When the family wasn’t working, they were reading—one room was almost filled with battered and stained but readable paperbacks. At certain hours of the day, when the parents had determined it was relatively safe, the children played music. There was a kind of violin made out of a stick, a can, and some wire, a square wooden guitar, a wind instrument constructed out of pipe and oval bits of metal. He assumed the children had practiced a great deal—the music was slightly jangly and nervous, but he found it oddly soothing.
Their “house” might have been an actual house at one time. They lived on the edge of a huge debris and trash field—their primary workspace. A stream of the trash had eddied down among some older structures, exploding the walls out, knocking them off foundations. The parents had hollowed out a hidden, womb-like space among all that. The structure was seemingly stable. There was an escape tunnel in the back, big enough for the family to crawl through in case of emergencies, although certainly not large enough for Falstaff.
He thought he might keep the name Falstaff. He didn’t know if Danielbot had understood what he was doing when he’d assigned him the name, but it might be his judgment and his punishment for what he’d done these past few years. Ironically he had little sense of humor anymore—it had been scoured out of him during his time in Ubo. Like Falstaff, he had been a liar and a coward. He’d lied to all of them. It had been his job, but now that seemed a pathetic excuse.
Sometimes, however, when these little children rode his back—four or more at the same time seemingly unable to get enough of him—he’d felt the high humor of Falstaff inside him, eager to come out.
Today the oldest daughter kept gesturing that she wanted to show him something. They’d been through this many times before—she was proud of this world of hers. He kept reminding himself that she’d never known anything better. She wanted to show it off to the newcomer. And the things she had revealed to him so far had been quite impressive. She’d taken him down into the old subway system where a jungle of vegetation and even a vegetable garden or two filled the abandoned cars. Another afternoon she took him into a friend’s abode where the fellow had filled several canvases with rotting organic matter. They stank badly, of course, but the colorful visual effect had been quite beautiful.
Today they walked a couple of miles through a series of ghostly abandoned neighborhoods—she was unable or unwilling to tell him why no one wanted to live there—to a towering apartment complex rising out of acres of rubbish. The pickers were out on the trash field in force, dressed in a variety of bright colors as well as the usual white, dull gray, and brown.
The front doors were heavily graffitied and so deeply scarred Falstaff wondered if at one point someone might have tried to drive a vehicle through them. Two guards were stationed on either side, armed with old-fashioned assault rifles. They eyed him suspiciously but smiled warmly when they saw his young companion, who greeted all four by name. Inside, the lobby was packed with pickers in their signature tribal outfits, food vendors, and a variety of other people he assumed to be guests of the pickers or hangers on like himself. All were animated and obviously excited.
That happy excitement was perhaps the most surprising thing he’d encountered since he’d left Ubo. Most of the faces he had seen before he got here had been guarded, suspicious, or simply afraid.
The elevators, not surprisingly, didn’t work, so they took the stairs, which were jammed with people in both directions. And although Falstaff felt some anxiety about the close proximity of so many strangers, everyone appeared to be in a celebratory mood. The landings were crowded as each had an out-facing window with people lined up to see whatever it was they were there to see.
Occasionally his young companion would clutch his hand. At first he thought maybe this was a childhood thing, a reach for adult support and comfort. But then he realized she was the comfortable one here. He was the outsider, and when she saw that he was a little uneasy or nervous in this vast crowd she was offering him support. He’d been aware of her watching him ever since they left her home—she knew what he was feeling better than he did.
This trip to the apartment tower was about more than bragging—it was her gift to him. He would really need to leave soon—he couldn’t bear such kindness, such love. He wasn’t worthy of it.
They exited onto the eighteenth floor near the top of the building. They stopped at an old woman’s apartment where they traded for some cold but tasty spiced burritos, three batteries for two burritos. A few more batteries and some quiet but firm bargaining (this lovely almond-skinned young girl was a force to be reckoned with) got them into the apartment down the hall, and two rickety chairs out on the balcony.
Falstaff peered out over the field of rubbish and the surrounding backdrop of buildings. In one sense it was Boston as he was afraid it had become, a dismaying ruin of trash and disintegrating structures and the fires beyond and the black boil of acrid smoke hanging above. He was high up enough to see what was left of Ubo out in the bay: like a ruined castle in the middle of a shallow polluted lake, its walls collapsed and blackened by the fire that had only recently expired. But there might still have been survivors, and maybe someday he would find them, if they didn’t find him first.
The field of trash spread out below him was not dismaying, but an amazing display of frantic activity as figures swarmed over the ground in a maelstrom of color, accompanied by a roar of cheered anticipation so loud and thunderous it frightened him with how the building shook. He kept looking at the girl for some kind of explanation—he had no real context for what he was seeing—but she simply pointed at his eyes and indicated that he needed to watch what was happening below.
There appeared to be one person in charge, a young man in a bright red T-shirt, long hair and a beard, who ran around at the base of the tower shouting orders to the pickers out in the field and various subordinates along the sidelines. But then Falstaff heard the yelling from above, and he leaned out from the balcony craning his neck up to see, and there was an arm coming out from the edge of the roof waving and gesturing with accompanying shouted orders. So whoever was directing this spectacle, whatever it was, did so from the roof, and his commands were relayed to the folks on the ground.
It occurred to him then that the field of trash the pickers were walking on wasn’t random—anything but, because the color showing to those in the apartment tower was an overall gradient of white or pale gray. It was a deliberate thing. Obviously you couldn’t get a random distribution of gray trash, and now and then when a gust of wind or the action of the picker’s feet caused some disturbance in the color palette, there were children dressed in white and gray who ran across the field with long sticks in their hands to make the correction.
Suddenly a great shout echoed across the field as a burst of bright red exploded in the middle of all that gray. Falstaff leaned forward to try to determine what was happening. The red appeared to be a great pulsing of flame and leaves like a rose made out of fire. But if he concentrated he could see that it was a mass of pickers with varying shades and shapes of red, pink, and orange on their costumes gyrating in a circle and showing different portions of their bodies to the audience above.
He hadn’t noticed them gather, but he now realized most of the field was covered with standing pickers, milling, moving about in both geometric and spiraling patterns, showing the gray predominantly, but there were glimpses of other colors in their costumes as well, further down their bodies and mostly hidden.