“Patricia is a philosopher,” said Joyce. “And a landscaper, and a birder, and an outstanding masseuse.”
“You’ll have to help me ID some of these crazy birds I keep hearing,” said Donny. “Where did you two meet?”
“Mexico City,” said Patricia. “Right after the coup.”
“Of course,” said Donny. He remembered the resentment he felt the last time he visited there and saw exiles talking politics at sidewalk cafés under the Aztec sun while others endured the dark years of dictatorship back here. “When did you come back?”
He already knew when Joyce had come back.
“Fuck off, Donny,” said Joyce.
“Sorry,” said Donny, even though he really wasn’t.
“I came back after the Compact was signed, and it was safe,” said Patricia. “There were no easy paths. But here we are now, finally on the path we were meant to find.”
“Right on,” said Joyce. Which was a weird phrase to hear her use.
“There are those birds,” said Donny, pointing at his ear.
“They know Sig is coming,” said Joyce. “They can smell him.”
“So can I,” said Donny.
“How was the archive?” said Joyce. As she set her guitar down, he noticed the new tattoo on her forearm. Rover-style, like Xelina used to wear, trading cards of extinct North American animals. This one a saber-toothed cat to match the more primitively inked giant armadillo she had gotten in prison.
“It was interesting,” he said. “I’m impressed with what you all have pulled together there. I didn’t even know records like that existed.”
“We’re just getting started. Are you ready for tomorrow? Or did you come to try to convince me we should make a deal?”
“I know better than that. And I don’t think my clients are in any more compromising a mood than you. I wanted to come ask you about something else. But it can wait until after the hearing.”
He looked at his watch, and regretted coming all the way out there. Especially as he realized it was later than he had thought, and the sun was already starting to work its way behind the river.
“Is it safe to walk back from here?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Joyce. “I don’t go out at night much anymore. But Sig always comes back. And I’m sure he’d be happy to help you find your way if you think you need it.”
He looked back toward the trees to see if he could see the feral kid stalking his prey. He just saw the ruins of the zoo, back there behind the foliage gone wild. Then he heard a scream, or maybe a holler, like the sound of some big ape. It might have even been a man.
“It’s a bird,” said Joyce.
“A big heron,” said Patricia. “She’s ready to mate.”
“Or she heard Sig is coming,” said Joyce.
Donny tried to read the look on Joyce’s face, and kept his quip to himself. He couldn’t tell who was sleeping with whom in this house, but he knew it was none of his business. He was an asshole for coming in the first place, and for letting himself think Joyce would have anything more than business to talk with him.
“I should go,” said Donny.
“That’s probably a good idea,” said Joyce.
36
Donny had seen Joyce just one other time since she fled the country. In Mexico City, for lunch, about three years after she left. He was there to interview a witness, another expat. She picked the place, on a side street off the main drag in Roma.
“We need to be careful,” she said in the message she left at his hotel. “Even here.”
He didn’t know what that meant, even though he sort of did. There had been a change in government in Mexico, and the new regime was said to be trying to improve relations with its northern neighbor.
That was the reason she had a table for them in the back, instead of out on the sidewalk enjoying the gorgeous weather. It was the reason she entered from the back.
“I’m afraid to even hug you,” she said, half laughing and half scowling. “Like I’ll catch one of your bugs.”
“I’m not sick,” he said.
“I don’t mean that kind of bug. I just mean you are the biggest surveillance magnet I know.”
He couldn’t argue. “I just try to bore them.”
“Maybe we should try to entertain them.”
He looked her in the eyes, but couldn’t tell if she was fucking with him.
“Should we eat first?” he asked.
“Definitely.”
She ordered Donny a dish that looked like orzo pasta but was in fact the eggs of some oversized species of ant. She ate blood-marrow tacos, and when he finally got her laughing for a moment she looked like a lioness enjoying her fresh kill.
It helped that she was laughing at him as he told a story of how he had accidentally tricked a federal prosecutor and a federal judge into putting into the public record a classified document about a new program for the monitoring of wayward journalists.
It wasn’t until they were stoned on margaritas and carving the face of George Washington into a shared block of flan that Donny learned Joyce wasn’t even based in Mexico City anymore.
“I’m in Managua, Donny. Mexico City isn’t safe any longer. Too many CIA mofos show up at the parties here, and too many federales on the payroll. I shouldn’t even be here, but we decided one of us needed to be here for the meeting.”
“Who’s the we?” said Donny.
“It’s Wade, Donny. You know that.”
She meant Wade Camacho, the singer-songwriter whom Donny decided had been deported for being too cute. Cowboy cute, with his denim shirts and five-day beards and annoying yodels about injustice.
She was right. He did know that. But the mind had a way of trying to convince you other things were possible. Even when you were separated by borders. By borders fortified with walls, guns, surveillance, and law. By the borders we build in our own minds, from language and feeling and our inability to ever really understand each other.
“How’s that going?” said Donny, doing his best to let the envy go, reminding himself that he was the one who chose to stay behind.
“It’s nice,” said Joyce. “Nice enough. We share a common cause, which is worth a lot. He’s entertaining. I mean, he’s a musician.”
“So are you.”
“Not like him.”
“No.”
“He’s kind of an airhead, which works very well for us, to my surprise.”
Donny smiled. “An airhead who’s a pretty good poet,” he admitted.
“Not bad,” said Joyce. “But the most important thing is that he makes me feel safe. Not just because he’s so tall. Cops and soldiers and politicians are all scared of him. You can tell.”
“That’s why I figured the White House deported him,” said Donny. “They were afraid he would sell dissidence as the sexiest thing around.”
“He is good at that,” said Joyce.
She looked around, sizing up the crowd for suspicious eyes.
“Is he with you?” said Donny. “On this trip?”
She looked at him with a hint of scorn in her eyes and the hint of a smile on her face. And then she shook her head.
“Do you love him?” asked Donny.
“Do you even know what the fuck that word means, Donny?”
Donny wasn’t sure if she was asking that as an accusation, or a genuine question, like some existential version of asking if you know what time it is.
“Not the first clue,” said Donny. “How about you?”
She shrugged. “I bet your grandma knows. She also knows how important it is to police one’s tendencies toward animalistic territoriality.”
Donny nodded. “I bet you’re right,” said Donny. He pushed ant eggs around on his plate, and then changed the subject.
“What’s it like there now?” he asked. “In Nicaragua.”
Nicaragua was a free state, liberated by a coalition of revolutionaries, urban elites, and foreign backers who had installed an ex
perimental new government six months earlier.
“It feels like a future you would actually want to live in,” said Joyce. “True freedom, equal rights for all, a sense of real community. Even for an outsider.”
“They won’t put up with that for long. Anything that makes you not cynical is way too dangerous.”
“Well, one thing you learn when you leave the country thinking you have found sanctuary is that there is no such thing. Not with the virus of power and dominion that infects the world.”
“So when are you coming home?”
“Another word whose meaning you don’t really understand. Because it doesn’t really mean anything. We’re all nomads, Donny. It’s in our genes.”
“I don’t know,” said Donny. “I really like my apartment.”
She laughed. “You really like your books. I’m just saying, we need to be thinking about our problems on a planetary scale. And locally, at the same time, at least tactically. But dream big, for change that is real, and permanent.”
“How do you do that?”
“It has to be almost like a religion. Like a religious movement. Like when Christianity or Islam or Buddhism swept over a swath of the planet. Like that, but green. Transcendent and grounded at the same time. A deep politics of the whole planet and every living thing. Even every inanimate thing in the natural world, which has its own kind of life.”
“We the Creatures,” said Donny.
“Exactly,” said Joyce. This time the smile was real.
She raised her glass, and Donny joined her. Then she turned more serious.
“You should help us,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Just what it sounds like.”
Now Donny was looking around for eyes and ears.
“I can’t leave my practice,” said Donny. “You know that. I made that decision three years ago, when I missed my chance to stay here with you.”
“We’re not asking you to leave your practice, Donny. Quite the opposite.”
“Who’s ‘we,’ Joyce?”
“We have been following your work. You’ve gotten really good at it. And we think you can help the cause in new ways. Especially with your access to people in our network who have been detained. People with whom it is very hard for us to communicate.”
“Are you recruiting me, Joyce?”
She just smiled, and fed him George Washington’s brain.
They ended up a little later in a room upstairs, sating other hungers, ones that had been building up over a much longer time. She said it was where she stayed when she was in Mexico City. It was a studio apartment, spartan but comfortable, with a bed just big enough for the two of them to fit in at the same time, watched over by a cheesecake Aztec warrior woman in the calendar on the wall. Donny wondered whether that guardian would be enough to protect them, but not enough to restrain himself from reuniting with the only woman he had ever really loved, even as he knew that politics and the pain it can cause had pulled them apart in irreconcilable ways, and neither of them could any longer be trusted to be true with the other.
They stayed up late that night talking, sharing confessions with each other about the lovers they had had since they broke up. Donny had more, but Joyce’s were more real. Joyce told him what nature was like in Nicaragua, where the decades of war had kept the developers at bay. She described some of the birds she had seen, with juvenile wonder in her eyes and invented words rolling off her tongue. Donny told her the developing taxonomy of lies he had invented to get people free, from a society that no longer really believed in the idea of freedom, unless freedom could be like a team mascot that everyone identifies with as the trademark of their tribe, without ever even giving any thought to what it is really supposed to mean. Like the American city, said Joyce, that has a picture of an Indian on its ball caps.
It was only when they woke up late, but not late enough, that they talked more about what Joyce had brought up at dinner. About how Donny could help the cause, with his contacts inside. He made promises. The kind of promises you make in code that lets you deny they were any such thing later. At least if they are read back to you from a surveillance transcript, at a deposition, or an interrogation.
The kind of promises a lawyer makes.
Donny was at the airport the next night, waiting for his flight back to Houston, when he saw the news of Joyce’s arrest and extradition. Hooded perp walk, with Mexican Marines and American agents on either side as they took her to her own flight home.
As he started working the phones, too busy to consider what it meant for him, he remembered what she said about the lie that is the idea of home.
37
Donny had made it into the canopy of flowers when he stopped and turned.
“Joyce,” he said.
“Yes, Donny.”
“I’m sorry.”
She stopped playing her notes, but took a while to answer.
“I’m sure you are, Donny.”
He walked back to the porch. It was just the two of them now.
“I mean, I’m sorry about Wade.”
“We all are,” said Joyce. She always was good at cauterizing her psychic wounds and hiding them from others.
Donny remembered the footage the government had leaked of Wade’s execution. The way the President’s goons had made him sing. Not Wade’s protest songs, but the songs of the so-called patriots.
Freedom isn’t free.
Joyce set her guitar against the wall. That was when Donny noticed the gun she had holstered to the front of the belt that held up her jeans.
“And I’m sorry I let you down,” said Donny.
“It’s okay, Donny. At least I wasn’t the only one. Ask Sig.”
Donny looked at his boots. They were beginning to look broken-in.
Donny had worn out his shoe leather when they kidnapped Joyce and brought her back to a cold cage in Dallas, on charges of treason and conspiracy. He called in every favor he had. He learned what had happened. How, while Donny and Joyce were in Mexico City, Wade had come to New York to play a show, on a special visa that turned out to be bait. How they arrested him during his performance, the better to strike fear into the hearts of his fans and followers, to show the price of dissent. How quickly he had broken during interrogation. Telling them everything he knew. Including where they could find Joyce.
Donny’s efforts to free Joyce were not successful. Not at first.
Donny’s efforts to build a network with himself as the conduit, between the people that were inside and the people that were outside, were more successful. Joyce was not a node in that network. He only heard stories, more like fragments of stories, about what she was doing. Making her new gospel, which like any good gospel, mostly just told the truth, spiced with the kind of mythic bullshit people like to hear. In Joyce’s case, by beatifying dead American dissidents and a few live ones, and turning one story of separatist utopia into a model for others to follow.
“I wasn’t meant to be free, Donny,” said Joyce as she watched him ruminate there to the sound of the awakened night birds and one foghorn blowing on the river. You could see she didn’t even recognize the boots she had bought him, and he realized how very long ago that had been. “I’m a teacher, remember. A college professor. My best work was done inside. First time it ever felt authentically meaningful.”
He looked at her. You could see she meant it. You could also see the pain in her eyes. The memory of the things they had done to her while she was their captive, and the worse things they had done to others.
“And I’m still here, Donny,” she said. “I’m alive.”
She was smiling, but you could see the anger that hid behind the smile. Maybe it was the way her teeth looked momentarily feral.
“I’m glad for that, Joyce,” said Donny. “I honestly wasn’t sure.”
“I’ve learned to keep a low profile,” she said. “Took me long enough.”
They both laughed.
“Don’t f
eel sorry for me, Donny. I’m happy. For real. I have finally found a place I’m comfortable. A way to maintain the balance.”
“Home?”
She nodded, in a noncommittal way. “Something like that. Sure.”
“This is a good spot,” said Donny, looking around. “What happened to the animals?”
“Some are still around,” said Joyce. “The ones that have become too much like us, and no longer know how to be free.”
Donny considered that. “What about the other ones?”
She just smiled.
Donny looked back toward the swamp from which he came. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there. It had always been there, even when they drained it.
“Do you know how to be free, Donny?”
“Nope.”
She laughed. And then she leaned forward, and took his hand.
“Stop blaming yourself for what happened, Donny. In the final reckoning there was really only one guilty person. And he has met his fate. No thanks to you.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Do I look like I could kill him? They broke me, Donny. You should see the pathetic rehab yoga I have to do just to get my ass out of bed in the morning.”
“You know what I mean.”
“And you don’t seem to be able to figure out that the dead don’t want their remains to be disturbed. Running around with your cathode-ray delusions of justice, imagining yourself as some white savior of the downtrodden victims to make up for the fact that you’ve fucked up your career and your relationships and every chance at happiness that came your way. Maybe the victims know how to take care of themselves.”
It stung, but somehow their fights always energized Donny, and the more they got going the more he wanted to get into it.
“Is that what happened to Slider?” he asked.
She scowled at him. “Actually, yes. He wanted to avenge his parents. He came to me, knowing you would never get anywhere close to real justice. I helped him find where the goons were who had killed Juana and Gil. Living under new identities arranged by allies of their former employer, supported by a black pension, off the books. And he went and found them, and killed them.”
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