Lighthouse Island (21 page)

How good that there's no-one left to lose

and one can weep. All created in order

to sing songs, this air of Tsarskoye Selo's.

The river bank's silver willow

touches the bright September stream.

Rising from the past, my shadow

is running in silence to meet me.

So many lyres hung on branches here,

but it seems there's room for mine too.

And this shower, sun-drenched, rare,

brings me consolation and good news.

And all around them women sat up in their beds and listened. The woman who had strangled her twins and the woman who had made false invoices, the one who had lost her ID, the girl who spoke on pirate radio, the gypsy women who were not gypsies, all tortured with one another's endless proximity but now each one listening for herself alone to the words, things rising from their pasts like silent running shadows. What was a harp, what was a tree. Consolation. Good news. Then it began to rain lightly, as if the world had just remembered how. It tapped at the painted windows as if it wanted in.

 

Chapter 26

T
he sons of bitches and the bitches got to jam themselves into everything we do. They listen to everything we say.

Charity stopped muttering long enough to eat half of her black bean and corn patty. The kitchen was blasted with the theme music from the new program called
Things You Cannot Say
. The atmosphere was heavy with steam and food odors, as if the air had weight and mass, as if it had color and the color was of some sour, tarnished metal. They were sitting on upturned buckets eating their midday meal, on work assignment in the big kitchens.

Nadia had stolen one kitchen worker's pair of coveralls and she could steal a second pair given the opportunity. She was not going to wait any longer for some kind of message from James. He would not understand how she was slowly going insane here. The heroines of the escape novels she had read were always as beautiful as clothing models in essential occupations, with significant villains after them, the center of high-level conspiracies. She was a nobody and she was determined to remain a nobody. That way she might stay alive.

What happened? Nadia said. Why were you arrested?

A donkey. I had a donkey. Charity ate quickly. They had fifteen minutes. She wiped her tiny mouth and said, He was about two hundred pounds underweight; I was going to fat him up but they got me for animal abuse. I was going to fat him up on cake batter. I knew where to get old expired sacks of cake batter powder. I knew how to forge his license and all the permissions stuff.

A donkey. Nadia laughed, as if she were laughing at a yelling woman on
Things You Cannot Say
. The woman was in a shouting fury at a street vendor. Nadia's tunic collar was sticking to her neck and her feet ached from the straw slippers and she had come to hate the sound of them,
slop, slop, slop,
gray uniform lives and gray slopping noises like walking rinds. The semolina was like gluey sand. I can't believe it. A real donkey.

Yeah, yeah. I got him way up north. I was traveling at night but there was some guys from that venomous natural substances program or natural poisonous pest program or council or task force or some shit like that, out looking for scorpions with blacklight flashlights and they nailed me. Bad paper. They said they had the power of arrest and detainment. Liars. Charity snarled over her black bean patty. Liars, liars.

Are people different out there in the field systems? asked Nadia. I mean, more resourceful, more hopeful and, you know, just different?

Shit, I don't know. Why ask me. They are goddamned prisoners for God's sakes, Sendra.

Around them the kitchen workers slung pots and pans into the thirty-gallon sinks full of soapy water and sliced open packages of semolina and tapioca, bags of sugar, emptied them into bins. At the door a dehydrated old woman held out her cupped hand and asked for half a cup of water. Kitchen Head shouted Get out, Granny. Get your ass out of here.

Nadia clasped her hands together to keep from walking up to Kitchen Head and smacking her. To speak like that to an elderly woman, look at her hands, a woman who had worked hard all her life and God knows why she was here. Nadia shut her hand around her fork and opened it again and shut it again and told herself to stop it.

She leaned closer to Charity. Could you go through that again?

Yah. Way north. A million miles north. There's some open places up there. Past the Mon Debris Soybean Farms. There's two-three donkeys up there. They took him away in a yellow bus. She bent her tangled head over her black bean patty.

Took who.

My donkey.

Okay. Are you from the North? I mean, why were you coming south to this area?

I was born up there on the Jolly Green Giant Essential Grains headquarters; my mother was a free worker. She said my dad was a guard. I just go around here and there. One place and another. I can't stand being in one place all the time. I been arrested four times now. I got to find that donkey. His name is Homer.

Did you ever hear of Lighthouse Island?

Shit, yeah, it's on TV.

Well, is there e-waste up there? North of here?

Sure, before the farms. From here north there's a kind of snooty neighborhood then scrap, then the paper mill. I know where north is, you bet your ass. Charity tossed her black hair. I know where south is, too.

Nadia saw Kitchen Head looking over at them and quickly smiled and gestured at the screen where a man on the street was shrieking at a bus conductor. There was no voice, just a sound track:
Bridge Over Troubled Water
. It was a very popular program since it showed ordinary people going into emotional states of rage, caught on camera, and the only other place you could see ordinary people instead of higher-up celebrities was on
Sector Secrets
where they were being arrested or dragged bloodily from bus wrecks. Nadia laughed in a false voice at a tiny enraged woman on the screen. Her Dutchboy haircut fell in hanks around her face; she saw herself in a shining steel pot. She looked like a fiercely intelligent floor mop.

Did you escape, when you were in jail before?

Charity stared hard at Nadia. No. But. She was silent again for a moment. I am ready to this time. The garbage chute, eh.

Exactly. Nadia forked down a crisp edge of black bean patty. We can do it in kitchen worker coveralls. I already have one pair.

If we're caught they'll kill us right there. We won't even get a screen test. Charity laughed.

I don't care, said Nadia. I don't care.

That evening two guards came and took away the little pirate radio blond woman, the one Nadia had helped fill out applications. Her face was vacant and stunned, her blue eyes wide with fear. Good luck, the other women whispered. Good luck.

T
he next day Charity managed to steal a second pair of kitchen worker's coveralls from a locker and then used them to mop the floor as if they were a wad of mop rags. Afterward Charity took them to the shower with her under her own clothes and washed the filth away.

It grew colder and from time to time they could hear light rain pinging at the painted windows. This would be a good time to try the garbage chute. It would not be festering with flies. Charity said, Wait, wait. I know when a good time is. Trust me.

It was close to All Hallows Eve and soon Male Voice One and Female Voice One would begin to read all the sea stories—Joseph Conrad and Melville and
The Golden Ocean,
which read aloud so well, and
The Voyage of the Liberdade
—and they would play the ballad “the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which always made her cry. From time to time in the evening she found herself staring at the gray-painted windows in all the noise and smells while she beat her fists on her thighs in gentle repetitive thuds.

She whispered to Charity, When?

Next week. New guard is coming. Doesn't know her way around.

That night the guards smirked as the
Trials and Tribulations
program came on. There was the little blond woman in the dock, shrinking away from a shouting prosecutor and the camera, fighting for her life.

 

Chapter 27

B
ig shots having lunch with administration, said the head cook. All the good girls get to take it up and serve it. Hey? Fancy offices. Air-conditioned. Bad girls don't get to go. Hey? She turned to Nadia. And what are you?

I'm a good girl, said Nadia.
And may God forgive me for groveling
. She went back to scraping the oily crust from the inside of a twenty-gallon rice pot.
A good girl, a good girl
.
Very unattractive. Poor camera quality
.

Nadia and Charity and two others shoved the lunch trolleys on the freight elevator and stood braced while they and the rattling dishes shot upward. They were dressed in new, pressed jail uniforms. They were strictly clean. Nadia counted the floors. Seven. In another day she and Charity would get out via the garbage chute and then, if they were caught appearing among the slop, start accusing whoever was standing around of poor safety practices and demand an investigation and then in the confusion get onto a food delivery truck. If they were caught the essential thing was to create as much confusion as possible.

The guard whispered,
Head guy from the top Demolition offices. Came on an airplane, imagine, an airplane
. She flung open the doors to the administrator's office. When Nadia and the others pushed the trolleys in she saw James.

The two halves of her heart struck together like a bell. Her mouth opened. Then she suffered through a little cough. She flushed red. Her ears were burning. James turned in his wheelchair with an attitude of mild interest and looked into her eyes half of a second. His eyes were a rainy gray. It was the first time she had seen his face in daylight and he gave nothing away. Then he glanced at all the other women prisoners and returned to a diagram.

Kitchen Head stepped forward and laid paper placemats of blue-and-beige stripes in front of James and then the administrator. The administrator regarded the women with a blank antiseptic stare. Kitchen Head ignored the administrator's assistant who clearly expected to be ignored and was regarded as a sort of wastebasket or perhaps a human in-out box. He sat against the wall, a meager sour man in a spindly chair. James took up his fountain pen and began to doodle on the placemat.

I know, he said, but we've already designed the C-4 placements. We have designated five thousand drilled holes and twenty-one miles of detonating cord.

There's nothing wrong with this building, nothing, said the administrator. The assistant said
indeed there is not
with little minimal sentences of body language. A minute head toss.

The women all stood silently behind the lunch trolley with their pressed jail clothes and clean nails while overhead fans beat the office air into waves like heartbeats. Nadia gripped a slotted serving spoon, poised over a mound of tapioca topped with maraschino cherries that looked like toy nipples. James had three thick folders laid out on the table. The jail administrator pushed them around as if they were giant playing cards.

Nadia could not take her eyes from his face for long moments and then remembered and looked down at the slotted server. She saw the silver trembling with little lights.

You're using water like there is no tomorrow, said James. We have authorization from the highest level to consider plans for a more hydro-efficient unit somewhere else. I mean this building is ten stories high, you're using huge amounts of electricity to pump, and it's just one inefficient unit tacked onto another. As far as I can see the original building was a library, a hundred years ago, and now it's surrounded by add-on after add-on serviced by very old leaking water pipes. James tapped his fingers restlessly over files. He took up his pen and doodled a stick figure roller-skating on the placemat.

I saw you on television, said the administrator. You claim your brother, some kind of rain man, a storm expert, is saying these disastrous rains are coming. We've had three little rains and he's talking floods! Should I be thinking about where the high ground is? Eh? Should I go and buy a rubber dinghy? Where's the drainage maps for this area? Shouldn't I be thinking about whether to save myself and my family and just leave all the prisoners to drown in their cells? Now where's your water problem?

It was merely a theory, said James. Meteorology is a notoriously inaccurate science.

Well, here's lunch, said the administrator. His voice was unnatural with rage but he spoke in a false, inviting voice. Look here, brought up from our own kitchens. Very good. These are excellent provisions. This establishment does not need demolition. It does not. Here, have some of this beef stew, genuine cow beef with fresh peas, carrots. From a cow. I have all the figures you want. We're doing our own scrapping to make new pipes, prisoner labor, cheap, cheap.

The room smelled wonderfully of furniture polish and detergent and clean air. Nadia envied the prisoner women approaching the table and watched as James accepted a soup plate of beef stew. Nadia would not be asked to serve until the dessert. Meanwhile she could simply steal glances at him. His muscled but pale hands, the healthy and coarse brown hair, and his very ordinary profile. He was real. He sat there in his wheelchair with an alert look on his face as if he were paying attention to the administrator. Taking up space, weighing a certain amount, breathing in and breathing out. He wore a watch on a leather band.

Look at this room! said the administrator. Just redone this month! And this is all going exploding into the air? Oh my God, this is unreal.

No, it will implode, not explode.

According to your brother, who is notoriously inaccurate, I might be paddling downstream!

Nadia glanced quickly from one side to the other. The entire room seemed to be electrified, its photons and electrons and atoms and beige-and-blue-striped curtains in a slubby weave were all charged with desire. With potential and kinetic love. With poetry and antique emotions. With faith, hope, and Charity, who was standing quietly by with a bread knife in her hand thinking of slitting the administrator's throat.

James said, The choice was between taking down the top three stories and taking down the whole thing. His voice was mild and full of authority. He had strong, deep lines around his mouth and between his brows and on his face a flat expression, a hard-set, a ram-you-damn-you look. He said, And in addition to the jail there are problems with the entire water sector. Never mind the rain predictions. This sector, including the paper mill, is over its allocation. Something's got to go. You've got to go.

What about them? Why don't they go? said the administrator. He was a moderate-sized man with very large ears and fine, thin blond hair who knew nothing of love. Of imprisoned girls who were covert royalty. Reduced to slaving in the kitchens of loathsome fortresses. Drugged by magic devices. Prepared to undertake their own rescue given one small hope, one small hope.

Can't, said James. They make paper.

Be damned to you, said the administrator. You're one of the people on the problematic distribution list, aren't you? Those people are usually arrested.

No. Demolition doesn't distribute anything. We don't produce anything. On the contrary.

It doesn't matter, the list is the list.

I see. James's pale eyes were unreadable and flat to the plane of his face, his lids hooded. I want you to call for recyclers to start stripping this building immediately, get out all they can use and then we'll begin assessment of the structure. You will have to distribute your prisoners.

You're in trouble yourself! cried the administrator and his reedy assistant flung himself about in his chair and made hushing gestures. I don't care! I can say what I want! This is my building, my jail! You'll never get set up, never; you'll be arrested before you even get in a scrapping crew!

At a signal Nadia stepped forward with two servings of the glutinous tapioca. Her straw slippers shuffled over the carpet. She put the first one in front of the administrator and then gave one to James. She stood very close to him and sat the dish down on his paper placemat. She could take in his scent, of good soap and clean linen and something that was just himself. He had written
Uphusband
not well
on his placemat.
Changed files. I have one week.
Then he kept on scribbling and wrote over the words.

What's that? The administrator said. What are you writing?

Calculating primer cord costs, said James. When will you start moving your prisoners?

Moving? You are living in a dream world. You see how well they serve, said the administrator. They get good training here. Excellent training in the food services, janitorial work. If these buildings were to be demolished they would be parceled out. Probably thrown into the mines! Women! In the mines! Dragging carts of coal!

Women, being shot on television, said James. For invented crimes. Maybe they'd prefer dragging carts of coal. What do you think?

Nadia paused a fraction of a second before touching him. Before saying, Director Orotov, would you care for coffee? But if she opened her mouth it would be the end of her. She stepped back to her place behind the trolley.

And poetry? said James. He laid the pen down and took up the dessert spoon in his fine, long hand.

What? The administrator looked up. Poetry?

Why not? I suppose they could be given some training in arts and culture. He dipped his spoon into the dessert. Shame to waste educated people, intelligent and creative people, in such minimalism. Our fine art is in a perilous state. You should be assessing each prisoner's abilities before reallocating them.

Arts and culture? The administrator stared at James. Educated people? Prisoners? You are living in some kind of a bubble. You need to be removed! You have no business trying to expand your agency by destroying my building! You've gone too far! The administrator's voice cracked at the exclamation points.

Try me, said James. He leaned back and pinned his mild gaze on the administrator. Nadia felt the tension between the two men like some kind of bitter odor in the air. Then to her amazement she saw James lift his right foot and put it forward on the footrest, lifting the toe of his shoe up and down. Then he dropped it down on the footrest again.

The administrator said, Maybe I will.

As they wheeled the carts out Nadia kept saying the puzzle words over to herself.
Uphusband not well. Changed files. One week.

That evening the head guard, the Lard Queen, got in a shouting match with their night-shift guards over showing the execution of the blond woman. The TV screen shone out in blue tones that flickered and jumped over the faces of all the women in the Q ward. Nadia found herself sitting on cot number thirty-four between Charity and one of the gypsy women. They were gripping one another's sweaty hands without even realizing they were doing it. The screen was hostile, a man-eating thing, a predator. They watched the little blond woman led into the execution chamber, pressed back against the sandbags in her loose shift. She was pleading in a long, babbling scream. Then the Lard Queen settled the argument by ripping the plug out of the wall.

Thank you, thank you, the women whispered.