by Anna North
“I’m sorry,” Darcy said.
“It’s all right. If she was here she’d have contacted me by now. Either she doesn’t want to see me, or she didn’t make it after all.”
Darcy began walking out of the room, but he kept talking.
“She was the one who told me we’d all have to get away. I didn’t believe it would really end—the cities, all those people. Even when the roads closed down, even when we were eating cats. Even when the vitamins ran out and all the kids were getting rickets and scurvy. I still don’t. I can’t make myself believe it.”
There must have been hundreds of people like him on the island, separated from their lovers by ocean and ice, years of unsaid greetings and good-byes dammed up in their throats. Darcy knew other people who had been separated from their families—Dolores Beltran’s husband hadn’t been able to get passage, because of something he had written once in a magazine. Everything about that time was shadowy to her—who got to go on the boats and who didn’t, who chose and how. Tyson never mentioned that time in the “Mainland Reminiscences” column he published in the news flyers, and Darcy had been eight years old before she understood that not everyone had made it over. In history class they learned about the first boat, and the second, and about how an influx of boats had then brought thousands to the island, but after that there was no more mention of the mainland, and they moved on to learning about Board elections and the accomplishments of the Founder. But the school’s janitor was a last-boater, and he told some of the older boys something that quickly trickled down. He said the last boat, an old freighter they hacked out of the ice at the Port of Los Angeles and patched up with car doors and tin roofs and whatever they could find, could fit only five hundred people. They all pressed together with their stashes of potatoes and cabbage and their contraband vitamin pills and their family heirlooms and their guns, and then when there was no more room and they could barely breathe, and the babies were shoved down between their mothers’ breasts and the little children were crushed against their fathers’ legs, people were still streaming up the gangplanks, trying to shove their way on. The janitor was only a child then—he didn’t know who started shooting. But he saw the men fall backward into the icy water; he saw the women clawing at one another’s eyes; he saw the body of a teenage girl slump red-stained across her family. Then someone gunned the engines and the boat pulled away from shore, and people were stripped off the sides into the sea, and more people were gathered on the dock, screaming and throwing stones. It was so cold that the ice knit up in the boat’s wake, and they all knew they were the last to get out, and they clutched one another, and the mothers sang quietly to their children, and none of them could bring themselves to rejoice.
Darcy asked her mother if it was true, and after Sarah tried to distract her with a knock-knock joke about monkeys, she said, in a calm and serious voice she rarely used, that there were many more people on the mainland than on the island, and that many of them had been left behind.
“What happened to them?” Darcy asked.
“The winters were getting colder,” her mother answered, “and even when we left people said it would only be a matter of time before they were just too cold.”
“Too cold for what?”
“Too cold for anything.”
“You mean they died?” Darcy had asked then.
Her mother got a look on her face then, an upward twisting of the mouth and eyebrows, a deep and old and impotent guilt. Darcy had seen that look since, she had felt it in the crowd on Remembrance Day, and she saw it on Armin now. Darcy didn’t want to hear any more from him. She didn’t like to think you could lose someone forever.
The other non-ambs were almost all women; they slept and knit and complained and lived out their long fragility. Ginnifer was quiet, Madison was bawdy. Courtney slept until Darcy put the cuff on her, then caressed her face as one would a child’s. None of them knew who Sarah was. The last room in the Hall of Africa was Yuka McKenzie’s.
“You’re not Nancy,” Yuka said when Darcy walked in.
She had thick full white hair, cut blunt at her shoulders, and a little body coiled up under the sheet. Her face was broad and colorless and minimally lined—a stroke had twisted and pulled the left half so her mouth tailed off in a scowl and her left eye tilted up at the ceiling. Her right eye bored into Darcy like a corkscrew.
“I’m filling in,” Darcy said.
Yuka must have learned to talk around her grimace—her speech was quick and clean.
“She get fired?”
Darcy paused, then answered truthfully.
“Good,” Yuka said. “She was too fat. Panting all the time. I don’t know how somebody so poor gets so fat.”
How does someone so rich get so mean? Darcy almost asked. Instead she slid the cuff wordlessly onto Yuka’s arm. She knew a way of pumping the cuff that applied sudden and painful pressure.
“What’s your name, new girl?” Yuka asked, apparently oblivious to the abuse.
Darcy answered her.
“I knew a Darcy once,” Yuka said. “Not a very common name anymore though.”
“No.”
“Nowadays everybody names their kid Sunroof or Shitstorm or whatever.”
Darcy said nothing. She wrote down Yuka’s blood pressure. It was high. She screwed up her last bit of hope and asked Yuka, “Do you know Sarah Pern? She’s my mom.”
“Did she live in Seattle,” Yuka asked, “in a co-op?”
Darcy’s heart rose in her chest. She looked at Yuka. Her left eye lolled freely, but her right eye met Darcy’s gaze and held it. She wasn’t going to let herself float off into the past like Armin. Her mind was firmly in the present, and it was watching.
“That’s right,” Darcy said. “Arete.”
The old woman’s whole face cracked open in a smile—even her bad eye rolled momentarily forward, centering Darcy in the full strength of its stare.
“Sure, I remember Sarah. She was a little sexpot, that one. I caught her with Duncan Harrison once—well, I won’t tell you what she was doing.”
Darcy felt like she’d been pinched. She let out a little barking laugh.
“She was ten years old when they left,” Darcy said.
Yuka widened her good eye as though to transmit a remembered shock.
“I know, and he was fifteen! I reported it to the council, but they didn’t do anything. They didn’t give two snowflakes for those orphan kids. No wonder a lot of them turned out the way they did.”
Darcy thought of the years of boyfriends, the nights her mother would spread a blanket on the floor, and then another blanket on top of that, so that Darcy could sleep between them.
“Think of a pair of hands,” her mother would tell her, and then she would ball up toilet paper and put it in Darcy’s ears, “so you don’t hear him snoring.” And then her mother and the man would get in the bed, and Darcy would make her breath sound low like that of a sleeping child, and she would hear the furtive shifting and muttering that she understood as sex before she was sure what sex was, before her sixth-grade science teacher explained that sex for girls like them would probably happen sooner rather than later, and that they should use a condom, but they probably wouldn’t, because girls like them couldn’t think about the future since they had too many problems in the present, and so really it was Tyson’s fault that five or ten of them would be pregnant by the time they left junior high. That teacher disappeared—transferred to the refinery, someone said—but sex remained on the girls’ minds and on their tongues, and pretty soon on their bodies. Autumn and Marisol and Killer Kirkorian were all pregnant in eighth grade, but Darcy wasn’t curious. Sex was already in the room with her a few nights a month, less during her mother’s period, more when there was someone new, and so when boys came up to her with their looks of studied carelessness she insulted them, treated them like children or idiots, and got a reputation as tough and mean and cold.
She remembered how she would wake in the morn
ing—having finally gone to sleep after all—to see the man putting on his shirt, his pants, once pulling his underwear over a purplish penis, and kissing her mother on the mouth or on the forehead and walking out the door. And then her mother would kneel to her, and kiss each ear as she took the toilet paper out; and if it was a Sunday, she would whisper, “He’s gone—now we can play.”
Then when she was fourteen, one of the men—a long-armed, bowlegged refinery worker with a parrot-fever scar in the center of his forehead—knelt to her in the middle of the night and pressed his lips against her cheek. It was almost fatherly, almost like a good-night kiss for a sleeping child, but this man was not her father and his mouth stuck to her skin a little too long, long enough to awaken a new insight in Darcy, the realization that she could be desired. It disgusted her. She called out for her mother, who woke immediately—had she even been sleeping at all?—and who took the man by the arm and whispered to him fiercely in the hallway for a moment before coming back alone and shutting the door behind her. After that, no more men came to the apartment, and if Sarah missed them, she didn’t show it.
Yuka had made her face politely blank, but Darcy saw a smile fighting up toward the surface. She might be lying, of course, but why would she lie? To confuse Darcy, maybe, to set her on edge, to make her lie in bed at night and wonder if her mother, who seemed so innocent when she bit her toast into a heart shape and placed it on her heart, had ever been innocent at all.
“She’s missing,” Darcy explained. “I’m trying to find her.”
“Well,” said Yuka, “I’m very sorry to hear that. Have you been to the guards?”
“They weren’t any help,” Darcy said. “You don’t know anything about where she might be, do you?”
“Is there a man in her life?” Yuka asked. “Maybe you should ask him.”
“There’s no man in her life,” Darcy said.
“You don’t really know that, do you?” Yuka asked.
“I know my own mom.”
The good half of Yuka’s face took on a haughty serenity then. She crossed her hands on the bedspread—small, soft hands like a girl’s.
“Obviously you don’t know her as well as you thought,” Yuka said, “or you’d know where she is.”
Darcy tried to think of something mean to say to her, something sweet on its face with barbs underneath, something that would keep cutting Yuka in the brain as she huddled by herself in her medicine-smelling room. But Yuka’s twisted face looked impervious to her, her wasted body weirdly strong.
“So there’s nothing you can tell me?” was all she could think of to say.
“Oh, there’s plenty of things I could tell you,” Yuka said. “I could tell you why this island is so fucked up, or what a lion really looks like, or how it feels when a clot cuts off blood flow to half your brain. But I’ve got no idea where your mother is. And if you’ll excuse me, I’m an old woman, and I’m tired.”
Someone had slid a comics flyer under Darcy’s door. It lay pale and alien amid the familiar mess of the apartment—the splayed bedsheets, the empty cheese-food cans, the few old makeshift toys under the window. On the front of the flyer, Max the Monkey was stealing money from the overflowing pocket of Mr. Moneybags, then using it to buy soda, which made him so dizzy and confused that when he looked at a dog, enormous hearts jumped out of his eyes. Across the top of the cartoon, above Max the Monkey’s head, someone had written six names:
Cricket Thomson
Simone Krull
Orion Wu
Duncan Harrison
Esther Rosen
Sarah Pern
She stared at the list a long time. Her mother’s name in writing shone out at her like the sun on water. Duncan Harrison’s made her smack the wall and pinch the bridge of her nose to drive the image away. She tried to place the other four names but could not. She flipped the flyer over and saw an ad for the Big Top—a polar bear and a wide-mouthed, bug-eyed Eskimo. “Brrrrring Your Family to the Big Top,” it read. Darcy left the flyer on the bed and hopped up and down each hall of each floor of the building and out onto the street, but Ansel was nowhere. Then she felt stupid—she had no way of knowing when he’d left the note, and of course he could be anywhere by now.
She searched the apartment for a pen, but all her school supplies were long lost in the cracks of bus seats and the halls of World Experiences and the big open maw of entropy, and she couldn’t even find a pencil stub. Finally she took the ketchup out of the mini fridge and, making a silent, aimless apology for wasting food, squirted it onto the paper in the shape of the question, “WHAT?” She left the new note in her hallway, its message peeking out from under her door like a bloodstain.
The next day was Treat Day, and Darcy brought flat glossy brownies to each of the non-ambs. Yuka had been waiting.
“You’re late,” she said.
Darcy opened her mouth to apologize. Then she said, “I had things to do.”
Yuka made the right half of her face faux serious.
“A meeting of the Board, perhaps?”
Darcy didn’t take the bait. She set the brownie down a little out of Yuka’s reach. Yuka’s right eye darted toward it hungrily. Darcy strapped the cuff around Yuka’s arm.
“Just some things,” she said. “Did you know Cricket Thomson?”
“What an interesting question,” Yuka said. “Why do you want to know?”
“Oh, no reason,” Darcy said. She moved the brownie a little farther from Yuka.
Yuka’s blood pressure was low. She began to laugh. Her laugh was as dry and harsh as sticks rubbed together.
“Are you having fun?” she asked.
“Fun with what?” Darcy felt herself sweat a little.
“Playing around with my brownie,” Yuka said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Yuka reached out and patted Darcy’s hand.
“You think you’ve got the upper hand and you’re going to get something out of me. But don’t worry, I’ll tell you what you want to know, and you don’t even have to play with my food.”
Darcy stood up as if to leave.
“It’s not that important,” she said. “I was just curious, since you knew my mom, if you knew a Cricket Thomson. Or an Orion Wu.”
Yuka smiled, the slack left corner of her mouth quirking up a bit. Darcy wondered if that side was really as immobile as it seemed.
“And I’ll be glad to satisfy your curiosity, Miss Darcy Pern, if you just do me a little favor. I want Marcelle’s notes on me.”
Darcy had never seen Marcelle with a notebook. She had never even seen her write. For all Darcy knew, she kept World Experiences running entirely by memory.
“Her notes?” she asked.
“You’re not very high up on the totem pole, are you? Marcelle keeps notes on every one of us: whether we’re eating, whether we’re moving our bowels regularly, whether we’re getting depressed and need a little Solzac in the old IV—and other things too. I want her notes on me.”
“I can’t do that,” Darcy said. “I’ll lose my job.”
Yuka turned away from Darcy slightly.
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t risk losing your job over some idle curiosity. You seem like a clever girl; I’m sure you’ll find some way of learning what you need to know.”
Darcy came home to find the note lying crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. The ketchup was smudged—it looked like something or someone had licked it. Darcy threw it against the wall, where it made an unsatisfying soundless impact. Then she kicked the wall with her bad leg, made a loud crack and a dent the size of her big toe, heard Jorge open his door by the stairs, and had to hop up five flights and collapse onto her bed in a cloud of pain.
She thought of going back to the Big Top and asking about Ansel, but if she showed her face there again, she’d probably get her other leg broken. And how could she even get into Marcelle’s office by herself, let alone find and steal her notes? Darcy imagined beating Yuka a
cross her misshapen face. She imagined her mother coming in and sitting cross-legged on the floor, bright-eyed, saying, “You won’t believe where I’ve been.” She held her throbbing ankle, and she remembered how her mother used to stand on top of her feet and tell her, “I don’t want you to get away.” And how, on the rare days when the wind turned cool and people went out in their long sleeves, she would sit by the window in the fading light and answer Darcy’s questions in monosyllables, or not at all.
“I really need this,” Darcy said as she poured oil on a strainer full of slimy noodles. “I wouldn’t ask you if I had any other ideas left.”
“You’re crazy,” Trish said. “We shouldn’t even be talking about this.”
Trish scraped the inside of a tomato-food can and shook the results into a pot.
“I just need twenty minutes. Just tell her you need her to look at something in the kitchen. I don’t care what you tell her. Come on, Trish, this is someone’s life.”
Trish shook her head as she scooped beef powder into the pot.
“It won’t work. Odds are we both get fired, your mom stays gone. I’m sorry, Darce, I really am, but I can’t afford to lose my job. You have to figure this out on your own.”
Armin had visitors: a woman in an expensive real-fiber shirt and low-heeled leather pumps, a man in an old-style suit. The woman had the composed, studied look Darcy had seen before on the faces of rich women, a look that implied she had been taking great care in her appearance and behavior for so long that this care had become indistinguishable from pleasure. The man was big and loud and profligate of gesture—when he saw Darcy, he made a great sweeping arc with his right arm.
“Aha!” he shouted. “One of our Florence Nightingales!”
Darcy didn’t know what he was talking about. His face was wide and red and open, but his little mobile eyes said he wasn’t as stupid as he looked. Darcy gave him her company smile.
“Darcy’s come to give me my sedative,” Armin said. “I have to get my rest.”
The woman looked confused—a tiny ripple traveled across her composure.
