by Eisele, Kimi
“Our very own radio!” Flash said, over the loud static.
Hooked to the boom box was a solar panel the size of a slice of bread. Dragon turned a dial, and the static gave way to the sound of a voice.
“—where people just like you are gathering, ready to embark upon their journey to the Center.”
The voice was the same one Beatrix had heard before, a deep male voice.
“People like Myrna Matthews from Houston, Texas. She has her eyes to a better world. She wants to upgrade. Can you tell our listeners why you’ve come to the Center?”
“I believe in a new world,” she said. “I believe it’s possible. I believe all this has happened for a reason. So many of the signs have already come, just as prophesized. The flu, the flood, the financial fall.”
“The darkness,” the familiar male voice said. “But we don’t have to fear the darkness. And here, there is light. Literal light.”
Flash turned the dial and came to the same voice, the same broadcast, every time there was a signal. “This guy is on every station. Jonathan Blue and his bluebell disciples! I can’t believe that’s all that comes through. I don’t get it.”
“Jonathan Blue? Where is he broadcasting from?” Beatrix asked. “Where exactly is the Center?”
“Supposedly, the geographic center of the country. But I heard it’s actually somewhere in Wyoming,” Dragon said.
“So left of center?” Beatrix said, amused. “Is this for real?”
“People believe it’s real, and that’s all you need, really,” Flash said. “Supposedly, they have generators, some mysterious stash of fuel. That’s how they tempt people: ‘All the amenities.’”
“That’s what you need to lure people away from their communities for some so-called ‘Ascension.’ That’s what he calls it,” Dragon said. “Says that what we’ve been waiting for is this kind of unity, and now that the filters are gone, we can finally join it. If we go there, that is. No doubt, this is a new world. But most of what he says sounds like claptrap to me.”
“Everybody always wants to be saved,” Beatrix said. In Latin America, the idea of waiting for the Messiah seemed to be programmed into people’s DNA. First, they’d been waiting for the mythical gods, then for the conquerors, then for Jesus Christ, then Simón Bolívar, then Che Guevara, then the International Monetary Fund, then Hugo Chávez. In the US, well, the US had long believed itself to be the Messiah, a model for all other nations, the shining beacon on the hill. Look how that ended up, she thought.
“Right. Where I come from, you don’t get saved for doing nothing,” Flash said.
“Where do you come from?” Beatrix said.
“California, born and raised. First-generation. My Vietnamese parents immigrated to the States before I happened.”
“And how do you get saved?” Dragon said.
Flash shrugged, then said, “Good deeds and humility.”
“Well, where I come from you only get saved by making money,” Dragon said. “It’s the only way my dad could measure success, at least.”
“A lot of good that did anyone,” Flash said. “The new currency is clearly measured in bike smarts.”
Gary, minus his red bandana, came up the walkway, carrying a cardboard box. “Nice setup,” he said, pointing to the radio.
“Oh, hi,” Beatrix said flatly.
“Hey, Gary,” Flash said. “Yeah, check this out.” He held up the back of the solar panel and explained how they’d configured it. It all sounded like gibberish to Beatrix, but Gary nodded vigorously, seeming to understand everything.
“I can show you how to do a crystal radio set,” Gary said. “They take no power at all. Just picks up radio waves.”
“You can all make your radios, but all you get to listen to is this Jonathan Blue guy,” Beatrix said.
“That seems to be true. He’s got some kind of strong power to be able to broadcast so far,” Gary said. He turned to Beatrix and held up the box in his hands. “I brought these for you.”
She opened the box to find three silver cans, punctured with holes that made patterned designs. Inside each can was a candle. “Lanterns,” Gary said.
“Oh, cool,” Beatrix said, genuinely impressed. “Where’d you get them?”
“I made them. My dad taught me how when I was a kid.”
The gesture surprised her more than she let on. She pictured Gary as a boy with small, determined hands. “That’s very thoughtful. Thank you.”
Maybe he wasn’t just an arrogant army dude. But did he want something from her? God forbid. When he walked away, she noticed the stiffness of his back, the unyielding square shape of his shoulders.
“Well, that was nice of him,” Flash said, peering into the box. “Lemme see.”
“Peace offering, I guess,” Beatrix said.
Dragon elbowed Flash, who made an okay sign with his fingers and winked. “Right. Peace offering.”
“No,” Beatrix said. “Not interested.”
The sound of ringing bells came from a distance. Flash bellowed out an announcement in a booming voice, “Big trucks, trucks, trucks . . . are here, here, here!”
At the water cart, half a dozen other neighbors were already in line. The air smelled of animal sweat and manure. Eight draft horses stood at the front of the water cart, shifting from hoof to hoof and batting flies with their tails. On the cart were three large water tanks that proclaimed, in blue cursive lettering, H20 from Dorn: Keeping you and yours alive! Coiled hoses hung on the sides of the cart, and spigots at the back opened the tanks to fill the buckets. A sign listed prices for everything from empty two-liter soda bottles to five-hundred-gallon tanks.
After a ten-minute wait, a man wearing blue overalls took their money.
“Can you tell me where this water is from, exactly?” Beatrix asked.
“Same place it was always from. The mountains,” he said. “Comes down the aqueduct.”
“Is it safe?” she said.
He widened his eyes and, making sure she was watching, retrieved a cup from the cart and held it under the spigot, then tilted it back and chugged the water straight down.
A woman behind them started huffing for them to hurry up. She pointed to the side of the tank, where Clean and Potable was written. “Says so right there, lady. I have three boys waiting on me at home. Can you move on?”
Beatrix turned to Flash and Dragon. “Do you guys trust this?”
“It’s what we’ve got,” Flash said, lifting up his full buckets and moving away from the tanks.
Beatrix picked up her buckets and followed, wary and unsatisfied.
Nearly six weeks after he left the city, Carson reached western Ohio. The sun steepened its arc overhead, and the May days turned warmer. Fallow fields filled Carson’s view—miles of dirt with cornstalk carcasses. Along the tracks, tiny yellow flowers sprouted from purple stems.
Carson welcomed these luscious specks of color, interruptions to the fatigue in his feet, the monotonous smear of gray gravel. As the days warmed, the tracks pushed through exquisite snarls of green—weeds, ivy, grasses, even fresh dandelions and mustards, which he collected and nibbled as he walked. The greens felt like miracle salads to accompany the venison jerky he’d been gifted some days ago and a can of mystery beans he’d found in an abandoned pickup truck. His pants were loose on him already, his belt notched tighter.
One afternoon, he followed a hunting hawk along a spur of track. The raptor circled and swooped, then rose with a mouse. Hawkeyed.
Carson came to a white building with two open bay doors, along a road flanking the tracks. A body shop. He was hungry. Might there be a forgotten vending machine to break into? As he entered one of the bays, two cats darted past. A third, Siamese, slinked out from behind a barrel and stared at him, its eyes like glacial ponds.
He called out, “Hello!” The cats appeared to be well-fed, but the place seemed long abandoned. Perhaps there were armies of mice here, thinning each day. Stray bolts, dirty rags, and invento
ry lists lay scattered across the floor, along with a stain of oil shaped like a thick-shouldered bull. A car was suspended on one of the lifts. Its underbelly made Carson feel suddenly out of scale, as if he were looking at a tiny Matchbox model.
Inside, he found the vending machine he’d imagined. He peered into the plexiglass, but it was completely empty. The coffee maker, too, had nothing to offer. He made his way past a stack of red plastic chairs and through the next garage, where a silver Dodge Neon was parked over the pit, as if awaiting an oil change. Surely, the gas had been siphoned out. He opened the door and sat down. He put his hands on the steering wheel for a moment, then reached under the seat and felt around for a key. Fat chance. He turned on the radio and was startled when a man’s voice, very deep and clear, came through the speakers.
“Chin up, rise above it. The sprit is resilient. What does it ultimately want? To rise, rise, rise!”
That this was a preaching voice didn’t surprise Carson. If anyone could get on the airways, it would be the religious fanatics. He turned the dial and searched for something else, but all he found was the man’s voice.
“I, too, was once addicted to my image. My ego wanted only to be massaged. I sought approval and wanted to be liked. But then I tapped into the larger web, the real web. You see, we can break free from the trappings of ego and plug into the higher power. This collapse has created a path for you. I can show you.”
Carson turned off the radio. He leaned his head back and relaxed into the seat. He woke with a start to tapping. “Get out! Move it!” A man held a rifle to the windshield.
Carson willed himself to stay calm. I can talk my way out of this. Yes, I can. He reached slowly for his pack.
The man, unshaven and with matted hair, leaned into the window. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m just traveling through,” Carson said, trying to sound calm. “The doors were open, so I came in. I didn’t know anyone was here.”
“Shame on you, trespassing like that,” the man said. “This is private property.” The rifle danced around in front of his face.
“This is an auto body shop,” Carson said, keeping his eyes on the rifle.
“It’s my place now,” the man said. A Siamese cat skulked behind a metal tool cabinet. The man crouched and beckoned, and the cat trotted over to him. He scooped up the animal with one arm, his other arm still wrapped around the rifle.
“You seen my other cats?” the man shouted. “Where are my other cats? D’you go runnin’ them off? Dammit.”
Carson stepped out of the car, easing his backpack out behind him. He was thinking about how to access his gun.
“You watch yourself!” the man said to Carson. “Go on, git,” he shouted. “Next time, stay in the woods. That’s public space. This here is private.”
Carson sprinted across the parking lot to a stand of trees. When he stopped, he could barely breathe. It started to rain, but he kept going, letting the rain soak him.
The rain lightened to a drizzle, then tapered off. The sun unburied itself from the clouds, steam rose from the rails, and everywhere water droplets caught the sunlight. Carson thought of how the man had spoken to his cat, so gentle, so unlike the way he’d spoken to Carson. June used to say men with cats longed for women but hadn’t the slightest idea how to talk to them, so they substituted feline for female. June was catlike herself, her petite, sinuous body, her delicate hands.
Something moved ahead of him on the trail, a four-legged blur with pointed ears. A coyote turned around and looked at him, its gray-brown fur dampened from the rain. After a long stare, it turned and trotted away.
Carson stopped to rest on a fallen log. He stretched out his legs and, after a while, pulled out his notebook.
May 21
B.,
I miss you. Still so far away. The other day, I thought I saw one of my students. Kind of an unremarkable kid until he won a national science competition none of us even knew he’d entered. His project was a device that let you power your own cell phone just by walking. Where is that device now? I’d have endless battery! In a different world, you could have fueled my walk with your voice.
Anyway, the kid I saw was carrying a string of dead squirrels. I said hey, and he looked up, but it wasn’t the same kid.
I’d give anything for that human-powered battery. I’d give anything for a string of squirrels. I’d give anything for a coyote’s cunning sensibility.
Love, C.
Rosie wasn’t sure how, but somehow Beatrix had convinced her abuela to let Rosie join the other housemates on a trip to the Gold Mine, some kind of old dump where people scavenged and recycled old trash and made it reusable.
“It’s not just a junkyard,” Flash explained. “It’s a community. They pool all their earnings and divvy them. They eat from the gardens and sleep in bunkhouses built from scrap materials.”
“Just like in Latin America,” Beatrix said. “Whole communities of pickers live off the dumps. It’s a hard life, but not undignified.”
The idea of living in a dump didn’t seem very dignified at all to Rosie. But it made living in a car seem downright luxurious.
They were in search of building materials for the egg house, bike parts, and—what had helped win over Abuela—jars for storing herbs and tinctures. Abuela now was making her own anti-anxiety solution, a blend of chamomile and poppy. Even though Rosie wasn’t anxious, Abuela sometimes added a few drops of it to the health formula she made Rosie take every day.
They rode beyond the Perimeter to the other side of the highway past the rail yards. It was farther than Rosie had ever been on her bike, and she felt a giddy sense of freedom with the movement. She pedaled hard and steady, making sure to keep up with the others.
On the other side of a chain-link fence, up a dry hill, the pickers moved in and out of view. They carried shovels and bags and moved slowly, digging and sorting the trash. Gulls, ravens, and vultures swooped down with finds of their own—a desiccated decades-old TV dinner, perhaps, or a scared mouse. Refuse had been stacked and sorted under hand-painted signs: auto, appliances, miscellaneous metals.
There was a gate, and just beyond it a green van painted with the words trash to treasures. sunrise to sunset. Flash shook a tambourine hanging on the fence, and a brawny rottweiler careened out from behind the van.
“Be right there,” a woman called out. “And, yes, she bites!”
The woman was tall, with short dark hair, and she wore a nose ring. A tattoo of a yin-yang symbol rounded over one arm.
“I know her,” Beatrix said, lighting up. “Frida, an old friend from immigration activism days.”
“Beatrix,” Frida said. “Long time no see.” She called the dog over and patted her head. “She doesn’t bite actually. I just say that to scare people. Good to see you. You’ve come to the right place. It really is a gold mine here. You wouldn’t believe what we find.”
“Treasures?” Rosie said, surprised by the sound of her own voice.
“Lots of treasures. And we organize it all for you. Go have a look. Everyone who comes here finds—”
A familiar voice interrupted them: “. . . where you’ll find all your needs, all the amenities you’re missing. Bountiful food, clean water, safe shelter. In this place, you’ll find the true you, without interference.”
“Ay, mi amor, turn that off, will you?” Frida yelled.
A man with a shaved head stepped out from behind the van. “I was just seeing if there was anything else.”
“There’s never anything else,” Dragon said.
“To make it sweeter, we have cold milk, my friends. Fresh cold milk. You thought those days were over, didn’t you? Ice cream for the kids. That’s right, you heard me: ice cream.”
“First it was running water,” Frida said. “Now it’s ice cream. What’ll he come up with next?”
Rosie tried to remember the last time she’d had ice cream.
“. . . acres of gardens. This is the land of abundan
ce . . .”
Frida rolled her eyes. “Notice, too, how he’s always talking about darkness and light. So dualistic. I bet there’s not one black or brown person in that Center place,” she said.
“I bet not,” Beatrix said.
Rosie nodded. They were probably right.
“This is the land of abundance right here,” Frida said, looking right into Rosie’s eyes. “Go find it.”
Dragon made a beeline for a pile of used rubber. “Hey, people, bike tires! Right here.”
Rosie followed Beatrix up the hill toward the mounds of other junk, still thinking about ice cream.
“Jars,” Beatrix said. “Keep your eyes peeled for jars.” They stood next to a truck bed piled with broken glass. Rosie felt forlorn. This really was just a junkyard.
They moved through heaps of scrap wood, wire, and cloth. Beatrix stepped into one of the piles and pulled up a scroll of chicken-wire fence. “Perfect.”
They wandered into a home-goods section, past a bed with a cast-iron headboard, a hope chest, flowerpots, a collection of sports trophies, a remarkably well-preserved stack of Life magazines, and a fake Christmas tree strung with gaudy jewelry.
Then Rosie spotted a pile of shoes. She rummaged through misshapen sneakers and scuffed wingtips, and found a single wedge sandal, still blue, with tiny embroidered dragonflies across the strap. She tried it on. “It fits!”
“That looks good on you,” Beatrix said, sounding like she meant it. “But can you walk? We used to say if you can’t run from the cops or climb a fence—”
“Please let the other one be here,” Rosie said, digging through the mound. A strip of blue! There it was. She freed the other sandal and held it up.
“Nice work,” Beatrix said. “Hey, look over there.” She pointed to an assortment of jars on a rickety shelf.
Rosie put the other sandal on and walked cautiously to fetch the jars. “Abuela will be happy now,” she said, feeling relieved.
They returned to the van, where Dragon and Flash waited with a collection of scrap rubber, shipping pallets, and what Flash called “a few fun finds.” He held up a large thin cloth painted to look like a fish. “I’m going to turn this into a kite. With a little snipping and some string, I’m sure I can get it aloft.”