America Pacifica

by Anna North

  Darcy let her eyes wander; she had never cared much about the news. The bus began to climb the northern hill, and Little Los Angeles fell away around them. Smog lay thick as pudding along the eastern mountains and between the towers of the refinery. Cars crushed together in the teeming flats; the first weak bits of sun clung to the soiled old Hollywood sign. The New Library Tower, still unfinished, stretched its vacant spire up through the haze. On the sidewalk, a girl fought with a boy on a lowrider bicycle. Both were covered in thick winter sweat. The girl kept tugging up her yellow tube top. She looked young and ugly and tired.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” the woman asked.

  “What does it mean?” asked Darcy. She was still half-asleep. The attack seemed far away from her. It seemed unreal.

  “The Board elections. It means the incumbents will talk up island defense, and they’ll just win again. I’ve voted for Lisabeta Moreno five times now, and not once has she even made the runoff.”

  The bus stopped at Figueroa and two blue-suited men got out, heading for the Seaboard plant. Then the engine choked on a salt chunk and made an ugly noise like a sick baby. The driver cursed and pounded the bypass button with her fist. The woman next to Darcy had her cheap wristwatch on; Darcy tried to look at the time without letting her see. It was 5:45 a.m.; she had fifteen minutes.

  “When are the elections again?” Darcy asked. She was more worried about getting to work on time than about voting.

  “January fifth,” the woman said. “Not that it matters, since it’s the same people every time.”

  “So?” Darcy asked.

  The woman shrugged, her face bitter.

  “So, we keep getting cave-ins, Seaguard taxes, same shit as always. And all the GreenValley and Pacifica Flyers execs keep sitting pretty. Sweet deal for them, I guess.”

  The elections happened every six years, and everyone on the Board had to stand except for Tyson, who had been elected to a special twenty-year term when Darcy was a kid. She was technically eligible to vote this year, but she hadn’t thought much about it. She wasn’t sure the elections would change anything on the island, no matter who won. And even though she didn’t know anyone who had gone from a Little Los Angeles childhood to a GreenValley office, she still thought maybe it was possible. There might be some combination of luck and persistence that could bounce her off the track of buses and hairnets and cheese food on seaweed crackers; she just wasn’t sure what it was yet.

  As they crested the hill and rolled down through Sonoma, Darcy watched the pink and blue stucco buildings with their little climbing grapevines. No big bras and boxers hanging out to dry here—they must all have working dryers in their clean, dry basements. And no fans clattering in the windows either, because these people had air-conditioning. On sleepless nights when her mother’s breathing was loud as an alarm bell in her brain, when every catch or pause in that breathing forced her into sudden vigilance, she would play over in her mind the images of clean and quiet apartments in Sonoma. She would imagine going to sleep by herself in one of them, and waking up by herself, without the smell of her mother’s sweat on her skin. She wasn’t dumb enough to think that everyone on America Pacifica would ever have their own house, but if she could live like the people in Sonoma one day, she wouldn’t worry about anyone else.

  “If somebody can give me the money to move out of my shitty apartment,” she said to the woman, “I’ll vote for him. If not, I don’t really care.”

  The woman made a huffing noise in her throat and turned away. The bus turned off the Avenida onto Waterfront, and had to stop for a cave-in crew. The cave-in was at the Arizona Project, a block west of Waterfront. In the faux-sandstone facade of the project complex was a hole, like a gap in teeth. A family stood around the hole, still in their nightclothes, staring. Cave-ins happened every week, but still they looked surprised. Behind them was the orangey murk of the sea, the bits of Seaboard bobbing on its surface already beginning to dissolve. Farther out, where the water was less solvent-poisoned, a jellyfish trawler hauled in its morning catch. And farther still, on the horizon, the dark guard boats squatted against the bluing sky. Darcy supposed she should feel grateful to them, but all she felt was jealous of how much money their crews made. The bus engine hacked and stalled again. She tried to sneak another look at her seatmate’s watch, but the woman lifted her wrist away from Darcy and smoothed her sparse hair. Darcy bit her fingernails one after the other.

  They got under way again, turned east to cross the Florida border. The bus grumbled down Palm Beach Avenue, past the pink and teal apartment buildings, built before Darcy was born and pocked now with monsoon damage. Some of the worst scars were covered over with gray asphalt paste, waiting for a team from the Pacifica Aesthetic Company to come paint over them. You got in trouble for painting yourself here, or for doing anything that violated the neighborhood’s theme. Once a high wind had blown the Seaboard flamingos out of the World Experiences lawn, and a guard had arrived with an injunction to replace them. It was important, he said, to maintain the neighborhood’s ancestral character. The guards didn’t bother too much about graffiti or paint jobs in Little Los Angeles, though. Some neighborhoods were too cheap for ancestral character. After the apartments came the first of the nursing homes, big gloomy Eden Acres. The woman let her wrist fall into Darcy’s view—5:54. The bus hit a red light at Palm Beach and Tampa, just before Darcy’s stop. She bit down hard on her thumb and tasted blood.

  Then they were at her stop and Darcy charged out. She ran past the Paradise Valley Assisted Living Center and the Graceful Living Retirement Home, past the medical-supply store and the mortuary, past the long pale polished stairway and the World Experiences Mature Community sign, around the side of the building, and into the little mouse-colored door marked SERVICE. Then down the low beige hallway, in and out between the jugs of cooking oil and boxes of dried jellyfish, over the pile of discarded seaweed cans, through the second door, and into the steamy smelly kitchen. The clock on the wall read 5:59.

  “You hear about the attack?” she asked Trish as they pulled on their hairnets.

  “Yeah,” Trish said. “Somebody told me the Hawaiians got frozen out years ago. Guess they were wrong.”

  “I heard they had crazy glass-domed cities,” said Win, firing up the griddle. “And boats with built-in grenade launchers. I heard they’re sending a whole fleet for, like, revenge.”

  Trish rolled her eyes. Win was known for his solvent habit and his alarmism.

  “Whatever,” she said. “You hear about this?”

  She pointed at the blackboard where their boss Marcelle had written the day’s menu. It read:

  BREAKFAST: hash browns, jellyfish sausage, scrambled egg product

  LUNCH: turkey (jellyfish) sandwich, seaweed salad

  DINNER: seaweed salad, mashed potato product, T-bone steak

  In Darcy’s two years at World Experiences, T-bone steak day had occurred only twice. They served Salisbury steak every other Friday, but that they could make out of jellyfish and beef flavor and texturizer; T-bone had to be mostly real. They got it from the one stockyard on the island, in Texas Town, and one steak cost more than Darcy made in a month. Breakfast and lunch were a blur of anticipation. Darcy and the rest of the kitchen staff bolted their break-time protein bars without tasting them. They barely talked about the attack. Their minds were all on how to steal some meat.

  Trish’s method was the simplest—she cut a small piece off every fifth steak as she was plating it, then shoved it in her mouth. Trish was a year younger than Darcy but she’d been working twice as long. She’d gotten a waiver from the Pacifica Board of Trustees because she had so many brothers and sisters. Her youngest brother was her favorite because he was smart; Trish said he was going to get a scholarship to go to the University someday and study marine engineering. Every year there were fewer scholarships—fewer bright, hopeful names published in the April news flyers—but still every smart kid on the island dreamt of the
m at night. If you went to the University you were basically guaranteed a good job, something where you sat at a desk all day and didn’t get your hands dirty. Something that would pay for a full apartment with its own toilet and shower. Most of the kids who went to the University were born rich, but for those very few scholarship kids it was a way to make money, a way to bounce yourself out. Darcy had always been an inattentive and indifferent student, so she’d never had a shot at this kind of escape. But before she dropped out, she remembered the older kids coming back from scholarship qualifying exams, looking uneasy and confused. Nobody would ever say what was on the exams; supposedly you’d get arrested if you told. And Darcy had never known anyone who’d passed.

  Win’s method was the grossest. He plucked each steak off the plate and licked it before adding scoops of potato food and seaweed salad. Darcy had bigger plans. She wanted to steal a whole steak. Her job was to trim the gristle off the meat and lay it on the griddle. When she got an especially big steak, she let the knife swing wide, until she had four gristly pieces to lay on the griddle in the rough shape of an actual steak.

  “I’m not plating that,” Trish said. “It looks stupid.”

  “You just have to make sure Megan Kramer gets it. Or that Emily woman with the one eye. They won’t be able to see the difference.”

  “Oh right, so I’m just supposed to tell Stella to give this one to a blindie? What if she asks why? How come you can’t just sneak pieces like a normal person?”

  “Because I want a real steak dinner for my mom and me. With the bone in it.”

  She slipped a rare steak off the griddle, wrapped it in two layers of Seafiber napkin, and stuffed it down the front of her jumpsuit.

  “Just hand it to Stella last,” she said. “The blindies always come in late anyway. It’ll be fine.”

  Trish shrugged and snuck another bite.

  “It’s gonna taste like your sweaty tits,” she said.

  Darcy smacked her in the arm. The birdsong tape started playing in the dining room, and the residents began drifting in. Darcy peeked out the serving window—as usual, the youngest and most able residents were arriving first. The dining room was prairie themed. Someone in the early days of World Experiences had sponge-painted a golden grassland across the walls. In the corner near the kitchen, a family of prairie dogs stuck their pointed noses and giant cartoon eyes up out of the grass. On the opposite wall three wild horses, slender and bright red, drank from a blurry stream. Next to the entrance, and farthest from the kitchen, a milky-skinned girl in a blue dress stood at the doorway of a thatch-roofed cottage, perpetually waving good-bye. The girl had made Darcy laugh when she first got to World Experiences—it had been a good fifty years since anyone could’ve gone outside on the mainland prairie in a dress that flimsy. Probably whoever painted it had never seen a mainland meadow that wasn’t heavily lidded with snow. Darcy could’ve done just as good a job, even though she was island-born and the only dogs she’d ever seen were the ones that came over on the last boat with all the criminals and homeless people. She hadn’t paid much attention in history class, but she knew people wanted to remember the mainland the way you remember a beloved dead person—pretty, and young, and happy, and always the same.

  Win set the plates in the serving window and Stella, in her bright blue prairie-girl dress, set them before the women. The room filled quickly at first, then more slowly as the arrivals grew slower and lamer and blinder, pushing walkers before them and trailing IV bags behind them and moving laboriously through the gel that time becomes for the very old and sick. The people at World Experiences weren’t very rich. They had more money than Darcy—the people in her building got old and died right there, not in homes with nurses and cooks and prairie girls on the walls. But the really rich people—old executives and Board members and higher-ups in the guards—went to Paradise Valley, where Darcy heard they got steak once a week and jellyfish powder was banned. Or their families hired service workers from Little Los Angeles or Lower Chicagoland to push their wheelchairs and spoon crushed-up real strawberries into their mouths. These jobs paid well, but Darcy hadn’t been able to get one. You needed a smooth face, unpockmarked, and straight teeth—you had to be just like a rich person, except poor. The old men and women who hobbled in now couldn’t afford servants, and they couldn’t afford Paradise Valley. What their middling fortunes could buy was steak once a year and someone like Darcy to lie in wait and steal from them. Finally Emily Jones made her slow way in and sat in the back by the waterfall with Megan Kramer and Che Simpson, who could only say the word “kale.”

  “Okay—now,” Darcy said. “Put it out now.”

  The fake steak lay between the potatoes and the seaweed, the edges of its component parts melted slightly together by the heat of the griddle. Trish placed it in the serving window and Stella took it. Then Trish said, “Shit.”

  “What?” Darcy looked up from a sink slowly filling with suds.

  “Marcelle.”

  Darcy looked out and saw her boss, regal in her old-style skirt suit, broad-hipped, small-waisted, her eyes narrowed in constant, minute appraisal.

  “It’s fine,” Darcy said. “They won’t notice anything, she won’t notice anything. It’s fine.”

  Stella picked her way past canes and walkers and wheelchairs to the back of the room, where she set plates in front of Megan and Emily.

  “See?” Darcy said. “We’re fine.”

  Then the dining room door opened and in came Ramona Smith-Sanchez, graceful, loose-limbed, and sharp-eyed. Ramona did yoga every day. She still got the mystery flyers delivered to her room. Stella lifted the final plate and Darcy willed it to teeter, to flip, to splay its contents across the golden-brown prairie floor. But Stella conveyed it smoothly through the air and set it in front of Ramona.

  She didn’t look at her plate right away. First she made some joke to Stella, who gave an employee’s polite laugh. Then she touched Megan on the arm and the two of them shared some kind of furtive, sympathetic communication. Then she looked at Stella again, and for a moment Darcy thought that time had become a circle, that they would be trapped forever in the minute and a half before Ramona touched her steak. Stella was laughing again. Ramona was laughing. Megan was quietly filling her mouth with food. Then Ramona picked up her fork and knife and cut herself a piece of meat. She put it between her lips. She chewed. She shut her eyes in pleasure like the woman on the GreenValley Foods flyers.

  “Okay,” Trish said, “you were right.”

  But Ramona was pausing with the second bite still on her fork. She was looking down at her plate with precise concentration. She was using a knife to pry the pieces of steak apart. She was calling for Stella, and they were both peering at the plate, and then Marcelle was stirring from her spot in the corner of the room, and she was gazing balefully at the mangled steak, and she was moving in the direction of the kitchen, the offending plate in her manicured hand.

  “Look busy,” Darcy hissed, and they all began showily scrubbing.

  Darcy was shoving a stack of mixing bowls into scalding water when Marcelle came through the swinging doors. She stood in the center of the kitchen and seemed to pull the whole room toward her, like a weight in the center of a cloth. She held up the plate. The steak was spread apart, and its pink juices were staining the potatoes.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  Her anger always had pleasure at the edges of it, like it would bring her joy to be proved right about their uselessness. She was forty-five, high-cheekboned, handsome. In her office were drawings of her attractive, well-nourished children.

  Darcy could feel the others silently willing her to confess. They would never say it, but they wanted her to step forward and bear the punishment alone. But she couldn’t afford even a small pay cut right now, not with their rent due next week.

  “It’s a steak,” she said.

  “It is not a steak,” Marcelle said. “A steak at World Experiences is a tasty, succulent piece of meat p
resented in an attractive fashion. Ms. Pern, does this object meet that definition of a steak?”

  “No, but—”

  “And why not?”

  Before she dropped out of high school, when she hadn’t studied for a test, she sometimes tried to open up her mind so that the universe could pour answers into it. She would shut her eyes, hold her breath, and imagine her brain as an open bowl into which inspiration could flow. It worked once—when the date of the island’s founding, April 10, 2043, had fallen into her consciousness like a cube of glittering ice. She tried it now, but all that came were stupid ideas—a monkey came in and ate part of the steak, it was like that when we got it from the butcher, Ramona must’ve hidden a bone in her sweater. Darcy chose the least dumb of these ideas.

  “That steak was supposed to be for Megan Kramer,” she said.

  Trish shot her an angry face.

  “She asked us for one without the bone,” Darcy went on. “She doesn’t like the way it looks. But things just get so crazy in here, and we forgot to tell Stella.”

  “So if I were to ask Mrs. Kramer, she’d tell me she wanted a steak with no bone?”

  “Not to be disrespectful,” Darcy said, “but Mrs. Kramer isn’t always the most consistent of our residents.”

  At first Marcelle seemed to be looking at Darcy with skepticism. Then Darcy saw it was confusion.

  “Darcy,” she asked, “what is on your jumpsuit?”

  Darcy looked down. The steak juice had oozed through the Seafiber, making an angry red-brown stain on the left side of her belly. Trish’s eyes burned at her. Standing behind Marcelle, Win pointed a finger gun to his temple and fired it. Darcy felt herself teetering forward into a future in which she confessed, pulled the steak out of her jumpsuit, lost her job, and walked out onto the street with no money and nowhere to be. The sensation was almost pleasurable. Then the idea she’d been waiting for came and knocked her back.