City of Orange - Hardcover

Yoon, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593422163 ISBN 13: 9780593422168

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A man wakes up in an unknown landscape, injured and alone.

 

   He used to live in a place called California, but how did he wind up here with a head wound and a bottle of pills in his pocket?

    He navigates his surroundings, one rough shape at a time. Here lies a pipe, there a reed that could be carved into a weapon, beyond a city he once lived in.

   He could swear his daughter’s name began with a J, but what was it, exactly?

    Then he encounters an old man, a crow, and a boy—and realizes that nothing is what he thought it was, neither the present nor the past.

   He can’t even recall the features of his own face, and wonders: who am I?

    Harrowing and haunting but also humorous in the face of the unfathomable, David Yoon’s City of Orange is a novel about reassembling the things that make us who we are, and finding the way home again.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Yoon is the New York Times bestselling author of Frankly in Love, Super Fake Love Song, and for adult readers, Version Zero and City of Orange. He’s a William C. Morris Award finalist and an Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature Honor book recipient. He's co-publisher of Joy Revolution, a Random House young adult imprint dedicated to love stories starring people of color. He's also co-founder of Yooniverse Media, which currently has a first look deal with Anonymous Content for film/TV development. David grew up in Orange County, California, and now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Nicola Yoon, and their daughter.

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One
 
He awakes with his eyes closed.
 
He senses light all around him and is reluctant to expose his sight to the brightness. His head pulses with pain. He lies on his back, half-sunken in the earth. The back of his head feels crushed. It can be slowly leaking blood for all he knows, hot and thick like dark oil sinking into the sand.
 
Sand. This is sand, he thinks. He makes a fist with his right hand, idly plays with it. Warm and fine. Glue it to card stock and you get sandpaper. Fire it up and you get glass. Mix it with limestone and you can sculpt buildings and bridges out of it.
 
You can build a whole civilization.
 
His eyes slit open to a blinding sun. It takes a second for him to comprehend. There's a blue sky, a white sun in it. There's a concrete wall floating above him, enormous and massive and silent.
 
Wait. Not a wall. He grits his teeth, lifts his head an inch. The pain changes shape in that moment. His head drips with it. His eyes steady.
 
It's some kind of bridge. Concrete, bleached white in the sun, spanning a wide trench carved from the same colorless material. An inverted trapezoidal channel. River? Riverbed? Lying asleep in a bed, but a river?
 
Oh please let his head not be bleeding. He settles it back down again into its divot, as if sand can stop the flow.
 
He sweeps his right hand back and forth. Now with the left hand. This is called something. Except in snow. Snow angels? When he was little, he and a bunch of other kids had swept out angels in frosty winter mountains somewhere. He remembered he had to go super bad, but he was so fascinated by the snow that he'd held it, not like the others who tried to write their names in steaming yellow. It'd been a field trip for city children unfamiliar with cold weather. Junior high school, holy shit. What letter did the name of the school start with?
 
A? B? C? D?
 
Elemeno-pee?
 
And his name? This particular individual lying here in the sand. Maybe dying here in the sand.
 
He tests the dead batteries of his memory. He can remember a few fundamentals without much effort: These are called fingers, this is sand, this is his head. This is Earth, he is male, he lives in a place called California, USA, planet Earth, the Milky Way, the Universe, da dada dada. But anything beyond those basic facts remains out of view.
 
That's the sun up there.
 
There is the sky.
 
Here is a blank river of concrete a hundred meters wide.
 
Nothing else.


 
Two
 
When he does stand, it's like hoisting a corpse with puppet strings.
 
First he props up his torso with his elbows. Then he pushes off the sand. That alone is an excruciating project. Next his legs, folding up, then his arms extending so that he can now sit upright. Another moment, eyes squeezed shut with pain, before rising to a full standing position.
 
His mind is a flickering television screen, a storm of digital static occasionally breaking to reveal things he can't see coming. He wishes he could turn it off. He touches the back of his head. Why am I touching the back of my head? he wonders. To find a power button?
 
No, to check for signs of trauma. Someone taught him this once, called it survival first aid. Hit your head, run through the steps, find out if you are a survivor. First: is there blood?
 
With dread, he notices his hair feels wet.
 
He doesn't want to look at his hand.
 
So he observes his surroundings instead. Ob-zurvz. Sir-roundings. This is a good test, like a startup sequence. He tries recalling larger words, and more blip into existence.
 
Embankment. Aqueduct. Desertification.
 
The concrete channel looks as if it's been scrubbed white by an epoch of sandstorms.
 
He brings his hand to his eyes finally. Sweat, not blood. This gives him a slight burst of energy, enough to move on to the next steps. He touches his eyes-neither bulging nor sunken-and prods his skull. Takes a big breath in through the nose, whistles it back out. Hinges his jaw open and shut.
 
He seems fine. That's a funny word for this situation, fine.
 
He turns his head ninety degrees left, then back right. Nothing snaps, his spinal cord doesn't twist itself apart. Fine.
 
So what is this?
 
The channel has a twenty-foot-wide groove carved into its center, about a foot deep, evenly filled with sand. It's in this sand he lay. Footsteps lead away from the indentation of his body and vanish where they reach the clean concrete. Probably belong to the people who killed him. Tried to kill him, anyway. Came goddamn close enough.
 
Annihilation. Desolation. Apocalypse.
 
Only a few colors here, like the gods had to make do with just five crayons. The powdery blue of the sky. White everywhere. Rectangles and triangles of warm gray, and a thin burnt edge of hard scrub above. He'll have to go see what was up there at some point. But not now. Not now, no way. One thing at a time was hard enough.
 
He instead shuffles into the blue darkness under the bridge, and makes his way toward the inclined edge of the riverbank.
 
His hand cools as soon as it touches the shade, instantly turning his life's goal into getting the rest of his body within it. He reaches the edge and lies down again with his toes pointing downhill. Something about raising the head, to keep it above his beating heart. Elevation.
 
His name is Aaron. Alan. No, none of those. Starts with an A. Amazon. Asshole?
 
He used to live somewhere. Used to work at someplace, doing something.
 
Super not helpful.
 
Work is the thing people used to do for money. Money is the stuff you once needed to buy things like shoes. He likes the shoes on his feet, even if the right foot's a little tight. He can't remember buying them. It's like staring down at someone else's sneakers.
 
He touches his hair. Straight. He plucks a strand and sees it is black, a dark line in this pale new world. Be interesting to see what his face looks like.
 
In any case, he is undeniably alive, even if the world isn't anymore.
 
What caused the collapse again?
 
He can't recall any details. All he knows is that every last bit of it-societies and schools and money-has been done with. Wiped away, like his memory.
 
He imagines vandals roaming the silenced cities full of broken glass, car doors left hanging open. But no bodies. A very strange, very clean apocalypse. Only simple violence is left, scattered muggings and assault, a smaller version of the mass atrocities humanity used to commit.
 
Everyone's gone somewhere else now, to do something someplace.
 
He knows life is fragile and ends without ceremony. The gazelle watches her calf get torn apart by the lions as she flees with the rest of the herd. What thoughts run through her head at such a moment? Why, God, must you take my only son?
 
Maybe gazelles aren't that eloquent. Maybe they spend their days too perplexed to even make it beyond your basic What?
 
Maybe, at a certain level, What? is as good as it gets for humans, too, especially these days. What? probably ranks as the number one most popular thought among all people left everywhere.
 
It's what he's thinking right now, anyway.
 
The mass vanishing of humanity must've been something else. Something spectacular, humankind's greatest and most lasting achievement.
 
He'd heard a theory once. As a last resort, humanity could've migrated en masse into space if the world got too polluted. Maybe that's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593422163
• ISBN 13: 9780593422168
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar