On a Clear Day (14 page)

Drego and Mei-Mei shut down. I had wanted to talk over my models, but I didn’t want to do it if Drego and Mei-Mei were shaky. And they were shaky.

Anja was reading British newspapers and business magazines. When she got up to get snacks, she asked me if I wanted anything. I went with her to the tiny kitchen between the cabins. They had freshly baked cookies and little paper cups of some kind of delicious custard.

“I think Javier wants to talk to you,” Anja said.

“About what?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but he keeps looking over in your direction.”

I decided that Anja was some kind of psychic. Really weird, but I liked her being on my side.

When we got back, Mei-Mei saw what we had gotten to eat and, predictably, went and got food for her and Drego. Michael had fallen asleep, and I went over and sat next to Javier.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Okay,” he said. “I checked the airport—Menara—and found that Natural Farming booked flights to London around the same time Sayeed came. It can’t be a coincidence that a C-8 corporation left Menara the same time Sayeed did. I figured they must have booked the flights for him.”

“That’s deep,” I said, “but I don’t know where to go from here. What the hell are they up to?”

“I bet there’s going to be some stink to it,” Javier said.

“Ya think?” I said.

“Yeah, it was a good pickup,” Javier said.

He didn’t seem excited about it or anything, and I didn’t know if I should run to Michael with it or not. The thing was that Mei-Mei and Drego seemed to be going their own way, and I didn’t know if they were even going to stay with the group. I knew Michael wanted to give everybody a chance to do their thing, but I was getting a real bad feeling about it all. What the hell was I missing?

I knew it wasn’t real, but I thought I smelled some of
Mrs. Rosario’s stew. Maybe some time at home would clear my head.

We landed at Newark, breezed through customs, and started saying good-byes. I wanted Michael to do or say something that was cheerleading or at least comforting, but he didn’t.

Tristan’s dad, a veteran who had lost his legs in some war a million years ago, was there to meet him.

“We’ll regroup at my place as soon as possible,” Michael said. “If everybody made reports about what they felt went down in London, it would be useful. We need to fill in as many gaps as we can.”

Anja, Drego, and Mei-Mei started walking toward the taxi stand. I followed them.

Clearly, Michael needed some space. Mei-Mei and Drego had shaken his confidence big-time. Or maybe the tension had just gotten to us all. We had gone to the conference because C-8 was kicking our collective ass. It was still kicking ass and making new plans, and we were still in the dark.

Over the next few days the underground blogs carried their versions of what had gone down at the conference. Stupid headlines, like “Dodging the Doldrums in Dullwich,” ran over super-serious pictures of the delegates looking glum. Most of the papers carried the same message: that nothing had been accomplished, and that our message wasn’t clear. There was at least one reference in each story to the Occupy movement of twenty years earlier.

In the Bronx.

On a whim, or the breeze stirred up by a whiff of nerve, I texted the Brit kid who did their computer work and asked him to send me any computer models he had done as a result of the conference. “And I will send you mine, of course.”

His text reply was shorter than my message. It read, simply, “No.”

I ran my models again and again, looking for anything I could report. The 2-percent “growth” meant that C-8 was on the move, and the world was holding its breath to find out what that move was.

Me lying on the bed, understanding crawling through my body like the flu. I was hot and sweaty and a little sick, but I was beginning to understand more than I ever had before. We had traveled all the way to England, had talked our asses off, and nothing had changed. Drego and Mei-Mei weren’t just creeps—they had to feel the same way I did. Discouraged. Hopeless. Shitty. What I had been seeing all around me for years were people who had just given up, who had just “stopped singing.” Now, maybe, it was my turn to shut up and close my eyes.

I thought about Morristown, about how my friends could visit me if I lived there. You just didn’t get on a bus anymore. You figured who was headed in your general direction, how much you could trust them, and how little information you could pass along. Morristown was surrounded by Gater communities, so once you got within five miles, you were relatively safe from roving
favelo
squads. There was a lot of old, smart money in towns like Madison and Maplewood, and they had built their
fortresses early. I wasn’t going to let a little risk keep me from the meeting.

Back to the computer. Assembling and disassembling the models. Making small adjustments, forcing myself to answer the same questions again and again.

What did I know? That C-8 never did anything that wasn’t in their interest. Now they were acting as if they wanted to change a little, but still boasting about a 2-percent increase in growth. We knew most of C-8’s actions and we sensed—really, we knew—that they hadn’t changed. We saw the similarities,
but where were the differences
?

I looked at the models I had constructed about the Nigerian oil business. The Brits had controlled Nigerian oil at one time, and there was plenty of data on income and barrels produced. Once C-8 had taken over control, the income remained steady and the expenditures went down. The fuckers were efficient. The question was, why were they giving up a percentage of their projected revenue to the Nigerians? My old Epson printer had spit out pages of multicolored graphs that looked enough alike to make you go blind. I typed in the question again.
Where was the difference
?

The other part of the equation was a C-8 company’s connection to Sayeed. It wasn’t like them to connect to anything negative, and I couldn’t find anything in the news files that made Sayeed look even vaguely positive.

Anxiety dream. Me and Mei-Mei have an argument and I get into her face. She’s good with words, spits her rap like
she’s been practicing, but I get to her by grabbing her by her throat and pushing her against the wall. Pure ghetto. Then Drego punches me in the face and I wake up. Lousy dream. Close my eyes. Wake up. Close my eyes. Wake up. Check the clock. It was only twelve-thirty, which meant I probably wouldn’t get a bunch of sleep all night.

Switched my night dream to a daydream. Me punching out Mei-Mei and then punching out Drego. It wasn’t going to happen, but I liked the daydream better. I reminded myself that Mei-Mei and Drego were not the enemy. They just didn’t deal with their frustrations well.

In the morning, Mrs. Rosario knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to have some
aguaji
. It was just what I needed.

“You look more skinny!” she said. “How was England?”

“Interesting,” I answered. “I think they’re more comfortable with their lives than we are.”

“They don’t have little towns with gates around them like we do?” she asked.

“They have them, but it’s like okay with them or something,” I said. “The English are a bit cold, I think.”

“Take the soup.”

The sliced plantains were pale in the clear broth, and the tiny flakes of cilantro and chilies were inviting. And sooo warm going in.

Rafael showed up wearing his wifebeater undershirt, walking in without knocking as per usual, and sat down next to me.

“Mrs. Rosario and I were looking in books about England
when you were gone. I saw some places I wanted to see when I was young. You know, I was almost in England once,” he said. “When I was twenty—maybe twenty-two. I almost went.”

I liked the idea that Mrs. Rosario had been following my trip. I liked being home again too.

“If any of us ever gets rich, we should all go to England for a few weeks.” Something to say.

“I’ll never get rich,” Rafael said. “It’s not good for you. You get rich and you lose your insides, the stuff that makes you real.”

Mrs. Rosario got on Rafael’s case about him not being ambitious enough to get rich, and he defended his status as a poor man. It was the wisdom of the DR and, along with the
aguaji
, comforting.

L
ying on the bed. It was narrower than I remembered, and firmer. Why is it harder to remember things I am so familiar with? Weird. I was more tired than I should be, I thought. Everything was suddenly a choice. Did I want to change into a nightgown or lie here in my jeans and T-shirt? What I wanted was a simple life. Eat. Sleep. Work. Look for hope. In a C-8 world it was even simpler. See what they have given you to eat. See where they let you sleep. Wonder what there is to hope for. My phone buzzed. I picked it up and saw there was a text message from Anja.