Chapter 19
Far down the narrowing perspective of the street, beyond the pharmaceutical factory district, the great abandoned towers lifted their broken windows twenty stories into the air. Nadia walked neatly onward. Lydia had been so happy to get rid of her that the spangled manageress had filled one of her water bottles out of the animal hydration jug and pointed her down the street. Wherever you are going, she said, keep on. He’s a terrible flirt but he’s all mine.
Nadia looked increasingly shabby and unofficelike. Hungover and wobbly. The world appeared very seamy. Her failures sliding down in an avalanching ruin made it difficult to adopt that cheery walk, a pleasant face. And they had her name, they were indeed looking for her.
In a few months, if she lived, she would be walking with James in a green world. She would believe this despite the Continuity Man, despite the distances in front of her. Privacy and silence. Running water. How odd, the thought of running water. Where would it all come from? Wouldn’t it run out after a while? Her mind was filled with an astringent negative charge.
She could not keep walking in the shoes and clothes she wore. Nadia thought of disguising herself as a boy, in sturdy clothing. She would have to cut her bright auburn hair but if it were short and under some kind of cap she would be more anonymous.
A new billboard on top of some building: Carmen in front of a fan, her black hair flying in ropy sheaves.
MY RAINSTORM FAN!
CARMEN IS BLOWN AWAY BY
THE WONDERFUL SMALL APPLIANCES GUYS!
OFFICE OF PERSONAL HYGIENE AND SAFETY
DEPARTMENT OF SMALL APPLIANCES
She came to an open square. Bare and twisted trees in the center; they seemed to be made of pipe and wire. An old movie theater and ropa usada shops and broken storefronts. The apartment buildings were ancient, five-story structures, their roofs joyous with flying laundry and over the entrance of a Basic Rations store was the date, 1932.
Old signs wobbled on their poles with nearly invisible images: a rabbit in a vest holding up vanished sandwiches and nonexistent loaves of bread. Someone in a furry hood lifting ice cream on a stick. Nadia wove through the crowds and sat down on a bench made of planks and concrete blocks to rest. She drank the rest of the water Lydia had given her.
The park was packed with people and awash in dirty paper and discarded baskets. Over one of the streets leading into the square was an enormous red-and-white banner: It’s Awareness Awareness Month! Learn to Focus on Your Focus! Apply now for weekend seminars!
She sat there, irresolute, and then took out the Handbook and pretended to read. She had to get somewhere and rest for several days in privacy where there was no neighborhood watch or threat of collection buses, away from the feeling of being observed, of not knowing where she was and living like an actress in public spaces in the cameras of strangers’ eyes. The demon stare, the mal de ojo, the evil eye. It was terrible not to have any continuity except yourself.
The linear shadow of the ironwork tree limbs fell across her hand. She turned another page. Explorer. To explore new places is one of the greatest adventures in the world, it said, in the Handbook’s childlike tones. It radiated attitudes of happy, youthful wonder.
Her drained brain slid into despair. The world had grown very cynical and old. Everybody was old, even the young. Children were old. Everyone faded like an old ice-cream sign, sitting in front of television screens as if their muscles ached with age. Where is the refreshing rain? Maybe the planet itself was terminally old. We are all like geriatric patients cowering in front of the male nurse who brings us our new teeth.
Then two watchmen came into the square with staring distrustful eyeballs and so she quietly slipped into one of the ropa usada warehouses. No ID needed. Payment in coins. In the big cool space, full of voices and pigeons high up on the I-beams, she joined a crowd of women rooting through the clothes and throwing aside what they didn’t want until they had all dug a crater in the middle of the hill of torn evening dresses, pajamas, raveling sweaters.
She found a sturdy pair of pants and a faded, limp shirt. She located a used knapsack and a flat cap and then came upon a box full of new red canvas shoes with black polka dots in all different sizes. Dreadful looking, childish, but she had small feet and was hard to fit and here was a pair that fitted perfectly.
She picked up a device with a screen that lit up in a weak gray illumination and a bar pulsed across it from green to red. For a moment it made her slightly ill to look at it.
At the counter the woman told her the device had been found by scrappers, it was legal, legal, a toy, you could play with it.
Then a brisk, loud gray-haired female official of some kind came into the warehouse and stalked through the piles of clothing insisting that women sign up for Awareness Awareness Month seminars. She demanded ID and shoved her clipboard at people; sign, sign. Nadia said, yes, just a minute, let me go get my sister, I need for us to get our names next to each other so we can get into the same seminar, and she walked away saying, We’ll both come and watch your godawful boring stupid video presentation, I can’t wait, what? What?
Outside she looked up at the sky where fat round cumulus clouds were starting to clot together. The wind had a damp feeling to it. Very strange.
Good trees! A short, fat woman stood beside her. Old Omaha Square! Real trees!
Nadia said, I thought they were some kind of artistic ironwork.
No! No! Real trees! Dead!
The woman had her hair done in cornrows with little bells tied throughout the braids. Her dress of brightly colored rags fluttered. She kicked at the trash.
Oh, said Nadia.
I’m a neighborhood snoop! Who are you? said the woman in her loud voice. Why are you just standing here?
I am looking for a beauty shop, said Nadia.
It’s right there, right there! The woman pointed. In the old movie theater. They turned it into a beauty shop. Are you blind? Hey? Are you blind?
It was dim and cool and restful inside the lobby of the old movie theater. There were ten stations and all of them full. Nadia did not think watchmen or arrest crews would come into this female hive. Noise, babble, hair dryers going, little girls tiptoeing in and out with buckets of water, every drop accounted for. The doors to the amphitheater were barred with large timbers, the seats empty and the screen dead forever. Against the wall was a four-foot television and on it she saw James. She stopped dead and stared.
Take a numbered chair. An older woman, smartly dressed, looked up from a desk. She wore raindrop earrings. I said take a number!
Sorry, Nadia said. She hurried to the chairs lined up against the wall and kept her head turned to the TV screen. James had uneasy edges and his wheelchair spokes blazed with the studio lights. I am amazed, I am amazed. Plath.
Nadia listened to his impatient voice, the same voice she had spent hours talking to two nights before. She sat down on a wooden stool numbered twelve beneath a faded poster advertising Thin Edge with Teresa Guardo, a film that had thrilled audiences everywhere a decade before Nadia had been born. Teresa was in a flying tae kwon do stance, grinning with wrath, her ninety pounds dressed in oily rubber, striking down big men with guns.
Twelve!
Nadia jumped up.
Bella! said the woman behind the desk and her raindrop earrings sparkled. She lifted her manicured hand. Bella! Then she returned to her careful tracking of the little girls and the buckets.
A young stylist in the rear swallowed the last of her noodles and jumped to her feet.
Shampoo? said Bella. Manicure? New haircut style like the savage hippies, asymmetrical, want to see pictures?
Cut and shampoo, said Nadia. She sat down and looked into the cracked mirror to see the television and James. She was desperate to hear him.
Just a trim? Now also we have lead-free nail polish and agave-essentials face renewer
for sale here. Also showers, reasonable prices per gallon and really hot water. Now, let’s trim this.
No, cut it very short.
The girl took up a length of Nadia’s hair and drew it out. You don’t want to cut this, she said. This is truly great hair.
It’s too hard to shampoo, she said. Needs too much water. She lay back in the chair and all her musculature uncoiled. The air was soft and steamy. The smell of the harsh green shampoo and propane was actually pleasant.
I hear you, said Bella. Now, I can give it a nice fall. Long on the sides. Kind of a Dutchboy. Girlish but tomboyish.
Good, said Nadia. I’ll go for that.
Nadia squinted at the reflected TV screen as she felt the tug of the comb and the shearing grind of the scissors as her beautiful auburn hair fell in great sheaves onto the dirty floor. James’s voice came to her and he was speaking not to her or to the interviewer but to an invisible audience.
The woman at the desk got up and came to Bella’s station. You’re not from this gerrymander, she said. Are you? The nearby women glanced over at Nadia with some interest.
No. No. I just got out of a terrible argument and I just left.
There it is, said the woman owner, in sudden understanding. She nodded her elegant head and her raindrop earrings jumped. Is he looking for you?
Yes. Nadia leaned forward to peer at herself in the mirror. She wiped at her eyes to make it look as if she had started to cry. She said, I’m trying to look different. So he won’t recognize me. A convincing sob snatched at her throat and she wished everyone would shut up so she could hear James on the TV but here she was, compulsively telling some involved lie.
We’ll make it different, said Bella. It’s going to be okay.
No, no, no, said the interviewer on television, whose name was Art Preston.
Nadia was then sorry she had made up this stupid story. Now they would remember her forever. The girl who ran away from an abusive boyfriend and cut her hair off short. They would tell this story to everybody they knew. Every night Nadia spent out of her own sector without a permit, without her ID, the more illegal she became. She sat stiffly and determined not to say another word.
Chapter 20
The television said, There are no more domestic animals. People are the domestic animals.
James leaned back in his wheelchair with his television makeup and his splintery brown hair and his broad nose, his sardonic smile. The same man as on the rooftop. Over the noise of women chattering and gossiping and the little girls running in and out with their buckets Nadia could finally hear the interview.
The interviewer shifted his feet around, perhaps to show off his excellent leather footwear. He said, Of course C. and E. has been very good to me, if you insist on being personal. Culture and Entertainment has been very good to me.
James considered him. I’m not being personal. I am being insistent, possibly rude. I was talking about my wish to change over to Cartography. Get out of Demolition.
Yes, but just explain why they never warn people on time.
I have no authority with Neighborhood Emergency Information Services. They are secretive. Maybe bribes would help, I don’t know.
You know you are now on public record saying something like that.
What, bribes?
Bribery is illegal.
Bite me, Preston.
Wow, said Bella. Who is that guy?
I don’t know, said Maryanna.
He’s in deep shit.
Maybe he’s been smoking some extraskunky pineapple express.
And your brother is in Meteorology. That’s what I would call a sinecure. One of those clueless bureaucracies studying meteors, and he has upper-level benefits for what? Sitting around staring through a telescope . . .
Meteorology is weather, said James. You’re an uneducated idiot.
How many hours a week? How many meteors show up in the sky per month? At nighttime so he and his assistants . . .
It’s weather. Weather. Meteorology means weather and it’s part of Intrusive Species so . . .
Probably sleep half the night. What do meteors have to do with weather? What weather? We don’t have any weather, this is what you call an appendix bureau.
What it has to do with is that low cloud cover distorts blast pattern, the blast pattern, you see. Anything lower than twelve hundred feet.
We don’t have cloud cover, what the hell are you talking about? I know perfectly well what meteorology means.
We do today, said Bella. Cloud cover.
It’s so weird, said the stylist at the next station. I mean like it gets dark, these clouds clump up and it’s dark. You can see the edge of the cloud shadow moving down the street. It’s freaking me out.
Preston couldn’t get his head out of his ass long enough to look out the window, said Bella.
Meteor-ology. And now we do have cloud cover. The past week or so.
I know that. I said that. I said meteorology. Interrupting is not the same as a civic debate. I said that. What does this have to do . . .
Listen . . .
You listen, Orotov.
Let me finish. My brother says the weather pattern is changing, actually quite drastically, in several parts of the world. This has not been covered on the news of course. No one will listen to him. Another “of course.” We may have very sudden weather changes here, very sudden. In case of floods . . .
Floods? Are you saying there are going to be floods?
James placed both hands flat on the table in front of him. Yes, yes, and various agencies will have to coordinate and we’ll need the old topographical maps, floodplain maps, and there will have to be plans for evacuation, emergency supplies.
Wait, wait, Preston said. Maps for vanished rivers. He laughed. All gone in the Urban Wars. The Global Positioning System that led our enemies to us and actually led armies to one another. It all had to go. We are not tied to maps anymore. They are constricting and rigid and lead to rigid and incurious thinking. Contemporary men and women need to be flexible, mentally lithe, so to speak . . .
James turned to Preston with a hard expression. Like watching executions live on TV? What kind of depravity is that? I will just repeat that there is a weather change happening in many parts of the world, in Peru for instance, listen to me here, just a minute . . .
Peru? Peru? We don’t name nations anymore, James. Borders kill. The world is entirely urban, this is a new world, this is something that humanity has never faced before. We live in historic times. There are no national borders. A border is an imaginary line and a kill space.
James gripped the wheelchair arms. Nadia watched him intently, thinking, Did you lie to me? About Lighthouse Island?
A kill space. You don’t say. I have news for you, the weather pattern . . .
The interviewer gestured wildly. Okay, this is just a low-rent noontime show, maybe an audience of a couple hundred million or so, it’s probably watched by people eating their noodles and hairdressers and street people, so go ahead, insult me. But we have to remember the city wars, we have the archived films of Leningrad, Stalingrad, Nanking, the incredible city warfare, Los Angeles, Chicago . . . I mean it was a time of horror, just horrors, Orotov, everybody fought to a standstill and so dividing the world into Eastern and Western Cessions, a desperate attempt to save an overpopulated world, who doesn’t remember the films of the bombing and invasions here . . .
James leaned back and stared up at the studio ceiling and its ranked lights.
I’ll just talk over you. My brother is a pilot, he has equipped a storm observer prop plane, twin-engine, and truly violent weather is coming . . .
Your brother, I can have you removed, I can do an exposé on your private life, you’re a sick man, Orotov. I have the reports here, here . . . The interviewer moved papers around on the table. His gestures were frant
ic, sloppy, uncoordinated. Get out. Just get this man out. Why are we live? Why does this shit happen to me?
A little girl spilled a bottle of shampoo and began to cry loudly.
When Nadia looked back at the screen James was gone and the interviewer was talking about something else. He said, I never allowed my children to watch television. It damages their brains.
Honey, honey, don’t cry, said a hairdresser. We’ll mop it up. The little girl was afraid of the woman who ran the place and stared at the hairdresser with wide eyes while also crying. They’ll shoot me, the girl said. They’ll shoot me. The air was filled with the sweet scent of the spilled shampoo.
It’s okay, baby, said Bella.
Do personal lives have significance? They do if it tells us something about character. Character affects personal decisions. James Orotov is under investigation for premature demolitions. More on this growing cult of Orotov defenders. It’s a weather cult, from all reports. There’s a growing backlash, however . . .
Her visual field was now being circled by that old familiar bright spark but then she heard the three bell tones that meant a public service message was imminent.
At least they didn’t drag in the Facilitator, said Bella. She said it in a low voice. Creepy freak.
Shut up, Bella.
The ad opened with a shot of glaciers taken from a helicopter that sailed over blue-and-green ice cliffs. The ice cliffs foamed with blowing snow. From high above there were crevasses in lines like broken white candy. Sibelius’s “Oceanides” sang through the dim, perfumed spaces. A voice-over intoned, I know, I know. More shots of ice cliffs. The voice said, Sometimes it seems as if the bureaucracies move like glaciers. Frozen up. Rigid.
Say it ain’t so, said Bella.
This again? A woman holding a magazine flipped pages.
The camera floated down the river of ice from high above and then there was the sound of seagulls. But together you and I can get them moving. Shots of enormous sections of ice breaking off and collapsing like public housing towers into the sea, some sea somewhere. Be brave. This is a new kind of courage. Civic courage. File your complaints against bureaucratic incompetence. Forms available everywhere. Then a shot of a sailboat with its sails taut and full of wind cutting through green seas and seagulls circling and crying.
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