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

by Brian Francis Slattery

  On the deck, the two men have rigged the shortwave radio to emit a stream of long, soothing tones; on the horizon, a smaller ship receives them, and the captain, a Nigerian expatriate who goes by the name of Bengwe Saloon, smiles.

  “The cargo is rather valuable,” his first mate says, “at least to the one who’s paying to ship it.”

  “Will he be willing to pay more?” Captain Saloon says.

  “Perhaps. It depends on the extent of his vanity.”

  “And the crew and passengers?”

  “They are interesting,” the first mate says, and shows Captain Saloon the papers. Captain Saloon frowns.

  “A complication,” he says. “But possibly lucrative.”

  “Should we take them now?”

  “No. The Pacific is wide. Let us cross a little more of it before we raise hell.”

  The first mate laughs, and Captain Bengwe Saloon smiles again. He’s always smiling now, for the years after the collapse have been good to him. He used to believe he was a serious magnet for bad juju, as three houses and an apartment building burned down around him, two of them from lightning strikes. A car he stole from an ethnomusicologist popped both its axles as he was crossing the Ogun River out of Abeokuta and the vehicle heaved into the water; he swam out of the window, watched the car snuggle against the river bottom as he clung to the bridge’s pylons. Twice he spent almost a year inthe crumbling jail in Lagos for crimes he didn’t commit. The first time, the man shown breaking into the ambassador’s house in the security camera footage could have been his twin; even he admitted it. The second time, it was clear that the woman who identified him to the police was insane; she had seen something, something had been done to her in the civil war in the countryside, but the judge was uninterested in the technicalities of who had done it. Upon release, he discovered that, eight months before, the guards had confused him with another inmate who had died of yellow fever and sold off his few possessions. For the next two years, he scavenged food and metal on the road between Lagos and Cotonou, from behind the houses of oil barons with honorary posts in the ministry of commerce, private security guards who slept on their roofs with shotguns and flashlights.

  Then the widening wave from the collapse of the United States of America washed over Nigeria, took half of the oil barons with it. Bengwe Saloon, leaning against a signpost, watched one of them leave, packing three-fifths of his family, sharp bundles of artwork, blue plastic suitcases of gold, into a rusting jeep, leaving seven kids to dissipate into Lagos’s dust-filmed streets. The Vibe entered into Bengwe Saloon then, poured down on him from a great height and flowed through the arteries in his arms, the muscles in his legs, moved through his brain until words formed, unmistakable, irrefutable: It is your turn.

  He walked to the front gate of the house and kicked it in, strolled across the lawn and through the front door, found the office at once, as though it was calling to him. Everything of immediate intrinsic value was gone, but papers remained, naturalization documents, records of transactions with Dutch and American oil concerns. And, in a brown envelope, the deed to a ship; a medium-sized fishing vessel that was built for coastal waters but could survive in the open ocean barring a hurricane. He loved it as soon as he saw the pictures. The black hullwith a pink stripe at the top, ringing the deck. The name: Lucky Sun. It was registered in Liberia, and he almost wept imagining someone else occupying his boat as he sat there swooning over the photographs, until further papers explained that it was in port in Lagos. He put on a suit he found in the bedroom closet, took the papers, spent the day walking toward the water, the documents rolled up in his left hand. At the port, they nodded at him when he said he was a cousin of the owner. He smiled to himself, his first smile in years, since fooling them had been so easy; though the truth was that the oil baron had been lax in his bribes, so they didn’t care anymore who took his ship.

  The Lucky Sun has been good to him. He has traced figure eights across a map of the Earth, seen volcanoes erupting on islands off the coast of Indonesia, whales at play off Alaska, a long swirling color in the sky above the Azores. He has accounts now in six different countries under six different names, and none of the account managers even knows who he is. And he gets to marry his first mate, a Panamanian woman with a long, swinging braid who has never told him her name, though they don’t love each other any less for it. In a collision with an iceberg off the coast of Antarctica, when the hold was filling with ice water, the cold flowed up through the metal, and he shivered under ten blankets, and her warm hands kept him alive.

  He turns the Lucky Sun toward the freighter. The line between sea and sky is rimmed with ribbons of yellow and orange. A band of green arcs over the Mumbai Stinger; overhead, deep purple; and Bengwe Saloon thinks to himself, It’s good to be here. For the next forty-seven minutes, everyone is asleep, Nerve and Kuala Lumpur in their warehouse near the East River on the leading edge of the light; the Aardvark and Jeannette Winderhoek in their high tower; the citizens of the Rosalita swaying on the small waves in the harbor; Johanna under the bats in Asheville; the New Sioux sprawled in tents in thescalloped fields outside Winnebago, Nebraska; Marco, Dayneesha, and the Americoids huddled against the Colorado cold; Inu Kimura drenched in Osaka’s nocturnal light. The people of the Mumbai Stinger rocking on the Pacific, the crew of the Lucky Sun in pursuit. They dream of each other, a network of desire delayed and waylaid, chains buzzing with the promise of betrayal. One good pull and they all come together, fly apart; money scatters and pools in a wired frenzy; bullets flit through cold air shielded by hot streaks of friction; and tens of thousands of people are pulled with them: some dragged, yelling and stumbling, feet tripping over each other; some pointing and waving, sprinting for the door, rushing to begin again, wanting to remake the continent and themselves even though they know it’s impossible. The past is the past. But the past is the past.

  Tyrone Fly opens his eyes. He is lying on the easy slope of an exit ramp off I-70 in Kansas, the flat earth falling away around him. He’s been unconscious for six hours; the red car he was thrown from lies on its back in a fire of yellow flowers, the driver crushed beneath it, the other two passengers severed and broken in front of a billboard advertising the world’s largest prairie dog, only fifty miles to go. He doesn’t see any of it, looks straight into the sky, wondering, How did I get here? How long has it been? The last few days wander back to him in fragments. The car burning across eastern Colorado, riding the long valleys. The driver leaning back into the upholstery, one foot hanging out the open window. The young couple in the back, she leaning in to kiss, sleeping in a question mark across the seats. Tyrone’s thumb in the air, trying to hitchhike, twenty miles east of Eureka; they were going to Jersey, had no problem stopping in Cincinnati. He had this idea that if he could just get back to that motel—the pink doors, the tan furniture, the swimming pool surrounded by Astroturf in the parking lot—then he would know what to do. And maybe she would be there, leaning against a vending machine, spare change andsouvenirs jangling in her pocket like they did when he found her last. Even if the city was burning around her, she would turn toward the car as he opened the door on the passenger side, fold her arms across her chest, and make him walk the final thirty yards. Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you since forever. Not for twenty-six days, not for eighteen months, because she wouldn’t be counting time anymore; too much would have happened since their first marriage for the things that killed it to matter now.

  A shadow passes over him, a hunched shape blocks the sun. A sharp musk of earth, matted hair, and diesel crawls into his lungs. Tyrone Fly rocks his head, looks around. The leg of a rhinoceros is planted four feet from his head, the animal hauling a wheezing calliope wrenched from factory plumbing, all copper pipes, pistons, a bellows belching steam. Hippopotami on the other side of him shift from foot to foot, tilt the platform balanced on their backs, a canopy made from sheets and black umbrellas, a mass of gears and fan belts underneath it; long aluminum tubing
bent into spirals, letting off streams of purple smoke, a machine running, serving an uncertain purpose. Horses and camels with contraptions strapped to their sides, chassis of steel, burst intestines made of wire. Then Tyrone Fly sees the men and women, painted all in white, black circles around their eyes, crawling over the machines, pulling taut the ropes of the circus tent mounted on six elephants, cackling and spitting at each other. One of them turns, pops his head toward Tyrone. His mouth cocks open when he sees that the sleeper is awake. He barks out an order, and then all the heads snap his way; all the mouths open at once. There are four seconds of silence before the screaming starts, a clanging din of percussion, violins of metal, glass-breaking quartertones from the calliope, the screamers answering back with a woozy, slithering chorus of dissonance, the sound of a marching band being disemboweled under the animals’ roars. Now all the machines are clattering into motion, they shake and catch fire, throw offspinning pieces, stagger into the air like drunken carrion birds; and seventeen men descend upon Tyrone Fly to bear him aloft. The music swells around him in a lurching rise; the land around him warps into a swirling sea boiling away beneath his feet; and the animals speaking his name, the howling faces shrieking at the sky, the machines falling out of the air bleeding diesel and steam, are all there is.

  CHAPTER X.

  GRAPHOLOGY; the plain and the SEA are the

  same; a barter of INTANGIBLES; the iron road.

  In the back room of a warehouse near the Queensboro Bridge in New York, Kuala Lumpur works under a fluorescent lamp with a fountain pen, practicing the same scribble over and over. A small stack of papers—permissions for trucks to enter the city, ships to dock there—is piled at the corner of the desk, emblazoned with the Aardvark’s elaborate imagery, the curlicues on the currency of the empire run mad. Forging them was easy, the paper nothing a counterfeiter with connections couldn’t procure, the fonts and stamps typical bureaucrat stuff. Ornate but lightweight; easy to replicate. A day with a fine chisel, a block of wood, pieces of rubber. The challenge is copying the Aardvark’s signature. She could do it slow, let her pen explore every wobble in the line, the fractals that spin off when nib and paper collide, but that might not be good enough: it has to fool Jeannette Winderhoek’s eye, the Aardvark’s own, and to do that she has to sign as he would. The technical details: same pen, same ink, same strength and speed of hand; these are easy, the skill of her trade. She knows the angle of the pen, the load of the ink, the way the hand races over the curves, cuts turns, sits and lets the ink collect, as soon as she sees the signature’s shape. But she also has to divine the Aardvark’s brain, make his hand hers, know the things his fingers have done and put them into herown. She has documents bearing his signatures from the last two years to refer to. His writing has loosened since she last impersonated him. He must have to sign so many things now, a man who used to torture people in airplane hangars sitting at a desk for hours each day, writing over and over again— what? The Aardvark’s signature is illegible, and for a couple of days, she was mystified, blinded by what everyone calls him, the moniker of his crime days, the name he used to sign. Then she got it: The Aardvark is signing his real name now, and though she doesn’t know what it is, couldn’t hope to glean it from the signature itself, she’s nailed it a dozen times. And she understands the Aardvark’s burden a little more, how much he hates running the city. I’m here, the scribble says, the true man, trapped in this tower, under a mile of papers and ink. Someone get me out, tell me I can leave. Somebody let me go.

  “That’s the Aardvark’s signature,” Nerve says.

  “Yeah,” Kuala Lumpur says.

  “Bet you’re making a pretty penny off that.”

  “Depends. It’s on spec.”

  “It’s not for the Slick Six, is it?”

  “Dayneesha called just a few days ago. From somewhere in Nevada, I think. I couldn’t trace her.”

  So Marco got Zeke out, Nerve thinks. “What are they planning?”

  “Don’t know. Whatever it is, it involves moving a whole bunch of something into town without anyone looking twice at it.”

  “Sounds … big,” Nerve says.

  “I think it’s going to be.”

  “…”

  “Nerve,” Kuala Lumpur says. “If what they’re doing works, I’ll make enough for us both to get out of here. I’ve been thinking Argentina.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Nerve says.

  Your man is not coming back, she wants to say. He nevermade it out of Vermont; he’s there now, on the side of the road, half eaten by crows. Or he’s in Canada; he found someone else. You should too.

  “I know,” she says.

  “Their plan might not work,” Nerve says.

  “Maybe not,” Kuala Lumpur says. “But they seem serious. As serious as ever.”

  In his dream, Zeke is an antelope bounding across a silver prairie, his head heavy with horns, hide bristling with fur, the taste of grass in his mouth. His herd is scattered, decimated by predators, dark things with lunging claws, though no scent of blood hangs in the air, no bones lie on the ground. A bell rings, a wide copper clanging, muffled at first; then the ground breaks open in front of him and a church sheathed in skin rises from the chasm. The bell is in its tower, its ring sharp and loud, music and voices rising from the pews inside. Antelope Zeke presses his cold nose to the church’s veiny door, and it is warm, alive. If he bit it, poked at it with his horns, it would bleed.

  Then he’s upright in his bunk, eyes open, wondering what the fuck that was about, when he hears another clang from somewhere above him, voices sloughing through the ship’s metal. The lights in his room are out; he shambles into the fluorescent hallway in his underwear, squints at his watch. It’s 2:38 in the morning. Someone’s running on the deck; someone else is shouting. The door at the top of the stairs screeches open, and Carolyn puts her hands on the rails and slides down the banister to land next to him in a sweaty panic.

  “I am an antelope,” Zeke says.

  “Put some pants on,” Carolyn says. “Now.”

  Something large and heavy crashes on the deck, skids across it to crash and break into pieces. Zeke’s fly is still unzipped when they reach the aft stairs; the boat makes a mad swing to port as they’re halfway up, and they slam against the wall, catch themselves, and vault to the top, where Hideo opens the door, gives them a look that tells them to be quiet, eventhough the deck is loud with shouts, screams, and what Zeke’s pretty sure are gunshots.

  The deck is amok with running and fighting, the captain and crew armed with fire axes and charging toward four men Zeke’s never seen before with small machine guns, in clothes that have been on them for weeks. Another crew member wrestles a fifth stranger with a long, greasy ponytail. The honeymooners are already in half-nelsons, the woman screaming. The cracked remains of an upended lifeboat crinkle into the bow; every few seconds they take bullets from the men with guns, and it occurs to Zeke that maybe one of the passengers is behind the splintered craft. Who are these guys? Zeke thinks. Then there is another copper clang; a curled hook is being dragged along the deck by a rope that leads over the side and latches onto the railing, and three men clamber over it, run into the hold of the ship.

  “Pirates!” Zeke says, as though he were four years old. “We’re being boarded by—”

  Hideo covers Zeke’s mouth, but the pirates have already spotted them and are moving toward them, loading their weapons, shouting syllables none of them can understand. An old look passes between the three of them, a look they gave each other for the first time ten years ago, on the roof of a Communistera office building in Kiev, when all the floors below were rolling flame; again a year and a half later in the snow in front of a diamond mine outside of Yellowknife, bullets sparking off the rocks. Again in an orange blimp crossing low over choppy waves in the Straits of Gibraltar. But not the day before Marco’s trial.

  Hideo nods. “Over together?” he says. Carolyn nods back. Zeke zips his fly. Then all thre
e of them run for the edge of the deck, vault the railing, and launch themselves into the air. The freighter moves out from under them, and for a moment, Zeke is an albatross, floating southward toward Antarctica. Then the wake of the ship churns below them, and there’s a shock ofcold: needles, broken glass, electricity. This isn’t the way I imagined going, Zeke thinks.

  A hand grabs his ankle, fingers clamp around the bone, and he’s hoisted from the water by a giant of a man with an oily rag wrapped around his forehead. The giant’s free hand clutches Zeke’s arm and throws him on the deck of the Lucky Sun, where Hideo and Carolyn shiver next to him; before any of them can speak, they hear laughter behind them.

  “Thank you for making our job so much easier,” says Captain Bengwe Saloon. “If only everyone would jump in the water, we would not have to climb up there to get you.”

  The giant picks up all three of them at once, bundles them under his arms, and takes them belowdeck. The bunks are metal shelves lined with thin rubber mattresses that smell as if they were stacked next to rotting onions. The giant strides out, closes the door, and pushes what sounds like a safe in front of it.

  “Hey,” Zeke says. “Where do you think the poop deck on this ship is?” But Hideo and Carolyn aren’t in the mood; they’re back in Watsonville, under the damp tents, crawling through strawberry patches while the guards shoot a runaway for sport.

  “This is maybe not the worst place we have been,” Hideo says. It’s a game that they played when they were slaves.

  “Was it worse in Mogadishu?” Carolyn says.

  “Maybe it was worse there.”

  They listen as seven other people are dragged down the hall, confined. A loud bang and a shudder as a wave lifts the Lucky Sun into the freighter’s hull. Voices murmur from the deck, a parry of disagreement, footsteps. Then the motor growls behind them, the jolt of the beginning of motion.