Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  The giant forwarding pumps were allowed to operate under high pressure only for socially significant units such as conference hotels and vacation events, for instance Cantrell Falls and hotels like the Ritz-Carlton. From time to time some rain fell and fizzed on the hot pavements and rooftops and made amazing evaporation hazes that the crowds of the overcrowded city stared at in wonder.

  Big demolition jobs required weeks of paperwork and mass arrests of citizens for water theft to make up the removal crews not to speak of the initial steps of vermin removal and shutting off the electricity, if there was any, and pulling out the water pipes. Computers only complicated things as they were old and given to crashing. The ranks of geeks in the Western Cessions, what was left of the USA, had thinned and dwindled along with the available computers. The factories to make new ones no longer existed. Because of the Urban Wars there were no longer any bridges over the Mississippi and so, given the disappearance of history and maps and old place names, the two halves of the former USA mostly forgot about each other.

  The few computers that Electronics Supply managed to assemble were allotted only to Forensics and to some higher-ups like James, which made his work seem important, whether it was or not. The net connections were called backbones and tapping into them took some effort. James often thought of these backbones as somewhat like his own, missing essential ganglia and constantly misfiring.

  After a number of decades Demolition developed an impetus and a rationale of its own and went on as if the agency wanted to blow up the infinite city itself. People were evacuated in the millions and sent to live somewhere else like the erstwhile floods of evaporated rivers.

  Cartography remained an appendix agency that lived only on paper and in the minds of a few hobbyists like James. They called themselves the Royal Cartography Society and communicated by locomotive post and sometimes, when they could attain an hour or so on a computer, through the old Fido network. They were not resurveying, but dedicated to pulling together old topographical maps.

  It was decided among them that the society would leave everything in the Eastern Cessions to someone named Charles Varner. For James it was to be the Missouri River from Portage Des Sioux, where it joined the Mississippi, to its source in Montana. He knew very well that the society made him feel that he was part of a band of brothers doing something slightly illegal, something a bit risky, even though he was confined to a wheelchair.

  Lewis Thayer was taking the Colorado River and the four hundred miles of agricultural land between Kansas City and Denver. The two cities had nearly merged but the Department of Hydration and the Department of Nourishment and Cleansing had kept them separate with violence, forced removals, and hundreds of thousands of acres of wheat, soybean, beets, quinoa, and barley, and hundreds of square miles of dense workers’ barracks. The Ag Department, by now reduced through purges, imprisonments, and defunding, could only lend trucks. The Colorado had led Thayer to the empty riverbed of the Rio Grande and thence to the shrinking Gulf of Mexico.

  James had fallen deep into the privacy of maps. The Royal Society of Cartography and their salvaging of old maps was not important. Nothing would ever come of it. It was only a hobby. But in some far future surviving Homo sapiens might need these ancient skills. The mark of civilized persons. James was glad to leave the eastern rivers (the Connecticut, the Hudson) or any of the extremely complicated rivers of the southeast such as the Tennessee or the Yazoo to others. He was happy with the Missouri River because it seemed like a frontiersman of the old stories, clearheaded and resilient, striding through broad plains and all the descending breaks.

  James placed a tablet of the PTEN deletion dosage in his mouth and tipped up a bottle of Fremont Glacier Water to wash it down. The bottle was supplied with its own koozie in braided colors. He spun his wheelchair and rocked back and forth a few inches in front of his office windows with the tumbler in his hands. On the other side of the blackened glass a windstorm churned sand and dust through the streets, a young woman struggled head-on into it with a hand on her hat. A guard sheltered in an entryway with his coat collar up, watching.

  James wheeled himself back to his desk and laid aside the portfolio of hand-copied maps and took up a large telephone handset, dialed a long series of numbers, and placed the handset facedown on the coupler. His addresses came up, green on the black monitor. He began to look for what information was available on Nadia Stepan. There was not much. She had apparently reached the Ritz-Carlton from two hundred miles to the south, where her office and residence were listed in Neighborhood Seventy in the Eighth Gerrymander. That had been, at one time, Kansas City but was now thousands of square miles of habitations stretching in every direction until it blended with what used to be Omaha and St. Louis.

  His radio was on; the sound was low and the tubes glowed. It was late September and so they were into the Spaniards now: Here we are at the beginning of autumn when the seasons turn and the leaves take on color. This is the season for the classic works of Spain and the unforgettable explorers’ tales.

  Male Voice One read from Blood and Sand.

  For many years past, ever since he had been given “la alternativa” in the Bull-ring of Madrid, he had always lodged at that same hotel in the Calle de Alcalá . . .

  How good it was to name the place where you ate and lived and fought with bulls. A city and a street. James listened and pulled out the original blueprints for the assisted living facility, in other words a jail, in the next gerrymander. They always shifted prisoners out of the places where they were arrested. If she were caught she would most likely be imprisoned in the Twelfth. He needed an excuse to go there. Think ahead, way ahead. The blueprints had come by locomotive post; the portfolio had the old Amtrak logo on it. James went over the jail blueprints and found the strategic points for the charges, the load-bearing walls. He had to requisition the steel-cutting torches and hydraulic excavators and when they were all in the bureaucratic pipeline it would be impossible to stop and then he and she would take flight for Lighthouse Island and the infamous Northwest, all cut to stumps and populated by brutes.

  He turned up the radio. Imagine small Spanish villages, imagine religious processions, imagine a city with taverns.

  The door flew open and his main director of agency planning stalked in.

  Ah, James!

  You were expecting someone else? James’s grip shut on the blueprint.

  The director came and stood very close to him, so close James could smell his lavender soap and his lunch breath. An angry flush rose to James’s cheekbones. He was forced to look up at the man with a craned neck like a pet of some kind. The man’s nameplate said WILLIAM CRUMM, DIRECTOR OF AGENCY PLANNING.

  James, we have an emergency, an emergency here. An unplanned emergency.

  The director always had a greedy, cannibal look to his face and deep violet rings under his eyes. The director’s dreadful smile was one with lips closed together in the middle and open at the corners which gave him a clownish aspect and behind it this lust for leaning over people, pressing on them, talking down into their faces.

  James, they are asking the last full measure of devotion from some of our employees. The director’s smile did not waver.

  Like shooting them?

  Oh no, oh no, just exile! Go away into exile in the far Northwest to work in the lumbering and turpentine! Shooting them, sheesh. Shooting them, what a thing to say, you are an asshole, James.

  James sat as far back in the wheelchair as he could. He suspected the director of actually shooting people himself. The man was running his eyes up and down James’s body and then he tore his gaze away from James’s slack and helpless legs and turned to the window.

  What do you want? said James.

  You’ve got to help me with Findlay. The director said this in a low voice and bent and laid his large hand on James’s upper arm and pressed himself close, which brought his belt buckle t
o James’s eye level. Hey? Hey? They want men from me and I’ve got to give them somebody, hey? I tried to get Findlay to go to the wine tasting but he smelled a rat. You, you’re the man with the plan and you want the Old Book Dump Jail to go, sorry, Assisted Living Facility, and so you’ve got to get Findlay to sign over his apartment to me, with the refrigerator and everything. Is he going to use it? No no. He’s old, he’s old.

  He’s not dead yet, said James. Yet.

  Ahahaha! Crumm waved that away. Now if I just took it there would be questions, undue influence, superiors taking advantage of inferiors and so on. Crum stroked the arm of James’s wheelchair. He said, I have to have that apartment. Big plans here, have to entertain. If Findlay is gone then I get his place. Findlay has this biiiiig dining table and a new refrigerator. And then I entertain the guy in Vacation Assignments, charm him, lay siege to him, and get three weeks at this new resort place in the Northwest; it’s called the Last Good Place. See, it all falls together there.

  Stand the hell back, said James.

  The director cried out, Well, excuse me! Oh my, I am being offensive to you in some way! Excuse me!

  The director stepped back one step in an elaborate gesture. His eyes were glittering and they never relaxed that hungry vigilance for a moment and James did not know whether it was sexual or an atavistic cannibalism. He had decided that if they came for him he would use the dart gun. He would force them to shoot him. Being a paraplegic in prison would mean a filthy and prolonged death.

  Is this okay? Is this okay? The director waved his hands on both sides of himself. Back here?

  Mr. Director, one of these days you and I are going to get into it, James said.

  The director ceased smiling and then came forward and ran his fingers through James’s hair. And I’ll see your teeth on the floor, he said in a low voice. And this hair stuck with blood on a club.

  Chapter 15

  James’s aging assistant shot his head around the door. He had pointy ears and spotty skin and a bow tie. He came in and shut the door and then sat down in the heavy armchair. It was ornately carved and snarled with lion’s heads and feral-looking roses. The assistant put his head in his hands and sobbed and then got control of himself and drew in a long liquid breath and cleared his throat.

  Yesterday they came and said it was a wine tasting. I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t get in the van. But I know it is just a matter of time.

  I can’t help, said James. He was still trying to overcome his ungovernable rage over the director running his fingers through his hair. That is, I am afraid there is nothing I can do. I am very sorry.

  Why not?

  They’re going to get me too. But first I want to blow up a jail. He put a hand to his tie and pulled it loose.

  They are coming! With the arrest warrant! In a few hours! The assistant clutched at his long and wrinkled face.

  Thomas, run for it, said James.

  Where? Where would I run? To some interurban slum? Pay for life’s necessities in semilegal greasy coins? Live in secondhand clothes and floppy sneakers and eat semolina?

  Yes, said James. Exactly. He reached up to a shelf over his desk to turn off the radio. Juan Gallardo the matador, a devotee of Our Lady of Macarena, both of them working class. Es ella quien nos da nuestro pan diario, said the radio and then he silenced it.

  Oh please, said Findlay.

  How about the Northwest? On James’s plain face was a thoughtful expression. He said, The city drains out there, drains away and there is only a spotty population and acres of slash and clear-cut mountainsides. Huge pulp mills. The legendary savage hippies, the state evaders.

  James, sir, stop, please. Take my wife to a place like that? We’re elderly! Do they even have running water? Television? Paved streets?

  Apparently, no. James wheeled himself back and forth. And so. What will the warrant say?

  Water theft of course, of course. Diverting for personal use, like I had a personal swimming pool! And some sexual charge, that will get people to watch. What sex charges could they make up for an old man like me? Findlay clutched his hands together and answered himself, They’ll think of something. And they are blaming us for insufficient warning time for demolitions, what else? So then it would be manslaughter. He looked up with wet eyes and finger-marks on his cheeks. But it wasn’t us! It was Removal and Public Safety!

  They’ll get them too. James held out a remote and the door to his office opened. And they’ll get me, too.

  You? Get you for what?

  Same things. And my maps. Cartographical treason would do in a pinch, I suppose. Come with me.

  James rolled out the door and into the hall and as he rolled he heard his assistant hurrying to keep up.

  James wondered what it would be like to walk alongside somebody again. Striding, pace for pace. To turn to the side to speak to someone instead of craning his head to look up at them. An injured central nervous system produced antibodies that blocked nerve repair, but the immunosuppressant he was taking prevented the antibodies from forming and allowed his CNS to repair itself. It also opened some cellular door to fevers, infections, formation of cancers, especially blood cancers. It was a race between self-repairing spinal nerves and loitering, opportunistic leukemia cells that lived in his body like rats in a multistory building. James rolled into his private exercise room.

  He placed the wheelchair alongside a leather-covered bench and grasped the supports and hoisted his hips onto the bench and then reached down and lifted his legs onto it as well, first one and then the other. It placed him so that he had to stare at the television.

  We must bring in the Council of the Executive only on rare occasions. A still shot of them came up. Ordinary-looking men in suits and ties. No one had ever seen video of them. The Facilitator and Lucienne LaFontaine-Fromm sat behind the anchor’s desk. I suppose they will have to sign off on the public execution thing, said La Fontaine-Fromm. Are they real? I am asking you before the Question Freak does. You wonder. She laughed.

  The Facilitator lifted both hands. Lucienne, we were born to image hypnosis. A gift, a ball and chain. Let’s talk about that.

  James lay down and began to buckle himself in.

  Let me help, said the assistant.

  Leave me alone, if you would.

  He lay flat for a moment and took a deep breath and then pressed buttons on a keypad and the bench began to lever itself upright with loud creaking noises. He was now in a standing position. He reached for the suspended weights and began to lift. He had always tried to keep up his upper-body strength against the possibility of arrest and being thrown in a stinking prison cell.

  What would they do? With a felon in a wheelchair? James said. No cactus farm. For me.

  A lawyer, said the assistant. He sat down on the bench of a Volta weight machine. His mind circled around his own dilemma. I should get a lawyer now. Why was I assigned to Demolition, why? It was my doom the second I got the assignment sheet. I always wanted to be a nurse. A male nurse. He ran his age-spotted hand across his bald head.

  Won’t help. That is, legal representation. James took a deep breath. Will not. Another breath. Do you any good.

  The weight cables made whining noises as they ran through their sheaves.

  James, I have come to you for help and you’re no help! The distracted assistant got up and paced the room. They are going to televise the trials! It’s going to be like Sector Secrets! My wife and grown daughters will see me groveling in the defendant’s chair!

  Yes. You will be trashed alive on-screen, repeatedly, all day long, by all the commentators, in the parallel universe. Those accused will become anticelebrities. They invented this in the old Soviet Union. James was breathing hard; it cut his sentences short. Clever bastards. Only thing they did well.

  Outside, the windstorm tore at the window frames like a burglar.

  Where
was the old Soviet Union?

  Far, said James. Very far. You can’t get there from here. They confessed. He paused, sweating, still in his open-collared shirt and loosened tie. But, after all, they were on TV. Maybe it was worth it.

  Why did they confess, for God’s sake? Findlay walked up and down making small, under-his-breath groaning noises. What was the point?

  They said they’d shoot the wife and children if no confession. And then shot them anyway. Ha ha, say the Fates. Hostages. They’ll arrest your wife, Findlay, and then you’ll confess to anything. And since you’ll be terminated the director wants you to sign over your apartment to him. He’ll promise all sorts of help but don’t do it.

  The assistant halted in midstep. Oh, oh, if that’s what he wants, he will have it! Tomorrow!

  I said don’t do it. He’s a liar and a serial killer. A bestial man. Don’t do it, do you hear me? It will get you nothing.

  I hear you, I hear you. The assistant paced around the room again as if in full flight down some narrowing alleyway. There has to be a way out of this. He stopped. Do you not have hostages?

  Hostages? Me? All I have is my brother. He takes care of himself.

  I don’t believe you, the assistant said. You have someone in secret. While I openly and publicly marry and have children. Go to all the trouble of creating and supporting hostages.

  On-screen the Facilitator said, We have no real way to change the occupant of the Facilitator’s office without violence, which is a serious structural problem in our societal makeup. I suspect my days are numbered, here on-screen. But before they get me, I’ll see that they get you.

  Lucienne smiled and gave a little laugh and her eyes darted to one side of the camera.