GETTAMOVEON

I glanced at my multi-time-zone watch: Networks would not welcome a call now, nor would my travel agent. And I was feeling a little unwelcoming myself. Over the past year there had been—for lack of a better term—a husbandly tone to Spider’s missives, as if he’d got used to having me at his beck and call. I was starting to bridle at it. Okay, so he thought Chillipepper was worth it. But I needed something else. I got onto Volcano-Lovers. In Internet-land, there’s discussion groups for everything, from morris dancing to (coded) incest, and several on volcanology, varying from the highly technical to the fannish. Deep down, those who love volcanoes are simply groupies for the baddest, deadliest, most temperamental things on the planet. They just talk in different languages. I could understand scientific papers, though Spider’s recent publications were eye watering. But for simple gossip, easy info, and, yes, like souls, I turned to Volcano-Lovers.

Alluringly, there was a thread for Chillipepper. I read through it, stopping at a message sent from a Russian server:

LARISSA: MY ALLOWANCE CAME THROUGH! SO CHILLIPEPPER HERE I COME!

That settled it. Chillipepper here I come, too!

I first met Larissa on a grubby little ferry crossing the Bay of Naples. She walked up to where I leaned on the railing, gazing at the waves.

“This should be Roman galley,” she said.

I looked up, registering the small figure, the raven-wing of hair, and her arctic eyes. Identifying the accent took slightly longer. Unlike some Russians I’d met, including a volcanologist I termed Ivan the Incomprehensible, she spoke clear, if slightly MTV English. But I blinked: How could she know what I was thinking?

As if registering that thought, too, she said: “If Bet Murray, famous volcano photographer, is crossing Bay of Naples from Cape Miseno to Vesuvius, then she’s being pilgrim, on trail of first volcano-lover.”

Russian has no articles, so those learning English as their second language have problems with a or the.

“You’re right, I am following the sea trail of Pliny the Elder,” I said. Pliny, commander of the Roman navy, had on a fine August day in AD 79 seen what would later be called a Plinian eruption column arising from Vesuvius. And set off across twenty sea miles for a closer look.

She had a book under her arm, and though I couldn’t read the Cyrillic on its cover, I could guess it was a translation from the Latin of Pliny the Younger, the commander’s nephew. He provided the eyewitness account, since Uncle Pliny did not survive his Powdermonkey curiosity.

“You know who I am, but you are…”

“Larissa.”

“You’re from Volcano-Lovers.”

“Also PhD student. My diss is on Bezymianny.”

Larissa might look childlike, but she had picked a volcano that even the most macho of volcanologists found scary. In 1956 Bezymianny blew its top off, creating a crater over a mile wide, with a Plinian eruption column reaching twenty-one miles skywards. It would have been lethal but for Bezymianny being in relatively uninhabited Kamchatka.

“Bezymianny? Bozhe moy! My god!” I said, in my minimal Russian. She smiled, a faux-pas smile, but not unkind.

“My pronunciation?”

“No. But Russians say Bozhe moy for ordinary things like cabbages and people. Not volcano.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Nichevo. That means, no matter.”

We fell silent, watching the expanse of water, the cone of sleeping, silent Vesuvius, as if seeing two thousand years ago. I thought of how Pliny the Younger had stayed behind but nearly got killed anyway. He saw a terrifying black cloud, torn as if by giant lightning, with massing flames at its centre. It sank down from the volcano, onto the sea, and rolled the twenty miles across the bay. Darkness came with it, like a light going out in a closed room. Ash began to fall on young Pliny, a teenager, and his mother. They thought the world was ending.

Yet Pliny had survived to provide the first existing account of pyroclastic flows—from the Greek

“cracked fire,” the lethal, fast-moving clouds of gas and ash that are the real volcanic killers. You can outrun a lava flow, but not something moving at three hundred miles an hour, at its worst hot enough to BBQ you or suffocate you with hot ash.

“Larissa, what do Russians call pyroclastic flows?”

She looked wry. “Loan word. Piroklastichesky potok. Why not borrow nuées ardentes?”

It was French, glowing clouds—ardent clouds, too, if we were punning.

“It sounds better, yes.”

“I want to see one!” From her face, an ardent wish.

“I might have wanted to be the first to film them, but Maurice and Katia Krafft”—alias the volcanic Cousteaus—“got there first.”

“And died for it.”

“At eight hundred forty degrees Fahrenheit, their clothes and hair alight, instant human carbon.”

Even for a pair of Powdermonkeys, it was sobering. I looked over the sea at modern Naples, the sprawling houses, and thought of teenage Pliny, watching the nuée ardente rushing towards him like a hellish bat, fire on its wings. He was lucky: In the twenty miles across the bay much of its force, heat, and hydrogen sulphide were dissipated. Otherwise he would not have survived to tell his tale.

Still in Vesuvius mode, we visited Pompeii the next day. I’d been before, but Larissa never had, and she was duly professional when regarding the famous casts of the volcano’s victims, the father and son holding hands, or the leashed dog, twisted in agony. We heartlessly speculated about temperature, velocity, and ash distribution. Only the sight of a doll’s head, found with the bones of an eight-year-old girl, clutched for comfort in a horrific death, gave Larissa teary pause. “So sad!”

Then we separated. I had a meeting with an Italian production company keen to use my footage in a projected remake of The Last Days of Pompeii. They were paying, so I wasn’t going to tell them what the Lord of the Rings special-effects guys had done to simulate a lava flow from Mount Doom: CGI graphics on top of K-Y jelly.

Larissa had to go to a wedding: “My cousin. They hired Versailles for reception. Why didn’t they hire somewhere with volcano!”

In the new Russia, nobody asks where people get their money. At the least, Larissa’s family were oligarchs; at the worst, mafia. I got the impression they were so relieved at an heiress not behaving like Paris Hilton, they would subsidize an expensive volcanological habit. It was probably cheaper than cocaine, anyway.

I continued to the next port of call, some serious talks with National Geographic. Life continued as usual: dangerous, solitary, and rather too weird for friends, unless they happened to be fellow obsessives. Now Larissa was a frequent guest in my in-tray: a photo here (the Versailles wedding looked like Fellini gone Slavic), a comment or professional query there. I figured at first she was networking, then that life had so blessed her that she simply gambolled through it like a friendly puppy. Finally I realised that I liked her, and that unless she was a really good actress, it was reciprocated. I could put up with Joe Boy Barrett for Larissa’s sake.

What was it about Chillipepper? Spider and his department had compiled a huge form guide to the world’s and even some extraterrestrial volcanoes. I would be sent an extract, everything I needed to know this time. But on my preliminary e-research, it wouldn’t seem that Chillipepper rated significantly in the volcano stakes. It wasn’t snow-peaked, nor did it have glaciers draping from its slopes like bridal trains (and—if melted by eruptions—causing torrential, lethal floods). It didn’t have the stately cone of Fuji, nor fountains of picturesque, fiery lava. Sure, it was an active stratovolcano, which means explosive, but not very, on the available evidence. It didn’t have a body count, not like Vesuvius nor Krakatau (thirty-six thousand in 1883).

That was off-putting, as was the fact that the Chillipepper region was currently in a state of—if not active—then grumbling civil war. For twenty years government forces and rebels had been at odds: holdups, murders, even massacres. The US State Department did not recommend the area for tourists, to put it mildly. There were only two entry points, a minor airport with an indifferent safety record, and a highway frequented by both guerrillas and the local bandidos. My travel agent would freak, and I didn’t know how I was going to pitch such a relatively boring volcano at the powers-that-pay. I could always write the conference off as a business expense…

But, but, I thought, I’m the Powdermonkey who brings home the footage. I could simply trade on my reputation. I reached for my address book. Then my in-tray beeped as it received a huge infodump from Spider. The accompanying message read: WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

What indeed? What do you know, my master?

It took some time to get down to Chillipepper. I only got the fare together after promising Cody Veitch some footage of the chillis for use in a lifestyle gourmet program. As it was, I missed most of the first day of the conference after further delays caused by fog in transit. It was dark by the time the elderly prop plane passed the volcano, and I perceived Chillipepper only as blackness between the lights of the city and the stars. And when I got to the site of the conference, I found a major traffic headache.

“Festival time,” said the taxi driver. His day job was teaching English, he said, which spared him my dog-Spanish.

Outside, a gaggle of girls, wearing scanty frills in various shades of red, yellow, and orange and a lot of glitter, banged on the rear window.

“It’s okay,” said the driver. “They don’t mean robbery, they just want to give the gringa a present.”

I wound down the window and received a necklace of fresh chillis, pointed as shark teeth. Dependent from it was a doll made of one large chilli, wearing a peasant scarf, shawl, and frilly skirts roughly fashioned from corn husks.

“Chilli harvest festival?”

“And Don Nestor’s day. Our Saint Nestor, if he makes it past the gringos in the Vatican.”

He sounded doubtful.

I was intrigued. “Isn’t sainthood automatic since the pope abolished the devil’s advocate? All you need is a miracle.”

Outside, a conga line of costumed animals—pumas, parrots, jaguars—passed gyrating wildly to the amplified beat of drums, electric guitar, and some screeching local variant on the fife.

“We’ve had our miracle: No eruptions since eighteen seventy-two.”

I’d read Spider’s form guide to Chillipepper, so I knew the driver was slightly exaggerating. There’d been no major eruptions, but plenty of tremors, rockfalls, and clouds of ash.

“And how did Don Nestor achieve that?” Volcanology wasn’t a science in the 1870s; otherwise some rival researcher would probably have killed Don Nestor for getting there first.

“He sprinkled holy water on the volcano.”

Remind me to suggest that to the Shinto priests near Unzen, I thought, the Japanese volcano where the Kraffts and forty others died. But the driver continued:

“That’s what they say in the church. But outside the church, they say different. You see, Don Nestor wasn’t just a Catholic priest. That’s Rome’s problem.”

A gap in the traffic appeared, and as the driver accelerated to fill it before someone else did I glimpsed a procession, priests in robes, banners, huge crosses. The Catholic Church might be the religious supremo in South America, but underneath the veneer of Christianity are all sorts of wild and woolly variants, with pre-Columbian elements, or incorporating deities brought from Africa, given a quick scrub and a name change, just like their worshippers, the slaves. Santeria, Candomblé, Vodoun; it was interfaith in practical, colourful action.

“What’s the story they tell outside the church?”

“Don Nestor, he hiked up his skirts and climbed the volcano. And when he got to the top and looked into the crater he saw fire: a god, woken from a long sleep, hundreds of years, and mad as hell to find that in the meantime all his temples had been razed. Now, Don Nestor, he grew up here, he knew how things worked. He sat on the crater rim, his feet dangling, and explained. Like how people might go to church on Sunday, but they’d hedge their bets, show respect to what was here first. When they planted crops, they’d turn towards the mountain, and say please silently, and when they harvested, they’d show thanks. But to the gringo priests they’d pretend that the dollies made outta chillis and corn husks were kid stuff. Nobody would say why the dolls get thrown into the harvest bonfire.”

“Displaced sacrifice,” I said.

“Whatever you call it. Don Nestor, he cut a deal. You’re feeling a bit neglected, hey? How about we throw a volcano party each year when the chillis get harvested? I’ll host it, to keep the monsignor happy, but everyone will know who’s really being honoured.”

Outside firecrackers popped, the partygoers broke into raucous song.

“And in return you lay off the fire from above, for your people, who show you the proper respect.”

“And what about other people?”

He grunted, gunned the motor, which backfired in response.

“You’ll have to cut your own deals.”

I hedge my bets, too. Once I’d dumped my baggage at the hotel, I took an everyday, nonvolcanological camera and went out to the street party again. If nothing happened with the volcano, I had just the footage to chilli-spice up Veitch’s cooking program, or even a travel show. It was two AM by the time I hit my pillow, totally wrecked. I made a very late entry to breakfast, when most of the conference attendees were heading to the day’s papers. Still, I managed a few greetings and had pressed into my hand the latest issue of a volcanological journal. I flicked through it, while breakfasting, then became riveted by the lead article.

“It’s Professor Barrett’s keynote address from yesterday, mostly,” said a lugubrious voice. I looked up to behold Zapata, to a T, complete with drooping mustaches. The name tag said: GONZALES. He was director of the Observatorio Volcanológico, a local boy who had been studying the volcano most of his life. The conference had been his idea—he headed the organising committee. Then Joe Boy had decided to take it over. Which meant Joe Boy got the glory, Gonzales got a heap of extra work. We swapped pleasantries, how nice the conference could accommodate me at such short notice, even without space on the program to show my films, yes, such a pity, some other time, maybe. But his mind was not on chat, from the way his gaze kept returning to the article, which was practically burning a hole in the tablecloth beside my orange juice.

“It’s fighting words,” I said. The usual stuff, but positively incendiary, this time. He frowned. “He and Professor Sigurrson, pistols at dawn…”

“On top of some volcano.”

An almost-smile, interrupted by several flunkies dashing in with a computer printout. Whatever it was, they didn’t want me to know, for they hurriedly withdrew. I finished my breakfast, studied the conference program. Tomorrow was excursion day, including a field trip to the volcano; today was speakers and the conference dinner. Currently Ivan the Incomprehensible was speaking on the chemistry of cooling magma. About as interesting as watching…magma cool, I decided. I went back to my room, checked Spider’s Chillipepper file against last night’s information. Yes, there had been an eruption in 1872, smallish in volcanological terms, but which had nonetheless sent a nuée ardente shooting down the mountainside for several kilometres. No casualties, but clearly enough for Don Nestor to gird his loins and ascend the volcano.

My SMS chimed, again Spider:

LPE.

Oh! I thought, suddenly realising what the huddle had been over the printout. Had I looked over Gonzales’s shoulder, I would have seen an image like a fringed caterpillar, a seismic signal. They were called Long Period Events, and measured the vibrations caused by superheated steam within an otherwise peaceful volcano. Spider had published about them lately, articles studded with ornate equations. If he was right, then Chillipepper was suddenly going to get much more interesting. I eyed the doll, now hanging from my mirror, then threw the window curtains open. Revealed was my quarry, a brooding bulk, dominating the landscape as volcanoes inimitably do. I sat back on the bed, gazing at it. A familiar adrenaline surge began to build in me, which—if I intellectualize it—is the closest I get to sex.

Chillipepper here I come!

Downstairs, it was morning teatime. I went looking for Larissa but found her conversing with Joe Boy.

“Bet! Goodtaseeya!” He was a man who went in for bear hugs, unfortunately. As I disengaged, I noticed that his beard had whitened and his big mitts were liver-spotted. “Bet, loved your work on Redoubt”—an Alaskan volcano overlooking a major oil field, which had meant lots of lovely oil money.

“Any more on Danger Man?”

Larissa was standing to one side, just looking at me and smiling. Somehow I had to get Joe Boy to piss off. So I opened my mouth and said the very thing to piss him completely.

“Well, no, I got an approach from a European network for a documentary on Professor Sigurrson. The Stephen Hawking factor, you know.”

For a moment I thought he was going to explode.

“Sigurrson! When he’s trying his best to ruin this conference!”

He stormed off towards a group of what, to judge from the concerned, adoring glances, were his grad students.

“Ruin?” I said to Larissa.

“Professor Sigurrson sent out—what do Americans call it on police shows? An APB. Watch out for perp, one stratovolcano, ten thousand feet tall, armed with explosives and dangerous.”

I glanced around, looking for Gonzales, who was bailed up in a corner, pulling at his mustaches and talking glumly into his mobile.

“I was behind him in coffee queue, US Geological Survey rang. Next city council.”

An LPE, if I’d followed Spider’s math correctly, was no joke. Neither was the possibility of having to evacuate a city. In the process a major volcanological conference would be disrupted, in which, I would bet, knowing how Joe Boy operated, substantial US funds had been sunk, with the lure of more in the future. If Gonzales wanted up-to-date instruments for his Observatorio Volcanológico, something no Third World government could easily afford, he couldn’t annoy Joe Boy. And Joe Boy, I thought, recalling the article, had no time for LPEs, preferring magmatic quakes—vibrations you could feel underneath your boots, goddammit, a real man’s seismic shock.

“Field trip’s off?” she queried.

“Over Joe Boy’s dead body.” What, miss an opportunity to show off?

“But Gonzales has say, surely?”

“Not a very loud say. He’ll mumble something like: On your own head be it.”

She shrugged. “We had paper on Chillipepper yesterday, it’s not Bezymianny. I’m going on field trip.”

“And I am, too, Larissa.”

In the morning, at six AM, packing for the mountain, I sent an SMS to Spider to tell him what I was doing. It was a message that brooked no opposition, he’d know that.

A reply came: REMEMBER WHEN I ASKED YOU WHAT YOU WANTED?

I remembered, from last year, in that curious remote intimacy we’d reached, when I’d asked him if he envied me. What I wanted…I’d thought of the Kraffts, then of volcanologists David Johnston and Harry Glicken riding a helicopter to Mount St. Helens the day before it erupted. They were all dead now, from nuée ardentes: Johnston the day afterwards, at St. Helens, Glicken at Unzen with the Kraffts. I had told Spider then: I want to take the ultimate volcano photographs, no matter what. I repeated that now, signed off. Dawn was rising over Chillipepper; the mountain—and the field trip—awaited me. Downstairs, in the lobby, I found a milling crowd of scientists, and Gonzales, shouting to be heard:

“I said, we have a new field-trip option, courtesy of the Provincial Agricultural Co-operative: tasting tour of chilli farms and wineries.”

Clever, I thought. If there was one thing to compete in the macho stakes with volcanoes, it was chillis. I wandered out of the hotel, to find a waiting line of jeeps, and warmed up with a brief recap of my nicotine habit. As I blew smoke rings—top that, volcanoes!—I watched Joe Boy commandeer the newest and biggest jeep. A group formed around him: the co-and junior authors of his incendiary paper, his grad students, Ivan the Incomprehensible and Boris, his twin and much more understandable brother, me and Larissa.

“Don’t we get a guide?” I said.

“I’ve been up the mountain before,” Joe Boy almost snarled, plainly not forgiving me from yesterday. Russians sit down quietly just before a journey, I knew that from Mir. I check my backpack.

“What’s that?” Larissa asked. We’d been drinking chilli-flavoured vodka last night, which had left her apparently untouched, now she was lurid in magenta and green Gore-Tex.

“The corn dolly? Local colour, for my film.”

She shook her head, pointed at the air canisters. “You’re not diving.”

“If I’m caught in a nuée ardente, then I don’t want to die with a lungful of scalding ash. That is, if I’m not totally crisped first.”

She stared at me, the steel-capped boots, the photographer’s multi-pocketed vest and my backpack over thermo-safety overalls, with a hard hat dangling on its string from my neck, like an old-fashioned bonnet. Nobody else on the field trip was dressed so protectively.

From the other side of the jeep, Joe Boy distinctly said: “Old woman.”

Without looking at him, I replied: “The networks won’t insure me otherwise.”

Our driver arrived. We piled in and set out through the sprawling city, passing through slums, then outlying farms, and, as we ascended the foothills, thick fog.

Chillipepper consists of two parts, like a layered pudding. One, the bulk of the volcano, is an ancient caldera, broken in parts like battlements; the second is within it, a much smaller and recent cone. We drove up pitted and winding roads, stopping at a small building just below the rim of the caldera, no more than a hut for mobile phone transmitters and geological instruments.

The driver got out a comic and a packed lunch, settling in for a long stay. There was no way to go but down, into the crater via a guideline of posts, connected with rope. Nothing could be seen except mist. I gazed into it, trying to locate the cone and its own personal fog. The caldera looked like San Francisco on a bad day, hardly something to get the adrenaline flowing. While I brooded, Larissa bummed a cigarette from me. And as I watched her head in its beanie bend over the flame, something really strange happened: I felt the chemical surge I should have got from Chillipepper. When I stared into the volcano again, it dissipated. Shit! What was wrong?

Barely able to see beyond an arm’s length, we formed a descending crocodile down into the crater. At the bottom, the combination of the rising sun and a stiff breeze wrought a miracle: The fog cleared, blown through the battlements, and we could see. The caldera looked, as usual this close to a volcano, like the surface of the moon, but smelly. The cone rose in the centre, the colour of an ash heap, and to my jaded eyes not much bigger. An unimpressive dribble of steam rose from it.

That mattered not; we had work to do. I got out my best camera, now I had something to film. All around the scientists scattered, the equipment of their various arcane specialities in hand: geochemistry, seismology, petrology. But for the babble in various languages, the soft phonemes of Russian, Joe Boy’s Texan drawl, it was completely silent. My boots crunched new-laid-down rock, kicked up soft ash. I still hadn’t got the expected surge—well, not from the volcano—and that bothered me. It was messing with my head, as were the remnants of the vodka, and I knew my personal edge was missing. I was like a lens that couldn’t focus: nothing seemed clear, or right.

Shots of the caldera soon palled, and that left only the cone. It got bigger as I neared and started to climb, not as steep as the ancient walls around us, but still not for the unfit. Halfway up I passed a grad student, examining rocks through a lens, and a little later the co-authors, collecting gas from a steaming fissure. One yelled as I passed: “A hundred ninety-five degrees C!” At the top I paused, not at the sight from the summit, of the surrounding landscape, Chillipepper’s domain, but into the crater. It was slightly domed in the centre, a clot of cooled, sealed lava, with who knew what beneath. Nonetheless Joe Boy and Larissa were racing across its surface, like a pair of science-crazed kids. My mobile beeped. “Oh shut up, Spider!” I muttered. On the other side of the crater, the twins glared at me. I reached into the pack, switched the mobile off, and as I did touched vegetable matter: the doll. Without thinking consciously, I pulled it out and tossed it into the crater. The doll came to rest against a rock, bizarrely upright in its skirts, as if stopped for a rest. Larissa looked up, laughed, then went back to what she was doing. Now I felt the surge, and I filmed the doll, filmed her and Joe Boy’s antics. What happened next? There are gaps in my mental records, where the film is my only witness. The earth shook, I knew that, and I froze as beneath me, with a deafening roar, the floor of the crater split up and open in a cascade of fire. The view skews up, catching a glimpse of the twins, now cowering. Then a handheld blur, of rocks beneath my running feet, some grey, some eggs new-laid, red-hot, and shot from the volcano. The angle careers as I dodge more rocks, boulder-size and spat out with incredible force. I must be off the cone now, and running across the caldera floor, the most dangerous place to meet a nuée ardente. Then I fall, and the camera view tilts upwards wildly, recording Chillipepper’s latest Plinian column as it reaches for the skies. The film goes blank.

I woke up in an air ambulance chartered by CNN that was flying me to the best medical treatment network money could buy. I had a broken ankle, burns from sulphuric acid and red-hot rock, also a compound fracture of the skull, from a projectile that would have mashed me without the hard hat. As I lay looking up at the nurse, a seasoned emergency evacuations professional, she cooed: “Your camera’s okay, you were protecting it beneath your body.”

And thus the footage was saved, much more valuable than any photographer. I opened my mouth, found it dry and cracked. “And everybody else?”

“They’re all fine.”

“Liar,” I said, a good line on which to pass out. I knew nobody could have escaped from the crater, and the rock barrage would have felled an army. Later I learned the rescue workers found most of the others in pieces, burned and bloodied traces. Joe Boy’s Texas belt buckle somehow got spat out recognizable, if twisted and half melted. Of Larissa there was no sign, as if she had been vapourized. When I next woke, I wept: survivor guilt, the worst loneliness.

I spent a long time in hospital, which I largely remember in short film clips. Cody Veitch, walking in with a big grin and a humongous basket of hothouse orchids. Cut to a trayful of blackened objects in front of me, all of which I had carried up the mountain. The backpack and vest had smouldered; only the thermal overalls stayed largely intact. I picked up my mobile, its case singed, but miraculously still working. Then I turned it so that the network team, the bland interviewer and her cameras, could read an SMS on the screen, from Spider:

BET! GET OFF CHILLIPEPPER! NOW! The date was two minutes before the eruption, when nobody standing on the cone had any indication, from gas emissions or perceptible tremors, of the fiery force about to surface. But Spider knew, the formula or whatever it was deadly accurate. His Nobel was assured.

Cut again, to an Orthodox priest, bearded, yet with a strong resemblance to Larissa. I asked him for a prayer, in Russian, for his sake as much as mine. He obliged, the unknown words flowing over me like an aural balm.

Cut, to more family, this time my parents, prepared to take me home and nurse me. As they said: “We’ve been expecting far worse…”

Cut one last time, to the network team again, filming me as I watched my Chillipepper footage on a wide-screen console. This was their climax, a pound of flesh or vicarious emotion. The only way I could view it was at a technical remove, ignoring the hype: “The ultimate volcano footage, from someone totally on the spot!” Thus detached, I watched, thinking I’d filmed bigger and better volcanic explosions, though at a greater distance. The eruption of Chillipepper wouldn’t have killed anyone, if people hadn’t been fool enough to be actually standing on the damn thing as it blew.

I dabbed my eyes discreetly for the team, the expected network emoticon. When they were safely gone, I cried rivulets, for the deaths I had just seen, even Joe Boy’s. I’d wished him harm, but not that much—he was simply an aging insecure man, protecting his scientific glory. At least he went the way he wanted to, pure Powdermonkey. I guessed all of them had. But I didn’t want to, not anymore. My Powdermonkey days were gone, the surge, the thrill lost with Larissa on the volcano. So was my career, I guessed. Could I ever look through a lens again, after filming the fiery death of someone I had only just begun to realise I loved?

The only thing to do was…do things. First was an e-mail to Spider. I sent him two words, terse as our relationship had always been: I RESIGN. No reply was needed, but I got it anyway: I UNDERSTAND. Next I summoned Cody Veitch and resigned in person.

“Call me when you need a book agent,” he said.

Cody might be a network asshole, but he reads people well. Words weren’t entirely a new tool for me: I’d always written to the family, even if it was all about volcanoes. I’d also loved posting to Volcano-Lovers. Could I make something of a new medium, get it to say what I wanted?

One day, months later, I was sitting in the family backyard, the new spring filling the trees with blossom. I had the laptop on my knee, playing Scrabble, that’s how boring and invalid I’d become. Suddenly I closed the game and started typing frantically.

There are ways to tell a story. Something had happened on Chillipepper to make me the only survivor, but there was no easy way to express it.

A dream? Too pat.

Magical realism? Don Nestor and the volcano god arguing my fate? Too arty. Crime? There was more to it than that. Horror? Beyond the wildest imaginings. A ghost story? Maybe. What was the best form for my truth?

I let my fingers do the typing or talking, and left it at that. If my film and my writing are at variance, then consider Don Nestor and the volcano, the tales told inside and outside the church. Both have equal validity.

I’m back at the volcano, amid the roar and the fury, running down the slope for my life, and I hear someone coming behind me, a girl’s voice, swearing in Russian, of which I understand two vital words:

“Piroklastichesky potok!”

I know the recommended procedure, find a hollow, don gas mask, and cover myself. A hideous wait would follow as the nuée ardente passed over me on its fiery journey down the mountain. Should I be really lucky, it might not be hot enough to char the flesh off my bones. I eyeball the craterscape frantically, seeking sanctuary. Next moment I trip, go sprawling into…just the ticket. I place the camera underneath me, heap ash over my steel-capped but possibly not fireproof boots, lie down with the backpack over my head.

“Larissa! I’ve only got the one gas mask, you’d better have it.”

“Nichevo. I’ll lie on top, protect you.”

And although she is so small, she stretches my body length and more over me, her skirts and shawl like a thick, rustling blanket. She wraps both arms around me, clasping them beneath my chest. The lappets of her long headscarf trail down into the ash, sealing me off from what is coming.

“Here it is!” she says. Hot darkness flows over us, and all I can hear is the crackle of the corn husks all around, as they burst into flame.

Gather

Christopher Rowe

Christopher Rowe lives in Lexington, Kentucky. He attended both the Clarion West and the Sycamore Hill writing workshops. With his wife, writer Gwenda Bond, he runs a small press, The Fortress of Words, which produces the critically acclaimed magazine Say…

His story “The Voluntary State” was a Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon award finalist. The best of his early short fiction was collected in a chapbook, Bittersweet Creek. Rowe has been writing a series of stories that portray a very weird, reconfigured Kentucky.

“Gather” is one of them.

At the very end of autumn, Gather had thirty-four coins to spend. Commerce—that’s the kind of buying things that used coins instead of goods—was not an opportunity that arose in the north town very often. He planned to spend all thirty-four.

There was a lot to regret about that. All of Gather’s coins were beautiful. They had curling, unknowable writing on one side and little pictures of God on the other. Gather loved to study the coins. He was intimately aware of all their differences and similarities, and aware, too, that with winter coming he’d have few chances to get more.

Besides his work assignments, his sisters would usually each give him a coin for good-bye and remembrance when it was their turn to go down the river to wife for the bad batch men. He’d found one copper coin in a wagon track, where the ground had split from thawing and refreezing in the inconstant autumn temperatures. It showed God’s eyes, all steaming. He’d won a rough gray coin at a fair, when he’d rowed a skiff faster than a sweepsman off a southern barge.

Another obstacle to transactions was the way the act of spending could complicate itself so hypnotically. Offer the merchant a coin for those pepper seeds spilling out of twists of dead, unflickering paper, then put the coin to heart, to lips. Do it again and rock forward and backward and then forward and then backward and put the coin to forehead, to heart, to lips, and on like that, and on until the merchant loses patience and raps one hand against the table and shakes the seeds with the other, arrhythmic. All wrong.

“Liveborn fool,” the merchant said. “A grown man, getting lost in counting games! Buy if you’re buying; we’re closing this fair down.”

Gather snapped to, because these barges were the last before winter, and it would be long years to huddle with just the cold comfort of money before spring.

The merchant spoke again. “Ice chokes the river, boy, and if it freezes over it’ll be you pushing our barges, skate-like, you and all these holy men down from their chapterhouse.” The southerners were bad batch men, mostly, with useless legs bundled up under them if they were merchants or captains, legs self-amputated if they were hard men who needed speed, like the sweeps handlers. Gather had liked rowing the skiff so quickly, and would have asked about a job on the barge, but he had to stay up the river with the preachers and his sisters. Only bad batch men can be southerners. That was from a bible. So he worked on the docks or on the fishing boats for now, and would work chopping holes in the ice when the river was frozen. Gather was stout and steady. He considered whether to buy the twists, which would yield long red wreaths of hothouse peppers, if he was careful. He considered his thirty-four coins.

“You can plant a coin,” one of his sisters had said when he’d accumulated two dozen of the coins. “You can plant them, but they won’t grow into anything useful out here.”

But that wasn’t quite true, it wasn’t exactly the truth, and Gather required things to be very exact indeed. Precision was his watchword and his sacrament.

In the end, he bought four twists of seeds from the southern merchant. He bought an old blanket that the seller claimed had been woven by a machine. He bought forty candles, forty pounds of sugar, and forty minutes’ worth of a storyteller’s time.

Forty minutes was long enough for the national anthem, the long night in the garden at Gethsemane, and the history of the first people to come down onto Virginia, who were called Pilgrims and who had starved to death before they were born again for God.

Counting coins again.

The twists and the blanket and the candles and the sugar and the time and that’s down to eleven left for imperishable food. Eleven coins on smoked fish like muskie, or eleven coins on ground grains like spelt, or eleven coins on dried pulses like beans.

Peas and lentils all winter, then.

Weeks later, when the river was frozen hard enough for foot traffic, some of the children came to Gather and asked him to pull their sledge across to the far side. This was forbidden, but their leader, a little girl with green eyes, was PK—a preacher’s kid—which warranted a lot of deference. But more than that she said, “One, two, three, four, Gather walks across the floor…” and on like that—a very clever little girl, very good at rhymes and rhythms. So Gather bundled up in his heaviest coat and his machine blanket and trudged out onto the ice with a towrope slung over his shoulder. The PK girl had him skirt north of the island where the watchtower stood. (“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, six teen, further up so we are not seen.”) There were no preachers manning the tower top that Gather could see, which was a curiosity. Then he heard hammering and work-chanting farther down the river and remembered that today was the first day the preachers would be pushing the big wagons across to the far side to cut up big blocks of frozen soil—the good kind of soil that things would grow in. Many work points, but only for preachers, who had special dispensation from God and specific instructions on where to gather the soil from their bibles.

The PK snapped her fingers in time with her counting to get Gather moving again, and he pulled them on up and across. Her voice faltered with her courage, a dozen yards shy of the eastern shore. The bank was choked with evergreens right down to the ice, towering pines that cut off any view of what lay farther back. Which was just as well, because God lived on the far bank and to go to the house of God was forbidden. That was from a bible, too.

“S’ko back, y’all.” One of the other children finally spoke. Earlier, the PK had hushed the girls whenever they started to speak, which Gather had appreciated because it was rare for a pair and nearly impossible for a group to keep the rhythm.

Gather was pretty sure the speaker was a niece of his, or possibly a very young aunt, some kin anyhow from the tangled net of cousins and sisters who stayed up the river for the preachers. She said,

“S’kome.”

The option of returning to town lay out there on the ice, but the PK was clearly not convinced. She stood, considering, and nobody moved to turn the sledge around.

A thick shelf of snow slid off the lowest hanging branch of a nearby tree. It made a noise like shhhh-choom. None of the children jumped or screamed or carried on, but Gather said, “Oh, Lord,”

because he thought that maybe God was coming down the bank.

The PK girl said, “Home home home home.”

For Gather, home was his apartment in the carriage house behind the post office. Once he and the children were back on the side of the river where people lived, Gather walked down Dock Street with the river to his left.

He turned in to the alley between the post office and the courthouse—he’d shoveled the brickway clear the day before—and crossed the courtyard to his door.

Gather’s apartment was on the ground floor of the carriage house, so he didn’t have to worry about navigating the treacherous wooden staircase tacked to the fieldstones of the exterior wall. The stairs were thick with ice and snow, because Miss Charlie, who lived upstairs, didn’t use them. Instead, she clambered up and down along the rope contrivances she engineered for bad batch men wealthy enough to afford her work. One was always hung through the trapdoor in the ceiling of Gather’s kitchen. Before he opened his front door, Gather pulled a canvas tarp back from where it covered his rick. He took an armful of split yellow wood, well seasoned, for the kitchen stove. Yellow was native Virginia wood, not like the Pilgrim pines on the bank. Not good for making useful soil, but good enough for burning.

Inside, Gather found Miss Charlie working at his kitchen table. She was tipping the pepper seeds out of one of his twists and into a clay jar. Gather saw that she’d already emptied the other three—the dead papers were spread across the tabletop.

“You told me, Gather, I remember your very words, you said, ‘I don’t like those hot old things.’” Miss Charlie was suspended amongst pulleys and weights, testing a new configuration. She was wrapped up in one of the soft hides people made from deerskins sometimes. Getting them soft was hard—Gather’d had a job doing that for a while but he hadn’t been good enough at it.

“I can grow ’em in the house, though, Miss Charlie,” he said, then dumped the wood into the metal box beside the stove. “And if you share your dried apricots, I can make the spicy jelly the preachers like.”

“Strong thinking, Gather,” said Miss Charlie. “Stronger than you were doing this morning when you let that pack of children lead you off into trouble.” Gather started to say that they hadn’t gotten into trouble but he remembered a lesson: Not getting into trouble isn’t the same as not getting caught. Miss Charlie untwisted the paper she held and smoothed it flat next to the others with her skinny, clever fingers. Miss Charlie was a scientist. Everything about her was skinny and clever. She arranged the four papers into a pretty, even line. They were rectangular, but not the same rectangular as the oiled wood top of Gather’s kitchen table. The ratios of the different rectangles were plenty enough different, which was a good thing. If they’d been close-but-not-quite, it would have been upsetting. Miss Charlie leaned over each of the papers in turn and examined them through her glass. Gather could see that there were letters on the papers.

“Is that writing the same as on the”—Gather thought of the word—“exempla you’ve got upstairs in your kitchen?” Gather glanced up at the open trapdoor. Miss Charlie looked up at him but forgot to take the glass away from her face, so her eyes were huge—one green, one brown.

“My la bor atory,” she reminded him. “I’m a scientist, we don’t have kitchens. The ones I have upstairs have a little life in them. This writing here is stuck on dead paper.”

Gather was afraid that she might lecture him for a while then, which she sometimes did, but she was too distracted by her work. Her work, Gather remembered, was always the question at hand. The question at hand meant something Gather didn’t know about.

“And anyway,” said Miss Charlie, “I don’t think these letters written here are like the letters on my papers upstairs, or on coins. They’re more like the letters on the mayor’s stick, or in a bible. Not quite, but that’s closer.” Gather had seen the mayor’s stick before—he’d felt it before, the bad way, across his backside—but he’d never seen the inside of a bible, as only preachers were allowed to uncover their tops. Once one of his sisters had pointed out that if the preacher reading from it wore a glass, you could see the writing in the green glow reflecting off his face.

“The paper—the medium”—and she looked at him and raised her eyebrows the way she did when she used a word she wanted him to learn—“the paper is about the same as what I’ve seen before, though.”

Miss Charlie chewed on her thumbnail for a second, then said, “Let’s do an experiment.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Gather. “Oh, Lord.”

“Hush,” said Miss Charlie. “It’ll be fine. I’ll go upstairs and get our aprons and goggles. You’d better go get a bucket of water.”

Miss Charlie swung up onto a rung threaded through the web of ropes hung from Gather’s ceiling, then hand-over-handed up to the la bor atory above. Gather had never seen the la bor atory except from this oblique angle. Oblique.

He felt a little bit concerned about what was likely to happen next, but Miss Charlie did outrank him, so he went back out into the courtyard to sweep snow into a saucepan, then popped it onto the stove for melting. Gather breathed the metal smell of the new water and hoped it wasn’t meant for an experiment that would leave him with less furniture, as so many of them had in the past. The heavy leather aprons slapped onto the tile floor, then Miss Charlie dropped down onto the table, free of her harnesses and crouching on her skinny legs. Two pairs of leaded glass goggles hung from her cord belt.

“Suit up!” she said. “I’ll let them know at the hall that you worked for me today, get you some credit.”

Which was better than chopping holes in the river ice, so long as he finished the assignment intact. Miss Charlie took four of Gather’s baking pans from the cupboard and laid them on the table. Gather liked to make cookies, when he could get eggs, and so had lots of pans. She laid each of the papers in its own tray and that made three different rectangles, three different ratios, with one table and four trays and four papers for the quantities. “Oh, Lord,” said Gather. “Oh, Lord.”

Miss Charlie made comforting noises and slung the heavy apron over Gather’s head. “Put on your goggles, young man. How often do you get to play with fire?”

Not often. It was true that Gather did not often get to play with fire. But this wasn’t comforting. The first part of the experiment was designed to determine if the paper could burn. Gather had never seen paper that would burn, but Miss Charlie claimed to have heard of it, to have heard of paper that would immolate. So Gather tonged a coal out of the stove and placed it squarely on each of the papers, one by one. That was called the scientific method.

None of the papers even curled up brown like burning things do when they start to burn, so Miss Charlie had Gather fetch down a rag from the cupboard while she pulled a tiny clay bottle from a pouch at her belt. She poured a scant two or three drops from the bottle into the water from Gather’s saucepan, then took the rag from Gather and swabbed it around and around. The water went from smelling of metal to smelling of lemons. Miss Charlie then squeezed the rag over the papers. Each of them flickered on and off once, then shriveled up, twisting back almost to how they’d looked when they still held pepper seeds.

“That’s a datum!” said Miss Charlie.

Which was very exciting, but it was well into the afternoon by then, and the children had coaxed Gather onto the river without his breakfast. Between those labors and now all this science, he was very nearly starved.

Since the pans were laid out, and since he had plenty of sugar and even a few eggs, the thing to do seemed to be to bake cookies. Miss Charlie, long resident above Gather’s kitchen, knew his baking and was very excited by this plan.

“I’ll do more on this tomorrow,” she said, and swept the papers together onto a single pan. While she cast around looking for a receptacle she might deem appropriate to carry the papers upstairs, Gather pulled a mixing bowl out from beneath the dry sink.

He went to set it on the table and saw the soaked, twisted papers gathered all together. He raised his hands above his shoulders and keened. He began to breathe in and out and in and out fast. Miss Charlie took his hands and hummed. She breathed slower, slower, slower, slower…slow. Then she saw the papers, too. She saw how’d they flickered back on and smoothly scuttled together into a new, single sheet. She saw that the words had crawled to the edges and she saw the finely detailed, heretic drawing that took up the center of the page.

“Why—” Miss Charlie was not a churchgoer, but she saw it. “Why, it’s God.”

How Miss Charlie convinced Gather not to go to the mayor or to the preachers with news of the picture was to: sing to him for one hour; tell him the names of all of his sisters that she’d ever known; give him the dried apricots she had tucked away in a burlap bag beneath the eaves in her apartment; promise him that the two of them knew as much about what God needed as anybody on the side of the river where people lived.

The whole time she was singing and listing and fetching and talking, Gather kept watching the paper on the table. It kept being God. God with people.

There was God, all of God, not just a little bit like on a coin, not just told about like in a sermon. All of God was on the papers on Gather’s table, and more. Because, unheard of! Untellable! There was a man with his hand on God’s flank and a woman kneeling next to God’s ferocious mouth. God, with people. People lived on this side of the river. God lived on the other. Even should God want to cross, the river was too swift in the summer. The ice would not bear God’s weight in the winter. It was impossible to know what to do, so Gather decided to let Miss Charlie decide. He was frightened, too frightened even to bake the cookies.

“I think there are three things we can do,” said Miss Charlie. “We have to choose one of these three things.” Miss Charlie held up three of her fingers and waved them around in a scientific way. Gather didn’t like threes. They made people mad. They were odd.

“Take it to a preacher,” she said, “but we’ve struck that already.” Gather saw then that she’d only started with three so that she could get to two right away, which was easier and soothing.

“We can hide it and never speak of it.” Miss Charlie looked at Gather very carefully when she offered that up. “Gather, could you do that? Could you never speak of it?”

Gather scrunched up his face and thought. “I think I would do a pretty good job for a pretty long time, Miss Charlie,” he said. “But I think that then I’d forget and tell.”

“That’s what I think would happen, too,” Miss Charlie said. “And I think you are very wise to be able to predict things like that. Don’t tell me you can’t be a scientist!”

“But what is number two?” Gather asked. He remembered that there were really only two.

“God…” Miss Charlie was thinking very hard. “God must be lost. God must need to get back across the river.”

Gather attended every Sunday service. Most times, it was the same preacher—the little green-eyed girl’s father—up there. Sometimes, though, if that preacher was away, then it was the mayor up there because he was the lay leader. There were even times when it was a different preacher altogether. And all of them did different homilies—a little bit different, anyway—and all of them always led three songs, an odd number of songs. But the thing that was always the same, no matter who was up there, was the way it ended, when they would say, “This is my God, and this is his body, and this is his blood.” And then everybody would eat the bread.

“Does God need to go across…” Gather paused. “Does God need to go back across, because otherwise, everybody will eat God all up?”

Miss Charlie could pitch her eyebrows up as steep as rooftops. “Yes, Gather,” she said. “Yes, I think that’s it exactly.”

Miss Charlie said that Gather should stop taking the work assignments he was given at the hall every morning. “You can work for me full-time,” she said. She tucked her bottom lip under her teeth, which meant she was performing a sum. “I have enough points for that to work for a time. For as long as we’ll need anyway.”

Gather had never had a permanent assignment. It was a comfortable distraction, even when Miss Charlie made him practice being quiet for the whole next morning before they went to arrange it with the mayor. The mayor was outside the hall, watching preachers push wagons full of soil up the road to the chapterhouse. He spotted them as they approached and fled inside, but forgot to bar the door. Miss Charlie marched straight past the glaring preachers and on through the door. Gather didn’t know whether his proscribed silence had started while they were still outside, but to be safe he didn’t answer their calls for him to lend his shoulder to their wagon wheel.

The big chimney in the hall had a poor draw, and the air was thick with smoke. The mayor had taken refuge behind his desk and was pushing beads back and forth on a calendar rod when Miss Charlie cornered him.

“Charlie,” said the mayor. “Charlie with the questions.”

“I want—” Miss Charlie began, but the mayor said, “No!”

He stood up suddenly and reached for his stick. Words ran around it in a loop, blinking on and off when he tamped it against the ground in time with his words to Miss Charlie.

“No, you cannot go to the chapterhouse. No, you cannot have an… exemplum of the soil before the preachers bless it. You cannot take a skiff south unless you pair with a bad batch man, and you will never have a bible!”

At that last, he struck the stone floor so hard that his stick made a buzzing noise and went dark. The three of them all stared at it together for a moment until it flashed back on.

“I want to hire Gather for the rest of the week,” said Miss Charlie.

Even in the dark, Gather was able to follow his sledge tracks from the PK morning back across the river. At first, Gather wanted to find a sledge and pull Miss Charlie on it, but she said that they were equal partners. She said that it was an equal endeavor.

At night, the fires in the watchtower seemed to burn as bright as a pinewood fire, but Gather knew they weren’t, not really. He had a job once hauling yellow logs out of the water and stacking them to dry by the watchtower fire, but only while the regular man was sick.

They were close enough to the fire for them to cast flickery shadows on the ice, but in the afternoon, Miss Charlie had gone to see the night watchman with some cookies she had made herself—

unprecedented—and said that he would be sick tonight. He would not raise the hue and cry. When they got to where the tracks ended, Gather said, “Shhhhh-choom, ” as quietly as he could.

“Is that how God talks?” asked Miss Charlie, and Gather remembered that she could never have been so close to the other bank before.

“The only time I ever heard God was that morning, Miss Charlie,” said Gather. “And that is what God said.”

“Did you know that makes you a prophet, Gather? If you hear God, I mean?” she asked him.

“All those little girls heard it, too. Little prophets,” said Gather. “Little prophet ess es.”

“Maybe I’m wrong, then,” she said. “Like on an initial hypothesis. Maybe you have to hear and listen both.”

Gather didn’t understand, but his feet were very cold from the nighttime ice. He shuffled the last few yards to the shoreline and noticed that he wasn’t afraid anymore. He reached his mittened hand up to a branch to steady himself, then gestured back to Miss Charlie. “Give me God,” he said. “I’ll put God up in this tree.”

Miss Charlie had wrapped God up in white clothes from the la bor atory. Neutral. Sterile. She pulled the bundle out from the bottom of her leather pack. Mysteriously, she had filled the pack with food and blankets and tinder. She handed the bundle to Gather.

“When God is back on the bank, there, Gather, what about those people? What about the man and the woman with God?”

Gather lowered his hands to his sides. The bundle hung in the loose grip of his left mitten. He waited to see if Miss Charlie would keep talking, but she didn’t.

“Is this another experiment?” Gather asked her. He felt himself getting agitated and didn’t know whether to push it down.

“I don’t think so,” said Miss Charlie. “I think this is an exploration.”

That was another word to learn, so Gather said, “What does it mean?”

Miss Charlie put her mitten around the bundle and pressed it against Gather’s palm, so they were holding God there, holding God up and between them.

“I think it means we keep going,” she said.

Then there was no agitation in him, and no hesitation. Then there was some clarity in him. “I think so, too,” he said.

Sonny Liston Takes the Fall

Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and very nearly named after Peregrine Took. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer as well as the Locus Award, and she currently lives in southern New England, where she claims that she is engaged in murdering inoffensive potted plants and writing science fiction and fantasy. Her most recent books are a science-fiction novel, Carnival, from Bantam Spectra; an urban fantasy, Whiskey and Water, forthcoming from Roc; and—with Sarah Monette—a Norse heroic fantasy called A Companion to Wolves, forthcoming from Tor. I know that Bear is best known for her fantasy novels, and I’m familiar with her dark Lovecraftian stories because I’ve published some of them. But “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall” is something very different from either.

1.

I gotta tell you, Jackie,” Sonny Liston said, “I lied to my wife about that. I gotta tell you, I took that fall.”

It was Christmas Eve, 1970, and Sonny Liston was about the farthest thing you could imagine from a handsome man. He had a furrowed brow and downcast hound-dog prisoner eyes that wouldn’t meet mine, and the matching furrows on either side of his broad, flat nose ran down to a broad, flat mouth under a pencil-thin mustache that was already out of fashion six years ago, when he was still King of the World.

“We all lie sometimes, Sonny,” I said, pouring him another scotch. We don’t mind if you drink too much in Vegas. We don’t mind much of anything at all. “It doesn’t signify.”

He had what you call a tremendous physical presence, Sonny Liston. He filled up a room so you couldn’t take your eyes off him—didn’t want to take your eyes off him, and if he was smiling you were smiling, and if he was scowling you were shivering—even when he was sitting quietly, the way he was now, turned away from his kitchen table and his elbows on his knees, one hand big enough for a man twice his size wrapped around the glass I handed him and the other hanging between his legs, limp across the back of the wrist as if the tendons’d been cut. His suit wasn’t long enough for the length of his arms. The coat sleeves and the shirtsleeves with their French cuffs and discreet cuff links were riding halfway up his forearms, showing wrists I couldn’t have wrapped my fingers around. Tall as he was, he wasn’t tall enough for that frame—as if he didn’t get enough to eat as a kid—but he was that wide. Sonny Liston, he was from Arkansas. And you would hear it in his voice, even now. He drank that J&B

scotch like knocking back a blenderful of raw eggs and held the squat glass out for more. “I could of beat Cassius Clay if it weren’t for the fucking Mob,” he said, while I filled it up again. “I could of beat that goddamned flashy pansy.”

“I know you could, Sonny,” I told him, and it wasn’t a lie. “I know you could.”

His hands were like mallets, like mauls, like the paws of the bear they styled him. It didn’t matter. He was a broken man, Sonny Liston. He wouldn’t meet your eyes, not that he ever would have. You learn that in prison. You learn that from a father who beats you. You learn that when you’re black in America.

You keep your eyes down, and maybe there won’t be trouble this time.

2.

It’s the same thing with fighters as with horses. Racehorses, I mean, thoroughbreds, which I know a lot about. I’m the genius of Las Vegas, you see. The One-Eyed Jack, the guardian and the warden of Sin City.

It’s a bit like being a magician who works with tigers—the city is my life, and I take care of it. But that means it’s my job to make damned sure it doesn’t get out and eat anybody. And because of that, I also know a little about magic and sport and sacrifice, and the real, old blood truth of the laurel crown and what it means to be King for a Day.

The thing about racehorses is that the trick with the good ones isn’t getting them to run. It’s getting them to stop.

They’ll kill themselves running, the good ones. They’ll run on broken hearts, broken legs, broken wind. Legend says Black Gold finished his last race with nothing but a shipping bandage holding his flopping hoof to his leg. They shot him on the track, Black Gold, the way they did in those days. And it was mercy when they did it.

He was King, and he was claimed. He went to pay the tithe that only greatness pays. Ruffian, perhaps the best filly that ever ran, shattered herself in a match race that was meant to prove she could have won the Kentucky Derby if she’d raced in it. The great colt Swale ran with a hole in his heart, and no one ever knew until it killed him in the paddock one fine summer day in the third year of his life. And then there’s Charismatic.

Charismatic was a Triple Crown contender until he finished his Belmont third, running on a collapsed leg, with his jockey Chris Antley all but kneeling on the reins, doing anything to drag him down. Antley left the saddle as soon as his mount saw the wire and could be slowed. He dove over Charismatic’s shoulder and got underneath him before the horse had stopped moving; he held the broken Charismatic up with his shoulders and his own two hands until the veterinarians arrived. Between Antley and the surgeons, they saved the colt. Because Antley took that fall. Nobody could save Antley, who was dead himself within two years from a drug overdose. He died so hard that investigators first called it a homicide.

When you run with all God gave you, you run out of track goddamned fast. 3.

Sonny was just like that. Just like a racehorse. Just like every other goddamned fighter. A little bit crazy, a little bit fierce, a little bit desperate, and ignorant of the concept of defeat under any circumstances. Until he met Cassius Clay in the ring.

They fought twice. First time was in 1964, and I watched that fight live in a movie theater. We didn’t have pay-per-view then, and the fight happened in Florida, not here at home in Vegas. I remember it real well, though.

Liston was a monster, you have to understand. He wasn’t real big for a fighter, only six foot one, but he hulked. He loomed. His opponents would flinch away before he ever pulled back a punch. I’ve met Mike Tyson, too, who gets compared to Liston. And I don’t think it’s just because they’re both hard men, or that Liston also was accused of sexual assault. It’s because Tyson has that same thing, the power of personal gravity that bends the available light and every eye down to him, even when he’s walking quietly through a crowded room, wearing a warm-up jacket and a smile. So that was Liston. He was a stone golem, a thing out of legend, the fucking bogeyman. He was going to walk through Clay like the Kool-Aid pitcher walking through a paper wall. And we were all in our seats, waiting to see this insolent prince beat down by the barbarian king. And there was a moment when Clay stepped up to Liston, and they touched gloves, and the whole theater went still.

Because Clay was just as big as Liston. And Clay wasn’t looking down. Liston retired in the seventh round. Maybe he had a dislocated shoulder, and maybe he didn’t, and maybe the Mob told him to throw the fight so they could bet on the underdog Clay and Liston just couldn’t quite make himself fall over and play dead.

And Cassius Clay, you see, he grew up to be Muhammad Ali.

4.

Sonny didn’t tell me about that fight. He told me about the other one. Phil Ochs wrote a song about it, and so did Mark Knopfler: that legendary fight in 1965, the one where, in the very first minute of the very first round, Sonny Liston took a fall. Popular poets, Ochs and Knopfler, and what do you think the bards were? That kind of magic, the old dark magic that soaks down the roots of the world and keeps it rich, it’s a transformative magic. It never goes away.

However you spill it, it’s blood that makes the cactus grow.

Ochs, just to interject a little more irony here, paid for his power in his own blood as well. 5.

Twenty-fifth child of twenty-six, Sonny Liston. A tenant farmer’s son, whose father beat him bloody. He never would meet my eye, even there in his room, this close to Christmas, near the cold bent stub end of 1970.

He never would meet a white man’s eyes. Even the eye of the One-Eyed Jack, patron saint of Las Vegas, when Jackie was pouring him J&B. Not a grown man’s eye, anyway, though he loved kids—and kids loved him. The bear was a teddy bear when you got him around children. But he told me all about that fight. How the Mob told him to throw it or they’d kill him and his momma and a selection of his brothers and sisters, too. How he did what they told him in the most defiant manner possible. So the whole fucking world would know he took that fall.

The thing is, I didn’t believe him.

I sat there and nodded and listened, and I thought, Sonny Liston didn’t throw that fight. That famous

“Phantom Punch”? Muhammad Ali got lucky. Hit a nerve cluster or something. Sonny Liston, the unstoppable Sonny Liston, the man with a heart of piston steel and a hand like John Henry’s hammer—Sonny Liston, he went down. It was a fluke, a freak thing, some kind of an accident. I thought going down like that shamed him, so he told his wife he gave up because he knew Ali was better and he didn’t feel like fighting just to get beat. But he told me that other story, about the Mob, and he drank another scotch and he toasted Muhammad Ali, though Sonny’d kind of hated him. Ali had been barred from fighting from 1967 until just that last year; he was facing a jail term because he wouldn’t go and die in Vietnam.

Sensible man, if you happen to ask me.

But I knew Sonny didn’t throw that fight for the Mob. I knew because I also knew this other thing about that fight, because I am the soul of Las Vegas, and in 1965 the Mob was Las Vegas. And I knew they’d had a few words with Sonny before he went into the ring. Sonny Liston was supposed to win. And Muhammad Ali was supposed to die. 6.

The one thing in his life that Sonny Liston could never hit back against was his daddy. Sonny, whose given name was Charles, but who called himself Sonny all his adult life. Sonny had learned the hard way that you never look a white man in the eye. That you never look any man in the eye unless you mean to beat him down. That you never look the Man in the eye, because if you do he’s gonna beat you down.

He did his time in jail, Sonny Liston. He went in a boy and he came out a prizefighter, and when he came out he was owned by the Mob.

You can see it in the photos and you could see it in his face, when you met him, when you reached out to touch his hand; he almost never smiled, and his eyes always held this kind of deep, sonorous seriousness over his black, flat, damaged nose.

Sonny Liston was a jailbird. Sonny Liston belonged to the Mob the same way his daddy belonged to the land.

Cassius Clay, God bless him, changed his slave name two days after that first bout with Sonny, as if winning it freed up something in him. Muhammad Ali, God bless him, never learned that lesson about looking down.

7.

Boxing is called the sweet science. And horse racing is the sport of kings. When Clay beat Liston, he bounced up on his stool and shouted that he was King of the World. Corn king, summer king, America’s most beautiful young man. An angel in the boxing ring. A new and powerful image of black manhood.

He stepped up on that stool in 1964 and he put a noose around his neck. The thing about magic is that it happens in spite of everything you can do to stop it. And the wild old Gods will have their sacrifice.

No excuses.

If they can’t have Charismatic, they’ll take the man that saved him.

So it goes.

8.

Sometimes it’s easier to tell yourself you quit than to admit that they beat you. Sometimes it’s easier to look down.

The civil rights movement in the early 1960s found Liston a thug and an embarrassment. He was a jailbird, an illiterate, a dark unstoppable monster. The rumor was that he had a second career as a standover man—a Mob enforcer. The NAACP protested when Floyd Patterson agreed to fight him in 1962.

9.

Sonny didn’t know his own birthday or maybe he lied about his age. Forty’s old for a fighter, and Sonny said he was born in ’32 when he might have been born as early as ’27. There’s a big damned difference between thirty-two and thirty-seven in the boxing ring.

And there’s another thing, something about prizefighters you might not know. In Liston’s day, they shot the fighters’ hands full of anesthetic before they wrapped them for the fight. So a guy who was a hitter—a puncher rather than a boxer, in the parlance—he could pound away on his opponent and never notice he’d broken all the goddamned bones in his goddamned hands. Sonny Liston was a puncher. Muhammad Ali was a boxer.

Neither one of them, as it happens, could abide the needles. So when they went swinging into the ring, they earned every punch they threw.

Smack a Sheetrock wall a couple of dozen times with your shoulder behind it if you want to build up a concept of what that means, in terms of endurance and of pain. Me? I would have taken the needle over feeling the bones I was breaking. Taken it in a heartbeat.

But Charismatic finished his race on a shattered leg, and so did Black Gold. What the hell were a few broken bones to Sonny Liston?

10.

You know when I said Sonny was not a handsome man? Well, I also said Muhammad Ali was an angel. He was a black man’s angel, an avenging angel, a messenger from a better future. He was the way and the path, man, and they marked him for sacrifice, because he was a warrior god, a Black Muslim Moses come to lead his people out of Egypt land.

And the people in power like to stay that way, and they have their ways of making it happen. Of making sure the sacrifice gets chosen.

Go ahead and curl your lip. White man born in the nineteenth century, reborn in 1905 as the Genius of the Mississippi of the West. What do I know about the black experience?

I am my city, and I contain multitudes. I’m the African American airmen at Nellis Air Force Base, and I’m the black neighborhoods near D Street that can’t keep a supermarket, and I’m Cartier Street and I’m Northtown and I’m Las Vegas, baby, and it doesn’t matter a bit what you see when you look at my face.

Because Sonny Liston died here, and he’s buried here in the palm of my hand. And I’m Sonny Liston, too, wronged and wronging; he’s in here, boiling and bubbling away.

11.

I filled his glass one more time and splashed what was left into my own, and that was the end of the bottle. I twisted it to make the last drop fall. Sonny watched my hands instead of my eyes, and folded his own enormous fists around his glass so it vanished. “You’re here on business, Jackie,” he said, and dropped his eyes to his knuckles. “Nobody wants to listen to me talk.”

“I want to listen, Sonny.” The scotch didn’t taste so good, but I rolled it over my tongue anyway. I’d drunk enough that the roof of my mouth was getting dry, and the liquor helped a little. “I’m here to listen as long as you want to talk.”

His shoulders always had a hunch. He didn’t stand up tall. They hunched a bit more as he turned the glass in his hands. “I guess I run out of things to say. So you might as well tell me what you came for.”

At Christmastime in 1970, Muhammad Ali—recently allowed back in the ring, pending his appeal of a draft evasion conviction—was preparing for a title bout against Joe Frazier in March. He was also preparing for a more wide-reaching conflict; in April of that year, his appeal, his demand to be granted status as a conscientious objector was to go before the United States Supreme Court. He faced a five-year prison sentence.

In jail, he’d come up against everything Sonny Liston had. And maybe Ali was the stronger man. And maybe the young king wouldn’t break where the old one fell. Or maybe he wouldn’t make it out of prison alive, or free.

“Ali needs your help,” I said.

“Fuck Cassius Clay,” he said.

Sonny finished his drink and spent awhile staring at the bottom of his glass. I waited until he turned his head, skimming his eyes along the floor, and tried to sip again from the empty glass. Then I cleared my throat and said, “It isn’t just for him.”

Sonny flinched. See, the thing about Sonny—that he never learned to read, that doesn’t mean he was dumb. “The NAACP don’t want me. The Nation of Islam don’t want me. They didn’t even want Clay to box me. I’m an embarrassment to the black man.”

He dropped his glass on the table and held his breath for a moment before he shrugged and said, “Well, they got their nigger now.”

Some of them know up front; they listen to the whispers, and they know the price they might have to pay if it’s their number that comes up. Some just kind of know in the back of their heads. About the corn king, and the laurel wreath, and the price that sometimes has to be paid. Sonny Liston, like I said, he wasn’t dumb.

“Ali can do something you can’t, Sonny.” Ali can be a symbol.

“I can’t have it,” he drawled. “But I can buy it? Is that what you’re telling me, Jack?”

I finished my glass, too, already drunk enough that it didn’t make my sinuses sting. “Sonny,” I said, with that last bit of Dutch courage in me, “you’re gonna have to take another fall.”

12.

When his wife—returning from a holiday visit to her relatives—found his body on January 5, eleven days after I poured him that drink, maybe a week or so after he died, Sonny had needle marks in the crook of his arm, though the coroner’s report said heart failure.

Can you think of a worse way to kill the man?

13.

On March 8, 1971, a publicly reviled Muhammad Ali was defeated by Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden in New York City in a boxing match billed as the “Fight of the Century.” Ali had been vilified in the press as a Black Muslim, a religious and political radical, a black man who wouldn’t look down. Three months later, the United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction, allowing Muhammad Ali’s conscientious objector status to stand.

He was a free man.

Ali fought Frazier twice more. He won both times, and went on to become the most respected fighter in the history of the sport. A beautiful avenging outspoken angel.

Almost thirty-five years after Sonny Liston died, in November 2005, President George W. Bush awarded America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to the draft-dodging, politically activist lay preacher Muhammad Ali.

14.

Sonny Liston never looked a man in the eye unless he meant to beat him down. Until he looked upon Cassius Clay and hated him. And looked past that hate and saw a dawning angel, and he saw the future, and he wanted it that bad.

Wanted it bad, Sonny Liston, illiterate jailbird and fighter and standover man. Sonny Liston the drunk, the sex offender. Broken, brutal Sonny Liston with the scars on his face from St. Louis cops beating a confession from him, with the scars on his back from his daddy beating him down on the farm. Sonny Liston, who loved children. He wanted that thing, and he knew it could never be his. Wanted it and saw a way to make it happen for somebody else.

15.

And so he takes that fall, Sonny Liston. Again and again and again, like John Henry driving steel until his heart burst, like a jockey rolling over the shoulder of a running, broken horse. He takes the fall, and he saves the King.

And Muhammad Ali? He never once looks down.

North American Lake Monsters

Nathan Ballingrud

Nathan Ballingrud lives with his daughter outside Asheville, North Carolina. His fiction has appeared in SCI FICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Third Alternative, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, among other places. He can be found online at

http://nballingrud.livejournal.com .

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if normal man does not amaze.

—G. K. CHESTERTON

Grady and Sarah shuffled out of the cabin, bundled in heavy jackets and clutching mugs of coffee that threw heat like dark little suns. Across the wide expanse of Tipton’s Lake the Blue Ridge Mountains breached the morning fog banks, their tree-lined backs resembling the foresty spines of some great kraken trawling the seas. Together they descended the steps from the front porch onto the unkempt grass and made their way down to the lake’s edge, and the small path that would lead them a couple of hundred feet along until they came to the body of the strange creature that had washed ashore and died there.

They did not speak much as they walked. Out of jail for only three days after six years inside, Grady was struggling to recognize his thirteen-year-old daughter in the sullen-eyed, cynical presence striding along beside him. She had undergone some bizarre transformation since he’d last seen her. She’d dyed her hair black; strange silver adornments pocked her face: she had a ring in her left eyebrow, and a series of rings along the curve of one bejeweled conch of an ear. Worst of all, she’d put a stud through her tongue.

“Man, I can really smell that thing,” he said. Sarah had discovered it last night, and was eager to show it off. The early cold snap had held off the smell to some degree, but it was beginning to creep toward the cabin.

“Wait till you see it, Dad, it’s amazing.”

Sarah had not come to see him during his last three years in prison. At first that had been at his own insistence, and she’d taken it badly: He told her of his decision while she and her mother were visiting, and she threw a tantrum of such violence that the guards were obliged to cut their session short. His reasons, he thought, were both predictable and justified: He didn’t want his little girl to see him in that environment, slowly eroding into a smaller, meaner, beaten man. But the truth was simply that he was ashamed, and by keeping his daughter away he spared himself the humiliation he felt in her company. After less than a year of that, though, his resolve failed, and he asked his wife to start bringing her again. But Sarah never came back.

They rounded a thick copse of pines, cutting off their view of the cabin. From this vantage point it was easy to imagine themselves far from civilization and all its attendant rules. Cold air blew in off the lake. Grady lowered his chin into his jacket and closed his eyes, smelling the pine, the soft wet stink of the mud, the aroma of real coffee. He’d smelled nothing but sweat, urine, and disinfectant for so long, it seemed to him now that he was walking through the foothills of Heaven.

“I don’t know what you think you’re gonna do with it,” Sarah said, ranging ahead. She cradled the mug of coffee he’d made for her like a kitten against her chest. “It’s way too big to move.”

“Won’t know till I see it,” he said.

“I was just telling you,” she said, sounding hurt.

Grady was immediately irritated. “I didn’t mean it like that.” Christ, managing her moods was like handling nitroglycerin. Wasn’t she supposed to be tough, with all that shit on her face? The old anger—irrational and narcotic in its sweetness—stirred in him. “So who’s this boy your mother told me about? What’s his name…Tracy?”

“Travis,” she said, her voice muted.

“Oh. Tra vis.”

She said nothing, picking up her pace a little bit. She was on the defensive, which only provoked him. He wanted her to fight.

“What grade is he in?”

Again, nothing.

“Does he even go to school?”

“Yes,” she said, but he could barely hear her.

“He better not be in fucking high school.”

She turned on him; he noticed, with some dismay, that she had tears in her eyes. “I know Mom already told you all about him! Why are you doing this?”

“Je sus, what are you crying about? Never mind what your mom told me, I want to hear this from you.”

“He’s in ninth grade, all right? You should be glad I’m dating an older boy, he’s not an immature shithead like the boys in my school!”

Grady just stood there, trying to decide how to feel. He felt a calmness descend over him, in an inverse proportion to Sarah’s distress. He studied her. Did she really believe what she was saying? Had she grown so stupid?

“Well. I guess I ought to be grateful. Do I get to meet this Travis when we get back to Winston-Salem?”

She turned and continued down the path.

After a few more moments of trudging in strained silence, they rounded a small bend and came upon the monster. It was as big as a small van, still partly submerged in the lake, as though it had lunged onto the ground and expired from the effort. Grady drifted to a halt without realizing it, and Sarah went ahead without him, walking up to the huge carcass as casually as if she were approaching a boulder or a wrecked ship.

“Jesus, Sarah, don’t touch it.”

She ignored him and pressed her fingertips against its hide. “What are you afraid of? It’s dead.”

He was having trouble apprehending its shape. It looked like a huge, suppurated heart. It seemed a confusion of forms, as though the weight of the atmosphere crushed it out of true: He had the strong impression that underwater it would unfurl into something sensible, though perhaps no less strange. Its skin, glistening with dew and sickly excretions, was dark green, almost black. Enfolded in the flesh near the mud was an eye: saucer-size, clouded, eclipsed by a nictitating membrane that covered it like a bone-white crescent moon. A two-foot-long gash was partially buried in the mud; it could have been a mouth, or the wound that killed it. An odor seeped from it like a gas, candy-sweet. Grady felt his stomach buckle. “What…what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “It’s a dinosaur or something.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

She went silent, pacing calmly around it.

“We need to uh…we need to get rid of it. Push it in or something.” The thought of this smell rolling into the cabin windows at night fueled an irrational rage inside him. It wasn’t right that this atrocity should ruin his homecoming.

“You can’t. I already tried.”

“Yeah well. Maybe I’ll try again.”

He placed his hands on it with great reluctance and gave it a cursory push to get a sense of its weight. The flesh gave a bit, and he felt his hands sink. He wrenched them away, making a high-pitched sound he didn’t recognize as his own. His hands were covered in a sticky film, as though he’d gripped a sappy tree. Nausea swelled in his body; the ground swung up to meet him and he vomited into the mud.

“Oh my God. Dad?”

He continued to dry-heave until it felt like his guts were crawling up his throat. He smelled coffee on the ground in front of him, and he crawled away from it. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”

Sarah pulled at his shoulders. “Dad? Are you okay?”

He managed to lean back into a sitting position, rubbing his hands hard against his pants, trying to wipe off the sticky residue. He thought that if he moved it would trigger another spasm, so he sat still for a few moments and gathered himself. He could hear his daughter’s voice. It seemed to come from an immeasurable distance. He crawled over to the water and thrust his hands into it, trying to scrape the residue from them without success.

The thing would have to be destroyed. Maybe if he hacked it up he could push it back into the lake. They were staying at his father-in-law’s cabin; surely the man kept a chain saw or an ax around for chopping wood.

Eventually, he grabbed her arm, hauling himself to his feet. His mug lay near the monster, splashed in mud. He decided to leave it there.

“Let’s go,” he said. He started back along the path without waiting to see if she’d follow. He continued to scrape his hands on his thighs, but he was beginning to doubt the stuff would come off.

Tina was awake by the time they returned. She was leaning against the porch railing, one hand clutching her robe closed at her neck and the other holding a cigarette. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, her hair sleep-crushed, her hangover as heavy as a mantle of chains. She stood up there like a promise of life, and something stirred in Grady at the sight of her, grateful and tender. He summoned a smile from some resolute part of himself and raised a hand in greeting.

“You look like shit,” she said amiably.

He looked down at himself. “I fell.”

“So did you see it?”

“Oh yeah, I saw it.”

“Mom, he got sick!”

He closed his eyes. “Sarah…”

“You got sick, baby?”

“Just, I—yeah, okay, I got sick. It’s fucking disgusting.”

They climbed the stairs and joined her on the porch. Tina brushed at his pants with one hand, her cigarette clenched in her teeth. “Sarah, go get a towel from the bathroom. You can’t walk into the cabin like this.”

“It’s all over my hands,” Grady said.

“What is?”

“I don’t know, some weird sticky shit on the, on the thing. I think it gave me a reaction or something.”

“We should get you to a doctor, Dad,” said Sarah.

“Don’t be stupid. I just got a little dizzy.”

“Dad, you–”

“Goddammit, Sarah!” She stepped back from him as though she’d been struck. Tina gestured at her without looking, still brushing her husband’s pants. “Sarah—honey—a towel. Please.”

Sarah’s mouth moved silently for a moment; then she said, “Fine,” and went inside. Grady watched her go, fighting down a spike of anger.

“What’s your problem?” said Tina, giving up on his pants.

“My problem? Is that a joke?”

“You been gone six years, Grady. Give her a chance.”

“Well, it was her choice not to see me for the last three of them. I didn’t ask her to stay away. Not at the end. And anyway, is that what you’re doing? Giving her a chance? Is that what the rings in her face and that shit in her tongue is all about?”

He watched a door close somewhere inside her. “Grady…”

“What? ‘Grady,’ what?”

“Just…don’t, okay?”

“No, I want to hear it. ‘Grady,’ what? ‘Grady, I fucked up’? ‘Grady, our daughter is a walking car wreck and it’s because I spent so much time drunk I didn’t even care’?”

She wouldn’t look at him. She smoked her cigarette and focused her gaze beyond him: on the lake, or on the mountains, or on some distant place he couldn’t see.

“How about, ‘Grady, I spent so much time banging Mitch while you were in jail that I forgot how to be a wife and a mother’?”

She shook her head; it was barely perceptible. “You’re so goddamned mean,” she said. “I was kinda hoping you’d of changed.”

He leaned in close and spoke right into her ear. “No, fuck that. I’m more me than ever.”

Grady showered—discovering that the substance on his hands was apparently impervious to soap—and the girls retreated to their rooms, nurturing their hurts, stranding him in the living room. He drank more coffee and flipped through the channels on TV. It was not unlike how he spent rec hour in jail, and he felt a profound self-pity at the realization. Goddamned evil bitches, he thought. I’m back a few days and they’re already giving me the cold shoulder. It’s disrespectful. He knew how to handle disrespect in prison; out here he felt emasculated by it.

He knew he should use this time to go out to the monster and start breaking it down. He’d only regret it if he allowed it to stay longer. But it would be gruesome, grueling work, and the very thought of it made his body sag into the couch. And anyway, it wasn’t fair. These two weeks at the cabin were supposed to be for him, a celebration. He shouldn’t have to climb up to his waist in fucking monster gore. So instead he watched TV. He turned on VH1 and was pleased to see that the countdown of the hundred best 1980s songs he’d started watching in prison was still going on. It chewed through his day. From time to time Tina emerged from their bedroom and drifted silently past him into the kitchen, still wearing her robe; he heard the tinkle of ice in her glass and the hum of the freezer when she retrieved her vodka from it. Whenever she came back through he refused to look at her and he supposed she returned the favor—certainly she said nothing to him. That was fine, though; he’d already proven he could live with hostile motherfuckers. She brought nothing new to the table.

Left to itself, though, his self-righteousness dissipated, and he fell into examining his own behavior. These women had been his beacons while he was in prison and within days of his return he had driven them into hiding. He remembered it being like this sometimes, but it seemed worse now. What’s the matter with me? he thought. Why do I always fuck it up?

Eventually Sarah came out of her room. She was dressed to go outside, and she held a large pad of paper under her arm. She strode through the living room with a purpose and without a word. Just like her mother, Grady thought.

“Where are you going?”

She stopped, almost at the door, her back to him. She raised her face to the ceiling, as though imploring God. “Outside,” she said.

“I can see that. Where to?”

She half turned, looking at him finally. “What does it matter?”

His teeth clenched. He stood up quickly, in a fluid motion: It was an abrupt and aggressive action, meant to convey threat, a holdover from the vocabulary of violence he’d spent years cultivating. “Because I’m your father,” he said. “Don’t you forget that.”

She took a startled step backward; Grady felt a flare of satisfaction, and was immediately appalled at himself. He sat back down, scowling.

“I want to draw the monster,” Sarah said, her voice markedly subdued.

“You—why would you want to do that?” All the anger had drained from him. He tried speaking to her now in a reasonable voice, the kind he thought a regular father might use. She shrugged. She looked at the floor in front of her, looking for all the world like a punished child.

“Sarah, look at me.”

Nothing.

He put some steel into it, not wanting her to make him angry again. “I said look at me.”

She looked at him.

“You don’t need to be going out there,” he said.

She nodded. She tried to say something, failed, and tried again. “Okay.”

But as she turned and headed back to her room, her face a cramped scrawl of defeat, his resolve washed away completely. He hadn’t expected her to acquiesce so quickly, and he experienced a sudden need to show her that he could be giving, and kind. “You know what? Go ahead.”

Sarah stopped again. “What?”

“Just go on. Go ahead.”

She seemed to consider it for a moment, then said, “Okay,” and turned back to the door. She walked out, shutting it quietly behind her.

She’s so weak, he thought. Goddammit.

Despite the fact that she’d only been staying there three days, Sarah’s room was a wreck. Her suitcase was open and clothes were stacked precariously on the bed, the ones she’d already worn strewn across the floor. He went into the little bathroom and looked in the medicine cabinet, which was empty, and into the trash can, where he found spent cigarettes. They were only half consumed, which he supposed was a small blessing. He figured she was training herself to like them. Maybe there was still time to put a stop to it. He spent a futile moment at the sink, trying once more to clean his hands. Back in the bedroom he opened the bureau drawers, thinking that he might find her diary. He was encouraged when he saw a spiral-bound notebook in one of them, until he opened it to find lists of chores and a draft of a letter to someone named Tamara about an impending trip—his mother-in-law’s notebook, which made it eight years old at least. He looked under her mattress; he looked beneath her clothes in the suitcase. In a large zippered pouch on the lid of the suitcase he found large sheets of paper covered in pencil sketches.

They were drawings of a nude teenage boy. Her boyfriend, he guessed. The infamous Travis. He sat carefully on her bed and looked at them, breathing carefully, concentrating on holding his hands steady. He tried to reason with himself: The drawings were not lewd; he supposed they were classical poses. He even recognized, dimly, that the drawings were good. There was talent at work here. But mostly he felt a rising heat, a bloody flush of anger. A bead of sweat fell from his forehead and splashed onto the sketch, obliterating the boy’s shoulder like a gunshot.

Well. No hiding it now.

He tore the drawings down the middle, turned them sideways, and tore them again. He returned the quartered papers to the pouch in the suitcase and determined that she would never, ever see that predatory little fuck again. He would see to it. He left her room and stationed himself in front of the TV

again. He couldn’t decide what he should do. He would wait for her and reason with her. He would scream at her and put the fear of God into her. He would go into the other bedroom and beat Tina until she bled from her ears. He would let it all go, and not say a word. He would go outside and get the goddamned ax or chain saw or whatever he could find and go down to the lake and lay into the moldering pile of garbage until his arms hurt too much to move, until he filled the air with blood, filled his lungs and his heart and his mouth with blood.

What he did was watch more TV. After about forty minutes he even began to pay attention. He forced himself to focus on whatever nonsense was on display, forced himself to listen to the commercials and consider the shiny plastic options they presented to him. It was a trick he’d cultivated in prison, a sort of meditation, to prevent himself from acting rashly, to keep himself out of trouble with the guards. Most of the time it worked.

He would not go down to the lake. He would not go into Tina’s room, where she was steering herself into oblivion. He would sit down and be calm. It was easy.

He went into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the pantry. He left the one in the freezer for Tina; unlike her, he liked to feel the burn.

A couple of hours passed. Sarah stayed gone. He killed half the bottle. The TV show became something else, then something else again, and his thoughts blundered about until they found Mitch. Tina had told him about Mitch while he was in jail. She started seeing him after he’d been in about four years, well after Sarah stopped coming to see him. He’d received the news stoically—he was proud of himself for that, even to this day. He inflicted operatic violence on some guy later that day, sure, but no one who wasn’t going to get it anyway. On the whole he thought he handled it all exceptionally well. And good news: Mitch got dumped after about six months.

Grady told himself he could live with it, and he did.

But it ate at him. Just a little bit.

Now seemed as good a time as any to explore his feelings on this matter with his wife. To have an intimate discussion with her. It would bring them closer together.

Grady lifted himself off the couch and plotted a course to the bedroom. He placed his hand on the wall to steady himself; the floor was trying to buck him. He would show it. He took a few lurching steps and halted, one arm held aloft for balance. When it seemed that doom had been skirted, he took a few more steps and reached the far wall. There was a window there, and he cracked it for some fresh air. The sun was failing, little pools of nighttime gathering beneath the trees. He smelled something faintly sweet riding the air, and he breathed deeply and gratefully before he realized it must be the moldering corpse of the monster. Shaken, he pulled away from the window and went into the bedroom. Tina was awake, lying flat on the bed and staring at the ceiling. A photo album was open at her feet; some of the pictures had been removed and spread atop the covers. When he came in she rolled her head to look at him, and flopped an arm in his direction. “Hey babe,” she said.

“Hey.”

He sat heavily on the bed. The room was mostly dark, with only a faint yellow light leaking through the curtains. He picked up one of the loose photos: It was a picture of her father standing by the lake, holding up a big fish. “What the hell are you looking at?”

She plucked the picture from his hand and tossed it to the floor, laughing at him. “‘What the hell are you looking at?’” she said, rolling her body onto his legs.

“Don’t do that.”

“‘Don’t do that.’”

He laughed despite himself, grabbing a handful of her hair and giving it a gentle tug.

“Ain’t you mad no more?” she asked, her fingers working at the button of his pants.

“Shut up, bitch,” he said, but affectionately, and she responded as though he’d just recited a line of verse, shedding her robe and lifting herself over and onto him, so that he felt as though he were sliding into a warm sea. He closed his eyes and exhaled, feeling it down to his fingertips. They moved roughly, urgently, breathing in the musk of each other, breathing in too the smell of the pines and the lake and the dead monster, this last growing in power until it occluded the others, until it filled his sinuses, his head, his body, until it seemed nothing existed except that smell and the awful thing that made it, until it seemed he was its source, the wellspring of all the foulness of the earth, and when he spent himself into her he thought for a wretched moment that he had somehow injected it with the possibility of new life.

She rolled off of him, saying something he couldn’t hear. Grady put his hand over his face, breathed through his nose. Tina rested her head on his chest, and he put his nose to her hair, filling it with something recognizable and good. They lay together for long moments, their limbs a motionless tangle, glowing like marble in the fading light.

“Why couldn’t you wait for me?” he said quietly.

She tensed. For a while he could hear nothing but her breath, and the creaking of the trees outside as the wind moved through them. She rubbed her fingers through the hair on his chest.

“Please don’t ask me that,” she said.

He was quiet, waiting for her.

“I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know a whole lot about that time. But I just don’t ever want to talk about it. I wish it never happened.”

“Okay,” he said. It wasn’t good enough. But he was just drunk enough to realize that nothing would be. He would have to figure out whether or not he could live with it. It was impossible to say, just now. So he lay there with her and felt the weight of her body against his. When he closed his eyes he imagined himself beneath deep water, part of some ruined structure of broken gray stone, like some devastated row of teeth.

“I should make dinner,” Tina said. “Sarah’s probably hungry.”

Her name went off inside him like a depth charge. He lurched upright, ignoring the swimming sensation in his brain. “Sarah,” he said. “She went out.”

“What?”

“To that thing. She went out to that thing.”

Tina seemed confused. “When?”

“Hours ago.” He swung his legs out of bed. “Goddammit. I’ve been drunk!”

“Grady, calm down. I’m sure she’s fine.”

He hurried through the living room, his heart crashing through his chest, a fear he had not believed possible crowing raucously in his head. He pushed her door open.

She was there, illuminated by a slice of light from the living room, lying on her belly, her feet by the headboard. Her arms were tucked under her body for warmth. Her suitcase was open, and the pictures he had destroyed were on the floor beside it.

“Sarah?” he whispered, and stepped inside. He placed his hand on her back, felt the heat unfurling from her body, felt the rise and fall of her breath. He crept around the bed and looked at her face. Her eyes were closed and gummed by tears, her mouth was slightly parted. A little damp pool of saliva darkened the blanket underneath. The rings in her ears caught the light from the living room. He stroked her hair, moving it off of her forehead and hooking it behind her ear. Anything could have happened to her, he thought. While I was drinking myself stupid in the other room, anything could have happened to her.

Tina’s voice came in from the other room. “Grady? Is she all right?”

Christ. I’m just like her. I’m just as fucking bad. He went to the door and poked his head out. “Yeah. She’s sleeping.”

Tina smiled at him and shook her head. “I told you,” she said.

“Yeah.” He went back into the room. He pulled off Sarah’s shoes and socks, slid her jacket off her shoulders. After a lot of careful maneuvering he managed to get her turned around and underneath the covers without waking her. He leaned over to kiss her on the forehead, and smelled the vodka on his own breath. Self-loathing hit him like a wrecking ball. He scrambled into her bathroom and barely made it before puking into the toilet, clutching the bowl with both hands, one leg looking weakly for purchase behind him. He’d had nothing but vodka and coffee all day, so there wasn’t much to throw up. When he felt able, he flushed the toilet and headed back to the bedroom. He leaned over and picked up the torn pictures, so he could throw them away. Beneath them he found the new ones, the ones she’d spent all day working on.

He didn’t recognize them at first. She’d used colored pencils, and he initially thought he was looking at a house made of rainbows. Upon closer inspection, though, he realized that she’d drawn the dead monster: as a kaleidoscope, as a grounded sun. His mind reeled. He dropped it to the ground and here was the monster again, rendered larger than it was in real life, its mouth the gaping Gothic arches of a cathedral, its eyes stained glass, ignited by sunlight. There was another, and another, each depicting it as something beautiful, warm, and bright.

Why couldn’t she get it? Why was she forever romanticizing vileness? His breath was getting short. He rubbed his temples, his body physically rocking as waves of anger rolled through him. She was just stupid, apparently. It was too late. Maybe he’d fucked her up, maybe Tina did, but the damage was done. She’d have to be protected her whole goddamned life.

Might as well start now, he thought.

Tina was in the living room as he walked through it, shrugging into his jacket.

“Where are you going?”

“Is the shed locked?”

“What?”

“Is the shed fucking locked?”

“I, no, I—”

“Good. Stay here.”

When he opened the front door the cold slammed into him like a truck. The temperature had dropped precipitously with the sun. He paused to catch his breath, then jumped down the stairs and headed around back to the shed. He slid the door open and flipped on the light. Inside was a dark, cobwebby tomb of stacked wood and garden appliances with the untroubled appearance of dead Egyptian kings. No chain saw was evident, but he did find an ax leaning against the wall behind a rusting lawn mower. He reached gingerly through a shroud of webs, wary of spiders, and grasped the handle. He pulled it out, trailing dust and ghostly banners.

It had changed since this morning. It actually was shedding light, for one thing, though it was a dim phosphorescence, the result of some strange fungus or bacterium running amok through its innards. The creature looked like some ghastly oversized night-light. The gash that was either a mouth or a wound had borne fruit: A weird and vibrant flora spilled from it like fruit from a cornucopia, pale protuberances with growths like outstretched arms listing this way and that, a dozen vegetable christs. Life abounded here: Small chitinous animals hurried busily to and fro, conducting their miserable business in tunnels and passageways in the body, provided for them by nature or their own savage industry; a cloud of insects, drunk on the very perfume that had driven him into fits, alternately settling on its carcass and lifting away again in graceful curtains, like wind blowing through a wheat field.

Grady raised his ax and took a few tentative steps toward it.

Something moved near him: a raccoon startled from its feast and gone crashing into the underbrush. The flesh around where it had been eating sloughed away and more light spilled into the forest: Hundreds of small insects, their backs coated with the glowing fluids of this dead thing, moved about the wound like boiling suns.

The ax was heavy, so he let it drop. He couldn’t process what he was seeing. He had to figure it out. He sat down in the mud several feet away from all that moving light and stared at it for a while. Maybe there was beauty in there somewhere. Maybe you just had to look at it the right way. He looked at the palms of his hands. They cast light.

All Washed Up While Looking for a Better World

Carol Emshwiller

Carol Emshwiller grew up in Michigan and in France and currently divides her time between New York and California. She is the winner of two Nebula Awards for her stories “Creature” and “I Live with You.” She has also won the Life Achievement award from the World Fantasy Convention.

She’s been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two New York State grants. Her short fiction has been published in many literary and science-fiction magazines; her most recent books are the novels Mister Boots and The Secret City, and the collection I Live with You.

Emshwiller’s whimsical tone sometimes disguises the seriousness of her themes. Here, a woman’s search for an exotic escape from her mundane existence takes her to an island with some unpleasant surprises.

I wanted to be washed up on a foreign shore, but this can’t be it. I wanted, first, a long, long beach, so I could lie there and recover for a while. After all, I’d be tired. I’d have fought the waves for, maybe, days. Or it certainly would have seemed like days. I am tired. I must have rowed for hours but one can’t judge time at a time like this.

I didn’t want to fight a surf and then sharp rocks. I wanted beauty, palm trees, coconuts, a freshwater stream flowing down not far from where I would have collapsed. And natives of course. They would find me and bring me to their huts or caves. Nurse me back to health.

But there doesn’t seem to be anybody here.

As far as I can see this is all beach. More like a desert. It is. I may have to walk for miles before I can get help. If there is any help.

I won’t start yet. I have to rest first. I’ll just lie here, my cheek on wet sand and sharp little shells. Periwinkles. I know you can eat them, but it’s a lot of work. It takes half a dozen to make one decent bite.

Actually, I liked it well enough back where I was. I liked my boss and my fellow workers, but I’d been there ten years. I’d turned forty. I thought it was time for something different, but not this different. I should say my job was in a huge windowless library, pillars all across the front. Greek Revival pediment and all. Wide steps up to the colonnade. Inside, the offices were small, the stacks huge. There were no windows except little high ones in the basement. In the spring we could look out at the forsythia in bloom. At other times it was just a little bit of green.

I must have slept or passed out, my nose down with the crabs. And then I hear someone say, “What sort of creature is it?”

First I think they must be talking about some odd shell. I’m curious, too. I roll over to see what they’re looking at and it’s me.

“Never saw anything like it before.”

“Look, it’s wearing clothes.”

“What’s it worth?”

“A pitcher or two.”

I say, “No,” and, “No, no, no.”

“Hear that? It thinks it’s talking.”

“Sounds almost human.”

Far as I can see they look just like me, or more or less. But it’s foggy. They might not be here at all. I’m thinking it would be nice if they weren’t.

This isn’t the kind of thing I wanted. Where are the palm trees and the kind brown natives with their little grass huts and soft springy beds of reeds? These people are as pale as city folk. Even their eyes and hair are pale. How can you be so pale on a desert island? If that’s what this is. Or maybe it’s always foggy. I try to sit up. I’m dizzy and my leg hurts. I reach to touch it. What if it’s broken?

“Look, it can sit.”

“It’s a her.”

“Yup.”

I look at myself and see that I’m still wet and my blouse is clingy.

“Maybe it’ll get up and walk.”

“Won’t that be funny? If it does, it’ll be almost just like us.”

“We could take it home and show Ma.”

“Wonder what it eats.”

“How about sheeshoosh?”

That makes them laugh.

I’m thirsty, but I don’t think I’ll get anything from these…people. Even so I make a gesture to my mouth. I say, “Drink. Please.”

“Listen to that. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was speech.”

I say, “It is speech.”

“Did it say it’s speaking speech?”

“Couldn’t have.”

“Do you think it has a name?”

“We could name it.”

“How about Jo or Bo. Those are easy ones. It could even call itself to come to itself if it wanted to.”

At that, they all flop down on the sand laughing.

It’s still foggy out though the sun is well up—a murky gray ball. You’d think it would have burned off the fog by now.

They’re not paying any attention to me. I feel at my leg again. I can’t tell if it’s broken or sprained or what. I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed home even though I was so tired of never being out in nature. We didn’t even have windows. What little bit of nature I saw was when I walked home…bits of flowers or weeds around the bottoms of the trees. Pigeons. Not that I don’t like pigeons. Well, trust nature to give you a broken leg and make you so thirsty you can hardly stand it. I pick up a periwinkle and pull out the sliver of sandy meat and eat it. I do it again. I look at the creatures. There are five. Still laughing. They look leggy—long arms, too. Adolescents? Preadolescents?

One says, “Let’s name it Rex.”

“Does it look like a Rex?”

The creatures roll onto their stomachs and stare up at me.

“So that’s what it eats.”

“A lot of bother for nothing much. Must take all day. You’d think it wouldn’t be so fat.”

I’m not fat, just fat compared to them.

“Let’s get it going.”

They prop me up and I try to take a step or two, but then I go down on all fours. I say, “I can’t walk unless you help me.”

“Come on Jo, Bo…”

“Rex.”

“…we have to get on home.”

“Give it a couple more shell things.”

One comes close and peers into my face and I peer into its. Its hair is pale and long and lank. I can’t tell if it’s a boy or girl. Its eyes look sleepy because of their droopy lids. It says, “Ugh,” and hands me two tiny shells.

I say, “Thank you.”

“Listen to it try to talk. Ma will like it.”

“Maybe, but you never know with Ma.”

They pull me up again and I take a couple of steps, but I just can’t. Three of them have already started off and are way ahead. I drop down on all fours and start to crawl.

“Look how it’s going.”

“It’s too slow.”

They yell for the others to “Wait up!” and off they go.

I follow. Not hard. I mean it’s hard crawling, but not hard to see where they’re headed. They’ve left a trail in the sand much wider than need be.

After a few minutes, I raise up as high as I can but I can’t make out whether there are any cliffs or palm trees or grass houses in the distance.

Of course not very likely they’d help me even when I get someplace. But I’m so thirsty and there’s no fresh water around here that I can see. They’ve got to have some.

I crawl for what seems a long time. Then I hear, “Hey, look how far it got.”

“Not bad.”

“Let’s help it.”

And so they grab me again, one on each side. (There are only two of them this time.) They try to hold me up, but they’re not very strong. Still, they keep me on my feet, which I wish they wouldn’t. I say, “Slow down. Please.”

They don’t and I didn’t expect them to.

They bring me to a steep-sided pit in the sand. They throw me…or rather let me fall, slipping and sliding, down into it. And there is…I suppose it is…Ma.

“What in the world have you dragged in now?”

“It chatters. It’s wearing clothes. It can do lots of things. Maybe it can help.”

“It’s useless. Its leg is all swollen up.”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“I doubt it.”

“We can sell it.”

“Poosh.”

“Can we have it?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Yay.”

They all begin to dance and kick up sand.

I say, “Now, listen for once. I’m no different from you. I’m talking your language. Can’t you see that?”

“Maybe we can tame it.”

“I’ll do anything you want if you just give me a drink. I’ll give you my silky blouse and my silver bird pin. I’ll give you my turquoise ring.” (I wore these especially to give to the natives who might rescue me.)

“I’ve lost my shoes but I’ll give my socks, though I’d like to keep my underwear.”

“It’s trying to give a speech.”

“Wonder what it thinks it’s saying.”

“Let’s listen.”

But they don’t.

“I wish there were two of it. Then we could both have one. Where can we get another one?”

“Hang out on the beach is where. Things get washed up all the time. Maybe we could even get a better one.”

They tie a piece of frayed twine around my neck and I have to scrabble out of the sandpit—as much sliding down as climbing up. One pulls me along while another pushes. I’m not worried about getting choked. I think the twine will break any minute.

But how to get a drink? I wanted broth and a caring hand lifting my head to help me drink it.

We’ve been going slightly up for a while, me crawling and them pulling on the string. I turn around and see the view of the shore beyond. It’s a spectacular view now that the fog has burned off, but right now I don’t care. If I could drink a view…

Later, here come the other three. One asks, “Can it dance?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Well?”

“We don’t know how to make it do it.”

“Drink,” I say. “I’ll dance if you give me a drink.”

I keep pointing at my mouth.

They start slapping their hands on their thighs and making clicking sounds. One finds two stones to pound against each other.

They sing, “Diggity thump, diggity thump.”

I wave my arms to show them I’m willing.

We do that for a while until one says, “Whoa. Ma’ll be mad.”

“Is it getting dark already?”

Suddenly they all run off. I’m not sorry. A little peace and quiet. Maybe I can find a drink by myself. I pull myself along, but to the side where I think I see a bush. Maybe I can find a hiding place. Natives! At least not cannibals. So far, anyway. Why didn’t I think twice about leaky boats instead of just once. I was taking a bigger risk than I thought—heading off toward nowhere. Nowhere is exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t want this kind of nowhere.

I always thought, especially recently, that I was born to be washed up someplace odd and lost and unknown. A place unlike anyplace I was used to. Or perhaps born to crash in an airplane in a jungle, or on the top of a mountain. Someplace with rushing streams and gnarled thousand-year-old trees. Surely a spectacular setting of some sort.

And I was born to start over, to have a whole new life, a second chance, new friends, new surroundings, even new ideas. Especially new ideas. Born to not, anymore, think my same old thoughts that I’ve been thinking over and over. Even born to speak another language. One I never heard of before, full of glottal stops and hisses.

The more I saw the recommended movies, read the bestsellers and the book reviews, went to plays I couldn’t afford, saw the latest art shows, the more I knew that I was only marking time. That something more important awaited me.

But now I suppose you could say the moral of my adventure would be “There’s no place like home.”

Even so, no matter what happens, I won’t believe that. No matter how this ends up—it’ll probably end up with me dying for lack of water and food—anyway, no matter how, I’ll not believe it. Home is never best. Home is everything as usual. Who wants that?

It is a bush. Just one. It’s not as big as it looked to be from down the beach. I hunker down next to it. It’s a wonder I sleep at all, thirsty and hungry as I am, but I do. In the morning my leg feels some better. I guess it isn’t broken. I’m going to try and stay off it and I’m going to try to avoid those…whatever they are. I crawl yet farther, sideways along the beach. I hope away from them. There’s another bush. I head for it when…

“Hey, here it is.”

“Yay, I thought it was lost.”

“Don’t worry. Even if it was, we could look for another one. If one gets washed up, other ones must get washed up, too.”

“Well, then how come this is the first one we ever saw?”

They prop me up again, one on each side. By now I know it’s useless to say anything. It looks like they’re chewing gum. Is this a sign of contact with the outside world? Or has this always been the outside world, so that I’ve not really moved that far from my usual surroundings—as if I’d gone to Coney Island on a cold day when hardly anybody else was there?

They bring me back to that sandpit, me crawling and hopping, and at last give me a drink and food—in a dog’s bowl. In fact it says DOG right on it. And the food looks like kibbles. I’m grateful anyway. I say,

“Thank you.”

The ma says she doesn’t want me in the house, but where is the house?

“Can’t we have it inside? Please. Just this once.”

“We don’t even know what it is. Besides, it’s too sandy.”

Actually, there seems to be nothing but sand all over everything anyway. I feel so much better after having eaten and drunk, I curl up around the water bowl to fall asleep, but they don’t want me to.

We spend the day at all sorts of games. Hide-and-seek. They hide me under sand. Not my head, thank goodness. And: Can they crawl as fast as I can? (They can.) How many periwinkles can they eat?

Then one says, “If we can find a male, we could have babies.”

“And we could watch them do it.”

“Yay.”

They all (and I also, pulled and pushed along) go back to the beach to look for a male. They walk up and down, but not very far.

I’d have a fellow feeling for anyone washed up. I hope they find somebody, though I wouldn’t wish this on anybody.

They find shells they like. They make a little sort of harness with a plastic bag on each side of me. (Is this another sign I haven’t gone far or have plastic bags blown all over the whole world?) I carry them, crawling.

Back at the pit, the ma asks, “Did you feed it?”

“We forgot.”

“Well, I’m certainly not going to do it.”

They bring fresh water and food. I say, “Thank you. You’re very kind.” I’ll be polite. Maybe something will get through to them.

I want to stay awake to see if they go anywhere outside of this sandpit, but I’m too tired.

In the morning they forget to feed and water me. Talking hasn’t helped so I bark and meow. I even say a couple of big “baaaaas.” It feels good to do it.

I don’t know if they hear me or not, but they do feed me.

Then it’s back to the beach to look for more like me.

They forget why they’re there. They get to playing a sand-in-the-face game. I crawl away and they don’t notice.

I stay down on the harder wet sand. It’s easier going. Maybe I can get out of sight. I think I see, way, way down the beach, that there’s a rowboat pulled up on the shore. I crawl even faster.

I hope the oars are still there. I’ll be off to some other, better desert island. I’ll sing as I row.

“Hey, don’t let it get away.”

Here they come.

I get up and hobble but they catch me before I can get to the boat. And even if I’d made it, I’d have had to push off. I never would have gotten away.

They see the boat, too, and forget all about me.

I follow, but slowly. They’re all jumping around in it. I sit down beside it.

“Not bad.”

“And look, the oars are still here.”

“Too bad nobody’s here. I thought maybe we’d find another one and then you others could have one, too.”

“There’s got to be another one or even two around here someplace. Maybe three. Maybe we could all have one.”

I look around for tracks leading from the boat, but they look around for tracks, too, and kick up so much sand there’s no way to tell anymore.

Escape was so close it gives me hope. A boat is all I need. Or maybe even just a log to float away on. I search the sea and the beach for signs of driftwood. There’s only small stuff, but I collect a pile, anyway. Maybe I can build a fire and a ship will come, though there’ll be the problem of matches. I wonder if these creatures have any.

My pile is getting bigger. It takes me a long time crawling to gather stuff, but at least they’re not bothering me.

Then they notice my pile. They love it. They crawl in and out of the branches and old planks and mess it all up.

I say, “You could make a nice bonfire,” and one of them says, “Hey, we could make a nice bonfire.”

Do I actually have some influence? Except it is, clearly, the makings of a bonfire. I say, “What about matches?” and they say, “Let’s get some matches,” and off they go. I crawl over to the rowboat. I try really hard, but I don’t have the strength to push it back into the surf. I wonder if I can get them to do it. I climb in. Fall onto the bottom. Could I hide here? Of course then I wouldn’t have any chance of getting water and food.

The sound of the water lapping nearby is restful. I wake when I hear them coming back—good grief, they’re noisy—but I don’t move.

“Oh no, where has it got to?”

Meaning me, of course.

And then I see their heads all along the gunwale. Five of them. They smile and wave when they see me. I say, “Push the boat off. We can all go for a ride,” but they turn away to the pile of driftwood. I look over the side and watch them. It lights instantly.

Playing with fire. Not a good idea. I hope they don’t all get burned up. They’re my only hope for water and food.

But someone is striding down the beach toward us. At first I think he’s naked, and I feel good because, for sure, he’s one of those native brown people I was hoping for, but then I see he’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt, everything tan, and he’s just a regular person. I hope he can hear what I say. The creatures all run and hide behind the boat while I climb out and crawl to greet him. He’s a long way off so I manage to get well away from them before we meet.

When we get close, I sit up. I straighten my blouse and brush some of the sand off. I try to do something with my hair though I know it’s a lost cause.

He’s good looking and about my age, though, unfortunately, not my type. He sits down beside me, and right away he says, “I’ve been all the way around it, and there’s nothing here,” as if he’s not surprised to see me. Not even surprised to see me crawling first and then sitting here with my swollen leg stretched out in front of me.

I don’t tell him about the others. I just say, “Oh.”

He had come on shore early in the morning and it had taken him all day to get back around to his boat.

“This isn’t much of an island.”

The good news is, he, also, had wanted to be washed up on a foreign shore. I say, “I presume you’re looking for a whole new way of life, with adventures and interesting natives, in an exciting setting. I suppose you wanted naked ladies, but this isn’t the place.”

“You’ve made a bonfire. You want to be rescued.”

“This isn’t where I meant to come. I’m starving and thirsty and I’d like to leave with you.”

“You’re not what I’m looking for.”

“No, no, nothing like that, though, considering, we must have a lot in common. I just want to get away. Actually if I had a comb and could wash my hair I’d look a lot better. But I just want out of here.”

They’re still hiding behind his boat. I hear them giggling. The man hears, too.

“Are there other people here?”

“Sort of.”

They jump out and run to us yelling, “Yay, yay, yay, another one.”

“Who are they?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Before he can stop them they feel at his crotch.

“Yay, it’s a male.”

They dance around us and kick up sand until he’s as sandy as I am.

He wants to get out into the surf to wash off, but they keep getting in the way. I say, “It’s useless.”

He starts hitting out at them but misses every time. How can that be? He’s using up all his energy and it looks to be as useless as trying to tell them something.

“Stop. Wait,” I say. “We need them. There’s no water or food except if they give it to us back at their pit. I have to crawl there, but at least you can walk.”

He stops.

And then the creatures do it again. Yell, “Oh no. Ma will be mad.” And off they go. What if they get so distracted with him that I can leave him here instead of me? Maybe they’ll forget about me even though they want to have babies. Maybe if I had enough time, I could push the boat off by myself. Maybe I could even take days to do it. They might not notice that it was inching out little by little. Then I could be starting off on my real adventure.

“Go on,” I say. “Follow them. It’s your only chance for food.”

He trots off, but I head back to his boat. I wonder if he left any food or water in it. First I push at it. And push and push. I do move it a little. About a half inch every push. If I didn’t have a bad leg, I’d do a lot better. I keep pushing until I’m exhausted and it’s dark. I’ve gone about three or four feet. Then the moon comes up—not a full moon, but I can see fairly well except in the shadows. I get into the boat and look around for supplies.

There’s a dirty backpack tucked under the backseat. It’s wet. I find wet crackers in it. I think they’re cheese crackers and might have been good once. I eat them all. There’s an inch of stale-tasting water left in a plastic bottle. I drink that.

The bonfire smolders outside. I wonder if anybody will see it and come. Maybe I should be working at keeping it burning, but I don’t.

I sleep in the boat, though it’s not as comfortable as the sand. At least with sand you can make yourself a hip hole.

In the morning they all come rushing back. I hear them a long ways off. The man gets here first and they trail after. First thing he looks over the side and sees the empty water bottle and cracker wrappers. But even so he’s relieved. “I thought you might have taken off in my boat.”

I say, “Their water tastes a lot better than yours.”

I hope he doesn’t notice that his boat was moved a few feet.

Maybe he is my type after all. He looks less like a boy and more like a man than I thought. Or is it just that he spent a sleepless frustrated night? The circles under his eyes make him more attractive, and there’s something pleasantly worried about his face.

He hops into the boat and sits beside me—says, “At least you can hear me.”

He’s found out what it’s like not to be able to say anything.

All five of the creatures follow him into the boat. There’s hardly room for all of us. The way they’re crowding around and pushing at us, they obviously want us to sit closer to each other. He moves to the front of the boat to be farther away.

“Hey,” they say, “how about it?” and make lewd gestures.

“Sorry I didn’t save any crackers for you. I couldn’t help myself.”

I wonder if I look better to him this morning, just as he looks better to me. Can we already have gotten to the point where anybody of the opposite sex starts looking good?

They crowd us and push us so much we leave the boat and sit down, one on each side of the ashes of the bonfire.

He says, “My name is Brad.”

I wonder who I should be. I say, “My name is Melody,” which of course it isn’t—any more than he’s Brad. (I don’t know why that name popped out. I don’t even like it. And I don’t even look as if my name is Melody.) I’m sure he doesn’t believe me, either.

This night they don’t let me stay in the boat by myself. I try hard against their pulling. The boat only needs another three or four feet. But then there’s the dog food and more or less clean water. I go. Three stay with me as I crawl back, and two go on ahead with him.

Ma is really mad when she sees two of us. “Out! Out! Both of them! I never even wanted one. What will you be dragging in next?”

She makes them push us out of the sandpit.

There’s another little bush nearby. (There don’t seem to be any trees, just these bushes. Probably some sort of saltbush, considering.) They tie us up to this bush with frayed twine. Then they feed us and water us. As I figured, just one bowl. We take turns.

“You know, we could put some of this dry food in our pockets and take it down to the boat and save it until we have enough to leave.”

“What can we do about water?”

“Bring up that plastic bottle and fill it from the dog bowl?”

“Where does their water come from?”

“That’s the question.”

Later, by moonlight, we untie each other and climb back into the pit. There they are, in a bundle in the middle, sleeping. We make a survey. He does, I do the best I can crawling. As far as we can tell, it’s just an empty pit, debris strewn around. We find plastic bags, clothespins, rubber bands, old Coke bottles with water in them closed with wine corks, a collection of string and wire, insoles but no shoes…We take several plastic bags for dog food, and five of the Coke bottles with water. Then we climb back to the bush, hide our loot under sand, and tie ourselves up again.

We’re feeling quite happy with each other. I can see it on his face and I’m sure he can see it on mine. We talk. He tells me a long story about three women lovers who left him. He says they were bitches, all three of them. I don’t think that can be true and say so. I say maybe he’s been choosing the same kind of women every single time. “Psychologists say that happens a lot.”

He says, “They really were bitches.”

I say, “I don’t think so, not all three.”

He says, “What do you know?”

I say I’ve had a lover or two, but he isn’t paying attention. I say, “I know I’m a mess now. It’s been days since I had a shower or a good night’s sleep.”

He’s not listening. You’d think, after being with these creatures for a couple of days, he’d know enough to listen to somebody—even me.

He says he wanted, just as I suspected, naked native women. Naïve and unsophisticated. He says I’m not to his taste.

I say, “All I was looking for was a new life, not a mate.” I go on and on, but then I notice he’s asleep.

Back at the beach the next morning we put our water and kibbles in the boat. Not enough of either yet for the two of us, but might be enough for one. Depending, of course, on how far away the next foreign shore is.

I wonder if he’ll try to take off without me. It wouldn’t be hard, what with my bad leg making me so slow.

The creatures don’t seem to notice our packages, but then they open one of the water bottles and drink it themselves. They taste the kibbles, make faces, and spit them out.

Then we work on the bonfire. All of us do. They seem to enjoy it.

This time, when we head back to the pit, me crawling, as usual, I turn back. Brad and the other three are far ahead. I stand up. My leg is much better. I limp, but I go much faster this way. Of course I’ve got two of them with me.

I push and push at the boat. The two help. I wonder if they realize what they’re doing. And then the sun is on the horizon again.

“Hey, look.” And off they run.

The surf is up. The tide is in. I do it. I give the boat one last push. I get in and row away as fast as I can. How beautiful it is in the moonlight. Wouldn’t you think whatever it is I’m looking for would be found on a beach just like this? But now I’m thinking maybe prison or a nunnery would be better. I’d like a regimented life with bells to tell me what to do and when. Why didn’t I think of that before I took off that first time? I can’t wait to get into a cell of some sort.

I’m going to land somewhere with mountains. Or if I should happen to land on Coney Island, or some such place back in civilization, I’m going to commit a crime and go to jail. When he finds me gone off with his boat, Brad will have more tales to tell about how bad all women are and I guess they are if I’m an example. But I wouldn’t have gone without him if he hadn’t been so mad at women in general, or if he’d listened to me just once.

Brad! How ridiculous can you get? But Melody…It’s ridiculous, too, and I don’t really like it much, but I’ll keep it. Names can change your life just as much as places can. Maybe a new name is all I needed in the first place. Nobody named Melody would be working in a library.

Special Economics

Maureen F. McHugh

Maureen McHugh recently moved to Austin, Texas, with her husband and two dogs. She has written four novels and a collection of short stories and does freelance work in the video game industry. Although probably best known for her first novel, the Tiptree Award winner China Mountain Zhang, her short fiction is collected in Mothers & Other Monsters, which was a finalist for a major nongenre award, the Story Prize.

McHugh returns to China with a novelette about a young woman who dreams of a better life.

Jieling set up her boom box in a plague-trash market in the part where people sold parts for cars. She had been in the city of Shenzhen for a little over two hours but she figured she would worry about a job tomorrow. Everybody knew you could get a job in no time in Shenzhen. Jobs everywhere.

“What are you doing?” a guy asked her.

“I am divorced,” she said. She had always thought of herself as a person who would one day be divorced so it didn’t seem like a big stretch to claim it. Staying married to one person was boring. She figured she was too complicated for that. Interesting people had complicated lives. “I’m looking for a job. But I do hip-hop, too,” she explained.

“Hip-hop?” He was a middle-aged man with stubble on his chin who looked as if he wasn’t looking for a job but should be.

“Not like Shanghai,” she said, “not like Hi-Bomb. They do gangsta stuff, which I don’t like. Old-fashioned. Like M.I.A.,” she said. “Except not political, of course.” She gave a big smile. This was all way beyond the guy. Jieling started the boom box. M.I.A. was Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri Lankan hip-hop artist who had started all on her own years ago. She had sung, she had danced, she had done her own videos. Of course M.I.A. lived in London, which made it easier to do hip-hop and become famous.

Jieling had no illusions about being a hip-hop singer, but it had been a good way to make some cash up north in Baoding where she came from. Set up in a plague-trash market and dance for yuan. Jieling did her opening, her own hip-hop moves, a little like Maya and a little like some things she had seen on MTV, but not too sexy because Chinese people did not throw you money if you were too sexy. Only April and it was already hot and humid.

Ge down, ge down,

lang-a-lang-a-lang-a.

Ge down, ge down

lang-a-lang-a-lang-a

She had borrowed the English. It sounded very fresh. Very criminal.

The guy said, “How old are you?”

“Twenty-two,” she said, adding three years to her age, still dancing and singing. Maybe she should have told him she was a widow? Or an orphan? But there were too many orphans and widows after so many people died in the bird flu plague. There was no margin in that. Better to be divorced. He didn’t throw any money at her, just flicked open his cell phone to check listings from the market for plague trash. This plague-trash market was so big it was easier to check online, even if you were standing right in the middle of it. She needed a new cell phone. Hers had finally fallen apart right before she headed south.

Shenzhen people were apparently too jaded for hip-hop. She made fifty-two yuan, which would pay for one night in a bad hotel where country people washed cabbage in the communal sink. The market was full of secondhand stuff. When over a quarter of a billion people died in four years, there was a lot of secondhand stuff. But there was still a part of the market for new stuff and street food, and that’s where Jieling found the cell phone seller. He had a cart with stacks of flat plastic cell phone kits printed with circuits and scored. She flipped through: tiger-striped, peonies (old-lady phones), metallics (old-man phones), animé characters, moon phones, expensive lantern phones. “Where is your printer?”

she asked.

“At home,” he said. “I print them up at home, bring them here. No electricity here.” Up north in Baoding she’d always bought them in a store where they let you pick your pattern online and then printed them there. More to pick from.

On the other hand, he had a whole boxful of ones that hadn’t sold that he would let go for cheap. In the stack she found a purple one with kittens that wasn’t too bad. Very Japanese, which was also very fresh this year. And only a hundred yuan for phone and three hundred minutes. He took the flat plastic sheet from her and dropped it in a pot of boiling water big enough to make dumplings. The hinges embedded in the sheet were made of plastic with molecular memory, and when they got hot they bent and the plastic folded into a rough cell phone shape. He fished the phone out of the water with tongs, let it sit for a moment, and then pushed all the seams together so they snapped. “Wait about an hour for it to dry before you use it,” he said and handed her the warm phone.

“An hour, ” she said. “I need it now. I need a job.”

He shrugged. “Probably okay in half an hour,” he said.

She bought a newspaper and scallion pancake from a street food vendor, sat on a curb, and ate while her phone dried. The paper had some job listings, but it also had a lot of listings from recruiters. ONE

MONTH BONUS PAY! BEST JOBS! and NUMBER ONE JOBS! START BONUS! People scowled at her for sitting on the curb. She looked like a farmer but what else was she supposed to do? She checked listings on her new cell phone. Online there were a lot more listings than in the paper. It was a good sign. She picked one at random and called.

The woman at the recruiting office was a flat-faced southerner with buckteeth. Watermelon-picking teeth. But she had a manicure and a very nice red suit. The office was not so nice. It was small and the furniture was old. Jieling was groggy from a night spent at a hotel on the edge of the city. It had been cheap but very loud.

The woman was very sharp in the way she talked and had a strong accent that made it hard to understand her. Maybe Fujian, but Jieling wasn’t sure. The recruiter had Jieling fill out an application.

“Why did you leave home?” the recruiter asked.

“To get a good job,” Jieling said.

“What about your family? Are they alive?”

“My mother is alive. She is remarried,” Jieling said. “I wrote it down.”

The recruiter pursed her lips. “I can get you an interview on Friday,” she said.

“Friday!” Jieling said. It was Tuesday. She had only three hundred yuan left out of the money she had brought. “But I need a job!”

The recruiter looked sideways at her. “You have made a big gamble to come to Shenzhen.”

“I can go to another recruiter,” Jieling said.

The recruiter tapped her lacquered nails. “They will tell you the same thing,” she said. Jieling reached down to pick up her bag.

“Wait,” the recruiter said. “I do know of a job. But they only want girls of very good character.”

Jieling put her bag down and looked at the floor. Her character was fine. She was not a loose girl, whatever this woman with her big front teeth thought.

“Your Mandarin is very good. You say you graduated with high marks from high school,” the recruiter said.

“I liked school,” Jieling said, which was only partly not true. Everybody here had terrible Mandarin. They all had thick southern accents. Lots of people spoke Cantonese in the street.

“Okay. I will send you to ShinChi for an interview. I cannot get you an interview before tomorrow. But you come here at eight AM and I will take you over there.”

ShinChi. New Life. It sounded very promising. “Thank you,” Jieling said. “Thank you very much.”

But outside in the heat, she counted her money and felt a creeping fear. She called her mother. Her stepfather answered, “Wei.”

“Is Ma there?” she asked.

“Jieling!” he said. “Where are you!”

“I’m in Shenzhen,” she said, instantly impatient with him. “I have a job here.”

“A job! When are you coming home?”

He was always nice to her. He meant well. But he drove her nuts. “Let me talk to Ma,” she said.

“She’s not here,” her stepfather said. “I have her phone at work. But she’s not there, either. She went to Beijing last weekend and she’s shopping for fabric now.”

Her mother had a little tailoring business. She went to Beijing every few months and looked at clothes in all the good stores. She didn’t buy in Beijing; she just remembered. Then she came home, bought fabric, and sewed copies. Her stepfather had been born in Beijing and Jieling thought that was part of the reason her mother had married him. He was more like her mother than her father had been. There was nothing in particular wrong with him. He just set her teeth on edge.

“I’ll call back later,” Jieling said.

“Wait, your number is blocked,” her stepfather said. “Give me your number.”

“I don’t even know it yet,” Jieling said and hung up.

The New Life company was in a huge, modern-looking building with a lot of windows. Inside it was full of reflective surfaces and very clean. Sounds echoed in the lobby. A man in a very smart gray suit met Jieling and the recruiter, and the recruiter’s red suit looked cheaper, her glossy fingernails too red, her buckteeth exceedingly large. The man in the smart gray suit was short and slim and very southern looking. Very city.

Jieling took some tests on her math and her written characters and got good scores. To the recruiter, the human resources man said, “Thank you, we will send you your fee.” To Jieling he said, “We can start you on Monday.”

“Monday?” Jieling said. “But I need a job now!” He looked grave. “I…I came from Baoding, in Hebei,”

Jieling explained. “I’m staying in a hotel, but I don’t have much money.”

The human resources man nodded. “We can put you up in our guest house,” he said. “We can deduct the money from your wages when you start. It’s very nice. It has television and air-conditioning, and you can eat in the restaurant.”

It was very nice. There were two beds. Jieling put her backpack on the one nearest the door. There was carpeting, and the windows were covered in gold drapes with a pattern of cranes flying across them. The television got stations from Hong Kong. Jieling didn’t understand the Cantonese, but there was a button on the remote for subtitles. The movies had lots of violence and more sex than mainland movies did—like the bootleg American movies for sale in the market. She wondered how much this room was. Two hundred yuan? Three hundred?

Jieling watched movies the whole first day, one right after another.

On Monday she began orientation. She was given two pale green uniforms, smocks and pants like medical people wore, and little caps and two pairs of white shoes. In the uniform she looked a little like a model worker—which is to say that the clothes were not sexy and made her look fat. There were two other girls in their green uniforms. They all watched a DVD about the company. New Life did biotechnology. At other plants they made influenza vaccine (on the screen were banks and banks of chicken eggs), but at this plant they were developing breakthrough technologies in tissue culture. It showed many men in suits. Then it showed a big American store and explained how they were forging new exportation ties with the biggest American corporation for selling goods, Wal-Mart. It also showed a little bit of an American movie about Wal-Mart. Subtitles explained how Wal-Mart was working with companies around the world to improve living standards, decrease CO emissions, and give people low 2

prices. The voice narrating the DVD never really explained the breakthrough technologies. One of the girls was from way up north; she had a strong northern way of talking.

“How long are you going to work here?” the northern girl asked. She looked as if she might even have some Russian in her.

“How long?” Jieling said.

“I’m getting married,” the northern girl confided. “As soon as I make enough money, I’m going home. If I haven’t made enough money in a year,” she went on, “I’m going home anyway.”

Jieling hadn’t really thought she would work here long. She didn’t know exactly what she would do, but she figured that a big city like Shenzhen was a good place to find out. This girl’s plans seemed very…country. No wonder southern Chinese thought northerners had to wipe the pigshit off their feet before they got on the train.

“Are you Russian?” Jieling asked.

“No,” said the girl. “I’m Manchu.”

“Ah,” Jieling said. Manchu like Manchurian. Ethnic Minority. Jieling had gone to school with a boy who was classified as Manchu, which meant that he was allowed to have two children when he got married. But he had looked Han Chinese like everyone else. This girl had the hook nose and the dark skin of a Manchu. Manchu used to rule China until the Communist Revolution (there was something in between with Sun Yat-sen but Jieling’s history teachers had bored her to tears). Imperial and countrified. Then a man came in from human resources.

“There are many kinds of stealing,” he began. “There is stealing of money or food. And there is stealing of ideas. Here at New Life, our ideas are like gold, and we guard against having them stolen. But you will learn many secrets, about what we are doing, about how we do things. This is necessary as you do your work. If you tell our secrets, that is theft. And we will find out.” He paused here and looked at them in what was clearly intended to be a very frightening way.

Jieling looked down at the ground because it was like watching someone overact. It was embarrassing. Her new shoes were very white and clean.

Then he outlined the prison terms for industrial espionage. Ten, twenty years in prison. “China must take its place as an innovator on the world stage and so must respect the laws of intellectual property,” he intoned. It was part of the modernization of China, where technology was a new future—Jieling put on her I-am-a-good-girl face. It was like politics class. Four modernizations. Six goals. Sometimes when she was a little girl, and she was riding behind her father on his bike to school, he would pass a billboard with a saying about traffic safety and begin to recite quotes from Mao. The force at the core of the revolution is the people! He would tuck his chin in when he did this and use a very serious voice, like a movie or like opera. Western experience for Chinese uses. Some of them she had learned from him. All reactionaries are paper tigers! she would chant with him, trying to make her voice deep. Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory! And then she would start giggling and he would glance over his shoulder and grin at her. He had been a Red Guard when he was young, but other than this, he never talked about it.

After the lecture, they were taken to be paired with workers who would train them. At least she didn’t have to go with the Manchu girl, who was led off to shipping.

She was paired with a very small girl in one of the culture rooms. “I am Baiyue,” the girl said. Baiyue was so tiny, only up to Jieling’s shoulder, that her green scrubs swamped her. She had pigtails. The room where they worked was filled with rows and rows of what looked like wide drawers. Down the center of the room was a long table with petri dishes and trays and lab equipment. Jieling didn’t know what some of it was and that was a little nerve-racking. All up and down the room, pairs of girls in green worked at either the drawers or the table.

“We’re going to start cultures,” Baiyue said. “Take a tray and fill it with those.” She pointed to a stack of petri dishes. The bottom of each dish was filled with gelatin. Jieling took a tray and did what Baiyue did. Baiyue was serious but not at all sharp or superior. She explained that what they were doing was seeding the petri dishes with cells.

“Cells?” Jieling asked.

“Nerve cells from the electric ray. It’s a fish.”

They took swabs and Baiyue showed her how to put the cells on in a zigzag motion so that most of the gel was covered. They did six trays full of petri dishes. They didn’t smell fishy. Then they used pipettes to put in feeding solution. It was all pleasantly scientific without being very difficult. At one point everybody left for lunch but Baiyue said they couldn’t go until they got the cultures finished or the batch would be ruined. Women shuffled by them and Jieling’s stomach growled. But when the lab was empty Baiyue smiled and said, “Where are you from?”

Baiyue was from Fujian. “If you ruin a batch,” she explained, “you have to pay out of your paycheck. I’m almost out of debt and when I get clear”—she glanced around and dropped her voice a little—“I can quit.”

“Why are you in debt?” Jieling asked. Maybe this was harder than she thought; maybe Baiyue had screwed up in the past.

“Everyone is in debt,” Baiyue said. “It’s just the way they run things. Let’s get the trays in the warmers.”

The drawers along the walls opened out, and inside the temperature was kept blood-warm. They loaded the trays into the drawers, one back and one front, going down the row until they had the morning’s trays all in.

“Okay,” Baiyue said, “that’s good. We’ll check trays this afternoon. I’ve got a set for transfer to the tissue room but we’ll have time after we eat.”

Jieling had never eaten in the employee cafeteria, only in the guest house restaurant, and only the first night because it was expensive. Since then she had been living on ramen noodles and she was starved for a good meal. She smelled garlic and pork. First thing on the food line was a pan of steamed pork buns, fluffy white. But Baiyue headed off to a place at the back where there was a huge pot of congee—rice porridge—kept hot. “It’s the cheapest thing in the cafeteria,” Baiyue explained, “and you can eat all you want.” She dished up a big bowl of it—a lot of congee for a girl her size—and added some salt, vegetables, and boiled peanuts. “It’s pretty good, although usually by lunch it’s been sitting a little while. It gets a little gluey.”

Jieling hesitated. Baiyue had said she was in debt. Maybe she had to eat this stuff. But Jieling wasn’t going to have old rice porridge for lunch. “I’m going to get some rice and vegetables,” she said. Baiyue nodded. “Sometimes I get that. It isn’t too bad. But stay away from anything with shrimp in it. Soooo expensive.”

Jieling got rice and vegetables and a big pork bun. There were two fish dishes and a pork dish with monkeybrain mushrooms but she decided she could maybe have the pork for dinner. There was no cost written on anything. She gave her danwei card to the woman at the end of the line, who swiped it and handed it back.

“How much?” Jieling asked.

The woman shrugged. “It comes out of your food allowance.”

Jieling started to argue but across the cafeteria, Baiyue was waving her arm in the sea of green scrubs to get Jieling’s attention. Baiyue called from a table. “Jieling! Over here!”

Baiyue’s eyes got very big when Jieling sat down. “A pork bun.”

“Are they really expensive?” Jieling asked.

Baiyue nodded. “Like gold. And so good.”

Jieling looked around at other tables. Other people were eating the pork and steamed buns and everything else.

“Why are you in debt?” Jieling asked.

Baiyue shrugged. “Everyone is in debt,” she said. “Just most people have given up. Everything costs here. Your food, your dormitory, your uniforms. They always make sure that you never earn anything.”

“They can’t do that!” Jieling said.

Baiyue said, “My granddad says it’s like the old days, when you weren’t allowed to quit your job. He says I should shut up and be happy. That they take good care of me. Iron rice bowl.”

“But, but, but,” Jieling dredged the word up from some long-forgotten class, “that’s feudal!”

Baiyue nodded. “Well, that’s my granddad. He used to make my brother and me kowtow to him and my grandmother at Spring Festival.” She frowned and wrinkled her nose. Country customs. Nobody in the city made their children kowtow at New Year’s. “But you’re lucky,” Baiyue said to Jieling. “You’ll have your uniform debt and dormitory fees, but you haven’t started on food debt or anything.”

Jieling felt sick. “I stayed in the guest house for four days,” she said. “They said they would charge it against my wages.”

“Oh.” Baiyue covered her mouth with her hand. After a moment, she said, “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.” Jieling felt more frightened by that than anything else. Instead of going back to the lab they went upstairs and across a connecting bridge to the dormitories. Naps? Did they get naps?

“Do you know what room you’re in?” Baiyue asked.

Jieling didn’t. Baiyue took her to ask the floor auntie, who looked up Jieling’s name and gave her a key and some sheets and a blanket. Back down the hall and around the corner. The room was spare but really nice. Two bunk beds and two chests of drawers, a concrete floor. It had a window. All of the beds were taken except one of the top ones. By the window under the desk were three black boxes hooked to the wall. They were a little bigger than a shoe box. Baiyue flipped open the front of each one. They had names written on them. “Here’s a space where we can put your battery.” She pointed to an electrical extension.

“What are they?” Jieling said.

“They’re the battery boxes. It’s what we make. I’ll get you one that failed inspection. A lot of them work fine,” Baiyue said. “Inside there are electric ray cells to make electricity and symbiotic bacteria. The bacteria breaks down garbage to feed the ray cells. Garbage turned into electricity. Anti-global-warming. No greenhouse gas. You have to feed scraps from the cafeteria a couple of times a week or it will die, but it does best if you feed it a little bit every day.”

“It’s alive?” Jieling said.

Baiyue shrugged. “Yeah. Sort of. Supposedly if it does really well, you get credits for the electricity it generates. They charge us for our electricity use, so this helps hold down debt.”

The three boxes just sat there looking less alive than a boom box.

“Can you see the cells?” Jieling asked.

Baiyue shook her head. “No, the feed mechanism doesn’t let you. They’re just like the ones we grow, though, only they’ve been worked on in the tissue room. They added bacteria.”

“Can it make you sick?”

“No, the bacteria can’t live in people.” Baiyue said. “Can’t live anywhere except in the box.”

“And it makes electricity?”

Baiyue nodded.

“And people can buy it?”

She nodded again. “We’ve just started selling them. They say they’re going to sell them in China but really, they’re too expensive. Americans like them, you know, because of the no-global-warming. Of course, Americans buy anything.”

The boxes were on the wall between the beds, under the window, pretty near where the pillows were on the bottom bunks. She hadn’t minded the cells in the lab, but this whole thing was too creepy.

Jieling’s first paycheck was startling. She owed 1,974 RMB. Almost four months’ salary if she never ate or bought anything and if she didn’t have a dorm room. She went back to her room and climbed into her bunk and looked at the figures. Money deducted for uniforms and shoes, food, her time in the guest house.

Her roommates came chattering in a group. Jieling’s roommates all worked in packaging. They were nice enough, but they had been friends before Jieling moved in.

“Hey,” called Taohua. Then seeing what Jieling had. “Oh, first paycheck.”

Jieling nodded. It was like getting a jail sentence.

“Let’s see. Oh, not so bad. I owe three times that,” Taohua said. She passed the statement on to the other girls. All the girls owed huge amounts. More than a year.

“Don’t you care?” Jieling said.

“You mean like little Miss Lei Feng?” Taohua asked. Everyone laughed and Jieling laughed, too, although her face heated up. Miss Lei Feng was what they called Baiyue. Little Miss Goody-Goody. Lei Feng, the famous do-gooder soldier who darned his friend’s socks on the Long March. He was nobody when he was alive, but when he died, his diary listed all the anonymous good deeds he had done and then he became a hero. Lei Feng posters hung in elementary schools. He wanted to be “a revolutionary screw that never rusts.” It was the kind of thing everybody’s grandparents had believed in.

“Does Baiyue have a boyfriend?” Taohua asked, suddenly serious.

“No, no!” Jieling said. It was against the rules to have a boyfriend and Baiyue was always getting in trouble for breaking rules. Things like not having her trays stacked by five PM although nobody else got in trouble for that.

“If she had a boyfriend,” Taohua said, “I could see why she would want to quit. You can’t get married if you’re in debt. It would be too hard.”

“Aren’t you worried about your debt?” Jieling asked.

Taohua laughed. “I don’t have a boyfriend. And besides, I just got a promotion so soon I’ll pay off my debt.”

“You’ll have to stop buying clothes,” one of the other girls said. The company store did have a nice catalog you could order clothes from, but they were expensive. There was debt limit, based on your salary. If you were promoted, your debt limit would go up.

“Or I’ll go to special projects,” Taohua said. Everyone knew what special projects was, even though it was supposed to be a big company secret. They were computers made of bacteria. They looked a lot like the boxes in the dormitory rooms. “I’ve been studying computers,” Taohua explained. “Bacterial computers are special. They do many things. They can detect chemicals. They are massively parallel.”

“What does that mean?” Jieling asked.

“It is hard to explain,” Taohua said evasively.

Taohua opened her battery and poured in scraps. It was interesting that Taohua claimed not to care about her debt but kept feeding her battery. Jieling had a battery now, too. It was a reject—the back had broken so that the metal things that sent the electricity back out were exposed and if you touched it wrong, it could give you a shock. No problem, since Jieling had plugged it into the wall and didn’t plan to touch it again.

“Besides,” Taohua said, “I like it here a lot better than at home.”

Better than home. In some ways yes, in some ways no. What would it be like to just give up and belong to the company. Nice things, nice food. Never rich. But never poor, either. Medical care. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing. Maybe Baiyue was a little…obsessive.

“I don’t care about my debt,” Taohua said, serene. “With one more promotion, I’ll move to cadres housing.”

Jieling reported the conversation to Baiyue. They were getting incubated cells ready to move to the tissue room. In the tissue room they’d be transferred to a protein-and-collagen grid that would guide their growth—line up the cells to approximate an electricity-generating system. The tissue room had a weird, yeasty smell.

“She’s fooling herself,” Baiyue said. “Line girls never get to be cadres. She might get onto special projects, but that’s even worse than regular line work because you’re never allowed to leave the compound.” Baiyue picked up a dish, stuck the little volt reader into the gel, and rapped the dish smartly against the lab table: rap. The needle on the volt gauge swung to indicate that the cells had discharged electricity. That was the way they tested the cells: A shock made them discharge, and the easiest way was to knock them against the table.

Baiyue could sound very bitter about New Life. Jieling didn’t like the debt, it scared her a little. But really, Baiyue saw only one side of everything. “I thought you got a pay raise to go to special projects,”

Jieling said.

Baiyue rolled her eyes. “And more reasons to go in debt, I’ll bet.”

“How much is your debt?” Jieling asked.

“Still seven hundred,” Baiyue said. “Because they told me I had to have new uniforms.” She sighed.

“I am so sick of congee,” Jieling said. “They’re never going to let us get out of debt.” Baiyue’s way was doomed. She was trying to play by the company’s rules and still win. That wasn’t Jieling’s way. “We have to make money somewhere else,” Jieling said.

“Right,” Baiyue said. “We work six days a week.” And Baiyue often stayed after shift to try to make sure she didn’t lose wages on failed cultures. “Out of spec,” she said and put it aside. She had taught Jieling to keep the “out of specs” for a day. Sometimes they improved and could be shipped on. It wasn’t the way the supervisor, Ms. Wang, explained the job to Jieling, but it cut down on the number of rejects, and that, in turn, cut down on paycheck deductions.

“That leaves us Sundays,” Jieling said.

“I can’t leave compound this Sunday.”

“And if you do, what are they going to do, fire you?” Jieling said.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to earn money outside of the compound,” Baiyue said.

“You are too much of a good girl,” Jieling said. “Remember, it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

“Is that Mao?” Baiyue asked, frowning.

“No,” Jieling said, “Deng Xiaoping, the one after Mao.”

“Well, he’s dead, too,” Baiyue said. She rapped a dish against the counter and the needle on the voltmeter jumped.

Jieling had been working just over four weeks when they were all called to the cafeteria for a meeting. Mr. Cao from human resources was there. He was wearing a dark suit and standing at the white screen. Other cadres sat in chairs along the back of the stage, looking very stern.

“We are here to discuss a very serious matter,” he said. “Many of you know this girl.”

There was a laptop hooked up and a very nervous-looking boy running it. Jieling looked carefully at the laptop, but it didn’t appear to be a special projects computer. In fact, it was made in Korea. He did something and an ID picture of a girl flashed on the screen.

Jieling didn’t know her. But around her she heard noises of shock, someone sucking air through their teeth, someone else breathing softly Ai-yah.

“This girl ran away, leaving her debt with New Life. She ate our food, wore our clothes, slept in our beds. And then, like a thief, she ran away.” The human resources man nodded his head. The boy at the computer changed the image on the big projector screen.

Now it was a picture of the same girl with her head bowed, and two policemen holding her arms.

“She was picked up in Guangdong,” the human resources man said. “She is in jail there.”

The cafeteria was very quiet.

The human resources man said, “Her life is ruined, which is what should happen to all thieves.”

Then he dismissed them. That afternoon, the picture of the girl with the two policemen appeared on the bulletin boards of every floor of the dormitory.

On Sunday, Baiyue announced, “I’m not going.”

She was not supposed to leave the compound, but one of her roommates had female problems—bad cramps—and planned to spend the day in bed drinking tea and reading magazines. Baiyue was going to use her ID to leave.

“You have to,” Jieling said. “You want to grow old here? Die a serf to New Life?”

“It’s crazy. We can’t make money dancing in the plague-trash market.”

“I’ve done it before,” Jieling said. “You’re scared.”

“It’s just not a good idea,” Baiyue said.

“Because of the girl they caught in Guangdong. We’re not skipping out on our debt. We’re paying it off.”

“We’re not supposed to work for someone else when we work here,” Baiyue said.

“Oh, come on,” Jieling said. “You are always making things sound worse than they are. I think you like staying here being little Miss Lei Feng.”

“Don’t call me that,” Baiyue snapped.

“Well, don’t act like it. New Life is not being fair. We don’t have to be fair. What are they going to do to you if they catch you?”

“Fine me,” Baiyue said. “Add to my debt!”

“So what? They’re going to find a way to add to your debt no matter what. You are a serf. They are the landlord.”

“But if—”

“No but if,” Jieling said. “You like being a martyr. I don’t.”

“What do you care,” Baiyue said. “You like it here. If you stay you can eat pork buns every night.”

“And you can eat congee for the rest of your life. I’m going to try to do something.” Jieling slammed out of the dorm room. She had never said harsh things to Baiyue before. Yes, she had thought about staying here. But was that so bad? Better than being like Baiyue, who would stay here and have a miserable life. Jieling was not going to have a miserable life, no matter where she stayed or what she did. That was why she had come to Shenzhen in the first place.

She heard the door open behind her and Baiyue ran down the hall. “Okay,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll try it. Just this once.”

The streets of Shenzhen were incredibly loud after weeks in the compound. In a shop window, she and Baiyue stopped and watched a news segment on how the fashion in Shenzhen was for sarongs. Jieling would have to tell her mother. Of course her mother had a TV and probably already knew. Jieling thought about calling, but not now. Not now. She didn’t want to explain about New Life. The next news segment was about the success of the People’s Army in Tajikistan. Jieling pulled Baiyue to come on. They took one bus, and then had to transfer. On Sundays, unless you were lucky, it took forever to transfer because fewer buses ran. They waited almost an hour for the second bus. That bus was almost empty when they got on. They sat down a few seats back from the driver. Baiyue rolled her eyes. “Did you see the guy in the back?” she asked. “Party functionary.”

Jieling glanced over her shoulder and saw him. She couldn’t miss him in his careful polo shirt. He had that stiff party-member look.

Baiyue sighed. “My uncle is just like that. So boring.”

Jieling thought that to be honest, Baiyue would have made a good revolutionary, back in the day. Baiyue liked that kind of revolutionary purity. But she nodded.

The plague-trash market was full on a Sunday. There was a toy seller making tiny little clay figures on sticks. He waved a stick at the girls as they passed. “Cute things!” he called. “I’ll make whatever you want!” The stick had a little Donald Duck on it.

“I can’t do this,” Baiyue said. “There’s too many people.”

“It’s not so bad,” Jieling said. She found a place for the boom box. Jieling had brought them to where all the food vendors were. “Stay here and watch this,” she said. She hunted through the food stalls and bought a bottle of local beer, counting out from the little hoard of money she had left from when she’d come. She took the beer back to Baiyue. “Drink this,” she said. “It will help you be brave.”

“I hate beer,” Baiyue said.

“Beer or debt,” Jieling said.

While Baiyue drank the beer, Jieling started the boom box and did her routine. People smiled at her but no one put any money in her cash box. Shenzhen people were so cheap. Baiyue sat on the curb, nursing her beer, not looking at Jieling or at anyone until finally Jieling couldn’t stand it any longer.

“C’mon, meimei, ” she said.

Baiyue seemed a bit surprised to be called little sister but she put the beer down and got up. They had practiced a routine to an M.I.A. song, singing and dancing. It would be a hit, Jieling was sure.

“I can’t,” Baiyue whispered.

“Yes you can,” Jieling said. “You do good.”

A couple of people stopped to watch them arguing, so Jieling started the music.

“I feel sick,” Baiyue whimpered.

But the beat started and there was nothing to do but dance and sing. Baiyue was so nervous, she forgot at first, but then she got the hang of it. She kept her head down and her face was bright red. Jieling started making up a rap. She’d never done it before and she hadn’t gotten very far before she was laughing and then Baiyue was laughing, too.

Wode meimei hen haixiude

Mei ta shi xuli

tai hen xiuqi—

My little sister is so shy

But she’s pretty

Far too delicate—

They almost stopped because they were giggling but they kept dancing and Jieling went back to the lyrics from the song they had practiced.

When they had finished, people clapped and they’d made thirty-two yuan. They didn’t make as much for any single song after that, but in a few hours they had collected 187 yuan. It was early evening and night entertainers were showing up—a couple of people who sang opera, acrobats, and a clown with a wig of hair so red it looked on fire, stepping stork-legged on stilts waving a rubber Kalashnikov in his hand. He was all dressed in white. Uncle Death, from cartoons during the plague. Some of the day vendors had shut down, and new people were showing up who put out a board and some chairs and served sorghum liquor, clear, white, and 150 proof. The crowd was starting to change, too. It was rowdier. Packs of young men dressed in weird combinations of clothes from plague markets—vintage Mao suit jackets and suit pants and peasant shoes. And others, veterans from the Tajikistan conflict, one with an empty trouser leg.

Jieling picked up the boom box and Baiyue took the cash box. Outside the market it wasn’t yet dark.

“You are amazing,” Baiyue kept saying. “You are such a special girl!”

“You did great,” Jieling said. “When I was by myself, I didn’t make anything! Everyone likes you because you are little and cute!”

“Look at this! I’ll be out of debt before autumn!”

Maybe it was just the feeling that she was responsible for Baiyue, but Jieling said, “You keep it all.”

“I can’t! I can’t! We split it!” Baiyue said.

“Sure,” Jieling said. “Then after you get away, you can help me. Just think, if we do this for three more Sundays, you’ll pay off your debt.”

“Oh, Jieling,” Baiyue said. “You really are like my big sister!”

Jieling was sorry she had ever called Baiyue little sister. It was such a country thing to do. She had always suspected that Baiyue wasn’t a city girl. Jieling hated the countryside. Grain spread to dry in the road and mother’s-elder-sister and father’s-younger-brother bringing all the cousins over on the day off. Jieling didn’t even know all those country ways to say aunt and uncle. It wasn’t Baiyue’s fault. And Baiyue had been good to her. She was rotten to be thinking this way.

“Excuse me,” said a man. He wasn’t like the packs of young men with their long hair and plague clothes. Jieling couldn’t place him but he seemed familiar. “I saw you in the market. You were very fun. Very lively.”

Baiyue took hold of Jieling’s arm. For a moment Jieling wondered if maybe he was from New Life, but she told herself that was crazy. “Thank you,” she said. She thought she remembered him putting ten yuan in the box. No, she thought, he was on the bus. The party functionary. The party was checking up on them. Now that was funny. She wondered if he would lecture them on Western ways.

“Are you in the music business?” Baiyue asked. She glanced at Jieling, who couldn’t help laughing, snorting through her nose.

The man took them very seriously, though. “No,” he said. “I can’t help you there. But I like your act. You seem like girls of good character.”

“Thank you,” Baiyue said. She didn’t look at Jieling again, which was good because Jieling knew she wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face.

“I am Wei Rongyi. Maybe I can buy you some dinner?” the man asked. He held up his hands. “Nothing romantic. You are so young, it is like you could be daughters.”

“You have a daughter?” Jieling asked.

He shook his head. “Not anymore,” he said.

Jieling understood. His daughter had died of the bird flu. She felt embarrassed for having laughed at him. Her soft heart saw instantly that he was treating them like the daughter he had lost. He took them to a dumpling place on the edge of the market and ordered half a kilo of crescent-shaped pork dumplings and a kilo of square beef dumplings. He was a cadre, a middle manager. His wife had lived in Changsha for a couple of years now, where her family was from. He was from the older generation, people who did not get divorced. All around them, the restaurant was filling up, mostly with men stopping after work for dumplings and drinks. They were a little island surrounded by truck drivers and men who worked in the factories in the outer city—tough, grimy places.

“What do you do? Are you secretaries?” Wei Rongyi asked.

Baiyue laughed. “As if!” she said.

“We are factory girls,” Jieling said. She dunked a dumpling in vinegar. They were so good! Not congee!

“Factory girls!” he said. “I am so surprised!”

Baiyue nodded. “We work for New Life,” she explained. “This is our day off, so we wanted to earn a little extra money.”

He rubbed his head, looking off into the distance. “New Life,” he said, trying to place the name. “New Life…”

“Out past the zoo,” Baiyue said.

Jieling thought they shouldn’t say so much.

“Ah, in the city. A good place? What do they make?” he asked. He had a way of blinking very quickly that was disconcerting.

“Batteries,” Jieling said. She didn’t say bio-batteries.

“I thought they made computers,” he said.

“Oh yes,” Baiyue said. “Special projects.”

Jieling glared at Baiyue. If this guy gave them trouble at New Life, they’d have a huge problem getting out of the compound.

Baiyue blushed.

Wei laughed. “You are special project girls, then. Well, see, I knew you were not just average factory girls.”

He didn’t press the issue. Jieling kept waiting for him to make some sort of move on them. Offer to buy them beer. But he didn’t, and when they had finished their dumplings, he gave them the leftovers to take back to their dormitories and then stood at the bus stop until they were safely on their bus.

“Are you sure you will be all right?” he asked them when the bus came.

“You can see my window from the bus stop,” Jieling promised. “We will be fine.”

“Shenzhen can be a dangerous city. You be careful!”

Out the window, they could see him in the glow of the streetlight, waving as the bus pulled away.

“He was so nice.” Baiyue sighed. “Poor man.”

“Didn’t you think he was a little strange?” Jieling asked.

“Everybody is strange now,” Baiyue said. “After the plague. Not like when we were growing up.”

It was true. Her mother was strange. Lots of people were crazy from so many people dying. Jieling held up the leftover dumplings. “Well, anyway. I am not feeding this to my battery,” she said. They both tried to smile.

“Our whole generation is crazy,” Baiyue said.

“We know everybody dies,” Jieling said. Outside the bus window, the streets were full of young people, out trying to live while they could.

They made all their bus connections as smooth as silk. So quick, they were home in forty-five minutes. Sunday night was movie night, and all of Jieling’s roommates were at the movie so she and Baiyue could sort the money in Jieling’s room. She used her key card and the door clicked open. Mr. Wei was kneeling by the battery boxes in their room. He started and hissed, “Close the door!”

Jieling was so surprised she did.

“Mr. Wei!” Baiyue said.

He was dressed like an army man on a secret mission, all in black. He showed them a little black gun. Jieling blinked in surprise. “Mr. Wei!” she said. It was hard to take him seriously. Even all in black, he was still weird Mr. Wei, blinking rapidly behind his glasses.

“Lock the door,” he said. “And be quiet.”

“The door locks by itself,” Jieling explained. “And my roommates will be back soon.”

“Put a chair in front of the door,” he said and shoved the desk chair toward them. Baiyue pushed it under the door handle. The window was open, and Jieling could see where he had climbed on the desk and left a footprint on Taohua’s fashion magazine. Taohua was going to be pissed. And what was Jieling going to say? If anyone found out there was a man in her room, she was going to be in very big trouble.

“How did you get in?” she asked. “What about the cameras?” There were security cameras. He showed them a little spray can. “Special paint. It just makes things look foggy and dim. Security guards are so lazy these days no one ever checks things out.” He paused a moment, clearly disgusted with the lax morality of the day. “Miss Jieling,” he said. “Take that screwdriver and finish unscrewing that computer from the wall.”

Computer? She realized he meant the battery boxes.

Baiyue’s eyes got very big. “Mr. Wei! You’re a thief!”

Jieling shook her head. “A corporate spy.”

“I am a patriot,” he said. “But you young people wouldn’t understand that. Sit on the bed.” He waved the gun at Baiyue.

The gun was so little it looked like a toy and it was difficult to be afraid, but still Jieling thought it was good that Baiyue sat.

Jieling knelt. It was her box that Mr. Wei had been disconnecting. It was all the way to the right, so he had started with it. She had come to feel a little bit attached to it, thinking of it sitting there, occasionally zapping electricity back into the grid, reducing her electricity costs and her debt. She sighed and unscrewed it. Mr. Wei watched.

She jimmied it off the wall, careful not to touch the contacts. The cells built up a charge, and when they were ready, a switch tapped a membrane and they discharged. It was all automatic and there was no knowing when it was going to happen. Mr. Wei was going to be very upset when he realized that this wasn’t a computer.

“Put it on the desk,” he said.

She did.

“Now sit with your friend.”

Jieling sat down next to Baiyue. Keeping a wary eye on them, he sidled over to the bio-battery. He opened the hatch where they dumped garbage in them, and tried to look in as well as look at them.

“Where are the controls?” he asked. He picked it up, his palm flat against the broken back end where the contacts were exposed.

“Tap it against the desk,” Jieling said. “Sometimes the door sticks.” There wasn’t actually a door. But it had just come into her head. She hoped that the cells hadn’t discharged in a while. Mr. Wei frowned and tapped the box smartly against the desktop.

Torpedinidae, the electric ray, can generate a current of two hundred volts for approximately a minute. The power output is close to one kilowatt over the course of the discharge and while this won’t kill the average person, it is a powerful shock. Mr. Wei stiffened and fell, clutching the box and spasming wildly. One…two…three…four…Mr. Wei was still spasming. Jieling and Baiyue looked at each other. Gingerly, Jieling stepped around Mr. Wei. He had dropped the little gun. Jieling picked it up. Mr. Wei was still spasming. Jieling wondered if he was going to die. Or if he was already dead and the electricity was just making him jump. She didn’t want him to die. She looked at the gun and it made her feel even sicker so she threw it out the window.

Finally Mr. Wei dropped the box.

Baiyue said, “Is he dead?”

Jieling was afraid to touch him. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing. Then he groaned and both girls jumped.

“He’s not dead,” Jieling said.

“What should we do?” Baiyue asked.

“Tie him up,” Jieling said. Although she wasn’t sure what they’d do with him then. Jieling used the cord to her boom box to tie his wrists. When she grabbed his hands he gasped and struggled feebly. Then she took her pillowcase and cut along the blind end, a space just wide enough that his head would fit through.

“Sit him up,” she said to Baiyue.

“You sit him up,” Baiyue said. Baiyue didn’t want to touch him.

Jieling pulled Mr. Wei into a sitting position. “Put the pillowcase over his head,” she said. The pillowcase was like a shirt with no armholes, so when Baiyue pulled it over his head and shoulders, it pinned his arms against his sides and worked something like a straitjacket.

Jieling took his wallet and his identification papers out of his pocket. “Why would someone carry their wallet to a break-in?” she asked. “He has six ID papers. One says he is Mr. Wei.”

“Wow,” Baiyue said. “Let me see. Also Mr. Ma. Mr. Zhang. Two Mr. Lius and a Mr. Cui.”

Mr. Wei blinked, his eyes watering.

“Do you think he has a weak heart?” Baiyue asked.

“I don’t know,” Jieling said. “Wouldn’t he be dead if he did?”

Baiyue considered this.

“Baiyue! Look at all this yuan!” Jieling emptied the wallet, counting. Almost eight thousand yuan!

“Let me go,” Mr. Wei said weakly.

Jieling was glad he was talking. She was glad he seemed like he might be all right. She didn’t know what they would do if he died. They would never be able to explain a dead person. They would end up in deep debt. And probably go to jail for something. “Should we call the floor auntie and tell her that he broke in?” Jieling asked.

“We could,” Baiyue said.

“Do not!” Mr. Wei said, sounding stronger. “You don’t understand! I’m from Beijing!”

“So is my stepfather,” Jieling said. “Me, I’m from Baoding. It’s about an hour south of Beijing.”

Mr. Wei said, “I’m from the government! That money is government money!”

“I don’t believe you,” Jieling said. “Why did you come in through the window?”

“Secret agents always come in through the window?” Baiyue said and started to giggle.

“Because this place is counter-revolutionary!” Mr. Wei said.

Baiyue covered her mouth with her hand. Jieling felt embarrassed, too. No one said things like

“counter-revolutionary” anymore.

“This place! It is making things that could make China strong!” he said.

“Isn’t that good?” Baiyue asked.

“But they don’t care about China! Only about money. Instead of using it for China, they sell it to America!” he said. Spittle was gathering at the corner of his mouth. He was starting to look deranged.

“Look at this place! Officials are all concerned about guanxi!” Connections. Kickbacks. Guanxi ran China, everybody knew that.

“So, maybe you have an anti-corruption investigation?” Jieling said. There were lots of anti-corruption investigations. Jieling’s stepfather said that they usually meant someone powerful was mad at their brother-in-law or something, so they accused him of corruption.

Mr. Wei groaned. “There is no one to investigate them.”

Baiyue and Jieling looked at each other.

Mr. Wei explained, “In my office, the Guangdong office, there used to be twenty people. Special operatives. Now there is only me and Ms. Yang.”

Jieling said, “Did they all die of bird flu?”

Mr. Wei shook his head. “No, they all went to work on contract for Saudi Arabia. You can make a lot of money in the Middle East. A lot more than in China.”

“Why don’t you and Ms. Yang go work in Saudi Arabia?” Baiyue asked.

Jieling thought Mr. Wei would give some revolutionary speech. But he just hung his head. “She is the secretary. I am the bookkeeper.” And then in a smaller voice, “She is going to Kuwait to work for Mr. Liu.”

They probably did not need bookkeepers in the Middle East. Poor Mr. Wei. No wonder he was such a terrible secret agent.

“The spirit of the revolution is gone,” he said, and there were real, honest-to-goodness tears in his eyes.

“Did you know that Tiananmen Square was built by volunteers? People would come after their regular job and lay the paving of the square. Today people look to Hong Kong.”

“Nobody cares about a bunch of old men in Beijing,” Baiyue said.

“Exactly! We used to have a strong military! But now the military is too worried about their own factories and farms! They want us to pull out of Tajikistan because it is ruining their profits!”

This sounded like a good idea to Jieling, but she had to admit, she hated the news so she wasn’t sure why they were fighting in Tajikistan anyway. Something about Muslim terrorists. All she knew about Muslims was that they made great street food.

“Don’t you want to be patriots?” Mr. Wei said.

“You broke into my room and tried to steal my—you know that’s not a computer, don’t you?” Jieling said. “It’s a bio-battery. They’re selling them to the Americans. Wal-Mart.”

Mr. Wei groaned.

“We don’t work in special projects,” Baiyue said.

“You said you did,” he protested.

“We did not,” Jieling said. “You just thought that. How did you know this was my room?”

“The company lists all its workers in a directory,” he said wearily. “And it’s movie night, everyone is either out or goes to the movies. I’ve had the building under surveillance for weeks. I followed you to the market today. Last week it was a girl named Pingli, who blabbed about everything, but she wasn’t in special projects.

“I put you on the bus; I’ve timed the route three times. I should have had an hour and fifteen minutes to drive over here and get the box and get out.”

“We made all our connections,” Baiyue explained.

Mr. Wei was so dispirited he didn’t even respond.

Jieling said, “I thought the government was supposed to help workers. If we get caught, we’ll be fined and we’ll be deeper in debt.” She was just talking. Talking, talking, talking too much. This was too strange. Like when someone was dying. Something extraordinary was happening, like your father dying in the next room, and yet the ordinary things went on, too. You made tea, your mother opened the shop the next day and sewed clothes while she cried. People came in and pretended not to notice. This was like that. Mr. Wei had broken into their room with a gun and they were explaining about New Life.

“Debt?” Mr. Wei said.

“To the company,” she said. “We are all in debt. The company hires us and says they are going to pay us, but then they charge us for our food and our clothes and our dorm and it always costs more than we earn. That’s why we were doing rap today. To make money to be able to quit.” Mr. Wei’s glasses had tape holding the arm on. Why hadn’t she noticed that in the restaurant? Maybe because when you are afraid you notice things. When your father is dying of the plague, you notice the way the covers on your mother’s chairs need to be washed. You wonder if you will have to do it or if you will die before you have to do chores.

“The Pingli girl,” he said, “she said the same thing. That’s illegal.”

“Sure,” Baiyue said. “Like anybody cares.”

“Could you expose corruption?” Jieling asked.

Mr. Wei shrugged, at least as much as he could in the pillowcase. “Maybe. But they would just pay bribes to locals and it would all go away.”

All three of them sighed.

“Except,” Mr. Wei said, sitting up a little straighter. “The Americans. They are always getting upset about that sort of thing. Last year there was a corporation, the Shanghai Six. The Americans did a documentary on them and then Western companies would not do business. If they got information from us about what New Life is doing…”

“Who else is going to buy bio-batteries?” Baiyue said. “The company would be in big trouble!”

“Beijing can threaten a big exposé, tell the New York Times newspaper!” Mr. Wei said, getting excited.

“My Beijing supervisor will love that! He loves media!”

“Then you can have a big show trial,” Jieling said.

Mr. Wei was nodding.

“But what is in it for us?” Baiyue said.

“When there’s a trial, they’ll have to cancel your debt!” Mr. Wei said. “Even pay you a big fine!”

“If I call the floor auntie and say I caught a corporate spy, they’ll give me a big bonus,” Baiyue said.

“Don’t you care about the other workers?” Mr. Wei asked.

Jieling and Baiyue looked at each other and shrugged. Did they? “What are they going to do to you anyway?” Jieling said. “You can still do a big exposé. But that way we don’t have to wait.”

“Look,” he said, “you let me go, and I’ll let you keep my money.”

Someone rattled the door handle.

“Please,” Mr. Wei whispered. “You can be heroes for your fellow workers, even though they’ll never know it.”

Jieling stuck the money in her pocket. Then she took the papers, too.

“You can’t take those,” he said.

“Yes I can,” she said. “If after six months, there is no big corruption scandal? We can let everyone know how a government secret agent was outsmarted by two factory girls.”

“Six months!” he said. “That’s not long enough!”

“It better be,” Jieling said.

Outside the door, Taohua called, “Jieling? Are you in there? Something is wrong with the door!”

“Just a minute,” Jieling called. “I had trouble with it when I came home.” To Mr. Wei she whispered sternly, “Don’t you try anything. If you do, we’ll scream our heads off and everybody will come running.”

She and Baiyue shimmied the pillowcase off of Mr. Wei’s head. He started to stand up and jerked the boom box, which clattered across the floor. “Wait!” she hissed and untied him. Taohua called through the door, “What’s that?”

“Hold on!” Jieling called.

Baiyue helped Mr. Wei stand up. Mr. Wei climbed onto the desk and then grabbed a line hanging outside. He stopped a moment as if trying to think of something to say.

“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery,” Jieling said. It had been her father’s favorite quote from Chairman Mao. “…it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act by which one class overthrows another.”

Mr. Wei looked as if he might cry and not because he was moved by patriotism. He stepped back and disappeared. Jieling and Baiyue looked out the window. He did go down the wall just like a secret agent from a movie, but it was only two stories. There was still the big footprint in the middle of Taohua’s magazine and the room looked as if it had been hit by a storm.

“They’re going to think you had a boyfriend,” Baiyue whispered to Jieling.

“Yeah,” Jieling said, pulling the chair out from under the door handle. “And they’re going to think he’s rich.”

It was Sunday, and Jieling and Baiyue were sitting on the beach. Jieling’s cell phone rang, a little chime of M.I.A. hip-hop. Even though it was Sunday, it was one of the girls from New Life. Sunday should be a day off, but she took the call anyway.

“Jieling? This is Xia Meili? From packaging. Taohua told me about your business? Maybe you could help me?”

Jieling said, “Sure. What is your debt, Meili?”

“Thirty-eight hundred RMB,” Meili said. “I know it’s a lot.”

Jieling said, “Not so bad. We have a lot of people who already have loans, though, and it will probably be a few weeks before I can make you one.”

With Mr. Wei’s capital, Jieling and Baiyue had opened a bank account. They had bought themselves out, and then started a little loan business where they bought people out of New Life. Then people had to pay them back with a little extra. They each had jobs—Jieling worked for a company that made toys. She sat each day at a table where she put a piece of specially shaped plastic over the body of a little doll, an action figure. The plastic fit right over the figure and had cutouts. Jieling sprayed the whole thing with red paint and when the piece of plastic was lifted, the action figure had a red shirt. It was boring, but at the end of the week, she got paid instead of owing the company money.

She and Baiyue used all their extra money on loans to get girls out of New Life. More and more loans, and more and more payments. Now New Life had sent them a threatening letter saying that what they were doing was illegal. But Mr. Wei said not to worry. Two officials had come and talked to them and had showed them legal documents and had them explain everything about what had happened. Soon, the officials promised, they would take New Life to court.

Jieling wasn’t so sure about the officials. After all, Mr. Wei was an official. But a foreign newspaperman had called them. He was from a newspaper called The Wall Street Journal and he said that he was writing a story about labor shortages in China after the bird flu. He said that in some places in the West there were reports of slavery. His Chinese was very good. His story was going to come out in the United States tomorrow. Then she figured officials would have to do something or lose face. Jieling told Meili to call her back in two weeks—although hopefully in two weeks no one would need help to get away from New Life—and wrote a note to herself in her little notebook. Baiyue was sitting looking at the water. “This is the first time I’ve been to the beach,” she said.

“The ocean is so big, isn’t it?”

Baiyue nodded, scuffing at the white sand. “People always say that, but you don’t know until you see it.”

Jieling said, “Yeah.” Funny, she had lived here for months. Baiyue had lived here more than a year. And they had never come to the beach. The beach was beautiful.

“I feel sorry for Mr. Wei,” Baiyue said.

“You do?” Jieling said. “Do you think he really had a daughter who died?”

“Maybe,” Baiyue said. “A lot of people died.”

“My father died,” Jieling said.

Baiyue looked at her, a quick little sideways look, then back out at the ocean. “My mother died,” she said.

Jieling was surprised. She had never known that Baiyue’s mother was dead. They had talked about so much but never about that. She put her arm around Baiyue’s waist and they sat for a while.

“I feel bad in a way,” Baiyue said.

“How come?” Jieling said.

“Because we had to steal capital to fight New Life. That makes us capitalists.”

Jieling shrugged.

“I wish it was like when they fought the revolution,” Baiyue said. “Things were a lot more simple.”

“Yeah,” Jieling said, “and they were poor and a lot of them died.”

“I know.” Baiyue sighed.

Jieling knew what she meant. It would be nice to…to be sure what was right and what was wrong. Although not if it made you like Mr. Wei.

Poor Mr. Wei. Had his daughter really died?

“Hey,” Jieling said, “I’ve got to make a call. Wait right here.” She walked a little down the beach. It was windy and she turned her back to protect the cell phone, like someone lighting a match. “Hello,” she said,

“hello, Mama, it’s me. Jieling.”

Aka St. Mark’s Place

Richard Bowes

Over the last twenty years Richard Bowes has published five novels, the most recent of which is From the Files of the Time Rangers. The novel Minions of the Moon won a Lambda Award. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, and elsewhere. The novella “Streetcar Dreams” won a World Fantasy Award. His story “There’s a Hole in the City” won the story South 2006 Million Writers Award for Fiction. His most recent short-fiction collection Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies was published by PS

Publishing in England in 2006.

Recent and forthcoming stories will be in Electric Velocipede #10 and Subterranean magazine, and Horror: The Best of the Year, 2006, The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, and So Fey anthologies. Richard Bowes has lived for most of his life in Manhattan. Several of his recent stories have taken place downtown in the Greenwich Village and East Village of his youth, places that have changed drastically over the past thirty years but that live on, forever memorialized by Bowes’s vivid imagination.