Mesa never came home.
Chapter 4
The massive dumps of serotonin left me faint and exhausted. The memories clung to me and made me feel dirty. I missed Selene, and my nerves were raw. I wanted to cry. My eyes burned, but no tears came. My ears felt hot, and my cheeks were flushed. I had wanted to get fucked up, but not like that. I had made no particular plans to revisit that old life, but the chips were there, and I promised myself I would use only one of them. The addict’s motto: just one, then I’ll stop. It never works out that way. One always led to one more and then another one and another.
I was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. In the footlocker, I found work gloves, a hat, goggles, and a scarf. I slipped into my work boots, the leather stiff, wrinkled, and worn down.
My empty pot sat on a small Bunsen burner. I remembered my mishap the night before and swore. I took a canteen and got in line for the spigot with the rest of the reclamation crew. No guards were at the spigot yet, but the people waiting weren’t helping themselves. This was not a self-service station, and a man in the watchtower glared down at us.
I knew the guy in front of me but said nothing. His clothes were stained and wrinkled, not too different from my own. He turned around and nodded. Hafiz. I didn’t know his last name.
“You’re looking pretty shitty, Jonah,” he said.
I nodded back. “Couldn’t sleep.” The words were a thick paste in my mouth.
When a guard finally came, the water ran rusty from the spigot. It stunk like a foul egg, but seeing the water reminded me of how thirsty I was. Last night’s whiskey had dehydrated me, and a dull ache twitched and throbbed behind my eyes, promising to get worse.
We shuffled forward to get our canteens filled. Another guard ordered us to form a line for morning roll call, then we were led through the security checkpoints and into truck beds for the drive downtown. Most of us were quiet and tired. One guy yakked incessantly while everybody ignored him. Our disinterest didn’t stop him, though. He chattered away, talking to himself but occasionally seeking confirmation from the others.
“Am I right?” he would ask, making it sound like a single word. Amiright?
I shrugged, not feeling in any shape to judge. Right or wrong, who I was to say?
He asked again, “Amiright?”
I shrugged again, giving him a half-hearted I-suppose-so nod.
“My man!” he said and gave me a gentle fist to the shoulder. Then he went on to talk about something else, but I paid no attention. His words were lost on me. My brain was fried. I was good and truly fucked up, but I didn’t really want to be anymore, especially not with the day’s work ahead of me.
The bumpy ride jostled us against one another. Bombing runs had rendered the Pasadena freeway impassable, so the driver took Sunset Boulevard to Figueroa. The truck stayed to the cracked and shattered road as best as it could, but eventually, the road ended at a crater, and the driver had to off-road it. The ride wasn’t much different.
The PRC employed contractors to make headway with the repairs, but they were slow leviathans riddled with bureaucracy. They gave Sacramento and the Chinatowns to the contractors, who got those areas rebuilt and back up to speed pretty quickly. Los Angeles was different, though.
Los Angeles had pockets of snipers and gangs who fancied themselves freedom fighters. They were itching to take on the PRC and the contractors who worked for them. Most work crews going into LA were met with violence, and rumor had it that the PRC had lost more soldiers after the war than during it, thanks to the resistance’s guerilla attacks throughout the area. Liberty’s Children operated fiercely but discreetly. Usually, they recognized a POW work crew and met them with discretion, maybe even tried to free them. Not always. The violence had led to a dramatic slowdown in the reclamation work, but both sides persisted in their efforts, creating more damage and more dead bodies.
Men unloaded from the trucks. PRC gathered at one end of a truck bed to set up a few cups and thermoses of coffee and ice water. A cooler carried sandwiches for each of us for lunch, probably made with hard bread and old meat.
I scanned the ruins and checked the skylines. Skyscrapers had once been there, but few were still standing. Most were husks, their walls shattered to reveal broken patchworks of steel girders. The US Bank Tower and Wells Fargo had been decimated in the first wave of attacks. One and Two California Plaza were broken stubs of exposed metal, loose wire, and chunks of concrete. Odd, shiny glints of broken glass dotted the surface.
I tugged on my work gloves as dump trucks pulled up to the work site, and we formed a line, went through another headcount in case someone had fallen off the truck after leaving Echo Park, and waited for our duty assignments. I was put in a group with three others and waved off down to Hope Street, off Third. One of the dump trucks followed us, inching forward slowly, debris cracking and popping beneath its large wheels.
I shifted blocks of concrete and brick, lifting with my knees and twisting to dump the loads into the wheelbarrow next to me. Hafiz gripped the wooden handles and pushed it across the uneven ground, back to the truck, where another man helped him unload. I dug at something hard and yellow, shifting the dirt away to expose part of an M from a McDonald’s sign. Half-buried was a curved piece, but I couldn’t tell what letter it may have come from—C, D or maybe an O. Whatever. It didn’t matter. Just something small to puzzle over, to keep my brain working through the dull labor. I tossed the broken signage into the wheelbarrow, along with some busted chairs that had once formed an outdoor seating arrangement at The Court outside of the Wells Fargo Center.
We pushed, lifted, and hauled debris. We sweated and swore. Hafiz traded duties with me after a time, giving me a bit of a reprieve while he tackled some of the harder work.
“What the fuck do you suppose this is?” He held up a piece of broken wood with odd lumps. I took it and turned it over in my hands. I swept away some of the gray dust, revealing a smear of green that time and rot had dulled considerably. My fingers brushed against a hard protrusion on the front. Loose flaps of brittle leather hung from the back of the board. I couldn’t help but laugh, recognizing the object.
“Caress of a Bird,” I said.
Hafiz raised an eyebrow at me. “Huh?” he said, as if I’d lost my mind and were speaking gibberish.
“It was a sculpture inside Wells Fargo,” I said. “Joan Miró.”
He shrugged. “Dunno. Never heard of it.”
After another minute of digging, he asked, “How you know about that?”
“I’m a historian,” I said. It was a private joke, but he nodded, taking me seriously.
A soldier sat atop a hill of crumbling steps, his back resting against a half-wall—the remains of what must have been an office at some point. Beyond him were other walls that had been blown apart, lined up like chipped dominos. Cracked and broken desks were covered with chunks of drywall, plaster, and curls of pink insulation. A rough semicircle of ceiling had survived the collapse when the upper floors caved in. Our guard was uninterested and bored. He smoked and rested while watching us work.
I remembered sitting on those steps with Selene and Mesa, long before the war, eating kettle corn from a food truck vendor that always parked nearby. The Bank of America Center was a ruin. Calder’s Four Arches sculpture towered over the remains. Covered in a thick layer of grime, nicked and dinged, the swoops of its arches were slightly cracked and weathered, but it had fared surprisingly well.
As the war dragged on, the arches had become a memorial for lost loved ones. A collection of faces and frozen smiles, photographs, their colors faded by time, curled and browned from exposure to the elements, were plastered around the sculpture’s red legs. A small boy enjoying birthday cake. A toddler whose face was smeared with pasta sauce. Dogs and cats. Grandmothers, uncles, and aunts. Group photos of friends and families. Hand-lettered signs, asking in large, bold black blocks: HAVE YOU SEEN HER? Old pictures and lost lives.
I helped Hafiz lift a
large, heavy chunk of asphalt. My arms and wrists sore, I gritted my teeth under the strain. Sweat had soaked my shirt, dampening the carpenter’s coat I wore over it. I was covered in gray dust from head to toe, my face slick with perspiration. We heaved it into the wheelbarrow, and I rolled it to the truck, where three of us handled it a bit more easily. When I got back, we moved a few smaller blocks, taking it slow and easy.
The sun was harsh, and I caught a glint of metal. I dug around a bit, tossing fist-sized pieces of road and plaster into the wheelbarrow. After a few minutes, I had unearthed a small, feminine hand. Thin fingers of rotting flesh wore a wedding band and long, broken nails. I pushed more debris away, exposing her forearm. Scooping up dirt, pebbles, and rocks in my cupped palms, I found an elbow. Seeking help with another large hunk of rock, Hafiz looked over, saw the remains I had unearthed, and forgot about it. He started digging, too.
She was fairly well preserved, all things considered. Decomposition had started and settled. Bugs had found her and feasted, taking away patches of skin for supper. She was dirty, her crusty hair matted and filthy. Her skin was dried out and stretched taught.
Behind her right earlobe was a small metal port. I probed the back of her skull, where it joined the neck. I recalled Jaime’s message of the previous night, from Alice, to chip any bodies I found.
Hafiz grabbed her forearm, trying to pick her up. The skin pulled away, loose and crinkly, and it reminded me of tissue paper as it tore at her elbow and slid down to her wrist in a clump. He fell back, coughing at the sudden stench.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded.
“What’s the guard doing?”
He stared past me, over my shoulder. “Nothing. I think he’s asleep.”
I turned around to steal a glance. He was slumped up against the wall, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. I could hear him snoring, even over the grunts of lifting from the other crew members.
I prodded roughly at her skin but couldn’t feel much through the thick hide of the work gloves. I pulled one free, then went back to my search. Her skin was pliant and thin. My stomach lurched at the touch. Bile rose in a burning wave along the back of my throat. I turned my head and buried my face in my shoulder to breathe through my mouth. I gave myself a few seconds to regroup then resumed my explorations of her body. I was hunting for a circular mound of calcification, similar to the hard nub buried beneath the flesh of my own neck.
“What are you doing?” Hafiz whispered, leaning close to me. His breath stank, and his body odor, baked under the day’s heat, was worse than the smell of the corpse I was poking at.
“Looking for something,” I said.
A jagged edge of vertebrae scraped against my index and middle fingers as I pushed through the rot and struck the bone of her spinal column. Thin strands of nerves and stringy muscle sloughed away, and I kept digging, my stomach heaving and threatening to revolt as I pushed upward, to the underside of her skull. My fingers fell into a sharp and jagged crater where the back of her head was missing. Her brain had rotted away, been eaten, or dried up under the rubble ages ago. My fingers brushed against the thin wire filaments patched into the inside of her skull. They fell away in loose bundles. I pulled back, hooking my thumb and fingers around the data port behind her ear. I tugged it away easily, a thin collection of cords coming with it. I swore under my breath, then pressed hard against her thin skin, working my way back around to the underside of her skull and the back of her neck. I pressed hard and found nothing. Down farther, maybe?
This was taking too long. Worried that the guard would wake and catch me, I was racing against an invisible clock. My forehead was soaked in sweat, and dark, wet circles were growing out from my armpits. I poked around her shoulders, pushing my fingers beneath the collar of her blouse, and found something hard against her shoulder blade. My fingernails tore into the flesh, tracing the outline of a squarish deposit soldered to the bone.
“What’s he doing?” I asked. Opening my mouth gave my stomach its cue, and I fought back a convulsive heave, a thick wad of bile lodging in my throat.
Hafiz looked at me quizzically, then looked down at her and back up at me.
“The guard,” I said, a twinge of anger creeping into my voice.
“Nothing, nothing,” he said.
The metallic square was hard and wafer thin. I found a small bump at the edge of the device. Around a slope of calcified mineral deposits on the bone was a collection of nanofilaments that would branch off toward the spine and ride up into her skull, networking the data entry port into her brain and the small storage device on her shoulder. A small latch kept the unit sealed, and I had to jam my thumbnail into the crevice to pry it apart. Inside was a tiny data chip, smaller than the fingernail on the woman’s pinkie. I carefully dislodged it, turning back to check on the guard.
Still asleep. Nobody else was paying us much attention. The crews working in small clusters, spread out in zones, were focused on their own work, not me and Hafiz. I pocketed the chip and replaced the lid. I could do nothing about the damage I’d caused to her flesh, but with the pattern of injuries etched across her back and head, what I had done was hardly discernible.
A loud crackling noise from the radio woke the guard.
I wiped my hand in the dust, trying to lose the gore as best as I could, then wiped it on my pants and replaced the glove. It felt funky and damp.
I threw more chunks of concrete into the wheelbarrow, and Hafiz followed my lead.
“We good?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Sure.”
I didn’t think I would have to worry about him. “Body!” I hollered out and waved to the guard. He came over to inspect then radioed for the meat wagon. The flatbed took a few minutes to grind its way over to us, and when it did, Hafiz lifted her a bit more gingerly, working his hands under her arms, while I took her ankles, hoping the squishy skin of her legs didn’t suddenly loosen and puddle against my grip. We heaved her into the truck. Four bodies had already been collected from the other sites.
I looked up at the sky, trying to gauge the time by the sun. It had to have been close to noon, if not past. I sponged away the sweat with the forearm of my coat and thought about ditching it. We’d all heard stories about some poor bastard who’d scraped his bare arm at a clean-up site and got an infection bad enough that his arm had to be amputated. I’d never met anybody who actually knew the guy, but what difference did that make, really? So we all wore our coats, sweated our balls off—and kept our arms, legs, toes, and fingers.
My hunch about the time was confirmed a few minutes later when the guard announced our lunch break. We lined up, went through another head count, and accepted the rations handed to us. A cup of water, a stale sandwich, and an apple.
I wandered back to the steps and sat near the Four Arches. I’d always enjoyed it there. Even after so long, I could smell the fresh popcorn and the hint of lemon in Selene’s perfume. Her black hair would have shined under this sun, glossy and waxy smooth. She would have sat next to me, our knees touching and arms brushing as we ate, and made small talk. She would have been wearing a skirt for work, and I would have lingered over the curve of her calves and the lines of her legs beneath the dark fabric. She would have accused me of ignoring her as she talked about her day, and then I would be lost in the deep green waters of her eyes, only half-listening. Mesa, so small and her skin untouched by the stab of an inker’s needles, would be a few steps below, interrupting us with incessant strings of questions. Selene would smile and answer, always so patiently, with the love pouring off her. And a part of me would realize that I didn’t belong there, that this should not be my life. I would feel guilty or depressed, and she would pick up on it instantly. If she asked me what was wrong, I would lie with a forced smile across my lips.
I wanted to shove those memories away, but I couldn’t. After the previous night’s DRMR session, they were still too fresh and opened too many old wounds.
I tried to e
at, but the dry sandwich was dusty in my mouth. I’d lost my appetite, even though I hadn’t had solid food since the night before. I forced myself to eat the rest and drank the water, feeling dehydrated and dizzy. All it did was make me thirstier, so I went back down to the truck to refill my cup.
“Ten minutes,” the guard mumbled in a thick accent. His English was broken, and he spoke as if he had cotton in his mouth. His words lacked enunciation and were jumbled together. Tamits it sounded like.
I crossed the street, back over to the Wells Fargo Center, where I climbed over and around the debris then up the steps. There used to be life there, shopping and dining. But the entire block was bare, skeletal, and dirty. A part of a wall remained, along with a sign that said Nick & Stef’s Steakhouse. Selene and I had eaten there a few times, usually before catching a show at Ahmanson Theater—ages ago, back when we were dating and I was still trying to impress her.
I remembered the perfectly grilled dry-aged New York strip from there. I could nearly taste the hints of mesquite and oak in the flame-licked meat. My mouth watered, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had steak. Or a nice, smooth, dry red wine.
The restaurant was a shell. Broken, upturned tables, and shattered chairs. Cracked slate floor. Broken wooden beams. The walls were covered in black mold and stained from water damage. The bar was in ruins and cracked in half. Exploded bottles that had once held thousands of dollars in liquor littered the floor. I saw nothing I could take back to Jaime, and certainly nothing I could idle ten minutes away with.
I got back to work, sick of the past and the discord of memories. My hand was tacky and uncomfortable in the glove. I drained my cup of water, tossed it into the wheelbarrow, and loaded that with as much as I could. When I lifted wrong, I felt a sharp pop in my back. Muscles seized up, and I sat down, sore, throbbing, and angry. I gritted my teeth until it passed, and Hafiz sat with me, nursing a cup of water.
Convergence Page 5
