“You can’t be here often, or for extended periods. What happens when you’re not?”
“I have guard rats.” He began pulling cubes from one of the stacks. “Joking. About theft and property, too.” He reconfigured the cubes as a chair, more or less. “Those who live out here and I have an understanding. Turns out we’ve much in common.”
“Being?”
“That you deal with an unfree world by making yourself so free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. Camus, I think.”
“Yet you run with the marshals of that world.”
“Their screens, drones and watchers catch most of what happens on the surface of their world. But much goes on beneath, in ours.”
“Giants of the deep?”
“Minnows and small fish. Thousands upon thousands of us. Where the true history resides.”
Li pulled a link from his pocket, punched in.
“The villagers want to climb the hill and storm the castle, and there is no castle. The castle is all around us. What we have to do is learn to live in it.”
As he spoke, perfectly relaxed, he was sweeping and scanning at impressive speed. “Ever come across a series of children’s books, Billy’s Adventures?”
I shook my head.
“I read them when I was five, six. The first one started off: ‘Two years it was that I lived among the goats. Two years that I went about on all fours, ate whatever came before me.’ Like most kid’s books, as much as anything else they were put out there as socializers. Teach the boys and girls how to get along with others, shore up received wisdom, hip-hurrah things-as-they-are. But scratch the surface and what was underneath gave the lie to what was on top. The books weren’t about joining the march, they were about staying apart while appearing to fit in. They were profoundly subversive.”
Back when this area was a functioning part of the city, Li’s squat had been a service facility, a utilities satellite maybe, a goods depot. Layers of steel shelving six- and eight-units deep sat against the rear wall. Stained and worn cement floors, splayed heads of ancient cables jutting from the wall. Steel everywhere, of a grade not seen for better than half a century, including the door that now rang open to admit an elderly man in clothing at once suggestive of tie-dye and camouflage. Balding, I saw as he slipped off his cloth cap.
“And so here you are back with us,” the man said. Trace of a far-northern accent in his voice. “And not alone.”
Li introduced us. “Thank you for minding the burrow, Daniel—as ever.”
“Well then, we can’t have just anyone moving in here, can we? We do have standards.” Then to me: “Welcome to the junkyard.”
Li had continued to monitor his link as we spoke. Now he beckoned me. The screen showed a street in the central city, masses of people moving along, dodges, feints, near-collisons.
“There,” Li said. The cursor became an arrow, touched on one individual moving at a good clip close to storefronts and walls. “And there.” Two larger figures, perhaps six meters back, matching speed with the first. “I’m piggybacked on security feeds. Seconds ago, sniffers at the corner dinged.”
“Those two are armed.”
We watched as the lone figure turned into a narrow side street or entryway. Both pursuers hesitated at the mouth, then stepped in, first one, then, on a six count, the other. People streamed by on the sidewalk. We waited. Moving at an easy pace, the single, smaller figure emerged. Patently she’d taken note where the cameras were and kept her face averted, but size and carriage were unmistakeable.
Fran.
Molly.
“By now she’s in the wind and the area’s spilling over with police.”
“And those hunting her will have new dogs in the area along with them,” Li said. “Unless, of course, they’re the same.” He thumbed over to news feeds. No mention of the incident. Then to the city’s official feeds, where delays from technical problems had been reported in the area and citizens were advised to consider alternate routes. “So many multiple realities,” Li said. “Is it any wonder we’re unable to see the world straight on?”
Time passed, as it will, however hard one holds on.
Li told me about religious practices among the Melanese who during old wars and due to the island’s tactical location, grew accustomed to airplanes arriving almost daily filled with goods, some of which got shared, much of which got cast off and reclaimed. For many years after, with that war over, the islanders carved long clearings like runways in the forest, built small fires along them to either side, constructed a wooden hut for a man to sit in with wooden disks on his ears as headphones and bamboo shoots jutting out like antennae. They waited for the airplanes to return with goods. Everything was in place. Everything was just as before. But no airplanes came.
It began to feel as though what we were doing in our approach to the whole Fran-Molly affair wasn’t far removed.
Why would Fran signal for backup then fail to make contact, even to make herself visible? Leapfrog, maybe? Assuming we’d move in and her pursuers’s focus would shift to us, leaving her free to… what?
Look again.
There had been urgency, power, in that attack. The air crackled with it. Fran knew where cameras were placed, carefully kept her face averted. From visual evidence her pursuers also knew, yet took little effort to skirt the cameras. (1) They were protected or (2) They didn’t exist.
And just what did we hope to learn by endlessly reviewing the incident? “One works with what one has,” Li said every time we thumbed up the file.
What we had was next to nothing.
And hellhounds on our trails. We could all but hear them snuffling around out there in the dark.
Government after government fell, each trailing in its wake the exhausted spume of grand theories. Anomie had come piecemeal over so long a time that we were hard pressed to remember or imagine another way. Platitudes, slogans and homilies had supplanted thought. That, or unfocused, unbridled hatred.
Was the government at which we arrived a better one, or were we simply too exhausted to go on? The bigfish capitalism we fled and the overseer government we embraced had much the same disregard for bedrock democratic principles. But each individual was housed, educated to the extent he or she elected, provided sustenance and medical care, state-sponsored burial.
Border disputes, blockades, financial sloughs, outright attacks, the collapse of alliances. Those early years thrummed with dangers to which our nascent union, fussily jamming the day, often reacted with little regard for long-term consequence.
Ever on the go, the world’s contours shifting and reshaping themselves even as I passed among them, I grew accustomed to media and official reports of a world far removed from that I witnessed. Which among these gaping disparities were sinister, which utilitarian? And just what was it I was doing out there? The people’s work? The government’s? That of a handful of wizards behind the curtain? One of Sid Coleman’s songs comes to mind again, “Which Side Are You On,” not all that much of a song really, but a damned good question. I wonder every day.
I was a good soldier, as soldiers go. One would expect years of such service to fix in place conventional, conservative beliefs. Instead, they honed within me an innate aversion to authority and to organizations in general. When I rummage in the attics of my mind, what I come up with is an immiscible regard for personal and civil liberty.
Claeton, pronounced Claytown by locals, mid-January and so cold that when your nose dripped, icicles formed. A thick white mist rose permanently from the ground. Bare trees loomed in the distance, looking as though someone had strung together a display of the hairless legs and knobby knees of old men. We inhabited a ghostly sea bottom.