These days, we bring her water.
Not to be too delicate about it: Vanessa is fucking obsessed with water. Like everybody, I guess, but Vanessa is picky. Won’t touch anything that didn’t originate in a plastic bottle. Iodine, charcoal filters, those pale pink pH balancing tablets that FEMA distributed by the crate-load—none of it is adequate, separately or in conjunction. If the water’s been in a cloud in the last four months, Vanessa won’t have it, period.
She’s a sweet woman, Felicity says, always shaking her head when she says it. But nothing about Vanessa Novak is easy.
Any time Felicity gets her hands on bottled water, from FEMA or the Salvation Army or one of her ephemeral boyfriends, I hook up the red canvas child carrier to the back of my bike, load it with gallon jugs or cardboard cases of bottles, and head south. Vanessa’s apartment is on the top floor of a narrow, flat-roofed three-story, and you enter through the sketchiest addition ever slapped onto the back of a building, all unpainted two-by-fours, protruding nails, and square, single-paned windows that rattle loosely in their frames. Vanessa uses this back room as a greenhouse, a pile-up collision of tomato vines, bell peppers, chives, and basil in square plastic trays. A trapdoor and a painter’s ladder take you onto the roof, which has been plastered over with solar panels and more trays of plants, sheltered from the rain by a blue camping tarp.
Vanessa is up there now, fiddling with one of her panels, barefoot on the black stretch of tar-like shingle. A bandana with a pattern of koi fish and square coins keeps her tight brown curls out of her eyes. She looks up, hearing the trapdoor knock against one of the steel legs of the tarp as I flip it open.
“Hey,” I say, too winded to offer much more. “Got you some water.”
She grins, showing uneven but exceptionally white teeth. “Friday, you are magnificent.”
It takes about five minutes to get the eight gallons of water out of the child carrier and up the stairs to her apartment. She leaves six in the greenhouse room and has me lug the other two up the ladder, onto the roof, where she unceremoniously dumps the contents over a pallet of yellow-flowered something. Even after months of this, a small part of me winces to see perfectly good drinking water dripping off the leaves, soaking into the shingle. Vanessa, as always, doesn’t notice me squirming. Or maybe she just doesn’t give a shit. Hard to tell with her.
Sometimes, when I bring her water, that’s all there is—the magnificent smile, the wordless trek up and down the stairs, the unceremonious watering of the plants. Today, she wants to talk.
“Especially loud this morning, aren’t they?”
She’s standing with her brown, sleeveless arms folded across her chest, frowning at the unidentified yellow flowers. I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“Pardon?”
“The rain,” she says.
“Oh.” I shrug, scratch the back of my neck. “Slept through it, I guess. Last night was a total shit-show.” Which is putting it mildly, but she doesn’t need the details. “Felicity still wants you to come out with us sometime. If you’d like to.”
“Why? Got a solar panel that needs fixing?”
“Nothing like that.” She’s kidding, so I try to smile. All over again, I see the ceiling of the warehouse peeling away, the sheet of toxic water falling over Paëday’s generator. Sparks flying everywhere, then darkness so intense it hits me like a slap. Meme screaming. I push the whole thing away with an artificial, throat-clearing cough. “Just thought you might have a good time. Enjoy the music, meet people.” Pop a few pills, watch a few ceilings collapse. End of the world, lady, every party is a free party.
“Mutually exclusive,” she says.
“Pardon?” Again.
“I can’t have a good time and meet people. I don’t like music, anyway. Blows your hearing.” She licks her lips—is she still teasing? Hard to tell, again. “That’s probably why you aren’t hearing them. Look.”
She takes one of the now-empty gallon jugs, weaves her way between the solar panels and scoops something from the edge of the roof.
“Jesus. Is that rain water?”
“I’m not drinking it,” she says, screwing on the cap. “Just listen.”
She hands me the jug, half an inch of water sloshing around the bottom. I hold it against my ear. Hear plastic crinkling, nothing else.
“Sorry,” I say.
She gives me a look, mouth quirked and eyebrows crinkled, like I’m speaking with an accent she can just barely puzzle out. Or like she’s hearing two people shouting at once and can’t decide which to listen to. She lets me hand the jug back to her, holds it up to the light. Dark specks, like coffee grounds, float on the surface—flakes of shingle, I guess, from the roof.
She walks to the front of the house and dumps the water over the side, onto the dead lawn below. Something down there seems to spook her, because she steps back quickly, almost tripping over the corner of a panel. But by the time she gets back to the shade of the tarp, she’s smiling again, thanking me for the water, and I know that’s my cue to leave.
The plastic garbage lid with its yellow graffiti is still sitting on the sidewalk as I make my way down. I glimpse another flash of yellow at the end of the block, sideways on a fire hydrant. And again, on a manhole cover in the middle of the road. A ‘C’ turned on its back, with a row of circles clustered inside and the ends turned out, curling. Again and again, all the way out of Cat-piss Park. Bright as Day-Glo, yellow like the edge of nausea.
“A ship with two faces,” Cloud says when I show him a sketch of it. He’s standing on the bottom step of Felicity’s front porch, on his way out to find a new location for tonight’s music. He stopped over to check on Paëday, who spent the night on the two Ikea futons in Felicity’s living room. Meme has gone back to sleep, he says, in the upstairs bedroom that Felicity still refers to as Mia’s.
Mia is Felicity’s daughter. She’s twenty-two, four years older than me, and she hasn’t been in Chicago for years now. Whether Felicity thinks she’s ever coming back is a thing that shifts with the wind.
Paëday, Cloud says carefully, is fine, just shaken up—Meme especially, since she was standing closest to the part of the roof that caved in. The edge in Cloud’s voice makes me afraid to ask for details. Their generator is almost certainly lost, and most of the sound system with it. So now what are they going to do? What the fuck can they possibly do?
Isn’t that the question for all of us.
Cloud sees me thinking and he reaches up, puts a hand on my forearm, gentle as a kitten. He’s a different creature by daylight, without the drugs or the music. Years ago, in one of the month-to-month apartments where I lived with my mother, there was a janky light switch in the bathroom. The bulb only lit up while you were flipping it on or off—never when the switch was set all the way up or down, only for that split-second sweet spot in the middle, the undetectable moment of hesitation on the way from high to low or low to high. That’s what Cloud’s like, only bright in the middle. And the truth is, I like him best like this.
“Look,” he says now, tracing my sketch with the tip of his thumb. The other hand is still on my arm, warm and not too heavy. “It’s like a Viking ship. The circles are shields, and the curving ends are, what’s the word—beakheads? Although I’m not sure why there’s two of them.”
“Ship with two faces,” I repeat. Like the image itself, the phrase makes me faintly sick, although I couldn’t say why. Cloud hands me the scrap of paper with the sketch, and I push it down into the front pocket of my jeans. “Well,” I say finally, “I doubt it’s a gang sign. Unless we’ve got Viking gangs now.”