Lighthouse Island (20 page)

 

Chapter 25

N
adia was shoved into a great hall full of women; she was made to strip and change into a gray dress, handed straw slippers. The prisoner woman behind the counter found her knapsack and stuffed Nadia's clothes into it, tagged it, shoved it onto a shelf along with thousands of other bundles.

Then a long confusing march with twenty other recent arrestees through hallways, down stairs, up other stairs, and all the way Nadia counted every step and memorized every turn.

They came to a very large, malodorous room painted a dark gray full of cots, people, and a television screen the size of a Ping-Pong table. Two policewomen sat on chairs outside the door and pressed a button on a small remote as the prisoners were marched through the doorless doorway because there was some kind of photo-cell beam there they had to walk through without triggering an alarm.

This is an assisted living facility! It's a jail, girls, not a prison! You will remain here under quarantine until we are sure you have no communicable diseases! Then at some time you will be informed of your meeting with your counselor! Your counselor will inform you of your charges and then you will be sent to one of the work farms or solitary confinement or you may have a screen test for television appearances depending on how your offense is categorized! This building is a maze and if you decide to try to run you will not, repeat not, find your way out! You have been given your cot number and sufficient clothing and personal items for reasonable comfort! There is a signal that will activate a siren if you step beyond this door! You have been assigned a cot, find it! Obey the rules!

Their faces were plump and smooth from plentiful water rations. They were all overweight.

N
adia could see out a scraped place in the painted-over windows if she stood on a cot. She could get enough to eat if she fought her way into the line. She would be able to sleep if she jammed wads of unraveled blanket threads into her ears.

A five-foot television screen carried their minds away into other and more pleasant places, and on a table in front were stacks of applications. It was a gray ward and a gray life. The only color was on the television where actors and commentators wore richly toned clothes and moved in spacious interiors. The ward was packed with more than a hundred women, shouting and arguing and pleading for silence to hear the dialogue on
One Thin Dime
.

Pipes overhead were rusted at the joints and the walls were greasy at head height where women sat on the cots next to the wall and leaned against it. Drying clothing steamed where it drooped from the windowsills. Before it evaporated from her mind Nadia made a map in her head. She shut her eyes against the noise and voices and arguments and gripped the heavy coarse blanket with a hand to each side of herself. She started with the big entry hall. The number of steps. The turns, the stairs. Then here.

Nadia pulled her legs up on cot number thirty-four and wrapped her arms around her knees and wondered which one of these women knew of an escape route, a way out, a guard who could be bribed. She prayed to some divine force that she was not attractive enough to be sent for a screen test. She pulled the blanket over her head and tried to bring up images of Lighthouse Island, of James.

The third morning an older woman came and sat close to Nadia and talked about her orgasms in a low, urgent voice. Her lips were deeply pleated and they worked as she spoke in muscular spasms. She stared intently at Nadia and spoke of her own orgasms, other people's orgasms, the noise they made in the night.

Get away from me or I will hit you, said Nadia. Get away from me. She wanted to shove the woman off the cot next to her where she sat but somehow she knew the woman would like that. I'll report you, she said. I'll report you for abuse.

The woman laughed and then walked away still laughing.

J
ames knew she was here, James would help her, somehow. She had to keep thinking this because otherwise her soul would shrivel. Nadia liked her soul, she believed in it, as she believed in James and his ability to reach her here in the crowded hell of the lowest rung of the world.

The latrines were in a stinking section of the building, twenty commodes in a line. They squirted 50 percent muriatic acid in the rank toilet bowls and inside the tanks and burned themselves. Their skirts looked like they had welding-spark pinholes. Nadia shuffled from toilet stool to toilet stool in the sloppy jail slippers, head down, trying not to bring attention to herself.

They had to look inside the tanks and behind the commodes and turn off the overhead lights and then unscrew the lightbulbs and check around the fixtures for hidden notes or food: prisoner contraband stashes. The guards yelled if Nadia lost one of her loose straw slippers. They hit her and shoved her to the floor. She got back to her feet in a flash before she could be hit again and counted steps and memorized turns. Like everyone else she had bruises on her arms and legs.

She worked alongside a black-haired girl who said her name was Charity, a thin, mean little survivor. Despite a black eye and probably a broken rib or two she clumped along behind Nadia with her jug. Her hair was a frizz of black spiderwebbish tangles. She had feet like pie plates.

Bitches, fat bitches, she said. They drink gallons every day, taking water away from us ordinary people. She said this in a flatlined voice, without stress or intonation. They want the pretty girls for TV. To shoot them. If I had a gun I'd blast them right in their faces.

Shut up. Nadia stepped back from the volatile fumes. You want to get beat up.

Yeah, yeah, Charity snorted and her black hair shook out over her forehead. I get out, I'll catch one of them in an alley and kick their asses so far up their collarbones they'll have to take off their shirts to shit. Then she said in a oddly pleasant voice, Say, Sendra, would it be okay if I traded cots. I could be next to you and we could look out for each other. There's criminals here all mixed up with people like me who didn't do nothing, really. Charity turned to her. Nothing.

Nadia hesitated. Well, okay.

T
he bruise on Nadia's cheekbone faded to yellow and her hair turned to dirty red sticks before she found a way to get a comb. One of the women carved them out of wood with a sharpened metal kitchen spoon she kept hidden in her mattress. A comb cost two days' water but Nadia paid it and shrank inside her gray uniform and during those two days suffered through the dizziness of dehydration. But she managed not to fall, not to lose the jail slippers. She knew if she went down they would beat her unconscious. It seemed to be some kind of custom or rule. She watched the guards, when they changed shift, how they shut off the electric eye when they came in for inspections.

Once a week the prisoners were led into the showers, where the spraying heads hit them with lukewarm jets of great force, lasting, Nadia was warned, exactly three minutes. They handed in their dirty tunics and skirts at the entrance and were handed others going out. They showered in their underwear, scrubbed their underpants and tatty brassieres. The guards made the old woman who talked about orgasms go in last, by herself, and her mouth muscles worked and leaped as if she were speaking to some interior demon.

They cupped their hands and drank the almost undrinkable recycled water. Those who had combs raked tenderly at their wet hair. Nadia held her hands to the water and knew she was inhabited by a constant, subdued rage. It was going to make her sick; it would do something terrible to her. She stood in her soapy underpants and gray brassiere and glanced at Charity through the stinging jets. Charity's tattoos were not only extensive, mainly composed of magical animals such as unicorns and flying kittens, but beneath her shoulder blades she had instructed the tattooist to include the cost:

INK: FORTY DIMES

LABOR: NINETY-TWO DIMES

TOTAL: 132 W.C. DMS

A
team of men slogged up a mountain pass and from time to time the straggling line was obscured by blizzards. Feral humans with green gummy-looking teeth charged at them from the forests but the Imperial Rebels soldiered on.

I thought they all got killed, said Nadia. She had learned to speak in the accepted flat voice, bare of interrogatives, emotionless. Watching the television made her feel better but soon her eyes would develop a glittering field of sparks and then pain. She looked down at her hands. The crowded room full of women stared resolutely at the TV, which was what they were supposed to do. It made the guards happy. They yelled at a very young girl for dancing and the old gypsy women playing some kind of game with bits of pilot biscuits.

That was the guys that went AWOL, said Charity. This is Captain Kenaty's unit. They are trying to get to the AWOL guys and get their cell phones. But they don't know the AWOL guys got killed by the savage hippies. They put the captain back in because the young men were rioting over it. Listen, the guard that comes for you is named Terminal Verna. The one that takes you away for death row.

A gypsy woman sitting near them said, Big tall woman. When they send her for you it's all over. They give you your stuff and say, Here's Terminal Verna, come to take you away. She laughed silently with her lips shut. It's blotto for you. But maybe you get to be on TV. You get to be a star for about ten seconds.

Charity rested her chin on her fists. Terminal Verna needs her throat slit, she said. The Facilitator needs his throat slit.

Nadia clapped her hand over Charity's mouth and whispered, You're going to get killed, you're going to end up in the dryers.

N
adia sat on her cot with its unraveling gray blanket and the dirty sheets and tried to help women fill out applications. The guards sat at the wide entrance to the Q ward watching
My News, My Day
. The jail authorities had just thrown any kind of application in a pile on the table: applications for clothing allowances, for Buddy car repairs, for lightbulbs and pet ownership and divorce and vacation time and study programs and small appliances. The women simply wanted to be heard by some official somewhere. They wanted their name in a file so they did not disappear altogether.

Okay, so you have to give your reasons here, Nadia said. The noise of the television and the hundred or so women in the ward was so loud she had to raise her voice. The air stank.

You write it, said a small blond woman. She was crocheting a cat out of blanket threads. You can write it; you know how to say it right. The young woman's voice was light and childlike.

Well, what kind of toaster do you want?

Oh, one for bread.

All toasters are for bread. You'll have to apply for a yeast bread allowance.

Oh, well, let's do lightbulbs, then.

Nadia turned the application over and crossed out
toaster
and wrote in
lightbulbs
with her pencil stub and said, Why are you in here?

The small blond woman said, I helped my boyfriend with his pirate radio station. They tracked us down somehow. I don't know how they do it. She smoothed out her crocheted cat and regarded it and then began on the tail, looping the blanket threads on a fork tine. And you? What about you, Sendra?

I messed up at my job, said Nadia. I worked at a special memorizing section. She wrote down, “Request for three 25-watt lightbulbs for reasons of deficient eyesight.” I didn't recycle my trash. Threw it all out the window. I was drinking wine at the time.

Memorizing?

I had to memorize poetry.

What's going on here, what's going on here? shouted the fat guard that everybody called the Lard Queen. The guard bulled her way into the listening crowd, grabbed the application from Nadia's hand, and tore it up. The Lard Queen had grown bored with her news, her day.

O
ften Nadia was so thirsty she briefly considered drinking the water in the toilet tanks. Briefly. They were to be sent to a work farm somewhere but here they were already, slaving like Orcs in the Mines of Moriah. Nadia asked Charity, Am I talking in my sleep? I am dreaming so intensely. I dream about this man that I met and I am laughing with him, there's an ocean and then other things.

No, said Charity. If you do I'll whack you on the arm.

What if you're asleep.

I'll wake up.

Listen.

What.

I think that's rain on the windows.

Charity lifted her head. Is it possible?

T
here had to be a way to get out of here, by lying or adopting some disguise or murdering a guard or hiding in the garbage. And then going on as she had begun, to the north. She bent her head and tried to see it in her mind and not the brilliant and professional images of sitcoms and
Sector Secrets.

Does the sea remember the walker upon it?

Supper and the water ration arrived in a noisy trundling as the barrels were rolled down the hall to their ward and other wards on the Q ward. The water seemed more vital than food. Everyone grabbed their metal cups and shoved into line and some women staggered; their blood pressure was low from dehydration. Nadia learned that standing up quickly made you faint. She stood up slowly. Charity held out her cup as if it were a chalice, trembling.

O
ne night when the guard at the door had fallen asleep and was lightly snoring the small blond woman whispered, Recite. You said you memorized all these poems.

What.

Anything. Anything you memorized.

And out of the unresting crowd of women with their arms or sheets thrown over their faces voices spoke up: Yes, yes, recite, give us a poem.

Nadia rustled around in the files of her memory. It was a moment of strange elation and she realized it was because she and the women in the ward were together for themselves, just this short time. The guards were not the focus of their attention. She put her hands over her eyes and whispered,

The souls of those I love are on high stars.