The Dead Lands (18 page)

To Gawea, he said, “Is there something wrong with you?”

“No.”

“I ask, because your eyes…You don't have a tail? Or seizures? Any difficulties with language?”

“No.”

“Hmm.” He made some notes on his clipboard and said, “Next,” and sent her into the black mouth of the schoolhouse behind him.

They branded her on the shoulder, along with the rest, her flesh sizzling, bunching up in a letter,
F
, and a number, 131. They cleaned her, gave her fresh clothes, assigned her a bunk. “You are now part of something bigger,” the thin man told them. “You're serving a kind of collective. The rebirth of humanity. The reconstruction of the country. Your work matters. It's important. You're better off here. Forget your old lives. Forget what people used to call you. You're a tool now. You're a shovel, you're a hammer, you're a sickle, you're a trowel.”

When the heavy woman tried to protest, the thin man nodded to some guards and they dragged her out back and tied her to a post and lashed her with a whip seven times, and after that nobody said a word when told what to do. Everyone had a task. The job of the gardener was to raise and preserve food. The job of the tailor was to weave and sew and patch. The job of the slaver was to harvest slaves. In this way, town by town, or hive by hive, they multiplied, programming behavior, constructing a new world.

Gawea was assigned to the hospital. When they told her what to do, she did it. It was easier that way. Easier to focus on a task, scraping a broom across the floor and making a pile of dirt. Knocking down cobwebs. Mopping up puddles of blood. At first it even felt welcome, curative. She had a place and function in the world. As long as she kept busy, she didn't have to think. Her head remained empty. Emptiness felt safe.

In this way, several days and then weeks passed. She washed trays of tools—scalpels, forceps—until they gleamed. She stripped the beds of sheets, collected towels and aprons from the floor, soiled with blood and shit and amniotic fluid. “It won't be long,” the thin man told her, “before you're ready for a child yourself.”

Mostly they left her alone. She had a way about her, a stillness even when moving, that didn't draw the eye. Today she paused at a second-story window to observe a papery gray wasp's nest, half the size of her, dangling from a nearby branch. The black-bodied wasps, each the size of a finger, crawled across its outside, thrumming their wings.

Then she went about tidying a cot, folding a blanket around a thin mattress stuffed with wool. She was in the pregnancy wing, and in the room rested three other women, all wearing shapeless gowns to accommodate their rounded stomachs. Two of them weren't much older than her, young enough to still look longingly at dolls. The other had gray threading her hair.

They rubbed their hands across their bellies, sometimes clutching themselves, as if trying to strangle away the pain contracting there. Gawea answered to the midwives, one of them a slit-mouthed, wide-hipped woman who always pointed a finger when she called out, “
You!
” before assigning some errand.

Gawea paused in the doorway of a room where she found the midwives busy with a birth, drawing a squalling purple-skinned baby from between a mother's legs, wiping it with a towel and laying it on the mother's chest before cutting the cord and sewing a tear and easing out the placenta and stanching the bleeding.

In the next room, a woman paced the floor with her fists balled into the small of her back. Her eyes were closed and her teeth bared. She breathed in a pattern of quick pants and long gusts.

And in the room after she found her mother, Juliana.

Gawea recognized her instantly. It was more than the framed picture her
oma
carried around. Her mother was, after all, more than a decade removed from that charcoal likeness. Hollow eyed. With thinning hair, yellowing skin. All these years and several births and so many years of hard labor later. No, the recognition was deeper. As if blood were magnetized.

A baby suckled at her breast. It was curled like a shrimp into the nook of her arm. Its head was still coned from birth, its skin wrinkled and splotchy. Juliana was smiling, stroking its downy hair and humming a song that stopped short when she spied the girl.

“What do you want?”

“Mama.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mama.” Her voice was tiny and delicate, like a teacup rarely used. “It's me. It's your daughter.” She hurried to the bed and laid a hand on her mother's. Something happened then. Ever since losing Oma, she felt closed down, locked away, unaware. Now, as she grabbed hold of her mother, it was as if two doors on either side of a house burst open and sent the wind rushing in and out, all of it mixed up with birds and bats and bugs and rain. “Mama.”

Juliana's eyes watered and her nostrils flared, as if exposed to a whiff of alcohol that once made her sick. “I don't know who you are. Get away from me. I said get away from me.”

A scuff sound. In the doorway stood the slit-mouthed midwife. She was wiping her hands off with a towel that matched her shirt, patterned with blood.

“Get her away from me,” Juliana said. “Get her away from my baby. She was trying to take it from me.”

“No,” Gawea said. “Mama.”

The midwife threw down her bloodied towel and started toward her, one of her hands already raised.

“Ma—” The word was cut short by the fist that struck her. She fell to the floor and brought a hand to the hot swelling at her cheek. She looked up at Juliana with dribbling black eyes only to see her mother's face twisted up in a snarl. The years had done something to her, distanced and polluted her. She had forgotten one family and become part of another.

“Stay away,” she said, “you
freak
.”

There was a sudden electrical hum. The air trembled, like a wind first finding its breath. The midwife raised her hand again to strike her. But the hand never fell.

A dark stream of wasps poured through the window. One moment the midwife was rearing back to strike Gawea and the next moment she was seething with wings and stingers. They covered her completely, a nettling mass. She crashed into a wall and then the floor. She tore at them, clawed at them, but, like smoke, they parted a moment and then filled the space her hands passed through. Their bodies pulsed, jabbing their stingers again and again into every available surface of skin, and then, when the midwife opened her mouth to scream, they scrabbled down her throat.

She was still thrashing on the floor when Juliana, over the storm of wasps, screamed, “Get away!” She wrapped the baby in a blanket now and clutched it two-handed. “Get away get away get away get away!”

Gawea's expression hardened—as if all the anger and sadness and disappointment she might feel had mineralized—until it appeared someone had chipped her face from a piece of rock. She was about to ask the wasps something more. She was about to ask them to hurt the baby. If she concentrated hard enough, if she bent her desire into a question, she knew they would answer.

But they stopped her. First the midwives, then the doctors. They stormed into the room and held her down and knocked her out and she woke later in a barred cell with a swollen eye and a blackening headache. On the other side of the bars she found the thin man, studying her with his head cocked and his eyebrows arched. “You're awake.”

She rolled upright and brought a finger to her temple and it came back tacky with blood.

“What are you going to do to me?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“What's going to happen to me?”

“That's not my decision. If it was my decision, I might slice you open and see what makes you tick. You make me very, very curious.”

“Whose decision is it, then?”

“Aran Burr's.”

“Who's Aran Burr?”

“Who's Aran Burr?” The thin man laughed, a reedy clicking. “If you don't know that, then I better tell you the color of the sky and the name of the planet and the smell of a rose.”

“Who is he?”

“You'll know soon enough. He wants to meet you. He wants me to take you to him.”

O
NCE ELLA LEARNS
where Simon lives—in a lean-to in an alley—she insists he stay with her. “We'll head back to the doctor in a few days for a proper cast. In the meantime, we need to keep that wound clean. Judging from your clothes and your habit of crawling through sewers and sleeping with rats and trash, you're obviously incapable of taking care of yourself. You'll die. Or they'll have to cut your arm off and then you'll die.” So he will stay with her at the museum. In the room they share, there are two beds, and Ella sleeps in one, Simon the other.

His forearm, now purplish with an angry red gash in the middle of it, has swollen to twice its size. His black sausagey fingers will not respond to his commands. Twice a day she helps clean the wound and doses him up with morphine, but she does not permit him as much rest as he would like. She puts him to work instead—sweeping one-handed, scrubbing the bathroom, boxing up a butterfly display and replacing it with reptiles and amphibians. He is especially taken by a specimen of frog—called the Hairy Frog or Horror Frog—skirted around the waist with fur and capable of breaking the bones in its fingers and toes in order to defend itself, forcing the shards through the skin, creating claws. He remembers the pain of the break and rubs his arm and imagines it as a newly carved weapon. He is a weapon. And if he could revenge his father—if he could hurt someone, slash his arm across a throat—it would be Slade.

About this he spends a lot of time daydreaming, and about other things, too. Hunting dinosaurs with a spear. Blasting off to space in a rocket. Lancing a knight in a duel. Whereas before, he spent all of his time trying to fill his stomach and filch valuables and escape detection, his every comfort is now attended to, and he can afford to indulge. The museum encourages his mind to play. For the first time in many years, he is allowed to be a child.

When he asks for his backpack, Ella says, “Maybe later,” and when he complains, she says, “You do what I tell you to do. I've got you by the balls, remember?”

So he does as he's told. There seems to be no other way with her. Even when she uses the word
please
, it comes at a near shout, but so does she make him meals and mend his clothes and cut his hair, the clippings of which collect in a thick nest on the floor when she circles his chair and scissors her way to his scalp and finally stands back and nods approvingly and says, “You look much better now. Very presentable indeed. Except for your stuck-out ears.”

He runs a hand across his bristling scalp. Without all that hair he feels naked. She is good at making him feel that way. Stripped, revealed, as if there is no hiding anything from her.

It is then they hear a noise. The thudding of what at first sound like footsteps. She puts a hand to his mouth and says,
Shh
. He shoves the hand away and says, “What?” and she returns the hand, muzzling him. She faces the dark hallway. Her scissors rasp open. And then the thudding comes again and she recognizes the sound. “Someone's at the front entrance.”

Simon pushes her hand away again, and this time she lets him talk when he says, “It's night. No one's supposed to be out.”

She closes the scissors with a snap.

“Maybe we should ignore it,” Simon says.

But the thudding stubbornly continues, trembling the air.

He stands from the chair. Cut curls fall from his shoulders and feather his feet. Ella pushes him back into a seated position. “You stay here.” When he opens his mouth to protest, she points the scissors at him and says, “And whatever you do, don't make a sound.”

Sometimes it happens. Someone comes knocking late at night. Usually the feebleminded. The occasional drunk deep in his cups. Lewis will hiss and snap at them, burn them with a lantern, push them down the steps, send them hurrying off. But that was in the days before the enforced curfew. And now Lewis is not here to help. There is only her. The boy doesn't count. A broken-armed, thin-necked thief. He is as threatening as a gumming puppy. He is to be protected, not offer protection.

She knows who it is. She wishes she didn't, but she does. She can feel him out there—in the same way the old-timers say they can feel storms—when she grips the scissors tightly and follows the staircase to the first floor and approaches the double doors, which shake in their frames. She waits there a long time, willing the sound to stop, but it won't. Not until she undoes the lock, opens a crack, peers out.

In the darkness, in his black uniform, his face appears like a moon hovering over her. He presses a hand against the door to open it wider, but she presses back, giving him only these few inches, enough for him to see her unyielding expression.

“You took quite a long time to answer the door.”

“I was busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Sleeping.”

“You sleep with the light on? I saw the light on.”

“I was getting ready to go to sleep.”

“Are you with someone?”

“No.”

“I didn't have to knock, you know. I was just being polite.”

“What do you want?”

She cannot stop him now, though she tries. He leans into the door and it gives way. Her strength is a child's compared to his.

“You haven't heard from him?”

“Who?”

“Lewis? Who else?”

“No, of course not.”

The door clicks closed. “What's behind your back?”

She almost says nothing, but she knows that will only make him angry, will make him step toward her, grip her arm and twist it into view. Slowly she reveals the scissors.

“There's hair on these scissors.”

“I was cutting my hair.”

“That's not your hair. It's not the same color.”

“Then I was trimming the clots off a stuffed ground sloth.”

“I thought you said you were getting ready for bed?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“Do I? I have so many for you.”

He snatches the scissors from her. His fingers, too fat, don't fit into the grips, so he must use two hands when he opens and closes them. “Hold still a moment.” He steps close to her and she slides back her feet and he says, “I said hold still.” She does as he says but will not allow him to observe her fear. She crosses her arms and stares straight ahead when he circles her, teasing the blades across her shoulders, the back of her neck, down her arms. Finally he chooses a section of sleeve, a moth's wing of fabric, that he snips away, and it disappears into his pocket.

She prides herself on her strength. Not just the muscles that ball in her arms, but her heart, her ability to bully back anyone who might take advantage of her. But she feels weak now. Slade makes her feel weak. She almost cries out for the boy. That will only make the situation worse, she knows, give Slade another target to prod with a blade, another line of questioning to delay his stay and renew his suspicion of her. But the scissors are so sharp and his mouth is so close, his breath mingling with hers.

She is close to kicking at his crotch, when just in time Slade drops the scissors. They clatter on the floor. He walks away. He opens the door and pauses at the threshold to regard her. “I could hurt you, you know. And nobody would stop me.”

She has to swallow several times before she can say, “I know.”

“Good.” He pulls the door behind him, his eye in the crack the last thing she sees of him.

Ella won't speak to Simon, not at first. He asks her what happened. He asks her what's the matter. He asks how can he help. She paces the hallway and then their room, stomping her feet, brushing a hand through her hair, slashing the air with the scissors.

“What?” Simon says, and after a few minutes she starts to talk under her breath and Simon says, “I can't hear you,” and her voice grows louder and louder and comes out finally as a shout when she goes over all the things she should have said and done but didn't.

He waits for her to finish and then says, “I hate him too.”

This seems to irritate her. As if hatred were water and there was only so much to go around. “You hate him? Why would you hate him? What do you even care? What does this have to do with you?”

When he says Slade killed his father, she tucks the scissors into her belt and says, “Oh.”

“I'll kill him for you. I'll kill him for both of us.”

“For me?” At first she seems taken by the idea. That he would offer such a thing. Then she is struck more by the absurdity than by the nobility of the gesture. “You can't even climb a ladder without breaking your arm. You can't even tie your own shoe. You'll kill him? I'll kill him. I'll kill him my own damn self.”

He sees there is no reasoning with or comforting her, so he tries a method of thieving: distraction and inertia. If you sneak up beside somebody and hold a rotten apple to their face, ask them to buy it, they'll naturally reel back, swing up their hands. With that momentum he'll pop off a bracelet or slide coins from a pocket. He'll follow Ella's lead. “How would you do it? You could stab him. Sneak up behind him and—” Here he slashes at an invisible figure and makes a wet, shredding sound.

“No,” she says and wrinkles her face. “That wouldn't work. That wouldn't work at all. You'd have to get close and risk him grabbing hold of you. And he's too big. You'd have to stab him a million times. And you'd have to stab him with something long, like a sword, to even reach anything important.”

“Then, what? How would you kill him?”

“I don't know. Maybe I'd push something out a window onto him. Something heavy. An anvil. Knock his brains out.”

“Or poison!”

“That wouldn't work either. Same as with the knife. He's too big. How much poison would it take to kill someone like that? A lot. And how do you camouflage a lot of poison? You can't just sprinkle it on a biscuit. You see? You need me. You can't think anything through on your own.”

Her tone has mellowed. Her mouth has risen into a smile. He has helped lag her fear. Not enough to get her to sleep, but enough to get her ready for it. They share the same room, their beds separated by a night table. They extinguish their lamps and he lies there for a long time, listening to her breath, waiting for it to settle into the rhythm of sleep. Then she says, “Simon?”

“What?”

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

“You know.” He waits for her to say more, but she doesn't. Outside the turbines turn and croak their lazy circles and sink them into sleep.

The next morning, it takes him a moment to shake off his dreams, to orient himself in the museum, to recognize Ella spreading the curtains and letting in a slash of sunlight.

He sees then his backpack, stained and patched, made mostly from canvas and bottomed with leather. He has asked for it many times—so many times that she has threatened to throw it away if he asks again—and now here it is. The flap is open, as if it has disgorged all its contents on the floor. There is a blister pack of stainless steel nails, a chisel, a hammer, a faded rubber ducky with the beak hanging off, a rusted coil of wire, three sheets of sandpaper, a corroded butcher knife and metal spatula, three bottles of aspirin and another for springtime allergies.

She sits on the edge of the bed and folds her hands in her lap and asks if he sells these things and he says yes, and she asks if people wonder where he finds them and he says not really. “Because I'm a thief, you know. You don't want to ask too many questions when you're buying from a thief.”

“You're not a thief. You're a grave robber.”

“No, no. I steal from the living too.” He tells her that he can pick any lock, climb any wall, slip through any door or window in the Sanctuary. This he says in a rush of pride and excitement—and then realizes whom he is speaking to and goes quiet and readies for a scolding.

But she only tucks her hair behind her ears, a delicate gesture for her, and says, “What about that one?”

She is talking about a photograph, discolored and bent in half, the picture flaking along the crease. A family on a sand dune. Two parents, three kids, all leaning into each other, their smiles bright and their hair windblown, while sunlight sparkles in a thousand crystalline points off the ocean behind them. “Why would you take this?”

“I don't know.” He crawls out of bed and squats to study the photo. “I guess I like the way it makes me feel when I look at it and hold it in my hand. It's like it's got this charge, a little life in it still.” The mother appears to be laughing. One of the children, a boy, isn't looking at the camera at all, his eyes on a gull riding the breeze. Simon imagines the bones beneath their faces and wonders where they might be interred. “This whole museum is a bit like that, don't you think?”

Ella studies him for a pregnant moment. Then she goes to the closet and swings open the door and pulls from beneath her clothes an old toy chest with a hinged lid and a rocking horse carved into the side.

She shows him what she has never showed anyone. What she calls her dream box. Inside there are toy ponies, a pink plastic comb, a Renoir magnet, a pack of playing cards, an angel calendar, a yellowed copy of
The Hobbit
with the pages crumbling out of it, and more, much more, including a folder full of photos and clippings. She holds everything with the tips of her fingers, taking care not to bend or dirty them. He doesn't ask her why she has it, this box full of everything. He understands. They are the same, both refusing to acknowledge that they live in a place where fantasies must be discarded.

Here is a vinyl record in a brittle paper sleeve.
Françoise Hardy
, it reads across it. Simon takes it from her. “Have you ever listened to this?”

“No.”

“My father had records he used to play.”