“I think so,” I hear Doctor Seabrook say. “Just a slight tweak needs to be made to the power coupling. We have to return to our boat to get the necessary parts.”
“Y’all want an escort?” the mayor says.
“No, we’ll be right back. Come on, Kang.”
Kang and the Doctor carry me through the supine forms in the hallway and past the crowd of people sleeping in the courtroom. We walk out through the metal detector and down the steps lined with water and paper towels. We march through the lobby and out into the empty streets of Blysse.
The sun rides high overhead. It is warm, but not as warm as the sun from the TV.
Kang carries me out of town, stopping only once to pick up a weather vane. They’re going to use it to patch the hemp cooker.
As we walk, Seabrook tells me a joke. It’s a long joke, and it makes me feel tired. He says he heard it from Roy out in the hall while I was watching. Once there was this little town, and some big muckety-mucks from the city came and asked for permission to run some tests on this new product they’d developed. A new high-def TV. One of the men was wearing an army uniform with a patch on it just like the one I had in my pocket. The visitors said they wanted to set up a display in the courthouse. They set it up that very day, turned it on, and left. Little by little people from the town came in to check it out, and once they came they never left. Wives came in to get husbands and stayed; husbands came to get wives and stayed. People came in to complain that the police weren’t doing their duty or that the trash company hadn’t collected in months, and they stayed too. Children came in after their parents and stayed. Soon everybody moved into the courthouse. Nobody wanted to stop watching TV. Then the businesses ground to a halt. People stopped going to work, nobody went to church, kids stopped going to school, the mail stopped coming. A tornado hit the town one day and nobody came to help. Everybody knew about the storm. The picture of it ravaging their town on CNN was so gorgeous, they all stayed planted and just watched the whole thing on the television. The phones stopped ringing. No cars drove past on the streets. Electricity was coming from somewhere, but nobody questioned where from, because the people could still watch TV and that’s all they cared about.
If they have electricity, somebody is providing it.
It’s an experiment.
Seabrook talks until we get back to the Tamzene and set sail again, but I don’t care.
Everything looks dull and gray and boring.
It all would look so much better on that huge flat screen, high-def TV.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
dullness
Arthur and Esmerelda come up from the hold, adjusting their clothes. Arthur’s mouth looks red. I’m not sure. I don’t care. He writes something on his pad. I don’t understand.
Seabrook and Kang build a bonfire in the woods downriver from Blysse. They lay the pieces of the weather vane on rocks stacked up within the fire until they glow. Then Kang hammers the weather vane flat. He bolts the metal to the hemp cooker over the places where it had cracked during the storm. Seabrook heats the bolts with the blowtorch.
I sit and wait.
The deck boards stretch in dull gray lines.
The others galonk around the maroon hemp cooker for a while, silhouetted in front of the pinkening sky—a faded, washed-out pink, like somebody bleached a salmon.
They talk. I can’t make out much of anything.
Once in a while, they look at me with frowny faces.
I sit and wait.
The moon rises. On the TV in Blysse it will blaze.
I think about George Lucas. That will be something, even if it’s the old cheesy ’70s version of Star Wars without the CGI effects. Would laser beams and lightsabers actually hurt to watch? How would the Grizzlies sound if they played their show right between my brain lobes? Their San Fran concert will be on pay-per-view.
Arthur drapes a blanket over my shoulders. It warms me. I don’t care. He lies down next to me on the deck. Then Seabrook lies down and so does Esmerelda, and Kang isn’t here anymore.
I can’t make my move right away. I wait until they’re all breathing heavily. I wait until Arthur stops flipping around in his sleep.
Then I quietly get up and weave my way around the sleepers. I go over the side of the boat.
I slip into the waist-deep water and move as slowly as I can so I won’t slosh any water around. When I reach the shore, I crawl up into the trees.
Kang, I think. Kang could still stop me. Where does Kang go in the night? He never sleeps on the boat. He is there one minute and then not there a minute later.
I start into the woods and hope I don’t run into Kang. Then a voice makes me hide behind the trees.
I peer into the dark. After a few minutes I see a blue glow. It reminds me of something I’ve seen before, another blue glow in the woods. It moves back and forth.
Somebody is pacing in the woods, talking on a cell phone.
“I know,” says the voice. It’s a man. “I know, I know, I know. We’ve been through this.”
I see what looks like long silver hair. It’s Kang. Talking on a cell phone.
“We’ve been through it, Mom,” he says. It’s freaky. His voice is high and nasally.
“I don’t know why I bother sometimes,” he says. “Yeah, yeah. Every night. I call you every night, Mom. Because I love you. Don’t you love me?” Hearing him speak and pace with a cell phone squeezed between his shoulder and his cheek is sort of like when you see the guy who plays Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies: you can’t picture anybody but the CGI beastie, but then there’s this ugly little British guy making those noises. It’s a rip-off, and even though you can’t put your finger on what exactly is wrong with it, you feel betrayed just the same.
My badass Indian is a mama’s boy.
“I’m not coming back, Mom,” he says. “This is who I am now. What do I always say? What do I always say? You are who you choose to be.” He snaps the phone closed, and everything is dark again.
I stay hidden for a while until I hear him move off down the river, tripping over roots and muttering about it. Then I get up and head back upstream toward Blysse.
I have lots of questions. I mean, where in the world has he kept a cell phone all this time? How does he keep the battery charged? And who the hell is this guy? I don’t know why it didn’t seem weird to me before. Indians with war paint and headdresses just aren’t around anymore. But there are psychos everywhere.
I brush off the questions. I’m focused on getting back to the TV in Blysse. Seabrook, Arthur, and Esmerelda don’t need me. Arthur will find his way back home. Plus, with me out of the picture, he’s got whats-her-name all to himself. And Seabrook’s avoided the Green Police so far without me, after all. I’ll tell His Eminence all about the Tamzene and how it really does work and is an honest-to-goodness good thing he ought to help with some government funding, and everything will be all right.
Truth be told, people, if I have to nuke the boat and the crew with it, at this moment, I’ll press the button.
I stumble along. I trip and bloody my arms and knees. After a long time, I see a searing white light. It’s Blysse.
It’s the TV slicing through the darkness.
It bleeds through the trees ahead. I run toward it. I fall again and cut my legs and arms. I’m bleeding pretty badly, but I don’t care because that light is getting closer and closer and brighter and brighter.
But when I get there I discover it isn’t Blysse at all, but a set of floodlights attached to poles at a campsite. The camp is full of people dressed in black. When I run into the camp, they all stop and stare at me with surprised, sagging looks on their faces, metal army plates full of food in their hands, and the Green Police logos on their uniforms. Some of them wear the patches on their chests—the same patches I found in the woods that Charlie Lee and the people from Blysse recognized, the same patch that’s in my pocket, and the same logo that’s on the poster in the office of His Eminence.
Deep inside me a little voice says, Stop.
Everyone freezes. We stare at one another.
Whatever is speaking inside me has a movie projector—not a flat screen, not a mega high-def or anything like what’s in Blysse, but an old chattering reel-to-reel job like they had decades ago.
The movie that plays is Arthur pushing the stool over to me so I don’t embarrass myself for being short that one day on the Tamzene. There are images of Arthur and me laughing. There are some great shots of Arthur jumping in the way of that bullet just a couple of mornings ago. The movie is also Seabrook: cradling Arthur’s ankle, clutching me by the arm on a night when he’s hurting, punching Shwo-Rez in the back of the head.
As I realize I’m running back into the dark woods, the movie continues to play. I see Kang next, wrapping his arms around Arthur and me with that closed-lipped smile . . .
“You there! Halt!”
. . . standing, holding his knife at his side on the deck of the Tamzene, facing down the burning white yachts.
And I’m plunging into the woods, trees crisscrossing behind me. I can see silhouettes of the men on my heels, but I am pulling away from them now. The TV, Blysse, my parents, the Grizzlies—all of it be damned. For once I’m going to be the hero, people. Winthrop Brubaker is going to save the day. I realize now that I’m making it, I’m pulling away, they’re tangled in the trees. I’m making it. I’m making it. I’m—
Sharp pain slices into the back of my neck. I fall forward into blackness.
PART FIVE
Survival of the Fittest
“What didn’t go right?”
—President George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
jorge
They’d been given two big ones and a small one. The big ones were nothing new: men, sinewy and covered in hair. But the things in the box had never seen such a young, tender one as this before. A large metal mouth gaped from a box that joined the young one’s chest.
It would be hard to chew.
The humans sat in the white room. The young one’s handcuffs jangled against the chair. The two big ones sat, heads bowed, in expressions the things in the box had grown to know. Though they had learned little about the minds of men, they believed the expressions were ones of hopeless fear.
The shiny black eye opened, and a face appeared. Inconsequential noises commenced.
“Doctor Marion Seabrook.”
“Yes.”
“Your companions are Kang and . . . Arthur, is it? . . . I’m afraid we have no record of either of you . . . Your name, Mr. Kang? . . . Okay, we’ll skip names. Where is the Tamzene? . . . Gentleman, I can promise you this will go much easier if you cooperate.”
“What’s a Tamzene?”
“Hmmmph. Gentlemen, we found you in the woods downriver from the last known whereabouts of your invention, Doctor Seabrook. You were clearly searching for your escaped hostage, Winthrop Brubaker. It’s only a matter of time before we locate your boat. Why don’t you make it easier on yourself and tell me where the Tamzene is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We were fishing.”
“Look to your left, gentlemen.”
For the first time the three humans glanced in the direction of the things in the box. The things in the box chattered. The young one opened his mouth in a silent howl.
“Do you have any idea what the things in that box can do to you if I release even one? So a little cooperation please, gentlemen. Sharing is caring, right? . . . Mr. Kang, your full name . . . Your full name, Mr. Kang . . . Is it Jorge? Jorge Zuniga? I can see by your face that rings a bell. We have a winner! I have here an Arizona driver’s license for a Jorge Miguel Zuniga of 225 Crestview Terrace, Flagstaff. Not the best picture. You had short hair and glasses. But I’ll wager dollars to donuts this is you, Mr. Kang.”
“Kang?”
“Didn’t tell you that, Doctor Seabrook, did he? You thought he was a Native American named Kang? He’s a con artist. He’s been telling that story for five years, Doctor Seabrook. Or should I say Rev. Seabrook, pastor of the Love Canal First Presbyterian Church, last seen in Niagara Falls, New York, 1980? . . . We know all about you, gentlemen, so it’s useless to continue with this charade.”
The dark one stared at the floor. The young one and the older one seemed to study him, mouths agape. Then the things in the box chattered, and the humans all flinched.
“Doctor Seabrook, a scientist such as yourself must be familiar with amospermophilus homoedo . . .”
movement
The trees along the river were one hundred years old. They’d been saplings when men first settled in the nearby towns. In their youths the river had been strong. Fish with speckled bellies plunged through the clear-running channels. Deer drank from the pools the river made in its shallow reaches.
In those days, the trees wished they’d been given the ability to move. When the water swept past their roots, it was so strong it threatened to drag them along. If only, the trees had thought in those days, we’d been gifted with the swiftness of mind and fleetness of branch to climb further into the forest to protect ourselves.
As the years passed, the rush of the water subsided. The river withered like a vine dying of thirst. The channels turned brown, and the fish died. Again the trees wished they’d been gifted with musculatures and joints and nervous systems to pull up their roots and march through the forest to a land where the air wasn’t so choked with poison, where the streams flowed with clean, sweet water.
The night the order arrived, the trees were dying claws leaning over a slackened dirt-colored sluice. Now? some of them thought. After so much has happened? After all has been lost?
But they obeyed. They strained within their branches. Strain was something they’d previously been unable to know and feel, but now here it was, something foreign yet not foreign, something ubiquitous yet never before seen, willing their arms to move.
They wrapped themselves around the man-made thing, the boat with the metal smokestack. Great cracking noises filled the forest as their weaker limbs snapped free. They felt their bows dipping into the river.
Soon, they’d hidden the boat from view.
As sheets of rain fell, the river began to swell.
innocents
It starts out innocently enough. We’re sitting at the table in the front salon on one of those nights—you can count them on your fingers—when His Eminence is home. Nobody talks. Nothing strange here. I’m staring at my plate full of roast duck and so is the Moms. His Eminence is spooning heap after heap into his face, surveying the room with that searchlight expression, the kind that you hope won’t land on you if you suck your neck deeply enough between your shoulder blades. The Moms and I are trying our best to avoid it, but eventually it lands on me, and His Eminence asks how school was.
“Okay,” I say, which is what I always say.
“Ready for camp?” he asks me.
“Sure,” I say.
And everything is quiet once again.
“Let me ask you something,” His Eminence says. “Is that fork bothering you?”
His question throws me because it’s bizarre, so I give him three words instead of one: “I guess not.”
So we eat a while longer. The Moms is staring at her plate, looking at neither me nor His Eminence. Nothing is out of the ordinary.
After a few minutes His Eminence slams his fork down on the table, and that’s the first time I notice he has yellow eyes.
“You’re a Brubaker,” he says, “and it’s a disgrace that any Brubaker would ever eat with a knife and fork. That’s your mother’s influence.”
And then I realize that the His Eminence’s face is false. He tears is off like it’s a Mission: Impossible rubber mask, and underneath is the face of a cougar.
“We’ll teach you proper table manners,” the cat says to me, and then bends down and starts scarfing up food. He jumps up on the table and wolfs down the aspar
agus, roast duck, and potatoes au gratin.
The Moms is just sitting there with tears rolling down her face. She looks at me and screams, “Run!”
I wake up lying in a white room with long curtains that arch over a view of a sun-covered field of grass that stretches all the way to a row of trees. Beyond that, the river glimmers.
The bed is soft. The blue comforter is pillowy. A big black desk on the far wall sits next to a cushioned chair with a pair of khaki slacks and a white shirt folded on it. A blue vase crammed with flowers rests on the desk.
I stand and scoop up the clothes. They’ve been draped over a pair of polished wing tips, a leather belt, a pair of black socks, and a pair of boxer shorts. On top of them is a note written in cursive on a thick sheet of high-grade paper:
Master Brubaker, dial 7 for room service. We hope you have a pleasant stay with us. The Management. PS—Ms. Sweetwater has requested that you join her on the front range at your earliest convenience.
The letterhead at the top of the page says Locksley Ponds.
The plush carpet squeezes between my toes. Everything smells like flowers. This is like one of the upscale five-star hotels we stayed at when His Eminence needed me and the Moms on his campaign tours. I wonder if all of it was a dream. The Tamzene, Seabrook, Kang, Arthur, Esmerelda—they’re like comic book characters, like a crazy B movie, them and Shrub People and biting squirrels and that high-def TV.
Then I look in the mirror over the desk and almost lose my shit.
A skinny little beastie stares back, somebody with skin the color of Hershey’s syrup, greasy hair poking everywhere, a big scratch on his grimy little arm, and other little bruises and scrapes everywhere. The kid is only in his skivvies, and his chest, arms, and neck are pale where his turtleneck—now nowhere to be seen—had once been. It takes me two looks before I realize the whole Tamzene trip was the real deal.
We Are All Crew Page 22