“My grandmamma and mama after her made coconut bread from the palm trees outside our house. When them nuts fell on the ground . . . whump, they went . . . us kids’d grab ’em up and pound ’em on the concrete walk until they got broke up enough so we could pull the husks off and get to the nut inside. Mmmm, mmmm, but those nuts was sweet when you got ’em open.” She gazed skyward, her eyes wide as if some crevasse of memory had suddenly split open in her mind and she was seeing what used to be in that deep blue above.
El listened. She’d never heard anyone except the sisters speak of the past before; she had no knowledge of palm trees or coconuts. The taste of that sweet bread lingered on her tongue.
“What’s a coconut?” she asked.
Old Merrie turned toward the girl, her head cocked like a robin listening for a worm underfoot. She smiled, a crooked little smile.
“What do you know about, girl? What did those nuns teach you over there?”
El’s gaze wandered everywhere on the roof. From the stark vent stacks to the huge refrigerator, to the seating rows stacked in piles to the long tables that would later be filled with food and drinks, she looked everywhere but to Old Merrie’s eyes, which regarded her steadily. Finally she allowed herself the luxury of looking into those eyes. She hadn’t met a gaze head-on since leaving Sister Catarina, the last of the Sisters of Mercy.
“They taught me to trust only myself and my love of God,” she said. “They taught me to guard myself from the world outside. They taught me to be careful and good.”
Old Merrie nodded as if she, too, had been taught these lessons.
“And what did they teach you to do to survive?” she asked.
“I know how to plant edibles and sew my own clothes. I can cook and clean. I can do figures and write. They schooled me the same as anyone. They taught me how to build things too. I can take apart an engine or build a new one from old parts. They told me I was clever that way. And they taught me how to survive off the land.”
“I tell you this: Young girl like you, beautiful as you are and just coming into your womanhood, this life is dangerous. Dangerous for everyone young I observed all these years. But for a girl like you . . .” Old Merrie shook her head.
They were facing west on that vast roof. The sun was bright gold, slowly descending. Old Merrie turned and motioned for El to follow her. When they reached the very edge of the roof at the corner, she squinted, looking out over the flat landscape to the horizon where, far off, a mountain from the earth rose like some glacial erratic.
“You look out there, girl. Look to see what’s beyond. This ain’t the whole world. You ain’t seen nothing of it in your short life. Coconut trees and mangoes and papayas and all manner of trees you ain’t never seen nor tasted nor smelled.”
Old Merrie stood very still. After a few moments, as the sun moved further down beyond the mountains, the glimmer began. Faint at first. Pale green with a hint of blue.
El moved closer to the edge, but instead of looking out to the horizon, she peered over to the street below.
“Tonight they’ll face this,” she said. Inadvertently she weaved slightly toward the abyss.
“Nothing you can do about that,” said Old Merrie. “You got to look out, not down. You got to think about what’s better than what you got.”
Then El raised her chin and fixed her eyes on the faraway place that now shimmered a hot green against the lowering sun.
“What is it?” she asked, her voice filled with wonder.
“The Glimmer,” Old Merrie said simply. “And beyond that, somewhere, Zamora.”
“Why are you showing me?” El asked without glancing at Old Merrie. She couldn’t take her eyes off this sight.
Old Merrie pushed at a small chunk of concrete with the toe of her crude sandal. It tumbled off the edge of the roof and disappeared down and down where they could not see whether it landed on anyone or anything of consequence.
“They took away everything I could have had,” she said without malice. “I never could have babies. They took that from me. It was all I ever wanted. They pushed me to a life of hard scrabbling for my supper. They wiped away my memory. But now it comes back to me. Now that I’m old. Because whatever they try to take away, it’s stubborn and wants to stick. Now they don’t pay no mind to me. They only care about the young. They’ll take you away, too. They’ll give you to some Protector or Overseer or worse because you’re pretty. And then you’ll never get away.
“I tell you this. There’s a better place out there where the light shines. And if it was me, I’d take any risk to find it.
“What you see here tonight . . . well, it ain’t the way it’s supposed to be for a young man or for someone like you. If he wins, they’ll take away his soul. He won’t want for anything. But he won’t want anything, neither. He’ll stop wanting and he’ll stop hoping. Because to win is to let them corrupt him. And if he loses, well, you know what happens then.
“And what about the girl? The winner, he can take any girl he wants. The girl he chooses, well how long will he keep her? And then where do she go? If I had a baby girl, and she was the one I raised and loved and fed and worried over . . . if you was that baby girl, I’d say find that light, girl. Find it or lose yourself forever.”
El couldn’t run back to the nuns. Not anymore. She’d heard about other girls, about what happened to them. She thought about Niko. About the way he looked at her. About the way she felt when he touched her.
They both stared out past The Hovels. Past The Protections. As far as they could see to where it seemed that, in the late-afternoon sunlight, the flat earth had begun to change to . . . what? A hill, a slope where the light now shone silver, bright as a mirror for a few more brief moments before it disappeared.
But now El knew it was there. Somewhere.
The boys weren’t the only ones with high stakes riding on The Race. It was well known that the Overseers needed an ongoing fresh supply of girls to staff the brothels and gambling houses. Most of the men who paid to belong to these “clubs” preferred young girls, although even in the brothels, there was a strict hierarchy. Most of the women didn’t live past thirty, if anyone even bothered to keep count.
It was forbidden to buy their way out unless under some extraordinary circumstance—if an Overseer wanted one of the girls to live under his roof, for instance. With the permission from (and a substantial payment to) Villinkash, this sometimes happened. Of course, what the girl became after that was of no concern to anyone. So that, even if everything else within Infinius was tracked and catalogued, girls were so disposable that they were no more than pieces of furniture to be passed around or discarded for the Leftovers to collect.
All the Overseers were men, with the exception of the wife of Villinkash, who had married him under duress when he was at the beginning of his rise to power. At the time, even she hadn’t realized just how far he intended to climb using her money to get started. It was never clear to the public why she had married him. But one thing was certain: her status as an Overseer was a sham for publicity purposes.
The night before The Race, each building had held an auction of sorts, choosing by secret ballot which girls would represent their rider. Then each girl was given a ribbon in the color of her building. In this way, the whole city knew who was riding for what building and which girls could be chosen at the end as a prize for the winning rider. Girls whose riders did not win would be paraded through the city until they reached a central location where they would be trained for their new life in the brothels.
A huge hologram hovered over The Ring. It would broadcast The Race in excruciating detail. All the monitors in the city broadcast The Race. Everyone could see the cycles lined up on the Tower of David roof.
In The Hovels, Leftovers were encouraged to bet (bartering with whatever they had) on the outcome of The Race. To not support The Race was punishable by “deportation,” where masked guards would bring the offender to the edge of a series of electrified fen
ces called The Protections, then strap the offender to the fences to fry alive. Sometimes, this didn’t take long. Sometimes, it took most of a day while the offender slowly lost consciousness before succumbing completely. All of it was documented and broadcast on InCom for the people to see and hear.
The gleaming bikes had been pampered far more than any newborn baby. It was one of many ironies that, after The Collapse, the Overseers retained certain parts of the old society they deemed valuable to their aims. Certain technologies would be essential. Controlling the population would be paramount. Efficient farming methods would be useful as well as strictly regulating methods of distribution. It wouldn’t do to have a surplus of anything. Scarcity, after all, would cause competition for essential goods. This could maintain high values not many could afford. And when the Overseers deemed it useful to make goods available, the people would further conclude how they were good managers and concerned for the welfare of the populace. The problem of policing the society was solved through advanced technology. Since travel would be outlawed, except by the higher castes of Overseers and Protectors, vehicles wouldn’t be needed. Of course, there would still be factories of sorts to make necessary machines, especially the motorcycles for The Race.
One of the plum jobs was employment at The Works, where old bikes were refurbished and new ones constructed by hand, like fine watches used to be. This would take craftsmanship, for sure, but it also would take dedication and trust. Experts in all the intricate parts of motorcycles would be handpicked by the Overseers at a young age and trained like little ballerinas for a lifetime of endless service until their hands and feet would give out. But until that day came, they would be cared for and protected. Older mechanics and restorers who survived the rigors of the factory became master trainers for the next generation in an endless cycle of servitude.
Just after El turned thirteen, two years before Miriam and Niko met, Miriam’s editor had gotten approval for a story about how religious groups were what the Regime wanted portrayed as “thriving.” Although no one admitted to outright censorship, there was, instead, a process for publishing stories that covered anything even remotely political. Religion fell into that catchall. So instead of censoring stories after they’d been written, a committee screened all story ideas before (and then again after) they were written.
The Regime felt stories about religion showed how deeply held beliefs were not only tolerated but encouraged. It allowed faith-based groups that held extreme views about biblical end times and backed groups that made financial donations or that delivered others for so-called subversive activities, which could be anything. Basically they supported an us-versus-them theology.
The old nuns operating out of a garage were left to themselves, not because the Regime particularly cared about their cause but because the Watchers, although brutal, were also a superstitious bunch. Some of them were known to make the sign of the cross whenever they passed the garage. Others left small items for the sisters. Old clothing, a baby blanket, cans of formula in paper sacks, even, at times, a baby whose mother had been dispatched to the camps. The sisters never acknowledged any of these acts. It was as if there was an unwritten peace treaty between the nuns and the Watchers. And so, the sisters managed their work in quiet, if not secret.
Miriam had interviewed the leaders of these churches and was able to speak with many of their followers. She noted how eerily they all said exactly the same thing in the same words and phrases. Whereas The Cleanse had wiped out memory, this religious fervor had been instilled piece by piece until it had become an automatic regurgitation upon any number of signals.
While researching this story she had come upon the nuns at the convent where El had lived. It was generally assumed all the priests had been cleansed out, and by the time Miriam arrived at the door of the garage where the Sisters of Mercy did their work, she saw that the drive-in door had been permanently bolted closed and painted a dull gray.
El answered a side door that had once led to an office. Two elderly nuns stood behind her and cautiously motioned Miriam in. After El closed and bolted the door, one of the nuns led her to a heavy, old wooden table.
“Welcome,” she said. “Won’t you take a seat at our table? I’m Sister Mary Angelica, and this is Sister Catarina. She’s our baby. Only . . . what are you now, Sister?” She looked over at Sister Catarina, who smiled back at her.
“She’s teasing me. I’m one year younger than she is, but she’s been holding it over me for six decades now. I’m eighty-one.” Sister Catarina pulled out a chair across from Miriam and placed her hands flat on the table in front of her.
The sleeves of her habit were frayed at the wrists. Miriam put that in her notes in shorthand. El came over and sat down next to her. Sister Angelica followed, sitting next to El on the other side so Miriam was facing all three of them.
Miriam started right off because she never knew when an interview might end abruptly.
“What has been the hardest change for you since The Collapse?”
The sisters looked at each other.
“Ours is a service order,” explained Sister Catarina. “Now it is so hard to serve the community. When a poor soul comes to us for help, all we can offer is prayer and a bit of bread that we make with our own hands. We still wear the habits so that anyone can tell who we are and what we offer. Still, we don’t feel safe on the street. Even if we felt it was safe to get out to the neediest, we’re old now, and frail. We depend on El for so much. But we worry about what will happen to her when we’ve gone to our Father.”
Miriam turned to El and asked, “What do you do for the sisters?”
In her shorthand, Miriam noted that El was a beautiful girl with big gray-green eyes set in a delicately oval face framed by dark curls, which she had pulled back loosely with a black ribbon. She was otherwise unadorned and her skin seemed to glow, even in that semi-dark space. Miriam wrote she was beautiful and innocent, yet there was beneath that a will that came through. When she spoke, it was with calm and confidence that was “astounding given the circumstances,” Miriam wrote.
“I do whatever is needed to help them survive, as they did for me,” she said.
“And what of the dangers out in the city?” Miriam asked, for it was certainly no place for a beautiful young girl.
“I am protected by my faith,” she said simply.
“Faith in what?” Miriam asked.
Before El could answer, Sister Angelica spoke in a quiet voice, as if thinking aloud to herself.
“Sometimes one must have faith in the future. Even when the present seems hopeless, we must remember that God is all around us. He manifests in the kindnesses we do for others and in the faith we keep.”
“But Sister, not everyone shares your strong faith. What would you say to those people?”
“Sister Catarina and I have been here a long time, and we know that societies are fluid. None of them last forever in a pure form,” she said. “Their structures are sometimes difficult to see clearly in the present moment. But they are always shifting like sands in a desert. Every wind moves them around. It makes new patterns, creates steep hills and ravines where there was once a flat plane. The moment we are in now will not last. It will harm many, as it has already done.
“Our own priests were victims of its irrational destructive force. But haven’t we seen this all before in history? Nazis in Germany; Bolsheviks and then Stalinists in Russia; fascists in Spain and Italy; Spanish conquistadores; Americans with their concept of Manifest Destiny, which provided an excuse to annihilate native populations in order to absorb their great lands; Africans selling rival tribes into slavery to Europeans, who traded with Americans in people as if they were cattle; Japanese warmongers; unspeakable Cambodian Khmer Rouge brutality; and, of course, North Korea starving its own people for the sake of nuclear weaponry. All examples of what history failed to teach us before the wars and famines and pandemics, before our planet revolted with heat and storms and frigid cold waves. An
d here we are hundreds of years later separated into disparate colonies, with micro climates that can’t be predicted, our city tormented by brutal heat and people manipulated by the few at the expense of the many.
“Yes, we have seen it often through the ages. Now we are the ones in a state of torment. As El here says, we have our faith. In what, you ask? In the cosmos, if you like. In all the specks of dust we are and will be. Shall I speak of God? Of Jesus? You think because we are nuns of an order that we are blind to the world? No.” She shook her head. “We are neither blind to it nor removed from it. This is the world we have. But not forever. Sister Catarina and I, we will not see the light shine through this darkness. But we have faith that it will break through the clouds. Time is merely a construct of people. And people know not the winding of the eternal clock.”
This wasn’t what Miriam had expected from the interview. She was looking for concrete answers to those reporters’ who, what, when, where, how, but this time she wouldn’t get that far, for Sister Angelica stood and motioned to El.
“Shall we have tea now?” It was less a question than a period on the sentence of the visit.
All Miriam could do was write of her impressions, of the physical space they occupied, of their daily life, and of El, who, now with quiet calm, went about the chore of making tea and slicing bread. They shared with her the honey they had gathered from their own hive, which they tended daily in the scrub yard behind the refurbished garage convent. The sisters had planted flowers from seeds El had gathered for them out near The Protections. The bees hummed merrily around the hive.
“They gather from as far away as a mile,” Sister Catarina told Miriam. “Although Lord knows where they find more flowers, but they seem to. I do know that many people who took up residence in the Tower of David placed potted plants on their terraces. They grow vegetables all up and down the building, and some grow flowers. They sell the flowers in bunches for weddings and anniversary parties. You see how resourceful we are. Humans, animals, insects, all find ways to survive, no matter how dire the circumstances.”
A Place Called Zamora Page 7