He handed her the feed sack and then dragged out a jug of water that said ANIMAL HYDRATION LICENSE #99401.
Nadia quickly memorized the license number, for no reason she could think of. In the dim kerosene lamplight inside the vinyl tent the pigeons sported dyed tufts of feathers on their skulls and bright paper collars. Nadia let the grains spill out of her hands and watched with deep interest as the birds thudded and hammered at the feed with their beaks. Above her the vinyl wrap lifted and sighed in the evening wind.
You tell me who you think you’re looking for. The Continuity Man turned to the cages with the gophers. A hand-lettered sign said, THE SIAMESE FIGHTING GOPHERS! Never mind. Why don’t I stop asking. Those labor roundups just send people running anywhere.
The Continuity Man reached into the cage and picked up the gopher and struggled him into a tiny pair of World Wide Wrestling trunks of gold-and-purple satin and then turned to her. And you, you’re not in the mainstream, you’re out of the common herd, girl. You’re at sea on the streets, lost in the alleyways of the agencies. He leaned close to her in his dirty tuxedo. It smelled like sweat and tobacco.
Nadia said, I see you have deep insights into people. She had never seen a gopher. She waggled a finger between the cage wires to attract the gopher but he wasn’t having it and instead buried his face in some leafy stuff, a true wild animal humble among the beet tops with tiny hard paws. Somewhere there was a gopher heaven of jumbled rocks and succulent roots but this wasn’t it. His satin trunks writhed. Next door Thelma’s lower half was splendid in scarlet and yellow. She stood up in all her unkempt fur, her tail emerging from a hole in the trunks, and lifted both minute paws to Nadia.
Nadia, Nadia, be kind to those who are in prison.
Chapter 18
Nadia looked down at the cards: the Lovers and the Hanged Man, a generic Facilitator with a sheaf of reports as the Prophet.
Which I have to have your name to tell your continuity, now we escaped the impressment gang.
Frances, she said. Frances Lymond. Wait. How much does this cost?
Not a dime. We get grants.
They sat on either side of a table with a kerosene lamp between them. The vinyl wrap lifted and fell with the hot nocturnal wind and scattered shadows. His hands were calloused and battered, and he had some kind of tattoo on his wrist, a series of bars that said he had come out of some hard-rock life into this one, much easier, requiring only charm, which he did not have.
Now here is the Popess or the Popette who descries your earthly circuit, he said. You at one time met a man who will reenter your life very soon. All is not lost. At one time you were wearing a blue dress. You got to wear the same blue dress in your next scenic appearance. This would be on the stage set of your life when this bozo you met some time before shows up again stage left. I see a continuity stream of eyes, Frances. Watching you like an informer. Streams of eyes, here.
Surely not, she said.
Yeah, yeah. Calm down. They ain’t coming back. He grinned at her and outside the women laughed and banged pots and pans on the fire. The Continuity Man dropped another card. So here you have the thousand-yard stare, the hairy eyeball, the evil eye, mal de ojo, the demon glare and so on. Dries things out. The Demon Glare desiccates. He pulled at his bow tie. I look these things up in a thesaurus, he said. Lydia found one in a paper bale. It only goes to T. She also found me a book of well-loved clichés. He dropped another card. It displayed an eye staring out of the palm of a hand. Don’t ask me, I just take the cards as they fall, hey? It’s weird how they kind of make sense after a while.
Nadia looked back at the eye on the tarot card and then she lifted her head and tried to smile.
And you, she said. You all just travel around freely.
Lydia. He rolled and lit a cigarette. She does the talking, gets the travel permits, thinks up stuff. Why? You’re kind of strange, girl. Like out of nowhere. He picked up the cards and began to shuffle them. Most people have made it home and they are hiding out. I bet they’ve got blankets thrown over the TV. Afraid of what they might see next.
Nadia regarded her new hand of cards. The Hermit stood barefoot and cowled in the dark of the night with a five-pointed star gleaming in his lantern and he was thin and starved for life in the third dimension. This snowy and solitary monk would be in her future or he had been in her past. It’s Thin Sam, she thought or wished. And so what have you seen in your interesting life?
Lighthouse Island, the Continuity Man said. He snorted smoke.
Nadia lifted her head and her mouth was slightly open. She tried not to appear startled and was, briefly, successful. She closed her mouth. No kidding, she said.
He glanced up at her and saw her sudden interest. There you are, he said. Now this is the important part of your continuity, this right here is in your stars. You got to go there and light up the lighthouse light before you get caught and sent to the Upper Tundra Zinc Mining Units.
I do?
Yah.
But you were really at Lighthouse Island?
Yep-per. He shifted the cards in his hands. There were deep lines in his face from dehydration. He pulled the bow tie loose.
One of the spangled women bent over and came into the vinyl-wrap tent.
Lydia, he said. This is our only customer. Wine for my men!
Lydia ducked back out under the great red fingernails and came back in with fried potatoes wrapped in newspaper and a bottle of vodka and a grim look at the Continuity Man with his loose bow tie and dirty collar and his attempts to be a mysterious wizard of arcane knowledge.
Nadia lifted the cup and poured down the vodka and was instantly drunk. The lines containing the extravagant, garish figures on the cards threatened to double and triple. The Hermit now had two heads and several hands. I, uh. She stifled a hiccup that had lodged somewhere behind her sternum. She said, It’s up in the Northwest. The savage hippies of the Northwest.
He nodded and drank and rolled his eyes. That’s what that TV program says. A lot of damn cannibals up there with No Farting tattoos and so on. Now, Frances, let me tell you something. The world is hard and crazy and there isn’t no sense in nothing, so people look for continuity and hope in the weirdest places. You’re a PD and desperate for love and kindheartedness and courage and all that. What I see here is your boyfriend has thrown you out and you missed getting picked up by a hair. But a miss is as good as a Mrs., hey?
Is that who is up there? Really? She stared at him with a grim look, determined.
Up there? You mean onshore?
Well, yes.
He shrugged. People with weird names. Chan the Uncanny. There’s a Captain Gandy, got an illegal ship called the Bargage Maru. I don’t think he’s been eaten yet. Salvage rats and these dirty kind of villages on the coast.
You’re a world traveler, she said. She tried to look admiring.
Yes, he had traveled far distances, and not first class either. The Continuity Man had fallen afoul of a supervisor and had been sent by a judge to work for Primary Resources, worked on a factory fish processing unit that fished along the coast near the real Lighthouse Island. Long pause. He had seen boats bringing food supplies there, and a lighthouse tower without a light. There was also a wind turbine, blades still whizzing around. A power source for something. So there. Is that what you’re trying to find out about?
Well, yes, said Nadia. And, ah, your career in, like, fish gutting.
The Continuity Man shuffled the tarot cards and said that the processing barge he had been sent to, they fished for salmon, halibut, cod, anything that could be reduced to small pieces and canned or dried and then abandoned by the ton since distribution was left to the mentally challenged. Tons of canned fish rusting because they can’t get their effing paperwork straight. Primary Resources sucks. Another considering silence, a kind of barely revealed hurt came over his lined face. It lasted only a second
but it was about a full-grown man reduced to small pieces and then abandoned. It is a big sea up there and a long way away. Years away, and there were three or four other cities or maybe nations between here and there and it had taken him two years to make it back to here and he’d hiked along like a zombie. Living on whatever came to hand, but in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is, you know, shit out of luck.
Nadia said, I see. She took another sip from her refilled cup and choked again. So resourceful!
Lydia is my mermaid, rescued me from a vodka shop.
He flipped out another card. The Burning Tower, a great office tower being demolished in a controlled demolition and there were clerks and oversupervisors in suits and ties and high heels falling; a storm of paper made up of reports, assessments, minutes of meetings, directives, all snowing down on an ashy landscape. He regarded it for long moments.
Nadia asked, How did you get here?
Where?
Here. Where we are. She felt like a spy in a book, The Maltese Falcon, perhaps. And herself a beautiful redhead with a heartbreaking story. Nadia was close to being overcome by drink. She ate a slice of fried potato, carefully, with two fingers. How did you get past the savage tribes and so on? Up there? She wiped the hair out of her face and suddenly felt the cold night air creeping under the vinyl wrap with its huge red-lipped happy women drinking Fremont Glacier Water.
There aren’t any savage tribes. They like have houses and stuff. His bow tie spilled down his shirt in a shower of lime-green and yellow polka dots. A pigeon sat on his shoulder. I just say savage tribes because that’s what they say on the news. I just say what the news commentators say. Easier, go along, get along. We docked once in a while and walked around, and I swear to you, there was some people that you couldn’t talk to unless you were holding this fake egg. Chan the Uncanny, this weird guy started the egg business. He laughed. Some old bald guy made this book out of wallpaper. And there was nothing in it. The Continuity Man laughed again and slapped his knee. Another weirdo in a top hat, if you can believe it, said there’s a religious colony up there somewhere, or scientists or something, experimenting on goats. It’s isolation, they go off their heads. And so where do you expect to spend the night, Frances?
Nadia smiled with a slight weaving motion of her head and said, I’ll call a messenger girl to take me to my mother’s place.
The Continuity Man said, Sure. Okay. Now, Frances (he had been told to say the person’s name frequently), every place I came to I made up some story about where I’d been before. Don’t you? Yes, you do. He drank. He laid the Fool before her. You think you are the only person on earth slipping through the grid of the bureaucracies and skipping along like the Fool at the edge of arrest. We all do. Forging ID is risky but I do it. They only last for a few days. Ah, your cup is empty! You must pay attention to Continuity. What did you tell the last person you lied to? Will they trace your pretty face on computer? What were you wearing at the time? Check your narrative sentence by sentence. Never lose your shoes.
Outside the three women around the fire were singing “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time.” They were astoundingly good but they sang to an empty street.
Where is here? She said it with an inebriated insistence. She opened her gray-green eyes very wide to look at the cards and hoped he would not grab her arm or try to kiss her, she would then struggle, there would be screams for the neighborhood watch and so on. She was drunkenly walking a tightrope.
You are in Omaha, he said. He stared at her over his tin cup. In what used to be the state of Nebraska. Not too far away from here is the old bed of the Missouri River. Of course, what used to be Omaha is now thirty million people not counting the satellite units. They run into the satellite units of Gerry Eight which was Kansas City and everything’s up to date there.
Right, right.
Now, here, this is the Prophetess. She’ll tell you where all your childhood friends have gone. Consulting with her is like attending a high school reunion. Human beings can’t live without correlation and links and parallels and coincidences. He glanced up at her. I make lists of words like that and memorize them. It helps people, I don’t know how but it’s a hard world, girl, and people are always trying for the power of positive thinking from some old guy named Norman Rockwell Vincent, but they don’t know how anymore.
Nadia nodded agreeably.
And now they’re killing people live on television. Think people will ever be interested in my damn zoo when that’s going on?
Nadia paused. They looked at each other across the tarots with a kind of mutual knowledge of how serious broadcast executions were; the sea change that had just happened, the paradigm shift.
No, she said, in a low voice. Nothing you do or say will ever be as thrilling.
He also spoke in a low voice. I know it. I know it. I don’t know what to think.
Did you watch? said Nadia.
No. He bent his head down to stare at the cards and Nadia could see a thick scar right across the top of his skull, through his part. He laid out another card. A blindfolded woman in a long gown stood with one hand on a wheel. He said, That’s Dame Fortune, but damned if she don’t look like somebody blindfolded for execution.
Put it back, said Nadia, put it back in the pack.
Too late, he said. Then he straightened up and tugged at his loose bow tie and became the weird and wonderful Continuity Man again. Now! he said. On your travels, Frances, have you ever met the same person twice?
Nadia thought, with some difficulty. No, I haven’t met the same person twice. She leaned back in the wooden chair. That’s why we need Continuity! On the table before her were the Prophetess and the Sun and the Moon in triplicate. The fried potatoes had disappeared. So had the spangled women. It seemed to be late at night. She said, I thought Lighthouse Island was a theme park kind of thing.
He stared at her for a long time in a considering way. The pigeon with its bright blue and yellow head pecked fruitlessly at his ear and then flapped down to the table and began hammering at the remains of the greasy newspaper.
What are you doing? he said. Where are you going and why? Here you are dressed like Prissy McGillis the PR Girl, with clearly nobody waiting for you to come home or otherwise show up, in a neighborhood you don’t know, and asking me about where is here. Get out of here. Shoo. The pigeon ignored him.
Nadia was as persistent as a zebra mussel. She said, Does anybody live on Lighthouse Island?
He placed both forearms on the table and leaned toward her. The pigeon, in fawning imitation, stared at her as well. No. It’s privately managed now. Probably by somebody very rich and well connected. The rich are different from you and me. Money talks but it can’t buy love. If you were to get there, like on a fishing boat or a raft or something, you’d be arrested for trespass. You’ll never see it. No matter how many credits you save up your whole life there, girl.
But there is one! It’s there.
Not a lie entirely. They used to go to the real one and then there was all kinds of problems with nature and toilets so they made a fake one. I know. I did the continuity for the set. The fake one is in some gerrymander close to here, about a million miles from the ocean. Then I got arrested on fake charges of theft. Sent up to where the real one is. Gutting fish. I was seasick the whole time and filthy and cut to pieces with fins and knives and I was eating fish-head soup while the fillets went somewhere else to people with forks and the guts cooked down to cat food for people who have got cats. Have you ever seen a cat? He pulled at his loose tie. I’d like to know what kind of spoiled pets people got that was eating that shit.
Nadia lied, out of general principles. No, I never have. For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he’s a good Cat. For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary: “Jubilate Agno.” Kit Smart. She ran one hand over the greasy cards. What’s between here and there, starti
ng with here?
He tipped his head to one side and regarded her with eyes of a thin brown color, as if they had another plane of color lying hidden behind them. The city. Next north is those towers, housing towers, totally empty. Then an industrial area. About two weeks’ travel west is the big scrapping heaps.
And e-waste? She said this too eagerly.
Yah. So?
Just, I had heard that.
Well, hear more. Then after that a lot of plains dry as bones and beet fields and prisoners’ barracks by the thousands, mountains going up to fifteen thousand feet covered with mining barracks, then more city, guards, watchmen, and Forensics agents and railroad dicks and stoolies.
You’ve met somebody who has promised to take you to Lighthouse Island, right? He said you and him are going to skip around in the rain forest and swim in the Pacific. Salmon fillets for dinner. He flopped back in his chair. You been asking about it all evening. All it took was for the guy to say “Come with me to Lighthouse Island” and you were snookered. And there it is, off-limits. No trespassing. Reserved for the manager. He lied.
How dare you, she said, for lack of anything else to say that made sense. What a terrible thing to say.
He moved his chair around closer to her. Hey? Think about it. He lied. And you believed him. The Continuity Man shifted the tarot cards. And girl, you had better be very careful about the authorities. Once they start executing criminals live on TV, pretty soon they are going to start looking for more, for any reason. Any excuse. We’re talking sacrificial maidens, here. Something tells me you qualify.
Nadia could not think what to say. She knew it was time to get out of the tent but she would not get far wobbling down the street. She had to find a place to sleep and thought, Close to Lydia. That would be safe.
Here. He flipped out a card from the tarot pack. Here. Have a Devil.
The goat face stared out of a dark background with the yellow pentagram bright and baleful between his horns.
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