by Moira Crone
Ariel’s hair was unwashed as ever. He had a spindly beard, even more unkempt than the last time I’d seen him, and a remarkable tan. When he came into the kitchen, he slung his hand-sewn black sack onto the back of a chair, started digging into it and brought out a great many canned and jarred foods—fish, fruits, delicacies from the Gaists of Defuniak Shores, where he’d been visiting. Some of these were in recycled glass jars, and some were from smugglers who brought in tins from the free Caribbean islands, he said. He had mussels, stuffed olives, smoked oysters, canned claws of crab. He opened a half dozen with little keys shaped like the letter T, rolled back the tops, and offered them to me. Of course I said no.
“Getting that little shrunken Heir stomach?” he asked, teasing me. “What fun is that?”
I knew the flavors of the delicacies—hearts of palm, anchovies—were intense. Too intense.
“You’ll shrink yours too when the time comes,” I said.
“We’ll see,” he said.
I explained what Lazarus had really done. Then I asked him how his Trust was.
“Well, that can all be rethought, maybe,” Ariel said, nodding his head assertively, “because everything we think could be wrong.” He looked about, as if to see if there were other listeners, and then settled his gaze upon me again. “I’m just now wrapping my head around it—what I learned in Florida—” His eyes were glistening. He was like he was when we were little, when he was explaining the fancy rules of some mad game he’d just invented, as I said, the way he was before he met O. He assumed I knew what it was about. “That charm—you said you had the key, what was that?” I asked.
“Listen—” He spread his fingers apart a few inches above the wooden table. “There were hold outs. They had their own ideas—status quo ante ideas. They didn’t sign anything. They didn’t recognize the U.A. Never—”
“So we weren’t in an enclave? That makes me an Outliar? That makes us—?”
Ariel continued. “There was a conflict within the West Florida Federation about five years before we were born, two factions. Some were willing to sign on in enclaves. Others were standing with a researcher named John of Pensacola—the main one. We come from his band. That’s the start of what I found out.” He reached down inside his sack and retrieved and opened another tin. Mussels this time. Orange and green in their sauce, I saw, when he turned back the lid. “You have to try these,” he said, nodding.
“Did you say John of Pensacola?” I asked, pinching up one, and putting it back—it was greasy, shimmering. Why was I even touching these? “What, our parents were in his band?”
“That’s tricky. Let’s go back a few years. The leaders of this place were the scientists from the labs in Defuniak. They worked for WELLFI’s interests—they were subsidiaries. But they were becoming too independent. Hated the bans on research. They also didn’t like the strat laws, hated the anti-mixing. They wanted to make Treatments cheaper—or, really, they wanted them to be unnecessary.” At that strange idea, he shifted his eyes away, and then back, as if he needed to find support for such a claim on the highest shelves of the kitchen, or in my eyes. For myself, I wanted to be blasé, but I couldn’t. “Albersian treatments were a crude method, something more elegant could be developed, that was their line. Genetically. Genetically. They felt they had found the gene for aging, for dying. They were looking for some cure that didn’t need to be updated every two years. But of course, this would mean, something that wouldn’t make the Protos and the First Wave any more money. The U.A. wasn’t having that.” He shook his head so hard his dirty hair flew round. “Some alternative to the Albers’ Method? Never. Eventually, WELLFI shut down the lab, accused them of smuggling, piracy, selling WELLFI secrets to foreign entities. In fact, they were selling their genetic therapies for Nat diseases to clinics all over the world. That was why Lazarus didn’t want anybody to know where we came from. He was afraid we would somehow be found out, and harm would come to us—I mean, he resisted until just lately, when he said I could see whatever I wanted to see—I mean, just a few months ago, after I ran into you over on St. Charles? He switched his policy, I guess.”
“He seems to have been changing a lot lately,” I said.
“WELLFI was livid about these renegade researchers. They were persecuted. I see that now, even more than when he tried to explain it last week.” Ariel squinted, which he sometimes did when he wanted you to know he meant what he said. “I’m not furious. Not with him. The prejudice against anyone associated with West Florida still exists—on this last trip I encountered it, everywhere I went. Rebels. Smugglers—”
Ariel got up and put more of the contents of his sack onto the table. He was looking for a particular tin or jar. He lined up one whole row, and then dug down again. Finally, he pulled up some fat peaches stuffed in a jar as round as a ball, pried off the paraffin-sealed top, and offered them to me. I knew they were very sweet, with that thick chewy suede-like skin. I couldn’t remember the last time I ate a peach. Yet, it would be hard to start, so I resisted. He shrugged. Sorry for me.
“John of Pensacola and the others got more and more radical. Said their science was going to change the whole model. Two of these were his sons, Jude and Neil. Who are of myth, I would have to say. Of legend, perhaps—”
“Neil of Pensacola? Jude of Pensacola?” I interrupted.
“Both huge in Cuba. There’s supposedly a small band on the DEAX border, other scattered ones, part of the diaspora—I guess you could call them—followers. You hear of them? ”
“Long story,” I said, nodding.
“Pretty late in this negotiation, WELLFI said they would give them some autonomy, like a little fiefdom in the DE-AX, if John would give them revenue from his discoveries. But John declared West Florida could be its own land—he’d have his own country, thank you very much. West Florida was a country before there was the Louisiana Purchase, like Texas. It started north of here, and went all the way to the Perdido River. The U.A. surrounded them immediately. A blockade. They were still selling their therapies—couriers were coming up to meet them on little skiffs from off-shore islands. From Cuba, from Haiti, from Mexico. He made a flag, printed money, and had a bank. He decided the new country needed people, and so he started unfreezing embryos he’d stockpiled from his early days, his genetic research days, and finding surrogate mothers to bear them.” He took a deep breath. “We were two of those, as far as I can tell. Many were born during the blockade. Then, when you were not quite three and I was maybe five, by my calculations, the U.A. decided to roll in with firepower. Go after the holdouts. Boom Boom Boom. I remember some of this. When I was in Florida, I saw things I’d seen, or felt I’d seen—” He gazed off. “I know it’s true. You were younger. You always thought I lied. We lived there. I recognized some of the buildings, the plaza—all ruins now. I didn’t lie. They hugged us, held us, there. Treated us like humans.” He looked hard at me, asking a question. His mouth drew into a little “o,” his thick brows lowered. He said, “You still don’t believe me. You say it’s a myth. You say—”
“No, no, hear me,” I said. Then I wasn’t sure what I would say. I shuddered. It was true. Somewhere, inside, I knew it was all true. O—All of it, true. He had never lied to me. Never. All of it was true.
This rushed through me like a bright, vigorous wave. Pain, sorrow—
“I took pictures. I can show you. Just as I had remembered, everything, palm trees—”
“I believe you,” I said. And for that moment I loved him more than I ever had. I had been blind.
He stopped. He heard what I said. He almost started to laugh, the release of a kind of tension, that sort of laugh. “You do?” he asked. His eyes went up to the ceiling, as if he were looking for help. He would have to get his bearings.
“Yes, I believe you.” I nodded. “I should have before.” I remembered Mo Lion’s missive. I would have to show it to him. It was upstairs in my jacket. Yes, I knew about the myth.
“When the U.A. gun b
oats came up Perdido Bay, they sneaked us out, I am not quite sure who took us. There were others, too, but it’s not known if they survived. But the boat we were in was pursued into the Gulf, and then ran up into the Old River to hide for a while, and, as far as I can tell, our escape boat was sinking, but somebody set us out in little blankets, with our ID medallions, put us on the levee in a drawer of metal and then, I don’t know, Marilee found us in the mud.”
I leaned forward, eyeing some anchovies in a tin Ariel had left open. I considered how Ariel’s information would tear apart the already thin, shredded plan I had for a future. Ariel. Always there to ruin my life, though he’d only meant to once, that time in the park. What was I going to do? What was I going to be? I felt it all disintegrating. I was falling, falling, nothing underneath me.
The anchovies were salty, like the sea. I thought of Klamath’s cooking, and I missed, for a moment, that simple life of waiting, of suspension, at the Wood Palace. Now I’d come to learn that I had been born during a war. This seemed apt, to me. I was still in one.
“I suppose you have something to worry about if Lazarus wanted to give your money to Chef Menteur. He can, you know, technically, until you go in and declare, and commit to Memphis, he can do anything he wants with that money. But you don’t have to worry from this investigation. Your Trust is still sponsored by an Heir; you didn’t come under some Charter. You came from complete outlaws, pirates, and renegades. Hah! So relax.” He snorted, and grinned his boyish grin. “The West Floridians found ways to make diabetes easy, to conquer certain cancers, ways to zap genes in the egg, to make the next generation more perfect than the one before it—they even got some of their money out. But there were consequences.”
He brought out coconut, started to eat again. I knew it would be very sweet. My mouth would pucker. A word flowed out of my consciousness. “Does this have to do with the Salamanders?”
“Well then you know. The legend of the Salamanders. They are also called second born. I don’t know what that means. The ones, who know, won’t tell you. It’s their mystery, what they believe, what they pray to in secret: it’s a cult. Around our brothers. These are much older brothers. Some in Cuba say it’s high Santeria, others say they have another vision, it arises when they are about twenty-eight. They say, in Spanish, these are able ‘to pierce the boundary—to know—within and without.’ I think it’s something to do with what John did to those genes. Those of his sons, Neil and Jude, and maybe the genes of those he caused to be born during the blockade. In other words—us.” He was running his fingers through his stringy hair, applying some oil from the coconut inadvertently, making it even stringier. He was excited. “I mean, wouldn’t it be ironic?” Ariel asked. “After it all—our whole stinking lives, our lives lower than slaves, if it turns out—we are priests, leaders, by birth? We have a vision?” Suddenly, Ariel reached over and ran his fingernail along the top of my head, until he found the tiny indent Mo Lion had found, and he scratched it with his fingernail, hard, like he was trying to pierce it, and I felt the same peculiar shock Mo Lion gave me. “Did you feel that?” he asked. “Down your whole spine? And our lip—all the Salamanders I saw in the pictures have this lip—”
I nodded. I touched mine.
“Well, then, it isn’t just me,” he said, shrugging. “That’s a sign. But what does it mean? And that thing, that thing we saw around O? Nobody else saw that, not even Camille—but you did. I did.” He shrugged again. “I’ve seen pictures. They look something like us.” He cocked his head, his eyes widened. “No, exactly like us. People cling to them, follow them everywhere. Say they are the second born, which is a kind of—I don’t know, there are several interpretations. One is—‘undying.’ Imagine, we don’t have to be Bonesnakes. We don’t have to starve, be Re-jobbed, have our cells rinsed, our RNA screwed with, wrapped up in dermises, sealed up like, like, living—be one of them. I know you love some of them, but—” He shook his head. “This whole life, everything Lazarus planned for us, every horrible thing I suffered with O, for the sake of—all of it has been a huge, huge, huge, detour, a byway, a vast distraction from our real—it’s like a cosmic joke.” Ariel smiled. “So, I’m going to Cuba. Want to come?”
“What about your Trust? What about your money? The suit for control?” That was what I asked, but I was about to run up the stairs and get the letter from Mo Lion, show him what I knew—
He cocked his head. “Maybe I don’t care—maybe I want my real life—”
“And if it’s just a legend?” I asked. “You don’t know if it’s real.”
At that point, he brought two hands up to his own neck, grabbed his Nyet collar, unhooked it, took it off, and laid it down. There it was, then, just a green tarnished hoop on the table. It was as if the tremors in me started to spread out, so that things around were beginning to crack, to fall apart, and I was afraid to move, I was terrified—“It is just a legend.”
“Not if you believe.” Just then a loud shout. There were other noises at the same time in the background—banging doors, screams. Footsteps, getting closer—Vee burst into the kitchen.
“Lazarus, it’s Lazarus!” he shouted. “It’s horrible.”
VIII
9:00 PM October 18, 2121
Audubon Foundling House, Audubon Island
New Orleans Islands, Northeast Gulf De-Accessioned Territory,
U.A. Protectorate
In my memory, the next few days dwell in a dark blue, deep, deep river, where they will always be.
This is what I saw:
The tips of Lazarus’s orange-pink toes, suspended about two feet above the armrest of his bench. His strange form, his foam-wrapped skeleton, hung from the upper beam of the library. His ladder was lying on its side, on the wide-planked wooden floor, and there was a rope around his neck. Apparently he had used the ladder to climb up to the rafters and thrown the rope over, and then to fashion the noose. I thought of the shock of the moment when he kicked the ladder out from under himself. The noose had squeezed—how did he know how to do this? Where did he get the resolve, the intention? From the force of the knot tightening about his throat, his sheet lenses had popped out and landed on his cheeks like large dark dots, like the ones clowns have. There was a thick, naked clown in a he-man suit. He hung there where our father, our king, had once been.
Ariel yelled first. “Cut him down. Where is his WELLVAC alarm? Call them now!”
I wanted to move, but my body was not responding to commands. I heard Marilee say, “He threw it away, into the Trench. Days ago. I saw him. I ordered a new one! I should have seen the signs!”
“We’ll get him down,” Ariel said. “Come on.” He gestured to me. “Come on, we have to—” He picked up the ladder. “We can call them—”
“He’s dead,” Vee said. He stood there in his pajamas. He had been awakened from his grieving slumber by Marilee’s discovery. His whole face was now even more assaulted by grief than it had been when I had last seen him—he was gnarled, grizzled, and hardly recognizable.
“I know,” Ariel snapped, setting ladder right. “Help me Malcolm.”
Somehow, I responded. The ladder had steps on both sides. We climbed up—Ariel got to the top step and then grabbed the body around the upper torso with one arm. With the other, he was trying to reach the knot, loosen it. “Help me,” he said. “Brother.”
I was aware how my arms reached to grab the top knot of the rope, to release Lazarus’ head. But in another realm, I was disappearing, that was the sensation. Or more like, fading out. I thought remotely, of how, a moment ago, I’d been a man, with opinions, enjoying Ariel’s optimism, his tale of legends, of rebellion. I was watching our old world fall to pieces, with a sort of glee, and now I was erased. I felt the impulse to wipe the present away, I felt myself obeying that impulse. I saw the room darkening around me. Then, for a moment, I came back to the present, where my arms were holding Lazarus’ lifeless thighs, and Marilee was handing us a muslin drape, a sheet, and we were
wrapping him—Ariel supporting the bruised blue neck, closing the popping eyes.
In part of myself, I saw these things, in another, I had vanished.
*
It was perhaps four and a half hours later.
The body was on the floor, now, in the dining hall, and Vee and Marilee were seated on the bench. We all were silent, except for Ariel, who could not sit still.
He paced back and forth in the cypress hall and called out, “I only just understood him, only a few days ago, now he’s gone! Gone!” And to me, he said, “What is wrong with you, don’t you understand? He’s gone! Is this that cave you used to slip into when we were kids? Wake up. Come out Malcolm. Come out!”
The words were in my mind: I am here and I know he is gone. But a second later, I wasn’t even sure if I had said them aloud or not. I had said something, but I couldn’t remember what it was.
The body was on the floor. We had no idea what to do about it.
We couldn’t bury an Heir. Heirs didn’t die. They didn’t.
And I was thinking this: I had wanted to kill him. And here he was, dead. Dead. So-long wasn’t the word. Dead, that curse, was the word.
*
The discussion was a horror, but a necessary horror. It came the next day.
We had replaced the muslin sheet with a plastic tarp. Ariel had just finished explaining that we had to remove the prodermis pretty soon, because the Heir body underneath “will make it stink—we won’t be able to get rid of the smell.” I had no idea where Ariel had obtained such information. I didn’t ask.
We had concluded that there was no way to tell WELLFI, and we would have to keep it from Lazarus’s sons, as well. Vee described the consequences we faced. Unless pure accident could be demonstrated, we would all be accused of Heir Murder—a thousand times more serious than any other kind. If Vee and Marilee were implicated, they would both be put to death. And Vee’s other children, by his first marriage, Ginger’s sister, Ginger’s sister’s children, would all be jailed. All procreation certificates for all of their progeny would be abrogated. If any of these events could be traced to Ariel and me, we too would be put to death, the Trusts we had taken back by WELLFI, distributed to living Heirs with diminished Trusts, by lottery. “You should have thought of this,” Marilee said, pointing her chin as if addressing Lazarus’s corpse, which now lay on one of the dining tables. She used a very rare tone of low rage. “He said he wanted to save us, and here he does this! Here I was, doing everything to keep him alive, and here he goes—”