Girl in Landscape (2 page)

“Frog legs, Caitlin, you already told us this story,” said Raymond.

“Yick,” said David.

“Shut up,” said Raymond.

“It’s disgusting,” said David.

“Frog arms, frog heads, frog ears, frog dicks,” hissed Raymond, close to David’s ear.

“Stop!”

Pella nudged her brothers apart and sat between them, preempting the inevitable request from her mother. Jammed between them, she thought of the night of Clement’s concession speech, the three of them seated in that ballroom, waiting, Raymond and David kicking at each other under her chair, stirring the desultory balloons that lay everywhere, decorated with Clement’s name. Pella had taken one of the balloons and twisted it until it squeaked, then tore.

Clipped onto the side of the train, they roared through the black tunnel, their faces lit in bursts by the colored lights of the ads that strobed out of the darkness,
eye-blink retinal tattoos. The antic iron rattle of the subway consoled Pella. She imagined she could smell the heated metal. She was in a place where she belonged, under New York City, her family in their private car a discrete unit in a teeming hive, buried out of sight of the sky. She let the pounding of the track drown her mother’s words.

“The Archbuilders had a strange science. They used viruses to change things. They used viruses to build arches and a lot of other stuff, and then they changed the weather, so it was always warm and there was plenty of food around. And when they changed the weather the Archbuilders changed, too. They stopped building arches.”

“Why?” said Raymond.

“The weather changed their
temperament
,” said Caitlin. “They got different priorities. Some of them went into space. And the ones who stayed forgot a lot of stuff they knew before.”

“Will we live outside?” said David.

Caitlin laughed.

Pella let her brothers ask the questions. She listened to the tone of Caitlin’s answers, urgent and beguiling. She could hear her mother making the idea of the family moving to the Planet of the Archbuilders real, inflating it to fill the space that had gaped when Clement lost the election.

As the train slowed at the beach station their car was unclipped and slotted into the vast parking garage under the station. Caitlin led them to the elevator.
SURFACE
WARNING
signs came to life as they passed up through the underground.

The doors opened to a concrete bunker, lit with blinking fluorescent, floor littered with sand, sunlight leaking from around a corner. Pella lugged out the flattened cones. Caitlin leaned her bag of sandwiches and toys against a wall, took one of the cones and unfolded it over David. Pella began to do the same with Raymond, but he snatched it away.

“I can do it myself,” he said.

“Fine,” said Pella. She took her own and fitted the headpiece around her skull, then let the weighted outer ring fall to the ground, tenting her inside the transparent cone.

“Mine’s too big,” said David. He kicked at it where it scraped the concrete.

“That’s good,” said Caitlin. “You won’t get burned. Better than too small.”

“It looks dumb.”

“Nobody cares how it looks,” said Pella.

“Probably there’s nobody there anyway, stupid,” said Raymond, his voice scornful and uncertain at once.

Raymond and David had only played in sand at a nature parlor called ’Scapes.

They walked out in their four cones toward the sunlight. Pella lifted the edge of hers and felt the concrete wall as they turned the corner. The wall was cold. It thrummed, too, with the confirming thrum that was everywhere, elevators and climate-control devices vibrant in the underground concrete and steel.

Everywhere except where they were going: outside.

“Pella,” said Caitlin, and Pella let her cone fall to cover her again, felt it rasp in the grit at her feet.

They stepped out of the shade of the bunker, and the scattering of sand across concrete underfoot blended into the beach itself. Pella gaped up. The thing about the sky, the thing she always forgot, was the vaulting empty spaciousness of it. The blue or gray she’d seen framed through so many tinted windows, unbound now, explosive. Endlessly vaulting away from her eye.

And the sun, the enemy: horrible, impossible, unseeable.

“Look.”

Raymond and David were pointing at the ruins behind them, the boardwalk, the blackened armatures of the abandoned amusement park. They didn’t even look at the
sky
, Pella thought.

“See that tower, like a mushroom?” said Caitlin. “That was the parachute jump.”

“Did you go on that one?” said Raymond.

“No. It was closed when I was young. Do you know why? People didn’t open the parachutes in time, and broke their legs. But I rode the Cyclone.”

“The what?”

“The roller coaster.” Caitlin pointed it out, a cat’s cradle of ravaged iron that looked helpless and naked in the sun.

Pella, annoyed, turned to the shore. To the right and left the beach was empty to the rock pilings that made, with the boardwalk, three walls of its frame. The fourth wall, the wrongest, was the sprawling, pitched ribbon of cyclone fence that ran between the pilings at
the point of the water. Refuse and seaweed had washed up in the night and now clung, rotting, high on the wire, but at midday the waves fell far short of the base of the barrier.

Even this distance exhausted Pella’s gaze, from the sand where she stood to the place past the fence where the darker sand met the sulfurous, glistening ocean. Even before she grappled with the edge where the water met the sky. Even before she grappled with the sky.

And now she was supposed to be able to look past that sky, into space. Caitlin wanted her to. But even the expanse of sand was space enough, too much.

Pella walked slowly away from her family and toward the water the fence would not allow her to reach. She kept her eyes lowered against the terrible sun, watched instead the strange track her cone made as it dragged in the sand.

“Pella!”

Her brothers came running up beside her, already out of breath, David almost tripping on his cone.

“Castle or fort?”

“What?” said Pella.

“Build a castle or a fort? David says castle, I say fort—”

“What’s the difference?”

“C’mon, Pella—”

“No, I mean it, what’s the difference between a castle and a fort?” Pella plumped down in the sand, her cone half-telescoping to accommodate her.

David fell on his knees alongside her. “I don’t know.”

Raymond began: “A fort is …,” but didn’t continue.

Caitlin spread the blanket just behind them, and plopped down the bag of sandwiches and toys. “This a good spot? A fort is what, Ray?”

“They don’t know the difference between a castle and a fort,” said Pella, carefully leaving herself out of it.

Caitlin took a sandwich, then lifted her cone so that the bag was out, exposed on the blanket. “A castle is like a town. People live there, not just the king, or soldiers. It’s permanent. A fort is a war thing, it’s just for being attacked. But if you’re building them in the sand maybe the difference is the castle is small and detailed, like a dollhouse, and a fort is like a big wall that
you
hide behind as if you were under attack.”

“That’s what I meant,” said Raymond conclusively.

“Okay, fort,” said David. He moved his cone to cover the bag of supplies and pulled out the spatula Caitlin had packed, for digging.

“Be careful of the sun,” said Caitlin.

“We know,” said Raymond, as they set to work.

Pella leaned back with her mother on the blanket, got as close as the cones would allow, and squinted through the far-off cyclone fence, at the waves.

Pella’s first period was a glob of brownish red, as though some tiny animal had died against her body. It ruined a pair of underwear and sparked a fever of shame, and left behind a bland but dogged ache that woke her in the night. It was only then, as she lay awake in the dark, that she decided to tell Caitlin. Which led to a garish lesson in tampon insertion and a trip to the
UnderMall for a shopping splurge, as if Caitlin wanted to confirm Pella’s private guess that this advance was a burden and required compensation.

“Raymond,” said Caitlin, “get your hands inside the cone.”

Clement’s election was something worse, a collective shame, the family entombed like mummies in a sarcophagus of denial, imagining the polls weren’t saying what they were, pretending not to overhear the phone calls, not to feel Clement’s radiant dread. Then a truly pathetic night spent milling in a shabby ballroom, eyeing monitors, enduring sympathies first masked then slowly unmasked, like a party with the guest of honor gradually dying. Caitlin got drunk at the end, and Clement, unforgivably, didn’t, instead stood clear-eyed and patronizing with a hand in Caitlin’s hair as if to steady her, gazing self-pityingly off toward some imaginary frontier.

Not imaginary enough, it turned out.

Pella watched the boys play in the sand, saw them discover how hard it was to collaborate on a project from inside their separate cones. The cone rims kept slicing through towers and walls. As Pella watched, Raymond twisted his arm down into the sand up to the elbow.

“Tunnels!” he said.

David followed, and soon they’d built a tunnel that connected the space of their cones under the sand. “Look, Caitlin,” said Raymond, as they triumphantly passed spatula, driftwood chunk, and plastic cup safely between them.

Pella thought of the tunnels through the bedrock of
the city. The decline of the subway was part of what cost Clement his seat, he’d explained. The people blamed his party for the collapses. The deaths. So they’d swept his party out of office.

And now were sweeping their family to the Planet of the Archbuilders. Or was it Caitlin who was doing that, with her talk?

“You can’t do much at the
real
beach,” complained Raymond when their tunnel pancaked, burying the tools in sand.

“ ’Cause of these cones,” said David.

“Soon you won’t have to wear cones to go outside,” said Caitlin. “That’s one reason we’re going.”

“There’s no sun?” said David.

“There’s a sun, but it doesn’t hurt you. The Archbuilders didn’t ruin their ozone.”

Pella looked involuntarily at Caitlin’s bared arms through the translucent cone, at the three scars where cancers had been taken off.

“So why’re we even here?” said Raymond. “If it’s not as good as where we’re going? Why didn’t we just go to ’Scapes?”

“I wanted you to see the real beach, before we left. To look at the ocean. The Planet of the Archbuilders doesn’t have an ocean.”

“Huh,” said Raymond.

Pella rose to this occasion. She saw, as Caitlin couldn’t, that it was useless to try to inspire Raymond and David to certain feelings about the life of the family, about their own dawning lives. As useless as trying to
inspire those feelings in dogs. Whether they would grow into such feelings or not, they were numb to them now.

And, though she was less clear on this, she thought Clement was half-numb to them too. They issued from Caitlin, and Pella was their only sure receptor. “Caitlin means that this is where she came when
she
was a kid,” Pella said. “She used to swim here, come here all the time. So when you’re doing that kind of stuff outdoors on the Planet of the Archbuilders you’ll think of what it was like for her.”

Though she spoke patiently, a part of Pella wanted to knock them down, to hold their eyes open and say,
Can’t you see the sky? Can’t you feel the change coming, the horizon growing closer?

Clement was a coward not being here for this dry run under the sky. For Pella saw it now: This trip was on Clement’s behalf. Caitlin was saying goodbye to her own Coney Island.

“Why do they have the fence in front of the water?” said Raymond.

“People were drowning themselves,” said Caitlin.

“You mean that lemming thing,” said Raymond.

“Yes,” said Caitlin.

“That’s stupid though,” said Raymond. “ ’Cause they always find a way. The fence won’t stop them.”

The lemming thing
was another reason Clement and his party had lost the election. Pella had watched it on the news, bodies in water, massing and rolling like logs. Soldiers roaming afterward, aiming floodlights, pointlessly.

“That water’s no good anyway,” said Caitlin. “You can’t swim in it. You barely could when I was a girl.”

“But you did,” said Raymond.

“Yup. And this beach was covered with people.” Caitlin saw Pella glance at her scars again, and said, “Arms are so brave, don’t you think?”

“What?” said Pella.

“Don’t you think arms are brave?” She pistoned her right arm back and forth under the cone. “They just go on, they never get tired or give up or complain.” She kneaded her bicep with her other hand. “It’s the same arm I’ve had all my life, the same skin and muscles. It just goes pumping on into the future. Brave.”

“I don’t know,” said Pella. But she looked at her own arm.

“You’re crazy,” said Raymond.

“Caitlin’s not crazy,” said David.

“I’m going to go look at the water anyway,” said Raymond, getting up suddenly. “Maybe I can crawl under the fence.”

“Stay where I can see you,” said Caitlin.

“I’m going too,” said David.

“You can see all the way to the rocks,” said Raymond.

“Right. So don’t climb on the rocks.”

“Couldn’t with this stupid cone anyway.”

They pounded off through the sand, and Caitlin and Pella were left alone in their place, surrounded by a litter of digging tools and sandwich wrappings. The breeze dashed the tips of Pella’s hair into her eyes.

Just a beat of silence passed between them, then Caitlin spoke.

“There’s another thing about the Planet of the Archbuilders,” she said. “It’s something Ray and Dave might not understand.”

Don’t tell me
, Pella thought instantly. She avoided her mother’s eyes.

It was surely something peculiar and terrible when Caitlin had to begin by flattering her.

“We aren’t going to be just any family moving there,” Caitlin went on. “Clement is going to do Clement stuff wherever he goes. I mean, that’s one part of why we’re moving, so that he can.”