This Census-Taker(14)
“What did the man say to you?” I said.
“He told me not to steal your supper. He gave me money.”
She bought meat and grain and we stewed it on a fire in the last of those empty houses that the children claimed as their territory and we all ate there on the body of the bridge. In a big empty attic room with late sunlight coming in, that made me cry again, in a way that was new to me.
Take accounts, keep estimates, realize interests.
You can count a city in a room, in your head. You can be taught that, and if you are you might learn that you already knew how to do it, and if you do you’ll have to learn to accommodate a new purpose, to encompass and itemize for a goal, to make it yours. With such intent, everything will be more concrete, the boundaries of the counted city circumscribed more precisely, and you may be more or less lost, or as lost as before. Were you lost? You don’t have to know: you can go along with things.
I’m writing by hand now. The wasp is dead or sleeping. There’s nothing for which my guards can listen.
Ultimately my manager would come to give me instructions, and I was glad to take them. And, unsanctioned, I was given advice too, by his previous assistant, informed or warned by her of gossip among colleagues, a line, a letter at a time, demanding attention.
Something started in that new attic, as I spent my first night ever out of the uphill.
I watched the room with what light came in from the bridge. The house was full of the skeletons of furniture, around and through which the gang-members picked and played in complicated chases and which they gave new work to do. I was silent. They eyed me carefully and when they did I’d wait in alarm but none came to ask me questions about what I’d seen. Samma had told them not to.
At last a tiny crooked boy younger than most did approach me, so I grew tense again, but what he said, shyly, was “Did you ever see that cockerel?”
Among themselves they said there was a cockerel made of smoke and embers that scorched its way up and down the slopes. They’d populated the uphill—where most of them had never been—with monsters. They asked me about them all—that bird, a scaly worm, a ranting spider—and all I could offer were the snarls of big cats. They listened as if they weren’t disappointed with my gabbled stories, and the more I tried to say, to describe not only the animal sounds I’d heard on the hill but the beasts of which I was thinking, the more a guarded alarm showed on their faces with their tiredness, until every girl and boy gave up for the day and lay down on blankets or cardboard in cubbies throughout the building, window holes where windows had been bricked up, inset shelves that had held things.
I whimpered to think of the new stains on the old wall of my home, the glimpse of my father’s closed eyes, or my mother’s, their arms, those of the one stood over the other with something raised, some part of a body held. It wasn’t my father who had died: he’d done the killing. It came back at me and I kept my new gangmates awake with screams.
No one punished me for the noise. At a certain point I stood up from the rag bundle where I’d been placed and recited one extended howl into the staring face of an imagined dead woman. Samma and Drobe rose and came to me and she picked me up and carried me outside. She was not so big but I recall no hesitation or effort on her part.
The air blew through me. I’d never before been in the town so late, though I’d looked down on it untold times. Previously I’d only ever seen streetlamps either unlit or in their initial fitful waking or lit from far enough away that they were glimmers like the arses of phosphorescent bugs. Now Samma set me on my feet and I ran to stand beneath the closest and gaped wet-eyed up at its filament like a visitor to a shrine.
In the generating zone on the other hill the unseen turbines spun fast to make this light that replaced the moon, against which the drop was so dark. The houses to one side of me and the railings by that obscured void to the other converged before me on the second hill, in the dimmer quarter that had once cradled my mother.
“Moth boy,” Samma said. She sounded fond. “If you could fly you’d get right up there and touch the wire and die.”
“You know what happens when you die?” Drobe said. “Do you know church?” he said.
I ran forward again, hearing nothing of my own steps. Samma grabbed me, held me as tight as a harness, but I still felt as if I was running for those southern parts, or then as if the night itself had stopped to pause my investigation.
Did my mother walk ahead of me? Even when she told stories of her earlier life she never seemed nostalgic, and I could think of no reason that death alone would change that. If she took that revenant route it might be she had no choice, that she had to pass through those familiar failing suburbs to scatter cats and go without a shadow past their hides in the roots of walls and carts sat so long wheel-less on their axles that they were less than landscape. To think of her made me afraid again, even in my abrupt nocturnal exultation, so the face I gave her was the sexless wooden one from the rubbish. With that she took the tight alleys in the shadow lee of geography.
It wasn’t all collapse. Neither side of the town was ever only flyblown or air-bleached plastic or runoff and the slippage of industry but those were the castles she’d sought to live in, a cruder form, and it was by them that I considered her.
Someone would come to find strangers and those born of strangers, Drobe said, repeating things he’d heard. People had been sent out to perform such tasks, he said, to take number, and now someone was coming. I didn’t understand him. It seemed I’d spoken of the trash head in my ruminations, and that mention had provoked him to interrupt me with his garbled information.