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

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “Marco,” Zeke says.

  “Don’t,” Marco says, and Zeke feels an arm go around him, Marco’s hand on his back. “I know you must have tried.” Then he’s gone, and the three members of the Slick Six regard each other in the glowing light of the fires along 42nd Street. Carolyn won’t say anything, won’t let Zeke speak. Did we have our last conversation already? Zeke thinks. Was it today? Yesterday? What was it about? Hideo’s brow has two vertical wrinkles in it. He wants to say something. They all do. They’re mustering phrases that you can’t take back, the words you say to end something, and as their voices rise all at once, a bell goes off in Zeke’s head from a church covered in skin. Let the fights begin.

  There are no fires at the doors of the Aardvark’s tower, and so the thirty policemen who’ve been ordered to guard them are waiting in the dark. At first they were jumpy, twitching with their loaded guns toward every sound, and their fear made them hear everything: A rat scrambling in the gutter was a galloping horse; a paper hopping across the street echoed like gunfire. But now the war cries of the New Sioux seem far away, the shouts and shots recede, until the policemen are alone on a quiet street, in another country.

  “Maybe they’re going to wait until tomorrow to attack us,” one of them says.

  “Daylight. Yeah, they’ll wait until daylight.”

  “So do we wait here or go home?”

  “We can’t go home. What if they attack in, like, twenty minutes?”

  “What if they don’t?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. We don’t know. So we have to wait here.”

  Somewhere downtown is the whooshing rumble of a building collapsing, an arc of cheers.

  “You hear that?”

  “I’m not deaf.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “You ever hear the one about the bus full of ugly people?”

  “No.”

  “Bus full of ugly people goes over the edge of a ravine and everyone in it dies.”

  “This is a joke?”

  “Yeah, man, it’s a joke.”

  “Well, I don’t feel like hearing it.”

  “How about the one about the woman who walks into a sex shop looking for a—”

  “Come on, man. Now is just not the time.”

  “Okay. A man walks into a bar and says, hey bartender, I’llbet you five hundred dollars that between me and this guy here, we have five testicles.”

  “I told you, man, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “All right, all right. Two beekeepers meet at a beekeeping convention—”

  “Shut up!”

  “Aw, come on, they’re funny.”

  “I’m sure they’re hilarious. That’s not— You hear that?”

  “What?”

  For the policemen, the next thirty-two seconds are a blur of blood and bone, whistling knives, blind gunshots. A man finds his own arm on the pavement; another doesn’t understand yet that he’s been cut in half. The ones who are shooting don’t know what they’re aiming for, end up shooting each other. For Marco, it’s a cleansing ritual. He’ll do this thing, leave his mark on this place, then return to Hideo and Carolyn; he’ll ask them again when the world is new, and they’ll see it as he does, take him back. They can all move to an island off the coast of Belize, steal fruit from trees, hunt animals only to cook them over small fires. They will be beings without history. He stands before the doors of the tower, slick with blood and smelling of meat, breaks the locks on the door and walks inside, looking for the stairs; doesn’t notice the woman behind him, following him in.

  The Aardvark has pulled his chair out from behind his desk, dragged it over to the window, and he sits there looking over the amber glow of the city below. Empty bottles of pills roll around on the desk, tracing circles; something in the way the Aardvark is settled in the chair suggests to Marco that he doesn’t intend to ever get up again.

  “Miss Winderhoek! I told you to go,” the Aardvark says, swivels around in the chair. “Oh. It’s you.”

  “Hello, sir,” Marco says.

  The Aardvark looks him over, the gore on his clothes, the weapons in his hands. “I see you’ve been busy today. You’vecome to kill me; that’s plain to see. But where are the rest of the Slick Six?”

  “They’re …”

  “They left you again?”

  “…”

  “Oh, Marco. Marco, I’m so sorry.”

  “…”

  “They never had the courage you did, did they?” He scoops up an empty bottle, takes it for a spin in his chair. “You were always what gave them their teeth. You’re what made the Slick Six slick. Sick slick licks. Lick sick six.” He stops the chair, gazes at the ceiling, head wavering. “That’s why I concentrated on sending you to prison, you know. You never would have sold them out, but I knew at least one of them would not return the favor.”

  “Do you know which one?” Marco says.

  “Does it matter?” the Aardvark says. “None of them deserved you in the first place. You were better than all of them put together. You still are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. I always thought so.” At once the Aardvark stares at him. “Why didn’t you stay with me?”

  “We talked about this a long time ago—”

  “You call that talking? One little conversation after years of service?”

  “It was just business, sir.”

  “You broke my heart.” An expression seizes his face; his head jerks to the side, as if he has been shot in the back of the skull, and his left hand rises to cover his forehead. A long sigh.

  “But that’s the game, isn’t it?” he says. “A couple of people get lucky, but most of the time, everyone always wants someone else. If we didn’t, if we all just found each other, matched up two by two, three by three, four by four, all the way out”—he’s smiling now, arm out, fingers fluttering in the air—“and all ourdesires went away, there wouldn’t be much history, would there? No more. Just everlasting bliss.”

  “…”

  “Sounds boring, doesn’t it?”

  “No, sir. It sounds all right to me.”

  “Please. I know you better than that. We are both men who do things, and we try not to think about them too much because that would make us crazy. Look out there.” He waves toward the window at a new plume of fire rising over the rooftops. “Look what we made, you and I.”

  “No. You made that. I’m trying to undo it.”

  “Oh, Marco. Don’t you see? We’re history’s agents and its slaves. It has made us do its bidding, made us go around the wheel again and take the whole country with us. But now it has no more use for us. Kill me. Then kill yourself. Then it’s done, we go into a book somewhere, and everyone else can go on living their lives.”

  “I did come here to kill you. I had every intention.”

  “Then do it.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “No,” Marco says.

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do,” says Maria Lista Sandinista. She thinks of her parents, in the back of a van, in an apartment in St. Louis where water poured out of the ceiling, in the Wyoming hills. Mom, Dad, thank you so much for teaching me everything you could. Then she says, “You should have set me free too, Marco.”

  For an instant, the explosion from Maria Lista Sandinista’s bomb is contained by the glass at the top of the Aardvark’s tower, and its livid eye glares upon the city, sweeps a flash of light over the island in all directions at once. I see you. Then the glass gives way and the flames roar out, boil around the top of the tower, scatter into the sky. The metal holding up the topstories groans, and the pinnacle slides down the side of the building, tearing holes in the towers around it in its descent, until the frame of the eye is on the ground, blinded by flames and heat.

  It silences Hideo, Carolyn, and Zeke, who stop fighting in midsentence, but don’t close their
mouths. Kuala Lumpur, who has been watching from the roof, gives a low whistle. For the police, who could see the flare of the explosion all over the island, it’s a signal, a final order. He’s gone. The word goes out on radios, to the boys in the park who had set up barricades along the stone walls, to the ones along the shore being forced into the water by Indians on horses, and they all put down their guns, put up their hands. They’ll walk into the dark streets tonight, looking for ways to shed their uniforms, change into something else. They’ll drink in bars lit by candles or running off of generators, in front of delis where there are beers on the sidewalk that they’re just about giving away before they get warm. And the New Sioux will race up and down the island of Manhattan, whooping and crying; in a few hours, they’ll gather around the pond at the southern end of Central Park, in the shadow of the mansions that commerce built, start one more fire, bring out drums and instruments, and sing and dance for what has been returned to them. The centuries are folding in on themselves; the next nine hours exist off the calendar, cannot be measured by clocks. It’s the eternal present, the Big Now; this night will circle the Earth for decades.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  Reunions.

  The Aardvark’s tower still stands in the middle of New York City, a burnt, jagged spire stabbing the sky, but the planet is reclaiming it: The windows fall out, spin end over end to crash into the street; the floors fall in, and plants grow through the spaces they leave. Vines twine up the walls, young tree branches curl off, and at the building’s shattered summit, a baby maple starts to spread its limbs. In the fall, the building will mimic the explosion that ruined it, the leaves flaming red and orange, stirring into the street below. For Robert Blackfeather Sherman, who lives with his family in a cabin at the north end of Central Park, the tower is a sign of balance, of equilibrium restored, though he can only guess at the significance. He has to read the world as he finds it now, for his visions have left him; the Vibe doesn’t visit anymore. He can’t remember the moment his gift disappeared, but it must have been just after he met Inu Kimura and they drew lines across Manhattan, gave Kimura the southern half, the New Sioux the northern half, cut Central Park in two. Gave a certain Captain Saloon his island. In the days before the meeting, when the New Sioux were settling into the city and Robert Blackfeather Sherman walked from one end of Manhattan to the other, the river rippled with the ghosts of his ancestors, all coming tothank him, to say good-bye; the streets blurred with the streaked trails of inhabitants past; the air above him warped with the arrivals and departures of gigantic spacecraft. Buildings rose and fell, winked out, streets turned to mud, to stone, back into streets, until it was all happening at once, a grand comedy of hope and futility, civilizations born and dying in a rainbow haze. The country was unmooring itself from its history at last, the past was the past, the past was the past, and they were all the land’s new natives: the New Sioux, the rebelling slaves, the people who held on through the Aardvark’s empire, bureaucrats sneaking into their old offices to fix by force what diplomacy before the collapse couldn’t touch, women with briefcases flicking on fluorescent lights, traders occupying stores the Aardvark had closed years ago, new immigrants arriving by ship and plane to write their own history across the bricks and bones of the old nation. Robert Blackfeather Sherman could feel the soil swell with it all, and under his feet, the first beat of a deep pulse, a heart shocked into stillness working again, and there at the northern tip of the island, in the fields before the cliffs on the other side of the river, he knelt and cried for what had happened and what was coming, for the way he had done what the Vibe asked of him.

  But after meeting Kimura, there were no visions. It took him a week to realize it; he kept expecting them to come again; they didn’t. The great work of my life is over, he thinks now. I won’t do anything like it again. He thinks he’s content now, for it seems like more than enough to have taken New York back for his people, to have given his family a home. But when he’s older, he’ll miss the visions, the sense of purpose, the feeling that he was molding the clay of the world into a shape of his choosing. He’ll dream of riding the green-and-gold plains again, his horse beneath him, a machine gun across his back. But he’ll never go back there, never see his daughter Asia, who arrived with Keira Shamu just in time to see the last ceremonies on the steps of the federal courthouse, the deals thatturned the land over. She watched her father shake hands with Kimura, with the new representatives of the city, the state. His speech was generous, there was kindness in his delivery, and when he grinned into the peals of applause, she recognized his old self returning; he was shedding his years as an agent of retribution already. He left the podium, descended into the crowd, and she fought through the masses to try to intercept him, losing and regaining sight of him, rehearsing what she wanted to tell him; found him in the arms of his wife, the unborn child big between them. His back was to her, his face resting in the crook of his wife’s neck. Over his shoulder, his wife could see her husband’s first daughter, her querying look, though she didn’t know who the girl was. And the words left Asia Sherman’s head; she waved and turned tail, deciding that her father had had enough of the past.

  A week later, at a nightclub in Atlanta, Asia Sherman will meet the son of a Chinese coal magnate on the dance floor; he’ll invite her to a party in Jakarta, and from there, she will fling herself into the arms of the lords of commerce. For the next three years, her life will be a shrieking chain of parties, in clubs in Santiago, Kobe, Colombo, Nairobi, Berlin; on a ship off Shanghai; at a decaying banana plantation in Ecuador; on an unnamed spur of rock a half-mile swim from the hills of St. Croix. On the arms of men in silk suits, soaked T-shirts, women in linen pants. In hotel rooms where the new cities of India draw serpents of light across the land at night. She’ll have twenty-seven boyfriends and nineteen girlfriends, until her last partner, a Brazilian man who wants to marry her, finds out about her history and strands her in Cape Verde, leaves her at the airport. All at once, her party years will be over, though she won’t believe it at first. The hotels and clubs will be closed to her; the airlines won’t take her money. I know who you are, they’ll say. So she’ll stay on the island for two more years, change her name, farm sugar, learn Hindi and Bengali, go back to India and make a fortune in electronics. In time, she’llmeet the Brazilian again in a restaurant on the top floor of a former monastery in Moscow, carvings on the walls of epiphanies and martyrdom, suffering and redemption.

  “I know who you are,” the Brazilian will say. “I know who you were years ago.”

  “Can’t a girl change?” she’ll say.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  Inu Kimura came to New York to examine his new piece of real estate, and hasn’t left. There’s too much money to be made, even with slavery outlawed again and other laws introduced, some of which Kimura resents, for they impede business, take a cut from his profits. Taxes, they call them. Graft, he says. Robbery. You call yourself a government now, but you are as much of a thief as I ever was. Nerve, now an instrument of legitimate trade, is always there at the docks with a clipboard, marking down with horrifying accuracy the movement of things into and out of the city. Every half an hour, his cell phone rings, and another agent on another pier barks at Nerve in a code that Kimura, eavesdropping, has given up trying to understand. At the end of every month, Nerve hands Kimura’s secretary a piece of fruit—a pomegranate, a kiwi, for these things are valuable—and walks into Kimura’s office to settle accounts. Sometimes it’s all business, and the smoothness of the transaction is the only indication that the two men know each other’s pasts. Other times, though, Kimura is feeling nostalgic.

  “We used to screw people like us,” he says.

  “It’s not as much fun being on this side of the law, is it?” Nerve says. “But isn’t this worth it?”

  The harbor teems with even more ships than before; the shoreline is a wall of rusting hulls, sails, and solar panels. The piers s
himmer with light and sound, the buzz of music and commerce. The old slave block is a taquería with a ranchera band playing on the roof, amplified through the bullhorn mountedover the front door. The accordion sounds like a circus, like a train, and the streets are full of people again, from the cities of Asia and Africa. They’re painting their passports brown; they speak new languages that change the meanings of things, tell stories of what it was like before, as though “before” were a distant planet.

  “Maybe it’s worth it,” Kimura says.

  But he still thinks of Osaka, the rivers of neon, the wooden door with his insignia burned into the grain. It irritates him to watch the men in black suits waiting for the fishing boats to come in; they poke through the catch with long white poles, give a nod, and men lift a prize tuna as if it’s a piano and convey it to an ice-packed crate, in which it will be flown to Japan to be eaten by men for a stupefying price. Once, he was at that table, eating too; now he can’t afford not to sell it. The money’s too good. Four months later, after a dinner of sea urchins and sake, Inu Kimura will suffer a stroke that kills him on the spot, but before the police even know what happened, the body will be gone, the scene clear. Kimura will return to Osaka as ashes; his funeral under the Sanwa-Sumitomo building will be the biggest and most secret party the city has seen in a decade, ministers and former heads of state with their arms around counterfeiters, chief financial officers hustling across a dance floor to a fifteen-piece band composed of diplomats and opium dealers. At four in the morning on the third day, the revelers who remain will commend his ashes to the Yodo, and they will wind through the ocean of light, tour the city he loved. All over the world, he used to say, I am a feared man. But when I am in Osaka, I am still that city’s child.

  Nerve will hear stories of the party a few weeks afterward, stop by Kimura’s old office to deliver a final pomegranate.

  “Who will they get to replace him?” Nerve will say.