by Eisele, Kimi
“Ayodeji, my dear,” she said, smiling.
“Sadie, my wife,” Ayo said to Carson. He put his hands on the woman’s cheeks and kissed her mouth. “It’s Mr. Principal. He is a good man. Remember, he is the one who gave us books for the children.”
Carson remembered the first time he’d brought Ayo books, all extras from various classrooms—Othello, To Kill a Mockingbird, a geography textbook. Ayo had lit up and thanked Carson over and over.
Sadie gave Carson a shy smile, running her hand self-consciously over her hair to smooth it. “We have nothing to offer him,” she said quietly.
“It’s quite alright,” Carson said, sorry that Ayo had brought him unannounced.
A toddler in an adult-sized T-shirt wrapped her arms around Ayo’s leg and held on as he made his way into the room. “My girl,” he said, depositing her on the sofa next to a boy amidst a pile of Legos.
The apartment smelled like cooking oil and dirty feet. It was small and sparse, only the sofa, a folding chair, and a tall empty bookshelf in the living room. “We recently inherited the place,” Ayo said, poking Carson with his elbow and laughing.
“Good location,” Carson said, smiling. Beyond the Legos, he spotted a cat carrier, two supersized bags of Pampers (where had they found those?), and a rolled-up carpet.
“Father,” an older boy said. He was maybe fifteen. He knelt down to the Legos with the younger boy. They were constructing some kind of city. Small plastic buildings rose up from the rug, forming narrow streets and boulevards. As the city sprawled, the Legos became sparse, and in their place were other objects—an old tin can, some knives and a fork, wooden beads.
“Here you are, sir,” Ayo said, handing Carson the tablets.
Carson thanked him, then gestured to the Legos. “A utopia, do you think?”
“Yes, I think so, Mr. Toe,” Ayo said.
“Mr. Toe?” Carson said.
Ayo slapped his forehead. “Not Mr. Toe, no. I meant Mr. Principal.”
“Mr. Toe? What kind of name is that?” said the youngest boy, starting to laugh.
The little girl laughed, too. Carson looked at Sadie, who put her hand over her mouth, as if to hold in a chuckle. “Is he married to Ms. Finger?” she said, then let out an unreserved hoot, which made everyone else laugh more.
Ayo held out his hands to make them stop. “Listen, Mr. Toe was a real person. He came to our village when I was a boy. My brother Adeyemo and I—” He looked at Carson. “We are twins,” he said. “We were twins. He is no longer here.” He paused. “But Ade and I, we almost ran over Mr. Toe the first time we saw him. With tires! This was a game we played. We used to roll tires and race with them. Someone had distributed a pile of auto tires in our village. We had not ordered them, but they arrived. We never knew who sent them. We played with the tires. I was fast—faster than Ade most of the time.”
“And Mr. Toe?” the little girl said.
“Mr. Toe came from England or Australia, I don’t remember. His full name was Edward Toe, but we just called him Mr. Toe. He had pink skin and brown hair that fell straight over his forehead. My mother said he was soft like a cloth. He was not like the others, who came always trying to convince us of things. Father would say, ‘If they have to convince us it is a good idea, it is not a good idea.’
“Mr. Toe became our teacher, and every day we met him under the guava tree. My children, you have never tasted a guava, have you? Such a sweet fruit. We would have our lessons under that tree because we did not have a schoolhouse. Mr. Toe taught me how to do mathematics and the proper way to hold my mouth to form words in English. If it weren’t for Mr. Toe, I would not be where I am today”—he looked at Carson—“a businessman in America.”
“Come,” he said, calling Carson to the table, where he unfurled a map of the country, stitched together on two pieces of paper and hand-drawn by someone with a good grasp of geography.
Ayo traced a line all the way to the West. “The railroads are the safest way to travel,” he said.
Carson studied the map, noticing a legend of symbols in the corner. They were simple line drawings, like hobo markers from the 1930s. He read the words aloud. “Water, shelter, food.”
“Yes, a key to signposts, I believe,” Ayo said. “Very useful for a traveler.” He slid the map toward Carson. “Take it,” he said. “You will need it.”
Carson rolled up the map and tucked it under his arm and said goodbye to Sadie and the children. Ayo walked him out, and Carson paid him for the water tablets. “And the map, how much?”
“The map is on me,” Ayo said, smiling. “And before you go, we will procure you a gun, okay?”
A gun? Carson thought, mildly stunned. But Ayo was nodding, full of assurance.
“Yes, sir. You will need that, too. But that, my friend, you will pay for.” Ayo held his gaze on Carson. “You know, Mr. Principal, it is true. You remind me of Mr. Toe. Maybe that is why I am helping you. Payback.”
Carson felt grateful. “Or paying it forward, as they say.”
“Yes, yes,” Ayo said. “Paying it forward.”
Beatrix liked the way Carson said her name. The first time he’d called, he’d said it as soon as she’d answered. “Beatrix. Hello.”
Her heart was pounding. “I’m making soup,” she’d said. “Even though it’s hot as hell here. I’m ready for autumn. So I’m making soup, and the kitchen is broiling and so am I. But damn it, it’s my night to cook, and my housemates and I are going to eat hot soup for dinner even if it kills me.” She heard him laugh through the phone.
“You sound determined, Beatrix,” he had said.
He could not see her nodding, but she felt seen and heard.
She’d noticed how he’d said her name the day they’d met, too. It had been a fluke. She had traveled to the East Coast for a climate change rally. As a favor to a friend whose brother had just started teaching high school, she’d agreed to speak to a global studies class. Not the usual sort of thing she did, but why not? She’d been a little nervous, knowing teenagers could tear you to pieces, but she’d found two dozen oranges at a corner market and lugged them into the classroom. Everyone always loved the orange lesson.
The idea was to illustrate how flat maps often distort world geography. Orange peels as the gateway into uneven development and American imperialism.
Carson had slipped into the classroom just as some of the students began lobbing oranges back and forth. She’d noticed him—tall, with dark hair. Easy, confident.
“Hey, hey, people,” Beatrix said. “Don’t be chucking your world around—that’s half the problem right there. Hold it tight. Take care.”
She instructed the students to draw a map of the world on the orange. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just the basic geography as you know it. I’m sure you know where South America is. But did you know that Africa is actually much larger in area than North America?”
Carson had taken a seat in the back of the room. “Hey,” she called out, tossing him an orange. “No spectators.”
He smiled, held up the orange, then pulled a pen from his breast pocket.
Once their maps were drawn, she had everyone peel their oranges—in one piece, if they could—and then press the peel to the table. “See how the continents split apart? To avoid that, you have to fill in the gaps,” she explained. “All flat maps distort the world, either by size or shape or area. So the map you’re used to seeing puts North America front and center, and distorts the South. Why does this matter?”
She managed to lead them into a discussion about global economics and trade and offshore markets and manufacturing and who won and who didn’t. Some of the students crowded around her, wanting to know more and how to get involved in fair-trade causes. She handed out pamphlets and wrote web links on the white board and told them to start a high school action group. “You all have so much power! Use it.”
As she left the classroom, Beatrix raised a fist, and the students echoed the gesture.
&nb
sp; She was hurrying down the hallway, looking for an exit, when Carson came toward her.
“Oh, hi. How do I get out of here? All these barricades!” she said.
He had laughed. A pleasing laugh. “Down the hall and through the double doors,” he said, gesturing to the left. “Great lesson, by the way.”
The compliment flustered her. He introduced himself as the principal, and she’d apologized for having complained about the hallways. He made a joke about trapping students inside and they’d both laughed, and he kept asking questions of her and she had to go catch a train, and somehow he asked for her card and she gave it to him.
“Beatrix with an x,” he’d said, reading her name out loud. “From the other side of the country.”
Some weeks later, he’d emailed her, commenting again on her lesson—he hadn’t looked at oranges the same since. She responded and then he wrote again, and their messages grew long and revelatory. Beatrix learned that Carson’s political leanings were to the left (phew), that he’d never gotten over his teenaged love of Kurt Vonnegut, that his favorite color was yellow but that he did not own any yellow clothing, that he’d been a history teacher for four years before “moving up” to administration, and that most days at least once he regretted that choice. She learned about June, his late wife, an artist, a painter, about her death two years earlier. Beatrix imagined June as kind, thin woman with straight hair and small features. She knew they’d lived together in an old remodeled country farmhouse near a river and that now he lived in the city. He liked grilled-cheese sandwiches with ham and banana. One of his favorite things to look at was a hawk hovering on a thermal.
After three weeks of writing, he had called. They spoke when she was “stateside,” as he liked to say. When she traveled, they sent emails and texts, and sometimes Skyped.
Carson had a concise way of speaking. He often paused between sentences to ruminate, to listen. And then there was his laugh, a kind of chuckle that made Beatrix think of a pond and someone tossing in small stones one at a time.
From the quiet of her lonely apartment, Beatrix tried to summon Carson’s laugh now, but she couldn’t.
Carson paid attention to small things. Moisture in the air. The way someone’s eyes followed him down the street. Birds migrating along the Atlantic Flyway, as they did every spring—even now, in the blackout, warblers to bald eagles. The warblers were so small, but their movements were unmistakable. His father had taught him that, to look at a bird’s movements in order to identify it.
On the other side of a chain-link fence, he spotted a magnolia warbler. He recognized it right away—the yellow on its breast, the white patches on its fanned tail.
Watching the bird, he stepped into the street as a taxicab careened toward him. It skidded to a stop, and Carson leapt back onto the curb.
The cabdriver was shouting and getting out of the car. “You!” he said. “It’s you!”
Carson backed away, confused. The man was stocky, with dark skin, dark hair, and thick arms. A dark strip of mustache stretched across his face, and beneath it, he was smiling. “Are you okay? I can’t believe it’s you,” the man said, holding out his hand. “Fernando Gomez,” he said.
The face was familiar to Carson. Someone’s father. A student’s. He pictured the girl—long dark hair, smiling eyes, bubbly. Then he remembered: this father had stood up at a school meeting last fall and given a rousing speech about education, how it was why he had come to this country and was all his children had.
“We’re getting out of the city,” Fernando said. “My cousin has a small farm in Pennsylvania. Everyone is already there—tíos, primos, sobrinos, abuelos. They were all farmers in Mexico, so they know how already. You are getting out, too, sí ?”
Carson nodded, thinking of the map.
“Come with us,” Fernando said. “It would be an honor, after all you’ve done for Yadira, and all the kids. Really, an honor.”
Yadira. The girl. A senior who had not been able to graduate because the school had closed. An honor? What had he done for Yadira? For any of them?
Fernando wrote down his address on a piece of paper. “Find me here a week from Wednesday. We can take you.”
Heading home, Carson passed the old carriage house, a block-long building, vacant for decades. He slowed now to look at the brick canvas covered with street art. A giant spray-painted rat rose up in silhouette from the base of the building to chase small men in suits. The word “dope” stretched above an archway in bulging yellow letters. Inside the archway, a reproduction of one of the Italian masters’ Madonnas had been wheat-pasted, the child in her lap, a young polar bear suckling her breast.
Ahead, someone was leaving the building with a bicycle. Were people living in there? It was Jairo the bike messenger, a headlamp strapped to his forehead. This isn’t where he’d said he lived.
“Mail delivery?” Carson asked, confused.
The boy took a moment to remember him. “Nah, got a flat.” He removed the headlamp. “Better to take shelter when that happens, if I can. Plus, it’s rad in there. You’ve never been inside?”
Carson shook his head. Jairo put the headlamp back on and led him in.
The building smelled of moisture and chemicals, and Jairo’s light spilled over the walls, revealing giant head shapes filled with cogs, machines, and digital numbers; a sky of bulbous dark-gray clouds; and an army of indigenous fighters cut from an enlarged historical photograph. Geronimo and crew, Carson was pretty sure. One of the figures had been transformed with paint into an eagle, cartoonish and angry, a shredded scroll in its talons.
How many times had Carson walked by never knowing this was here, never thinking to look? “Are you one of the artists?” he asked.
Jairo lit up a patch of floor where a bicycle was stenciled in pink paint, its rider in a cape scrawled with the word “power.” “Kinda, yeah,” he said. “My friends did stuff here, too. But we didn’t know a lot of the other artists. Never even saw them. We’d just come in and look for their stuff. It was so lit. There’d be something new almost every day.”
Carson’s interest quickened. “Like a newspaper,” he said. “Or a wiki.”
“Exactly,” Jairo said, lighting up what looked like a bed with a paper collage of people piled on it, asleep. “The calm before the storm,” he said.
In the next room, the same paper people were sitting or standing, holding laptops and cell phones. A broad swath of gold covered some of them, creating the letters SHTF painted from floor to ceiling.
“Shit hit the fan,” Carson said.
“Yeah. That’s Seek,” Jairo said, pointing to a tag below the F. “Always does big letters like that.”
As the light bounced over the walls, the images flashed like a flip-book. Jairo’s voice began to fill the space. “If you know what you’re looking at, you get the whole history.”
The light fell on an array of TV screens wheat-pasted over a stylized forest, then to a painted Popeye, tilting back a can of oil instead of spinach. “Our addiction to our screens, to cheap oil,” Jairo said. “Until the supply dwindles. Prices get too high for you and me. The debt bubble expands. Banks have no liquidity when the people come for their money. Debt bubble pops. Check out those bubbles. That’s Lady K, she’s high-key good.” He swung the light to a giant pair of dice. “Energy executives roll the dice on the backs of their customers, and all the wells go dry. The cars line up at the pumps.
“Over there,” Jairo said, his light flashing on another wall, “those are the hackers worming into the internet. Worms, viruses, ransomware—off the charts. Facebook explodes with fake news, everyone facing off against everyone. Look, CeeMo was here.” Jairo held the light on a jumble of letters. “He’s the fuckin’ goat, IMHO.”
Jairo’s words came quickly, full of breath and melody. This kid seemed smart beyond his years—a teenager who had paid attention. Though he was unsure of some of the slang, Carson could pick up the gist of it all.
In the next room, the i
mage of a woman in a hospital gown holding on to her IV rack was cut out and wheat-pasted on a pillar. Carson recognized the photograph from the early days of the flu, when the hospitals began to be overrun. Looking at the woman’s glassy eyes, their gigantic desperation, he remembered how haunting that time had been, how lucky he’d been.
“So many dead,” Jairo said, as if reading Carson’s thoughts.
The light shined on a polar bear standing atop a tiny ice cube. Above the image were names: Katrina, Sandy, Maria. All hurricanes. Carson thought of the moldy sofas on the sidewalk less than a mile south of where they stood. Who knew what storm season would bring this year? Nearby was a tumble of concrete and the word “quake” repeated like an echo. That chain of seismic shifts its own Armageddon, Carson recalled.
“A crippled government exposed in its decadence,” Jairo said, illuminating dinner tables clogged with food; a chandelier; a solid-gold toilet on a vast and green White House lawn; stacks of textbooks and the words “Forgive our loans!”; stick figures and skeletons; a flock of vultures; stacks of dollar bills; october $hocks in green block letters.
“Though it wasn’t much of a shock, was it?” Jairo said. “The insiders dodged the bullet. The rest of us—flat broke.”
Carson remembered the day. He kept checking online, watching the numbers fall. His retirement fund had dwindled to nothing. He’d let school out early so that students and teachers could get home safely. The riots had already started.
They stood in the darkness. Carson could hear Jairo breathing next to him in this modern Lascaux.
After a while, he heard Jairo’s footsteps on the concrete floor. He followed the sound through the dark. The light came on long enough for Carson to see an explosion of orange paint. Then it went dark. On and off. On and off, as Jairo created a dramatic effect. Then on. The entire room was splattered with orange—thick splashes of it across walls, ceiling, and floor, covering everything beneath it. At the center of one of the walls was a large black circle, maybe seven feet in diameter, untainted by orange.