It was funny, in a way, but it also made me want to cry. I was explaining to the kids, and the judges, how to go about measuring the height of a pyramid. It was simple triangles-and-shadows stuff, but I looked so earnest. I watched myself, the child me, and the tears started coming. I had believed that math was the key to everything. Just get the right numbers and the world made sense.
My nails looked awful, chipped up, uneven from staying up all night chewing on them. My dress had a stiffly starched collar that made my face look pointy as it flared out. I wanted the video to go on forever, to show how I felt when I was given the gold certificate laminated on a dark mahogany board. It didn’t, of course. Little Dahlia had faded to black. Gone. Forever.
I was lying on the bed, sniffling myself to sleep. In my mind, a little girl sat at home in a corner doing math problems from a workbook. When she was finished with each problem, she carefully checked the answer in the back of the book. She was so pleased when her answers were correct. She felt so safe, so secure. Nothing was wrong in her life. She had figured there are answers to everything, and knew she could find those answers.
There was a knock on the door. Go away.
Another knock. I wiped my eyes, looked at myself in the mirror, and then ran a wet cloth over my face. My smile felt lopsided as I opened the door.
“Is everything okay?” Michael.
“Sure, why not?”
He took a step backward, started to turn.
“Michael, why are you here?” I asked, keeping my voice to barely above a whisper.
“I live here,” he said.
“You know what I mean,” I answered. “Why are you here, in this place, in this time, in this fight?”
Standing in the doorway, his shoulders at an angle to the wood-framed rectangle, he seemed bigger. His eyes moved around the room as I moved away from the door. He didn’t come in.
“Short version,” he said. He was uncomfortable. “While I was out fronting the band, my folks were doing their thing. My dad ran a business, maybe two or three. He was making sportswear for a number of labels. They were making the clothes in Bangladesh. There were some headlines, a disturbance, and my father decided to close one of the businesses for a while. My mother wanted to go see the factory, to see if it really used kids to make the clothes.”
He shifted his position.
“Come in,” I said.
“No.” He shook his head. “Anyway, against my father’s wishes, she booked a trip to Bangladesh and went to see the factory. There was a street protest—she texted me; the New York Times called it a riot—and she was killed. The State Department hushed it up. My father lost it. I had never thought of them as being close, but I guess they were. He lasted three months and then killed himself. Over her, not the factory. Not the kids.
“I thought about who my mother had been, and who I was. She was somebody who wanted to see truth wherever it was. Who insisted on seeing even when she knew it was dangerous. I was somebody who hadn’t seen or even known about the factory, who wasn’t concerned about it, who didn’t give a damn about anything except the brilliance of the stage lights. For the first time in my life, I was alone, with tons of cash, and this place, and stocks and accounts I haven’t even added up yet, but I was alone. Onstage I’m usually alone in my head, but I always had a band, and crews and roadies and agents behind me. I swore there would never be another time when I would ever walk around in the daylight and not see. I want to see everything, Dahlia. I want to be responsible for everything I see.”
“That’s kind of heavy,” I said.
“It’s all light if you don’t follow it up,” Michael said, backing away.
I couldn’t think of anything cool to say, so I just smiled and waved.
6
We packed for London. Michael said that we would be traveling as a group and calling ourselves the JOHO Band.
“Which means what?” Drego asked.
“‘Just off Highway One,’” Michael said. “Highway One was a bluegrass band from California that my mom used to like. It doesn’t mean a lot.”
You could see the wheels turning in everybody’s head over JOHO, but the name was just crazy-stupid enough to get by. He also told us not to forget to take the patches off our passports.
In 2016, the government had started a program in which every parent with a child born in America had the option of having a passport chip implanted in the child’s right hip at birth. They said it would enhance national security and speed us through airports. It had seemed controversial at the time, but a lot of people went along with it. Then it got to be even more controversial when police departments starting using the chips to track suspects. Some companies came out with chip covers, little screens that covered the area where your chip was implanted so it couldn’t be traced by satellite. Some people had their chips taken out.
I had mine covered with two patches—one was the conventional blocking patch and the other was a titanium diffuser just in case somebody hacked the block. It was a little paranoid, but I didn’t want people in my business.
I was excited about going to London. The computer had a lot of cool apps, and I was going to transfer them to my laptop, but then I saw that the computer also had a holographic projector switch. Right away, it came to me that if I could do computer projections in holographic mode, I could get a faster read than in flat mode. I packed both computers and told Michael what I was doing.
“You take what you need,” he said. “If you need more stuff, we’ll get it for you.”
He smiled. I couldn’t get a smile going because I was thinking really hard. When my brain is in gear, the smile doesn’t get out too easily. Some people think I’m hard. I’m not. Maybe a little too intense at times, but not really hard.
Breakfast: eggs, juice, tea, coffee, cereal, fruit, toast, sausages, and something that looked like creamed spinach. Mei-Mei was sitting next to Drego again. She kind of leaned toward him, claiming part of his space.
Tristan was at the end of the table. He was eating the fruit and the spinach-looking stuff and staring down at his plate as Javier talked.
“It’s a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute flight from Newark to Heathrow,” he said. “So we should be there by seven at the latest. The British group is going to meet us and transport us to our hotel. From what we feel—feel more than know—the Eton Group doesn’t really trust anyone. They’re talking about Anglo-American ties, but they’ve been burned in the past. Two years ago, they organized an Occupy rally in Parliament Square and there were more police than occupiers. Then all the leaders of the group were singled out and photographed. The police knew when they were coming, and who the leaders were.”
“In England, they have those cameras everywhere.” Tristan spoke without looking up. “You can’t take a crap in London without being photographed.”
“We aren’t doing anything illegal,” Javier went on. “We’re just gathering information. We’ll be photographed, but most likely, any information they gather will stay in Britain. They just gather so much of it.”
“If the British have to watch everyone so closely,” Mei-Mei said, “why should we trust them?”
“We’ll trust them until we find a reason not to trust them,” Michael said. “Our mission isn’t to take over anything or even to occupy anything. We’re living in a world where the stick seems to have nothing but shitty ends. We’re looking to see if we can make a difference. Too many people are sitting by the roadside, too tired to move on. Maybe they’re too old and tired. Maybe we are, too. I have to know, one way or the other.”
He looked away, as if what he was saying had affected him, but I didn’t see how it had. He was still being a mystery.
It was a different world and I wasn’t sure of myself. Everything about Michael and Javier smelled of bigger money than I had ever smelled. Even the way they sat at the table, so relaxed, so sure of themselves, said that this was where they belonged, and that they had been here before.
Tristan
was alone with his thoughts and seemed almost as if he was brooding about something. Anja was light, airy. She tried talking to Tristan a couple of times, but he only grunted in return. Mei-Mei and Drego acted as if they were hanging out. I wondered how close they really were.
That left me. I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was overmatched. When you got down to it, nobody was giving shout-outs to math. They all had something special going on, and I didn’t feel as if I could keep up with them.
On the way to the airport, I was thinking of the invasion of Normandy. A bunch of guys thinking they were going to save the world and dying on the beaches.
Security. People going through while scanners were going over their chips. An Indian family tried to go through and the scanners couldn’t read the woman’s chip. The guards pulled her over to the side and had her stand against the wall while her children cried. Gross.
I got to the security kiosk, and the security dude ran the scanning wand over my right hip. My picture appeared on the screen next to him, and he looked at it and at me.
“Nice picture,” he said. There was a map of my home area with code numbers next to it, which I imagined told him something about what group I belonged to.
“You’re travelling with a band?” he asked next. “What do you play?”
“I sing.”
“Oh? Sing something for me.”
“No.”
“Gotta pay to hear you, huh?” He grinned. His wand gave him the only power he had.
He waved me through and we went to the gate. Another check of our papers, another chip scan. Drego was pulled aside and Mei-Mei was told to move on. We entered the cabin, and found our seats in business class. The flight attendant started serving drinks, and nobody was talking about Drego. Mei-Mei took her seat, but she was looking anxiously toward the door.
Anja was doing a crossword puzzle. I bet she was nervous. Good. I wasn’t the only one.
I’d flown plenty of times, mostly to Santo Domingo. The flight was three hours, about the same as our flight to London. Then it would take me hours to get to my relatives’ home. Flying didn’t bother me as much as going someplace and not being sure of what I was doing. I thought of Mrs. Rosario. Would I rather be home in the Bronx?
No. I was excited to be part of something. My palms were sweaty and I wanted to move on.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Mei-Mei shift position. I looked up and she was looking out of the window; then I saw Drego coming into the cabin.
“They give you a hard time?” I asked him.
“They had to check to see if I had any hidden truths in my hand luggage,” he said. He sat next to Mei-Mei. Yep, something was definitely going on over there.
The first hour I downloaded the Times of London, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and El Diario; Michael and Javier mostly talked to each other. Tristan slept, and Mei-Mei talked at Drego. Anja was watching a movie. I decided that she would be the one I would pal around with.
I fell asleep after an hour and woke up to the flight attendant telling me that we would be landing shortly and offering me a hot towel. For some reason I said yes, and she gave me a rolled-up towel that was too hot to do anything with. I saw Javier wiping his face with his, and so I did the same. It wasn’t refreshing, and it didn’t get my face that clean. It was just hot.
Customs at Heathrow meant walking through a screening device that looked like a metal detector. If they could pick up all your information just by having you walk between two sensors, it meant that they could find you anywhere by placing enough sensors around. I wondered if I should cover my chips again.
The Brits were waiting for us just outside the security area. They looked geeky and pale. My first thought was that they were probably superbright kids. I also noticed that the girls were a little taller than the boys.
A van took us to the Chelsea Cloisters hotel on Sloane Avenue. It was one of those driverless things that worked okay, but I didn’t like them because I was looking out the window thinking we were going to hit something. All the while, the Brits were talking about how glad they were that we had come over and how we were going to make a difference.
“The hands-across-the-sea thing really works, you know,” a thin dude with big teeth said.
Anja nodded and smiled, and Michael reached over and shook the guy’s hand.
At the hotel we got our key cards, and Javier said we’d be going to the first meeting at one o’clock the next afternoon.
My rooms were small, really just a teeny bedroom and a living room with a small stove, a few pots and pans, a countertop oven, and a kettle to boil water in. I started hanging up my stuff when Anja called. She said she was trying to get people to walk around the neighborhood, but nobody wanted to go with her.
“I’ll go,” I said. “Maybe we can find some food.”
We met in the lobby, and the clerk told us where the local grocery store was. Or, she said in her cool English accent, you could go out the back door and go to Marks & Spencer.
Anja had heard of Marks & Spencer, so we went there. On the way I told her how to translate the English money, pounds, to dollars in her head. All you had to do was figure that the pound was 10 percent more than the dollar.
We got to Marks & Spencer and it looked more like a clothing store. I couldn’t believe the prices on the dresses and pants.
“But they are great!” Anja ran her hand over a skirt and watched the fabric seem to change color. It was a metallic material that caught the light and reflected whatever colors were in the light and also the ambient colors around it.
“These are nice,” I said, “but check out the price! Does that say four hundred and twenty pounds?”
“You could wear it with anything,” Anja came back.
“If I spent that much on a skirt, I’d have to wear it with everything!” I said.
We checked out some blouses. The metallic thing was in. There were silver, gold, and sheer black blouses. What got me was that some of the black blouses were like a deep color with almost no shine, but when you turned it slightly, a pattern of black on black appeared. Very nice. Very expensive. It was the States all over again, but concentrated. No poor people were going to come in here.
The food was in the back, and we spent fifteen minutes just looking to see what the differences were between an American market and a British market. Anja thought the Brits went in for more fresh food. I didn’t think so.
“They just have more expensive stuff,” I said. “At least in this store. But Javier said not to worry about how much we spent when he was passing out the pounds.”
I bought a lot of fruit and fresh veggies, and Anja bought some things with weird British names. She showed me a dessert called spotted dick.
“Anja, you are like a child,” I said.
“I don’t care,” she replied. “But I’m not coming all the way to England and not trying this. And … my fine little friend, did you see the way the Brits were checking us out on the way to the hotel?”
“Oh, my God, that was so funny,” I said. “I didn’t know you had noticed it—but you do notice a lot of things. They kept looking at Drego and Mei-Mei and all of us really, as if we were some kind of freaks or something.”
“They were checking us out pretty good,” Anja said. “But we are a different-looking group. They had one Indian boy with them, but the rest of them looked like they were cut out of the same batch of pizza dough.”
Anja went on about how she didn’t like the pep talk they were giving us even though she knew they were trying to figure if we were serious or not. All the time she was talking, I was thinking how much I was getting to like her. Or at least I felt more relaxed around her. I didn’t know why.
We got our stuff, got sniffed at by the woman monitoring the checkout counter, and made our way out the door into the busy London street.
“Dahlia, if you could be rich, I mean filth, nasty, C-8 rich,” Anja said, “and shop at Marks and Spencer every day, would you be tempted to
chuck it all and sell your soul to the devil and give up the struggle?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “But maybe I’d consent to be rich for one day a week just to remember what I’m fighting against.”
“Oh, I love a smart woman!” Anja said.
We walked back to the hotel—it was only like a ten minute walk—with me remembering that I had forgotten to buy milk and Anja remembering she had forgotten tea.
Waiting for the elevator and watching some of the other guests in the lobby. Since they could afford a London hotel, I guessed that when they were wherever they had come from, they saw the world through gates.
“What do you think of our little crew?” Anja asked.
“They seem sharp,” I answered.
“You like Michael?”
“What does that mean?”
“The others you nail with your look—it’s like you’re penetrating them,” Anja said. “Michael—you always kind of side glance him.”
“You like him?” I asked.
“Not like that,” she replied.
“Not like what?”
“Dahlia, I didn’t mean anything … honestly!”
“No problem,” I said.
“Wednesdays?” she came back.
“Wednesdays what?”
“When we get filthy rich for one day a week”—Anja’s smile widened—“we’ll go shopping at Marks and Spencer on Wednesdays.”
“You’re on!”
As soon as I started cutting up the veggies I had bought, I realized how hungry I was. It was a residence hotel, and the small tuxedo kitchen was neatly tucked behind a sliding fabric-framed door. There was only one large skillet in the kitchen, but it was enough. I started sautéing some onions in garlic and Clover spread, and they filled the room up immediately with good smells. I added some mushrooms and carrots and turned the heat down.
I set up my computer, brought up the news, and saw that the reception was lousy. I switched to boost mode, and the picture came up but I lost the color. No big deal. The Tories were debating whether or not the government should take over the London Times as a cultural institution.
On a Clear Day Page 5
