Authors: Benjamin Parzybok
“I don’t remember what the Bottle Route is.”
“Bottle route, cans and bottles, ka-ching? A shopping cart? For fuck sake. Ten years. I know everybody. I don’t forget anything.
Anything
.”
She put her hands up defensively. “I just need to meet Gregor.”
He shook his head at her and turned to finish the rice. “It’s a thing, OK? Like a disease.”
“What?”
“A disease.”
“What is?”
He pointed to his head, his finger tapping his temple. “Forgetting. Not forgetting.”
“OK,” she said and busied herself with kitchen tasks, trying to stay out of his way. After he served the bowls—he took great care to split them equally—she scraped the pot clean, dividing the last teaspoon of rice cruft between them.
“Thank you,” she said, and he stared at her, one eye open wider than it ought to be, a tuft of his sparse beard standing out oddly on his chin.
Finally he said, “Yeah, it’s all right.” He turned away with his bowl toward the back door.
“Leroy?”
He stopped.
“Come eat with us. We’re not so bad.”
Leroy scowled and stood by the door.
“Can you take me to Gregor?”
“You don’t just go knock on his door.”
“What else have I got?”
Leroy made up his mind and she followed him to the living room, handing a bowl of rice and a short glass of water to Bea. “What else? Everything else, everything but that.”
“He’s no king of Egypt, right? Can’t you help me set up a meeting?”
Leroy shrugged. “He’s close enough to it.”
Zach stood in his underwear, pants in one hand, shirt in the other, and watched the morning news dominated by Maid Marian. The manhunt continued, risen now to a fever pitch by the copycat crimes. The city was going to make a lesson out of her. People were putting signs up in their windows that said “MAID MARIAN SAFE HOUSE,” the news reported.
A bearded man on a bicycle with
a tattoo of a pigeon on his neck was interviewed. Three other bicyclists, two men and a woman, were in the background behind him. They were going to find her before the police, he said.
The interviewer said: “But—I’m trying to understand, what will you do when you find her?”
“We’ll hide her. She’s a truth-exposer.” The bearded man turned to the camera and pointed. “You can’t trust the city!”
Behind him, the woman cyclist called out, “We’ll join up with her!”
“Well,” the newswoman said into the camera, “as you can see, Maid Marian has stirred up a tremendous amount of emotion among Portlanders.”
Next they interviewed the sheriff, and Zach watched with amazement as his girlfriend transformed into a brand. First, there was the iconic image, a woman distributing water to the thirsty. Next they affixed legendary connotations to the image—Maid Marian of Robin Hood—giving the “thief” an irreproachable sense of morality and ethics. The news qualified this tongue-in-cheek, saying the word
thief
as if they should all be lucky to know such thieves. Then a fan base sprung up—good god, not more than a day or two later—deepening the brand and making it socially acceptable—nay,
desired
. They wanted her to win, they began to need her as a conduit for their hope. People were actually putting signs on their houses to indicate their fealty to brand. It was an advertiser’s dream. He watched as the police obliviously made her image stronger. At this point, if she were caught the city would riot. They’d already rioted once this week, he remembered, after a horribly orchestrated water distribution fell into chaos and a nine-year-old boy was trampled.
A symbol had been created for her, and it was stenciled on the street. Her name and likeness surely would already be scribbled on bathroom stalls, bus stop shelters, cop cars. If teenagers bent their energy to her, if she became part of the culture’s consciousness—then she would have ascended beyond what was possible as a commercial brand. Then she would belong to the realm of Che Guevara or Joan of Arc or, he realized, Robin Hood. It was too early to tell, but no matter the situation, he knew it couldn’t be helping his relationship.
Before dusk, Renee and Bea rode for the unused water towers. Now that they’d been in the neighborhood, the mile and a half ride felt like a long, hazardous journey, and they embarked with trepidation. They rode hard, pausing for no one and memorizing their route and the obstacles in it, complete with its burnt-out cars and trash heaps, the charred remains of houses, roving bands of wary youth. Renee sensed that each
block had its own impromptu system of arrangements and connections, of safeguarding each other, or in some cases a single group that antagonized all others.
At Nineteenth and Prescott they pulled over to the edge of the street to inspect the park. Two water towers rose in front of them. At their feet there was a playground. One water tower was shaped like a massive thimble, the other like some old Russian moon rocket, suspended on eight legs. They were empty now, monuments from a different time.
The park was tiny and crowded with objects. In its half-dozen city lots were stuffed the two towers, a playground, and a couple of maintenance buildings, but there were still plenty of places to hide, and so they wheeled their cycles in carefully. Bea gripped the kitchen knife she’d strapped to her handlebars. But the park was quiet. They sat underneath the big thimble tower and chatted in a whisper while they waited for sufficient darkness.
Renee unwrapped the green laser pointer from its Morse code instructions, and it made her smile. Renee had studied the Morse code off and on all day in anticipation of this moment, reading his handwriting and trying to commit what she could to memory. Bea would help her write down and translate the bits, but she had much to say and much she wanted to hear.
She tried to imagine him out there, climbing the stairs of his funny old building, opening the metal door that led to the roof where he worked on projects or watched the street below. Sitting cross-legged on the black tar and rubbing his hand across his clipped head.
The light was dim enough to begin, and she hoped he was there. If only it were possible to compress the space between, so that she could whisper into his ear with her eyes closed, her nose brushing against his cheek.
This would have to do. They stationed themselves on top of the plastic playground slide and faced toward the big thimble tower. She opened up the beam of the laser pointer and traced a circle up high on the tower in intervals, a hard, bright green dot the size of her thumb tip. She felt spooked by the alert they were broadcasting, but to hear from him was worth the risk.
She traced circles a few more times. If there was no answer, she would tap out the message she’d memorized for his video camera.
She patted Bea’s leg in the anxious anticipation of anything happening, grateful she’d come.
A new dot appeared on the tower, this one the size of a fist, the beam gone wide from the distance. It was him. It flashed a series of rapid blips—it was easy to read excitement in the reply.
The messages came fast. Bea read them off the tower to Renee, who scratched them out on paper and tried to decode them as they came in.
“Dash dot dot dot space dot space dot dash new word,” Bea said.
“Hey, that’s your name. He wants to know if you’re here, Bea.” Renee answered back a yes: -.—. ...
His light shone on the tower to reply and she left hers there, circled around his. Their lights flirted around the edges of each other. This was silliness, she knew it, and dangerous too. Morse code was a kludgy, awkward way to tell someone how you felt. But for a moment, she couldn’t bring herself to remove her beam from this approximation of him.
“What’s going on?” Bea said, and then after a moment she sighed with disgust. “Never mind.”
Zach’s light began to relay messages again. He had found Josh, whom he was sending up, but no others. She told him what she could of their house, but tapping out the messages was painstakingly slow, and she began to grow more nervous as the night went black.
“We better go,” Bea said.
Renee nodded. At the other end of that green dot was Zach. She sat for a while longer. They didn’t have anything else to say, not really. After a while Renee tapped out: “love bye.”
As they were leaving they watched one last quick reply, the bright green dot pulsing out its last message on the tower. “2MROW?”
-.—. ...
In the morning they were in the living room removing gl
ass debris when an older woman stopped in the street outside the house.
After a while she leaned against the front gate heavily, as if preparing for a long wait. She stared in blankly, something about her movements at the end of things. She reached her dark brown hands through the gate’s slats and was still.
They watched her from the living room window, wary.
“She doesn’t look armed,” Bea said. “I wish she’d move along.”
“She’s waiting for someone,” Renee said.
“Leroy!” Bea called. “You got a visitor!”
“Not for me!” Leroy yelled from the third floor.
Renee picked another handful of tiny shards of glass from the carpet, painstaking work. After about ten minutes she looked up to find the woman still there.
“You want me to go talk to her?” Bea said to Renee.
“No, let her be.”
Forty minutes later Renee found her sitting on the front porch, her hands folded across a gold and pink polyester dress, trembling slightly. She was in her early seventies and her black hair was smoothed to a plasticky perfection. A wig, Renee surmised.
“Oh,” the woman said, when she saw she’d been spotted.
“Can I help you?” Renee said
“Are you Maid Marian?” the woman said, and then waved her hand dismissively and clumsily stood. “Never mind,” she said.
Renee swallowed an instant of confusion. “That’s what they call me.”
“I heard you were up here.” The woman stopped and stared toward the gate. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”
“Heard it from who?”
“Everybody.”
“Everybody?”
“Well not
everybody
,” the woman said, as if Renee had made some outrageous claim. “Just people talking.”
“What’d they say,” Renee said.
“Nothing,” the woman said crossly. “We all saw you on TV, what’s there to say?”
“I see,” Renee said, but wasn’t sure she did. “And you’re looking for—do you have a place to stay, sleep?”
“Well, yeah,” the woman said angrily and took one step toward the gate.
Renee felt like she’d crossed some line of propriety and looked for a way to apologize.
After a while the woman said: “No, I don’t.”
“OK,” Renee said. They sat there for a while in silence. There was a touch of sea air in the morning breeze, and yet despite the tease, no rain came. The weather had snaked its way up the channel the Columbia river had made and sat there in the city with its arms crossed, as if to say, What are you going to do about it?
“You can stay here,” Renee said. It came naturally. She made the decision without consulting Leroy or Bea. “It’s a huge house. There’s work to do. What’s your name?”
“Julia,” the woman said, and fought a smile.
Renee instinctively sensed an exchange was in order, that for Julia to stay here without a contribution would lead to an unfortunate debt in Julia’s mind. She hunted around for a trade, no matter how small.
“Are you a good judge of people?”
The woman reared back and inspected her. She gave Renee a bird-eyed stare. “Kind of question is that? Everybody thinks they’re a good judge of people.”
Good answer to a dumb question, thought Renee.
As they walked into the house they heard Leroy yell, “Third floor is off limits!”
Julia paused and leaned heavily on the banister. She was a little out of breath and Renee thought she might not be well. “That Leroy?” she yelled up the stairs, but no answer came.
“You know him?” Renee said.
Julia shrugged. “Everybody knows Leroy.”
Renee gave her a choice of rooms on the second floor, and let her know she might have to share eventually. “You get settled, then come back and we’ll talk about what needs doing.” Renee watched her pause in a room and inspect the things that had been left there—a torn mattress and dresser, a cracked mirror on the wall, a door that led to a shared bathroom with no running water. She appeared tired and Renee struggled against the urge to tell her to lie down.
“I’ll bring you a drink,” Renee said, realizing she’d have to borrow it from Leroy. “We’ll all be safe here.”
“OK,” Julia said, her voice turning suddenly meek and conciliatory.
When Julia came back down they sat on the front porch and talked.
Renee wanted to hear more about “people talking” but she couldn’t figure out how to get the subject up again. “Do you think others will come?” she asked finally. They stared at each other; a plastic bag blew by and somewhere a door slammed.
“They’ll come.”
“Because of . . . ?”
“For Maid Marian.” Julia shrugged and appeared to be done talking. They sat in silence for a while. “These are pretty low times,” she said.
Renee agreed.
“People—they haven’t had something to come to. They need something to come to.”