Lizard Radio

by Pat Schmatz

  Rasta sits back on her heels and looks down the field. Rory and Dakota are talking to Micah. Lyddie crawls down a row about halfway between us, a row over from Tuvik. “No.” She shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Why me?”

  Rasta takes off her cap and runs her fingers through her feathery white, baby-fluff hair.

  “Something about you, Lizard. I can’t quite say what it is yet, but my da would like you. I’m sure of it. He’s an excellent judge of character, and so am I.”

  I don’t know anything about character, and I’ve never had an alliance, strong or otherwise. I’m still not sure what she means by it, but I’ll not let a bender bigot anywhere near my inner spark.

  “The bender guy.” I watch to see if she makes that mean mocky face again. She doesn’t. “I asked Machete about him. She said he’s gone.”

  “Maybe he vaped.”

  I sharp a look at her. Was Rasta up there that night, too? Did she see him vape? She doesn’t give anything away, just keeps plucking little plants out of the ground while she talks.

  “My gram vaped. My da says one morning she just wasn’t there. No body, nothing. Just blip, vape, gone. He says my gram was too wise and beautiful to stay on this earth, too exceptional. I never met her. It happened before I was born.”

  “But hardly anybody vapes from camps. And never from this one.”

  “That’s what they say.” Rasta tips her head up and sideways, nodding at a slant. “But how do we know?”

  “Well, where does your da think they vape to?”

  “Depends on his mood. Sometimes he thinks the gov kills them. Other times he thinks they get transported to some alien universe. Da’s a bit of a nut sometimes.”

  “Lizard, Rasta,” calls Micah. “Finish that row before lunch. Or at least before July.”

  We start moving again, passing each other as we hit the mounds one after another. Neither of us speaks till the end of the row.

  “So will you?” Rasta asks.

  “Will I what?”

  “Be my strong alliance? I don’t care that you’re a bender. In fact, I like it.”

  With her big gray eyes and pointy chin, she looks like an elf. A very serious, committed, earnest elf.

  “Maybe,” I say. “Just for tries.”

  She holds her hand up, fingers spread and curved. I touch my fingertips to hers.

  “Strong alliance,” she says.

  I give a quick nod, but I don’t say it back.

  WHEN THE LAST BLOCK of the day ends, I run down the slope and trot back to my pie. It’s all quiet — I’m the first one down from fields or classes. I drop my secateurs off in my slice and continue along the path that goes deeper into the woods. I want to find somewhere private, if there is any such thing in CropCamp.

  The only pie past ours is Lacey’s one-slice, about fifty paces beyond on the left. The path continues after that, and I follow it until I reach a fork. The left trail is clear, and the right one is sketchy, barely discernible. I take the sketchy one. Brambles and ferns stretch across trying to trip me up. I step over a fallen tree into a small open space where the path ends. Thin barky tree trunks surround me, stretching up to a piney canopy. The floor is soft brown needles. I kneel down and sniff. They smell hot and bakey, a cooked version of the delicious tang in the air.

  I stand and scan to see how private it is, and I catch a movement of pale green in the distance. Lacey. I’m not as far from her slice as I’d thought. I head back to the fork, stepping quiet and moving slow so she won’t notice me. I take the more defined path and continue deeper into the woods.

  I haven’t tuned in to Lizard Radio in two whole days now. I can’t remember the last time I’ve gone that long. For sure not since Sheila first took me to Korm. That’s been — let’s see — seven — no, almost eight — years ago. After that horrible day when I came home from school with a cut under my left eye and a real-life fear of violents and Blight. I was scared to poke a toe out the door after that.

  I never really told Sheila what happened, but I refused school for a while. She set it up so that I could mostly use the Deega from home. I still had to go once a week, and I fought it every time. After a few weeks of that, Sheila took me to Korm.

  They’d been friends in the way-back, but Sheila had lost track so it took some looking. Korm doesn’t live in a flat like regular people — everything about her is clandy and hush. Sheila knew someone who knew someone who told her where and when to find Korm.

  That first day, Sheila introduced me, and I really truly couldn’t tell if Korm was supposed to be a he or a she. She was big-shouldered and she smelled male and her voice was low-deep, but she had a mountain of hair stacked high on her head, and she wore a flowing skirt and moved like a woman.

  She circled, looking me over. She was full of grace and power like a big prowling cat. I wanted her to choose me. She put a hand on the back of my head and said, “I’ll take this one.”

  “Kivali, do you want to stay?” Sheila asked me.

  I nodded.

  “I’ll be back in one hour.”

  Sheila closed the door tight behind her. The basement room was bare, floored with mats. Muted light came in through the two small rectangular windows. Candles on the floor cast flicker and looming shadows. Korm stood on her knees in front of me so that we were about the same height. Her hands were enormous but they danced and flowed as if they lived a life apart from the dark room and the musky smell.

  “Everything we do together is secret,” she said. “Even from Sheila.”

  I shifted, backed away a bit. Sheila had warned me about adults with secrets.

  “If the secrets feel bad, we’ll stop.” Korm always heard my nervous thoughts, right from the first day. “You know right from wrong,” she said. “Just trust yourself. Fact is, you are a bender, and I am a bender, and we know things different from everyone else, even Sheila. She says that you go on trance-missions. Is that true?”

  I nodded. That’s what Sheila called it when I used her meditation techniques. Only I went a lot further away than she ever did, and after that day at school I started doing it all the time. I think Sheila was scared I’d trance out and never come back.

  “And you call it Lizard Radio?”

  Sheila shouldn’t have told Korm that. It was private, between her and me.

  “It’s okay,” said Korm. “Trance-missions are good, whatever you call them. Now tell me who you are.”

  “I’m Kivali Kerwin.”

  My voice was tiny and tinny next to Korm’s.

  “That’s your name. Now tell me who you are.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what she meant.

  “Don’t think,” she said. “Just tell me. Who are you?”

  I liked that she asked who, not what, so I gave her a good answer.

  “I am a lizard.”

  That made Korm smile. And when Korm smiled, the candles danced and the air floated soft and warm around me, and I relaxed. Much better than the last time I’d said lizard. That was at the market a couple of years earlier. A little girl asked if I was a boy or a girl, and I said, “I’m a lizard.” Sheila hugged me so hard, she almost broke my neck, but then she said, “Next time, say girl.”

  I didn’t say lizard again until Korm. Not until Sully.

  I continue on the wide path through the woods. I’m surprised that it keeps going — I had no idea that CropCamp spread so wide. I keep thinking I’ll run into a fence or a sign. Micah said in orientation that the borders are marked with bright yellow signs so we won’t cross the boundary biosensors accidentally. Biosensors are expensive, and they’re usually only at sector borders, but all camps are enclosed with them for safety. No one can go on or off the grounds without transmitting bio-ID.

  There’s a break in the brush ahead on my right and I slow down, expecting I’ve hit the end. But no — the path opens into a perfect little grassy area surrounded by a grove of huge trees. These trees aren’t piney. They’re huge
, with thick trunks stretching up into a canopy of leaves so dense, you can’t tell which branches go with which tree. They hold the grassy area in close and the green mirrors itself up and down and all around like it’s a whole different world. I suck in through my nose. The smell is different, too. Muskier. Deeper. This is the spot.

  I slip off my frods and set the komodo on one, so it can be out in the air and the woods and watch me. I barefoot to the center. The long grass is softly green, giving my soles cushion to spring from. My foot comes down on something sharp. It’s an acorn. I put it in my pocket and close my eyes, bringing myself into myself.

  Before you can be what you are, you must be all things.

  I slow my breathing, pull the air in and around me. Pull the green of the grass up through my soles and into my blood. Feel everything and me, and me and everything, and steady and center.

  Then I speak to myself in Korm’s voice.

  Be a rock.

  I find the rock in me. Granite, like the boulders by the camp entry. Warm in the sun, cool in the night, rain pounding and snow covering soft and still in the depths of winter. The wind touches me in all seasons. I invite the wind to blow across my surface, and then I leap into it and become the wind, whipping through the trees and carrying the weather. Far below, a tiny spark glows. I swoop down and blow on it until the fire blazes, and I am the fire, howling and spitting light to the skies until the skies begin to rain. The water meets the fire in an explosion of steam, and I am the steam, hot into cold. I meld with the drops, dripping and swirling, splashing and crashing inside and out, running over the rock. The rock. I am the rock.

  I open my eyes and look around the grove. I’ve always loved the way that Korm talks about nature and takes me through visualizations, but the depth of green here is so much more than anything I could imagine. Not just green for my eyes, but green in every textured sense, inside and out. I’ll come here every day after Block Four for some Lizard Radio time. Except for Mondays, when I have kitchen rotation. All the other days.

  I lie flat on my back, close my eyes again, breathe deep. I miss Korm. I miss her so much. But here in the grove, her voice holds me. Now you can be what you are and go where you go. Just remember where you came from. I lie back, close my eyes, head into trance-mission, and —

  Gong.

  Really? My free hour gone already?

  I have ten ticks to clean up and get to the Mealio. I drop the komodo in my pocket with the acorn, strap on my frods, and take off at a run. Pounding the earth, sucking in the air, fire in my heart and blood rivers rushing through my body. There’s nothing in the world that feels as good as Lizard Radio in the great nonimaginary outdoors.

  As I thud up to the pie, Sully comes around to my side.

  “Lizard! Where were you?”

  “Taking a walk.”

  “That’s not walking. That’s running. Why do you look so happy? Having a bit of clazzy-jandy in the woods?”

  “We’re late,” I say.

  “Fike the fiking gongs. Two days of it, and I’m gonged out of my head. We should steal that thing and hide it somewhere. Want to help me?”

  “Sure. After dinner. Come on.”

  I start up the path at a trot, and Sully jogs next to me.

  “You’re speedy,” she says.

  I charge up the slope and wait for her at the top, bouncing on my toes. I’ve been off-balance around Sully since that first moment when I said “lizard time” out loud like a six-year-old. But now I’ve found my feet here, and I’ve found the Radio. I’ve got my balance. Sully scrambles the last few steps to the top and stops with her hands on her knees, huffing.

  “Go ahead. Don’t be late on my account. You run like a fiking bunny rabbit.”

  “Come on,” I say. “We’ll fast-walk it. Better two of us late than one alone.”

  Machete sees us come in. She looks right at me, but she doesn’t say anything. Sully and I split up, finding two open seats at different tables. I settle in my seat and look over at her, and she grins. I smile back, because how can I not?

  “LIZARD! I THOUGHT YOU were going to muffle that gong.”

  “Lizard is a Wednesday. Let her sleep in.”

  That shuts Sully up. Nona hasn’t addressed either of us since Monday morning, not one time. A tick or two later, my door flap opens and Sully pokes her head in, eyebrows stretched to the sky.

  “She likes you,” she mouths, pointing to the wall that I share with Nona.

  I shake my head.

  “How was your DM with Machete?” she asks out loud. “Did you get chopped?”

  “Not really. I’ll tell you about it later. I want to sleep some more.”

  Sully laughs and mouths, “You like her,” pointing from me to Nona.

  I wave her out and try to go back to sleep, but the birds are too loud. I only have one shower chit, barely enough to get wet, so I decide to go pedal some watts in the power room.

  By the time I cycle and shower, Block One gong is ringing. On days off we’re allowed to skip CounCircle and breakfast, but we have to be at the Study Center for Blocks One and Two. We have study sessions and rotate in and out of ayvee pod and DM sessions. Rasta quizzes me on the seeds and plants and soil types and SayFree tenets from the first two days, and then it’s my turn for MaDa inflow.

  The ayvee pod is a little room at the far end of the Study Center. I shut the door behind me, and it takes me a moment to realize what’s missing. Noise. For the past three days, any time I’ve been indoors it’s been full of talk, especially the Mealio. And the outdoors talks constantly, what with the crickets and birds and chirpy things in the night that Tylee claims are tree frogs. Insects whir and buzz, and the leaves and branches whisper back and forth, and animals scuttle around, and all the noise is everywhere. This ayvee pod has a ceiling, and walls, and ninety-degree angled corners, and no comrades and no wildlife or wind. Quiet.

  I find the chip marked KERWIN, punch my code in, and hit PLAY. Sheila’s face appears on the screen, filling me with a mash of feelings. I cross my arms, holding myself in close. She starts right off with her cheery-chipper CropCamp-will-be-fun tone. Her refresher course is rigorous and good, helping bring her work up to state standards. Such a good summer for us both — me in camp and her in the refresher course.

  Who is this person? This is not Sheila.

  Fike to the state standards, I’m an artist. You can’t dictate art. Where’s that Sheila? The one who first taught me to trance-mission? The Sheila who hates cams and won’t have one in the house? She either bought one or went to the community center to make this. Her face fills the screen as she moves closer to the cam.

  “Komodo. You’re learning to be a good comrade and citizen, and you’ll do that just right. Remember who you are. I held you in the baby days but I can’t hold you now. Everything is changing. Nothing will be the same. We all have to learn and live and grow — you too. Me too.”

  The screen goes blank. Her inflow only lasted two ticks. She couldn’t even be bothered to talk to me for the full five allowed ticks. Where the fike is my very own Sheila? Again, I scan my memory of the past two weeks.

  It wasn’t just the CropCamp rah-rah. One moment she treated me like a five-year-old, calling me “sweet gecko” and watching my every move. The next, she was abrupt and distant: “Things change, Kivali,” and “Everyone has to grow up sometime.” Almost mean, even. And back to “sweet gecko” five ticks later. She was so un-Sheila-like that it was easy to ignore the CropCamp stuff and treat it like a joke or a phase or something.

  Also, Korm chose the same two weeks to go absent. Totally absent. She often goes absent for a week, but rarely for two. Does she even know that Sheila skizzed me off to CropCamp? Those two, they don’t talk to each other unless they have to.

  I take the earbuds out and hit PLAY again. The words don’t sound like Sheila at all. I want to see what her face and body say. Her gaze is cast slightly to the side, until — there. Right there. Her eyes flick directly to the cam, f
ull on.

  I stop it, reverse, put the earbuds in and listen.

  Remember who you are.

  Then her eyes shift ever-slightly away again. I freeze the picture.

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” I ask the komodo. “Who I am. Only the lizards know.”

  I was maybe a day old when Sheila found me on the sidewalk outside her flat, wrapped in a yellow T-shirt with a cartoon lizard on the front. She says that I could’ve been dropped cosmos to terra, hatched or cloned, or dumped by someone with a secret. And because Sheila begged and fought and filled out the docs and petitioned, they let her foster me. Even though she’s asolo, never been married. She had to shape up her work and register for flat-checks and do all sorts of stuff that she didn’t want to do.

  “Why?” I love the story. I’ve made her tell it a million times. “Why did you?”

  “Because you were tiny and alone, because you looked right into my eyes, because I thought: What if this one changes everything? And once I thought that, I knew that I had to fight for you.”

  I put the komodo back in my pocket and watch the whole thing again with earbuds in. It’s subtle, the eye shift. I’d never notice if I hadn’t watched without sound. Maybe it means something. Maybe nothing. The green leddie over the door buzzes. My ayvee time is up.

  I have all of Blocks Three and Four free, so I head back to the oak grove. I miss Sheila, the real Sheila. I don’t want secret messages. I want her to be herself. Also, I want her to tell Korm that I’m away at camp. She should know. Doesn’t matter what I want, though. I’ll only see five ticks a week of any Sheila, fake or real or enigmatic, for another two and three-quarter months.

  Since I have plenty of time, I follow the path past the grove to see where it goes. It gradually narrows, and after I’ve walked a ways, a splash of yellow emerges in the distance, eye-high. As I draw closer, the red lettering becomes clear:

  CROPCAMP BORDER

  BIOSENSOR BOUNDARY

  Checking right and left, I see the signs spaced maybe one hundred paces apart, so you can’t cross without knowing. The biosensors read your DNA and flash your info on a Deega somewhere, and the gov knows that you’ve passed. Korm says the biosensor lines are expensive and don’t really cover the entire boundaries. She says the underground has been gradually mapping out the biosensor gaps.