Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

by Brian Francis Slattery

  The inmates stand frozen in the whirling market. Sometime in the last six years, early in the morning, picking burntgristle off a pan, or alone in a hallway, seawater raging on the other side of the steel under their hand, each of them accepted that the Rosalita, the ocean’s simmering chaos, the other aging inmates, would be everything they’d have for decades. Now, here, amid the commerce and carnival, the yelps of numbers and sea lions, the buzz of bad wiring, girls skipping bottle caps off gasoline cans, eight of the inmates realize they don’t want anything else. They turn toward the Rosalita and its rust, its creaks and its shudders, the new holes in the walls, and see themselves again in its halls and stairways, the wide riveted courtyards of the blocks, stewing fish on the deck over the coals from burning broken furniture. They could be citizens of their own country now, sovereigns of the rest of their years. They look at each other then, and because they’ve lived with each other for so long, they just nod, stride as one through the crowds, up the gangplank, and back to the Rosalita, as free as they have ever been in their lives. But Marco Angelo Oliveira is shocked by the feeling of his years on the ship sliding off him, flowing out and away from him, filtering into the ether to join the history circling the world. He has been sleeping, and his dream self has been busy, reading the words in the northern lights, listening to the whispers in the water, writing down the signals that appeared in the guts of fish, the scattering of teeth across the cell block floor, the sunlight bending through the portholes. Now that he’s waking up, the Vibe taps him and he rises, a slow ascent into the air, between the buildings near the teeming market, above the city, the people below him flowing into a shimmer of movement on the shores of the half-dead city. Then the tops of the buildings are below him, even the spire spiked into the city’s heart with its angry eye, and Marco can see the planet curve away beneath him, the Atlantic a rippling sheet of silk, the land a cresting sea of concrete breaking against forests and hills that have come to reclaim it. He follows the veins and vines of highways and train tracks, the speed made solid on thousands of miles of rail and pavementshooting lines across Appalachia, the deserts of Texas and Arizona, the fields of California, the blank plains of Kansas, and he knows with the clarity of childhood that the sound of a bell that was struck in his head the day he boarded the Rosalita will not stop ringing; and if he ever wants to be happy again, he must find the Slick Six, his family, his home.

  CHAPTER II.

  A reunion of ACQUAINTANCES; a brief

  HISTORY of Zeke HEZEKIAH and the

  AARDVARK; a jailbreak.

  Nerve, a trader, occupied a warehouse near the Queensboro Bridge a day after the dollar went south and the riots began. It was so easy; he threw a brick through a ground-floor window, destroyed the shrieking alarm with a pair of pliers, congratulated himself for guessing that the police wouldn’t respond anyway. He climbed to the roof, looked out over the smokestacks, the high-rises on Roosevelt Island, the angled glass on the towers on the other side of the river. Feathers of tan smoke rustled in the wind above them, the work of chaos and arsonists, but Nerve couldn’t so much see the collapse as feel it in the roughening of the air, hear it in the car horns breeding car horns sliding together into a long, dense drone, and weaving through it, the roar of a stadium, of millions of people screaming and stomping their feet at once, everywhere, all around him. His phone rang. It was a business associate in Morocco; she had heard the news. What is it like? she asked, and he held his phone to the mouth of the city, broadcasting the sound of panic, so much like the sound of celebration.

  He put five locks on the warehouse door, gave three boys lodging on the first floor a steady supply of food and drugs to patrol the place with guns. So he and Kuala Lumpur, a counterfeiter, have lived for five years. They saw the starved bodiesdumped into the river in piles; heard about the Aardvark’s coup from repurposed police vans squawking the news up and down Queens Boulevard; saw the skeletal scaffolding of the Aardvark’s tower shudder into the skyline, harried by crows; watched specks of workers give it flesh. They were on the roof again the first night the searchlight flared on, began its sweep of the buildings around it. They were pretty sure the light didn’t do anything, but as a symbol, it was enough; it kept them from going outside during the day for the next three months.

  Nerve lives on the top floor of the warehouse, sleeps in a bed hung by chains from the ceiling, lost in a maze of his stock: tools, engine parts, assorted pharmaceuticals, bullets, a small platoon of generators and refrigerators, furniture, crates of canned goods. He does a good business, has the accounts in Beijing enumerated in yuan to prove it. It is not a bad life, he thinks; it’s easier than before, in some ways. No more need for fake identities, front organizations, and bribes, though the Aardvark demands as much paperwork as ever to move anything on or off the island of Manhattan. Forms, stamps, signatures, verbal permissions. All signs of the Aardvark’s paranoia, Nerve thinks. All easy to fake, thanks to Kuala Lumpur, though it still slows him down. Also, if the Queensboro Bridge collapses, either by bombing or negligence, nobody’s going to fix it, and his location will become problematic. And he doesn’t know where his man is, hasn’t seen him since the last fireworks of the last Fourth of July, when they could already see what was coming. I’ll be back soon, he’d said; I’m just going to Vermont and back. I just need to get my brother. That was over five years ago, and Nerve still thinks he sees him in the back of another at least once a day.

  Nerve’s hand twitches when he sees Marco coming; it remembers the first time they met, how Marco bent the hand behind Nerve’s back, closed a fist around one of its pinkies, showing the place where he could snap it off. Just crack thatbone in two, Marco said. The skin and muscle give up a lot easier than you think they do. Nerve’s brain forgave Marco after the Silk Road job, helping a Japanese fishing magnate with Chinese ceramics trade with a Saudi prince with Iranian rugs. Neither would say where they’d acquired their pieces, though three museums seemed to be missing inventory, four people had disappeared. There was a whiff of subterfuge about the deal from the beginning, and it became clear, as the plans became more intricate, that the trade was itself a cover for a larger and much more criminal transaction that Nerve suspected involved drugs for people, or parts of people. But Nerve said nothing, and got six figures for his silence; afterward, he and Marco had bottle after bottle of shiroka melnishka loza in a Bulgarian café at the end of a Tokyo alley damp from a week of rain. The memory of the wine graces Nerve’s lips again, and they smile. But the hand still remembers.

  “Nice place,” Marco says.

  “Tell me what you really think,” Nerve says.

  “Looks like it’s falling apart.”

  “That’s funny,” says Nerve, though he doesn’t laugh. “I was thinking the same thing about you. I thought they’d sent you up the river.”

  “Out to sea,” Marco says.

  “That’s funny,” Nerve says, though again he doesn’t laugh. “How is it that you’re back?”

  “Civil disobedience.”

  “You’re not looking for a job, are you? I could use a man like you. Business is as brisk as ever. But there are sometimes revenue issues. One finds oneself collecting unusual collateral. About three and a half hours north of here is an emu farm that I am now part owner of. The eggs make good trade, though sometimes I let a few hatch, then go up there and eat the birds before they get old and tough.”

  “Do they taste like chicken?”

  “You’d think so. But I had one that tasted much more like beef. I suppose it all depends on what you feed them.”

  “So what do you feed them?”

  “I don’t feed the emus. There’s a sign that says I shouldn’t. The caretaker does it.”

  “And what does he feed them?”

  “Other emus.”

  “So what do they taste like?”

  “I’m so glad the prison ship didn’t blunt your humor. I was afraid incarceration would make you jaded.”

  “Just cold.
”

  “That’s funny,” Nerve says, though once again he isn’t laughing. This is a family thing. Neither of Nerve’s parents has ever laughed. What passes for laughter is a crinkling of the face, a silent shaking that makes them look like they’ve been insulted, so they say they like the joke even though the lack of laughter always makes them sound sarcastic. Nerve has wondered if his inability to laugh is congenital or social, though he knows the distinction isn’t important now that he’s in his thirties and doesn’t really care if he laughs or not. People often look and sound their worst when they’re laughing. The things that happen to their faces, the sounds that come out of them. Appalling.

  “I’m looking for the Slick Six,” Marco says.

  “I figured. I believe they’re all over the place now. What kind of plan are you hatching?” He still has the emus on his mind.

  “It’s a secret.”

  The secret is that Marco doesn’t have a plan, not yet, but it’s not a good idea to tell Nerve this. The suit Marco’s wearing he stole from an apartment twelve blocks away less than an hour ago; this and his reputation as a man who can do things are all he has.

  “Knowing you, it won’t be a secret for long. I remember, oh, eight years ago now—”

  “—Is that who I think it is?” The voice comes from behind a crate of life preservers; when its bearer sees Marco, she breaks into a sprint, leaps like a long jumper, and latches herself to Marco’s torso, arms around his shoulders, legs around his waist.

  “You’ve gotten bigger,” she says. “And you’re so tan.”

  “And you don’t look a day older than when I saw you last. No, I take that back. You look older and it suits you.”

  “Only you could get away with saying that. And I lied. You look horrible. Pale as hell.”

  “Does that mean you’ll tell me your real name now? I’ve been on a prison ship. I deserve it.”

  “Nobody deserves it, Marco.”

  She claims that she goes by the name of Kuala Lumpur because, not being able to read English at the time, she filled out her immigration forms wrong, didn’t realize it until her papers arrived. Marco has never believed this story, even though he saw the documents. Kuala is, after all, a gifted counterfeiter. She takes personal responsibility for the devaluation and subsequent redesign of several minor currencies in the decade before the dollar’s collapse. They have pictures of me in central banks and police stations all over Africa, she says. A poster of me at the Zimbabwe-Zambia border. I get to look at Victoria Falls all day, all night, until the telephone pole falls over or the Zambezi runs dry. She also does IDs, government documents, diplomas, land deeds. The Slick Six, who at the time were engaged in speculative real estate deals in Argentina, Costa Rica, and Venezuela, hired her for this, but it didn’t take long for her and Marco to start flirting every time they talked to each other. Seven months later, the Slick Six invited her to join them; they could even still alliterate, Zeke said, and by the way, will you marry me? She rejected them all. You people are way too serious for me, she said. But she kept working for them all the same, works for Nerve to this day. She can draw up the papers to bring a hundred elephants across the East River by barge, get a batch of anthrax to the docks to be traded for a fictional castle in Addis Ababa. There’s not a signature she can’t forge, though she’s afraid to do the Aardvark’s too often.

  “I haven’t heard from Hideo or Carolyn since they went to LA,” Nerve says. “Word was they went legit. Something insane like that.”

  “Johanna went south,” Kuala Lumpur says. “As in North Carolina. Asheville, the last free place in the old US of A.”

  “Funny place for a good Connecticut girl,” Marco says.

  “Well, you sure spoiled her, didn’t you—”

  Nerve is waving his hands in the air. “—Okay, okay, will the two of you please just—”

  “—Sorry,” Kuala Lumpur says.

  “Don’t do it again,” Nerve says.

  “I won’t,” she says.

  “I mean it.”

  Kuala turns to Marco. “Dayneesha’s famous in Fort Worth. She’s the new news.”

  “What about Zeke?” Marco says. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Of course I do,” she says. “So does Nerve.” Her brow crinkles, the corners of her mouth tighten, and the Vibe visits her head. Say it, it says, and grants her a glimpse of a horse rearing in the middle of Madison Avenue, the rider firing a rifle in the air. Smoke turning the sky black.

  “What?” Marco says.

  When Zeke Hezekiah was eleven years old, a berry aneurysm on the internal carotid artery at the base of his brain popped, and he found himself in a coma. His earthly vessel was riding a bicycle at the time, and it continued on its course halfway down the block before the bicycle’s tires grated against the curb and threw bike and rider across the sidewalk. When he woke up, it was January and he was fifteen, postpubescent and sickly, lashed to a respirator and an IV, alone under a humming green bulb. His parents’ movement, the noises theymade, disoriented him; for a tiny moment, he wished himself back into oblivion, but it didn’t work.

  Then it was months of therapy, learning to walk, to eat, to lift things. Two of his best friends had moved away, one to Seattle, another to Andorra. A third had gone to a juvenile detention center for four counts of rape, two of armed robbery, one of assaulting a police officer. Zeke spooked the ones who were left; they had closed the holes he had left in their lives, and they didn’t want to reopen them. The size of his loss bore down on him at the end of August, as he waded across a stream to fetch a football. He felt it as a tidal wave roaring up behind him, gathering him up, tossing him into the air, throwing him onto sharp stones, dragging him into churning water. His sister told him later she found him screaming in the stream bed; all he remembers is clinging to the rocks.

  He excelled in school, graduated early, finished college at twenty. Soccer and track, a hurdler. He played bassoon in the orchestra, trombone in a soul band that gigged in clubs with chicken wire around the stage, and guitar by himself at home, where he could slip between the strings and crawl inside it. His parents and friends saw determination—zest for life, his father called it—but the truth is that Zeke Hezekiah was driven by fear. He knew that it hadn’t been the crash that put him down, but something in his own head; it was still there, scabbed over and inoperable; it or another aneurysm could pop again at any second, send him off for good. Seventeen years later, it hasn’t happened, and the drive has mellowed into a serenity, an acceptance of the fragility of his existence that people mistake for Buddhism. Sitting now in a cell of what used to be a city jail, he believes that he was prepared well for the last decade, in which he has been a fool to fortune in a medieval way. He spent his twenty-second birthday strapped to a bed in a state hospital in the Republic of Georgia, after they found him in a drainage pipe in Tbilisi shuddering through heroin withdrawal, his American passport shivering in his back pocket.

  Eight years later, he was in splendid exile looking out over cool blue water in what passed for an unassuming house in Monaco, with bank accounts in Liberia and Vanuatu, a house for his parents near the ocean in Andalucía, where they’d honeymooned long ago and where his mother had said she wanted to retire. About a third of his wealth was legitimate, amassed through a supernatural gift for currency trading. But the real money, he knew, was thanks to the Slick Six.

  He saw the crisis coming long before it broke. The evidence was all around him, pulled from newspapers, from clips of politicians and businessmen speaking into bouquets of microphones, casual words from his brokers, conversations in hotel lobbies. Asia and Europe are far more vibrant than the United States these days. Far more opportunities for investment. The national debt of the United States may prove to be unserviceable; that slipping dollar isn’t helping, either. Foreign ministers met with the secretary of commerce. The secretary was fired, replaced by another secretary, who was also fired. A strong statement from the chairman of the Federal Reserve
that everyone knew was a plea to the governments of the world, the lords of global commerce: Please come back. Please let us have your money. We’ll make it worth your while. We promise.

  Zeke called Hideo in Los Angeles.

  “Hideo. It’s Zeke.”

  “Yes?”

  “How much of your money is in dollars these days?”

  “What is this about?”

  “I don’t need a number, just a percentage.”

  “I do not know.”

  “Guess.”

  “I do not know. Seventy-five percent?”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Zeke. I live in America. Of course most of my money is in dollars.”

  “Well, get it out of dollars and into something else. Buy Chinese bonds, a house in Europe, a factory in India. Whatever.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the United States is going under.”

  “Maybe you are high?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “America’s economy cannot just collapse, Zeke. It is very different from a small country, a poor country.”

  “Not anymore, it’s not.”

  It was all in the numbers. Foreign clients selling their dollars away, walking away whistling. Just act natural, they said. Act like nothing’s wrong, and then sell everything. The Last Wave, a tribe of financial speculators and extreme surfers, were interviewed from helicopters, riding giant breakers off of Fiji. This is going to be the big one, they said through their suntan lotion. This is going to be what we named ourselves after. The money was jittery, ready to flee. It only needed to be startled.

  Zeke called Johanna in Connecticut.

  “Have you been watching the news?” Zeke said.

  “It depends on what you mean by that,” Johanna said.

  “About your economy.”