Harsh Oases

by Paul Di Filippo

  Today was as warm as yesterday, and we raised a pretty good sweat. Nia dropped off to sleep right after, but I couldn’t.

  Eleven days after the flood, and it was all I could dream about.

  Ethan was really starting to get on my nerves. He had seen me hanging out with Nia and Izzy, and used the new knowledge to taunt me.

  “What’s up with you and the little girl, Hedges? Thinking of keeping your hand in with some target practice?”

  I stood quivering over his bunk before I even realized I had moved. My fists were bunched at my hips, ready to strike. But both Ethan and I knew I wouldn’t.

  The penalty for fighting at any of the Femavilles was instant expulsion, and an end to government charity. I couldn’t risk losing Nia now that I had found her. Even if we managed to stay in touch while apart, who was to say that the fluid milieu of the post-disaster environment would not conspire to supplant our relationship with another?

  So I stalked out and went to see Hannah Lawes.

  One complex of tents hosted the bureaucrats. Lawes sat at a folding table with her omnipresent laptop. Hooked to a printer, the machine was churning out travel vouchers branded with official glyphs of authenticity.

  “Mr. Hedges. What can I do for you? Have you decided to take up one of the host offerings? There’s a farming community in Nebraska—”

  I shook my head in the negative. Trying to imagine myself relocated to the prairies was so disorienting that I almost forgot why I had come here.

  Hannah Lawes seemed disappointed by my refusal of her proposal, but realistic about the odds that I would’ve accepted. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Not many people are leaping at what I can offer. I’ve only gotten three takers so far. And I can’t figure out why. They’re all generous, sensible berths.”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No one wants ‘sensible’ after what they’ve been through. We all want to be reborn as phoenixes—not drayhorses. That’s all that would justify our sufferings.”

  Hannah Lawes said nothing for a moment, and only the minor whine of the printer filigreed the bubble of silence around us. When she spoke, her voice was utterly neutral.

  “You could die here before you achieve that dream, Mr. Hedges. Now, how can I help you, if not with a permanent relocation?”

  “If I arrange different living quarters with the consent of everyone involved, is there any regulation stopping me from switching tents?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Good. I’ll be back.”

  I tracked down Nia and found her using a piece of exercise equipment donated by a local gym. She hopped off and hugged me.

  “Have to do something about my weight. I’m not used to all this lolling around.”

  Nia had been a waitress back in the city, physically active eight or more hours daily. My own routines, at least since Calley left me, had involved more couch-potato time than mountain climbing, and the sloth of camp life sat easier on me.

  We hugged, her body sweaty in my arms, and I explained my problem.

  “I realize we haven’t known each other very long, Nia, but do you think—”

  “I’d like it if you moved in with Izzy and me, Parrish. One thing the tsunami taught us—life’s too short to dither. And I’d feel safer.”

  “No one’s been bothering you, have they?”

  “No, but there’s just too many weird noises out here in the country. Every time a branch creaks, I think someone’s climbing my steps.”

  I hugged her again, harder, in wordless thanks.

  We both went back to Lawes and arranged the new tent assignments.

  When I went to collect my few possessions, Ethan sneered at me.

  “Knew you’d run, Hedges. Without your badge, you’re nothing.”

  As I left, I wondered what I had been even with my badge.

  Living with Nia and Izzy, I naturally became more involved in the young girl’s activities.

  And that’s when I learned about Djamala.

  By the end of the second week in Femaville 29, the atmosphere had begun to sour. The false exuberance engendered by sheer survival amidst so much death—and the accompanying sense of newly opened horizons—had dissipated. In place of these emotions came anomie, irritability, anger, despair, and a host of other negative feelings. The immutable, unchanging confines of the unfenced camp assumed the proportions of a stalag. The food, objectively unchanged in quality or quantity, met with disgust, simply because we had no control over its creation. The shared privies assumed a stink no amount of bleach could dispel.

  Mere conversation and gossip had paled, replaced with disproportionate arguments over inconsequentials. Sports gave way to various games of chance, played with the odd pair of dice or deck of cards, with bets denominated in sex or clothing or desserts.

  One or two serious fights resulted in the promised expulsions, and, chastened but surly, combatants restrained themselves to shoving matches and catcalls.

  A few refugees, eager for stimulation and a sense of normality, made the long trek into town—and found themselves returned courtesy of local police cars.

  The bureaucrats managing the camp—Hannah Lawes and her peers—were not immune to the shifting psychic tenor of Femaville 29. From models of optimism and can-do effectiveness, the officials began to slide into terse minimalist responses.

  “I don’t know what more we can do,” Hannah Lawes told me. “If our best efforts to reintegrate everyone as functioning and productive members of society are not appreciated, then—”

  She left the consequences unstated, merely shaking her head ruefully at our ingratitude and sloth.

  The one exception to this general malaise was the children.

  Out of a thousand people in Femaville 29, approximately two hundred were children younger than twelve. Although sometimes their numbers seemed larger, as they raced through the camp’s streets and avenues in boisterous packs. Seemingly unaffected by the unease and dissatisfaction exhibited by their guardians and parents, the kids continued to enjoy their pastoral interlude. School, curfews, piano lessons—all shed in a return to a prelapsarian existence as hunter- gatherers of the twenty-first century.

  When they weren’t involved in traditional games, they massed cm the outskirts of the camp for an utterly novel undertaking.

  There, I discovered, they were building a new city to replace the one they had lost.

  Or, perhaps, simply mapping one that already existed.

  And Izzy Horsley, I soon learned (with actually very little surprise), was one of the prime movers of this jovial, juvenile enterprise.

  With no tools other than their feet and hands, the children had cleared a space almost as big as a football field of all vegetation, leaving behind a dusty canvas on which to construct their representation of an imaginary city.

  Three weeks into its construction, the map-cum-model had assumed impressive dimensions, despite the rudimentary nature of its materials.

  I came for the first time to the site one afternoon when I grew tired of continuously keeping Nia company in the exercise tent. Her own angst about ensuring the best future for herself and loved ones had manifested as an obsession with “keeping fit” that I couldn’t force myself to share. With my mind drifting, a sudden curiosity about where Izzy was spending so much of her time stole over me, and I ambled over to investigate.

  Past the ultimate tents, I came upon what could have been a construction site reimagined for the underage cast of Sesame Street.

  The youngest children were busy assembling stockpiles of stones and twigs and leaves. The stones were quarried from the immediate vicinity, emerging still wet with loam, while sticks and leaves came from a nearby copse in long disorderly caravans.

  Older children were engaged in two different kinds of tasks. One chore involved using long pointed sticks to gouge lines in the dirt lines that plainly marked streets, natural features and the outlines of buildin
gs. The second set of workers was elaborating these outlines with the organic materials from the stockpiles. The map was mostly flat, but occasionally a structure, teepee or cairn, rose up a few inches.

  The last, smallest subset of workers was the architects: the designers, engineers, imagineers of the city. They stood off to one side, consulting, arguing, issuing orders, and sometimes venturing right into the map to correct the placement of lines or ornamentation.

  Izzy was one of these elite.

  Deep in discussion with a cornrowed black girl and a pudgy white boy wearing smudged glasses, Izzy failed to note my approach, and so I was able to overhear their talk. Izzy was holding forth at the moment.

  “—Sprankle Hall covers two whole blocks, not just one! C’mon, you gotta remember that! Remember when we went there for a concert, and after we wanted to go around back to the door where the musicians were coming out, and how long it took us to get there?”

  The black girl frowned, then said, “Yeah, right, we had to walk like forever. But if Sprankle Hall goes from Cleverly Street all the way to Khush Lane, then how does Pinemarten Avenue run without a break?”

  The fat boy spoke with assurance. “It’s the Redondo Tunnel. Goes under Sprankle Hall.”

  Izzy and the black girl grinned broadly. “Of course! I remember when that was built!”

  I must have made some noise then, for the children finally noticed me. Izzy rushed over and gave me a quick embrace.

  “Hey, Parrish! What’re you doing here?”

  “I came to see what was keeping you guys so busy. What’s going on here?”

  Izzy’s voice expressed no adult embarrassment, doubt, irony or blasé dismissal of a temporary time-killing project. “We’re building a city! Djamala! It’s someplace wonderful!”

  The black girl nodded solemnly. I recalled the name Vonique from Izzy’s earlier conversation, and the name seemed suddenly inextricably linked to this child.

  “Well,” said Vonique, “it will be wonderful, once we finish it. But right now it’s still a mess.”

  “This city—Djamala? How did it come to be? Who invented it?”

  “Nobody invented it!” Izzy exclaimed. “It’s always been there. We just couldn’t remember it until the wave.”

  The boy—Eddie?—said, “That’s right, sir. The tsunami made it rise up.”

  “Rise up? Out of the waters, like Atlantis? A new continent?”

  Eddie pushed his glasses further up his nose. “Not out of the ocean. Out of our minds.”

  My expression must have betrayed disbelief. Izzy grabbed one of my hands with both of hers. “Parrish, please! This is really important for everyone. You gotta believe in Djamala! Really!”

  “Well, I don’t know if I can believe in it the same way you kids can. But what if I promise just not to disbelieve yet? Would that be good enough?”

  Vonique puffed air past her lips in a semi-contemptuous manner. “Huh! I suppose that’s as good as we’re gonna get from anyone, until we can show them something they can’t ignore.”

  Izzy gazed up at me with imploring eyes. “Parrish? You’re not gonna let us down, are you?”

  What could I say? “No, no, of course not. If I can watch and learn, maybe I can start to understand.”

  Izzy, Vonique and Eddie had to confer with several other pint-sized architects before they could grant me observer’s status, but eventually they did confer that honor on me.

  So for the next several days I spent most of my time with the children as they constructed their imaginary metropolis.

  At first, I was convinced that the whole process was merely some over-elaborated coping strategy for dealing with the disaster that had upended their young lives.

  But at the end of a week, I was not so certain.

  So long as I did not get in the way of construction, I was allowed to venture down the outlined HO-scale streets, given a tour of the city’s extensive features and history by whatever young engineer was least in demand at the moment. The story of Djamala’s ancient founding, its history and contemporary life, struck me as remarkably coherent and consistent at the time, although I did not pay as much attention as I should have to the information. I theorized then that the children were merely re-sorting a thousand borrowed bits and pieces from television, films and video games. Now, I can barely recall a few salient details. The Crypt of the Thousand Martyrs, the Bluepoint Aerial Tramway, Penton Park, Winkelreed Slough, Mid-winter Festival, the Squid Club—These proper names, delivered in the pure, piping voices of Izzy and her peers, are all that remain to me.

  I wished I could get an aerial perspective on the diagram of Djamala. It seemed impossibly refined and balanced to have been plotted out solely from a ground-level perspective. Like the South American drawings at Nazca, its complex lineaments seemed to demand a superior view from some impossible, more-than-mortal vantage point.

  After a week spent observing the children—a week during which a light evening rain shower did much damage to Djamala, damage which the children industriously and cheerfully began repairing—a curious visual hallucination overtook me.

  Late afternoon sunlight slanted across the map of Djamala as the children began to tidy up in preparation for quitting. Sitting on a borrowed folding chair, I watched their small forms, dusted in gold, move along eccentric paths. My mind commenced to drift amidst wordless regions. The burden of my own body seemed to fall away.

  At that moment, the city of Djamala began to assume a ghostly reality, translucent buildings rearing skyward. Ghostly minarets, stadia, pylons—

  I jumped up, heart thumping to escape my chest, frightened to my core.

  Memory of a rubbish-filled, clammy, partially illuminated hallway, and the shadow of a gunman, pierced me.

  My senses had betrayed me fatally once before. How could I ever fully trust them again?

  Djamala vanished then, and I was relieved.

  A herd of government-drafted school buses materialized one Thursday on the outskirts of Femaville 29, on the opposite side of the camp from Djamala, squatting like empty-eyed yellow elephants, and I knew that the end of the encampment was imminent. But exactly how soon would we be expelled to more permanent quarters not of our choosing? I went to see Hannah Lawes.

  I tracked down the social worker in the kitchen of the camp. She was efficiently taking inventory of cases of canned goods.

  “Ms. Lawes, can I talk to you?”

  A small hard smile quirked one corner of her lips. “Mr. Hedges. Have you had a sudden revelation about your future?”

  “Yes, in a way. Those buses—”

  “Are not scheduled for immediate use. FEMA believes in proper advance staging of resources.”

  “But when—”

  “Who can say? I assure you that I don’t personally make such command decisions. But I will pass along any new directives as soon as I am permitted.”

  Unsatisfied, I left her tallying creamed com and green beans.

  Everyone in the camp, of course, had seen the buses, and speculation about the fate of Femaville 29 was rampant Were we to be dispersed to public housing in various host cities? Was the camp to be merged with others into a larger concentration of refugees for economy of scale? Maybe we’d all be put to work restoring our mortally wounded drowned city. Every possibility looked equally likely.

  I expected Nia’s anxiety to be keyed up by the threat of dissolution of our hard-won small share of stability, this island of improvised family life we had forged. But instead, she surprised me by expressing complete confidence in the future.

  “I can’t worry about what’s coming, Parrish. We’re together now, with a roof over our heads, and that’s all that counts. Besides, just lately I’ve gotten a good feeling about the days ahead.”

  “Based on what?”

  Nia shrugged with a smile. “Who knows?”

  The children, however, Izzy included, were not quite as sanguine as Nia. The coming of the buses had goaded them to greater activity. No longer
did they divide the day into periods of conventional playtime and construction of their city of dreams. Instead, they labored at the construction full-time.

  The ant-like trains of bearers ferried vaster quantities of sticks and leaves, practically denuding the nearby copse. The grubbers-up of pebbles broke their nails uncomplainingly in the soil. The scribers of lines ploughed empty square footage into new districts like the most rapacious of suburban developers. The ornamentation crew thatched and laid mosaics furiously. And the elite squad overseeing all the activity wore themselves out like military strategists overseeing an invasion.

  “What do we build today?”

  “The docks at Kannuckaden.”

  “But we haven’t even put down the Mocambo River yet!”

  “Then do the river first! But we have to fill in the Great Northeastern Range before tomorrow!”

  “What about Gopher Gulch?”

  “That’ll be next.”

  Befriending some kitchen help secured me access to surplus cartons of pre-packaged treats. I took to bringing the snacks to the hard-working children, and they seemed to appreciate it. Although truthfully, they spared little enough attention for me or any other adult, lost in their make-believe, laboring blank-eyed or with feverish intensity.

  The increased activity naturally attracted the notice of the adults. Many heretofore-oblivious parents showed up at last to see what their kids were doing. The consensus was that such behavior, while a little weird, was generally harmless enough, and actually positive, insofar as it kept the children from boredom and any concomitant pestering of parents. After a few days of intermittent parental visits, the site was generally clear of adults once more.

  One exception to this rule was Ethan Duplessix.

  At first, I believed, he began hanging around Djamala solely because he saw me there. Peeved by how I had escaped his taunts, he looked for some new angle from which to attack me, relishing the helplessness of his old nemesis.

  But as I continued to ignore the slobby criminal slacker, failing to give him any satisfaction, his frustrated focus turned naturally to what the children were actually doing. My lack of standing as any kind of legal guardian to anyone except, at even the widest stretch of the term, Izzy, meant that I could not prevent the children from talking to him.