by Anna North
Sunshine smirked at that, but still she bent her head in close attention and didn’t pick up her paste or her bags. Darcy thought of her mother crying. The thought made her want to break something. She almost never cried. Or she did, but not over anything real. She cried immoderately whenever she stubbed her toe on the hot plate or the corner of the mattress, or when she had cramps on the first day of her period, or when the Seacafé was too hot and burned her tongue. But she didn’t cry when her hours were cut, or when Darcy’s pay got docked, or when they didn’t have enough money to eat the last few days of the month, or any of the times when, it seemed to Darcy now, it would have made sense to break down. Instead those were the times when she was most childlike, when they stayed up all night and drew on each other’s skin and acted like they were both little girls hiding from some oppressive and rule-bound mother. Had that been put on, Darcy wondered, that part of her that seemed oldest and truest and most their own? Were there other people who watched her cry out sorrows she hid from Darcy? The other divers? The people on the bus in the mornings? Darcy wanted to find all of them, to somehow extort from them the scenes she should have witnessed.
“Anyway she was just bawling, she was making a scene, and of course with the crackdown I didn’t want any trouble. So I told her she had to go.”
Darcy felt a pang of anger that anyone, offered an extra moment with her mother, would refuse it.
“You threw her out?”
His eyes went narrow, his nostrils pinched. This was a new, cool kind of anger.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m not the kind of person who asks for pity. But I haven’t had a particularly easy life, I’ve worked hard, and I want to hold on to what I have. Not that that looks like much of a possibility now.”
“Because the guards came for you?” Sunshine asked.
“Not the regular guards. Tyson’s personal force—a man and a woman in those gray uniforms. The first time was a week after I saw Sarah. They were looking for Ruth then. I keep that part of my life pretty secret, so I didn’t tell them anything. But they poked around a lot, asked about my ex-wife, looked in my bedroom. They kept saying they were ‘special detectives.’ Anyway, for a couple days I was spooked. But they didn’t come back—until you came to see me. Today I came home from work and they were at my apartment. Luckily I happened to run into my neighbor in the lobby. She wanted to know what the guards were doing there. I didn’t answer. I just ran.”
“If they showed up at his place right after you did,” Sunshine said to Darcy, “they’re probably following you.”
“That’s what I assumed,” said Nathaniel, “but I also assumed you’d be in on whatever your mom was doing, and you aren’t. So I really don’t know what you’re planning, but I had a job and an apartment and now I’m on the run, and you’d better fix it.”
“I’m just looking for my mom,” Darcy said, “who disappeared, along with your sister, or don’t you care about that?”
“You don’t know anything about my sister,” he said.
Footfalls sloshed outside the shack, and Ansel walked in the door.
“Who are you?” Nathaniel asked.
“I am the King of the One-Armed Men,” Ansel said, “and the Duke of Hell City. Who are you?”
“I used to be the assistant vice president of marketing at GreenValley,” said Nathaniel, “and now I’m a pathetic fugitive.”
Ansel was smiling, and his body was full of energy. His eyes were slightly wild.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you know this guy who likes to wear a red tie? Hangs out in casinos?”
“No,” said Nathaniel, his voice snide. “Do you know someone who can get the guards off my trail and get me my job back?”
“Possibly,” Ansel said. “Give me some time.”
Darcy had no patience for Ansel’s bluffs now. She had no patience for Nathaniel either. He might have lost the job that kept him in fresh tomatoes and an air-conditioned apartment, but she had lost the only person in the world who really cared about her. She thought of the guards in the gray uniforms. They were after Nathaniel, and they might well have taken Yuka too—she had never mentioned a son to Darcy. If the guards were following her, they’d eventually find her here. And when they found her, they would either kill her or they would take her to the same place they’d taken her mother.
She stood up.
“Okay,” she said again. “Fuck this. Somebody’s following me, and whoever’s following me has my mom. So I’m gonna go outside and stand around until they get me. You guys do what you want.”
“Fine,” said Nathaniel.
“You can’t,” said Ansel.
Sunshine was silent for a moment. Then she put a final scoop of paste into one of her bags and tied it off.
“That’s a good idea,” she said. “But you should wait until we have a plan.”
The room seemed to organize itself along new and sharper lines. Some of the rage went out of Nathaniel’s face. Ansel whispered to Sunshine and Sunshine shook her head.
“No, look,” she said, “it’s smart. She’s the one they want, let her get inside. She can find out what we want to know, and then we’ll get her out again.”
Ansel looked at Sunshine. Sunshine’s face was like Marcelle’s in its stillness and authority. Darcy was jealous of her calm, and she wondered again what was in her mind.
“Okay,” Darcy said. “I’ll wait. But it can’t be long.”
“Don’t worry,” said Sunshine, “it won’t be.”
8
Darcy hadn’t left the shack in two days. Sunshine had given her a bucket to piss in so she wouldn’t have to go to the pay toilet down by the Boat; when Darcy protested, Sunshine just laughed.
“We do this all the time,” she said, “and we haven’t died of embarrassment yet.”
Darcy rolled her eyes.
“I know you think you’re better,” Sunshine said, “because you’re not last-boat, and because your building had running water or whatever the fuck. But let me tell you, nobody with any real money could tell the difference between you and me.”
She turned to Nathaniel, her face calm but her eyes shining.
“Isn’t that right?” she asked him.
“It’s not like that,” he said, but Darcy knew it was.
The first night Ansel had gone out to recruit help. But he had come home alone, spread the map out on the floor, and then pounded his fist down on it so hard that the grill fell over on its side and even Sunshine looked alarmed. She had knelt to him then, and whispered something Darcy couldn’t hear, and Ansel had pounded his fist again and shouted, “No! I’m going to do this. I have to.”
She didn’t like the way he sounded, both petulant and driven. He reminded her of Glock for a moment, of a child grabbing for what he wanted, and she wondered what would happen if he ever got it. She let him calm down for a few minutes, and then she asked him, “What happens if you actually get rid of Tyson?”
He didn’t look up from his map, on which he was now scribbling with a blinkered intensity.
“There’s no if,” he said.
“Fine, when.”
“Then we’ll have elections for new leaders.”
“Real elections?” Darcy asked. “Because the Board elections are fake, you know.”
“Of course I know. We’ll have free elections, and instead of a Board we’ll have a council, with representatives from all the different workers’ groups—the divers, the refineries, the factories, the service sector.”
He was looking at her now, and gesturing, as though she had jolted him back into oratory mode.
“And instead of the council making all the decisions, like the Board does, there’ll be a referendum system, and everyone on the island will get to vote. And we’ll institute a progressive income tax, and get rid of the subsidies, and we’ll redeploy all the guards to rebuild the cave-ins, at reduced pay.”
Darcy was about to ask about the Seaguards, about defense against the Hawaiians, but if he
r mother was right the Hawaiians had never attacked at all. All those sirens and flyers, all those taxes, for nothing. She wondered if it was possible.
“You sound like you’ve thought about this a lot,” she said.
Ansel made a flourish with his good hand, and seemed cheerful again.
“I think about nothing else,” he said.
She was reassured, but the next night he was gone again, and so was Sunshine, and Darcy sat in the shack with Nathaniel and felt as hopeless as ever. She had unwrapped the filthy gauze from her bad leg, and now she rolled her jumpsuit up to stare at the skin. It was the right color again, but still as tender to the touch as a new bruise, and when she stood on it wrong it sent a cold shock all the way up her back. She walked with a limp. Of course, now she had nowhere to walk to.
Outside, it was raining so hard that the street had become a rushing brown river, carrying flotillas of candy wrappers, cheese-food cans, cigarette butts, and shit, along with the occasional dead rat or living, thrashing dog. Nathaniel crouched on the yellow cushion, his discomfort palpable. He had refused to eat anything Sunshine cooked, saying he had allergies, until the previous night when he had wolfed down a grilled jellyfish and then pretended to be asleep so that no one could talk to him. Now something particularly noxious washed by outside, filling the shack with a fetid smell.
“Somebody should teach these people about hygiene,” he said.
Before she’d wanted to stand apart from Hell City and its inhabitants, but now Darcy felt insulted on their behalf. She had known hardship, and she could complain if she wanted to. He could not.
“If this is the worst thing you’ve ever smelled,” she told him, “you’re in for a treat.”
Nathaniel shook his head.
“You all think I’ve had an easy life, don’t you?” he said.
“Look,” Darcy said, “you were cooking with fresh tomatoes when I met you. I’d have to work for a month to buy a fresh tomato.”
Nathaniel looked out the plastic-bag window.
“My ex-wife was a schoolteacher,” he said. “Not in our neighborhood—in Lower Chicagoland. A real bleeding heart. I went down there to talk to the kids once. They were all fighting and throwing things; one of them had a solvent bag right there at his desk. And I told them they too could be an assistant vice president at GreenValley Foods someday, if they just worked really hard and wanted it bad enough.”
Darcy raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, and?”
“And it wasn’t true. Maybe for some people, but not for me. Hard work alone wouldn’t have got me where I was.”
“So what did you do?” Darcy asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s not that interesting.”
But he looked at her, and she saw the same desire she’d seen in Armin and Yuka, the hunger for someone safe to tell a secret to. She remembered what the nun had said about voiceless people, and she wondered how many more the island held, how many kept quiet out of fear or isolation or the sheer apathy that came from grinding every day against so many strangers’ lives. Darcy gestured around her at the yellow cushion, the grill, the warped Seaboard walls.
“Neither is this,” she said.
“I don’t know if you know this,” he said, “but it was really hard for the orphans. We didn’t understand what was happening to us. They gave us a choice, you know. The grown-ups sat us all down on the rug in the co-op and they said we were our own people, we could choose to stay or go. But we were just kids; we didn’t know anything. When they said who wants to go we all raised our little hands.
“And then we were here, and it was all different—the heat, the ocean. At the beginning they hadn’t figured out anything—we were eating mussels in poison month and Cricket Thomson almost died. No one was watching us. They were busy building the new world for us, they said. And they kept telling us we’d be in charge someday. The leaders of tomorrow, they kept saying.
“And then we got older, and somehow none of that ever happened. The older kids, eighteen, nineteen, were trying to get jobs, but not a single one could get a good company job, and, I mean, GreenValley only had about thirty employees at this point. It didn’t make sense, unless they were trying not to hire us.
“I started hearing about it from the other orphans, that we were blackballed. That it came from the top, from Tyson. He couldn’t trust our loyalty, because of something about Daniel. The others got angry, but I didn’t really remember Daniel—I was just confused.
“One thing I did know was I wasn’t a girl—once a plastic surgeon came in with the influx, that decision was easy. Of course, there were a few complications.”
“Like what?” Darcy asked.
“Well, I heard about the doctor from a friend of mine,” said Nathaniel, “someone I used to know when I was still hanging out with Sarah. Back then I used to go to the gay bars, these tiny little places hidden in the new office buildings and whatever. It was kind of a beautiful time, in a way—there was an excitement in that stolen space, and we all knew it would be gone soon because the offices would fill up, so we had to get in all our fun before that happened. And we had that feeling of having survived something terrible, like when you cry for a long time and then you feel euphoric after. Anyway, during the influx I heard about this guy. He was a plastic surgeon, and on the mainland he had mostly been cutting off frostbitten toes and straightening out kids with rickets, but now he was claiming he could do a sex change.
“There were so many people like that then—it’s almost funny now. The construction workers who said they were architects, the students who set themselves up as lawyers. One guy was the head of the bank for a little while, and then they found that he couldn’t read. And of course you could ask someone for their qualifications, but there was no way of checking anything. Still, I wanted this so bad, I would’ve gone to almost anybody. I had this image in my head, this muscleman. You remember Arnold Schwarzenegger? That’s who I wanted to look like.
“Anyway, the surgeon was in a part of Chicagoland that was still tents—a tent for the dentist and a tent for the pawnshop and a tent for this guy. It was really hot in there, and instead of having all his instruments laid out in a tray, he just had this box, like a tool chest only less organized. There was a tarp down instead of a floor and at the corner of the tent the grass was peeking through. I had to borrow a bunch of money because he only took cash, and after I gave it to him he said back on the mainland he used to do this with stem cells, but we were going to do it the old-fashioned way. I asked what that was and he said he was going to take a piece of my thigh and attach it to my vulva with a hole in the middle so I could pee. He said it would look weird at first, but the testosterone would make it look better. He said that and the breast removal together would take six hours, and then he gave me a shot of solvent and I was gone.
“After he was done I felt good. It hurt, but he gave me some painkillers, and I bought testosterone from this other guy, who had a pharmacy that was half fresh stuff and half stuff he’d hoarded on the mainland, and every time I gave myself a shot I felt like I was becoming a man. I was only twenty years old. When it was time to take off the bandages, I was freaked out at first—it didn’t look like a penis; it looked more like a slug, but after a day or so I kind of liked it, I started to feel like it was me.
“The next day the pain started. It was like someone stuck a drill into my leg and turned it on. And my whole right thigh started to swell and get red and hard, like there was a bowling ball in there. I dragged myself down to Chicagoland—I remember there was just this one bus that went there then, and I was waiting for it in the hot sun and I felt like I was rotting from the inside—and when I got there he was gone. His instruments and the operating table were still there but he was nowhere. So I got back on the bus, but this time I passed out from the pain and some old ladies took me to the charity hospital. I was there three days, and one of the days they ran out of painkillers. I was just screaming all day long—everybody
was screaming, it was a horrible place—and then finally on the fourth day I was sort of coming back to my senses and they told me that I’d had blood poisoning, probably because of poorly cleaned instruments, and that they had to remove six inches of flesh from my thigh and some of my abdominal muscle, and I was lucky I got there when I did or I might have lost the whole leg or died. They didn’t have to take the penis though. I was happy about that.”
Darcy thought about her leg. She reached down and pressed the ankle and felt the pain come up like an answer. She wondered if it would ever stop hurting. By the time she could get to a hospital, would they have to cut it off?
“Does it still hurt?” she asked cautiously.
“Not really. I can’t run very well, and I have a huge scar from my crotch all the way to my knee, and this funny-looking dent in my stomach that never went away. And I never became a muscleman. But the penis did get a little better—it still looks weird but I can have sex, or at least I could before I was divorced.
“And of course I became a different person. Nathaniel. I’d always liked the name. And once I had it I realized what I could do. I could just start cutting ties with people. Cricket was working construction, building those factories they said we’d be running, and your mom was living in a squat—none of them was going anywhere in life.”
“My mom lived in a squat?” Darcy asked.
He smiled a little.
“Oh yeah, she was like a hippie queen. She lived with twenty other people in this unfinished building, this place in Founders’ Village that they tried to build before they really got Seaboard right. They were always stepping through the floor. They used to all sit in a circle and she’d teach them songs.”
Darcy tried to imagine her mother surrounded by friends and worshippers. Her mother who always seemed so alone when she came in wearing her wet diving suit, like she’d just come back from an expedition to the moon.
“What were her friends like?” she asked.
“I didn’t know them very well,” he said. “None of them had jobs. They got all their food from dumpsters—your mom weighed about ninety pounds. They were always getting parrot fever, and they never had medicine. At least two of them died.”