The Long Way Up

TF-1 west of Ten-Bel. Spring, 2041, midday.

The road out of El Fraile ran flat between banana plantations, towering walls of tan sun-occlusion fabric closing on both sides into a long brown corridor that smelled of warm leaves and diesel. Stef drove through it the way you always drove through it, slowly, because anyone coming the other way on a bike or a hand-cart could not be seen until they were already in front of you. He came out of the corridor onto TF-1 and turned west. He had taken the gravel out of the air filter twelve months ago and it had not gone back in, and on a road like this you could feel the absence of the gravel in the pickup of the engine and in the quiet exhale of the exhaust.

The TF-1 ran west along the south coast and gave way, eventually, to other roads further on. Six lanes, in the old counting. The island drove on the inside pair and had given the rest back ~~ the outer lanes fenced off into long thin goat paddocks with the guardrails doing the fencing, chicken runs staked out along the breakdown lane, the median gone over to tabaiba, nopal cactus, and dry grass. The asphalt was greening from its seams outward, weeds in ruler-straight lines where the expansion joints were, and the lane paint had faded to a rumor. The kilometer markers were the one signage anybody polished. When your address is the garlic stand at kilometer sixty-two, you keep the number legible.

The whole drive would take just under three hours if he did not stop. He generally did not stop. Today he had two boxes in the bed, the second of which he had been thinking about for the last forty minutes, which was: how quickly the bearings on a 2.5-inch drive that had been sealed in plastic for fourteen years might or might not seize when you finally plugged it in.

Anna would handle that part. He was just the truck.

Ten-Bel came up.

The Belgians had master-planned it in the 1960s ~~ Tenerife-Belgium, the name said it plainly: a holiday colony poured in cement, low pale blocks around gardens and walkways and communal pools, laid out with the tidy optimism of a rainy country that had finally found the sun and did not intend to waste a minute of it. The cement had spent sixty years fading and the gardens fifteen going feral, and the town had decayed the way certain faces age, into something almost more beautiful than what it started as. And it was alive. West Vlaams drifted over the courtyard walls with the smell of frying; the old swimming pools held the town's water now; the bowling green grew greens. It was still, after everything, full of Belgians.

The bypass was on the left. The bypass had been built in the 2010s when the resort traffic had been heavy and the locals had wanted not to be in it. A man could take the bypass and not see the Hall of Vigilance, and not see the brewery, and not see the road that led up to a particular concrete house with a particular small garden where, in 2041, his mother almost certainly still lived.

Stef did not take the bypass.

He did not take the bypass for a reason that he had stopped trying to articulate to himself somewhere in the year 2032. He drove through Ten-Bel because it was the road, because he had grown up on it, because the truck was fine in either gear, and because he had decided long ago that he was not going to be the kind of man whose life routes were determined by his avoidances.

The Hall of Vigilance went past on the right. Brutalist concrete. White-painted lettering, redone every few years. The community-theater bones were still visible if you knew what to look for: the stage platform inside, a soundbooth window, a loading dock at the back where, in another century, a touring company had unloaded a folding stage. Stef knew it had been a community theater because he had been there once, when he was seven, on a school outing, and had seen a puppet show. He remembered the puppets. He remembered, also, the smell of the room. The smell of the room had not changed when the building's purpose had.

The brewery was beside the Hall, in an annex that had been built in 2031. Bier-Bel and banana biodiesel were the two trade currencies of the south. The Vigilant Prophets brewed the one, pressed the other, and took the price the island would pay. Wouter, who was Stef's cousin on his mother's side, was in there somewhere at this hour, probably writing rhymes. Wouter wrote rhymes about spiritual warfare on a Sankyo MelodyMate MM-3 that he believed was a weapon against the world. It was, in fact, a thirty-euro unit from 2013. Wouter was earnest. Stef had not seen him in seven years.

His mother's house was three streets back from the road. He could not see it from the road. He had not needed to see it from the road for many years. He thought of his mother, briefly, and of the kitchen of that house in a December he could no longer date, which had been the kitchen of his childhood and which had also been the kitchen of his sister's childhood.

He thought of Alice.

He thought of a December night in that kitchen, when Alice had been thirteen and Stef had been seventeen, and they had been doing the dishes after a Vigilant Prophets potluck. Alice had been quieter than usual that night, in the particular quiet that Alice had, which was not silence but a kind of careful audit of a room. They had stood at the sink for a long time and Stef had handed her dishes and she had washed them and they had not spoken. At some point (Stef could not now remember the exact moment, only the shape of the kitchen and the angle of the light over the dishrack) she had said, very small, I want to leave.

Stef had said, I know.

That had been the conversation.

Years later she had left, on a flight to Boston, and after some more years had become Alice in fact as well as name, and after some more years had married Anna in a city hall in Provincetown with three witnesses. Stef had been one of the witnesses. He had flown out from Belgium for it and had cried, quietly, in the way he did things, in the back of the city hall.

Now Stef was in a 1978 Land Rover on the TF-1 with a hard drive labeled FAMILIA in his cargo bed, and the kitchen of his childhood was three streets to the right, and his mother was inside it doing whatever a Vigilant Prophet did at midday, and Alice was not there. Or was. Anna did not know.

Stef did not know either.

He drove.

The Guagua came around the corner ahead of him going the other way, a 1991 Mercedes O404 that smelled, even at the distance of a passing road, of banana biodiesel and damp upholstery. Marisol was driving today. She raised one hand in the small island wave that meant you, I see you, all is acceptable. Stef raised one hand back. The Guagua went on east toward Santa Cruz. He went on west.

He was past Ten-Bel.

The road kept the south coast for another half hour. At the venta outside Guaza, a dead service station with stalls in the shade of the old fuel canopy and a woman who sold cheese she aged in the cool of the underpass, he slowed and did not stop, and the woman raised one hand anyway, because the Santana was known. A solar radar sign near Las Américas still had power. Its segments stuttered, dropped out, came back, and told him, approvingly, 22. Twice he slowed for goats being driven up the asphalt, the herd parting around the truck and closing again behind it, the goatherd lifting his stick in the island wave. Past Las Américas the dead resorts were rotting in the sun and the scrappers were turning the metal back into something useful. Adeje went past on the right. Stef saw, at one of the higher exits, the white concrete corner of the building Klaus lived in, which had been built around 2020 by a Belgian architect who had not understood the island and had then died of a heart attack in Brussels in 2024 without ever returning to confirm what he had built. The villa was, in Stef's view, the kind of architecture that was made by a man who had never known love. Klaus came out onto its terrace sometimes in the mornings to glower at the scrappers through binoculars. Tomás had told Stef this. Tomás knew all the scrappers; the scrappers knew Klaus by his cycle of mornings.

Stef did not have an opinion about Klaus, exactly. He noted the building and drove on.

Past Costa Adeje the autopista ran out. It ran out honestly: the last thing it did was lift an offramp thirty meters into the air, curve it west, and stop ~~ open air, rebar whiskers, a painted horizon line some kid had added at the very end. El Trampolín. The works had stopped in early 2027 and the ramp had spent fourteen years pointing at Santiago del Teide like a sentence nobody finished; in the evenings people climbed it with blankets and watched the sun go down over La Gomera. TF-82 took over beneath it, climbing the western slope through Guía de Isora and Chío, then down to Santiago del Teide. The dry coastal scrub gave way to the pines of the Corona Forestal as the road went up. He came over the Erjos pass with the engine working hard and started down the other side into the mar de nubes, and the laurisilva forest closed in around the road. The air went cool. The windshield went, briefly, into a fog that the truck pushed through without comment. He slid the window open a finger and listened to the engine work the down-pull, and then at the old iglesia of Ruigómez the up-pull again.

He thought of the box in the bed.

He thought of a child in a kitchen somewhere, in a year he did not know, on a drive whose owner had not been seen since 2027.

He thought of his mother in her kitchen, three streets back from a road she had probably not driven on in five years.

He thought of Alice.

He drove the rest of the way without thinking of anything else, because he had decided long ago that the right amount of thinking about Alice in any given hour was enough thinking and not too much.

The turn-off for Querencia de los Helechos came up on the right. He took it. The road roughened and narrowed and rose and the trees closed in. The old electrical pylon came into view at the top of the rise, outfitted with three Pringles-can antennas pointing at three different angles, humming the way it always did. Years ago, Stef had scaled that pylon to install them. He noted the cantennas, glanced at the alignment on the south-facing one, made a small note in the part of his head he kept for such notes.

Anna's house came into view above the upper fork. He pulled up at the foot of the path.

He got out. The cat at Anna's door looked at him with the expression cats had for people who had been there before. He carried the first box, then the second, up to the porch and set them down.

Anna came out.

"Two boxes," he said. "The second one is from Gertrude. Splendora storage unit, sealed since 2027, owner unregistered. She did not boot it. She wanted you to."

Anna nodded.

He looked at her for the small extra moment that was the way they said things to each other that did not need words.

She looked back.

"Root beer?" he said.

"Forty-seven."

"I'll come by in six weeks."

"Bring Godelieve."

"I will."

He went back to the truck. He hand-cranked it on the second try, which was acceptable. He pulled away from the path and started down the slope toward the main square, and the truck noise carried for a while in the stillness, and then the road turned, and the noise was gone.