“Is it yours?” she asked, the pulse at her neck quickening.
“In a way, yes,” he said. “This letter belongs to a word, and the word used to be very important in my life. The word used to be my livelihood. Before the pandemics. Before collapse. Before the water. Before the Raids.” He bowed again. “Come with me,” he said, and they walked outside of the building for a bit. He pointed to the big blue plastic letters of the Awn Shop sign. “See?”
She didn’t see, but she nodded and smiled, and they went back inside. Something important had been exchanged, she knew. Adults were weird. Then, her confidence renewed, she placed the penny on the glass counter between them.
He produced an eye magnification device. He studied the penny. “You see this green coloration?”
“Yes,” she said, their heads nearly touching.
“That’s what happens when oxidation occurs between copper and air. Over time, copper turns green.”
“Like the drowning statue,” Laisvė said. The statue was her favorite large object that lived in water. As she’d told him ten thousand times. “The drowned statue is made from thirty tons of copper,” she continued. “Enough to make more than four hundred and thirty million pennies.”
“Yes, yes, so you’ve said.” The old comma had a gentle way of redirecting the story. “This coin here is the Flowing Hair cent. Incredibly rare. You know what? People hated it! They thought Lady Liberty looked insane. And people fear the insane. Evil people, thinking evil things.”
Laisvė stared at the coin: the flowing hair, the wide eyes. “Evil is just live going a different direction,” she said. “People need to learn to understand backward better. Words. Objects. Time. People get stuck too easily.”
“So true,” he said. He stared out behind her, beyond her. “When coins stopped making their way through the economy, the feel of them in your hands left too.” He picked the coin up and held it between them, staring at it so closely, his eyes seemed to cross a little. “Buying shriveled up as the disasters came: pandemics, fires, floods, the Raids. From the highest towers of government down to the bank tellers and hardware stores and candy shops and restaurants, that strange metallic feel in the palm, that noise not quite nameable, not a rattle, not a clanging — it disappeared.”
They sat inside the silence a moment, honoring the fact. She thought about the taste of copper in her mouth; she thought about his story, what he’d told her of it anyway. His ancestors had been from Guangdong Province, as it was called before it sank into the sea. He’d been something like a historian before he became an old old old comma, or that’s what Laisvė deduced.
Laisvė had probably been something else before too. At least in the prenatal stage, when a fetus could be a pig or a dolphin or a person.
“I’ll trade you an apple for the P, he said, leaning back and waiting for her answer. “And for the penny—”
Laisvė gently pulled the penny back. “I have to keep the penny. I have to carry it. Also, I’d better get back home. Before there’s trouble.”
The Awn Shop man peered down at her. “I see,” he said. And he reached behind his chair, retrieved an apple, and handed it to her.
She turned the apple around, noticed a faint yellow glowing spot, and plunged her teeth in. The sound of her bite hung between them. “Goodbye, then,” she said.
She stared at the penny as she turned and left the shop. A penny was a complex object, an artifact. She thought, not for the first time, about the word thief. It was a word her father used, but not a word she would apply to what she did. Whatever she was holding, her father always took it out of her hand to examine it, worrying about what trouble it would bring.
She thought of herself with another word: carrier. A thousand times she had to convince her father that she did not steal objects from the Awn Shop. Aster was convinced that losing her mother and brother had subjected Laisvė to some kind of trauma that led to problematic, erratic behaviors: stealing objects, endless list making, a tendency to focus obsessively on meaningless things. She was convinced that Aster’s seizures came from the same origins, only he had yet to understand them as meaning-making spaces.
To her mind, when she carried objects, she was participating in the so-called underground economies she’d read about in the dilapidated library. And it was during her reading that she came to realize how, sometimes, people too moved backward and forward in time. How the right people might be in the wrong time and thus need carrying.
She walked home from the shop feeling, if not happy or content, then complete, like a sentence or a math equation solved. She walked in a zigzag pattern through the alleyways between buildings, every structure holding its emptiness or its stories or its people and secrets. Sometimes she closed her eyes and let herself be guided by her hand as it ran along a building wall. It was a fun game, to walk the urban textures with your eyes closed, follow old paths made by different feet. Smells and sounds and cold and heat became more real, and colors filled her head.
But eventually she remembered her father’s fear for her, and she opened her eyes and sped up her serpentine trek. When she heard a tat-tat-tat—it could mean either machinery or trouble — she stopped, then turned away from the sound and tried to walk a different path. To distract her mind, she listed the names of worms she knew: compost worms, earth-mover worms, root-dwelling worms, whispered under her breath over and over: Eisenia fetida — tiger worm. Dendrobaena veneta — nightcrawler. Lumbricus rubellus — red wiggler. Eisenia andrei — red tiger worm. Lumbricus terrestris — earthworm, beloved of Darwin.
Another flurry of popping sounds — still some distance away, she thought. She paused and spoke aloud to no one but the dirt and the building walls reaching up on either side of her: “Darwin put the worms on his billiard table at night. He shouted at them, clapped at them, played the piano and the bassoon at them. He blew whistles at them. He decided they didn’t have ears. But when he played a C, for a moment, there was silence. They’d felt the vibrations.” She then went back to whisper walking, her eyes closed, her hand running lightly against the wall, tracing place, making for home. Didymogaster sylvaticus — extremely rare. Megascolides australis — possibly extinct.
Walking walking walking, her hand against the bumps and chunks and bricks of buildings, her mind making its patterns. The corner of a building emerged beneath her palm and the rocky dirt gave over to pavement beneath her feet. She came to the end of an alley that opened up onto a street near her apartment building. Her intention already across the street. Get back before there’s trouble.
She peeked around the corner. In one direction, about six blocks down, she saw the sounds, saw the black and gray, saw what she was supposed to run from. The sounds had a name: Raid. A Raid, like her father warned of in his terror voice, was raging just down the road. She could see the uniformed men with guns, she could see the black vans lined up, she could see the terrified or angry people pouring out of the buildings, hands on heads, men, women, children. Piled into the black vans. Screeching tires toward who knows where. She could feel her father’s fear in her shoulders.
She watched until all sound stilled. Then she looked in the other direction. No one, nothing, it seemed — just good, solid, still, soundless air — so she took a step forward. But the bottom of her red skirt shivered, then cut back across her leg — a violent whoosh of air and heat so close to her face and body that she jumped almost into the sound of it, something like a hundred rabbits landing thud-squish onto pavement as if they’d all been thrown at once, violently, from a great height.