The girl outside shifted her weight, Eric turned back after checking out the phone, and from deep inside Alice actual expressions from the xenophobic nightmare of her mother’s phrasebook began rising up, free-floating, to seek their application in this circumstance: drop out, druggie, going to hell in a handbasket, hippie, take some responsibility, nigger lover, have they no shame, undesirable elements, each sounding fluent and expressive to her though she felt no anger, only the pull, from the next room, of the neglected television making her impatient with this interlude.
And then the door was shoved open entirely, and the two men came in, with guns.
She tries to imagine, for the hundredth time, Eric aiming a rifle at a living target.
There was a time when Alice thought it was possible that a poem or a song could save every faltering affair in the universe; there was a time when Alice thought she would use it, as she might an incantation, on a night when the TV finally ran out of things to say.
Tania wryly quotes to herself: Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys upon the Life of the People!
NANCY LING PERRY — Fahizah
Fahizah noticed in the rearview that the instant after passing them, the pigs swung into a wide arc to make a U-turn and began following them from about twenty yards behind. It was a quiet and ominously piglike move, and she was sure the pigs’ eyes glowed red at the moment they’d targeted them, like pig androids in a pig killing machine. Fahizah checked her speedometer to make sure she was within the limit, whatever the hell that was around here. Thirty? Eighty-seven? Quarter past three? Huh? She was actually going about forty-two. Holy shit. She realized that she was sort of near Whittier College. The memories came seeping back into her pounded consciousness. Not a happy year, the one she spent there, but it presented her now with a golden opportunity to exercise classic revolutionary deceit: She was on her way to Whittier College, OK, pig? Go ahead and call Pig Central and find out if what she said wasn’t true. She could tell all about the local landmarks: the library, the college theater, the fire-breathing stanwixauropodinoose … and … and … they better believe her, man. The cruiser followed them, flat and menacing. She would shoot their pig faces off. She would steal their pig badges and pig guns from their faceless pig corpses. She thought: Fahizah: the name means one who is victorious. Was her mouth moving? She raised a hand from the steering wheel to touch her lips and found them muttering, in silence, independent of her thoughts, whatever the hell they were.
Cujo turned around again to look at the cops.
“Will you stop?” said Zoya. “You’re just giving them a reason.”
“Pigs don’t need a reason,” said Cujo. “They’re pigs.” He and Fahizah giggled. Zoya looked annoyed.
“Just stop looking back there.”
“I smell bacon,” said Cujo, singsong. He raised his nose and sniffed noisily.
Fahizah looked into the rearview, thinking: There is no flight to freedom except that of an armed projectile. She kept the van at a steady forty, the engine quietly speaking to her, fine fine fine you’re doing fine fine fine, the message traveling from the gas pedal to her foot and up through her spinal cord, as she signaled and eased into the right lane to give the pigs a chance to pass them, to disengage. A fighting chance. To the rear, the cruiser shifted along with them. She thought it might take off any second now. She thought she’d read something about that, flying pigmobiles. Pigs with wings. Heh. They would fly overhead to release the death gas on them, cause them to crash their cars. Then take their bodies to the Dissection Center. Display their brains in some pig trophy case that toured Amerikkka to dissuade the People from attempting to challenge fascist power. They would hook the brains up to a pig Mind Control device that would have them spouting pigisms in their own voices. That was probably something to worry about maybe.
“I say if they pull us over that we just kill them, ask questions later,” said Zoya. That suited Fahizah just fine. She patted her personal sidearm, a revolver, snug in its shoulder holster, thinking: The only way to destroy fear is to destroy the makers of fear.
They continued east on Slauson for another half mile or so. Ahead of them, Cinque kept a steady course. Suddenly he signaled left. The van’s brake lights flared as it slowed and turned into a small street leading back into the bungalow maze. Fahizah noted its name as she passed: Ascot. Like a man in a whadayacallit smoking jacket. Like a man in a smoking jacket holding a whadayacallit snifter. Like a man in a smoking jacket holding a snifter taking a cigar from a whadayacallit humidor. Like a man in a smoking jacket holding a snifter taking a cigar from a humidor. Yeah. That’s what it was like.
“Nobody look!” warned Zoya.
Fahizah said, affecting a British accent: “Would you care for a cigar?” Zoya stared.
Why the hell would anyone look, man? Fahizah would feel her way back to her comrades. She had reversed the polarity of the Fascist Government transponder that had been subcutaneously implanted, and now she could home in on her comrades at any distance on Earth as well as Zibiriliax; she’d tested it.
Still, she tried to suppress the desolation of the thought: We’re totally alone.
They drove on, perhaps two miles, until they approached the dry bed of the Los Angeles River and the overpass that crossed the Long Beach Freeway. There the cruiser that shadowed them abruptly turned off to follow a course parallel to the highway. When their pursuers disappeared from sight, Fahizah pulled over, bringing the van to a stop amid the low industrial buildings.
“Now what?” said Cujo.
“We go back and rendezvous,” said Fahizah.
“Where’d those guys turn off?” said Cujo.
As Fahizah opened her mouth, Zoya answered: “Ascot.”
Such a display of diligence should have pleased General Fahizah. It pissed her off instead, as she was forced to add lamely, feeling the weakness of the imprecision, “It was kind of near Central.” Abruptly she opened the door and got out to stretch her legs. She felt drained and let down all of a sudden. Her mind felt flat and ordinary.
The street outside was quiet, with only a faded wash of noise from the nearby freeway. She was tired, and her eyes ached. She stared morosely across the street at the unappealing landscape, considering her last meal, a congenitally nasty farrago of canned spinach, okra, and mackerel. An ember of discomfort burned at the center of her stomach. She wanted a cheeseburger from the Zim’s restaurant on Nineteenth and Taraval, with french fries and an icy glass of Coca-Cola that burned the back of the throat as it went down.
She felt like nothing, a nobody from nowhere.
Inside the van, Cujo was absorbed in picking his nose. Zoya climbed out to stand beside Fahizah.
“That got kind of scary,” she confessed.
“Oh, man. I need, like, a fucking break. That wore me out,” said Fahizah.
“You want me to drive?”
Fahizah nodded. She leaned against the van and put a hand to her face, sensing some stifled impulse behind her eyes, the snots and tears that never came — never! She felt so sorry for herself she decided to fake it, a little, drawing in big gulps of air and shaking with a simulated passion that was totally counter to the crawl-in-a-hole thing she was feeling. Anyway, it was the wrong audience. Zoya just stood and watched. She’d spent the day with crying Gabi, Fahizah remembered. Gabi cried, Yolanda cried, Teko cried, Gelina didn’t cry much but you knew she would if it came down to it. Tania didn’t cry. An interesting thought. She pitied her, stuck somewhere with Teko and Yolanda; what a pair of royal pains in the ass they could be. If anything could make her cry, it would be getting caught with the two of them at a fork in the road; the arguing would go on forever. This made Fahizah smile. She lifted her dry face from her cupped hand and reached up to clap Zoya on the shoulder, then walked around to get in on the passenger side.