Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  A distant river, beyond civilization, peopled by earnest and simple villagers, a last good place. Sven had hot tea and bread brought in by a servant. Nadia thought he could probably have ordered a pizza delivered, too, with cheese and tomatoes and ground animal flesh on it. And with all this he entered the life of the river.

  Chapter 17

  In the century and a half of severe drought and wild seasonal swings between cold and heat, the Mississippi River had dwindled to a little apologetic stream and was repeatedly imprisoned behind dams all the way down from wherever it emanated from. The great swamplands of Louisiana and East Texas turned into dry palmetto scrub and thorn plains and along its lowered sea levels forests of mangrove sprang up that were then ruthlessly cut down for mariculture farms and workers’ barracks. As the water level dropped, seamounts and keys rose up out of the underwater formation known as the Mississippi Fan. Workers and prisoner-workers slid down the ropes on which kelp grew for alginate and waded in freezing salt water, in the huge grow-out ponds for shrimp, sloshing through the algae blooms. They manned the pumps for the water exchange and were driven to exhaustion on paddlewheel aerators. They lived in tar-paper barracks and ate fish food when they could steal it and boiled quinoa and corn when they could not. They dove into the Gulf’s sandy waters to repair the sea bass pens until their breath left them forever.

  The Mariculture Division of Nutrition and Cleansing considered them all criminals deserving whatever they got no matter how often the assigned noncriminal workers tried to remind their crew supervisors that they had been convicted of nothing and were not in fact prisoners, really, sir, it was their work assignment but it was like talking to a stroke victim who could not tell one hand from the other. Besides, Mariculture was trying to become independent from Nutrition and set up its own bureaucracy, its own executive ranks so it could then build its own upper-level housing on the rolling saw-grass dunes of Les Isles Dernieres, now a part of the mainland, in attractive Mediterranean-style architecture with inner courtyards, seawater fountains, tiled roofs, twenty-foot ceilings, and immense windows. The supervisors wanted to live under the fans, enjoy the soft ocean breezes, run barefoot with the dogs down the beach alongside the sea, the beautiful sea.

  Mariculture had begun to arm its own Strike Force Teams to defend its autonomy when the Red Disease broke out. Workers’ arms and legs became bright red, then they succumbed to fevers and disorientation. More than seven thousand people died and many more became unfit for work so Mariculture sent out urgent requests for fresh manpower to Forensics. Forget the ruses and cheap tricks; get them from anywhere. Impress them, seize them, arrest them if you can find an excuse, kidnap them out of Nutrition’s yeast factories or the scrap piles. Start the collection during the live executions, when people are distracted.

  In the confusion caused by this emerging local war in Gerrymander Ten, between Nutrition and Mariculture, and the useless workers’ attendance sheets since so many were dead, some people seized a boat and loaded it with stolen supplies and set out at night toward the south, where they heard lay the Islands of the Blest. There grew bananas and limes and fat rats, all for the taking, and no agencies. As they shoved off on their mad escape attempt they saw on the far southwest horizon strange-looking banks of clouds, gigantic and solid; they were lit with an interior frenzy of lightning. A few friends saw them off, whispering, Luck to you, and watched them sail out into the moon’s path on the sea, the beautiful sea.

  And so Forensics’s top offices, which lay no one knew where, wearily passed on Mariculture’s demand for at least ten thousand workers to Gerrymander Eleven Forensics and it was this slow noise of the collection buses rising in the canyon streets that Nadia heard.

  She sat at a stall in a little market area trying to buy a bottle of water. The little market area had been set up in the empty spaces of demolished buildings; awnings stretched from apartment windows and children ran down confusing alleyways.

  Around Nadia plastic buckets were stacked for sale, and chipped mugs and wooden toothbrushes. Next stall over, in the market regulator’s booth, TV voices blasted at high volume.

  All bullshit, said the woman behind the counter. Now, two pints is two quarters.

  That’s outrageous, said Nadia. She handed her the coins anyway and sat to drink down half the bottle of yellowish water. The soles of her feet were afire and there was so far to go.

  Hurry, drink, they see.

  Okay, okay.

  Nadia sipped at the water and closed her eyes for a moment against the heat and the dust. Lucienne LaFontaine-Fromm was at the news desk. This is breaking, she said. We are now broadcasting the live execution of Parsons and Gamez.

  No! The market woman turned, quickly, her spatula in her hand. From the crowded market came more shouts of No! and They can’t! And a peculiar crackling sound of laughter and catcalls. A woman’s voice shouted that there were kids here, they can’t see this!

  Nadia turned to the TV screen in the market regulator’s booth; the screen was layered with street dust and flies were crawling over it. On-screen, in colors made up of hard, glaring tonalities, two women were being led to a stack of sandbags by guards in uniforms Nadia had never seen before, high collars and belted tunics. The women were in sacklike dresses. They were fainting and stumbling. The lights were very harsh and since the women were not made up for TV their faces looked raw.

  How could they? cried Nadia.

  Right in front of everybody, said the woman behind the counter. Right in front of everybody.

  The two women flung their hands and arms up in front of their faces and then the sound of gunfire, a rapid light popping noise. The women jerked, their heads flew back and the cloth of their dresses seemed to be snatched at by invisible hands. Big dark spots appeared on their faces, they fell down and continued thrashing around. A roar rose up in the market and its little alleyways and courtyards and from the crowded street, a furious shouting. Someone scooped up a pan full of boiled oats and flung it at the market director’s TV screen.

  A crowd of people stood in front of every TV screen in the market. Something strange and malevolent had been released into this city-world, set free to travel from mind to mind like a roaming and hungry subhuman thug older than humanity. The women were being dragged away by the feet and a long gray slime from the back of one woman’s head slithered after her. A woman in a striped apron cried out, Oh my God!, but kept on staring at the screen. And all the familiar and comforting characters of the sitcoms cowered in their world of the imagination; Captain Kenaty and his heroic soldiers, Barney and Carmen with their endless domestic conflicts, the young recyclers of Early to Rise exclaiming over their treasures, all faded to insignificance beside this—real death in real time.

  Nadia poured down the rest of the bottle of yellowish water and walked away. She needed some kind of mind-wash to get the terrible scene out of her head. She pressed through the crowd and ducked into an open doorway. It was a storage room. She sat on a sack full of something lumpy and rattling and in the distance heard someone singing, or trying to sing. A bar of sunlight fell from overhead and illuminated a sparrow on a high beam with a wisp of sacking thread in its beak. It gazed down at her with a deep interest and as she watched, a falling drift of dust motes caught the hot sunlight and glittered like stars on their way to the floor. She sat with both hands open in her lap, and the sparrow made a chipping sound like a question or a series of questions.

  I don’t know, she said.

  Then she lifted her head; far down the street the roar of many large engines sent echoes ricocheting from wall to wall. Nadia quickly took up her tote bag and went out of the storage room.

  Two buses blocked off each end of the side street where the line for kerosene straggled and chatted. The hang gliders and their watchmen had spied out crowds and lines. Nadia saw the two women in spangled skirts make a run for the cab of the kerosene truck, jerk the door open, grab the
driver, and fling him onto the ground, where he was instantly grabbed by a Forensics officer. The women darted inside and hid under the dash.

  Confusion, yelling, the streets thick with running people. A Forensics cop walked around and asked in a calm voice, Nadia Stepan? Do you know this person? Nadia Stepan? They looked at ID and then jerked people into the buses by the arms, not caring that the people dropped packages and files and mail and food.

  Nadia had no idea where to run. The fry cooks had shut off their burners and fled, the market crowd began to disappear into the alleyways.

  She saw a sort of plastic box lying on the ground, dropped from the hands of some unfortunate captive, and snatched it up. It was a high-school textbook with visual inserts. She walked quickly toward the Forensics officer with an unperturbed expression.

  She said, Nadia Stepan was taken yesterday in Gerry Eight at 12:45. You can strike her from the list. Nadia flipped open the book and tapped a page. A voice said, Oversupervisors five quarts a day with twenty . . . Yes, said Nadia. Our info here says her oversupervisor has been given a bonus of five quarts a day for her apprehension. Nadia slapped the book shut. So you can take her off the run list. Nadia stood calmly in all the screaming and shouts and violence.

  Okay. The officer had tissue-engineered jaws square as a brick and eyes of two different colors and a scorpion tattoo on his neck. She saw him hesitate and so she turned and walked away down the narrow street and the biscuit-colored buildings of concrete whose dim and broken windows stared at each other across the pavement.

  A hand shut on her elbow and shoved her forward. Nadia turned. A stout Forensics officer stared straight ahead and pushed her on. His gray hair shone short and clean under an old-fashioned watch cap with a bill and his body smelled of sweat and hot uniform cotton. She started to say something, to invent an objection and a story but he said, Shut up. He was not much taller than she was and there was something about him of that proctor in high school so long ago but more unwavering and quiet.

  He pushed her into the door of a telephone exchange where the operator held her earphones in her hand with a wide fearful stare. It was a ground-floor apartment in a cinder-block building, trunk lines running down into it like anacondas. There were no lights on all the jacks of the panel and the jack lines lay loose as garter snakes with their metal noses. The primitive telephone system had been shut down. A piece of sacking had been thrown over the television. Beneath the sacking a panel of experts was discussing the bullet trajectories fired during the execution. Above them was the sound of running feet. The Forensics man sat Nadia down on a chair and reached for a spare pair of earphones and handed them to her.

  Put these on, he said. He watched without expression as she jammed them down on her head. Listen to me. Nadia pushed one of them behind her ear. The chaos in the streets outside went on and on with shouting and blasts of air horns, commands. Dust rolled in through the open door and the operator shrank back against her dead exchange panel.

  I’m listening, she said. They were both speaking in low voices.

  Stay here, sweetheart. The Forensics officer pulled a cell phone from his pocket and his eyes went from Nadia to the other woman while a drop of sweat ran down his graying temple. Stay in here. This is not how it used to be. He punched in a series of numbers and stood with an abstracted air waiting for it to ring. I remember how it used to be. Hello, Fred. I’ve cleared the telephone exchange. Two essential workers here. Leave them alone. No, I didn’t. Of course it’s an order. He clapped the cell phone shut and looked down at her. He seemed bitter and sad.

  I’m to stay in here, said Nadia.

  Yes. You fooled that young officer for about thirty seconds.

  Nadia didn’t say anything.

  Twenty-five years ago it wasn’t like this, the officer said. Our job was bad guys. We didn’t grab young women off the street to send them to the work farms. Nobody even thought of executing people live on television. He slipped the cell phone back into its holster and stared out at the street. It was something you would never even think of.

  Nadia and the telephone operator sat limp and silent with their eyes fixed on him.

  Stay in here until it’s dark, he said.

  Thank you, said Nadia.

  Can’t fight them. He shifted and his equipment rattled; the Taser, the cell-phone holster. He moved to the door and pulled down the bill of his cap. There’s this thing called Big Radio, he said. I listen to it sometimes.

  They sat without moving, wearing the headphones like black tiaras. At sundown the telephone operator took her ID out of her purse and whispered, Stay here as long as you want. I won’t lock up.

  Nadia waited for a long time, forever, for an eternity. Then she slipped out into the dark of the alleyway, dirty and exhausted. She couldn’t keep this up forever, or even much longer.

  Nadia woke up among a heap of stuffed animals: teddy bears, plush elephants, fuzzy lavender kittens, and a great many woolly dogs whose leatherette tongues spilled out of their mouths. She was catastrophically hungover.

  She was wearing all her clothes, which was a source of some comfort. She lay in the back of a trailer with her arms around a pale blue penguin. There was a view out the open back doors to a wispy cooking fire; in the cool of the early morning a frying pan was being shaken and slid about on the fire grill by one of the women in spangled tights.

  She lay and stared for long moments, remembering the labor roundup of the day before, and hiding in the telephone exchange. But after that things became very vague. There was a tiny flipper impression on her arm. She found her water bottle and drained it. Then she found her straw hat. The brim was all bent. From a distance came the sound of a factory whistle and the smell of something like collagen being cooked in huge cauldrons, a bready smell.

  Then one of the women called out, Oho! We’re awake! We’ve been talking all night and now we’re back to earth!

  Nadia said, I never left the planet. She sat up with her hair half fallen and parts of it still in the pins.

  I don’t care what he said, you aren’t working here, the blond woman said. Her ruffled and spangled collar blew around her jaws. Nadia swallowed desperately and tipped up the bottle for the last few drops. Work here?

  Now she remembered. In bits and pieces, anyway.

  Empty nighttime streets and thin colorful curtains drawn tight, gleams of light from the sides and cracks in doors. She darted out of the telephone exchange into a jumbled neighborhood with short streets that ran headlong into one another in the dark. Sometimes there were anguished cries from a window overhead, Hush, hush, we’ll find where they’ve taken her, but then she heard the same voice a block down the street saying I’ll make it up to her and realized it was Barney and Carmen. Everyone had their TV audios as high as possible and were probably whispering behind the noise. From time to time people hurried past her with their heads down.

  At last she came out on a wide street that ran between a factory on one side and ruined houses on the other. There were lights among the foundations. People were living in there. She hurried on and tried to get the desperate look off her face and to appear unconcerned.

  From the factory she could smell the odor of chemicals and something muzzy and cooked like a petri dish solution. Ahead were the lights, moving around like ghost-dancers in the foundations of the partly demolished buildings. Various sorts of wallpaper still clung to vanished bedrooms and piping stuck out of the walls and there were pale squares where pictures had hung.

  In this space the circus people were setting up. One woman was filling the kerosene lamps from her glass jug. Two others were erecting tents made of enormous used vinyl advertising wraps that had been stripped from billboards. A skateboarder’s runners and giant skateboard wheels were propped up by poles. In front of this it said Zoo. The women were singing, a capella and in three-part harmony:

  Going to the chapel and we’re . . .
gonna get ma-eh-eh-ried . . .

  Another giant billboard wrap, used for a second tent displayed three women in a Buddy car holding up bottles of Fremont Glacier Water. Over it a glittering announcement:

  CONTINUITY MAN! ZOO! FORTUNES DIVINED!

  The Continuity Man stared out from under the blond, colossal heads of the women drinking Fremont Glacier Water and picked his teeth. The lamps shone upward on his face. He said, Here’s one they didn’t get.

  Two neighborhood watchmen strolled down the street. Nadia turned and gazed around herself in a mild and vaguely interested manner. For a moment she wondered if it were another ruse. Then she took a chance and ducked into the Glacier Water tent.

  The Continuity Man said, You got away and now you don’t know where you’re going, do you?

  Well, actually, I’m looking for somebody, said Nadia.

  This is where he is. The Continuity Man glanced at her and then at the watchmen. You found the place. He was wearing a dusty dark suit and a metallic green waistcoat and a bow tie in lime green with white polka dots. He leaned over and spat the toothpick on the ground.

  It occurred to Nadia that these people were travelers; they had official permission to travel. They would have rumor and information and stories of distant places. She needed information as much as she needed shelter and food and rest. She could pretend to be part of the group and evade the neighborhood watch and buy another day of freedom under the hot sun in this baked and flattened world.

  Well, good.

  Yeah yeah. You just come along here and we’ll give the fighting gopher and the Ph.D. pigeons their dinner and then I’ll tell you your continuity and all about who you are looking for truly in your tricky little subconscious thingie.