Year of the Flood: Novel (4 page)

7

The period that followed was a bad time for Toby. Though she’d hidden the evidence and managed to disappear, there was still a chance the CorpSeCorps might come after her for her father’s debts. She didn’t have any money they could seize, but there were stories about female debtors being farmed out for sex. If she had to make her living on her back, she at least wanted to keep the proceeds.

She’d burned her identity and didn’t have the cash to buy a new one — not even a cheap one, without the DNA infusion or the skin-colour change — so she couldn’t get a legitimate job: those were mostly controlled by the Corporations. But if you sank deep down — down where names disappeared and no histories were true — the CorpSeCorps wouldn’t bother with you.

She rented a tiny room — she had enough money left from her cafeteria savings for that. A room of her own, which might save her few possessions from theft by some dubious roommate. It was on the top floor of a fire-trap commercial building in one of the worst pleebs — Willow Acres was its name, though the locals called it the Sewage Lagoon because a lot of shit ended up in it. She shared the bathroom with six illegal Thai immigrants, who kept very quiet. It was said that the CorpSeCorps had decided that expelling illegals was too expensive, so they’d resorted to the method used by farmers who found a diseased cow in the herd: shoot, shovel, and shut up.

On the floor below her there was an endangered-species luxury couture operation called Slink. They sold Halloween costumes over the counter to fool the animal-righter extremists and cured the skins in the backrooms. The fumes came up through the ventilation system: though Toby tried stuffing pillows into the vent, her cubicle stank of chemicals and rancid fat. Sometimes there was roaring and bleating as well — they killed the animals on the premises because the customers didn’t want goat dressed up as oryx or dyed wolf instead of wolverine. They wanted their bragging rights to be genuine.

The skinned carcasses were sold on to a chain of gourmet restaurants called Rarity. The public dining rooms served steak and lamb and venison and buffalo, certified disease-free so it could be cooked rare — that was what “Rarity” pretended to mean. But in the private banquet rooms — key-club entry, bouncer-enforced — you could eat endangered species. The profits were immense; one bottle of tiger-bone wine alone was worth a neckful of diamonds.

Technically, the endangered trade was illegal — there were high fines for it — but it was very lucrative. People in the neighbourhood knew about it, but they had their own worries, and who could you tell, without risk? There were pockets within pockets, with a CorpSeCorps hand in each one of them.

Toby got a job as a furzooter: cheap day labour, no identity required. The furzooters put on fake-fur animal suits with cartoon heads and hung advertising signs around their necks, and worked the higher-end malls and the boutique retail streets. But it was hot and humid inside the fur-zoots, and the range of vision was limited. In the first week she suffered three attacks by fetishists who knocked her over, twisted the big head around so she was blinded, and rubbed their pelvises against her fur, making strange noises, of which the meows were the most recognizable. It wasn’t rape — no part of her actual body was touched — but it was creepy. Also it was distasteful dressing up as bears and tigers and lions and the other endangered species she could hear being slaughtered on the floor below her. So she stopped doing that.

Then she made a lump of quick cash by selling her hair. The hair market hadn’t yet been decimated by the Mo’Hair sheep breeders — that happened a few years later — so there were still scalpers who’d buy from anyone, no questions asked. She’d had long hair then, and although it was medium brown — not the best colour, they preferred blond — it had fetched a decent sum.

After the money from the hair was used up, she’d sold her eggs on the black market. Young women could get top dollar for donating their eggs to couples who hadn’t been able pay the required bribe or else were so truly unsuitable that no official would sell them a parenthood licence anyway. But she could only pull the egg stunt twice because the second time the extraction needle had been infected. At that time the egg traders were still paying for treatment if anything went wrong; still, it took her a month to recover. When she tried a third time, they told her there were complications, so she could never donate any more eggs, or — incidentally — have any children herself.

Toby hadn’t known until then that she’d wanted any children. She’d had a boyfriend back at Martha Graham who used to talk about marriage and a family — Stan was his name — but Toby had said they were far too young and poor to consider it. She was studying Holistic Healing — Lotions and Potions, the students called it — and Stan was in Problematics and Quadruple-Entry Creative Asset Planning, at which he was doing well. His family wasn’t rich or he wouldn’t have been at a third-rate institution like Martha Graham, but he was ambitious, and fully intended to prosper. On their more tranquil evenings, Toby would rub her flower preparations and herbal extract projects on him, and after that there would be a round of crisp, botanical-remedy-flavoured sex, followed by a shower-off and some popcorn, without salt or fat.

But once her family hit the downdraft, Toby knew she couldn’t afford Stan. She also knew her days at college were numbered. So she’d cut off contact. She didn’t even answer his reproachful text messages, because there was no future in it: he wanted a two-professionals marriage, and she was no longer in the running. Better to do the weeping sooner rather than later, she told herself.

But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.

After getting that news, she’d blown her hoarded egg-donation money on a drug-fuelled holiday from reality. But waking up with various men she’d never seen before had lost its thrill very quickly, especially when she’d found they had a habit of pocketing her spare change. After the fourth or fifth time she knew she had to make a decision: did she want to live or did she want to die? If
die,
there were quicker ways. If
live,
she had to live differently.

Through one of her single — nighters-a man with the Sewage Lagoon equivalent of a kind soul — she found a job at a pleebmob business. Pleebmob businesses didn’t ask for identity and didn’t need references: if you dipped into the till they’d simply cut your fingers off.

Toby’s new job was with a chain called SecretBurgers. The secret of SecretBurgers was that no one knew what sort of animal protein was actually in them: the counter girls wore T-shirts and baseball caps with the slogan
SecretBurgers! Because Everyone Loves a Secret!
The job paid rock-bottom wages, but you got two free SecretBurgers a day. Once she was with the Gardeners and had taken the Vegivows, Toby suppressed the memory of eating these burgers; but as Adam One used to say, hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience. The meat grinders weren’t 100 per cent efficient; you might find a swatch of cat fur in your burger or a fragment of mouse tail. Was there a human fingernail, once?

It was possible. The local pleebmobs paid the CorpSeCorpsMen to turn a blind eye. In return, the CorpSeCorps let the pleebmobs run the low-level kidnappings and assassinations, the skunkweed gro-ops, the crack labs and street-drug retailing, and the plank shops that were their stock-in-trade. They also ran corpse disposals, harvesting organs for transplant, then running the gutted carcasses through the SecretBurgers grinders. So went the worst rumours. During the glory days of Secret-Burgers, there were very few bodies found in vacant lots.

If there was a so-called reality TV exposé, the CorpSeCorps would make a pretense at investigation. Then they’d list the case as Unsolved and discard it. They had an image to uphold among those citizens who still paid lip service to the old ideals: defenders of the peace, enforcers of public security, keeping the streets safe. It was a joke even then, but most people felt the CorpSeCorps were better than total anarchy. Even Toby felt that.

The year before, SecretBurgers had gone too far. The CorpSeCorps had closed them down after one of their high-placed officials went slumming in the Sewage Lagoon and his shoes were discovered on the feet of a SecretBurgers meat-grinder operator. So for a while stray cats breathed easier at night. But a few months later the familiar grilling booths were sizzling again, because who could say no to a business with so few supply-side costs?

8

Toby was pleased to learn she’d got the SecretBurgers job: she could pay the rent, she wouldn’t starve. But then she discovered the catch.

The catch was the manager. His name was Blanco, though behind his back the SecretBurgers girls called him the Bloat. Rebecca Eckler, who worked Toby’s shift, told her about him right away. “Stay off his radar,” she said. “Maybe you’ll be okay — he’s doing that girl Dora, and he mostly does just the one at a time, and you’re kind of scrawny and he likes the curvy butts. But if he tells you to come to the office, look out. He’s real jealous. He’ll take a girl apart.”

“Has he asked you?” said Toby. “To the office?”

“Praise the Lord and spit,” said Rebecca. “I’m too black and ugly for him, plus he just likes the kittens, not the old cats. Maybe you should wrinkle yourself up, sweetheart. Knock out a few of your teeth.”

“You’re not ugly,” said Toby. Rebecca was in fact beautiful in a substantial way, with her brown skin and her red hair and her Egyptian nose.

“I don’t mean ugly like that,” said Rebecca. “Ugly to deal with. Us Jelacks, we’re two kinds of folks you don’t want to mess with. He knows I’d get the Blackened Redfish onto him, and they’re one mean gang. Plus maybe the Wolf Isaiahists. Way too much grief!”

Toby had no such backups. She kept her head down when Blanco was around. She’d heard his story. According to Rebecca, he’d been a bouncer at Scales, the classiest club in the Lagoon. Bouncers had status; they strolled around in black suits and dark glasses, looking suave but tough, and they had women swarming all over them. But Blanco had blown it big time, said Rebecca. He’d ripped up a Scales girl — not a smuggled illegal-alien temporary, they got ripped up all the time, but one of the top talent, a star pole dancer. You couldn’t have a guy like that around — someone who’d mess up the works because he couldn’t keep his cool — so they’d fired him. Lucky for him he had friends in the CorpSeCorps or he’d have ended up minus some body parts in a carbon garboil dumpster. As it was, they’d stuck him in to run the Sewage Lagoon SecretBurgers outlet. It was a big comedown and he was bitter about it — why should he suffer because of some slut? — so he hated the job. But he figured the girls were his perks. He had two pals, ex-bouncers like himself, who acted as his bodyguards, and they got the leavings. Supposing there was anything left.

Blanco was still bouncer-shaped — oblong and hefty — though running to fat: too much beer, said Rebecca. He’d kept the signature bouncer ponytail at the back of his balding head, and he sported a full set of arm tattoos: snakes twining his arms, bracelets of skulls around his wrists, veins and arteries on the backs of his hands so they looked flayed. Around his neck was a tattooed chain, with a lock on it shaped like a red heart, nestled into the chest hair he displayed in the V of his open shirt. According to rumour, that chain went right down his back, twined around an upside-down naked woman whose head was stuck in his ass.

Toby kept her eye on Dora, who’d arrive at the grilling booth to take over when Toby’s shift was done. She’d begun as a plump optimist, but over the weeks she’d been shrinking and sagging; on the white skin of her arms, the bruises bloomed and faded. “She wants to run away,” Rebecca whispered, “but she’s scared. Maybe you should get out of here yourself. He’s been looking at you.”

“I’ll be okay,” said Toby. She didn’t feel okay, she felt scared. But where else could she go? She lived from pay to pay. She had no money.

The next morning, Rebecca signalled Toby over. “Dora’s dead,” she said. “Tried to run. I just heard it. Found her in a vacant lot, neck broke, cut to bits. Saying it was some crazy.”

“But it was him?” said Toby.

“Course it was him,” Rebecca sniffed. “He’s bragging.”

At noon that same day, Blanco ordered Toby to his office. He sent his two pals with the message. They walked on either side of her, just in case she might get flighty ideas. As they went along the street, the heads turned. Toby felt she was on the way to her own execution. Why hadn’t she quit when she had the chance?

The office was through a grimy door tucked behind a carbon garboil dumpster. It was a small room with a desk, filing cabinet, and battered leather couch. Blanco heaved himself out of his swivel chair, grinning.

“Skinny bitch, I’m promoting you,” he said. “Say thank you.”

Toby could only whisper: she felt strangled.

“See this heart?” said Blanco. He pointed to his tattoo. “It means I love you. And now you love me too. Right?”

Toby managed to nod.

“Smart girl,” said Blanco. “Come here. Take off my shirt.”

The tattoo on his back was just as Rebecca had described it: a naked woman, wound in chains, her head invisible. Her long hair waving up like flames.

Blanco put his flayed hands around her neck. “Cross me up, I’ll snap you like a twig,” he said.

9

Ever since her family had died in such sad ways, ever since she herself had disappeared from official view, Toby had tried not to think about her earlier life. She’d covered it in ice, she’d frozen it. Now she longed desperately to be back there in the past — even the bad parts, even the grief — because her present life was torture. She tried to picture her two faraway, long-ago parents, watching over her like guardian spirits, but she saw only mist.

She’d been Blanco’s one-and-only for less than two weeks, but it felt like years. His view was that a woman with an ass as skinny as Toby’s should consider herself in luck if any man wanted to stick his hole-hammer into her. She’d be even luckier if he didn’t sell her to Scales as a temporary, which meant temporarily alive. She should thank her lucky stars. Better, she should thank him: he demanded a thank you after every degrading act. He didn’t want her to feel pleasure, though: only submission.

Nor did he give her any time off from her SecretBurgers duties. He demanded her services during her lunch break — the whole half — hour-which meant she got no lunch.

Day by day she was hungrier and more exhausted. She had her own bruises now, like poor Dora’s. Despair was taking her over: she could see where this was going, and it looked like a dark tunnel. She’d be used up soon.

Worse, Rebecca had gone away, no one knew exactly where. Off with some religious group, said the street rumour. Blanco didn’t care, because Rebecca hadn’t been part of his harem. He filled her SecretBurgers place quickly enough.

Toby was working the morning shift when a strange procession approached along the street. From the signs they were carrying and the singing they were doing, she guessed it was a religious thing, though it wasn’t a sect she’d ever seen before.

A lot of fringe cults worked the Sewage Lagoon, trolling for souls in torment. The Known Fruits and the Petrobaptists and the other rich-people religions kept away, but a few wattled old Salvation Army bands shuffled through, wheezing under the weight of their drums and French horns. Groups of turbaned Pure-Heart Brethren Sufis might twirl past, or black-clad Ancients of Days, or clumps of saffron-robed Hare Krishnas, tinkling and chanting, attracting jeers and rotting vegetation from the bystanders. The Lion Isaiahists and the Wolf Isaiahists both preached on street corners, battling when they met: they were at odds over whether it was the lion or the wolf that would lie down with the lamb once the Peaceable Kingdom had arrived. When there were scuffles, the pleebrat gangs — the brown Tex-Mexes, the pallid Lintheads, the yellow Asian Fusions, the Blackened Redfish — would swarm the fallen, rooting through their draperies for anything valuable, or even just portable.

As the procession drew nearer, Toby had a better view. The leader had a beard and was wearing a caftan that looked as if it had been sewn by elves on hash. Behind him came an assortment of children — various heights, all colours, but all in dark clothing — holding their slates with slogans printed on them:
God’s Gardeners for God’s Garden! Don’t Eat Death! Animals R Us!
They looked like raggedy angels, or else like midget bag people. They’d been the ones doing the singing.
No meat! No meat! No meat!
they were chanting now. She’d heard of this cult: it was said to have a garden somewhere, on a rooftop. A wodge of drying mud, a few draggled marigolds, a mangy row of pathetic beans, broiling in the unforgiving sun.

The procession drew up in front of the SecretBurgers booth. A crowd was gathering, readying itself to jeer. “My Friends,” said the leader, to the crowd at large. His preaching wouldn’t go on for long, thought Toby, because the Sewage Lagooners wouldn’t tolerate it. “My dear Friends. My name is Adam One. I, too, was once a materialistic, atheistic meat-eater. Like you, I thought Man was the measure of all things.”

“Shut the fuck up, ecofreak,” someone yelled. Adam One ignored this. “In fact, dear Friends, I thought measurement was the measure of all things! Yes — I was a scientist. I studied epidemics, I counted diseased and dying animals, and people too, as if they were so many pebbles. I thought that only numbers could give a true description of Reality. But then —”

“Piss off, dickhead!”

“But then, one day, when I was standing right where you are standing, devouring — yes! — devouring a SecretBurger, and revelling in the fat thereof, I saw a great Light. I heard a great Voice. And that Voice said —”

“It said, ‘Get stuffed!’“

“It said, Spare your fellow Creatures! Do not eat anything with a face! Do not kill your own Soul! And then …”

Toby felt the crowd, the way they were poised to surge. They’d stomp this poor fool into the ground, and the little Gardener children with him. “Go away!” she said as loudly as she could.

Adam One gave her a courtly little bow, a kindly smile. “My child,” he said, “do you have any idea what you’re selling? Surely you wouldn’t eat your own relatives.”

“I would,” Toby said, “if I was hungry enough. Please go!”

“I see you’ve had a difficult time, my child,” said Adam One. “You have grown a callous and hard shell. But that hard shell is not your true self. Inside that shell you have a warm and tender heart, and a kind Soul …”

It was true about the shell; she knew she’d hardened. But her shell was her armour: without it she’d be mush.

“This asshole bothering you?” said Blanco. He’d loomed up behind her, as he was in the habit of doing. He put his hand on her waist, and she could see it even without looking at it: the veins, the arteries. Raw flesh.

“It’s okay,” said Toby. “He’s harmless.”

Adam One showed no sign of dislodging himself. He carried on as if no one else had spoken. “You long to do good in this world, my child —”

“I’m not your child,” said Toby. She was more than aware that she wasn’t anyone’s child, not any more.

“We are all one another’s children,” said Adam One with a sad look.

“Scram,” said Blanco. “Before I knot you!”

“Please leave or you’ll get injured,” said Toby as urgently as she could. This man had no fear. She lowered her voice, hissed at him: “Piss off! Now!”

“It is you who will be injured,” said Adam One. “Every day you stand here selling the mutilated flesh of God’s beloved Creatures, it’s injuring you more. Join us, my dear — we are your friends, we have a place for you.”

“Get your fuckin’ paws off my worker, you fuckin’ pervert!” Blanco shouted.

“Am I bothering you, my child?” said Adam One, ignoring him. “I certainly haven’t touched …”

Blanco came out from behind the booth and lunged, but Adam One seemed used to being attacked: he stepped to the side, and Blanco rocketed forward into the group of singing children, knocking some of them down and falling down himself. A teenaged Linthead promptly hit him over the head with an empty bottle — Blanco wasn’t a neighbourhood favourite — and he sank down, bleeding from a gash on his head.

Toby ran around to the front of the grilling booth. Her first impulse was to help him up because she’d be in big trouble later if she didn’t. A pack of Redfish pleebrats was mauling him, and some Asian Fusions were working on his shoes. The crowd moved in around him, but now he was struggling to right himself. Where were his two bodyguards? Nowhere to be seen.

Toby felt curiously exhilarated. Then she kicked Blanco’s head. She did it without even thinking. She felt herself grinning like a dog, she felt her foot connect with his skull: it was like a towel-covered stone. As soon as she’d done it she realized her mistake. How could she have been so dumb?

“Come away, my dear,” said Adam One, taking her by the elbow. “It would be best. You’ve lost your job in any case.”

Blanco’s two thug pals were back now, and were beating off the pleebrats. Although he was groggy, his eyes were open and they were fixed on Toby. He’d felt that kick; worse, he’d been humiliated by her in public. He’d lost face. Any minute now he’d haul himself up and pulverize her. “Bitch!” he croaked. “I’ll slice off your tits!”

Then Toby was surrounded by a crowd of children. Two of them took hold of her hands, and the others formed themselves into an honour guard, front and back. “Hurry, hurry,” they were saying as they pulled and pushed her along the street.

There was a roar from behind: “Get back here, bitch!”

“Quick, this way,” said the tallest boy. With Adam One covering the rear they jogged through the streets of the Sewage Lagoon. It was like a parade: people stared. In addition to her panic Toby felt unreal, and a little dizzy.

Now the crowds were becoming thinner and the smells less pungent; fewer shops were boarded up. “Faster,” said Adam One. They ran up an alleyway and turned several corners in quick succession, and the shouting faded away.

They came to an early modern red-brick factory building. On the front was a sign saying, PACHINKO, over a smaller one that read,
STARDUST PERSONAL MASSAGE, SECOND FLOOR, ALL TASTES INDULGED, NOSE JOBS EXTRA.
The children ran around to the side of the building and began climbing up the fire escape, and Toby followed. She was out of breath, but they scampered up like monkeys. Once they’d reached the rooftop, each of them said, “Welcome to our Garden” and hugged her, and she was enveloped in the sweet, salty odour of unwashed children.

Toby couldn’t remember being hugged by a child. For the children it must have been a formality, like hugging a distant aunt, but for her it was something she couldn’t define: fuzzy, softly intimate. Like being nuzzled by rabbits. But rabbits from Mars. Nevertheless she found it touching: she’d been touched, in an impersonal but kindly way that was not sexual. Considering how she’d been living lately, with Blanco’s the only hands touching her, the strangeness must have come in part from that.

There were adults too, holding out their hands in greeting — the women in dark baggy dresses, the men in coveralls — and here, suddenly, was Rebecca. “You made it, sweetheart,” she said. “I told them! I just knew they’d get you out!”

The Garden wasn’t at all what Toby had expected from hearsay. It wasn’t a baked mudflat strewn with rotting vegetable waste — quite the reverse. She gazed around it in wonder: it was so beautiful, with plants and flowers of many kinds she’d never seen before. There were vivid butterflies; from nearby came the vibration of bees. Each petal and leaf was fully alive, shining with awareness of her. Even the air of the Garden was different.

She found herself crying with relief and gratitude. It was as if a large, benevolent hand had reached down and picked her up, and was holding her safe. Later, she frequently heard Adam One speak of “being flooded with the Light of God’s Creation,” and without knowing it yet that was how she felt.

“I’m so glad you have made this decision, my dear,” said Adam One.

But Toby didn’t think she’d made any decision at all. Something else had made it for her. Despite everything that happened afterwards, this was a moment she never forgot.

That first evening, there was a modest celebration in honour of Toby’s advent. A great fuss was made over the opening of a jar of preserved purple items — those were her first elderberries — and a pot of honey was produced as if it was the Holy Grail.

Adam One made a little speech about providential rescues. The brand plucked from the burning was mentioned, and the one lost sheep — she’d heard of those before, at church — but other, unfamiliar examples of rescue were used as well: the relocated snail, the windfall pear. Then they’d eaten a sort of lentil pancake and a dish called Pilar’s Pickled Mushroom Medley, followed by slices of soybread topped with the purple berries and the honey.

After her initial elation, Toby was feeling stunned and uneasy. How had she got up here, to this unlikely and somehow disturbing location? What was she doing among these friendly though bizarre people, with their wacky religion and — right now — their purple teeth?