Sometime in her first week at the new house, Renee found one outside, painted in arching letters in the middle of the street, the arrow pointed directly at their house. She sat down among the large letters, feeling startled and amazed. It was another gift. The longer she stared at it, the more she felt like it was a visitation from an oracle, a sign in the oldest of senses. It wasn’t just about her, she knew that: It was a thing. She took a pen from her pocket and inscribed the symbol on her forearm, branding herself with the symbol they’d given her. Yes, she thought, admiring it on her arm. I accept. She would be theirs. She would do her best for them.
Nevel sat at his office desk—his own, now, a private place in which he
could utter obscenities without aggravating those around him. The view was of the rust-dusted light rail line on the street below, which had long closed down. He reread the document he’d received, entitled: New Westside Water Distribution Creative Brief. He kept losing focus. He was tired of all this. Before this job he’d been in a string of failing companies. Places where you sat at your cubicle and rotted and waited for someone at the top to give up. To realize the company was irreversibly dying.
But now it wasn’t the company, it was everything: The city was dying, the west was dying and turning to desert. A long, boring, despair-inducing decline.
Nevel stood at his office window and watched people pass below. A shiny black car pulled up in front of the building and he recognized it as the mayor’s.
He watched the mayor’s bodyguards shoo away the homeless who gathered to see what the commotion was. And then the mayor emerged. Their chief. His hair shone.
You cannot close a city down and give the money back to the shareholders. There was no larger, wealthier city hovering about to buy up Portland’s assets. You must soldier on, keep your shovel to the bottom of the hole until something turned up. Everyone waited for a change of fortunes.
Nevel turned to his desk to tidy up. The mayor would be in his office in approximately three minutes, six if he stopped to talk to anyone else.
The East Coast was luckier, better off, at least in terms of weather. But for all intents and purposes, they too had devolved into interconnected city-states. In each of these little hives of civilization there must be a mayor, he thought, very much like theirs, or perhaps a governor or some military figure, and there must be one of himself, too, the bee whose job it was to cobble together optimistic, educational campaigns for the chiefs of these failing cities. In charge of publicizing the good works, as they were.
After he’d straightened the place up, he sat in his chair and waited, staring at the door, preparing himself mentally. He was in advertising. A flexibility was required. He scratched out a few obscure notes on a blank sheet of paper so that he could place something between them, an artifact of work in progress to defer to.
When you pitched a product, there was the side of the story you wanted the consumer of the product to know, and then there was the whole story. In many ways, the city’s campaigns were a welcome respite, in that instead of being intent on selling, their job was to help and to educate. At least in theory. Though still, as with any good ad campaign, they buried a story here too.
After a few minutes the door opened. The mayor did not knock, a man who must barge wherever he went.
“Mayor Bartlett,” Nevel said. He stood and held his hand out. The mayor took it.
“Nevel! How are you?” the mayor said.
The mayor liked him, he remembered with mild surprise. He seemed to like both Zach and him, and while he could understand why he might like the brainiac, Nevel could never quite fathom what the mayor saw in him.
The mayor paced back and forth in front of his desk and then scratched at his collar line. “Have you been itchy lately?”
“Itchy?” Nevel said.
“Probably just me.” The mayor stopped mid-stride and turned back to Nevel. “Listen, have you got one of those blood pressure gauges? Tester things?”
“Sphygmomanometer?” Nevel said, feeling immensely pleased with himself for knowing the object’s name.
The mayor paused, perhaps startled at the word, and then said: “Yes, that thing.”
“A partner might keep one—shall I ask?”
“Yes, yes, good—can you? You know how?” the mayor said.
Nevel left his office, glad for the chance to have a task. He made a query of the firm’s partners, resisting the urge to tell them it was for the mayor, though they would infer anyway. He rummaged through their meager first aid supplies and came up with nothing. As a last-ditch effort he queried the creatives in their burrow.
“I do,” Zach said.
“Not really,” Nevel said.
Zach rummaged in his desk drawer and pulled out a blood pressure monitor, stretching the tube long as the gauge snagged on some other bit of electronic shrapnel in his drawer.
“You’re worried about your heart?” Nevel said.
Zach shrugged. “Who isn’t? How’s the mayor’s?”
“I’m about to find out.”
Zach nodded. “Let me know how it goes.”
Back in his office, the mayor had rolled up one shirt sleeve of his sky-blue button-down shirt. His elbow rested on the desk.
Nevel pulled his chair around, conscious of the closeness in which they now sat in his small office.
“Shall I?” He gestured with the sphygmomanometer.
The mayor looked away thoughtfully and Nevel took it as a sign he should proceed. The mayor was better built than he was, he noticed, his bicep boasting a potato shape. He Velcroed the strap to the mayor’s upper arm.
“Are you flexing?” Nevel asked. “You should relax.”
“Oh,” the mayor said. Nevel tightened the strap on his arm and began to squeeze the rubber pumper. He had not done this since he’d cared for his mother, but for nine months he’d done it nearly every day, until her death. Each time, he’d joked with her: I’m going to pump you up! Or: you’ll be the size of a life raft when I’m done with you!, or some other pneumatic joke inserted to add levity to their role reversal. The mayor cleared his throat, smiled, and then looked away again. Nevel began to release the pressure, counting the ticks as the contraption hissed. He imagined telling his wife about this later, but decided he would not. Some stories were better left untold.
“This is kind of high,” Nevel said. “One fifty-seven over ninety-six.”
The mayor exhaled violently, “I knew it!”
“Were you—were you holding your breath?” Nevel chuckled with surprise.
“Was I?”
“OK, I think you should—do you ever do deep breathing?” Nevel was going out on a limb here, he knew it, but the care he’d given his mother was taking over, and so he proceeded. “With me, inhale.”
The mayor sat up very straight and inhaled dramatically.
“It looks like you exercise regularly?” Nevel said.
The mayor shrugged again, but could not repress a self-conscious smile.
“Relax your shoulders, exhale. All the way out, pause.”
“Mm,” the mayor said when he’d finished, “that is nice.”
“Now inhale, good. Keep going, close your eyes if you need to.”
Nevel inspected the mayor as his eyes were closed. He had perfect skin and impeccable hair, but his eyes were drawn to a spasm below the mayor’s left eye, the dark topography there. The tic throbbed.
His nose was an arrow, a geometric perfection. The man could probably grow a full beard—beards were near-ubiquitous now in the absence of shaving water—but the chin was swept clean, meaty and handsome. Despite the obvious care the face underwent, there was a sadness there. Or maybe, Nevel thought, looking at anyone with their eyes closed made them appear sad, the spark gone from their face. When his daughter was younge
r, a year old, she’d wanted to pluck the eyes out of faces, as if they were but jewels you could hold in your hand, or the very flame that powered a person, that you might wish to extinguish or have for your very own. Nevel wondered if, given the head start the mayor’s closed eyes gave him, he’d have time to snatch one of his.
“Good, let’s try again.” Nevel pumped the rubber stopper again to inflate the blood pressure monitor.
“You heard of this Maid Marian character?” the mayor said. His eyes were open wide, now, beaming with a mad and intelligent brightness.
“I have, but right now let’s just relax.”
The mayor let out a grumbling sigh. “What should I do, Nevel?”
“You’re asking me? No, now this is higher,” Nevel said. “You’re not relaxing.”
The mayor ripped angrily at the Velcro. “Goddamnit!”
“Now hold on—”
“Meanwhile, I’ve got these a-holes who’ve got me by my balls, buying up portions of water, or sending little hinting threats, and fuckward National Guard, they’ve got to have their share too. Commander Aachen, you’ve met him?” The mayor balled his right fist and released it. “No, of course you haven’t. Who even knows how much they’re skimming off the top, see? If they are, if they are, I mean.”
“I see,” Nevel said.
“So we ratchet down rations, but something’s going to give, right? I’m stuck in between them.”
Nevel realized what the mayor was telling him. His face felt hot. This was the reason they had a job, he reminded himself, sitting right in front of him. Nevel wrapped the tube around the meter portion of the blood pressure monitor and set it carefully on the edge of his desk. He had no idea what to say.
The mayor paced in the tiny runway of the office, between the desk and the door. He stopped and leaned against the door, resting his forehead there. “Sometimes I feel like I run this city as much as a figurehead steers the vessel she’s affixed to.” His voice was muffled against the wood.
“Who does run it, then?” Nevel’s voice came out flat and disinterested.
The mayor turned, suddenly angry. “I do!” His arm jerked out, as if he were skipping a rock down the pavement. “Ah, fuck it. I’m trying to.”
“Do you want to talk about this campaign?”
“No. What’s it about? No, you do it. You get your people to do it. Get Zach. Do a good job.” He rolled his sleeve down and buttoned the cuff. “OK? Thanks for that.” He pointed at the sphygmomanometer.
“Anytime.”
“Keep it around. I’ll be back in a few days. Deep breaths. You’ve got to help me make this work, Nevel.” The mayor turned and closed the door softly after him.
Nevel rolled his chair back around behind his desk. He picked up his unit gallon and unscrewed the top, and then rolled to the window and waited, watching the black car below until the mayor had entered it and driven off. He took a long draught of water. Why me? he thought.
Then he unrolled the blood pressure monitor and wrapped it around his own arm, filled as he was with self-loathing, and began to pump.
They locked down as much as they could, but there was not much to be done about the broken front window. In the back bedroom Bea and Renee sat close in the dark on the bed and listened to the night. Far away—far enough away—there were shots. Closer in, some yelling. It felt like a transformation took place upon nightfall. The citizens of Northeast Portland began to hunger for each other’s flesh; they were eating each other alive out there. Renee thought about the kids they’d met in the street and hoped they had a real place to tuck into, and someone to tuck them in.
She and Bea slept in their clothes, side by side on the same mattress, holding hands, each of their other hands around a make-shift weapon. Bea held a large standard screwdriver and Renee had laughed when Bea made a joke about “really screwing someone up.” Renee gripped the stout handle of a broken pair of pruning shears. Upstairs, Leroy had gone quiet. They feared him, too, even as they took comfort in their united location.
Some time deep in the night Leroy appeared silhouetted by moonlight in their doorway. “Girls,” he called quietly. “Girls,” he said again, and when no one stirred he said it again until they’d woken.
Bea scrambled to her knees and held the screwdriver in front of her.
“Shhhhh,” he whispered. Leroy eased his way into the room, stepping with exaggerated slowness so as to keep the wood floor from creaking. He squatted next to them.
“Don’t you come any closer,” Bea said.
Renee tried to clear her head of sleep. The pruning shears handle had gotten away from her somehow and she groped around for it even with him right beside her.
“There’s someone downstairs,” Leroy whispered.
The hair on the back of Renee’s neck stood up. They listened.
At first she heard nothing, only the sound of Leroy’s breathing next to her, a call somewhere far off in the night.
Then they heard plodding footsteps. An item dropped, perhaps bumped from a table.
“How many?” Bea said.
“Maybe one, maybe two,” Leroy said.
What do we do?” Bea said.
They listened—there was the sound of scraping, or something being dragged. For a moment, Renee pondered what it would be like to go and fight for these two breathing bodies beside her. The mass of her charging blindly downstairs toward their intruder, readying her body for collision. There was a rightness to it.
There was a crash from below.
“Let’s dance,” she said suddenly, “come on!” She let out a terrific whoop and then began to jig about the floor, knocking into objects in the dark as she went, off-balance but reeling onward. On the first go around she grabbed at Bea and Leroy, who remained squatted and bewildered. “Come on!”
They took to it, finally. The three of them whooping and calling and stomping about in a circle, beating on the floor with their feet. They sounded like a buffalo stampede, and it was a fantastic feeling to make this much noise, to fight back the night this way. Below them, she hoped the scavengers hurried away, terrified by the clamorous haunting from above.
They kept at it as long as they could, dancing together out of the room and down the hallway into the other rooms and back again, avoiding the stairway still. She didn’t know how long they lasted.
“Now we go check?” Renee said when they finally petered out. She wiped the sweat from her eyes and tried not to think about the dwindling amount of water left in her bottle.
“I’m not going,” Leroy said. He was panting hard. In a glance of light Renee had seen him smiling while he danced.
“Phew,” Bea said. “How long until light?”
“Three, four hours?” Renee said.
“Let’s sleep in the same room and wait for light,” Renee said.
“With him?” Bea said, pointing her screwdriver at Leroy.
“Of course.”
Renee patted Bea and Leroy on the back as she steered them back to where they slept, closing the door behind them and putting a chair against it. She directed Leroy toward the other twin mattress and they lay down on the first. Their breaths still came fast, but there was no sound from below.
“Well, OK then,” Leroy said after a while into the dark, in answer to nothing in particular, and Bea and Renee laughed.
Renee did not sleep until dawn. Her bunkmates drifted into heavy breathing and she remained awake, thinking of the neighborhood outside. She wondered where her fellow water activists were and decided soon she’d go use her Morse-code system to talk to Zach. A hazy plan had started to take shape in her mind. She wanted to see the boss of everything.
In the morning, they crept slowly down the stairs together, armed with what they had, but the house was empty.
“Maybe we sho
uld board up the whole first floor,” Bea said.
“Or dance every night,” Renee said.
Bea and Renee sat at the dining room table and looked at each other. They were hungry and thirsty, and had no rations left from those Lisa had given them. They watched Leroy pass toward the kitchen and wondered about asking. They knew he could go to the distribution up the street at the elementary school field each day, where they would be arrested.
The wallpaper had begun to curl away from the wall in the dining room, and the light fixture that hung over the table only had a single light of the five that had been in it. Bea drummed her fingers on the table.
Renee whispered that she’d ask him and Bea shrugged and hung her head. Ahead of them, Renee knew, there were days filled with nothing but trying to secure rations for themselves.
“I’ll get you a drink.” Renee walked to the kitchen and leaned against the counter. The power was on and Leroy hurriedly cooked rice with some kind of ration-issued vitamin-enriched protein powder over the top of it.
He looked up at her and knew what she wanted and turned back to his task.
“The police are looking for us. We can’t go to distribution,” Renee said. The pot of rice was small, only enough for a single portion. “You probably knew that already.” Even the bland smell of cooking rice made her stomach ache. When his back was turned she leaned over and inhaled steam. “Do you have savings?”
“No, I don’t have savings. Every time I get something together I get robbed or a couple of white girls drop in.”
Sherwood Nation: a novel Page 8
