Excerpted from Perfect From Now On
by Christopher Harris
PART I THE BIG ONE
She’s woken by gunfire but doesn’t get up and run.
Her name is Giocanda Gia for short and she naps on her cot beneath a two-story mural, listening over and over against her will to the new Whitney Houston song.
It will maybe turn out she really should’ve run.
The mural is faded and depicts some kind of spacecraft strapped to an orange cylinder that dwarfs the craft; the mural’s perspective deemphasizes the ship and italicizes the cylinder. But rust marks weep down the whole composition anyway, here in this unsunken quadrant of a Ninth Ward warehouse that never ever cools. The pop-pop-popping is distant but audible over the sound of more rain, and Whitney. The roof drips water through an endless lattice of vents that don’t blow air and pipes that don’t carry water and cables that don’t bear electricity and ladders nobody climbs and orange ceiling tracks hooked up to nothing. Gia speaks and understands English much better than Spanish and largely keeps quiet. Her dad is long deported and maybe her mom is sick somewhere in a hospital. Weirdly, looking at the mural gives her hope.
It’s getting dark. She sits up and thinks she smells faint smoke even through the rain and knows what it means. Better for her sanity to get away from this song, which isn’t official internee torture (because there’s no such things as internees) but damn, she’s heard it enough.
There’s nowhere to run anyway.
She puts on cracked plastic boots and also her wool coat though it’s stifling in here. She steps away from the row of cots bearing its juveniles and juvenilia: girls sleeping and not, dolls makeshift and not, off-brand crayons, torn pages depicting teen idols bearing elaborate hairdos, slivers of chalk with which the littler girls draw schematics on the concrete floor of the mansions in which they’ll one day live, plus the occasional can for nighttime pees.
They don’t officially call them guards. They police this warehouse and others in the area, wearing beige uniforms and
carrying no weapons. They’re friendly. Gia steps around the puddle where the water’s inexorable ascent has paused: a puddle that becomes, over there in the dark, a pool and then a lagoon turning millions of dollars’ worth of high-tech equipment into automated offal. Babies and toddlers live in nurseries that used to be this facility’s executive offices, and when they age out into Cool or Grace or Glamour (Gia lives in Glamour) they often arrive bearing lice or the flu, and it’s up to the older girls to take care of them. Gia looks 14 but is a couple months shy of 18; if anyone remembers this, they’ll graduate her into the former sugar plant or oil refinery nearby, where food isn’t supplied and people supposedly have sex regardless of who might be trying to sleep in the next bunk. Gia knows what sex is.
She steps outside to the loading dock where the rain is even louder, and one of the guards is here smoking pink. This guard is one of the newer ones: she still talks in lilting questions, still gets excited by incompetent kiddie finger-paintings, as though her enthusiasm will be the first step that encourages one of these little unwanted forgotten brown bambinas to transcend her meager beginnings and become an artist or scientist or something even more amazing. Gia doesn’t know anything about the lives of these guards, only that they’re do-gooders with nice shoes and skin, and they don’t have southern accents. It’s this guard’s stone that’s playing the new Whitney Houston song, and it goes:
When I said I would always love you
You know, my baby, it’s still true!
I was so emotional baby
Every time I thought of you I liked to feel the heat with somebody Now I only want the heat of we two!
Gia nods hello, the guard smiles. Gia mindlessly mirrors the smile, and then the guard also nods, now in time with the music, offering a big-sister encouragement that compels Gia to change her own nod’s syncopation, so that they’re both nodding in time with the song’s peppy beat, and the guard’s smile changes to: aren’t we having a moment!…and the whole thing is exhausting and beholden and the power dynamics are completely screwed up, because in a couple months this same woman might be the one dislodging Gia from
the cot she’s had for…three years? Gia would rather go back to Texas, where she was born. In her memory, Texas is only sunny. She steps down into the mud. The rain is always warm. Technically Gia isn’t supposed to leave Glamour after dark, but nobody enforces this. As long as she doesn’t try to flee the Ninth Ward, they don’t care. She has a tin flashlight someone gave her a long time ago. She stores it in the underside of her cot where nobody will think to steal it. She brightens the mushy ground as she goes, pretending she doesn’t see roaches clambering over footprints’ bluffs and basins, pretending it’s only rain in her light’s column and not also thousands of aquatic midges that don’t bite but smell like rotting fish, and are too stupid to get out of the wet.
Gia splashes down to the rotary and she’s never seen the water so high: the canal here has already turned into more of a lake, which warehouses emerge halfway out of: former storage buildings for sunken manufacturing plants that are now only good for bedraggled pelican roosts, though bad boys from Little Woods sometimes swim out to these roofs and dive into the bayou runoff (and then sometimes Gia hears that these boys have become sick with fever). But now even with her dim flashlight, Gia can see that the water has crawled over another levee and past a meager forest that leads to a highway. She clomps into a giant empty parking lot and stamps mud off her boots and wonders if the path ahead will be passable. The song is in her head and she’s helpless: Now I only want the heat of we two.
Gia doesn’t know what she’s like. She thinks a lot about how other people see her. She tries to be nice to the younger girls so they’ll look up to her; the other teenagers in Glamour seem to’ve decided Gia is hopelessly uncool and if not thickheaded then at least lacking in the social grace they’ve all agreed makes a person likable. She’d chalk it up to a relatively late remotion to New Orleans, except recent arrivals like Min and Beatriz are far more inner-circle-adjacent. Even someone like Pilar Two an objectively strange girl known to sneak her own chopped-off hair into her food seems respected because she fills surplus composition books with writing nobody Gia knows has ever read. In Gia’s Dallas memories, she fit in better: never a leader but happily accepted as a follower; in middle school in the Cedars she was a lieutenant of Gloria Dominguez, a pretty and scary girl who stole clothing and smoked pink, and Gia pretended to hate school as
much as Gloria but now thinks back with pleasurable pain on the sun-blinded polished hallway floors and the painted lockers and the school’s old-fashioned laptop computers about which everyone was always complaining but now seem like the highest luxury. Gloria, whose customary threat was, “I will fuck you until your soul dies!” (regardless of the threat’s target’s gender). Gloria, whose favorite t-shirt (stolen, of course) was a cartoon cat with its paws in the air over the slogan Who Cares? Gloria, whose jawline was pronounced and beautiful and the opposite of Gia’s saggy jowl.
Gloria, who, instead of oblivion, said “fade into Bolivia.” Gloria, who said Mr. Bishop touched her below the waist behind the school and wouldn’t let it go, shouted it in the principal’s office, shouted it at the school secretary and the lunch lady, until one day some woman was giving the whole school a talk about the dangers of pink, and Gloria stayed absent from school, and Gia walked to Gloria’s apartment and it was empty and Gia never saw Gloria again.
She finds a passable path over the highway and it’s so dark she can see the campfire on what passes for a hill in this generally sunken place. Are those gunshots again, or just raindrops landing? There are already two dozen people around the fire, shooting the breeze, telling jokes, holding court. These brick outlines once belonged to an apartment complex Gia likes to imagine lavish; only one structure retains part of its second floor and it’s beneath this precarious overhang adults bring green wood and combustible refuse. They come from West Lake Forest and Little Woods and the former amusement park and other neighborhoods Gia doesn’t know the names of, and she isn’t clear whether tromping all this way through bogs and flood runoff is illegal or just frowned upon. People around the fire definitely vape pink and take other substances but mostly it’s a social occasion and Gia feels grown up for knowing about it.
She likes to sit in the outermost ring with her elbows on her knees and listen. Some of the men are handsome, some of the women are pretty. She’s looked into mirrors and wondered why the placement of her eyes and mouth couldn’t be more pleasing, but she knows her face is more appealing than her fleshy body, which is why she wears the baggy coat in this heat and clutches it around her. People know her and nod. Or maybe they nod at everyone? “And I’m telling you,” says a bald man, “rich people still have
dogs.”
Several people express scoffing disbelief.
“They have the DNA stored. Home delivery, here’s your new pup.”
“Bullshit!”
“Not only that,” says the bald guy, “rich people’s pets never ever die. First sign of sickness, drop them off at the vet, you get a puppy version of your same trusty pooch the same day.”
Someone else says, “I call bullshit, bayshee.” Gia has to admit: she can’t remember seeing a dog or cat in person.
“Trust me.”
“No no. My own eyes are what I trust.”
“Get up out of the good-for-nothing South to a place where there’s actual money, you won’t believe what they got going on.”
A woman says, “I heard there’s companies who can take your mind out of your dying body and put it in a new body.”
People laugh, but Gia can’t tell what they think.
“Well, I know it sounds pretty random. It’s what I heard.”
“I do happen to think they keep information from us,” says a bespectacled Asian man, and others nod. A nearby conversation goes silent so more people can listen. “There was a shooting in D.C. A mother who threw herself in front of her children as the bullets were flying, and many witnesses who saw an angel appear.”
“…”
“Eight feet tall with wings and a halo. And this is multiple people who report seeing this. The angel pulled the mother close and shielded her from the bullets.”
Gia watches people around her blink.
“I know,” says the man. “But how can a dozen people see the same thing if it didn’t happen?”
Conversations splinter and evanesce, there’s talk about beer and God, they tell dumb jokes and ponder acceptable levels of human excrement in food. Most everyone who comes to the fire had a job interrupted, and often they talk about that: many were gig employees doing a bunch of different things, some were plumbers and construction workers, a few seem like scientists and they use words Gia doesn’t know. Tonight a few people describe a massive explosion that destroyed parts of New York City, and are contradicted by a Jamaican woman who claims to have just come from New York City, where no such explosion ever happened. Gia
is fascinated by all the talk. The future for which she aches is decidedly opaque, but is related to these campfire stories.
“…”
“Chocolate is cheap in California.”
“…”
“Suburbia. Don’t talk to me about suburbia. It’s death. I’d rather be here.”
“Good, ’cuz this is the Defueling and they ain’t never letting you out.”
“…”
“Immigrants are stealing factory jobs in Ohio.”
“Bayshee, they think we’re immigrants.”
“…”
“That’s not how a plant like that would work.”
“No?”
“You wouldn’t get a huge explosion destroying square miles. If you told me radioactive fallout, okay. But what you’re describing would have to be a bomb.”
“…”
“I’m a Bears fan and I never got over it. Worst call I ever saw, I’ll never forget exactly where I was.”
“…”
A white woman seated in front of Gia says, “You know who they’re shooting at, don’t you?” She has two tiny tattoos behind her ear, and Gia can see them in the firelight:
The bespectacled man says, “I surely do not.”
“They’re coming back for Archie.”
“Who’s that?” the man says, but the woman impatiently shakes her head and the tattoos blur.
Not too many white people around the fire. Not too many white people in the Ninth Ward, except those saintly enough to think they can change remotion or desperate enough to escape their lives and take jobs administering to girls like Gia. The tattooed woman doesn’t fit these categories, so maybe she grew up here, maybe she stubbornly stayed as the bayous rose and never
receded and the city of New Orleans sank and the French Quarter turned aquarium and the Ninth Ward became a flagship remotion settlement. When they got her, Gia was 14 and her mom had just been diagnosed: treatment was expensive but her mom’s doctor said without it she’d die, and being in debt was better than being dead. A few treatments in, the bills came and Gia’s mom couldn’t pay, and Gia’s mom said don’t worry about it, and Gia thought about Gloria Dominguez and worried about it.
Someone says, “Those cities way up north are powered by cold fusion anyway, ” and someone else laughs.
“I like to believe things are getting better,” says the tattooed woman. “Two more years and there’ll be a new president. People will never vote for this asshole again. Everybody hates him. They can’t get away with this forever. We’ll get to go home.”
“Nobody rich in here. Nobody famous.”
“I got a friend who got elected to Congress, I’m still here.”
“It’s all 3D printing. They just recently 3D printed a whole person.”
“If they successfully scramble the names.”
“But what would you have to do? Something horrible.”
“Yep. It’ll be something horrible.”
The man with glasses says, “People prefer any lie to pain.”
The popular girls in Glamour are convinced time travel is real. They pretend to see future versions of themselves at night, peeking into the Michoud plant.
“People don’t break into the Ninth Ward.”
“But it’s true. Somebody did. And they want him bad.”
“Think about it. Why the fuck would anyone?”
“Maybe they got their reasons.”
Somebody laughs. “They heard about our wide variety of bugs.”
Gia meantime is rewinding the talk, wondering if she heard what she heard. She grips her flashlight in both hands.
She speaks: “Excuse me, did you mean Arce?”
The tattooed woman and bespectacled man and a few others turn and notice her, and their eyes aren’t unkind: but also they don’t know and don’t particularly care. It’s all talk to them, and all the talk is basically the same. It’s just the thing they do around a fire in the rain. The endless steel-wool overcast in daytime and the starless nights give life intimations of friendlessness they cannot
be watched, not by traditional satellites, not by God and if you’ve ever been alone like that long term, with no hint your forgottenness will ever change, you may recall the need to replace the unloved feeling with embroidery.
Gia blushes and squeezes the flashlight harder. They smile and shrug and talk about other things.
Arce is the one who gave her the tin flashlight. It was…two years ago? More?
More gunfire in the teeming night. To Gia, now it seems louder.
José Arce. Several years older. Lived in the Chalmette exrefinery. Fat and acne-scarred but well known, maybe even popular. Kind of a folk hero among young ones, or at least that’s how it seemed to Gia when she arrived in Louisiana: girls who’ve long since graduated from the rocket plant talked about him with admiration and fear, to them he was part Robin Hood and part boogeyman. They believed that he had caches of hidden food around the Ninth Ward, and that he had a network of guards who owed him favors, and that if they walked alone in the dark he might grab them from behind. Gia remembered seeing him. At the time…was he 20? The girls she presumed would one day be her friends some were also from Nicaraguan families, they occupied cots around her, their friendship was right there and seemed so inevitable those girls called him El Mito, but in a puncturing way, so that Gia couldn’t tell whether they really respected him or thought he was hot air. He was around. Speechifying to other young men who half-listened, climbing onto roofs and performing stupid bellyflops, organizing basketball games against kids who had parents and lived up in the northern neighborhoods. He was a character, and probably in some way proof to Gia that a person who wasn’t beautiful could become something.
She talked to him a couple times. It was so early after they shipped her in; everything from those first months is a blur. (The guards told her it was temporary that her mom was coming any day and she cried and believed them.) Arce wasn’t allowed into the girls-only Michoud plant but he wandered around outside issuing orders in Spanish, and some boys and girls would scatter: recon an abandoned supply truck that ran into the mud after Gentilly, report on security at the west levees, research about a family supposedly sick with Zika…and the weather so hot that
Arce constantly asked any man, woman, child or guard if they had clean water to spare. He wasn’t in charge of anything. Sometimes the people he shouted at just shook their heads and laughed. He was El Mito. He told the girls in Gia’s plant that they were all his daughters, and he was only two years older than some of them.
“In God we trust!” he told them.
Gia sometimes saw him, didn’t think much about him. Then…? Right, she remembers! There was a little girl in Glamour who broke her leg playing soccer and the bone stuck out like a pink knife and the doctor wasn’t anywhere near their building; some hapless guards wrapped the leg in towels and gave the girl all the bupp shots they had, and even they could tell it wasn’t enough, and there’s no hospital anywhere near this part of the parish, and everyone could see the girl going into shock in the parking lot. One of the older girls said, “She’s Mexican, go get El Mito,” and Gia looked around and realized the older girl was talking to her.
And Gia thought:
Where do I find El Mito?
And:
What can El Mito do, he’s an overgrown kid?
And:
Why does it matter that she’s Mexican?
She has no memory of looking for Arce; presumably she ran out to Poche Court and found the waters receded enough to scan the anonymous blue-and-white storehouses and distribution centers where hundreds of grown men lived, a place the guards warned about venturing too close to. (These days the water is high; Poche Court is gone.) Gia remembers Arce running with her, back to the parking lot. He wobbled, he couldn’t move fast, but his fat baby face was tight with concern. One of his daughters! It was so foolish, a playact, yet the guards stepped away when Arce arrived. He held the Mexican girl’s hand. He whispered to her in Spanish. He frowned at the guards and told them to use their brains, use their stones, call for help. And they deferred to him! A ring of girls surrounded them, silent with concern, and they could hear white voices outside the perimeter begging someone with authority and medical training to come deep into the Ninth Ward and take over. “Todo estará bien,” said Arce to the little girl whose eyelids seemed to have disappeared, “Todo estará bien,” as her unseeing pingpong eyeballs flicked left and right. Arce shamed a guard into
fetching ice from the private stash guards denied the existence of. The little girl sighed and calmed and sat up and brushed silt from her elbows. Eventually an ambulance came and the little Mexican girl was blue-lipped but smiled, waved, hugged her best friends. Nobody ever saw her again.
The girls forgot. They were busy with games and gossip, and sneaking out to look at boys. But for Gia, Arce became a presence: she rarely saw him, but the idea that he lived nearby and cared so much became a comfort. There were gangs, they supposedly occupied whatever houses north of the former I-10 hadn’t been subsumed into Lake Pontchartrain, and though large-scale north/south travel was difficult, Gia had persistent low-level anxiety that one day food and water would get so scarce in those neighborhoods that they’d launch a full-scale invasion to steal the children’s supplies, and who would stop them? The hapless guar ds with their turned-up beige collars and ponytails? Arce cared. He would find a way to protect them. Maybe he was already in touch with those gangs, maybe Gia was already living under the auspices of treaties Arce had worked out. It was consoling to imagine The Vérité Residential Family Center Of St. Bernard Parish awash with systems, shot through with schisms, loaded down by schemes. The alternative was quiet nothing.
He gave her the flashlight casually, as a saint tosses away a glove. By then she’d turned 15, and one day she was walking by herself past the old coffee plant that was too sunken for anyone to sleep in, wading through six inches of tidal floodwater that might be here tomorrow or might recede, up through a dead field and over a road wondering who Chef Menteur was and what did he cook, into a little neighborhood with Vietnamese signage, and finally to the barrier: Vérité’s operation center. Here the guards were armed, and decked out to look military. The houses inside those four blocks were small and spare but dry, and the people who oversaw Cool and Grace and Glamour and the other Ninth Ward children’s remotion facilities lived here. Gia liked to escape the teasing voices in Glamour and come, just to see: were there parents asking to get in, to find their missing children? Today, Arce was here.
He stood with some other young men also remoted, per their dark skin and scruffy clothing and smoked pink. Gia crouched to watch: they were down a small hill, she was hidden by
rusted-out mailboxes. She couldn’t hear what they were saying but it was aimed at the guards near the barrier: a brand of tough talk best lobbed from a distance.
What happened within those four blocks? Gia didn’t know. It was truly an outpost: basically it was the farthest east you could go without winding up in the gulf. If everyone made to live in Plum Orchard and West Lake Forest and Little Woods got together and stormed this operations center, well, surely they could capture it and kill every guard. But then the actual military would swoop down and take the four blocks back. It didn’t do any good to protest here. The beige-clad guards by the operations center barrier mostly probably agreed that Vérité was a mess.
Arce slapped complicated five with his friends and waddled alone over to the front gate. Sweat was in Gia’s eyes, a neverending humid sweat so different from Texas. Arce pantomimed rage Weird-smelling smoke was coming in from the bayou. One of the army men standing here at the barrier shrugged and took Arce’s wrist, spun him around, pushed him against some sandbags, while his partner made menacing steps toward Arce’s friends. They ran. Then Arce was freed and looked around, he pumped the army men’s hands like a car salesman. Gia thought it must be one more way Arce protected them, by pretending to be friends with these military men. They gave him a heavy cardboard box and he thanked them and saluted them, and then he stood still and they shrugged again and he presented his face and one of the army men punched him hard in the eye.
They shook hands again, and Arce departed, Gia’s way. She watched him lumber up this incline, she pulled deeper inside the mailbox shadows to hide, but as he passed by he said, “Oye, regresemos a tucasa.”
Gia didn’t budge or breathe.
“Let’s go,” said El Mito’s receding voice. “It’s too dangerous that way.”
And Gia decided to follow, at first several paces behind, but then he was talking to her in an abstracted way and she couldn’t hear, so she closed ranks. What did he say on that twenty-minute walk down Old Gentilly Road? She can’t remember much. Her mind was numbed by nervousness; it was like going on a hike with her old school principal. Threatening sky, water rippling bright green near their feet, wind hot and what was the smell, yes, she
remembers: burning swamps, like damp and rotting eggs. Arce breathed hard because of the box he was carrying. He probably asked her name and where she lived. The skin around his eye was changing from red to purple. The thing she surely recalls from that walk is Arce saying, “People who give you a reason to hate, even if they treat you so badly you can never forgive them, they also do you a favor. Puede ser bueno tener un propósito.”
“…”
“What else would I be doing in life? If I was in Chicago, would anything distract me so well?”
And before they got back to the Michoud rocket plant, Arce stopped and high-fived Gia and said, “If you promise not to tell: we live in a church just back over there,” and he pointed north behind a forest that was lusher then. “The hotels are underwater but El Todopoderoso, he takes care of his room.” He waved goodbye, comically walking backwards many paces, blowing kisses Gia’s way, then called her back over and reached aimlessly into the box, pulled out the first thing he found, and it was a tin flashlight. Now, tonight, Gia holds the flashlight, listens for gunfire, feels old.
“When I was a boy,” says a dark-skinned man with a Caribbean accent, from across the campfire, “people wouldn’t stand for it.”
“They can’t keep us here forever.”
“We are better off if we use it as a time with fewer distractions, as an opportunity to get closer to God.”
“Any of y’all remember Ricky Douche? White boy made me laugh.”
“Yeah, you just put a little in the eggs. Fluffs the whole thing right up.”
“I’m the reminder of a changed world they need to ignore.”
“Sure. Big Q-tip. I remember him.”
“They will unless we make the cost of keeping us here too high.”
Gia gets up, straightens the coat so it doesn’t hug her butt, and walks back out into the rain. It’s a lightless world of sound, the hiss of a million droplets, and the interplanetary sense of endless space, nothingness off into the creeping bayou. If she’s honest, she likes rain. It tastes a little funny faintly like nail polish smells but rain keeps most people indoors, giving the world to Gia. She can
walk around alone. Life is a weird teeter-totter of wanting to be alone and wanting to be discovered. She wouldn’t want to live in the houses up north, stacked ten to a bedroom. The girls in Glamour think it would be so fun to turn 18, that freedom. To have a job cleaning or cooking, to have a boyfriend, to make babies. She once had a serious talk with Pilar One, who is smart, and Pilar said, “I don’t know why you’re so down on it, yobo. It’s not perfect maybe, but life in Vérité is just a smaller version of life everywhere else.”
She flicks the flashlight on, tromps back toward Old Gentilly, finds the road and turns the light off; she knows this walk back better than she knows just about anything. There are no lights out there to the left: the eroded gulf arm. Here, the rain’s auditory effect governs, turning the algae bloom’s unsyncopated lap-laplapping into the white noise of a million fine splashes, steadying the countless complaints the world offers into a consistent soothing shush. She arrives back at the rocket plant. A different guard is by the loading dock now.
“Halt, who goes there!” she says. “I’m just kidding, Giaconda, I know it’s you.”
“Hi.”
“I’m supposed to warn you. For your own safety. There are a lot of bad people out there, and we don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“…”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“I know you like to roam around, I just wish you wouldn’t do it after dark.”
“…”
“It was Stacy’s shift before me, right? I wish she’d warn you.”
“She did.”
“It’s nice of you to stick up for her, Giaconda. It’s very nice. But I know she just gets high and doesn’t say boo. Everybody knows. She’ll be dealt with. I have every confidence.”
“…”
“We’re doing birthdays tomorrow,” says this red-haired woman. “It would be awesome if you’d help remind everybody. You know how much fun the kids have.”
“Yes.”
“So. You’re soaking wet under that coat, why don’t you get changed. It won’t be me when you wake up, it’ll be….”
Gia finishes the thought: “…another guard?”
“No. No, I was gonna say, it’ll be my day off. I’m going home early. Giaconda, seriously. You know we don’t like that word.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t call me a guard, seriously. I’m a counselor, right?”
“Yes, I know.”
“Don’t think of me that way.”
“…”
“You’re amazing and special, Giaconda.”
Gia would prefer the Whitney Houston song on repeat. She steps inside and the rain is louder on the metal roof. A thousand nights here. There’s an underlying smell of industrial soap and too much potpourri; it never smells bad, it’s always like a blimp dropped a billion flowers onto a peat bog. Now littler girls are playing hopscotch and avoid-the-shark, some of the older girls are probably chattering further inside the plant, where dead machines lie indifferent in the dark, where a wrong turn can lead to a waterfilled concrete pit that might go way underground. The Gia of prior years maybe the Gia of this morning would go looking for those girls, half telling herself she feared for their safety, but mostly wanting to be included. There’s an alternate story here, one where Gia is friends with everyone, nobody calls her strange, and they launch nightly expeditions into whatever kind of aerospace foundry this place used to be, wading through the submerged parts, discovering rusty treasures. Gia has a faded canvas shopping bag with half-a-smiling-rabbit still visible and the letters “NNY” and “ES YOU,” and she bundles her Vérité-issued socks and underpants, a pebble storing family pictures, the tin flashlight, a wind-up footed plastic globe that walks and shoots sparks, a spelling bee ribbon she tells herself was for first place but she knows was really for third, and an empty water bottle. She leaves everything else behind, including ill-fitting clothes that come in charity packages usually the t-shirts bear Christian slogans and the paper books she hates because she was remoted late enough in life to remember actual technology. Is she angry? It’s hard for her to tell. Life fits the cage. She thinks her mom might be alive, because aren’t you supposed to feel it in your bones when your mom dies?
She looks back from the side entrance and there’s enough light to see dozens of girls asleep in their cots, others ticklefighting, and Gia doesn’t see the guard, and she leaves.
She splashes back toward the highway but detours, into a bosk of infirm trees. Her boots sink in the mud. It’s spooky in here: just wet and hot and blind, she turns on the flashlight and illuminates these old trunks whose bark is sloughing off, only seeing a few bright gnarled trees at a time and nothing beyond them. Gia’s legs strain in the loam and she reaches out to pull herself forward and feels one of the trees give.
She struggles, strains…one more big suck at her boots and then she’s out, no more mud, she wades in six inches of water with hardpan underneath and shines the flashlight…and here’s a dark structure she’s never seen, set far apart from any of its neighbors, hidden by a canopy of dead trees. She searches with the light feeling like an explorer of ancient civilizations. Here are some rotting wood stairs, some silvered windows, and Gia looks up and there’s the big guy on his cross in a doorframe, face leprotic, robe cracked.
“Bang,” somebody says. “You’re dead.”
Gia drops the light. It splashes into the water and illuminates a cloud of brown before flickering out. She reaches down and feels around, vegetation and slime, she gasps thinking every second that goes by means the flashlight will never work again. Stupid, stupid…she feels it against her ankle, pulls it up, hates the water, hates it, the damn water is everywhere and ruins everything. Then a different light is on her from above, and she looks at the dead light in her hands.
“Freeze,” says the voice. It’s a man, he’s got his own flashlight and he blinds Gia. “I am the outlaw Billy The Kid.”
“You know me,” Gia says.
“Me están disparando. I don’t know anything. So freeze or I’ll kill you, yeah?”
Gia knows El Mito’s voice. He’s back.
“Nature’s most dangerous creature,” he says. “La niña Mexicana.”
“It’s a flashlight,” says Gia. “I only have a flashlight. You gave it to me.” She shows it to him, and puts up her other hand to shield her eyes. Arce is still invisible.
“It’s a dark and stormy night,” he says. “Where you coming
from?”
“Right here, Arce. I live right here.”
“…”
“Where did you go, Arce? Why did you come back?”
Again he doesn’t answer. She reaches out, slowly, and places her hand on his bulb: it’s like she can see her finger bones.
She says, “We missed you.”
“Okay, swamp creature, that’s enough. Time to move along. Back to where you came from.”
“Yes!” says Gia. “Yes, please!”
This makes Arce laugh. He pulls her hand from the flashlight, shines it on himself. He’s thinner. It’s El Mito, but his skin is clear and he’s gotten cheekbones from somewhere.
He’s the face of revolution, the embodiment of all the things Gia assumes every person living in this place dares to imagine: freedom Six months after the last time she’d seen Arce, she wondered why she hadn’t wondered about him, and where he’d gone. But that’s how it is. No matter how normal the new normal is crushingly normal! people who’ve been your wallpaper or your proximate savior can disappear and it probably means they died. Anyway, there’d been no one to ask.
“I don’t remember you,” he says.
He turns and steps back up into this demolished church. Gia strides onto the first stair and feels it sag. The strangest thought: watching a Welp stream when she was 13, falling in love with Danny McKenzie, a former teen idol once famous for corny jokes and spontaneously singing songs on his guitar, this charismatic international superstar and Gia fell hard, Danny was her first crush, but even then she didn’t dare dream of marrying the actual him…. She was practical. It would be enough to marry a boy who looked like him. Well, El Mito is the most famous person she’s ever met, and he’s right here, and he’s gotten out, and her heart pumps fireworks.
He’s in a big dark hot room. She joins, and the floor sounds awful, like they’ll fall through. He shines his light around, and it’s not recognizable as a place of worship. The rear wall is gone, the ceiling is peeled open to reveal pink foam and a cross section of broken glass, chunks of plaster, tattered wallpaper, twisted metal, split wood columns. Arce places his flashlight butt-end down, so they can see each other. Gia cuts to the chase:
“Take me with you.”
“Don’t you have a family?”
“I do,” she says. “Not here.”
“That’s right,” says Arce. “You orphans live in the warehouses down by the canal.”
Gia blinks at the word orphan. She says, “There’s no more canal.”
“Not then either, it’s just what we called it. They mix you together there with the chinas and negritas, right? In the name of democracy? You know, things here don’t smell as bad as I remember.”
“What did you come back for?”
“That,” he says, “is classified. Aren’t you hot under that coat?”
“…”
He looks around. “This church was my home. I took it. The guards knew, but there’s only so many battles they can fight. Me and three other guys, we got tired of the place they stuck us in, and the jobs they gave us. I was supposed to be a damn garbage man? I said no. At the time this was, like, a junkie shack. And we took it, and nobody ever bothered us about it after. You know, Vérité, they let in drugs on purpose, whatever you can get sent. Certain drugs, anyway. Cool by them, keep the people docile. It was more of a church then, we kept the place nice. Look at it now.”
“…”
“That name. It’s kind of an inside joke, right? There actually is no more St. Bernard Parish. It’s all underwater.”
“Do you know how to get out?” says Gia.
“It’s harder than getting in.”
“I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to go home.”
Arce says, “There’s a lot of that going around.”
Gia tells herself not to cry, which is always her last step before crying. Her voice breaks saying, “You could show me how.”
“Hey. Hey there, you know what my mama told me? ‘Don’t ornament it with tears.’ You think I don’t understand? I was here three years. It wasn’t because my doctor advised a damp climate. I was on a list, or I wasn’t on a list, right? I’m born in Ciudad de Mexico, it’s true, but my family naturalized when I was 7. I’m legal. What happened? Nobody tells you, of course. It’s the Defueling. How many people you think live in this camp?”
Gia sniffs. “I don’t know.”
“Come on. Make a guess.”
She thinks there are…a couple hundred girls in the warehouse? And as many boys not far away? In a small voice, she says, “A thousand?”
“Multiply it by twenty,” says Arce. “And how many you think want to be here? How many are happy? There are some, and those are the ones they point to. ‘See? This old lady is happy, we give her food, we give her a home.’ There are people out there in the rest of the world who protest against Vérité and call this place and all the others concentration camps, and then the politicians send out the word: ‘So outrageous to call it that, so disrespectful to the memory of our Jewish forefathers, nobody is starving, nobody is killed, no Gestapo, no gas chamber, we give them everything they need, this is our compromise, this is what we do to keep us safe.’” His expression gets mischievous. “‘This is the best solution not the final solution.’”
Words words, There must be something she can say. She makes forlorn eyes and doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. There’s only the rocket warehouse, the minutiae of which she does understand down to its smallest components, and she won’t go back.
“This is a fast trip,” he says. “I’m leaving before the dawn.”
“Why did you come?”
“…”
“I can help,” says Gia.
“It’s a solo mission, hija.”
“I’m the one who came to find you. The people at the fire didn’t even know who you were.”
“Ah. So you truly appreciate me.”
“Do you really have a gun?” she says.
He bites his lips, looks sideways as though there’s someone else in this wrecked place, lifts up his shirt and a matte-black weapon is tucked in his waistband. Then he points a finger at Gia. He mimes unwrapping the wool coat.
She does. He says, “Young girl, but you’re…substantial. How are you so substantial with what they feed you here?”
Gia wipes sweat from her face.
“Okay,” says Arce. “It’s dangerous, but okay, you can come. I think I could maybe use your help at the end.”
She grins, then finally begins to cry.
“Hey,” Arce says. “Hey there.”
She doesn’t cry often. The young girls in Glamour weep all the time, sometimes apropos of nothing more than the feeling of absence that’s built into all their close companionship, or just the grief behind calling out for a parent and not getting an answer. Even the mean teens: she hears them sobbing in their cots in the middle of the night. Now she’s losing it with El Mito, aware that her mood has become unconquerable only now that there’s good news.
“I said you can come,” says Arce.
Eventually she stops. She’s hot, she takes the coat all the way off. She feels better. She looks at him and says, “You have a stone.”
Arce tongues his teeth, deciding whether to lie. “Oh, you saw that?” He lifts his shirt again and pulls it from the waterproof case on his hip.
“Can I…?”
“It won’t work in here,” Arce says. “You can’t call anyone. The ads say there’s signal everywhere on the planet. But not here.”
“That’s okay,” says Gia.
He hands it over. It’s the first time she’s held one in years. She pokes through her canvas bag, finds the pebble, affixes it to the stone. The display makes a spiraling holographic flower like Gia remembers, and this recollection touches something primordial in her: it’s the little 3D rendering she used to hate when she was little, the delay of a device loading something into memory, a pretty spinning wireframe rose, but now it makes her ache to remember all those times when she had the luxury of being impatient for the rose to disappear. It only takes a few seconds. It’s replaced by digital bas-relief: a picture of Gia’s mom. Gia doesn’t smile, doesn’t cry, she feels Arce watching her, she swallows. It’s the first time she’s seen her mom’s face in…. She scrolls through more images that rise up holographically out of the stone. Her mom holding her as a baby. Her dad young without his mustache. The three of them at Gia’s elementary school play the year she was a chubby Rajah, wearing a linen headdress. Dozens more of her mom, so near. She cycles through them all a second time with the crystal of a dream unfolding into possibility.
“I guess we should go,” Arce says, but they bake motionless a
while longer in the sepia room.
She disconnects her mom’s old pebble, hands back the stone.
“Leave the coat,” he says. “You won’t need it.”
“Okay,” says Gia, placing it folded on a deconstructed black blob that maybe used to be a chair or a pew. “Who was shooting at you, Arce?”
“There wasn’t supposed to be anyone by the 510, I rowed up to the bridge. No car could cross there. But they were guarding it, they must’ve seen me coming.”
“So how do we get out?”
“Yeah,” says Arce. “Not that way.”
She follows him outside.
They walk past more dead trees, north and west, away from the rocket warehouse, away from the campfire, into a nighttime of half-underwater neighborhoods dressed up to look like home.
It’s fully night. Still raining. Gia follows where Arce’s flashlight beam has been. It’s moonless and not the kind of dark that will be your friend. Gia realizes the extent to which the guards’ warnings have made them all the orphans, the internees, the unseen instinctively leery of inquiry. Because worse things are out there, kiddies. You think this is bad. She trails the Mito-shaped darkness cut out from his blob of light. Every few minutes he clicks off presumably because he’s heard something, giving him the air of an expert tracker. They descend again through another dead forest, past factories and other buildings where men live. They walk across an overpass and on the highway a pair of chrome eyes reflects back at them.
“Wolf,” says Arce. “Maybe fox.” But have those species gone sterile? Gia doesn’t know. The eyes move, the creature crouches and seems small and defensive. Gia stops: she wants to keep Arce between her and those eyes in case the animal attacks.
But this animal is itself probably terrified. The eyes turn, she sees gray fur, it’s clear that the creature is small, and it leaps onto a Jersey barrier and lunges into the dark, probably over the edge. That’s a twenty-five-foot fall, down into the swamp. Gia thinks oh no we killed it and doesn’t want to investigate.
Arce leads them off the highway. They’ve been walking for about a half-hour. They climb a dark road with honey locusts spilling over, branches brushing their shoulders. The flooding isn’t as bad here. They pass over railroad tracks and past fences, a few
stores with no light inside, a school bus on its rims. And now there are other people: other flashlights bobbing in different vectors, invisible people on their way home or out to find trouble. Arce and Gia cross a big carless boulevard, there’s a dead sign for something called Winn-Dixie, something called Dollar Tree, a Budget Rent-ATruck. More people out here, laughing, singing, screaming…somebody skateboards past, several others follow A bottle shatters. There’s a bonfire in the parking lot of an auto parts store and it reveals a hundred dark bodies milling, drinking, hooting, partying. Gia’s never been near here.
Arce says, “Saturday night.”
They proceed past an elementary school and Gia wonders if the school still teaches kids, or if people just live in there. Deep into a quieter neighborhood where small houses furl in the rain and everything seems normal, except every fifth house or so has been burned or smashed in. An apartment complex, a hospital, a hair salon…Arce knows where he’s headed. Gia has lost her bearings and keeps thinking maybe the next block will have a fence with a hole in it, and Arce will climb in and hold out his hand and draw her through and they’ll be free. Here’s a burned-out car with a woman sleeping in the backseat. Here’s a man in a sleeveless white undershirt revealed in Arce’s beam smoking pink and menacing them. Here are three girls younger than Gia, holding hands and walking in a straight line, singing a nursery rhyme Gia is too freaked out to recognize. Here’s a bakery and an ice cream stand and a pharmacy, all dark and rotting, and the puddles begin again, then rivulets of rushing water by the curb, then they’re splashing again with every step. Gia follows his light.
They reach the access road of a highway that’s now part of Lake Pontchartrain. Arce pauses to inspect a mottled white building, running his light over the sunken parking lot and the broken one-way glass, the blown-apart alcove, the maritime detritus that bobs against the building. He walks toward the front door and Gia follows. It used to be some kind of commercial enterprise. Lace curtains in the barren window, alongside a sign that reads, “Smile! You’re On Camera!” They wade in. Is there a secret tunnel that begins here? The bottom of a staircase inside the building features black water that might be several feet deep. Arce braces his hands against the walls and kicks his legs athletically, levering halfway up the stairs and avoiding the water shaft. He says, “Stay
there,” but Gia also touches the walls and reaches out a soaking toe, trying for purchase, she lunges toward the stairs and slips and is falling but Arce seizes the back of her shirt collar and yanks her up, choking her a little, and the collar rips…but he pulls her and she’s safe. They climb to a second story.
It’s wrecked up here, too. Arce flashes around and Gia sees the roof is knocked in: there’s a layer of tarpaper, splintered pressboard, mud, and then metallic shapes of office equipment, a warped lampshade, and a wink from a round brass fixture Gia can’t place. In this debris, she sees a flash of jewelry. It’s not valuable some rhinestone hairpin or glass brooch but she wants to pick it up; then it’s gone again, lost in dark chaos but Gia has a wobbly instant where she pities the little bauble and the woman who once wore it.
Arce pulls out a canteen, offers it to Gia. She drinks sweet and clean water.
“Gordiflón,” somebody behind them says and they both jolt. In an instant Arce has his gun out, he spins and also points his light, they’re half-blinded in return. A white man in a beige uniform, like the ones who guard the operation center to the east.
“Pendejo,” says Arce. “Elegiste un lugar estúpido para morir.”
“And you aren’t supposed to bring friends,” this man says. He steps from behind a shape Gia knows. Another of those round brass fixtures.
“Let’s make it fast,” Arce says. “I need a new way out before dawn. Your boys almost got me on the way in.”
A coffin. There are coffins all around.
“Where are we?” Gia says.
The guard grins. “Child bride?”
“You’re getting paid,” says Arce. “The girl isn’t your concern.”
It’s a mortuary, a former showroom. Some businesses cleared out inventories before remotion to make new lives someplace less submerged; others just left everything behind and maybe took insurance money. Gia’s eyes adjust to the polished boxes and she thinks about a dumb stream she once saw part of about a man trapped in a casket, scratching to get out and then she thinks: stop being a little girl. Three years, cancer did its job, or your mom would’ve come to claim you.
“No reason to get nasty,” says the guard. “‘The girl isn’t your
concern.’”
“Give it and let’s get out of here,” Arce says.
“You know what’s on here,” the guard says, holding out his fist, “it’s dangerous. You get caught with it, you not only disappoint some folks who live in here. You real dead.”
“Basta.”
“It can’t get traced back to me, man. I’ll still be around here. Not like I can suddenly quit the minute I’m rich. They’ll know something’s up, they’ll know I did something.”
“…”
“Everything about this place changes, yo. Everything about everything changes.”
Arce looks at Gia, rolls his eyes conspiratorially. He takes the guard aside and they murmur. She’s sweating alone in the dark. Behind the two men there’s a soiled corkboard whose thumbtacks are rusted black, the papers are shriveled and tea-stained, but once they described funeral schedules. Gia flew to Chinandega when she was 5 and stood in the back of the church as the family walked single-file past her grandfather’s open casket. Her dad insisted she join, but her mom took pity. Gia didn’t want to see, and couldn’t say why.
When they made that trip to Nicaragua, did her parents worry about getting back into the U.S.?
She looks at Arce. He hates this place, too. He hates the guard he’s schmoozing. But he’s doing it for the cause. El Mito wants to bring Vérité down.
The men come to an agreement. A handshake turns into a bro-hug. The guard hands over a pebble, which Arce pockets. The guard scrambles back down the stairs without looking at Gia; she hears him galumph over the watery landing. Arce illuminates himself and says, “How about we get out of here?”
They descend out of the mortuary and even the muggy and rainy outdoors feels good by comparison. They retrace their steps out of the fully flooded part of West Lake Forest, through a different neighborhood of similar low-slung houses that are almost all dark save a few candlelit windows and many of which feature American flags across lawns or draped on electrical poles, the better to convince neighbors or guards that the occupant’s patriotism is undaunted by current developments.
It must be very late now, but when they get back to the main
road, they still find parties around big bonfires: mostly just people talking, but also convening around performers who do acrobatics, who pretend to be statues, who play acoustic guitars. They find a dancing contingent, a couple hundred strong, getting down to beats that sweating musclebound guys play on overturned paint buckets. They watch two men fighting, seriously fighting, near one of the fires, as a perimeter of women shrieks for them to stop.
Occasionally Arce halts and asks someone the best way over the Industrial Canal. Nobody gives him a straight answer and after they’ve moved on, Arce calls them stupid and lazy.
Eventually the neighborhoods grow quiet. It’s another hour of plodding down a straight road not knowing anything about their surroundings until every so often Arce gets curious and shines his light and reveals a storage facility, a recharge station, a car dealership, a motel.
Gia says, “What happens when we get to the end?”
“It’s what everybody wants to know,” says Arce.
“I mean, the end of this road.”
“Tell you what: I actually did come real close to getting shot. I wouldn’t be surprised if that cracker set me up.”
“I heard the guns.”
“So. Before the stadium, there’s a wall. They guard it. But it’s laid back, there’s not too much beef. They only bother you if you try to escape.”
Gia thinks about this. “But…we’re trying to escape.”
“…”
They walk and breathe hard. Arce checks his stone, gets no signal. She has pain in her feet, she’s soaked all the way through. Gia can’t believe she’s doing this. It’s honestly not far from fantasies she used to have about El Mito back before he no longer registered in her mind. What’s on the other side of that wall? El Mito knows.
“You’re Mexican, right?” says Arce.
Gia thinks it wise to say, “Yes.”
“Born there?”
“No.”
“Ever go back?”
“Yes, we go back,” she says.
“I was just there. Not just. But I went. It’s good.”
“…”
“Too many people. But if you have money there, vaya, kid, now it’s like paradise. They built a new downtown in Polanco, after the earthquake. The whole thing went up in…I wanna say two years? When I was there, a boy was missing. Boy of an important man, and it was on the news, and when it gets on the news that’s when you know things are bad. They’re not hiding it anymore, they can’t find him on the million billion cameras around the city, they’re telling the crazies to come out and make a ransom demand even if you don’t have the boy, like, at that point, you don’t think he’ll be found alive anymore. So I was walking in the place where there used to be embassies and museums, I remember from being very small myself, but now it’s El Tonantzin: big huge skyscraper buildings with everything you want, you never have to leave it, restaurants, bars, shopping, best views, everything new and beautiful. And where am I going, I’m going to surprise a friend of mine who lives there, and I go past a tech shop. And this boy is in there wearing a Chaser Chipmunk mask. He was asking them…I dunno, really: asking them to change his retinas or his fingerprints or something, and they’re like, ‘Little dude, that’s not a thing.’ He was small enough to be 10 but he wouldn’t take off the mask. I had just seen the news story. I ask if he lives there, he won’t say. So I talk to him, casual. I ask can he show me around. He says sure and we leave the tech shop, we wind up spending the whole afternoon. I’m good with kids. Every so often I ask about his parents, just to say, ‘Hey, man, I’m having a good time hanging out with you, but aren’t your parents gonna be worried?’ and he said no, they’re cool. Tell you what, Tonantzin has a sky beach on the tenth floor, no joke. And a bowling alley, and virtual fútbol, also a hundred places you can hide and go to sleep if you’re little. And this is Mexico. We’re the rampaging horde, and we got that place.”
Gia feels tepid water crest her left boot’s collar, is how she realizes she’s stepped in a sidewalk hole. She straightens up and thinks anything someone tells her could be true, and she says, “What happened to the boy?”
“Yeah, it was getting late, time for me to go home. I never even surprised my friend. I finally ask him, hey, are you that kid from the news. And he pulls me into a corner where the cameras can’t see him and pulls off the mask and it’s him. Gone for days and here he is. He slept there, I guess he ate there. I go, ‘You’re 10 years old, why you want to run away from your parents forever?’
And you know what he said?”
“…”
“He said, ‘To show they don’t know everything about me.’”
Gia thinks about the little kids born in Vérité who’ve never known any other life.
“And why’d I come back to the States?” says Arce. “Why come back to this cloaca? Good damn question. Money money money. Paradise ain’t free.”
They walk quietly for a while, settling back into cadence. It becomes possible to believe nobody is following them, nobody is about to fall upon them.
Arce stops. He says, “This way’s the first bridge. Or we jump down, cut across, the second bridge is a couple hundred feet that way. The question is: are they watching this one or that one or both?”
“…”
“Why don’t you run up there and see?” he says. “Just go on up, and if somebody shoots you, then we’ll know.” He laughs. “We should’ve brought along a couple little pinacate girls to throw out there as target practice.”
“We can swim across,” Gia says.
“You think so? There used to be a railroad bridge down there, too, perfect way to cross. Now it’s underwater. Yeah they still call it a canal, but it’s all the gulf now. Everything’s the Gulf of Mexico, ha ha. Swim off in the wrong direction in the dark, call me when you get to Yucatan.”
She thinks about this. “Can we climb along the bottom of the bridge?”
“I like the way you think, but no. Two ways to cross, no other choices. Downtown New Orleans on the other side.”
What he decides is: they pick this first bridge and they sneak in the dark as far as what feels like its crown. Gia can’t see a thing. She’s touching the sodden-sandpaper of a concrete median, hearing nothing but the basso fizz of the natural world in mid-reclaim. There are no horizon lights; if the city’s over there, it’s as dark as everything else. She bumps into Arce, who’s stopped. He cups a hand to her ear and the contact makes her distracted. He barely says, “Down on your belly.”
She does it. Face-first on asphalt, rain light but steady, bunny bag soaked under her sternum. Kissing grease and old rubber. Of
course there would be trials. She thinks of a warm bed in the Cedars: real food in the kitchen, her mom snoring beside her, sun a torment in the game of falling back asleep, a poster tacked above her: a once-upon-a-time teen heartthrob posed in formal clothes and sneakers…but his face is blurred out. Gia tries to make his face be a face; she can’t love him blurry like this. He will climb down out of the poster and reach a hand She must see him clearly: she must seem him as newly handsome El Mito. She can do this.
She wakes up. She thinks she’s in the warehouse cot. She breathes.
But no, she’s on the wet bridge and it’s only a minute later.
She thinks about flicking on the tin flashlight, but remembers it’s waterlogged and won’t work. She strains her neck to see: something up ahead is happening. There’s light, something blue and localized. She hears somebody talking, too loudly:
“The universe is to be conceived as attaining the active selfexpression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection.”
It’s a big blue old man made of light. He’s looking down reading.
“All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is.”
It’s very loud. The voice sprawls across this bridge, down to the water, and echoes back up. Rain twinkles like snow as it falls through the blue man. He’s a hundred feet away but preternaturally tall.
“Section seven. Thus the consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements within individual selfrealization. It is just as much a multiplicity as it is a unity; it is just as much one immediate fact as it is an unresting advance beyond itself.”
He casts a blue corona that gives the bridge dimension, and Gia’s eyes adjust. The road rolls down away from her, and someone is coming up in this direction. A small figure becoming bigger. Maybe more than one? Gia doesn’t move, feels her stomach pressed against sand gathered from many years ago.
“Thus the actuality of God must also be understood as a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation.”
Yes, two soldiers, walking toward the blue man, who still reads in a voice that tries not to be bored with itself. They’re in camo uniforms. They look up at this holographic image, Gia can see their expressions: confused but amused. The soldiers approach the source, one puts a hand through the blue man, whose resolution twists and spasms. They look around.
One of them clicks on a flashlight.
Gia sees his white circle probing. It reveals just the empty bridge, its wet components, then Arce’s stone. The blue man keeps reading, even as his body disperses and reassembles in the flashlight beam. She holds her breath.
“…hell is going on?” says a small voice.
“…the moracos just fucking around with…”
The white circle is coming Gia’s way. Tracking, tracking…closer…the spotlight we all know eventually is coming for us. But so soon?
A crack of thunder: that’s what Gia’s brain tells her for an instant, and then she knows it’s gunfire. One-two-three-four, she’s assembling events after they’ve already happened, her ears are ringing, the white muzzle shots came from across this street, onetwo-three-four and the soldiers are hit, Arce is up, he’s scampering into blue light with his gun drawn. One of the soldiers is still standing and Arce body checks him over the short railing, a long fall into the water below. The blue man says, “In this phase full actuality is attained; but there is deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other.” Arce kneels and turns the blue man off. It’s dark again.
“Come on!” whispers Arce. “Let’s go!”
“…”
“Hija, if there’s more coming we better be over the bridge when they get here. Come on!”
She gets up. Her heart knocks the front of her chest. She’s freezing then sweating, she smells something chemical that must be the result of a discharged firearm: she’s never been around a gun that’s gone off. For as long as she stands here with every square inch of her wet, danger of being discovered mounts and yet she doesn’t want to move ahead, because it means further acceptance of adulthood and the truth that she’s alone. Play young. It’s how they all get by.
Arce says, louder, “Come on. Being afraid doesn’t help
anything anyway.”
As she walks past the spot where the other bleeding body lies, she’s careful to look away but then also peek from the corner of her eye. But it’s too dark again. She can’t see.
Down they go, following an entrance ramp away from the highway. Flying buttresses are in Arce’s beam, a dark medieval place Then it’s just more walking in another flat neighborhood, like nothing happened.
Nobody finds them. How is it not dawn yet? It feels to Gia like an agreement reached by celestial beings.
She doesn’t realize she’s about to speak until she does. “What did he give you?”
“Who?” Arce says.
“He said what he gave you would change things.” She tries to adjust her voice, to be less accusing. “Is that why the guards are trying to get you?”
“Naw. No. They just don’t like it when people prove you don’t have to stay here like an obedient cow.”
She doesn’t feel obedient. “So what did he give you?”
“Everybody has a job,” Arce says. “Your job isn’t to worry about that.”
“I think you’re here to stop it. I think somebody’s paying you to end this place, so everybody can go home.”
“…”
“I was born in America,” she says. “And I don’t understand why they picked me to live here.”
“You make me sound like a hero,” says Arce, with pleasure.
“…”
“…”
They’re frugal using the flashlight just enough to stay on the road but in those moments Gia can see more small houses, like the ones from hours ago. No lights. No parked cars. A sign says Speed Limit 35. They cross Prieur Street. Then: water in the way again. It’s crazy what it does to you, knowing you’re part of the sinking world. New Orleans was built on the newest land in North America: alluvial and provisional. The calculation becomes whether or not to try and stay afloat as long as possible, because it’s really hard.
Gia’s ready to wade right through the water again, because how much further could it be? But Arce nudges her shoulders to
redirect her and says, “It gets too deep. Come this way.”
“Where do you go next?” Gia says. “After we get out of here.”
“Get my money,” he says. “You get some, too.”
“How much, Arce?”
“A lot. Don’t worry, we’ll negotiate.”
The shroud of this night is refuge and oppressor; it’s best not to think about it. Danger. The thing her mom used to drill into her when she was very small, all the bad that could happen because she was a little brown girl, but then quickly changed the subject and fed her ice cream so the pleasure-seeking parts of her brain were probably all weirdly intertwined with the bad stuff. Keep her hands behind her back in a store. (Strawberry swirl!) Always sit in the front of the bus and make eye contact with other passengers. (Cookie dough!) Be able to recite the preambles to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution at a moment’s notice. (Butter pecan!) The rules are the rules and the motley view of how a country treats its people is ideally no subject for a child.
Her head is ablaze imagining a reunion with her mom, sleeping by herself in a room again, or at least becoming Arce’s ruthless mercenary sidekick: going on adventures that will result in the toppling of Vérité, whereupon she’ll return to this place as a liberator and earn begrudging thanks from everyone in Glamour. They trudge down another side street.
Then, with no less surprise than if they’d stumbled upon a white elephant, Gia and Arce pause before a small two-story house whose windows are illuminated. As in: by electricity.
“Better hurry,” says Arce, and they double-time it zigzagging down the urban checkerboard. Another lit window. A motionactivated floodlight as they scurry past a fenced-in yard. More standing water. An air conditioner humming. The rain comes harder. Somebody has an honest-to-goodness vegetable garden and Gia can see green twists at manmade intervals emerging from dark soil, she can see them, which is her first indication that the world is finally brightening. The sky is dim gray. She sees her own hands. She sees the rumor of Arce’s back. He’s going fast, he’s halfrunning and she’s losing her breath. She fears he’s trying to ditch her, a sentiment that feels familiar and elemental and makes Gia panic. Are they already out? Is this the other side?
He turns and waits and says, “Let’s go!”
Now the houses are shoehorned together and while some still seem crumbling and abandoned, others show signs of life. Lemon light spills from a community café. A white man wearing sweatpants and headphones jogs along a cross street, pays them zero attention. They scud down another block, find another impassable lane-turned-lake, and it’s a horror scene not knowing which cheekily-painted house will be the one that contains a busybody up at dawn gazing into the street, seeing Gia and Arce come this way, and calling Them to file a report.
Arce finds an empty park, so green Gia feels like it’s trick photography. They’re in a nicer neighborhood. A lawn from a nursery rhyme towered over by ancient slash pines, a haunted nighttime feeling to this sunrise, the buildings here are tall and their glass is intact. But there isn’t any car traffic, and there are subtle indications: seasons’ worth of muck in the gutter, sidewalks corrupted by weeds, a rusted parking pay station, a toppled swing set inside the park. Now through the trees they see a couple skyscrapers in the distance and to Gia they look like crosshatched toys, a rich person’s domain she can’t even reckon with, literally unapproachable, the only thing that doesn’t seem to get closer the more they walk.
She hustles to pace alongside Arce so she can look at him in the light. He’s truly become beautiful.
These low houses with their wrought-iron drollery, a few offices seem open, some houses have lights on and others don’t, now there are a few other people walking around who remind Gia of zombies. Arce keeps his head down. No eye contact on the street, yes, there’s another rule. (Raspberry ripple!) Gia wonders, Is this the world now? Did something happen?
She’s gasping. She pulls Arce’s sleeve, gives him a pleading look to say she needs rest. For a few moments they press their backs against a stone building painted pink. Gia holds her knees. Rain is indistinguishable from sweat. Arce pulls out his stone, shakes it, waves it around. There’s an old laminated flyer affixed to a busted door:
U.S.A. Unity Corps Volunteers Needed
Right Here In New Orleans Won’t You Help The Children?
Arce sees her seeing. He says, “I have an idea. We get out of here, get you off the list, you can come back and volunteer. Won’t you help the children?” He’s not a subtle person, but his smile just now is puckish.
It occurs to Gia he doesn’t know her name.
“One way out by land,” he says. “I hoped we’d make it here when it was still dark. I wish we could wait out the day and try for the wall tonight…. But qué pena, somebody shot those men.” He pulls out the gun and twirls it around on his finger.
Gia imagines an angel’s-eye view of the shining wet hand that grips this place, its infinite fingers always squeezing closer together until everyone lives like a gray marine creature too scared to move. The city, the Ninth Ward, the entire sinking world and its children who either deserve what they get or don’t, many of whom pray for intervention from a deity already punishing them. To even visualize this view from the sky is beautiful and terrible: probably an act of optimism even if you believe nothing can save you. Here is tiny Gia, there is tiny Arce, the few wandering-around souls in this intermediate zone, the guards, the way out, the checkerboard, the bridge, the internees, the girls of Glamour: madness, and if Someone really is watching, well, perhaps They’re just a sadist.
“I want this to be over,” says Gia.
“No no,” Arce says, “they build it so it’s never over.”
He duckwalks out into the street and she follows. A few more blocks and it’s fully a city, wiped clean of most people, and drowning. Tall buildings of glass and orange marble stand in the shallows. Wide boulevards lorded over by pelicans on light posts. Blue pipes rising out of the water, either abstract art or bygone public utility. Trees and shrubbery meant to demarcate medians now are half-submerged skeletons pointing at a smeared dangling Drippz logo. Arce weaves them down streets of slightly higher elevation, everything funneling to the same point where finally they arrive: like a cooling tower there’s a silver stadium lighting up with the new day, a parking structure, a glass building, and a wall that blocks the only intact road out: a concrete checkpoint. Here’s where food and water and donated material like the shirt on Gia’s back come in, bound for Vérité. Several soldiers are stationed here, and they look even more serious than the ones by the Chef Menteur operations center and on the bridge.
Arce and Gia rest again, in a loading dock where nobody is doing any loading. Gia looks at the wall and the soldiers, and knows there’s no passing that way.
“We’ll go around,” Arce says, looking her square in the eyes. He touches her cheek, fatherly.
“What happens if they catch us?” says Gia.
“You’ll be fine. What’s worse than putting you right back into the camp?”
“Will they put you back?”
He smiles, affecting a noble pose. “Sure.”
“We’re going to make it,” Gia says.
“That’s what I like to hear.”
It’s still raining, and the sky is very gray, but it’s fully morning now. They’re careful to stay low and move slowly, down a bylane, away from the checkpoint, past glass windows that wear an insignia: Springfield Centre Mall. Around a corner in the stadium’s shadow: a vast empty parking lot that’s underwater. Arce says, “They told me it’s over there.”
Beneath a walkway, where the flooding begins, there’s a chainlink fence probably fifteen feet high with razor wire looped across the top. Arce walks to the fence, puts his fingers among the links, shakes. Gia thinks he means to climb, and thinks it would never work. The razors would slash them to bits.
But Arce doesn’t climb. He looks around to make sure nobody’s watching, and he walks along the fence, wading deeper into the water. Gia follows. He stops to shake the fence again, moves on, stops and shakes the fence, moves on. Finally, they come to a place in the shadow of a different abandoned building. Arce shakes the fence, and it jiggles differently. A support is slightly loose and bent.
“Lean right here,” says Arce.
Gia splashes over to him. The water is waist-deep and repulsively brown and warm. She wraps her fingers into the fence and pushes.
“Harder.”
She does. She shoves the fence, puts her weight into it and it bends forward a little.
“Here,” says Arce, and he shows her: like Sisyphus, both arms stretched, legs braced, forcing this small section of the fence forward, then pressing his face and chest and entire weight, and as
this part of the fence folds forward, the next section’s bottom lip rises up. He lets it back down again. “Do that.”
Gia straps the canvas bunny bag around her neck as Arce steps aside. She grabs the fence like he did. Pushes and feels the muscles in her lower back protest. She digs, digs in, pushes, as the bayou sloshes around her and into her. And there it goes, a fulcrum: a spot in the fence they can scramble under.
“Push!” whispers Arce. “Get on top of it a little more!”
She does, she’s able to bend it inch by inch, her face is against chain link, most of her weight is on it, she strains, her feet feel like they’ll come off the ground. Triumphantly, the fence’s bottom lip rises out of the water.
“I knew you could do it,” Arce says. “Thank you, gordita.”
Gia strains and breathes hard, smiling, knowing escape is here. Freedom. She looks across the parking lot, the other side of the fence: the world doesn’t look different over there. Another highway ramp. More water. Gray upon gray upon gray.
Arce crouches but keeps his face above water, lowers himself to the height of the fence’s lower lip. He begins to glide under. Bearing down, trying to keep the fence still, Gia says, “How will I climb under, Arce?” and he looks up at her, his chin barely above the water’s surface, splashing to get himself fully free, and his expression is cruel.
It’s a long moment of locked eyes and truth. Gia still feels like a child among caretakers, and their will be done for kindness or negligence. Her heart has been stabbed so many times in such small ways, she’s learned to expect it. That’s what eyes like this naked, dismissive do to you. They make you believe you don’t deserve any better.
She could remove her weight, lower the fence, and keep him in. She doesn’t. He swivels his head sideways, his ear skims the water, and he’s made it. She watches, thinking maybe she’s got it wrong, maybe he’ll pull up the fence from the other side so she can sneak under, too.
Arce stops. Gia realizes that he’s stopped even before she registers the sound of gunfire followed by a distant man’s shout. Her first thought is there must be somebody on the other side, a secondary corps in case people slip past the wall. But she doesn’t see anybody over there, and she can’t hold the fence much longer. Now everything goes quickly. Arce doesn’t move, and Gia says,
“What is it?” and Arce doesn’t answer. She can see his shoulders. “Go, Arce! Go!” but he doesn’t.
The men are shouting from behind and above her. There’s another gun blast, and water splashes near Gia’s hip. She pulls herself down from the fence, feels diamond imprints on her cheek and hands. The fence’s bottom lip correspondingly lowers. But on its way down, it gets trapped on Arce’s shoulder. He still doesn’t move. Gia is off the fence now, she adjusts the bunny bag around her neck, she crouches, slogs toward Arce, and sees: a bullet has hit him. His eyes are closed and his expression is peaceful and he has a beveled black hole in his forehead.
And the fence’s bottom lip is stuck on his shoulder.
More shouting and gunfire. Gia dunks all the way under and opens her eyes, sees brown: clots of warm mud, an asphalt seabed, a little bit of sunlight, a bullet whizzing underwater, and Arce’s bent body snagged on the fence. She swims to him. She can’t help it: she still loves him. His gun is sticking out of his waistband, and as she’s crawling by, breath held, she thinks of taking it, but instead gently touches him, reaches inside his pocket, finds the pebble they acquired in that mortuary. Then she’s past him, under the fence.
She stands up. She’s on the other side. Just more parking lot but no more impediments. She runs through the water and doesn’t look back, heading for a carless spaghetti interchange of highway ramps, and the only other thing she notices is that as she opens the dripping canvas bag’s mouth to drop in the pebble, the tin flashlight Arce gave her years ago is still jangling around in there, and it’s somehow turned on.