Lizard Radio

by Pat Schmatz

  It’s no good. They won’t take me. I’m surrounded by particles of color and light and shape. Temperature and texture. My breath rises and falls, and pulse beats blood through my body. A couple of cheery birds whistle back and forth. Why do birds get to be so happy? Surely they’ve seen other birds fall and crash and disappear. Birds die all the time.

  I draw a deep shudder-breath and blow it out. I pull the clothes on, lie back against the tree, and close my eyes. The grove still beats somewhere near the base of my spine. Here, alone in the woods, I can have my delusions and hold them close. I look for the lizards on the backs of my eyelids. Breathe in, two, three, like Sheila taught me all those years ago. Like Korm taught me. Empty your mind, two, three. Listen, listen sideways.

  After a long, long time, I’m able to sidle off the straightforward center of things. There’s a shift in balance, a whirling of form. Faint footsteps approach from beyond sideways, and I keep breathing so they won’t stop. Korm strides across the insides of my eyelids and turns to face me. Keep it steady; don’t drop the signal. In and out, two, three.

  Like me, Korm is dressed in pants, a shirt, and a jacket. The smell of her basement room holds me in familiar comfort. The windows expand, and the walls separate into trunks and stretch up to oak leaves. Korm’s outline wavers but her eyes burn with intensity. Kivali. She steps toward me. Her voice is deep, and it’s suddenly difficult to see Korm as her and not him.

  Where is the dragon?

  “She took it,” I say.

  Korm’s outline shimmers and wavers and disappears completely, leaving only green leaves and ferns. Even so, someone or something circles me. I slowly spin, trying to see all sides at once. I’m unsteady and unprotected, fully exposed.

  “Korm, it’s you, right?”

  I reach out, wanting solid touch. Korm laughs and materializes, wavers and melts and re-forms. Just as she is man/woman, he is particle/wave. I can’t settle on one perception or the other. I see both, and I see neither.

  And you? Are you human or lizard?

  “I’m neither.”

  Wrong answer. Lizard or human? Choose.

  This isn’t Korm. Korm wouldn’t make me choose.

  Choose! What are you?

  Korm’s roar crashes inside my head, and I hit the ground with a whoomp. I snap and thrash and roll upright, using my muscular tail to launch a jaw-snapping lunge at the screaming air. There is nothing to bite, nothing to take down, nothing to conquer. I tongue-flick, searching for scent and movement and finding nothing at all. I open my dragon jaw and speak with my human voice.

  “Neither and both.”

  Somewhere in the ethereal cross-section of particles and waves, Korm smiles. And when Korm smiles, the leaves dance, and the breeze floats soft and warm around me, and I relax.

  That’s where your power lies.

  I spin away and bury my face in my arms. Korm is wrong, and Korm is right, just like Sheila, and just like Machete.

  Kivali.

  Machete’s hand drops on my shoulder and rolls me over. It’s not Machete, though. I am alone, below a single oak. A disembodied whisper breathes in my ear.

  Give Darlene my love.

  The birds are gone, and the sun is higher. The leaves and bushes whirr and buzz with daytime insects. I rub my face. Everything is unreal. My feet, my hands, the birds, the fat bee buzzing past — none of it is real. Maybe I’m not even real. Have I ever been real?

  I stand and brush myself off. My body is my body. It’s mine. I look down at myself. I’ve never worn men’s clothes. No boys’ clothes since that winter boy-boots day in the school yard. They feel good on me, and right. I widen my shoulders and broaden my chest, and run my fingers through my hair. I look like a boy now, for sure. I’m not, though. Man and woman: they’re both familiar and foreign. Like beautiful pasture planets I travel in my dreams, speaking each language with a heavy accent.

  My dragon is caught in Machete’s trap. It’s bait, I know. But I have to go get it.

  The sun hangs high as I trudge along the road. I tie Rasta’s da’s jacket around my waist. My feet hurt, but it’s a relief to move toward something. The road goes on and on. It doesn’t move under me as fast as it did when I was walking to Rasta’s da. I wonder what Machete did when he turned up in CropCamp coveralls.

  The occasional skizzer passes, and a couple of gov trucks. No one slows down. No one seems to notice me at all. Maybe I’m not really here. Maybe I’m already gone, and I just don’t know it. Maybe everyone I know has vaped. Maybe I have.

  Maybe Sully will still be there. I hope that Sully is still there.

  The hot spot on my right heel gets hotter as the road slants upward. Just keep going, a hundred more steps. And a hundred more. What will I do when I get there? I’ll make Machete give me my dragon. I’ll take it to the center of the grove. We’ll beseech the skies and the moon. This time it will work, and the dragon and I will vape to the land of Lizard Radio. Korm will be waiting for me, and Sheila, too. Donovan Freer too, I suppose.

  It’s a long hill, and my blisters really don’t like it. Where is the CropCamp turnoff? I must be close. A hundred more steps. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight. A skizzer passes and slows, then pulls over to the side of the road. The person driving the skizzer wears a yellow head-scarf. She gets out and looks back at me.

  I should duck into the woods but the little dip in and out of that ditch seems like more than I can do. I’m so hot and thirsty and hungry and tired and footsore. That person puts her hands on her hips just the way Sheila does.

  I stop walking. That person shades her eyes with her hand.

  I think that person is Sheila.

  We are about fifty paces apart. I must be mistaken.

  “Sheila?”

  That person breaks into a run. I’m too tired to run but somehow I do, and we slam into each other and her arms are around me and she’s holding me in a tight, tight hug.

  Sheila is not a hugger. Sheila is hugging me.

  She pushes me away, looks at my face, and pulls me back in again. I collapse Emmett-style. She is not only holding me; she’s holding me up. She’s holding me up like she has since the baby days, with the moon, with the rinkety-dink, with the komodo, my whole life.

  When I’m finally able to draw a breath and stand on my feet, she looks me over.

  “I didn’t recognize you,” she says, “with your hair like that, and those clothes. What happened?”

  “Are you vaped?” I ask. “She said that you vaped.”

  Sheila’s eyebrows drop, and her mouth narrows to a thin line. I know this look. This looks means that Machete is in trouble.

  “Kivali. I did not vape. I’m right here.”

  “She said that you vaped.”

  “Darlene is a liar,” says Sheila.

  I catch my breath. Give Darlene my love.

  “You know her.” It’s not a question. “You’ve known her for years.”

  “Yes.” Sheila nods.

  “Korm knows her, too,” I say.

  Sheila’s wide-eyed jaw-drop would make me laugh if I wasn’t so tired.

  “Darlene told you that?”

  “No. Korm did.”

  LESS THAN A THOUSAND paces from the CropCamp entrance, I lie flat on my back and stare up at the world. My damp socks hang from a low, dead branch. The breeze licks my sore feet. The birdies chirtle and warble back and forth. I am amazed at how the appearance of one human face changes everything.

  Once we establish that Korm is not actually, physically here, and that both of us are, Sheila leaves to get food and water from the skizzer, and to hide it off the road while we figure out what to do. I’m well hidden in underbrush down the hill and into the woods. Shards of sunlight slice through the pine tops. The soft earth pulls me in, cradles me, sings in the voice of the cooling breeze, and I roll over and close my eyes. No shadows move, and dragons do not dance. It’s just dark, just easy, just —

  Loud. Running, crashing footsteps. Sheila slides in as I yank
my eyes open and lurch up. She rams my head down, and my nose hits the dirt with a sharp jolt. Sheila pants through her nose, trying to quiet herself. My heart ponies up like it’s trying to keep pace with hers.

  “What happened?” I whisper.

  Sheila shakes her head. The birds are gone. No sound at all beyond the thrum of blood racing through my body. The silence stretches, and high red fades from Sheila’s cheeks. A cicada buzz begins and builds. It rises to a pitch and falls. A chippie hops up on a stump, looks us over, and scrabbles away in the brush.

  “They found the skizzer,” whispers Sheila. “I don’t think they saw me — I belly-crawled back into the woods while they were searching it.”

  “Who?”

  “Gov uniforms. They can’t ID me from the skizzer, but they’ll be looking. We need to move.”

  I put my socks and boots back on, and we creep deeper into the woods, watching our feet so we don’t trip or crack sticks. I try to map CropCamp in my head and figure where we are in relation to Pieville, the Quint, the grove.

  Sheila holds up a hand, and we both stop. We stand in silence, listening, listening. Only woodsy sounds. Leaves murmuring in the breeze, a rustle here and a tweedle there. Sheila unwinds the rinkety-dink scarf and releases her sweaty curls. She hands it to me, and I wipe the sweat from my face.

  “Why are you out here?” she whispers. “Does Darlene know where you are?”

  I shake my head no and hand back the scarf. Sheila drapes it around her neck, takes one more scan of the woods around us, and eases to the ground.

  “How could you leave me with her?” I ask.

  “I gambled on the Darlene I used to know.” Sheila speaks so soft and low, I have to crouch in to hear. “It was a bad bet.”

  She pats the ground next to her, and I drop to one knee but I won’t sit next to her. Not until she gives me some answers.

  “So it’s true?” I ask. “You were friends?”

  Sheila nods.

  “I hadn’t heard from her in almost twenty years, but she Deega’d me the same day I got the gov order for early camp. Told me that if I sent you to her camp she’d watch out for you, get you on track and off the gov watch list.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Korm went on a fire-spitting rage when I told her.” I’m annoyed that Sheila doesn’t answer my question, but I want to know about Korm, so I don’t interrupt. “Wanted you to underground right away. We fought. That’s the last I’ve heard from her. Word is that she vaped.”

  “So you bet on Machete over Korm.”

  “Machete?” Sheila hints a smile. “That’s what you call her?”

  “Not to her face.”

  Leaves rustle behind, and Sheila grabs my hand. Someone is coming. Step, step. They’ve found us. Step, pause. Creeping, crafty.

  The birds tweedle and the cicadas buzz. My mouth is too dry to swallow. Another step, and then another. Sounds like just one person. Maybe we can overpower them, throw a tackle, escape if we can take them by surprise. There — there, the leaves move. Another step — a flash of brown — a face.

  It’s a deer. Big ears pricked. It steps forward, nods. The black nose twitches. What are you; will you hurt me? Another head bob, a step closer, and then it jerks back with a quick stomp and a whistle-snort, and crash, crash, crash, and away.

  Sweet free air rushes into my lungs, and Sheila and I gasp and laugh together.

  “That definitely means that no one is close.”

  Sheila speaks right out loud. My heart continues to pound, not with fear now but with wonder. A real, live deer. In the woods. With us. Those eyes, that dip-bobbing hesitant walk, those delicate legs, that glorious bounding flight into the woods.

  “So what exactly did Korm say about Darlene?”

  I let the deer go and turn back to Sheila.

  “ ‘Give Darlene my love.’ ”

  “How?” Sheila asks. “Mean like a weapon?”

  “Soft,” I say. “Sad.”

  “Sad, huh? About time Korm got sad.”

  “About what?”

  “Whatever happened between her and Darlene. All of our plans to change the world, take it by storm — they all fell apart at once. Korm went underground; Darlene applied to SayFree. I thought that we were close, all of us, and suddenly I was left solo.”

  “So how could you leave me with her? Why would you do that?”

  Sheila lies back and puts the rinkety scarf over her face. I think that she’s not going to answer me, but then she starts talking again in a very low voice.

  “Two things. One was hope — that she was sorry, trying to make up for things. The other was fear. Darlene made it clear that she wanted you in her camp and was going to make it happen.” The thin yellow flowers shift as Sheila speaks. “I know Darlene. If you’d disappeared, she’d rip up the entire sector looking for you.”

  “So it was better to hand me over so she could jam up my head with some implanted drug thing?”

  “Darlene said no implants on potential decision-makers, and you’d be a candidate if you’d cooperate. She said that the whole deal was off if you knew about our connection, though.”

  I wish she’d quit talking through that stupid scarf.

  “Darlene knew that I’d bite on a chance to keep you safe. She knows what matters to me, same as I know what matters to her.”

  “What matters to her?”

  “Vapes. Her older brother vaped when she was seven and broke her heart. Stopping vapes — that’s all she’s ever cared about. I guess that’s why she went with the gov. Figured she could stop them that way.”

  Oh. The image of Machete rocking under the moonlight, hands over her head — I can almost see her as a child. Almost.

  “And apparently, you matter,” says Sheila. “She Deega’d last week and said that she wanted to take over fostering you. Said you asked her to.”

  I yank the scarf off Sheila’s face.

  “She said what?”

  Sheila nods.

  “And you believed that?”

  My voice squeaks at the end. Sheila closes her eyes.

  “You were so angry when I left you. And then the updates were all about how well you were doing, how you had friends, how you were larking around with the popular kids. She said that you were happy, well adjusted.”

  The skin below Sheila’s eyes is so dark, almost like bruises. How did I not notice that before?

  “I doubted myself.” Finally, she looks at me. Water rises in her eyes. “All the choices I’ve made for you.”

  I’m tempted to put the scarf back over her face.

  “Some of it must have been true. Did you really have friends?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I had friends.”

  “Can you tell me about them?”

  No. Watered eyes or no, I cannot tell Sheila about Sully or Rasta. Not yet. I don’t answer, and I still don’t, and at last she sits up, rubs her face, and ties the scarf back over her hair.

  “Time for that later, I suppose. Korm’s underground connections heisted a skizzer for me today, and they won’t be happy about losing it, but they’ll still get us out of the sector if we can get back to the city.”

  “Korm’s connections are helping you?”

  “I went to them last week. Asked them for help. They know about you — Korm told them. They want me to try to get you away from Darlene.”

  “How? Just skizz in and pick me up and Machete will say, ‘Okay, fine, see you later’?”

  It feels good to be childish and petty. Sheila doesn’t even flinch.

  “I came on impulse and hope — and here you are, so it worked. Who knows, maybe your radio set it up for us. As soon as night falls we’ll get on our way.”

  Sheila’s in charge now. As if CropCamp never happened to me. But it did. She left me there, and CropCamp happened.

  “I’m going back in.” Same as in Machete’s office, words fall out of my mouth before I can catch up with them. “She has my komodo. I need it.”
>
  “Don’t be absurd. If Darlene gets her hands on you again, she’ll never let you go.”

  “Then I’ll vape.”

  “It’s not that easy. Korm tried to vape for years. Decades. Studied, practiced, researched. You don’t just decide and do it.”

  “I know some things that Korm doesn’t.”

  Sheila looks me over, up and down. She’ll see my bluff. She’ll see how scared I am to go back in there. She will stop me.

  “That may be,” she says, “but there’s something that you don’t know, and you need to know it before you set foot back in that camp.”

  “About vaping?”

  “No. About you. Where you came from.”

  “The saurians?”

  “Aren’t you curious about why Darlene took such an interest in you? Why she cares so much?”

  I shake my head no.

  “I first saw it when you were three, or maybe four. The way your eyebrows dip when you’re mad.”

  My eyebrows dip. A small black-headed bird lands in a tree to my left with a know-it-all bee-bee-bee. I raise my eyebrows as high as they’ll go. No eyebrow dipping. No.

  “I think Darlene knew exactly how old you were.”

  My face fires hot, and hotter. So I dip my eyebrows sometimes. So what?

  “A baby would have ruined her gov career. She knew that I’d take care of you.”

  “You never said that.” My voice quivers. “You said the lizards dropped me. I believed it.”

  “No matter who birthed you or which stories we tell, my gecko, you’re still you. I’ve never understood your radio, and now I understand it even less, but it’s something real and so are you.”

  I’m not her gecko anymore. Not since I stepped out of my lizard skin.

  “Listen, Kivali. Stories and theories aside, they don’t let asolos foster babies, Blight or otherwise. It made no sense for them to let me keep you. Someone had to pull some strings.”

  “I think you are wrong,” I say.

  “I didn’t want to tell you unless I was one hundred percent sure. When I saw the two of you together, I upped it to eighty. When she pulled the foster maneuver, I passed ninety. And now — why are you running around free? Don’t you think that’s odd?”