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

by Brian Francis Slattery

  In the morning, a coalition of partiers approached the promoters.

  “When’s the next one?” they said.

  The promoters looked at each other. “As soon as the batteries are full,” one of them said, and the rest nodded.

  “So there will be another Seven Days of Light,” the party-goers said.

  “Seven days of what?”

  “That’s what we’ve been calling it.”

  There have now been over forty of them, tens of thousands of people dancing under a sprawl of neon to music that shakes the sand as voices tangle together in a constant roar. From a distance, it’s like everything’s on fire and the multitudes are panicking, panicking in four-four time, but it’s just people partying; there’s a small town’s worth of them who never leave. During the Seven Days, they cook, sell water, fix bandages, assist in births, bury the dead; they’ve started a graveyard a few miles away, marked the plots with wooden triangles covered in green paint that captures the sun during the day and frees it at night. They clean the place when the Seven Days are done, burn the trash, wire the money they’ve made to a cluster of bank accounts in Canada, Europe, and China. At night, they have parties of their own around a tall bonfire, a fallen spark of the heat in the heavens, music heavy with drums. One hundred and sixteen children have been born to them already; they’ll grow up knowing only this cycle of weeks of noise and joy, weeks of placid cool; and until they hear the stories from the hordes that swarm them when the juice is on, they’ll believe that everyone in the world lives just like they do.

  “It’s a good party,” Dayneesha says. “Maybe the best I’ve ever seen.”

  “Better than Hong Kong seven years ago?” Marco says. “You loved it there.”

  “Those were good parties. But not like this.”

  “There are no Monday mornings now. This is what you get.”

  “…”

  “You want to get in there,” Marco says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Go. I’ll look for someone who can help us.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes.”

  Dayneesha grabs his hand. “I know you’ll able to find me later. Just don’t tell me how you do it. I’ve never wanted to know.” Years ago, this impulse saved her over and over again. When she was a child in Chicago and discovered she could manipulate numbers in her head, that was all that mattered; the painted cinder blocks and stained plastic chairs of her school, the bangs and screams in the apartment next door, didn’t distract her. When she was a teenager, accessing the mainframes of banks and government agencies was a game, a problem to be solved; she was doing it in her bedroom at 2:45 in the morning when her cousin was shot and dragged into theliving room, the secrets of the Department of Defense flickering on her screen as she screamed his name into his ear while the paramedics cut away his clothes, leveraged him onto a stretcher. She never saw him again. She didn’t ask Hideo what her work was contributing to when he brought her on, didn’t want to know who might be getting hurt. She bought her mother a car with the money from the first job, sent her brother to community college on the second. When the Slick Six were slick, and she was working twenty hours a day from a terminal in a tenement basement while maintaining her position as a silent partner in a land deal for a substantial part of a small African nation, she looked only at the data, names and photographs, a tilt of eyebrow, the cut of a jacket. She heard sounds through planted microphones, distorted, crackling, muffled. Saw shadows through grainy footage from security cameras. Never looked at news reports afterward. Marco appeared in the basement smeared and salty-smelling, showered in the next room under a loose fixture for a half an hour. She never asked.

  The music pulls her away from him, and she drifts toward the light and sound, the jaunt that reggaeton put into rumba, until a wheeling arm of dancers wraps around her and takes her in. The speakers draw her close, the waves of bass realign the atoms in her, until she flexes with every pulse and they move through her, like warmth, like love; she’s surrounded by hands, other bodies, bending to hers. A pill is between her fingers; she takes it without question, and the next six hours happen all at once, blurs of color that sharpen into the blue sole of a sneaker, the party from fifty feet in the air, three men slaughtering a piglet and roasting it over a water tank that’s been cut in half and filled with coal. The crack of breaking bone, its marrow on her tongue. A plaid blanket. The mottled rubber inside the trunk of a car, words mumbling from the backseat; the smell of their roses does not remain. Then, revelers restingin a pile to stay warm, a round face with big eyes forcing a smile, a hand on Dayneesha’s shoulder. A voice emanating from between the teeth.

  “Are you Dayneesha?”

  Dayneesha nods.

  “The one looking for the Americoids?”

  She nods again.

  “I think I can help you.”

  “Do you know where they are?” Dayneesha says.

  “No.”

  “Then how can you help?”

  “I was one of them.”

  “Good for you, honey. Does your jacket say what I think it says?”

  The mouth pauses. “Yes. But it was only what I was born to do. I’ve never actually done it.”

  “How nice,” Dayneesha says, and at long last, loses consciousness. When she wakes up, the sun is raging above her and everything is quiet; the power ran out four hours ago and the partiers are going home. Dayneesha’s arm is around Asia Sherman’s waist, and for four seconds, in the bleary fog between sleeping and waking, she believes they’re in love, and one of them is pregnant with the other’s child.

  “I was wondering when you’d wake up,” Marco says, sitting cross-legged in the dust under a black plastic umbrella. “Is this who I think it is?”

  Asia Sherman’s eyelids snap open, and Marco can see the rims of blue around her irises, the marks of Robert Blackfeather Sherman’s first wife; they said she got them from Custer himself, staining the people for generations later, dragging their history behind them on a chain. The Vibe dives into her eyes, swims into the turquoise until it runs into the water of the Pacific off of California, through which growls the Mumbai Stinger, a freighter out of San Jose that really is a slow boat to China; its final port of call is Dongtan, where it will deposit the few miles of timber stacked in its hold and the last of its passengers, so long as they’re willing to be brought ashore in a container.

  “My traveling companion,” Hideo says, in Malay. “Carolyn.”

  “It is an extreme pleasure to meet you, madam,” the captain says.

  “And you,” Carolyn says.

  “You speak Malay?” the captain says.

  “A little. Just for you.” She takes his hand and almost kisses it, smiles instead.

  Zeke doesn’t understand a word of this exchange, but it’s easy to see that the captain is dazzled. A pulse of blood pushes through the captain’s body, reminds him of when he was seventeen, on the shore in Kampong Bagan Jermal, attended by bobbing fishing boats under a hot moon, a hand on his girl’s thigh, offering her anything if she would just take off her dress. He basks in the rush; his genitals stir; his eyes glaze. It’s too much for the poor man. Later, when he rhapsodizes in an outdoor Afropop bar in the metal slums of Bangkok, the air heavy with grime and guitars, he’ll realize that he can’t remember Carolyn’s name or face, only the feeling he got when her fingers hooked his hand. It’ll make him stop in midsyllable; then he’ll make up all the details for the boys around him because he’s decided that the feeling was enough.

  The captain heads for the door, jostles Zeke as though he were an end table.

  “It’s only because you don’t speak the language,” Carolyn says.

  “It’s because I’m not you,” Zeke says. “Don’t worry, I’m not offended. He hits me; he hits on you. What’s the difference?”

  They have been on the Mumbai Stinger for three days, and twice, the captain has found a way to hit Zeke, maybe because Zeke persists in asking him where the poop d
eck is. There is nopoop deck on this ship, the captain says, bewildered and annoyed. We have no poop deck here. The first time the captain hit Zeke was in the mess, when the captain laughed so hard at a joke told in Malay that he tipped his chair back into Zeke and the bowl of canned clam chowder he was carrying, sent man and chowder sprawling onto the ridged metal floor. The second time was on the deck, when the captain, describing the length of God knows what, threw his arms wide and almost knocked Zeke over the rail. Knuckles white, body tilted at an unstable angle, Zeke looked into the purple water and did the math, figured that if he went overboard, it wouldn’t be a straight shot into the waves; no, he would bounce first off a rusting protuberance in the hull that would either break his ankles or brain him, depending on how he spun. He was running the numbers on this, at the mercy of the ship’s pitch; but just as he was sure it would be the ankles, the ship angled toward him, dropped him back on the deck where he had to duck to avoid being hit again by the captain, who was now describing, in a high chuckle, how wide some other godforsaken object was. Meanwhile, Carolyn needs only to dole out the smallest charm to keep the captain from checking the runaway slave roster, explains that they just need to get to Osaka and everything will be all right. The captain agrees; as long as he’s talking to her, everything really is all right.

  “Osaka it is,” the captain says, and Hideo nods. We will go to Osaka and stay there, he thinks, if there’s word that Marco and Dayneesha have failed. We’ll call in a dozen favors so that Kimura will pay to alter our faces, begin again as children who have inherited knowledge from a previous life but are not beholden to it.

  Four other passengers are on the freighter’s deck with them. Two of them have just been married, or are acting like it; they stand at the rail along starboard necking and letting the wind tangle their hair. He has holes in the knees of his slacks, and the bottom of her dress frays into tatters. Two men stand at the stern, one’s hands in the pockets of a gray canvas coat; he stares into the water while the other man kneels and fools with a shortwave radio. He hooks it up to a box with a crank and bright red wires, turns a switch on the back, and puts a pair of headphones on. The man in gray canvas sits on the deck and turns the crank while the man with headphones speaks into an antique receiver. Is there anyone out there? Can you hear us? They hear voices, humming tones, think it’s the message they’re looking for, but it turns out to be the first stanza of a Montenegrin pop song, a beautiful three-minute thing about girls and riding in cars.

  That song is also talking to Maggot Boy Johnson, who’s sitting in a Serbian prizefighting club on the piers of New York City. The song plays on the PA between matches, and half the spectators sing along amid crying of children, calls for fried dough, knife fights over unsettled debts. He’s there to bet on Big Mother, because Big Mother has never lost a fight and never will. In a few months, frequent bettors and bookies will become aware of this and the club will ban Big Mother from the ring because the odds aren’t enough to cover their losses, but for now, Maggot Boy and Big Mother are getting rich. They come home with bags of dozens of currencies slung over their backs, a pile of the new empires, walk to the rails of the cell blocks and empty them into the courtyards; and the citizens of the Rosalita buy wine and smoked pork, wool socks for children, and strings for the Portuguese guitar, so there can be fado from midnight until five in the pilothouse, the wailing melody, the chiming strings, the room filled with the stench and tar of cheap cigarettes. Big Mother is in the ring now, pulling his punches a little to make it look like a contest; he lets his opponent, a large Chinese sailor who he knows is more fat than muscle, land a few powerful shots on his jaw, a charade he maintains for three rounds. Then Big Mother starts fighting.

  The sailor takes a hit that almost breaks his cheekbone, another that moves a rib closer to his lungs, realizes what’s going on before anyone in the crowd does. It makes him howl and flail, throw punches that would do some damage if they could only connect. But Big Mother dodges them with ease; he leans back, steps aside, lets a few glance off his shoulders. Then he gives the sailor an uppercut that snaps his head back, two more that make him void his bowels, and the sailor spins to the floor in a hail of cheers and whistles while money moves through the stands in a rustling whisper.

  Maggot Boy Johnson is humming across the ring to collect his winnings when a gong sounds in his head and four Dutchmen in leather britches and wool jackets pass through the roar, muskets cocked over their shoulders. They move through Big Mother and stride to the center of the ring; the leader turns and shouts, and a fifth man, his woolen jacket stripped off, enters drawing a cart of a dozen guns, a bag of guilders swinging from one barrel, the wheels of the cart uneven, lurching. The five of them stand in the ring, pacing the ground, sitting down, standing up, scanning the middle distance while the next fight scurries through them, as though each was a scrap of smoke, a fragrance; they’re still waiting when the loser is carried out of the ring by his arms and legs, thrown at his horrified wife, who begged him not to fight for money. Halfway through the next match, as a spindly Sierra Leonean gives a bullock of a Cuban a bloody nose, five Lenni-Lenape in white shirts, deerskin pants, and bracelets around their arms glide in from the other end of the ring. As the Cuban topples onto his side, there are brief negotiations; the Dutchmen produce papers, a thin bottle of ink, a quill, ask the Lenni-Lenape to make their marks. They do, and just like that, they hand over the island of Manhattan, set history spinning on the wheel. The Dutchmen make a show of presenting cart, muskets, guilders, as though these things were obtained at great sacrifice. One of the Lenni-Lenape thanks them in stuttering Dutch, tries to hold them there, form the Dutch words for the questions that are shooting between his friends—can we still live on the land, eat its game, catch its fish?—but the Dutchmen have already left the ring as a new fight starts, and a tooth, knocked out by a fist to the mouth, spins end over end toward the ceiling.

  CHAPTER IX.

  Messages; the SNAKE RIVER; the slow

  boat to CHINA; the changing luck of

  CAPTAIN BENGWE SALOON;

  Tyrone Fly joins the circus.

  The ghosts of America were quiet for four hundred years, the people who had been taken, taken away; the Iroquois with holes in their heads, holes in their chests, burns across their skin; the casualties of forgotten wars; the slaves with skulls fractured by shovels; immigrants dead of tuberculosis and polio; the Cherokee starved in the South; the Yoruba who broke from his shackles to sprint across the sand in Virginia and get shot down in the surf; the Poles who froze to death in Chicago basements. They passed through the barbed wire strung across dunes of snow, lines drawn across land that did not ask to be divided; scratched at the underside of the asphalt over the ground where they’d been massacred, now paved into a shopping center parking lot; they tapped at the copper pipes growing ice; floated just beneath the surfaces of rivers, faces up, fingers out. There were more of them than there were of the living, but as the country clawed its history into the planet’s surface, manifesting the destiny it saw for itself, they never got a chance to say a word. Over the past few weeks, they’ve made some noise, pulling each other out of the ground, out of dark water. They see how America is descending from the firmament, dragged down by the weight of their collectivedemise. In the Midwest, they stalk the fields for stragglers, people in the long open spaces between towns, where there’s nothing between them and the sky but frayed power lines. They rise out of the water in New York Harbor; Maggot Boy Johnson sees them scrambling up the hull of the Rosalita, meets them on the deck, asks them please to wait, just a little while longer. And they march into Asheville every night, a procession of slapping feet, corrosive brass, voices tearing free from invisible throats in aggressive disharmony, a mockery of the old order, a harbinger of the coming chaos. The guards at the gate shudder as the horde moves through them, look at each other, start telling each other jokes to drive the spooks away. But tonight it doesn’t work, for on the heels of the dead, the firs
t survivors from Watsonville come weaving down the road, their clothes hanging from their bones. Let us in, they say, please let us in. You don’t know what we had to do to get here. The stories that fly out of them over the next three days are garbled, contradictory. In some, the slaves rise as if responding to a signal from space. In others, it’s a coup, so fast that the guards just give up. Others speak of outside influence, sinister and righteous. But Johanna reads the truth behind the words, thinks she sees the shapes of her friends, her former lover, in the way that death came to the camp and set the slaves free.