—
In memory, the Hiding had begun not long after she and Aster tried to integrate into a group of people who were trying to create a community by squatting in a bombed-out apartment building. Most of the people had children of various ages and sizes and dispositions.
The parents were worried about the impact that isolation and hiding and scarcity were having on the psyches of their spawn, as near as she could tell, so they were making an effort to collect themselves, maybe for safety and to share resources too. But they made one grand error: they wanted to socialize their children. The parents had a strange terror that the children would suffer without proper education and social engagement.
This puzzled Laisvė.
They tried to collect the children together to play. The idea was that the children would teach one another things they knew, and spend a good bit of time “just being children” too, playing, that sort of thing. Any open field or urban area not overrun entirely by thick weeds and bushes worked, but caged courtyards near apartment buildings worked best. One in particular nested near the Narrows; the parents took some comfort in the idea that a fresh breeze laden with moisture would keep the children well. But the experiment had gone badly, at least for Laisvė. Or maybe mostly for Aster. If the parents had just thought the idea through a little better, Laisvė thought, they would have realized that none of the children had any human social skills left whatsoever. Either they’d lost what skills they had, or they’d been born without them. All they had were survival instincts—animal skills.
Laisvė was thinking of bonobos. The genus Pan, the closest living relative to Homo sapiens. They shared the genus with chimpanzees, but their matriarchal order was more altruistic, empathetic, compassionate, and sensitive than chimps’. In bonobo societies, males derive their power from the status of their mothers.
That day, in the midst of the children’s play, Aster heard screaming. He ran through a crowd of kids that had gathered in a corner and found Laisvė standing alone, holding one hand in the air. The hand was bloody. At her feet was a male toddler, his body still. She killed the baby she killed the baby, they were all saying, but when he asked, How? How?, the words punching through his throat on the way up, no one could answer him. No one had seen it. All they’d seen were her outstretched arm and her bloody hand, held up above her head.
The toddler was an orphan, and he was not dead after all. But his mouth and neck were covered in blood.
No one, including Aster, thought to ask Laisvė what had happened. Nor did anyone notice the balled fist of her hand — or try to open it — or they might have found the small object she was holding. An object the toddler had found somewhere, and which two other boys had told him to put in his mouth. A rusted nail, it turned out, which the toddler had swallowed, and which Laisvė had pulled from his throat so he did not die.
No one noticed either, probably because of the male toddler so near death—My god, she nearly killed that boy—that Laisvė had seized one of the boys who’d made a joke out of trying to get a smaller boy to eat a nail, that she’d taken justice upon herself. She pushed the cruel boy away from the immediate area, out into the water. No one would notice for several hours that the boy had floated away, his internal organs already beginning to fail, how he grabbed at his gut with abdominal pain, how he shat himself and vomited for hours as he floated, until he became jaundiced and died from liver failure, like a fish gone belly-up in the waves.
After that, Laisvė had to be kept secret.
—
In their falling-to-pieces apartment building, time never budged. She understood that Aster wanted to protect her and hide her from harm, but she was starting to learn how stasis could kill a person. Look at evolution. The question was a kind of trade: Was it more dangerous to risk being out in the world, knowing that the refugee Raids were happening everywhere these days — armed men in vans snaking like killer whales through the streets, taking people away to god knows where — or was it more dangerous to atrophy, like a stone growing moss, inside a squatter’s apartment with a father dying from grief? No one ever became anything stuck inside staring at shadows, languishing inside Plato’s cave. People could forget they had bodies at all, living that way. Being alive meant walking toward death, and she had no special fear of death. Life and death were a story familiar to her.
She’d located the penny she carried in the swollen riverway lapping around The Brook. The P she’d found in an alley between abandoned and misshapen buildings, half buried in rubble and ensnared by weeds. This falling-to-pieces city was beautiful. She had no fear on this day, except the fears her father had put into her. To Laisvė, objects were everything, because they moved backward and forward in time. Sometimes the same was true of people: the right people might be in the wrong time and thus need carrying. When that happened, she went to the Awn Shop.
The closer she got to the shop, the louder her heart beat. She knew she was supposed to be a secret of a self — staying at home while her father was at work, walking the iron to build the Sea Wall to keep the water back — but she couldn’t sit still the way he wanted her to. The beauty of abandoned subway tunnels piled with debris and grown over with thorns and ivy that didn’t need much light, the sound of moles and rats and mice dotting the ground, the decommissioned library filled with falling-apart books, the fractured windows, a roof caved in here and there — well, everything vibrated, beckoned to her, come.
What used to be the public library was now a strange word-and-sound church, filled with all manner of birds and small rodents and disheveled books. When it rained or snowed, she sometimes moved books to different rooms or floors in the library, away from the weather. Sometimes she’d see someone else in the library, but not often. If she met up with any other person, she had instructions from her father: she should give her name as Liza, then hide. Names were tricky in these times.
Her armpit itched from the big blue P she’d tucked under her arm. At the door of the Awn Shop, she closed her eyes briefly, calming her breathing to a four-count rhythm as Aster had shown her.
Inside the shop, an old, old, old man sat curled like a comma over a great glass case. His eyes sat embedded within such a deep nexus of wrinkles that his face looked to her like an aerial map, which she very much loved. His hands were even better — veins like mycelia dancing over skin and bone. She suspected that he was blind, but he never let on.
Her favorite thing about the Awn Shop: the most important objects were always in the front glass case, but the whole shop was filled with time, as if time itself were among the objects on display. Everything there was from some other epoch. There were no customers left in The Brook, that she knew of, except in the underground economy. What used to be businesses had turned to debris. The peeled paint of the Awn Shop’s exterior walls was dung green. The front window was clouded with grime and time. She had no idea how the shop endured.
Today her excitement made everything orange and yellow. Steadying her breathing, Laisvė opened the front door and entered.
“Liza,” the old comma said. “Welcome.”
She set the P carefully atop the glass counter.
He looked at her, then at the blue plastic letter. Her cheeks flushed. She scratched her armpit. She knew it was something.
After a pause — long enough for Laisvė’s eyes to focus on actual dust particles moving through the light and air between them — he opened his mouth. “This object has been missing for a long time,” he said. Then he did something strange. He bowed, as if to thank her. She’d never seen him bow before.