Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  But you’re not.

  Not entirely.

  The wind poured like a waterfall over the tall parapet behind their heads. From a distance the sound of a siren, a subaudial deep thumping bass. He turned to her and bent forward and reached out with one pale hand and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

  He said, What is a person going to eat on Lighthouse Island?

  Fish? Nada mentally began to go through The Girl Scout Handbook. Go fishing in the sea?

  Despite the tall parapet the wind thrashed the fronds of the potted palms. She watched them, so flexible and resilient. Now she had to raise her voice to speak to him over the noise of the fronds and the wind.

  You know nothing about the sea, he said. Or wresting provisions from nature.

  No, no. Right you are.

  Or about basic mechanics of, say, wind turbines or setting gill nets.

  No, but that’s the least important thing right now. I mean, I’ll figure that out later. I do have The Girl Scout Handbook, 1957 edition.

  Ah, The Girl Scout Handbook, he said. Amazing. Bad weather, he said. What will you do when it’s bad weather? That is, on your journey to the end of the city?

  Get under bridges? Like in Condemned.

  God save us, you’re off walking to the end of the world on the strength of information you get from television programs.

  Well, I just saw it once. I don’t watch television.

  You don’t watch television?

  No.

  Ever?

  No, it bothers me. It affects my eyes.

  James put a curled forefinger against his mouth and stared out at the city. Go on, Nadia. There’s more.

  Nadia said, Okay, here you go, so I was blind until I was six so I never watched it when I was young. I can remember hearing it. Nadia pointed to her ear with a forefinger. I remember the other kids would stop playing with me or talking to me when it came on like I was a toy they weren’t interested in anymore. And I could never understand the stories, about, like, Pepper Spray and Long John, because I couldn’t see. The television characters would all go Oh! but I couldn’t see what was happening. So I got to where I just didn’t sit and watch. But it seems to make people mad. It makes them mad that I don’t watch it. I just try to get away alone and read.

  Poetry.

  Yes. I memorized a lot.

  He thought for a moment. You said, when you couldn’t see. What happened?

  They found something to cure it. Vitamin A. I guess it’s a rare substance. And my vision goes bad if I look at the screen anyway.

  Probably better. Now that they are considering gunning people down live on camera. I suppose the infidelities of Barney and Carmen were becoming stale.

  Nadia turned her head to the city’s far-flung lights and so he saw her profile fretted by the light flutter of loose strands of her hair. Will they really?

  All too likely. He took the empty blister card and began to split off the back. He said, You might make it to Lighthouse Island. Maybe not. The real problem is what you are going to do when you get there.

  What is on the way?

  Let’s see. On the way. Well, directly north are some abandoned apartment towers. You need to get to the top and see your way ahead.

  Yes, said Nadia. Her voice was anxious. See my way ahead, I’ll do that. She watched his face. She had a feeling of suspended delight, an uncertain hope. They were actually plotting together.

  Make a map as you go.

  I already am.

  You are? Marvelous. Very good, very good, I am amazed at you. He paused. Just to the north beyond this building is an agency sector. Fairly important agency offices and homes, our parasitic privileged moiety, of which I am so far one, so there will be a lot of Forensics guards and you must get past it as soon as possible. Get on the street past the Dollar General and stay on it, that’s north. Then there are the abandoned housing towers. They are called Dogtown Towers, I don’t know why. Beyond that and near them are chemical factories, pharmaceuticals. It will smell heavy, or I should say rather bready. Don’t stay in the towers for very long. They are slated for demolition. Past the chemical factories is an industrial area. Actually, northwest. Past that are the scrap heaps, including the e-waste, and then the big field systems. If you can do twenty miles a day you can get to the interurban area in something like, well, say a month. Now say that back to me.

  To the north, a section for higher-ups, agency head offices. Get past that area ASAP. Beyond that the old housing towers, abandoned. Dogtown Towers.

  Yes, said James. If you speak with people use local names as much as possible. As if you were from there.

  Yes, I will. Then on, drug factories that smell like bread. Then industry then the scrap heaps and e-waste. Then field systems.

  That was very good, he said.

  And so what are they like? The big field systems.

  Mainly just agriculture. Dusty fields going on for miles. Convict labor. Then after a stretch of agriculture, there is more city, another gerrymander. After that some formidable mountains, mining at high altitudes. Then on the other side, more city. And so on. Then you will come to the coast. Then you will cross water. Beyond that is a rocky island in the sea. This is like a video game or a tarot reading. James leaned his head on one fist and pressed down his tie. Perhaps they are the same thing. Both based on the ancient quest theme with which I am sure you are familiar, charted out in those tattered little plot books they hand around to apprentice scriptwriters. On the way you must fall in love and be assaulted by doubts and felons. He regarded her and smiled.

  But this is not imaginary.

  No. It’s not. There are very few maps. And there are good reasons for that. Indisputable reasons. Neither you nor I made the city. I don’t know how we became so primitive. My brother is head of Meteorology and people in the other agencies think it means meteors.

  Does he go up in weather balloons? The hot-air kind. Like Maturin and Diana Villiers.

  Ah, his terrible dream, said James. Diana dying with that enormous gem in her hands.

  I was reading it in the kitchen, said Nadia. I couldn’t stop. I was crying. The semolina burned. I only found five of the books.

  James looked into her eyes; he was searching for something. The wild nighttime city shone in his pupils and it seemed to her as she watched him from the shadow of her hat brim that he was knowing and wise and would not betray her. He was a wounded person, stopped and waiting with the enormous gem of human wonder in his hands shining like the blue peter.

  He sat back in his wheelchair and said, No, not a weather balloon. He’s a pilot. Slowly he stripped out the little foil flaps from the empty blister card and put them in his pocket. I don’t know why I’m doing this, he said.

  Nerves, she said. I terrify you. I am the Rooftop Strangler.

  On the contrary. He separated the two layers of the blister card and handed her the back portion. That will get you out of this building and into almost any building and most vending machines.

  She took it and stared down at it in her hand. What? You’re kidding.

  No, I’m not. And if you’re caught with it, it will be serious trouble. I’m a techie. We do stuff like that out of frustration. When we’re bored. Those were not mints. They are a medication that I’m taking. Experimental. Possibly very dangerous but it may allow me to walk again after a fashion or perhaps not after any fashion, but actually walk. And thus my plot thickens.

  Walk again?

  I took a bad fall when I was eighteen. Maybe someday I will be able to tell you about it. He rubbed his hands together briskly to warm them. You are in serious trouble already.

  And you?

  Also. Agency politics. My arrest looms in the future but is as yet undeclared. He crossed his arms over his chest against the increasing chill of the night. I am a cripple and
a demolitions expert and I have fallen in love only once before in my life. With a nurse. She drank a great deal. She had a beautiful voice.

  She sang?

  Yes. Very old sentimental songs. “Danny Boy.” She could make it sound like “Queen of the Night.”

  Ah. Nadia lifted her eyebrows. Nothing else sounds like “Queen of the Night.” She reached out and touched his arm and then settled her hand back into her lap and finally tucked both hands into her sleeves. But she was your queen of the night.

  James smiled, a slight, glad smile. Very good. He galloped his fingers on the wheelchair arm. I have instantly fallen in love with you. I think I will marry you. I wish I could ravish you and carry you off but being a cripple this limits my options.

  Nadia paused, suspended, and finally said, You probably need a drink.

  That could be. And visual images do not quench your longing to be out of the city? Long pans over the plains of Central Asia? Captain Kenaty marching steadfastly through cannibal-infested wastes?

  Please.

  And you are determined.

  I said so.

  Nadia held the card and couldn’t think of anything more to say. If the card worked it was an immeasurable gift and if it did not it was a cruel thing to do to someone. She turned it over in her hand.

  Don’t mess with it, he said. His tie was flapping in his face. Go around the corner and there is a kind of shed for the gardener.

  You mean I could sleep there?

  With prudence. Become ratlike. And tell me your name again.

  Nadia Stepan. She got up and handed him back his wide-skirted coat or cloak.

  That is your real name.

  I think so.

  Why only think so?

  I was in an orphanage. They change your name a lot.

  He pressed his lips together and nodded slowly. Yes, they do. Odd, isn’t it?

  It is odd. There must be a reason.

  Yes. Very well. I will see to it we meet again. There will be sound tracks with stringed instruments, intimate close-ups. His plain face and thick brown hair shone with ambient light. Now he was not smiling.

  Nadia said, Okay.

  He bent his head down to look at one hand. In it he held the flashlight. He handed it to her.

  Perhaps at some time this will be a light in a dark place. Good night.

  Chapter 14

  Nadia made herself comfortable in the small potting shed. It had been built to look like some sort of ethnic-looking adobe structure with a fake tile roof. A plaster armadillo lurked near the easily opened door. There was a cot and a sink, stacked clay pots and shelves of tools, a television.

  No fear of theft or maybe a gardener was careless. The television was on mute; some panel of experts argued with one another. She threw a piece of sacking over it and then turned to the faucet and sink. It was an unregistered faucet. A sign: POTABLE. She dumped the recycled water she had got in the hotel and refilled it. There were no clicks.

  She hoped to sleep but she had James Orotov to think about. An hours-long conversation to go over phrase by phrase in her head as if it were an assigned task. To think about his competent hands and his wide smile and his thoughts and why he was in a wheelchair and what was the medication he was taking and if the card would really work and how she was to make her way thousands of miles to the northwest, to some unknown coast beyond this world in which she was supposed to be fixed for the rest of her life but she would not give in, she would not.

  He read books, he knew “Anthem” and “Queen of the Night” and had taken her arm, a warm gesture in a cold and hazardous world, and he seemed to have said he would help her. I’m an orphan, she thought. I’ll take up with the first person that comes along.

  The next morning the windstorm seemed to waft her out of the great glass doors of the old Ritz-Carlton, past the alarmed looks of the guards. She held her hat and pressed forward into the crowds and a micronation of four-story buildings, all of them fairly new and exactly alike. It was the higher-up sector James had told her about. The streets were pleasantly uncrowded. Large glass windows looked out at Nadia stalking forward with her skirt flattened on her thighs and her big tote bag nearly torn from her grasp. She held her hat under her arm. There was no way to keep it on her head. A car big enough for four people glided past on thin tires, its brasswork gleaming, and the people inside stared out at her as they rolled down the street through the hard wind that blew dust from under their tires and on ahead of them. The man driving wore a uniform. Agency higher-ups.

  Each building was a dark sand color with a small entranceway and upper stories projecting out a few feet into the street, brass nameplates. Doormen or guards shrank back into the entranceways and stared at her as she walked past but they did not want to stand out in the terrible wind with its ammunition of sand grains and try to hold her ID in one hand and shout over the noise of the windstorm. The large windows were tightly shut, which meant there was air-conditioning inside.

  She felt innocuous in her office dress and her small heels. Her feet burned on the narrow sidewalks that were now like rivers of hot running dust. Once in a while she saw someone look out a window and then turn away as if revolving in a bell jar. A man in a suit and tie, two women drinking something from shining tumblers.

  The windows were gleaming clean, which meant they were allowed enough water to wash them. They would have moved up far enough to have flowerbeds in boxes (succulents only). A water feature in the hall; two gallons recirculating, battery operated. Eastern Tranquility with two three-and-a-quarter-inch chimes. Desert Spring with redstone basin and washable freestanding leatherette lizard, Woodland Pool with plastic water lilies.

  The thought of water features made her swallow and at last she knew she had to step into one of the set-back entranceways for a moment and get her breath. Her thoughts were on James and his sharp, inquisitive face and his hand on her arm. She wanted to think about him. She wondered why he had fallen, from what, why. She wished she had kissed him. At present he seemed unreal. Their entire rambling conversation in the dark seemed unreal. But he had said there was a genuine, physical Lighthouse Island, that she could get there, that he would see her again but on the other hand she had an orphan’s heart and was so often and so willingly deceived.

  She bent her head and groped into a foyer.

  The doorman stared down at her and touched his hat while the deafening windstorm shot errant papers down the street and made high-pitched noises at the window frames.

  ID? he said in a loud voice.

  I don’t want this address, said Nadia. I am just getting out of the wind.

  Yeah, it’s bad. He glanced at her clothes and shoes and her tote bag. Where are you going?

  Office of Deregulation and Reassignment, she said. Actually, just the PR department. It’s just ahead.

  Why are you walking?

  Well, she said. The brass plate said that the building contained several councils on assessment of subsurface Kelvin waves; other councils on assessment of the results of neighborhood disbursement of weed control chemicals. Everybody in there assessing away all day long like a lot of maniacs. She looked up at the man and said, I’m not important enough to send a car for.

  No pull, eh?

  None. Aren’t there some empty old apartment towers on ahead, here?

  The guard gave her a suspicious look. He put his hands to his face and wiped grit from his eyes. He had a tattoo on his forearm that showed beneath the white shirt cuff. Spider legs, apparently.

  I don’t know, he said.

  All right, well, back into the wind.

  Just a minute. What do you do for Deregulation?

  Nadia paused. Well, actually I do dressmaking and alterations and Mrs. Flent wanted me to come to her office.

  Alterations for who? The guard stared at her. It was because she asked about the empty tower
s. She should have kept her mouth shut.

  Uniform supply, she said. She reached out and touched the man’s lapel. His uniform was dark blue with sky-blue piping and on one lapel the piping was loose. You see there, you’re coming undone.

  His face hardened and he struck down her wrist. Get your hands off me, the guard said. Who do you think you are?

  Nadia turned and plunged into the torrent of wind.

  She passed five intersections and just beyond the fifth one she saw a very broad entranceway with a brass plate that said: DEMOLITION AND CARTOGRAPHY NO ADMITTANCE. A wheelchair ramp led from the street alongside the steps.

  She stopped. Was this James’s office? Was that possible? On both sides of the entranceway were long windows, black as petroleum. Nadia stepped inside the little foyer and beat dust and sand from her hat and her face. There was no guard.

  She wanted to see James in the daylight, to find out if he would pretend not to know her or would touch her arm and quote some line of poetry or hand her a map of the heavens, an astroscape that everybody could see over their heads every night of the world and in which an infinite geography offered itself to those who lived inside tiny apartment rooms and were trapped inside the canyons of streets. Here, he would say. He would hand her an open book. These are the stories of the stars. Heroes, heroines, enormous wild animals, pursuits, recognitions, courage and nobility and incomprehensible plots.

  The door opened.

  Get out of here, a man said. He wore a heavy wool suit with thick, brass-rimmed goggles hanging down around his neck. Get out of this foyer.

  She ducked out and back into the windstorm and walked on.

  The demolitions had all begun at the same time all over the continental city when it was clear there was no longer enough water pressure to pump water up twenty, forty, fifty stories. There had still been some open countryside a hundred and fifty years ago, when the city could build vertically, but now the upper stories were far too high, and water could neither be pumped up nor carried all that way by hand. And at the same time the rains disappeared and the lakes and reservoirs were emptied. Rivers became dry highways. The pumps choked and struggled and failed. All over the universal city people in high places opened their faucets to a weak dripping. So the skyscrapers had to go, in spectacular implosions, dust clouds, massive collapses of the architecture of previous centuries, which was not all that interesting anyway.