Tremor propped himself on an elbow and rubbed his eyes. The woman behind him shifted beneath the sheet, and he tried to remember her name, hoping she wouldn’t speak. As he dressed and left the room, he felt her eyes upon his back.
He looked up at the bleeding edges of stars when he stepped outside and realized he was still drunk. Exhausted by imagined acts of heroism and fitful dreams, he slipped into a rusted car and slid down in the passenger seat. In Portsmouth, he lifted his eyes above the dashboard and saw, in a shop window, a flyer featuring a grainy photograph of Mary Clay as a smiling young woman. Sickened, he slid down in his seat again until EZ parked before a stairwell leading to a second-story apartment.
Alone in the apartment, Tremor parted a set of shutters and watched headlights sweeping through intersections all over town. Distant voices carried hints of urgency, and he tried in vain to discern phrases with some bearing on his situation. He watched a man across the street tape a poster of Mary Clay to a wall, felt a chill along his spine, and heard Crazy Mary whispering incomprehensible words. He pounded his forehead, collapsed on the floor, and cradled himself in his arms, overcome by longing for his father, who’d wounded him less with beatings than a final, unbending judgment. Then he cursed a filthy tide for ensuring his fall from what little grace he’d known. Hell, in that moment, was solitude for Tremor, unaware that we were sitting beside him in the darkness, bemoaning the foul-tasting garbage delivered to our shores.
Professor Cleave, too, was suffering in solitude. He’d spent all night at the cabstand, drafting innocuous slogans about unspecified reforms under James’s watchful eye. When he wasn’t muttering about banners draped over chairs and poster boards piling up on tables, he engaged in silent debates with himself, posing questions about the basis of solidarity and the nature of justice, and fashioning long answers for imagined audiences. In odd moments, he allowed himself to dream about leading the union, despite the obvious impediments of his erudition and ill-fitting wardrobe. He allowed himself to hope. When he left the cabstand, though, he found dozens of flyers—each bearing the same image of Mary—affixed to shop windows and telephone poles. He considered the varied messages on flyers produced by different organizations and associations, including St. Anne’s Anti-Communist League, a “pest control” company, and a church known for its virulent opposition to gambling and gays. Then he saw Tremor’s name spray-painted on asphalt. By the time he climbed into the cab, he’d fallen into a mood as foul and desperate as our own.
“Their slogans say nothing, and the photo from her youth even less.” He dropped his keys and cursed. “No one will see her poverty or the violence done to her. Desmond is not alone in ignoring it. And he’s afraid. As anxious as all of you, by the looks of things.”
We had, in fact, been jittery all evening, stirred to near frenzy by sightings of jeeps and an ambulance, and later a hearse backlit by the setting sun. We only calmed ourselves in hopes of gaining some insight into the afternoon’s apparitions. Unfortunately, the demoralizing nature of crafting empty rhetoric had left Professor Cleave somewhat incoherent.
“‘The tragic incident,’ they’re calling it,” he said. “Tragedy had nothing to do with this. It began with that stupid boy and his phone. James talks about keeping big ideas out of things, and maybe he has his point, but if not now, when?” He fished his keys from between his legs. “I understand this is no time for incendiary rhetoric. But shouldn’t there be some middle ground between big ideas and no ideas at all?”
We curled the tips of our antennae and paced the dashboard, pondering his reasonable, if rhetorical question, at first stymied, and then distracted by his agitated movements.
He reached for the radio. “They normally wouldn’t broadcast anything but your Jamaican program at this hour, but these are exceptional times.”
As he drove past storefronts plastered with flyers, pundits discussed the political implications of the shooting and the viral photo inspiring international censure.
“Everyone is exploiting misery. The boy no less than these foolish people. He’s young and stupid, but nothing explains irresponsibility on the order of what he did.” Professor Cleave shook his head. “But the boy isn’t the worst. So many are using today’s events to elevate themselves. Or to turn the news away from this sickness. The criminals are not just in Rocky Point.”
We huddled on the dashboard and watched Portsmouth disappear.
“If Desmond is right, this will end in tears. But then, tears have already been shed.” He felt the gravel shoulder beneath his tires and eased the cab back onto the road. “And Desmond fears for his safety while he smokes himself to death.”
He turned off the radio and opened his window. We folded our legs and watched moonlit fields streak past, trailed our antennae in warm currents of air, and tried to follow his racing thoughts. He spoke, once, about the seeds of revolutionary change falling on disturbed ground. We remained quiet, too mired in grief to imagine anything new arising from the ruins of stormed plastic castles.
At home, he found Topsy sitting in the front room, rubbing his union pin between his thumb and forefinger.
“They’re saying this thing is at ten o’clock,” Topsy said.
“So you’re going?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Topsy coughed into his fist. “I wouldn’t miss the chance to tell your man how to fuck himself. So he’ll know how after he’s shagged off to some other island.”
“That’s the extent of your reasoning?”
“I’d say that’s good enough reason.” Topsy rose from his chair and dropped his pin on the table. “Goodnight, or so there was such a thing at one time. There will be others, when the misfits stop their dirty business.”
Professor Cleave was studying the worn surface of his father’s pin when Cora emerged from her bedroom. He watched her twist her hair into a knot and wondered if the shadows beneath her eyes had grown deeper since he’d last seen her. She pulled two bowls from a shelf, and he struggled to divine her meaning.
“You didn’t eat?”
“I let him eat and waited,” she said.
“So you wouldn’t suffer his conversation, or so you could eat with me?”
“Neither.” She paused. “Both.”
She stepped into the kitchen and returned with a pot of stew. She set the pot on the table and sat down beside Professor Cleave. When he reached for a spoon, she took his wrist and slipped her upturned hand beneath his palm. He tensed and tried to draw his hand from hers.
“What if you don’t have it?”
“Then we’ll have it together,” she said, lacing her fingers between his.
That night, they stood beside one another at the bathroom sink, brushing their teeth and staring at their paired reflections in the mirror. Then they lay down together, and for the first time in years, fell asleep facing one another, drawing from a pool of mingled breath. Too exhausted to crawl behind the baseboards, we collapsed beneath their bed and drifted into dreams about the world when it was young, and then into nightmares about some terrible fall, an accelerating descent without end.
SOLIDARITY
PROFESSOR CLEAVE OFTEN PROPOUNDED on the subject of solidarity, encouraged, we suspect, by our peaceful cohabitation within the confines of his cab. One dreary afternoon, during a rainstorm, he read the entire Communist Manifesto through to its concluding phrase, “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”—this delivered emphatically, above the din of water splattering on the windshield. If we grew restless, it was because we’d heard it all before, straight from the source.
Many of us had squatted in Karl Marx’s apartment during the six frenetic weeks in 1848 when the great political economist penned his famous manifesto on a nearly impossible deadline. Writing for the masses, ironically, wasn’t Marx’s strongest suit, and he struggled terribly to produce an easily grasped call to action for an awakening proletariat. He cursed the impossible task of establishing a united international workers’ front and forging solidarity among “bee
r-drinking philistines” hopped up on ale and the ferment of nationalism. “Was kann ein Kerl tun? (What can a guy do?)” the beleaguered author lamented, tearing at his beard and cursing the deficiencies of each simple, declarative sentence. “Mein Gott! Diese schrecklichen Sätze! (My God! These frightful sentences!)” cried the atheist in his agonies. So, we’d heard it all before.
We had other reasons for being restless during Professor Cleave’s recitation. Even in 1848 we’d been perplexed by the odd and, we would think, unnecessary enjoinder at the end of Marx’s tract. One can hardly imagine Marx having written, “Roaches of All Countries, Unite!” Such a call might have consigned Marx to the dustbins of history and his manifesto to the chronicles of literary flops; it would have been grossly redundant, if not ridiculous. Cohabitation comes naturally, or at least by necessity, for those of us crowded together in sewers and air ducts. Nationalism and its hollow pretensions have never been our opiates. We could waste a lifetime—or more to the point, many lifetimes spent together—scraping by and scrapping with one another, but why bother? The entire world is our shared oyster. Conversely, garbage is much the same everywhere.
Marx, arguably, should have written a manifesto specifically for chimps, beating their chests and thrashing one another with sticks (Chimps of All Nations, Unite!), or snarling dogs marking territory at every turn, or bees and their corpulent queens stealing honey from others’ hives. At least Marx wrote his manifesto for humans, a nearly cannibalistic lot, judged by the way they tear into each other, and certainly the most savage and superstitious, with their strange religions and complicated rationales for hating and hoarding, as if there weren’t enough garbage to go around. In times of scarcity or fear, they tend to seek scapegoats. Cockroaches conveniently serve their purpose. Once news of the Celeste broke, hotel managers, shopkeepers, and taxi drivers on St. Anne did everything to exterminate us, driven by unfounded associations between cockroaches and contagion.
To give credit where it’s due, Professor Cleave stood out for his sobriety and restraint, even after news networks seized upon stories of bloated bodies and necrotic vapors and ignorant gossips began to circulate rumors about cockroaches’ role in spreading pestilence. Who could blame us for capitalizing on his aversion to traps and sprays? Still, we found ourselves a bit affronted by his lectures on solidarity. He always extolled the collective, placed his faith in it, but he had so little faith in us. He harbored, too, a quiet disregard for most people, as well as an inhibiting sense of human failure, his own above all others. We often considered hiding in Mary’s house for good, but as we’re ashamed to admit, we opted for his cab because no one in Rocky Point had air conditioning.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DURING THE FUNERAL PROCESSION, some of us sequestered ourselves in Room 504, and not only because of its air conditioning. We couldn’t bear the thought of attending a dog and pony show for jockeying politicians. We scoured the floor for crumbs and tried to ignore the television, always the television, stunting everyone’s imagination and threatening to undermine the very foundations of empathy and compassion. Unable to mourn properly, we assured ourselves that we’d inherited Mary’s moral example, even if strangers had claimed her body and name. We also had the small matter of survival to think about. The safe spaces for cockroaches were shrinking and Helen, at least, seemed indifferent to our comings and goings (we’d become careless in our grief!). Mercifully, Dave was too preoccupied to notice us.
All morning, he’d been ingesting American news about soiled linens heaped in stairwells, overflowing toilets, and a planned airlift of provisions. Over and over, he saw the image of Tremor standing beside a charred body. He listened to pundits denouncing acts of savagery and calling for a murder investigation, St. Anne’s police chief assuring reporters that Trevor Prentice would be apprehended, and American politicians lauding the Celeste’s heroic captain and courageous passengers, who would never be surrendered to foreign aggression.
How terrible it must have sounded to Helen, who’d been so rudely abandoned in such a sorry state. She spent the morning pacing, feeling hemmed in and exposed all at once, and for the first time in years, angry.
“We should stock up on food. Before we piss away another day.”
Dave turned from the television. “What, you want me to go?”
“I don’t exactly want to deal with anyone’s shit by myself.”
He considered his reflection in the mirror. “Meet you downstairs in a few minutes.”
Helen found the lobby disquieting in its hints of sudden dereliction. Beyond a set of French doors, upended chairs rested on tabletops. A broom stood against a wall and a dirty rag lay on the floor, as if abandoned in the middle of unfinished tasks. She looked at the unstaffed reservations desk and felt much like we did, scouring the Ambassador’s kitchen for the odd scrap. A bug-out, indeed! If we hadn’t known better, we might have said she had antennae.
She sat down on the couch and leaned over the coffee table to consider a pamphlet bearing a photograph of parasails. As the phone on the reservations desk began ringing, the elevator opened. A heavyset man wrestled two large suitcases over its threshold with a series of blunt kicks.
“Christ it’s hot. They already shut off the AC,” he said, sinking into the couch. “At least they’ll have a luggage porter at the Plantations.”
“You’re moving to the Plantations?”
“Who wouldn’t? Hasn’t been a damn soul working here all morning.” He rubbed the white sunglass shadows beneath his eyes. “You’d think they’d at least have someone answering the phone.”
“It is strange.”
“Whole place is strange. Hired that kid, after all. Never saw him around, but I’d sure as hell notice him now.” The man wiped the side of his neck with a handkerchief. “If I were you, I’d grab your things and get on the first shuttle.”
“I’m not sure it’s worth moving,” Helen said, as the phone went silent.
“The Plantations is a hell of a step up, even if it’s owned by the same company that owns this place. Far as I’m concerned, we should get reimbursed for every dime we’ve spent.”
“You complained?”
“To anyone who’d listen. They just told me to catch one of the shuttles. Just as well. In three hours, I’ll be playing nine holes.” He stretched his arm along the back of the couch and drummed his fingers behind her shoulder. “Seriously, I’ll hold a seat. By noon, we could be knocking back Cane Cutters and getting massages.”
The phone began ringing again. “I’ll think about it.”
“Nothing to think about. Massages. A few drinks.”
“I’m not looking, actually.” She edged away from his hand. “For anything.”
When Dave emerged from the elevator, the man struggled from the couch. “Don’t waste too much time thinking.” He walked to the reservations desk and unplugged the phone. “In places like this, you got to take charge. Initiative’s everything.”
Outside, Helen tugged at her sweater. “That creep asked me to go to the Plantations with him. For a massage.”
“Way he looked, give him credit for trying.”
“It was getting to me. Maybe it’s the vibe here. Thinking about the bellboy.”
“That guy on the beach probably washed up dead. The kid just took a picture.”
“But who would take a picture like that?”
“A bored young guy. The same little fuck who ripped me off.”
“Can you imagine yourself doing something like that?”
“Not really,” Dave said. “Doesn’t matter. He won’t be showing his face around here.”
They walked in silence, consumed by thoughts of the day’s misery. In town, they wandered past gated storefronts and parked cars covered in flyers. Elderly women in wide-brimmed hats, old men in worn suits, and young children in starched shirts milled at the edges of intersections.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Dave said. “Everything’s closed.”
Helen picked a
flyer off the sidewalk and backed into the doorway of a shuttered bakery. “Says some woman got shot by the police. Her funeral procession’s this morning. There’s a strike—”
“Who was she?”
“Somebody’s beloved wife. That’s all it says.”
He shook his head. “They aren’t wasting any time getting her in the ground.”
“They can’t draw it out in places like this. In the heat.”
“Probably for the better. Just get it over with and move on.”
Helen met the stare of an old man crossing himself. “People are afraid of us.”
“Worse things than having people afraid of us.”
As he spoke, a slow dirge became audible, and a small boy standing on a corner shouted. A vanguard of men in black suits turned onto the street, followed by a hearse blanketed in white lilies. Cloaked in car exhaust, the people of Rocky Point followed in stained shirts and hastily mended dresses, surveying alien surroundings and staring at the sunburned strangers standing in a doorway. Helen imagined a sleek black coffin behind the tinted windows and drew her sweater close. Dave stepped up to the curb, strained to see the end of the procession, and cursed the unending heat.
“Solidarity Never,” we might have muttered, had we not been so preoccupied with our own problems. We spotted Cora Cleave in the ranks of taxi drivers straggling at the rear of the procession, beneath drooping banners and crooked signs. Aggrieved by her powder-blue pumps and the blisters forming on her heels, she’d fallen into a foul mood worsened by the sight of two Americans.
“What are those white people doing here?” she whispered, tugging on Professor Cleave’s sleeve. “They are dressed for the beach.”
Professor Cleave glanced at Dave and Helen and lifted his fingers to his neck. “They don’t know better.”
“They don’t care. That is worse than being ignorant or illiterate.”
“They have different ways.” Professor Cleave placed his hand on Cora’s back.
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