by Anna North
“Do you know how to play this?” Darcy whispered. She didn’t. Cards were a rich kid’s game—when the kids at her school wanted to gamble, they flipped cheese-food lids or bet on back-alley games of baseball.
But Ansel whispered, “Of course. Relax.”
He lifted the first three of his five cards. A king, a scepter, and the crown. Darcy looked around at the other people at the table—the man in the tie chewing his thick lip; a thirtyish woman with beautiful iridescent skin that turned out, as Darcy stared at it, to be very carefully painted and powdered; another man with a real-fiber handkerchief sticking out of his pocket. Darcy sat up straight. These people thought she was one of them. If she’d known how easy it was to fool people, she would have done it more often. She could have crashed student parties at the University. She could have gone to the boutiques on Fifth Avenue and tried on expensive real-fiber dresses. She smoothed her hair; she could be anyone.
“What kind of work are you in?” the man in the tie asked Ansel.
“GreenValley,” Ansel said, not looking up from his cards.
He said it as casually as if it were the truth.
“I’m GreenValley,” said the man. “What department?”
Ansel hesitated a half second before answering.
“Research and development,” Ansel said.
A line of concentration or concern appeared between his eyebrows. He laid down the scepter on the felted table and asked the dealer for two more cards.
“How come I didn’t see you at the last meeting with Tyson?” the man asked. He didn’t take any new cards. The line between Ansel’s eyebrows deepened.
“I was busy,” Ansel said.
His two new cards were both serfs, bent-backed and trudging through deep snow.
“That’s not much of an attitude for a young man like you. Your department isn’t going to keep getting subsidies if you don’t come and show support.”
Ansel smiled—a little weakly, Darcy thought. She started to feel nervous.
“Thanks for the advice,” he said. “I’ll take it into consideration.”
The woman in the diamond necklace got three new cards, which she looked at quickly and then laid facedown. She watched the man’s conversation with Ansel as if it, not the game, were the main event.
“Who’s the head of research and development?” the man asked. “I can’t quite remember.”
The cards in Ansel’s hands were shaking slightly. If she were rich, she wondered, would she be able to sense a poor person’s fear? Or would that sweaty, caged-up feeling be so alien to her that she would look right past it? She hoped it was the latter.
“It’s funny,” said Ansel, “I can’t remember either.”
“You can’t remember the head of your own department? I hope you can at least remember the CEO’s name.”
The man wore a smug expression now, one Darcy had seen on her teachers when, as they expected, she didn’t know the life span of the jellyfish or the number of days it had taken for the boats to cross the Pacific. Ansel looked like Darcy had looked then—panicked, foiled, caught. She was angry with him for offering something he couldn’t deliver, for making her feel strong when they were both still weak. That delicious recklessness deflated on itself, sagging like an empty solvent bag. Then Darcy thought of the steak in her shirt, her fake tears. She hadn’t gotten out of the pay cut with them, but she hadn’t gotten fired either. And this time maybe she could do better. She put on a pained face, pressed her fingers to her temples, and croaked at Ansel in her laryngitis voice, “I think I’m going to faint. Will you come with me to the bathroom?”
“You can’t leave the table during a hand,” said the dealer, but Darcy said, “It’s an emergency.”
She stood up unsteadily and hobbled toward the gold-on-burgundy sign marked RESTROOMS.
Ansel followed her; no one else did. The women’s bathroom was beautiful—sinks shiny and white as rich people’s teeth, cloth towels folded in a wicker basket on the counter, a hamper underneath where you could throw them after just one use. Above the mirrors was a window with real-fiber curtains and frosted glass. Darcy wanted to linger, to use one of the spotless toilets peeking out behind the stall doors, but she knew someone would come after them soon.
“Nice work,” she said. “I thought you had this under control.”
Ansel shrugged, his anxiety apparently relieved.
“Sometimes I overestimate myself,” he said. “Can you blame me?”
“Yes,” Darcy said. “How are we going to break that window?”
Ansel heaved himself up onto the counter with his good arm, then calmly turned the window latch and lifted the frosty pane. The sound of rain came rushing in, and then the rain itself, spattering the sinks.
“They didn’t bother to lock it,” Ansel said.
His smile was both triumphant and apologetic, both seeking approval and confident that he would receive it. In that moment she liked him again. He reached down to her and helped her up onto the counter.
The window was three stories off the ground. Looking down from it, Darcy saw a dumpster full of green Seafiber trash bags, rainwater pooling in their folds. A smell of rotten cheese food and something fecal came oozing up.
“Is it far down?” Ansel asked her.
“Fuck you,” she said, and jumped.
The bags squeaked and squelched around her, and one of them split open and wet the back of her neck with what felt and smelled like partially fermented fruit cup. Something she hoped was refried beans squished up between the fingers of her left hand. She had fallen well, at least, on her back instead of her hurt leg. Ansel came down a second later; his arrival sent up new clouds of fetid trash scent.
“Well, we almost had them,” he said, peeling a wet wad of Seafiber tissues from his coat.
“What was the point of that?” Darcy asked.
“We almost made some money,” he said. “Besides, we needed a place to hide from Tug.”
“Have you ever heard of laying low?”
“Laying low is for the low. And I, my friend, consider myself high.”
“You must be high,” Darcy said.
“I am not currently on any intoxicating substances. But I have been told I have an abnormal zest for life, an unusual joie de vivre.”
It was raining lightly but steadily. A cockroach darted in and out amid the garbage. At the end of the alley, Darcy could see the Strip. Through the wet air, the lights of the casinos wept like wounds.
“You could’ve gotten our asses kicked,” Darcy said. “We could’ve gone to jail.”
“Didn’t you hear them, talking about Tyson and subsidies and shit? That’s money he could be spending repairing the cave-ins or giving poor people parrot-fever drugs so they don’t die with pocks all over their faces. Those fuckers are taking something away from you every day of your life. Don’t you want to take something away from them?”
Darcy didn’t care about the people in the casino, or about Tyson or subsidies or cave-ins. She was tired, she wanted her mother, and Ansel seemed like he was going to be no help at all. She crawled across the trash and hoisted herself up onto the dumpster’s edge.
“Give me a straight answer,” she said. “Do you have any idea how to find my mom?”
“Not as of now,” Ansel admitted, “but my organization is very adept at such things. If you’d like to consider joining—”
The rain made tracks of dirt across his skin; his thin long pleading face looked almost sweet. And it had been a long time since someone had wanted to help her. Then she remembered the woman with the diamond necklace, her blush, her naked desire to believe what Ansel said. She had money and jewels and a family and time; she could afford to be conned. Darcy could not.
“I’m going home,” she said.
“Where’s home?”
“Little L.A. On the Avenida.”
“You really should stick with me,” he said. “I can help you.”
“It doesn’t look like it
,” she said, and she lowered herself down into the alley and hopped away.
3
I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” Marcelle said, “but you missed an entire day of work. And you haven’t exactly been a model employee lately. Besides, if I grant you an excuse, I have to do the same for everybody.”
Darcy had seen Marcelle’s office only twice before—once when she was hired, and once when she made a batch of jellyfish sausages with two parts real pork instead of one. It wasn’t a pleasant place—or rather, it was a place designed to be pleasant to people other than Darcy. Drawings of and by Marcelle’s children simpered and twinkled across the walls—they went to a better school than Darcy had, one that could afford glitter. On her large but slightly flimsy-looking desk was a yellowing photo of Tyson with a light-skinned black man—Darcy assumed he was Marcelle’s father. He looked young and happy and lucky, probably second boat, someone important enough that his children were managers of places like World Experiences. Behind the men in the photo was the scaffolding of a building, not yet covered in Seaboard, still full of promise. Tyson looked the way he looked in the few existing photos of him: shifty, stoop-shouldered, and strange.
“Not everybody’s mom disappears,” Darcy said.
Marcelle had a way of talking to Darcy that made her look like she was reading from a script posted somewhere behind Darcy’s head. Her teachers in junior high school had talked like this too.
“World Experiences depends on its rules, Darcy. If we break them, we all suffer.”
Then she did another thing Darcy’s teachers used to do—she screwed her face into a parody of conspiratorial friendship and said, “But I’ll tell you what I can do.”
Darcy waited. One in every ten times or so, that conspiratorial look meant something good. Sometimes a person who had something Darcy wanted—a teacher, a shop owner, the landlord, even Marcelle—also wanted something Darcy had. Usually it was affection. Even when people had power—maybe especially then—they wanted to be liked.
“I need someone to take vitals on the non-ambulatories. We had to let Nancy go. It won’t make up for the dock, but it will be something. What do you think?”
At first Darcy was angry—more work for less pay didn’t sound like a favor to her. Then she thought of the non-ambs themselves. They were the oldest of World Experiences’ residents, the most likely to be first-boat—the most likely to have known her mother.
“Sounds great,” she said.
Her ankle was swollen and sore inside its wrapping, and walking up stairs felt like stepping on nails. Darcy had to devise a kind of crab walk to get to where the non-ambs lived, along the Hall of Africa, a narrow low-ceilinged hallway packed full of fake animals. Paint wasn’t enough for whoever had designed this hall—a stuffed Seafiber lion gave a lopsided roar by the stairs, a leopard lay splayed like roadkill beyond it, an elephant raised its trunk toward room 203, and some sort of cowlike beast Darcy couldn’t identify made a loopy expression near the bathroom. More than once Darcy had crashed a lunch cart into one of these animals when she was on delivery duty; the dented haunch of the elephant in particular displayed the ill effects of its poor placement.
Some of the non-ambs lived in private rooms and some were obscured from one another by a flesh-colored Seafiber curtain. They were wheeled down to the Rainforest Dining Room once a week or whenever important people were visiting, and they were no more cranky, demanding, or capricious than the other residents. But they were more distant, further along on their slow journeys out of the world.
The first on Darcy’s route were the twins, Evelyn and Elvina. Their hospital beds were pushed close together, and identical IVs pumped drugs into their identical arms. Evelyn’s nose sprouted an oxygen tube; Elvina’s left leg ended above the knee. They had a photo too—good quality, framed, only slightly orangey with age—of the two of them as fit, smiling fortysomethings standing in front of a tent in Founders’ Village. They looked rugged in ripped T-shirts and cargo pants—one of them showed the camera a mango with a hearty bite taken out of the center. The photo was the only thing on their bedside table; it was probably their most valuable possession.
“Time to check your vitals,” said Darcy, trying to affect the chipper yet domineering voice she’d heard the nurses use. In her mouth it sounded slightly crazed, like the uncomprehending voice of a parrot.
The twins looked at her placidly. Then Evelyn turned to Elvina and said, “Thew thana doe.”
Some of the non-ambs—and some of the ambs too, for that matter—had retreated into gibberish worlds of their own making. Rainbow Dog Maclean spoke mostly in bird noises, and Angie Cho strung together her words not by sense but by sound, bad-badge-badger-hatcher-hatching-matching-match, so that a conversation with her was a long unfunny pun. A few of the nurses had the gift of treating someone like a human being even when she had stopped talking like one, but Darcy had never mastered this. She approached the twins mutely, warily, undoing the fasteners on the blood pressure cuff.
“You don’t happen to know a Sarah Pern, do you?” she asked.
“Doe dinga thana,” Evelyn said to Elvina, and both women let out airy halting cough-laughs. They looked at Darcy, looked at each other, and laughed some more. Darcy realized she was being mocked. She did what she had done in school when the hard girls from the Twentieth Street houses had made fun of her for bringing her lunch in a bag—she lifted her chin and looked off into the middle distance like nothing in her field of vision could possibly interest her. Evelyn and Elvina laughed harder. Elvina hacked, then went into a fit of long, low, rumbling coughs that sounded like animal moans. Darcy tried to feel her pulse—Elvina pulled her hand away and covered her spasming mouth with it. Then Evelyn reached across the space between the two beds and clutched Elvina’s other hand.
“Daffin doe,” she whispered. “Daffin pin ren daffin doe.”
Elvina’s coughs grew softer and further apart. She let Darcy feel her pulse and put the blood pressure cuff around her arm. As Darcy wrote down the results, she saw the women exchanging mirthful, private glances. When she turned to go they called out, “Ring thana,” and laughed some more.
Next was Armin Abcarian. Darcy had heard that he had once been on the Board, and she wondered what had happened to bring him here. He didn’t look impressive; he looked like a long vertical line down the middle of the bed. He gazed up at Darcy out of a face pared down to its foundations, like a hasty drawing of a face. His mouth was a single stroke, his brow a stark shelf, his cheekbones clear half circles below his eyes. A little pulse of excitement lifted his lips and eyebrows as she crab-walked into the room.
“Are you new here?” he asked.
“I usually work in the kitchen.”
“I see, I see.”
He held his arm out for the cuff. His wrist bones stood out smooth and round, the skin like a layer of lacquer over them. It looked like it had once been olive; now it was grayish green.
“Do you know a Sarah Pern?” Darcy asked, in a voice she hoped was casual.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’ve never heard of her. But maybe you can tell me something. Do you know someone named Marina Ionova?”
His blood pressure was low. She wrote it down.
“Sorry, I don’t.”
His face sagged a little, then tightened again.
“She might go by Marie.”
Darcy held a finger to his wrist to take his pulse.
“I know a Maria Jimenez.”
His eyes swelled. Darcy had learned to look into a person’s face and tell if his mind had gone out beyond the bounds of reason. Some of the residents had the blank-eyed look of people for whom the world holds no familiarity—old age had flooded their bodies and washed out their brains. Others turned to Darcy with expressions of concentration, as though making a physical effort to fix the room, the day, her face. Others still looked out of their furrowed faces with eyes that, though perhaps less keen than Darcy’s, were no less comprehending. Armin looked like
he belonged in the last category, but his expression seemed out of proportion to the situation. Nothing Darcy could possibly offer should make anyone so excited.
“Is she a little younger than me, maybe sixty-five?” he asked. “Kind of a sharp chin, green eyes?”
He stared at Darcy now with bug-eyed fixity. His eyebrows twitched; his mouth opened a little.
“No,” Darcy said. “She’s my age. She went to school with me.”
He nodded and shut his eyes. When he opened them again they were as unfocused as eyes on a bus, eyes on an elevator, all the excitement gone out of them. Darcy wrote down his pulse.
“Why did you want to know?” she asked.
He lifted two long fingers to the bridge of his nose and pressed, like he was pushing energy back into his brain.
“She lived in Portland,” he said vaguely. “She was working as a nurse.”
“A friend of yours?”
His smile was as wry and lurid as any young man’s.
“That’s what I called her. When we knew each other, I was married.” There was mischief in his voice, but there was also the damp tone of still-unhealed sorrow.
“She had this funny tic,” he went on. “She used to pull her left earlobe, then her right. She said it was to keep away frostbite, but she did it all the time, even indoors. She was always thinking, always trying to survive. And she had to be. She had a rough life—her mom was a drunk, they were poor. She never got enough to eat growing up. But she knew how to get what she wanted.”
He smiled and shook his head, as though remembering a part of the story he didn’t want to tell.
“I told her I’d get her over here. I left word to put her on a boat. It was very competitive, you know. Many people were turned away. But I had influence back then.”
He looked around his room, as though comparing. A little blue card by his bed reminded the staff that he couldn’t have sugar.
“I keep looking for her,” he finished, “but nobody can tell me anything.”