“The uprising is a bad idea,” Marco said. “Too many of you will die.”
“Better death than slavery,” Big Mother said.
Marco just shook his head. “Make some noise tomorrow night. Then let me take care of it.”
At midnight everyone rattled the bars of their cells, howled at the ceiling, a gorgeous choir of dissonance in the blackness of the block. They didn’t even hear the guards come in. The lamps flashed on for three seconds, flashed off, and in the interval of brightness the inmates could see four guards dead in the middle of the floor, a fifth standing at the light switch in shock, Marco dropping from the ceiling on top of him. Seven minutes later a buzzer the inmates had never heard before screamed across the ship, the locks on their cells shunted open all at once, and they were free. They found the guards holding keys, headphones, toothbrushes, pants half on, shirts half off, lying on their beds, liberated from their lives. Marco wasn’t even sweating. So the inmates knew the rumors were true, that Marco really was one of the Slick Six—the ones who pulled off impossible crimes, who stole houses from those who lived in them, drew millions upon millions out of the margin of error in the currency market, spirited jewels and paintings out of vaults and museumsand into the black market, where money flew huge and invisible through the ether. They were wanted in over a hundred countries but partied in public in all of them: There was never enough evidence to put them away; their lawyer was too good. But Marco was the one who’d really gotten things done. The man who could hide in your shadow, in a coffee cup. The bringer of violence, who strung a chain of ghosts—men, women, and children—across five continents. The one who’d been sent away so the rest of the Slick Six could go free.
The inmates convened on the deck under a drizzling Antarctic sky, shifted from foot to foot to keep warm.
“What do we do now?” Helga Ramstead said.
“Go back to America,” Sylvester Sylvester said.
“There’s nothing there anymore,” Ramstead said.
“There’s just nothing on TV. Don’t confuse the two.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I’m just saying there’s got to be something there.”
“No there doesn’t.”
They still couldn’t see it; it was too much at once. They tried to use the dollars that some of the guards had stowed away in pots and pans after the food ran out, but the traders on other boats put up their hands and frowned. Haven’t you heard? they said. Keep it. Show your grandkids. Tell them you remember the states united, and they’ll shake their heads and laugh, tell you to stop lying. Then they started listening harder to the news that strained through the radio, crackled on computer screens, seeped out of the casual talk of the crews of other ships. More riots in Chicago and Los Angeles, big ones, over food. A hole in the roof of the Capitol. Millions of people missing. Dying cities, drying prairies. Slaves in the south again. Slaves all over. The Federation of New England.
“I think we should go back,” said Big Mother. “Do you hear what they’re saying? No more government. Which means there’s no such thing as criminals anymore.”
“That means no right and wrong either,” said Piston Beauvoir. “Which means chaos.”
“The law’s got nothing to do with right and wrong,” Big Mother said. “They’re two separate things. Take away the law, it doesn’t mean everyone burns everything down, does it?”
“You tell me.”
They fought about it for three years. Maggot Boy Johnson walloped the Rosalita around Cape Horn in a shrieking thunderstorm that sank nine other ships; he smiled every time he saw lightning lance into the ocean, every time a wall of water jumped off the bow. They got into shipping off Eurasia, hid from pirates armed with machine guns piloting dented boats of tin and balsa on the windward side of a flock of rocks jutting off Indonesia. They sailed to Pulau Tengah, nine miles off the Malay coast, to drop off thirty crates of Sandeman port and several hundred pounds of Guatemalan coffee beans, and wound up staying for fourteen months. The island had been uninhabited for decades, until seven former oil executives and their Malay wives built a tiny town there in the ruins of the old Vietnamese refugee camp. They called it New Elysia, said they’d live there until the polar ice caps were gone, then let their wives and children go while they stayed to meet the tide; they deserved it, they said, for what they’d done. Every morning the seven men walked down to the beach, along the lacy line of foam where the waves drew lines in the sand, and there they lay down and let the waves surround them, fill their clothes, flow into their ears. They were listening for news, they said. Someday the sea will tell us when it’s coming for us.
New Elysia grew to a hundred people who made their living running a resort for the lords of global commerce who vacationed on the western side of the island; everyone else partied on the eastern side. There were roads to be cleared, trees to fell. But it was days of shrimp and mangoes, nights of zapin, while the lights of the fishing village on the Malay shore painted wavering orange ribbons over the blue water. Four ofthe inmates married local girls in one ceremony, and the party lasted a week, until all the port was gone and the road to the resort needed clearing again. It wouldn’t be so bad to die here, Marco thought, wavering through the forest at dawn. Not so bad to trip and fall into the ground, arms out, mouth open, let the planet swallow me whole. But then the Vibe, invisible, tugged on him, and he brought his assegai out from underneath his bed when he got home, began to sharpen its edges. The Vibe studied Marco’s face, its eyes turning darker in concentration, then moved through New Elysia and found Maggot Boy Johnson still in slumber, walked into his head. Maggot Boy Johnson was dreaming that he was in an infinite supermarket, surrounded by vegetables as far as he could see, weighing a piece of broccoli on a tin scale, when the influence of the Vibe set in; the fluorescent lights bent down from the ceiling, formed a set of neon lips, and spoke with the voice of history. This Marco, the Vibe said. See how I will make him my servant, him and the rest of you. Please don’t, Maggot Boy Johnson said. We’ve been through enough already. The fluorescent lights tried to laugh, but shattered instead; and the next day, they all found themselves standing in front of the Rosalita, looking at the rusting hull, at each other. They boarded one by one without even having to talk to each other, explain why they were going back, Malaysian seeds stowed away on the soles of their shoes.
Months later they are at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, moving away from Lithuania. It has been almost five years since America winked out of existence, but now news is escaping again, and the inmates want to know. Where’s the girl I was with in the days before they put me away? She had pink plastic sandals, a gap between her front teeth. We posted bail, climbed into a 1976 Gremlin with the top sawed off, bought some fake IDs, and turned onto the first curve of a two-week bender through the motels, roadside bars, and convenience stores between Dickson, Tennessee, and Monroeville, Alabama. Whenthere were storms on the highway, she wrapped her head in plastic so she could drive through the rain while I leaned back, spread my arms along the backseat, and closed my eyes, soaking up every drop I could. In front of the courthouse, she got up on her toes and kissed me, her hands on my back, and said she’d wait for me. No you won’t, I said, thinking I was tough when I was just being stupid. The memory of it has only sharpened; it cuts me when I get too close. Where are my parents? Are they still ashamed of me? Where is my dog? I gave him a collar of red leather, and somehow he chewed it off. He chased the bus when it drove off from the jail; when the ship angled away from the shore, I kept watching the pier, thinking he would show up, legs in a blur, mouth open, tongue hanging to the side, his new blue collar already half gone. I was going to tell him not to swim, because we’d just have to turn him back again.
They know they’ve turned south when the water gets warmer. They can feel it through the hull, a glow of heat rising around them, slow tendrils of warmth twining between the bunks and chairs, the chipped tables. The water sloshing on the floor grows plankton. Ice break
s off the deck, drops into the ocean in deep splashes that sound like animals barking. One night, on Piston Beauvoir’s watch, the black North Atlantic brine turns phosphorescent, and a pod of dolphins surrounds the ship, dark outlines in the glowing water; then they leap ahead of the prow, rise and dive, sending out fans of light with every splash, liquid fire in the air. The inmates start a betting pool on what America will be like when they get back. It’ll all be destroyed, some say, black ruins, unburied bodies lying in broken glass in the street, the countryside all ravaged crops and abandoned towns, kids shooting themselves under rotting bridges. Naw, man, others say. It’ll be like nothing ever happened. The lights’ll still be on, the plumbing’ll still work. Hot cups of coffee and toast with margarine, baked beans and bacon. Your girl in nothing but a tank top andunderwear, watching a color television under the shadow of power lines, heaven in your living room. No way, the hippies say. Everything’ll be green now, you’ll see. Skyscrapers covered in vines with white flowers, sidewalks of velvety grass, rows of corn on the tops of buildings. Mountain lions sunning themselves on rooftops above streets turned to streams swarming with trout, and we’ll take off our shoes on the moss at their banks, sit on the curb, and dip our feet in the water. The end of industry, the end of the rush, and as the last lightbulbs burn out and the kerosene runs dry, the universe will return to the North American sky; the stars we haven’t seen since there were cities, when we thought they were sparks scattered by the gods.
A dark stripe of land climbs over the horizon, separating the gray sea from its cloudy twin. At the helm, Maggot Boy Johnson takes the Rosalita through a series of long sweeps in the water; he is the victim of an explosive chain of collective memories, of Norsemen in salt-crusted furs and leathers heading toward the distant shore, spied on by natives with bone earrings and arrows; of squat Basque ships rocking in an ocean boiling with fish, throwing out their nets and pulling them in again and again until the deck riots with cod; of fisherman out from the Bay of Fundy in those same waters, bobbing on silent seas, the last fish far below; and Maggot Boy Johnson doesn’t know whether they’re there in the water, or only there, in his head. As they follow the coast down, against the flow of the current, real ships join the phantasms. A fishing boat with five men on it who look like they’ve been at sea for eight months, their laundry strung out in tan-and-plaid flags from pilot-house to stern. Freighters parade away from the shore, another herd bearing down.
Near New York they’re swarmed by a flock of scrap metal junks that parts around the Rosalita. A few sail up close enough that four men from the smaller ships can lean over the rail, touch the prison boat’s hull, appraising it; they nod to eachother, and a woman in pigtails runs to a siren mounted under the sail, cranks it up until it sends a caterwaul across the water, back into New York Harbor, where a curtain of brown-and-white smoke has been pulled over the buildings, over all of them save for a craggy spire that none of the inmates can remember being there. The sun is a raging fire over the hills by the time they reach the city. Maggot Boy Johnson pushes the prow through the tangled town of houseboats that rings Manhattan, a colony of barges, motorboats, and sailboats gutted and built up again with salvaged timber and corrugated metal, hooked to the harbor floor by cinderblocks on chains, lashed to each other by walkways of pallets, inner tubes, and ropes, detached to let the Rosalita pass. The boats teem with people moving among the rails and rigging; there are wraiths of music, the rubbery plunk and smack of homemade instruments under ululating voices, fires in charcoal pits on the roofs, plucked and spitted animals roasting over them, fattening the sky. The boats get so thick near the island that they hide the shoreline. Sixteen men and woman jump from boat to boat, holler and point, guiding Maggot Boy Johnson to a rickety pier bowing in four places under the weight of the throng upon it, aflame with oily light and noise. The dark blocks of the buildings rise behind them, serene monoliths, and it’s then that the inmates see that all of the lights are out but one: a piercing searchlight slices down from the top of that tower, which everyone knows wasn’t there before. The building’s a tall tapered thing, hairy around the edges, its walls a jumble of brick and plastic, concrete and glass, jutting I-beams, as if the tower were built by the horde of birds that swarm around it, as if the birds were following humans in their quest for heaven, tearing down the buildings all around it and rearing the tower from their ruins.
The Rosalita ties to the pier, and the crowd’s white noise begins to resolve into a polyrhythmic, atonal frenzy. In thesetting sun’s violent orange light, a dark-haired boy swathed in scarves of many-colored rags runs up the swaying ramp to meet Piston Beauvoir at the top, shouting at him in a language he doesn’t recognize. The boy has a plastic bottle that’s been cut in half, and he dances with it, rattling out insistent syllables. He mimes drinking, then being drunk; then Piston Beauvoir gets it. It can be a cup, this bottle, the boy is saying. A bowl. A shovel. A cage for insects, pet or invasive. A cover for candles when the roof leaks. Piston Beauvoir plays along, offers the boy his shoes, his belt, his government-issue shirt. But for the boy it’s serious business; he stops talking, looks the convict over, from his overgrown hair to his worn soles, frowns, and spits. Piston Beauvoir has nothing he wants. He turns and flies back down the ramp, yelling and waving the bottle over his head, the sunlight setting him on fire while three dozen men and women rush to the edge of the pier with long ladders of metal and bamboo, angle them toward the ship; the ladders clatter against the Rosalita’s rails, and people climb over the kerosene water of the harbor, shout as they leap aboard, eviscerate the pilothouse, taking compass, radio, the leather chair bolted to the floor, navigation equipment dangling entrails of cut wires. Within seconds they’ve popped out windows and portholes with crowbars, collected the bent rivets in bags, hammered doors off their hinges and dissected the hinges with screwdrivers, whistling. They take every other step in the stairwells, seventeen chairs, four tables, a pile of guards’ uniforms, three washing machines; eight men rip the stove and oven out of the galley, drag it to the deck, hoist it over their heads and soft-shoe back down the ladder to the pier with it. The ship is stripped in seven minutes, and a portly man wearing nine layers of clothes, three hats, one inside the other, approaches Marco Oliveira smiling, flings a brown envelope that Marco catches in two fingers.
“Fair is fair,” the man says. Inside the envelope is a thicket of money in multiple denominations, but Marco has never seen the currency. He gets lost in the symbols, birds and Victrolas, buildings drawn at dizzying angles, as if by someone falling from a balloon, but recognizes the man framed in the middle at once; turns the bill over, sees how the silhouette on the paper matches the spire with its light sweeping over the city, the all-seeing eye, already brighter than the dying sun. His face changes, and the portly man laughs.
“Nerve thought you might react that way,” the man says. “He says he wants to talk to you.”
“Feeling’s mutual,” Marco says. Maggot Boy Johnson watches Marco’s gaze rise to the tower, and the Vibe leans on Maggot Boy’s shoulder. See what I told you?
Don’t, says Maggot Boy Johnson.
Too late, the Vibe says. It’s already started.
The streets around the docks are mobbed with people and stalls, lit by lamps of oil and animal fat, bonfires of old window frames and newspapers; people with electric signs wired to their heads and stores on their backs: locksmiths, jewelers, cell phone salesmen, shoemakers calling out for customers in a mash of English, Spanish, and Chinese, the new language of money. A band in factory uniforms tears through “La Morena” on banjo, requinto, harp, and washtub, rocking out on a muscular three, all sharp turns between frenzied runs and singing curling high with passion, a man next to them selling cured pig haunches covered with flies, smelling of salt and decay. Less than fifty feet away, somewhere in the alley between the mosque and the club, a duo of oud and djembe slide along a loping, driving beat; he’s not selling any alibis, they sing, and five swaying couples stomp their fe
et to rattle the hardware shack next to them in time with the music. In the shack, a woman selling colanders and metal files, long twisted pieces of steel salvaged from car wrecks, while a man next to her with severe burns on his face sells stereo equipment and satellitedishes. There’s a fight in front of the empty slave market, two men waving pistols at each other; maybe this baby’ll do my talking for me, each of them keeps trying to say, but they’re too drunk to enunciate, too gone to hear. A smoking aisle of rickety stalls is walled with calls for laundry, noodles, organ doning, trips to China, a tiny man with an erhu jamming with a large woman on an upright bass on the changes to “Babylon System,” both of them singing in piercing, flat harmony. They’re a couple, but she looks like she could eat him. A truck howls and backfires, blares an air horn. Four men are standing around an unconscious woman, arguing about motor lubrication while blood seeps out of her ear. A currency trader barks from the back of a van surrounded by roasting meat and rotting vegetables, spices and lighter fluid; the bills of a dozen countries are in his hands. On the broken sidewalk behind a slaughterhouse that used to be a church a woman saws into a dead dog’s stomach, reaches in and pulls out a watch, her husband’s. She’s got his name etched into her front teeth, flashes it wherever she goes, though he died in the mass starvations four years ago. A circus has taken down a stoplight, raised a striped tent that hunches between the buildings; they have animals and trapeze artists, bleachers filling with people eating fried tripe and popcorn, an organ player blasting out music of deafening cheer while two women on stationary bicycles power the bellows. The crowd is tidal, swaying and flowing back and forth, until a huge freighter, solar panels hanging off of it, blasts its entrance into the harbor, and there is a rush forward toward the water, shouts and cackles, waving arms, ladders swinging toward the rails again. The money is already changing hands, a rattle of coins, a rustle of bills, as children dart across the space hanging high above the pier with hammers and blowtorches, welcoming the ship to the new America.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 2