by Anna North
“Save it,” Sunshine said to Ansel. “Darcy, you got what you wanted. Here’s Ansel. Say whatever you’ve got to say, but don’t make a lot of noise. They catch you down here, you’ll be sorry.”
“Wait, Auntie,” said Ansel, but Sunshine was already receding. Her body was a rough place in the smooth dark; then it was nothing. The circus was still going on above their heads. A loud, rhythmic thumping moved across the stage, like someone running or hopping in enormous shoes. Ansel’s blankets rustled.
“You want to see something?” he asked.
“What is it?”
“It’s a surprise.”
Ansel sat up. Despite the heat, he was wearing a Seafiber trenchcoat with long sleeves. He pushed the right sleeve up to reveal his arm, but Darcy saw no hand, no wrist, no forearm—nothing until the blunt end of an elbow. He turned the stump so she was looking down the barrel of it, and for a moment she stared transfixed at the wide, wet wound, soupy at the center, crinkled at the edges where it was trying to heal.
“What happened?” she asked him.
“I wasn’t as lucky with Nanook as you were.”
If Ansel could really find missing people, Darcy wondered why he had to resort to being chased by a bear.
“Did they trick you too?” she asked.
“Nah. I’ve been working here a while. Sunshine got me the job. I’m the reason they have to grab people off the street. Me and this stump here.”
“I’m sorry,” Darcy said. “But listen, somebody told me you could help me.”
“Now who would’ve told you a thing like that?”
Sitting there in the dark, she almost wished no one had. What was this man who seemed to spend his days lying crippled under the Big Top going to do for her? She felt the decline of hope like a headache coming on.
“Jorge Barrera,” she said. “He told me you helped him find his cousin.”
She expected him to say he didn’t know what she was talking about, but instead he laughed, a dry, unlovely sound that was older than his voice, and said, “So word of my exploits is getting around, is it? The Barrera kid was a nasty business, though—there are other things I’d rather be known for.”
“But you do know how to find people?” Darcy asked. “That’s something you do?”
“That depends,” he said, “on who you want found.”
A loud shapeless thud ricocheted around the dark. Darcy flinched. Ansel laughed.
“The curtain,” he explained.
Darcy breathed. She’d come here to tell him her problem, but now it stuck on her tongue. All the time she was little, first grade, second grade, fifth grade, she ran home as quick as she could from the little squalid elementary school with the cheese food smeared on the windows so that she could lie on the floor and wait for the signature vibration of her mother’s feet in the hall. This was before the pay cut, before Sarah had to dive long past dusk and come home pale and wrung out and alien. Then there was nothing she wanted more than to hear the first sound her mother made when she entered the building, to own every one of her familiar evening movements—the stretching of her arms and toes, the shucking off of her wet suit to reveal the tender bumps of her spine. Only when she got older did the other kids at school begin to hold allure for her, with their private jokes, their mean faces, their makeup stolen from their older sisters. Once in seventh grade she stayed late behind the science trailers with a girl named Cali, and they huffed cheap solvent from a bag and lay on their backs and told secrets. Cali’s eyes grew wide as she was talking, her whole face became luminous, she made it seem like there was something wondrous behind gossip, something perfect and crystalline and rare that all their words were mere clumsy gestures toward. When Darcy came home late and still wobbly in the legs and hands, Sarah didn’t ask her about the solvent.
“Who were you with?” she said instead.
“Just a girl,” Darcy answered, and then, shyly, still wanting to let her mother in on her secrets, “She told me who she likes.”
“Be careful,” said Sarah. She was turned away from Darcy, picking at a stain on the wall. “You can’t always trust people.”
“She won’t tell anything,” Darcy said. “We swore.”
Sarah turned around, and her eyes were fierce.
“I don’t mean she’s going to tell on you. What do you have to tell anyway?”
It knocked the wind out of Darcy. For a moment she stood in the center of the apartment holding her belly, like she’d been hit there. Then she yelled, “I hate you,” the one and only time, and ran to hide in the bathroom, but not before she heard her mother say, “I mean that she could hurt you,” in a little far-off voice.
After ten minutes Sarah came to find her, and smoothed her hair back, and kissed her eyelids, and let her eat a whole can of cheese food on pieces of square packaged bread, and the next day at school Darcy was distant and cold with Cali, even though she didn’t really understand why. Now she didn’t like to confide in anyone except her mother; telling anything to strangers made her especially afraid. But her mother was gone, and if she had another choice, she didn’t know what it was.
“My mom disappeared yesterday,” she told Ansel, “and I’m trying to find her.”
He seemed not to have heard.
“Darcy, what brings people like us here in the first place?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Money. They have it, we don’t.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Darcy asked. “The circus people?”
The crowd noise had thinned from a rush to a trickle and then to a series of driblets with dead space between them. A man shouted something that sounded like “Monkey!” and a woman laughed, and then silence.
“Lucky girl,” Ansel said. “You are ignorant in the ways of our world.”
Darcy turned away from him into the empty black.
“Fuck you,” she said. “I’ve been working since I was fifteen. All I ever had was my mom. Now she’s gone and no one will help me. I know as much about the world as I want to know.”
“As you wish.”
She heard a shift and sliding of the sleeping bag as he too turned away. She listened for Sunshine’s return but heard only Ansel’s breathing. Then from above, the drips of talk came back, as though time was switched around and running backward, replaying the circus from the beginning. The voices multiplied and swelled, and then the man with the suspenders began to respeak his lines, and then with a fumbling rustling sound the curtain went back up and teams of toes went dancing back along the stage.
“How many times a day do they do this?” Darcy asked.
“Today, probably five.”
“And how many have they already done?”
“I think this is the third.”
“Jesus.”
Darcy pulled the sleeping bag over her head. Through it she could still hear the man with the suspenders announcing something about “great mainland apes.” She heard new footfalls above her, lighter and more numerous, jumping and scuttling and stopping: more monkeys. Darcy remembered the one in the dressing room, its small intelligent malign face, the flowered dress bunched over its tail. Probably it too had been about some private business when someone grabbed it by its shoulders, muzzled its biting jaw, and bent it with drugs or beating or sheer captive time into a life of performing and obeying. Darcy felt a red hate pooling behind her eyeballs. Her ankle was sending shots of pain all the way up to her hip. She needed to find her mother and she didn’t know where to look and she was trapped in the dark and she had become the kind of person that people could just do things to.
“Are you crying?” Ansel asked.
“No.”
She didn’t mean to shout it, but she heard the word bounce loud and ragged all around the dark. They both froze. Swirling music was playing overhead. A wheel was rolling on the stage. A door opened and a little light stained the space where they lay. Darcy saw a slice of Ansel’s face—it was brown-skinned, hawkish, and hungry. He
r body clenched into its smallest self. A man and a woman exchanged some indecipherable words. She saw Ansel looking at her. The crowd clapped overhead. The light went away.
“Sorry,” Darcy whispered.
She heard Ansel shake his head.
“You’re the reason this island never gets any better.”
“What,” Darcy whispered, “because I’m loud?”
“You lack what I like to call a larger awareness.”
“Try having a larger awareness when your mom disappears, asshole.”
“My mom died when I was a kid. She had parrot fever.”
The monkeys were gone and in their place was someone speaking loudly in the stop-start cadence of a joke. The audience was booing.
“I’m sorry,” Darcy said.
“How long has your mom been gone again?”
“She didn’t come home last night. She’s been gone all day.”
“And you went to the guards?”
“And I went to the guards.”
Cymbals crashed. A few gasps floated down through the stage floor. A pair of boots and a pair of high-heeled shoes tick-tocked above their heads. Someone onstage was speaking. He said something that sounded like “chamber.”
“And they didn’t do anything?”
“And they didn’t do anything,” she said.
A scrawny-voiced macaw began to call—more gasps, some cheers. Then something was wheeled out onto the stage. A door opened and closed.
“Tell me, my fellow Eskimo, don’t you think the guards would have been a little more helpful if you were a little higher on the totem pole?”
“I guess, probably,” Darcy said.
“Are you aware that the families of Board members are actually exempt from arrest by the guards? They literally can do no wrong.”
“How do you know that?” Darcy asked.
“I have my sources,” he said. “But I can’t reveal them to just anyone.”
Darcy was getting frustrated. She was worried that he was messing with her, that he didn’t really know anything she could use.
“Fine,” she said. “Who can you reveal them to?”
“All my knowledge is freely available,” Ansel said, “to members of my organization.”
“Can your ‘organization’ help me find my mom?”
“Absolutely,” said Ansel, “if you’re willing to do something for us.”
A sudden downward rush of air. A thud and a scramble. Then light pouring down from the stage, a clearer, closer sound of cheering. A woman in a spangled dress, dusting herself off, looking right at them.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” And then, in angry recognition, “Are you that girl that pissed off Nanook?”
The light went out above them but the woman was running through the dark calling, “Tug, you better take a look at this!”
Then more light, the heavy sound of running, and Ansel standing, pulling at her, saying, “Come on, we’ve gotta go.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t stand.”
So he lifted her, threw her across his shoulder with his good arm, pinned her to his chest and ran zigzagging through the dark, with feet bashing all around them, until they burst out into the flashing night and Darcy’s eyes went white with the brightness of the Strip. They wove through a circle of cowboys singing for change, past three prostitutes teetering in their shoes, and around two monkeys fighting over a tangle of cotton candy, shrieking and hopping and scattering the pink shreds in the rain. Ansel was panting and Darcy could feel his body sagging under her weight. She smelled blood on his shoulder. He half ran, half fell through an open doorway and into a wide, round room with a vaulted ceiling.
Right away Darcy realized they were somewhere they weren’t supposed to be. The carpet Ansel set her down on was clean and patterned with roses. The ceiling was painted light blue, with fluffy clouds unlike any that ever hung over the island. All around them were tables where women in short shiny real-fiber dresses played cards with men in old-style suits. The air smelled like the kind of fancy cigarettes you could buy only in Manhattanville. And unlike any of the places where Darcy was usually allowed to be, the room was air-conditioned. Cool air blew down the back of Darcy’s neck and dried the sweat underneath her arms. She felt weightless and almost reckless, the way she imagined rich people felt before they spent a bunch of money.
Darcy followed Ansel over to a green felt card table where four elegantly dressed people were waiting for their hands. A woman with a saggy wattle and a diamond necklace pursed her lips at them. The dealer, a small severe young man in a burgundy vest, shuffled the cards without looking up. A middle-aged man with a red silk tie was holding forth about the defense budget.
“We simply have to raise taxes,” he was saying. “The Hawaiians could attack again any day. We got lucky that the Seaguards shot them down this time, but next time who knows how many ships they’ll bring? Who knows what kinds of weapons they’ll have?”
When Ansel pulled a chair out for Darcy, the man turned his bluster on them.
“Hey lasties, this is the thousand-dollar table.”
Ansel made his voice change completely. He flattened the vowels and clipped the consonants so he sounded like a Manhattanville executive.
“Our costumes must be pretty good, eh December?” he said to Darcy. “We better watch out—they might not let us back in our building.”
The man in the tie changed his expression from disgust to skepticism. He might not believe they were Manhattanville execs, but he was at least entertaining the idea. Darcy felt a kind of power flowing from Ansel into her. She didn’t know how to do a Manhattanville accent, so she threw back her head and tried to laugh like someone who had fired a lot of people and liked it.
“We’ve just come from a last-boat party,” Ansel told him. “Ever been?”
“What’s a last-boat party?” the woman in diamonds asked, eyeing the limp sleeve of his coat, “and what happened to your arm?”
Ansel looked serious for a moment.
“I had cancer as a child,” he said. “I almost died.”
“I’m so sorry,” said the woman. “How insensitive of me to ask.”
Ansel patted her shoulder.
“Not to worry,” he said. “Anyway, last-boat parties are a big deal now. I’m surprised you’ve never been to one. You don’t shower for a few days, you put on some ratty Seafiber clothes from an Our Lady store, then everybody crams into a really small room to drink palm wine and eat cheese food.”
“That doesn’t sound like very much fun,” the woman said.
“Well,” said Ansel, leaning in close to her, “it depends on how much you like rubbing up against people.”
The woman giggled, her neck flesh reddening.
“Honestly, though,” Ansel went on, “I think it’s good to do that kind of thing once in a while. The last-boaters, they experience everything more viscerally. They’re capable of appreciating some of the simple things in life in a way that’s harder for people like us.”
“I think that’s absolutely true,” the woman said. “I met a last-boat girl once, such a nice young lady. I was on the scholarship committee for the University then, and I recommended her very highly. She wanted to be a doctor, very driven. Not like these lazy Manhattanville kids you see these days. Of course, she didn’t get the scholarship—so few of them do.”
Ansel looked pointedly at Darcy. Then he made his face calm and solicitous and turned it toward the woman.
“Why didn’t she?” he asked. “I mean, if she was as good as you say?”
“Oh, I didn’t look at her file very closely. I assume it was something with the values test—it usually is.”
Darcy remembered the kids trudging grimly back from the scholarship exams at her high school—she wondered which of their values had been tested. Ansel anticipated the question.
“What’s on those tests these days?” he asked. “I haven’t looked at one in years.”
“Questions
about politics, support for the Founder. It’s important to make sure people are really loyal, you know, and not just pretending so they can get a free ride.”
Ansel gave Darcy another meaningful look. She hadn’t thought of this before, that Tyson might be testing people’s loyalty. She guessed it made sense—he wouldn’t want the Board paying for people’s education if they were going to turn around and use it against him. Still, the flyers always made the scholarship winners sound like the smartest kids on the island, not the most obedient.
The woman was looking at Darcy now.
“December, was it?” she said. “You don’t say much, do you December?”
Darcy turned to Ansel. He didn’t speak for her; he just looked back at her with a mild, easy confidence, like he did this all the time. Then she clenched her throat and whispered, “I lost my voice at the party.”
“Last-boaters do a lot of yelling,” Ansel added.
The dealer was getting impatient.
“You buying in?” he asked. “If not, you’ve got to leave.”
Ansel patted the pockets of his coat with his good hand. He put on a look of exasperation.
“I’m an idiot,” he said. “December, do you have any money?”
Darcy shook her head. The feeling of power weakened a little. She whispered to Ansel, “What are you doing?”
“Just play along,” Ansel whispered back.
“Listen,” he said to the woman. “I left my wallet back at the party. They make you check them at the door, for authenticity. I could go get it now, but we’re having such a nice time. What if you were to stake me? If I win, I’ll give you half. If I lose, I’ll go get my wallet and pay you back.”
The woman looked around her as though someone might give her advice, but she had obviously come by herself.
“I don’t like this,” said the man in the tie to no one in particular, and this seemed to make her decision.
“I do,” she said. “Of course I’ll stake you.”
She handed a green Seafiber bill to the dealer, who nodded and said to Ansel, “Snow kings, flakes wild, no flipping.”
Ansel nodded, and the dealer began laying cards on the green felt table. Their backs bore a picture of a cottage with warm light in the windows and heavy snow covering the roof.
