The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (4 page)

*   *   *

At that moment, me and Faron lay on another pair of bunks, provided by the Bosom Industries House of Corrections in Hiya City. For a small fee an orderly had slipped a needle in my brother's backside, and he was now sleeping off the effects of pig morphine. I kept watch on our cell's only window, high on one wall and set deep in a casement. The thunderheads that had found Umma in the Gables now pushed a black tendril into our cell. Rain spilled through the window to puddle up on the floor.

Faron looked peaceful enough. Not at all like a sociopath. The anger had flown from his open mouth and gone up into that stormy sky. In sleep my brother went gentle, and I wished that the morphine might never wear off. I came down to kneel beside him. The mat was soaked with sweat, so I rolled my brother against the block wall to cool him down. I stripped his sheet and carried it to the puddle, bringing it back heavy with rainwater to wring it over his neck and shoulders.

*   *   *

The door buzzer sounded. Umma jumped. She slipped from my bunk and pulled on a pair of sweatpants, stood at the peephole expecting it was the law. But the man who stood on our shit scraper did not look like enforcement. He was dainty, built like a resin doll, his hair so severely parted it might have been die-cut. He wore a short-sleeve shirt with a canary yellow necktie, his trousers more yellow still. When the stranger buzzed a second time, Umma watched how his limbs worked, as if they were hinged.

“Who are you?” she asked through the door.

He said the name Terry Nguyen and hoped this wasn't a bad time. She had been expecting a cop, but now she imagined worse. Terry Nguyen looked like an undertaker.

“I am here about your sons.”

“Are they dead or in jail?”

Nguyen assured her we were alive and incarcerated.

“You are not a cop.”

“I have come to help your family. Let me in.”

As evidence of his sincerity, he held up a brown accordion folder. The Bosom Industries logo had been stamped across the cardstock. She opened the door. Nguyen looked so inert that he almost put our mother at ease. He was a precious object, cute but in the manner of a poison frog.

He had taken the stairs and was a bit winded, he said, though it seemed like a lie. A man in those pants would never make it past the Stairdwellers.

“Might I sit?”

She offered Faron's bottom bunk. Nguyen made no impression on the mattress. He worked one hand inside a pants pocket, twisted it as a groan issued from his throat. Umma watched the knuckles contort the fabric and heard in her mind the word
spider
. On the other hand he wore a stack of carved silver rings. Together in the tight space under my bunk, Umma said she expected the man to kiss her. He looked as if he'd been authorized to do so.

Terry began by complimenting her marks at school and record at the clinic. “High attendance. Brisk. Presentable. Improved hygiene.” She'd earned good grades in Stitching as well. There was no point asking how he knew so much about her past. People know things. Nguyen wondered aloud what she hoped to accomplish when her degree was in hand.

“Stay put,” she replied, not finishing the thought. She would stay put, right here in the Gables, until Pop was released from the Pens and we were a whole family again.

“Long wait that.” Terry Nguyen knew about Pop.

“Yes,” she said. “That is true.”

“Or,” he offered, “it could be quite brief.”

The sentence for slaying I Murder was fourteen years plus wage garnishment for another ten. We'd be in the tower blocks forever. If Pop did live long enough to win release, he'd surely toss a Stairdweller into the airshaft and get sent down again in no time.

“How would you respond if I said your entire family could reunite, under this roof, tomorrow morning?”

Umma tried to imagine what price a man might extract for so lavish a gift. She tried to imagine what sort of man had the authority to grant it. She watched the hand twist inside its pocket and did not reply.

“You have heard of the new cruise-ship terminal up past Melburn?” he asked.

She had a hopeful thought. Maybe Nguyen would offer them indenture on an ocean liner in exchange for jail time. Bosom owned the cruise-ship terminal and the rum distillery. Prison labor could be reallocated.

“I thought they shut that terminal down?”

“They did,” said Terry. He shook his little head. “Do you happen to know why?”

Umma had no clue. Melburn, Floriday, was a good bit north of Miamy.

“I asked them to.” Terry said this proudly, though his expression did not change. He explained: a crew had been hammering through cement slab when their front loader dropped into a sinkhole. Not an unusual occurrence. Floriday was always opening up. They lowered a man down to retrieve the vehicle and he found a tunnel. Next he found a chamber, and then an ancient storehouse the size of a salt mine.

“Someone had sealed it off with cement, covered their tracks with sand so no one would find it, as if they had something to protect.” He held his breath. Umma felt compelled to join him. “There's a … vehicle down there.”

He spoke this last bit in a hush, a furry tone of reverence. He must have been disappointed when Umma glared at his tiny feet in annoyance. If our mother ever felt reverence, she concealed it, capped her feelings with cement slab, and hid them under a pile of sand. She only wanted to know what any of this had to do with getting her sons back.

It did not ease her irritation when Terry turned the conversation to fairy tales. “You have heard of the Astronomers?” he asked, though of course she had. Everyone had.

You, Little Sylvia, will come up knowing the truth, but to the rest of the world—to jellyfishers, crackers, finkies, and swells, to Bosom families and Consolidated alike—the stars are not real. The planets are not real. Astronomy, if spoken of at all, is regarded as a delusional cult scarcely more respectable than the Jesus Lovers. The Chiefs long back did the decent thing and decided to put both gangs out of business. The Jesus Lovers dug in; you still see their lowercase
t
scratched on fenceposts with a ten-dollar nail. But the Astronomers went off quietly and without leaving a trace or sign.

They were easily dispatched because their ideas so nearly resembled fiction. You will learn better, Little Sylvia, but to the rest of the world Astronomy is nonsense, magic on par with weather-knowing and poetry cures.

The surest way to hobble any truth is to put it in a storybook. Smart Man Tolemy wrote
The Lonesome Wanderer
for children so that we would come up knowing Astronomy as a fairy tale. His Astronomers were pale, hairless mountain men who believed the bright flaws in the Night Glass to be distant Suns. They believed the Wanderers to be other worlds like our own. In contradiction of common sense and observation, their Sun did not circle the Earth but the other way around.

In
The Lonesome Wanderer
every planet was equal; we were one of many, insignificant. Tolemy's Astronomers worshipped the Wanderers as flying mansions for the gods. Every child was urged to learn their names:

Mercury, the Messenger's swift chariot built of glowing embers.

Earth, prison of Man, a god of guilt who gnaws at the walls of his cell.

Mars, with canals like Sunk Venice, where Strife pilots her warship.

Venus, a brothel for the gods, kept by the Virgin Madam.

Saturn, girded by a belt of seeds for sowing the crops of Earth.

Jupiter, a hot-air balloon piloted by the Great Chief Jesus.

Neptune and Uranus, the poison-misted plains of the Ice Giants.

There had been an Eighth Wanderer as well: far Pluto, House of Death—so despised by the Astronomers that they forbid its name to be spoken aloud. This was Tolemy's Lonesome Wanderer, and to its forgotten surface he consigned the fool Astronomers.

Though I cannot say for certain, I believe it was the Smart Man himself who dismantled all the telescopes. He did so to prevent the world from knowing the truth: that the Astronomers were not fools, they were right.

“Only there is more to that story than what Smart Man Tolemy wrote down,” said Terry. “Were you aware that Floriday herself was a site held sacred to Astronomy? Right north of Melburn is a cape of land called Cannibal where they practiced sacrifice to the Wanderers, fire rites. When that hole opened up in the cement slab, our front loader fell crack into the antechamber of their holiest temple.”

“That right?”

“In their final days the Gunts believed their world was coming to an end, and soon. They went to the mountain to ask the Astronomers what could be done.”

The wise men gazed into their glasses and saw a vision: by the Wanderer Jupiter lay a moon that was one shoreless ocean frozen over like the shell of an egg. They named it after a failed Gunt social experiment where the maps now show Bosomland. Europa. Wet and teeming with life under the ice, it would be a new Earth when this one had been spent. Go back down the mountain, the Astronomers instructed. Build an airplane tall as the Four Seasons Miamy. Call it Orion after a famous outdoorsman. Bury it, they told the Gunts, deep in the sands of Floriday, and wait.

“Wait for what?”

“When the end date of the world is fixed and forty days at hand, said the Astronomers, the Chiefs will pass from the Earth.”

Umma laughed. Everyone knew the Chiefs were not going anywhere.

“On that day,” Terry continued, “Orion will rise up and fly away to Europa. But the Gunts were wrong: it wasn't our world that ended. It was theirs.”

A withered part of Umma had always wanted the Astronomers to be real. On Caroline nights, while sleep overtook us in our sharecropper tents, she would sit up in her underpants on an old lounger to watch the stars come out. She longed to see worlds in the Wanderers, suns in the starlight. Umma came from superstitious stock, Appellatians and Jesus Lovers, and old ideas can clog the tubes like dead leaves in a drainpipe. When Terry talked his nonsense about Europa and Orion and escape, she listened as if under a spell. Then she remembered.

“You know where my boys are at?” said Umma. “You promised you would help.”

Terry told her to be patient. He was getting to her boys. But first, he wanted tea. A splash was left over from yesterday's breakfast. She brought it to him in a mustard jar, which he accepted with a gesture of thanks as inert as his smile.

“I persuaded Bosom to halt construction on the cruise terminal until we knew what we were looking at down there. The vehicle is called Orion and I believe it is built to fly. The Gunts were good craftsmen. They left behind thorough instructions for how to launch it, and I intend to do so.” Now he got to the sugar-pith, as Pop would say, inside the cane. “The trouble, Miss Van Zandt, has been in recruiting volunteers.”

“Volunteers? Doesn't Bosom have pilots?”

Nguyen paid her a compliment. Good, strong tea. “Your family possesses so many of the qualities we seek,” he said. “Doctor schooling, a hardy husband, two sons who have performed adequately on their mining exams.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“But mostly,” said Terry, “what you have is motive. You will want to do it.”

Umma understood that this was no longer a conversation. Nguyen could afford to frighten her. “I am authorized by Bosom Industries to extend the following offer,” he said. “You agree to train for and test the Orion; we grant amnesty to your husband and sons.”

From his accordion folder he extracted a sheaf of legal papers. The hand appeared from its pocket clicking a pen.

“Can you tell me what my boys have done?”

For the first time since Terry Nguyen entered the apartment, Umma saw the man who sat beside her. She counted the fingers on the hand that held the pen: three. A salmon-colored scar ran from his wrist to the base of his middle finger. The skin above one ear was discolored, yellow. He wore a hairpiece, half a wig.

“Your husband has already given his assent.” With his pinkie he tapped a line at the bottom of the first page, then slipped it back in the folder before she could get a good look. “So have your sons.”

So it was that Umma signed her name and made her choice: between probable death and guaranteed loneliness. She could not have chosen otherwise, because, daughter, there is only one ending worse than the grave.

*   *   *

I shook my brother awake. Another night had passed, and the turnkey had come to set us free. She didn't mention the terms of our release. Discussion was limited to ordinals: left, right, forward, up, out. As Hiya City daylight appeared through the door, my brother underwent a miraculous recovery. His steps grew spritelier, the angry egg on his forehead less gooselike. He swaggered.

I slowed down, worried. Whatever we were being released to could not be freedom. Had we not but forty-eight hours earlier driven a stolen bus into a gator nest? Had we not inconvenienced or possibly killed a number of geriatrics in our flight from the law? The turnkey shoved us onto a scrubbed Hiya sidewalk and bolted the prison door behind us.

We were welcomed back into the world by a most unfriendly mob of grannies. They clustered on the opposite curb, shouting crude footnotes to the placards they held over their heads.

I AM NOT GATOR FOOD!

DEATH TO THE MIAMY ZOO TWO!

One lady threatened to gut me like a fish and then specified what fish and how she would cook my fillets.

We might run, but this was Hiya City, and geriatrics were everywhere. When the wind shifted I could smell their dusty perfume. They started shuffling across the street on their evil aluminum walkers. The elderly are a danger because they are past consequence and have permission to behave like dogs. I shrank behind Faron.

Before the angry mob overcame us, a black golf cart puttered up to the curb. In its smoked-glass windows I saw our own sorry reflections. The passenger door swung open, and a man leaned out as far as his seat belt would allow. “Give you a lift?”