Georgia Pine’s husband runs a local newspaper out of the auto garage’s office, the I-81 Bulletin, he calls it, though it only covers the fifteen square miles around him, augmented with news from Dayneesha’s feed. He was a reporter before the collapse, covered city hall, the police station, won a local award for a story about a war veteran who raised horses and hanged himself in the stalls when he learned he had pancreatic cancer. His paper folded after the collapse; the editor drove to Florida, said he wasn’t coming back. Fine by me, said Georgia Pine’s husband; I’m not leaving. So he edits the Bulletin now, has three reporters, does odd jobs fixing fences and shingling roofs. Four advertisers cover printing of five hundred copies, six pages of newsprint each. He stays up late on Tuesdays in the auto garage to get the paper out on Wednesdays, tells Georgia Pine he does it because someone has to keep the bad news coming. But people know him now, tell him stories hoping he’ll cover them, get them in the paper. He harasses the mayor. It’s like voting all the time. He has an interview with a former water tester for Fish and Wildlife, who says that maybe the collapse wasn’t so bad after all, for those who survived it. The endof big industry; clear air, cleaner water. Maybe the planet won’t be so angry at us now.
Agents of the lords of global commerce are set up on the other side of the road watching a laptop hooked up to a satellite dish by electrical wire and a coat hanger, exchanging baht for rupees, colones for a small commission. They’re moving an undisclosed sum out of the New Dominion and into an account in Kyrgyzstan that carries the name of a man who does not exist. We’ll put your money anywhere you want it, however you want it, the agents say. Who’s going to tell us not to? The agents multiply in the unregulated landscape. The racketeers in Richmond remember a short, wiry woman with hair of blue and gold, who swore and spat and flipped them off before handing them a briefcase with the kind of cash in it that you can retire on if you’re willing to move to Myanmar. A plastics manufacturer remembers a tall, dirty man with hair and beard jumbled to his waist, a long pipe curling away from his lips to dive toward the floor and curve back up again, green smoke weaving out of it to circle his head. An arms dealer recalls an old woman in a smock and bandanna, four teeth in her gums. Someone else, a child. But the agents are the closest thing anyone has to a bank; they wince, then hand over their yuan, watch it flying across the world, trailing transaction fees that the agents collect, take their living from. But at least people will get their money back when they ask for it. Most of it, anyway.
“I need this much in yuan,” the assassin says. He hands an agent a roll of money in ten different currencies, tied in a purple ribbon. The agent weighs it in her hand, then unrolls the bills, passes her palm over each one.
“Sixteen of these bills are counterfeit,” she says.
“Too counterfeit for you doesn’t mean too counterfeit for Somalia.”
The agent smiles. “They’re usable, I think.”
“So you’ll exchange them.”
“Minus a risk premium.”
“Of course.”
The assassin loiters on the edge of the market, eating a slice of cornbread that tastes like the baker’s out of salt, though everyone says they like it better that way now. He’s following the traces in the ether left by Zeke’s and Marco’s passage, a trick he learned in Zimbabwe a decade ago from a man who claimed he was the Last True Chief of the Shona, heir to the Great Zimbabwe. The assassin went through Harare just as the coup was starting, danced through machine-gun fire in front of Manny’s Nightclub, got a bullet in the calf before he became invisible, just to get to a blasted, oil-soaked field near the burned-out airport, where the Last True Chief squatted in a paisley-painted Japanese van missing half of its windows, blasting Ghanaian funk, a trumpet and sax locked in combat in a spiky ring of percussion, everything on overdrive, no condition is permanent. There should be many wives at my feet, the chief said. Visitors from surrounding kingdoms bearing tribute in grains, animals living and dead.
“That man, he is crazy,” said Thomas Sithole, Shona himself by descent, though he cared more about his job as a stationery salesman and owner of Manny’s than his family ties; he still brought in the chimurenga bands, though there were .38-caliber holes in the sides of his speakers, streaks on the house electric guitar from mine blasts, cracks in the calabashes. “He is trouble. You hang out with him long enough, you get a machete in the neck or worse.” He didn’t see what the Last True Chief could see, what the assassin came to learn.
“Take this,” the Last True Chief said, gave the assassin a plastic cup of acrid brown liquid. A helicopter burred overhead, and the chief looked up at it, waved his hand as if pushing it away.
“This smells like cleaning solution,” the assassin said.
“It is gasoline,” said the Last True Chief. “But not just gasoline.”
The effects were at first euphoric, then nauseating. The Last True Chief laughed when the assassin vomited his chicken with garlic and milk onto the van’s tires. For the next hour, the assassin had the deep and peaceful conviction that his stomach would crawl out of his throat and drag his liver with it, that he would die watching the two organs wrestle in the dust. Then all was clear, clearer than it had ever been in his life, as if the lenses in his eyes had been sharpened. The Last True Chief was squatting over him with an expectant look.
“Tell me if this appears different.”
He waved his hand over the assassin’s eyes, and streaks followed his fingers, made dull orange stripes and curls that persisted for a moment before fading, as if sinking into murky water. The Last True Chief rose, and his image smeared; he left a trail of light as he walked to the van to get beers.
“When things move, they blur,” the assassin said. “I’m hallucinating. Or you’ve done something to my eyes.”
“Not to your eyes. To your head. I have altered the way it understands time.”
“What do you mean, altered?”
“You can see into the past. Only a few seconds into it now. But with discipline, you can stretch that into months.”
“But if I see everyone’s past at once, won’t everything be a huge blur?”
“Discipline again. With practice, you will be able to decide what parts of the past to see and not see, and thus re-create history.”
The assassin squints at the highway in front of Georgia Pine’s now, and a horde of glowing ribbons of color stripe along its length, weaving and braiding around each other, the paths of refugees and those who preyed on them. He squints harder, and one by one the ribbons peel away and shrivel into the earth, until he finds the ones he’s looking for. Zeke’s is bright yellow, Marco’s a dark red, and they shoot straight down the highway in parallel, an arm’s length away from each other, getting brighter the farther south they go, until they’re neon rays against the side of the rising hills, then lost in the mountains. The assassin blinks and the ribbons disappear. Nobody notices when he vanishes too, along with a truck with Virginia plates and a full tank of gas, the body of the driver flung into the ditch, staring at the sky, mouth open in protest.
The old green sign that gives the name of the town, Asheville, is still there, bent and rusting, but it is unnecessary now, for all around the border of the town is a blockade of stones and felled trees that turn the highway into a one-lane road guarded by three men, two with shotguns, one with a clipboard and a large hunting knife. As the Americoids approach, the man with the clipboard walks toward the cab; the guns hang back, level the barrels at the truck’s grille, at Felix Purple’s head, then pretend to look away. We do this all day, their faces say.
“Your name,” the man with the clipboard says.
“Felix Purple of the Americoids.”
“Your business.”
“To spread good vibes wherever we go.”
“Number in your party.”
“Unclear, sir.”
“Are you shitting me, Mister Purple?”
“No, sir. We pick up and drop off a lot of folks as we go o
ur merry way.”
“It’s obvious this is your first time to the Free Township of Asheville and Black Mountain.”
“Me personally? Yes, it is.”
“You need to have a clear and straightforward reason for entering the township, or I can’t let you in.”
“Now you’re shitting me.”
“I am not shitting you, Mister Purple.”
There is discussion among Felix, Keira, and Doctor San Diego himself, who gestures in the air as if waving away very slow flies. His vibe has been harshed. Twenty minutes later, the caravan has left seventeen people at Asheville’s border and is turning around, growling away from the blockade. The music takes fifteen minutes to fade after the trailers are out of sight; Jimi has to finish what he was saying thirty years ago in Berlin, and Eddie Hazel is hot on his tail, for he has tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe. The smell will last for another four days, seep into the guards and mellow them without their consent. A week from now, they’ll all show up late, late without excuses, after having slept better than they have in years.
The fifteen Americoids left at the gate declare themselves refugees and willing to work; they’re given slips of green paper and pointed toward the town.
“We’re here to see the mayor,” Zeke says.
“Who are you?” the guard says.
“Tell her that two of the Slick Six are here.”
The guards’ eyebrows rise in unison, and soon Zeke and Marco are riding along Black Mountain Highway in a truck that turns off and up until it’s on a dirt road that slinks into the hills above the city, ambles by fields gone to seed, a line of woods on the other side of the valley, the swell of a round peak spiked by a tilting radio tower.
“Name’s Ralph Morrison,” the deputy says. “Heard a lot about you.”
“Good things, I hope,” Zeke says.
“You could say that.”
“This place is gorgeous.”
“Yes, sir,” Ralph says.
“You from around here?”
“Yes, sir, I am. Born liberated, and I’ll die that way, Lord willing.”
Ralph Morrison was running a supermarket near Black Mountain when the dollar fell; he saw the first shocks ripple across his store just a few days before it happened. Vegetables from Mexico, twice as much as they were the day before. Thosefancy peppers from Holland, unattainable. He bought what he could, put it on the shelf with new stickers. Called his suppliers; the prices were different again, even higher.
“What the heck’s going on with the broccoli?” a patron asked him. “They growing it in Beaujolais?”
“I don’t know.”
After a few days, he just took the price tags off; they didn’t make sense anymore. He took a blackboard out of his stock, changed the numbers every few hours. People started coming in with pocketbooks full of bills, then shopping bags. Came out with seven cans of green beans, a carton of milk. A man in a greasy cap offered to fix Ralph’s car for a frying pan and a gallon of cooking oil. Ralph Morrison agreed. A week later, he saw people across the street banging on the doors of the bank; more people running down the block, like in old movies, news from other countries. So that’s why they call it a bank run, he thought. People really run. He closed his store a week later, walked into the police station.
“Afternoon, Mr. Morrison,” they said. “What brings you here?”
“That depends,” Ralph Morrison said. “You either give me a job—I’ll take anything—or you lock me up now, because I either do a little B&E or nobody eats at my place tonight.” He laughs about it now, but he was serious then.
They turn into the driveway of a collapsing farmhouse with a fence warping along its side, drive up to a barn with a fresh coat of red paint, new white shingles, a few windows, a phone line stapled to the outside and running through a window, because the mayor doesn’t trust the cell and satellite services anymore. Johanna is standing in front of the house, arms folded across her chest. Marco smiles from inside the truck. Johanna catches it, but doesn’t give it back.
“So it’s true,” she says.
“So what’s true?” Zeke says.
“You two on the loose. Did you know that the Aardvark’sgot a bounty out on both of you? We got the message this morning.”
“How much?” Marco says.
“It’s not how much. It’s what, which in this case is a piece of Queens. A little piece, but a piece. I would collect the bounty myself, but he’d recognize me.” She has yet to smile; her lips curl, eyes slide from Marco to Zeke and back again.
“You’re screwing with us,” Zeke says.
“Am I?” Johanna says.
When Marco saw her last, her back was to him, one hand crawling behind her head to worry the skin at the nape of her neck; she left her briefcase on the defendant’s table; she was giving up, it was over. At the plaintiff’s table, the Aardvark’s lawyer, a woman with thick glasses and what looked like a chipped tooth, tapped her papers into a neat stack and bound them with a rubber band. The Aardvark himself sat back in his chair, hands clasped atop his belly, a giant grin on his wide face. He looked at Marco, passed his fingers along his throat, and hissed. As though he had beaten his and Marco’s past to death with a shovel.
“I’m so sorry for what happened to you, Marco,” Johanna says.
“It’s not your fault,” Marco says. “Everyone in that room but us had been bought.”
I don’t mean that, Johanna thinks. Since he was sent away, she has thought about him more often than is healthy. His scent. Remorse that she didn’t try harder, that she let the trial proceed even when she knew the Aardvark had paid the judge, paid him and threatened his family, stocked the jury with his associates. There were motions she could have made, a whistle she could have blown. I denounce these proceedings. This is a lynching. Miscarriage of justice. In her dreams she closes her eyes and jumps into the sky, flies over the ocean to the prison ship, finds him in his salty cell and shrinks to the size of a strawberry seed, rolling into his ear to hear his thoughts, burntby shock, stretching into resentment, then bursting into hatred at everyone else’s freedom. In her dreams, he is coming to kill them; the police find her choked to death, pages of law books jammed into her mouth. Under her dress, she has a pistol taped to her inner thigh. She watches Marco’s hands, his feet, for signals of attack. But they don’t come, and for four seconds, she’s confused. Then she understands.
“Come in,” she says.
The barn’s ceiling soars high inside. A blanket of darkness is draped over the rafters, hiding the animals that live there, eating, mating, nesting, raising their young, the report of their claws and wings tapping against timbers that spiral to the floor, where Oriental rugs unroll across uneven pine, surround a Buddha of a stove, scurry under rice-paper screens that hover around the bed. Seven lamps peer from behind salvaged couches, teeter on end tables with two legs nailed to the wall, hang down from unseen beams, but only two of them work; Johanna has only three lightbulbs, keeps switching them around and out, thinks they’ll last longer that way. The mountains have already stolen the sun for today, and in the dimming light she pads across the piling to an iron kettle singing out a cone of steam, pours it into three cups to make tea. They all sit in front of the stove, for the weather has decided to turn cold; they cross their legs, hold their cups in both hands, pass looks around, cowboys in a standoff, each one daring the other to speak first.
“So why are you here?” Johanna says.
“I have a plan,” Marco says, “to reunite the Slick Six.”
“For what?”
His mouth opens, but no words emerge, and Johanna knows what he wants to say. She decides to be cruel, laughs at him before he can speak.
“The world has nothing to offer us anymore, Marco. It’s only what you can make from it now.”
“Wasn’t it always that way?”
“No. Not like this. You’ve seen the slave camps, right? Half of those people put themselves up on the block. They’re so
desperate, they’re starving. That’s the difference now, Marco. When you fall, nobody catches you. Things break and stay broken. The lives we used to have, whatever they were, they’re impossible now.”
“I’m not saying I want it to be the same,” Marco says.
“And I’m saying I’m not interested,” Johanna says, and throws him a pause just long enough for him to feel the hurt, again, of having nothing to say.
“I thought …” Marco says.
“You thought what?”
“…”
“What I have here is good. Good enough. I’m sorry you’ve driven so far for this, but I think you should go.”
“But we just got here,” Zeke says.
“Which is my point. You two, you need to keep moving if you enjoy the idea of not being shot at, or stabbed, or clubbed over the head.”
“That’s funny,” Zeke says. “We were just talking about how much we missed that.”
“I’m serious, Zeke. I’m not going to turn you in to the Aardvark, but when word gets out that you’re here … really, you should go. Maybe you’ll have better luck with Dayneesha. She always liked you better than I did. Besides, what do you need a lawyer for? Nobody cares about the law anymore.”
Marco stares at her. What’s wrong with you? Your story keeps changing.
No it doesn’t, she thinks. It just gets more complicated.
The last time Marco and Johanna slept together, she said she couldn’t be with him because she was afraid of him. They were in Laguna Beach, in a beaten brown bungalow sagging between two houses of gleaming pink and turquoise; below them, out the window, a sea set on fire by the sun surged against the sand, while silverware clanked in a neighbor’s screened-in kitchen in rough rhythm with some early Skatalites, jaunting through Studio One static, a bleating guitar, fuzzy horns, a trombone solo from a man reconciled to hard times and taking a couple of hours off, having some beers, whistling at girls, moving his feet. Marco rubbed his eyes, stumbled out of bed into the next room. More rustling, the screen door smacking against its frame. She went to the window, watched him walk naked into the waves and start swimming. He was committing suicide, she thought; he would go until he was exhausted, then let himself drown. But he was back two hours later, briny and hardened with cold, said they should rejoin the others, who were already plotting their next job from a brownstone in Boston, a city Marco hated. His dive in the ocean, the length of his swim, was a measurement of his anger. If he had needed to, she thought, he could have kicked his way to Asia to spend it. But he didn’t need to, and it pricks her now that it’d taken him only two hours to work her out of him, when years later, he is still with her, in the shadows of the rafters, behind the rice paper, watching her sleep.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 9