Lighthouse Island (25 page)

N
adia passed an old woman who stood at the roadside, throwing leftover grains and biscuit crumbs from a bowl in broad gestures of great generosity, beautiful sweeping gestures. The birds slanted through the early-morning air and slid their dark legs in front of them as they landed, bearing to earth all they had learned of the upper skies and the birth of snow.

 

Chapter 33

E
-waste trucks grumbled past. They spewed pink mud. It looked like paint thinner. The rubbish they carried was all square; monitors stared out at the nebulous day with lifeless but deep glass eyes. Tendrils of curling wire spilled out between the racks and she saw dangling mouses like little fists. On one she saw a digital clock. It was in a steel chassis with curling brass inlays, ornate and battered. It was wedged between a broken printer and a stack of flat screens. It said,
5
P.M.
October 31 2198 Clouds and occasional drizzle.

Maybe the clock was out of order, maybe it announced times and years that did not exist. But then again maybe it
was
accurate; maybe it was some sort of atomic clock steadily enumerating the advance of time and the burdensome accumulation of years. Nadia decided to believe it. To believe that she was in the valley of electronic scrap, on a real earth turning on its axis, in the current of time, at home in the galaxy. A local habitation and an hour. “I am time, grown old to destroy the world.” She wanted the clock. She would say to James, Here I am, on November first, sometime in the twenty-second century. The Day of the Dead.

He would say, Give me your hand. I will be well. All will be well. There is an island in the North Pacific waiting for us. We will be devoted to each other and to the forests and the orcas, the drifting fogs and the blue, dashing jays, to the great restless North Pacific that eats men and ships and airplanes, but not us. Not us.

At the guarded entrance to the e-waste heaps Nadia lined up with about fifteen or so people. The line moved forward alongside the trucks. People spoke together in alarmed voices about the sleety snow. A group of people had crowded into the guard shack against regulations and pressed close to a TV screen. Suddenly someone shouted, No! No!

What's going on? A woman beside her called to those in the guard shack. Is it another execution? The woman clutched her hands together in alarm as if the television had become dangerous to look at, dangerous to see.

The Facilitator's been arrested!

They made the confused noises of an alarmed crowd, spontaneous cries, turning to one another, the erratic light of the screen jumping across their wet faces.

Nadia waited in line, standing on tiptoe to see the guard with his handheld card reader. And so the beautiful egghead was arrested, all the more reason to get out of here as fast as possible. He stood under a porch cobbled together of wood and canvas. He was very young and nodded without cease.

Yeah, yeah, go on, okay, go ahead. The guard waved people on. Then it was her turn. He took the stripped blister card from Nadia and turned it over to one side and then the other.

What's this? he said.

Nadia dropped the plasticized material from her head. Individual issue, she said. Her lips felt stiff for some reason. Just slide it. Nadia placed the five dimes in a neat stack on the windowsill and then tucked her hand in a coat pocket.

The guard did not look at the money but put her blister card into the card reader and waited. The black screen said something to him in bright green text, and he read it and shrugged. He kept turning back to glance into the guard shack at the TV where people cried out, I can't believe it!

Wendy Hu, he said. I am to issue you a permit, one time only.

I
want that clock, she said. May I have that clock?

The truck driver looked up with flat screens in either hand and the drizzle running from his canvas hat.

I can trade you this for it. She held out two eyes: a blue and a hazel. That would leave her with only one, a black one.

Hey! The truck driver reached out for the eyes. It's a deal. Hey, never seen these before. A Continuity Man will pay a mint for them. He handed the clock to her. We're supposed to account for everything but with this news the Facilitator is being arrested nobody's going to have their heads on straight. He smiled. This is a time for theft and flight and so on, got to play the cards as they lay, right?

M
ountains of wrecked printers, computer towers and monitors, old television screens. Many of them had wooden chassis that were now splintered and broken. In the distance smoke rose from a mound of burning plastic refuse. Sellers and buyers, most of them probably black market, fingered through the piles of components in the stalls. I need capacitors, a buyer said. One hundred Ohm speaker parts. Resistors.

This is all I got.

Nadia hurried past dim figures picking at cell phones with needle-nosed pliers and others cooking circuit boards over charcoal fires to drain out the dregs of gold hidden within them. People in blackened rags smashed toner cylinders, broke them open with wooden mallets and dumped the remaining powder into steel barrels and then with a sort of lighthearted jollity flung the broken cylinders into great bins. They did this under a shelter made of plastic pipe and canvas. It had originally been for shade but now the people worked under it for protection from the fine drizzle of rain and snow.

In the puddles forming at the edge of the canvas where the water dripped, beautiful marbled designs swirled in black and taupe as if the ink and toner were runoff from all the books that should have been written but never were, all pouring out in a discouraged and continual weeping.

Excuse me, excuse me, Nadia said.

Two human figures paused and looked at her. They were a midnight people, wildly busy, dark as anthracite.

I am looking for the truck bays.

A boy ran out and took her hand. He imprinted his hand on hers. He pointed with an inky forefinger. Straight ahead, lady, he said. You go that way.

T
he drivers of the square van with license plate number GAN22VP1–928LES were listening to Big Radio. Nadia told them her name and they pointed to the back. She climbed into the back of the van and sat among restored and renovated electronics, all of them bundled in shrink wrap. Water ran into the cab through a window that seemed to be permanently stuck open. Written on the side in ornate gold lettering:
Fremont Exclusive Delivery
.

Don't drink it, said the driver.

Okay, I won't drink it, the relief driver in the passenger seat said. I never saw it rain in fifteen years. Then it just drizzled a little.

You're not allowed to drink it. It's called incidental water and the TV goddamn expert health people say it's full of rat hair and bird shit.

I said I wouldn't, didn't I?

They drove on through pastry-colored scrubland. The highway was excellent: two-lane asphalt with a yellow stripe down the middle, jumping with raindrops. Only a few other vehicles traveled the road and on either side the borrow ditches overflowed into the fields. There was a strong iced wind outside and its song was a signature motif of some larger, worldwide change in the weather, change in the sea.

The windshield wipers, never used before, jammed and rusty, seemed to be willing to wipe once but when they were up they wouldn't come down again. They stopped midwindshield. The driver stopped and got out. He found a length of cord somewhere and tied it to the passenger-side wiper, opened the passenger window, and handed the cord to the relief driver.

Now yank that back down, he said. It goes up on its own and you yank it back down.

With the window open? And me getting rained on?

You want me to go off the road?

Well, shit.

They drove on past great checkerboards of fields that had turned into shallow lakes. There were dead cornstalks and river and creek drainages plated with concrete and spilling all they garnered into the cornrows. Agricultural workers labored in the cold and the sleet; they rode puffing steam tractors and sat on ATVs pulling a machine with revolving blades that struck the standing cornstalks into shining fragments and sprays of rainwater. They stood on flatbeds stacking sacks of beans that those on the ground heaved up to them. They were emaciated, they were criminals and political arrestees, water thieves, color saboteurs with a crust of snow on their shoulders and hats and backs.

Some had been important agency people with cats and water features and they were now serfs. They had got caught at some minor infraction and somebody wanted their job. Nadia had been raised to think the prisoners deserved whatever they got but that notion had now, after her month in prison, disappeared entirely from her head.

Mountain peaks loomed to the left like white lamps in the moving, queasy clouds. They passed an enormous industrial plant of some kind. Great steel vessels many stories high veined with complex piping and from chimneys steam poured into the misty air in confused plumes. The whole area was cordoned off by chain-link fencing that appeared hairy with the sagebrush and tumbleweed caught in it. Trucks loaded with workers drove through a gate as harassed guards tried to verify the numbers of prisoners exiting; sign here, worklists checked.

That's corn products, said the driver. Starches and syrups and oil and sheep food. They steal a lot of sheep food and syrup out of there. He watched the truck full of prisoners pull out behind them and speeded up to outdistance it. They'll get good rations there.

Right, said Nadia, from among the shrink-wrapped e-stuff. She wondered what the prisoners did with stolen sheep food. They ate it, of course. Nadia looked out at the landscape hoping to see sheep or any kind of animal. The world unrolled out of her imagination or from some deep source. She pressed her nose against the glass. Mountains, rain.

It snows up in the mountains, said the driver. To the west. There's a glacier up there. He pointed to the left-hand horizon and Nadia held out the compass to check out what he said and he was right, it was the western horizon. And then in the summertime it melts and runs down and it makes a lake behind the Fremont Glacier dam.

What if it overflowed? said Nadia. It's actually raining now. It could overflow. She drank down her second and last bottle of water.

Well, then we'd all drown, said the relief driver.

Now they were cruising through what appeared to be a small city of barracks, row after row, two stories high, mud splattered up to the windowsills. Thousands of people were getting into the backs of trucks, long lines of trucks. They unloaded sacks, transported machine parts, hung out stained clothing on clotheslines, or just walked along in a slow mechanical step, all in the wet, driven snow. Nadia looked into their faces. Could she possibly know any of these prisoners?

Then she imagined her own photograph, taken from a security camera screen capture, tacked up in the entryway of every guard shack and office. MISSING AND WANTED, ESCAPEE NADIA STEPAN AT LARGE. Then the trial, then the stack of sandbags.

Crowds of prisoners stood at the sides of the road to let them pass and the landscape was now a flat sheet of running water. The ditches were overflowing, running across the road.

The driver stood on the brakes. A guard was in the middle of the asphalt ahead, waving an orange flag. They stopped and sat and listened to the sleety rain drumming on the van roof as a long marching column of men and women crossed the road in the hundreds. They were all old-looking, including people who were clearly young. Water deprivation, dehydration. Some were scooping up ditch water with their water bottles, and the guards yelled, pushed, knocked the bottles out of their hands but some prisoners were fighting back.

I don't like this, said the relief driver. They're going to find those radio parts.

They wouldn't even know what they were, said the driver.

It was chaotic. The column wavered, fell apart, was pulled together again. Prisoners licked snow from their arms as they marched on. Then Nadia could hear loud shouts and the column broke and became a mob and a crowd surging around without direction and then she heard a sharp crack.

That was a firearm, said the driver. He shifted around in his seat, swallowing. It was a rifle.

Go on, get out of here, said the relief driver.

I can't just drive through them.

A flying wedge of guards burst through the chaos with two prisoners in their grasp and flung them down on the bare dirt beside the road and as the two men tried to scramble to their feet the guards shot them in the head. One of the men on the ground sprang galvanically to his feet with blood bursting out of the exit wound in his cheekbone as if he had found himself on a red-hot stove and the guard lifted his revolver and shot again.

Don't look, said the driver. He stepped slowly on the gas. Don't look at them. Look straight ahead.

Nadia kept her eyes on the two-lane asphalt with her hat tipped over her eyes. She said some kind of prayer or verbal supplication to the unearthly powers that were transparent and, hopefully, attentive, and shrank back into the farthest recesses of the van. Her heel struck a shrink-wrapped packet that began to emit sounds and flashes. A solemn voice that said
The Trials of Fardan! You are in City III.
Nadia threw her tote bag over it and after a few moments it shut up. As they drove on they passed bodies by the roadside in prisoner gray, being rained on.

 

Chapter 34

A
t nightfall they came to a tiny shack by the roadside, where a green-and-yellow flag cracked stiffly in the wind. It was some kind of roadside eating place for truckers and van drivers. Other vans were parked in front. It was bitterly cold. Nadia saw three red-cheeked children dressing up a donkey in a ragged ball cap and a shawl for some kind of play or drama in which the donkey was a royal personage. They wiped the fly specks out of his eyes and he yawned. And as he yawned a lamp was suddenly lit inside the café as if the light had flown out of his mouth.

A woman shouted, Come in here! It's cold out there! And the children snatched the cap and the shawl from the donkey and ran inside and the donkey stood bereft and naked in his fur.

All through the dim plains and up the sides of the foothills were house lights and rows of dim barracks lights.

Nadia went to stand beside the donkey and took in its wet, grassy odor. She was in need of reassurance, consolation. Her heart was still pounding from the terrible scene in the work camp. The woman came out of the little diner. The snow had changed back to rain and in the distance was a deep rolling thunder.

Nadia said, Can I touch him? Her?

Yeah, sure. You better come and eat. Him. It's a him.

Okay. I just wanted to touch him. Nadia put out her sodden lavender glove. What's his name? For a moment she thought the woman might say his name was Homer.

Sparrow. He's got all his papers and stuff in case you're a spy for the animal agency. You can check his tattoo number.

No, no, said Nadia. Not at all.

Nadia patted the donkey on his lower neck as the dark settled in on this high-altitude agro-world.
Cuando, en el crepúsculo del pueblo, Platero y yo entramos, ateridos por la oscuridad . . .

Were you, at one time, Homer? Nadia said. Have you changed names, become somebody else? She reached across the great chasm of creation to stroke his neck. “In the very dawn of the city we enter, Platero and I, frightened, in the dark.”

In the diner Nadia spooned up a clear, rich soup with slivers of crisps in it.

Those are tortillas, the woman said. We're different here. This ain't the global culture. She wadded up her skirt hem in her hands and watched Nadia with a distrustful expression.

T
hey drove on and she woke up when the world was gray with dawn and the windows were running with drops. She felt better. An entire twenty-four hours of rest, and the food at the roadside inn. The rain came down in sheets. She found the little flashlight in her tote bag and shone it around; all in order, including the familiar dread in the face of authority.
Fear the masters, grovel, O churl,
said the electronic device. Nadia jammed it under a bulky keyboard and it fell silent again.

We got to go through the gate. It's where the higher-ups live. Where we're delivering this stuff including you.

Nadia said, Good.

It's restricted for the higher-ups. A million square acres. The driver put the van in gear and they moved slowly forward in the line on their spoked wheels. The guards were making people get out of each vehicle and stand in the rain, checking ID, going through bags and boxes.

Nadia said, Acres are already square. You must mean a million square miles.

Exactly, I knew that.

The guards wore crisp loden-green uniforms and brass buttons on heavy overcoats. They had billed caps with a lot of brass insignia that Nadia had never seen. It was as if they were officials of some other country or nation. Their breath poured out in clouds and a blue-and-white-checkered flag floated in artificial light, and in the shadows of its folds it glowed red from the light of the red zingers flashing down the fenceline. The flag bore a coat of arms in its center and despite the rain it flapped out with every gust of wind.

An officer came to them with a cold expressionless face and they got out. She stood holding the canvas piece over her head while he took the blister card back from her hand. He put it into a handheld reader and for a second she wondered if she were going to be stopped here and handcuffed, imprisoned, beaten, shot. Abandoned here in some alien neighborhood called Wyoming, striking off on foot through the endless villages of shacks.

You're good, said the guard. He handed the card back to her.

T
he houses stood far apart from one another, surrounded by areas of grass, tall thin trees, fresh air, silence. They blazed with electric lights and the lights illuminated the downpour so that the rain looked like flying wet tissue. There were no banners with Awareness Months, no billboards.

They drove on winding streets and pulled into a huge basement or carport. She had dozed off again.

The driver said, Here you are. They unloaded her and her tote bag and some packages of e-goods. The van doors slammed. She watched as a pair of great doors slid back with a repeated snicking noise and the van drove on out. She picked up her tote bag and walked over to a door and knocked. When there was no answer she opened it.

The house was empty of people. She walked down a long hallway on a thick carpet. One room smelled strongly of wood smoke and cold ashes and in it she found a stone recess with burnt ends of logs in it and realized it was a fireplace. She turned away and saw someone approaching her but it was only herself in a mirror with an ornate frame. She looked drawn and thin and the colors of her clothes outweighed her. A burglar in a bent straw hat and a look of desperation.

She came to a large kitchen and saw herself reflected long and strange in the steel refrigerator door. She opened the door to find packaged food in plastic containers with snap lids. There were bottles of Fremont Glacier Water and she took three and drank one of them down and put the other two in her tote. She ran her hand along granite countertops and touched the leaves of genuine green plants growing from inset slots and a polished wood breakfront on which was stacked a pile of damask napkins. There were porcelain sinks and shining faucets. Shelves of wineglasses. A tall water tower, a tube of clear plastic with the daily allocation but she thought,
They don't need it here. It's just because they like to have it. It's pretty
.

She came upon a room full of books and long windows with opaque glass. She went to the glass and pressed her ear against it but there was no sound or sight except the figure of a cat pressed against the outside and when it heard her it mewed. On a table she saw a framed photograph. It was Thin Sam Kenobi, in an aviator's uniform, young and handsome. He wore no eyeglasses.

She reached up and touched the photo and her eyes filled with water. The cat mewed again.

S
he came upon on an old lady in a bedroom. The old woman was sitting up in bed in the middle of a froth of lacy pillows and around her hung a canopy of net with butterflies woven into it that shone in the early-morning light. The light lay across the floor in a pale bar. The old woman turned her head toward Nadia. She had fine eyes. Large and gray as rainwater and still beautiful.

Yes? the old woman said.

How are you today? Nadia said it in a cheery nurselike voice.

You're not Heather.

No, I'm Wendy!

The old woman nodded. Yes, yes, Heather is dead.

I'm so sorry for your loss. I'm her replacement.

Nadia walked into the room and began to straighten things on a rich, glossy sideboard where there were photographs and a book of crossword puzzles. To one side a keyboard on a spindly-legged table.

I killed her, said the old woman. She stared into memories, confused and jumbled, that darted unrestrained in the air in front of her. No, no, Farrell killed her.

Well, Nadia said. I am sorry to hear it. What did James say about it?

Nadia took up a tissue from the woman's bedside and began to dust the keyboard. As she dusted she must have inadvertently hit some key or button, because the keyboard lit up and burst into “Oklahoma!” The volume was terrific.

Oh, “Oklahoma!” cried the old woman. My favorite thing! She sat up and then fell back again among the pillows. Nadia punched wildly at buttons and the keyboard broke into another song.

Oh, “Beautiful Dreamer”! cried the old woman. She sat up and then fell back again. My favorite song!

The noise was overwhelming. Somebody was going to come and investigate. Nadia would be taken away in thumbless mittens to die in the dryers. Another hit on a button produced an oom-pa-pa rhythm, loud as a parade. Nadia felt as if she were falling into a lightless well of musical accidents, pursued downward by tubas and unseen chords and virtual xylophones. She got down on her knees and jerked the cord from its plug.

Oh, silence, said the old woman in a low voice. My favorite thing. She lay quietly in her pillows with her eyes closed.

Nadia tried to breathe evenly. Well, now, what are we doing today? she said. She picked up a day-by-day pill case from the bedside table with a shaking hand. Let's see. You've had your meds this morning. Nadia put it back down and wondered who had given the old woman her medications. Should I go and ask James?

You have to go help him in the pool. James is in the pool.

All right. Nadia patted the old woman on the arm. It was as frail and brittle as white candy. Where is the pool?

Why don't you know?

I'm new.

You're not Heather.

No, Nadia said. Heather is dead. Farrell killed her.

Farrell. Farrell. The old woman waved one hand. He missed his dental appointment. These avaricious tooth people.

Yes, but I have to go help James in the pool, said Nadia. But I have forgotten how to get to the pool. She smiled and fluffed a pillow. You have to tell me how to get to the pool.

I used to get in the pool. Now it's so much trouble. They lift you out and you're all wet.

Yes, it's inconvenient. Nadia felt panic rising. If I go out the door, do I turn left or right?

Left, said the old woman. To the kitchen. Where's Brat Kitty? He's so spoiled.

I'll go find him, said Nadia. She bent down and picked up her tote bag and walked out of the room and turned left.

In the kitchen she assembled some things on the tray; cheeses from the huge steel refrigerator and a package of crackers, glasses, a bottle of wine. If she ran into somebody who asked her who she was she would say, I'm the new maid.

She turned from one side of the kitchen to the other. No stairs. She went back out into the hallway, the opposite way from which she had come, and there was an entrance to the pool, the word written on the door, and stairs beyond.