Our apartment house was inside the perimeter they were setting up. Inside the sacrifice zone. I’d lived there for ten years, and just like that, they were letting the bamboo have it.
I spotted pop, standing in a crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. He was shaking his head, making angry gestures at no one in particular. At God probably.
“No way this made it through the barrier,” he said when I was in earshot. “God damned biotech punks carried it in and planted it, I’m telling you. Or terrorists—damned Jumpy-Jumps.”
I nodded. The adolescent bio-tinkerer who’d loosed the bamboo in the first place—probably to impress his friends—felt it wasn’t getting enough attention, so he hacked it into the safe zone. “You seen Edie or Pat yet?” They lived in the apartment next door. Though not anymore they didn’t.
“Nah,” he said. “What do you got there?” He pointed at my books.
“Nothing. Just some books.”
“We got no time for books,” he grumbled, walking off. “Start moving stuff out of there while we can still get through. We’re homeless.” His voice cracked on the last word.
* * *
We slept at my uncle Troy’s, two blocks away on East Harris. I slept in the kitchen, between the counter and the table, because there were already three to a bedroom and two in the living room. Three of them were boarders Troy had taken on to help make ends meet. It was hard to sleep with the sound of bamboo snapping and crackling in the distance—like trying to sleep to the sound of rats scuttling around in your ceiling—but it was too hot to close the kitchen window.
In the morning I went back to our place to assess the damage. A sea of yellow stalks waved in the hot breeze, loosely spread in some places, tight as a pack of cigarettes in others. It ended short of Pulaski Square, so the barrier had held.
I wandered into Pulaski Square, where the tribe was still camped, and watched them. They certainly didn’t have many possessions: machetes, cooking pots; one kid was clutching an old action figure doll. From what I could see, no one seemed to be in charge. Most of them were sprawled on the lawn dozing; a group of older men were playing some sort of gambling game that involved tossing carved sticks.
I sat on a bench, pulled Light of the Warrior-Sage out of my pack, and opened it at random.
The warrior-sage keeps a silent quest in his heart. This quest keeps him vital, lubricates his mind and spirit, keeps him poised and alert in the luminosity of his soul. His quest is selfless, for the warrior-sage recognizes that the boundary between self and world is illusion, that alleviating the suffering of the world and alleviating the suffering in his own heart are one and the same.
A calmness spread through me. I put the book down beside me and stared up into the branches of the oaks, letting the idea wash over me. It was like the words were always inside me, waiting to come out. A warrior-sage—I was a warrior sage.
I picked up the book and started from the beginning.
I learned that the warrior sage spoke only the truth, not because of some arbitrary moral code, because the truth insulated you from falling prey to the rolling mirror, the illusions that coated the world and were always changing. The warrior-sage respected all life. He practiced a quiet dignity; his feet planted firmly on the earth, his vision that of the great eastern sun.
My phone rang.
“Kilo!” It was Dice. “You in there? I was coming to pay a call, and found the terrain no longer to my liking.”
“Props, Dice. You looking to practice some downtown science on this fine day?” I retrieved a Batman comic, flipped through it while we talked about nothing. On the splash page Batman was going Kung Fu on a gang in a back alley while a blonde woman cowered against a concrete wall. He wasn’t saving her from getting gang-banged, was he? That’d be intense for a comic. I’d always liked Batman. He would sure pull a full shift if he were working in these times...
I jumped off the bench. “Dice, I gotta bounce, man. I’ll ring you after.” My heart was racing. All that time honing my martial arts skills, my weapons technique...it was leading to this moment.
I threw a flurry of punches in the air and whooped.
“Where are your sticks?” I turned around. It was the topless girl who could have been hot if she wasn’t sporting that filthy hillbilly look and had better teeth. Her accent was like the dude I’d talked with yesterday—she pronounced W’s like V’s.
“I left them at home.” If I could call uncle Troy’s kitchen home.
“What game were you playing with them?” She made a strange, scrunchy facial expression, like she wasn’t aware other people could see her face.
“It wasn’t a game. These are weapons, for protection.”
She made a grunting noise that I took to mean she understood. I kept glancing down at her chest; I couldn’t help it, her boobs were right there. Her nipples were puckered, her areolas as big as silver dollar pancakes.
“If you see any trouble, let me know. I’m a protector, like the police, only I don’t charge money. I’m a protector for the poor.”
She frowned, then looked off over my shoulder, at the bamboo outbreak. She broke out in a big smile, suddenly looking like any city chick except for her crooked grey teeth.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. Love of nature shit, just like the Hazda. God damn if these people weren’t modern hunter-gatherers.
* * *
I dressed all in black, to blend in with the night. No fancy costume. The warrior-sage is humble; he does not seek attention. I strapped a sheathed knife at my calf, Escrima sticks in a pouch at my waist, nine millimeter mule pistol tucked in the big cargo pocket of my otherwise skintight pants. I’d made a mask out of an old t-shirt, but would only wear it when action was imminent.
The sun was setting, the crickets singing in the waning heat. My first night as a crime fighter, my first night as a true warrior-sage. I was excited, yet calm. I felt ten feet tall, all my senses on fire, as I turned off East Harris and cut across Pulaski Square.
The tribe was still there, hunkered down on the lawn in groups of three or four, talking, laughing, sleeping. No TVs, no phones. I waved at the topless girl, who smiled and waved back over-enthusiastically.
On Broughton I climbed a fire escape and took to the roofs, hopping across the low walls between the attached buildings, out of sight, scanning the streets for crime.
The vagrants were about now that the sun was down. An Asian woman stood on the corner in a faded green felt skirt, looking to turn tricks, her children sitting at her feet playing with bottle caps. One of her arms was nothing but bone and scar tissue. She’d danced with the flesh-eating virus that surfaced back in forty-five. But she survived it, lucky lady, unlike my mother and a few million others.
A bunch of uniforms were standing outside the boarded-up Lucky 7 mini-casino checking ID’s, probably for no reason except to exert their authority.
All seemed well and correct. I exited the roofs into an alley, headed down to River Street.
An old tour trolley, stripped down to wheels and a floor, rumbled by on the uneven cobblestone of River Street.
“Right over there, a particularly bloody stiletto went down,” some red haired dude in an old navy jacket said into a crackly microphone. “Dude stabbed another dude seven, eight times in the face, till his blade got stuck in the eye socket and he couldn’t get it back out.”
“Where’s the harm in that?” Slinky shouted from the back of the trolley, a bottle of home-brew clutched in one fist. I stepped behind a telephone pole, watched the murder tour roll by. Tonight I didn’t want to be seen.
I stayed in the shadows, hawking the doors and windows of the bars for signs of trouble.
Around midnight, I sat on a bench overlooking the river, watched detritus float by, hoping someone would try to roll me. Not much likelihood of that; the criminal element didn’t much bother dudes with iron biceps who were armed to the nines.
A tug boat hooted in the distance. Overhead a bat flapped mad figure
-eights around a lamppost.
I sighed. It was more difficult than I thought to find a crime in progress. If this didn’t work, what then? Hop on the trolley and take the murder tour? Get drunk? Lay pipe with the local sluts? I needed to kick-start my career as a warrior-sage, or I was going to lose heart, sink back into the illusion of the rolling mirror.
Two dudes stumbled past, one wobbling dangerously close to the dropoff into the river. “Look at the moon! It’s glowing in the dark!” he said, pointing. The other cackled. Stoners shot up with something, probably Soma.
It occurred to me that there was one place I was guaranteed to find a crime in progress. I’d been thinking violent crime, open wounds, but there were subtler crimes that might interest a warrior-sage. I’d done my share of drugs, but selling them, that was no service to the community. I got off my ass. Time to pay a visit to a certain burned-out storefront on Abercorn.
From behind a parked car I surveyed the scene. It was essentially an empty lot, tucked between two buildings, but the tile flooring and some of the fixtures were still intact. Blackened bricks and heat-deformed steel lay scattered and piled, casting long shadows. Weeds jutted through cracks in the floor.
B-Bob sat on a stool behind a bruised Formica counter, his back to the brick wall of an adjoining building. A chick leaned up against the wall, arms crossed behind her back, purse dangling from her shoulder, talking to him.
I pulled on my mask, slunk among the piles of debris, blending into the darkness like a cat.
“She’s got some train wreck going on at her place,” the chick was saying as I approached undetected. I recognized her: Allie Cohn. I’d gone to school with her.
When I was so close I could smell Allie’s licorice chewing gum, I stood, brandishing the nine millimeter. “Freeze.”
Allie shrieked. B-Bob nearly fell back in his stool. I lunged, grabbed the automatic pistol sitting on the counter, stuffed it into my belt.
“Take it, take it,” B-Bob said, his hands in the air. “We got no problem.”
“Yeah, we do got a problem,” I said. “I’m the new law in this town. Tell all your buddies that the Warrior-sage is patrolling, and he’s closing down all the candy stores. Put everything out on the table. Now.”
Hands shaking, B-Bob pulled piles of baggies and bright-colored pills out from behind the counter, laid them on top. Then he put his hands back up.
I pushed the drugs into a pile, pulled a little can of lighter fluid from my pocket, and squirted it over the drugs.
“What the fuck? You just going to flunk them all?” Allie asked. B-Bob just stared at the pile, wide-eyed.
“I ain’t no thief.” I fished a matchbook from my pants. “This shit wrecks the city. All you bastards bleeding the block, you just make a bad situation worse. I’m putting a stop to it.”
“I don’t sell to kids,” B-Bob said. “I don’t do no harm, I just help people escape for a little while. It’s the only vacation most people around here can afford.”
I heard a metal click behind my ear.
“Drop the gun,” a voice behind me said.
Real slow, I put my hands up, turned halfway around until I could see the guy. I planted a side kick under his armpit, followed by a spinning hook kick that caught him square-on in the jaw and dropped him.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the girl fumble in her purse and pull something out. As I spun to face her she pointed a pistol at me, clutching it in both hands.
“No!” I shouted as she drew a bead. “Put it down!” I pointed my pistol at her. She hesitated, then closed one eye like she was at a fucking rifle range.
I shot her twice in the gut. She grunted, fell back into a sitting position, stared down in disbelief at the blood, which looked black in the dim streetlight.
“You suck,” she said.
“I’m sorry. You should have listened. I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” I babbled.
“Bobby,” she whimpered. “I need help. It’s starting to hurt.” She gagged, and a wave of blood poured out of her mouth and down her chin. Bobby squatted beside her, drew her head to his chest.
I ran. I never ran so fast. I stopped not because I was out of breath, but because I couldn’t see through the tears. I stopped in a deserted alley, pulled off the mask, pushed my face against the bricks. My sobs echoed off the walls.
What the fuck had I done? I’d shot Allie Cohn, who used to sit in front of me in biology class. For what? For what reason? I could still hear her, in shock, telling me I sucked, like I’d taken her last French fry or something.
At that moment I couldn’t stand being in my own fucking skin. I wanted to put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.
I walked. I stared up at the Spanish moss dripping from the branches of the oaks, the moonlight peering through. I walked until daylight.
By morning I’d stopped crying, but I still felt so twisted up inside it was hard to take a full breath. I wandered into Pulaski Square. The tribe was breaking camp. The girl waved when she saw me, and I realized I hadn’t even asked her name, like she was an animal not worth that courtesy. This morning she looked strong and certain, like she was the one who had it right, who knew how to live, and I was the clueless dink.
“I don’t know your name,” I said, trying to smile.
“Bird,” she said.
“Kilo.”
“I like you.” She stared at the ground, looking like a fourteen year-old with a crush. It occurred to me that I didn’t know she wasn’t a fourteen year-old, but it felt so good to have someone say something nice to me just then that I didn’t care.
“I like you, too.” I blinked tears away.
“Why don’t you come with me?”
“I—” I was going to tell her I couldn’t, but then I saw myself in the bamboo forest, hunting, sleeping, raising children with Bird, teaching them to survive. No more guns, no more viruses, nothing to think about. Noble savagery. “Would they let me?”
“Would who let you?” Bird asked.
“Your...peoples. Who would I ask?”
Bird shrugged, squinted. “Why would you ask anybody?”
No one in charge. I forgot.
Two naked kids ran between us, giggling, one chasing the other.
“I’d like to come with you,” I said.
Bird squealed with excitement, jumped up and down. She grabbed my arm, led me to a little pile: a cooking pot, bow and arrow, machete, a black plastic bag tied with a string. “These are our things. Will you carry our machete and bow and arrows?”
I nodded, picked them up. Bird grabbed the other things, and we left the square. Just like that.
We hiked out of Savannah. By afternoon I was drenched in sweat and exhausted. I hadn’t slept in thirty hours, and I’d shot a girl since then, probably killed her.
We reached the foot-high plastic wall that marked the perimeter of the outer rhizome barrier, and pressed into the bamboo. It was like another world. In most places the stalks were so tight that you had to squeeze between them; you chose your path like you were in a maze, trying to look ahead, avoid the areas where you had to hack with the machete, seeking out the more open areas where you could walk normally. The kids had an easier time of it; not only were they smaller, but they moved like they were born to it, which they probably were.
There was a constant cracking, like ice breaking all around. The cracking seemed to rise and fall, louder, then softer, but that may have been in my head. The long, narrow striped leaves added a dry rustling whisper to the cracking sound when the wind blew.
It was hard for me not to think of the bamboo as a rat-plant, something repulsive, but I had to admit it was beautiful in its way. There were birds and squirrels and other little animals everywhere. They seemed to be right at home. I’d thought most of the animals had died out, or almost, but they seemed to be thriving here.
When we camped for the night I called my old man. He told me I was a fucking moron, that it sounded like I’d joined a cult, and my ass w
ould be back on his doorstep when I got tired of playing Tarzan and needed a fucking shower. Great guy, my pop.
It was a ‘one-night’ camp, which meant we found a reasonably open spot, all put our shit down, sat on the ground, and we were camped. A few people went off to hunt. Bird took my hand and led me a little ways off, and we screwed for the first time. She was pretty good—it was obviously not her first time. Her breath was bad, and by then I guess mine was too, so I didn’t kiss her much. But it felt good and natural, fucking in the wilderness, and no one in the tribe looked at me like I’d done something wrong when we rejoined them. No religion bullshit, no guilt.
They weren’t playing at this. It was like they didn’t know how to think in the regular way anymore.
Dinner was rank: squirrel, bird, wild onions and blackberries, but I ate without complaining. I wasn’t gonna play the role of soft city boy. After dinner, people cut themselves bamboo stalks and scraped out the sugar from inside (I guess that was dessert) while Sandra, the white-haired skeleton of an old lady, told a story. I recognized the story—it was a bastardized version of an old movie from the thirties, King of Our Engine. Good flick, so-so in story form.
I wondered what was in the garbage bag Bird had been carrying, so I grabbed it and pulled it over to me. I was starting to get the hang of this place; you didn’t ask permission to use other people’s stuff, you just took it if you wanted it. They were like communists. I untied the bag and peered inside. It was filled with little bamboo shoots, with black and white striped stalks and gold-colored leaves, the roots wrapped tightly in burlap. What the hell? I’d never seen this variety before. Maybe that’s why Bird had taken them, because they were unique and attractive? I couldn’t ask Bird now, because I didn’t want to talk while the old lady was telling her story, so I sat cross-legged and listened. A little girl, two or three years old, came over and sat in my lap. She threw her head back and looked up at me, grinning, and I ruffled her hair. She giggled. I couldn’t tell whose kids were whose—they wandered from person to person like they were happy orphans.
Futures Near and Far Page 10