Smoketown

by Tenea D. Johnson

Anna felt the heat rising to her face, and was momentarily taken aback by the sensation. In a sort of stupor, she continued. “And why is that? According to you?”

  Seife seemed pleased with the hint of edge in Anna’s reply.

  “You have no reason to feel important?”

  “I never said that. I just wanted to hear your supposition. You are the caller after all.” She’d lowered her voice without thinking about it on the last sentence.

  “’After all’. I don’t think I have ever heard someone use that phrase before. ‘After all’; how it that possible really? To know something after all? Are you not part of the all?”

  Anna was both surprised and excited by this line of questioning. Parts of her reserved for quiet reading and heated arguments with the media broadcasts began to stir and take note of Seife with mounting interest.

  “It is a paradox. After all, I wouldn’t even be Anna anymore. Much less would you hold the same job.”

  “Anna?” Seife asked.

  “Anna Armour.”

  “Armour, a French surname?” Seife asked.

  “My surname is mongrel. Armour is part of my first name. It’s Anna Armour.”

  “You said. . .” Seife began.

  “I don’t usually tell people the whole thing.”

  “A night of secrets revealed.”

  “Yes,” Anna agreed. Silence settled between them while this sank in.

  “It is not a job, they say. Callers are called,” Seife said.

  “I didn’t mean to—” Anna began.

  “I know,” Seife interrupted. “Why don’t you usually tell people your whole name?”

  “They’re usually just asking to be polite. No need to know more than is necessary. . . Or perhaps I’m just lazy,” Anna said.

  “So you’re feeling energetic then? Or you’re feeling impolite?”

  Anna left that one unanswered, turned the bar stool to face Seife more fully. “Why do you have to cover your face when you call? Why do you agree to it?”

  “You are quite forthright.”

  Anna looked down at the bar, swirling the dark liquid in her glass. “I am tonight.”

  “You believe that this is the drink,” Seife suggested.

  Anna lifted her gaze back up from the bar and shook her head slightly. “No, not the drink.”

  Seife smiled softly, and turned slowly on her stool, back towards the stage.

  “Time for my next set. Perhaps I’ll tell you later,” Seife said. She acknowledged Anna with a nod of her head.

  “Anna.” Seife stepped off the stool and looked back at Anna, her eyes inching from shoes all the way up until their gazes briefly met, then she turned away.

  Anna watched the shapely back recede from her. Glitter dust swirled in the air Seife’s body displaced as she moved, the sparkling fragments spiraling in her wake.

  Eyelids heavy, and with the warmth of the liquor languor deep in Anna’s bones, she could almost sleep where she sat. She concentrated on not resting her head on her crossed arms, though they felt as drawn together as two magnets. She let the thought float away as Seife began to sing. The familiar lyrics reached Anna though her haze.

  Ever was born on the brink

  Of two moments

  crashing together in time

  She flew before walking

  Sang before talking

  And traded her soul for a dime.

  It had been her mother’s favorite song. Seife’s version had jazz where the original was folk, making it less a tragedy, but listening to it, Anna’s excitement began to dissipate, her mood to dim. The somatics didn’t help. She felt at any moment she might cry, or pass out, or otherwise embarrass herself. The caller had been kind, even interested in bantering with her, but she’d perhaps been foolish to think it were anything more. Perhaps. Anna leaned over to the bartender, nearly upending her drink, and asked when Seife would next perform. She heard herself slur, but couldn’t find the edges of her words so they all tumbled out together. She turned back to the stage and slowly her vision followed. She didn’t have long before she’d be unable to get herself home. With a last, lingering look at Seife, she stepped back out the club’s golden door.

  

  On the train, Anna leaned her head back with eyes closed. She tried to pull herself out of her mood with planning: she should look in on the cygnets as soon as she got home, check for new reals in The Dire—her mother would have hated that place almost as much as she would have enjoyed tonight’s performance. Anna’s to-do list drifted away at the thought. It was no use trying not to think of her mother. She let her mind wander.

  Until Peru, Anna had only been close to one other person. Her mother, Bly, was pressed so deeply into Anna’s soul that her emotions ran around the edges of Bly until they emptied out Anna’s pen, her paint, her charcoal—all of it touching her mother before it touched paper. Bly had impressed everyone. It was the reason behind her mother’s string of successes, and ultimately Anna believed the reason she’d found herself wandering through the woods at fourteen, let loose on the world without her mother’s guidance.

  Most mothers encouraged their little girls to attend dance class, or learn a third language, or spend time in zero-G workshops. Not Bly. Anna didn’t attend classes with other children. Instead, her mother bought Anna her first set of paints when most parents would have been horrified at the thought. It had quieted the intense headaches that plagued Anna.

  Anna most appreciated it, though, because art gave her friends to play with, if only those made of paper and clay. Bly knew art would help the headaches because she’d been through the same ordeal, but her parents had not known what to do, for Bly or with her.

  Bly only taught Anna the old art styles: no nanos or holo pens; they wouldn’t have fit the need. And as Bly told her, there’d be time enough for nanos.

  Anna would sit with Bly in their lab—she had always insisted on calling it this as far back as Anna could remember—and marvel at the splotches of green and purple that Anna made on the roll of banner paper spread out on the floor. They spent hours together there. So much so that until she learned to write properly, Anna thought her name was three green stars. The image felt so right, that if she were a thing she believed then these are the things she would be.

  Bly let Anna paint the bottom meter of her bedroom wall and a kitchen chair that found its way into the back of the lab. With each project—large or small, planned or accidental—Bly intently watched Anna while she drew. When Anna turned three years old, her mother began to explain the importance of Anna’s work.

  “It’s a safe way to create, to practice,” her mother said to her from where they both sat at their worktables, Bly’s a bigger version of her own.

  “Safe,” Anna repeated happily. She looked up at her mother, smiling.

  Bly laughed. Anna watched as she grabbed a small bottle of red juice from the corner of her large worktable.

  “Something new today, Anna,” her mother said, climbing down from her chair and kneeling near Anna. “Let’s start a new one, love.” Her mother placed a fresh sheet of paper on her desk and filled an empty container with a bit of the red juice. To this, her mother added some of the blue paint she’d been using to draw clouds. Mixed together, the juice and paint created a rich purple liquid that immediately caught her attention.

  “This juice has bugs in it,” her mother said. Anna looked at her wide-eyed and squinted at the bottle of juice. She couldn’t see any bugs, but her mother never, ever lied; so she waited for further explanation.

  “The bugs are what made the juice red,” Bly continued.

  Anna blinked, taking it in.

  “Bugs like this,” Bly said removing her handheld from her back pocket and showing Anna an image of a small red beetle. “You’re gonna bring the bugs back.”

  Anna looked at her mother incredulously.

  Bly laughed out loud, shaking her head. “You can do it, love. Draw Mommy a picture of this bug. Just look at it, feel it
in here,” she said, placing one hand on Anna’s chest and another on her head, “and draw it.” Her mother placed her hands in her lap and smiled, waiting.

  Anna took her paintbrush and dipped it into the purple liquid. Without hesitation she drew what looked like a purple oval of sun with six short rays, or at best a squashed bug. She placed the brush back on its pad and looked over at her mother.

  “Good job, Anna,” her mother said.

  Within a minute the image began to vibrate on the paper. Anna moved closer to the paper and stared. Awkwardly the bug lurched up and forward, trying its best to climb out of the paper.

  “That’s my girl.” Her mother scooped the strange insect into her palm, then deposited it into a small aquarium she pulled out from behind a stack of paints and wax on the floor.

  Anna looked at the thing through the glass and smiled proudly.

  “What should we call her, Anna?” her mother asked.

  Ms. Janks, as the bug came to be known, lived just long enough to witness the birth of her successor, inadvertently teaching Anna about the ultimate consequence of creation: death.

  Anna took the death of Ms. Janks in stride, though the responsibilities of living, even then, caused her moments of pause. Bly taught her that she must never create for personal gain, that it was best to sit with the work before she began so that she could absorb its essence from the genetic material, and most importantly, she should maintain her humility. Anna, like all children, hadn’t understood the logic behind placing limits on herself. So, in the beginning, she often had to stop and consider her impulse, if only after she had followed it.

  Anna’s training and art progressed; her acumen for each appeared boundless. Her painting became more vibrant and life-like with a depth of texture and tone that began to rival the pieces that she and Bly saw on their frequent trips to museums. Bly supplemented Anna’s work with lessons on organic chemistry and biology so that over time, her drawings slowly became more realistic, and in turn so did her creations. She painted and drew nearly every day, but Bly only had her create things slowly, every few months and sometimes not for a year at a time.

  “You’re not ready for that yet” became a refrain of Anna’s prepubescent years. She started printmaking and sculpture—but her non-artistic creation lagged behind. Anna could tell, though, with what Bly did let her do and the improving results that her mother was pleased with her progress. Soon they would try a joint project, Bly declared while she examined a small cherry tree Anna had made with a woodcut block. No more than a half-meter tall, the tree was exquisite, its branches winnowy and windblown, the blossoms perfectly formed puffs of blush. Bly barely touched them as she peered at the tiny tree from all sides.

  “It’s beautiful, Anna,” her mother had said. “You’re ready. We’ll start our project in the summer.”

  “What project?” Anna had asked.

  Bly turned from the tree and spoke directly to her.

  “Do you know how many plant and animals species have become extinct just in the last five years? More than six times the rate of a century ago. Some of those could survive if a single food source in their habitats were reestablished, or they were brought back in a different location. If enough of them are made, they’ll survive. That wouldn’t be a new fantasy, Anna, but a new world, with the right old and the best of the new. Together we could start that.”

  For Bly, that summer never came, and never did her world. And so for Anna there had been no one until Peru.

  Anna opened her eyes. She must have been in a fugue; the twenty-minute ride home was nearly over.

  Groggily, Anna lifted her head and squinted as the train slowed at McClaren Station. As she stepped into the bright burgundy beam where she’d first seen Seife, she realized that she’d left the parcels for Peru back at the club.

  6

  Eugenio woke before his alarm. He reached up to the touchpad next to the bed and pulsed the wall sconces fully on. Before he could turn onto his back, he heard his sister, Lucine, open the door.

  “You’re going to be late,” Lucine said from the doorway. He looked up and saw her standing with a ripe glistenberry in one hand. She chomped down on on it as she crossed the room and stood over him. “They’re gonna fire you if you keep showing up late and then what?”

  He could hear the smile in her voice.

  “A bit early for gloating, no? Besides, I’m early.” He turned over on his back just as a drop of the berry’s juice fell from her palm and down onto his cheek.

  “Never too early.” She smiled down at him. “I’m just saying this is no way to get there first if indeed you intend to. Breakfast?” Her long, dark hair brushed his nose from where she stood. Lucine always wore it down in the morning, a thick black drape that fell past her waist and made her almost unbelievably lovely: the midnight hair, the smooth olive skin, sparkling brown eyes and chiseled measured jaw. Though he loved the intimacy of these moments, Eugenio wasn’t quite comfortable with the feeling that crept up with them.

  Lucine produced another fruit from the pocket of her jacket.

  He reached up to take it, then watched as she left his room. Eugenio finished the fruit and got dressed for work. Stepping outside his bedroom into the huge open space of their industrial loft, he didn’t see Lucine—not in the bare concrete of the kitchen or in her workshop near the service elevator. He walked toward the elevator and spied Lucine through the glass door that led out onto the mezzanine roof. Lucine sat on the ledge. He knew she could spend hours staring out in the haze of the city in the predawn dew. She liked to start her mornings this way, with only the quiet hum of the building and the faint lights of the wakening city at her back, The Dumps in front of her.

  She had told him that the great mounds of indeterminate black and brown, the chunks of varying depth beckoned to her and something would always catch her attention: the oddly shaped something in the distance, a glare near the middle, something to be investigated, the latest possibility lying out there on the mound.

  Eugenio opened the glass door that led out to the roof.

  “. . . is the future. My knowledge is old, passed to me from mouth to mind,” Lucine said. She paused for a moment and with her back to him raised her hand so it was a bit further from her mouth. Eugenio saw the small recorder there, an old one he’d given her months ago. She had always been much better at this part of being Mendejano than him. She had gigs of oral histories backed up and broadcast, but as much as he liked to record other people’s stories, he didn’t yet have any of his own. He listened as she continued.

  “I am a toolmaker, still rare for a woman. Tools themselves are still necessary even in this virtual world. People do not know this until they need one. And that is when I appear.”

  She was a great storyteller, Eugenio thought, and almost as if she had heard the thought she said:

  “Once upon a time, healing took only a few breaths. This is how my ancestors did it: a mouthful of smoke blown over the right face with the right words at the right time. And of course the right smoke. Now those herbs are harder to come by as the pharmas took what they wanted and the world poisoned the rest. So we have evolved. I don’t share my ancestors’ religion, but we do have the same beliefs. We Mendejano cannot heal, but we can fix. As people have come to worship things, some can only be reached by fixing their things. The healing is the part that comes after. It has to happen in their hearts.”

  Eugenio relaxed against the door frame, his schedule for the moment forgotten.

  “I make my tools from what I find. My mornings are spent in the colossal dumps on the western edge of the city. In a different place, hundreds of birds would spend their days in The Dumps. For this reason, I’ve always found such places holy. But, here I am the only scavenger searching for preciousness.”

  She brought the recorder back down to her lap, pausing.

  Eugenio roused himself and called out from the doorway.

  “Goodbye, Lucine.”

  She turned, raised her hand
goodbye.

  At work, the heavy footfalls of battalion members’ boots echoed down the central hallway of the Emergency Management Center just outside Eugenio’s office. He sat at his narrow aluminum desk with the door open, lost for the moment in the distraction of the sound.

  “Assem-ble!” someone yelled from further in the building. The footfalls receded in that direction.

  Eugenio yawned as he stared at the reports on his tablet. The rank smell of the men and the insecticide they used shot down his throat, causing him to cough. He stood up and closed the door. He had let the routine reports pile up while he investigated more interesting aspects of the city’s health, and now a full gig-disc’s worth of work blinked red on his tablet, demanding attention. Some of the paperwork backlog had to be processed soon or someone would notice. He sighed and sat back down in his chair, mentally preparing himself for a long morning’s slog. The sooner he cleared this work the sooner he could get back to tracking down Rory McClaren.

  He would start with the entomological reports; though it was by no means his area of expertise, by virtue of necessity part of the caseload had been shunted off onto him. There just weren’t enough entomologists on staff to handle the number of swarms and infestations that rippled through the city at an ever-increasing rate. Besides the recent rolling beetle incursion during the commemoration, a swarm of Africanized bees had attacked a transload of kids when the driver bumped into a hidden nest, causing a death and two hospitalizations.

  So the bugs were once again a public relations priority, and thus nearly doubled the number of files waiting on Eugenio’s review. The battalions would soon have to perform mass exterminations to keep both the populations in check—and then no doubt there would be another infestation next. The battalions might be meeting about that very fact right now, he thought. Swarms on the eastern side of the city had increased dramatically over the winter. Eugenio wondered just how much the city spent on the job that birds could easily perform. His finger hovered over the blinking red icon of the entomological reports and inched over to the opposite corner of the tablet where his most recent interview files were saved. He glanced up at the time and tapped that icon.