by Anna North
Darcy ignored her.
“Listen, I know how you feel.”
Darcy sat up and looked at her. She was balanced on her knees with her long calm hands on her thighs. Her face was weary and haughty and knowing. Darcy abruptly hated her again.
“You don’t,” she spat.
Sunshine gave her a look of pity.
“You think you’re the first person to do something you didn’t want to do? How do you think everybody else around here gets along?”
“Don’t tell me how people get along,” Darcy said. “I’ve been getting along all by my fucking self for a while now.”
Sunshine’s face barely moved, but the tiny tightening at the corners of her eyes was enough to show her anger.
“Without Ansel,” she said, “you’d still be fucking around Las Vegas asking stupid questions.”
Darcy stood. The wall of the shack shook a little from her movement.
“And now I’m what?” she yelled. “Squatting in a box with two circus freaks whose idea of a plan is getting an arm bitten off by a retarded bear?”
The slap came fast, hard enough to shock but not to bruise. Darcy held the side of her face and felt her blood rising to meet her skin. No one had ever slapped her before. She was used to punches, scratches, school-yard fighting, but this was a new language.
“I can talk shit about Ansel,” Sunshine said, “and you can talk shit about me. But if you talk shit about Ansel, you leave here and you don’t come back.”
Darcy sat back down. Sunshine’s face was unreadable now.
“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?” Darcy asked. “Just go, I mean.”
“It’s up to you. But I wasn’t all that different from you when I met him. I pissed off this guy from Death Row. He put a hit out on me. Ansel got it fixed, he never told me how. He gets things done. He seems like he won’t but then he does. That’s why I stay, in spite of everything.”
Darcy wondered now what Sunshine’s stake was. Why had she gotten Ansel the job at the Big Top in the first place? Were they lovers? Did she want Tyson gone too, or was there something else she wanted Ansel to do?
“What do you mean, ‘everything’?” Darcy asked.
Sunshine looked out the window.
“Shh,” she said, “he’s coming back.”
She lay down on the floor with her head on the yellow cushion and her long, bunioned feet pointing up. Darcy hesitated for a moment and then lay down next to her.
“Are you really his aunt?” Darcy asked.
Sunshine didn’t answer; she just barked a single laugh out into the dark.
7
Naomi Rosen lived in Lower Chicagoland, in an Orthodox neighborhood. She came to her door smiling, in a Seafiber wig with hairs thick as noodles. She had a little boy, two or three years old, with enormous fearful eyes, and when he clutched Naomi around her knees Darcy was murderously jealous of him. Naomi was about twenty-five. She didn’t know a Ruth, or an Esther, and in fact, she told Darcy, her husband’s family had changed their name when they came to the island.
“Too many bad memories,” she said, still smiling, like her cheerful, pockless face was part of the erasure of those memories.
Snow Rosen, of Fifty-third Street in Manhattanville, didn’t open her door. Darcy heard laughter and conversation in her apartment and no matter how much she banged, she couldn’t produce a pause in it. So she waited in the hallway for an hour, and then two, and then for a period of time that had no definite duration, shaped only by the comings and goings of other people in the building, all of them dressed in real-fiber and wool and leather, some smoking tobacco cigarettes, one cuddling a tiny tame dog, three carrying briefcases, one holding a cloth bag brimming with leafy green vegetables Darcy didn’t recognize.
The hallway was decorated in understated Mainland Nostalgia—deep red carpet, wallpaper with pictures of bridges, apartment numbers engraved on gold plates on the doors. Darcy had cleaned a building like this once, in her short stint with a bucket and mop before she landed the World Experiences job. That building had been in Upper Chicagoland, not as nice as this one but even more nostalgic, with Cubs cards on the doors and signs advertising deep-dish pizza. Darcy didn’t completely understand Mainland Nostalgia. She was curious about her mother’s home, that world of ice and snow and malnutrition, but the Old Mainland of bridges and pizza seemed not just far away but pointless. Most of the people on the island were from the West Coast anyway—something about the highways shutting down—so what did they care about Old Manhattan or Old Chicago? Darcy wondered if they even noticed what was on their walls. Maybe they were so comfortable all the time that they didn’t need to look around them. The red carpet was very deep and soft. Darcy sat down, leaned up against the wall, and let her waiting slide imperceptibly into sleep, a sleep in which she dreamt of waiting, so that the only difference was the flock of brightly colored birds flapping up and down the hallway, squawking at Darcy in a strange but distinctly human language. Then the apartment door opened and the birds faded back into the walls and a woman’s face filled up Darcy’s field of vision. The woman was young, maybe a few years older than Darcy, her hair was bleached yellow-white and gelled back into a ducktail, her lips were frosty pink, and her eyelashes were long and silver and spiky, like the legs of a metal bug. She was wearing a white fur coat that she held closed with her hand.
“Hi,” she said, wide-eyed and slow-voiced, the single syllable as long as a deep breath in and out. “Wanna party?”
Darcy followed her into an enormous room painted entirely white, and at first Darcy thought she was still dreaming, only her dream had taken her inside an ice cave or a snowdrift or a shining, pristine bone. Then she saw the three white sofas arranged in a box, the white coffee table in the center, the white refrigerator and white countertop, a man and a woman in white bomber jackets and tight white jeans, and the only nonwhite thing in the room—a standing rib roast, untouched, oozing red-brown juice onto a white platter. Darcy’s stomach leapt with longing.
“Are you Snow Rosen?” she asked.
“Sure,” said the woman, “and what are you about?”
“I’m looking for a Ruth Rosen. Do you know her?”
Snow knit her brows like she was working on a math problem. She opened her mouth to speak and shut it, opened and shut it again.
“Oh man,” she said finally, “you need to give me a minute.”
She sat down on the sofa—her head rocked back, and her arms fell limp at her sides. Her coat slid open to reveal a silvery-white minidress, a triangle of white chest set with narrow bones, and one bluish thigh.
“Hope you’re not in a hurry,” said the man. “She might be gone for a while.”
“Do you know Ruth Rosen?” Darcy asked him.
The man shook his head. He was wearing a white knit cap pulled down to his ears. His eyes were blue.
“Northstar, that ring a bell with you?”
The woman’s voice was low and rich and sleepy.
“Snow’s the only Rosen I know,” she said.
“That sounds like a poem,” the man said. “Snow’s the only Rosen I know. Snow’s the only Rosen I’m nosin’.”
He pressed his nose into Snow’s neck. She stirred but didn’t open her eyes.
The apartments Darcy had cleaned in Chicagoland had looked like she expected a rich person’s home to look—ornate, with antique-style furniture, real photographs on the walls, mainland flowers from the Floridatown cold-houses slowly wilting in their crystal vases. Scented candles that pumped out apple or rose smells when she lit them. Here the blinding walls, the cold, the unsweet smell that was no smell, all made the room seem like the world’s cleanest morgue. Probably this was what came after comfort, she thought, when you were too rich even to want things to look pretty. She wondered if these people were also too rich to be mean, to fend off her encroachment the way the lesser rich learned to do.
Darcy looked at the roast. It was so dark against the white counter tha
t it looked like the fabric of the room had ripped open, exposing glistening flesh.
“Can I have some of that meat?” she asked.
Northstar looked momentarily confused.
“Oh, I totally forgot that was there,” she said. “Sure, let me get you some.”
Northstar put her hands on the roast and tried to break off a piece. Bits of shiny meat came off under her fingernails. She looked apologetically at Darcy.
“It’s really hard,” she said.
“Do you have a knife?” Darcy asked.
Northstar smacked herself in the forehead. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
“I can,” said the man, but she ignored him. She opened a white drawer and scrabbled around in it, her hands clumsy as paws. Finally she got her fingers around the handle of a big kitchen knife and began haphazardly wounding the roast.
“Here,” Darcy said, “let me.”
Roasts like that were too expensive for World Experiences, but she’d seen them in the training manual. She slid the knife in between two ribs and sliced downward, then made another cut so that a fat slice of meat five ribs wide came off in her hand.
“Do you want some?” she asked Northstar.
“Um.” She considered for a moment. Her eyes were smaller than Snow’s, and so far apart that the whole middle of her face was white, featureless wasteland. Her eyebrows were severely plucked.
“Yeah,” she finally decided.
Darcy cut another, smaller piece for Northstar, then one for the man, and then she sat on a couch and sucked the bloody meat off the bone. It tasted gamy, foreign, old-fashioned—she thought of Glock’s rye whiskey and smacked the thought away. Northstar and the man ate with guileless concentration, like children.
“You know what would be good with this, Mistral?” Northstar said to the man, her mouth full of meat. “Strawberries. Strawberries and, like, cream.”
“Want to get some?” he asked.
“I’m too tired,” she said. “Let’s do it tomorrow.”
“But then our guest won’t be there to enjoy them,” said Mistral.
“You should just stay,” Northstar said. “Stay here tonight, and tomorrow we’ll all go get strawberries and cream.”
Darcy imagined a world in which this was possible. She thought about just leaning back against the white couch cushions, sinking down into these people’s lives. They were so relaxed, they might let her stay for a week, a month, forever. They probably didn’t even have jobs—they probably sat around the apartment all day, eating real meat and snorting the classy powdered solvent, which cost twice as much as smoking it and three times as much as huffing. They probably had big all-night parties with beautiful lazy people in expensive clothes, and went to other people’s fascinating pristine apartments, and drove cars, and walked at all times on solid, well-paved, high-rent ground that was never in any danger of falling into the ocean. Northstar was giggling now, even though no one had said anything, and Darcy imagined a life so carefree that laughter could become a stock response.
“Wait,” Mistral said, “don’t we have that meeting tomorrow?”
“What?” Northstar looked at Mistral like he had just pointed out a monster.
“You remember. With the Board. They’re going to talk about the Hawaiian attack—defense spending or something.”
“You guys are on the Board?” Darcy asked.
“We’re junior members. We have to go sometimes so that when we replace our parents, we’ll know what to do.”
“I thought you had to get elected,” Darcy said.
Mistral waved his hand. “I think that’s, like, a formality. I wish somebody else would get elected. It’s so boring. All we do is sit around and they tell us how to vote.”
Darcy felt her breath quicken. She had believed, in an abstract way, Ansel’s claim that Tyson kept rich people rich and poor people poor. But she’d always assumed that the Board was legitimate, that if she bothered to vote she would have some say in governing the island. It shocked her how easily Mistral admitted that this wasn’t the case, how easily she could have found out years before if she’d bothered to try.
“Who tells you?” she asked.
“Some woman,” said Mistral. “I think she works for Tyson. My dad said Tyson used to come himself, but he’s too old now or something.”
Mistral stared down at his thumbnail, which was perfectly square and had a slight, unnatural sheen. He seemed bored with the conversation, but Darcy wasn’t ready to let it drop.
“So she just tells you how to vote and then you do it?” she asked.
He sighed. “Well, I mean technically we can vote however we want. But if Tyson doesn’t like how I vote, then bye-bye subsidies for Dad’s GreenValley division. Which means bye-bye to this.” He ran his hand vaguely through the icy air of the room. “I don’t really care about voting though,” he finished. “What’s gonna happen is gonna happen.”
He put his white shoes on the white coffee table, laced his fingers behind his head. Darcy hated his easy languor—here was someone who sat on the Board, who had the power to fix the cave-ins, feed everyone in Hell City, and pave the sidewalks of the Avenida with real concrete, and he didn’t even care enough to use it. But why would he, when he had enough money to let a rib roast go to waste on the counter? Why would he want to change anything?
Mistral shut his eyes for a moment, and Snow shifted in her drugged-out sleep. Northstar was picking at her rib with tiny, even teeth. Part of Darcy still wished she could stay with them and eat strawberries and think about nothing all day. She couldn’t exactly blame them. She hadn’t cared about Tyson or the Board or voting or what was fair or unfair until her mother disappeared. She was surprised to find that now she did.
Darcy put her rib bone down on the coffee table.
“I need to find Ruth Rosen,” she said.
Mistral didn’t seem to register her change in tone.
“How come?” he asked.
“Someone important to me is missing,” Darcy said, “and I’m trying to find her.”
Northstar looked up from her rib as though waking from a dream.
“Oh my God,” she said, “who’s missing?”
Darcy looked at her little empty face and decided there was no harm in telling her.
“My mom,” she said.
“Oh my God,” Northstar said again, “that’s terrible.”
“Did you go to the guards?” the man asked.
“I did,” she said, “but they didn’t help me.”
“That’s terrible,” Northstar said. “You should tell me their names. I can get them fired.”
“I don’t know their names,” Darcy said. “All I know is Ruth Rosen.”
Northstar hoisted herself up off the sofa and began shaking Snow.
“Come on,” she said, “wake up. We need to help this girl.”
Snow’s head rolled loosely on the axis of her neck.
“I’m tired,” she moaned. Her mouth went slack.
Mistral filled a glass of water in the white sink. He brought it close to Snow and then splashed it across her face. She didn’t rouse right away; instead she curled inward like a wounded cat, brought her hands up to her face and began wiping ineffectually. She went still, and Northstar moved to shake her again. Then she spoke, her voice thick as a child’s after crying.
“Okay,” she said, “okay, what?”
“We need to do something for this girl,” Northstar said. “We need to—”
She stopped. She looked up at the ceiling like she was trying to read something written there.
“Tell me if you know Ruth Rosen,” Darcy finished for her.
“Yeah,” Snow said, “yeah. Here, wait—” She made grasping motions in the air with her silver-nailed hands. “Here, I’ll write it down.”
Northstar crawled under the coffee table and found a white leather purse. She took out a white leather-bound journal and a shiny white pen. Snow took both of them and began to wri
te with minute concentration. Darcy felt her heart pounding in the cold room. She wondered if Snow would be able to write clearly. She was taking a long time, and Darcy wondered what she was writing. Was it an address, or some crazy incoherent story Darcy would have to decode? After several minutes Snow made a decisive final stroke, handed the paper to Northstar, folded her hands in her lap, and looked up at Darcy with an alert and expectant expression. Northstar folded the paper in half and handed it to Darcy. Darcy opened it and saw this:
“There’s nothing here,” she said.
“It’s the new white ink,” Mistral said. “You have to look at it the right way.”
Darcy squinted, and held the paper close to her face, and rotated it, but it stayed blank.
“I can’t see anything,” she said.
Mistral took the paper and squinted at it himself. Snow pulled her legs up on the couch and shut her eyes again.
“Oh,” he said. “Looks like Snow doesn’t really know anything after all.”
“There’s no address?” Darcy asked.
“It’s a drawing of some kind of fruit. I think it might be a strawberry. Hey, Snow”—he shook her—“can’t you do any better than this?”
Snow made a little throaty noise and covered her eyes with her hands.
“She gets like that sometimes,” Mistral explained. “I don’t think she really knows any Ruth Rosen. But you should still stay and have strawberries and cream with us.”
Five minutes later, Darcy was out on the street again, filled with an ineffectual, angry energy. She had even less control over her life than she’d ever thought, and it made her want to break something. She saw a coffee cup sitting on the sidewalk, the only piece of trash on Fifty-third Street. Kicking it made her bad leg hurt and produced an unsatisfying papery sound. In front of an apartment building, red flowers were growing in a raised bed, the pipes of their special cooling system poking out of the soil. Darcy snapped four fat blooms free of their stems and left them lying in the dirt, then walked off feeling like a child.
Darcy tried to visit Bruce Rosen the next morning, but he wasn’t at his apartment, in the bad part of Floridatown. She had given up on World Experiences entirely—she wasn’t going back to her apartment, so she didn’t have to pay rent anymore, and when she found her mother they’d have to figure out some other way to make a living. She waited for Bruce all day in his dank and narrow hallway, listening to rats skitter in the walls. He came home at 9 p.m. wearing a smelly Seafiber clown suit and carrying three badly dented juggling pins. He said he didn’t know a Ruth Rosen, never had, never would, he had come over with his mother, Caroline, on the fourth boat, and she had told him they were going to a place full of fruit and sunshine, and within a year she was dead of parrot fever and he was forced to support himself, first by taking bottles and cans to the recycling plant and then, when he was old enough, by working as a clown in the down-market nursing homes, and he had been doing that for sixteen years now and he’d never have enough money to get an apartment with a bathroom or even to take a girl out for a nice meal, and he wasn’t interested in meeting anyone, let alone someone with the same last name as his mother. So Darcy said she was sorry, and he made a noise that was half laugh and half sneer, and Darcy went outside and got back on the bus again.