Lighthouse Island: A Novel, page 13
All along the walls were his books: very old ones concerning the fall of civilizations such as the Minoan and Assyrian, their inevitable decline into dystopias after beginnings that involved heroism, ideals, and a kind of general liveliness; his edition of The Urban Wars, printed on pasty-feeling paper with blurred print, a collector’s item. His photographs of Barbara Smith Conrad as Dido, lamenting, and Lane Frost waving good-bye, the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, Chaplin roller-skating in Modern Times and Cooper in High Noon and Errol Flynn in tights leaping from the rail of a sailing vessel. All active people with legs.
He had a signal that allowed him to access the executive channel but now he seemed to have lost all taste for old movies with plots and connected events because he had entered that world himself; a plot was streaming out of the future toward him with the force of a tidal rip. Connected events bobbed and turned on its surface. He turned on Big Radio for the nighttime classical music. Boccherini, “The Night Watch.”
He would find out where they were taking Findlay; he would have to try to send him food and clothing, if possible. It was possible that they would use the old man as an experiment; first live execution on TV. But then, the panel discussion last night had recommended somebody attractive. That left Findlay out. James closed his eyes for a moment and listened to the music and then spun his chair around.
The long desk had a green-shaded banker’s lamp that threw its glow down on the limp pages of his brother Farrell’s report. James had not tried to hide the report. Why bother?
Abandon everything. Run for it. If he had his legs again, nothing else would matter. If he could save her alive, saturated with sentimental poetry and ancient plotlines as she was, they could escape to the margins and live among the seal rocks of Lighthouse Island and never worry about arrest again. Evasion seemed the only answer. They would live on mussels and salmonberry tarts in the mist. He would walk, they would undress each other, casting aside their sou’westers and rainproof anoraks. That is, if she was who she appeared to be; that is, if she stayed under the radar. She might become a hostage and not even know it, or on the other hand the world could fall apart and they could escape in the general ruin. James personally favored the second scenario.
Because look at this, he said to himself. He turned Farrell’s pages. The report was sticky with bad toner. It spoke of Kelvin waves that crossed the Pacific Ocean just under the surface, a few centimeters high and kilometers in width. Strange things. He came to charts of the upwelling cold currents along the coast of the geophysical unit once known as Chile. He read of Farrell’s puzzlement concerning the appearance of continent-sized cloudbanks above the west coast of South America as reported by somebody named Amanda who lived in the extinct nation-state formerly known as Peru and refused to give her last name. Amanda sent in her observations by short-wave and ground lines and often had trouble getting through.
She said great storms were arriving out of the Pacific with the appearance of personages dressed in sheet lightning and rain like heavy metal pounding down out of a fermenting sky.
Now here. A chart of the Walker circulation spiraling into vast storms fed from caverns in the upper atmosphere; the place where rain was generated and reborn, but for some reason during the past two hundred years the rain had died. Who knew why? Sciences of all sorts had undergone regrettable decay under the Facilitators but there was so much else to attend to: unsupportable levels of population, droughts like humankind had never known, cities sprawling over entire continents, demolitions, enforced population shifts, catastrophic loss of reading skills, cities fighting over water sources, the ineradicable fungus of bureaucratic jargon.
So in terms of transparent, invisible caverns of air in the upper atmosphere where rain was generated, why not? It could all suddenly cut loose. The ironclad high-pressure system that had held the continent in its grip might be dissolving. Anything could be true. Unfortunately.
Appended, Farrell wrote, is a very old discussion of the Madden-Julian Oscillation by which the author of this report remains confused but submits request for another six months of study of aforesaid plus budget for excavation of NOAA archives (see Appendix; shovels, rock drills, axes, nail bars, rations for scrappers).
We revert to mysteries and Kobolds, Farrell wrote. There are great caverns up there where rain is reborn. Consider Sibelius’s “Oceanides” and the seven levels of heaven: the troposphere, the planetary boundary layer, the stratosphere, the mesosphere, thermosphere, the exosphere with its magnetic aurora, and outer space. All these levels with their calculable lapse rates at the Karman line, and the transparent grottoes gravid with rain events. They might be there. It could happen.
It was happening. Rain, love, coincidence, cosmic intersections in the anonymous urban hive. Gifts of synchronicity. The whispers of a Continuity Man and his tarots in violent colors.
James wheeled to his computer and pulled out the bulky keyboard and began to rattle at the brass-bound keys. He crept along the spines of the Fido network, into other gerrymanders. How did you find your way through old records without numbered years? Easily; you bundled months into year-shaped units. He skipped backward in time in twelve-month packets. He found her at age five, suddenly appearing in an orphanage, Nadia Stepan Fourteen fifty-nine zero zero SB. He burrowed into their records. The name change was difficult. But people in wheelchairs have a lot of time in twelve-month packets on their hands and are therefore dangerous to public order.
Finally he managed to get into Nutrition’s Public Vending Commission Monthly Usage site. He ran down the hits so far. His card had not been used today. It couldn’t be helped. She would be safer on the streets than she would be with him.
Then he stepped out on the familiar road through the backbones and lines to the geography of charts and maps and located the one he wanted. Lighthouse Island and the adjacent coast. It was a marine chart. It did not show the interior. It was meant for sailors and ships so it was studded with fathom numbers and indications of old lighthouses long dead. “Nootka Sound,” it said. “Saturday Inlet” and “Lighthouse Island.”
The storm peppered his great bay windows with sand. He suddenly lifted his head. His right foot was tingling.
Nadia slept after a fashion in the middle of a cactus garden and the intense wind lost some velocity as twilight poured over the elegant and hostile neighborhood. The last evening limousine with its beveled headlamps purred down the street. Judging from the sound it was a gasoline engine. The driver sat in an open front seat wearing goggles against the windblown debris; he stared at her long and hard. The people in the back were reading newspapers by battery lamp; the limo quietly rolled down the street and disappeared. Nadia sat on a bench among succulents and the fish-hook barrel cactus and thornless prickly pear, Echeveria and agaves. They all had labels and were artistically arranged. The streetlights threw odd shadows.
She lifted the back of the blister card to the light and looked at it closely. In the clear places there was an almost invisible thread. She took out her notebook and ripped out two pages, folded them around the card and placed it in a pocket inside her tote and then zipped the bag shut.
She sat on the bench with her clothes rustling in the wind. When would it stop, when would it stop. If she were found lying down and sleeping on the gravel path she would be taken for a dead person or at the least forced into a homeless shelter. There she would be interrogated and fed potato starch and probably stabbed in her bed.
She shut her eyes. In her imagination she walked alongside James’s wheelchair, the sparkling spokes, a flag on a long wand. They walked on a great smooth path between the fir trees of Lighthouse Island and there was a fine mist that diffused the sunlight into something damp and welcoming. They spoke to each other of the difficulties of being lovers, with him confined in a wheelchair. Can’t we just be friends? she said. Devoted friends, companions of long hours of talk. They would be utterly loyal to each other, sharing a passionate and unlawful curiosity, fellow tramps in the intellectual slums, asking the criminal questions, inciting passions for the land, alone in their own micronation of love and damp.
A guard strode by with what sounded like rusty ankles. He creaked from streetlight to streetlight making his appearance in every pool of illumination like an actor with many repetitive walk-ons. Nadia sat with her aching feet drawn up on the decorative bench. She watched an enormous centipede questing along through the gravel pause and lift a forked tail. Then another one. Her plan of sitting upright and managing a few hours’ sleep as if she were a figurine made of papier-mâché in this little cactus park was not a good one with these centipedes.
The centipede slowly wavered to a rock. It seemed to say, Nadia, Nadia, you will get there.
Then a tiny grinding sound and small pipe-heads rose up out of the gravel. One almost at her feet, another in the middle of tiny spineless prickly pears. She froze. Security cameras, they were looking at her through little cameras on the ends of the pipe-heads. The deadly small thing rose up several inches as if inquiring of her. She thought of throwing her sleeping material over it or at least the nearest one but then it began to spray a fine mist.
A watering system.
She refused to move but sat with her material over her and watched tiny water beads collect and stream from the edge. It made her both wet and happy. Then it stopped, and the pipe subsided. All the umbrella-rib arms of the cholla gleamed with drops. Water dripped from the brim of her hat, something she had never seen before in her life.
James was probably somewhere comfortable, being lifted into a bed with sheets. Surrounded by devices. Someone brought him dinner on a tray. She herself was sitting motionless on a public bench like something on pause longing for dawn or at least early morning and planning out how she should appear at every hour of the day. She must not walk out on these streets too early. What excuse would she have? When was dawn? What time did the agency higher-ups come to work? Say about nine. She was going to have to sit here until nine in the morning and then get up and walk out confidently and neatly, down the street, as if she had someplace to go. Which she did. It just wasn’t where people would think. She needed a compass.
The endless night crept on. The centipedes traveled here and there with their million million legs. Invisible clock hands in invisible places edged upon one hour numeral after another.
By midmorning she had walked beyond the elite neighborhood, past one of the exclusive Dollar General stores that were for upper-level people only, and she did not stare at the people walking in there, past the security gate, their limousines idling outside and maids carrying the children, as if she had never seen higher-ups before. She came upon a neighborhood where there were once again crowds and bicycles and broken windows and the odor of fuel pellets and wood chips burning in the little stoves.
She felt safer but desperately hungry as well as thirsty, and hot. The sun was straight above her and her hat made an unsteady saucer of shade at her feet. She had counted another twenty blocks since the morning. She had to walk another one hundred and fifty-six to make twenty-two miles for the day and she knew she would never make it. She took off her hat and quickly combed her hair back and replaced it and went on with a deepening discouragement.
People wove in and out and around one another in a textile, every mind in every skull preoccupied with thirst, how to get water for self and parents and in-laws and children. Would the water actually finally run out altogether? How to dodge the selections, where to go if your building was demolished. Preoccupied with their ration cards and office bosses and finding blood pressure drugs somewhere and the spare change jingling in their pockets and some hopeless love for someone, preoccupied with the laundry, with credits, with the tragic death of Captain Kenaty and his apparent revival.
Down a side street Nadia saw tanker trucks parked to distribute fuel; they had pulled into a demolition site. On their rounded sides was painted EMERGENCY HEATING RELIEF Fuel Delivery Task Force even though it was not an emergency, had not been for a century. People lined up around the block. They carried glass wine jugs and metal cans. In the line she passed several people dressed in brightly colored tights and tunics with sparkles. They spoke among themselves and hefted their empty jugs.
Nadia came to some kind of rise of the earth and out on the darkling plain of the cityscape, alone in the sky, were the great abandoned housing towers. Multistory fading heads were painted on the sides, among them the Facilitator from her grade-school years, Brian Wei. Pigeons billowed in and out of the thousands of broken windows. Beyond them, on a rise, a microwave tower on wooden legs published its police purposes against a brass-colored sky.
From somewhere came the sound of Big Radio. Male Voice One said, 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. We have completed our excerpts from Blood and Sand and now let us begin our explorers’ tales with Sven Hedin’s My Life as an Explorer.
Late September; soon the weather would change, swiftly and drastically, to cold. Who up in the apartment building cared? Some anonymous person in the hive, a person of like mind whom she would never meet. They were all separated from one another, the listeners. Big Radio was not forbidden since it was considered the addiction of lower-down crazies grumbling about spiritual losses in the stench of their airless rooms. It signified the fascination with an avaricious past and a desire for the personal communication and entertainment devices that had turned humanity into consuming somnambulant narcoleptic zombies. So in the hot street Nadia stood in the shadow of a ragged awning and listened and the words lifted her heart.
Soon I was seated at my writing-table, the first sheet of paper, compass, watch, pencils, and field-glass before me, looking out over the magnificent river, which described erratic turns, as it wound through the desert.
A line of children ran screaming past, followed by harassed teachers.
The landscape came gliding toward me, silently and slowly, without my having to take a single step or rein in a horse. New prospects of wooded capes, dark thickets and waving reeds opened at every turn.
Someone carrying long rolls of paper bumped into her, crying, Way! Way!
Islam placed a tray with hot tea and bread on my table. The silence was broken only where the water rippled around a bight or when the dogs stood in the bow, barking at a shepherd who stood outside his tent, petrified, watching our boats go by. I entered into the life of the river.
A distant river, beyond civilization, peopled by earnest and simple villagers, a last good place. Sven had hot tea and bread brought in by a servant. Nadia thought he could probably have ordered a pizza delivered, too, with cheese and tomatoes and ground animal flesh on it. And with all this he entered the life of the river.
Chapter 17
In the century and a half of severe drought and wild seasonal swings between cold and heat, the Mississippi River had dwindled to a little apologetic stream and was repeatedly imprisoned behind dams all the way down from wherever it emanated from. The great swamplands of Louisiana and East Texas turned into dry palmetto scrub and thorn plains and along its lowered sea levels forests of mangrove sprang up that were then ruthlessly cut down for mariculture farms and workers’ barracks. As the water level dropped, seamounts and keys rose up out of the underwater formation known as the Mississippi Fan. Workers and prisoner-workers slid down the ropes on which kelp grew for alginate and waded in freezing salt water, in the huge grow-out ponds for shrimp, sloshing through the algae blooms. They manned the pumps for the water exchange and were driven to exhaustion on paddlewheel aerators. They lived in tar-paper barracks and ate fish food when they could steal it and boiled quinoa and corn when they could not. They dove into the Gulf’s sandy waters to repair the sea bass pens until their breath left them forever.
The Mariculture Division of Nutrition and Cleansing considered them all criminals deserving whatever they got no matter how often the assigned noncriminal workers tried to remind their crew supervisors that they had been convicted of nothing and were not in fact prisoners, really, sir, it was their work assignment but it was like talking to a stroke victim who could not tell one hand from the other. Besides, Mariculture was trying to become independent from Nutrition and set up its own bureaucracy, its own executive ranks so it could then build its own upper-level housing on the rolling saw-grass dunes of Les Isles Dernieres, now a part of the mainland, in attractive Mediterranean-style architecture with inner courtyards, seawater fountains, tiled roofs, twenty-foot ceilings, and immense windows. The supervisors wanted to live under the fans, enjoy the soft ocean breezes, run barefoot with the dogs down the beach alongside the sea, the beautiful sea.
Mariculture had begun to arm its own Strike Force Teams to defend its autonomy when the Red Disease broke out. Workers’ arms and legs became bright red, then they succumbed to fevers and disorientation. More than seven thousand people died and many more became unfit for work so Mariculture sent out urgent requests for fresh manpower to Forensics. Forget the ruses and cheap tricks; get them from anywhere. Impress them, seize them, arrest them if you can find an excuse, kidnap them out of Nutrition’s yeast factories or the scrap piles. Start the collection during the live executions, when people are distracted.
In the confusion caused by this emerging local war in Gerrymander Ten, between Nutrition and Mariculture, and the useless workers’ attendance sheets since so many were dead, some people seized a boat and loaded it with stolen supplies and set out at night toward the south, where they heard lay the Islands of the Blest. There grew bananas and limes and fat rats, all for the taking, and no agencies. As they shoved off on their mad escape attempt they saw on the far southwest horizon strange-looking banks of clouds, gigantic and solid; they were lit with an interior frenzy of lightning. A few friends saw them off, whispering, Luck to you, and watched them sail out into the moon’s path on the sea, the beautiful sea.
