Asimov's SF, October-November 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Ms. Rios—"

  Thin fingers brushed the wet strands back. Manicured nails. Mercedes Rios looked away, toward a blank spot on the Employee Wellness Office wall. For a moment she seemed to compose herself.

  Then her shoulders began to shake and the wails began anew. Esther pushed her Kleenex box closer. “Ms. Rios, please tell me what's wrong."

  She gasped, “I can't."

  "I want to help you. I know you feel bad about frightening the children. You're here because your record has been excellent until now."

  Fresh tears coursed down flushed cheeks and dropped onto a modest blouse. The tissues remained untouched.

  Esther followed her client's gaze to an expanse of cream-colored paint between bookcases. Almost everyone who sat in that chair stared at the same spot. Most eventually disclosed the images they overlaid on it.

  Most were not as overcome as Mercedes Rios. Clients that broken-hearted had experienced a sudden death in the family, hit with unexpected, devastating news during an otherwise ordinary day. But that had not been the case here.

  This time an innocent video had set off a response so incongruous and out of proportion that trauma had to be the cause. Mercedes sat with her shoulders hunched and clasped her hands above starched trouser legs pressed tightly together.

  "Why don't we go over what happened in the playroom?” Esther offered.

  Mercedes said, thickly, “They gave you the report."

  "I want to hear it from you. You don't have to tell me why it happened. Just tell me what happened."

  Black eyes blazed. “Why? It won't change anything. It'll say I'm unfit to be around children any longer, so just fire me and let me start over!"

  "I don't have the authority to do that, Ms. Rios. But I do have the authority to make recommendations to your supervisor, who is concerned about you. Your outburst surprised all of us."

  Rios looked ready to curl up into a ball. At least she wasn't crying any more, but that was of little comfort to Esther.

  "You have no children of your own,” the counselor observed.

  "No."

  Something was making her voice flatten.

  Esther asked, “Do the older children usually operate the VCR?"

  Mercedes nodded, still staring at the wall.

  "Your supervisor's report says that you were fine until someone inserted a tape of The Little Mermaid. Then you seemed unaware of your surroundings. You dropped a juice cup. When the children started singing ‘Under the Sea’ in time with the movie, you screamed at them to stop."

  Mercedes whirled on her. “And how would you feel if somebody made a cartoon about the Holocaust?” The twenty-two-year-old's face was inches away, her eyes wild. Her hoarse yell drove Esther's breath from her. “How would you feel if nobody cared about what really happened? If they made it all pretty and funny and gave it a happy ending?"

  She collapsed back into her chair, her chest heaving. Esther stared at her, stunned, and managed to say, “I lost grandparents in the Shoah."

  The tears began again. “Then you know what it's like."

  The puffy face became a mask. Mercedes turned away, her expression disturbingly blank. She remained silent for the rest of the session.

  * * * *

  The Pollution Prevention Act passed less than two months later. The news reached Mercedes in a footnote on a crumpled sheet of paper titled, “Sample Statement of Work.” It was one of many numbered sections dumped into a large trash bin next to a laser printer still spitting out copy at seven o'clock. Fluorescent lights burned up and down the hallway on a frigid Saturday night in November.

  Even the daycare center was open this late, but Mercedes didn't go there any more. She absently smoothed her custodial uniform, as if doing so would unkink the print in her hand. Below it rested more than a dozen reams worth of garbage.

  If the company knew how much she took home with her, it would fire her for sure. She was stealing proprietary garbage, whose final drafts would become government property. Mercedes had figured out that much.

  She wheeled the discards from one room to the next, knocking on doors before she entered to empty smaller bins. The secretary thanked her. Most of the others remained fixated on their computer screens. Outside a locked door lay a small mountain of paper and a top sheet on which someone had scrawled BASURA in black magic marker. Mercedes added those piles to the rest of the trash.

  The same people were still in their offices on Sunday afternoon and late into Sunday night. Mercedes wondered if they ever went home.

  She had come straight from church, where one candle burned for Hector, who had died in a factory explosion in 1978. Another burned for Elian, who had died of liver cancer the following year. She had lit votives for her mother and father, for Aunt Amalia and Uncle Francisco. For lung cancer and for emphysema and for COPD, now that she knew what COPD meant. The garbage had told her.

  They'd all smoked. That fact had hung in the air longer than any stack and fugitive emissions spewed from across the bay.

  A tether connected her to the sea floor. She couldn't see it, couldn't touch it. But it was there, the pull of family, a baby's green eyes, certainty wrapping her like seaweed. Her people.

  Children of God, all of them.

  Mercedes lit a last candle in its red-tinted glass for her imagination and didn't tell a soul.

  * * * *

  "It made electrical equipment."

  Esther Weitz jotted notes on a legal pad. “The plant where your father worked."

  "Father and brother."

  Mercedes could talk about them more easily than about the thing that never was. Esther had lost family, too. She lit candles called yahrzeit.

  "It closed down in 1980, when the—when the laws changed.” How much was a maid not supposed to know? The more knowledge Mercedes amassed, the more perilous everything became. “After what happened in Love Canal."

  Esther's pen scratched. “Those people lived near the water, too."

  Mercedes looked down at the hands in her lap. “Si."

  "I've noticed that you revert to Spanish whenever you don't want to tell me something.” Blue eyes blinked at her through bifocals. “Usually when we get near the beach."

  Mercedes tried to keep the misery from her voice. “I've told you about all of the dead fish. What more do you want to know?"

  "I know that the dead fish are not the whole story, Mercedes."

  She laughed a little and reached for a tissue. “Circulo.” She dabbed at her eyes and twirled her finger in the air. “Spanish for ‘circle,’ you know? That's what CERCLA means to me. I see the word over and over, and it keeps bringing me back to the same question: Why? They did a Habitability Study on Love Canal, but not where I lived. Just because the factory is gone now, does that mean nobody should look at the water?"

  The air crackled around Mercedes until she couldn't tell where one risk ended and another one began. How many sea babies were dying? How many were washed away from their mothers’ arms year after year in tides of effluents?

  The questions were terrifying because they shouldn't even exist. They sprang from the fantasies of a little girl, lying in wait for her like monsters under the bed.

  But the monsters under the bed had gone away.

  Her counselor squinted at her from across the desk. “CERCLA?"

  "Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act.” The English formed jagged boulders, building a seawall in her mouth. “It's on all the papers people throw away. They keep rewriting the same things. They've been doing it for days."

  "Proposals are like that, when you're a government contractor.” Esther laid her pen down, eyebrows raised. “I see you don't just collect the trash."

  "You say I use Spanish to hide things from you.” Mercedes stood, shoving her hands into the armpits of her uniform. No matter which way she teetered, it would be toward an abyss. She began to pace, from bookcase to bookcase. Only four steps. She had not realized the Employee Wellness O
ffice was so small. “I shall tell you what filled my neighborhood when I was growing up. Cromo. Cobre. Amoniaco. Acetona. Glicol de etileno. El fluoruro de hidrogeno. Niquel and Estireno. Metanol. Diclorometano and Tolueno and Tricloroetano."

  Spines blurred. The labels on the three-ring binders could have been anything, wavering through salt water. “They sound pretty in Spanish, no? Poisons. They came in the air and in the water. Until one day everything burned, just before everything closed. Everybody said it was arson and nobody got charged, and for three days we were told to keep our doors and windows shut and not go outside. No work, no pay. No pay, no rent. No rent, no place to live. So people went outside anyway."

  Esther's eyes gazed holes into her back. For a moment Mercedes thought that they were green.

  "I'm sorry, Mercedes.” The sound of genuine sorrow made her want to turn around. “But that's not what sent you to me, is it?"

  Why couldn't Esther be like the Father Confessor, happy with what she was given? Why couldn't she just send Mercedes away with a prescription of Hail Marys? A penance for every fish and a prayer for every grain of sand? Instead, she kept probing, dragging her nets in search of bottom feeders. Dark and murky and not real. Not worth telling about.

  What if every soul had to file a Toxics Release Inventory?

  "Do you know what's funny?” Mercedes asked, not turning around. “I overhear the office workers. They take these proposals, many copies in a big box, and they buy a seat on the plane to Washington just for the box because they will not let it out of their sight. You'd think it was a living thing, like that. But it's only paper."

  Esther asked, “What did you let out of your sight, Mercedes?"

  Nada.

  She whispered, “I have to go."

  * * * *

  Half a year after the Day of Dead Fish, the Endangered Species Act passed. Nothing on its list resembled the child. It was amended in 1988 and still nothing resembled the child.

  Marine protection laws had passed the year before that day on the beach, but they didn't reach where Mercedes lived. Neither had the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, though it was supposed to, or the Clean Water Act that followed. Mercedes searched through empty promises in leather-covered books and returned them to their shelf, beside economic and regulatory impact assessments bound in black plastic coils.

  She maneuvered her Electrolux around the corner office, whose mahogany desk was as messy as the plastic modular ones in the rooms without windows. She shut off the vacuum and turned to a bin beside the file drawer. There, chocolate frosting and bits of yellow cake smeared the ink on a crookedly printed spreadsheet. A paper plate colored in Christmas wreaths leaned against a thin plastic liner. Mercedes gathered and tied off the bag, squeezing out a puff of sickly sweet air.

  She worked her way down to the conference suite, whose partitions had been wheeled open to create a giant room. A mirror ball hung from one of the tracks, amidst green and red streamers looping toward a white board. She accepted a small apron from one of the kitchen staff, tied it around her waist, and set about harvesting discarded food and plastic ware. The fifty-gallon trash can in the hallway filled with sliced carrots, cubed red peppers, broccoli florets, and half-eaten cake contaminated by ranch dressing. The waste felt as palpable as a slap.

  The people around Mercedes paid no attention to her, or to the singing deejay who segued from “Blue Christmas” to “Margaritaville” in the corner. Mercedes glided past him and past the tall, plastic tree hung with tinsel, advancing from a cluster of research assistants to a cluster of programmers and then to managers. She sampled the foreign tongues of shop talk. Almost no one crossed the lines, from one professional level to another. The few remaining support staff filled their plates with sweets and returned to their cubicles.

  Esther gave a faint nod from the Human Resources table and turned back to her colleagues. This was not the Wellness Office, whose walls invited openness. Here in the enlarged conference suite, the invisible walls were obvious, separating Esther even from the electric menorah barely visible on the other side of the deejay.

  Except for the free food, everyone could just as well have been working at their desks. Mercedes floated through a party that didn't exist.

  Yet it was strangely comforting.

  * * * *

  What did an exposure threshold mean for a sea baby? Who could say whether toxins had bioaccumulated inside it or not? Jesus had not measured the sins of the world in parts per billion, he had just absorbed them all.

  Now he glowed on the cross beneath a crimson sky, flickering at Mercedes from the veladora on her dresser. After three days of burning, the light from its wick shone through his heart and lit his halo from beneath. Behind him, his mother La Virgen de Guadalupe grieved within her golden frame.

  Discarded papers covered the floor.

  Mercedes stooped to lift the sheets one after another. She set them down again, moving bits of analysis from one pile to the next. Throughout the night her bed remained undisturbed and tucked in as ink swam before her eyes. Between the lines she prayed to San Peregrino, patron saint of cancer and incurable diseases, who had stood on his feet for more than thirty years as penance for his sins. His sores became like those on the fish thrown back to sea.

  What if she had never gone to bed that night? What if she had stood over the rusted tub and prayed long and hard enough for warm milk to spurt through her finger and for tap water to wash away the bruises? The thin cry in her head had itself been a miracle, percolating up from the basement and driving her on while no one else noticed a thing.

  Mercedes paced in her stockings, still in her uniform. She stopped to retrieve a shawl from her closet and draped it about her shoulders, black against gray. Murky tones, like the bottom of the sea in a long-ago dream, when she should have stayed awake instead.

  La enfermedad invade mi cuerpo, mi corazon y mi fe desfallece...

  No.

  It was Elian who'd been invaded by disease. It was her mother whose heart had stopped. Her father whose faith had drained away into a respirator. They lodged inside her, too, in a world where the people above the water were just as invisible as those beneath.

  Nobody cared about them. They all cared about The Little Mermaid, the cartoon princess who'd lost her voice to a jealous witch and regained it for love. No one bothered to look for the actual mermaids, just as no one bothered to look at the neighborhoods whose bays and streams they inhabited.

  How many communities were so blessed? How many were so cursed?

  There was magic under the sea, and it was dying.

  * * * *

  I have written to Woods Hole.

  Mercedes watched imaginary envelopes fly past cream-colored paint between the bookcases. How could she even formulate a plea?

  I have written to EPA. I have written to NOAA. I have written to UNESCO.

  Dazzling acronyms. They vacuumed her letters up and remained black blots. Every fantasy ended the same way.

  She didn't know how long she'd been staring at the same spot, refusing to sit in the chair beside the tissues on Esther's desk. She was not as strong as San Peregrino. Even after only a few short weeks, even with snatches of sleep, she felt faint. Her legs had turned into lead. Her feet burned. Volatile organic compounds.

  Don't heal me. Heal them.

  She struggled for breath.

  On other people's desks the Mother of All Wars raged in headlines, with more Scud missiles falling on Tel Aviv.

  "Mercedes.” Weariness ringed Esther's voice. “What do you see on the wall?"

  She rasped, “Did you make it like this on purpose?"

  "No, but the blank space has proved useful. You're evading the question."

  Mercedes snuggled against a bookcase and laid her cheek on the paint. Teak-veneered particleboard held her up. “No one would listen."

  "I'm listening, Mercedes."

  She blinked dry eyes. “No one would believe me."

  "There are people who bel
ieve the Holocaust never happened, Mercedes.” Esther's voice was a ragged line dropping through depths. “There are people who can't conceive that my uncle has a boyhood friend who can't travel out of Gaza now, because he is a Palestinian."

  Mercedes whispered, “This is different."

  "Is it?"

  "We have no headlines.” She peered into the crack between the shelving and the wall. “We have no museums.” A chill spread across her chest, drawing her arms in closer. “Nobody had tattoos. The stigmata were all on the fish."

  The question from behind was almost too soft to hear. “And on what else?"

  Did bones lie at the bottom of the sea? Fingers, a humanlike skull, a spine? Would they have all crumbled and vanished without a trace? Did the creatures live in caves, huddled so deep that no expedition dared search for them? Had they been driven into polluted waterways from a different habitat?

  Did any of them reach out to the people above the water, to people with legs, who walked or drove or took the bus to the factories killing them both?

  Esther asked, “What are you cradling, Mercedes?"

  Mercedes looked down at her arms. She was a Pieta holding air.

  She slipped under the sea, drowning.

  * * * *

  The counselor stayed with her in the emergency room as a saline solution shipped drugs into her veins. Diaphanous white curtains eddied about them both. Machines beeped as though from far away.

  Then she was discharged, still muzzy-headed from the chemicals. Before the fog had completely cleared, Mercedes was standing in line at the Unemployment Office. She never saw Esther again.

  She became a succession of uniforms, drifting among counters and filling bags. The beach where her family had fished grew a boardwalk and a gazebo. An apartment bloc of subsidized housing rose where the electrical equipment plant had once stood, across the bay from renovated condominiums. Rented yellow kayaks and sailboards chased the tide, buffeted by clean winds.

  Computer screens turned from black-and-white to color. “El Galleton” became an MP3 stream.

  She huddled in the public library between two adolescents headphoned into video games and listened to tinny echoes. With a keystroke she could access twenty-four GPS satellites in geosynchronous orbit and none of them could find what she was looking for, no matter how long she waited to use a machine or how often her time ran out. Mercedes sank her fingers into the gray at her temples and navigated keywords until the Internet became an undertow.