by Anna North
“It’s not pretentious,” she said. “Someone like you, I’d think you’d shop at those Manhattanville boutiques. But it looks like you don’t waste your money on that stuff.”
Pine rolled her eyes and looked at the guard. For a moment his expression didn’t change. The band stopped playing, and dancers shoved past Darcy toward the bar, fumes and laughter on their breath.
“See, Darcy, some people—”
Pine snorted. The guard gave her a look, she went quiet, and he began again.
“Some people think your circumstances define you. They think if you happen to grow up in, say, Manhattanville, if you happen to be a professional person, you’re fundamentally unlike, say, someone who comes from Hell City. What do you think about that, Darcy? Do you agree?”
A keenness came through his smug face. It reminded her of Armin.
“I think your character defines you,” she said.
He turned to Pine.
“See! Character. That’s what I’ve been talking about. Darcy, sit down. My name is November, but you can call me Glock. Have a drink with us.”
He motioned to a waitress with a tray of sloshing beer jars. She set one down on the table, and Darcy watched the easy passage of coins from his hand to hers.
“Where do you come from, Darcy?” the guard asked. “What’s your story?”
“I’m from Little L.A.,” she said. “I work at World Experiences.”
She saw his interest flagging already, his eyes sliding from her face.
“Before that I went to school, I went to Seventeenth Street School, near the Seafiber factory.”
He was looking at Pine now. She whispered something to him, and he laughed the way people laugh when they’re not supposed to. She took a sip of the beer. It tasted like spit.
“I had to drop out when my mom’s hours got cut at the docks,” she went on.
He focused on her again.
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“So you dropped out, and you got a job at World Experiences. Did you do anything in between?”
“I interviewed for a lot of places—GreenValley, the printing presses—”
He looked away again. She didn’t understand what he wanted from her. She was spending all her time these days figuring out what people wanted.
“I did some odd jobs for a while,” she went on.
“What kind of jobs?”
“I collected bottles, I cleaned some apartments.”
“Did you do anything more unorthodox?”
Pine drained her jar.
“I want another beer,” she said.
“Hang on,” said the guard. “I want to hear what Darcy has to say.”
Darcy tugged on her shorts. She had worked lookout for one of her classmate’s brothers, a solvent dealer with a lazy eye, but the money wasn’t very good, and it became clear that she’d have to sleep with someone or beat someone up if she wanted to advance. She’d stopped after a couple of weeks. But even that could get her jail time if he chose to turn her in. A lie formed in the back of her throat. But she saw how he was looking at her, the thinly veiled nervous expectation tightening his mouth and eyes. The lie in her throat changed shape.
“That doesn’t seem like a very smart subject to be discussing with a guard,” she said.
A vein was beating in his temple.
“Pine,” he said, “am I a typical guard?”
Pine shrugged.
“Don’t ask me,” she said.
“Well,” he said to Darcy, “do I look like a typical guard to you?”
Darcy wasn’t in the habit of examining guards critically. On the street, she always avoided looking directly at them, for fear of drawing attention to herself. She remembered the one she had talked to about her mother, his false helpfulness, his hand on her back in a parody of comfort. This one was different—his hands always moving slightly on the table, his eyes drifting and locking, drifting and locking. The first one had probably pulled the same trick with five women a day. But this one was restless, on the lookout for something new. She wasn’t sure which one was typical, but she knew which was more dangerous.
“Typical or not,” Darcy said, “you could get me in a lot of trouble.”
Glock turned to Pine.
“Could you give us a minute?” he said.
Pine’s eyes turned from scornful to frightened and she leaned in close, whispering to him again. He whispered back, and her face softened a little. She nodded. Then she turned to Darcy, scrunched her face up in fake sweetness, and trilled, “Byee!”
When she was gone he moved his chair closer to Darcy’s. She wondered if Ansel had been right that he wouldn’t want to sleep with her. He smelled expensive, the way she imagined the cool inside of a fancy store would smell.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “The guards, who do you think they work for?”
“Tyson?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not. Some of them work for the gangs or the drug kingpins.”
She had heard this before, but mostly dismissed it as paranoia. She thought of feigning surprise, then settled on worldliness.
“I’ve heard something about that.”
He ignored her.
“But me,” he continued, “I work for myself. Not Tyson, not some wannabe with a few solvent vials. I work for me.”
He might have been all talk; for all Darcy knew, he was the most loyal guard on the force. But the way his eyes and hands stopped moving, as though everything in his body were waiting for a response from her, made her think that part of the thrill for him was telling the truth. He liked to keep a secret, to hold on to it, and then when the mood took him, he liked to tell it in a bar to a girl he barely knew. He liked to feel that he was putting himself in danger. But of course, the danger wasn’t real. He hadn’t told her anything of importance, anything she could use. Darcy wondered if he’d ever felt really at risk.
The band started to play again, and the people at the next table stood up to dance. The whole crowd of swaying, addled humans turned their backs on Darcy. No one was watching her.
“Are you carrying a gun?” she asked.
He looked confused.
“I always do.”
“Can I see it?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
Darcy gambled. “It’s just been so long since I held one.”
Actually she had never held a gun. She had seen one only a handful of times—in the belt of a solvent dealer, sticking out the window of a car one rainy morning in her childhood. But he looked like he believed her. He looked like he wanted to.
“You won’t do anything stupid?” he asked. But his hand was already inside his jacket.
“I’ve never done anything stupid in my life,” she said. Some unfamiliar part of her was choosing her words, making her lips move.
He passed her the gun under the table. It was heavy, and it felt old, covered with scratches and some thin, alien grease. She could imagine a cowboy pressing it to an outlaw’s temple, a gangsta pointing it at a cop on a crisp Old Los Angeles night. She could imagine it traveling over the ocean in a dark hold, coming ashore in an unmarked crate.
She moved close to him so that their legs were touching. She had seen people shoot guns in gangsta flyers: she knew where the safety was. She clicked it off. She pressed the barrel against Glock’s gut. His eyes went wide and she could see all the way down them. She saw fear and excitement and, at the bottom of his retina, she saw a dangerous, unpredictable woman who might be about to murder him. Darcy smiled and the woman smiled.
“You scared?” they asked.
“Should I be?”
His voice was hot and thick. Darcy was happy and the woman was happy. They fused.
“I want something,” she said.
“What is it?”
“I want to find someone named Ruth Rosen. I want to know where she lives.”
“I don’t know if I can get that for you.”
His brain was wriggling. He was testing her. She pushed the gun up under his rib.
“Yes you can,” she said.
“I’ll need a few days.”
“One day,” she said.
His eyes glazed over for a second, and she couldn’t tell if she still had him. She imagined pulling the trigger. Blood would spurt out and pool on his chair, and she would stick the gun inside her uniform and run. She could do it. She stared at him and he stared back and he saw that she could. But then where would she go? She hardened her face, tried to hide this thought from him.
“Where do you live?” he said.
“Let’s just meet back here tomorrow,” Darcy offered.
He could see that she wasn’t so unpredictable, that she needed something from him and that she had only a few ways to get it.
“I’d rather come to your place,” he said, his voice easy.
She was still holding the gun, but he knew it was a game now. Darcy lost her hold on the dangerous woman and was herself again, questing and striving, putting on a disguise.
“I have to go now,” she said. “I’ll see you here tomorrow.”
She let the gun fall into his lap.
“We’ll see,” he said, and he clicked the safety back on and stuck the gun in his pants.
6
The next night Darcy sat in her apartment, staring at the wall in a paralysis of anger and doubt. Would Glock even be at the Boat if she went back? She hadn’t given him any compelling reason to help her. If she went back there, would she find herself alone among the whirling bodies, in her ill-fitting school uniform, looking around like an idiot for someone who wasn’t there?
It was almost ten—she’d been back from work for two hours—but still she couldn’t bring herself to leave the apartment. Instead she knelt under the windowsill, with her old toys. The rock dolls lay on their sides, their eyes pointing at the floor, like flounders. The crown sat empty, with no head to honor. She opened An Animal Atlas of the West Coast and flipped its brittle pages. She’d learned the names of all the animals before she could read, and they felt somehow normal to her, even though she had never seen them and never would. The salmon leaping over Oregon, the grizzly bear in Yosemite, the mountain lion stalking across Southern California—they were like Santa Claus to her, both fictional and familiar, unseen but known. But the maps were so alien they might as well have been random markings—tracings of water stains, or accidental pen tracks across the page. The frilled lip of Southern California, the little northern notch, the deeper dent plunging down through Washington, at the base of which her mother once had lived. She couldn’t imagine anyone living on these greenish shapes. Least of all her mother, the most familiar person in the world, whose absence made the angles of the walls seem off, the shape of the air feel wrong. How could she once have fit into another space, a space Darcy knew nothing about, could not even picture? Why hadn’t Darcy absorbed some understanding of this space, learned how to see it in her mind the way she had learned to predict when her mother was about to sneeze or sing or cry?
Why hadn’t Sarah ever talked about the mainland? When Darcy asked, she usually got an abstracted look on her face, like longing poorly hidden, and answered Darcy’s questions as briskly as possible before steering the conversation toward something inconsequential. Darcy assumed it hurt her to remember her first home, the place she could never return to, but her reticence always churned up a sour jealousy in Darcy. Did Sarah wish she had never left the mainland, that she had never started the life that made Darcy possible? Did she consider the co-op her real home, instead of the apartment she shared with Darcy? And if not, if she didn’t feel for the mainland some secret and competing love, why did she hold all knowledge of it away from Darcy, a privileged part of her Darcy wasn’t allowed to share? If she hadn’t, if she had told Darcy what went on with Daniel at Arete, Darcy might have a better idea of how to find her now.
Darcy put the book down. She shucked off her jumpsuit, and was halfway into her school uniform when the apartment door opened. She felt such a flood of excitement and relief that her vision went gray for a moment, and a ringing filled her ears. All the things she had wanted to say to her mother in the days she’d been missing, the important ones and the inconsequential, tiny ones she had not even realized she was storing up—all came rushing up into her throat. She imagined how her mother’s face would look—tired, exhausted even, but glowing, glad to be home.
Then she turned around and saw Glock in the doorway, wearing his visor and grinning. As she rushed to button her uniform shirt, she remembered what the Seaguard at the docks had said—they had everyone’s address. From the moment she told him her name, he had known how to find her.
He was wearing what looked like a University kid’s version of gangsta wear—a sports jersey with “Los Angeles Dodgers” printed instead of painted, a pair of dark jeans, their real-fiber still crisp and rustly around his legs. Darcy saw now how young he was, not more than twenty-five, though he tried to move like an older man. He put his hands on his hips and looked around at the room like he was surveying a great landscape.
“I like this,” he said. “No paintings, no coffee table, no antiques. No bullshit, just the basics.”
“I wasn’t expecting you,” she said lamely.
Her armpits were sweating. She glanced at the window and imagined jumping out of it, but it was three stories up, not two, and there were no dumpsters waiting on the Avenida.
“A pleasant surprise, then,” he said, and his face was open and without irony.
He sat on her bed. He was close enough that she could smell him—a thick cologne, womanish in its sweetness, and below it a hint of sweat. She looked at his waist for the square bulge of a gun, but she saw only the blue folds of his jersey. He might have it strapped to his leg under the jeans—wherever it was, he wouldn’t let her get at it as easily as before. Its hidden presence made her vision vibrate with apprehension; his body on the bed made the whole room strange. She wanted both of them gone.
“So,” she said, “did you find Ruth Rosen?”
He moved away from her. The grayish blanket bunched beneath his thighs. He looked annoyed and bored by her question, like she was a nun on a bus trying to push a flyer on him.
“I thought we could talk a little first. I brought something.”
He reached into his jeans pocket. Darcy’s muscles tensed all along her body, like a zipper closing. But all he held was a flask. It was metal, another expensive version of something you could get for a few dollars on the Avenida, with a detailed and overly realistic Snoop Dogg face stamped into the side. He unscrewed the cap and handed it to her. She considered the possibility that it was drugged, but she didn’t think Glock was interested in a passed-out girl. She drank.
It was good whiskey, with a smoky roughness in place of the weird sweet tang of palm fruit. She wondered if it was made from real rye. She’d never had rye whiskey before, but this tasted so old and rich and foreign she thought it must be the real thing. It reminded her of steak and pinewood and paper, and all the other mainland things that were almost gone from the world, so that luxury had a museum quality to it, a musty, decadent obsoleteness. He took the flask from her and drank with his head thrown back. His neck was pale and smooth, like he’d never had a pimple in his life. He came back up from his drink as from a dive, his eyes wide and staring.
“You wouldn’t have shot me,” he said.
Darcy tried to find the dangerous woman from the night before, but all she could do was imitate her, like an actress in a bad street show.
“What makes you so sure?” she asked.
He didn’t seem to notice the change in her. He was looking at her face, but his eyes were unfocused, like he was watching an image projected on her skin.
“Because you’re like me,” he said. “And I know you know it.”
He took another gulp of whiskey and handed the flask to her. As she drank her second sip, she felt the first one steaming up he
r brain.
“Ever since I was a kid,” he went on, “I’ve been different. I lived in Manhattanville; my parents were second-boaters, GreenValley executives. They were really popular in the neighborhood—we had lots of parties. But I never wanted to play with the other kids, I never felt at home with them. And one day I realized—they were too soft. They were going to play with their toys and their cars and their girlfriends, and then they were going to become GreenValley execs too, and eat nice food and wear real-fiber clothes and never worry or think about anything. But that wasn’t me. I was destined for bigger things. And I can tell you’re the same.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Darcy said, still acting.
“But I do,” he said, “I know that you’re special. You’re strong. People like you and me, we’re the next generation.”
“What do you mean?” Darcy asked.
“Stick with me,” he said. “You’ll see. A change is coming, and you and I are going to be a part of that.”
Darcy couldn’t help but be intrigued by him, the weird fever in his eyes, the sweat on his upper lip. In his crisp jeans and his nicely printed jersey, he looked like someone who wanted to be something he wasn’t. But she thought he was right about himself—he wasn’t complacent. He might have the power to become whatever he wanted.
“What kind of change?” she asked.
Then he put his hand on her leg. She knew she should have expected it, but still she jerked her leg away, as if he had burned her. He reached to touch her again, and she stood up from the bed.
His face flushed baby pink like the corner of an eye.
“What,” he said, “you’re going to try to deny it? I know you feel the same.”
He stood. She backed up against the door. He moved onto her and sealed his mouth against her neck and she felt it foreign there, like a scab.
“I don’t do this with everyone,” he told her. “You’re different. Because you’re like me.”
She thought of the other guard with his soapy smell. She thought of the men who had been here with her mother, their breath pounding through the toilet paper into her ears, their grunts and farts and the shapes of their asses in the air filling the quiet space of their apartment and staying there for days, long after they themselves were gone, crowding the simple sealed universe that had been hers and her mother’s alone. Her hand was on the doorknob. She was going to spring herself out into the hallway and run until she was far enough away that he wouldn’t look for her, that he would go home to Manhattanville and push his way into the body and brain of some other girl instead. She turned the knob.