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

by Brian Francis Slattery

“Replace?” the secretary will say. “Not him. Nobody could.” Two months later, Nerve will be in Vermont, standing in front of the ruined house of his lover’s brother. You got that right, he’ll think, and turn around and get in the car without going inside. He’s seen all he needs to, wonders if Kuala Lumpur still has room for him in Buenos Aires. She does.

  On the pier at East River Park, there’s a noodle shop thick with steam where a woman named Ono Fidelia slings anemones soaked in butter, fried in garlic, submerged in curry. Zeke Hezekiah and Keira Shamu plan to meet there, so he’s standing in the doorway on a rain-pelted afternoon, after the last ships have gone out, before the first ones come in. There are only four tables, eight chairs, and seven of them are empty; a man in a gray coat plays chess with himself in the corner, making a move, turning the board, puzzling over the pieces.

  “If only you knew what your opponent was thinking,” Zeke says.

  The man looks up, squints at him. Looks back at his pieces. The rain becomes a torrent, and Zeke steps outside, waits under a giant multicolored umbrella that turns the water around him into a beaded curtain. Keira arrives seventeen minutes later, wearing a newspaper that she’s folded into a wide hat. She smiles when she sees him, so hard that her affection for him spooks her and the thoughts scatter from her head.

  They haven’t seen each other since North Carolina, when he got off the bus in Asheville, but they’ve heard reports of each other. Of Zeke: that he went back to Monaco, to Andalucía, to South Africa. Of Keira: that Doctor San Diego had joined the cosmos at last, the bus trip was over, the Americoids were over, she was staying in New York; that she had showered, cut her hair, become a painter, given up the trade.

  “It’s good to see you, Zeke,” she says.

  For half an hour, they dodge personal questions and talk about mutual acquaintances. How Doctor San Diego’s body was found in Mali, grieved over by griots. Nobody knows how it got there, but it was discovered that he was one hundred and twelve years old. How the Americoid tribe was gathering as something else now. That was the thing with those people: Thenames and faces changed, the combinations changed, but the vibe was the same. They pulled their family out of the ether.

  “It’s not as easy for some of us,” Keira says.

  “No,” Zeke says. He got a postcard in Monaco from Hideo and Carolyn a few months ago: Living in Osaka. Have child. Are happy now. He hasn’t heard from Dayneesha at all, not since the last phone call from Kansas while the New Sioux were setting fires in New York.

  “What are we doing next?” she said.

  “Day. There’s no next. There’s no we.”

  She was silent for a moment and then said, “Mr. Hezekiah, it’s been real nice knowing you.”

  “You too.”

  “You know how to find me if anyone needs me,” she said. But he didn’t, and never will.

  “Why didn’t you say anything to Marco?” Keira says. “Before they did?”

  “They needed to say it. And I thought that they’d just fight about it, and then—”

  “They’d come together.”

  “Right.”

  “…”

  “It could have been good, you know? Really good,” Zeke says.

  Zeke Hezekiah, Keira thinks. If only you knew.

  “There’s no way he could have gotten out, is there?” she says.

  Zeke looks outside. The stripped spike of the tower, a burnt weed in the rain.

  “If you had seen that explosion, Keira. Just the size of it. I don’t know how anyone could escape it.”

  Keira thinks of the Digby pier, of engineers and Inuit. She knows.

  At first, Marco thought his trick hadn’t worked, for the fire was all around him, eating his clothes, biting into his flesh;

  then he understood that he was riding the spire of the Aardvark’s tower out of the sky, toward the ground, and for a full second he was weightless, could have reversed his direction, floated above all this, flown away. Then the spire crashed into another building, opened a long gash in the side, and Marco watched gray chairs, black metal desks, and stained plastic walls of empty cubicles flash by. He jumped, snagged a length of bundled cables hanging from the cauterized floor, slowed himself down as he slid along its length. Stopped with a yard to spare, looked up, and climbed hand over hand into the wounded building while the spire fell away beneath him, trailing smoke.

  He watched Zeke’s plane take off from a boat in Jamaica Bay, watched from the roof of a housing complex in Battery Park while the ship carrying Hideo and Carolyn cleared the harbor. Thought for a few days that he could wreak vengeance; he could ruin them, destroy their lives. But it wasn’t what he wanted. He went south again, walked along the cracking roads to Asheville, up the mountain to the leaning barn where Johanna had been. But she was gone, the sign she’d left washed out by rain, the room shimmering with ants, spiders, small rodents making nests in cabinets. In Fort Worth, the war was at the city limits, Dayneesha’s warehouse a skeleton streaked with ash, a hole punched in its head by a shell. In Miami, the islands in the harbor were smaller, the waves lapping away at the beach; the residents were building walls around the perimeter, trying to keep the ocean out, while the ocean bided its time, knowing it could get in whenever it wanted. He stole onto a freighter bound for Venezuela, where the oil was almost gone and the guns were growing around what was left. In the Amazon, the tribes who’d taught him how they fought were gone. A woman with her hands on the wheel of a pontoon boat said that some had became loggers, some moved to Caracas, others moved deeper into the forest. Two became criminals, lords of favelas in Brazil. One became a pop star who lived in a yacht in the bayoff of Rio de Janeiro. At last, Marco was in Zimbabwe, where they were taking down the last of the streetlights to sell the wires, the discs of tinted glass.

  “I’m looking for the Last True Chief of the Shona,” he said.

  “You want to see into the past?” they said.

  “No. I don’t want to see it anymore.”

  In Mongolia, they’re still breaking horses, but there are fewer people, fewer horses; they’ve withered into the ground, leapt into the sky. We think of them sometimes, say the people who abide. In Ulaanbaatar, they haggle for tires and feed, offer blankets, promise their labor. At night they lie on the ground outside the city and look for satellites, pretend to shoot them down with arrows. That’s what you get for trying to watch us. In Korea, Marco stands before Red Kwon’s grave, a broken tower alone on a hillside overlooking the DMZ. Why did you make me into this? he wants to ask, but he knows how Red Kwon would answer. His eyelid would flicker; he’d show the whites of his teeth, and give Marco a pole to the ribs. You were supposed to know when you were broken. It’s not my fault that you didn’t. He thinks about Pulau Tengah, the colony of New Elysia, how the orange light fell into the dark ocean while the lords of global commerce on the other side of the island called an office thousands of miles away, moved 240 million euros in two seconds. He could go back there, join the oil executives in their atonement, plant himself on the beach, his toes in the water. He could lie on the shore and wait until the sea rose to take him, him and the island, the coastal cities of the world, wait for the planet to decide it had had enough of us and eat our history, then pull itself out of orbit to die in the sun.

  The street in Guatemala City where he first met Red Kwon is underneath a pile of broken stones and timber, the victim to a bombing by narcotics traffickers. In the villages in Colombia, Marco can see the signs of the wars of his childhood on the fathers and mothers, the rifts in their skin, the snap in themuscles, the dull spark along the edges of their eyes. But it’s not in their children. In the evenings, the kids sit on the curbs along the painted walls of plaster houses with sodas and beers, stretch their legs into the road, slump their backs, assume that the crackling chain of sound from another part of town is fire-crackers, though they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

  He moves into Bolivia, to the twisted trees and dirt roads, the slanted
fields, the slums that grew him, though he can’t remember them. Near Quebrada del Churo, a wavering wooden building leans over the edge of a ravine, its porch in a slow slide as the beams beneath it warp, the ground shifts.

  He spends a year killing and eating animals, collecting nuts and insects, while he clears a plot of land around the former schoolhouse. One square patch of earth against the fingers of the trees, he thinks at first, but then reconsiders and lets the trees take back part of the land he cleared. He doesn’t need it. Soon he’s growing vegetables, more than he can eat. He sells some to the people around him, knows that the world will take the rest. A papaya eviscerated by birds. A pepper plant strangled by weeds. He spends most of his nights alone in his house, looking into the ravine, while the noise of the river below moves through his head. Sometimes he walks to the nearest town to hear music, drink burning liquor, talk to the man who built the cot he sleeps on, the woman who made his blankets. They can’t see the marks on him that show what he was, and he speaks the same language that they do, though to them he sounds like a child.

  Right about when Marco loses track of how long he’s been there, the assassin’s ghost steps through the wooden door of his house while Marco is eating dinner, moves across the floor without a sound, sits across the table from him, eyeing the meal, the steam writhing from vegetables.

  “What brings you here?” Marco says.

  “Just passing through,” the assassin says.

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  “No, I’m not hungry.”

  “So how is it? Being dead?”

  “You get used to it. For me, even the dying wasn’t so bad, though I know that’s because you were merciful.”

  “Do you still see the past?”

  “Yes and no. It all looks a little different from here.”

  “Different how?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  “It’s beautiful. Do you want to see?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could if you wanted to,” the assassin says. “Come on.” He stands up, holds out his hand. Marco puts down his fork, looks down at the food. A slice of pepper. A mound of rice. He doesn’t want to go, but he doesn’t know why he wants to stay, either.

  After the rains stop, Marco paints the house in reds, oranges, blues, yellows. He brings in fruit from the field, strings it from the porch rafters to dry. Antonio Morales, who sold Marco his furniture and shared a beer with him afterward, their legs dangling into the gully, passes through his field, waves, knocks, and invites himself in. It takes Marco a while to realize that Antonio is making sure he’s still alive.

  Just before the rains start again, Marco hears a whistle from the field, Antonio shouting about how he’s coming and bringing a visitor with him, someone from far away. Marco grabs three warm bottles from the table, moves through the house, opens the door. Johanna is standing there among the hanging fruit, the birds in the fields eating his crops. Her hands on her hips. She has been to New York and back to Asheville, Fort Worth, Miami, spent two weeks in bed in a shuttered room in Venezuela squirming from a sickness that scoured her out while a bass player thumped through the floor beneath her anddogs mated at her door. In Harare, she traded her watch for a ticket to Karachi, broke up a knife fight over the sale of a girl in Mongolia. She slept under a bed in Guatemala City as bullets flew through the open windows, singed the covers with their passage, drilled themselves into the plaster of the far wall. She took the highway all the way down the backbone of Latin America, stopping everywhere to hold out a folded photograph, a copy of Marco’s mug shot almost faded into unrecognizability, always asking, have you seen this man? Do you know where he’s gone? Two years, four months, twenty-seven days; she has counted every hour.

  “You look even worse than you did when you got out of prison,” she says.

  “You don’t.”

  “You didn’t have to go so far.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  For four seconds neither of them moves, and both wonder if there will be violence. She could bring the past screaming onto the porch and butcher it, the things he did, the things she did, what she told the Aardvark that cost Marco six years of freedom. They could kill each other with it, leave two corpses—one in the field, one in the ravine—the villagers reading their histories in their entrails. It almost comes out of her all at once, crawling out of her throat, trying to escape, but then Marco lunges forward, puts his hand across her mouth. Shakes his head. No more history now. No more. Then he swings the door wide and opens his arms, and she walks in.

  “I’m so sorry I abandoned you,” she says. “I’m so sorry I betrayed you. You didn’t deserve it.”

  “Yes, I did,” he says.

  Six years pass of coffee and onions, weddings in town with brass bands whose members scowl in black suits and sneakers, making music to which Johanna dances with every man there, whirling and clapping. Their first child is born in the field in front of the house, dies of dehydration three weeks later, andthey put him in the ground where she labored with him, hammer a wooden marker into the soil that a big storm carries off. A second child is born on the cement floor of the bar in town during a birthday party. She lives, speaks Spanish better at three years old than her mother ever will. When she’s five, Marco takes her to La Paz to show her what a city looks like; the bus passes through the slums where Marco’s sure he was raised, but looking over the cinder blocks, the metal roofs, the nests of electrical wire and open ditches, the dogs and chickens in riot, children staring at him hard as he goes by, he doesn’t recognize any of it.

  On the way back to Quebrada del Churo, as the sun is going down, the bus breaks down on a straight shot of road through the country. A metal part falls from the engine so twisted that nobody, not the driver nor any of the two dozen passengers, can tell what it is. It’s getting dark under the trees overhanging the road, so all the passengers get off the bus to sleep with their feet in a ditch, their heads in the dust on the road’s shoulder. Marco climbs to the roof with his daughter; lies down amid the bundles and packages tied down with rope, straps, and bungee cord; folds his arms across her; and the people on the ground all fall away, the bus beneath them rises into the air and bears them aloft until they’re high over the landscape and they can see the road curling away, the long line of the horizon tracing the arc of the planet, the trees bowing and swaying with gravity; and there in the air he asks the world if he’s free now, if he’s good enough. The Vibe doesn’t say a word, for it’s been done with him for years; but in his daughter’s breathing, the calls of birds from the vines draped over branches, the thickening sky talking about rain, the insects landing with rustles and whispers on their faces and hands, the ruts in the road that connect La Paz with his wife sleeping on the warping porch at the edge of the ravine, he thinks he hears the answer.This page intentionally left blank

  Acknowledgments

  To Steph, again. To Liz Gorinsky and Cameron McClure, for pushing. To Nathan and Dawn, for taking us to see Dr. Evermor. To the McPherson police department, for understanding. To Deanna Hoak. To Robert Legault. And to all of you too.This page intentionally left blank

  Brian Francis Slattery edits public-policy publications dealing mostly with economics and economic issues; he is also an editor of the New Haven Review, a literary journal. When not editing, he plays the fiddle and banjo. He also writes occasional nonfiction pieces about public policy and the arts, mostly for his local alternative weekly. He is the author of one previous novel, Spaceman Blues, and lives just outside of New Haven, Connecticut, with his family. He can be reached very easily at www.bfslattery.com.

 

 

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