“You disgust me.”
“I know.”
Their smiles get wider, and each wants to tell the other how much they’ve been missed, about the party in Cell Block Three with a jug of ethanol cut with limes and Tang, the fight with rugby players outside a beer garden in Stuttgart, the duel with chisels on a tanker off Mauritius. For Zeke, the girl in Montenegro who lived in a Zastava 10; they drove it up and down the Adriatic coast four times, the crags and cliffs falling into electric blue water all around them; they almost married in Budva on the third trip, but then said too much too fast, and she left him at the Croatian border. He never saw her again. A box of fruit floating in the South China Sea. The way his time in the Aardvark’s jail has seemed like penance, though he knows it isn’t. If they could distill the years into a few perfect syllables that would collapse it all into the present, right now, theywould; instead, Marco just extends his hand, Zeke takes it, and the past remains where it is, waiting, the fuse lit.
They’re about to go when another voice lifts itself from a nearby cell, quieter, more ragged than Marco remembers, but unmistakable. It says his name, first curling it up into a question, then forcing it into a plea, then spitting it out in a surprise that leans toward command. Zeke doesn’t need to be told what to do. He paralyzes his limbs in midstep, a martial artist preparing to spin into the air, thinking about how he will destroy his enemies with his toenails, even though he knows he’s just a currency trader. Marco is frozen against the wall; his already faint outline beginning to disappear.
“You have mistaken me for another,” Marco says in a voice that isn’t his.
“No, I haven’t,” the voice says. “I can smell you.”
Marco looks at Zeke. Even through the dark, Zeke’s eyes say: You should have worked on your tan. Marco points a long finger at him: Don’t even start.
The woman in the cell is Andrea Maria Romanescu, also known as Maria Lista Sandinista. A militant anarchist raised by militant anarchist parents, she was throwing Molotov cocktails into squadrons of shielded policemen before most boys her age had thrown a baseball. Her father was a gifted mathematician, her mother a poet who turned her pen to writing manifestoes. They schooled her from the back of their yellow van, her father squeaking calculus equations across a chalkboard while her mother sweated behind the steering wheel, trying to lose the police; her mother read Victorian novels to her in the tornado shelter of a rest stop outside Kansas City while her father was in the bathroom, wiring up a car bomb. They taught her how to change her identity, what to say to the authorities when they had you in cuffs, how to break up and start riots with castanets. The FBI caught up to them at last when Maria was fourteen. They made her a ward of the state, extradited her parents to the countries of their births, whereeach was wanted for crimes against the state. She never saw them again. To this day, she imagines them in work camps, being forced to write anthems to the glory of the ruling party or assemble low-grade wristwatches, though part of her knows that this is a delusion.
Maria Lista Sandinista was the last person to see Marco before he boarded the prison ship, the only person he knew who saw it leave the pier in Baltimore. The Slick Six were scattered by then. Zeke Hezekiah had been in Monaco for almost four months, Johanna in Connecticut drinking 1866 cognac by the bottle, Hideo and Carolyn in LA, saying good-bye to crime, good-bye to those fine times.
“I’m not angry,” Marco said on the dock, his ankles in chains.
“You should be,” Maria said. “You were so loyal to them, and this is what they give you. A decade in prison, the best years of your life.”
“They didn’t abandon me.”
“Oh really? I don’t see anyone else in the Slick Six getting on the boat with you.”
“You don’t have the whole story.”
“Then why don’t you tell it to me?”
This was the root rotting under the soil, the way they poisoned each other. Even when he had come back with bandages, splints, thousands in cash, a large set of keys, a fake ID, he told her nothing about where he’d gone, what he’d done while he was away from her, and she couldn’t leave it alone. She needed to know; the bomb thrower in her wanted to do these things, too. His silence was an acid in her head, eating into her thoughts, and neither his unbroken attention to her when he was there nor the obvious lust she felt for him could soothe it.
After the ship left, she arranged for a long residence in Nicaragua as the fictional niece of a prominent business family; under the name of Lupita Santiago, she would make a legitimate and very comfortable living as an exporter before the wobbling dollar destroyed the Salvadoran economy as if a nuclear bomb had hit it, and kidnappers—all under the Aardvark’s payroll, though they didn’t know this—invaded the house that bore her name. They thought she must still have something squirreled away, bars of gold taped to the attic ceiling, bolts of fine silk lining closet walls. They found an empty house overrun by spiders, birds nesting in the courtyard. But they found her in Chicago behind a pair of pink sunglasses, escorted her to her cell in New York, guilty of charges of conspiracy against the new empire. They say it’s because of what she did as Lupita Santiago, but she knows it’s because of the Slick Six, because she bothered to be there when the prison ship pulled away from the pier, while the rest of them ran.
“There’s no time now,” Marco said then, “but I’ll tell you someday. I promise you.”
“You never told me anything, Marco,” she says to him now, in the dark. “You kept it from me all those years.” She raises her voice as if she can’t help it, as if the past is pushing the air out of her, and Marco winces, thinks about killing her; but it doesn’t matter now. Someone shuffles in the dark two cells down, clears his throat.
“Who never told you anything?” a voice says.
“She says Marco never told her …” another voice chimed in.
“Marco never said …”
The voices are rising around them, a flash of news moving from cell to cell, carried across the stale air, and Zeke closes his eyes, for among this crowd, the Slick Six are famous. Being one of them kept him alive; but it won’t let him make a quiet exit.
“Marco? Marco who?”
“One of the Slick Six was named Marco, right? Went to sea years ago …”
“What’s he doing here now?”
“‘Gone to sea, gone to sea, silver buckles on his knee. He’ll come back and marry me …’”
“—doing here now, the man who can do things?”
“Zeke, is Marco getting you out? Take me with you.”
“Yeah, man, get us all out of here, get us all out …”
Zeke hears Marco unsheathe something, move toward the bars where Maria Lista Sandinista’s voice came from.
“I’m sorry—” she says.
“—You might have just killed us,” Marco says. “Do you understand now? Why I kept it from you? This is why. Listen. This is why.”
Marco, Marco, the syllables float from block to block, crawling into the ears of sleepers, writhing through their jaws until the mute lips are shaping them. The words warp dreams, make the prisoners think of games with water pistols, of days in public swimming pools. Marco, Polo. The weedy water of warm ponds and cold rivers, snapping turtles in the depths. Italians crossing Asia, wandering from the caravan to die facedown in a flock of mushrooms; nomads find the dried cadavers decades later, take the metal from their clothes to melt down, grind the bones to sell for medicine that lets you see into the future. In a few hours, Marco knows, the inmates will stitch the story of how he freed Zeke into their suffering, see the threads of light and shadow that form their faces, and they won’t be able to stop talking about it, the night Marco came back from the ocean and stole Zeke Hezekiah like he stole the Aardvark’s best paintings, his house on the western shore of Bermuda. The words will travel up through the guards to the warden, up to the city administrators, who will get into knife fights to decide who gets to tell the Aardvark. So will the Aardvark learn of what ha
s happened, how he has been cheated again; so will Marco’s escape become a chase.
“Can you at least let me out of here?” Maria Lista Sandinista says, in a voice like a six-year-old. But Marco and Zeke are already gone. The alarms go off from cell block to cell block;
red emergency lights spark off the cinderblock walls; inmates shout into the halls; guards holler at everyone to settle the fuck down. And Maria Lista Sandinista’s parents speak to her through the ether, of timers, batteries, insulated wires, of putty that can tear down buildings. Be our daughter, they say. Do what we never could, because the van kept breaking down, because we paid for vegetables with nickels and dimes, and the FBI put a tap on our velour purse. Write your anger on the surface of the world in letters of fire, and let them rage until the words have destroyed everything.
CHAPTER III.
A lawyer’s IDENTITY CRISIS; a drive
south; DOCTOR SAN DIEGO and the
AMERICOIDS; the betrayal and REVENGE
of the Inuit; a riot; visions of history.
Jeannette Winderhoek stands at the wide expanse of glass at the top of the Aardvark’s tower among a forest of statues and bonsai, frescos and bas-reliefs pulled from ruins, tapestries depicting the usurping of kings by their underlings, usurped in turn. The vines planted in a pot near the stairs have crawled everywhere, fingers of leaves pulling at the elevator doors, stuttering across the mahogany slab of the Aardvark’s desk, throwing an odor into the room that speaks of the tropics, of Central America, Bolivia. From this height, Jeannette Winderhoek is the eye of the city. She can see everything, the outline of the island of Manhattan etched into the metallic sheen of the harbor, Long Island and the mainland falling away, the buildings spread out before her, the back of a concrete porcupine. Everything and nothing. The millions of windows are dark, impenetrable, the street so far below her that the movement on them blurs near stillness. They say they control the city now, yet it is as much a mystery as ever; they don’t even feel the air it breathes until it grows into a hurricane.
She walks to the brass telescope mounted on a table, angles it and gazes down the row of derelict office buildings on Madison Avenue, fastens onto the corner of the public library, theoutside of which is being cleaned by volunteers. The building and all of its books are still intact, she knows; the employees of the library made a spontaneous pact to defend it as soon as the police force stopped working, and now they just live in the building. They hauled beds into the offices and corners of the huge reading rooms, put plaid couches against the marble walls. An army of cats patrols the halls, has litters on the stairs. She imagines that some of the librarians are fulfilling a long-cherished fantasy. It’s just them and the books now, the stamped serifs, the margins smudged with fingerprints. You can still go to the library, to the yards of windows casting long stripes of light across the stone floor, the long tables, the wood paneling, the paintings on the walls. You can still go and read the books. Except for the large firearms that the librarians carry, it’s like nothing happened, as if every noon, businessmen are still eating their lunches under the lions.
Jeannette Winderhoek envies the librarians, that they should be able to carve their old vocations out of the new world. Her firm shut itself down the day before the courts closed and the riots began; by then, all of the other partners had left for Europe and Japan. She worked through the last day, a case involving a copyright dispute, folded her briefcase closed in an empty office. Her hand turned off the light, flipped the lock on the office door, a habit turned absurd. She shook the hands of her assistant and a junior lawyer, who wept. The American president tried to declare martial law to push back against the riots, but he’d already been given a vote of no confidence. Then a shooting in the Capitol took three dozen congressmen with it, and just like that, the government sighed out of existence. Jeannette Winderhoek still can’t accept it. The law is real, isn’t it? It’s still there in the way people behave, the way they govern themselves. Cars on the right side of the road, look both ways before you cross the street, no killing your neighbor or taking his things without asking. It’s in her law books, those giant brown-and-tan tomes with gold letters. Thewords in them are real, and they describe the law; depending on the school of legal thought, they are the law. The law was never more than that, right? Words on paper? Its greatest strength and most damning weakness. If it isn’t real now, then it never was. But no one would argue that it never was. It had power, august and undeniable; it could move billions of dollars and send people to prison. It was real then, so it must be real now. Which means Jeannette Winderhoek is still a lawyer. It’s not what she does, not anymore. But it can still be who she is.
Ah, but you forget, says the prosecution—Jeannette Winderhoek doesn’t know how to argue just one side of a case anymore—the Code of Hammurabi was a book of laws once; now it’s history, senseless outside of Babylon, the divine wisdom falling from Anu the Sublime, now unworshipped, the subject of archeology. All of those laws written in the books in the library of Alexandria, they’d be historical documents now if they’d survived the fire, the nomadic centuries. The law needs a government, a society to govern, doesn’t it? The creaky debates of legislators giving it flesh, a judiciary kicking it in the stomach, installing teeth. But the Capitol is abandoned now; there’s a hole in the roof. A family of twelve is living in the Chamber of the Supreme Court; they’ve piled bags and boxes on the Spanish and Italian marble; they sleep in a row behind the mahogany bench and do not dream of laws. So Jeannette Winderhoek, standing at the spyglass, is transformed from lawyer to legal historian, practitioner to academic, and the things in her head wither from profitable to arcane.
Then there’s the slavery. First it was a rumor, people were selling themselves, selling their children. A rural thing. A farmer dismantling his house. A deal between two men: a girl pushed from one to the other, a bag of pharmaceuticals handed over. Both men looking over their shoulders. Then the specter crawled out of the South, followed the tracks of the Underground Railroad, hot for revenge; and all at once, it was in New Mexico, Philadelphia, the South Bronx. The Aardvark sent Jeannette Winderhoek to see the markets for him; he didn’t believe the stories were true, but they were. An auction block hauled onto a playground looking over the Harlem River, people caged in the basketball court. Currency traders in trucks, sorting foreign denominations into bins; four men with machine guns standing around, chewing gum. The auctioneer shouting across the asphalt through a bullhorn, a throng of buyers gathered, a larger crowd of spectators. Two men cheering. A woman wailing with an ancient Funkadelic T-shirt on: AMERICA EATS ITS YOUNG. An old man in a wool suit with an acid-eaten copy of What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? in his hand, shaking his head and crying. Jeannette Winderhoek regarded it all, watched several dozen human beings shackled by their new owners, and as the crowd thinned and they carried away the block, she walked up to the auctioneer, told him who her employer was, and asked, with the politeness of a golden needle of cyanide, for a cut. The auctioneer agreed. He knew what the Aardvark could do. When the first returns came in, the Aardvark put two fingers to his mouth; his eyes dilated. He was putting it together.
“Aren’t there laws against this?” the Aardvark said. She sighs when she thinks of it now.
“Good question,” she said then. “But even if there are laws, nobody’s enforcing them.” De jure and de facto, she thought.
“It’s an interesting social experiment, don’t you think?” the Aardvark says. “Take away the laws and regulations but leave the capitalism. What do you get?”
Jeannette Winderhoek imagines herself on the plains of Kansas, a fallow, whistling desert of burnt corn stalks, the line of the horizon melted by mirage, broken by lines of telephone poles, the posts of grain silos, distant churches. Oil derricks rear back and bow, siphoning off the rocks’ blood. The sky above an unblinking eye. Then, one by one, the signs of human intervention disappear; the power lines, the skeletal irrigationequipment, the houses huddled at
the intersections of pebbly roads, the roads themselves; as though the camera keeps stopping and starting and things are taken away during its blindness. Soon it is just Jeannette, the wind, and the sky, and she feels herself slipping, understands why people might go to church more out here; it’s so easy to be a victim of God’s wrath. Were His gigantic hand to descend from the firmament to pluck you from the planet, there would no buildings, no valleys, no trees to impede its approach, no mark on the ground to signal your disappearance. Just a spiral upward into the atmosphere as the hand passes, pulling up dust into a wispy finger of soil, a tornado in reverse, until the wind carries it off.
Then a clot appears on the horizon, hissing out a metallic din that separates into the clash of parade instruments, the fanfare of an out-of-tune brass band. The shape grows into a multitude of people carrying a boxing ring over their heads; with a collective yawp they drop it in front of Jeannette Winderhoek and encircle her. The band’s music is loud now, loud and decayed into aggressive dissonance, dismembering marches and pep rallies, as a man in a three-piece suit, silk hat, and tails enters the ring, paper deeds to stock and real estate spilling from every seam. His teeth beam in impossible whiteness, and he throws his arms open, a call to challengers. The band blats out a fat, rotting chord that flips stomachs, and another man ducks under the ropes, puts up his dukes, hair and beard down to his waist, braided and beaded, a leather vest, a faded shirt with a one-eyed smiley face on it, ripped pants, no shoes, rolling papers and tabs falling from his pockets. A bell rings from the sky, and the men bare their teeth and lunge; the crowd surges forward on a wave of shouts and trills, and the two fighters dissolve in a cloud of blood and paper, a whipping tangle of beads and tails, nails shredding clothes and digging into skin until both are opened from forehead to navel, opened and dying where they stand, prizefighting for the soul of America.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 5
