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

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “I saw Marco again,” Carolyn says. Now they’re in her tent, huddled together in the strawberry fields amid rows of women sharing gray and brown blankets, their collective breath merging into a dense fog.

  Hideo nods. “I saw him myself. In daylight.”

  “So he’s here.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What is he doing here?”

  “I do not know.”

  The hope wings through them both that Marco is coming to get them out; behind it, on a leash of fire, the howling fear that he has come to kill them, for the way they left him behind.

  “Where is he now?” she says.

  “I do not know,” he says.

  Across the thousands of miles of the former United States of America, people are asking the same question. Where is Marco? the Aardvark rumbles. It’s already dark in New York City, and the power’s out in Jersey and Brooklyn again; they light fires on the tarred roofs to illuminate the streets below. He can tell through the spyglass that the city has been deconstructing the offices around him, taking a chair, a desk, a window, though he never sees it happen. His gigantic family is in riot on the floors below; if he hadn’t taken away their guns a few weeks ago, they would be using them now. All told, the emperor is displeased, for his empire is unruly, always breaking, burning, falling down, and then there are lines to see him, to see Jeannette Winderhoek, who they know has his ear. Complete strangers ask his sister what can be done about the water on Roosevelt Island, as if they know better than he does how to use his family’s politics to get to him. Kidnapping threats appear in the mailbox: fix the sewers or you lose a daughter. Others mewl at him, give him presents—cars, food, bolts of cloth that wind up heaped on the floor below his office—but even then, there are threats. It’s written on their eyelids, on the palms of their hands. If you don’t fix the broken things, I will break more things, and you can’t stop me. In a flash of introspection, the Aardvark realizes why the authorities never caught him: not because he was so clever, or because they were too slow, as he had always thought. They just had so many other things to do. There were the bridges, the water, the garbage, the schools, fires in tenements, fires in apartments, fires in subway stations. Just holding the city together was so much work. Before collapse, he had been a fly in a tornado. And for two and a half seconds, the emperor of New York wishes he was a fly again.

  Where is Marco? Maria Lista Sandinista says. The jail is getting crowded; inmates sleep in the hallways, under stairwells, push closer together until violence makes some of them into corpses that the Aardvark’s men drop into the harbor. She has been revisiting her Bakunin again; she’s reading about the bombs of more than a century ago, the ones that made the river of history jump its bed. She has already smuggled in a few parts, lengths of wire with alligator clips, a battery, a switch. She doesn’t know quite what to do with them, or how big the weapon will be. But she can already see the flames, a small and furious sun rising inside the jail, bringing light to its dark walls, to the bars and locks, the stains on the stairs, the faces of the inmates stretched into wonder. For a brief second, everything will be clear; and then she will be free.

  Where is Marco? Johanna lies in the dark in the Free Township of Asheville, and her eyes won’t close, though the assassin is long gone. He’s gliding across the Southwestern sands, following the ribbons of light along the highway. Dayneesha is roaring by the gated communities on the hem of Los Angeles, feels the guns follow her down the road. She’s dying for orange groves, the truck stops in Bakersfield, strawberry fields forever. And Zeke follows the wooden steps down the dune at the edge of Myra Jong’s camp, walking into the orange light that spills across the Pacific, soaks into the sand, rises up to the sky, until everything is touched by its soft fire. Marco is lying on the beach in wet clothes, laced by bladder wrack and seaweed, hair thick with salt, toes curled with cold. He looks dead, but he has only been swimming.

  He was in the water for forty-five minutes, but he made it almost a mile out, his arms turning in slow circles into and out of the water, his legs scissoring back and forth; he rose and fellon the swells of the tide, his eyes looking down into the deep blue California water. The bottom dropped away fast, as fish flashed below him, ribbons of movement and color. Then there were only the rays of the sun lancing the depths, sparking the particles in the water to trace their descent. He stared into the water as though into space, into waves that had circled the planet for millennia, distracted by land. And the Vibe gathered itself from the dying light, swirled around the swimmer, humming to itself.

  I thought you said I had to do something, Marco said.

  You do, said the Vibe. But I need to show you something first.

  Something moved beneath him, something big—a dolphin? a whale? No. A rock, a boulder of speckled granite was rising upward through the water toward the surface, a chain bound around it five times over, then angling into the dark, drawing itself out of the murk until it ended at a manacle, another, another; and captured inside them was a clot of fifteen slaves that had been pulled to the bottom of the ocean centuries ago, staring back at him now, their eyes accusatory, mouths open with anger. A watery cry escaped from one of them, and the ocean began to darken, shift, as three more boulders, six, twelve, a horde of them, like a school of giant jellyfish, pushed toward the light, thousands of slaves lashed to them in terror and rage, hands tied behind their backs, wrists tied to their ankles, rising upward all around him; a host of men and women ballooning with seawater, their eyes fixed on him, hands reaching out, all speaking at once, talking in a hundred languages but saying the same thing, how they’d been screwed, how they’d been cheated, how we all deserved better. The rocks breached the surface, strained to lift into the sky, and the drowned slaves surrounded him until their hands were upon his limbs and a dozen mouths were at his ear, and he was crying into the ocean, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for the things I did. And the world spoke back: You have to do better than that. Much better The Vibe ripped through him then, showed him, for an instant, the wars of his childhood, the guns in the jungle, the roof of a post office in Malaysia, zapin in the street below. The time in prison, the time at sea. The slave camp in Virginia, bleeding black smoke, the refugees streaming across Texas, the fires behind them. The wounds in the land. And a rattling cackle passed through the water and the air as the years all careened together, and the living and the dead gathered in his head, revealed to him what must be accomplished before they would be ever be satisfied.

  “I know what I’m going to do now,” Marco says to Zeke, back on the beach. “I’m going to put the Aardvark away, and put us all back together. I’m going to set us all free.”

  “Hideo and Carolyn?”

  “Them. And the rest of us. And the slaves. All of us.”This page intentionally left blank

  CHAPTER VII.

  The state of LOS ANGELES; confrontation;

  revolting DEVELOPMENTS.

  The freeways of Los Angeles, from the 210 shooting through the foothills of the San Gabriels to the 110 lancing through the air over Compton, are drifted with scurrying plastic and dust; glass bottles and tin cans; the shell of a car by an exit ramp, torqued and rusted, paint boiled away by fire, a vestige of riot. There’s a hush over the highway now; its miles of quiet concrete, which curved through the metropolis with industrial grace until the pillars crumbled at their fault lines, are buckled and folded by the hand of an earthquake that took a third of the LA skyline two years ago: People standing in the street saw the ground flex, ripple like water, watched the city change its face. The places of white stone, shining metal, and glass are empty now, brushed over with fine sand, gray and brown, a signal of the buildings’ decay, the desert’s languid return. But all through the streets—the wide boulevards bordered by strip malls of blue and adobe, carnicerias and social clubs, gas stations that almost never have unleaded but always have diesel, hunching rows of brick stores with painted signs for tattoos and tires—the city of Los Angeles throngs wi
th people. The stores are all dark and empty, powerless, a line of ovens baking rats and insects in the afternoon heat. But the stands in front of them are full; plaid shirts strung on clotheslines; bootleg CDs and counterfeitsneakers; a speaker spitting out Akwid so loud that the fuzz from the overdrive turns the trumpets into saxophones, Sergio and Francisco into carnival barkers coughing syllables toward stands selling tamales and carne asada. Smoke rises from grills and steamers wedged into the back of a van with one side cut off, powered by tatty solar panels and the vehicle’s dying battery. The family that lives inside is having a good day; they’re selling burritos as fast as they can wrap them. The middle sister dances out front, sings out come on baby come on baby baby come on, clapping and stamping out a dance hall beat while her mother does business in six currencies, knows the exchange rates, does the math without thinking. It’s like this every day from the waning tail of the heat until midnight, sleeping pigs and peacocks screaming in aluminum cages, running through the crowd and attacking children, until a helicopter chatters overhead, and the men with wide hats tilt their brims upward and hiss, aim and discharge five greasy handguns, and everyone scatters screaming until the aircraft leaves for another boulevard of fallen palm trees: the Los Angeles River, reeds at its banks, reaching the ocean again.

  The helicopter rises above the city, turns the people below into beetles, then specks of sand, as it dozes for four seconds in the air, wobbles in an updraft, and settles down atop the U.S. Bank tower’s circular crown. Jeannette Winderhoek steps out of it, hunches under the wind of the blades, and runs toward the end of the landing pad, where three men in white suits wait for her, holding black briefcases in hands grazing their belt buckles. She recognizes one of them at once: Mr. Yamamura, first lieutenant to Inu Kimura. Yamamura nods.

  “Welcome to Los Angeles,” he says.

  “Thank you for coming,” Winderhoek says. “I know it’s a long way for a meeting.”

  “It is nothing,” Yamamura says. “Kimura has several business concerns in the area.”

  “I bet.”

  Now Yamamura’s head cocks. “Not to worry. You are his largest and most important client.”

  “I should think so,” Jeannette Winderhoek says, though she guesses he says that to everyone.

  Her helicopter has left, but already another one is landing. The rich say the streets are not for them anymore; the news from satellite television teems with stories of couples ambushed and hijacked two miles from home, their cars and persons stripped of anything of value, then dumped into the surf. They all travel by helicopter now. The Angeleno sky fills with angry buzzing as they rise from mansion backyards and alight on the roofs of offices or the parking lots of restaurants that have turned salt cod and beef jerky into delicacies. So they are prisoners in their own city. The word among the rich is that the city is a ruin of derelict cars and graffiti, patrolled by half-feral gangs and packs of coyotes that come down from the hills to scavenge in ransacked supermarkets. They hear them howling in the hills, barking in the street, scratching at the windows as if they smell something good inside. But Jeannette Winderhoek, in a wide boardroom with tinted windows looking over the city that smooths out beneath her, is skeptical.

  “It doesn’t look that bad down there. Looks clean,” she says.

  “Maybe picked clean,” Yamamura says. “They say some have become cannibals.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I do not believe anything.”

  By the time the riots were over, Los Angeles had lost over half of its population, dispersed in a wide fan around the Southwest, dispatched on threads of ships that spun out from the bay, threw orphans across the world. They arrived in Tokyo and Osaka by the shipload, refugees streaked with rust and oil, fumbling for the introductory Japanese phrases they’d drilled into their brains as they heaved across the Pacific. Where is the toilet? I need a doctor. Can I live here? Theyworked in meat-canning plants in rubber aprons and galoshes, translated business deals, taught English to ambitious businessmen in corporate suites, decided to forget all about LA, never learned how the city gave itself to the ones who stayed. Vast families that had crammed themselves into three-room houses with backyards full of paint cans and gasoline-soaked carpets expanded to fill a block, tore out the fences between the lots, grew crops in the sunny corners, built playground equipment from furnaces and boilers, stacks of four-by-sixes, rafts of plywood with signs on one side saying OWN THE HOUSE YOU DESERVE. People left shacks next to railroad tracks for stucco houses on wide, winding streets; wandered from room to room; ran their fingers along furniture and televisions, netsuke, clothes hanging in closets; discovered that the suit jackets almost fit, they were just a little tight in the shoulders. They’re now pulling corn out of the hills, gathering in the shipping yards along the coast, replacing the freighters with commandeered fishing boats that bring in yellowtail and snapper, raw barracuda stewed in oranges and lime. On Tuesdays and Fridays, there’s a market in Long Beach, seafood in ice, shriveled vegetables, and every Angeleno who visits thinks back to the day they realized that this life is better than the one that came before it. They were sitting on the roof of a tienda and watched the sun go down over Santa Monica and slide into the sea. They were climbing up Mulholland Drive and heard a squirming guitar, a churning organ wriggling from a wood-sided house in Laurel Canyon. They were watching the Amberson and Gomez Flying Acrobat Family with their children in the parking lot of the farmer’s market on Third and Fairfax, a galumphing brass band, gnarled contortionists, a woman on a camel lurching around the ring, showers of candy fanning from her sweeping arm. They were sitting at the shore among the long rows of cranes and saw one of them pop its moorings, tilt screaming and moaning into the water, lie there with its feet in the air, drinking from the ocean. The electricity’soff and the water is bad. They cradle papayas and mangoes in their hands, apologize before hacking them to pieces. But their seven-year-old children can’t even remember riding in cars, and the parents look at the dusty station wagon rotting in the driveway and understand that they don’t miss any of it: spending hours in a hardened mass of cars on the freeway, pouring concrete for foundations on barren hillsides, driving down bolts and rebar; the linen suits, the calendar, the night shifts at diners and laundromats, the stench of soap under crackling neon. They can’t recall what it was all for. A collective idyll has spread under the helicopters: Los Angeles has become their secret paradise, the dead power lines their jungle vines, the bulbs of streetlights their budding flowers. They do what they can to keep the city’s reputation as a place of mayhem, start fires at random, chase away the hippies with shotguns, unloading them over their heads, cursing at them in Spanish. They plant stories about kidnappings that end in mutilation, of gun battles that leave dozens rotting in mall parking lots. They know it won’t last, it can’t—the hippies keep coming, the word that LA is groovy now passes among them, across the universe—but they’re doing what they can to delay their inevitable expulsion.

  Jeannette Winderhoek and Yamamura finish their meeting fast. “In closing,” Yamamura is saying, “Mr. Kimura is quite pleased with his arrangement with the Aardvark, and thanks him for his dependable servicing of debt. He trusts that the terms aren’t too constraining?”

  “Oh, no,” Jeannette Winderhoek says.

  “Miss Winderhoek—between you and me—could the Aardvark pay it all off if he wanted to?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” Miss Winderhoek says.

  “Then there is nothing more to discuss,” Yamamura says. “Thank you again for your time.”

  Jeannette Winderhoek rises, closes her briefcase.

  “It is so much money,” Yamamura says. “Is it not, Miss Winderhoek?”

  “Yes it is,” Jeannette Winderhoek says. She turns to face him, and they share a look that each of them has kept private until now. The world is wrapped in a film of wealth and connections, and they skate across it while millions drown below. Their apartments are too big for them, thick
with scrolls from China, figurines from Ghana, cloth from Peru; gifts at the end of lucrative transactions, talismans from the lords of global commerce. Yet sometimes both of them wish it could be simpler. A porch. Water. Coffee. Only the day ahead of them. The new Los Angeles whispers to them through the glass, come outside and join us, but it takes too long to say the words, and both are gone before it finishes its sentence.

  The elevator carrying Jeannette Winderhoek comes to rest between two floors with such grace that she doesn’t realize that she’s stopped moving. Then the lights buzz, flicker out. She stands in the dark; her hand is moving to the stiletto stored in the side of her briefcase when something cold stops it.