The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “Swimmers?” Lucy asked.

  Torres had laughed, exasperated. “God damn, girl. You are wet.” He’d walked away, shaking his head, chuckling. “Wet and soft.”

  Back then Lucy hadn’t known how easy it was to write the wrong thing. How easy it was to end up slumped over your steering wheel with a bullet in your head.

  She’d been wet and soft then, just as Anna was wet and soft now.

  “You can live with us, you know,” Anna said. “Arvind can arrange it through the National Professionals Program. You can come to the university first. With your credentials, you’d be a shoo-in for visas. And Stacie and Ant would love to have you with us.”

  “There’s mold up there.” Lucy tried to make herself laugh. “Even your underwear molds. They’ve got studies that say how bad that is for your health.”

  “Be serious, Lucy. I miss you. The kids miss you. You’re alone down there. And there are nice men up here.”

  “Nice Canadian men.”

  “Arvind is a nice Canadian man.”

  Lucy looked at her sister helplessly. There wasn’t anything to say. Anna stared back at her, equally helpless—an entire lecture held back, all the things she desperately wanted to say but wouldn’t.

  You’re insane.

  You’re being stupid.

  I’ve never seen someone so willfully suicidal.

  Normal people don’t do what you do.

  All of it held back because what was the point of arguing?

  However much Lucy might want to slip through the looking glass and join her sister’s world, she didn’t want Anna’s world infected with all the things that were inside her now. She wanted, no, needed this glass between them, protecting Anna and Arvind and the kids. It meant that there was still some place where the world wasn’t falling to pieces.

  Finally Anna relented and made herself laugh. “Don’t stop talking to me just because I’m a pain in the ass. You know I love you.”

  “I only beat you because I love you.”

  “Exactly.” Anna’s smile was bright with everything she wasn’t allowing herself to say, and then she turned from the camera.

  “Stacie! Ant! Come talk to Aunt Lucy. You were telling me all week you wanted to talk to her, and here she is calling us!”

  The kids got on-screen, and they were adorable, and Lucy thought that if any kids were worth having, Stacie and Ant were a delight. And then Arvind passed by, smiling at her, his dark skin so much a contrast with his wife’s paleness, and then he was scooping the kids off to wash their hands and eat their lunch.

  Anna reached out and touched the screen. “I worry,” she said. “That’s all. I just worry.”

  “I know,” Lucy said. “I love you, too.”

  They said their goodbyes and closed the connection, leaving Lucy staring at the darkened screen, thinking about all the warnings and caretaking and advice that people held back because they were too afraid of severing relationships, even though they could see disaster looming.

  I just worry.

  “I worry, too,” Lucy murmured. The truth she couldn’t say to Anna.

  Outside in the alley the truck revved its engine again. Irritated, Lucy stood up and grabbed her pistol. “All right, asshole. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Sunny wagged his tail hopefully at Lucy’s sudden movement.

  “Stay!” Lucy ordered. She worked the dead bolts, chambered a round, took a deep breath, and yanked open the door.

  Sunshine blazed down as she strode across the yard. Just beyond her chicken-wire fencing, the pickup waited, rumbling. Cherry-red paint, massive jacked-up tires, tinted windows.

  Lucy couldn’t see the driver through the glass, but she knew he was looking at her. Lucy held her pistol at her hip, ready to lift and fire, wondering if someone was already pointing a gun at her from within the cab, wondering if she should already be shooting—

  “What do you want?” she shouted as she stormed closer. “What the fuck do you want?”

  The truck gunned its engine. Its tires spit gravel, and it took off, tearing down the alley, leaving dust and discarded Clearsacs billowing in its wake.

  Lucy stared after the retreating truck, her heart pounding. Dust drifted over her, lazy and feathery. She coughed and wiped at sweat with the back of her arm, wishing she’d gotten a license plate.

  Am I going insane?

  Either someone was stalking her, or she’d just been about to shoot some innocent kid because she was losing her mind to paranoia. Either way she was a walking tragedy. She could practically hear Ray Torres and Anna both shouting at her to run like hell.

  A whole Greek chorus, right inside her head.

  From inside the house, Sunny barked, annoyed at being abandoned. Lucy went and opened the door. The dog came bounding out in an eager dash of jangling tags and flopping pink tongue.

  He trotted to her truck and sat, waiting expectantly for her to open the cab.

  “Christ. Not you, too.”

  Sunny panted eagerly. Lucy shoved her pistol into the back of her jeans. “We’re not going for a ride,” she told him.

  Sunny gave her a disgusted look.

  “What?” Lucy asked. “If you want to go back inside, fine. Or you can stay outside. I’m going to sweep. We’re not going for a ride.”

  Sunny crawled under the truck and flopped down. Lucy got the dust broom. Sunny watched her with accusing eyes.

  “You and Anna,” she muttered.

  She started sweeping off the sandstone slabs of her patio, obliterating the pale dunes that had settled into angles of repose around the edges of her home. Clouds of grit enveloped her, making her sneeze and cough. She could almost hear Anna scolding her for being too casual with her lungs.

  In the beginning Lucy had been religious about using her dust mask and changing its filter, religious about shielding her lungs against wildfire smoke and dust and valley fever. But after a while it was hard to care about invisible airborne Coccidioides fungi anymore. She lived here. This was her life. A dry hacking cough was simply part of that.

  She could remember her shiny REI dust mask dangling around her neck when she’d first arrived in Phoenix. Straight out of J-school and ready to dig up her first big scoop.

  Christ, she’d been wet.

  With the patio cleared, Lucy propped a ladder against the house and climbed.

  From the flat expanse of the roof, Phoenix spread before her: traffic and suburbs, a dust-draped sprawl of low-rises and abandoned single-families slumping across the flat desert basin. Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Scottsdale—the remains of a metropolitan sea that had flooded the open basin, filling it with houses and arrow-straight boulevards until they lapped against the saguaro-studded mountains at its rim.

  Sun blazed down, hot and relentless, glaring through a muddy veil of powdered soil kicked up by commuter traffic. Even on a clear day like this, the sky seemed truly blue only directly overhead.

  Lucy smeared muddy sweat off her brow and wondered if she even knew what true blue looked like anymore.

  It was possible that she stared up at the sky, and called it blue or gray or tan, and it was none of those colors. Dust eternally hazed the air here, and if not dust, then the gray smoke of California forest fires.

  Maybe she’d forgotten the color blue, and it existed only in her imagination now. Maybe she’d been down in Phoenix for so long that she now made up names for all sorts of things that no longer existed.

  Blue. Gray. Clear. Cloudy. Life. Death. Safety.

  She could call the sky blue, and maybe it was. She could call her life safe, and maybe she’d survive. But really, maybe none of those things existed anymore. Blue was just as much a mirage as Ray Torres and his patronizing smile. Nothing lasted in Phoenix.

  Lucy got to work, shoveling storm dust off her collectors, exposing black silicon surfaces from GE and Haier to the sun. She spat on the glass and rubbed pits and scratches muddy clean, scrubbing longer than necessary, knowing that she was being
obsessive but working still, because it was easier to clean house than face what she’d seen the night before and what it meant for her now.

  “Why are you calling?” Anna had asked.

  Because my friend had his eyes pried out, and I’m afraid I might be next.

  She couldn’t get the memory of Jamie out of her head. A disassembled person, lying right outside the Hilton 6. She had photos on her camera. She hadn’t even realized that she’d snapped them when she was at the scene. Sheer reflex.

  The first one had almost been too much. She’d set the camera aside, overwhelmed by what she’d captured, but still they were there. The abrupt end to the story Jamie had been trying to write for himself.

  She remembered him sitting in the Hilton 6. Polished and confident, saying, “I’m going to be a goddamn fucking fish, Lucy. I’m going to have a swimming pool and boy toys wall to wall, and when I get my Cali visa stamped, I am never coming back.”

  His life, mapped out.

  Jamie was too smart to stay stuck. And too clever to stay alive.

  She remembered him, too, the night of the deal. Jittery. Smoothing his coat. Straightening his tie. Stone sober but trembling with anticipation. She remembered sitting in his tidy one-bedroom, there to record the moment.

  “You should let me come along,” she’d said.

  “I like you, Lucy, but no. You get your exclusive after I get my money.”

  “You’re afraid I’ll try to steal your score,” she’d said, making him look over sharply.

  “You? No.” He’d shaken his head. “Every other person in the universe, yes. But you, no.”

  She remembered him reknotting his tie again and again, something that he normally did without thinking but that now had him so fumble-fingered that Lucy finally came over to help him.

  “Thank God for crypto currencies,” he’d said. “I couldn’t do this kind of deal before. Not without raising flags. I should probably be making an offering to the patron saint of Bitcoin and CryptGold when it’s all done.”

  “You would have just used regular cash,” Lucy said.

  That had made Jamie laugh. “You think it’s that kind of deal?” he asked. “You think this is the kind of thing where I walk out of a hotel room with a couple suitcases full of nicely pressed hundred-dollar bills? Girl”—he shook his head—“you think too small.”

  “How big is this?”

  Jamie smirked. “How much would you pay to keep a city alive? Or an entire state? What would you pay to keep the Imperial Valley’s agriculture from turning into a dust bowl?”

  “Millions?” Lucy hazarded.

  That had made Jamie laugh again. “And that, Lucy, is how I know you will never betray me. You think small.”

  The rumble of an engine broke Lucy’s thoughts. It was the same truck as before. A predatory unmuffled grumble. She pulled her gun.

  Down in the yard, Sunny started barking. He was racing back and forth along the chicken-wire fence as the red truck eased down the alley. It slowed, a red gleaming monster, scoping Sunny and the house and her.

  A shark, cruising its prey.

  Lucy crouched and aimed. Sunny’s barking was incessant—he was going crazy. Lucy was afraid he’d jump the fence and go after the truck.

  The truck rolled slowly past. It didn’t stop. Just kept going.

  Lucy straightened, watching it recede down the alley and pass the squatter camp at the far end of the block.

  She wondered if she should have taken a shot.

  The engine noise faded. Sunny stopped barking and retired to the shade on the porch, looking pleased with himself. Lucy kept waiting, listening, but the truck didn’t circle back. The lesson was clear enough, though. She couldn’t sit paralyzed any longer. She could either make decisions for herself, or someone else would make them for her.

  Lucy climbed down from the roof and shook the dust off her clothes. She ran her fingers through her hair and brushed out Sunny’s fur. She let him inside, stripping off her own clothes in the dust room, carefully leaving the storm’s residues outside her home.

  Sunny watched her expectantly as she put on indoor clothes, then sat down before her computer.

  The first taps were hesitant. Embryonic words. A sketch, a history. And then a cascade of letters, tapping faster now, her fingers rhythmic, finding the shape of her story, all the words she’d held back from writing for over a decade because she’d been afraid. All the words, all the accusations, pouring out of her and onto the page, describing the shape of the vortex that was swallowing them all.

  She wrote about bodies. She wrote about Ray Torres and the swimmer he’d warned Lucy off from so many years ago. She wrote about how he’d ended up, slumped over the wheel of his truck, after being gunned down. A man who knew too many things about too many people, and who knew where the bodies were buried. She wrote about Jamie and the discarded body that he’d become. She marked him as a person, as an individual, flawed and crazy and passionate. Horny and angry and brilliant. She marked him as someone who might last beyond his dreams and ambitions, a person who would not be erased despite his killers’ attempts to tear away his face.

  When Lucy was finished, she posted her words along with a single photo of the dust-storm hillock that had been her friend. A tombstone. A marker. A chance for Jamie to be something more than another bit of rubble in Phoenix’s collapse.

  She stood and stretched and went and got a beer from her tiny fridge. She went outside to the porch, calling Sunny after her. Was surprised to find the sun was already setting. She’d written the day away. Lucy toasted the bloodred ball of fire as it sank over the Phoenix sprawl. Toasted Jamie.

  Don’t write about the bodies. It’s not safe.

  “Maybe I never wanted to be safe.”

  It felt good to say it out loud. She didn’t want safety. She wanted truth. For once, she wanted truth.

  Nothing lasted forever, so why should she try to fight her own end? Phoenix would fall as surely as New Orleans and Miami had done. Just as Houston and San Antonio and Austin had fallen. Just as the Jersey Shore had gone under for the last time.

  Everything died. Places were blown away, or drowned or burned, and it just kept happening. The equilibrium of the world was shifting. Whole cities were losing their balance as the ground they’d taken for bedrock shifted beneath them and knocked them right on their collective asses.

  Maybe it would just keep happening.

  Maybe it would never end.

  So why run? If the whole world was burning, why not face it with a beer in your hand, unafraid?

  For once, unafraid.

  Lucy switched to tequila. She drank in the darkness, grateful for nightfall and the cool hundred degrees it brought.

  She wouldn’t lock herself away, and she wouldn’t run. She would remain here, comfortable in the smoke and the dust and the heat and the dying.

  She was a part of Phoenix, just like Jamie and Torres.

  This was home.

  She wouldn’t run.

  CHAPTER 6

  Morning for Maria came as gummy eyes, smoky air, and the hack of Sarah’s dry cough.

  Beams of desert sun cut the dimness of the basement, revealing lazy dust motes, concrete floors, and cracked plastic pipes for water and sewer overhead. The arteries and veins of a house that had died years before.

  Maria didn’t need to check Sarah’s phone to know she’d overslept. It was time to be awake, time to be out. Time to be selling water.

  Maria’s few clothes dangled from nails beside the tank tops and ass-hugging shorts that Sarah used in her work. A stuffed frog that Sarah had gotten out of an abandoned house and given to Maria, right after her father had died, looked down on her. A pink plastic hairbrush of Maria’s that they shared lay on a concrete ledge, carefully arrayed beside their frayed toothbrushes and old barrettes, and a couple tampons that Sarah was saving in case she needed to work during her period.

  A scarred red-and-glittery wheelie suitcase held the rest of their cl
othes, a lot of them coming from Tammy Bayless, before she and her family had gone north. The girl had been their size and just given them the suitcase full of clothes before her father could sell them off.

  “Just take them,” she’d whispered in the darkness.

  The next day she’d been gone with the rest of her family.

  Maria rifled through the suitcase and found clothes that were sort of clean. Some days she and Sarah would hang them up and beat them with sticks to get the dirt and dust out. Other days Sarah would sneak their underwear into the hotels where she worked and sometimes wash things when men let her shower.

  Maria pulled on shorts and an Undaunted T-shirt, ignoring memories of when her mother had washed clothes in a machine and left them folded on her bed.

  Maria climbed the steps and unlocked the door to the basement. The sudden glare made her eyes tear. Outside, the smoke was thick, a brown haze in the cloudless sky. Ash scents clogged the air. The wind was blowing in from California and the burning Sierras, for sure. Maria waited, peeking out the door, watching.

  Not much stirring yet. Just the few people with work and places to go: Texans who’d been lucky enough to get work at the Taiyang Arcology like her dad, people who knew complex plumbing or could use industrial cutters, or who knew algae reclamation. The Nguyen family was up—she could smell cooking noodles in a broth, the smoke of burning two-by-fours curled gray over the fence next door, lazy in the still air of the suburb. It looked safe. A good time to be on the move.

  Maria closed the door again and padded back down the stairs to crouch beside Sarah. Shook her. “Come on,” she said. “We got to go. Got to get all this water over to Toomie’s spot.”

  Sarah groaned. “How come you don’t just do it?”

  “You want your money, you got to sweat for it.”

  “This water scam is your thing, not mine. I’m just an investor.”

  “Yeah? Gimme your sheet.” Maria yanked it off Sarah’s body, revealing pale flesh and the red nylon panties that the men liked.

  Sarah curled up, skinny legs pulled up tight, tan lines glaring rings on her thighs. “Come on, Maria, why you gotta be like this? Gimme time to wake up, at least.”