On a Clear Day (7 page)

“If the British have to watch everyone so closely,” Mei-Mei
said, “why should we trust them?”

“We’ll trust them until we find a reason not to trust
them,” Michael said. “Our mission isn’t to take over anything or
even to occupy anything. We’re living in a world where the stick seems to have
nothing but shitty ends. We’re looking to see if we can make a difference. Too
many people are sitting by the roadside, too tired to move on. Maybe they’re too
old and tired. Maybe we are too. I have to know, one way or the other.”

He looked away, as if what he was saying had affected him, but I
didn’t see how it had. He was still being a mystery.

It was a different world and I wasn’t sure of myself. Everything
about Michael and Javier smelled of bigger money than I had ever smelled. Even the way
they sat at the table, so relaxed, so sure of themselves, said that this
was where they belonged, and that they had been here before.

Tristan was alone with his thoughts and seemed almost as if he was
brooding about something. Anja was light, airy. She tried talking to Tristan a couple of
times, but he only grunted in return. Mei-Mei and Drego acted as if they were hanging
out. I wondered how close they really were.

That left me. I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was
overmatched. When you got down to it, nobody was giving shout-outs to math. They all had
something special going on, and I didn’t feel as if I could keep up with
them.

On the way to the airport, I was thinking of the invasion of Normandy. A
bunch of guys thinking they were going to save the world and dying on the beaches.

Security. People going through while scanners were going over their chips.
An Indian family tried to go through and the scanners couldn’t read the
woman’s chip. The guards pulled her over to the side and had her stand against
the wall while her children cried. Gross.

I got to the security kiosk, and the security dude ran the scanning wand
over my right hip. My picture appeared on the screen next to him, and he looked at it
and at me.

“Nice picture,” he said. There was a map of my home area
with code numbers next to it, which I imagined told him something about what group I
belonged to.

“You’re travelling with a band?” he asked next.
“What do you play?”

“I sing.”

“Oh? Sing something for me.”

“No.”

“Gotta pay to hear you, huh?” He grinned. His wand gave him
the only power he had.

He waved me through and we went to the gate. Another check of our papers,
another chip scan. Drego was pulled aside and Mei-Mei was told to move on. We entered
the cabin, and found our seats in business class. The flight attendant started serving
drinks, and nobody was talking about Drego. Mei-Mei took her seat, but she was looking
anxiously toward the door.

Anja was doing a crossword puzzle. I bet she was nervous. Good. I
wasn’t the only one.

I’d flown plenty of times, mostly to Santo Domingo. The flight was
three hours, about the same as our flight to London. Then it would take me hours to get
to my relatives’ home. Flying didn’t bother me as much as going someplace
and not being sure of what I was doing. I thought of Mrs. Rosario. Would I rather be
home in the Bronx?

No. I was excited to be part of something. My palms were sweaty and I
wanted to move on.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Mei-Mei shift position. I looked up and
she was looking out the window; then I saw Drego coming into the cabin.

“They give you a hard time?” I asked him.

“They had to check to see if I had any hidden truths in my hand
luggage,” he said. He sat next to Mei-Mei. Yep, something was definitely going on
over there.

The first hour I downloaded the
Times
of London,
the
Guardian
,
Der Spiegel
, and
El Diario
. Michael and
Javier mostly talked to each other. Tristan slept, and Mei-Mei talked at Drego. Anja was
watching a movie. I decided that she would be the one I would pal around with.

I fell asleep after an hour and woke up to the flight attendant telling me
that we would be landing shortly and offering me a hot towel. For some reason I said
yes, and she gave me a rolled-up towel that was too hot to do anything with. I saw
Javier wiping his face with his, and so I did the same. It wasn’t refreshing, and
it didn’t get my face that clean. It was just hot.

Customs at Heathrow meant walking through a screening device that looked
like a metal detector. If they could pick up all your information just by having you
walk between two sensors, it meant that they could find you anywhere by placing enough
sensors around. I wondered if I should cover my chips again.

The Brits were waiting for us just outside the security area. They looked
geeky and pale. My first thought was that they were probably super-bright kids. I also
noticed that the girls were a little taller than the boys.

A van took us to the Chelsea Cloisters hotel on Sloane Avenue. It was one
of those driverless things that worked okay, but I didn’t like them because I was
looking out the window thinking we were going to hit something. All the while, the Brits
were talking about how glad they were
that we had come over and how
we were going to make a difference.

“The hands-across-the-sea thing really works, you know,” a
thin dude with big teeth said.

Anja nodded and smiled, and Michael reached over and shook the
guy’s hand.

At the hotel we got our key cards, and Javier said we’d be going to
the first meeting at one o’clock the next afternoon.

My rooms were small, really just a teeny bedroom and a living room with a
small stove, a few pots and pans, a countertop oven, and a kettle to boil water in. I
started hanging up my stuff when Anja called. She said she was trying to get people to
walk around the neighborhood but nobody wanted to go with her.

“I’ll go,” I said. “Maybe we can find some
food.”

We met in the lobby, and the clerk told us where the local grocery store
was. Or, she said in her cool English accent, you could go out the back door and go to
Marks & Spencer.

Anja had heard of Marks & Spencer, so we went there. On the way I
told her how to translate the English money, pounds, to dollars in her head. All you had
to do was figure that the pound was 10 percent more than the dollar.

We got to Marks & Spencer and it looked more like a clothing store.
I couldn’t believe the prices on the dresses and pants.

“But they are great!” Anja ran her hand over a skirt and
watched the fabric seem to change color. It was a metallic
material
that caught the light and reflected whatever colors were in the light and also the
ambient colors around it.

“These are nice,” I said, “but check out the price!
Does that say four hundred and twenty pounds?”

“You could wear it with anything,” Anja came back.

“If I spent that much on a skirt, I’d have to wear it with
everything!” I said.

We looked at some blouses. The metallic thing was in. There were silver,
gold, and sheer black blouses. What got me was that some of the black blouses were like
a deep color with almost no shine, but when you turned the fabric slightly, a pattern of
black on black appeared. Very nice. Very expensive. It was the States all over again,
but concentrated. No poor people were going to come in here.

The food was in the back, and we spent fifteen minutes just looking to see
what the differences were between an American market and a British market. Anja thought
the Brits went in for more fresh food. I didn’t think so.

“They just have more expensive stuff,” I said. “At
least in this store. But Javier said not to worry about how much we spent when he was
passing out the pounds.”

I bought a lot of fruit and fresh veggies, and Anja bought some things
with weird British names. She showed me a dessert called spotted dick.

“Anja, you are like a child,” I said.

“I don’t care,” she replied. “But I’m
not coming all the way to England and not trying this. And … my
fine little friend, did you see the way the Brits were checking us out on the way to the
hotel?”

“Oh, my God, that was so funny,” I said.
“I didn’t know you had noticed it—but you do notice a lot of
things. They kept looking at Drego and Mei-Mei and
all of us
, really, as if we
were some kind of freaks or something.”

“They were checking us out pretty good,” Anja said.
“But we are a different-looking group. They had one Indian boy with them, but the
rest of them looked like they were cut out of the same batch of pizza dough.”

Anja went on about how she didn’t like the pep talk they were
giving us even though she knew they were trying to figure out if we were serious or not.
All the time she was talking, I was thinking how much I was getting to like her. Or at
least I felt more relaxed around her. I didn’t know why.

We got our stuff, got sniffed at by the woman monitoring the checkout
counter, and made our way out the door into the busy London street.

“Dahlia, if you could be rich, I mean filthy, nasty, C-8
rich,” Anja said, “and shop at Marks and Spencer every day, would you be
tempted to chuck it all and sell your soul to the devil and give up the
struggle?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “But maybe
I’d consent to be rich for one day a week just to remember what I’m
fighting against.”

“Oh, I love a smart woman!” Anja said.

We walked back to the hotel—it was only like a ten-minute
walk—with me remembering that I had forgotten to buy milk and Anja remembering
she had forgotten tea.

Waiting for the elevator and watching some of the other
guests in the lobby. Since they could afford a London hotel, I guessed that when
they were wherever they had come from, they saw the world through gates.

“What do you think of our little crew?” Anja asked.

“They seem sharp,” I answered.

“You like Michael?”

“What does that mean?”

“The others you nail with your look—it’s like
you’re penetrating them,” Anja said. “Michael—you always
kind of side-glance him.”

“You like him?” I asked.

“Not like that,” she replied.

“Not like
what
?”

“Dahlia, I didn’t mean
anything … honestly!”

“No problem,” I said.

“Wednesdays?” she came back.

“Wednesdays what?”

“When we get filthy rich for one day a
week”—Anja’s smile widened—“we’ll go shopping
at Marks and Spencer on Wednesdays.”

“You’re on!”

As soon as I started cutting up the veggies I had bought, I realized how
hungry I was. It was a residence hotel, and the small tuxedo kitchen was neatly tucked
behind a sliding fabric-framed door. There was only one large skillet in the kitchen,
but it was enough. I started sautéing some onions in garlic and margarine, and
they filled the room up immediately with good smells. I added some mushrooms and carrots
and turned the heat down.

I set up my computer, brought up the news, and saw that
the reception was lousy. I switched to
boost
mode, and the picture came up but
I lost the color. No big deal. The Tories were debating whether or not the government
should take over the London
Times
as a cultural institution.

“No, because if you do, it won’t be a cultural institution
anymore, dummies!” I said aloud.

It really made me mad when things got screwed up in the same way all the
time. Somebody was going to “save” something and ended up destroying it by
making it into something it had never been intended to be. I threw some extra garlic
into the pan in protest. I had bought thinly cut “chicken filets,” and I
sliced them up and stir-fried them into the other veggies. They looked like real chicken
but they weren’t real chicken. I knew a lot of people didn’t eat them
because they didn’t know what they were. I didn’t know what was in half
the food I ate anymore. Nobody did.

I looked for a grater, couldn’t find one, and diced up a few pieces
of ginger as the guy who ran some theater talked about putting on a musical version of
Hamlet
. Sounded boring, and I was about to switch to another news outlet
when there was a knock on the door. I opened it and saw Michael with a newspaper and a
bag in his hand.

“I just wondered if everything was okay,” he said.

“Yeah, I’m all good,” I answered. “How are you
doing?”

“Good. I went down the street and picked up a paper and a sandwich.
I should have asked everyone first to see if they needed anything.”

“What kind of sandwich you get?”

“Uh—it’s kind of an egg salad sandwich,” he
said, holding it up so I could see it.

“It looks pathetic. You want something to eat?”

“You don’t mind?”

I moved away from the door, and I thought he hesitated a second before
coming in.

“Smells good, whatever it is,” he said.

“It’s just some veggies and fake chicken—you eat fake
chicken?”

“Yeah.”

“Sit down.” I found the wooden spoon I had been using and
pushed the veggies toward the center of the skillet. It did smell good now that the
ginger was getting into the act. “Have you been to England a lot?”

“Not a lot, but a few times,” Michael said. “We
performed here at the Coliseum and in a few clubs in Brixton.”

“What’s leading a band about?” I asked.

“It’s seriously together,” Michael said. “If
you’re doing it right, you’re bringing people together and they’re
creating something. You get the right people and you can see it happening. And if
you’re communicating, the audience sees it happening too. Then all you have to do
is keep it going. You know what I mean? A lot of good things could happen in the
world
—would
happen in the world—if people just weren’t
afraid of the momentum. The momentum builds and then somebody feels the need to stop
it.”