by Gates, J.
“Don’t worry, we’re going to be fine,” I lie. Actually, we’re probably going to crash and die, which is why my heart is fluttering faster that a hummingbird’s wings.
I’m looking out the side window, desperately scanning the gray concrete landscape for a place to set down, when the chopper shudders again. Great rolling clouds, some gray, some black, some white, rise from factory smokestacks on all sides of us. Directly below are several rows of N-Corp housing units—these only a few stories high. To the right I see a red flash, and then it comes: the sound of sirens. I bank left.
“This is it,” says Clair, despondent. “I failed.”
The chopper shudders again as I bank. The fuel is very low, dangerously low.
“I have an idea,” I say.
Ahead, a pale silver line, etched in the face of the gray concrete landscape, cuts toward the waning, smog-enfeebled sun.
“Look,” gasps Clair. She points, and my eyes follow her finger to my left, back toward the city. Five black dots grow larger before my eyes. Squad choppers.
“What do we do?” she says—to herself, not to me.
“You’re going to pray,” I say, clenching my teeth as I fight to hold the chopper level.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
“I’m either going to save us or kill us,” I say, gripping the chopper’s controls tighter. “Now seriously, start praying ”
Ahead: the river.
~~~
A drop of sweat rolling down my brow; the scream and shutter of the chopper; Clair next to me, talking to God or her gun or herself; the black steel birds no doubt filled with leering squadmen growing larger and closer: all these things shred my concentration, unravel my nerve. Still, I bring us lower, throttle up our speed. The chopper’s shaking worse now. The whirring blades above seem almost to groan as they slice through the air. The engine’s howl is pinched and broken with coughs.
I press the button labeled “auto.”
The river shimmers below, seeming to hold the only shards of light left in this desolate place.
I rise from my seat and almost pitch back into the rear cargo area, but manage to maintain my footing. I grasp the door handle. Turning back, I find Clair’s questioning eyes on me.
“Jump when I jump,” I scream over the dying engine.
She looks at me, shocked. “Are you kidding?”
“We’re over water. The satellites will lose us when we jump, and the choppers will see this thing crash and think we’re dead.”
“If we jump we will be dead.”
“Maybe not.”
She blinks at me, still cradling her gun like a dead parakeet.
“We gotta go now,” I yell. “If the squads are close enough to see us when we jump, they’ll just pick us out of the water. They have to think we went down with the chopper.”
“Why are you helping me?” she asks suddenly.
Maybe it’s because I believed her when she said she had nothing to do with the bombing. Maybe it’s because she’s pretty. Maybe it was just an excuse to get out of the office for the day. I don’t know what to say, so I ignore the question.
“Just jump, there’s no time!” I shout, glancing out the window. The squad choppers are close. Any closer and they’ll see us fall. Wind from the open door tugs at my ponytail, stirs wisps of loose hair to lash against my face, but I can still manage to see the river below, entombed in its cement-walled channel. Ahead, perhaps five hundred yards, it changes course. This is our only chance to jump. If we time it late, we’ll wind up a couple of red punctuation marks on the pavement of the far bank.
The rush of wind is cold, biting, exhilarating. We pass through a plume of smoke, in it the scent of life and death, creation and destruction. I look back at Clair. She’s half risen, but still grasps her seatback with graceful, desperately clinging hands.
“One,” I say.
“You’re crazy,” she says, standing.
“Two.”
“No wonder Ethan wanted to recruit you!”
Both our hands are on the door handle now. Our eyes lock. Her smile reflects mine.
Together, we say: “Three!”
And we throw ourselves into the wind.
~~~
“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.”
Late at night, after her parents and sister have gone to bed, before my father comes and picks me up, Kali sings me lullabies: Your Kali’s gonna buy you a mocking bird . . . ”
I lie on the couch, my head laid in her lap, as she runs her fingers through my hair. I run my fingers up her leg.
“And if that mocking bird don’t sing . . . ”
It never fails; when she does this, tears always come to my eyes. No matter how I fight it, thoughts I never normally allow to surface crowd into my head: like, where is my mother now? Heaven? Hell? Nowhere? How could she die and leave me alone?
I sigh. The imager chatters away quietly, trying to sell us things. With one arm around her waist, I cling to Kali, already understanding instinctively—despite my youth—how fragile this moment is, how fleeting this perfection.
The smell of tuna casserole still lingers in Kali’s family’s cramped apartment, but if I turn my head, I can smell the skin of her smooth tanned legs instead. It’s the smell of summer sun and chlorine, sweet lotion, and above all her, the essence of her, the essence of love and want and being fifteen.
“Kali’s gonna buy you a diamond ring” she sings. “And if that diamond ring don’t shine . . . ”
There’s a sound in the hall and Kali sits bolt upright, shoving my head off her lap. She edges to the other side of the couch, away from me, and looks over her shoulder at the door. A toilet flushes, a door shuts. Just one of her parents taking a pee.
“Why’d you push me?” I ask, outraged. When you’re fifteen, everything stings.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, still looking over her shoulder. “I just don’t want my dad to catch us. I don’t think he could take it. I’m really worried about him right now. ”
She looks down at her lap, finished with the conversation, but I press on.
“Why?”
She sighs, hesitating. “There’s something going on at his work, I think. He’s been acting really weird. I’m afraid of what he would do if he found out about us.”
“So you’re ashamed of me?”
My arms are crossed. I look at my bare feet, propped on her parents’ coffee table.
“No!” Kali says. “I mean . . . I’m sorry, May. Okay?”
I refuse to look at her.
“If that diamond ring don’t shine,” she sings into my ear softly, “Kali’s gonna kiss you a million times,” and she presses her lips to mine. The smell of her, the taste of her is so delicious that my anger instantly melts and I pull her toward me. This is love, real love; nothing in the universe is more real. I defy anyone to tell me otherwise.
That song . . . Even now, her voice still rings in my ears.
The sound will stay with me, like a thorn in my heart, forever.
~~~
In a smog-induced twilight filled with shifting smoke and screaming engines, I tumble through the wind. There, a glimpse—of a billowing white cloud, of the river as it springs to meet me, of one tiny blink of sunlight on the water’s darkened face—and now I’m skipping like a stone.
Slapping, my limbs glance off the river’s surface over and over. I shut my eyes tight. Panic. I feel the crushing power of God all around me. And I will die. And this is the end.
My knee hits me in the face. My arms feel torn from my body.
The world is a blender set on puree.
Floating, now, all I taste is the blood on my teeth. All I hear is the liquid murmur, that amplified silence, laced with the distant la
ment of a whale or sonar or my own submerged screams.
Outer space, that’s where I am.
Any minute now, God will whisper four small words and create the All, but for now there’s only me, drifting here, bodiless.
This is better than life, somehow. Being without a body is good, carefree. I never liked life much, anyway. Too much buying hairstyling products and sitting in quiet, white-lit offices. Not enough . . . everything else.
Somehow, instead of whispering for the unveiling of light, God belches a raucous yell.
One eye opens. There’s that same cloud I saw on the way down—saw it between my own wildly flailing legs, I think. There’s a tattered-looking seagull, wings spread wide, relaxing against the sky. I wonder how he can live in this soiled, ruined place. He calls out, sounding the same as God did a minute before, but if there are any other birds around to hear him, I don’t see them. This guy might be the very last.
Who would have even thought a wild animal could survive in the industrial arc, anyway?
You’re drowning, my brain tells me casually, like it’s an offhand comment, and I realize I haven’t breathed in a long time. Most of my face is still submerged, and when I open my mouth to take a breath, I get a throat full of what tastes like fish-flavored bathwater tainted with bitter, burning chemicals. Drowning. I try to flutter my feet, to paddle with my arms, but I can’t feel my limbs at all.
I finally get my head above water and take a breath. Instantly, sharp pain gouges my lungs. Every time I breathe too deeply, the agony almost causes me to black out.
I am broken.
There’s no way I can swim.
Suddenly, the sound of a terrible concussion rends the world. I try to turn myself around to look, to see the source of the blast, but I can’t—it’s too difficult. All I can guess is that the chopper crashed. I crane my neck around, until in the distance I can see a column of black smoke solemnly ascending, mingling with the smoke of the factories then blending away.
Now I’m sinking again. I’ve still only managed to open one eye. Sinking. All I see is green water. Even my shallow breaths are stolen from me. I descend, and all gets darker, colder.
I’m sinking to hell, and it’s actually a relief. The suspense is finally over.
—Chapter ØØ5—
Dad looks down at me from the deck of his sailboat, Green Back, and puffs a cigar, leaning lazily against a lanyard. He might be looking down at a floating jellyfish or a lost fishing lure instead of at his daughter, drowning.
Me, I’m thrashing around, my scrawny arms beating ineffectually against the water, my little seven-year-old feet churning wildly, uselessly. I sputter, cough, weep.
“You can swim,” my dad tells me matter-of-factly through cigar-clenching teeth. “All mammals are evolved from sea creatures, for God’s sake.”
Somehow, this doesn’t comfort me. “I can’t—I can’t swim! Dad!”
I had more to say than that, but a swell surges over my mouth, muting me, before receding and leaving me choking, coughing, terrified.
“You can swim,” my dad assures me. “You’re a Fields, you can do anything.”
He sips his brandy.
“Help!” I scream. “I can’t—” Another swell slaps me in the mouth, choking me.
“May,” he says, and looks down at me with a slow, warm smile. “You can.”
Something in his tone, his face, his demeanor, relaxes me and suddenly, as if purely by will—not mine, his—I’m actually doing it. I’m treading water. I’m swimming!
For a second, I smile in spite of myself.
“See,” Dad says. He smiles and ashes his cigar. That’s when I get angry.
“I almost drowned! Are you happy?” I shout.
“Yes,” he says. “I am.”
Just then, his cell phone rings. He answers it.
“This is Fields. . . . Dammit, I’m trying to teach May how to swim here! . . . How should I know what the stock price is, I’m on a goddamned sailboat!”
“Dad!” I call. “Dad!”
He glances down at me, then back out to sea as he listens to his caller.
“Pull me up!” I yell. Even in the cold water, I can feel my face going red and hot with rage. I paddle to the edge of the boat, reach up my hands. But instead of reaching down for me, he turns away for a second.
I hear him say, “Pushed her in. She’s gotta learn sometime, right?
. . . Well what the hell do you know about parenting? You can’t even handle a tiny goddamned acquisition without me there to hold your hand.”
“DAD!” I scream.
“I’ll call you back in ten,” he says, and I hear the slap of his boat shoes as he crosses the deck and comes back toward me. I reach up again, groping for rescue. But instead of my father’s hands reaching down for me, a rope ladder slaps down the side of the hull.
Now I’m trembling with anger, with emotion, with the remnants of terror. I grab the ladder and start pulling myself up, rung by rung.
Dad smiles at me as my head rises over the deck. He puffs on his cigar. “You want to get to the top,” he tells me with a wink, “you gotta learn to climb.”
~~~
“You’re going to be okay. We’re gonna take care of you. Everything’s going to be fine.”
In all my life, I never believed words like those when I heard them used. Now, here, baptized in this polluted, desecrated tributary with my body broken and my mind scrambled, somehow Clair’s promise inspires faith.
Above, five black helicopters bellow past. In the streets and in my heart, sirens scream, and I already know nothing will ever be the same again.
“Stay with me. Stay awake.” Clair’s words are furtive, desperate whispers, barely audible over the splash of the poisoned water and the howl of the sirens, hardly registering in the drift and spin of my mind.
As my head lolls back I see the bleak, gray concrete wall, cracked and sheer. A rusted metal ladder affixed to it leads up to a lip over which the pallid sun peers down at us. The corroding iron rungs paint two streaks the color of dried blood all the way down to the black, lapping waterline.
Clair still has one arm wrapped firmly around my chest. With the other hand, she tries to grip the ladder and pull us both up out of the river, but it’s impossible.
“I can do it myself,” I mumble.
“You sure?”
I’m not sure, but I pull away from her anyway.
“You go up first,” she says. “If you start to fall, I can catch you.”
The controls of my body are foreign to me; I feel like a marionette with tangled strings. Gripping one slippery rung and finding another one with my foot, I pull myself slowly, tremblingly upward. My head throbs. I can’t feel my feet, and my hands are shaking. I look down at myself as I climb. My shirt is dyed with what can only be my own blood, but on this subject my brain can form no opinion—this is all too unreal, too much like a video game or a movie, too unlike my life. So I disbelieve it, and I climb on.
From below, Clair whispers, “Hurry. They’re close.”
And indeed, I realize, the sirens are screeching at us now from both sides of this sad river, their volume increasing as more and more electronic screams add to the chorus.
Each handhold is slick, smeared with algae and oil—or something worse—and twice I almost fall, but somehow I make it to the top and pull myself over the lip. I take a few shaky steps forward and lean against a rusted chain-link fence.
The world is spinning. I puke on a dandelion growing through a crack in the pavement.
Now Clair’s face is here, her big, beautiful eyes appearing over the edge of the man-made riverbank, the lipstick smeared from her sensuous lips, her face fraught with sympathy, terror, and bewilderment, all lacquered beneath a veneer of resolve.
“We have people here. It’ll be okay. We have friends waiting, in one of the empty factories. If nobody saw us jump, they’ll think we were in the chopper. They’ll think we’re dead.”
In my delirium, that prospect seems wonderful. “I wish I were dead,” I mumble.
She doesn’t understand what I’m getting at. “I know you might be in a lot of pain,” she says, “but you’ll be fine. We have people who can help. They aren’t doctors, but they know medicine.”
“No,” I say. “I wish I were dead because—because I hate the world.”
She snorts derisively. “Why would you hate the world, Blackie?”
“If you want to get to the top . . . ” I begin, but nausea overtakes me and the rest of my words get lost.
I should be resisting, I remind myself. I should be fighting my kidnapper, not helping her. But I don’t. I’m in no condition to fight, even if I wanted to.
Clair doesn’t stop. A siren comes our way and she looks over her shoulder and drags me along faster. Toward what, I have no idea.
~~~
Starving.
The blood on my head has curdled to a dark, sharp crust, and the whole world throbs every time I move my neck.
Lying prone, staring up at layer after layer of rusted catwalks and dust-laden piping, I watch the lamplight make the shadows dance.
I must have passed out, because I don’t know where Clair found the lamp.
I don’t know how long she’s been gone or where she went. It feels like I’ve been lying here forever, falling in and out of time.
When the man’s voice comes, it seems to drift from among the catwalks, resonating through the hollow hearts of the pipes, echoing off some unseen ceiling with cathedral-like acoustical clarity. I try to move my head and look for whoever is talking, but the effort is too much.