Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  Adults were shoved into the back of a big truck with handcuffs in front of them reflecting and winking in the flashlight beams while the urban windstorm tore at all the girls’ nightclothes and fluted and sang around the corners, through the empty upper stories of millions of apartment buildings across the endless spaces of cityscape where the informer who turned in Thin Sam peered through curtains and counted his silver coins.

  All up and down the street, blinds and curtains were drawn briefly back, letting out thin spears of lantern light, and then dropped again. It was dangerous to know. There were a few dark silhouettes on rooftops where people had run up through the empty upper stories to the roof to see if they would be next. The ambient light of the urban sky glowed behind them, and below the streets unseen trains rumbled. A bus with peeling advertisements for the Home Heating Department’s new Fiberglas Lamp Wicks pulled up in a cloud of exhaust vapor and three people got out but when they saw what was going on they got back in. The bus slammed its door and pulled away. Then a sudden loud roar of airplane engines and the crack of lightning and shouting men. The noise burst from every window. Still Alive had just come on.

  Nadia cried for days and could not eat. She had been brash and daring with her cranky dark auburn hair sprayed out like wiring and her head full of startling ideas discovered in the stained books others had discarded or abandoned, which others had left behind. Now it seemed all her interior water would leak away and she would mummify herself with sobbing. She knew the possessions of the dead were sold on the street in order to pay the Candyman and the sweets given away but Nadia hid the silver dangle and some tattered foils and wept silently over Thin Sam. After a long time her grieving for him was a kind of melodic, distant echo that seemed very ancient, very far away.

  And beyond the trauma a strange feeling of triumph. She had lied to the interrogator and got away with it. And so she became an adult, with an adult’s complex attitude of both hatred and fear of the authorities. And who, said Riddley Walker, is the Loakel Tharty round here?

  Chapter 5

  A bitterly cold February. Another new place, an unknown neighborhood in the overcrowded world of trashy, stacked flats, windy streets, and tired people. Her counselor told the new family that Nadia had been shifted to another foster home because of an unfortunate incident in the last place and that she could not watch television because of her eyes and they felt sorry for her and offered to fill her in on the latest corruption trial, and tell her what had happened to Louvat on Early to Rise when he had been buried under a collapsing wall as he was trying to retrieve a cache of I-glasses and I-pods from an old exchange office but she said, That’s all right, I never kept up anyway. Nadia bent her head down and sat on her cot and listened. Far away in some other apartment a radio played. She would listen to Big Radio whenever she could because it was a link to Thin Sam and links were hard to come by in this world.

  Female Voice One said, in delicate tones, And now it is time, in the beginning months of the New Year, that we turn to fable, legend, and myth. We step into the land of mystery. We move on to the graceful and moving No¯ plays of ancient Japan.

  The night grows late. Eastward the bells of the three pagodas toll. By the moonlight that gleams through the needles of the thick cedar trees I begin to put on my armor.

  Nadia could memorize anything and often said long passages aloud to herself because of their beauty, because they were affirmative, because the words lightened her heavy heart. She whispered, Eastward the bells of the three pagodas toll.

  What do you want to do with your life, Nadia? her counselor had asked. She was a kind person named Caroline with thick and kinking hair.

  Well, said Nadia, I want to do a walk across the entire city and then to Lighthouse Island. I could do it for charity. I could raise money for a charity drive. For instance, for the subcommittee on Tourette’s syndrome. Promote awareness of Tourette’s syndrome. I would do the entire walk on foot. If I had a map. It would be energy-smart and eco-green. She clasped her work-worn hands and smiled brightly at the counselor.

  The counselor stared at her. She said, I’m not even going to write that down.

  Nadia’s new foster family stood in line and did a minimalist bow with their heads when the counselor left, the women in their striped aprons and men in cement-stained clothes from their concrete work. And Nadia watched her go. She thought of the television ad for Lighthouse Island shining from the wooden console with a deep glow as if she could reach into the television screen and take the image in her two hands like a crystal ball and the light of it would flow through her fingers, its magic infuse her, releasing her into her true self, which was a generous and confident girl who lived in a rain forest with a light tower sending out signals across a gleaming ocean.

  The counselor clicked away on little heels, down the crowded, noisy street in her gray dress with its soiled white collar, carrying her canvas briefcase full of children’s adoption files, reports, assessments, family evaluations, reviews. The files and assessments that direct lives.

  She was deeply preoccupied with Nadia Stepan’s case. She barely noticed the cold. It seemed persons unknown had attempted to pry into the girl’s files. She was a bright, odd girl and the counselor wanted to teach her to exhibit the Five Signs of Superior Intelligence, all the appropriate attitudes to make her way up to an office job, better food, more water and electricity and then onward and upward to private showers and water features, vacation credits to places like Country Gardens or Celebration Cruises. She wanted Nadia to lead a more privileged life in which nothing alarming would ever happen. But this fantasy of walking off across the city could get Nadia certified. It really meant, “I want to escape this life.” This turned people into State evaders who lived on the margins like animals, perpetually homeless. Like the savage hippies in the Northwest, who formed cults, fought one another, drowned in their rotting boats, ate raw fish.

  But the counselor was afraid she was of no more use to Nadia Stepan than a Continuity Man with his dazzling tarots, fake predictions of love and promotions.

  People on the street had all turned and were hurrying, or trotting, toward her and past her. An overloaded bus had come to a halt with the driver standing on the brakes with both feet.

  Only the unity of television kept the planetwide megapolis from flying apart into brawls, from bombing each other all over again. The young recyclers who rooted in the rubble on Early to Rise were avatars of ancient treasure hunters, of tomb looters from earlier times. The news anchors and panels of experts gave the people the feeling of being informed. Public trials shamed and destroyed those who stole from the agencies. Billions of urban inhabitants watched Imperial Rebels as one mind as Captain Kenaty and his men struggled toward some distant abandoned city. They were the heroic soldiers the audience loved to admire. A new flashy quick-bit program called The Question Freak showed a crazed Master of Mayhem racing through the sets screaming audacious questions and this satisfied people’s need for defiance of authorities. The bearded savages of Still Alive instructed them in the depths of human depravity beyond the city where no televisual icons connected all these spilling quinoa grains of persons into something rich and fine.

  Men came running down the street with orange demolition signs.

  What? she said.

  Turn around and get out of here, lady! Run for it!

  She turned. The C-4 went off. A shock wave struck her and sent her briefcase flying along with other people and pieces of windowsills and metal shards and rolling plastic wheels from recycle pitches and bits of concrete from telephone poles and whipping electrical wires.

  So a great part of Nadia’s files flew into oblivion, which probably saved her life.

  In the new foster home, in the run-down tenement called Silver Lake Apartments, they gave Nadia a place at the far end of the main hall where there was an overhead storage space. The storage cabinet was so high you needed a stepladder to g
et into it. There they stored things that had to be kept away from children such as matches and kerosene and boric acid powder. The population density of Silver Lake Apartments was far above the allowable limit but nobody paid any attention to allowable limits anymore. They had become fossil regulations.

  Nadia hung a canvas shower curtain with multicolored fish painted on it from the cupboard’s edge and behind this she made herself a bed with stacks of books on which she placed planks and a foam mattress. There she hid from the clatter of arguments, yelling children, televisions, crashing dishes. There were regulations about the exact size of the table she was to have, the length and width of her bed and the thickness of her mattress, but nobody paid any attention to those regulations either. She bent eagerly over Wendell Berry’s poetry, Valley of the Dolls, Tobacco Road, Piano for Dummies, Sylvia Plath, anything she could find. You do not do, you do not do.

  The sheets they gave her had been freshly washed and so that was good. For warmth in the winter she had her coat and a couple of dun-colored army blankets. The families all drank their own gin and vodka allowances, and then more from the black market, but nobody got violently drunk. From time to time one of the women cooked up crispy fries in hard-to-obtain corn oil and sometimes on Fridays they had orange drink. In abandoned top stories of buildings slated for demolition Nadia found old books in dusty heaps and so life was not so bad.

  The books with lurid covers she carried down to start the kitchen fire. They were always the boring ones that left her saying aloud, Come on, come on, I don’t believe it. She also had to take the trash and separate it for the recycle bins, light the firebox for the hot showers, and fire up the little coal stove. Mrs. Novgorod was incredibly filthy and always tipping over ashtrays or walking away from sticky crusted dishes. She said, You can do it. You’re young and strong. And so Nadia did it but nothing interfered with her obsessive reading.

  So she began a Sometime life. Sometimes she managed to see the girls from the last place, who lived in the next apartment block. Sometimes the basic rations were not delivered to the neighborhood for days and they all went hungry or walked for miles, carrying the children, to an emergency supply point. It was said that tons of dried and canned food and shoes and computers were stored underground but the bureaucrats got stalled by paperwork. Sometimes the pipes failed and then water came in tanker trucks; it was beige or yellowish but it was drinkable. Everyone lived with the fear that water would finally and totally run out. The news at six thirty often told them that this might actually happen.

  At that point everybody in Silver Lake Apartments freaked out. Then there would be a long confusing interview with the senior counselor for water distribution policy who blamed a lot of multisyllabic factors that did not lower the level of anxiety. So they all lived in a condition of subdued dread and low-tech ignorance as the human world marched steadily forward to the Steady State at the End of the Universe. They did not know where in the endless city they were and no longer cared. The audience was told the city came to an end at the shores of the oceans, where houses like concrete swallow’s nests were pegged onto cliffs over a dirty, salty sea. The people who lived there from time to time found themselves sliding into a dishwater surf with all their furniture and babies.

  Like the amazing personal technology of Previous Times, all things had within them the digital instructions of their own collapse. The factories that made the devices had gone overseas and died there in televised revolutions. The Urban Wars had destroyed whatever was left on this side of the sea. Nobody knew how to make the devices anymore and worse, nobody knew how to make the machines that made the elements and the components of the devices. And the things that received and relayed the signals of all the personal devices were also missing in action. The petroleum that powered the factories and out of which were made millions of essential plastic things had slowed to a trickle. Thus there was very little plastic for solar panel films, pens and steering wheels, bottles and water pipes and toothbrushes, only some for Buddy car parts and a few computer monitors and keyboards, the police cell phones and of course televisions.

  Petroleum became difficult to find and extract because the number of three-cone roller drilling bits with tungsten teeth were becoming scarce. Devices that had kept people together in social networks were gone. So let’s sit down and relax from being boiled in the stew of overcrowded streets, sit down with these sportless sports programs and the sitcom characters with their vital miseries, their clean clothes and hygienic studio sets, and with the news and its alarms.

  People kept to themselves to avoid the management of public thought and also to blank out local authorities. Neighbors did not react to the sound of smashing glass when a neighborhood watchman drove his club through a kitchen window. He had caught Mrs. Caulder throwing a box of oily rags into the alleyway and she was taken away with a bleeding nose and did not come back for a week. And why not? The woman was deeply stupid and could have set the city on fire. People watched silently and said nothing. Nadia knew to never mention her parents nor should she ever mention that night on the street and the poor shoeless dead. Dear Thin Sam. A traveler now within that valley. She had the silver dangle and often recalled the sound of his voice. She remembered every word and they seemed to be words of power and hope, and therefore rare. Rare as Krugerrands and as valuable.

  People disappeared but everybody pretended not to notice and stayed neutral and colorless like fabric lampshades. Mrs. Caulder finally disappeared permanently. She left her teeth behind. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was written in their schoolbooks. The only people in the entire city-world who could both ask and tell were the police and the executioners. They were given the gift of openness and weapons.

  Nadia plunged into books because there was no danger of fictional characters disappearing, and even better, they were not subject to arrest. They could not reach out of the pages and threaten her or kill her friends and load their bodies on trucks. They were always there: the Highwayman and Anna Karenina and Edwin Drood and Huckleberry Finn and Scarlett O’Hara. She took the books and ran up the stairs to the roof in her stiff clothing and her ill-fitting shoes, her thick auburn hair spinning loose from its braids, lost in the story of Madame Olenska.

  The roof, like all roofs, was a place of crisscrossed lines of drying laundry, disintegrating boxes of stored junk, and pigeons tipping on the overhead wires. From there you could see the old Liberty Memorial and in the distance a line of bluffs with unusual apartment buildings where important agency people lived. They were far and sparkling and she had never known anybody who went up there.

  Mrs. Bergolts and Mrs. O’Donnell lugged baskets of wet clothes back from the Ocean Breeze Laundromat seven blocks away and struggled up four stories to hang them out and so they were always in a cruel mood when they got there. They called each other names. Irish slut, thieving Russian gypsy. They yelled at Nadia to hurry up with more baskets. You can do it, they yelled. You’re young and strong. Dehydration made people irritable.

  Nadia put The Age of Innocence and The Master and Margarita into her already-read stack, in with the science-fiction books. Once she had found a box full of e-books and took one of them apart to see if there were some way it had stored books inside it, but there was nothing inside but things called components. A teacher explained that they didn’t work anymore because the books that were supposed to appear on them had to be sent from a cloud that no longer existed. It didn’t matter. There were so few clouds anyway in the blazing vacant sky.

  Nadia dodged the flapping clothes on the lines and ran back down the empty floors to be on time for breakfast. She understood that Bulgakov had fallen down a virtual cave-shaft and had discovered something that was very old: magic. Toros! Toros! A kind of literary Altamira. Nadia loved how the people changed identities, a man became a cat, the heroine turned into a witch. She fell in love with Bulgakov. She imagined herself the heroine, the target of his wounded desires, and memorized long section
s of the dialogue, saying it aloud on the rooftop where she could see other rooftops stretching on and on into infinity.

  All the history and technical books had been confiscated a hundred years ago because they were incorrect and had to be modified but they were never reissued because these matters were now presented as televisuals so ponderous and jargonistic nobody could remember what was said, or cared, either, and so history was lost; it drew backward like a tide and left nothing but paperback novels gasping on the beach.

  The long-forgotten novels taught her about nations and borders and extended families, people who had ancestors and descendants and cell phones, whose cities had named streets, numbers on houses, wide rivers and running streams of water. Every place had a name. They had all the water they wanted. They lived in hamlets amid pastures full of red cattle or they lived in houses and apartments in cities and these living spaces had hot and cold running water and private green yards and fish ponds. Ice seemed to be available at all times and real coffee flowed like wine. Cities had limits beyond which the green countryside spread out and in these discrete cities were restaurants, cafés, and coffeehouses where people met and talked for hours. Nadia had never seen a café or a restaurant.

  The characters danced and drank too much at Christmas; they sat in private automobiles and looked at maps and tapped at the keyboards of personal computers and tiny handheld devices that gave you weather reports. They had some kind of tiny eyeglasses called contact lenses. They sailed around the world alone and a crazed dwarf named Quilp drank boiling tea out of a pot. They decided themselves what job they would take and there was some system where you could punch in numbers on a telephone and order a pizza delivered to your house, a kind of meat and cheese pie. They had high-phosphate dish detergent that made surfaces cracking clean. They did not chip pieces of bar soap into the laundry machines. They said anything that came into their heads.