by K. Chess
She’d never been despised before.
“I’m not trying to assimilate you, Hel.” Helplessly, he scanned the spines of the volumes on the top shelf, his own private Museum of Vanished Culture. “What would make you feel better? That’s all I want.” He’d arranged the books not by author or title but by color. He looked for the robin’s egg blue of The Pyronauts. He didn’t see it. “Hey, where’s the Sleight book?” Hel ignored him, paging restlessly through the poetry volume. “Did you bring it into the bedroom or something?”
Hel found her way to the list of first lines in Nakamura’s appendix. “I loaned The Pyronauts to a friend.”
“Wait—you did what?” He’d never been particularly protective of his own property; as a student and later, as a teacher, he’d been happy to loan and borrow. He even shared his hand warmers with that mooch Kabir. What had come over him? “Sorry for snapping. You lent it to Oliveira?” They’d never met, but the sociologist’s public persona certainly indicated that he was conscientious. The book would be safe with Oliveira. Maybe Sleight could even be useful to his work in some small way.
“Oliveira’s not my friend,” Hel said with surprising vehemence. “I wouldn’t let him touch your book.”
“The museum woman, then? I didn’t think you liked her much.”
“No.” She slammed the Nakamura shut. “Not her. Her assistant. This young woman—Teresa Klay—she’s been very helpful. With my project. I thought she’d like to see it, OK? And when I showed her, she was interested. She wanted to read it. So I said she could take it home, as long as she was careful. I’m sorry—if it’s a problem for you, I can ask her to bring it tomorrow, when we meet. I mean, she might think it’s a bit weird, but I’m sure she’d understand. Do you want me to?”
“Do you trust her?”
Hel looked him in the eyes. “Don’t you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t worry about it. Let’s go to bed.”
CHAPTER TEN
The initial decision, the justification—that was the hard part. The act of following was simple. Hel picked up Angelene’s trail at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Hell’s Kitchen, where a two-day exposition featuring suppliers to the chemical process industry was underway. Assiduous internet searching over the last week had revealed that Donaldson’s wife would be speaking at a session entitled “Real-Time Monitoring of Four-Component Liquids for Material Characterization and Purity Assurance” at 16:00. Hel couldn’t afford the entrance fee, so she spent most of the afternoon on the nearby stretch of the High Line at Thirty-Fourth Street. The vast, glass-sided cube of the conference center looked odd to her, but the elevated view of the Hudson from the park reminded her of riding trains at home. While she waited, Hel caught up on the Micallef case in a series of old New York Daily News issues. At last, she spotted an attendee throwing away his conference badge and lanyard. Once the man and his friends were out of sight, she retrieved the badge from the trash can, wiped the droplets of coffee from its laminated surface, and thumped down the stairs to the street.
She’d dressed herself in dark neutrals—a pantsuit from the Salvation Army this time, to blend in with the professional crowd. She entered the massive building from one of the Eleventh Avenue entrances and proceeded to a basement-level ladies’ room to wait for the session to end. In the last stall, she sat on the toilet with her legs tucked up so her feet wouldn’t be visible, and popped the tab of a Rockstar. An element of risk could not be eliminated, but Hel felt that this might be her day. They had an affinity, she and Angelene, as two scientists. Two rational people.
At 16:55, she pushed her crushed can into the tampon receptacle and left the bathroom. With the help of a map, she found the room on level one where Angelene and the rest of the panel had just finished speaking and stationed herself ten meters down the hallway, where she could scan the stream of attendees leaving the room. She hadn’t actually seen Angelene since the night at the fundraiser when the book went missing, but she remembered her round, affable face and blocky body. Men and women in business casual—probably four men for every woman—poured out of the room, heading for the next session or the exhibition hall or the long twin escalators. Hel checked each of the groups lingering in conversation by the doors, wishing she’d kept the newspaper. Something to read would shield her face in an inconspicuous way.
There, out of the corner of her eye—Angelene Silva, looking as dapper as Hel remembered in a plaid button-down and a bow tie. As Hel watched, Angelene joked with the tall white man beside her, a coworker, no doubt. He handed over a sheaf of papers. Angelene opened her yellow leather briefcase and put the papers inside, and the two of them walked off together toward the food court farther down the corridor on this level. Hel followed at a distance, trying to look small and ordinary.
In the food court, Angelene headed to Mendy’s Glatt Kosher Deli while her companion opted for Grazie Italiano. Hel wasn’t sure whether this separation was a good thing for her surveillance mission or not; Angelene would be easier to follow on her own, but might be more observant of her environment without the distraction of a conversation. Hel pretended to use the ATM nearby and monitored the fast-moving line at Mendy’s. Angelene picked up her food and walked to the seating area.
As she stood behind a column, watching her quarry devour two hot dogs with the works, Hel realized how hungry she herself was. It was dinnertime, and the conference exhibit hall would be open for another two hours. She might be stuck here till 19:00, ducking behind booths as Angelene toured the exhibits floor, dodging industrial chemists and the people with whom they did business, watching from afar as deals were made. She jumped with alarm when her phone buzzed. Two missed calls from Vikram. Normally, he’d be getting ready for work now—why would he call her? She ducked back behind her column to tap out a quick text—What do you want?—hit send, then looked up.
The table stood empty except for a mustard packet and some scattered chopped onions. Hel whirled around, scanning the large space. She breathed again when she caught sight of the yellow briefcase resting on the floor between Angelene’s feet as she swept trash into the bin and stacked her tray.
Hel tracked her out of the food court, back to the bank of escalators at the center of the building. There, she had to wait; Angelene chose to ride backward, bouncing on the balls of her feet and looking out at the crowd. Did she know she was being followed? Impossible. Hel decided it was simply her nature: observant, restless, interested in the world around her. Much more of a challenge than Hel had prepared for.
Twenty paces apart, they pushed through the registration crowd in the main lobby. Hel saw Angelene pulling out her own phone, and she quickened her pace to close the distance between them. Angelene answered, speaking into the phone inaudibly. Hel drew as near as she dared. Nothing would shield her now, if Angelene turned.
“Yeah, babe.” Pause. “Yeah.” Pause. “Yeah, OK. I promised I would.” Pause. “OK. I’m headed home.”
Immediately, Hel dropped into a crouch, pretending to tie a shoe—this had become her favorite move. She was just in time; Angelene glanced over her shoulder before striding through the automatic door.
Outside. Fading daylight. They proceeded south on Eleventh Avenue, Hel trying her best not to be seen and hoping they were headed toward the Thirty-Fourth Street stop for the 7 train, not to one of the parking garages. The walk took no more than three minutes but the challenge posed by Angelene’s constant attention, her birdlike responsiveness to her surroundings, made it seem like three weeks. Unlike her wife, the sleepwalking Sword Queen, Angelene looked around her at the people she passed. Hel gave her extra space, glad they’d talked only briefly, the one time they met, glad Angelene had been drinking that night.
Girl, they really did a number on you.
Hel swiped her MetroCard without faltering, passing through the turnstile as Angelene stepped from the platform onto a Flushing-bound train that had just pulled in. The same dilemma as before: Was it
wisest to get on another car and potentially miss seeing Angelene’s exit? Be bold, she told herself. She chose a seat at the opposite end of the same car and let her head hang low. The doors closed and the train began to move.
At Times Square, the train filled up. Hel watched Angelene give up her seat to a hugely pregnant woman, saying something to her that made the expectant mother laugh. Hel stayed seated, blocked from view by a thirtysomething man with a skateboard who hung on to the bar over her head—a marvel; at home, skateboards were toys, used by children only—and by a fat woman in scrubs printed with unfamiliar characters. Hel peeped at Angelene over the fat woman’s shoulder.
Grand Central, the last station in Manhattan. Angelene remained standing, still engaged in conversation with the pregnant woman. Glimpses of the dark tunnel walls flashed by outside the windows across the way, punctuated by those niches for workers that Jonas had always marveled at.
The train pulled into Vernon-Jackson, the first Queens stop. Hel checked for Angelene, and there she was, pushing her way off the crowded car and into the station. Keeping her distance once again, Hel followed.
They emerged on Fiftieth Avenue in Hunters Point or Long Island City—she wasn’t really sure where the neighborhood borders were, here—and turned onto Jackson Avenue, moderately busy at this time of day. Hel felt insubstantial, but not in the powerful way she had when she’d followed Donaldson through Manhattan like an all-seeing ghost. Now, Hel’s legs were floppy and weak. Gusts of wind threatened to blow her away and normal city sounds—a car alarm, a whining child, music leaking out from a passerby’s headphones—carried inordinately. Up ahead, Angelene walked with a bounce in her step, swinging her marigold-yellow briefcase almost too innocently.
Left on another street. A blind corner. Hel counted to twenty before rounding it, imagining an ambush. But when she turned onto the street, she saw an empty block. A Citgo gas station on one side of the street, town houses on the other. Angelene was mounting a set of red-painted stairs. The stairs led to a three-story redbrick apartment house sandwiched between two others. Hel took in the crisp middle-class awning. The wrought-iron security bars of recent gentrification on the first-floor windows, painted a neat white. The unmistakable shape of a blazer—a scooter, they were called scooters or motorcycles here—shrouded under the canvas of a fitted cover in the tiny courtyard next to the trash cans and the recycling bin and the stairs that led down to the basement. It all looked so ordinary. Angelene unlocked the door and stepped inside.
This was it.
Hel had done it. She’d found it. Their home.
She was still standing on the sidewalk congratulating herself when Donaldson came sailing around the corner.
For a fleeting second, she hoped the other woman—dreamy, distracted Donaldson, with white earbuds showing in her ears—wouldn’t notice her, but Donaldson was already saying her name. “Helen?”
The familiar weight of the knife in her pocket. Not that she would use it. That was not an option.
She turned and ran.
By the time she got across Queens to Jamaica, it was 20:00; Vikram’s shift had started an hour ago, and the big empty bottle of wine clattered around at the bottom of the brown paper bag with the much smaller plastic bottles of vodka she’d bought at the bodega to steady her nerves. Cobalt-blue bottles, the color of the cough syrup she’d taken as a child. She’d never bothered to call Vikram back and he hadn’t replied when she’d texted that she was headed to his work.
She walked the eight blocks from the subway, hyperaware but with her reaction time diminished, flinching at shadows too long after they’d spooked her. She traveled brightly lit streets. She was thankful for the trucks that rumbled past carrying their nighttime loads, how they made her feel part of a well-ordered world where goods and services were transferred with efficiency, where each person had his or her own role, where everyone was a part of the same machine.
She’d almost forgotten what it was to have the satisfaction of a worthy job to do.
When she arrived at the warehouse, she followed the fence around two corners to the guard shack. There, she gripped the chain-link in both hands and shook. “Vikram! Let me in!”
Above her, the blinded brick warehouse loomed. Above that, the sky, the light from one or two stars breaking through the city fug. No Vikram. No one breathing out here but her. She sidestepped along the fence, moving closer to the nearest streetlight while maintaining her palms’ contact with the looped galvanized steel wire of the fence. “VIKRAM!”
“Jesus, Hel.” Dear and dependable in his pressed pants and jacket, his cap securely on his head, her lover crunched toward her across the gravel, the flashlight in his hand not turned on, as if he’d trained himself to see in the dark. She marveled at how the sight of his familiar shape, the way he carried himself, calmed her. Allowed her to focus. “You scared me,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry. Let me in. Where’s the gate?”
“I can’t let you in. There are cameras.”
She couldn’t see his face; she could discern the general outline of his nose, distinguish the contour of his cheekbone in three-quarters profile, but she wanted his eyes. “Shine your light up. Shine your light at your face.”
He turned the flashlight over in his hands, as if he were just discovering it, then clicked it on and pointed it in her direction instead. “What are you doing here?”
She blinked in the sudden brightness. “You called me, remember? You called my phone. Come on. No one looks at the security footage. You let Kabir stay here all the time when he’s not supposed to be.”
“That’s different. Kabir’s responsible for himself.”
“And I’m not?”
“You’re drunk.”
“Yes,” Hel said. “I guess I am. Talk to me through the fence, Viki. Stay here and talk to me through the fence. I’m frightened.”
“I don’t believe you.” He spoke the words calmly, as if the proposition were impossible, as if she were not capable of being frightened. She found this touching and ridiculous. “Why are you here?” he asked. “What do you want?”
“You can stop pointing that at me. It’s hurting my eyes. You called me. Why?”
For a moment, he hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I just miss you. I mean, where have you been recently? What do you even do during the days?”
The old scars from the knife across the meat of four of her fingers suddenly stinging, her heart beating that hard, purposeful beat, that rhythm she knew from the moments before the first incision, when the patient lay before her, anesthetized face blank and trusting. She was feeling that for the first time since she’d stepped out into the wrong Calvary, and Vikram dared ask her this. What she was—what she still was inside—was more important than what she did. “What do you do during the days?”
“I told you. I’m at the cottage.”
“Every day? Working with that guy—helping him clean out that junk heap? He thinks you’re an alien.” She laughed, and as she laughed, she was aware that she was acting inappropriately and she laughed louder.
Vikram didn’t seem to notice. “I guess,” he said. “Me and Wes too, from my Reintegration Education group—he definitely thinks we’re weird. But we’re all getting pretty used to each other. I’ve been thinking maybe you’re right. Maybe individual stories could help people here relate to the UDP experience a little better.”
“That’s sweet,” she said. “But I was wrong. Nobody gives a shit.”
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: HELEN NASH, AGE 40, THE BRONX
The two little boys were big enough to walk ahead. Stairstep brothers, or maybe fraternal twins, neither older than five. The mother carried the baby in its sleeper, slung over her shoulder like a bag of flour, and she pushed the baby’s empty stroller with her free hand. The man who was with them tried to help, but she wouldn’t let him wrench the stroller from her grip.
No one told me this story. I saw it all myself.
A
t Calvary, the Homeland Defense Force had removed some of the larger monuments and tombstones and tipped over other ones so that they lay flush with the ground. People stepped on them. You remember that. We all walked over them like paving stones, forgetting that this was a cemetery at all, or too shocked to care. Desperate times. A big group of onlookers already stood beyond the roped-off area, and that was really making me nervous, but no one acted violently. There was just this sense of potential, like a crowd always has. Military staff scanned the codes of those who’d been chosen and conducted them forward, shielding them from the jealous crowd.
The little boys, of course, had no codes, but the authorities let them through when the woman showed hers. Because of operational regulations, family members weren’t supposed to be let into the restricted area, but no one had the heart to enforce that, not on the first day of evac. They were still figuring out their procedures, what worked and what didn’t.
I heard that later, they built a fence topped with razor wire. I heard that later, the officers guarding the area wore masks. Not like the anti-rad masks lots of people were wearing. Balaclavas, just so no one could see their faces when they ripped mothers from their children. But it wasn’t like that on the first day.
A sort of staging area was roped off from the actual breach site. Two checkpoints. They let the little boys into the staging area, and the woman and her baby—though they made her leave the stroller outside. They even let in the man who followed her, two paces behind. The family had ten minutes to say good-bye before she would need to hand the baby over to the man and enter the line, where I waited with the other soon-to-be-UDPs—lucky, terrified—waited for the hole in the sky to open up again and swallow us.
“Who is in charge here?” the woman asked. She was from some other country—I can’t even guess where—she wore a long skirt and a head wrap. She had an accent from somewhere. But she was a citizen now. Everyone knew it must be so, because of the code associated with her ID when they scanned her card. The baby, in its yellow sleeper, had woken, but it didn’t fuss. The mother turned it around and held its body against her, its fist-sized face outward, so it could see. With one hand she supported its bottom, under the bulge of the diaper, and she pressed her other hand against its small chest. It blinked at us, its expression stoic.