Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  There seemed to be no regulations on anything: the watts of lightbulbs, shoe sizes, per-person living space, possession of window boxes, size of water bottles, and placing of television screens. They had no ration allowances. They owned cats and dogs without the permission of the Department of Livestock and Companion Animals. There were times and places where there were no people: at midnight, among mountains. It was a world of swimming pools and cybertheft and malls, lakes and pets and horses and cows, cowboys, free-running bison, marshes, rain, fog, pear trees, snow, sailing ships, and men in tights. They were spendthrift and wasteful and neurotic. They had devoured the world and left nothing but a dry husk for Nadia Stepan.

  Chapter 6

  One moment Nadia was a common average adolescent inhabitant of the megacity and the next she was running for her life. At eleven in the morning she and several other girls were paralyzed with lunatic laughter on the girls’ side of the auditorium, which caused the proctor to stalk toward them with his cane raised, and at twelve noon she was bolting through the streets carrying her life in her hands.

  At the noontime bell she left the lecture hall and its fifteen hundred pupils and hurried out to the dressmaker at the Technicolor Cow to try on her graduation dress that a defrocked Lutheran minister had made from pale orange reconstituted polyester. It was small, like herself, an undernourished fabric but bright and gaudy. The thin woman knew all the students, and their waist sizes and their hem lengths, and when she pulled it over Nadia’s head to check the fit she whispered,

  Nadia, Nadia, fly away home.

  What? Why?

  The dressmaker pulled the dress off and wrapped it in foolscap and pressed it into her hands. Listen, listen, Child Welfare is demanding all letters and diaries from graduating Parentless Dependents. They are coming this afternoon. Right now. Have to be handed in at graduation, for job assignment.

  She had forgotten. It was a new directive. When the people at the top decided, what could you do? She asked, How do you know?

  The defrocked Lutheran minister gestured to a strange device under the counter and said, Local radio. Pirate. Go, go now.

  Nadia ran out with the package tight in her hands. She bolted past the broken ceramic particolored cow at the entrance and down the narrow streets dodging people and vehicles and street repairmen pouring tar like black hot gluten, slapping her flat oversized Mary Jane–type shoes on the pavement. She shot past a gypsy stall where candies were set out in various glass jars and a sign with a tarot deck that read:

  HOBART LASALLE, THE CONTINUITY MAN! FORTUNES TOLD, CONNECTIONS DISCOVERED!

  BACK IN 5 MINS.

  They would go through her diary, some hideous unshaven Forensics agent with vodka breath would read how she and Widdy had jammed the street water meter with a comb, how she had called Facilitator Stormond Thrum an imbecile and all the agencies bumbling corrupt liars, how the Council of the Executive was fake, how her nose was too big and nobody would ever marry her, how she loved Martin’s slanty stance and his gorgeous eyes and how she dreamed he would kiss her, how she was possessed by feelings she could never, ever, tell anybody, how the news reports were all bogus and so otherwise why did they never report on the superrich people with water gardens and refrigerators who lived in Alpine meadows or that astronauts had been abandoned on Mercury and were still alive there sunning themselves beside seas of liquid cinnabar, how she loved Widdy, her best friend, and (later) how she hated Widdy and wished Widdy would go fart peas at the moon, how she had taken her pillow in her arms and pretended it was Martin.

  Her diary would get her arrested and sent to the punishment unit of some juvenile detention facility, which they called summer camp as if everybody sang songs and danced around campfires.

  A tall man sat partially hidden by the fish shower curtain flipping through her diary. Nadia saw him down the long hall. She glided noiselessly to one side of the doorway. She heard Female Voice One on the radio say, Spring opens up with the promise of Easter and the lively humor of Alice in Wonderland, excerpts from the gripping fantasy of Lord of the Rings . . .

  The Forensics agent snarled and reached up and ripped out the wires. His lips moved as he read: Facilitator an imbecile. Nadia gasped for air and her cheeks were incandescent. News reports fake. He nodded and licked his thumb and turned a page. He was dressed in the Forensics uniform of track pants and balloon runners and a watch cap. If only she had not written all that crap, if only.

  A stack of diaries and letters spilled out on the floor. He had taken them from other PDs all over the neighborhood. Greasy filthy boor, animal, moron. She was gasping with rage.

  Then there was a man’s voice bellowing, What are you doing? What are you doing?

  Mr. Caulder stormed past Nadia into the hall, drunk at twelve noon and fed up with neighborhood watchmen and informers and petty housing rules and the lectures from sportscasters and a broken kerosene cooker; his wife sent away who knew where leaving him only her teeth, so here he was in the brain-dead world alone, drunk, half dressed and caged like a zoo animal inside his own frustrated rage.

  What are you doing, you asshole! Get out of this apartment building! Mr. Caulder’s mouth was wide open, shouting; she could see his discolored tongue and his brown, crooked teeth.

  The Forensics man looked up. Shut up, he said.

  Mr. Caulder tore the fish shower curtain out of its nails and flung it across the hall.

  Get out! It was worth it all, just to scream in some smirking official’s face, it was worth it. Mr. Caulder grabbed Nadia’s diary and threw it and then kicked the whole pile of diaries and letters into the air. Haul your ass out of here, you jackwit, you prick, you goddamned moron, reading girls’ letters, picking on women, that’s who you go after! Try me, try me!

  Mr. Caulder was incoherent with happy rage. The Forensics agent reached around to the back of his belt but when he stood up Mr. Caulder raised his fist and struck the agent square on the nose and knocked him out.

  Come and get me! Mr. Caulder shouted out the dusty window. Come on!

  Nadia had no doubt they would come and get him, but now she saw her chance and bolted down the hall, past the bellowing Mr. Caulder, grabbed her diary, and ran out of the Silver Lake Apartments, down the stairs. She made it to the littered street and as she ran she realized a thick journal was going to be very hard to get rid of. But there—she flung the whole thing into the hot tar where they were resurfacing and yelled Oops!

  She would never write anything again.

  Nadia slunk down in her seat and tried to concentrate on the tedious lesson on standard water allocations. She chanted along with everyone else: Oversupervisor five quarts a day, assistant director . . . They had finished the lecture on the Internet, that technological slum that spread pornography and lies and allowed feral gangs to gather and loot and so the agencies had to shut it down. They had heard this every year of their supposedly exclusive education. Widdy and Josie had begun to laugh again, loudly. The proctor stormed past the overcrowded seats toward them with his cane.

  Watch this, said Nadia.

  Oh, shut up, Josie whispered. Look, he’s coming. Nadia, you are always trouble. They’ll ship us off on the dead trains. Josie’s moon face was sweaty and yellow.

  Nadia stood up. Despite her tiny protein-deprived size she took on an air of authority. She became frosty and restrained.

  Thank you but I have this in hand, she said.

  The proctor stopped. In hand, he said. Oh, really.

  The packed benches of girls kept their eyes on the distant screen. The loudspeakers were now bellowing the lesson on the Urban Wars, how the chaos was finally ended by the agencies. The heat was searing.

  Yes, these girls are under tutelage supervision, Nadia said. I am with the Personal Student Observation and Auxiliary Advisement Panel. We accompany problem students and direct those with insufficient behavioral adjustment. I think we a
re quite laughed out now. She looked down at the girls with a cold and stern expression. Are we done with the hysterics?

  Yes, ma’am. They nodded and turned back to the screen.

  The gray-haired proctor in his gray uniform snorted and tossed his head.

  Then where’s your ID? he said.

  I am not required to show my ID to an education assistant, said Nadia. Go get your supervisor and I will show my ID to your supervisor.

  Nadia sat down and primly tugged at the hem of her skirt. He then told her if that was her job then please keep the students from laughing out loud during lessons. He went away and whacked somebody else with his cane. A discordant shriek of pain three rows down.

  How do you do that? Widdy asked.

  I don’t know, said Nadia. Just natural-born genius.

  The lesson on televisual values closed with the poetry quote:

  The mysterious North, perfumed like a flower,

  Silent like death, dark like a grave.

  Written by Facilitator Brian Wei

  No, it wasn’t, said Nadia. It was Joseph Conrad. And it was the mysterious East, not the North. Liars, liars.

  And so with school finished she would have to take the first job they offered, any assignment, especially since Mr. Caulder had hit a Forensics guy and her entire apartment block could be cut off, no food, no water, no hope of ever reaching Lighthouse Island.

  Dust accumulated in the innards of the mimeograph machine, on the windowpanes and sills, in the breathless spaces of the office corridors. People at their desks fanned themselves with pieces of cardboard, recycling thoughts in both words and images. How not to be cynical, how to avoid the disparaging tone, how to be sincere and inspiring, how to steal from the office; toilet paper, bug spray, extension cords. If she stole a lightbulb then she had to go stand in line at a recycle place to buy a dead one and sneak it back in to replace the live one. Life was one deception after another. Of not asking why her roommate Annalee Villanueva had not come back from her ID card renewal interview, for instance.

  And here it was Pentecost and so Big Radio would soon be into the French, starting with Les Misérables and going on to Dumas fils and Villon for whom Nadia had actually puzzled out the French, Dessus rivière ou sus estan, qui beaulté ot trop plus qu’humaine, mais où sont les neiges d’antan?, but Pentecost and then Midsummer Eve would go on without her, unheard. Nadia the Radioless.

  She acquired a suit of office clothing from a ropa usada store and washed it and took it in until she looked presentable. Little heels with rosettes and a straw hat with a bow. Her one extravagance was a pair of garnet earrings that she hoped would impart dark and passionate secrets about the world to her unconscious as she walked about the preformed concrete building with its slotted windows, beyond which the yellow air was thick with dust and flying trash.

  Nadia had started out well in Public Relations but over a period of three and a half years—about one thousand and three hundred working days—she was repeatedly demoted because she could not come to grips with Mandated Error and had also fallen into an injudicious office relationship. She had tried to get access to her records to see what the bureaucracy was saying about her, and since she was over twenty-one, in fact she was now twenty-two, she was allowed to go to the district information-storage offices a mile away, a long hot mile of walking and fighting the crowds. At one point she had a view down the street to the dry riverbed of the Missouri River, now covered with junk housing and above this a line of bluffs. The Bluffs, luxury apartments, staring down at the urban hive and its insect-people. Higher-up agency people.

  She found her way to a damp underground facility where jaded clerks sat in front of long rows of computer monitors and entered data incorrectly, mistakenly erased files, and spilled sticky lemon drink on their keyboards. When they were truly bored they invented computer viruses that produced raging fevers within the hard drives.

  Nadia realized that in this overpopulated world there had to be a hundred thousand other Nadia Stepans, that she must have some identifying code after her name. She succeeded only in seeing one blurry page on a monitor that had a handwritten note: Nadia Stepan145900SB. Somebody has improperly opened this file in an unauthorized search; time period minus seventeen years.

  That’s it! cried the creepy geek. He was threadbare and rank, and his hair was cut into ladders. You had thirty seconds! That’s it, baby!

  Nadia was reduced to trudging around the hot hallways delivering office supplies for the Veterinary Recycling Task Force PR Group. The hall paint was a lime green and the whole interior structure was shaky like her evaporating youthful years. She understood that her life was to be plotless, that nothing should ever happen. To hell with you, she thought, but she did not know who “you” might be. Some demons of fashion, the devils of chic, the people at the top who decided, a bodiless cabal.

  The Question Freak appeared once in a while on television in a neon-blue coat and orange-and-green-striped tie with round glasses, bolting through the TV studios screaming, Why do we have to suck up to supervisors? Where is here? When are the agencies going to die and leave us alone? This was supposed to be an escape valve for a negative world, but it just made Nadia feel worse, leaden and dismal.

  The sky over the city rooftops was a burnt blue month after month and year after year but Nadia had never known anything else. Her office was only five blocks from the Mermaid Arms Youth Housing units so she never went anywhere. The office drones wrote down ideas for the General Nutrition PR spots about the delicious paste made from pulped cactus, scribbling on their preformed concrete desks. It was not advisable to say “pulped cactus”; the word was “nopal.” The spots had to include the trigger words like “smart” and “green” and “healthy” and “safe” and “alternative.” Not only were animal products or the animals themselves never mentioned but the fact that they were never mentioned should not be mentioned. They had all been eaten long ago so there was no use in the public longing for, say, a dog.

  The year cycled around like a big Laundromat washer. The agencies had never abandoned Christmas and Easter and Passover and Pentecost and All Hallows Eve because they evoked strong visual images and these cheerful holidays made up for getting rid of the year numbers and maps and place names. It kept people oriented toward the perpetual present. Years were recycled instead of used up and thrown away.

  Nadia stood by her cart with dry lips, thin and small, under her straw hat her dark-red hair gleaming in knotty braids like cranberries, as they selected people for the new seminars from which people never returned. She was single and not essential but somehow they had not yet called her ID number. She had never committed a felony. Having an affair with her oversupervisor’s husband was a criminal offense of some kind but not a felony. They had taken her ID for recalibration, they said.

  At lunchtime a group of the young men sat in front of the office television to watch soccer; Nadia came to the door to see the advertisement for Lighthouse Island. A clean sea booming against rocks, drifting rain, the Slavic fantasy house with its steep roof, the lighthouse sending out beams of light into the fog, into the unpeopled waste of ocean. Tourists were shown gazing out of the lighthouse tower windows and feeding seagulls. There was a spinning sail of wind art on top of a very tall tree trunk. No televisions, no crowds, no trash. Cool air, rain. Save up your credits and go! Close to the graveyard, where the daughter of Oceanus watches over the bottomless sea.

  Nadia sat at the preformed concrete table with the note. It was written on the back of a tin can label that depicted an oyster in a sailor hat. The note said, pls send felt liners sox p’nut butter mittens pensil paper pls help send to Annalee Villanueva Girls Contemporary Dance Camp Dorm 600 Tundra Blues Ger. 22 by D. Vail he will come 2 U pls. help pls Annalee.

  Nadia raised her head to see her roommate Josie standing in the doorway to their Youth Housing apartment with that tossy-hair gesture and her
nose elevated as if she were deeply offended, Josie’s only line of defense.

  You went and ratted on her, didn’t you? Nadia stood up in her striped blanket bathrobe and bare feet like an outraged indigenous person. You thought up something.

  Oh, you’re always so dramatic, said Josie. Why do you always have to go overboard?

  But you did! She’s in detention. You wanted more room. Josie, you’re a criminal. Nadia clutched the table edge. They were all sort of socially bigger than she was, not having lost their parents until they were preteens on that awful night at Riverdale Apartments and therefore had better food as children but Nadia was an orphan born and raised. So they seemed more important than herself but she was at present furious. You’re a rodent, said Nadia.

  Josie kept on with the hair tossing and took up a box of matches. I don’t want to be friends with you anymore, she said in a punishing voice. She lifted her cool moon face with the tiny compressed features right in the middle and lit a cigarette rolled in dark brown paper. She pounced to the window where the dust from a building site drifted in. Josie said, She shouldn’t have been dating that pirate radio guy. They would have come and got all of us. She thought she was going to be some kind of underground celebrity, and we would have embarrassed her in front of all her new friends, her daring new friends.

  Nadia started to say I would like to set you on fire, but then she might be next on Josie’s list. All the years Nadia had known her, Josie had made herself at least briefly important by being offended by nearly anything and extracting apologies from people, but they had all grown wise to the apology scam and now Josie had found a new way to be important. And Nadia had to live with her. There was no place else to go in all the endless city but the housing you were assigned, unless it were alleyways or abandoned skyscrapers slated for demolition. She sat down again and put her head in her hands.