Stranded in the center of this pyroclastic flow is Meche. The gold strands emanate from her, stringing out in a flurry between her outstretched fingers. John is a small and hunched figure next to her, caught also in whatever she’s weaving.
On my layer of the world, this place is built from fire that cools into blades.
It is the wolf’s voice, I sense this, though it’s all in my head.
Only those who ply its same element can hold against it without being changed. For, on all layers, it is a place meant to shred the spirit.
I know, I think. Even my mother senses that.
But it is only a stop on the way to a worse and more fearsome place. It will get sharper and more punishing from here.
What can we do?
We each have our magicks to add.
But I don’t.
I know I’m not out long, just the time it takes John to finish the job for me (pull chip out, mop up with betadine, slap an instaskin patch on the spot). Meche’s banking on the instaskin’s astringency to help stanch the flow of blood and for the adhesive to serve, more or less, in place of a suture. When I come to I feel like its been hours.
“Put the GPS chip in your bra and keep it on you at all times,” Meche says as she finishes inspecting Mari’s neck. “When we get out of here we’re going to have to find a place to plant them.”
“When are we leaving?” Mari asks, looking straight at me. She’s the same person from before my dream/hallucination/whatever but I can’t fully meet her eyes.
“Soon,” I say.
But, truth is, I haven’t even started on that part.
First I have to convince my mom to let me drive to Hastings. For spring break. With John.
As if.
So I lie. I tell her I’m going to see my father.
I haven’t seen my dad in a year. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me, he’s just strange that way. Plus, he moves around a lot. Cell phone, Harley, odd jobs – he prefers portable and impermanent to anything that pins him down. He comes through twice a year and visits me on his way up to the rez to spend time with his mom and cousins.
“He called you?” My mother’s not even pretending to believe me.
“I called him and he told me he’s working a swap meet on the outskirts of Hastings these days. I invited myself down.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a vacation.”
“And working with you at the inkatorium does? Look, I never get to see him. I miss him. I want to spend time with him too.”
She gets this tired look in her eyes and turns away from me. “Fine. But you pay for gas and tolls from your savings because this isn’t a pay week and we’re pretty close to tapped out. And, just so you know, I’m going to call him beforehand and set him straight on some ground rules.”
Alrighty, then, I’ll have to call him up first and warn him that I’ve used him as an excuse for a getaway week with my boyfriend. When I talk to him, he’s less receptive than I had hoped. I finally manage to get him to agree, but only by wielding some heavy-duty abandoned daughter guilt. It makes me feel as if I’ve turned into my mother, and I’m not at all sure he gets the details of the tale right.
I volunteer at the inkatorium every night in advance of the exit date. My mom tells Val she thinks I’m doing this to spend extra time with her before bailing. “She thinks it’s sweet,” Val says, patting my hand as she passes me the community service badge.
Like so much with my mom, it makes me mad. I’m only there to scrutinize the shift rosters and mess with the computers, and now she’s loaded me down with emotional debt, the kind that’s impossible to pay off.
I’ve picked a day I know she won’t be on campus – she’s heading to the state capital for her annual performance review – because I might be a bad daughter but not so bad that I want her around to get blamed for what happens. Val’s off shift too.
I park Blue Belle in the back lot, close to the door. My entire savings are in the glove box; John’s and my duffles are in the back seat area, and under those, the clothing in Mari’s and Meche’s sizes I’ve picked up at the thrift shop. Plus a tube with instaskin patches. The cargo cover is unfurled and hooked in. As hard as it is for me to do so with all my savings in there, I leave Blue Belle unlocked.
When I run into John he looks a little green. I think it’s finally dawned on him that if we get caught we’ll be in the type of trouble his parents can’t buy him out of.
The staff is easy without my mother around, and at noon a bunch of them go to the mothership console to watch a show that involves people winning money if they’re able to keep down whatever gross beverage the producers concoct.
In the lunchroom John and I deliberately stay away from Meche and Mari, but I can see them from where we sit. I swear to God, Havana Barbie looks as impassive as the doll Toño chose for her name. Mari plays catch with the kids, but I can tell she’s preoccupied when she misses a fly ball. The kid who threw it hops around with her arms in the air as if she had accomplished the impossible.
After lunch, when I pass the mothership again, I see more staff gathered round. It seems a good omen that they’re distracted and not as vigilant as normal.
The fire alarm is set to go off at 6:30 p.m., when John and I are getting off shift and the third grouping of inks are heading to the cafeteria for dinner. Mari and Meche are on third and, if all goes well, will be closer to the back exit than the front one when the alarm rings. We’ll be out and together in the back parking lot, hidden in plain view with a crowd of inks and volunteers and junior staff. The senior staff will evacuate to the front lot with the inks from the infirmary and from the higher security rooms where the disruptive inks are held.
That’s how it’s intended to work, anyway.
I’m near the back door, where I’m supposed to be, and I can see Mari and Meche more or less where they should be when the alarm goes off. There’s no John. And the staff is holding, not exiting.
I punch keys on my cell phone.
“Where r u?” I text John.
“Improvising.”
“WTF?”
“Later. Pick up = frnt.”
Within seconds Bennett is beside me at the door, listening to Renfro’s voice rendered crackly through the 2-way radio: “There’s a lot of smoke in A-wing. I don’t think this has anything to do with the other, Bennett. Fire trucks should be here soon. I say it’s a go.”
Bennett starts calling out orders. The door opens, but I wait. Mari goes through first and stumbles into Bennett before straightening up and heading in the general direction of my car. I meet Meche’s eyes in the brief moments before she too sweeps by in the crowd. I snag Bennett before he goes anywhere.
“John was working in A today.”
He gives me a sympathetic look. “He’ll be okay, Abs.”
“Our shifts are over,” I say. “Can I drive out front, pick him up and get going before the fire engines come and block me in all night?”
He nods. “I’ll tell Renfro.”
When I slip out the door, most of the staff and volunteers seem to be on the other side of the parking lot herding inks onto the back lawn and away from the building. I get into Blue Belle and haven’t even started the car up when Bennett’s at the driver side window motioning for me to roll it down.
He leans in and looks around.
“Amy and Greta are off shift, too, and have little kids to get home to. You think you can give them a ride? I think you can fit everyone if you put your bags in the cargo area.”
“Sure,” I say, after a second. “Are they out front?”
“Yeah. Renfro is sending them over to where John’s waiting for you.”
I nod a goodbye then roll the window up and watch him walk away. “You heard?”
Mari’s voice comes out from under the cargo cover. “Those bags aren’t going to fit in here. We hardly fit.”
I maneuver Blue Belle to the front lot. About when I spot John, I hear the first fire engine racing down Ma
nor and, from the sound of it, pretty damn close to the inkatorium’s driveway.
“Shit, shit, shit. We’re not getting out after all.”
But John and Greta and Amy are thinking the same thing and they sprint up to Blue Belle and scramble inside.
“Punch it,” John says. “We can still make it.”
We do, just barely. Ed Sweeney, the cop who’s blocked part of the road to give first responder vehicles clear access, honks angrily as I swing by him in flagrant violation of emergency rules of the road. He knows who Blue Belle belongs to and my mother’ll hear about this from him. God, I’m going to be grounded for life.
Dropping off Amy and Greta adds 30 minutes to the trip, and because John’s in the car I have to pretend I’m dropping him off next and start in the wrong direction. By the time we’re in the clear, we’re nearly an hour delayed. I pull over about five miles out of town, to a spot I know will be abandoned.
“What the hell happened? Why didn’t they follow the established fire plan?” I ask as soon we’ve unhooked the cargo cover and let Meche and Mari out of the cramped space.
“Who knows?” John says. “But I overheard Renfro say he wasn’t letting anyone outside unless he actually smelled smoke and located the source inside the inkatorium. So I set one in the bin with hair waiting to be hauled to the incinerator. Oh my God, it stank.”
While we’re talking, Mari and Meche change out of their jumpsuits, hide them in the weeds, then cover their tattoos with instaskin. In minutes we’re on the interstate.
“I think we have a problem. Get off at the next exit,” Meche says about 15 minutes on. When I look at her in the rearview, she’s gone dead white. “I forgot to get rid of my tracker,” she says, then pitches the chip out the window she’s opened.
“Mari?” I ask when I’ve run out of names to call Meche.
“Remember how I tripped into Bennett? He’s me for now. Until my tracker falls out of his clothes.”
We try to find our way to Hastings on local roads. Without a map, and without GPS because cars that belong to people like me aren’t equipped with options. Instead of three hours, John guesses it’s going to take us five.
I fume as I drive. John watches me out of the corner of his eye but knows better than try to talk me out of it. After an hour, he leans over and turns on the radio. That’s when we figure out what the staff was doing earlier glued to the television.
Across the state, cities and towns are burning.
Please, I think as we listen to the list, don’t let the state capital be one. It is. And there’s a ring of fires around Bedford, where my dad really is at the moment.
“Cell phone,” I say to John. He digs it out of my bag, flips it open then shakes his head. Nothing.
The newscaster’s up to the Fs on the list.
I pull over on the shoulder while we wait.
“What do we do if Hastings is burning?” John says.
We go from a bad place to a worse and more fearsome one. But I don’t repeat the wolf’s words because, hey, I don’t believe in quoting figments of imagination. Still, I think it’s right about one thing.
We’re going to need magic.
Part Two
“How do you elude a giant who takes out 400 with the swipe of one hand and carries the very mountains on his back?”
Francine Riordan, “Mythic Motif and Genocide in Central America,” Journal of Myth and Folklore 57, 1: 64.
Mari: Intercession
1.
The building where Finn and I rented our apartment is burning. So is Holy Innocents, both church and rectory. Abbie drives where we tell her to go, shock written on her features.
Meche gives me a look when we pass Hipco’s headquarters – intact – and again when we go by its archives engulfed in flames. The fires aren’t really random, they’re in emergent neighborhoods that still rent to inks. The newspaper office, housed in one of those eccentric Robert Math buildings Finn once told me about, is untouched. Two blocks away, the city’s Chinatown is char and cinder.
I look out the window onto a streetscape like I’ve seen in the photographs my father brought back with him when he went to Central America to retrieve me.
A war zone in everything but declaration.
I’ve never seen so many weapons out in the open. Vehicles full of guard and reservists rumble through flashing traffic lights. Intersections are barricaded. The night sky is orange from fire.
The flash mobs precipitate it, if you can believe the radio reports. Coordinated by twitter and cell phones, people flood transit centers and municipal buildings. The mob – all ink – tramples bystanders and overwhelms anyone who stands in its way. There is no manifesto to explain the action. What explanation needs to be written that isn’t already engraved on our skin? Fifteen detention hubs and several safe communities are affected. Hastings isn’t the only city responding to the havoc by firebombing its own people, only the most efficient.
We’re stopped multiple times. No tattoos in this car, officer. See?
At Meche’s direction, Abbie parks outside a brownstone in the toniest section of town. No slow burning shingle. No brick darkening under flame. Just the smoke from other sections of the city carried on heedless winds. Meche leads us to a house in the center of the block. I wonder who she knows here and whether they’ll open the door to her ragtag cohort. Then I watch in surprise as she lifts the cover on a keypad by the door and punches in a string of numbers. The front door clicks.
“Come on,” she says, “we’re home.”
The house is impeccably restored and appointed. Abbie walks around it in a haze, too honest to hide her envy. John plops down on the sofa as if he’s been invited. And that’s the hardest adjustment, we have been invited. By a woman different than the one we thought we knew from the inkatorium.
This one is an entrepreneur whose once-thriving peña is down to skeleton staff, just a line cook, Napoleón (green tat), and an older man named Silvio (blue). He removed the image of La Caridad that marked it as a peña a couple of weeks ago, he reports immediately, as if that’s the most important thing he must explain to the boss who’s been away for months.
Post-traumatic stress, I think.
But no, Meche gives him a significant look. “And?” she asks.
“And, nothing,” Silvio says, defensive. “We’re okay.”
She mumbles something I don’t quite catch.
“I’ve taken other liberties, too,” he says in Spanish to Meche. Then, glancing at the teens, he switches to English. “So many people have been burned out by the fires, I’ve said some can stay here. At no cost.” He lifts his chin and juts it just a little.
“Of course,” Meche says, and suddenly she’s entangled a conversation about freeing up the money it’ll take to house and feed an unknown number of guests.
I wander, stroking the spines of the books lined neatly on shelves in her living room, then drift upstairs. The house has three floors, with a computer hub on each, and rooms ranging from grand to monastic.
Back on the first floor I find myself at the living room windows, looking out. My animal twin stretches. It feels like it’s always been this way, she and me together on overlapping layers of existence. But every so often it still makes me wonder. Where does she end and I begin? And, can I even make that distinction?
Before I know it I’ve slipped the deadbolt on the backdoor, and again I don’t know if it’s her instinct or mine that leads me outside.
There’s actually a fourth floor to the house, one level with the fenced-in garden I’m overlooking from the deck. I haven’t seen any staircase leading down to it, and the front of the house has no separate entry, so its access must be hidden somewhere.
Meche finds me. She leans over the railing beside me. “I’ve told the children to call their parents and let them know they’re alive and safe and that they won’t be leaving until it’s safe to transit the city.”
I nod. “We owe them, you know.”
She
makes an irritated sound. “Of course I know.”
After a while she says. “I don’t recognize my city. Weird how your life can become unrecognizable and somehow you adjust, but when your city turns…. If my grandparents were here they’d feel some sense of déjà vu seeing the streets we drove through.”
“I was thinking something along those lines about my parents.”
“I wonder if we’ll end up repeating their lives.”
“Since my mother died violently, I vote no.”
She turns around, leans her back on the railing. “Finn is here, by the way.”
I start. “Now?”
“No, but he’s staying here, so he’ll be back. He’s one of the people Silvio knew for certain I’d want to help. Father Tom too. They came by a few hours before us, with a West African family in tow. I’ve just met the mom, Laurene. She’s got little kids so Silvio made her take the basement apartment where they can run around without getting underfoot.” She sighs. “He really has a sadistic streak. I think she’s more scared of the access stairway than what’s happening outside.”
“How do you get down there?”
“Stairway inside the closet next to the bar. A lot of the Civil War era buildings in the neighborhood have hidden stairways like it. Or had them, before remodels. They’re all acute angles, narrow steps and steep pitch. Dodgy and scary, but kids never seem to have a moment of fear running up and down them.”
I look out over her garden. It’s not its season, but it’s still pretty and just wild enough that I find myself making a noise an awful lot like purring.
“I’d give anything to remember what it’s like to be fearless,” I say after a moment.
“These are frightening times.”
“No, I mean….”
“I know what you mean,” she says when I can’t finish my thought. “Sometimes the landscape of the heart becomes more foreign than any other.”
Her face softens a little and she looks away from me.
I’m struck by how little I know her. And now I’ve cast my lot with hers, based mostly on chance and an instinct I can’t even wholly call my own.
Ink Page 13
