The Book of Water (25 page)

“At any rate, it ain’t good, and it’s getting worse.”

Her brows knit. “People have made this happen?”

“That’s what the science guys say. Course, with them, you always gotta ask who’s paying their salary.”

Her frown deepens. “But . . . why would you do this?”

“Hey! It wasn’t me, all right? I just live here. Besides, nobody did it on
purpose.
Lotta times, you do things, you don’t think about what else’s gonna happen because of it.”

“And when they knew what was happening, they stopped it?”

“Well, no, not exactly.” He realizes now that the science part of this isn’t the toughest part to explain after all. “Like, for a long time, nobody believed it, and then the scientists were scared to say anything ’cause fixing it was gonna cost so much money. Now I guess everybody just thinks it’s too late.”

“At home,” the girl says slowly—she’s mulling it over hard, and beside her, the apparition is wearing a pensive expression that Jéjé never would have. “At home, we are having wrong weather, too, except it is the opposite: it is too cold and wet. It snowed in the middle of August.”

“Sounds like paradise.”

“Oh, no, N’Doch. Our farmers can’t grow enough either. The grain was thin and blighted. The fruit trees hardly ripened. And the kitchen gardens were blackened by frost just when they should have been producing their best.”

“Hmm. Sounds bad.” N’Doch is distracted by movement up ahead, a couple of thin dogs snarling over some lumpy thing in the road. He doesn’t want to tangle with them or
their lump. Where there’s two, there’s usually more, and who knows what the lump might be carrying. “This way.”

He veers off the road and cuts across a dusty field that used to be a playground for the factory workers’ kids. He recalls a few big metal-frame swings and a beaten-up slide, but all that’s left now are the poured concrete emplacements that held their legs. The clarity of the memory surprises and disturbs him. He speeds up, as if he could walk away from it. The girl has to pick up her pace to stay even with him.

“But, N’Doch, at home we have none of these things you talk of, these . . .” She tries to reproduce the French she’d heard, having no word of her own for “bomb” or “car” or “factory.”

“But you burn stuff, right? You’re wearing that fancy knife, so you must melt down metal somehow to make the steel. And if it’s so cold, you’re probably cutting down every tree in sight just to keep warm.”

“No, N’Doch, it is not like it is here. There are many trees everywhere. There are always enough trees.”

“Yeah? Well, some day there won’t be.” But he can see she can’t imagine it.

“But still, the weather is perilous. The priests say . . .” She glances his way. “Please do not be angry, N’Doch, but the priests
and
the people say it is God’s will. That the snow and the ice in August is God’s punishment for their sins.”

N’Doch decides to be patient about the God thing for once, since the girl obviously doesn’t know any better. “So what’s everyone done in 913 that’s so sinful?”

That kind of slows her down, like maybe she hasn’t thought about it. “All the usual things that God says are sinful, I suppose—Envy, Sloth, Gluttony . .”

He notices she leaves out the Murder and Adultery parts. “Gluttony. Now there’s a sin I could really get into right now.”

“It’s not a joke, N’Doch.”

“C’mon, girl, be real! The whole concept of sin is a joke!” He didn’t expect his patience would last, though he’s not sure why her innocence riles him so much. “There’s no such thing as pure good and pure evil. There’s only life, and getting along in it as best you can.”

She stops, with the dust of her own footsteps rising around her like smoke, as if the ground was on fire. Her
eyes are dark and serious, and N’Doch feels pinned to a wall even though there isn’t a wall anywhere in sight. “There is true evil, N’Doch. I have met it in person. And there is true good. How can you say otherwise when you have known a dragon?”

Now that’s interesting about the dragons. She says it without a trace of doubt in her mind, but when N’Doch sneaks a backward look at the image of his dead brother trotting along behind him, he knows he’s not so sure. Pure good, in his book, should not be so fuckin’ weird. But to get her moving again, he says, “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right. We’ll talk about it later.”

In the far corner of the field is a big tree. The old men used to hang out in its shade, drinking their endless little cups of sweet tea and arguing politics. Sometimes Sedou would be there, N’Doch remembers, arguing with them. There’s no one sitting under it now, and the tree itself is scarred and leafless. But N’Doch decides to take advantage of its thin shadow for old times’ sake. When he was little, venturing forth in his first kid-gang, this tree marked the end point of the Wedge, where the factories and warehouses—often the goal of the gangs’ scavenging forays—blended into the blocks of walled residential compounds and the narrow streets of the commercial districts. He leans against the tree, surrendering to the memory, then shakes himself alert. He can’t get caught standing around out here in the open. Having safely passed the dog pack, he heads back to the boulevard, which will take them through the DMZ into the City proper and the comparative anonymity of the daytime crowds. The address Djawara has supplied for Lealé is in one of the more stable, conservative neighborhoods, which means he’ll have to play the role and blend, if he doesn’t want to get stopped.

He surveys his little entourage for a final reality check before they hit the inhabited zone. The girl looks pretty convincing, now that she’s sweated up a bit. Except, of course, she’s white. The apparition would convince anyone but N’Doch. Or his mama. Amazing how something like a song can conjure a person so totally—with details, even, that he didn’t know he remembered, like how Jéjé’s skin was the lightest in the family, so much that Fâtime’s girlfriends teased her about who the father might be. It occurs
to N’Doch that with his own dark skin, the pale girl, and the apparition in the middle, they might be taken for a family. Which is an okay cover, after all. He wonders if the girl will mind. Maybe she won’t even notice.

The low-slung buildings are closer together here, lined up more or less regularly along the dusty street, with alleys and empty lots between. The DMZ is the buffer between the full-out war zone of the Wedge and the residential districts of the sometimes working poor. N’Doch leads his group past used furniture stalls, junkyards and car repair shops, all boarded up now, plus a couple of derelict gas stations. One still has its chain-link intact and some dogs inside, plopped in the shade but ready to spring on any intruder. It might be doing business now and again, if the owner has a buddy in the current government or can luck into a black market score to fill his tanks.

Past the DMZ, things begin to come to life—a few people are moving about, mostly men and conservatively dressed, but real people with homes and televisions, not squatters. They’re doing their day’s chores before the midday heat settles in. Watchers, N’Doch calls them. He divides the world into the Watchers and the Watched. The Watchers live only vicariously. The Watched live on television. He counts himself as being Watched-in-waiting, and hopes he doesn’t have to wait a whole lot longer.

Along the ragged curbs, the single-story shops are still mostly closed, their once-bright facades sun-bleached to pale yellows, pinks, and salmons, their carefully hand-lettered signs chipped and faded. But here and there, a steel accordion gate is half-open, a corrugated metal blind is raised, even an awning is partly extended. No merchandise hangs around the doorways. Nothing is displayed out front, nor for that matter inside, N’Doch suspects. In this part of town, you just have to know who’s selling what and when they might have it, as well as be pretty well known to the seller, or he won’t even let you into his store, never mind do business with you.

“We’ll just move on through here,” N’Doch urges as the girl starts to lag, wanting to peer inside the shadowed doorways. “Folks aren’t gonna like you staring like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like a tourist.” Which is what she is, N’Doch reminds
himself. He’ll know he’s into the real City when everybody they pass doesn’t step aside to avoid them or stop to glare after them as they go by. He’s encouraged to see a water seller’s stall that actually has a customer, and two old men under a scrawny tree playing checkers with washers and lug nuts on a curling paper board. Finally they move through a gang of small boys kicking a much-patched soccer ball around in the middle of the street, and N’Doch relaxes his pace a little. People actually live here, Watchers for sure, but still, people who won’t immediately try to rip him off. They live in boxy cinder block houses with tiny concreted front yards, invisible behind high stucco walls with steel mesh gates. N’Doch lived in one himself for a while, half a mile or so away, before things got so bad, before Sedou was killed, before . . .

He’d known that’s how it would be—like it was going back to the bush and Papa Dja’s, only worse—the flood of memories he’d rather not be swimming in, struggling to keep himself afloat.

“Damn!” he says softly.

“S’ up?” asks the apparition.

He gives it a look, and the way it hauls back from him tells him the look was not kind. The girl sees it, too.

“Is something wrong, N’Doch?”

He’s not used to it, having his feelings work him over like this. He feels like a boxer on the ropes. To cover, he grabs at the apparition and cuffs it playfully. “Nothin’s up, kid. Nothin’ at all.”

*   *   *

Erde sensed that something was still not right between N’Doch and his dragon, but because she had bonded so instantly with Earth, she had little advice to offer them. They’d have to work it out on their own, as she was sure they would.

Besides, she couldn’t concentrate on N’Doch and Water—or Wasser, as she had dubbed Water’s shape-shifted form. She could only look around and around, trying to soak in all the newness and make some sense of it. Entering this strange town, this City, was like stepping into the intricately painted pages of her grandmama’s illuminated Bible, where every leaf or flower, even the stones in the walls of the ancient sacred cities of the Holy Land,
looked exotic and unfamiliar, nothing like the lands around her father’s castle. Not the ruddy dusty street, not the pale, petal-colored crumbling walls or the sparse, dry vegetation or the dark skin and bright clothing of the inhabitants. And, of course, there was the heat, the constant heat. Perhaps it was the unrelenting sun that made everyone’s skin so dark. Perhaps if she stayed here long enough, she would be burned as black as N’Doch.

As they moved deeper into the City, there were more people in the streets, and the buildings got taller. Soon they were tall enough to cast a shadow along one side of the road, and of course everyone chose to walk on that side, so it began to feel like a crowd, almost like the crowds in the towns at home on festival days, except this crowd was neither joyous nor rowdy. Erde thought this particularly strange. Except for the children, or their parents disciplining them, all these people were rushing here and there in total silence, keeping strictly to their business. No one stopped to greet an acquaintance or exchange a bit of gossip, perhaps because there were so few women about. As the crowd thickened, the men even shouldered and shoved one another, and no one stopped to apologize. If one of them pushed her hard enough, Erde worried, she might stumble and be trampled by the throng. Or get separated from N’Doch, who was slipping between the moving bodies with the speed and ease of an eel through swamp grass. She’d be left behind and he’d never know he’d lost her until it was too late. Of course, Earth could come instantly to rescue her, but Erde could just imagine what sort of terrible panic that would cause, if even a half-grown dragon materialized in the midst of this crowd. She snatched at N’Doch’s arm, but he shook her off surreptitiously.

“Not here!” he hissed. “Hold on to the kid if you want. Nobody’ll mind that.”

*   *   *

To his surprise, she gets it right off.

“Is it improper?” she asks.

He nods. “In public. In private, men and women do whatever they want together.” He glances back, grinning, but she’s looking both shocked and curious, and since he’s not hot to be the one filling her in on the facts of life, especially right here and now, he lets it drop.

“We’re getting close now,” he says, but she’s already distracted. She’s stopped dead in front of a barred-up shop full of televisions. The window actually has most of its glass left. Only one row of the vids are on, a big enough expense but the least a shop owner can get away with and still expect to sell anything. One of the early morning series is playing. A couple of teeners have stopped to watch. The girl is being shoved this way and that, but she’s staring at the bright line of repeated images like she’s never seen a TV before. Remembering where she’s come from, N’Doch realizes she probably hasn’t. Hard to imagine such a thing. A few guys pull up to stare with her, in case she’s spotted something they don’t want to miss. N’Doch doubles back through the crowd to stand beside her before she and the apparition get ’napped right out from under his nose.

She doesn’t have to look up to know he’s there. That dragon thing again. It keeps unnerving him. She reaches for his arm, then stops herself halfway, so her hands gets left floating in the air.

“What magic is this?” she whispers.

The older guys glance at him, check themselves in the cracked window glass and move on. The kids are glued to the tube, and ignore them. N’Doch can see the girl is scared. “Only electronic magic. Remember I told you about electricity?”

She nods dubiously. “How are the people in the windows made so alike? Are they golems?”

“Those aren’t windows. And those guys aren’t really there. It’s only a picture.”

“Someone has painted them?”

“Not exactly . . .” He can see this is gonna be a hard one.

“But they move. They’re so . . . like they’re alive.”

“Well, they are, only not there in the box. Somewhere else.” He tries to see the vid images the way she must be seeing them, as something alien and inexplicable. He fails.