Pierce sits down at one of the computers and takes out his heinous, thick-framed glasses. He hesitates a moment before putting them on.
“They’re really, you know, not that … bad,” I say.
“Don’t patronize me.”
“You’re right. They’re completely hideous.”
He begins tapping away. I can tell that even if I ask him a question, he won’t answer, because he won’t even hear me. Whatever he’s doing, though, it’s clear that it’s not making him very happy. Finally, my curiosity overpowers my exhaustion, and I get up and look over his shoulder.
He’s staring at a screen filled with nothing but lines of numbers.
In the blackness of the screen, I see the dark reflection of my own face. I jerk my head back, averting my eyes. I’m not ready to look at myself yet.
“What’s all that?” I ask.
He holds up his index finger momentarily and then keeps typing and grimacing. I wait another minute for a response, but he seems to have forgotten I’m standing there.
“I’m starving,” I say.
I remember the sandwich I stuffed into my jacket pocket. I go back into the foyer to get it. The sandwich has congealed into a gooey ball. I walk back into the tent, sit down, and take a bite of the mess in my hand.
Pierce must smell the same thing I do as I bite down: slightly spoiled lunch meat. His lip curls in disgust. “What are you eating?”
“I don’t know.”
“You might be a lab rat, but you’re not a real rat. No need to eat garbage. Go look over there. Lots of delicious freeze-dried food to choose from. The instructions are on the packets.” He points toward the propane stove with the kettle on top. “Make me something, too. Not the beef enchiladas, though. They taste like Mexicans.”
“Aren’t enchiladas supposed to taste Mexican?”
“No, I mean they taste like actual Mexicans. Unwashed ones.”
He looks at me, and his face goes red faster than a stoplight. “No offense.”
“No offense about what?”
“Aren’t you—I mean you could be …?”
“I could be what?”
“Mexican maybe? Or something.”
I stare at him.
“Although you’ve got green eyes, so maybe you’re Mexican and something else mixed together.”
If I had eyebrows, they’d be arching at that comment. “Maybe you should stop talking now.”
“Yes, maybe I should, before you decide that I’m some huge racist jerk and not just an awkward idiot who was trying to be funny.”
I turn away and look through the plastic packets of food. I have green eyes. That’s what Mrs. Esteban told me, too. Until he said it, I wasn’t sure my memory could be counted on. But this much is true: I have green eyes.
When the water in the kettle boils, I add it to the contents of the packet. A few minutes later we’re both eating hot, gritty chili. I obviously didn’t let the water hydrate the food properly, but I was too hungry to wait. My impatience has been rewarded with kidney beans hard as pebbles. Pierce doesn’t seem to notice or care. He eats while looking at the computer screen. I guess this is how it’s going to be—him doing whatever he’s doing, and me just sitting here watching.
After a while he says, “Seriously, you might as well have a rest. Maybe take a nap. This is going to take a lot longer than I thought.”
He returns to the computer with a look on his face that I’d call “entranced.” Maybe “obsessed.”
I realize that I don’t just want to sleep; I have to sleep. But I can’t. The temperature in the yurt is dropping. After a few minutes of pacing around and rubbing my hands together to stay warm, I see Pierce start shivering, too. He keeps mistyping and swearing. Finally he gets up and puts a couple of brown bricks into the black pot. The bricks smolder, then catch. They smell like candle wax.
My head starts to throb. Maybe the sudden heat is getting to me. I sway and almost lose my balance.
“Whoa there. You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re fine? Well, then lie down until the fineness passes.”
I’m about to say no, but can’t think of why I should. Lying down is a perfectly good idea when you’re about to fall down.
I sit down on the mattress, and Pierce lifts my feet up and positions them for me before covering me with a blanket. “Let me know if you need anything.”
I am inexpressibly grateful and so, naturally, I say nothing.
Pierce sits back down and keeps working. The sound of his fingers on the keyboard, the sight of his profile in those awful glasses … I feel myself starting to drift off.
Just as the world’s edges start to get fuzzy, I hear him talking to me, although his voice sounds different. It’s deeper and slower and full of reverb; it’s like he’s reciting poetry from the far side of a metal tunnel. He’s telling me something about how the storm is coming; that I can survive it. That I can survive anything, because I’m special, and he won’t just stand by and let them kill me.…
Is this real?
I’m not sure. I don’t care. All I know is that I feel safe for the first time that I can remember. Which isn’t very long, I know, but I welcome the feeling just the same. For however long it’s going to last.
CHAPTER 8
Voices. So many voices in my head. I hear someone talking. It’s the red-haired woman, Hodges. She’s talking to me. No, about me.
“What rotten timing, officer,” she says. “I was just on my way to see La Bohème. But I’m glad you finally caught her. Truly. Well done, NYPD.”
The red-haired woman is sitting across from me in a dress that seems to be made of a hundred yards of purple silk, seed pearls, and puffs of air.
Flouncy.
That’s the word that comes to me when I look at her.
She’s clutching a fur wrap around her narrow shoulders and holding a sequined purse in her hand. Her hair is pinned up with a sparkling hair clip.
We’re in a police interrogation room. There’s a table and four chairs. One wall is dark glass—an observation window. I glare at it, daring whoever is behind it to face me.
Sitting next to the red-haired woman is a middle-aged cop. His holster is visible underneath his suit jacket, and as he leans forward to pull his chair closer to the table, the handle of his gun knocks against the armrest and a sprinkle of dandruff lands on the table in front of him.
The red-haired woman pinches the bridge of her nose like she has a terrible headache. “I’m glad we can finally bring this to a close. This vandalism has gone on quite long enough, and as usual, the media have the story all wrong. She doesn’t look like much of a hero to me. What do you think, officer?”
“Nah. Not much of one.”
“So how did you catch her? I’m curious.”
“We got an anonymous tip and just waited at the bottom of the crane. Treed her like a squirrel until she finally had to come down or fall.”
“Thank you, lieutenant. If it’s all right, do you think I could talk to her a moment? Privately, I mean. She might feel more comfortable if it’s just me, and we might be able to get to the bottom of all this that much more quickly.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“I’ll be just outside the door if you need me.”
As he gets up, he gives me a look that says, Don’t try anything or I will stomp on your neck. Then he leaves me with this woman who I’ve never seen before—even though she’s acting like she knows me.
The red-haired woman rests her elbows on the table and bats her eyelashes at me.
“New York City,” she says.
She says nothing else for a long while. I look around the room like I can’t be bothered talking to her and finally ask, “What about it?”
“New York is soooo welcoming. I would never have believed it. Here I am, just a poor girl from Georgia. Yet I’ve come all this way to …”
I roll my eyes.
; “You should really listen to this, Sarah. It’s important that you understand. You see, when people say they grew up poor and they’re from Georgia, that’s a very different kind of poor. A whole other level of poor. Even you and your tenement apartment and your mother who’s worked as a domestic her whole life—even you can’t begin to understand how poor Georgia poor really is.”
“Is that right?”
“But I come here to New York, scratch and claw my way up through so many terrible, demeaning jobs. You have no idea how badly people will treat you when they know you have to take it. But I learned a few things over the years, and I’ve come to see what’s really important.”
I stare at her.
“You see, you have to set a goal and not let anything or anyone stand in the way of it. That’s what I do, and that’s the reason I’m here now, in this beautiful dress, on my way to the opera. A true New Yorker.”
I raise my cuffed hands and let them plunk down onto the table. I’m wearing a tank top, jeans, and a beat-up pair of sneakers held together with duct tape around the toes. I have dirt under my fingernails and I smell like the streets, like bus exhaust and urine. I say nothing. I’m very sure that this woman in the flouncy purple dress has no idea what the real New York City is.
I’m New York City.
I sneer at her to let her know I think she’s a pathetic poser.
“You could learn a thing or two from me, Sarah. You really could. About determination. And commitment.” She adjusts a small, diamond-encrusted C brooch on her dress. “But of course you won’t learn. Which is unfortunate for both of us.”
I stretch my neck back and forth. My arms are still achy. I’d been hanging on to that crane for an hour when the police finally showed up. How could they have known where I’d be?
“Have you been listening to me, Sarah?”
“What? Yeah, sure. You were poor. Now you’re not. Good for you. Is this little pep talk over now?”
She smacks the table with the palm of her hand and I jump. I glance at the dark glass, wondering if someone is going to come in, but no one does.
“Who are you? My new case manager?”
But as soon as I say it, I know it can’t be true. This woman is not like anyone I’ve ever met. Not in school, not in the foster care system. Whoever she is, she’s not here to spew the usual hopeful, encouraging pile of garbage they’ve tried to feed me regularly since my mother died.
“Who am I?” she says.
She extends her hand to shake mine, laughing lightly as if she’d completely forgotten I’m cuffed and shackled and can’t possibly raise my hand to meet hers.
“My name is Evangeline Hodges, and sweetheart, right now you are ruining my whole damn life.”
A loud burst of static jolts me fully awake. I roll onto my side, off the mattress, and then try to stand up.
Was I dreaming?
No. I was remembering—remembering the red-haired woman’s voice. It’s the very same voice I just heard come out of the radio before it landed on the other side of the yurt. Pierce startled when I got up, and the walkie-talkie he was cradling in his lap flew six feet.
“Hey! Careful! It took me an hour to figure this out.”
“What?”
He picks the walkie-talkie up carefully by the antenna. The back of the radio has been removed, and some of the wires are sticking out. “8-Bit’s radio. Those soldier dudes are using an encryption program. It changes frequencies a hundred times a second.”
I’m hardly awake, and even if I were, I wouldn’t understand what he’s saying.
“I slowed down the interval that their frequency changes and … never mind. Point is, we can hear them for about a minute before the frequency hops again and we lose the signal. Assuming they’re in range.”
I sit down on the edge of the mattress, and we lean in close over the radio. It squelches and buzzes, and we hear nothing but static. Then, suddenly, a deep, digitized voice breaks through. The words are garbled, and the signal cuts out a couple times. A woman answers back. It’s Hodges.
“Where is he?” she demands. “I want him found.”
“We think he’s on the sixth floor somewhere. We’re searching room to room now, ma’am.”
“Get him out of there. I don’t care how. He’s messed my plan up enough as it is.”
“Most of the offices up here have coded locks. It could take some time.”
“I don’t want to hear excuses. Don’t you people have things that go boom? Use them!”
I look up at Pierce. “Who are they looking for? Did you hear a name?”
“No. Now shhhh.”
“She definitely said he though, right?”
“Yeah. That’s what I heard.” Pierce gives me an odd look, like he’s trying to figure something out that makes no sense whatsoever. “Who is she?”
He says it like he’s talking to himself, so I don’t answer. We stay hunched over the radio for another minute, but the voices fade in and out and we hear nothing useful. Then the signal jumps again and all we hear is static.
“We lost them.”
A sudden gust of wind shakes the yurt. I gasp.
Pierce puts his hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay.” He looks up at the ceiling, which is moving violently. “Well, okay-ish. Maybe.”
I shoot to my feet. “What time is it?”
“Why?”
“Just tell me.”
“You were only asleep for about ninety minutes.”
I exhale in relief and sit back down. More than once, I’ve awakened to find that hours or even whole days have passed. But it’s fine. There’s no need for another pill just yet. That’s all that matters.
I feel a backdraft through the hole in the roof. It scatters ash from the glowing brick in the black pot. I pace back and forth in the small space, going over the memory, trying to make sense of it, but I get nowhere.
“Sorry I fell asleep while you were talking to me,” I say.
He looks at me, confused. “I wasn’t talking to you. I’ve been sort of consumed with the radio and all this stuff on the flash drive 8-Bit left me.”
“Oh.”
I sit down in the chair opposite him and put my hands around my skull and squeeze gently. I do this every time I wake up.
“Are you in pain? I have something you can take.”
“What? Oh, no, thanks. This is just a thing I do. I think I just need to check that my head’s still there sometimes.”
I raise my eyes and notice Pierce looking at me like he wants to ask me a question.
“I know what you’re going to ask,” I say.
“What?”
“Is it weird being bald?”
“Well, is it? I mean, for a girl.”
“I guess it’s no weirder than having no memory.”
“You seriously don’t remember anything? Like, not even what you had for breakfast?”
I’m not sure what, if anything, I should share about these confusing things coming back to me. It’s almost like I’m being haunted, and I’m too afraid to tell anyone about the ghosts I see because they’ll think I’m crazy. I don’t want Pierce to think I’m crazy.
“Oatmeal and grapefruit juice.”
“Good for you. I had a miniature candy bar and cold instant coffee.”
We smile at each other, and I realize that you can half-trust someone for a while—maybe even a long while—but there will always come a moment when you must choose to let go and trust completely or withdraw. Somehow I’ve come to this point already, and I decide to let go. I’m surprised by how easy it is and how willing I am to do it.
“There’s stuff I remember, but I’m not exactly sure when it happened or why. Most of the time I have this odd, drifting feeling, like the world isn’t quite solid or I’m not. Other times I’ll have these intense feelings that come out of nowhere. I have no idea what causes them. All I know is they’re never good.”
“I find that to be the case for me, too.”
I rub m
y forehead. “I … I remember recent things, things that make no sense. Like playing with the Legos.”
“Legos?”
“Yes. They were a therapy aid—you know, to help rebuild hand-eye coordination, if you were having trouble with that. Me and Nurse Jenner always fought about them.”
“Why?”
“They said I was getting too fixated. I guess I kept trying to build something. This tower, or building, or whatever. I would get it mostly finished, but I could never get the top right. It was so frustrating. Every time I went to the rec lounge I’d try to build it. I did it over and over again. Then they made me stop.”
“What do you think you were trying to build?”
“I don’t know, but one day I went into the lounge and there it was. The tower I’d been trying to make. Someone had put it together for me. The top was like a … a sword, you know? Kind of tapered to a point at the top. And I had this feeling, like I’d seen that building before. That it was really important, but I had no idea why.”
“Who finished it for you?”
“Don’t know, but Nurse Jenner was furious when she saw it. She came in and started screaming at me, asking me if I was even trying to get better. Why was I always making trouble when they were just trying to help me? I didn’t get a chance to tell her that I hadn’t built the thing before she knocked it to the floor. Then she told me to clean up the mess. I had to crawl around picking up all the pieces while she watched to make sure I got every single one.”
Pierce sighs and says, “Nurse Jenner sounds like just the sort of super lady who should be working in the mental health profession.”
I wonder what’s happened to Nurse Jenner. Maybe they shot her, too. I hope not. She isn’t very nice, but no one deserves that sort of end. That’s when I think of Jori. I can practically feel her bony shoulder against my side.
“What’s up? You’ve got a weird look on your face,” Pierce says.
“I was thinking of this girl, Jori. She’s another patient. I don’t know what happened to her. I tried to find her before, when the men were shooting at me.…”
Tabula Rasa Page 6