by Thea Lim
“I’m so happy to see you,” Polly said, surprised by how true this was, and by the warm feeling she got from seeing his familiar, nervous face.
“Can we go somewhere?” he asked as the other women eyed him.
* * *
She took him away from 4A1, under a tree, by the trench. He put his hat back on his head and scratched his forehead under the brim, so that his hat sat uneasily on his crown.
“I have an idea that I think could be good for both of us,” he said. “I have a proposition. I live on the Bolivar Peninsula.”
Her warm feeling gave way to nerves.
He didn’t say any more after that. He watched a big blackbird on a close-by branch make noises like a small machine starting up.
“What’s your proposition?” she said eventually.
“I thought you could come and live with me.”
“Me?”
“I thought it would be more comfortable for you.”
Now, when Polly was scared, she no longer lashed out. She shrank behind a shell of politeness. “That’s very nice of you.”
“It’s not charity. I would get your rent instead of it going to TimeRaiser. It’s like billeting.”
She wanted to know what the catch was, but she was afraid to ask outright.
“What about my job? Would I work for you?”
“No, you would keep your job here. You’d just live at my house.”
He hardly made eye contact, but she couldn’t remember if that was irregular. The bird carried on its engine sounds.
“Is that a no?” Norberto said.
“I should think about it.”
“I thought you would say yes right away. You would have your own room. Isn’t that better than this?”
“I need to think about it. But it’s nice to see you.” Though, this was no longer true, because he had become unfamiliar all over again. “How is Moody?” she asked.
“Good. More tenants now. More work.”
“That’s too bad.”
“No, it keeps me busy. You’re all right?”
“Yeah. People are nice.”
She took a few steps back towards the crowd, as a way to end the conversation.
“There’s something else. Let me tell you the truth.”
He beckoned her to come back, as if what he had to say was confidential.
“I need your help,” he said. He looked around. “Come behind this tree.”
“What for?”
“I just have a question.”
She shook her head. In her memory, he was her height, shrunken by his halting manner. But in real life he was at least a half foot taller. She stayed where she was.
He was undeterred. He improvised. He stepped close and whispered, “There is something called a family credit, okay? If I had a baby, I’d get a big bonus. Like a monthly increase. There are bonuses for repopulation if you’re American.”
All she did was press her tongue to the floor of her mouth and take a breath.
But he saw it and said quickly, “You don’t have to have sex with me. It’s not like that.”
“What is it like?”
“We just have to pretend like we’re having a family.”
“Pretend?”
“It wouldn’t be that hard. We like each other enough, don’t we?”
That uncanny laughter from the week before came out of her again, but he kept talking.
“And you don’t really have to be pregnant. To prove you’re pregnant, you only have to give them a urine sample. I can get some urine. From a pregnant lady.”
“You’re crazy. That would never work. There’d be no baby at the end.”
“It would be good for both of us. Mutually beneficial. That’s why you should come live with me.”
“Why are you asking me?” She wanted to upset him, to jolt him into seeing how wrong his request was. “There are hundreds of desperate women. I hear you can buy them on the Strand.”
But when she succeeded—he got as far away from her as he could without moving his feet, and a wretched, cowering smile covered his face—she felt regret.
“You look like someone else,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He had the hat in his hands again, gripped so tight he might rip the seams.
“My ex, Marta. You look like her. I have lots of photos of her, and we could use them as proof of an established relationship.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Look, no one knows what my ex’s name was. Nobody knows that she isn’t you. They’re cracking down on the repopulation program. Too many frauds. But if we get married—it’s a formality, it doesn’t have to mean anything—and if we have old photos on top of that, plus the urine, we’ll be a shoo-in.
“Think about it. When they come to verify our pregnancy, we show them the photos, say that it’s you and me in the photos, instead of me and her, and you and I knew each other before, and then we got separated, and then by chance you moved into my building, and then we got married. Destiny. It’s a romantic story. It will go great.”
“You’ve already worked it all out.”
She moved back, but he matched her steps. His whispering entered frenzy.
“If I can get the bonuses, plus your rent, I could get together a down payment to buy a storefront. A lot of the Journeymen, when they finish their bonds, they stay here and keep working. They need somewhere to shop. You know, to buy housewares, clothes. The PXes ain’t gonna cut it. I’ve been collecting stock for years. I’m going to open Galveston’s first Kmart.”
Polly walked away.
“Wait,” Norberto said. “I could give you some of the profits. We could live separate lives. We don’t even have to sleep in the same room. We could be like roommates.”
“When were you going to tell me your real plan? After I had nowhere to go?”
“That was wrong of me. I apologize. But I didn’t do that. I told you the truth first—now.”
“I thought you cared about trying to achieve your interests without taking advantage of the guy lower down the ladder.”
He pepped right up. “I do! That’s why this is the perfect plan. It doesn’t rock any boats, it’s good for me, and it’s good for you. You could have a room! With a door!”
All along such a bashful guy and you turn out to be a crackpot. But Polly didn’t say this out loud. She just went back to the crowd.
“You’re looking for someone,” Norberto called after her. “When you arrived, you were trying to find someone. If you help me, I’ll help you find him. Tell me his name!”
“I’m not looking anymore,” she called back.
* * *
At the showers, Cookie let Polly cut in line.
“What was that? What did he want?” Cookie said, pushing Polly ahead of her.
“He wants me to move into his house.”
Behind Cookie, one of the women from the circle shook her head and clucked, like she was part of the conversation.
“He’s your boyfriend?”
“No.”
More clucking.
“This is Mary,” Cookie said. Mary was a forty-something black woman with a concave face like a crescent moon.
“Why does he want you to move in with him?”
“Some kind of scam.”
“Don’t do it. You must be independent. From men.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Hey,” Cookie said. “Sleep with one eye open.”
“Okay.” Polly had no idea what she was talking about.
But it became clear, a few days later, when Cookie shone a flashlight in her face before sunup.
“Wake up,” Cookie whispered. “Come on.”
“What time is it?” The dark looked darker than it usually did at rising time.
Cookie put her hand over Polly’s mouth. “Come with me.”
There were four of them gathered outside the door to 4A1: Cookie and Mary, and another two women Polly didn’t know.<
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“I can’t go with you,” Polly said. “I have to go to work, and I can’t get fired again.”
“Shhhh. It’s five a.m. What time you gotta be at work?”
“Seven thirty.”
“We got lots of time. We’re just going for a quick walk.”
“But where are we going?”
“Just come.”
They crossed Church Street and left the lip of Polly’s twelve-minute world. They walked south in single file. Soon they were in the unsettled city, the torrent of jungle and broken buildings that had taken most of the island. Polly followed the bobbing lights of the other women’s flashlights.
At first she was on edge, but Cookie kept turning around to beam at her, and a stillness came over Polly. She was briefly stepping outside of the monotony of her everyday, and some point in her past life when she had taken moonlight walks was converging with some point in her future life when her time would be her own.
For the first five minutes they followed a lane of caramel-colored, churned-up land that looked as if it had been formed by a meteor skidding to a stop. Then the terrain changed and they were crossing old, mutilated concrete. They stopped to squeeze their dynamo flashlights. The flashlights were always the first things to go missing from the emergency kits in every container.
“This was Broadway. This used to be the main thoroughfare,” Mary said. “That was a cemetery ahead of us.”
Polly couldn’t see anything beyond a combine in the middle of the street. It had crashed into a palm tree which, in the years since, had calmly grown around it. Everywhere, roots had plowed up the concrete in huge shanks, shoved wherever the plants decided. You could not see more than ten feet ahead. They passed what looked like the remains of a crash-landed spaceship.
“The old Chevron station,” Mary explained.
They turned off what had been Broadway. The pathway narrowed until bushes grew around and over their heads, entirely blocking out the sky. The only sound was the intermittent click-click-click of someone shaking a flashlight. Rats darted, streaks of squeaking gray between their feet. Polly kept her shoulders to her ears, afraid that poisonous things above might drop down her collar. Lengths of the trail were submerged in reeking water, with only thin margins for passing over without getting wet. Polly’s hands were sticky from clinging to the sappy branches.
Polly imagined fantastical things at the end of the trail: an underground city run by self-subsisting runaways; a hidden port with ships going anywhere but here; a storage locker packed with all the things she missed—peanut butter, orange juice, pork chops, television. She tried to stop these wild fantasies so she would not be let down.
The leafy tunnel came to a dead end.
“Careful, careful,” someone hissed, as the woman at the head of the line apprehensively parted the branches. They stepped through the hole, letting go of the boughs delicately once everyone was through.
They were in a clearing, one formed so sharply that a straight wall of broken foliage and debris rose on the left. To the right, there were the remains of once-splendid houses. And overhead, like giants, live oaks stretched their arms to make a total canopy.
The porch roof on the first house was propped up by a piece of plywood leaned against the facade, only held in place by gravity, which seemed an oversight. The next two buildings had no roofs. The fourth’s porch was missing, and in its place an interior staircase led to the door. They trooped down the sidewalk, a springy pavement of cardboard and tin. Number five had once been a fourplex, until the roof descended and made it a bungalow.
Cookie turned to Polly and put her finger to her lips.
“Don’t wake them,” she said, and Polly realized that people lived here.
A drying mop hung from the sill of one window, and at another someone was using a Bob Marley blanket as a curtain. There were three more houses before the clearing stopped, but all were uninhabitable in their own different way: a slumping roof, a missing exterior wall, lichen covering one whole side of a house, like a skin disease.
“We can look in the window of number five. They just finished it, no one is living there yet.”
They shone their flashlights through the windows. Corridors extended on either side of a central stairway. The whole floor was dotted with posts—PVC pipe, rods of rebar somehow bound together, a thick, sturdy branch—to stop the ceiling from coming down. There were no doors: the doorways canted too much to accommodate them. They could see into a front bedroom. It had a wardrobe covered in plastic sheeting and nice things to cover the walls: strips of floral wallpaper bleached clean, an old bedsheet hung like a tapestry, torn-out pages of magazines from the ’70s.
Cookie spoke as if the place were a mansion.
“You should have seen what it looked like before. It’s amazing.”
She swept her flashlight over the front yards. The squatters had vegetable gardens, lumpy gourds springing from a mini pergola of chair legs lashed together. Maybe this was where the squash at work came from.
Cookie beckoned them on to number six, whose door was swollen shut. Part of the roof was missing, giving the house a lopsided, crazy look. It was light enough now that they could shut off their flashlights. They stood in front of the living room window and looked in. Scabs of paint peeled off the walls. Dust lay on the floor in sheets, like loose leaves torn from a book. An armchair looked eaten through with acid. But the ceiling was still elevated and one window even had glass. Streaks of dawn came dappling through the hole in the roof.
“Furniture breeds mold, and, man, is it a pain to get it out the door. You can’t pick it up without it collapsing in your hands. But I think we can do it if we put our minds to it,” Cookie said. “What do you think? You want to move in? My friend founded this compound. She says we can have this if we want it.”
“Why do people live here?” Polly asked. “Is it free?”
“No. You still pay rent to TimeRaiser. Can’t get out of that.”
“But why? This is TimeRaiser housing?”
“If we want to stop paying rent, we have to officially inform TimeRaiser. Then TimeRaiser would raze this place. You pay rent like protection money. This way, TimeRaiser leaves us be.”
“So why live here?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Mary. “Autonomy!”
“Imagine. You could have your own space,” Cookie said. “They use rain barrels to collect water, so you could shower whenever you wanted. You could go to sleep when you wanted. You could cook!”
“Why did you invite me?” Polly said.
“You know things. Like the Demographics Center. You can make furniture.”
She’d been no one because nobody knew her, but they had given her a new identity, and her cheeks tightened with the urge to cry. She looked up at the Spanish moss, drifting from the boughs like beautiful blue ghosts.
“So what do you think? Are we in or are we out?”
“In,” Mary said.
“In,” said the other two.
They all looked at Polly.
“Moving in here is no big deal,” Cookie said. “After what we survived? God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life. Hermann Hesse.”
Polly looked into the house. Off the living room, a doorway led into another room they could not see. Maybe a kitchen, maybe a bedroom. Polly imagined sitting in that room and hearing the birds and the ladies whistling outside. She imagined looking out the windows of the house. What would it be like to look out a window and not hope to see Frank? What would it be like to look out a window and not even have him cross her mind?
“Let’s do it,” Polly said.
“Really and truly?” Cookie grabbed Polly’s hands. “You won’t regret this!”
Cookie should have used another word. Instantly, Polly was made only of regret and fear. She couldn’t live out here. What if he couldn’t find her?
Back into the tunnel of brush they went. She mirrored their movements. When th
ey scaled root bulges, like stepping-stones across the bog, she followed them up. When they yawed hard to the left to make way for a low-passing bat, she rolled with them. They packed the mud down with their feet and she used the pathways they had made. She could not back out now. They had taken her as their own.
On Broadway, the sky was lightening in preparation for the sun. If she waited for him and he let her down, she would not survive it. Who would not choose to preempt such pain?
The other women sang softly as they walked, and by the time they got to Forty-First, Polly lifted her voice just above audible when they sang “The Piña Colada Song.”
“Today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present,” Cookie said as they crossed Church.
“Who said that?”
“Anon,” Cookie said. “Me!”
“Who’s that man?” Mary said. “Did we get caught?”
“What can they catch us for?” Cookie said. “Walking?”
Even from a distance, Polly could spot Norberto’s nerves from the stoop of his shoulders.
“It’s Polly’s stalker,” Cookie said. “Let me deal with him. You go inside.”
“That’s not necessary,” Polly said, but Cookie was already running across the dirt road, shouting at Norberto like he was vermin.
“Scoot! Get lost!”
“I only want to talk to Polly! I got some information for her!”
The women of 4A1 clustered around the doorway to watch. Cookie put two hands up as if to push Norberto. She was so short, her hands were almost overhead.
“No, it’s all right.” Polly stepped forward as Norberto’s arms popped up like a boxer’s.
“You get lost!” Cookie shouted. “Stop preying on innocent girls!”
Then Norberto did a bizarre thing. He shouted, “Frank Marino! 113 Grape Street, Buffalo, New York!”
Polly had been hanging on to Cookie’s arm to keep her back from Norberto, but she let go. Cookie stumbled forward and almost fell.
“What did you say?” Polly said.
“Frank Marino, 113 Grape Street, Buffalo, New York.”
Polly rushed to Norberto. He was holding a sheaf of papers in his hand. She glanced down at the papers and saw her name. She slapped him, without knowing why.