“My Teacher said I was going to need luck and he tried to explain it to me. He said that something could happen that shouldn’t happen when it does, and this would help me when everything else was against me. He said that was how to know I was lucky.”
“And that’s me. It’s your good luck that I’m with you. And it’s my good luck, because Marci was already sorry she didn’t stay with the plane. And everyone on that plane was going to need luck for the plane not to crash.”
“Who told you about luck?”
“Here are three bikes and we’re tired of walking. What do you call that?”
“I call it three bikes and we’re tired of walking.”
“Then let’s take two bikes and find the train so we can find your wife.”
Hopper, Seth, Stranger
The lines of engines and containers went in either direction, trains hundreds of cars long. Between the cars, the tracks were filled with small trees and brush that had found its way through the crushed rock. In the rush to rehab the people who knew how to run things, Systems had overlooked the people who understood the trains. The two men examined the picture of the railroad yard again, confused, until Hopper said, “Between the train cars, there’s a boxcar and beyond it, the flagpole on top of a building.” They found the pole, and from there, it didn’t take long to find the car.
The handle was not locked. He pulled the handle up to release the door, and it opened quietly. “There’s no rust,” said Seth.
“Stay here.” The front of the container was stacked with rolls of tar paper. Hopper pulled himself into the container. He tossed a few rolls on the ground and, at the end of the container, found stacks of green metal crates stenciled with: property of the us marine corps.
Seth opened the first box. There were rifles and bullets.
“You put these here?” asked Seth.
“I don’t remember.” He was on his knees beside one of the crates when he felt the air stir as someone came into the container. A man. Seth stood up and the man threw Seth out of the car and rolled the door shut.
The stranger lifted Hopper and rushed him backward. Neither of them could see the wall or know when they would hit. Hopper pushed his thumbs into the man’s eyes but lost his grip when he was slammed into the wall.
Everything he tried was matched as though by a mirror and Hopper wasn’t sure who was thinking of the next move first. They tumbled without being able to stand up because neither could overpower the other. Hopper didn’t know how long they were like this. When he pulled his hand away, it was grabbed by the other man and when the other man slipped away, Hopper caught him. He felt the other wanting to ask him the same question he was ready to ask: Why are we fighting?
Then he stopped. He thought about his Teacher and what his Teacher would tell him to do and he went limp, curled up on the floor, and covered his head with his hands. The other didn’t move either. Was the other doing the same thing?
Hopper let the other move first, hit first, grab first. The other wrapped his hands around Hopper’s throat and this time Hopper heard his voice ringing in the container as he roared. The other’s grip weakened by a fraction and Hopper’s hands were on the other’s throat, until the other stopped moving, until the other was dead. He slid the door open. Seth was there.
“I found his bike. It has a map in the saddlebag. You have to see it.”
It was a good bike, with a carbon fiber frame, a rear wheel rack with a saddlebag, and a label from a bike shop in Palm Springs. Hopper knew the store. It was like the bike the Teacher had given him. Inside the saddlebag was a map of Los Angeles, with the Fence drawn in black marking pen, and a red star and the words STORM DRAIN where the Fence crossed Westwood Boulevard.
Hopper went back into the container. The dead man was about Hopper’s size and age, and he wore a gold wedding ring.
His Silent Voice finally spoke. “I’m thinking that each of you thought the other was there to steal the weapons. But the weapons were for both of you. That’s what I’m thinking.”
“That means the Teacher sent him?”
“It seems so but that’s a leap we don’t have to make. And maybe he was here to stop you from taking the guns. He didn’t ask who you were or what you were doing here.”
“He had food,” said Seth. They ate two of the stranger’s power bars and artichoke hearts.
Hopper looked at the map. “This is where we are,” he said, putting his finger on the rail yards. “This is where we have to go.”
Frank Sinatra, Security Committee, Pickle
Frank gathered all the Unverified Second Wavers who helped with Security, the ones with rehab but no trace in the DMV.
“Vayler Monokeefe was our good friend and we’re worried about him. We haven’t seen him for a while. We think he might have hurt himself and that scares us. We care so much about him. So we’re asking for help. And in return, the person, or persons, who find him, whether he’s safe or not, or even alive or not, will be granted verification. Start here, keep walking, and don’t follow anybody else. You can go in groups of five, no more than that. The last place we saw him was on Figueroa, and he’s not inside the Fence. We wish, but he’s not. Start right away.”
“I want to look for him, too,” said Siouxsie Banshee. “I bet I can find him. Tell me what you know about his habits and hobbies.”
“He has the habit of lying. And he has the hobby of running away from punishment.”
Pickle, the Inventory driver who was there when Shannon was discovered, knew the city as well as anyone and he remembered the first Inventory runs to Santa Monica, Venice, and the Marina. He was sure that Vayler would go to the Marina because Vayler was a man of little imagination, no matter that he was once in charge of a museum. Pickle thought of asking someone else to help, because the best place to look for Vayler would be from a shallow draft rowboat going up and down the channels of the harbor, and the best thing to look for would be a light, so the best time to hunt for him would be when it was dark. Another set of eyes would be useful, but Pickle wanted to live in Center Camp and get a promotion to assistant committee head and for that it was best to share this with no one.
There were dinghies around the Marina, with paddles or oars. Pickle didn’t know how to row but it couldn’t be too difficult. Vayler might not be there, but if he was, there’d be no competition for the reward.
Mr. and Mrs. AutoZone
AutoZone unlocked the garage door and pushed it up on its track. Since the Burn, Inventory was busy and Frank Sinatra was looking for Tesla’s murderer. He didn’t miss Tesla.
The life of the Fence didn’t call to AutoZone’s body or his spirit. When he turned around and saw the girl that Tesla and Carrera named Hey You he felt a double happiness, because she wasn’t Tesla’s killer come to bag another mechanic, and because he had missed her. She disappeared in the days of confusion after the cars had been stolen, and the doctor was kidnapped and the pilot was killed, and he respected her impulse to run away from the tension. For however long she had graced the periphery of life in the motor pool—and not even rehabbed First Wavers could safely gauge units of passed time—the Shamblerette had given the crew the simple entertainment of her primitive vitality.
“Where have you been?” he asked her.
She waved her hands in the air to let him know that she had been everywhere.
“You?” she asked him. He waved his hands the same way and hopped from one foot to the other in imitation of the little jig he hadn’t seen in weeks.
She danced the jig in return and he clapped his hands to give her a beat. She wanted to tell him: “This is like drowning, in a good way.” But to do this she would have to show him Marci, and she was tired of being Marci. The name meant nothing anyway. What was a Marci other than letters on an airline name tag? Maybe it meant something in the past, but if it did, the substance was gone. The more often she repeated
the name to herself, the less it meant anything familiar. She whispered her name so quietly that even she couldn’t hear it, until it became two syllables with the stress shifting from Mar to See and back, marSEE, MARsee, marSEE, MARsee and then they decoupled from each other and became two random sounds: mar see mar see mars ee mar seem arms eem ar seem ar sss eee mmm. That was when she stopped being Marci and became . . . no one. She was what she wanted to be, nameless and ready for a new life in a world where all the best people had names that told the world something about their rank, habits, or mistakes. She thought that Jiggy or Jigs would fit her nicely, but this was the choice AutoZone would have to make for her. So she continued to dance, remembering with every sloppy kick not to let AutoZone see her moving too close to the beat. When she was certain that her awkwardness was solid, she asked him: “My name?”
“Let me think about that,” said AutoZone. He couldn’t remember anyone asking him for a better favor, and with no one there to make a joke of this request, he wanted to give her a name that she deserved. He was sure she’d wander away again and that when she did, this time he’d find her. He looked around the garage at the labels on tires and cans of oil. He thought of calling her Valvoline, but pretty as it was, and Valvoline would fit this Driftette nicely, if she wandered, the name wouldn’t bring her back. So he gave her his second choice for a name, not so pretty, but it might help bring her back to him if she got lost. And maybe it was a silly name, but like everything he stocked in the motor pool, it would have a function. “All right,” he said. “From now on, I’ll call you Mrs. AutoZone. Can you remember that?”
“Mrs. AutoZone.”
“That’s who you are.”
Shannon, Erin
Shannon stayed in her room. When she wanted food she yelled at Erin to bring her something, but there was no other contact. She listened to her songs and read her autobiography. There were pictures of her with her mother and father when she was little, pictures of her in school plays, with her high school band, backstage. She learned about her boyfriends and girlfriends, about the couple she dated.
She heard Erin at the door and didn’t want to answer; there was nothing to say. She knew that Erin had seen what happened on Figueroa before the jet broke the spell but she wasn’t ready to talk about it with her. Shannon wanted to keep the door shut against the possibility that Erin might read her mind, since she didn’t yet know what she wanted to put in her mind. Erin sent the Stripers, one at a time and then as a chorus. Toffe, who never spoke, spoke.
“Shannon? This is Toffe. Are you okay? We miss you. Nothing is fun now without you. If Erin said things the wrong way, tell me. I used to say things the wrong way and I stopped the saying of anything, but I have to say now we miss you.”
“I want to think,” said Shannon. “I need to be alone. Leave me alone.”
Shannon took a bicycle and rode slowly through Center Camp, trying to see it as she would have when she was protecting herself from men who just wanted to steal her food and fuck her.
She pedaled up the hill out of Center Camp and down the long steep street to the Playa. She wanted to go fast. It was a relief to do something dangerous. Center Camp’s comforts had taken from her that thoughtless but contented life of basic survival.
* * *
There was a flamethrower party on the Playa, cowboys and cowgirls taking turns burning plywood houses set up for the game of destruction. The peanut butter and jelly bus was parked at the perimeter handing out sandwiches. A golf cart redecorated as a neon bumblebee rolled past Shannon to join a parade of art cars circling The Woman, huge teapots in a line like circus elephants, a rolling skull made of Christmas lights, the driver and passenger in the eye sockets.
Shannon parked her bike and walked among the First Wavers. Everyone she passed said hello, said her name, and clapped hands for her. She made life better for them just by looking at them, just by smiling. There was a way of looking at life behind the Fence that didn’t make it immediately awful, the hub of evil in the ruined world, the source of destruction. Whose fault is the world’s condition? The world outside the Fence had been ugly and so long as it stayed that way, what could she hope to do inside?
Stilt walkers stopped to drink at a bar built ten feet tall, just for them. She was recognized. The barmaid tossed her a can of prized Tecate beer and a lime. A stilt walker offered her a hand to take an elevated seat beside him.
The beer was cold, the lime wasn’t too dry, and it had enough juice to give the beer a fresh tickle. Cool Breeze, a stilt walker with sparse gray hair and deep lines in his face, introduced her to Bullet and Venus DePlaya. Bullet was Erin’s age, with long hair wrapped in a bun on his head, secured with chopsticks. Venus wore a leopard-print bodysuit with a hood and leopard makeup, so it was impossible to even guess at what she might look like underneath the costume.
“I’m not used to being with people who know who they are,” she told them.
“We’re mostly our functions. We’re the Burn Brigade; some call us Burners. We make fire. We’re attached to Toby Tyler’s Systems Committee and also do Inventory, but mostly we just love to make things burn. The way you love to make people dance.”
“Or maybe just make people look at me.”
“That’s an achievement,” said Bullet. “I have to put on stilts to be looked at.”
Venus DePlaya asked, “Are you going to sing for us the way you sang for the Drifters?”
“I didn’t really sing to them,” said Shannon.
“We want to hear you,” said Bullet, and they all agreed with him.
“Before the food runs out,” said Cool Breeze.
Venus made a gesture to him not to say more.
Cool Breeze ignored it. “She’s one of us now. She lives in Center Camp. She helped keep the Drifters from going completely out of control at the Burn, and look at how beautiful she is. So she should know that Vayler is missing.”
“I don’t know who Vayler is,” she told them.
“You will.”
“And the food?” Shannon asked.
“We don’t really know,” said Cool Breeze. “We hear things. Our attitude from the beginning of NK3 has been the world died and there is nothing we can do to restore it. Life in some form will continue without us. Maybe the storytelling animal will be gone. We can only save those who think the way we do, and have the competence we all need to make things work as well as possible. And there was a way of doing things in the past that brought the world to the way it is. And we reject that way of doing things.”
“In faaact,” said Venus, drawing out the word, “in faaact, to tell the truth, we do not remember that way of doing things. So we just do as feels right to us. And you feel right to us. You really do. Give me a kiss.”
Shannon kissed her, a deep kiss. Then Bullet said, “Next!” And Shannon kissed them all.
She finished her beer and they lowered her to the ground. She continued inside the perimeter toward The Man and The Woman.
Now she ignored the people who greeted her, and she found that no one was bothered by her disinterest.
She climbed into The Woman’s upper chamber and looked at the world through The Woman’s eyes. The Woman told her this: “Shannon, the life of the Playa would make sense if it were once a year for a week, but a festival cannot sustain a culture.”
Hopper, Seth Kaplan, Paolo Piperno
Hopper and Seth, both wearing headlamps, followed the dead man’s marked map through the storm drain. The floor of the tunnel was wet and there were shallow pools behind dams of muck.
“I like it in here,” said Seth. “There’s just the map and you and me.”
A heavy black line on the map marked the Fence, but there was nothing to mark it in the drain and they weren’t sure they were past that threshold until they heard cars and saw torch light shining through the gutters.
“We’ll keep walking,” said
Seth. Hopper had said nothing for a long time and Seth had stopped asking him what he was thinking.
“How far from Center Camp when we get out of the tunnel?”
“Everything is close, but you have to be careful. You can’t just walk up to Center Camp with a bag of bones looking for the woman who lives with Chief. I can do you a service, Hopper.”
The tunnel came to a junction where the storm drains of four canyons met. From here the tunnels turned steeply uphill. Seth pointed to the second from the left and traced it on the map.
They walked another two hours. It was after midnight when they came to a grid of iron rebar wrapped in a tangle of long dead tree roots that had pulled the concrete apart.
They heard voices and music.
They pulled at the loose soil and used a broken piece of the rebar to dig more of it away. In a few minutes, they were looking up an angled column outlined in long strands of colored lights.
“We came up underneath The Man,” said Seth. “We’re looking up his leg. The one with the stairs. We’re in the middle of the Playa. And it’s packed. People will see us. “Turn off your headlamp.” He pulled himself through the hole and looked straight into the eyes of Helary and Jobe.
“What’s down there?” asked Helary.
“Nothing much,” said Seth.
Jobe offered a hand. “You need help?”
“Thank you,” said Seth. “We were just exploring.”
“How far down?” asked Helary.
“Not very.”
“Is that a tunnel?” asked Jobe. “Does Security know?”
“I can tell them,” said Seth. “But I don’t think it goes far. No more exploring.” He helped Hopper out.
Helary and Jobe moved on.
The giant statues were full of lights tonight and the oil lamps around the perimeter flickered in the breeze but didn’t go out. The stilt walkers juggled fire and someone was playing a Shannon Squier record on the loudspeakers mounted in both statues.
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