Tabula Rasa Kristen Lippert Martin (7 page)

making him very happy. Finally, my curiosity overpowers
 my exhaustion, and I get up and look over his shoulder.
He’s staring at a screen filled with nothing but lines of
 numbers.
In the blackness of the screen, I see the dark reflection
 of my own face. I jerk my head back, averting my eyes. I’m
 not ready to look at myself.
“What’s all that?” I ask.
He holds up his index finger momentarily and then
 keeps typing, grimacing in disgust. I wait another minute
 for a response, but he seems to have forgotten I’m standing
 there.
“I’m starving,” I say.
I remember the sandwich I stuffed into my jacket
 pocket. I go back into the foyer to get it. The sandwich has
 congealed into a gooey ball. I walk back into the tent, sit
 down, and take a bite of the mess in my hand.
Pierce must smell the same thing I do as I bite down:
 slightly spoiled lunch meat. His lip curls in disgust. “What
 are you eating?”
“I don’t know.”
“You might be a lab rat, but you’re not a real rat. No
 need to eat garbage. Go look over there. Lots of delicious
 freeze-dried food to choose from. The instructions are
 on the packets.” He points toward the propane stove with
 the kettle on top. “Make me something, too. Not the beef
 enchiladas, though. They taste like Mexicans.”
“Aren’t enchiladas supposed to taste Mexican?”
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“No, I mean they taste like actual Mexicans. Unwashed
 ones.”
He looks at me, and his face goes red faster than a stop-
 light. “No offense.”
“No offense about what?”
“Aren’t you—I mean . . . you could be Mexican, right?”
“What?”
“You look, you know, Mexican. Or something.”
“Right. Or something.”
“Although you’ve got green eyes, so maybe you’re Mex-
 ican and something else mixed together.”
If I had eyebrows, they’d be arching at that comment.
“Maybe you should stop talking now.”
“Yes, maybe I should, before you decide that I’m some
 huge racist jerk and not just an awkward idiot who was
 trying to be funny.”
I turn away from him and look through the plastic
 packets of food. I have green eyes. That’s what Mrs. Este-
 ban told me, too. Until he said it, I wasn’t sure my memory
 could be counted on. But this much is true: I have green
 eyes.  
When the water in the kettle boils, I add it to the con-
 tents of the packet. A few minutes later we are both eating
 hot, gritty chili. I obviously didn’t let the water hydrate the
 food properly, but I was too hungry to wait. My impatience
 has been rewarded with kidney beans hard as pebbles.
Pierce doesn’t seem to notice or care. He eats while look-
 ing at the computer screen. I guess this is how it’s going
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to be—him doing whatever he’s doing, and me just sitting
 here watching.
Finally he says, “Seriously, you might as well have a rest.
Maybe take a nap. This is going to take a lot longer than I
 thought.”
He returns to the computer with a look on his face that
I’d call “entranced.” Maybe “obsessed.”
I realize that I don’t just want to sleep; I have to sleep.
But I can’t. The temperature in the yurt is dropping. After
 a few minutes of pacing around and rubbing my hands
 together to stay warm, I see Pierce start shivering, too. He
 keeps mistyping and swearing. Finally he gets up and puts
 a couple of brown bricks into the black pot. The bricks
 smolder, then catch. They smell like candle wax.
My head starts to throb. Maybe the sudden heat is get-
 ting to me. I sway and almost lose my balance.  
“Whoa there. You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re fine? Well, then lie down until the fineness
 passes.”
I’m about to say no, but can’t think of why I should.
Lying down is a perfectly good idea when you’re about to
 fall down.
I sit down on the mattress, and Pierce lifts my feet up
 and positions them for me before covering me with a blan-
 ket. “Let me know if you need anything.”
I am inexpressibly grateful and so, naturally, I say noth-
 ing.
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Pierce sits back down and keeps working. The sound of
 his fingers on the keyboard, the sight of his profile in those
 awful glasses . . . I feel myself starting to drift off.
Just as the world’s edges start to get fuzzy, I hear him
 talking to me, although his voice sounds different. It’s
 deeper and slower and full of reverb; it’s like he’s reciting
 poetry from the far side of a metal tunnel. He’s telling me
 something about how the storm is coming; that I can sur-
 vive it. That I can survive anything, because I’m special,
 and he won’t just stand by and let them kill me. . . .
Is this real?
I’m not sure. I don’t care. All I know is that I feel safe
 for the first time that I can remember. Which isn’t very
 long, I know, but I welcome the feeling just the same. For
 however long it’s going to last.
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CHAPTER 8
 oices. So many voices in my head. I hear someone talk-
Ving. It’s the red-haired woman, Hodges. She’s talking
 to me. No, about me.
“What rotten timing, officer,” she says. “I was just on my way
 to see La Bohème. But I’m glad you finally caught her. Truly.
Well done, NYPD.”
The red-haired woman is sitting across from me in a dress that
 seems to be made of a hundred yards of purple silk, seed pearls,
 and puffs of air.
Flouncy.
That’s the word that comes to me when I look at her.
She’s clutching a fur wrap around her narrow shoulders and
 holding a sequined purse in her hand. Her hair is pinned up with
 a sparkling hair clip.
We’re in a police interrogation room no bigger than a large
 closet. There’s a table and four chairs. One wall is dark glass—an
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observation window. I glare at it, daring whoever is behind it to
 face me.
Sitting next to the red-haired woman is a middle-aged cop. His
 holster is visible underneath his suit jacket, and as he leans forward
 to pull his chair closer to the table, the handle of his gun knocks
 against the armrest and a sprinkle of dandruff lands on the table
 in front of him.
The red-haired woman pinches the bridge of her nose like she
 has a terrible headache. “I’m glad we can finally bring this to a
 close. This vandalism has gone on quite long enough, and as usual,
 the media have the story all wrong. She doesn’t look like much of
 a hero to me. What do you think, officer?”
“Nah. Not much of one.”
“So how did you catch her? I’m curious.”
“We got an anonymous tip and just waited at the bottom of
 the crane. Treed her like a squirrel until she finally had to come
 down or fall.”
“Thank you, lieutenant. If it’s all right, do you think I could
 talk to her a moment? Privately, I mean. She might feel more com-
 fortable if it’s just me, and we might be able to get to the bottom of
 all this that much more quickly.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“I’ll be just outside the door if you need me.”
As he gets up, he gives me a look that says, Don’t try any-
 thing or I will stomp on your neck. Then he leaves me with
 this woman who I’ve never seen before—even though she’s acting
 like she knows me.
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The red-haired woman rests her elbows on the table and bats
 her eyelashes at me.
“New York City,” she says.
She says nothing else for a long while. I look around the room
 like I can’t be bothered talking to her and finally ask, “What
 about it?”
“New York is soooo welcoming. I would never have believed
 it. Here I am, just a poor girl from Georgia. Yet I’ve come all this
 way to . . . ”
I roll my eyes.
“You should really listen to this, Sarah. It’s important that
 you understand. You see, when people say they grew up poor
 and they’re from Georgia, that’s a very different kind of poor.
A whole other level of poor. Even you and your tenement apart-
 ment and your mother who’s worked as a domestic her whole
 life—even you can’t begin to understand how poor Georgia poor
 really is.”
“Is that right?”
“But I come here to New York, scratch and claw my way up
 through so many terrible, demeaning jobs. You have no idea how
 badly people will treat you when they know you have to take it.
But I learned a few things over the years, and I’ve come to see
 what’s really important.”
I stare at her.
“You see, you have to set a goal and not let anything or anyone
 stand in the way of it. That’s what I do, and that’s the reason I’m
 here now, in this beautiful dress, on my way to the opera. A true
New Yorker.”
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I raise my cuffed hands and let them plunk down onto the
 table. I’m wearing a tank top, jeans, and a beat-up pair of sneakers
 held together with duct tape around the toes. I have dirt under my
fingernails and I smell like the streets, like bus exhaust and urine.
I say nothing. I’m very sure that this woman in the flouncy purple
 dress has no idea what the real New York City is.
I’m New York City. I sneer at her to let her know I think she’s
 a pathetic poser.
“You could learn a thing or two from me, Sarah. You really
 could. About determination. And commitment.” She adjusts a
 small, diamond-encrusted C brooch on her dress. “But of course
 you won’t learn. Which is unfortunate for both of us.”
I stretch my neck back and forth. My arms are still achy. I’d
 been hanging on to that crane for an hour when the police finally
 showed up. How could they have known where I’d be?
“Have you been listening to me, Sarah?”
“What? Yeah, sure. You were poor. Now you’re not. Good for
 you. Is this little pep talk over now?”
She smacks the table with the palm of her hand and I jump. I
 glance at the dark glass, wondering if someone is going to come in,
 but no one does.
“Who are you? My new case manager?”
But as soon as I say it, I know it can’t be true. This woman is
 not like anyone I’ve ever met. Not in school, not in the foster care
 system. Whoever she is, she’s not here to spew the usual hopeful,
 encouraging pile of garbage they’ve tried to feed me regularly since
 my mother died.
“Who am I?” she says.
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She extends her hand to shake mine, laughing lightly as if she’d
 completely forgotten I’m cuffed and shackled and can’t possibly raise
 my hand to meet hers.
“My name is Evangeline Hodges, and sweetheart, right now
 you are ruining my whole damn life.”
A loud burst of static jolts me fully awake. I roll onto my
 side, off the mattress, and then try to stand up.
Was I dreaming?
No. I was remembering—remembering the red-haired
 woman’s voice. It’s the very same voice I just heard come
 out of the radio before it landed on the other side of the
 yurt. Pierce startled when I got up, and the walkie-talkie
 he was cradling in his lap flew six feet.
“Hey! Careful! It took me an hour to figure this out.”
“What?”
He picks the walkie-talkie up carefully by the antenna.
The back of the radio has been removed, and some of the
 wires are sticking out. “8-Bit’s radio. Those soldier dudes
 are using an encryption program. It changes frequencies a
 hundred times a second.”
I’m hardly awake, and even if I were, I wouldn’t under-
 stand what he’s saying.
“I slowed down the interval that their frequency changes
 and . . . never mind. Point is, we can hear them for about
 a minute before the frequency hops again and we lose the
 signal. Assuming they’re in range.”
“What?”
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“I’m explaining the way this—it doesn’t matter. We can
 hear them talking, and they don’t know it.”
I sit down on the edge of the mattress, and we lean in
 close over the radio. It squelches and buzzes, and we hear
 nothing but static. Then, suddenly, a deep, digitized voice
 breaks through. The words are garbled, and the signal cuts
 out a couple times. A woman answers back. It’s Hodges.
“Where is he?” she demands. “I want him found.”
“We think he’s on the sixth floor somewhere. We’re
 searching room to room now, ma’am.”
“Get him out of there. I don’t care how. He’s messed my
 plan up enough as it is.”
“Most of the offices up here have coded locks. It could
 take some time.”
“I don’t want to hear excuses. Don’t you people have
 things that go boom? Use them!”
I look up at Pierce. “Who are they looking for? Did you
 hear a name?”
“No. Now shhhh.”
“She definitely said he though, right?”
“Yeah. That’s what I heard.” Pierce gives me an odd
 look, like he’s trying to figure something out that makes
 no sense. “Who is she?”
He says it like he’s talking to himself, so I don’t answer.
We stay hunched over the radio for another minute, but the
 voices fade in and out and we hear nothing useful. Then
 the signal jumps again and all we hear is static.
“We lost them.”
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A sudden gust of wind shakes the yurt. I gasp.
Pierce puts his hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay.” He
 looks up at the ceiling, which is moving violently. “Well,
 okay-ish. Maybe.”
I shoot to my feet. “What time is it?”
“Why, you got a hot date?”
“Just tell me.”
“You were only asleep for about ninety minutes.”
I exhale in relief and sit back down. More than once,
I’ve awakened to find that hours or even whole days have
 passed. But it’s fine. There’s no need for another pill just
 yet. That’s all that matters.
I feel a backdraft through the hole in the roof. It scatters
 ash from the glowing brick in the black pot. I pace back
 and forth in the small space, going over the memory, trying
 to make sense of it, but I get nowhere.
“Sorry I fell asleep while you were talking to me,” I say.
He looks at me, confused. “I wasn’t talking to you. I’ve
 been sort of consumed with the radio and all this stuff on
 the flash drive that 8-Bit left me.”
“Oh.”
I sit down in the chair opposite him and put my hands
 around my skull and squeeze gently. I do this every time I
 wake up.  
“Are you in pain? I have something you can take.”
“What? Oh, no, thanks. This is just a thing I do. I think
I just need to check that my head’s still there sometimes.”
I raise my eyes and notice Pierce looking at me like he
 wants to ask me a question.
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“I know what you’re going to ask,” I say.
“What?”
“Is it weird being bald?”
“Well, is it? I mean, for a girl.”
“I guess it’s no weirder than having no memory.”
“You seriously don’t remember anything? Like, not
 even what you had for breakfast?”
I’m not sure what, if anything, I should share about
 these confusing things coming back to me. It’s almost like
I’m being haunted, and I’m too afraid to tell anyone about
 the ghosts I see because they’ll think I’m crazy. I don’t want
Pierce to think I’m crazy.
“Oatmeal and grapefruit juice.”
“Good for you. I had a candy bar and cold instant cof-
 fee.”
We smile at each other, and I realize that you can half-
 trust someone for a while—maybe even a long while—but
 there will always come a moment when you must choose
 to let go and trust completely or withdraw. Somehow I’ve
 come to this point already.
I decide to let go, and I’m surprised by how easy it is and
 how willing I am to do it.
“There’s stuff I remember, but I’m not exactly sure
 when it happened or why. Most of the time I have this odd,
 drifting feeling, like the world isn’t quite solid or I’m not.
Other times I’ll have these intense feelings that come out
 of nowhere. I have no idea what causes them. All I know is
 they’re never good.”
“I find that to be the case for me, too.”
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