The City, Not Long After, Page 2

  She felt the movement of a small hand against her thigh and she reached down for the baby. With a corner of the quilt, she wiped the blood and mucus from the child’s face. The girl gasped once, whimpered, then opened her eyes and regarded Mary with an unfocused stare. At last, with her baby at her breast, Mary fell asleep, waking only when the night breezes blew in through the open window.

  Mary never gave her daughter a name, calling her “baby” or “child” or sometimes “daughter.” She did not know whether the angel would return to name her daughter, but it seemed wisest to wait. Losing her husband and friends to the Plague had made Mary cautious. Naming the child seemed a foolish risk, as if a name would attract the attention of a malevolent universe. Namelessness offered a kind of protection.

  When she considered the matter, Mary realized that choosing not to name the child made no sense. But sense did not play much of a role in Mary’s life. Besides, the girl really didn’t need a name. When Mary called to her daughter, she simply called “Come here.” The girl knew her mother was calling her. There was no one else around for her mother to call.

  The baby grew up to be a wild, skittish, tree-climbing girl. She roamed the open lands around the farmhouse, chasing the feral cattle that grazed in overgrown pastures. She seemed to have no fear, this child. But then, she had no trust either. Somehow the two seemed linked in Mary’s mind.

  Late at night, when the girl was sleeping, Mary crept into her bedroom. Her daughter lay on her side, curled up like a fox in its burrow, her breathing soft and steady. Mary unconsciously matched her own breathing to her daughter’s rhythm. She gently touched the girl’s hand, taking comfort from her living warmth.

  On nights like that, Mary waited for something that she could not admit, even to herself. She waited for the bright angel to come and name her daughter, then steal her away. Mary guarded her daughter, falling asleep in the chair by the bed.

  More often than not, she woke to find an empty bed. Her daughter had slipped away in the early morning, leaving a tangle of empty blankets. The girl was off searching for birds’ nests, snaring rabbits, catching crayfish in the creek, scavenging in abandoned houses for things to trade at market.

  When the girl was nine years old, she found the globe in a nearby farmhouse. It was on a shelf of knickknacks, wedged between a metal replica of the Empire State Building and a china figurine of Minnie Mouse. With her fingers, she wiped away the furry layer of dust that covered the glass. Though the afternoon was cool and only a little sunlight filtered through the dirty window to shine on the shelf, the globe felt warm to the touch.

  The girl peered through smears of dirt at the vague rectangular shapes inside. When she shook the globe, she saw flickers of movement through the glass.

  She moved to the front porch where the light was better, polished the glass on the sleeve of her shirt, and peered inside again. Tall buildings with square windows stood side by side. The tallest of the buildings came to a point, making a triangle rather than a rectangle. When she shook the globe, flecks of gold rose in swirls and showered down on the buildings.

  She had never seen anything so beautiful. The glitter caught the sunlight, sparkling like flames. If only she looked closely enough, she thought, she might see people in the tiny cars that stood motionless in the street. She turned the globe over and over in her hands, liking the feel of it. On the black base, raised gilt letters read: “Souvenir of San Francisco.”

  Her mother had told her about San Francisco. Bedtime stories always began, “Back in San Francisco, before the Plague….” The stories were odd and disjointed, fragments of her mother’s life. Bright memories of the Chinese New Year’s parade, touched with the scent of gunpowder from firecrackers. Remembrances of neighbors: the old woman with twenty-nine cats, the young man who practiced Tai Chi on the roof.

  From her mother’s memories, the girl had created her own picture of San Francisco: a place as exotic as Oz, with tremendous hills over which cable cars rolled. She had asked her mother once why they could not go back there. Her mother had shaken her head. “Too many ghosts there. I can’t go back.”

  The girl took the globe home with her, along with the other trinkets she had found: a jackknife with an imitation pearl handle, a deck of playing cards decorated with photos of naked women, a set of embroidery scissors in the shape of a stork. When she got home, she put the jackknife and playing cards with the other things she would take to market. She gave the embroidery scissors to her mother. But the globe she kept for herself. That night, before she went to bed, she shook it once more and watched the gold flecks drift around the towers of the city.

  When she was still quite young, the girl taught herself to hunt. Not far from her home was a tumble of concrete slabs, where a freeway overpass had collapsed in an earthquake. The rubble provided a maze of ready-made burrows, and the rabbits were abundant. At first she snared them with cunning loops of fishing line, set in faint pathways that the animals had worn in the grass. When she was a little older she made a slingshot with the metal tubing from a rusted bicycle frame and the rubber from the bicycle’s inner tube. With slingshot in hand, she would lounge on a sun-warmed concrete slab, waiting in the soft purple twilight for the rabbits to come out and feed. Even in dim light, she rarely missed.

  In a neighboring farmhouse, she found a Golden Book Illustrated Encyclopedia. Though her mother had taught her to read, she liked the Encyclopedia mostly for the pictures, and she carried it home, several volumes at a time. After five trips she had the whole alphabet. On winter evenings she lay by the fire, studying pictures of exotic places and things. In the volume marked W she found pictures of weapons. From a picture she got the idea for her crossbow. She cut saplings from the almond orchard until she found one with the right springiness for a bow. She whittled the stock from lumber that she found in the barn. On long summer days she practiced target shooting in the orchard and became an excellent shot.

  In the summer the valley was hot; in the winter the rains came. Each spring the almond trees in the orchard bloomed, and each fall she and her mother gathered nuts and hulled them for market. Before she went to bed each night, the girl shook the glass globe. Sometimes she dreamed of San Francisco.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHEN DANNY-BOY WAS EIGHT years old, he learned that art could change the world. The lesson began in an alley off Mission Street in San Francisco. Danny-boy crouched behind a garbage dumpster and watched a man paint a wall.

  The man was dancing; his bare feet beat a rhythm on the asphalt. He wore a red kerchief around his neck and a pair of ragged jeans, cut off above the knee. In each hand he held a can of spray paint. His arms moved in sweeping gestures, leaving trails of paint on the red brick wall. As he painted, he chanted in a guttural voice. Danny-boy could not make out the words of the chant—could not even tell for certain that there were words, and not just grunts and nonsense syllables.

  A ring of upturned abalone shells surrounded the man. In each shell a clump of herbs burned, sending clouds of pungent smoke swirling through the alley.

  Through the smoke, Danny-boy could make out the pictures on the wall. A herd of barrel bellied horse with manes as stiff as toothbrush bristles galloped toward Mission Street. A stag tossed its rack of antlers toward the foggy sky. A curve of red-brown paint formed the great humped back of a bull buffalo. As Danny-boy watched, the man added a slash of red for the animal’s eye.

  Without hesitation, the man stooped to discard one spray can and pick up another, making the motion a part of his dance. He reached high on the wall and painted birds—or, rather, pairs of curved lines that somehow suggested birds. Danny-boy recognized them as geese, flying in a V-formation.

  Fascinated, Danny-boy crept closer, always ready to dash back to his hiding place. His feet must have made a sound on the asphalt, because the dancing man glanced his way, smiled quickly (a flash of white teeth in a darkly bearded face), and gestured to a stack of herbs by the wall.

  Cautiously at first, Danny-
boy took bits of sage and yerba buena and added them to the abalone shells. The thick clouds of smoke filled his lungs and made him feel a little dizzy. Tentatively, he began to match the man’s movements, dancing outside the ring of abalone shells, waving a branch of sage to stir the smoke.

  The man painted a meandering blue line. Beneath it, he sketched a school of fish and the enormous body of a whale. His chant changed, growing higher and faster. He painted a herd of deer, another herd of wild cattle. He danced more wildly, sweat glistening on his bare back. He snatched up a can of gray paint and quickly drew a wolf in the right-hand corner of the wall. Without warning, he dropped the can of paint and leaped away from the wall and over the ring of abalone shells, landing beside Danny-boy.

  Danny-boy’s ears rang in the sudden silence. He stared up at the man, curiously unafraid. Curly brown hair covered the man’s arms, his back, his chest. Beneath the hair, his skin was reddish brown, the color of a newly cut redwood. Something about the way he stood—relaxed, yet ready to move—reminded Danny-boy of the wild dogs that prowled the streets of the city.

  “My name’s Danny-boy.”

  The man glanced down at him. “Call me Randall.”

  Danny-boy watched curiously as Randall squatted beside one of the abalone shells and poked at the smoldering herbs with one paint-smeared finger. He picked up the shell, dumped the ashes into his big hand, then rubbed them on his face and body. Glancing at Danny-boy, he said, “Take some. It’s good. Purifying.”

  Danny-boy pulled off his T-shirt and gingerly rubbed ashes on his chest and arms.

  “Come,” said Randall.

  Danny-boy followed him to the stream that ran along Eighth Avenue. Over the years, the flowing water had eaten away the asphalt, exposing the rocks and sand that lay below. Grasses that had taken root between the sidewalk stones grew thick and green beside the water. As Randall approached, a bullfrog leapt from the curb and swam for safety.

  Randall splashed cold water on himself and scrubbed his face and chest with a handful of grass. Danny-boy imitated him, shivering a little in the cold. When he had scrubbed off most of the ashes, Danny-boy dried himself on his T-shirt and lay down on the sidewalk, glad of the sun-warmed concrete at his back. Randall sat beside him. Danny-boy studied the man.

  “How come you were painting pictures on that wall, Randall?” Danny-boy asked at last.

  Randall rested one big hand on the cement and turned to examine Danny-boy more closely. “We need more game around here. Buffalo, deer, fish. We need better hunting.”

  Danny-boy frowned. “What does that have to do with pictures on the wall?”

  Randall plucked a grass stem and nibbled on the end of it. He hesitated for so long that Danny-boy thought he might not answer at all; then he said, “If I did it right, the pictures will bring back the game.”

  “Yeah?” Danny-boy considered the idea for a moment. “You think so.”

  Randall tossed the grass stem aside. “I think so.” He shrugged.

  “I’m only one-sixteenth Cherokee. Raised up in white man’s schools. The stuff I know about this—it comes from here.” He patted his hairy stomach. “I may not have done it right. But I think I did.”

  Danny-boy frowned, considering Randall’s words. “If you want to bring back those animals, why’d you paint a wolf then? Nobody wants more wolves around.”

  Randall smiled suddenly, showing his white teeth. “It’s a signature of sorts,” he said. “Besides, I wouldn’t mind having a few more wolves around. Just a few.” He grinned at Danny-boy and Danny-boy grinned back, though he didn’t quite understand the joke.

  Danny-boy had grown up in San Francisco. He was born a few years before the Plague, but his memories of those early years were hazy. He remembered the plush rabbit that had been his favorite toy, and his mother’s hands lifting him when he fell on the playground and skinned his knee. Other than that, his early past was a blank.

  After the Plague, a middle-aged woman named Emerald found him wandering in the street and adopted him. His name came from a song that Emerald liked to sing.

  Emerald’s grasp on reality was tenuous at best. Sometimes she believed that Danny-boy was her own son, and claimed that she was a holy virgin and he was the new Messiah. At other times she remembered who she was and where she was, and she told Dannyboy stories about the world before the Plague.

  As a child, Danny-boy explored the skyscrapers that fronted on Market Street, wandering through oak-paneled conference rooms and offices that smelled of dust. Sometimes he read the papers that he found lying around—Books, the old man who lived in the library, had taught him to read. But usually the papers were dull—memos about mergers and financial statements for companies that no longer existed.

  Most of the ground floor offices had been vandalized: windows broken, desks upturned, files opened, and papers scattered. Danny-boy avoided such scenes of violence. He preferred to explore offices that had remained undisturbed. There, dust had settled on papers that lay untended on the desks; mice had deposited turds in the drawers and among the keys of the typewriters. In dry flowerpots, only the plastic plants were still green, and even their persistent color was muted by a layer of dust.

  Danny-boy sensed that these offices were still alive somehow. If someone were to wash the dust away and rinse the plastic plants clean, he believed that the telephones would start to ring and the typewriters would hum. People would rush into the offices, pick up the papers, and take up where they had left off. Danny-boy prowled the offices, fascinated and terrified by the notion that the old days might come back.

  While exploring one office building, he found a red switch marked EMERGENCY GENERATOR. Without considering the consequences, he flipped the switch.

  The building came to life around him. From somewhere beneath the floor came a low-pitched rumble that became a steady hum. A subtle vibration traveled through the floor and made him tremble. Overhead, the fluorescent tubes flickered, then glowed with an unnatural blue-white light. There was a clicking sound, like the chattering of teeth. Cold, stale-smelling air blew from a vent, etching patterns in dust that had been undisturbed for more than a decade.

  He waited. The cold air made him shiver, but nothing else changed. Cautiously, he began to explore, venturing into windowless interior offices that had always been dark before. He jumped at each unfamiliar sound: the hum of a copy machine, the whispering of the air-conditioning system, the soft click-click-click as the second hand of an electric clock made its rounds, ticking off the seconds of a time long past. He glanced behind him, but the dust was marked only by his own footprints. On a corner desk, a small red light glowed on a cassette player. He ran his fingers over the black buttons, wiping away the dust. Hesitantly, he pressed the key marked PLAY.

  Danny-boy watched the tape turn, dimly visible behind the dusty plastic cover. A tinny voice spoke from the headphones that lay on the desk. When he picked them up and held them to his ear, he heard a man saying: “… delays caused by the illness of delivery personnel. The following locations have reported shortages: …

  Danny-boy threw down the headphones and ran, caught by a primitive terror. He did not fear the voice in the box, but he was caught by the feeling, so strong in this enclosed room, that the past would return to reclaim the city. Emerald had told him of all the people in suits who had worked in the buildings downtown. Suddenly he feared that the gray faceless people who used to sit at these desks would return to find him playing with their things. They would catch him and put an end to all his games. He fled the building and never went back.

  When Danny-boy was eight, Emerald tumbled from the window of an apartment building, fell five stories, and died. Danny-boy was never sure what had caused her to fall, but he suspected that she had fallen while reaching for the full moon that hung low in the sky.

  CHAPTER 3

  WHEN HE WAS FIFTEEN YEARS OLD, The Machine fell in love with his biology teacher. Of course that was before the Plague and before he knew he was a m
achine. His father called him Jonathan and he believed he was human, though clearly different from his classmates.

  He attended a private high school for gifted students. He did not like it much—the classwork was too easy and his classmates were fools. He knew, from the time he had hacked his way into the school’s data base and read his confidential files, that his teachers thought he was antisocial. So did Dr. Ward, the psychologist he visited once a week He did not participate in class discussions; he hated sports; he avoided group activities. During class he spent most of his time designing and sketching intricate mechanisms: a ball-and-socket joint for a mechanical walking machine, a spiraling digging apparatus for a burrowing machine, rotor blades for a flying machine.

  His father was an engineer engaged in robotics research. He was a balding man with a weak chin and brilliant blue eyes. His mother was an engineer of some kind as well. She had left The Machine’s father when The Machine was only six. Occasionally, mostly on holidays, she flew in from Tokyo, where she worked for a multinational corporation. On her rare visits The Machine’s father treated her with brittle respect, politely inquiring after her latest research project.

  The Machine’s mother seemed uncomfortable around him. She was a sweet-smelling stranger who brought him clockwork toys from Japanese shops. After she left he took them apart in his basement workshop, marveled at the intricate gearing mechanisms, and rebuilt them with minor improvements.

  Ms. Bruner, his biology teacher, was slim and dark-haired like his mother. The Machine fell in love the moment he saw her. On the first day of class she smiled at him and asked him to sit up front. That was enough. In her class, he paid attention. When she perched casually on the edge of her desk and talked about mitochondria, his breathing picked up speed. He still did not participate in class discussions, but he smiled at her and he thought that the smile she gave him back was special, somehow different from the way she smiled at everyone else.