Enemy Women

by Paulette Jiles

  The attendants were upset when they finally found her. Solitude was the same as hostility. Children were never left alone. Raisa sat and felt about for her plate, her spoon, and tried to eat and drink without spilling but the other children tipped her cup over and laughed and so she flung her grits wildly, hoping to hit them. She was always a mess and she had to be cleaned up. It made the attendants impatient. two other girls, June and Nancy, decided to become her protectors and were kind to her. They treated her like a doll. They put the morning and evening water bottles in her hand and said, There now, drink up! They braided her hair and tugged her around the rooms. One time they were given oranges and June and Nancy scrupulously divided an orange among the three of them, an act of generosity that restored Raisa’s faith in humanity. They sat her in front of the television and told her what was happening with the sardonic spoons and the hero-children. When the news came on they were all silent and then bored.

  For Raisa the stories were all broken and fragmented and incomplete. This kept her anxiously asking, And then what did they do? What are they doing now? They’re not talking, what are they doing? So that she was left with nothing but missing links and stories that were mutilated and garbled because she couldn’t see expressions or movements or understand what the music meant. She turned her left ear toward the television in hopes of hearing some kind of continuity that the others couldn’t and then she turned her right ear toward the screen but nothing helped. It left her with a kind of despair that she could not put into words. She told herself, It will get better. Life will get better.

  In winter they all left the day-care center and went some other place, some other building. June and Nancy had disappeared. The incessant thundering and street noises grew louder and closer. They were dressed in padded jackets and wrapped in blankets made of an abrasive material. Step up, Raisa. Here, sit down, Raisa. As they drove through the streets there was another sound from far below.

  What’s that? said Raisa.

  What’s what? She felt Shaniya turning to her.

  There’s a sound far down, she said. Underneath us. Raisa held on to Shaniya’s arm because she was afraid she was being taken to someplace where she would be killed; the thought occurred to her in a kind of evaporating image. The vehicle had stopped to wait for something. Crowd noises outside. It was bitterly cold.

  Those are the underground trains, said the attendant. My God, she can hear anything.

  Life at the new place started up all over again, just the same. She had to begin again memorizing the number of steps into and out of rooms, into the sleeping area, the eating area, the toilets. She could hear the hissing steam boilers in the basement and the singing of the wind through telephone wires and electrical wires strung from building to building, and the sound of the thick crowds on the sidewalks outside. The television talked about new and deeper wells being drilled, collecting glacier water; it spoke of sex scandals in high places. Crowds applauded, there were dramatic conflicts between men and women in intense close-ups, more Pepper Spray and talking spoons and instructions on the use of solar casseroles.

  She became despairing and anxious. They had left her parents behind. She thought of them as still standing at the intersection where they had abandoned her, the last place she had looked at with her terrified and seeing eyes. She thought of them weaving among the displaced crowds, restless and insubstantial. Raisa decided they had gone on, toward the northern stars. They had waited for her but she had not come. How could she? So her mother and father went on through outer space toward the Big Dipper. Her parents would never find her again.

  Raisa took hold of Shaniya’s hand and said, My mother and dad said if I looked up at the North Star they would be there. Am I not going to be blind someday? Raisa closed her hand around the jingle bell they had tied on her wrist so that everyone knew where she was. She always managed to find silent corners and closets. Happily alone among the mops.

  Shaniya said, Well, we’re trying to get you some medicine.

  Then I could see the North Star. That’s where my mother and dad are.

  Shaniya said, What mother and dad ? You never had a mother and dad.

  Raisa said, But I did, I did. She grasped the woman’s skirt and jerked at it as if she would rip it. Her fists were bony and white. I did!

  Shaniya took hold of her hand and said, Baby, you just listen to all those programs and see. Do any of the children on Undersea Adventures have mothers and dads?

  No, they did not. So there you go.

  Chapter 2

  Raisa went in a vehicle to a hospital with new papers and a new ID that they told her to hold before herself and hand to whoever asked for them. She had been wearing an eye mask for two weeks. After the retinyl palmitate had arrived, her gray-green eyes were newborn and weak and had to be protected.

  Her name was changed to Nadia Stepan for medical care and future maintenance by the Agency for Parentless Dependents. She did not understand this. All hope of her parents ever finding her must now be finally abandoned. They would look for a girl named Raisa. She wasn’t Raisa anymore. She was a stunted six-year-old with clothes too big for her and a stiff headscarf and boatlike shoes, a creature that kindheartedness and courage and nobility, concepts that had now become free-floating angelic transparencies, could not locate in this dry and overpopulated world even though they were looking for her, searching everywhere.

  Shaniya left her in the care of doctors and nurses and kissed her cheek and went away. The sound of explosions had started up again. Nadia sat in a room that smelled of antiseptics. Brightness enveloped her but all was silent and so she sat very still.

  For a long time she sat, listening to people running up and down the halls, the sound of gurneys on wheels and people crying out, I need some help, here!

  When Nadia reached out a hand she touched a water bottle. Down the hall was a television with news: demolitions now occurring without proper forewarning, agency heads responsible arrested. Trials beginning next week. Arraignments. Footage. The Facilitator regrets.

  She waited. The water bottle was slippery in her hands. After a while it was clear no one else was there. They had forgotten her. A complete silence except for the announcer’s voice on the TV down the hall. Another explosion and rumbling. She sat waiting for somebody to take off her eye mask, for the great revelation, the world of sight.

  She called out but there was no answer. She pulled the covering from her eyes herself and tore strands of hair with the adhesive. The light was so dazzling she seemed to be suspended in it. She could hear walls coming down.

  She put out both hands and walked into planes of gleaming things. She picked up her feet and put them down very carefully as if she were printing some image on the floor. She came to the room with the television. She sat down in front of it. The picture resolved itself, became intelligible, and she saw a tall, thin tower with a light on top sending out an intense beam and a great sea washing over rocks, curtains of drift.

  Lighthouse Island! said the announcer’s voice. Save up your credits and go! See the rain forests! Trees reared upward into mists and rain, long trunks like the legs of marvelous beings whose bodies were higher yet. Northern beauty, misted nights! The revolving light on top of the tower arrowed into the night and the sea.

  Nadia thought, This is the magic planet that Lucy and the Swiffer Boys were looking for in their transformer ship. Searching through a cartoon galaxy. I am supposed to go there. Ocean spray thundered over the guardian cliffs of the shore. Maybe that was where her parents went. A house of logs with intricately carved eaves and painted decorations and medallions and pointed windows, a fantasy house, resolute and calm with a light shining out of a window, people inside, safe and warm. Kind people.

  An ambulance attendant found Nadia in front of the TV, picked her up, and ran with her through descending showers of rubble, into the dry streets.

  She said, I am not Nadia. My name is Lucy Swiffer.

  They believed her; not for very long
, but enough to encourage her in thoughts of deception, altered personalities.

  At the beginning of the demolitions of the Three Falls neighborhood many square miles of skyscrapers came down, and people scavenged in the rubble for copper pipes and other fixtures, paneling, scrap lumber, nails and screws and hinges and tile and I-beams and I-tools. Some were legal scrappers but others were freelance and most of those were thieves. In groups of four and five the scrappers wrenched up blocks of rubble and snaked out electrical lines; they came upon dishes and clothes and from time to time the remains of other people.

  James Orotov was eighteen years old and had come to love demolition, even the smell of cordite and the dust of test blasts. He was deeply absorbed by the remains of structures where he could see the hidden anatomy of the city exposed like a medical student’s cadaver, where he could observe load-bearing beams and ancient water mains and the infill of foundations. He and his brother had the privilege of flying south with the engineers, one of only ten flights that year. In the south one could come across old Saltillo tiles with imprints of the hands that had made them, and paw prints and chicken tracks. James had a collection of these tiles with their fossils of vanished animals and workmen. In a notebook he began to make secret maps; they were tentative and unsure. Prester John Apartments, he wrote. 28 degrees 24 minutes North latitude and 97 degrees 45 minutes West longitude.

  He and his brother went out on a balcony of the Prester John Apartments after the crews had taken down the top five stories to see the beams that supported the balconies. His brother dared him to step out on the balcony and so he did. So they both did. They eased through the doorless doorway and onto the balcony and then the balcony gave way. There were no beams. It was only a concrete shelf without supports.

  He fell all four stories and landed on top of a pile of mattresses, fans, solar cookers, cacti in planters, wheelie carts for shopping, tools, bedding, and polyester clothes that had been dragged into the street by former inhabitants.

  As he dropped through the hot city air a great voice (his own) shouted through his mind like a loud-hailer, But I never met her! He fell, windmilling his arms, into the deep canyon of the narrow street, young and strong and in flight for perhaps the last time in his life. Slabs of broken concrete came down with him. He struck the pile of mattresses and clothes and would have survived without serious injury but the remains of the balcony fell on his back and broke his spine. Pieces of concrete hit the street and bounded and shattered into even smaller pieces. His brother hung from the balcony door frame by his fingers and some men ran up the four flights and pulled him in.

  The workmen loaded James onto a door and ran down the street with him. They dodged buses and carts. James shouted that he could not feel his legs. His brown hair was glistening with blood. His brother dashed ahead to a telephone exchange booth and called for an ambulance. The operator gave the EMS the corner numbers and James was taken to a hospital and ended up in a wheelchair.

  He recalled his descent through the hot afternoon air and his wild thought, But I never met her!

  Met who?

  He studied and attained degrees in both architecture and explosives. He studied cartography on his own. He had brown hair and gray eyes and the cynical and reserved attitude of someone confined to a wheelchair. James often tried to find his way through the antiquated and unstable remains of the Internet, searching for the disappeared. He had once been tall.

  James and his brother, Farrell, became closer after the fall. They had lost their father to cancer and so there were only three of them left and one of these in a wheelchair. Farrell was stockier than James and shorter, only now of course James sat in his wheelchair and was shorter than anybody except children and dwarves. Farrell studied meteorology and aviation and became a pilot and a devotee of old weather reports, written in a language so obsolete that few could puzzle it out. Meteorology, an orphan bureaucracy, was always shifted around because the world had fallen into a state of weatherless weather. All was blue seared skies and drought and, in the winter, intense cold because atmospheric water had frozen up in the glacial caps at the poles, plunging the world into a Drought Age. Farrell was given a position in Meteorology and Intrusive Species Identification because he could read the technical jargon or at least was interested in understanding it and could translate the greater part of the reports. He obtained a Ph.D. in aviation and weather, as if it were an award.

  Farrell asked agency heads in Wellness and Medical Certification about research into spinal injuries, specifically corticospinal tract regeneration. It was not a high priority and medical research had gone seriously downhill over the last century. Farrell discovered a facility that prepared retinol for stabilization into retinyl palmitate. The plant was laced with great tubes delivering inert gases for gas packing, smoky people in subzero temperatures doing things in white coats, and in the rear a tiny laboratory where corticospinal researchers lived in squalor.

  Yes, sir? A woman sat in a busted armchair out in the entry way to the minute laboratory. Her hair was flattened under a dirty white cap, her skin dried into innumerable wrinkles. A cardboard box that said biowaste overflowed onto the floor. He told her why he had come.

  She said respectfully, Well, Director Orotov, we may have something. We’re trying to find a blocking system for an enzyme called PTEN; it’s a cell-proliferation inhibitor. It inhibits a molecular pathway called mTOR, and if we can delete the PTEN, we may get nerve regrowth. Spinal nerves normally don’t regenerate but this may do the trick. It has with the pigs.

  I see. Farrell’s dark eyes were fixed on her and very alert. So, this is working on your lab pigs.

  Yes, but it may allow for formation of tumors. Other illnesses. I mean, you suppress a cell-growth inhibitor and so you may get all kinds of weird cell growth.

  Okay. Farrell nodded. You’ll let me know, won’t your

  It will be available for severe cases only, at first. An experiment.

  And the severe cases are always among people who have connections.

  Isn’t that the truth?

  But you’ll let me know? Farrell laid down two Krugerrands. What else do you need ?

  The woman looked at the gold coins for a long moment. A new centrifuge. The one we have is hand-cranked if you can believe that and the air seal is faulty. The woman put her hand on the coins. This is lunch. For, like five months or so. What do you do, Director Orotov?

  I’m in Meteorology.

  Farrell and James came from a good family, a privileged family. They had been taught, against all logic, the privilege and responsibility of public service. But the corrosive contempt of the general population for the agencies wore down this concept as if by steel wool.

  The brothers often went to the rooftops to talk, to get away from those who might listen in and disapprove and get them arrested. They listened to Big Radio and its cycle of readings: Here we are at the beginning of autumn when the season turns and the leaves take on color. This is the season for the classic works of Spain and then the unforgettable explorers’ tales. Let us begin with Blood and Sand.

  From the streets below came the sounds of the inhabitants of the worldwide city streaming in many directions, thick as boiling grains, dried out and thirsty. Beyond that sound another deep tremolo of trains rumbling underground carrying compressed brewer’s yeast, cactus paste in blocks, boxes of soy crumbles, solar panels, pressed recycled cardboard, packets of fish-flavored shreds, rice milk from what used to be St. Louis but was now Gerrymander Seven. The shipments were often stalled for months for lack of paperwork or were sidelined and rifled by professional thieves while neighborhoods quietly starved. Distribution was a chronic problem and a mystery but secret trains full of prisoner-workers bulled their way past the immovable food shippage.

  The brothers sat on Farrell’s rooftop with a water feature called Eastern Tranquility and listened to this symphonic arrangement of urban sounds and talked. They discussed the human propensity to construct cities and the i
mperatives of urban growth. James’s long unfeeling feet were in house slippers on the wheelchair plates, his hand skipped over his keypad. They talked about heavier-than-air flight, about old movies, about the future of humanity, about forgetting, about the fall of James and the fall of man.

  James was one of the top men in his field and he was quietly invited to join the Royal Cartography Society, which was not exactly illegal. After the Urban Wars they had destroyed all the maps, the old place names as well as the year numbers. This left people in a kind of eternal present in no specific place. The maps needed to be recovered, rediscovered, and if they were quiet about it, no problem. Pandrit Yi was an undersupervisor in Urban Drainage and Flow Control in the Eighth Gerrymander who mapped in the wee hours; Albert Burke held some kind of job

  with Furniture Supply and he actually walked over the rise and fall of the land, house by house, in the far north, Fourth Gerrymander, Neighborhood Fifteen, which was at one time known as Minneapolis, and drew in the topographical lines as things felt and bodily known.

  Are we truly born to formulate cities? James had himself driven to the interspaces, traveling by ambulance to the limits of his own part of the city, which was a micronation, or had been, to look out on the slums that lay between while his attendants groused and snorted. To leave the dense city, even to approach the small spaces in between urban concentrations was, to them, like approaching death and starvation. They drove for days, through the confusion of broken freeways, crowded by dense housing.

  They drove past hundreds of thousands of workers’ barracks crowded and filthy and in other areas dense fields of cactus pads fat with glycerin surrounded by a mineral landscape that long ago had been stripped of soil. They came to a place where winds tore across the interurban deserts and carried with them dust and sand grains and lost kites and clothing from distant rooftop clotheslines and wads of dried grasses as coarse as thatch.