by Thea Lim
Mary grabbed her hand. “Don’t! Don’t!” Mary said. “If he’s an American, you could be arrested.”
Norberto’s hat fell off, and then hastily, he sat down in the grass.
“Isn’t Frank Marino the man you are looking for? I found him for you.”
“Who told you his name?” Polly sat down in the grass too.
Cookie hovered. Then she turned away. She began focusing her efforts on getting the other women to go inside.
“I never told anyone his name,” Polly said. “Except in the contact sheet, and you said that didn’t exist. Wait. You got it from the Demographics Center search I made, didn’t you?”
“It was in your file. Remember? The little piece of paper with his inquiry from ’95.”
Her confusion frightened her. She shouted to cover it.
“But where did you get that address? Did you make it up?”
“No. He looked for you again. He did another inquiry, in October ’97.”
“You said there was only one search, in September ’95. You’re trying to trick me.”
“It’s not a trick. I wouldn’t try to trick you. I’m not like that. See—here.” He handed her the paper-clipped sheaf of forms, and pinned to the very top was a black-and-white photo of Polly, her eyes wide from the flash. It had been taken in 1981, the day she left.
“I thought if I did you a favor, you might do me one. I could show you how our interests line up. I have a corps brother who works in TimeRaiser admin. I asked him to do a search for your inquiree’s name, see if an address was floating around. There were three hits. The one we knew, the 1995 search, but the fellow also looked for you in ’93 and ’97.”
“He looked three times?”
“Inquiry submitted. Frank Marino. There’s his address. It costs money to make an inquiry. Three, four hundred dollars. But he did it three times.”
“Why wasn’t this in my file? The file you had on me.”
“Because nobody cared to keep track. But I did.”
“When were they going to tell me?” Polly cried. “When were they going to tell me he was trying to find me?”
“I’m not positive. You probably have to ask.”
“I have to ask for information I don’t know exists?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! But I’ve already helped you, see? Even if you do nothing for me, I’ve helped you. I got no reason to keep information from you. I’m not TimeRaiser.”
Everyone had gone back inside. It was just the two of them in the grass.
“Don’t crumple the pages,” Norberto said. “It’s TimeRaiser property and it’ll look fishy if the pages are crumpled.” He took the papers from her hands.
“How come you can have tenants? Cookie says we can only live in TimeRaiser housing. Are you lying?”
“I got a landlord license from TimeRaiser when they were giving them out in the early days, before they built the worker housing. I’ll show it to you.”
Polly thought about Cookie’s book of sayings. How Polly wanted the sayings to be true; how Polly wished that letting go could be mastered within the length of a line. But the sayings were directives without instruction. They told you what to do with no information on how to do it.
“If you stay here, you’ll be bonded till kingdom come. How many more months do you owe now than when they signed you up? It’ll only get worse.”
She didn’t say anything. He placed the folder back in her lap. There was her own face from 1981, on the other side of time. The corners of the forms flickered in the wind. There was her name and, below it, there was Frank’s.
“If I live with you, I’m not paying rent. I get to keep the rent money in my LifeFund so I can finish my bond.”
“All right.” Norberto exhaled like a trumpet.
“Okay,” she said.
In preparation for the wedding, they went through Marta’s old clothes. Polly tried on the dresses, to see if any fit, for the ceremony. The more Polly looked like Marta, the more they both could sell this.
Polly pulled on a yellow dress with bitsy purple flowers. The colors were foul. When she stepped out, Norberto handed her a brown belt.
“In the photo she wears it with this,” he said.
She looked at the snapshot in his hand. Marta was leaning back from the dinner table, her head tipped to the side, smiling ferociously, as if she wanted every tooth in the photo.
“Tip your head,” Norberto said.
Polly did.
“Hand on hip.”
She put her hand on her hip.
“Can you smile?”
She smiled as wide as Marta.
He stood in front of her as he always did in these moments, with his palms in midair, like someone trying to straighten a picture frame.
The first time he had given this kind of instruction, her chest had closed like a fist, and she had steeled herself for the press of his hands. But he’d done nothing. He just stood there with palms out, looking at her, but not at her, the creases in his forehead getting deeper and deeper.
Sometimes he would say, “Well, what if . . . ?” and ask her to move her hair or stand in different light. But every time he would finally say, “Not quite, but good enough.” Eventually, she felt disappointed too. She too wanted a kind of magic to exist, where the way someone curled their hair behind their ear could turn time, and something lost would be returned.
Norberto sat down on the bed. The clasp on Marta’s suitcase had seized; they’d had to hammer it off. Now the components of Marta’s life spread out like a blast radius: all shades of jeans, gardening shorts, notebooks. Absentmindedly, Norberto rubbed the vinyl of a green backpack, then pushed it away. Polly had been living with him for a month now. The wedding was the day after tomorrow.
“Was Marta Hispanic?”
“Chilean.”
“Do I look Hispanic?”
“Are you?”
“No. But my father was Lebanese. People think I’m Hispanic here.”
“You could be.”
“People keep speaking Spanish to me.” She paused. “My friend—that short lady at the containers? She says people think I’m Hispanic because of my . . . situation. When I had status, I looked white, but now I look Hispanic.”
“Who said this?” Norberto frowned.
“Cookie.”
“Cookie sounds racist,” he said.
“I think she meant other people are racist. Americans who assume I’m . . .”
Still frowning, Norberto crossed his legs and shook his foot, coiled. Polly trailed off.
“How did you develop these photos?” she said. “Is Kodak still around?”
“There’s a guy around here. It’s his hobby. He scavenged the photo-development kiosks in Galveston and built himself a darkroom in his back shed.”
“Why?”
“Way to pass the time. He traded photo services for food.”
“So you can get photos developed, but you can’t mail a letter?”
“Yes. Like I said already, a thousand times.”
Norberto had insisted there was no postal service. He’d said that the stamp he’d sold her for her letter to Donna, the PO box, the whole thing was a scam. “Why else do you think you never got an answer?”
Polly couldn’t believe this. “What kind of scam is that?” she asked. “Just to make five dollars a pop?”
“Factor in PO box rental, Journeymen sending letters everywhere, searching for their families,” said Norberto, “and you’ll make a million.”
Polly had decided to mail a letter to Grape Street anyhow.
“Money down the drain; more useless days on your bond,” Norberto tutted, but he took her letter to post at the PX, and registered a new PO box for her at Moody.
Every evening they motorboated across the bay to get home to the Bolivar Peninsula. Here the landscape was neither abandoned nor impeccable. “There were never many living out here,” Norberto explained, “so when they left, it didn’t make much difference.”
; Norberto’s house was up on stilts, and that first night, Polly had tripped climbing up the porch in the dark; but when he opened the front door, the sunset poured out. The house was in the way of the horizon. Sunlight found its way around the columns of painstakingly stacked goods.
“This is clothes,” Norberto had said, pointing to a line of steamer trunks, packed four high. “This is firewood, obviously. Has to go in here because the shed has a leaky roof. Newspapers, here.” The bundle was the size of a sofa. “I scavenged a library for copies of all the major events: end of Vietnam War, Nixon resigns, first lady prime minister elected. They’ll be worth quite a bit one day.” There were fans and lamps, although his house had no electricity. “I used to sell them at Moody, but TimeRaiser got wind. Now I’m keeping them for the store.”
The couch looked homemade. The kitchen sink was stacked with stereo receivers and the fridge was filled with toys, but there was an unobstructed view of the sky through the kitchen window. There were no pastel chalets or jetties cleaving the sea. There was nothing built, only things that had grown; no human etchings, only grain-colored sand and dark water for miles.
When Polly confessed she wasn’t coming with them after all, Cookie said she understood. “But you be careful, dear,” she’d said. Polly promised to visit their house and help with the furniture anyway. Cookie said she’d let her know what day to come, but then she never did. Polly was cruel with her own feelings at this loss. She scolded herself that this was the sadness of choice: she was lucky to feel so blue.
At head office, the clerk consulted with three different supervisors to verify it was not against regulation for Norberto to charge one dollar’s rent. They tried and tried to find a ruling written against it, but eventually they had to concede it was within Norberto’s rights. They recalculated her bond to completion in thirteen months. Polly got up at four a.m. every day to make it to work on time. Norberto said that, after her bond, she could live with him for as long as it took to earn her boat passage north. Maybe she could make it to Buffalo in time for their anniversary. The fifth for Polly, the twenty-second for Frank.
Now Norberto lit the kerosene lamps and put some water on the woodstove to boil, and Polly put her coveralls back on.
“Will you tell me about your life? Like how you got here?” she asked him.
Norberto squeezed his lips like he was eating something sour.
“Not necessary,” he said.
“I need to know some things about you. What if they ask?”
“They won’t ask at the wedding.”
“Will they ask after?”
He spooned what he called coffee into a pot—a black dust of ground-up chicory root. For a filter, he had a woollen sock. He drank it straight, to save the cost of milk and sugar, but he put sugar in hers. While she was making tiny evil tiles under the blinking lights, she could forget she was human, but for the thought of the evening and a cup of coffee laced with something sweet.
“What happened to Marta?” She sat across from him in a kitchen chair and he sat on the couch. In the little time she’d lived there, this formation had become their routine.
“This is a big house, right?”
“Sure.” Polly couldn’t really tell. Most of the rooms were filled with home goods.
“It’s five bedrooms, in great condition. TimeRaiser even offered to buy it—for a new venture: rustic vacation rentals. Anyways, in the early days, before Moody or the container system, we rented out the rooms.”
“Okay.”
“You see the dunes, between the house and the sea?”
“Yes.”
“Do they look natural?”
“Sure.”
“They’re man-made. Part of the hurricane-protection system. One of our tenants, he was an engineer on that project. Marta fell in love with him.”
“When did she leave?”
“Two years or so? Oh no—it’s 1999—three years. Who’s counting?” He laughed bleakly.
“Do the neighbors know? Are the neighbors supposed to think I’m Marta?”
“Don’t worry about the neighbors. We’re tight. No one’s going to rat us out.”
Blackbirds, the ones she now knew as grackles, tapped on the roof.
“How did you get here?” she asked.
“Where?”
“Here. Are you from here?”
“I got here by boat.”
“Where did you come from?”
“I’m from El Paso.”
“Will you tell me your history, from the beginning?”
“My history? Like, my great-great-grandfather fought the Texians at the Alamo. Then—”
“No, just tell me what happened once the pandemic started.”
“You should talk to Mrs. Howard, down the road. She’ll talk your ear off about surviving, foraging for mushrooms and ferns and flowers, decurrent gills and compound leaves. Hot,” he said, rippling the surface of his drink with his breath. “Why don’t you tell me your story?”
“I have no story. The story is that I was with you until ’81, then I traveled, and now we’re together again. After we’re done with you, we’ll have to make up a story for us.”
“True.” He stared at his mug. “I was eighteen when they started evacuations. We were sent to Albuquerque and I lost my family. Got separated right away. Parents and younger siblings.”
“How did you get separated?”
Heavy bones slid under the skin as he clenched his jaw.
“It’s okay. Never mind,” she said.
He nodded curtly. “I joined the corps. You get to move around, I thought I could find my family. But the policy changed from evacuation to containment and we started closing borders. It was awful. People would be trying to cross, to find someone, but you couldn’t let them through.
“When the central government collapsed, some of my corps brothers kept trying to keep the peace, even after we were disbanded. But I didn’t like the work. I did find one of my cousins eventually, trying to cross a border. He knew what happened to my family.”
“What happened?”
He shook his head.
“I’m very sorry.”
He shook his head again, like an animal trying to shake something free.
“I was in Alabama then, by the mid-’80s. You know, it doesn’t have to be this way. Before, hundreds of years ago, people lived in sync with each other, and animals, plants, all that.”
“They balanced their interests?”
“You got it, sister. Do you know how Singapore survived?”
“Singapore?”
“The pandemic barely grazed them. One: they gave the good pharmaceuticals to all citizens. Everything was free. And two: they sent boatloads of medicine, also free, to the nearest islands with the largest surviving populations—Sri Lanka and Taiwan.”
“Are they communists?”
“The opposite! They needed trading partners, so they kept their neighbors alive. Cooperation can be self-interested. But not here. In the ’80s, people’d strip a corpse to survive. It was awful. I couldn’t even tell you.” It was work to get to the next sentence. “So I wanted to get away. Most people were going east, towards the settlements. I went the other way. Down. That took a few years.”
“A few years?”
“I walked most of the way. For a while I drove for Great South Bus Lines.”
“What’s that?”
“A bunch of crooks who stockpiled gas and ran a bus service for criminal prices.”
“Why did you work for them? Weren’t you trying to get away?”
“To get away, I had to work for them. Story of my life. It got us as far as San Antonio.”
“How did you get here?”
“We walked, and then I helped a guy repair a boat, and he got us here.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Me and Marta. Found the house together. Don’t know what happened to the former residents. If this was my place, I would have stayed. Who could you catch the flu fr
om here?”
“How did you meet Marta?”
“On the bus line. Love at first sight.” He said this mechanically.
“What year was it by then?”
“How many questions is that? I should cut you off. We met in 1988. It was 1991 by the time we made it here. TimeRaiser took control of the area in 1993. Marta saw it as a chance to make our way back to ‘civilized’ life. That was when things went bad between us.”
“Why?”
“We felt opposite ways about TimeRaiser. I didn’t know she didn’t like the way we lived. Truth is, they were the happiest days of my life. But, for her, I went back to corpse stripping, and then she left me. What do you think of the couch?” he said abruptly. “As an expert.”
The couch was made of two-by-fours and a headboard. The cushions were hand-stitched.
“Very resourceful.”
“It was Marta’s doing.”
“After Marta left, why didn’t you quit working for TimeRaiser?”
He took a big swig of coffee. “You know what I hate?”
“What?”
“Being poor. No choice but to follow orders. Better me superintending than some sadist, right? Not really. But if I do this, I can get my store. I’ll be autonomous.
“I remember what it was like to not be poor. Smelling good. Food that doesn’t taste like dirt. Toilets that aren’t holes in the ground.” He set his mug down hard and the scrawny table wobbled. “That’s what she said when she left: ‘Can’t shit in the ground no more.’ I never minded it, till she said that.” Then he laughed to show that all of it, his life, was of no importance to him.
Polly helped him change the subject. “Are those records for sale?” He had covered a row of records, three feet long, in plastic sheeting, painstakingly pulled taut to show the spines.
“They were here when I arrived. They’re probably ruined.”
“Did you test them?”
“It’s not like we can go to RadioShack.”
Finding the plastic alone must have cost great effort. It was easy to imagine him on his dimpled knees, tenderly wrapping the records, cursing each time the plastic slid out of place.
“You’ve kept them so well,” she said.
He looked proud. “It’s for my nostalgia department. Pre-pandemic artifacts will be in high demand. Hey, you could work with me! You could restore furniture. A one-woman purveyor of nostalgia.”