by Rebecca Ore
Little Red looked as if he were about to ask Willie why he’d sell plasma now, but he just closed his mouth, shrugged his crooked shoulders and bought Willie a Mexican pizza.
That night, Laurel read Willie in the restaurant’s upstairs room. Willie woke up with fifty dollars in his pocket.
When Willie walked down the stairs into the restaurant, the counterman looked up from the glasses he was washing and grinned big and sexual, like Willie screwed Laurel.
A year of this, then Willie would become yet another person. He’d saved his life today, though now he realized he’d been stupid to go back to the plasma center, stupider to ask to be paid for the walnut cupboard.
At home again, he cleaned very carefully around his drode holes.
SIX
BABY BREAKDOWN
I spent the next week about ready to look for a mantis. Baby Lucinda squalled and bit every morning when her mother went into her weaving room, but I quickly learned to take her out for a walk, pushing a stroller with the other undocumented workers. I wasn’t the only one with a cheap wig.
No mantises had come this far west yet.
I stayed off Shattuck Avenue, off the bulletin boards, worried that the hackers knew where I lived and would try to get me again.
Some time later, George Reese said, “You look better.”
“Thanks,” I said, wondering if he planned to make me feel worse.
“The child seems to like you.”
“She stopped biting after Wednesday.” I looked down at the crescent of baby teeth in the web of my right hand. Once she realized I could pick her up and hold her off the floor indefinitely, and would every time she bit, she stopped.
“So far,” George said.
I said, “You haven’t turned me in, have you?”
“No. Do you want to be turned in?”
I didn’t answer.
“What were you running from?”
“My former principles, maybe.” I felt slightly guilty that I wasn’t grateful to George for providing me with a home, understanding after I’d gotten myself screwed.
“You should hire me to be your lawyer,” George said. “I have some criminal practice,” George said.
“So… let me see… if I hire you as a lawyer, then whatever I tell you is privileged information, right? So they can’t bust you for harboring me? Or can they?”
“And you would be working for me to pay your fees.”
“Do you do a lot of immigration cases?”
“Perhaps I have,” George said.
I doubted he could play with the Feds quite so neatly. “So, how do I hire you?”
He pulled out a contract that would take five dollars a week out of my salary forever.
I said, “What you’re really doing is reducing my wages.” On the other hand, five dollars a week would almost be worth it to see him realize what he’d thought was a simple runaway turned out to be a fugitive terrorist who’d run out of an informant training session.
He said, “Is the money so important to you?”
“I like having options.”
“There’s always prison, isn’t there?”
“No, actually not. I’d agreed to work for…”
He put his hand over my mouth and said, “I can’t hear this unless after you sign the contract.”
As soon as he pulled his hand away from my mouth, I said, “Feds. You heard it.”
“Fine. Would you like to leave now? I’ll have to fire you for failing to show proper ID.”
Well, I’d had my bravado moment. The streets were mean. I had only the money the hackers gave me for making myself available. The baby hadn’t bit in a few days. I could live with this.
I signed the contract, rolled my new fake prints on it. Reese said, “I don’t suppose I’ll find you on any Census records.”
“No, I’m a rebuild.”
“So, how did the Feds turn you?”
“I was supposed to go up with a mini-nuke in southern Louisiana, but they rescued me. They didn’t mean to rescue me. I agreed to go hunting for them, someone who was making big seductive mantises. Improving insect lungs, giving them pheromones that tranquilized humans, fucking with insect neurotransmitters. Seemed like we had common cause, going after some mad scientist. Then, I was doing these training exercises on evasion. So far, they haven’t caught me. They swore to Amnesty that they wouldn’t gun me down.”
“I see. As your lawyer, I could call the Federal Bureau of Investigation and arrange a surrender. But if this is a training exercise, why not see how long it takes for your trainers to find you?”
Yeah, and maybe the Feds got a kick out seeing me raped by hackers and living as a babysitter. “The people training me were military. Somewhere north of Camp Mackall, I think, in North Carolina, east of Fort Bragg.”
“Did you intend to go up in the mini-nuke explosion?”
“No. I didn’t know a mini-nuke was in the car.”
He said, “Do you want me to arrange a surrender?”
“Oh, damn, I don’t know.” Shit, for all I knew, he could be another part of my training exercise. The hackers yet another. Bastards. Or was I being paranoid? ‘Is what we faced a conspiracy or just sets of unlinked actions based on what most of our opponents believe in?’ Who’d said that, Jergen or Joe? “Maybe you’re one of them, too.”
“Have you considered the possibility that I could represent eco-terrorists?”
“You could. But you don’t call them eco-warriors or eco-defenders, so I rather doubt it.”
“Allison, you could agree to take a scan to prove you didn’t deliberately set the nuke.”
“I’ve done that already.”
“Your people must have suspected you could be unreliable.”
“Guy who recruited me works for the Feds now.” Thanks a ton, Jergen, for not putting me on the hunt, too.
George shrugged slightly, lips twitching in an echo of the shoulder movement.
I said, “Damn, thanks a lot.” I was feeling angry again, happy to have that emotion back. Me, against the world. Of course, the world would win, but I’d be damned memorable.
“Do you think you can continue to take care of Lucinda in the house? I don’t want you outside with her if there’s a chance you might be busted violently. Are you going to stand calmly when they come to get you?”
“They swore they wouldn’t.” Stand calmly, not struggle? Make sure they got Lucinda back to the house? Hell, I didn’t know.
“Do you want me to call Amnesty and tell their lawyers where you are?”
“Is that safe?”
“They’re lawyers.”
I laughed. “Sure, if I’m gunned down, let’s have Amnesty protest. Lucinda’s going to start biting me again if I don’t take her for walks.”
“You’re good with her. You’ll find a way to pacify her.”
I thought about letting his daughter chew on his skull. “You’re advising me to continue the training exercise, then?”
“I don’t see why not,” George said.
I couldn’t stand this life forever. If they haven’t caught me in another month, I’d turn myself in. “Thanks. Now, you know I’m not a serial baby-killer.”
“Or a thief.”
I didn’t tell him I had been one. We nodded at each other, him putting the contract away, me leaving a poorer woman, but weirdly relieved to have told someone.
The next day Ethyl went out, leaving me and Lucinda in the house. When she came back, she gave me a real human hair wig. Behind her eyes, my story seemed to be playing—nukes and rape. George had told her I was pitiful, not dangerous. Oh, pity, I hate you, I thought a second before I decided to be grateful. We recycled the hacker’s wig through a polyester bottle shredder.
Lucinda bit me when she found out I wouldn’t take her outside anymore. I found that pushing her around the house in her stroller was an adequate substitute. If I pushed fast. I could also balance her on my feet, me on my back holding her hands in mine, and thro
w her onto a sofa—leg lifts with child. She giggled down at me and screamed with delight as I hurled her through the air.
Here I was, in a new body looking thirty-five at the oldest, stubbly head, in a house constantly disintegrating around me: baby shit, vomit, coffee grounds, textiles turning into lint and rags, dust settling, fermenting garbage in the worm bin, fruit flies looking for leftover apple cider in the bottles in the recycling bin. Every morning, I pulled off Lucinda’s messy diapers, put them in a pail for the laundry service. During the day, most of the time, she used the toilet.
Like other people concerned about saving the pieces of a disintegrating ecosystem, the Reeses maintained an endangered species—a greenhouse orchid. Their yard was a Xeriscape. They did not waste water rinsing out the bottles they’d recycle, either.
Were these the people I wanted to be when I grew up? Lucinda ran shrieking into the greenhouse and pulled down three slabs covered with orchids and tried to eat the psuedo-bulbs. She looked up from the fat, swollen leaf stem she’d bitten into and said, “No.”
I felt the orchids would have been safer in an intact Indodesian rainforest, but extinction is forever. I took the orchids away from Lucinda, wondering if George would notice the baby bites on them.
At lunch, I said, “I’m sorry. Lucinda got into the greenhouse today. She pulled down some plants.”
George said, “Orchids are used to having primates and other mammals run over them.”
Ethyl said, “She could have been poisoned.”
George said, “They’re not toxic.”
Lucinda said, “Daddy, Momma, Ah-ah, no.”
Once they figured Lucinda called me Ah-ah, George and Ethyl called me Ah-ah, too.
“Are we going to miss Ah-ah when she goes away?” George asked Lucinda.
“Ah-ah go?” Lucinda asked back.
I remembered a cat who also decided it was the center of the universe, with less evidence. I said, “Allison will probably leave someday. Big men will come take her away.”
Ethyl said, “If they show up, you’ll have to go outside to deal with them.”
“Ah-ah’s going to bring in the fruit now,” George said.
Lucinda watched intently as I peeled a banana for her. She probably figured it was a psuedobulb and if she’d only had the peeling concept that morning, she could have gotten to what was good to eat in an orchid. She reached for the banana, said, “Ah-ah, me do.”
I gave her another banana, but her fingers were too weak to pull back the peel. I cut up the first banana and put a few of the slices on her plate.
George and Ethyl didn’t watch. They were talking about machine war somewhere, maybe Asia.
“Ah-ah, do you think Lucinda’s learning to talk on time?” George asked as I picked up the fruit peel and cores for the worm bin.
Don’t make an issue of the name, I told myself. “I don’t know.”
“You’ve taken care of children before?” Ethyl asked.
“No.”
“How did you get out of that? Since you weren’t really a drode head.”
I almost said, I ate them, answered, “The ecologists I knew didn’t believe in having children. Sometimes, I wished we weren’t the top predator on the planet, had something that would get enough of us so that we could be humans full out and leave the finer details of ecological maintenance to the eco-sphere.”
“We’re only having one,” George said. “But I have clients who’ve had more. And a welfare rights organization is pushing to allow welfare women to have more than two children.”
“Why? Are we running low on drode heads?”
Ethyl said, “We’re compassionate people. If children are a comfort to welfare mothers, then perhaps we should allow them to reproduce more freely.”
“We’re like coyotes. We’re stress breeders. We need an efficient predator who tranquilizes most of us before it kills a select few.” Perhaps that wouldn’t be enough.
George said, “How did this get started?”
I said, “You asked me if Lucinda was learning to talk on schedule. I said I didn’t know. Why should I know?”
“Child care is commonly available work.”
Unspoken was for people like you. On the other hand, I thought as I fed the worms in the composting bin, they were trying to make me an expert in something, allow me my competence. As I went back to clear the plates from the table, I said, “I don’t remember when I learned to talk. I didn’t go to the orphanage until I was eight.”
None of them said anything. The two adults were busy trying to figure out how to fit me into their conceptions of themselves as good people.
Had Jergen said, “People who see themselves as good can be ruthlessly brutal to anyone who opposes them”? Or had that been Kearney? Both my sides—eco-radical and military—seemed more realistic to me than this exploitive liberal couple sitting while I cleared their plates.
They kept Lucinda with them in the media room while I washed the dishes in the grey water system. The bitten orchids would get the microscopic food scraps.
Things could be worse. The orchids could be extinct. I could be ashes floating in the Gulf of Mexico.
If the ecosphere is trying to put runaway stress breeders back in balance with the rest of the planet, how will she do it?
Worrying worries itself out. One day, Lucinda and I took a nap against the heat-storage wall behind glass on the south side of her home. We’d brought in a feather bed and a down-filled comforter. Trombe wall, I remembered from my ecology lessons. We were so warm, we didn’t need the comforter. Lucinda’s warm body curled against me. To her, this must seem like hiding, a secret place south of the Trombe wall, behind windows suspended over the hill’s slope. I wondered if I dared to fall asleep, breaking the windows would be so easy.
Winter turned to spring through that one clear day. Lucinda was the reality cats imitated, a human baby needing love and cuddles, a human woman finding power and value in that need. Was Lucinda really so awful?
I tried to remember my mother cuddling me.
What was so wrong about a house full of Trombe walls, greenhouses, and worm bins perched on an earthquake hill?
I tried to imagine the present-day population of California housed in Miwok bark-slab cone houses, those slab-walled teepees I’d seen in a museum exhibit. Fifty million people would have to heat with wood, all the women out grinding acorns. We’d exterminate the trees. And the pollution would be terrible, millions of pounds of fly ash, carbon monoxide, phenols.
Did Lucinda’s mother have to let other women do this cuddling by the Trombe wall, to avoid being tempted into yet another child? Micromanaging the ecosphere is so unnatural. Evolution led us to freefall whoopie with the machines.
Could I stay here and let this child substitute for what I had aborted, what my mother gave away?
Lucinda asleep was so very tempting. Jergen’s wife had two children.
But I knew Lucinda well enough to know not to fall asleep. I propped myself up on one elbow and watched traffic in the streets below. All present vehicles from the lowliest open frame bike to the most luxurious of natural gas autos fought entropy, were engineered by law to last at least twenty years.
We were better than we used to be, but… You can get used to anything. Jergen had told me that, not Kearney, and I’d thought he meant me in particular, not any human being.
I wanted to refute him before I sank into this role forever.
Ethyl said, “When she was first born, when the sun shone, I took her to the front of the Trombe wall and nursed her.”
In space above ground, the Miocene female apes nursed babies that led to us.
But ultimately, the innate patterns weren’t enough compensation. I was bored, edgy. Could I love this baby? Should I run farther? Where was the person who could teach me how to operate as a runaway drode head? Had the orphanage, the hacker rapists, and the good liberals sucked out my brains? On my day off, I called Fort Bragg and asked for a Captain Kearney at a
training base north of Pinehurst.
They got the public phone number and asked me to wait. I stood exposed by the phone, waiting for the hunters to come down on me. Should have called Amnesty first, I supposed.
Why was I doing this? Answer, the military had the bigger gang. I was bored. I hated being tempted by a baby.
The phone rang. I picked up. Kearney asked, “Allison, why are you calling?”
“Why haven’t you picked me up by now?”
“So, you’re in California. We haven’t noticed an increase in eco-crimes.” He both sounded like he was joking and like he was concerned. Had I really gotten away? Was this call really stupid? Kearney said, “What have you been doing?”
“Babysitting for a lawyer. I’m his client, so he can pay me less and all that.”
Kearney said, “Do you want to stay there?”
Revenge. “Kearney, I got hacked and raped by some teenage jerks. I’m going nuts from boredom. I don’t really expect you poured thousands of dollars into my head to leave me on the streets as a babysitter.”
“We could bill your lawyer for your modifications. Allison, why did you call?”
“Kearney, when I remember mottos and sayings, I can’t remember whether you told them to me or Jergen.” I looked around me but saw nothing that looked like quickly-approaching Feds. A woman looked at me, but if no one had looked at me, considering how worked up I was getting, I’d have been sure Kearney had his people in place. “Kearney, what is the real purpose of this training exercise? To see if I really wanted to get away, back to the ecological life?”
“Perhaps,” he said.
“Damn, Kearney, I really don’t want to be a babysitter for the rest of my life. And I want these guys who hacked me and raped me.”
“We saw that in a probe, but we couldn’t trace it.” So Kearney hadn’t been able to find me. I’d just given myself away. I felt like an absolute idiot. Then Kearney said, “You want us to bust those guys?”
Yeah. I pounded my fist on the wall. “Yeah.”
“They can’t go to trial.”
“Oh, man, I don’t want them to go to trial.” What I wanted was their white eye lenses covered with blood, their cocks skinned and balls crushed.