Dust
The book opens with imagery. “May is the time of dust. Gusts of wind rise and ebb through the haze, carrying huge sheets of dun-colored dust that seethe and rustle across the landscape. They slither across the ground, hissing among the creosote bushes and on until piling up in billowing dunes and waves that wander unseen and grow in the constant static.” As the narrative progresses, references to this dust will recur several times until the protagonists finally leave the Mojave Desert. The endowment of the dust with a serpentine quality created by the reference to slithering and hissing subtly conveys an underlying sense of evil to its origination. In this sense, this opening imagery also acts as foreshadowing.
The Neurocaster
The neurocaster is a device that is absolutely essential to the story of how the dystopic apocalypse in the story occurred. The device is visually displayed in a mock advertisement announcing the arrival of a major update that shows exactly how it is worn by the user but—in a perfectly modulated bit of parody—offers absolutely no other useful details about the product. This is also true of the first time it is mentioned by name. The narrator instead opts for imagery revealing the consequences of its use. “I found the owner of the sex robot in a derelict trailer on the other side of the compound. He was toothless and bearded, and gasped for breath beneath his neurocaster. His body was emaciated and shriveled, and the place reeked. A tube in his arm snaked around an IV stand to a huge tank in the ceiling that had once been full of something yellow and gooey.” Once again, imagery linking serpents to the presence of evil is cunningly used in the description of the IV tube to the grotesque contents of the tank to which it connects. The overall portrait of the man as basically little more than a living skeleton is about as apocalyptic as it gets, and the mention of the sex robot vaguely hints at an underlying association of the apocalypse with issues of sexuality. This issue has already been explicitly addressed on the opening page of text.
Stirring Up Memories
A particularly disturbing scene in the novel is one which touches upon the extremities of religious fundamentalism and child abuse. Not a single word is used which could be described as the rabid insanity of extremist thought. The only word indicating abuse is “bruises.” It is the unnerving power of the imagery used in the protagonist’s narration that brings it all together. “The monotonous noise of the Reverend’s spoon meeting the porcelain cup over and over rose from the coffee and shot up against the ceiling and bounced off the walls where the silverfish contorted in pain and poured across the cereal and oats and instant waffle powder that collapsed inside their boxes and soon filled the entire kitchen.” The word “monotonous” is introduced specifically to describe the sound coming from the cup, but by this point it also describes the Reverend once he starts sermonizing about how neurocasters are the work of Satan intended to lure people off the path of righteousness. What the imagery is describing here is not so much a fantastical reaction to the literal sound of the stirring, but the memories his presence has stirred up in the narrator about his daughter, who used to be her girlfriend. The single reference to bruises describes those left on his daughter’s body as he pounded his zealous message of redemption into her until finally she, like the boxes of cereal and waffle mix grew too weak to fight and collapsed under the weight of his monotonous repetition.
Half Full or Half Empty?
The final chapter of the book is titled “The Sea” and features no text. Instead, it is a comprised entirely of just four illustrations. The next-to-last picture in the book shows nothing but two very significant objects that are essential elements throughout. The preceding chapter ends with the narrator in a state of intense anxiety over an action she knows she has to make that involves both these objects. They are both abandoned, floating in the water, devoid of any contextual information about the consequences of her decision. The imagery is thus a portrait of ambiguity. The choice she makes has only two possible consequences and the mere fact that two objects have been left in the state in which they are pictured confirms neither as true or false. How the story ends is left up to whether the reader interprets this imagery optimistically or pessimistically.
