Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  I must have heard that fifty times. Bella blasted Nadia’s head with a large, clumsy metal hair dryer that she had to hold with both hands. Inside it the wires glowed red with electricity and the cord was frayed. There!

  Nadia stood up and ran her hands through her new, short hair.

  It’s as good as I could make it, said Bella. It’s springy.

  The owner woman wagged her finger at Nadia. You go home and lock your door and don’t give in if he comes around. Don’t give in.

  And all around the other hairdressers and the women said, She’s right, she’s right.

  Nadia pulled out a Western Cession dime and handed it to Bella. I’ll never speak to him again. I mean it. Now, how much is a ticket to the showers?

  Nadia walked north toward the abandoned towers. She was hungry and she thought about the human necessity to eat something every day, every damn day. It was a curse. At least she was clean from the hot-water shower and she had a neat haircut.

  She continued on and kept the afternoon sun at her left hand. It was cloudy and the air felt damp. By late afternoon she came to a Buddy car repair shop and recharge station. It took up the whole first floor of a long building. It was very noisy. A thin, coughing guard in a worn brown uniform stood at the entrance. She walked over to him and felt a kind of hungry trembling all through her body and was afraid she might faint.

  She said, Are there any vending machines inside?

  Yeah. They take ID or coins of money.

  Well, can I go and get something from them?

  The guard gestured toward the low doorway beyond the gate. Don’t go any farther than that main room.

  He turned back to a little portable TV where the Sunshine Boys were playing the Neutro-Rockets.

  Nadia entered the square, bare room that had another door on the far side, leading back into a work area. There were four vending machines. She put her tote bag and the knapsack on the floor and knelt down to find the blister card. There were bootprints on one side of the sandwich machine as if people had been kicking it.

  The machine exhibited a running crawl across the top that said THERE IS NO “AWAY,” REUSE RECYCLE RECOVER ***PAN-URBAN RECHARGE AND REPAIR DEPARTMENT ***PRESS PLAY TO SEE VIDEO ON HOW WE DO BATTERY RECYCLING. She inserted the blister card. The crawl changed: UNIDENTIFIED NO ID NECESSARY CHOOSE PRODUCT. She pressed a knuckle against the number for a roast beef sandwich. She didn’t want to leave a fingerprint. The machine rumbled as something wrapped in brown paper fell into the tray. It worked, it worked, it worked.

  Audio came on: tinkling, sweet harp music, and then a voice said, Hey! Try this! The National Council on Water Security urges you to join with your neighbors in making your own waste-water purifier!

  She pressed the STOP AUDIO button but it kept on.

  Get a group in your office together! It’s easy! Fill out an application! Over tea and snacks you can all discuss . . .

  She hit the button again but the loud voice kept on, urging her to have tea and snacks and join with others and something about using old bathtubs.

  Stop, dammit, she said.

  The rear door opened and a man came in. His face was dark with metal dust and he was white around the eyes. Goggles hung around his neck and his dusty green shirt and pants had burn marks.

  Here, he said. He stood back and kicked the machine solidly with his workboot heel. The voice slowed and gargled toooogethuuur yoooo annnd yooooor . . . and stopped.

  Put you around the bend, he said. He stuck his ID in the slot and then shoved coins into another slot and a bottle rattled down. Is the air weird out there?

  Weird how? she said.

  Wet. It’s wet air out there. Clouds.

  Yes, she said. It seems wettish.

  Well, I never thought I’d see it.

  He went back through the door with the bottle and slammed the door shut.

  Nadia inserted the blister card again and pressed for another sandwich, and then the almondless Almond Delights. She pressed the numbers for a bottle of Mamosi because it had a screw cap and she could reuse it. She tried for soy cheese product but then it said NOT AVAILABLE.

  Very well, very well. Nadia was elated as well as hungry.

  If she could find vending machines she could stay alive and fed. There would be no vending machines on Lighthouse Island. It was a wilderness, after all. But they would figure it out. And now James would know she had used the card, he would know where she was.

  Chapter 21

  The abandoned public housing towers became taller and taller by the block. The sidewalk was still thick with sweating, hot people and it seemed even hotter now with the unusual humidity. Some were hurrying from one factory office to another with things to be read or signed, applications for vacation time for husband and wife to be granted at the same time, for increased water rations for a new baby; others had got out of work early and were treading along with string bags of things for supper. Girls raced past delivering messages: Can u come drink rice wine tonite, watch dynamos, Ken. I saw u w/ Brin-duh want to break up or not, 2 U. Lecia. Borrow ½ gal kerosene pls? pay u back Thelma. The message couriers made shrieking noises on their tin whistles. She passed gypsy women on their way to their stalls and a woman sitting on the pavement in front of a pile of used stuff, selling the possessions of some recently dead relative in order to pay the Candyman. Beneath the lines of washing strung across the street from apartment window to apartment window were small puddles of dripping water and therefore happy, grateful sprigs of grass were growing up through the cracking asphalt pavement, destroying it inch by inch.

  Nadia sat at a hot-drinks stand solving, moment by moment, the eternal problem of street people, which is how to kill time in public without appearing odd.

  It was already dark. She was not afraid of the night streets. Half a century ago during the Square One campaign they had executed anyone arrested for sexual predation and/or drugs and/or common theft and a great many other transgressions, like having fatherless children. The impoverished world could no longer afford bad behavior, nor the feral street gangs. The O’Donnells said there were public trials of the most degenerate people imaginable. It was riveting TV. So those genes were removed from the metropolitan population. This also gave many people a way of getting rid of personal enemies by false denunciations but hey, neither you nor I made the city.

  The television at the hot-drinks stand sat behind the stove counter; Railroad Blues came on. There was the wise old conductor who could be counted on to straighten everything out in the end, and the flighty girl in the dining car who was always stumbling and spilling pasta onto some important higher-up. Part of the attraction of Railroad Blues was watching people devouring green salads, tomatoes and roasts, fresh vegetables and yeast bread. These dishes were all whipped up by the crazy cook who hid his gin bottles in the cold locker with the fish (real whole fresh fish). There was a young baggage handler in love with the flighty girl in the dining car, named Pamela, and all the peculiar people who got on the train at various places. There was never any scenery where they stopped. Just train stations of various kinds, clean and generic, numbered but not named. The characters were not constantly assaulted with televisual admonitions and urgings or live executions. The people on TV never seemed to watch TV.

  Nadia paid for her weak cup of tea and got up. The man in the hot-drinks stand had finally become impatient and suspicious so she had to go.

  Through open windows the wise old conductor shouted at the flighty girl in a cracking voice. The previous episode had ended with the passenger train speeding toward a crossing where a concrete-mixer truck had stalled. At the time the conductor was drinking something from his thermos and joking with the baggage handler as they unknowingly sped toward destruction and at the last moment the conductor cried out a desperate warning. Just ahead of her the two neighborhood watchmen leaned in a window and called, Did they hit the tru
ck?

  The towers whistled in the evening breeze like great wind instruments. The spaces between them were confused with the sastrugi of broken sidewalks and tossing shadows of weeds. Nadia slipped through a rent in a chain-link fence.

  Pigeons spoke to one another inside the stairwells in tones of maidenly alarm as she passed. She came to the nearest tower and took out the flashlight James had given her. She put her fingers over the lens and allowed only the faintest beam of light to lance out. She looked up to see the stars and the sky. The enormous tower with its broken tiers of windows appeared to be sailing like a stained and misdirected cruise ship through the galaxies. She imagined herself as a passenger on it with a ticket or a passport in her hand, voyaging to love in a time of officialdom. The tower would land on a glacier that capped some distant planet; it would be flown by James in his wheelchair with his hands on the starship’s controls. She would say, There’s nobody else here, nobody, nobody, and he would say, I know. I know. The universe is ours.

  She went on with a batlike confidence in the power of night.

  Up the echoing dark stairwell floor by floor. At last Nadia came to the twentieth landing. She stepped into the abandoned hallway with all its grit and dirt and she could see in the dim city illumination that the consoles of fluorescent lights had come loose and were hanging down, trailing wires. The hallway floor was littered with pieces of plasterboard and twigs from pigeons’ nests and shattered tubes. She banged against glass windows, frames and all, stacked against one wall. People had stripped out and stacked them to come for them later. Maybe tonight.

  The door on her right was open: apartment 2055. The flash of a mirror hanging half off the wall, a torn ottoman, and some broken dishes on the floor as if people had fought with one another or the police before finally being evicted. The bathroom door was open and it was very dark inside because there was no window but from the intermittent flashes when the Cantrell Falls billboard drew back to show the rushing white water she could see that everything had been torn out. Marks on the floor where the toilet had been, and on the wall where a sink had been. The bathtub had been too heavy to move.

  The low clouds moved in, the color of peaches. At an empty casement frame she leaned out over the city. She saw the fifty-story Ritz-Carlton far away to the south. That building was behind her. Her journey was ahead.

  Lighthouse Island: no buildings, no water rationing, only landforms and random plants, fossils, silence, solitude, mountains on the horizon with all their authority and secrecy, fauna, a lighthouse beam turning on hidden bearings and the booming evening seas washing in, over and over, lit up repeatedly by the singular ray. Danger, magic. And James, a companion of the heart. She leaned on her thin hands and stared out.

  Ahead to the northwest, on the very edge of the crenellated horizon, shone the lights of the heavy industry area. As she stared at it an intense detonation flared up and then subsided; blasts of illumination from what she guessed were smelting plants washed the hard walls in seductive and magical light.

  Nadia tore the brown paper from her roast beef sandwich. She wasn’t sure she liked the taste and the meat inside seemed like it must have come from a tire. She needed a knife and spoon and some kind of bowl. She sat with the Mamosi bottle in her hand, in the dim lights coming through the broken window, and drank it all down. She jiggled her foot. It made a gritty sound on the floor so she stopped. The cool night wind hooted at the windows and all the holes and broken places of the towers. She still had a bottle of water and the empty Mamosi bottle now but no idea where she could get more. It didn’t matter. She was recovering her self, which was as famished as the tarots for life and the ruined choirs of sweet silent thought. She was the sole inhabitant of this great tower: the Oversupervisor of Empty, the Queen of Ruin.

  She opened her knapsack and at last changed into the secondhand boy’s clothes and they were so oversized that she felt quite diminished. Then she folded everything she possessed, including the tote bag, and jammed it into the knapsack.

  She had to start on her map. A cartographical adventure. Samuel Hearne in the infinite city, Sven Hedin on his river, or Captain Bligh on the trackless Pacific, guiding with an astrolabe his shallow boat over the ocean that was like an atmosphere, and beneath him great drowned cliffs like towers, from one of which she gazed out over the brown and glowing air of the metropolis.

  She blew dust from the table and wiped it with her sleeve and then got out her pencil and sat down on the ottoman, alive with liberation and dreams.

  She drew an asterisk at the top of the page for the North Star.

  To begin she noted at the bottom of the page the name of her apartment building, the Mermaid Arms Youth Housing units. The place she had shared with Josie and Widdy and Anna Villanueva. Home, she wrote. Then the dismal office only five blocks away. Then, above that, the demolition dust cloud, the opening to the underground. Then the train north. A long arrow and a man with a pale, evil lizard face riding the arrow. The dead train, over which she put an X. She didn’t know how else to signify it. She scribbled figures. Say, five hours. Train: 40 mph? She had never traveled on anything faster than a city bus, which, as she had seen standing behind the driver, went no faster than 20 mph or an alarm went off. So 40 mph. 40 x 5 = 200 miles. The underground cafeteria and the cook finished that page.

  She turned to a new page and again drew in the asterisk, the North Star at the top of every page.

  Northwaite Court where she had more or less managed some sleep in an alley and listened to Adrian’s torments. Then the wide street the man with the motorbike had said was Farragut Street, licensed for food shops. Then she drew in a jet airplane indicating the place where she had stopped and looked up to the sky to see the jet trails. Then the fifty-story building with the clock: the Ritz-Carlton. Just under the clock two wheels with a stick figure, sitting. James in his wheelchair.

  She drew the agency sector and the cactus garden and the centipede with its stitchery of legs. Then the market and the terrible TV broadcast that she did not even like to name. And then the escape from the impressment gang, the telephone exchange. The Continuity Man and the vinyl-wrap tents; her tarot cards: the Devil, the Hermit, the Burning Tower, Dame Fortune blindfolded as if she were about to be shot. Plush elephants. Above that the movie house-cum-beauty shop, Arbor Square and its bituminous trees, then the hot-drink stand. She sketched in this tower where she now sat, and northwest of that, a very long way, the big scrap heaps and the industrial area, little coils indicating smoke. Finally a large arrow pointing upward and a question mark: Lighthouse Island?

  The billboard light illuminated her map and then left it to the dark and then lit it up again.

  She tried to recall some old story about two children lost in a great, endless park who left crumbs behind them to mark their way because their parents had abandoned them. They wandered around a Grimm forest on high speed like Toto toys. She tried to remember the details. It seemed to her they ate a house.

  At first light Nadia stood at the window to look out over the megapolis and under an armada of spaced clouds the heat-haze intensified the smell of leaded gasoline and other combustible fluids. She heard bus horns and shouts and saw the winking flashes of windshields and the dense, packed crowds in the streets, the tops of people’s hats bobbing along in their foreshortened hurry. The parachutes of hang gliders glistened and rippled tautly in the early-morning updrafts and the whine of their motors could be heard above the crowd sounds; the day-flight watchmen sailed along with their goggles and their binoculars, spying out violations.

  She kicked off her red polka-dotted canvas shoes and leaned against the wall and read from the Handbook. You will find it a great deal of fun to have a garden, it said. There were drawings of lettuce and onions and cauliflower. It spoke in cheerful sentences about growing fruit trees and beekeeping and chickens and dairy cattle. Nowhere in the Handbook did it tell her what one did with animal waste or where t
hese animals got their water.

  Then she heard the chugging motor noise of a hang glider coming closer. She ducked barefoot into the bathroom and pressed her back against the wall.

  The hang glider slid past the twentieth story. The watchman was looking into the windows out of his round goggles. The machine tipped from one side to the other on a stiff parachute and fought the confused winds swirling around the towers.

  From her dark recess Nadia saw the man though the slit of the partly open door, the tattoos on his arm under his rolled-up flapping shirtsleeve, his desire to catch somebody at something, and his pebbled-leather helmet. Behind him fleets of cumulus clouds skated along with flat bottoms on some invisible surface and the city rooftops glinted.

  The machine lifted above the level of the window and then dropped back down again. It hovered and bounced on the updrafts. Nadia could hear his radio crackling. The watchman listened and then flipped down a monocular eyepiece and turned his head, one eye staring through his thick spyglass. He was looking into the windows, her window. He hung there for a long time staring and quivering and the engine backfiring. He moved a wing vane and turned his machine. At last the motor faded away.

  Chapter 22

  James rolled up to the doctor’s desk to look at the prosthetics mannequin. It was a repellent thing that came apart in sections according to where the desired amputations would take place and the overhead fluorescents made the plastic body appear necrotic. James regarded it without expression and then rolled back.

  So here, you see, as I do this, if we amputate just below the knee, said the surgeon. A transtibial amputation. Ahem, excuse me. He was a tiny, dry man with crinkled skin and an irritating habit of clearing his throat. James watched as the surgeon deftly removed the mannequin’s legs at the knees. The mannequin was about a foot and a half high, gender neutral, and naked as a baby rat. It was joined in sections with steel pegs. Its arms could be removed as well; everything came apart but the head, for obvious reasons. Behind the surgeon was a glass-fronted cabinet containing prosthetic arms, legs, hands, and feet, all very abandoned looking. Eff, eff, ahem, excuse me, now give me your attention.