Lighthouse Island: A Novel Read online

  She put out both hands and walked into planes of gleaming things. She picked up her feet and put them down very carefully as if she were printing some image on the floor. She came to the room with the television. She sat down in front of it. The picture resolved itself, became intelligible, and she saw a tall, thin tower with a light on top sending out an intense beam and a great sea washing over rocks, curtains of drift.

  Lighthouse Island! said the announcer’s voice. Save up your credits and go! See the rain forests! Trees reared upward into mists and rain, long trunks like the legs of marvelous beings whose bodies were higher yet. Northern beauty, misted nights! The revolving light on top of the tower arrowed into the night and the sea.

  Nadia thought, This is the magic planet that Lucy and the Swiffer Boys were looking for in their transformer ship. Searching through a cartoon galaxy. I am supposed to go there. Ocean spray thundered over the guardian cliffs of the shore. Maybe that was where her parents went. A house of logs with intricately carved eaves and painted decorations and medallions and pointed windows, a fantasy house, resolute and calm with a light shining out of a window, people inside, safe and warm. Kind people.

  An ambulance attendant found Nadia in front of the TV, picked her up, and ran with her through descending showers of rubble, into the dry streets.

  She said, I am not Nadia. My name is Lucy Swiffer.

  They believed her; not for very long, but enough to encourage her in thoughts of deception, altered personalities.

  At the beginning of the demolitions of the Three Falls neighborhood many square miles of skyscrapers came down, and people scavenged in the rubble for copper pipes and other fixtures, paneling, scrap lumber, nails and screws and hinges and tile and I-beams and I-tools. Some were legal scrappers but others were freelance and most of those were thieves. In groups of four and five the scrappers wrenched up blocks of rubble and snaked out electrical lines; they came upon dishes and clothes and from time to time the remains of other people.

  James Orotov was eighteen years old and had come to love demolition, even the smell of cordite and the dust of test blasts. He was deeply absorbed by the remains of structures where he could see the hidden anatomy of the city exposed like a medical student’s cadaver, where he could observe load-bearing beams and ancient water mains and the infill of foundations. He and his brother had the privilege of flying south with the engineers, one of only ten flights that year. In the south one could come across old Saltillo tiles with imprints of the hands that had made them, and paw prints and chicken tracks. James had a collection of these tiles with their fossils of vanished animals and workmen. In a notebook he began to make secret maps; they were tentative and unsure. Prester John Apartments, he wrote. 28 degrees 24 minutes North latitude and 97 degrees 45 minutes West longitude.

  He and his brother went out on a balcony of the Prester John Apartments after the crews had taken down the top five stories to see the beams that supported the balconies. His brother dared him to step out on the balcony and so he did. So they both did. They eased through the doorless doorway and onto the balcony and then the balcony gave way. There were no beams. It was only a concrete shelf without supports.

  He fell all four stories and landed on top of a pile of mattresses, fans, solar cookers, cacti in planters, wheelie carts for shopping, tools, bedding, and polyester clothes that had been dragged into the street by former inhabitants.

  As he dropped through the hot city air a great voice (his own) shouted through his mind like a loud-hailer, But I never met her! He fell, windmilling his arms, into the deep canyon of the narrow street, young and strong and in flight for perhaps the last time in his life. Slabs of broken concrete came down with him. He struck the pile of mattresses and clothes and would have survived without serious injury but the remains of the balcony fell on his back and broke his spine. Pieces of concrete hit the street and bounded and shattered into even smaller pieces. His brother hung from the balcony door frame by his fingers and some men ran up the four flights and pulled him in.

  The workmen loaded James onto a door and ran down the street with him. They dodged buses and carts. James shouted that he could not feel his legs. His brown hair was glistening with blood. His brother dashed ahead to a telephone exchange booth and called for an ambulance. The operator gave the EMS the corner numbers and James was taken to a hospital and ended up in a wheelchair.

  He recalled his descent through the hot afternoon air and his wild thought, But I never met her!

  Met who?

  He studied and attained degrees in both architecture and explosives. He studied cartography on his own. He had brown hair and gray eyes and the cynical and reserved attitude of someone confined to a wheelchair. James often tried to find his way through the antiquated and unstable remains of the Internet, searching for the disappeared. He had once been tall.

  James and his brother, Farrell, became closer after the fall. They had lost their father to cancer and so there were only three of them left and one of these in a wheelchair. Farrell was stockier than James and shorter, only now of course James sat in his wheelchair and was shorter than anybody except children and dwarves. Farrell studied meteorology and aviation and became a pilot and a devotee of old weather reports, written in a language so obsolete that few could puzzle it out. Meteorology, an orphan bureaucracy, was always shifted around because the world had fallen into a state of weatherless weather. All was blue seared skies and drought and, in the winter, intense cold because atmospheric water had frozen up in the glacial caps at the poles, plunging the world into a Drought Age. Farrell was given a position in Meteorology and Intrusive Species Identification because he could read the technical jargon or at least was interested in understanding it and could translate the greater part of the reports. He obtained a Ph.D. in aviation and weather, as if it were an award.

  Farrell asked agency heads in Wellness and Medical Certification about research into spinal injuries, specifically corticospinal tract regeneration. It was not a high priority and medical research had gone seriously downhill over the last century. Farrell discovered a facility that prepared retinol for stabilization into retinyl palmitate. The plant was laced with great tubes delivering inert gases for gas packing, smoky people in subzero temperatures doing things in white coats, and in the rear a tiny laboratory where corticospinal researchers lived in squalor.

  Yes, sir? A woman sat in a busted armchair out in the entryway to the minute laboratory. Her hair was flattened under a dirty white cap, her skin dried into innumerable wrinkles. A cardboard box that said BIOWASTE overflowed onto the floor. He told her why he had come.

  She said respectfully, Well, Director Orotov, we may have something. We’re trying to find a blocking system for an enzyme called PTEN; it’s a cell-proliferation inhibitor. It inhibits a molecular pathway called mTOR, and if we can delete the PTEN, we may get nerve regrowth. Spinal nerves normally don’t regenerate but this may do the trick. It has with the pigs.

  I see. Farrell’s dark eyes were fixed on her and very alert. So, this is working on your lab pigs.

  Yes, but it may allow for formation of tumors. Other illnesses. I mean, you suppress a cell-growth inhibitor and so you may get all kinds of weird cell growth.

  Okay. Farrell nodded. You’ll let me know, won’t you?

  It will be available for severe cases only, at first. An experiment.

  And the severe cases are always among people who have connections.

  Isn’t that the truth?

  But you’ll let me know? Farrell laid down two Krugerrands. What else do you need?

  The woman looked at the gold coins for a long moment. A new centrifuge. The one we have is hand-cranked if you can believe that and the air seal is faulty. The woman put her hand on the coins. This is lunch. For, like five months or so. What do you do, Director Orotov?

  I’m in Meteorology.

  Farrell and James came from a good family, a privileged family. They had been taught, against all logic, the privilege
and responsibility of public service. But the corrosive contempt of the general population for the agencies wore down this concept as if by steel wool.

  The brothers often went to the rooftops to talk, to get away from those who might listen in and disapprove and get them arrested. They listened to Big Radio and its cycle of readings: Here we are at the beginning of autumn when the season turns and the leaves take on color. This is the season for the classic works of Spain and then the unforgettable explorers’ tales. Let us begin with Blood and Sand.

  From the streets below came the sounds of the inhabitants of the worldwide city streaming in many directions, thick as boiling grains, dried out and thirsty. Beyond that sound another deep tremolo of trains rumbling underground carrying compressed brewer’s yeast, cactus paste in blocks, boxes of soy crumbles, solar panels, pressed recycled cardboard, packets of fish-flavored shreds, rice milk from what used to be St. Louis but was now Gerrymander Seven. The shipments were often stalled for months for lack of paperwork or were sidelined and rifled by professional thieves while neighborhoods quietly starved. Distribution was a chronic problem and a mystery but secret trains full of prisoner-workers bulled their way past the immovable food shippage.

  The brothers sat on Farrell’s rooftop with a water feature called Eastern Tranquility and listened to this symphonic arrangement of urban sounds and talked. They discussed the human propensity to construct cities and the imperatives of urban growth. James’s long unfeeling feet were in house slippers on the wheelchair plates, his hand skipped over his keypad. They talked about heavier-than-air flight, about old movies, about the future of humanity, about forgetting, about the fall of James and the fall of man.

  James was one of the top men in his field and he was quietly invited to join the Royal Cartography Society, which was not exactly illegal. After the Urban Wars they had destroyed all the maps, the old place names as well as the year numbers. This left people in a kind of eternal present in no specific place. The maps needed to be recovered, rediscovered, and if they were quiet about it, no problem. Pandrit Yi was an undersupervisor in Urban Drainage and Flow Control in the Eighth Gerrymander who mapped in the wee hours; Albert Burke held some kind of job with Furniture Supply and he actually walked over the rise and fall of the land, house by house, in the far north, Fourth Gerrymander, Neighborhood Fifteen, which was at one time known as Minneapolis, and drew in the topographical lines as things felt and bodily known.

  Are we truly born to formulate cities? James had himself driven to the interspaces, traveling by ambulance to the limits of his own part of the city, which was a micronation, or had been, to look out on the slums that lay between while his attendants groused and snorted. To leave the dense city, even to approach the small spaces in between urban concentrations was, to them, like approaching death and starvation. They drove for days, through the confusion of broken freeways, crowded by dense housing.

  They drove past hundreds of thousands of workers’ barracks crowded and filthy and in other areas dense fields of cactus pads fat with glycerin surrounded by a mineral landscape that long ago had been stripped of soil. They came to a place where winds tore across the interurban deserts and carried with them dust and sand grains and lost kites and clothing from distant rooftop clotheslines and wads of dried grasses as coarse as thatch.

  On the edge of the Fourth Gerrymander were one-room shacks spaced precisely three hundred yards apart so that they dotted the landscape in endless squares. James wheeled himself out of the ambulance and down a ramp. He refused to use the electric controls so his arms and shoulders were very strong. He was somewhere in one of the old national entities that had been layered on top of another and older national entity. This had once been Mexico. Then the United States. Then the Western Cessions.

  His attendants stood behind him in the unceasing wind among broken walls to look out at the wellheads that drilled for water in a landscape so simple it seemed to have just been made. Dirt. Sand. Rocks. They drilled for the gyppy fossil water of ancient seas that lay in the seeping layers of limestone at fifty-four thousand feet. At this particular place James could see great ships half buried in the sands. A gulf of the sea had drawn off and left them at some ancient port. Their rusted prows rose a hundred feet above gray dunes. The Shunta Maru, the Ramik Fane.

  Maybe we are on Mars, James thought. The wind tore at his short brown hair. That’s possible. But then would the Big Dipper look the same? Would Polaris still be in the geographical north? His attendants went back inside the ambulance and played cards and then wrapped themselves in their coats and fell asleep around a catalytic heater. The stars emerged slowly and then James sat alone under a clear black heaven where the constellations took on a fierce intensity, and indeed they were all in their accustomed places with the Dipper on one side of the firmament and the Chair on the other and between the two, Polaris dimly shining.

  Chapter 3

  In the apartment building of the family that had been told to adopt her, there lived an older man named Thin Sam Kenobi who used to sit at the entrance of the apartment building and make disposable jewelry things out of the foil from cigarette packages and soy cheese packages.

  Nadia, in the ardor of her orphan heart, decided to love Thin Sam like a father and to think about him and do things for him. She and Thin Sam had made themselves a bench by stacking volumes of scavenged hardback books and putting planks across them. Nadia’s hands were short with blunt nails and still brown with last summer’s sun. The winter was dry and arctic, so Thin Sam had made a rocket stove for them and they held their hands out to it.

  It was only October and bitterly cold but sitting outside was better than inside, the TV on Deafening, all of them drinking up their gin allowance, the air clouded with people’s breath and the walls sparkling with frost.

  Every apartment was assigned about 20 kWh of electricity per month, which was enough to run the OLED television screen, flexible and thin as paper, and maybe a lightbulb for a few hours in the evenings. Communications and Entertainment made sure every human being in the megacity had access to television. Some people fought for assignments to apartments with a higher allowance, maybe 90 kWh a month, but then you had to pay for it with work hours and the electricity failed a lot. And then there were people who were adept at stealing it, and also tapping into the water pipes. Penalty: the cactus farms.

  Throughout the apartment building at least twenty televisions were all broadcasting the same program. Soccer was over (men in shorts struggling in the frozen mud over a ball) and now it was Early to Rise, where a group of people in a recycle unit found weird things in rubble and argued with one another and had love affairs, but if Nadia watched the screen for more than five minutes she began to see sparks flashing and weaving through her vision.

  So she began to read and memorize whatever came to hand. In abandoned upper stories she found novels, stories in which the characters’ actions and thoughts were described and the plot proceeded with a happy continuity. The characters’ behaviors were explained and motivations stated so everything fell together. She didn’t need to see anything. She found herself so grateful for this phenomenon that she fell into novels as if into a well, and into poetry as if it were a river.

  We’re looking down into a valley, she said to Thin Sam. Under all the buildings there, right? “And travelers now, within that valley, through red-lit windows see vast forms . . .” of whatevers. I love to scare myself. Vast stinking forms. Eww. She lifted her dark eyebrows and smiled at him.

  Nadia, Nadia, he said. He folded the delicate foil strips in his hard fingers. There used to be a lake down there. Standing water. Dirty but standing. It was called Blue Springs Lake.

  Where did it go? She pressed out a foil strip between her cold hands.

  We used it up. He took the strip from her hand. For manufacturing. Flushed our waste with it. Then the weather changed. Our ancient imperative for growth. It was supposed to be a good thing. Nobody asked, when does growth stop? And so here we are. T
his used to be called Kansas City but now it’s just city most of the way to Denver and we are called Gerrymander Eight.

  And where did the animals all go?

  We ate them, he said. And we took up all their space. Except for rats, mice, and the hardier sort of bird.

  Nadia handed Thin Sam another foil. She had to press them out smooth and then fold them longways; then he wove them together in diamond patterns. She loved being away from the television and the crowded rooms and passageways. From Thin Sam’s cupboard where he lived and drank and had his being, a radio played.

  Nadia kept her schoolbooks under the bench and only occasionally flipped through them because they were so boring. She also kept old novels there. Nobody cared if she read. Child welfare didn’t care. So few people read that it was of no concern.

  Thin Sam Kenobi was loose inside his layers of clothes, several shirts and a tattered sweater and a coat. His knuckles were round as marbles. From below came a deep rumbling. The transport trains. He had taken to instructing her in matters of life, things an orphan girl ought to know.

  He said, Always, always hide food. Never, never sign anything.

  Why? she said. She rested her pointed chin on one fist and her dark-red hair stuck out in sprays.

  Because there are people who would arrest you and take you away. He turned a leaf of foil in his hand. You would be a happy child if only the world would let you be.

  This left Nadia confused. Was she supposed to be happy all the time? Would people love her then?

  Never mind. So. Thin Sam rooted around in his basket and came up with more foils and handed them to her. And you will see other girls who have parents and good lives, and when you find yourself getting angry, getting envious, say to yourself, Stop, stop. It’s a waste of mind. Okay?

  Yep, said Nadia. Will do.