19
THE HOLE
We’ve reached the road to the Avenues that lead into town. Las Ramblas. I stop following Lucas when the road flattens out in front of us, at the top of the hill. “Do you have any idea where you’re going?”
He points. “All the major roads run west to east in the Hole. Las Ramblas will take us there.” I nod, but I’m impressed. I only know the basics—that Las Ramblas is known for its massive crowds, and that today is no different.
The crush of people is dizzying, particularly for me. I can’t think—at least, I can’t separate out what I think from what the world is thinking. “You said you’re here to meet someone?” I fumble to string together the words.
He nods, but doesn’t answer.
“Who, Lucas?”
“You’ll see when we get there. This way.” Lucas motions, and we begin to move eastward into the Hole.
We walk beneath the giant banners that flutter in the air over the city streets. Here’s what I learn in the span of a few short blocks: The Lords Are Generous. The Embassy Is Kind. The People Are Lucky. The Future Is Bright. A stern-faced painting of the Ambassador in her scarlet jacket rises to the height of an abandoned building. I can count the golden birdcage buttons on it, each one the size of my head, while the breeze blows through the broken-out windows that puncture the paint.
Are all cities like ours?
I don’t actually know, seeing as I’ve never seen another, except for those few moments of the Silent Cities that the Ambassador showed me. The Embassy media is so tightly controlled, it’s impossible to know for certain. Sometimes, Ro would come to dinner at La Purísima, his eyes crazy and full of fire, and tell us bits of stolen Grass news. How the Lords have wronged us. How the Embassy lets them.
Right and wrong. The whole world divides into two columns, for Ro. He sees things differently than I do. I’m overwhelmed by a million perspectives, all at once. There’s no one right answer, not when everyone is shouting at the same time. That’s why the feelings are so hard for me to sort out. So draining. Half the time I agree with everything they feel and everyone I meet.
Weaving my way through the crowded street with Lucas at my side, I realize Lucas isn’t afraid of how he feels. He wants to feel it—it, me, everything. Everyone. He takes it all in, deep inside him.
Not Ro.
For Ro there is only black and white, right and wrong—and he is right. He doesn’t care if you agree with him or not. In fact, it’s better for him if you don’t.
Ro just wants to fight.
The famed Avenues food vendors line the curb. Handmade tortillas fry on the top of the nearest overturned trash can. Potatoes sizzle together with onions on the next. Ropes of cheese or bread dough twist around sticks. Ropes of snake meat, too, but I look away before my eyes can rest on the place where the sticks push out of the blackened, impaled mouths.
“Why are you making that face?” Lucas looks at me, laughing.
I shudder, shaking my head, and he relaxes against me, letting our shoulders touch.
You’d almost think we were regular seventeen-year-olds, on a regular walk, through a regular city. But none of those things are true. I’ve escaped a military complex for an illicit rendezvous with an unknown source in a dangerous city.
With the Ambassador’s son.
Part of me is glad the Padre isn’t here to see it. He’d worry, I think—like I’m worrying now.
We reach the end of the Avenues, Las Ramblas, and though Lucas hasn’t said anything, I see the rails and realize we are going to ride the City Tracks—my first time. Unlike the Californias Tracks, which run along the coast, the City Tracks only operate within the Hole.
Ten minutes later, we’re heading east. At least, so says the sign on the door of our boxcar, which is nearly empty; only Embassy Brass can ride the City Tracks. Though Lucas’s plastic couldn’t get us into the Hall of Records, a quick flash at the bored Sympa guards still got us onto the Tracks. Thankfully, they didn’t look too closely at the last name.
At Union Station, I hop down from the edge of the car, after Lucas, and follow him as we make our way through the crowds in the vast, spacious lobby. A row of Sympas watch us. I try not to look in their direction, as if not watching them will keep them from watching me.
The lobby is endless. My heart pounds, and the doors to the street seem a mile away. Thickly cracking leather chairs sit in groups like a brown herd. Beneath them, the floor is beautiful, a mosaic tile pattern that builds into the center of the room as if it were a long, ornate rug.
The windows are tall. I think of the pictures of the cathedrals I have seen in the Padre’s study. The light filters through them, and most of what I can see in the light is dust.
We push open the doors to the visible world.
In the broad whiteness of daylight, I have to blink to make out the dark shape I am looking at. It’s a tree, growing in the center of the plaza across from the train station. People peek out from the roots, hiding and sitting and even sleeping inside them. Sympas stand idly by, ignoring them, as if this mess of humanity was something invisible, something that never could be considered part of the city plan.
“So many people.” I can barely choke out the words, because I feel them all. Everyone in the plaza, the streets—needing, grasping, wanting. Fear seeps into every other emotion, every interaction. I clutch Lucas’s sleeve while I struggle to get my bearings.
He slips his hand down to my wrist and pulls me gently through the crowd. His touch is reassuring, and I let him calm me.
Lucas points. “That’s the Pueblo. The oldest building in the Hole.” I can’t see where he is pointing through the crowd.
I pause, and focus on breathing. I focus on not feeling. I focus on the wall between my feelings and theirs, willing it to hold. Willing the Hole outside to not absorb me.
“Come on.” Lucas disappears in front of me. Our fingers pull apart, and I try to follow, but within three steps I have lost him.
“Miss lady. Miss lady. Miss lady.” I move carefully past the extended hands. A hammer drops rhythmically in the distance. I hear drums. No. Firecrackers—and drums. Stomping feet beat to the rhythm. The twanging of strings, maybe a kind of guitar? I crane my head to find the music, but it is easier to hear than to see in the mash of people. Three competing groups of street musicians perform in three plazas nearby. A fringe of feathers bobs, appearing and disappearing in a splash of bright color above the clustered heads of the crowd.
Another hand appears in front of me. I shake my head: “Sorry. No digs.” It’s true.
The hand grabs my arm and pulls. I turn to see Lucas, looking exasperated. “There you are. Stay with me.”
Stay with me.
I take his hand. It is warm and his sleeve is once again down over his wrist. I squeeze it, without realizing what I am doing. He stops walking.
“What?” I look at him, embarrassed. I try not to act surprised to find myself holding his hand.
“Nothing.” He smiles and looks away.
But it isn’t nothing. I can feel him. Lucas on the inside is as sprawling and chaotic as the Hole itself. He’s warm and pounding and hopeful and scared. Terrified. He’s overwhelmed and intimidated and alive. He feels like the Hole, only better. He feels like the only hopeful thing in the Hole. Because I can feel that too, the hope. It’s only a tiny spark, a flutter. But it’s there.
I’m lucky to feel it, even once in my life, I think. I don’t feel it often. So I don’t say a word when he laces his fingers through mine as we walk.
We push past the stalls, and I catch a glimpse of the inside of a shop, through a doorway. A woman is selling Mexicali dresses, long swaths of cotton that hang off the shoulders in brilliant colors, embroidered with rainbows of thread. Feasting-day dresses, I think. I should steal one for Biggest, back on the Mission. She would like the green one, with the rainbow woven belt. But that isn’t what catches my eye. It’s a painting, on hammered tin that looks like silver, of the Lady. Stripes come from her head like the rays of the sun itself.
“Miss lady? You like?” The shopkeeper is a woman with black hair and brown skin. Her eyes are brilliantly blue. “Tres. Three hundred digs. It’s a good price, para la madre de todos.”
Lucas tugs on my hand. I keep walking.
“Miss lady! Miss lady!”
Lucas turns back to her, and I can feel the moment she recognizes his face. “El hijo! El hijo!” For a minute I think she is talking about the son of the Lady—but she means the son of the Ambassador.
Her own face freezes as she takes it in. That’s right, the son. She must have access to a vid-screen. Now she disappears inside the shop, slamming the blue-painted doors behind her.
“I have that effect on people, sometimes. Or, more to the point, my mother does.” Lucas looks at me. “Sorry. You weren’t really going to buy that, were you?”
“With what digs?”
“It’s just as well. If you like that, I can show you a better one.”
“A better painting?”
“No. Not a painting. A better Lady. You’ll see. Come on, it’s on the way.”
We weave through the alleyways of stalls, passing pepper candies and peanut candies. Old candy from old Mexicali. Pulpa de tamarindo in waxy packets, as sweet and as sour as the Hole itself. Mangos rolled and dried in chili powder. Miniature accordions and blue toy guitars and yellow maracas and pink harmonicas and red trompos. The colors and faces appear in layers, drifting in and out like the breeze and the sky.
We turn up a broad boulevard, where a man walks a donkey carrying bundles of what look like T-shirts past a giant wall of graffiti.
“You can’t possibly know where you’re going.” I pull on Lucas’s hand.
“But I do.” He looks at me with a sideways smile.
“But I don’t.” I smile back.
“Have a little faith, will you?”
“I wish I could.” My smile fades. “I wish I did.”
“Are you always this cheerful?” He laughs, and I shake my head, looking up in time to see an archway as we pass beneath it. Two dragons, hammered together out of some sort of red metal, are fighting overhead, from one side of the street to the other. Their bodies are long and twisted like snakes, but their clawed arms and legs are short and sharp.
“Laowai. Laowai.” I can hear the crowd murmuring as we pass. I don’t know what the term means, except that it is me. Someone who does not belong in this part of the Hole.
Neither Lucas nor I do.
The heat overwhelms us. I motion to the side of the road, where the edges of market stalls lean haphazardly together. Small square signs tell their names. Bok choy, yu choy, gai lan pile against each other in as many different greens as there are colors. Purple yams sit together between faded orange satsumas and pale green oroblancos, bigger and sweeter than grapefruits. The yuzu lemons, bright little balls of sunlight, only make the day seem hotter.
Between the stands, a wrinkled old woman sells bags of something unfamiliar that I think is a drink, from a red wagon. “Paomo hongcha? Paomo hongcha.” Another woman sits next to her on a folding stool, wearing a T-shirt that says Sexy Mama. Together they are probably seven hundred years old.
“What is that?” I look at Lucas.
“I’ve gotten it before. Not here, not from her. I don’t know what she’s saying, but I think it translates to something like sea foam.”
Fizzing water, part of a lime, and a kind of sugary powder are all dumped into what looks like a paper cup.
Lucas looks at her. “Sea foam?” She nods and the woman next to her, the Sexy Mama, starts to laugh. Her smile is almost entirely gold, or something that looks like it.
He fishes a coin out of his pocket and hands it to the woman.
The woman howls at me in a language I do not understand. Her face has a thousand wrinkles.
An older man stops next to me. “She told her friend she is going to rip you off because you come from Grass.”
“How did she know?”
“Your friend calls the drink the wrong name. You say sea foam. We call it Sympa pisswater.”
The woman holds out the drink. Now she is angry, and shouting at me.
“Take it,” the old man says. “She says to take it and go.” He leans closer to me. That much farther away from the Sympas who idle on the side of the street, behind the cart.
“She says to hurry. She says the Merk is waiting for you.”
“What?”
I back away from him, confused. I find myself in the middle of the street, in a seemingly never-ending stream of Remnants, students, laborers, jugglers, street musicians.
“Dol! Wait—”
An old man pushing a massive wooden drum on wheels slams into me. Now I’m trapped in the middle of some kind of processional. I whirl around to see a second drum, just before it hits me.
I go flying.
I open my eyes. A group of old men stand over me, inside an elaborately carved doorway. Red and yellow and green. A wooden scroll is cut into the frame.
THE BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATION. That’s what it says on the door. Same as the characters on the drum that knocked me to the ground.
The men look benevolent, I guess. They don’t look malevolent, anyway. They look nice.
I close my eyes. The day has overwhelmed me. I’m bruised from where the drum has hit me, and I’m too tired to think.
I open my eyes to see that I am sitting inside what I imagine is the main room of the Benevolent Association. I try to stand up. I have the impulse to run.
“Please, please. You must sit.” Only one man says the words in English. The others are all shouting at me in a language I don’t understand.
I look past card tables where men are smoking and playing a game with well-worn tiles. There are zodiac calendars on the wall. Hanging beads line the doorways.
I am given a warm glass of water and a bowl of spiced nuts. The smell curls into my face, chili peppers and lemongrass. I cough spice.
“You are well. You will be well.”
A bespectacled man in a jade-colored jacket sits across from me.
“Where’s Lucas?” I ask.
“Your friend? The Little Ambassador? He is well. All is well.”
I try to stand again.
The man pulls me down, but doesn’t let go of my hand. In fact, he stares at it.
“What are you looking at?”
“Your hand.”
“What about it?”
“Nothing. I give you reading. Make sure you are well.”
“No thanks.”
“I insist. I am most benevolent.”
He straightens my hand, in front of him, pulling a clipboard out of a bag he wears against his hip. The clipboard carries a chart showing the dim outline of a hand divided into quadrants, and a schematic of a blank face. Graphs and grids and charts of numbers, as well as the zodiac, fill the rest of the page.
“Your reading. For the Year of the Tiger.”
“Is that what it is?”
He ignores me. I look around, a bit desperately now, for Lucas. I don’t like this man touching me. I don’t like anyone touching me. He feels smooth and soft, though, both the part I can feel with my hand and the part I can feel with my mind.
“I can’t read you with numbers. Not for you. I read you with creatures. You belong to the animals.”
He pulls a handful of jade animals out of his bag, one by one. He lines them up in a row on the table between us, carefully. His hand shakes as he moves, resting heavily on each one while he speaks.
A pig. “I am sorry for your loss.” He lays the pig down on the table. Ramona, I think.
He weighs what looks like a lamb in his hand, shaking his head. “Not the sheep. The shepherd. You have lost him as well.” The sheep joins the pig.
He holds up a monkey. “Monkey. Very playful. Very dangerous. Keep your eyes open and see things for what they are.” He places the monkey on the far side of the table, a distance from the sheep and the pig.
Now he fingers a turtle. “Very scared. Lonely. But will help you find your way.” The turtle goes halfway between the monkey on one side, and the sheep and the pig on the other.
He places a dog next to the turtle. “Faithful. Loyal. But teeth are sharp.” Now he holds up what looks like a small carved lion. “Lion of heart not always a good thing. Will cause you great pain. You must decide for yourself what is a lion and what is a dog.”
The dog and the lion stand together.
I look at his face. He grins, bobbing his head, and I notice for the first time he is wearing a neatly brimmed hat with a bright orange feather sticking out of the stitched band of trim. The feather exactly matches the kumquats that sit in a bowl in the center of the card table between us. He is a card table made into a man, I think.
“Your hand.”
I give him my hand again. This time, he is full of sorrow and anxious energy, tears and sweat like foam from the ocean when it touches the shore, washing up along the beach.
Sea foam, I think. Not pisswater.
“See this? You are strong.”
I don’t know how a freckle beneath my thumb can possibly mean that, but I nod.
“Do not marry before you are twenty-five. If you do, you will have many children and no money. Very unfortunate.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem.”
He laughs and I see the gold in his teeth. He taps at a line that spreads like wings in the center of my palm. “Your brothers. They watch over you.”
“They’re dead.” I try to pull my hand away, but he stops me.
“My bad. I try again. Best two out of three.”
He scrunches up his face, this time tracing the three lines that arc across my palm.
“I see a child in your future. Here. A girl.”
“Before twenty-five? So I’m poor?”
He shakes his head. “Not yours.” He frowns. “Very important.”
“I am?”
He looks at me carefully, closely.
“She is.”
He holds my hand tightly, and his eyes glaze over. He is looking but not looking at my hand, and I can feel him slipping away from me.
“You must help her. Everything depends upon it.” His tone changes and he is no longer smiling.
“Yeah?”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small velvet bag. One by one, he picks up the jade animals and drops them inside it.
“Keep them. I was to keep them, but your hand tells me to give them to you.”
I reach for the bag. He pulls it away.
“Greedy, greedy. Not for you. For her. When you find her. If.”
He is, like everyone else in the Hole, crazy. That’s the first thing I think. The second is, he’s running a scam.
So much for the Benevolent Association. They’re probably ransoming Lucas as we speak.
“What about the boy?” he asks.
It’s as if he can read my mind. “What about him? What does my hand say?”
But at that, the old man tips back his head and laughs, raising his hands. “I can’t tell you. Time up now. Shoot me. So it is written.”
“What?”
“Shoot me. That is all that remains.”
He smiles and rolls his eyes back, until all I can see are the whites.
“I don’t understand.”
He closes his eyes. A bullet rips through his chest, spattering me with red flesh. Another whizzes past my head.
“Oh my God.”
The old man is dead. A row of bullets eats into the wood above him. I fall out of my chair and sprawl onto the floor.
Even so, I can’t take my eyes off the old man.
The red stain seeps upward as his body slumps downward. The hat tumbles free and the orange feather floats lazily in the air. There are kumquats everywhere, rolling and spilling across the table, across the floor. Like the blood.
Shoot me. He wasn’t kidding.
He knew it was coming.
He knew.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Sweet Maria.”
I grab the velvet bag, scramble to my feet, and run.
As I move, I think that this is what my life has become. This, and nothing more. Mysterious news and sudden death. Blood spatter on the wall and kumquats rolling on the floor. This is my life now.
It makes me run faster.
EMBASSY CITY TRIBUNAL VIRTUAL AUTOPSY: DECEASED PERSONAL POSSESSIONS TRANSCRIPT (DPPT)
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET
Performed by Dr. O. Brad Huxley-Clarke, VPHD
Note: Conducted at the private request of Amb. Amare
Santa Catalina Examination Facility #9B
See adjoining Tribunal Autopsy, attached.
DPPT (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE)
Catalogue at Time of Death includes:
31..
32. One small carved animal, green in color. Cheap quality, commonly sold in souvenir shops throughout the Southlands. 2.2 zm. Jade. It appears to be a lion, broken in half.
Source or significance unknown.