recipient of…"
They send out a camera team fronted by a snitty little media witch who tries not to touch anything in the children's ward except during those few seconds when the take goes "live." Then, in front of the opened lens, she rests her hands affectionately on Joy's passive head. Pulling away as soon as the cameras stop, the newscaster checks her palms for shed hanks. "My God," she whispers audibly to her crew, as if discovering rat feces in the coils of her electric range. "It's hair-loss city in here."
No sooner does the story run than the cards begin to pour in. Surreal get-well wishes from a sick world. Wishes in eleven languages, including her own, plus all manner of grammarless dialects. Some with no words at all, just pictures, little Crayola comic strips purporting to relate her own story back to her, tracing a narrow escape from murderous nondemocratic forces all the way to ultimate techno-cure and consignment to happy, waiting ranch family. Boutique-bought three-dollar cards with no signature. Mass-mailed photocopies. Delicate, church-circle, handmaid handmades. Sympathy and condolence scrawled on the backs of cold-tablet packets. Long, rambling teeny-tiny-print letters about the loss of daughters to the same, never-mentioned disease. About daughters who are not their real daughters, about real ones swapped or disguised or hidden. Real daughters who think they are adopted. Adopteds, abandoneds, who never in a million years suspected. Mothers who are sure Joy is theirs.
Nico sits on the foot of her bed as the crates of communiques pour in. He demands first dibs, as if the cards are really his and he has just been forced to use Stepaneevong because she's convenient. He devours the cartoons and drawings, passing them on with a low chuckle of having pulled a fast one. The hard letters, from the crackpot adults, he makes her read to him. Then the two of them set up a routing system whereby the bushels of mail are passed around for public consumption before they are turned back in for official record-book tallying. At least it's something to do.
But it's morbid, and it only serves to feed the ward's dancing mania. Each get-well is an acupuncturing coffin pin, rotated and tweaked in the suppurating wound until the subjects feel nothing except bewilderment at being held here against their will.
Aware of the risk, Linda shows up at bedside one afternoon while an on-duty card-reading shift plows bleakly through the day's mail, no longer even grinning. "What do you say to a little amateur theatrics?" she says, to no one in particular.
No one responds, until Joy stares openly at the tyrant who has taken control of operations.
"You mean, like a play?" Nico asks. "Make me heave, why don't you? Like, little froufrou costumes and makeup and that? Of all the infantile…"
She is ready for him. "Bunny hopping at the Pasadena Women's Club?"
"That's different. That was… preparation." Even in midsentence, you can see him realize that this stray message brought by unwitting courier is preparation too. Exactly the thing he's been after. "What do you got?"
Linda removes from its hiding place in her pouch the old anthology, A Country a Day for a Year, the promised term of time now an impossible luxury. Nico emits a groan, beyond repugnance.
" The Goose-Child.' "
"Wrench my neck."
" 'The Wolf-Child.' The Lizard-Child.' "
"Three strikes. Blow off this animal kingdom thing."
" 'Jam on Jerry's Rock.' "
"Pardon me?"
"That's the name. 'Jam on…' "
Nico voices a loud fart, followed by universal oos of disgust. But Linda knows she has them now.
" 'Aladdin.' 'Sinbad.' 'The Magic Caldron.' 'Trickster Plays the False Bridegroom.' 'Hanuman's Burning Tail.' 'The Borrowed Feathers.' 'The Magnetic Islands.' "
"Oh, sure, right. I'm not dressing up as anything smaller than a minor landmass."
" 'The Three Golden Sons.' 'The Seven-League Boots.' 'The Frog That Made Milk.' "
"I scddy bag the animals already."
" 'Beezaholi and the Cyclogeneron'?" a frightened voice from among the backbenchers suggests.
"Sure," Linda says. "Why not? Couple of diodes, some tinfoil…"
"No friggin' way. Jose. Full stop. Keep reading."
Linda sighs, a languorous Lillie Langtry, and returns to the table of contents. " 'The Wati Kutjara.' 'The Fake Beauty Doctor.' 'The Stone Eskimo Child.' 'The Mayor of…' "
Joy twists acrobatically under Linda's arm, her weight on her knuckles, as supple as a crippled beggar. Her fingers slide down the list of potential scripts at twice the speed that the false mother can pronounce them out loud. She sieves through the tides, moving her lips silently, looking for one in particular. When she finds it, as she never doubted she would, she calls it out in foregone-conclusion monotone, for the first and last time in her life interrupting another human being.
It is that spooky name, the old familiar, the last tale Linda would have thought children of this city would sit through, let alone dress up and perform this late in time's day. But the effect on Nicolino, and by association his entranced clan of republican guard, is enough to goose her flesh. "Lemme see that. Gimme that book."
He flips to the story in question and assaults it with the viciousness of the functionally illiterate. Here it is. The point of all the endless, agitated prep. The explanation, the need for dancing lessons. "Okay," he decides with producer's finality, "this is the story we're doing. You direct. We double-cast all us gimps to play both sets of teaming masses." Now: where're we going to find four dozen rat suits, a high dive, and a pipe?
How does this one go again? The ubiquitous, uninvited out-of-towner shows up on the city outskirts one morning to make a comprehensive survey. Comparing the checklists of the real against the ideal upward spiral, he concludes to himself with masterful, mumbled understatement, "Serious infrastructure problems here.
"Bad shape," he elaborates, a pleasant euphemism. One quick spin around the city-wall circuit confirms the obvious. From any perimeter tower, anyone paying attention can make out the state of affairs. Were the problem just cosmetic, it would already be unsolvable: the house plaster going shabby, the shoddy half-timbering rotting no sooner than it is rigged together. The open sewers back up into putrid pools, exceeding all stopgap attempts to sluice off the stinking sludge. The slum quarter spreads like desert into the heart of town, but the vitiated commercial sector cannot afford to pull the sinkhole down and do the required rebuilding.
The glittering Rathaus is a mammoth travesty, its obscene overhead bleeding the tax base dry. The guild buildings are down on their heels, held up by subsidy, levitation, and the magic of deficit spending. The centuries-old overhaul of the basilica has halted in mid-flying buttress. Quintessential urban nightmare, arrived at by what the grade schools will one of these once-upon-a-times take to calling civics: pauperize the past and mortgage the future to pay for an unsustainable, Pollyanna present. "An easy mark/' the self-employed surveyor says, shaking his head with a grin.
The man descends from the ramparts and heads toward the diseased downtown retail plaza. It is market day, and he settles down between a fishtail vendor, a blood sausage emporium, and a rottingly ripe cheese stall. The out-of-towner has not eaten for days, and he takes whatever sustenance he can through inhalation.
He sits down unceremoniously, cross-legged on the bare ground. He pulls open a soft leather satchel from which he draws writing materials. Spreading a piece of parchment awkwardly in front of him, he begins to print, "Fore-year 1284, Anno D. Have arrived. Find it a flea-bitten burrow with big-league pretensions, well into the predicted collapse." A woman who has slowed to gawk at this bizarre act of mall performance art edges off suspiciously as he looks up. Another, holding a hank of carrots by the hair, mistakes him for a beggar or a pope's emissary collecting for some worthy ground offensive and drops a few pennies on his parchment. The stranger politely returns them.