“Not your wife, I meant Madeinusa.”
“She could be swimming.”
“She hardly knew how to walk. And she couldn’t dance. How is she going to know how to swim?”
Hopper tore the wrapper off one of the power bars, chewing slowly while he played with the toggle on the zipper of the bag.
“Are you afraid to open the bag?” asked his Silent Voice.
“You’re talking too much.”
“Are you afraid to open the bag? You shouldn’t be.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“What are you? You’re something, otherwise you’d just open the bag and see the thing that pulled you across the desert.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“That’s not possible.”
All the life he really knew for certain had been focused on finding this bag and when he pulled the zipper open, he would no longer be living in anticipation. Everything that still compelled him to seek an answer would be pushed aside by whatever reality demanded of his present attention. He would need something new. Changed desire. Changed motive.
He pulled the zipper slowly. A beach towel was rolled tightly and held in place by a leather belt. Something round and hard was tucked deeply in the bundle. Under the towel was a pistol.
He left the gun in the bag, and loosened the leather belt. With the belt off, the roll released. Inside the beach towel he found a child’s bones, a small skull, ribs, hands, hip. A gold ring was pinned to a small pink satin ball gown with short sleeves and puffy shoulders. Inside the dress was a letter and a photograph, both of them burned:
Darling,
She’s dead. I’m sorry. We tried. All of the children died. I’m sorry. I buried her here because they’re outside now burning the bodies and I don’t want to throw her into a fire with other bodies. But you’re here now, you’re reading this, you remember.
Say no more. When you see me, don’t say, “I’m sorry.” You don’t have to. I’m already forgetting what happened. I wrote it down but I forget where I put the paper.
Find me even if I forget you and I won’t forget you. Because if you are reading this, then you remember.
And if anyone else is reading this, please, please, I ask you to put this back where you found it.
Remember mercy?
Love, all love,
Robin
The photograph showed a little girl held in the arms of a man. Her face blocked his. She was in the pink ball gown. The other half of the picture was lost to the fire, except for a woman’s left arm, reaching around the little girl, right over the girl’s left shoulder. The woman was wearing a wedding ring.
“That’s her,” said his Silent Voice. “You found her. Very good. We have to leave now. I know where to go next.”
Hopper took the ring off the pin. It fit the small finger on his left hand.
Chief, Go Bruins, Pippi, Shannon, Erin
Chief gave Shannon the front passenger seat of the Hummer and sat behind her with Erin, who would know from his silence to leave him alone. When the Fence gates closed behind them and he was on the road back to Center Camp, Chief wanted to reorganize his life and the life of the world he ruled so that he could keep a promise to himself never to leave the Fence again, never to be stupid about anything ever again, starting with the stupidity of caring for the Second Wave and the Drifters. The fever, he had allowed the fever of the big Burn to infect his brain. Maybe I have an NK3 relapse, he worried. Maybe it’s a mutation of the mutation—the slow-acting, slow-onset stupidity of leadership.
Back at Center Camp, Erin kissed Chief’s hand. “This is the hand that hit me,” she said. “And what makes me happy is that I was mad at you and you let me be mad at you, so I can’t complain about the pain. Shannon, can I complain about the pain?”
“You can complain about anything.”
“When you say ‘you,’ do you mean me myself or do you mean ‘you’ in a general way?”
“Yes.”
Chief left the car at Erin’s and walked up the hill to his palace. It probably wasn’t healthy to force his lungs to work harder with the air so dirty, but he welcomed the ordeal as punishment.
He found Pippi in the kitchen, making tea for him.
“It’s called Throat Coat. We don’t have much left and I asked Vayler to find some. He promised there’s more out there and he’d save it all for me.”
“Thank you.”
“The jet,” she said. “That was exciting.”
“I’m glad you were here. It might have crashed on us.”
“Aren’t we happy it didn’t?”
Eckmann, LAX Crew
Singapore Airlines Flight 1 was climbing through the darkness above the San Gabriel Mountains when it started to bounce like a car on a cracked highway. The shaking started without warning and increased. Eckmann screamed at Franz: “Stop doing that! Why is it doing that? Why is the plane bumping on the road? I don’t see the road. I don’t see the bumps! Make it stop!” Nothing on the gauges indicated a problem with any of the systems.
Franz didn’t want to tell Eckmann that he didn’t know what he had done wrong, because the plane was on autopilot. Spig Wead looked through the manuals for a remedy to the problem. “Maybe we hit a cloud,” he said.
Eckmann locked himself in the bathroom.
Spig Wead watched the radar and as the beam swept the circle, he tried to understand the green mass ahead of them.
“Is that weather?” he said, asking himself more than anyone else.
“I think it’s clouds,” said Franz. “Or a storm.”
“But we can’t see it.”
“The radar is picking up a wider area than we can see.”
Franz knocked on the bathroom door. “Eckmann, you should come out and look at this. We think the problem isn’t the plane. It’s winds from a storm.”
Eckmann said something Franz couldn’t hear. “Could you say that again, Eckmann?”
This time Franz heard the word: “Stupid.”
“You’re not stupid, Eckmann.”
“I’m finished.”
“Finished with what, my friend?” Franz didn’t know why he called Eckmann his friend. He wasn’t his friend. Eckmann screamed when he should have been quiet; he scared others when he should have made them feel safe. He had lost their trust. He knew that.
The plane was shaking again, harder than before the pilot had lost control.
“Why are we shaking like that?”
“I think it’s the wind, Eckmann. It doesn’t look like anything that you did wrong in getting the plane ready to fly.
“But that doesn’t matter now. Are you there?”
“Of course I’m here. I can see the cockpit and I can talk to you at the same time.”
They were above the clouds. The ground was gone.
“We need to go below the clouds,” said Spig Wead. “Unless we go down we won’t know what’s there.”
The radar display showed them over Indio, California.
“We’ll have to go slowly,” said Franz. “We don’t know how high the clouds are above the ground.”
The cabin was quiet. Franz pushed the button for everyone to hear.
“We’re flying into storm clouds. We can’t land in the dark but we’re heading toward Arizona and the sun. Keep your seat belts fastened.”
Frank Sinatra, Siouxsie Banshee
“Tell me about art,” said Frank. “What was it for?”
“People didn’t like blank walls at home. Even here, this is just a hotel room, and there’s a photograph of the Hollywood sign before the letters fell down. And that’s a picture of a movie star named Marilyn Monroe. Does it do anything to you when you look at her?”
“It makes me wonder if she’d be verified.”
“That’s Frank the Security person
talking. But is there anything else about the picture? Like, does it speak to you about changing ideas of femininity?”
“I want to understand what you’re saying,” said Frank. “And it makes me angry that I can’t.”
“I don’t want to make you angry.”
“Not angry at you. But there are millions of pictures all over the city, and they’re different. Big houses, small houses, old motels, big hotels like this, which was very expensive, they all have art. And you know what was good and what wasn’t? How can you tell?”
“I don’t think I can. I think I only know what I was trained to know, and I don’t know what’s good. I know what’s authentic, not a copy, and only from a limited time. There’s not a lot of very old art in Los Angeles so I was sent here because I was an expert in the twentieth century.”
“It makes me sorry that you can’t be verified.”
He didn’t say anything after that. He was thinking about sex with her. He was thinking about friendly sex, something new to him. She’d had friendly sex, which seemed to come with knowing about art, since there was a lot of nakedness in art. So she kissed him. She didn’t like what he did with his tongue. It filled her mouth without moving, without searching for a hidden Siouxsie that words couldn’t express and any other touch couldn’t reach, so she pulled away to kiss the edges of his mouth, his neck, his eyes.
They agreed that this was a good way to be together but were soon interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Redwings?” asked Frank.
“I’m here with Chief. He wants to powwow. We have a problem.”
When he was in the room, Chief told Frank to send Siouxsie away.
Siouxsie said, “I’m not leaving. As soon as you’re gone he’s going to tell me what you said, and whatever the problem is, and obviously there’s a problem because you wouldn’t be here, I’ll help him figure it out, which will be good for you, Chief.”
“She’s right, Chief.”
“Then tell me what you’re thinking.”
“You thought Vayler was just doing his job by making sure he did a complete inventory of the Burn Zone right up to the Burn, so it was too late to send a thousand Drifters to the food storage warehouses that are more than a few hours away. So in preparation for all the Drifters being downtown, you brought in the singer.”
“As insurance.”
“So you knew something was wrong about Vayler’s refusal to get them away from Figueroa. I think I know why he didn’t. In order to bring back the supplies he says are out there, he needed a few thousand Drifters. To keep them in line, he needed at least a hundred Security people. He didn’t want Security to go with him; he didn’t want them to see that the warehouses are empty. I’ve seen it, Chief, on the way to Covina, a Chinese supermarket with a green triangle that wasn’t crossed off with red, and it was empty. And I talked about it with Vayler and he said it was emptied for convenience.”
“Frank, bring Vayler back quietly.”
“I don’t think I can find him quietly. He’ll know we’re looking for him and he’ll keep moving. We still have a lot of sections of the city that aren’t burned.”
“Our lives, Frank. Everything depends on knowing what we have left. We can’t eat food that isn’t there.”
“We don’t know yet. It may be that Vayler Monokeefe is hoarding the food and he’s going to hand it out only to people loyal to him.”
Redwings interrupted. “That’s got to be the truth.”
Frank, accustomed to Redwings’s sometimes grand unfounded conclusions, asked him why he thought so.
“Because I wouldn’t have thought of that myself and because you went right to the gnarliest conjecture.”
“Two words I’m not sure of, Redwings. The last words you just said.”
“I put them together. ‘Gnarly’ means gnarly, and ‘conjecture’ means guess.”
Frank told Chief he would do what he could.
“Be quiet about this, but take a ride around the inventory depots. It’s possible you’ll find that what the Founders left us is still there.”
“Not likely,” said Siouxsie.
“All the more reason we need to talk to Vayler.”
Shannon, Erin
Erin sat behind Shannon in the tub and massaged the singer’s back with slick, soapy fingers. Erin was jealous of the people who had Silent Voices, though she’d met few of them because most were inadequately rehabbed and didn’t live in Center Camp.
“What are you thinking about?” Erin asked the star.
“What’s your name?”
“Erin. I’m Erin.”
“I miss my chisel.”
“We can always find another at a hardware store or in the supplies depot.”
“It’s not the same.”
After that, Shannon stopped talking and got out of the tub. Erin wrapped the singer in a towel. “You had a long night. You must be tired.”
Shannon didn’t agree or disagree, but went to her bedroom and shut the door. Erin knocked and Shannon knocked back, and Erin understood to leave her alone.
Hopper, Visitors
Hopper sat on the riverbank and watched the two white herons that yesterday had flown away from naked Madeinusa. Now they were back on his side of the river, facing upstream. He felt the throbbing pressure to honor his Teacher and keep finding things until those things led him to his wife. He thought that if he stopped trying to solve the puzzle of what to do next, all the obligations that made him ache might scatter like the pieces of burned houses that formed the morning’s cloud.
He took the pink dress and photograph from the bag and set them on Madeinusa’s clothing, then brushed the loose granules of rotting concrete and made a clear area for the bones. He was careful with the skull, and took it out first, forcing himself to keep the eye sockets toward him. The skull rolled to the left and he braced it with a few small stones. Then he took out the rest of the bones, in no special order, and laid them out evenly. His Silent Voice said, “I don’t like looking at this. Can you cover them up?”
Hopper set the pink ball gown neatly on the ground beside them and then shifted the bones one piece at a time until they were inside the gown.
The label in the pink gown with the puffy shoulders was DISNEY.
So her name was Disney.
The man in the photograph wore a long-sleeve shirt. “Is this me?” Hopper asked his Silent Voice.
“Yes.”
“Is that woman on the other side of Disney my wife?”
“Yes.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’d have to look at the label in one of her dresses.”
A voice in the brush alarmed the herons and as they took off, Hopper heard a woman say, “Is he talking to himself?”
She wasn’t Madeinusa and he had to fight that disappointment to give himself the energy to protect Disney’s bones. And as he rolled the bones inside Disney’s dress and stuffed it back into the backpack he pulled out the pistol, pointing it toward the bushes where the woman was hiding. The gun reminded him of what his Teacher promised: “What you need will come to you.”
A man stood up, his hands raised.
“Careful, Seth,” said the woman.
“Who else is there?”
“Just us,” said Seth.
“Come out, hands up.”
“My name is Marci. I don’t know my real last name and nobody ever gave me one. This is Dr. Seth Kaplan. He’s verified. I’m not.”
Seth tried to explain himself. “We’ve been walking up the river all night. Did you see the jet?”
Hopper didn’t answer
“There was a jet,” said Seth.
“We were supposed to be on it,” said Marci.
Hopper said their names. “Marci and Seth.”
“That’s right,” said Seth. “Tha
t’s us. Marci and Seth. We were supposed to be on it, but we didn’t want to die.”
Hopper was puzzled by Marci’s anger at Seth. “And then it took off without us and flew over the ocean and came back. We saw it fly over the city. Fly very low over the city and then climb. Without crashing.”
“It’s one thing to get a plane into the sky and another thing, entirely different, to land a plane, especially a big plane,” said Seth. “So they got it up. That’s sort of easy. Can they land it safely?”
“I lost faith,” Marci said to Hopper. “Eckmann never failed to do what he promised.”
“Tell that to Franz,” said Seth.
“He didn’t promise Franz anything until he promised him a doctor.”
“He didn’t promise me anything except that unless I saved Franz, he’d kill me.”
“He didn’t mean that. Did you see him kill anybody?”
“Other than all those people he took into the sky?”
“You didn’t see them die, Seth. You saw them fly away under control. They had enough fuel to cross the country three times.”
“Then they had enough fuel to stay up until the plane dropped out of the sky. The longer they stay up, the longer they delay what they can’t control. Franz practiced taking off, not landing. We did the right thing. We jumped off the plane to save each other’s lives because we love each other.”
“Love,” said Hopper.
“Yes,” said Seth. “What else could it be?”
“A mistake,” said Marci. “But who are you, really? What are you doing here? What are you hiding under that dress? Whose dress is it?”
“When a man you don’t know is pointing a gun at you, don’t ask so many questions,” said Seth.
Hopper put the gun in his waistband. “I can show you.”
He opened the bag and unrolled Disney’s pink ball gown. He arranged the skeleton. Marci looked to Seth to say something, and he started, with a sound that could have turned into any of a thousand words, but wasn’t sure of any of them. Hopper covered the bones with the dress again.
“Where did you find that?” asked Seth.
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