Concrete Underground (2010) (21 page)

YOU ARE BEING LIED TO...

TRUST US

23. Sunsets, Mirrors & Convenient Illusions

"Yeah, I guess I'm going," I said into the phone. "I'm just not sure about this whole costume thing."

"Argh, why are you always such a wet blanket?" Columbine replied. "Have a little imagination. I bet you're the kind of guy who likes to point out all the mirrors and wires during a magic show."

"Of course, at least until some bitter cow inevitably starts mooing about how I'm spoiling the show for her snotty little brats."

That got a laugh out of her. "So anyways, I wanna hang out tonight. Come get me?"

"No, I told you, I'm following that lead on Lily. And the way shit's been going lately, I want you to stay out of it for a while. I don't want to be responsible if something happens to you."

"Boo," she jeered in response.

"Listen, I'm almost there, I gotta go."

"Okay, but at least come see me tomorrow before the party, then we can go together."

"Sure," I agreed before hanging up and pulling over the Porsche.

The sun was already setting as I parked on the shoulder of the overpass. I got out of the car and stood in the exact the spot where Lily would, according to her phone's GPS. It was on the western shoulder of the expressway, facing toward the sun as it disappeared behind the Dientes Torcidos mountain range across the valley. I wondered if that was why Lily had been stopping here after work - to see that magnificent view of the sunset. Then I looked down at the cars whizzing by on Highway 77 and followed them as they crossed the Guadalupe Bridge over the San Hermes and vanished in the distance.

Twilight settled in, and I watched as little dots of fire flared up on the east bank, marking the shantytown that started under the bridge and spread north back up the river.

I thought about how each of those flames represented a cluster of people gathering around for warmth, people who had fallen through the cracks and disappeared from society. People the rest of the city preferred to see as nameless, faceless, anonymous. I imagined what it would be like to end up down there, how easy it would be to lose your own sense of self, your identity - how easy it would be to be forgotten.

Suddenly I felt a strong, irresistible magnetism pulling me there, beckoning me. And somehow, I knew with absolute certainty that Lily was there.

---

The San Hermes River runs down from the mountains northeast of the valley and snakes its way right through the middle of our city.

The San Hermes River Park is actually a series of smaller parks, a long, narrow stretch of preserved open space that follows along either bank for miles, beginning from the old Guadalupe Bridge that connects the northern industrial zone to the city proper, and spanning all the way past the newer Millennial Bridge that was just completed before the turn of the century.

The park varies in width from small public gardens no wider than a city block all the way up to the ten mile wide area surrounding Hermosa Ravine, which is set up for campgrounds, hiking trails, rock climbing, and river rafting.

Hermosa Ravine is the park's heart, where people go to play, to escape, to fall in love. Millennial Bridge is its face, the point most visible to residents in the city proper, the shiny new monument that gets slapped on postcards and travel brochures as an homage to progress. And that makes Guadalupe Bridge the asshole. It's there and it serves a function, but it's ugly and smelly and most people would rather not think about it too much.

The shantytown, then, is the turd that the bridge squeezed out. It consisted of a couple hundred makeshift shacks cobbled together out of scrap metal, old wood, cardboard, plastic tarps, and anything else that could be scavenged.

Most of the people who lived by the river were undocumenteds - mostly newcomers who didn't have local family and hadn't been able to make any connections for a place to stay. Then of course you had your junkies and your alcoholics who had been bounced from the shelters for continuing to use, your runaways, your garden variety crazies who were booted onto the street when County Mental Health closed half its beds, and finally other sundry people who for whatever reason found value in living off the grid - people who were hiding out, people who had nowhere else to go, and people who were feeding off the carcasses of the weak.

I passed by a mirrored closet door that had been refashioned into the wall of someone's shack and caught a glimpse of my reflection. The glass was cracked in an intricate spiderweb pattern in the upper left hand corner, but other than that it was in pretty good condition. I paused for a minute to look at myself in it and was disturbed how well I seemed to blend into the surroundings.

I hadn't shaved since before I was kidnapped, my shower this morning was at best perfunctory, and I hadn't had a chance to do laundry and therefore had been wearing the same tattered coat and torn jeans for days. Add to that my scarred and twisted mess of a face, and you'd think I purposely dressed in a kind of hobo camouflage.

Then suddenly a face appeared in profile in the broken glass. It was Lily's; she was talking to a dark-skinned Latin American woman about twenty yards behind me. I spun around and found the other woman cooking some unidentifiable animal on a spit over a metal drum fire, but Lily was nowhere in sight.

I ran over to her and shouted, "Where did that woman go that you were talking to, the redhead?"

She stared silently, half from lack of comprehension, half from panic caused by my frenzied state.

I tried again in Spanish, "
?Adonde se fue la pelirroja?
"

She extended her hand out to point right, and I sprinted off.

Pumping my legs as hard as I could, I weaved my way through the dense crowd. From time to time I'd catch fleeting glimpses of her, flashes of her vivid red hair standing out against the drab surroundings, but she was always just at the edge of my sight, always rounding the next corner, always a step ahead of me.

I chased her through the haphazard, maze-like layout of the shantytown along a path that twisted and doubled back on itself. It soon felt like I'd been running for miles, but I couldn't be sure that I wasn't going in circles.

Then, just as I felt my legs about to give, I saw her again, closer than she'd ever appeared before. I launched myself with renewed vigor and hurtled through a small group of migrant day-laborers. But when I broke through them, I saw that my target was really just Lily's reflection in a mirror. I scanned the area, but couldn't find her anywhere. Then I noticed a sickly-thin woman with flaxen hair and realized that the reflection was hers, and that the glow from a nearby fire was making her hair appear red in the mirror.

She noticed me staring and shot me a sour expression. It was hard to gauge her age; she gave the impression of someone very young, but who was aging prematurely from a harsh living. Her ashen gray skin had lost all the luster and freshness of youth, and her eyes were sunken deep into dark black sockets.

She wore a bare-midriff halter top and a tattered denim skirt. I imagined that she thought showing that much skin was somehow sexy, but on her it induced pity more than anything else. She was so emaciated that you could see the bones protruding grotesquely through her skin, making her frame look frail and brittle, like a strong wind would knock her over with enough force to snap every bone on impact. Her arms and legs were covered with track marks and needle holes, many of which had become infected.

"What are you looking at?" she demanded in a voice much throatier and raspier than I expected.

I opened my mouth to try and somehow explain, but then decided it wasn't worth the trouble. So instead I shrugged and was about to turn away when a familiar voice called out, "There you are, Claire!"

Violet walked up to the woman, Claire, and tried to throw a wool blanket over her but was rebuffed.

"Why'd you run off like that?" she asked, not yet noticing me.

Claire answered, "Because there's nothing else to say. We're done, give it up."

Violet was about to reply, but then finally caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye. She did a double-take. "D? What are you doing here?" She paused, and then peered more closely at me, unable to stop her upper lip from curling in disgust. "And what happened to your face?"

I scratched my head. "Um, it's a long story."

She shifted her eyes back and forth between the two of us, trying to decide who was the lost cause and who was still worth trying to save.

Then Claire made the decision for her.

"I don't have time for this. I've got to go make some money," she said and pushed her way past us, then headed over to a group of four migrant workers who were squatting in a circle, playing cards. She knelt down beside them and tried to strike up a conversation with a mix of broken Spanish and clumsy attempts at seduction - awkwardly running her fingers through her hair and getting them caught in the tangled knots, placing her hand on one man's arm but not being able to stop it from shaking.

"Jesus," I muttered, "people actually pay for her? I mean seriously, I get that it'd be rough, being poor and alone in a foreign country, cut off from your wife for months, unable to speak the language - sure you'd be hard up. But
her
? It'd be like fucking
Schindler's List
."

Violet stared at me in wide-eyed disbelief, and I made a mental note to keep working on that whole thinking-about-shit-before-saying-it-out-loud trick.

"God, D, I never realized you were such an unbelievably callous asshole."

"Look," I tried to backpedal. "I'm just saying if I was gonna pay for it, I'd be a little bit more picky about the merchandise. I mean, not merchandise, I'm sure she's a very nice girl and a real human being with feelings and all that, but she looks like fucking Skeletor. No, that came out wrong. I mean, she's just not my type. I'm into curves - like you, I'd rather pay for you over her any day. Not that I'm calling you a whore, or saying that I would go to one, I'm just saying I'd sleep with you. No wait... look, in fairness, people usually realize that I'm an asshole right away, so you can't hold it against me that you didn't figure it out 'til now."

Stop. Talking. Right. Now. You. Fucking. Idiot!

Violet blinked her eyes silently.

"I'm going to assume that whatever did that to your face also gave you brain damage and just try to forget the last thirty seconds ever happened."

"Thank you."

"Now do you want to take a walk so you can explain what you're doing here?"

---

We walked north along the riverbank, getting out of the shantytown and enjoying the quiet serenity of the park at night. I explained, briefly, that I'd had a hunch that Lily was hiding out there and came looking for her. Then I told her about the twin beatings I'd received - the first one when I was kidnapped from the plane, and the second by Asterion security. I debated also telling her about my trip to the strip club last night with her husband, but decided against it since I couldn't be sure of my own motives on that one.

She softened her attitude towards me, but there was still a distance between us - we weren't connecting the way we had before. I wondered if it was because my insane rant made her realize I was a terrible, insensitive pig, or because I suddenly looked like Quasimodo and there just wasn't the same physical spark anymore.

At one point during our walk, I leaned in close to get a whiff of her perfume, not thinking she'd notice, but she happened to turn towards me at just the wrong moment. She thought I was leaning in for a kiss and recoiled sharply. I could tell from her eyes she instantly regretted it, but neither of us said anything. We just acted like it didn't happen.

"So who's Claire, how do you know her?" I asked.

"She was staying at the shelter where I work for a while. She's a good kid, but she's had it rough - a dirt poor family of six kids, an abusive drunk father, a pair of older brothers who molested her, a history of addiction. But she's a fighter, and I really thought she was going to turn herself around. Then the shelter found out that she was using again so they kicked her out. I convinced them to give her a second chance, but she'd have to go back into rehab and prove that she could stay clean. I came out here to tell her, but she won't do it. She's got that weird kind of pride some people get, the kind that makes them so afraid of failing that they don't want to even try, that way they'll always have that excuse - it's not that I
can't
do it, I just choose not to."

I didn't even know what to say, so for once I had the good sense to stay quiet.

"You know," she added, "she's only sixteen in two months."

"Christ," I said, "I had her pegged at least ten years older than that."

Violet nodded.

"That must be a rough job," I continued. "I mean, everyone you meet is at rock bottom. It'd be hard to keep from getting dragged down, too. You'd have to make sure to come up for air now and then so you don't forget how nice it is to feel a little bit of sunshine on your face."

"It's not all just doom and gloom," she objected. "You meet some really inspiring people with incredible stories of courage, of perseverance, of redemption. That's the thing, you have to remember that everyone is a living, breathing person with their own histories, their own dreams. Too often those at the bottom get written off, tucked away in some corner and forgotten. Places like the shantytown exist because it's more convenient for the people in power to hide those who are struggling from the rest of us. But it's all just smoke and mirrors, like stage magic - they haven't really gone anywhere, but you believe they've disappeared because that's what you want to believe. It's like the setting sun, it doesn't cease to exist after it drops below the horizon."

My eyes wandered up ahead to a bridge in the distance, the one that the old train tracks used to cross. I thought I saw a couple figures standing on it, dropping something off the side, but I blinked and they were gone.