Lighthouse Island (11 page)

Walk again?

I took a bad fall when I was eighteen. Maybe someday I will be able to tell you about it. He rubbed his hands together briskly to warm them. You are in serious trouble already.

And you?

Also. Agency politics. My arrest looms in the future but is as yet undeclared. He crossed his arms over his chest against the increasing chill of the night. I am a cripple and a demolitions expert and I have fallen in love only once before in my life. With a nurse. She drank a great deal. She had a beautiful voice.

She sang?

Yes. Very old sentimental songs. “Danny Boy.” She could make it sound like “Queen of the Night.”

Ah. Nadia lifted her eyebrows. Nothing else sounds like “Queen of the Night.” She reached out and touched his arm and then settled her hand back into her lap and finally tucked both hands into her sleeves. But she was your queen of the night.

James smiled, a slight, glad smile. Very good. He galloped his fingers on the wheelchair arm. I have instantly fallen in love with you. I think I will marry you. I wish I could ravish you and carry you off but being a cripple this limits my options.

Nadia paused, suspended, and finally said, You probably need a drink.

That could be. And visual images do not quench your longing to be out of the city? Long pans over the plains of Central Asia? Captain Kenaty marching steadfastly through cannibal-infested wastes?

Please.

And you are determined.

I said so.

Nadia held the card and couldn't think of anything more to say. If the card worked it was an immeasurable gift and if it did not it was a cruel thing to do to someone. She turned it over in her hand.

Don't mess with it, he said. His tie was flapping in his face. Go around the corner and there is a kind of shed for the gardener.

You mean I could sleep there?

With prudence. Become ratlike. And tell me your name again.

Nadia Stepan. She got up and handed him back his wide-skirted coat or cloak.

That is your real name.

I think so.

Why only think so?

I was in an orphanage. They change your name a lot.

He pressed his lips together and nodded slowly. Yes, they do. Odd, isn't it?

It is odd. There must be a reason.

Yes. Very well. I will see to it we meet again. There will be sound tracks with stringed instruments, intimate close-ups. His plain face and thick brown hair shone with ambient light. Now he was not smiling.

Nadia said, Okay.

He bent his head down to look at one hand. In it he held the flashlight. He handed it to her.

Perhaps at some time this will be a light in a dark place. Good night.

 

Chapter 14

N
adia made herself comfortable in the small potting shed. It had been built to look like some sort of ethnic-looking adobe structure with a fake tile roof. A plaster armadillo lurked near the easily opened door. There was a cot and a sink, stacked clay pots and shelves of tools, a television.

No fear of theft or maybe a gardener was careless. The television was on mute; some panel of experts argued with one another. She threw a piece of sacking over it and then turned to the faucet and sink. It was an unregistered faucet. A sign:
POTABLE.
She dumped the recycled water she had got in the hotel and refilled it. There were no clicks.

She hoped to sleep but she had James Orotov to think about. An hours-long conversation to go over phrase by phrase in her head as if it were an assigned task. To think about his competent hands and his wide smile and his thoughts and why he was in a wheelchair and what was the medication he was taking and if the card would really work and how she was to make her way thousands of miles to the northwest, to some unknown coast beyond this world in which she was supposed to be fixed for the rest of her life but she would not give in, she would not.

He read books, he knew “Anthem” and “Queen of the Night” and had taken her arm, a warm gesture in a cold and hazardous world, and he seemed to have said he would help her.
I'm an orphan,
she thought.
I'll take up with the first person that comes along
.

T
he next morning the windstorm seemed to waft her out of the great glass doors of the old Ritz-Carlton, past the alarmed looks of the guards. She held her hat and pressed forward into the crowds and a micronation of four-story buildings, all of them fairly new and exactly alike. It was the higher-up sector James had told her about. The streets were pleasantly uncrowded. Large glass windows looked out at Nadia stalking forward with her skirt flattened on her thighs and her big tote bag nearly torn from her grasp. She held her hat under her arm. There was no way to keep it on her head. A car big enough for four people glided past on thin tires, its brasswork gleaming, and the people inside stared out at her as they rolled down the street through the hard wind that blew dust from under their tires and on ahead of them. The man driving wore a uniform. Agency higher-ups.

Each building was a dark sand color with a small entranceway and upper stories projecting out a few feet into the street, brass nameplates. Doormen or guards shrank back into the entranceways and stared at her as she walked past but they did not want to stand out in the terrible wind with its ammunition of sand grains and try to hold her ID in one hand and shout over the noise of the windstorm. The large windows were tightly shut, which meant there was air-conditioning inside.

She felt innocuous in her office dress and her small heels. Her feet burned on the narrow sidewalks that were now like rivers of hot running dust. Once in a while she saw someone look out a window and then turn away as if revolving in a bell jar. A man in a suit and tie, two women drinking something from shining tumblers.

The windows were gleaming clean, which meant they were allowed enough water to wash them. They would have moved up far enough to have flowerbeds in boxes (succulents only). A water feature in the hall; two gallons recirculating, battery operated. Eastern Tranquility with two three-and-a-quarter-inch chimes. Desert Spring with redstone basin and washable freestanding leatherette lizard, Woodland Pool with plastic water lilies.

The thought of water features made her swallow and at last she knew she had to step into one of the set-back entranceways for a moment and get her breath. Her thoughts were on James and his sharp, inquisitive face and his hand on her arm. She wanted to think about him. She wondered why he had fallen, from what, why. She wished she had kissed him. At present he seemed unreal. Their entire rambling conversation in the dark seemed unreal. But he had said there was a genuine, physical Lighthouse Island, that she could get there, that he would see her again but on the other hand she had an orphan's heart and was so often and so willingly deceived.

She bent her head and groped into a foyer.

The doorman stared down at her and touched his hat while the deafening windstorm shot errant papers down the street and made high-pitched noises at the window frames.

ID? he said in a loud voice.

I don't want this address, said Nadia. I am just getting out of the wind.

Yeah, it's bad. He glanced at her clothes and shoes and her tote bag. Where are you going?

Office of Deregulation and Reassignment, she said. Actually, just the PR department. It's just ahead.

Why are you walking?

Well, she said. The brass plate said that the building contained several councils on assessment of subsurface Kelvin waves; other councils on assessment of the results of neighborhood disbursement of weed control chemicals. Everybody in there assessing away all day long like a lot of maniacs. She looked up at the man and said, I'm not important enough to send a car for.

No pull, eh?

None. Aren't there some empty old apartment towers on ahead, here?

The guard gave her a suspicious look. He put his hands to his face and wiped grit from his eyes. He had a tattoo on his forearm that showed beneath the white shirt cuff. Spider legs, apparently.

I don't know, he said.

All right, well, back into the wind.

Just a minute. What do you do for Deregulation?

Nadia paused. Well, actually I do dressmaking and alterations and Mrs. Flent wanted me to come to her office.

Alterations for who? The guard stared at her. It was because she asked about the empty towers. She should have kept her mouth shut.

Uniform supply, she said. She reached out and touched the man's lapel. His uniform was dark blue with sky-blue piping and on one lapel the piping was loose. You see there, you're coming undone.

His face hardened and he struck down her wrist. Get your hands off me, the guard said. Who do you think you are?

Nadia turned and plunged into the torrent of wind.

She passed five intersections and just beyond the fifth one she saw a very broad entranceway with a brass plate that said:
DEMOLITION AND CARTOGRAPHY NO ADMITTANCE
. A wheelchair ramp led from the street alongside the steps.

She stopped. Was this James's office? Was that possible? On both sides of the entranceway were long windows, black as petroleum. Nadia stepped inside the little foyer and beat dust and sand from her hat and her face. There was no guard.

She wanted to see James in the daylight, to find out if he would pretend not to know her or would touch her arm and quote some line of poetry or hand her a map of the heavens, an astroscape that everybody could see over their heads every night of the world and in which an infinite geography offered itself to those who lived inside tiny apartment rooms and were trapped inside the canyons of streets. Here, he would say. He would hand her an open book. These are the stories of the stars. Heroes, heroines, enormous wild animals, pursuits, recognitions, courage and nobility and incomprehensible plots.

The door opened.

Get out of here, a man said. He wore a heavy wool suit with thick, brass-rimmed goggles hanging down around his neck. Get out of this foyer.

She ducked out and back into the windstorm and walked on.

T
he demolitions had all begun at the same time all over the continental city when it was clear there was no longer enough water pressure to pump water up twenty, forty, fifty stories. There had still been some open countryside a hundred and fifty years ago, when the city could build vertically, but now the upper stories were far too high, and water could neither be pumped up nor carried all that way by hand. And at the same time the rains disappeared and the lakes and reservoirs were emptied. Rivers became dry highways. The pumps choked and struggled and failed. All over the universal city people in high places opened their faucets to a weak dripping. So the skyscrapers had to go, in spectacular implosions, dust clouds, massive collapses of the architecture of previous centuries, which was not all that interesting anyway.

The giant forwarding pumps were allowed to operate under high pressure only for socially significant units such as conference hotels and vacation events, for instance Cantrell Falls and hotels like the Ritz-Carlton. From time to time some rain fell and fizzed on the hot pavements and rooftops and made amazing evaporation hazes that the crowds of the overcrowded city stared at in wonder.

Big demolition jobs required weeks of paperwork and mass arrests of citizens for water theft to make up the removal crews not to speak of the initial steps of vermin removal and shutting off the electricity, if there was any, and pulling out the water pipes. Computers only complicated things as they were old and given to crashing. The ranks of geeks in the Western Cessions, what was left of the USA, had thinned and dwindled along with the available computers. The factories to make new ones no longer existed. Because of the Urban Wars there were no longer any bridges over the Mississippi and so, given the disappearance of history and maps and old place names, the two halves of the former USA mostly forgot about each other.

The few computers that Electronics Supply managed to assemble were allotted only to Forensics and to some higher-ups like James, which made his work seem important, whether it was or not. The net connections were called backbones and tapping into them took some effort. James often thought of these backbones as somewhat like his own, missing essential ganglia and constantly misfiring.

After a number of decades Demolition developed an impetus and a rationale of its own and went on as if the agency wanted to blow up the infinite city itself. People were evacuated in the millions and sent to live somewhere else like the erstwhile floods of evaporated rivers.

Cartography remained an appendix agency that lived only on paper and in the minds of a few hobbyists like James. They called themselves the Royal Cartography Society and communicated by locomotive post and sometimes, when they could attain an hour or so on a computer, through the old Fido network. They were not resurveying, but dedicated to pulling together old topographical maps.

It was decided among them that the society would leave everything in the Eastern Cessions to someone named Charles Varner. For James it was to be the Missouri River from Portage Des Sioux, where it joined the Mississippi, to its source in Montana. He knew very well that the society made him feel that he was part of a band of brothers doing something slightly illegal, something a bit risky, even though he was confined to a wheelchair.

Lewis Thayer was taking the Colorado River and the four hundred miles of agricultural land between Kansas City and Denver. The two cities had nearly merged but the Department of Hydration and the Department of Nourishment and Cleansing had kept them separate with violence, forced removals, and hundreds of thousands of acres of wheat, soybean, beets, quinoa, and barley, and hundreds of square miles of dense workers' barracks. The Ag Department, by now reduced through purges, imprisonments, and defunding, could only lend trucks. The Colorado had led Thayer to the empty riverbed of the Rio Grande and thence to the shrinking Gulf of Mexico.

James had fallen deep into the privacy of maps. The Royal Society of Cartography and their salvaging of old maps was not important. Nothing would ever come of it. It was only a hobby. But in some far future surviving
Homo sapiens
might need these ancient skills. The mark of civilized persons. James was glad to leave the eastern rivers (the Connecticut, the Hudson) or any of the extremely complicated rivers of the southeast such as the Tennessee or the Yazoo to others. He was happy with the Missouri River because it seemed like a frontiersman of the old stories, clearheaded and resilient, striding through broad plains and all the descending breaks.

James placed a tablet of the PTEN deletion dosage in his mouth and tipped up a bottle of Fremont Glacier Water to wash it down. The bottle was supplied with its own koozie in braided colors. He spun his wheelchair and rocked back and forth a few inches in front of his office windows with the tumbler in his hands. On the other side of the blackened glass a windstorm churned sand and dust through the streets, a young woman struggled head-on into it with a hand on her hat. A guard sheltered in an entryway with his coat collar up, watching.

James wheeled himself back to his desk and laid aside the portfolio of hand-copied maps and took up a large telephone handset, dialed a long series of numbers, and placed the handset facedown on the coupler. His addresses came up, green on the black monitor. He began to look for what information was available on Nadia Stepan. There was not much. She had apparently reached the Ritz-Carlton from two hundred miles to the south, where her office and residence were listed in Neighborhood Seventy in the Eighth Gerrymander. That had been, at one time, Kansas City but was now thousands of square miles of habitations stretching in every direction until it blended with what used to be Omaha and St. Louis.

His radio was on; the sound was low and the tubes glowed. It was late September and so they were into the Spaniards now:
Here we are at the beginning of autumn when the seasons turn and the leaves take on color. This is the season for the classic works of Spain and the unforgettable explorers' tales.

Male Voice One read from
Blood and Sand.

For many years past, ever since he had been given “la alternativa” in the Bull-ring of Madrid, he had always lodged at that same hotel in the Calle de Alcalá . . .

How good it was to name the place where you ate and lived and fought with bulls. A city and a street. James listened and pulled out the original blueprints for the assisted living facility, in other words a jail, in the next gerrymander. They always shifted prisoners out of the places where they were arrested. If she were caught she would most likely be imprisoned in the Twelfth. He needed an excuse to go there. Think ahead, way ahead. The blueprints had come by locomotive post; the portfolio had the old Amtrak logo on it. James went over the jail blueprints and found the strategic points for the charges, the load-bearing walls. He had to requisition the steel-cutting torches and hydraulic excavators and when they were all in the bureaucratic pipeline it would be impossible to stop and then he and she would take flight for Lighthouse Island and the infamous Northwest, all cut to stumps and populated by brutes.