by Anna North
“Do you know what’s happening?” she asked them.
The girl looked withdrawn and upset. The boy with the cut put on a sardonic expression, but he didn’t answer. The smaller boy rubbed the soot out of his eyes.
“Someone told us Tyson was dead,” he said.
“He isn’t dead,” Darcy said. “But he might as well be. What else did they tell you?”
The girl spoke up. “They’re saying someone named Darcy killed him, and she’s a last-boater, and she’s going to put all last-boaters in charge.”
Darcy shook her head. “I’m Darcy, and I didn’t kill anyone, and I’m not going to put anyone in charge.”
“You’re Darcy?” the smaller boy asked, his eyes wide with fear and fascination. “Is it true you broke into the Pacifica Bank and stole all the money?”
The girl’s voice was more cautious but no less curious. “Are you really going to buy everyone in Hell City a house?”
Darcy started to answer, but the boy with the cut interrupted. “I don’t believe you’re really her,” he said.
The girl shot him an annoyed look.
“Think about it,” he said. “Why would she be here with us? Why wouldn’t she be in the Northern Zone, eating steak and celebrating? That’s what I’d do.”
The girl’s face clouded.
“Can you prove that you’re her?” she asked.
Darcy almost laughed. The idea that her identity was now valuable enough to be doubted was hilarious. Instead she said, “I don’t think there’s anything to celebrate yet. The people in charge now might be just as bad as Tyson, and everybody might be just as bad until we start doing things differently.”
The boy with the cut rolled his eyes, but the girl knit her brows together.
“What do you mean, ‘differently’?” she asked.
“I need to ask someone on the mainland about that,” Darcy told her. “But probably no more refineries. No more cars. No more steak, no more strawberries, no more apples. No more trying to make the island like the mainland used to be.”
“What’s an apple?” the smaller boy asked.
The children were skinny in a stringy, stray-dog sort of way. Their faces had the ashy, grayish cast that Darcy’s used to get at the end of the month when she and her mother ran out of food money. They were staring hungrily at the fish in the net. These were children who had never had electricity. They had never been in a car—they probably took the bus only a few times a year. They had never seen a strawberry. If anyone could give up the island way of life for a new one, it would be these kids, who had never tasted its benefits.
“It’s a fruit,” Darcy said. “Like fruit snacks.”
The boy with the cut stood up. All his movements were tense and guarded, like he was used to watching his back.
“Whatever,” he said. “We’ve got to eat now.”
The girl turned to Darcy. “You can eat with us, if you want.”
They made a fire on the beach out of pieces of ruined boat and some old Seaboard milk containers they found lying in the sand. The smoke rose up, smelling of sick sea, and joined the great cone above the island. It was dark now, and the greenish flames cast shadows on the children’s faces, making them look like tiny old people. The girl cooked the fish on an old oar—she had to keep pulling it out of the fire to keep it from catching. The fish were bony and undercooked and tasted like solvent, but Darcy hadn’t eaten all day and so she licked the pale meat from the spine, crunched on charred skin. When each of them had eaten a fish there was one left, and Darcy lied and said she wasn’t hungry anymore. The girl divided it in three with her fingers and the children each gulped their pieces down quickly, like seagulls.
When the fire was out, Darcy started making a place in the sand to sleep. The smaller boy watched her for a moment, then said, “You should stay with us.”
“We don’t have room,” said the other boy.
“Yes, we do,” said the smaller boy, “if you don’t move around so much.”
“I don’t move around.”
“You do. You’re always yelling and throwing your arms and legs around like you’re fighting.”
“How do you know? You’re sleeping.”
“Sometimes you wake me up.”
“Okay,” said the girl, silencing them. “There’s room. She can stay.”
They had a few garbage bags stretched between oars dug into the sand. Underneath was a nest of old jumpsuits and Seafiber bags and a torn blanket with monkeys on it. The smaller boy crawled into the center and fell asleep quickly. The boy with the cut lay down next to him and closed his eyes. Darcy lay at the edge of the nest, her body straight so as not to crowd the boys. The girl took her place on the western side, so that anyone coming from the center of the island would have to go through her first.
Sometime at the night’s gray tail end Darcy woke up. The boy with the cut was making a high-pitched keening cry in his sleep, a terrible half-animal noise. The smaller boy was sleeping soundly. Darcy didn’t see the girl. She got up and walked out onto the beach. The girl was sitting in the sand, facing away from the surf. The smoke plume showed up harsh black against the lightening sky.
“You couldn’t sleep?” Darcy asked.
The girl’s face was pinched and drawn inward on itself. She looked at Darcy like she was trying not to speak, and then she spoke anyway.
“I’m scared,” she said.
Darcy sat down next to her.
“What are you scared of ?” she asked.
“A week ago we were so hungry we were eating Seafiber. Now we have the boat, so we have fish every night. But pretty soon someone else is going to want it, and they’re not going to ask like you did. And we’re not going to be able to fight them off.”
The girl sat with her hands wrapped around her knees, the habits of her body already hardened into a defensive crouch. Darcy imagined her scavenging along the alleys of her Hell City life, her brain and legs traveling a fixed path from one crisis to the next and the next and the next. She felt a pang of sympathy so strong she almost reached out and touched her. Instead she said, “I know people who can help you. Get to the Northern Zone, find Esther and Nathaniel Rosen. If you tell them I sent you, they’ll keep you safe.”
The girl looked up at her with hope, and then with suspicion.
“How do I know you won’t screw us?” she said. “I’m still not sure you’re really Darcy.”
Darcy looked out at the ocean. A rim of light was riding the horizon.
“Did they tell you anything else about me?” she asked.
“They said Darcy was six feet tall, and you’re not. They said she had a big gun, and you don’t have a gun. They said she walked with a limp.”
The girl paused, remembering. Darcy’s limp was better, but it must still be noticeable. She rolled up her pant leg to expose her ankle.
“Feel,” she said.
The girl reached out a tentative hand, pulled it back, and reached out again. She ran her fingers along Darcy’s calf, and when she reached the lump above the ankle, her eyes locked with Darcy’s.
“Did you get shot there?” she asked.
“No,” Darcy said. “I broke it running away from a bear. You can’t believe everything you hear, but the limp part’s true.”
The girl was silent, considering.
“Listen,” Darcy went on. “You don’t have to believe me. But if you don’t, and you just stay here, you’re screwed sooner or later anyway. You know that much already.”
The girl looked at the sleeping boys and then back at Darcy. Her eyes were very tired but there was resignation in them, and something like relief.
“Do you know how to sail?” she asked.
Darcy and the children went fishing the next morning, and the girl taught her how to hoist the mainsail and raise the jib, and then how to reach and how to run with the wind, and at first Darcy was clumsy and the boat slowed and slid sideways on the sea, and the boy with the cut complained and said she’d n
ever get it, but after two days of sailing she began to understand the boat with her body, and they sailed and caught jellyfish, and that night they put several of the jellyfish on the garbage-bag roof to dry so that Darcy could take them with her.
When she had been with them three days, Darcy and the smaller boy went to Hell City and bought fresh water and solvent from a looter who had set up shop outside the Boat. With what little was left of her money, she bought the children some bread and cheese food, and that night instead of fish they had sandwiches. And when she had been living on the beach a week, Darcy went out in the boat by herself and came back with a big haul of jellyfish and a sunburn on her cheeks and a feeling of the beginning of something new. At night she practiced using the sextant, and she read Kon-Tiki to the children, and studied her atlas, and sometimes she told stories about her mother and about Daniel and about the mainland.
But she didn’t sleep. The sounds from the rest of the island swelled and slackened—one day it was calm and the smoke seemed to thin and Darcy wondered if Ansel had made peace after all, and the next night the air filled back up with screaming, and a kind of fast, percussive music Darcy had never heard before, and the noxious smell of burning. Sometimes late at night Darcy listened to the mingled din and wondered what part of it came from the Northern Zone, what part from the wall, what part from the compound itself. She wondered if the crowd had ever breached the wall, if the guards inside would be able to fight them off, if Ansel was even still alive. She thought that he was, that probably he would find a way to survive even a direct assault, and she realized this made her glad.
Once Darcy woke from a shallow doze to gunshots so close she ran outside and buried the solvent tanks beneath a layer of sand. No thieves came to the beach that night, but she knew that every hour she spent there made Glock or the gangs or some rebel guards more likely to find her, and to find the children too, and so she made them stay out all day on the water teaching her, until all their arms were rubbery with fatigue and their eyesight blurred from staring at the waves. After a week and a half, when Darcy had learned to maneuver the boat under both wind and solvent power, and they had loaded up the boat with jellyfish and water and solvent and the monkey blanket from their nest, Darcy said good-bye to them on the sand. The boy with the cut still looked distrustful, but there was a brittle hope in the girl’s cautious face, and Darcy bent to them and told them, “When you meet people who talk about me, tell them you knew me. And tell them I’ve gone to the mainland to get help, and that I’m coming back.”
14
On the first day the wind was good and she was not afraid. She didn’t watch the island as she sailed away; instead she watched the ocean roll forward at her from the horizon, in puckers and eddies and wavelets, not choppy, not still, but each second yielding up a new shape and shade, offering to wipe her mind clean with its green movements. She learned how to feel the direction of the wind in her ears. She turned the sails and tacked windward. She saw how this could become her life, how she could forget she had ever not been on the ocean.
Then she was turning to adjust the mainsail, and she saw the island, the smallest possible glimpse of the island before it passed beyond the range of sight, a brownish patch with smoke coming up, and then a spot so small it was like a bug, a little hairy bug clinging to the horizon. And as she watched, suddenly transfixed, letting the sail go momentarily slack in her hand, it winked out and was gone. And only then did she feel despair like nails driving down into her chest, and she crumpled down into the damp briny space at the bottom of the boat, and she let the boat drift, or rather she forgot that there was a boat, or that she was responsible for it, and she mourned. First she mourned the things she had hated and feared—the sight of a rat creeping across the floor at night or stopping to sniff and leave its fur or shit or the filthy memory of its presence on the only clean shirt she had, the feeling of hunger when they had no food in the fridge, the acrid grating jealousy of seeing someone on the street casually eating something she couldn’t afford—an ice cream cone with real chocolate chips, a chicken kebab, a purple smoothie made with berries. A man looking down at her mother as he hitched up his pants. Glock holding his penis in his hand for a moment before putting it inside her. The feeling of being alone in her apartment with nothing to do but think of how alone she was. The smell of rotting jellyfish. The sidewalk melting in the rain. Soot settling on the windowsills when the factory was burning old Seafiber. Monkeys laughing in a dark alley. Mold. The feeling that, no matter how much she hated the island, she could never get away.
Then she mourned the things that were both sweet and ugly, and the ugly things that memory made sweet—the beginning of monsoon season, when a beautiful shining sheet of rainwater would fall down on the island, and stir up all the shit smells, and rot the ceiling out. The first sickening whiff of solvent from a jar, and the way it seemed to tip the world a few degrees off plumb. The number 9 bus back from World Experiences, full of people she saw every day but hardly ever spoke to. The smooth taut scar at Ansel’s elbow. Falling asleep face-to-face with her mother and waking up six hours later, still smelling her skin, still breathing her breath, still exhausted, as though no time at all had passed.
And finally, when she had been through all the things that were safer and less dear, she mourned the things she had loved without reservation. She mourned the part of the morning just before the alarm went off, when the air was cool and the sky was gray and she didn’t have to be anywhere. She mourned the salty oil slick of cheese food on her tongue when she hadn’t eaten all day, and the smell of the churro stand on the Avenida, and mangoes, and the sweet forbidden tang of anything stolen. She mourned the day she got drunk on the unrestricted beach and felt for the one and only time in her whole life that she and the mass of people who lived with her on the island were connected, that when they knocked against her and jostled her and fought her for space on the sand or the last shaved ice from the shaved-ice man, they were actually communicating, in some language that neither they nor she fully understood but that would become clear some day, reveal itself in terms so simple and true and obvious that she would smack her forehead and say she should have known it all along. And she mourned her mother, or not her mother exactly but all the things on the island that carried her memory, that made plain her absence, the hole shaped like her mother in the left-behind world.
And as she knelt in the bottom of the boat, remembering the line of rock dolls under the window, and the imprint in the bed, and the divers coming out of the water, black-suited, slick as seals, and the little girl in Yuka’s memory, and the young woman in Nathaniel’s, and her own jealousy that these memories could only be stories to her, that she would never know those parts of her mother with her own mind, the sky began to purple, and the wind began to rise, and the boat kicked and made her remember it again, so that she turned the sail and steered the keel through the growing waves with the setting sun behind her.
When it was night, the stars shocked her. She was unprepared for their density, for their number, for the way they crowded so close together that they seemed to form a substance, like the speckled skin of an enormous animal that rounded its belly over her. The fact of a universe outside the island was so suddenly and powerfully before her that she hid from it. She furled the sails and pulled her blanket over her head and pretended that she was back in the apartment again, and that all that mourning had been only a game.
On the second day the wind was still good, and Darcy felt listless and empty, like the ocean had passed through her instead of around her and washed all the sugar out of her blood. Dealing with the sail made her arms sore and her whole body exhausted in a way she’d never known. She thought of her mother dropping limp onto the bed after a day of diving, her mouth loose around her words. She was out of tears, and remembering her mother just made her feel soft and porous all over, like the mast could pass right through her hand.
She ate two of the jellyfish without tasting them and drank some of
the water. The ocean was greenish and opaque. Near nightfall she saw a seagull and realized it was the only living thing she had seen all day.
On the third day the wind died down and she had to use the motor. The boat ran slowly against the waves, like someone struggling uphill. The smell of burning solvent in the air was familiar and comforting. The air was cool. It dried the sweat under her arms and made her feel new and clean and awake. For a long time she sat in the bow and let the air float around her. She had never felt so cool outside an air-conditioned room. It seemed impossible that the inhuman world could provide such comfort. The whole ocean was like a cool clean room where she could lie down, just what she had always wanted.
On the fourth day the wind picked up again, and she could turn the motor off, but the air had a rancid smell and she had to hold a jellyfish up to her face to mask it. Every few hours she saw things floating on the water, fibrous wads and purplish, rough-edged chunks.
On the fifth day she began to talk to herself, little comforting words and bits of the old songs.
On the sixth day she saw a storm. It was a brownish spot like a sore on the edge of the sea. She steered away from it. She sang, Have you heard the tale of sweet Betsy from Pike?
She sang, Michael, row the boat ashore.
She got the boat so it was pointing into clear sea, and for the first time in two days the air was clean and had a sweet smell, almost like flowers, and then the rain was all around her like a panic, so constant and inescapable that it might as well have been inside her, and the sky was pus-yellow and then green and then black, and then a strange color that was so dark and changeable and difficult for her brain to describe that it seemed monstrous, as though the benign animal of the starry sky had been devoured by something terrible from outside the universe, or below it, and that thing was now roiling her around in its raw gullet, drenching her with its spit.