And I knew where I’d be.
8
Free Speech and
All That
Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-11
Subject: JAMES, NORA EMILY, 15
Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42
Micah sat in the same spot near the art section, hunched over his sketch pad, a stack of books blocking what he was drawing.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” he said, peeking over the books.
“Me neither.” I wondered if they were the same books that had been there Friday.
He pulled out my chair for me again and then slid his sketch pad in front of me. My story was all there. Almost. The comic was eight boxes, or what he called “panels,” stacked in tiers on a regular sheet of paper. The first panel, the biggest one, showed a body splatting to the pavement at my feet. The next showed me waking up in a sweat. The graffiti. TFC. Him with his cast. Spitting out the pill. It was all there. The fat black pen strokes pinned the action to the crisp white page. It was in black and white, no color at all, but it seemed realer, not so cartoony that way. He hadn’t put the words in yet, but the action told the story. It was odd, like seeing myself from a distance. Not a bad odd, though. It was as if I were far enough away to see the whole story and not get hung up on a scene.
“You said someone needs to remember,” he said. “I was thinking maybe we could do it with a comic book. Okay, more like a comic strip. With our stories. And maybe other kids could tell us their memories before they get erased.”
I didn’t look up at him, although I could feel how close he was and how much he wanted to do this. I stared at the section of the comic where I was in the treatment room. Micah didn’t include Mom’s memory because I hadn’t told him what it was. In the frame, I just hid the pill under my tongue. (I spit it out in the last frame.) But something wasn’t quite right.
“Do you ever dream about getting beat up or the van hitting you?” I asked him, but I was really thinking about the comic strip.
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “My dreams aren’t as bad as they used to be. Drawing helps, I think.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
He looked confused, and I couldn’t blame him. My brain doesn’t always follow a straight line.
“What I did.” I pointed to the treatment room panel. “It doesn’t make sense—as a story—unless you know what my mother’s memory was.”
He nodded thoughtfully. Then I told him. And I told him she was probably there at the TFC now.
Micah looked like someone had punched him in the gut. It was actually kind of sweet.
“Wow.” He let out a long breath and touched my hand.
Then he ripped off a clean sheet of paper and handed me a pencil.
“You write. I’ll draw,” he said firmly.
We sat there, quiet, our heads together, our pencils moving across paper as if we were channeling something, until my mobile buzzed to tell me the car service was outside waiting for me.
“What are we going to call this?” he asked as I helped him stuff everything into his bag. He banged his bum arm against the table in the process.
I tapped his cast and turned to leave. “Memento, of course,” I said over my shoulder. He wasn’t the only one who could make an exit.
I didn’t have the dream that night.
Later that week, after we had a solid first draft together, it occurred to us that we might need to disguise ourselves. I didn’t want my friends or family to figure out it was me. He was sure SWAT teams and black helicopters would drag us away if we didn’t cover our tracks.
We talked about several ways to do this. He even tried making our characters into animals. I thought it would be too cutesy until he showed me this old graphic novel about the Holocaust, where the Jews were mice and the Nazis were pigs. It definitely wasn’t cute. Micah tried using sheep and wolves for our people, but he gave up on that idea because they kept coming out too Disney. So we stuck with people. He came up with different characters. We changed the names, tweaked the story lines a little. The whole protect-the-innocent thing, especially since the innocent was us.
Then we realized something else. We didn’t know how to produce or distribute Memento without getting caught. I didn’t think it was a big deal. Free speech and all that. We should just upload it, I told him, and send it to everyone at school.
Micah laughed so hard when I said it that Ms. Curtis suggested it was time for us to go home.
“I know just the person who can help us,” Micah whispered as he shoved his sketch pad into his bag. “Tell your car service you need to go to the downtown library tomorrow. I’ll meet you there, and we’ll go to my friend’s place together. Okay?”
“Downtown?” I dreaded the thought of going down there again.
“Don’t worry,” Micah said. “I have your back.”
And I knew he did.
9
Nothing Works
Anymore
Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-13
Subject: NOMURA, WINTER, 14
Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42
One of the hands, the one with the silver watch painted on the wrist, flopped to the ground like a dead fish. No matter how tight I ratcheted the hands to the armature, one would eventually work its way off. I threw the hand across the garden, smacking it into the bamboo gate—just as Sasuke-san walked through in his best blue suit. His only suit really. He only wore it to one place, and he looked so tired and old and small in it today.
“Ay, Win-chan,” he said. “Watch it.” He was annoyed, but not at me.
“Sorry, Grandfather,” I said. “I can’t get this stupid sculpture to work right.” Then I launched into a tirade about kinetic sculptures, school, and what an idiot Micah was. I don’t know what I said. I was just babbling to distract my grandfather. And myself. Anything to keep us from talking about it.
“We’ll talk later,” he said. I knew without him saying it anyway. The motion didn’t work. Another lawyer quit. We didn’t get visitation rights. Again.
Nothing worked right anymore.
“I’m going to change,” my grandfather said as he picked up the hand and tossed it to me.
“Micah’s coming over later,” I told him. “He’s bringing a girl. Nora James.”
Sasuke-san raised an eyebrow. I shook my head. Sure, I liked Micah, but more like a brother. The idiot brother you have to look out for. And maybe this girl wasn’t the best thing for my idiot brother, but that’s not what was bugging me about her. At the moment.
“Who was Mom and Dad’s first lawyer?” I asked. “That lady you liked.”
“Sidney James,” he said slowly and more like a question. “Oh,” he said silently, and walked back to the house.
I turned the mannequin hand over in mine. Maybe if I added some weight to the hand, maybe a real wrist watch, it would balance out all of the hands, keep them turning like gears. And maybe if I added solar cells and mobile processors to those sheets of canvas I’d found, it would drown out the sounds I hear in my head whenever I slow down long enough to listen.
10
Whatever That Is
Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-11
Subject: JAMES, NORA EMILY, 15
Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42
From the downtown library Micah and I walked to the corner of Eighth and Day. The edge of the warehouse district. Mom had said once that this area used to be nice. Trendy lofts. High-priced condos. Hip clubs. It wasn’t so trendy now. Most of the buildings were boarded up. A bombed-out car, the rust thick on its body like scales, hugged the curb at Sixth and Day. The air smelled of rotting garbage.
I stayed close to Micah as I followed him down an alley to a chain-link fence covered with faded Nomura Electronics signs. Between the boards, all you could see was metal. Micah pushed on a sign, and it slid open like a patio door, revealing a hole in the chain-link fence.
Once inside the fence I was eyeball to
eyeball with a forest of steel poles and wooden beams. My first impression was that we were under the bleachers, as if there were some secret stadium here. Turns out there was.
“What is this place?” I demanded.
“You’ll see it better once we get out from under the seats.”
We walked along under the back row until we emerged into the open. There I saw a giant playground of steel, rope, and Plexiglas. It looked as if it had been built from those metal building sets Dad bought me when I was little and then played with all Christmas Day by himself.
Micah jumped on the bleachers and bounded up to the top. “From here you can see the whole layout.”
With a groan, I followed him up there. I took in the crazy quilt of structures. A log with handholds carved out of it hanging over a partially filled pond. A big fish net flapping over a dry pond. A canyon of clear walls.
“It’s an obstacle course,” I concluded.
“Yeah, Winter’s granddad lets me skateboard on that one.” Micah pointed to a curved wall that looked like a massive wave. It had to have been twenty feet high.
“He built this whole thing years ago to practice for some goofy Japanese game show,” Micah added.
“Uh, cool.” It wasn’t.
“Oh, this isn’t the cool part,” Micah said, beaming. “Over there, behind the Spider Climb.” He pointed to a tower of scaffolding at the far end of the yard.
“Don’t they have security?” I asked. We hadn’t needed a retina or voice scan or even a key code to get this far.
Micah shrugged. “They have some sort of system on the house itself. Winter leaves the back ‘gate’ open so I can skate or hang out whenever.”
As we cut across the course, I noticed that some of the obstacles were missing pieces. Some of the rope was frayed and rotting. Boards were missing.
The Spider Climb turned out to be two walls of slippery Plexiglas you evidently had to climb to get to a rope, which you then had to shinny up about thirty feet to reach a buzzer on the top.
Just beyond the tower there was a bamboo gate. It opened into a whole different world. I don’t know what I was expecting after the adult jungle gym we’d just passed through. Definitely not this.
“This is Winter’s garden,” Micah announced as we stepped into it. And I had to admit it. This was the cool part.
A bamboo wall encircled a crisscross of polished wooden paths and white sand. It was almost peaceful, like something out of a Japanese home-and-garden show. Or a martial arts movie. Almost. Except that instead of bonsai trees and big rocks planted in the sand, there were these eerie metal sculptures. And they moved. At least the first one did.
Though it was just a few big twists of burnished metal, it looked like a hunched-over man pawing at a pool of water. His hands slapped at the surface of the water, sending out bigger and bigger ripples.
“Watch this,” Micah whispered, pointing to the next thing in the garden. It looked like a metal shopping bag lying on its side.
The water started to lap up onto the sand by the bag. Two slender black pieces of metal peeked out of the bag and felt their way to the ground. The feelers or legs crab walked themselves partially out of the bag, and the creature started to pull itself, bag and all, up the sloped walk. Its frenzied back-and-forth motion reminded me of something.
“Are those windshield wipers?” I asked, thoroughly impressed—and unnerved.
He nodded, a big grin on his face.
Something about the jerky, almost desperate crawl of the wipers dragging the shopping bag shell behind them made me uneasy. Then as the whole thing reached the top of its little hill, it stopped crawling, collapsed back into its shell, and slid back down to where it had started. It was like it couldn’t get anywhere with that bag on its back.
The next thing—a windmill of metal hands beating at the air—started moving. The flailing motion of the hands as they reached the top of the windmill and then started back down reminded me of someone drowning. A limb fell off into the sand. The spiky-haired girl from Micah’s drawing scooped up the creature’s hand and then clicked a button on a remote control. The creature shuddered to a stop.
Winter Nomura bounded up the walkway to meet us. I could imagine her skinny arms and legs spider walking her way up the Plexiglas tower we’d just passed through.
“I’m going to have to redo the servo mechanism on that one,” she said quietly, almost as if she didn’t want it to hear.
“That shopping bag crab is still the glossiest thing you’ve ever made,” Micah said.
She cringed.
“That thing is so not glossy,” I said. I blurted it out before I really thought about it. I didn’t mean to insult her work. I meant the opposite.
Winter peered at me as if she’d just noticed Micah wasn’t alone.
She looked exactly like he’d drawn her, except that her hair was now blue. She had an intensity that was hard to capture on paper. Very quiet, yet if you shook her up, she’d explode like a bottle of soda. Her almost black eyes bore through me as if she had X-ray vision and could see exactly how I worked. She was more unnerving than her creatures.
“It’s not supposed to be,” she said after what seemed like an eternity. “Glossy, that is.” She turned off that X-ray vision and almost smiled. Almost. I felt like I’d passed some test.
Micah didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he was used to Winter by now. He was babbling on about this project of ours and how we needed her help. We let him babble.
“Your garden is beautiful,” I said, adding, “in an eerie sort of way. It’s—unsettling.”
“That it’s supposed to be,” she said. And this time she did smile.
She showed us the other sculptures she was working on—“kinetic” sculptures she called them. The last one was just a pile of canvas and wires and circuits so far.
“I have this idea,” she said, excited, “to do something with solar sails. Not sure exactly what yet.” She led us to the pagoda in the center of her garden. There she’d laid out dozens of tiny solar cells on a low table. She’d also cracked open several old mobiles and other electronica and was creating something on a circuit board. “I think the sails will be like chimes, the sunlight powering ring tones or something crazy like that. Maybe car alarms.”
I picked up a mobile she’d gutted. “I thought you weren’t supposed to open these,” I said. There was clearly a warning sticker on the back: under penalty of law blah-blah-blah.
“If you can’t open it . . . ,” she began.
“You don’t really own it,” Micah finished for her as if he’d heard it a million times.
“Anyway,” she said, “I’m going to put one final piece in here.” She pointed to the table. “Don’t know yet what it’ll be, but it’ll run off the solar panels on the roof. And it’ll kind of sum up everything.” She shrugged. “Whatever that is.”
A gate on the other side of the garden creaked open. A wiry older man, dressed in track pants, a T-shirt, and a black hat like you see in old black-and-white movies, brought out a tray.
“Win-chan, tea for your guests.” He set out cups and a teapot on the table. “Two sugars for you, Micah.” Micah bowed his head slightly. “One for you?” he asked, looking at me, scrutinizing my sugar intake, I guess. I nodded. “And a triple shot of espresso for my little whirlwind.” The liquid in the cup he handed Winter was as black as ink. “Six sugars,” he added with a grimace.
“I’m Koji Yamada, Winter’s grandfather,” he said, putting the tray aside to extend his hand to me.
“Nora James,” I introduced myself. I couldn’t help staring at his arm. Both arms. They were covered in designs. A snake flowed down his right arm with the head ending at his hand. A tiger pounced down his left arm in full color.
“Those are beautiful. How long do they last?” I asked.
“Forever,” Mr. Yamada answered, amused.
“They’re real tattoos,” Winter said. “You know, needles stabbing ink into your flesh.”
“Each of my tats means something to me.” He pointed to a cherry blossom on the left side of his neck. “Birth of my child.” He pulled down the top of his T-shirt to reveal a snowflake over his heart. “My grandchild.” He pointed to some Japanese writing on his right wrist. “My first shop.” The snake. “Knowledge.” The tiger. “Protection.
“Why would I want to change those? They’re the things that make me who I am.” Then he added, “Besides, would you buy clothes from a naked man?”
Memento Nora Page 4