City of orange, p.14
City of Orange, page 14
You think I’m a good person? he says.
Just mystified! says the crow, distracted. But we can’t do anything about that, because of course we’re not allowed.
I don’t think I’m a good person, he says. But if I am, then does that mean you could just leave me alone?
I can’t, says the crow, finally rising to its little feet. And I wouldn’t want to besides. I have a job to do. All of us do. Between you and me, by the way, the powers that be are rooting for you.
What?
They seem confident you’ll be able to find the portal leading out of this place. I myself have a secret wish that one day we can be friends. Maybe when this is all over? What do you say?
He is utterly lost.
Goodbye, says the crow, and vaults into the night sky.
Thirty-Seven
He carries the water back to the shelter and sits for a moment. He gives his head a shake to see if anything might rattle loose within. He’s just spent the last hour talking to a crow. A crow whose mouth did not move. He touches his own lips.
Hello there, aah, aah. Yep, his lips move.
But he can talk without moving his lips, too. Hello, there. They sound in his head.
Hoo boy. Not good. Crazy doesn’t happen all at once. Crazy happens gradually. If his then-self could see his now-self, he’d run. Crazy is shouting at God and hobbling around naked and getting cozy with increasingly vivid hallucinations.
Maybe the crow was a hallucination?
Maybe the vandals thought he’d been a hallucination? And tried striking him out of existence just like he did with the other dead crow?
Or the old man? He touches the straight razor. No. He touches the handwritten note. No way. He pictures scrawling the note himself in his sleep, channeling some lost spirit.
The old man was real, keep saying it, the old man was real.
He can see himself from afar right now, and is embarrassed to death by the sight. Crying over a goddamn crow. Eating it—come on, man—and having a heart-to-heart with a bunch of rocks. He’s just as unhinged as those half-naked contestants on that island survival show they used to laugh at.
That type of show that had been categorized under Reality.
Bunch of first-world assholes cosplaying third-world struggles, he said. So absolutely stupid.
Although I want you to put your judgment aside for a sec, she said. She paused the show and he resisted the urge to play-wrestle her to the ground for the remote.
But look at them! he cried.
Of course they’re stupid, she said. But why do we even have the impulse to create a show like this? And why can’t we stop our impulse to watch it? Mm?
Huh, he said, too stumped to say anything else.
You know people do stuff for a reason, even if they don’t know it, she said. I think what’s going on here is a bunch of privileged people sick of the day-to-day, sick of all the expectations, and they all just wanna feel something beyond their job title. Having a guy with a camera direct your every move makes it all real easy and safe.
Frees you from responsibility, too, he said.
You just saw it, didn’t you, she said. The appeal.
Stop being so smart, he said. Give me the remote.
No!
She was being too much already up until this point, and her look now sent him over the edge. He grabbed her with both hands, kicked out her legs, and flipped her onto him. She flung a cushion away to better straddle his hips. It’d been weeks, and they were both so very ready. While the TV flickered on pause, she said, We have to be quiet.
He can’t bear to let himself remember the rest.
The river channel is an inverted trapezoid, he thinks, as hard as he can with his eyes shut. It is windier on one side. It can hold four and a half million orange ping-pong balls.
He opens his eyes again. At the channel’s bottom, yesterday’s wind had scooped a series of ripples in the fine sand in a sinuous pattern untouched by footprints or tumbleweed tracks.
One last meal, then time to get a move on. He enters the shelter, fills another can with water, and sets it aside. He reaches for the matchbox.
He likes this matchbox: crown brand matches, a red sash across plain blue. He doesn’t know any Crown Brand, so the box’s design elicits nothing in his mind. Three bullet points read for Camp, Picnic, Emergency.
Well, this is all three. Below them, look, Byron, the words made in china.
Each match has a hard dab of ignition material, whatever it was called. He’s not a match expert. Or an anything expert. Anyway, staring closer at it in the dead quiet of the shelter, really taking his time now, he notices the blue match head is topped with a small white dot, like a balding pate. The wooden shaft is square, which makes sense. Easier to grip when striking than, say, a round one. Probably less waste and effort during manufacturing, too.
The striking strips on the sides of the matchbox aren’t solid abrasive rectangles but instead an array of two-millimeter dots, hexagonally arranged with about one millimeter of space between each. He imagines the machine that printed these strips has to be pretty sweet, like a giant inkjet printer with nozzles the size of eyedroppers, all marked up in futuristic Chinese characters and moving with relentless precision.
He looks closer and closer and closer until he can see nothing but perfect dots.
He could make it to China. Head west to the coast, then north to Alaska, then pilot a boat across the strait. Head south, find the factory and its big-ass printers, and study them and the rest of the perfectly intact machines forever and ever.
He’s never going to China. He’s never going anywhere again. He can’t even make it past this stupid stain on a map.
He strikes the match.
Once the can is heated, he sits very still and sips hot water as slowly as he can to hold in the silence of the moment. Then he reaches the end, and it is finally time.
He spreads out his blanket and begins packing things up when he hears a scratch outside. He flings the blanket open. It’s not a crow, though.
It is a boy.
PART III
THE BOY
Thirty-Eight
The kid is about seven-eight-nine. He wears miniature jeans, miniature sneakers, and a miniature T-shirt with little distress marks designed into it. Impeccable and clean and hip, like a tiny rock star. He wears a small backpack that is small for even him.
Dark walnut hair drapes flat across his narrow face the color of pale tan somewhere between White and what—Asian? He stands staring at him with big eyes outlined by the darkest, most dramatic eyelashes he’s ever seen on anyone, let alone a kid.
Those eyes of his look like he could lift him into the air with just a blink.
The boy stands there with such ease. Like all this is normal. But then again, he knows how fast things can become normal, and how it’s twice as fast for kids.
If he even is an actual boy, which he probably is not. He’s most likely another provocation in a growing line of provocations: first the old man, then the crow, now this.
Berries, he says.
The boy stares at him.
Wasn’t expecting a kid, he says.
The boy says nothing. He shifts his feet, just as the crow did earlier. Even his hair is flat and shiny like crow feathers.
Nice try, he says, and throws an empty can at the boy. He misses badly, or maybe the can sails clear through him, but either way the boy runs off.
* * *
—
The can rolls to the bottom of the slope. He calms himself down. He evens out his stance.
For a panicked moment, he thinks he can’t feel the brass key in his shoe anymore. Maybe the hours of constant pressure have numbed his nerves there. Maybe Crow Boy stole it in the night. Maybe the sweat and moisture thinned the brass into foil thin enough to melt on the tongue.
He digs a fingertip into his shoe, reaches the humid strata beneath, and with relief feels the front of the key. He knows it’s the front because he can feel letters stamped there like he’s felt many times before. Beheld it, admired it, noticed how his fingertips smelled like brass afterward. Tiny brass molecules deposited into the colossal winding canyons of his fingerprints.
Everything here is a provocation, he thinks. Key, crow, boy, old man, abandoned house going up in spectacular flame. You’re just trying out one form after another.
Who is this you? Please don’t tell me it’s me. Because then I’d really be stuck here forever. I’ll see my wife come rising up out of the ground, my baby, too.
They’d come up again and again and ask, Why didn’t you stop it?
There’s no answer to that.
He rubs the key in his shoe again and again, oh God, oh thank God, it’s still in there. That very important object so warm to the touch that he can’t let it go and just stands frozen, crouched in place like one of those poor Vesuvian souls.
He sees a pop of invisible light all around him.
In the next instant he remembers tossing empty cans, this time into a tall steel trash bin, using their kitchen wall as a backstop. Two points. She hated when he did this.
But she hadn’t been home that day, had she.
He fetched another from the fridge, cracked it open, took a sip of something. A margarita, from a can.
A long while later—who knew how long, it didn’t matter—the police called to confirm his address. Using the first number in the favorites list is a common tactic we use, they said. We just need to confirm your relationship with your wife. There’s been a crash.
What crash, he said. He’d been watching a movie about warring tribes of acrobatic vampires versus muscle-bound lycanthropes, and there was a big face with bloody fangs stuck on the screen.
What about the baby? he said. What’s going on?
Sit tight, sir, said the police. We got someone coming over right now.
A trio of officers arrived. Two men led by a woman, who did all the talking.
Your wife, she said, heard the sirens of our squad cars in pursuit of the suspect and she followed absolutely the right instinct when she pulled over to the right shoulder of the flyover.
Good, okay. So she did the right thing. He offered them water. They refused.
The suspect was traveling over ninety miles an hour when he struck her vehicle from behind. So unfortunately, sir, while pulling over is absolutely the right instinct to do, the stated procedure on a single-lane flyover is actually to stay put, which not many people know. I mean not many police officers remember that.
So wait. She did the wrong thing.
Not at all. What I’m trying to explain is she followed what would otherwise be correct procedure when encountering an official emergency vehicle, which is to pull over as far to the right as possible, except in this case she was in a rare crisis-type situational.
Can we go see her now? Is the baby okay?
Sir, her particular vehicle was struck from behind by the suspect individual traveling in excess of ninety miles an hour.
The officer grasped at the air with her hands, out of words.
He remembers buckling at that moment, like someone cut power to his legs, then how the two male cops reflexively dropped their hands to their holsters. How the world took a tumble before it clicked off to nothing.
Thirty-Nine
The bonfire sent embers into the night and underlit a ring of faces in its shifting orange glow. Happy faces. Grins, the glint of earrings. Someone was strumming a guitar. A staccato song in what—Spanish. The Spanish teacher, right.
Now he remembers: it was a gathering of teachers. They laughed and gossiped and drank wine and gin and whiskey from big red cups. They picked at cheese and chips and store-bought cake from a folding table hidden in the shadows.
A cellular telephone played its little melody. A ringtone! My God, he’s forgotten about all that crap: tiny thumb boards for texting and horrible phone photos and that idiotic but irresistible brick-breaker game played using a pea-sized trackball that constantly got gummed up, remember those? Beyond the fire floated a young man’s blue face illuminated by the tiny rectangle of light cupped in his hands. He wanted to slap the device into the embers, then slap the face: You have fire right in front of you! Look at that instead!
He’d been a couple two three drinks in by that point.
A sudden roar: the belly of an airplane ripped through the sky right above them and rumbled off into the lustrous clouds, ascending to become one of the traveling stars silently blinking beside the moon. They were at that one beach, he recalls. The one at the end of the airport runway almost no one knew about.
Tarheel Sands, she used to call it. Because of the jet exhaust residue.
He’d been talking to Byron. Byron leaned in close, because Byron was a close talker.
Just try to take a picture of one of these planes, man. Byron exhaled gin. See what happens.
Okay, he said, and reached for his pocket.
Do not even think about it, Byron said. You press that button, it’ll trigger a triangulation data event. They can pinpoint your location with that thing, and they store copies of everyone’s photos.
Who’s they?
They are everywhere. They are the exact reason why all of this, everything you see, is, I forget. Dude, I’m wasted.
They snorted with laughter. But Byron stopped and drew him close again.
We laugh now, murmured Byron. But just by being here we’re automatically added to some kind of airport security watchlist. Location and demographic data tracked, then sold to the highest bidder. Welcome to 2006, baby.
Come on, man, he said.
It’s true, said Byron.
It’s not true!
Whatever, I’m okay with just the one time. It’s not like she was even aware she chose a high-security perimeter for this party.
He looked past Byron, across the fire, and saw her face floating there surrounded by friends. Her eyes flashed, looked away, then held him again with resolve, as if playing a game of chicken. Who would look away first?
Can’t believe my party idea got only one vote, said Byron.
You know I always got your back, he said. He held on to her eyes.
The river channel, man! No reception, concrete walls ten feet thick. I’m talking Eisenhower-era shit!
I’m gonna go, uh, tell her about this area and the tracking and stuff.
Her mind is not ready to accept that level of truth, holmes!
He patted Byron and headed forward.
Her surrounding friends made way for him. I need more drinks, one of them blurted, skittering, and suddenly he was standing alone with her.
Happy summer break, he said.
Happy summer break.
This place is perfect. Great idea.
Thank you. She sipped her cup with eyes aglow. In this light, her brown skin touched with the sun from earlier in the day looked like the most meticulously burnished bronze.
Another airplane lunged across the night sky, propelled by mighty jets. They could see Byron duck his head at the sound and almost take a tumble.
Is Byron still with us? she said.
He’s fine, he said. He just wants all of us to smoke out and get naked and form a movement. Live in a big naked commune and no one’s super sure whose baby is whose.
Naked Byron, she laughed. Dang, I just said naked and Byron.
He laughed, maybe a little too long. He paused. This fire good, he said, stumbling.
She squeaked out a laugh at his goof. Fire good! Fire good!
Shut up, he said, and used the moment as an excuse to gently elbow her.
Fire create, fire destroy, she said. Some primal bullshit, right there.
She retied her garlands of black hair against the breeze.
From this, she said, pointing to the fire. All the way to that. She pointed at the airplane in the distance. There’s nothing like us in all of biology.
You should teach your students that.
Biology and planes?
’Sway more interesting than, like, the angle of takeoff is adjacent to the ground, which we’ll assume is a flat zero degrees, so if the plane is going this fast then we can calculate the ground speed, and bam, I just put my whole class to sleep.
Come on, let’s get refills. She led him to the table in the dark. They poured whatever they could find into their cups, didn’t matter. He filled hers the way the pros did it, by pinching the bottom of the wine bottle.
She cocked an eyebrow at his gesture and exclaimed, Hor hor hor!
Oui oui hein hein, he said in retort.
She’s funny, he realized, and it made him want to be funny, too.
Let’s go check out the waves, she said.
Yes, he thought. He remembered this moment with exact certitude. Let’s go.
The sounds of the party receded behind them, and when they reached the ocean the bonfire was but a distant match flame. As the waves tumbled onto the flat shore he could see a faint white glow at the fringing foam, too bright to be from moonlight alone. Had to be something else in the water.
I think my students are bored with me, he said.
Maybe that’s just geometry, because it can’t be you, she said, and touched his arm. I bet you have some closet math nerds who are too scared to show it. I bet some even love showing up to your class more than any other class.
