by Anna North
Nathaniel Rosen lived in Sonoma Hill. His building was not as nice as Snow’s, but its hallways were clean and high-ceilinged and smelled like frangipani. His apartment was on the third floor. As she rang the doorbell she heard cooking sounds inside the apartment—the clack of a knife against a cutting board.
When he opened the door there was a crackling of mutual appraisal. Darcy tried to look serious but undesiring: not like a saleswoman or a criminal. Nathaniel had a small head and narrow, cautious eyes. He was bald; his eyebrows were thin; concern wrote two vertical lines above his nose. Darcy could see a slice of his kitchen through the door—a counter with a large mixing bowl and two fresh tomatoes, a pot on the stove, a table with a single glass of wine.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Darcy said, “but do you happen to know a Ruth Rosen?”
Nathaniel looked afraid for a second. Then his face went stony.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Now is not a good time.”
He paused for a moment and Darcy saw an opening to argue. She opened her mouth. He shut the door.
Darcy tried to look through the peephole. His blue shirt receded out of view. She banged on the door.
“Please,” she called, “my mother’s disappeared, and I’m just trying to find her.”
She heard footsteps grow louder, pause, then grow softer. She banged again. She heard the knife again, now insistent, almost showy.
“I’m staying in Hell City,” she yelled through the door. “It’s a shack with a garbage-bag roof, sort of near the Boat. There’s a green bucket outside. Please come see me, if you change your mind.”
She knocked a third time, quieter now, hope ebbing. The knife only got louder.
Ansel was alone in the shack when Darcy got there. A big Seafiber map of the island lay across his knees, covered in notes and symbols. Darcy sat on the floor and put her head in her hands.
“Worthless,” she said.
“You didn’t find Ruth, I take it?”
“No, I didn’t find Ruth. Two of the people didn’t know anything, one was drugged out, and one wouldn’t talk to me. That list was a total waste. Everything I did was a waste.”
Ansel folded the map and sat down on the floor with her.
“No, it wasn’t. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry you had to do it, and if I’d known, I never would have put you in that position. But it wasn’t a waste. Everything you do brings us closer.”
“You mean closer to your crazy plan? I don’t care about that. I don’t give a shit about Tyson, I just want to find my mom.”
“I know,” Ansel said. His face went somber. “But what about if—when you do find her? Are you just going to keep working at World Experiences?”
“I probably can’t,” she said. “I’ll have to get another job.”
“But you’re just going to go back to your ordinary life, knowing what you know now?”
Darcy raised her head. She felt like an empty refrigerator. She felt like the wind blowing through trash.
“What do I know?” she asked.
“You know that our founder and president probably kidnaps people. You know he’s a criminal, and that he’s trying to hide something. And you know that you have the power to do something about it.”
All the bleakness turned to rage inside Darcy’s chest.
“Power?” she yelled. “Look at me. I’m sitting on a floor in Hell City, I just fucked some asshole guard, and I didn’t even get anything useful for it. At least whores get paid.”
Ansel was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “When the guards wouldn’t help you, you didn’t stop. When Yuka wouldn’t help you, you didn’t stop. And when you had to do the one thing you swore you wouldn’t do, you still didn’t stop. Tyson should be afraid of you.”
He was looking at her in a way only her mother had looked at her before. He was looking at her with respect. She had a strange feeling then. She wanted to be close to him, to touch his skin. It wasn’t desire, exactly—not the kind of feeling she’d gotten the handful of times she’d made out with boys at solvent parties. It was both deeper and shallower than that—shallower because it didn’t reach down through her gut and between her legs (the guard had frozen out that route), and deeper because she felt, for the first time since her mother had disappeared, a flicker of kinship with someone. She wondered if other people—people whose lives were less isolated, who never formed a tiny, sealed-off world with one other person—felt this kinship with lots of different people. She wondered how they managed it.
And she wondered, too, if she would keep fighting when she found her mother. Maybe Ansel was right, maybe Glock was right—maybe she had some sort of extraordinary quality, secret even to her. Maybe she did have the power to alter the things she’d always assumed she’d have to endure. She thought about Mistral, lazing back on the white couch. What would he do if Tyson kidnapped his mother? Would he beat down the doors of the other Board members, his fish-pale skin all flushed and slick with rage? Or would he saunter up to Tyson at some party in the Northern Zone, stick a gun in his back over the strawberries and cream? Of course, Tyson would probably never kidnap the mother of a junior Board member. He must’ve assumed he could get away with taking Sarah because she was poor and her family powerless. Darcy wasn’t sure he was wrong.
“What do I do now?” she asked Ansel.
“Well, the last guy sounds weird. Why do you think he wouldn’t talk to you?”
“I wouldn’t necessarily talk to me if I came to my house,” said Darcy. “But he looked scared. He looked like I hit a nerve.”
“Maybe you should try him again.”
“I don’t know how I’ll get to him. I knocked and knocked.”
“Did you mention your mom? That might get his sympathy.”
“I did,” Darcy said, “and it didn’t.”
They sat in silence for a moment. A naked boy ran by the window and down the alley—he was ten or eleven, too old to be outside with no clothes on. His bare feet sent up little splashes where they fell. Darcy hated Hell City.
“Maybe you should ask Yuka,” Ansel said. “If this Nathaniel guy does know Ruth, she might know him.”
It wasn’t a good idea, but it was an idea, and it made Darcy feel slightly less alone.
“Okay,” she said, “thanks.”
“Thank me when you find your mom,” Ansel said.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Trish hissed. “You don’t work here anymore. You didn’t even give notice.”
“Just let me in for ten minutes,” Darcy said. “I promise I won’t let anyone see me. I just need to talk to someone.”
Darcy was standing in the rain outside the service entrance to World Experiences. The gauze around her ankle had soaked up dirty water, and she had nothing else she could use to rewrap it. Trish stood in the dry hallway, her hairnet on, her expression skeptical.
“Who?” Trish asked.
“Yuka.”
“What do you need to talk to Yuka for?”
“I need to ask her about my mom,” Darcy said.
“Your mom’s still missing?” Trish asked.
Darcy thought about how she must look—her hair dirty, her jumpsuit soaked, a tail of wet gauze coming out of her pant leg. Her voice desperate. She must seem like a derelict, like someone who had fallen off the edge of life. Trish’s face showed that special pity people feel for those who were once their equals—pity mixed with disgust, mixed with fear.
“She’s still missing,” Darcy said.
Trish looked behind her, into the kitchen.
“Fine,” she said. “But if Marcelle sees you, you broke in. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
She let Darcy into the hall.
“And try not to drip all over everything, okay?” she added.
Win was washing pots in the kitchen. He looked up at Darcy and opened his mouth to ask her a question, but she walked by without waving. She crossed through the dining room, empty and silent, with its between-meals smell o
f cleaning fluid and aging jellyfish. The empty chairs and the lonely painted prairie girl made her nostalgic for a time when getting caught swiping steak was her biggest fear. Then she came out into the Antarctica Hall, with its Seaboard icebergs and oddly proportioned painted penguins. She was halfway down the hall when Marcelle came out of room 104, talking to one of the nurses.
“You can’t be spending half an hour with each of the residents,” Marcelle was saying. “We need to take all the vitals and get them entered in the charts within a reasonable time frame, and you can’t do that if you’re socializing.”
Darcy crouched behind an iceberg. She held her breath.
“I wasn’t socializing,” the nurse said. “Ramona had a problem with her bed. It doesn’t adjust right anymore. She needs a new one.”
They stopped just in front of the iceberg. If Marcelle bothered to look behind it, she would see her. Darcy could smell Marcelle’s perfume—crisp and antiseptic, neither fruity nor flowery. She could feel the magnetic pull of Marcelle’s authority.
“I told you,” said Marcelle, “we can’t buy anything until our subsidy meeting with the Board. If you really want new beds, you’ll suck up to the Abcarians and the Stones next time they visit. They have Trustees in their family. Talk about what a great job Tyson’s doing with the cave-ins, something like that.”
If Marcelle saw her, she’d throw her out, and then she wouldn’t be able to talk to Yuka. But would Marcelle also have her arrested for trespassing? Would she fine her for leaving without giving notice? Darcy was reduced to borrowing bus fare from Sunshine’s stash—there was no way she could pay a fine. And what if she went to jail?
“I don’t think—” the nurse began.
“It doesn’t matter what you think,” Marcelle said. “It matters that we show our support. That’s how we get subsidies. Which is how we get beds, and how we pay your salary.”
Darcy heard Marcelle take a step toward her. Then Marcelle said, “You know what? I’m going to oversee you on the next one. Then I can make sure you know exactly what the appropriate amount of time is.”
They turned, and they both walked into a room on the far side of the hallway. As soon as the door was closed, Darcy ran as quietly and as fast as she could up the stairs to the Africa Hall.
The door to Yuka’s room was shut. Darcy knocked softly and then, when she heard no answer, loudly.
“I said come in,” a weak voice told her through the door.
It wasn’t Yuka. When she entered, Darcy saw that the bed was full of a big, soft woman. She lay sipping tea and holding a magazine, mounding up the covers where Yuka had shriveled beneath them.
“Where’s Yuka?” Darcy demanded.
“Yuka? I’m sorry, I don’t know very many people here. I just came yesterday.”
The woman’s face was round and mild and uncomprehending.
“The woman who was here before you,” Darcy persisted. “Where did they move her?”
“Oh, there was no one here when I came. It was very clean. There’s quite a long waiting list to get in here, you know. Not as long as for Renaissance Hall, but still.”
Darcy punched herself in the thigh.
“So you didn’t see anyone else in here?”
“Are you all right? Do you live here? Do you need help finding your room?”
Darcy had not shut the door, and now she heard the sneakered feet of one of the night nurses behind her.
“What are you doing here?”
She had never heard a night nurse speak before. This one sounded just like her earliest teachers—pained, officious, somewhere obscurely caring. Her face was small and boneless-looking, like the steamed buns you could buy on Chinatown Avenue.
“I was just checking on her,” Darcy said, sweating. “I thought I heard her call. Didn’t this used to be Mrs. McKenzie’s room?”
The nurse looked at her with red-rimmed eyes. For a moment, suspicion seemed to give her face shape and organization, and Darcy heard her own heartbeat in her ears. Then the nurse’s cheeks went slack again, whether with weariness or trust Darcy couldn’t tell.
“If one of the residents calls, you call one of us,” the nurse said. She turned to the old woman. “Are we all right, Mrs. Armitage?”
“Well, I would like some more tea.”
The nurse turned to Darcy. “Could you get that? We only have so many hands up here.”
Darcy stood her ground. “Where’s Mrs. McKenzie?” she asked.
“Her son came to get her on Monday. They’re going to take care of her at home, he said.” She changed her voice to a stage whisper. “Which is great, in my opinion. She really upset some of the other residents.” She ratcheted her voice back up to normal. “Now, tea?”
When Darcy got back to Hell City, filthy water stood two fingers deep in the alleyway. Whatever drainage the mucky beach provided was not enough, and people were beginning to dam up their shacks with wadded-up trash. The door to Ansel and Sunshine’s shack was undammed, and Darcy could see the bottom of it becoming swollen and waterlogged. Then she opened the door, and someone came running at her through the small room, pink-faced and yelling.
“What the fuck do you want from me?” he shouted, and it took her a moment to realize he was Nathaniel Rosen.
“You came,” Darcy said. “Thank God.”
He was wet to the skin, and shivering with rage, and he smelled like nervous sweat. Sunshine was completely calm, sitting on the yellow cushion, stuffing a dark paste into old Seafiber french fry bags. The paste smelled like fertilizer.
“He’s a little worked up,” Sunshine said. “He’s been waiting for you.”
Nathaniel put his hands on his head and began pacing around the shack. There was no sign of Ansel.
“I knew you were trouble when I saw you,” Nathaniel said. “You move like her, you talk like her. You could’ve worn a gorilla suit and I would’ve known.”
“Like who?” Darcy asked.
“Like Sarah. I told her I wasn’t interested, because I knew something like this would happen. Then you show up, and now they’re following me.”
Darcy looked at Sunshine, who shrugged and went on stuffing bags.
“Wasn’t interested in what?” Darcy asked. “Who are ‘they’?”
He searched her face; even in his panic his eyes were steady and keen.
“She didn’t tell you, did she?”
He sat down on the floor now, kneaded the bridge of his nose.
“My mom?” Darcy said. “Like I told you, she’s gone. I don’t know where she is.”
“Did she tell you anything? About Daniel, the boats, Esther?”
“Nothing,” Darcy said. “I know a little about Daniel, but not from her.”
Sunshine was sitting forward now, listening, her fingers working without her brain.
“Jesus Christ, I barely even know about this, I can’t believe I’m telling you. Ten years ago, your mom comes to me. To my apartment. She makes my wife—I was married then—she makes my wife leave, and she tells me Daniel’s trying to contact us. She says he sent a ship.”
Sunshine put her bag down.
“How did she know?” she asked.
“She said she saw it. She said she saw a ship on the horizon, and she saw the guard boats shoot it down.”
“The first Hawaiian attack,” Darcy said. “Why did she think it was Daniel?”
“That’s what I asked. She said he had some symbol he taught us. I don’t know, I think she’s crazy. I don’t remember any symbol.”
Darcy looked at his bald head then. She looked at his hands now spread out on his thighs. The knuckles were furred with dark brown hair, but the fingers were thin and short, their tips shaped like almonds.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but are you Ruth?”
His look was wry and weary.
“Good catch,” he said. “I was, until about, oh, twenty years ago.”
“You must have had it done illegally,” Sunshine said, “or it’d be on
Tyson’s records.”
Nathaniel turned to her, quick and feline, his anger still warm.
“And who are you exactly?”
Sunshine just smiled her haughty smile.
“I’m nobody,” she said.
It seemed to disarm him.
“I am too,” he said, “or I was.”
“Have you seen my mom since then?” Darcy asked him.
“Three weeks ago,” he said. “After the second attack. She said that was Daniel too. She said that proved they were trying to contact us. She said she’d already sent a message to my sister, to Esther. I said so what and she said don’t you understand, we have to send someone. If we show them we’re listening, maybe they’ll come help us. I said help us what, I have a good job, I have a fine life. Then she started crying and saying how can you not know what it’s like, don’t you look around you, don’t you look around. And I said I don’t know what you’re talking about, and she said my daughter has to work six days a week, she can’t go to school, just so we can live in an apartment instead of a shed.”