A New Day in America (27 page)

***

“I had a bad dream,” Yvette mutters, her lips sticky and white from too deep a sleep.

Nos sits upright in the bed, stunned she’s there—that he’s there. He gets up and looks out the window. The sun is reluctant to rise in the Brooklyn morning. Nos opens the blinds and glances at the red and brown brick rows of two-story brownstones outside, familiar as wallpaper.

“I saw demons,” Yvette says with a rare panic. “They had heads like buffalo and horses and wild boar. They had guns bigger than I’d ever seen and wore rounds like clothes.”

Nos can’t believe it. That’s the same dream he has. Nos turns to his wife, her eyes moist, face hidden in reams of brown curls.

“They want Nay, babe. They curse her. She was hidden, and only I knew where she was. They raced after her, searching, and I raced to her. You were gone. I didn’t know where you were, and I couldn’t…I couldn’t get to her. No matter where I ran, the way was blocked…”

Nos embraces his wife. “I have those dreams, too. The same ones. But bad dreams are only dreams.”

He can feel that she is getting thinner, as the women in her family do as they age. Nos strokes the once powerful legs that would stomp flamenco steps they knew by heart in a blaze of twirling red and snapping chimes. Even her smile seems a frown these days, never the knowing a sensual smirk, but the sense that it will all disintegrate once again. Even joy is sad because it could not last.

“Can you take out the trash?” she asks. She’s in the bathroom, twirling her hair around a curling iron.

“OK,” says Nos, and he looks for Nay. He goes over to Naomi’s room and eases the door open but can’t find the girl—only the sleeping stuffed bears, pigs, and frogs about the bed and spilled on the floors. Her baby blue beddings are empty. He looks all over the house but he can’t find her. He even goes down to the basement with all the guns and tools.

“Babe!” he yells up the stairs. “I can’t find her.”

“Then how will you take out the trash?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he yells. “Help me find her.”

No answer.

“Babe?”

No answer.

He knows she can hear him. He always calls like this up the stairs. They have whole conversations like this.

“Babe! Babe!” he yells. He knows something’s wrong.

Nos climbs familiar stairs, suddenly new and terrifying. His home is completely tossed. Every shelf is toppled, every couch and chair is upturned, every drawer emptied, every trinket broken and left in a pile in the middle of the living room. There’s a Suzuki bike in the corner. He calls and calls to Yvette, hoping, praying to hear her chirping response. It is utter chaos, although that might be just as well—there’s nothing worse than chaos on the inside with order on the outside. When you feel a mess you want the world to be a mess, so you know there’s nothing wrong with you. This way the external validates the internal. It’s the reason Nos makes messes.

In the bathroom, where she curled her hair, where they have showered every morning for the last decade, where he would shave while Yvette ranted about politics, is a bloody bundle of flesh. The curtain is pushed back, and his wife’s punctured body lays facedown in the blackening red.

“Yvette,” Nos whispers as tears pour. “Babe. No, Yvette, no babe. Jesus, babe, Jesus no, Jesus no…”

He peels her limp corpse toward him. Below his wife’s body is his daughter. Naomi is face up, blood like a coat of paint. Nos lays Yvette gently on the bathroom floor. He goes to Naomi’s dreaming blood-struck face and presses his fingers to her sticky neck and feels the hummingbird flutter of her living pulse.

Nos lays his wife on their bed, lost in the void. Two perfect globes of ceiling bulbs reflect in her pupils. Naomi watches, shock-struck, her face a repetition of her mother’s empty shell.

Lawlor is standing over her. There’s blood on his mouth, and he’s holding a bloody knife. “There’s something
holy
about war,” he says in casual conversation.

***

Nos’ eyes open. A room comes into focus. The room is brown. He can’t move. He can’t feel his tongue. A pain burns in his hand and in his chest like flaming embers of coal. He has no will to move his body, though his bones ache severely with restlessness. A numb euphoria tingles along his skin, and although he knows some drug makes him unable to feel his own reality, he is sure the tingling can only mean one thing:
Didn’t die
.

A woman sits in his periphery. She stands. He can hear her breathe.

“Yvette,” he mutters.

“Leila,” she corrects. “That your PTSD talking?”

His head falls to the pillow. “Maybe just ‘trauma’ this time. Lose the ‘P’.”

“I’ll buy it. You got shot five times.”

That face—that skin like dusk—that smirk hitting him like it hit that day back East, the offset high cheekbone scar.
Am I dead or dreaming?

“Five times?”

“Two in the legs, two in the abdomen, one grazed your face. You got a scar like mine.”

“Can’t aim worth shit,” he mutters.

“I saw you. I thought you were dead.”

“Naomi?”

Nos takes in a long inhale as Leila blows out a long exhale.

“Haven’t seen her.”

Nos closes his eyes.

“Before they caught me I put her in the dumpster. In the alley.”

“Shit. We were right there when we found you.”

“Yeah. Right there.”

“Revelation is moving into the city. I’ll go,” she says.

Leila is gone before Nos can thank her.

No one buys any of the old lady’s silly beaded necklaces. She walks all day through the city hollering “Jewels and gems for sale.” But there are no stones, only beads. Her face is so burned people don’t even look at her. Nay follows. She looks at every single face they pass for Pa. No one even looks like him
.

They stop to eat. They stand around a drum can fire with three men who are also burned like the old lady. She tells them Naomi is her daughter. They chew on chicken bones and offer some to Nay, but she doesn’t want any. She is starving. They say how skinny she looks and how hungry she must be. They keep offering bits, but Naomi refuses. She doesn’t know them. Pa wouldn’t let her eat the food. The frying smell fills her, and she can almost taste it. But they are hungry, too, and it’s their food. She looks away as they eat, putting it away quick, like they may not eat ever again
.

It gets late, and they fall asleep by the fire. They have old blankets and coats. She looks and looks for Pa through the night. Maybe she dips into dreams because at one point she thinks she’s found him, and she is alive with relief. But he isn’t there. Just four huddled snoring folks with burns on their faces and hands
.

Pa will come. He can do anything. He will appear. He can do anything
.

In the morning Nay and the lady keep walking. Nay realizes they aren’t going anywhere, but they just keep walking. They pass men with guns in desert fatigues with the circle and flame on their uniforms like the soldiers from the amusement park. Their eyes glide over Nay and the lady, but Nay knows what they’re looking for. Her hood is over her head so they can’t see. The lady yells at them and calls them ‘Stiller worshipers.’ Nay doesn’t know what it means. She doesn’t understand anything the lady says, and she stopped listening sometime yesterday. But the lady is always talking. She calls herself Galadriel, but Naomi knows that’s not her name
.

Nay wants her to stop yelling at the soldiers. They turn and look away from her, but they are very annoyed
.

“You want to go to the camps?” one asks her
.

“No, oh you divine muckrakers.”

“Then move along.”

“You kneel to Stiller and take and take because you think Stiller loves you.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” says the other, gripping the handle of the huge gun that hangs across his chest
.

“Filth. Muck. Trash.”

“Move along!” yells the first. He kicks her in the butt, and she falls on her face. She is too frail. Nay wants her to stop
.

The soldiers’ eyes rake Naomi once again, and the other soldier kicks Galadriel on the ground. They laugh. Naomi stares at them. She sees that they are weak. Only weak men kick old ladies and enjoy it
.

They walk away and laugh. The lady curses into the pavement. Naomi helps her stand. She is bleeding from her mouth, but she doesn’t seem to care. She curses
.

“Filth. Rubbish. Garbage. Garbage men.”

They keep walking and stop in a park. There are trees and grass and benches. Naomi used to see trees all the time on the river with Pa. She misses the river, even though it made her nauseous sometimes. They kept moving in the river, and she knew they were going somewhere, but they were free. It was quiet and boring, but they were free. The city feels like a prison
.

The day is warm, and there is a breeze in the park that Naomi didn’t feel while in the streets. The lady eats from a bag of seeds and offers Naomi some
.

“You have to eat, gemstone. All humans have to eat. Especially monkeys.”

Naomi looks away. The lady sets the bag of seeds down on the bench between them
.

A man and a woman are sitting on a bench across from them. The man has his arm around her. She nuzzles into his shoulder like a purring kitten. They kiss. He looks at her like he would do anything for her. Soldiers walk in the park, but they don’t care and kiss anyway. They are free
.

Naomi takes four of her favorite beaded necklaces off of the lady’s cart and takes them across to the couple on the bench. She holds them up. It takes a moment for them to take their eyes away from each other and notice the little girl
.

“Oh, sweetheart,” says the girl. Her lips are the same pink color as her face. Her hair is messy. And she’s pretty. “How lovely.”

“What a cutie,” says the man. He has light eyes
.

Nay holds up the necklaces. “For her,” she says
.

“Darling little thing, she’s so skinny,” says the woman
.

“Million more like her out here,” says the man
.

“They’re not cute like her.”

“Cuteness. Quite a survival skill.”

“How much for the necklaces?” asks the man
.

“Two dollars.”

He reaches into his pocket
.

“The evolutionary advantage of ‘pretty,’” he says. “Pure Darwin.”

He gives her a five-dollar bill for two necklaces and lays both around his girl’s neck, and she laughs and admires them
.

Nay brings the five-dollar bill over to the lady and gives it to her
.

“My perfect little gemstone,” she says, and it sounds different than the other things she says and says—she sounds like she means it
.

Nay sits back on the bench beside her and picks up the bag of sunflower seeds and eats until the seeds are all gone
.

Nos can hear Jaz breathing before he sees him. His keys jingle along their chain, and the leather of his holster creaks as he sits, yawning like he just woke from hibernation.

“Thank you for carrying me,” says Nos.

“How’d you know it was me?”

“My whole time in Frisco I haven’t seen but one man sturdy enough to haul my big ass anywhere.”

Jaz laughs.

“Couldn’t have been no cake walk.”

“Can’t have no man dying behind my dumb trigger happy crew.”

“Yeah. So how’d Leila convince you?”

“She has your back. Something serious. She’d have dragged you back herself. She was looking for a damn sheet of metal—homegirl was about to lay you out on it like a stretcher and tie it to the dogs and have them drag you back here like a damn sled. I said
all right
.”

“Solid girl. Loyal as those dogs.”

“Only if you earn it. Otherwise she got the knives out. Quick.”

“I helped her out. Once upon a time in the East.”

A slender, white-haired man approaches in a lab coat that seems to radiate with the whiteness all around.

“Here’s the doc,” says Jaz. “Doc Bauman.”

Bauman gives a brief, courteous nod, his teeth are a stark white against his tan skin. Nos wonders why they always wear white—like they’re going for a feeling of serenity, but really evoking heavenly imagery of the afterlife. Not the best association.

Dr Bauman explains that Nos has a punctured lung, or pneumothorax. The lung has been filling up with air, so he had inserted a chest tube in order to drain it. Nos feels beneath his arm as the doctor speaks, touching the long plastic tube that sprouts from his side. It leads to a small, clear canister on the floor. The doc explains more but makes less sense, using words like radiograph, Seldinger technique, and possible subcutaneous hematoma. Nos keeps eye contact and nods like he understands, Jaz doing the same, Nos thinking,
how long? How long, Doc?

“Two weeks,” the doctor had said.

Two weeks.
Bullshit
.

The door opens, and Leila is there in front of two dogs. The dogs look in the room with their eyes crinkled and try to nose their way inside, and Leila blocks them with her knee and shuts the door. She comes in shaking her head.

“Dumpster was empty. Saw a little footprint in the blood, but nothing I could follow.”

“Fuck.” Nos closes his eyes.

“We’ll find her,” says Leila, though midway through the sentence she loses assurance, as though she can’t even believe it long enough to say it.

Nos leans forward to get up and is overwhelmed by a massive pain that forces him back down to the bed.

“Look, you’re fucked up,” says Leila. “The bullets were through and throughs, but you got a ton of damage.”

“Not much time,” says Jaz. “We ‘bout to bounce. ‘Fore the motherfucking stormtroopers roll on this city.”

Nos has to find her.
Fuck leaving town, fuck taking another breath before searching every inch of city, Revelation jail, camp, or hospital
.