m searching for. In a moment, I’ll grab her, and we’ll run together, or I’ll send her ahead on her pink bike, tell her to go as fast as she can. Or maybe it’s already too late. Maybe we will come here every day and search through what our people left behind; then we’ll look up—our arms filled with treasure—and watch rockets stitch the sky closed.