Yarn

by Jon Armstrong

  ANTARCTICA: BIRUDU

  I slowed the Chang to a crawl. The last sign I had seen said: Entering Birudu / Population 48 Million. And while I could see fields of house-towers in the distance, even cheaper versions of the vertical aluminum cigars that Zoom Langsin lived in, I was in the industrial side of town, where the buildings were squat, windowless, and covered with the varnish of smoke and greed.

  Thirty feet ahead of the Chang stood the first man I had seen for miles. He was covered head to foot in a yellow suit with a long visor and articulated black gloves. In one hand he held a long pole with which he was poking at the bottom of a jagged overhang of a building with the measured and bored motions of an hourly worker.

  When my door swung open, the biting rot of the outside air seeped into my nose even before I had inhaled. The viscous humidity soon sheened my face, and beneath the soles of my Celine-Audis, the ground was spongy and sticky like risen sourdough.

  I stepped to the front of the car and cupped a hand beside my mouth. "Any yarn mills around here?"

  The poker man startled. "You're not supposed to be here!" I could just make out the dark triangles of his eyes, nose, and mouth, like charcoal smudges of a sketch hidden in the glare of the plastichrome of his visor. "Get on out!" He turned to the building as a door opened.

  From the medical green interior, the silhouettes of two men emerged. Shielding my eyes, I saw that the first wore a short sleeve B-shirt and shorts, while the second was dressed in a HAZMAT suit like Poker. The M-Bunny man's face was covered with a dark crust, like a blackened steak. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips shrank back from mottled black and brown teeth. While his eyes met mine for an instant, I sensed that his will and dreams had withered away to nothing but a sad residue.

  I put my right arm to my face and breathed through the filtering material Pheff had hemmed into my sleeve, watching these two men walk to a trailer beyond Poker. Hazmat opened the door and pushed the M-Bunny man inside, shutting it after him. On the door, I could just make out a handwritten sign: Incubation. Below it were five interlocking black triangles.

  As he returned to the building, Hazmat saw me, stopped, and raised an accusing finger. "Restricted area!"

  Meanwhile Poker was idly prodding here and there. "I already told him."

  Hazmat shook his head solemnly. "This is a restricted area!" The level of self-righteousness in his voice identified him as a boss. "There's a biological restriction."

  My dad had surely encountered someone just like Hazmat. I thought about running at him and leveling him with a heel to the throat, but I turned to my Chang and, while still pressing my suit sleeve to my nose, got inside, quickly lowered the door, and turned the cabin air control to MAX Purify.

  My hands were shaking and my stomach was acid. I had long avoided thinking about what it had been like for my father after he gave himself up. Even when Vada and I visited the M-Bunny headquarters, my anguish for Rik's regular recycle had diverted my imagination. And much later, when I had the means, I had searched for my father's past, for where he had been and what he had done-not how it had ended. But as I released the brakes, and engaged the forward motors, I was flooded with the vision of my father's last hours. He had been stuffed in some small space, allowed to get sicker so that they could scrape his skin to collect whatever viral or bacterial prize they thought he had. M-Bunny's real product wasn't corn, or the products of its mills and factories, or even more prisoners-it was biological weapons.

  KOM: NEARING THE FINAL HEM

  From that day in K'Kom, Gregg called me Darn it for my emergency darning, and while I can't say I enjoyed the nickname, at least he always said it with a laugh or a smile. As for Vada, her reaction confused me. Even as Xavier and Marti praised me, she didn't say anything, and when I finally asked her what she thought, she only said that I'd been brave-the word she used was valiant, stretched out in a way that seemed to dilute its power. I got the feeling she resented what I'd done, as if perhaps I wasn't supposed to save her. And from that point on, the space between us cooled a few degrees. Of course that only made me long to be closer.

  "I want to keep doing this forever," I told Vada late one night. "I see how much you love performing-I saw that back in Seattlehama, but it really gives you joy. It nourishes you. And that I'm making your costumes-that's a dream for me."

  "I try to give something to the men in the slubs, but this is not my life. This is just a part of who I am."

  Even more than her words, her tone seemed to render what I'd said inconsequential. "This is a good life."

  "This is just what we do while we need to raise funds, hide, and plan."

  "Vada… all I'm saying is that I'm happy and so are you. I can see it when you perform. That's what attracted me to you on the Europa."

  She exhaled. "The shows feed my joy, but not my anger."

  I wanted to scream. She seemed to think of her own anger as an organ, a poblano-shaped thing that rested beside her spleen. Not only did it exist, but required certain nutrients, demanded to be exercised, and most of all, couldn't be appeased, let alone extracted with forceps, happiness, or love. It wasn't the thing to ask, but I did anyway. "What anger?"

  "We all have an ache somewhere. You do too."

  "I don't," I told her. "Not when I'm with you… not when I'm working on your gowns."

  That night was dark, and the ship was lights out, so I couldn't see her, but the way she sighed, I could tell she thought I was the broken one. "I can't let Bunné do what she's doing."

  I wanted to laugh. "Bunné's a million miles away."

  "Seven thousand twenty-eight."

  "You're joking!"

  She laughed for a moment. "Well, approximately." When her laugh faded she sat up. "Every minute that we're out here, she's killing thousands and consolidating her power, becoming more entrenched. Don't you care?"

  Her single-mindedness exhausted me. "I do and I don't."

  "You should hate Bunné. You should despise her for what she did to you, let alone that she ground your father into a paste."

  Her word paste infuriated me. "Bunné didn't do that, the M-Bunny reps did. Besides, my father allowed it. He did it-" Guilt and rage swelled in my throat. "-He did it so I could have the bonus."

  Vada thrust herself from the bed, and plunked down on her chair. "I don't expect you to understand the larger context. I wish you did, but I don't expect it."

  The problem was, I was beginning to understand the larger context all too well. And as if to show her, I said, "We're heading to Seattlehama."

  "Yes." Her tone was bitter, her delivery, sharp.

  "You told me that you want me to rip a yarn from her. What that means exactly and what will happen to Bunné afterward, I don't know. I can guess, but what I… what I see now is that there are no plans for us after that."

  By then, I had made Vada two hundred and forty outfits, dresses, gowns, corsets, jumpers, mornings, evenings, and even a variant on a wedding dress. I had darted, hemmed, milled, cobbled, ironed, finished, tailored, stitched, beaded, shirred, ruffled, darned, frogged, zipped, tied, chained, over-locked, embroidered, top-stitched, zigzagged, padded, and stiffened.

  More than that, I had heard about her childhood spent hiding and training in the Ukraine, Africa, the North Pole. I had heard her stories of being shot at, poisoned, savaged, beaten, locked away, and spit upon. I had listened to her recount her experiences fighting, singing, fire eating. I had enjoyed the tales of the people in her life: Qem, Adana Feez, and The Astonishing Zoré (obviously, she was a performer). I had even learned a little of her early life at the Toue camp, although that wasn't a favorite topic of hers as it was mostly overcrowded with tragedy.

  She hadn't moved since I had spoken. "Vada, what's going to happen to us?"

  "Tane," she began, her voice soft, "what we're doing now is lovely. It's wonderful, and it's not very dangerous. But if you stay with us… you will end up killed. And I absolutely don't want that. You don't want that. It can't… I mean… w
e can't… we're just too different. Our lives are too different."

  I got up from her bed and stepped gingerly through the darkness to her side. Sinking to my knees, I put my arms around her. She in turn put an arm over my shoulder even as I heard her sigh wearily. "Vada," I said, willing our differences to silence, "shhh!"

  "Come on, Darn it!" Gregg stood on the sand in nothing but a braided black thong and water goggles. Behind him, submerged to her neck, was the skinny-dipping Marti, who waved merrily at me before somersaulting and paddling off in the greenish murk. "The water only looks bad, but it's not." Gregg shrugged. "Well, maybe you'll just grow another toe."

  For the past two weeks we had done just five shows as we flew over more water than land. We were now on the northern coast of Fiji. Vada and Xavier had left for town early in the morning.

  "We're meeting someone" is all she had said that morning as she dressed in our double room at the Pair of Dice Algae Ocean Motel and Spa.

  "You mean you're not going to tell me."

  "And that's for your sake. If you…" She stopped, closing her eyes for an instant before she buttoned the top of her blouse-a veri-peek net with embroidered red polka dots. "Look," she began again, her voice softer, "even the time you've spent with us is something you'll always have to hide. If it's discovered, you'll probably be banned from the cities… and I'm beginning to regret that I-"

  "What about what I want?"

  "What you want can't change who I am."

  "I'm not leaving you. I need you."

  "Tane, please. Let's not start."

  "Damn it!" I said, not caring who heard through the thin walls, "I want you. That's what I want! I wish you wanted me as much."

  "I'm not something to have."

  "I didn't say that. I said I want to be with you. I want to sew for you. That's all I want." I had been shouting. When I stopped I was as empty as a husk. This was a waste of my time. It was never going to happen. With my hand to my forehead, I spoke toward the floor, "I wish you wanted that."

  "Tane…"

  Turning, I opened the screened door and stormed across the cement, past the T-shirt carts, the smoked rat-on-a-stick huts, the plasticott sandals sellers, and the ocean-tar necklace vendors to the water's edge. I stood there staring at the slop of the algae-filled ocean feeling furious, foolish, and hoping like hell she would come after me.

  When I finally returned to our room, all I found was the puckered bed of our night and the words miss you, scrawled in her narrow loops on the back of a drink coupon for Magoshi's Seaweed Cabaret. I felt abandoned. I angrily jammed my clothes into a white plastic laundry bag, as if I might just toss it over my shoulder and march off into the distant tropical hell. But when I stuffed my second pair of pants into the bag, it split open. I grabbed my things and hurled them at the lurid sunset painting bolted to the wall.

  That evening, she returned. "I do need you," she said over dinner, the words awkwardly hollow in the post-Tiki, seamonkey-squalor of Magoshi's.

  "You need me to rip a yarn, and then you're leaving me."

  Her mouth tightened to a hard line. "You're acting like a child."

  "You're treating me like I'm your foot soldier. I'm glad you saved me and brought me in to your life. I understand how unprecedented and risky it was. I could tell the way Gregg and Marti first looked at me, but you're trying to use my talents like Withor, Kira, or Pilla."

  She tilted her head to the side. "That's not how it is."

  "That's exactly how it is! This is actually about us. You took me in and we were together. But now it's like you don't think I'd have feelings, like this was just a job. But when I sew for you, I feel you… I really feel you. I know where your bones are, I know the folds of your flesh… I love you."

  Vada lowered her chin, eyes on the table. "I feel the same way." She smiled sadly. "I'll never forget anything."

  I stared at the condensation on my glass and shivered. "You already have."

  She clenched her fists. "We can't be the husband and wife like you want." Her hands relaxed and she dropped them to the table. "Not like you want. You know what I am. I have wonderful feelings for you. But I'm… I can't fall in love."

  "You mean: you don't want to."

  "I didn't say that."

  A tray stacked with our BBQ stingrays arrived. Vada was ravenous; I downed the rest of my blue algae cocktail and ordered another.

  Later, the two of us strolled down the boardwalk-cement walk, really-under the strings of colored lights and the spiraling swells of night flies.

  "What was that meeting this morning?"

  "We met someone who has studied the material."

  "Bunné's?"

  "Shhh," she admonished, if the boy-girls in grass crowns were all listening in. "From what we heard, it's going to be extremely difficult."

  I shrugged unconvinced. "Sure."

  "Four days from now, she's going to have a show at the open-air amphitheater at the top of her building. It's called The Suicital."

  I stopped and turned to Vada. The red and orange bulbs overhead washed her color away. Her dark eyes looked black, her skin, white. "The closer I push, the farther you retreat."

  She closed her eyes slowly. The corners of her mouth darkened and a few faint dimples appeared on chin. "I'm… I guess in some way I'm afraid."

  "And you're supposed to be the outlaw." Grasping her hand, I led us on.

  We came to a collection of carnival rides: a giant Parris Wheel, a Spin-Tron, a Vorvox, and something called Hell Tunnel. I insisted we get in the last.

  "This is silly," she said, but didn't otherwise resist.

  We sat in a little car, which trundled along through stale water and various black rooms where worn projections of spiders, scorpions, and blood patterned our bodies. We barely paid attention though, for as soon as we had started, I grabbed her, and since I had made all her clothes, I knew their secrets. I had her exposed in an instant. We fashioned, and at least for those few minutes on that silly ride to hell, on that polluted island paradise-in the flesh if not fully in spirit-when I pushed, she pushed back.

  ANTARCTICA: A BAR CALLED JUNIP NESTLED BETWEEN FEATURELESS FACTORIES AND WAREHOUSES

  Inside it was so dark, I couldn't see anything. The music consisted of a steady grind and what I imagined were the perverted mutterings of a hunchback. The place smelled of body odor, spilled mash, and darkness.

  From the low ceiling, crusted with decades of forgotten and unlit lighting options-including two dilapidated chandeliers, missing most of their faceted teardrops, and several cracked low-hanging sconces-the only source of illumination was a strange swirl of red plasticott that looked like some amateur's representation of the beginning of the universe or a massive nosebleed.

  Once my eyes began to adjust and the walls and floor came into view, I could see twenty slubbers slumped over a flock of small black tables to the left. All were dressed in ill-fitting t-shirts. Among them I recognized recent versions of uniforms by M-Bunny, L. Segu, Bestke, and even two Wans-with their five useless empty eyelets down the front. The men were mostly all the same, except for the thickness of grime on their faces, the shapes of their frizzy beards, and the degree of misery curving their spines.

  On the right, a dozen more sat before a dark bar, decorated with a backlit rack of bottles of cheap liquor-corn mash, green-o, and what they called white maze.

  If any of them looked up when I had first entered, they had repositioned their heads at precisely the same angle of desolation and misanthrope as before. When I moved toward the bar, I saw only one overtly watch-his eyes glazing my suit and tie with suspicion as his left index wiggled halfway up his right nostril.

  I saw two empty plasticott stools at the bar: one just a foot away at the end and the other halfway down. I stepped toward the second and I took my place as the men on either side inched away. After studying the bar surface, I found a relatively clean spot to rest my elbow.

  I sat there for at least sixty-four bars of the noisy r
obotic music until a middle-aged woman in a tiny and too-tight red plastic dress finally emerged from behind a dank curtain and took up her place behind the bar. Her hair was florescent pink; her rubbery mouth liberally smeared with a sparkly green lipstick. From the middle of her red plastic necklace, a simulacra of a scrotum hung between her breasts and above that a long red erect phallus curved toward her mouth like a pacifier or microphone.

  Once she had freshened the drinks of several others, she slopped her rag at the bar around my elbow and said, "Yeah?" Her voice was as smooth as crackers on sheets.

  "I'm looking for a yarn mill."

  "To drink?"

  The men on either side of me laughed.

  Without acknowledging her joke I just said, "Xi yarn."

  She rolled her eyes "I don't make it!" She got another laugh from her audience, probably hoping for comps.

  "Of course," I said, abandoning that tack. I gestured at the shelves behind her. "A bottle of your best acid mash."

  "That's three thousand!"

  But before she had finished her sentence, I had flipped out three fresh bills. Once she had registered the Calvins, I added another. "Three for you and one for the handsome red lad around your neck."

  When one of the men laughed at my joke, she swiped his drink away and scooped up my bills in the same motion. A moment later, she smacked a bottle of Sir Admiral Dooganberry's Hot Pink Mash down in front of me. Then, in a clearly practiced move, she sucked the dong far into her mouth only to spit it back out in disgust, before turning on a heel to retreat behind the filthy curtain.

  A show barely worth one Calvin. I unstuck the bottle, slipped off the stool, feeling the plasticott momentarily cling to the high-twist wool of the seat of my pants. Holding up the bottle like a lure, I spoke over the music, "I'm looking for a Xi yarn mill around here."

  For several beats, no one even moved. Then a man with a red-and-gray-peppered beard knocked back his drink, and burped. Glaring at me, he blew out and let a wad of snot hang from his right nostril. A moment later, as if playing yoyo, he sniffed it up.