It was as if someone had opened a drain inside her and her consciousness all poured away. She never knew where her mind went at that time. Her joints came unstrung and the dirty floor rushed up at her face as if the whole building had tilted.
When she woke up, the woman in the flowered headscarf was sitting beside the old couch where she lay and was holding a pottery cup of something hot and sweet. There was some kind of a big torn quilt thrown over her and she felt dangerously weak. This was frightening because she had to go on, she had to.
Drink it, the woman said. She had Oriental eyes and small hands. Sugar. Good for you.
The air was warm and steamy and the whole building vibrated from the washers and dryers. Rain splattered the windows. Now the big television in its wooden chassis roared with some kids’ program. The candy stripers were watching it nervously, afraid that another execution might be announced in front of the children. But it presented a jolly world of flat colors; animated spoons did headstands, a wastebasket danced some kind of cha-cha, a tiny pink Buddy car did wheelies and a group of children watched it all, still as death.
Thank you, she said. Nadia lifted her hand but it fell back of its own accord. In a minute, she said.
My name is Bing, the woman said. What’s yours?
Nadia hesitated and then said, Prissy McGillis.
Bing said, So how many names is that now?
Nadia sat up and managed, after a slight struggle, to drink down the cup of hot sugary water. A lot, she said, and smiled. Do you collect for old man Gallegos?
Yes. Midnight Cowboy Theater man. Bing laughed. Right. I do your clothes. Bing shook out Nadia’s tote. Eww, she said. They give you a homeless dress. Give me what you have on.
The homeless dress was almost like a prison uniform but she didn’t care, there weren’t going to be any Forensics officers coming in here, she didn’t think. Nadia was happy to lie unstrung on the couch and watch the clothing shoot through the huge wire-screen tubes overhead, blown out of the dryers and onto the sorting tables. She was watching for telltale signs that hers were coming out of the dryers. The first sign would be her red canvas shoes with the black polka dots galloping along down the tube, one after another. It was noisy and clean and warm. The giant washing machines whirled and shuddered in a storm of clothing. Outside the great heavy rains had begun, and soon all would be changed, changed utterly.
Bing ate sunflower seeds and said, The showers are back there. If you are indigent they have to let you take a shower for free. Rules are rules.
Oh, thanks, said Nadia.
You need my daughter walk you back there? Hey, girl, Lia, come here!
No, said Nadia. I’m okay.
Nadia stood for a long time in the shower, gripping the soap basket to stay upright. The cubicle was made of warped beaverboard and the slats were slimy with soap but she didn’t care; the water was almost clear, and it was hot, and she scrubbed her thick, short hair until it was a mass of lather, rinsed it, toweled it nearly dry with the thin gray towel.
And so, said Bing, regarding Nadia with her long black eyes. She handed Nadia some sunflower seeds. Bing’s hands were very small but wide, heavy with muscle. She had tapered fingers and perfect nails. Do you know where you are now? She asked this in a low voice.
Nadia said, also in a near whisper, Yes, I’m here. She cracked the seeds between her teeth.
You are going on somewhere, said Bing.
Yes. Nadia watched the tubes overhead. A red canvas shoe came clumping down along with flying pieces of clothing. Her shirt, her brassiere and underpants. She said, There’s my clothes.
It’s raining out there, said Bing. A little snow like salt coming down too. You need warm clothes. I talk to the candy girl.
And so after Nadia retrieved her clothes from the sorting table they allowed her to look in the storage room behind the washers, where there were clothes people had left behind when they had been taken away, arrested, forgot them because they were drunk. Bing shouted at the attendant, If they are not for people like this homeless crazy woman, for who then? Eh?
In the storage room, which was where the candy stripers also drank their tea and ate their lunches, Nadia was delighted to find a heavy charcoal-colored wool coat, striped leggings, and lavender wool gloves inside the pockets of the coat. In a cupboard she came across three vials of Kero-Light and a folded square of some kind of plasticized material. She shoved the small things in her tote bag and pulled on the heavy coat and leggings. A good haul.
Thank you, said Nadia. She took Bing’s hand. Thank you.
Bing said, Now, you, think about this, I scrap dishes. Find me some good dishes, no nicks, I pay you dimes. Bing affected that sort of pidgin English in which independent women traders always spoke. You could use some dimes. You buy good fry bread from Noria, just down by the dishes.
Yes, yes, I will.
Where are you going, Priss?
To find the love of my life, said Nadia. Who lives behind the North Wind.
The program switched to Empress of the Golden Plains. The adults sat down on couches with children on their laps to watch as the empress discovered a traitor in her midst, her favorite general: Banu Shan, a courageous, even noble general who had never wavered in his loyalty to his beautiful empress. Banu Shan stood before the empress alight with love for her, crushed by shame. Nadia fell back on the couch. Oh man, she said. He’s innocent. That’s so unfair.
Do you think he’s gone over?
Over? said Nadia. To the enemy?
Yeah, the ones with the nose rings.
I don’t know, really, Nadia said. Hard to keep up.
At last the program closed with the empress lifting a goblet full of an unknown liquid to her lips. Slow fade. An insect crept slowly down the face of the lighted screen, testing its luminous surface with long and thready antennae as if desperately trying to reach General Banu Shan. The insect’s antennae sent out a questing signal backward through time and sideways in space, all the way to the steppes of Central Asia, to a time before the seas of grass were covered in cities and slums; before, when the Aral Sea existed and held out its miraculous reflecting surface from dawn to dusk and its shores were crowded with wildfowl and lone riders bearing sincere messages gazed out over the restless water while the wind whispered at their backs. Banu Shan, your enemies in court have told the empress that you have gone over to the R1a’s! Banu Shan! The liar is named Asdan, go, kill him, save your honor!
The insect crawled on down the screen leg by leg and at last one of the children squashed it in a smear of fluids and a clutter of disconnected legs and so the message was forever lost. Somewhere in the realm of the imagination Banu Shan is shackled to his horse’s breast-collar and is led away by the Household Guard.
Nadia walked down to the riverbed again, confident in the pouring rain, with the plasticized material over her head. The magpies rode the tossing bare limbs of brush and looked at her as if they had been expecting her.
Nadia, Nadia, do not lose heart, it will not be much farther.
She came to the dish heaps. The column of rain had swept on past and now the sleet returned. Nadia felt pinhead grains falling on her face. A large truck backed up and disgorged a roaring slide of more dishes and pottery. Far ahead was a building from which came a deafening, smashing noise. In it they were grinding up dishes for some use she could not imagine. She joined the hundreds of scrappers clinking among the breakage, slowly, turning over dishes and drained of strength.
She pulled at the corner of a cardboard box sticking out of the broken ceramics. It took her a long time to work it loose. Her lavender gloves were now full of nicks and tiny slashes. She pulled out the packing carefully. As the shredded paper scattered at her feet, an eye rolled out.
The box was full of glass eyes. Blue ones, gray ones, dark brown, black, hazel, and mild brown. They stared, naked and astonished, out at
the valley of scrap and Nadia quickly slipped them into her coat pocket. The world was full of people in long draped blankets and cloaks among the broken dishes and in the distant sky a thin thread of oily smoke and a hang glider. The valley of Crow Creek was filling with water. It ran down between apartment buildings and splashed into the old drainage bed, the bed itself now a roaring torrent of live water, and the only bridge over it was a two days’ walk behind her.
At sunset Bing came walking down the road with a handcart. It rolled along smoothly on high wire-spoked wheels that left wandering tracks in the mud. Two women walked with her, the young women who had laughed at Nadia at the Laundromat. They had rinds of light snow on their headscarves and stared at her as Bing counted out seven old dimes into Nadia’s hand for five plates and three bowls, all good.
Bing regarded Nadia with her bright and ageless eyes. And now where you are go?
To the electronics waste.
Lucky you are on right side of river. Now, people have to think about, do I have to cross the river? New. She laughed.
How far is it?
One day walk. You give the guard five dimes.
Okay. Nadia knew it was time to walk on but she was reluctant to leave the company of Bing and her daughters. So she said, How did you start collecting, Bing?
One way and another. I was a color expert for C&E. For television sets, clothes. I did color suits and ties for people who say “studies show.” Somebody wanted my job. But! I saw it coming. These my daughters, we got away. Long story. My cousin, she made it to the Northwest. She was a water tester. Bing paused. And you too are running. I know.
How did she get there? Nadia clasped her hands nervously. How?
I get one letter. She was on a train with chemicals, then snuck off, started walking. She says people up there speak by holding an egg and they have to live in concrete prisons by the sea. But then, no more letters. Bing shrugged. And so you looking for somebody you love. Behind the North Wind.
Nadia turned up her wool coat collar. Yes, yes, I am. Do you do fortunes?
Yes. But I don’t do fortunes and these hard looks into the other world for free.
Well, I’ll give you back some dimes. How many dimes do you want?
I have lots of dimes.
So then Nadia reached into her pocket and brought out two clattering eyes. She held them out.
Take whichever one you want.
Aha! Oh, wonderful! Excellent!
Bing peered into Nadia’s cupped hand and chose the mild brown one. She took out a handkerchief and wrapped it and put it away in one of her jacket pockets. She sat down on a small barrel that had fallen from some truck at the side of the road and put her hands over her face.
Nadia watched her. She said, Are you . . .
Ssshhhh! Both girls shushed her at the same time.
After several minutes Bing looked up and said, You met him in a hotel. It was made of glass. He could walk then. It was in the other world. Now you are coming together in this world. She wiped her hands together. There. That’s a good message. I made good contact. It was the eye.
Nadia caught her sleeve and said, And so now I need words of wisdom.
Bing laughed. You want too much.
I don’t care, said Nadia, and then she said, What’s too much?
All right. Bing reached out and patted Nadia on the shoulder and the light snow fell from her coat shoulder in flakes. I will tell you this, Prissy, what I have learned, poor girl, poor homeless girl. What I have learned is that if you live long enough, all the old clichés become true wisdom. Those old sayings we laugh at when we are young. We become fifty years old, surprise, we see that they were all true. They grow up so fast, many hands make light work, there is no place like home, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, love is blind.
Nadia passed an old woman who stood at the roadside, throwing leftover grains and biscuit crumbs from a bowl in broad gestures of great generosity, beautiful sweeping gestures. The birds slanted through the early-morning air and slid their dark legs in front of them as they landed, bearing to earth all they had learned of the upper skies and the birth of snow.
Chapter 33
E-waste trucks grumbled past. They spewed pink mud. It looked like paint thinner. The rubbish they carried was all square; monitors stared out at the nebulous day with lifeless but deep glass eyes. Tendrils of curling wire spilled out between the racks and she saw dangling mouses like little fists. On one she saw a digital clock. It was in a steel chassis with curling brass inlays, ornate and battered. It was wedged between a broken printer and a stack of flat screens. It said, 5 P.M. October 31 2198 Clouds and occasional drizzle.
Maybe the clock was out of order, maybe it announced times and years that did not exist. But then again maybe it was accurate; maybe it was some sort of atomic clock steadily enumerating the advance of time and the burdensome accumulation of years. Nadia decided to believe it. To believe that she was in the valley of electronic scrap, on a real earth turning on its axis, in the current of time, at home in the galaxy. A local habitation and an hour. “I am time, grown old to destroy the world.” She wanted the clock. She would say to James, Here I am, on November first, sometime in the twenty-second century. The Day of the Dead.
He would say, Give me your hand. I will be well. All will be well. There is an island in the North Pacific waiting for us. We will be devoted to each other and to the forests and the orcas, the drifting fogs and the blue, dashing jays, to the great restless North Pacific that eats men and ships and airplanes, but not us. Not us.
At the guarded entrance to the e-waste heaps Nadia lined up with about fifteen or so people. The line moved forward alongside the trucks. People spoke together in alarmed voices about the sleety snow. A group of people had crowded into the guard shack against regulations and pressed close to a TV screen. Suddenly someone shouted, No! No!
What’s going on? A woman beside her called to those in the guard shack. Is it another execution? The woman clutched her hands together in alarm as if the television had become dangerous to look at, dangerous to see.
The Facilitator’s been arrested!
They made the confused noises of an alarmed crowd, spontaneous cries, turning to one another, the erratic light of the screen jumping across their wet faces.
Nadia waited in line, standing on tiptoe to see the guard with his handheld card reader. And so the beautiful egghead was arrested, all the more reason to get out of here as fast as possible. He stood under a porch cobbled together of wood and canvas. He was very young and nodded without cease.
Yeah, yeah, go on, okay, go ahead. The guard waved people on. Then it was her turn. He took the stripped blister card from Nadia and turned it over to one side and then the other.
What’s this? he said.
Nadia dropped the plasticized material from her head. Individual issue, she said. Her lips felt stiff for some reason. Just slide it. Nadia placed the five dimes in a neat stack on the windowsill and then tucked her hand in a coat pocket.
The guard did not look at the money but put her blister card into the card reader and waited. The black screen said something to him in bright green text, and he read it and shrugged. He kept turning back to glance into the guard shack at the TV where people cried out, I can’t believe it!
Wendy Hu, he said. I am to issue you a permit, one time only.
I want that clock, she said. May I have that clock?
The truck driver looked up with flat screens in either hand and the drizzle running from his canvas hat.
I can trade you this for it. She held out two eyes: a blue and a hazel. That would leave her with only one, a black one.
Hey! The truck driver reached out for the eyes. It’s a deal. Hey, never seen these before. A Continuity Man will pay a mint for them. He handed the clock to her. We’re supposed to account for everything but with this news the Facili
tator is being arrested nobody’s going to have their heads on straight. He smiled. This is a time for theft and flight and so on, got to play the cards as they lay, right?
Mountains of wrecked printers, computer towers and monitors, old television screens. Many of them had wooden chassis that were now splintered and broken. In the distance smoke rose from a mound of burning plastic refuse. Sellers and buyers, most of them probably black market, fingered through the piles of components in the stalls. I need capacitors, a buyer said. One hundred Ohm speaker parts. Resistors.
This is all I got.
Nadia hurried past dim figures picking at cell phones with needle-nosed pliers and others cooking circuit boards over charcoal fires to drain out the dregs of gold hidden within them. People in blackened rags smashed toner cylinders, broke them open with wooden mallets and dumped the remaining powder into steel barrels and then with a sort of lighthearted jollity flung the broken cylinders into great bins. They did this under a shelter made of plastic pipe and canvas. It had originally been for shade but now the people worked under it for protection from the fine drizzle of rain and snow.
In the puddles forming at the edge of the canvas where the water dripped, beautiful marbled designs swirled in black and taupe as if the ink and toner were runoff from all the books that should have been written but never were, all pouring out in a discouraged and continual weeping.
Excuse me, excuse me, Nadia said.
Two human figures paused and looked at her. They were a midnight people, wildly busy, dark as anthracite.
I am looking for the truck bays.
A boy ran out and took her hand. He imprinted his hand on hers. He pointed with an inky forefinger. Straight ahead, lady, he said. You go that way.
The drivers of the square van with license plate number GAN22VP1–928LES were listening to Big Radio. Nadia told them her name and they pointed to the back. She climbed into the back of the van and sat among restored and renovated electronics, all of them bundled in shrink wrap. Water ran into the cab through a window that seemed to be permanently stuck open. Written on the side in ornate gold lettering: Fremont Exclusive Delivery.
Lighthouse Island Page 24
