by Eisele, Kimi
Carson let his eyes absorb the color, then eventually settled his focus on the void. It was like the big bang in reverse, he thought. Staring into the black, he felt a weight in his chest. The last decade compressed into a fifteen-minute art tour.
“Genius cyberhack,” Jairo said, “whoever it was.”
Carson nodded. “After a perfect storm.”
Jairo made a clicking sound, then said, “Hey, man, I gotta get going now.”
“That’s it?” Carson said.
“That’s it. The end.”
Her backpack as full as she could manage, Beatrix slipped the note from Dolores into her back pocket and locked the door behind her. Her heart was pounding, but this seemed the best choice. There was nothing here for her.
Just down the front walkway, she heard, “Where to?” She whirled around and saw Dragon standing on the porch.
“I’m off to go find Hank and Dolores,” she said. “Wish me luck.”
“Oh,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
Beatrix waited for him to say something more, but he didn’t. “Yeah, I need to find them,” she said.
“I see. Well, be careful. There’s a lot of bad shit on the roads. You have some kind of protection?”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean it’s kind of horrible out there, and if you haven’t thought it through really well, you might just be on a suicide mission.”
Beatrix felt her stomach lift into her throat. “I just want to find my friends.”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
Beatrix nodded, just a half lie. She had Dolores’s map.
A singsong whistle came from down the block. Dragon whistled back, and within seconds a man as tall and lanky as Dragon, but a little younger, appeared on a bicycle. He had short and shiny dark hair and wore cutoff shorts and a flannel shirt.
“Flash!” Dragon said. “Beatrix, meet Flash. He’s my good friend and roommate.”
“Ah, the famous Beatrix, queen of the”—he paused to find a rhyme—“beatniks?” Flash hopped off the bicycle. “I’ll think on that one. Just back in town, right? Does that mean you missed the big fall? And the flu, too?”
“I left in January and got stuck in Mexico for a few months. But I was here before that.”
“You must have had the early strain, like me?”
Beatrix nodded. Hank and Dolores had called it the “Knock-Knock Flu,” a reference to the Bob Dylan song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” It was so bad they’d really thought they might die. Their tongue-in-cheek title was prescient. When the next flu came around, it was stronger and deadlier, but left alone those who’d had earlier strains.
“I’m praying we don’t get another round,” Flash said.
“Flash is with the PBB, too,” Dragon said.
“The what?”
“The People’s Bicycle Brigade,” Flash said. He flexed his biceps and pointed to the tattoo on his forearm—a bicyclist in a cape emblazoned with an F and a lightning bolt.
“What’s the People’s Bicycle Brigade?”
“We’re kind of like the internet,” Flash said.
“On bikes,” Dragon said.
“People who stop to help you change a flat,” Flash said. “People who, like, keep things going, you know? An information network and a help service. No paychecks, no cash. Trade only. We do basic mechanics, carpentry, gardening, heavy lifting. Whatever. We’re bike messengers, really,” Flash said.
“Speaking of goods, how are you on food, Beatrix?” Dragon said. “Any cash or things to barter along the way?”
Beatrix considered the small wad of bills in her pack and her meager savings, now evaporated from the bank. “What would I barter?”
“Inventory your skills,” he said. “Then trade them for what you need.”
“Right,” Beatrix said, feeling in that moment completely impoverished.
“Wait, I thought you just got home,” Flash said. “Now you’re off again?”
“She’s off to find her friends. North, to a farm somewhere,” Dragon said.
Flash made a face. “By yourself?” He shook his head. “Stay put here for a while.” He rolled up his sleeves and looked at Dragon. “At least long enough to help us dig a second hole for the compost toilet.”
“At least that long,” Dragon said. “Then you’ll have a skill to trade. Come around back, and we’ll show you.”
Beatrix followed them to the backyard, feeling suddenly foolish. They wanted her to dig her way out? She set down her pack and watched them take turns with a shovel. She had been using this compost toilet for a few days now but hadn’t really understood how it worked.
“Once it’s cooked long enough in the ground, it essentially cleans itself. Apparently, we’ll have usable compost within a year,” Dragon said, tossing a shovelful of dirt into a wheelbarrow.
“I guess you have to see it to believe it,” Beatrix said.
“Oh, come on now, where’s your faith, Miss Activist?” Flash said. “Surely you believe in things you can’t see. Isn’t that what change is all about? Isn’t that what protest is for?” He looked at Dragon. “I mean, you said she used to help organize protests. Right?”
“I did,” Beatrix said, helping Flash move a heavy rock from the soil.
“Cool. I get that. There was plenty I wasn’t thrilled about, too,” Flash said. “But I’m not really the protesting type.”
“You’re more of a get-down-and-dirty kind of guy,” Dragon said. “Like me.”
“I’m not opposed to dirt,” Beatrix said, tossing another rock. “But I’ve never understood how people could not speak out.”
“And shouting, er, protesting in the street made you feel like you were doing something?” Dragon said.
“We weren’t just shouting. We were proposing alternatives. That seems obvious enough now, doesn’t it?” She felt annoyed. “Silence,” she said, then paused. “I think silence is a very dangerous thing.”
Dragon and Flash looked at each other. Beatrix expected one of them to change the subject, turned off by her tone, but then they looked back at her with interest, so she continued.
“My friends and I spent years being really pissed at the complacency—the crappy decisions that people seemed to accept by virtue of being silent. You know, you get a good deal on a new T-shirt, but never mind that some mother of five sat in a hot factory sewing it for three dollars a week. And, yeah, a Hershey’s bar cost you a dollar, but who gets the dollar? Not the farmer who picked the cacao beans. We couldn’t handle the disconnect.” She stopped herself. There was so much more to say.
“Right,” Dragon said, nodding.
“Eventually, though, I kind of settled on fair trade as a way to change things,” Beatrix said. She took the shovel from Dragon, stepped up on the edge of it, and let it sink slowly into the dirt. She told them about the work she’d been doing in Ecuador, organizing cacao farmers, promoting Fair Share chocolate bars. “They’re at all the health food stores. The food co-op, too,” she said. “Well, they were. And they were making a difference. Kids got to go to school. I mean, kids had a school to go to, and a teacher, which they hadn’t had before. We eliminated the middleman and got farmers to agree to pool their products and negotiate a fairer price with people who hadn’t ever listened to them before.”
“That’s really cool,” Dragon said, taking the shovel back.
“It was cool,” Beatrix said.
Beatrix recalled her recent weeks in Mexico: The utter mayhem in the streets, the realization that everything was crumbling, the countless trips to the airport, the pleading with the airline personnel, the growing recognition that a global market for fair chocolate now probably meant nothing. And inside her, a fear taking hold that she might never see Carson again.
Dragon handed Flash the shovel, and Beatrix watched him scoop up the dirt. She thought of Hank and Dolores doing the same thing at the mystery farm. She looked at her overstuffed backpack. It seemed to stare at her scor
nfully.
The afternoon was warm, and the sky looked like it might rain. Carson took off his jacket and waited for Ayo on the corner as planned. Ayo waved to him as he approached, and Carson noticed a bandage wrapped around his index finger.
“What happened?” Carson asked.
“Silly, stupid cut.”
“Be careful of infection.”
“Do not be concerned, my friend. There are bigger things to die from than a slice in the hand.”
They started walking and soon passed a young woman standing with a grocery cart. Midtwenties, with clear white skin and red lips that looked like a small ripe strawberry. Ayo backed up and looked into the cart. “What do you have to sell?”
“Fiddleheads and mushrooms,” the woman said. Her mouth pressed shut like a mail slot.
Ayo’s face lit up as the woman peeled back a towel to expose a box full of oblong flesh-colored mushrooms. “They look like thumbs,” Carson said.
“Miracles,” she said. “Or ‘merkels,’ depending on where you come from. They grow wild. You think the mushrooms are funny-looking, how about these?” she said, and peeled back another towel. “Fiddleheads. They’re baby ferns, but they make me think of pinwheels.” She handed one to him. “They’re better cooked.”
“It looks like that small horse that swims in the sea,” Ayo said.
“A seahorse!” the woman said, smiling. “Yes, they do look like seahorses.”
Ayo popped the fiddlehead into his mouth and chewed, then made a face. “Bitter. Bitter seahorse.”
The woman laughed, her white molars visible, eyes squinting small. Carson wished he could buy a bagful of the seahorses for Ayo to take home to his kids.
“Listen to me,” Ayo said, moving closer to the woman. “Do not come out tomorrow. It would not be wise to be out, you, a young pretty girl. They say the raiders are coming.”
“The raiders?” The woman frowned.
“I just share with you what they tell me. Please be careful.”
Carson and Ayo turned east. They found an alley and ducked down it. Carson pulled out a wad of cash. “I am very grateful to you,” he said, and when Ayo handed him the gun, he was surprised by its weight.
“It’s not a dead fish,” Ayo said, chuckling at how Carson held it. He pulled his own gun from his jacket and explained how to load and store the weapon. He dragged an overflowing garbage bin into the center of the alley. “That’s your target,” he said. “Strong stance. You are not a seahorse. Look at my hands. High grasp. Tight. Now squeeze it. You don’t want your other fingers to move when you pull the trigger. Only one.” Ayo’s eyes were focused on the garbage bin. Without blinking, he said to Carson, “Have you ever milked a cow?”
Carson laughed nervously.
“Of course you haven’t,” Ayo said. “Good Lord. You are a smart man, but you don’t know what you need to know. But it’s okay, because you don’t want to milk a gun either.”
Carson copied Ayo’s stance: arms stiff, hands locked on the gun, eyes focused.
“Just hold it tight. Look forward. Keep your eyes fastened. All the way. Loose finger.”
Carson looked at Ayo. “Loose finger?”
“Yes. Keep your index finger loose. Not stiff. Do it.”
But Carson could not relax his finger, could not pull the trigger. He felt like a small, weak boy.
“Mr. Principal, the only way to do it is to do it.”
Carson stood still, aiming. “Right. The only way to do it is to do it,” he said. He pulled the trigger and hit the trash, sending a plastic bag into flight.
“Yes!” Ayo cried. “Good. Again. We have bullets, my friend.”
Carson shot five more times, then lowered the gun. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just been running. “Eshu,” he said, finally, “thank you.”
Ayo let out a laugh. “Eshu, yes!” He put his hand on Carson’s shoulder. “Good work.”
Carson tucked the gun into his jacket and felt stronger. The feeling unsettled him. He watched Ayo tuck away his own gun. No big deal. Okay. Right.
Ayo handed him a small box. “You’ll need this, too,” he said. “One magazine, fifteen rounds.”
Carson cleared his throat and took the box. He pointed to Ayo’s hand. “Take care of that finger, okay?”
Ayo smiled, nodding. “Sadie worries about me. But I am the first of the twins, the only brother in my family still standing. I will not fall.” He looked at Carson in the eye. “Don’t forget: every day is another blessing.”
“I won’t forget.”
They hugged quickly, and Carson took his leave. At the end of the block, he turned around. Ayo was standing there still, watching him. Carson waved, and Ayo waved back.
CHAPTER 3
Beatrix rode the red bicycle rode through the neighborhood and passed a park full of camping tents. An SUV was parked on the grass, and next to it a man in a dark wool coat was shoveling dirt.
“What’s the ditch for?” Beatrix asked, getting off her bike. Nearby, a woman sat on the ground, holding a small, bundled infant to her chest.
“The car,” the man said. “I’ll keep digging, and eventually it’ll drop in, except for the windows. I saw homeless folks make a house like this back home in Ireland years ago. Remove the seats and the engine, and you end up with a perfectly insulated living space. Wondrous thing, if you don’t mind little places. Carchitecture,” he said, winking. “Couldn’t build fires for food and warmth in a small apartment. And the shit kept piling up, literally. If this doesn’t work, we’ll join the rest of them and head to the country.”
The woman—his wife?—lifted her shirt and tucked the baby underneath to nurse. Beatrix tried to imagine holding a baby on her own lap, up to her breast to suckle. The task seemed both Herculean and mundane all at once.
“We’ll be harder to oust this way,” the man said, starting to dig again. “Because you know they’ll be comin’. They’ll come and kick everybody out eventually.”
Beatrix wondered who “they” were and what kind of authority they had. She remembered how residents of a community in Ecuador had once protected their homes from wealthy landowners. When the bulldozers arrived, they’d stood stoically in front of their bamboo houses, their arms locked together in a human chain. Sometimes the simplest gestures were the strongest.
“If they come,” she said now, “you’ll stand up to them.”
The man lifted the shovel, but she couldn’t tell if he agreed or not.
She got back on her bike and rode to the business district, where shops and restaurants and the Fair Share office had once operated. She and Hank had found the place after jumping ship from Global Cause, a larger organization that had lost sight of its original mission of putting people over profits. Beatrix and Hank had stayed small, directly supporting Latin American producers. Before everything went dark, Fair Share had become a respected, effective, and solvent operation.
But now the neighborhood was changed. Most store windows were boarded up. Others announced available on sun-faded signs. Beatrix rode past the frozen yogurt place, the head shop, and the food co-op—all closed down. She idly wondered what had become of all the products in the beauty section of the co-op. Back when their causes seemed to be slowly improving the world, when they were relaxed enough to play, she and Dolores would try the testers. Beatrix always chose a citrus-scented essential oil. “Juicy,” Dolores would say when Beatrix held it out for her approval. The whole memory seemed so frivolous now.
Three teenaged girls wearing baseball caps and flip-flops rode by on bicycles, and then a bearded man hauling a trailer full of chopped wood. A boy in overalls stood on the sidewalk selling wilted lettuce from a grocery cart. On the curb, a man in a tie held a sign: wanted: shelter for two. will cook and make jokes.
The Fair Share headquarters occupied a small office above Rigo’s Mexican Lonchería, a favorite lunch spot until Rigo had closed up and returned to Mexico. Beatrix cupped her hands to the window and peered in: nothing but a
glimmer of chrome counter where they’d ordered veggie tacos and sipped horchata.
She locked the bike to a signpost and made her way up a narrow staircase. Inside the office, she opened the blinds. She had somehow hoped to find an intern, at least one. No such luck.
Posters on the walls proclaimed their latest campaigns: one square = fair share and kiss hershey goodbye. A photo of a thick bar of dark chocolate and a group of children in one of the Ecuadorian Amazon villages playing basketball on a new court. It read: you get your dreams. they get theirs.
She flipped through the calendar on the wall to April, just a few days away. On the fifteenth, they were scheduled to host the “Free to Fair to Where? Summit,” a meeting of twenty-five international delegates to discuss what the economic downfall would mean for trade. So much for that.
She sat down in one of the chairs and rotated it toward the back of the room, where a map of the world hung, annotated with Post-its and scribbles. A thick hand-drawn arrow pointed to South America: There’s power DOWN THERE. A page from a notebook taped over the Arctic read: And then we all drown . . . That map, with all its stories, had always reminded her of the scope of things. There was a whole world to consider, and every single part of it mattered, not just the pretty purple United States of America.
She remembered Quebec City and the rally to oppose the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. As the protesters made their way through the streets, Beatrix had felt like they’d become a single organism. Its heartbeat came from the cluster of drummers a few yards in front of her, and its limbs stretched across the city into other cities, across borders into other countries. Down with exploitation, down with greed! Goodbye, evil system! We are the seeds! the organism chanted.
“Goodbye, evil system,” Beatrix said now, out loud. How prescient. Down with everything, for everyone: the investment bankers; the CEOs; the lobbyists; the farmers, factory workers, and custodians; and their yearning and yelling activist selves, too.
She rummaged through the top drawer of her office desk and pulled out an old phone list. Someone would know about the farm where Hank and Dolores had gone. Someone would know what to do. She scanned the list and sighed. No actual addresses, just cell phone numbers, email addresses, Instagram and Twitter usernames.