Then the doors of her car opened and the automated voice declared, We are cleaning the northbound make sure all personnel are absent remove all personnel the northbound is now going through the cleaning and disinfecting process remove . . .
She leaped for the platform and landed awkwardly, turned her ankle, and got up and ran limping down the platform. She swallowed repeatedly. An ochre mist ballooned up and drifted while music from the loudspeakers blasted out “Not Dead Yet” by a group she hated.
The gelatinous mist lagged behind her like an assailant. She was in a high-ceilinged tunnel lit by a few electrical bulbs in a long diminishing procession and far down the tunnel were great open spaces carved in the earth full of pallets of boxes and bags. The famous food storages. She heard footsteps, stopping, starting, running for a few yards. Stopping. Nadia wept and wiped at her nose and mouth; all her bodily fluids seemed to be leaking from her eyes and nose. Don’t let me throw up. She ran on.
She ran limping but thought of turning around and grappling with him. Fighting with him. She could throw herself at him, take off one of her heels, and smash his face. She dropped to a slow jog and turned a corner and came to a hub where tunnels led off in different directions. Set in a rough cast-concrete wall was a bank of elevators facing her with scarred metal doors. Lights flashed over the doors: numbers.
She pushed the up and down buttons on every one and then darted down a tunnel. Flattened herself against the damp, rough wall. She took the shoe from her painful right foot.
In the silence the elevator doors wheezed open and then shut again. She waited with her shoe in her hand but when she no longer heard footsteps she knew that he had got on one of the elevators. Nadia put her shoe on again and continued on down the left-hand tunnel, limping and stinking of chemical.
Sometime later she found herself in an enormous cafeteria.
People in coveralls ate from metal dishes and slammed trays down on a long counter that seemed to stretch into infinity. They ate as if it were a job of work, as if they had been assigned this task of shoveling pasty food into their mouths. There were no windows.
The ceiling was low and the cafeteria was lit by hanging lightbulbs as large as balloons. Nadia was still underground and she had no idea how to get out. How to get back to street level. A buzz of conversation hovered over the great open space, the sound of thousands of spoons and forks striking metal plates, the cooks all up and down the line arguing and shouting at one another along with the occasional loud complaints of men and women dressed in various sorts of working clothes.
Overhead, on every wall, hundreds of television monitors were cluttered with images of freight-hauling trains coming in and being unloaded, trains running under the nozzles of spray, numbers in a crawl along the bottom. The cars were all open, nothing more than flatcars with sides one or two feet high, filled with sacks, boxes, bundles.
Nadia strolled up to the hot tables and peered at the dishes that were offered as if she were about to choose one. She glanced at all the people; no one was dressed as she was, in office clothes.
She couldn’t just go up to somebody and say, How do I get back up to street level? They would say, Who are you? Where’s your ID card? What are you doing here?
Then again, maybe not. She stared at compartments of smoking mashed potatoes. Nobody ever got down here without some kind of special worker permit. It would not occur to anyone that she had jumped down a demolition hole to get here.
A cook came up to the hot tables with a cart of food. He began to ladle some kind of lentil dish into a compartment. He glanced across at her and lifted his nose in the air and took a deep breath.
Woo hoo, you got caught on one of the disinfectant trains, he said.
Yes, said Nadia. Yes, I did. It’s actually making me feel kind of sick. She stood unsteadily on her thin ankles and opened her dress-top collar. Then all the monitors went dark. It might mean something was going to happen here and she felt even more desperate about getting out, up to the street. It might have been because they didn’t want anybody to see the prisoner trains.
Okay, sweetie, have some lentils.
Other cooks and cooks’ helpers pushed past him with carts, up and down the endless line of counters. The overhead bulbs shone in a long planetary array. On a screen up on the wall Imperial Rebels was on; the men were arguing about whether to go toward the distant mountains or turn south.
No. I need fresh air. She put one hand on the steel counter and dropped her head. I feel faint. I feel like I’m going to pass out.
Woo hoo, don’t do that! Are we short of fresh air down here? Yes, we are; it is a known fact the ventilation is never up to regulations for worker health and safety. He leaned forward and pitched the last of the lentils into the compartment. It sucks.
I need to go the short way to street level, she said. She clutched both hands around the straps of her tote bag, a dried-out and exhausted microwaif.
Woo hoo, is there a short way to street level from here? Yes, there is and is it known that the cooks use it all the time, and do we let a special few use the short way to street level? Yes, we do, give us a kiss or two and I’ll get little raggedy-ass Bennie to take you there.
Go to hell, she said. I’d rather faint right here. She gripped the counter edge. Or throw up.
He looked left and right at all the hurrying busboys and the people standing with their trays and metal dishes. He flipped up a section of counter and said, Duck in here.
Hundreds of people in the cafeteria lifted their heads and glanced at the darkened monitors, and then at one another, and then turned back to their food. There was a sudden silence.
Come on, the cook said.
I mean it, said Nadia.
Me too, the cook said. Hey hey, we’re harmless. He waved a soupy dipper at her.
Nadia slipped in through the open section of counter and shrank away as the cook took her arm.
Be glad you aren’t on one of those trains, he said. Bennie, you little shit, take this citizen to the cold-box elevator.
Chapter 9
A nightjar sang out with a throaty, bulbous noise, darting about in the air over the city. Nadia sat in an alleyway and listened to a television. Heavy music with a deep, bumping beat. Somebody’s coming, over the sea . . . The crowd of people inside the apartment were trying to sing along with it but they only made distressed sounds until they came to one of the exclamations that they remembered and then shouted it out. Deep black! Deep black sea! Probably they had already drunk their evening ration of water and eaten their supper and had brought out the vodka. It was time for the story of Adrian’s Atoll and all his troubles.
Nadia listened in perfect, ratlike silence. She was relieved to hear the people inside speaking as she spoke, and watching a familiar television program. She had come so far, but it was not over. Adrian baby, do you love me too?
Adrian had survived alone on the island for months when three other people washed ashore on a raft made of steel barrels and some kind of floor from an old house. New people; conflict, arguments. They all had to work together to dig for water and build shelters. There was a tiger lurking on the island and Nadia remembered how Josie and Widdy had relished the close-ups of the tiger’s beautiful face with the sea lights reflected in his eyes, and behind him the blurry, waving green vegetation and the roaring sound of the dirty, unresting sea. The show confirmed Nadia’s view of the world, the ancient view of Earth as a planetary bathtub with a large, careless child splashing around in it.
She did not really understand how she had become friendless and alone on the street yet again in this stupid repetitive way when she considered that other people had friends, specifically a haughty wicked bitch like Josie. Finally she decided it was the reading. All those novels, all that poetry, the romantic notions and regrettable hopes. Because Nadia was an orphan, shifted from one family to another, she never knew how to behav
e and so adopted one fervent heroine after another as avatars, and so here she was, a fervent heroine, in flight.
What if I lose myself? she thought. Totally? For a second a kind of terminal emptiness opened up at her feet, a cold orbit.
But then the moon came up, a thin curve, its deep blue heart like a darkened spirit held in waiting and it shone down in the narrow space between the buildings. As always the moon had some business of its own, far above the infinite, crowded city, some task to do with the concealment or the enlargement of its soul. Stars trailed after it but they were hard to see. She looked for the Chair and the Dipper to tell her where she was going—north. She was going to Lighthouse Island, with its tall wooden Russian-looking theme-park house, a damp rain forest and long rays of light from a tower, great glassy breakers pouring over rocks. I have somewhere to get to, she thought. Other people don’t. When she got to Lighthouse Island she would become herself.
At first light she drank most of Joe Fineman’s water, splashed some on her face and dried off with her handkerchief, ate the last of the Quench candies, and brushed all the weed leaves and dust from her skirt with the Day-Glo pink feather duster. Then she walked out of the alley with a bright, springing step despite her swollen ankle and on down the street as if she were on her way to some employment. She was, actually; and that was to make herself a map. That was her employment. She was self-employed.
She was very thirsty and she had no idea how far she had come on the underground train, but it had seemed to go very fast. She had slept several hours. She had traveled many miles to the north and maybe she had outstripped the arrest crew. Just out of nowhere they wanted to kill you yet kept everything so tidy and quiet. But I’m perfectly good! Nadia thought this desperate thought behind her street face. Why waste my life? I can think and talk and do stuff, I have great teeth, really good peripheral vision. But millions upon millions had thought similar things and were extinguished anyway. She was still free, still at large, and if she could reach that wilderness place of green and sea she would not waste her own life or anyone else’s either. In spite of the hot street and the thick crowds and hunger and thirst the world lay open before her. Her life was in her own hands like an egg and we all have only one each and so we are obligated to save it if we can.
She had to be cautious and appear perfectly at home. A clandestine life, an existence of secrecy and fraud. Hard work ahead. But she could do it. She was young and strong.
She came to a wide street full of people on foot and bicycles and motorbikes and buses and Buddy cars. They were all dressed more or less like herself and she felt a great relief since she had come so far in the underground and who knew how people might dress in this far place, what language they might speak? But here they were, just like her, recipients of the global culture. Like Alice she had fallen down a hole in the earth but unlike Alice she had emerged into a perfectly familiar overcrowded world and it was herself that was strange.
The sidewalk glowed with reflections from broken glass and a sun that hung huge and red over the street-canyons. She and the others hurried on in a crowded, sweaty herd. Overhead a great billboard urged people to save up their credits and apply for a luxurious sea cruise. A flight of sparrows flew like darts past the digital palms and lagoons.
She walked on. In her head the comforting sound of Male Voice One, memorized, internalized, familiar: Here we are at the beginning of autumn when the season turns and the leaves take on color. This is the season for the classic works of Spain and the unforgettable explorers’ tales. Let us begin with Blood and Sand.
She came to a man squatting beside his motorbike with a screwdriver in one hand performing some kind of furious surgery on the little engine. Vendors with green-and-yellow flags had set up in the abandoned storefronts; a child selling shriveled beets chewed gum in one and in another a woman had fired up her butane cooker and was making fry bread for sale.
Good morning, Nadia said. Excuse me. She smiled and hid her dirty nails by grasping her tote bag.
What? He turned his head up to her and then went back to unscrewing the bolts that held the motor to the frame. He wore a jacket and tie and kept slapping the tie out of his way. What do you want?
What’s the name of this street?
He paused in his work. Why don’t you know it? He turned to look up at her again.
My agency was moved to around here. They just left us to find our own way to the new offices.
He untied his tie and drew it off and stuffed it in his pocket and then he went back to his work. People hurried past them and bumped into her; excuse me, excuse me.
Oh yeah? What agency is that?
Personnel and Supply for Animal Control. They just put our office equipment in trucks and went off and left us to find our own way.
Animal control. Hmm. He nodded and slapped his hands together to knock off the engine dirt. What animals?
Ah, pigeons, I think.
Why did they move?
The copy-room ceiling fell in. Right on top of the watercooler. Twenty gallons gone to waste! She waved one hand in astonishment.
Well, whatever, he said. They say this is Farragut Street.
Oh, thanks. And so, does it go north? Nadia turned to stare up the street.
North? He sounded incredulous. North?
Just wondering. She never should have said the word “north.” Stupid, stupid. She must not be stupid.
I have no idea where north is. The man started the motorbike and kicked up the kickstand and roared off. Nadia walked over to the fry cook and paid two pennies for a cup of hot citrus drink and put a penny in the bribe cup. She sat down on a little stool to drink it, slowly.
The fry cook was queenly in her primitive kitchen, serene, her green-and-yellow flag flying, her permit number painted on the wall and the wonderful smell of crisping fry bread and sugar powder. Her battered wooden TV monitor sat precariously on a shelf, jumping with faded colors. A man that the crawl said was the director of Gerrymander Eleven was complaining about the Young Men’s Rioting Association. They were rioting because Captain Kenaty of Imperial Rebels had been killed. The director said they might write him back into the script as a concession. The bad color made the director look as if he had red teeth.
Oh, shut up, great director asshole, said the little cook. She took two pennies from an old man for a small cup of tea. To Nadia she said, Get up, let that old man sit down.
Of course! Nadia sprang to her feet and the old man seated himself slowly, all his joints creaking.
What’s he on about? the old man asked. When’s Easy Money?
Soons he shut up, said the woman. Big-talking asshole director.
The fry cooks affected a sort of pidgin English in order to seem foreign and mysterious, as if their fried snacks might be redolent of the spices from some exotic cuisine. They also seemed to say anything they thought without fear of arrest or water cutoff.
Overhead the rickety sound of a hang-glider motor, gnashing along like a sewing machine with a day-flight watchman in it looking down. He might have a list, a flyer with her picture and her name on it.
The man with the motorbike was walking back toward the little cook shop, talking to a watchman who walked alongside him. Nadia froze, but then something fell out of a window overhead and struck the street. It was a can of some kind of porridge slop and the fry cook and several other people screamed up at the window. The porridge fanned out in a sort of mushy star all over the sidewalk. The motorbike man and the watchman stopped, caught up in the argument and the mush. Nadia gave the cup back and hurried on with her hat down over her face, blending into the heavy crowds.
After several blocks the avenue devolved into a slope that allowed her to see a long way. A vista. She gazed out over the massive smoking hive that was the city and all the world, a kind of gray silicate crystallization going on into infinity. It had to be a universe constructed by so
mething other than human beings; people were only minute units in the dry passageways, a hive in the middle of the waterless world.
Nadia could see some kind of center below, a knot of tall buildings. Probably a group of high-up agency office towers because clearly the great buildings had enough water pressure to go all the way to the top floors. The tallest building’s outer skin was made of glass, iridescent from long exposure. Much of the glass had been boarded over, with air-conditioning units sticking out.
If she could go up to the roof of that building she could see a very long way. She could plan, think ahead, and even draw a map in her notebook and so she stood primly in the hot sunlight, outwardly calm, with audacious plans developing in her head. She would continue walking north, making a map as she went. She would bequeath that map to generations unborn, who would revere her memory. She would secretly insert herself into the future.
A group of people stared up into the sky and pointed at a jet trail. So Nadia stood with them and said, Oh, wonderful, awesome, and it was indeed an entrancing thing to see the minute silver jet spouting vapor from two engines like a depth charge launched into the latitudes.
One of the men said in an authoritative voice that it was going northwestward and so it was probably the Facilitator going off to smooth things out with the great northwestern gerrymanders and everyone around said, Yes, right. He’s gone to see about the big water pipeline from the northwest. Yes, yes.
After a few moments the jet was lost to sight and left behind an expanding cloudy path blown into segments by high-altitude winds. Northwestward, thought Nadia. Farragut Street seemed to more or less go in the same direction. Notes for a map.
Two neighborhood watchmen came up and said, What’s the problem here?
Everyone said, Nothing, nothing, and hurried on.
Lighthouse Island Page 7
