America Pacifica

by Anna North

  “I’m Darcy,” she said. “And I’m going to the mainland to see if anyone’s still alive.”

  A new sound came up then, not a bellow but a flurry, a mix of questions and speculation that was almost like excitement. They asked her why she thought people were still alive, and if she had heard of such and such a person, and where on the mainland she was headed, and someone said he had heard of Darcy and were the stories true, but Darcy could feel the flurry beginning to hold her back, and so she told them all, “If I find someone, we’ll send a ship back.”

  As she ran down the alley, she heard them repeating her name.

  Darcy walked through the rest of the day and some of the night. As she passed through Lower Chicagoland the crowds turned from frenetic to weary, their shouting less joyful and more desperate. Children coughed in the smoky air; drunk men vomited on sidewalks strewn with broken glass. She grew exhausted, but the alleyways looked dangerous, exactly where someone would look for her. Finally she found an abandoned deli in Sonoma Hill, completely looted except for a jar of pickled seaweed rolling back and forth along the uneven floor. She unscrewed it and ate the vinegary strands while she looked among the shelves for a good place to sleep. In the back was a storeroom with a broken padlock. She crept inside and leaned against the door to sleep, and dreamt of rain.

  At first she thought the kicks against her back were thunder, and still half-asleep she pressed her palms against her ears, but then she heard a gunshot and drew her own weapon, as fast as if she’d been doing it for years. A man burst in, wild-eyed and shirtless, a smell of smoke and sweat swirling around him. They stared at each other down the barrels of their guns.

  The man spoke first: “Give me your money.”

  She was relieved that he didn’t seem to know who she was. A free agent, then, not someone from the gangs or the guards.

  “I don’t have any,” she lied.

  “You’re lying. Give it to me.”

  “Get out.” Her voice didn’t waver. She was surprised at how angry, how commanding she could sound.

  “I’ll shoot you,” he said. “I will.”

  In those last two words she thought she heard a crack. She pushed on it.

  “Go the fuck ahead,” she told him.

  He faltered then. He didn’t lower his gun but she saw the muscles in his forearms loosen.

  “I need money,” he said. His voice was broken open now; he was almost crying.

  “I can’t help you.” She spoke more softly now but kept her gun trained on him.

  “Please,” he said. “They want a thousand dollars, or they’re going to come and kill me.”

  “Who does?” Darcy asked. She had a hundred dollars from Tyson’s drawer, but she was going to need it later, if not to buy a boat from its owners, then definitely to get enough solvent to cross the ocean.

  “The Kings,” he said. “They think I have money because I had a store. But the looters took everything—there’s nothing left. And nobody will help me.”

  Darcy told herself he might be scamming her, but the fear in his face looked absolutely real. He dropped his gun to his side and looked at her piteously, whatever pride he’d once had shattered at her feet. If she gave him the money he’d be a hundred dollars closer to safety, but she’d be broke on an island poised for civil war, with no way to get where she needed to go.

  “I don’t have any money,” she said slowly. “Please leave me alone.”

  He looked at her and he looked at her gun and she saw his whole body shrink with resentment and resignation.

  “If you’re lying,” he said, “I hope you burn in hell.”

  He said it matter-of-factly, too exhausted from fear even to shout at her, and his words stuck in her brain all the rest of that night and kept her from sleep.

  In the morning of the next day she reached Little Los Angeles. Here the guards seemed less established. She saw a few on Figueroa, trying to subdue a crowd outside Carnicería Ortiz. But on the Avenida no dominance was yet decided—empanada stands lay unused and smelling of stale oil, their operators unsure who to pay off, and Darcy saw the faces of women in high windows, looking for patches of safety on the street below. The street itself was nearly empty—there was nothing left to loot, and all the people who thought themselves weak or vulnerable were waiting to see who they should pay allegiance to. All the people who felt strong were jockeying to earn this allegiance, but not in any organized way. Four men in red bandannas were standing on the corner of Fifteenth Street, watching, posturing, and doing cagey, faux-reluctant drug business with a man in an old-style suit. New gangs were forming—the pharmacy had become a kind of headquarters for a loose band of men in jumpsuits, with guns and self-conscious, hard expressions. Two of them were talking to a woman, at first friendly, then harsh, then coming at her from both sides with short barking shouts and guns raised until she sobbed, and pulled from under her shirt two dented cans of beef food and a log of Sealami.

  Darcy saw all this, the fear of the woman as she left empty-handed and sniffling, and the different but no less potent fear of the men, workers all their lives, suddenly blessed and saddled with strength, and she let it fill her mind and heart until she sweated and shook with the horror of her home laid waste before her, but she did not stop. Instead she crossed Sixteenth Street and passed Mercado Lucky 7—restocked with stolen goods and restaffed with their thieves—and reached her old building, its ground-floor windows broken and its front door staved in. Above the doorway a spray of blue paint read “Guards Die.” A monkey, nervous and patchy-pelted, rolled an empty beef-food can with its hands and licked its metal wall. Darcy paused and was about to keep walking, to let the building molder away in memory. Then she thought of the Animal Atlas. It wouldn’t help her find the mainland—she had better maps already—but it was something of her mother’s, something she could take and hold, and that was enough to make her want it. She turned and entered through the broken door.

  The inside of the building had a new sound. Before the air in the stairwell had been thick with unstanched voices, with the clatter of cheap objects breaking, with the squelch and cry of fighting and fucking, but now a cautious, imperfect quiet hung over the stairs. Darcy heard the arrhythmic patchy popping of sounds emitted and then stifled—a scrabble of feet, something metal against something glass, a baby’s thin chirruping cough. On the wall at the second-floor landing was the word “Catorce,” crossed out and replaced with “Kings.” On the wall on the third floor was a brown stain that looked like blood.

  The door to Darcy’s apartment had been broken down and set back up again, and then sealed into the doorway with several layers of duct tape. Darcy pulled on the knob and the whole door came away with a ripping sound. Feet rushed to the corners of the room. Then someone whispered, “Darcy!”

  Pressed against the wall near the window was Dolores Beltran. Her arm was wrapped in a strip of jumpsuit, blood soaking through. Next to her were Augusta and her baby, a rag in his mouth to keep him from crying. More of Darcy’s neighbors huddled on the bed—Liberty Ramirez and his sister Luz, the Zargaryans from the first floor. And squatting next to the hot plate was Jorge, the landlord, looking haunted and sleepless and confused.

  “You came back,” Dolores said. “Is it true you killed Tyson?”

  “No,” said Darcy. “What are you all doing here?”

  Dolores motioned for Darcy to lower her voice.

  “This is the only building on the block the gangs haven’t taken over yet. Everyone between Sixteenth and Seventeenth tried to pack in here.”

  “So who’s in your apartments?” Darcy asked.

  “We don’t know them,” Dolores said. “They have broken bottles. They made us leave.”

  “Darcy, you have to help,” said Augusta. “Make them give us our apartment back.”

  They were worse off now than they would have been if she had agreed to help Marie. She hadn’t saved her mother, and she had helped drive her neighbors from their homes. Everything she ha
d done seemed worse than a waste. Darcy didn’t see her mother’s book anywhere, and she knew she couldn’t ask for it.

  “I can’t,” Darcy said. “I’m sorry.”

  “We heard you’re in charge now,” said Luz.

  “You have a gun,” said Liberty.

  “The baby needs medicine,” said Dolores.

  And then they were surrounding her, tugging at her clothes, pleading with her, growing increasingly desperate and insistent and angry, and the apartment seemed to shrink around Darcy—a place that had seemed small enough when Darcy was alone and powerless was even tinier now that it was packed full of people who assumed she had power.

  “I babysat you when you were little,” Dolores said.

  “I gave you extra time on your rent,” said Jorge.

  “Just help us get our apartment back,” said Augusta.

  “Just help us get something to eat,” said Liberty.

  Darcy backed toward the door. She felt even weaker now than on the anxious nights she’d spent motherless in this apartment, even more alone. Now more than ever—more than at the wall, where the lame and blind were strangers, more even than in the storeroom with the frightened man—she felt the deep intestinal tug of guilt and duty, and now more than ever she felt the futility of trying to fulfill that duty. She knew she could stay and help them, but she’d have to give up on ever breaking free of the island. And she couldn’t bring herself to stay and fester in the memory of her mother’s death and the slow attrition of Ansel’s ideals. She knew it was selfish—probably she could do something for her neighbors in the short term, and going to the mainland wouldn’t help them for a long time. But still, she wanted them to understand her, to know why she was leaving and what she hoped to find.

  “I’m not in charge,” she said. “The person in charge is named Ansel. He might help you, and he might not. I don’t know. But listen—I’m going to the mainland, to Los Angeles. I think there are still people living there, and if I find them, we’ll send a ship back. But in the meantime, you could go yourself, if you want to. You could get your own ship together. If you don’t like Ansel, if he doesn’t help you, you don’t have to follow him. You can do something else.”

  They looked at her silently, their faces flat. Maybe they understood her, maybe they thought she was insane. Dolores looked at her family, then back at Darcy.

  “Okay,” she said. “Go.”

  Liberty began to protest. The baby began to cry. Augusta said something vehement to her mother in Spanish. Dolores shook her head.

  “No,” she said, and then to Darcy, “you should go. And if you see my husband Cristian on the mainland, you tell him we didn’t forget him.”

  Darcy stood for a moment, trying desperately to think of something she could do for them and still escape. Then she remembered the gun. She was still a couple hours’ walk from the docks, and once she got there, she’d still need to find a boat and learn how to sail it. If she gave the gun up, she’d be defenseless all that time. And if she didn’t, the curse of the man in the storeroom would ring in her brain forever. She drew it out of her pocket, heavy and black, and everyone in the room shrank back against the wall.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Darcy said, holding the gun by its muzzle. “I’m giving it to you.”

  Liberty reached his hand out, recovering quickly, but Darcy didn’t trust him.

  “I’m going to walk out the door,” she said. “And I’m going to leave it in the doorway.”

  She began to back away. They could use the gun to defend themselves, she thought. Maybe they could get their apartments back. She reached the doorway, and bent, still watching them, and laid the gun down on the Seaboard floor with a tiny click, and ran. But before she turned away she saw the look in Liberty’s eyes, the hunger and excitement, and she wondered if she’d done the right thing after all.

  When she reached the ocean it was dusk. The road was deserted; dull orange clouds hung lackluster overhead. The seawall, the barbed wire, the exhausted sky—it looked like a place humans had given up on, a place that had given up on itself. Then she walked through the gate to the docks, and saw the ocean crowded with boats, boats thick as seaweed on the water, and her shriveled heart swelled in her chest, and she charged toward them, barreling through the waves.

  They were burned. Darcy smelled it before she saw it, the horrible briny char of flames slowly snuffed by dirty seawater. Their gas tanks were blown out from the inside, the plastic peeling back like the petals of blackened flowers. The lacquered Seaboard of the hulls was blistered and cracked and crinkled—the sea was seeping in, slowly filling the boats with orange water. The sails hung limp and tattered and black from the masts, like the wings of sickly bats. The Seaguards must have set fire to their boats when they heard about Tyson, though whether from a desire to keep them from Ansel or in a spirit of pure chaos Darcy didn’t know. Out on the horizon, the big guard ships were smoking too.

  Darcy sat in the sand and faced away from the ocean. The solvent in the water had eaten her pant legs threadbare. Halfway up the beach a bony brown dog nosed a pile of fish bones. When it saw Darcy it came toward her with a loping, sidelong gait. She held her hand out; it sniffed at her, tilted its head as though to rub against her open palm, then yipped and took off down the beach.

  She imagined her mother shaking her awake. She imagined her mother’s lips in her ear whispering a song. She imagined her still astonished after all these years, throwing the window open, shouting, “Feel how warm it is!” They would slurp the dregs of a cheese-food can, and Darcy would put on her jumpsuit and her mother would put on her wet suit, and then they would go to work and come home and maybe buy some hot dogs, and maybe some cookies, and draw funny teeth on Tyson in the morning flyer, and go to sleep, and do it all again. They would be hungry, and sweaty, and Darcy would keep wishing they had more money, but at least their life would be whole.

  In her mind, Darcy rolled the days back. The burned boats struggled back out into the water, the black sails whitened, the blown-out gas tanks closed. All the rioters slotted back into their factories, their loot settled back onto the shelves. Tyson’s blood unclotted and he sat upright and began giving orders. The rain re-fell; Darcy’s leg unbroke itself and her heart healed. Her mother unbreathed her last breath.

  Then the islanders piled back into their boats, last ones first, first ones last. They unbuilt the buildings—Manhattanville folded up into neat stacks of scrap, Little Los Angeles melted into a pile of algae and slid into the sea. Finally the founders unpitched their tents, bundled their children up, and unmade their journey.

  Why stop? The co-op uncooperated, the roads reopened, crops came back to life and clouds sucked back their snow. Darcy’s mother crawled back inside her own mother and was unborn. And somewhere in the retreat of time a switch unflipped, a lamp unlit, a brain went blank, and the whole inevitable slide of the world ceased to be inevitable, so that if time were to start moving forward from that spot, everything would turn out different, fire instead of ice, or plague instead of fire, or somehow, if the clock were stopped and started again just right, the accident of a smooth, safe journey, a straight path to a good place, a present innocent of all possible mistakes. Darcy could not imagine that present, could see only a cool room with books, a hobbyhorse, a rocking chair, someone else’s vision, but she knew it existed somewhere in the tree of possible lives, and she ached for it, as for a half-remembered dream.

  She stood. The dog was gone. The dark was falling. A bird circled worriedly overhead. Far away on the ocean she could see something white. As it came closer it took on a triangular shape, swelling out away from the wind: a sail. When the sail was the size of a postcard on the sea she saw that it was blank, and when it was the size of a T-shirt she saw three small figures standing in the bow, and when it was the size of a sail the figures jumped out onto the dock and tied the boat up to a cleat.

  Darcy ran over. One of the figures was a girl, eleven or twelve years old, with long lank sun-f
ried hair pushed behind her ears and a watchful brown pointed face like a cat’s. The other two were boys—one maybe ten years old, with black hair and a cut beneath his eye, and the other, possibly his brother, younger-looking, but with a much older person’s stillness about the eyes and spine. The girl reached into the stern of the boat, pulled out a net with a meager catch of fish inside, and peered at it with a critical eye.

  “Is this your boat?” Darcy called to them from the end of the dock.

  The girl startled badly and whipped the net behind her back.

  “Yeah,” she said, “why?”

  Darcy walked up the dock; the children eyed her ruined pant legs with mistrust.

  “Okay, listen,” she said, “I know someone who can help us. Someone who can help everybody on the island. But I need a boat to reach him. Do you think I could borrow this one?”

  The boy with the cut looked at Darcy like she was crazy.

  “No way,” he said. “It’s ours now. We found it, and we need it for fishing.”

  “Can I talk to your mom?” Darcy asked.

  “We don’t have a mom,” the girl said, and her flat eyes hurt Darcy’s heart. The smaller boy looked away down the beach.

  “Can I talk to your dad then?”

  The boy with the cut pushed his hair out of his face. No one had cut it in a long time. The cut looked like it might be infected.

  “We don’t have a mom, and we don’t have a dad,” he said to her, in a voice that sounded like he was getting used to commanding. “This is our boat, and you can’t have it. Now quit fucking with us before we kick your ass.”

  Darcy wished she still had the gun. Then she reproached herself. Would she really have threatened children? She had no idea how to talk to them. Her mother had never talked to her the way adults were supposed to talk to children, so that they listened to you and did what you said. She turned away from them, toward the interior of the island. All the smoke from all the fires swirled from the edges of the island into a single plume at its center, like a black funnel turned upside down. The air was thick with half-burned flecks of plastic and Seaboard—it had a burning, chemical sweetness. The roar of the looters and the looted sounded mechanical now, like traffic, like the engine of an enormous, self-operating machine. Darcy turned back to the children.