by Thea Lim
“Is it . . . a wood-staining room?” There was no need for a special room for stain.
“Blood storage. Guests deposit their blood, the closet keeps it cold, the blood doesn’t age, five or ten years later they reinject it, and they feel brand-new again. Young blood.” He snorted at his own joke. “I’ve been given every assurance the closet will be moved in time for the launch of the Starlight Roof.”
The pine box had a porthole window. Soda fridges were manacled by bulging machinery, its hum vibrating the floor. Liquid dangled in frosty bags, blood brown and milky green.
“Some of the blood has turned white,” Polly said.
“That’s cat milk.”
She waited for Baird to grin and show he was teasing, but he didn’t.
The worksite swarmed with Journeymen working elbow to elbow, laying brick, sanding floors, shingling roofs. But Polly and Baird were alone in an expanse of space and silence. She found a dropcloth and started on the pillows. This work was a blessing, a distraction from the bog of fear and hope inside that spumed with every thought of Saturday. Baird set himself down on a couch. There were over thirty silk cushions, patterned with audacious birds of paradise in fuchsia and gold, and they all stank of motor oil and cat piss. She tried to think nothing of it when Baird undid his upper buttons and rubbed his chest. She tagged each cushion, indicating the necessary repairs—hole: thread bridging; grease stain: kerosene; filthy: soak—the days of its life to be deleted. The imminent satisfaction of erasure calmed her.
Baird was insensible to her technique. He was lying down. Polly kept her eyes averted, imagining he was just working out a problem and at any moment he would get up and hotfoot it over to his desk. But an hour passed and he started to snore, loudly. She rustled the cushions, she dropped a rasp, but the snores persisted. She went over and stared at him. He had a big, old man’s face. At rest, his mouth sagged and his eyes were sunk with deep lines of sadness.
His eyelids quivered.
“Leonard?” he said.
She shuffled back, almost tripping over a caddy of hand tools. Then he burped and turned. A bad, sweet-sour smell permeated the air, and finally it dawned that he was drunk.
She went back to work. The most logical thing was to work as soundlessly as possible so he wouldn’t wake until he’d slept it off, and the problem took care of itself. There could be a reason for his odd behavior. Maybe today was an anniversary, something distressing.
If she were him, she’d turn to drink too. His lover had stopped while Baird carried on, and now forever they were sealed on opposite sides of that irrevocable moment. How much better off she was. With every cushion, I get closer to Frank, she said to herself. This was her first proclamation of hundreds: with every cushion, every stitch, every pen stroke.
Baird slept until the PA system announced the last shuttle for the day. Polly stood as far back as she could and prodded his shoulder with a finger until he opened his eyes.
“It’s time to go, sir,” she said.
He emitted a loud, shocking noise between a low and a yawn: a bare, vulgar sound. When he was finally upright on the edge of the couch, he looked like an ancient, blinking baby.
“When I feel sad, I look at all this.”
She thought he was rambling. Then she followed his gaze out the window, to the seafront, where the land was in an acute state of deconstruction. Three blocks away, like a seam joining the squares of a quilt, the scene changed at the lip of a finished resort. The completed resort looked like a fairy village: candy-colored houses, kiddie trains ferrying guests from massages to dinner, a Ferris wheel by the sea.
“Open the window. Do you know what we’re doing?”
They could hear the evening-shift workers shouting over a jackhammer’s pounding.
“We’re getting the past back, but better. It will be the way we like to remember it instead of the way it was. People will pay anything for that.”
She watched him fill out the progress log for the day. Progress on the throw cushions well underway. Night stands for the Ritz suite ready for delivery midweek—though the tables he appeared to be referring to were still under tarps, untransformed.
The shuttle was full of Journeymen who had worked on the middle wing all day, their clothes and faces stiff with ashy gunk. At the containers, the traffic slowed altogether, one lane blocked by other buses dropping off workers. Women were lined up in the sun, waiting for their turn to enter a poky open-air enclosure made from corrugated tin. It was a shower pit. From the bus, you could see right inside. Towel-clad women dunked buckets into a blue water drum in the center and then they poured the water out, little by little, over their heads.
“I wish they would build a privacy roof,” the red bob said, her hair still perfect. “For everyone’s sake.”
At Moody Plaza, Norberto was sitting in his office, writing price cards.
“Did you call your friend today?”
“My friend?”
“About the contact form?”
“Right. No, I didn’t. Let me call him tomorrow.”
“Sorry to keep asking you, but it’s really very important. It’s urgent.”
“I’ll do what I can.” He went back to his cards.
* * *
On Tuesday evening a woman with bright eyes and dirty-blond hair, who’d got off the same evening shuttle, held the stairwell door for Polly and smiled. She was slow to unlock her door—because her key was stuck, or to give Polly a chance to strike up conversation? But Polly lost her nerve and scurried inside. She was bad at meeting strangers. Still, the longing for information seized her like a bottleache. Had any other Journeymen found the people they had left behind? Had anyone been to the United States? Did they know how to find Donna?
On Thursday, Polly spied the woman as she got on the shuttle. Even more serendipitous, beside her was an empty seat. Then the woman waved. Polly jostled past a passenger hoisting a bucket and dived into the empty seat.
“This seat is for my sister,” the woman said.
The passenger with the bucket was looking down at Polly in surprise.
Polly stood to flee, but the crowd kept her in place. Then the sister with the bucket kept insisting Polly share the seat. She wouldn’t quit and finally Polly sat, clinging to the back of the seat in front, to keep from slipping into the aisle.
The sister’s name was Misty and she was only just twenty, and her older sister’s name was Sandy. They shared the room on the fourth floor and they were both massage therapists at the resorts. Misty was very enthusiastic about 1998; they had come from 1984, which was so awful you couldn’t even imagine. Sandy didn’t feel the same. That evening they showed Polly everything: the laundry facilities, the library (a single bookshelf in the lobby), and the game room (the picnic table in Norberto’s store), where there were nightly poker games.
“How do they bet?” Polly asked.
“You a card shark?” Misty said.
“No, I ask because . . . I didn’t bring any money with me.”
Always, Polly was patting her right breast pocket, feeling for the reassuring plastic rectangle of her ID. She wished she had just a few dollars. Donna had always taught her to keep some money in a can. “For your independence,” Donna had said.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s not legal tender. Pre-1982 currency is invalid. That country doesn’t exist anymore,” Sandy said.
“There’s nowhere to spend money money anyways,” Misty said.
“Of course there is,” Sandy said. “You could use it to leave. We could do business with each other.”
“Not legally,” Misty said.
“That’s the point,” said Sandy.
“She’s a conspiracy theorist. You can buy chips.” Misty pointed out a parts cabinet, mounted on the wall behind Norberto’s desk, with stacks of olive and beige casino chips in its drawers.
“One Journeyman tripled his bond that way,” Sandy said.
“That’s not true, don’t be so negative.”
&
nbsp; “It is true.”
“Not triple. Maybe double. Maybe. How many months on your bond?” Misty asked Polly.
Even in the worst-case scenario, where Sandy was correct about everything, once Frank came, Polly would be immune. She would still be under bond, but her life would be hers again.
“Thirty-two,” said Polly. “You?”
“Fifteen, at the end of this month.”
Sandy didn’t volunteer her bond length.
“She tripped,” Misty said. “She was carrying too many sacks of towels and she broke her wrist. So she has a few extra months to work off.”
“So do you,” Sandy interrupted.
“Nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“Spent too much in the PX on God knows what,” Sandy said.
“The bond is not so bad. Just think of it like a college degree,” Misty said.
Polly smiled at her. This was a good idea.
“Now, that’s unintelligent,” Sandy said.
Sandy and Misty knew what kind of canned vegetables to expect this week, based on the time of year. They knew that Moody Plaza was the only housing for O-1 visa holders in Galveston, and by the time it was full, it would have layers and layers of decorators, tennis coaches, and osteopaths. They knew how wild the vacationers were for anything branded “healthy living”—anything to ward off the memory of sickness and death at the border of their towns, their houses, their skin. They knew the food-growing centers were in Tyler, Texas, and they were pleased about how close they were to Tyler, when the food had been so much worse in 1984 Tucson. They gave Polly tips on how to make the most of the pathetic cakes of soap Norberto sold, where to pick flowers. Misty told her about the Christmas beauty pageant and who would win this year. Sandy told her about the one newspaper, the Texas Chronicle, how it came out once a week and hardly had any news. Polly used her little funds to buy a copy anyway, and saw she was right. It contained mostly development reports from across the South. There was an international section with reports on Zimbabwe and Australia. But the photos looked just like Texas, although the captions said otherwise; she checked them twice.
Because she could see that giving this tour gave them pleasure, Polly didn’t interrupt to ask how to find someone in the United States until they ran out of tips. Sandy suggested mailing a letter. But it was as expensive as anything, and what if Donna had moved? Was there a phone book?
“Of course!” Misty said, and Polly’s heart fired into her mouth. “There’s the Demographics Center. They’ll run a search for you.”
But Sandy interjected. “It’ll cost you. I wouldn’t bother. The results always come back the same.”
“Hush,” Misty hissed.
“What?” Sandy said. “She should be properly informed. Usually the reports are disappointing.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s just talking about what happened to her,” Misty said. “You go to the Demographics Center if you want to.”
“What happened to you?” Polly asked Sandy.
“Well. I came to save my husband, but his state was too advanced for them to cure. Of course, they didn’t say so before they got me on the boat. He didn’t make it. Now I’m stuck.”
Misty put her arm around her sister. Her shoulders straightened at the touch. “But Shirley on the sixth floor found her brother. He’s in Florida and they’ll see each other once her bond is done.”
“Good for her,” Sandy said. “What about me? TimeRaiser created a mess and then made a mint fixing it. How do we know they really sent the ’93 vaccine to ’81? How do we know it wasn’t actually an even more virulent version of the flu masquerading as a vaccine? How do—”
“Who are you looking for?” Misty cut her sister off.
Polly was livid to feel herself turning red.
“If it can only travel twelve years back,” Sandy continued, undeterred, “then why didn’t they travel to June of 1981 and rebuild a new machine there and keep on going?”
“Because the machine can’t ever get beyond June of ’81.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a product of its time. You can’t rebuild it without its limits.”
“That’s pure propaganda. They can but they won’t!”
“Is it a boyfriend?” Misty said.
“What?” said Polly.
“Who are you looking for?” Misty repeated.
“It’s my aunt,” Polly said, but she knew she sounded like a liar. “And my boyfriend,” she admitted.
Sandy sighed, the specific exhalation of someone about to tell it like it is. Polly knew what was going to happen before it happened, the ill about to come from Sandy’s mouth, like an incantation, a thing that becomes actual when words hit air. But she couldn’t prevent it, short of covering her ears.
“Don’t get hung up on the one, dear,” she said. “When did you say you were from?”
“1981.”
“You’re too smart to be that faithful.”
“Sandy!” Misty issued another impotent warning.
“Have you considered that it’s been seventeen years?”
“You’re so embarrassing!”
“You girls! You dragged yourself out of a worldwide pandemic only to waste away over a man?”
It wasn’t that Polly never considered that she could have been forgotten. It was that she was always thinking she’d been forgotten, and every minute was a dogfight to unthink it. She retreated from what Sandy was saying until her mind seized an opposite thought: if Frank was in Galveston, wouldn’t they know him? Could he even be living in Moody Plaza? Why had she not thought of this before? It was such a simple solution that it had the absolute sensation of truth.
“Do you know Frank Marino?” Polly said.
“Who’s that?” said Misty. “A singer?”
“I have to go,” Polly said.
“My sister upset you. Ignore her,” Misty said.
“I have to check the swaps board. I think I saw something I need.”
But she had to get through only one more day that wasn’t Saturday, and then she would climb the Flagship’s shallow steps, with their paint blistered by the heat, and enter the lobby and find him there and know for sure that she could never be forgotten.
* * *
But she had to work on Saturday.
“Every day but Sunday,” Misty said as they boarded the shuttle. “We could be like those poor H-1 people, only every third Sunday off or something.”
It was all right. The Hotel Galvez was much closer to the Flagship than to Moody Plaza. It was on the same street, just a few blocks down the coast; she could walk there after work. Frank wouldn’t come all this way and not wait till sundown. This dreary work of heartening herself was still less painful than the reminders of Frank and Donna that any minute could call up. Eventually this white noise of optimism would completely fuzz over her memories of their minutiae: their laughter, musk, tics, gripes, singing, skin.
Baird was too engrossed by a half-stripped wingback chair to say hello. All week he’d either been asleep or aggressively busy. She forgot him, her focus lasered on the last of her injured cushions, and it was mid-afternoon when she noticed him gone.
He was sitting on a three-legged stool at the far end of the hall, in front of a chair from the original Starlight Roof. She watched as he rubbed his thumb over the grooves of the splat. He traced the stains in the upholstery and followed the curve of the top rail with his palm. For at least five minutes he ran his hands from seat to splat to top, like in a trance, until with the careful precision of a drunk he put the chair back.
Nostalgia drove their work; without sentimental value they’d be out of a job. But you could not get too involved with the nostalgic impulse yourself. It would not do to think about what parties the chair had seen, what faces the mirror had held, whose hands had palmed the table, and what had become of them. If you got too involved, it would be like doing surgery on your wife. It was only a chair.
“I
t must be emotional to work on those chairs,” she said.
“What?” he snapped.
Why had she said anything?
“Don’t be silly,” he said. But his breath slowed, his mouth parted, his head tipped to roll the tears back to their ducts. He was remembering: the night the Starlight Roof reopened, that feeling that at last he’d returned to a home he’d never seen; their Park Avenue rental, so high up that no one could peep him as he mooned at the skyline from the tub while Leonard soaped his back; Leonard bringing home one of the chairs from the Starlight Roof as a surprise. It became Baird’s favorite seat during parties; it was the best place to watch Leonard dance.
“Okay.” He patted his chest. “Okay.”
She could see what was happening to him. It chilled her, as if he were showing symptoms of a disease she carried. To feel sad about the past is to recognize the past as passed. She would get to the hotel and find the lobby empty. She would get to Twenty-Fifth Street and the Flagship wouldn’t be there; in its place would be only the coast swept clean. All week, doubt had festered underneath. She hadn’t asked anyone if the Flagship was still standing; she didn’t want to know.
This uncertainty continued to dog her as she walked away from the crowd of workers ringing the shuttle stop like a cloud of dust. Soon there was nothing but a hedged-in resort to her right and the road and the water to her left, and it felt like crossing a colossal stage, the Gulf a vast arena, every wave a seat. She could not remember exactly how the Flagship looked. Was it red or tan? There was an embossed nautical design the height of the shore-facing wall, but was it a mermaid, or a dolphin? The hotel was evaporating before her eyes.
Polly wanted to think of something nice. She started singing to herself, the first song that came to mind. She sang “Love Will Keep Us Together” and entered the dangerous realm of memory. Neil Sedaka was on the radio, the silverware was lined up on a cheesecloth laid on the kitchen table, and Donna was wriggling around in her chair because she needed to pee but she wanted to get through the teaspoons at least before she broke her rhythm. Polly stopped singing.
She could hear the sounds of a swimming pool. She came across a rectangular stone: a footstool for seeing over the hedge. She braced herself for sinister sights. What sort of things might they get up to in this desperate little town at the whim of pleasure? A game of polo with humans in place of horses? A barbecue with live cows? An orgy while children looked on?