The memory librarian, p.27
The Memory Librarian, page 27
“Ava!” Grandpapa had cried, pulling his grandchildren to him. Artis said Mama ran out into the bright light of day, threw herself at the machinelike figures dressed in crimson and black, her arms flung out to fight. Somehow, she promised, she would come home again, somehow she would finish celebrating Bug’s birthday.
She promised.
Artis didn’t like to tell that tale, the story of a party interrupted, an impossible promise too long remembered. But Bug insisted. The promise was Bug’s favorite part, the retelling something they could hold when memory wasn’t always a choice.
Now, away from their family for the very first time, the world outside Grandpapa’s porch looked different. The gray fist of New Dawn that held so many didn’t look as approachable anymore. Or so close. Bug remembered Artis’s anger, rare as the sun shining during rain. “She wasn’t brave!” he’d mutter into his pillow, in the twin bunk bed of the back room they shared. In his sleep he’d cry out, “Nevermind!”—something about memories bagged like trash, then dumped. But Bug never wanted to forget, though Mama was more a story than a memory. Sometimes that’s all that mattered. So in Bug’s version of the tale, she was always brave, always kind, always loving.
“You’ve got your mama’s eyes,” Grandpapa would say. “Got her dreaming spirit too.”
“She was a fool,” Artis had said, mumbling on those nights when her absence became too much to bear, on the nights when he was tired of being strong, being hopeful, the only witness his wet pillow and the cool night air. “Should’ve run, not fought,” Artis whispered, his voice choking on the pillowcase. “Maybe she would still be with us.”
To be with her was all that Bug wanted, on this day more than ever. But nothing good could come from dancing in the flames or staring at the sun, and flinging one’s self willingly into the authors’ hands was something Bug was neither brave nor foolish enough to do. Bug had heard whispers about the civil unrest in some of the other communes, and Grandpapa was careful about where they traveled. Yet, like many living in the cluster, Grandpapa had to travel to work in the wired City of Light. Never knew when a protest might erupt or when the NDRs and authors might find a new target, and his wariness showed on his face and in the hunch of his shoulders. And Bug saw that. So they stared at the gray obelisk in the distance, shuddered and turned away, running in the opposite direction, racing down a path, not caring where it would go.
Ola and Trell found Bug lying by the tracks, wobbly head down, ear to the ground, listening to the rumbling sounds of ghost trains from long ago. A century before, Sectors Seven and Nine had been crisscrossed with iron. Once, the railroads connected all the small sectors and their surrounding ragtag communes to the rest of the nation, even the part where Ola, Trell, Bug, and Artis lived. But those days were gone, part of an industrial revolution that eventually became obsolete. After the Diesel Wars, when oil companies tried and failed to violently maintain global reliance on oil, the railroads had been ripped up, recycled, and redistributed—like everything else from the old world—all except the one set that Bug found down the winding dirt path that led deep into the woods, the one that was like something out of Grandpapa’s old movie vids or his father’s leather-bound storybooks.
Exhausted from running, embarrassed from the fuss, Bug welcomed the opportunity to escape disappointment. Bug didn’t want to think about the gray obelisk anymore, his mama, or the stricken look of hurt in Artis’s and Grandpapa’s eyes. Instead, the child imagined the sound of phantom train whistles. Heard the rhythmic clickety-clack of iron horses galloping over shining new rails.
“Woohoo!” Bug cried, wiping away fresh tears. Sweat trickled down their back, the yellow jersey sticking as heat waves shimmered in the air. Bug spun around, imagining smokestacks and puffy clouds like in the old cartoons. Bells and headlamps, a rooster-red cowcatcher barreling down the track.
“Make way! Make waaaaay!” Bug cried. “Woohoo!” Arms flailing, the child ran smack into Trell’s narrow chest.
“Dang!”
Startled, Bug’s big eyes widened.
“You almost knocked the wind out of me. What you doing out here, anyway?” Trell asked, his voice filled with heat exhaustion and genuine curiosity. He carefully checked Bug’s head for bumps and bruises, made Bug stick out their tongue, and looked the child up and down. Satisfied, Trell smacked a mosquito away from his arm and stared in wonder at the crossroads of rusted train tracks that seemed to stretch endlessly toward nowhere. Nowhere anyone had traveled since the advent of airships, not since combustible road vehicles had been abandoned years ago.
“We could’ve been eating now, all that special food your grandpapa made for your birthday,” Trell said, “but instead, we’re standing out here, in ole dusty Freewheel, burning up under the sun in a forgotten place nobody wants to be bothered with.”
Bug’s face rippled a bit, shifting from one emotion to the next: sadness, confusion, then back to sadness again. The child looked as if they wanted to cry.
They had not forgotten.
Seeing Bug’s expression, Ola shot Trell a warning glance, and he mumbled a quick apology.
She placed her firm hand on Trell’s shoulder, pressed down gently, then walked over to Bug. Her hands were so talented; she could fix anything. “It’s okay. I don’t like birthdays either,” Ola said. “But that cake Grandpapa baked sure looked good. I would’ve loved to have a slice, wouldn’t you?”
“What you said!” Trell laughed.
“Quiet, Trell. I wasn’t talking to you,” Ola said.
She didn’t mention that having been homeless with her parents, she didn’t get many birthday parties or presents.
Grandpapa worked as a cook and sometimes made extra servings to share with Ola and her family. Nothing special or too showy, just simple food that said you’re welcome and not you owe me. He understood something about hunger and how it ate at more than the lining in the belly, how it ate at the heart and made it harder to concentrate and dream at night.
But Bug didn’t seem interested in food right now. “My mama left me a present. I gotta find it,” Bug said. The child stepped forward, awestruck, and stared at the railroad tracks, still imagining running far, far away. In Bug’s mind the old tracks became a road made of wood and metal, of all God’s promises, and at the end of that road, Bug’s mama was standing on the porch, calling for them, Artis, and Grandpapa to come on in the house, because the streetlight was shining and it’s time to eat.
Bug was hungry, could feel it gnawing at the pit of their belly, but wasn’t ready to return home to Grandpapa just yet, so the child ducked and ran, balancing atop the nearest rail. Trell shouted and took after Bug. “You can’t outrun me, grasshopper!” The air filled with their laughter as the three friends ran in circles, round and round, Bug leading them farther down the spiraling path until the sky was covered with a canopy of great leafy trees.
Here the air was cooler, quiet. Remnants of the old town lay scattered in the weeds and the rocks all around them.
“Where are we?”
In the ring of communes outside Sectors Seven and Nine, most everyone was a natural birth. Any talent they possessed came naturally. No access to enhancements or enrichment programs—only the highly privileged and the inherited rich could afford those.
But art was universal, something even the poorest among the communes could create on their own. They had to be resourceful, gleaning supplies from wherever they could be scavenged. Bug had been drawing since their chubby little fingers could hold a marker or a brush. Grandpapa and Artis had helped mount Bug’s first show in the narrow hallway of their little house. They’d made the frames from wax pastels glued on cardboard, and Artis had even helped Bug write invitations. So when they emerged from the great trees’ shadows and stepped into a wide, open clearing, Bug felt as if they’d stepped from the real world into one of their painted dreams.
An old-fashioned gas eater half-sunken in the earth rose, hood up, like a dinosaur. Bug ran to it, palms brushing away its reddish-brown metal flakes. Here, a strange scent filled the air, like steel mixed with honeysuckle. A dilapidated warehouse leaned over a battered boxcar covered in painted rainbows. A gentle wind carried the faint scent of rusted iron and melting rubber, offerings from an older day. Discarded refuse, repurposed and reimagined, adorned in all the colors Bug imagined in dreams.
The air was full of the scent of trees. They offered their great limbs as shelter to the children, a canopy of green that shielded them from the drones. Bug skipped around, delighted in what remained, spirit lost in the wild green clearing that someone had redesigned, it seemed, just for them.
“Look!” Bug ran over to a massive quartet of rugged faces, each distinctive, carved into concrete slabs. They stood facing away from each other, giant stone sentinels, wind-shaped under the sun.
“They have eyes,” Ola said, puzzled. “Who would leave this here?”
“I don’t know, but whoever it is,” Trell said, shaking his head, “looks like they went clean off. There’s more.”
Tall figures made from scraps of wood, old signage, twisted bicycles, and traffic lights littered the area, remnants from another age. Someone had taken the time to sculpt a giant Tin Man. He peered down at the children with reflectors for eyes and oxidized gas-eater rims for a hat. It looked as if the Tin Man’s hat and the pinwheels were meant to spin and the sculpture once lit up.
“Fee fi fo fum!” Trell yelled, looking around, amazed. “This looks like we walked onto the set of Jack and the Beanstalk! We gonna ease on down the road like The Wiz!”
“No,” Bug said. “This is Mama’s present she promised me! I thought I had to find it, but now I understand.”
“Understand what?”
“We got to build it.”
“Whatchu talking about, child?” Trell was only four years older than Bug, but he spoke as if that were eons.
“I know exactly what to do, just follow me. We’re gonna need this,” Bug said, picking up an open 24 hours sign. They struggled to carry it, but no one argued. Bug pointed to the clearing where the four giant faces stood, staring off into the distance.
“North, south, east, west. Cardinal directions. We build here.” They dragged the sign to the center of the stone diamond. Ola shook her head. “This is not the party you invited us to,” she said, smirking.
“Don’t worry, Ola,” Bug said, patting her hand. “This is way better than cake! This is art! Our art, and can’t nobody tell us what to do or how to do it.”
Ola tilted her head, marveling at the little spirit in front of her. Bug was very special, and it was their birthday, after all.
Together the children lifted overturned wooden chairs covered in moss, carried bricks from the scattered piles, red dust staining their palms. Bug squealed each time they found an iron railroad spike, and held it overhead, almost as long as their forearm. Ola found a crate of old 78s with titles like Joshua White and the Carolinas. Trell rescued a box of old magazines, Life and Ebony, some pages crumbling at his touch. They uncovered old signs from stores that had long since been abandoned. Nothing was too old or dirty, too strange or broken, to be reimagined in Bug’s eyes. All was art, all was beautiful.
They found a basket of ribbons, brightly colored, and wrapped them around the limbs of low-hanging trees and the scrubby bushes that sprang from the earth.
Played so long, even the sun grew tired. It went on behind a cloud to take a rest.
That’s when they heard the singing, a strange tune none of them knew the lyrics to.
“Around the world in a day,” the voice sang. It grew closer and closer. “Swing low, sweet chariot. Let me . . . ride.”
A tall robed figure emerged from the trees. Dressed in white folds that floated around them in the summer wind, a coppery scarf wrapped around their head, a golden gele. The children froze, unsure of what to do.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” the elder said, waving a golden baton with bright streamers. “Well, traveler, looks like we got company. Uninvited,” she muttered, and stomped her feet. She was wearing tall white boots with orange pompoms in the centers. “The name is Tangerine Waters, Mx. Tangee to you.”
Trell looked over at Ola, Ola looked at Bug, but Bug was not afraid. Bug walked over to hold their hand, elated.
“Nice to meet you, Mx. Tangee!” Bug said. “Look what we built!”
Bug pulled away from Ola, who tried to hold them back, and clasped Mx. Tangee’s many-ringed fingers, placing their chubby ones in her weathered hands.
“You are right on time,” Bug said. “It’s almost finished. What do you think?” the child asked, suddenly shy.
Mx. Tangee walked slowly over, the golden baton spinning the reemerged sunlight, to inspect the handiwork that stood before her: a tentlike structure built from everything imaginable. It rose from the center of the four carved stones as if it had sprung up from the earth, a wild blossom, a riot of color and textures, a haven for rescued, forgotten things.
“Looks to me like you built yourself an altar, a tent of miracles. Fitting for a place like this. You walking on ley lines, sacred land.”
Ola’s face finally lost its frown. The mention of ley lines intrigued her. She tugged at her shirt, the blue now stained with sweat and soil, and joined Bug at Mx. Tangee’s side.
“You know, everywhere in the world there are ley lines, ancient spots of power, mystery, and intrigue, the places where our beautiful earth channels all of her energies,” said Mx. Tangee. “These woods around you are sacred to the Wyandot, the Chickasaw, and the Choctaw. If you are lucky enough to find where these remarkable lines intersect—and you have the good sense to put down your shovel and just feel—child, there ain’t nothing you can’t build. You workin’ deep mojo then!”
Trell looked skeptical. “If this is such a magical place, then why is everything so busted? Nobody has lived in Freewheel for well over a century. And when they were here, does anyone know if they ever prospered?”
Mx. Tangee smiled knowingly. “You the healer,” she said. “Physician, heal thyself.”
“What?” Trell asked, confused.
“If you know everything about all the things that’s anything, you can answer your own question.”
Bug and Ola giggled. Trell nodded, not sure if he understood.
Still, this strange woman was fun.
She untied her scarf, allowing loose locs to tumble out, then carefully adjusted and retied it. “Ain’t just about prospering, it’s about progressing, connecting, tappin’ into something larger than yourself, so you can really see. Can’t build nothing if you can’t feel nothing. Community comes from feeling and feeling comes hand in hand with creation. What y’all out here creating now?”
“My present,” Bug said. “My mama promised me, the last time I saw her. She said I would know it when I see it. I see.”
“You sure do,” said Mx. Tangee. She removed one of her earrings, shaped like a giant beetle. It carried a moon in its golden forelegs. “This is for you. To add to your altar.”
“Why do you call it that? It looks like a clubhouse to me,” Trell said. “‘Altar’ makes it sound like a church. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just saying.”
“And maybe in a way it is like the spirit of a church. Together you have made something special, with intention, in a place on a day like no when else.”
“No wind?” Bug said, puzzled.
“Naw, when. It ain’t about the where or the who, it’s the when. This is a Sirius matter, auspicious occasions. Constellations and stars move overhead, overstand?”
The children were saying yeah but shaking their heads no.
“It’s all right, you will in time. Everything comes full circle. And time takes care of itself. Our work is the work of the living, of the present. The right now builds tomorrow. And while the when is important, it’s also important to be mindful about the how. Like this right here,” she said, and sang another tune. “Souls look back and wonder, how I got ova!” She guided them over to the first stone carving near her, the one facing north.
“Come, child, um . . .”
“Ola.”
“Yes, come, Ola. Here is the north traveler. This spirit in stone is connected to the earth’s energies that run in that direction.” Mx. Tangee pulled out a ceremonial dagger, its blade riddled with beautiful markings, runes.
“Carve the first letter of your name. Do everything with intention. Think of how your heart beats and your blood flows. Whatever is truly in you, part of you, will flow freely.”
Trell was behind Mx. Tangee’s back, mouthing the word Noooooo. He giggled, but watched expectantly.
Ola took the blade. It was heavier than she thought. Purple gemstones and mother-of-pearl decorated the handle. Ola held the blade up, pointed at the stone, and carved, with some difficulty, a very wobbly O.
“Well done,” Mx. Tangee said, pressing her palm against the stone flesh. She nodded approval. “Air, inception, a beginning. Well, it’s getting started now.”
“Do you live here?” Bug asked. Mx. Tangee just smiled. “I wanna go next.” They stood on their tippy-toes, tugging at the elder’s bright robes.
Mx. Tangee laughed and ushered the child over to the stone carving that faced east. “I’m what you might call a fellow traveler. Most of my life I have lived on the edges of what everyone else proscribed for me. But somewhere along the way, I decided life had to be different.”
Bug needed help to carve their B.
“Well done,” Mx. Tangee said. “Sometimes good friends can help us see a vision through. Bug, your stone faces east, representing the earth and redemption.”
Bug danced around as if they had won a prize.
Mx. Tangee passed the ceremonial dagger over to Trell, who dodged it, bobbing and weaving, shadowboxing. Finally he accepted the blade and held it up in the air. “I have the powerrrrrr!” he cried. Bug and Ola burst out laughing. Mx. Tangee just shook her head.
“You play too much,” Ola said, grinning.
