Clade by Mark Budz

sits by the hospital bed, the drawing cradled in her lap, watching the rise and fall of Ibrahim’s chest. The images on the sketchpad exert a magnetic pull on her, as if her eyeballs are veined with slivers of iron. She can’t not look. Her gaze is drawn to the scene the way her memory is sometimes drawn to the past—repeatedly and against her will.
    Like Ibrahim, Anthea was a street kid. A runaway. They have that in common. But what he’s running from is so completely outside her realm of experience it’s like those nether regions on n-teenth-century maps populated with dragons, demons and other mythic horrors.
    Anthea thought she had it bad: escaping the aloof, ruthless hauteur of her mother; hanging with a bunch of twelve-year-olds who believed that ROMENTOMBED back issues of
National Geographic
were a defunct fashion magazine; distributing sexually transmitted drugs—black-market psychoactive prions that nested in the warm cozy environs of her body where they were happy to hang around indefinitely, waiting for someone to give her cold hard currency instead of a black eye and a split lip for her services.
    Ironic that putting out got her out. At the age of fourteen she was approached by a Global Upreach social worker. Instead of STDs, she agreed to spread vaccines and antibiotics to people who couldn’t afford the drugs supplied by managed health care. The money was lousy, but the benefits were great. Free room, free board, and when she turned seventeen an all-expenses-paid trip to the college education of her choice.
    Until then her existence as a
puta
had been pretty subsistence level. She was lucky, escaped with nothing more serious than a few ritual gang scars. What was Ibrahim’s ticket to a better future? How did he get out . . . and at what price? Where did he think he was going? Or had he been like her? Didn’t care where he went as long as it was someplace different?
    Looking at the drawing, a sort of William S. Bur-roughs meets Paul Klee collage, it’s impossible to tell. No way she’ll be able to decipher it without help— Ibrahim’s or someone else’s.
    At least his face is peaceful now, not the cracked-glass visage inscribed on the pad. Splintered scribbles of red, daubed with malarial puddles of yellow she speculates are eyes.
    Easier to study the sunken lines of his face, bathed in the indolent afternoon haze from the window by the foot of the bed. The window is really a wallscreen, which just happens to be tuned to a realtime view outside the building, where afternoon clouds are grouping over the hunched backbone of dry hills. The crepe sprayon sheets cocoon Ibrahim like a funeral shroud. The inflatable pillow supporting his head reminds her of a sagging party balloon. By design everything is soothing powder pink. Pink is the color of health, of happiness.
    Quiet movement behind her. Anthea starts, wrenches her head around à la Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
, which she had to deconstruct for a postmodern cultural history class: Psycho Cinema, the Mediagenic Expression of Supernatural Archetypes in Late Twentieth-Century Collective Consciousness.
    “Well?” she asks Isa, the on-duty physician. “How’s he doing?”
    “Not good.” Isa gazes past her for a moment, peering at a virtual datawindow. She’s a wiry Australian aborigine with hair that resembles a tightly coiled ensemble of pipe cleaners. “His condition is stable. For now. But I don’t know how long that will last.”
    “Can I talk to him?”
    “As soon as he wakes up. He’s still sedated.”
    Anthea stands, sketchpad pressed to her chest with both hands. “What can you tell me about him?”
    “What do you want to know?”
    Everything, she’s tempted to say. Where he came from. How he got to SJ. Who his parents are. “Let’s start with what’s wrong.”
    Isa purses her lips, glosses them with the tip of her tongue. “To begin with, he isn’t keyed to the local ecotecture. We’ve got him on antiphers, but that’s a