“Here, put this on,” he said.
There was a trace of an accent, German or Scandinavian maybe. Before she had a chance to argue he had taken off the gas mask and was putting it on her, pulling the goggles and snouted air filter down over her face. Almost at once the air became breathable. Through the goggles she watched him take off his bandana and soak it with water from a bottle he pulled from the pocket of his parka. He tied it like a bandit over his nose and mouth.
“Come on, let’s go.”
He put an arm around her and began to steer her off through the crowd. Her leg hurt but soon she forgot about it and surrendered, without a thought for the others or even for herself or where this stranger might be taking her.
Maybe it was simply that she was dazed from the knock to her head when she fell. Cocooned behind the mask, the clamor of helicopters and screams and sirens now muted, she felt strangely detached, as if the world had suddenly gone into slow motion and she was in a dream or watching it all on the TV news. All she would later remember were random images framed in the little round lenses of the goggles: a woman lying bleeding on a bed of broken glass, a Buddhist monk in a crimson robe, hunched on his knees in prayer, his shaved head pressed to the sidewalk, discarded banners torn and trampled everywhere, and an African drum with a torn skin, rolling slowly away down an empty street to the ocean.
“Are you okay?”
She opened her eyes and blinked and, seeing nothing, had a rush of panic that the gas had blinded her. She sat up and rubbed them. They felt as if someone had stripped a layer of skin from them. She looked up to where the voice seemed to have come from and saw a shadowy figure towering above her.
“Yeah, I think so,” she said. “God, my eyes.”
“Here, bathe them.”
He knelt down and placed a bowl of water on the floor beside the bare mattress she had been lying on. While she bathed her eyes, he struck a match and lit a candle and when she looked again she saw the narrow face, those pale blue eyes. He didn’t smile, just handed her a towel to dry herself. It smelled of gasoline.
“Thank you.”
“Let me look at where you hit your head.”
She turned so he could inspect the wound. She was wearing a big brown sweater that wasn’t hers. It was rough and oily and smelled like a wet sheep. He had probably put it on her because her clothes had gotten soaked and though she didn’t much like the fact that she had no recollection of him doing it, she was glad he had because the room was freezing. At least she still had her pants on.
“It’s quite a bump. There’s a small cut but it doesn’t need stitches. Keep still while I clean it up.”
He wet the towel in the bowl and gently dabbed the back of her head. The room was small and smelled of damp and the walls were cracked and peeling. The floor was of bare wooden planks, some of which were missing, and there was no furniture, just heaps of clothes and junk and old newspapers and magazines. There was another mattress below a single window that had been blacked out with an old blanket. Abbie could hear people talking in the next room and through the half-open door she saw shadows moving on a wall.
“There. You’ll live. You were concussed and passed out. You’ve slept for four hours. I was getting worried.” He held up a hand. “How many fingers?”
“Eighteen?”
He almost smiled. He handed her a mug.
“It’s tea. There’s water here too. You must drink. Your leg is bruised but it’s okay.”
She could feel her shin throbbing.
“Thank you. Where are we?”
He shrugged. “A house. It’s just a squat.”
“And who are you?”
“Just a squatter.”
She gave him a baleful look over the rim of the mug and this time he did smile. It was hard to guess how old he might be. Late twenties, thirty maybe. Despite the stubble, there was something fine, almost feminine, about him. He was beautiful and seemed to see her think it.
“My name is Rolf. And you are Abigail Cooper from the University of Montana.”
“Been through my wallet, huh.”
“Spent all the money, used the credit cards. Had a good time.”
“Be my guest. It’s Abbie, by the way.”
He gave a formal little nod. He got to his feet and headed for the door, telling her over his shoulder that there was food in the next room when she felt like it.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And thanks also for, you know, getting me out of there today.”
He turned and looked at her, gave another nod, then went out. Abbie sat awhile, cradling the mug and sipping the tea. It was too sweet but at least it was warm and comforting. She wondered what had happened to the others, whether Eric and Mel were okay. It shouldn’t be too hard to find them. They had all made a note of Hacker’s cell phone number in case they got separated.
When she felt strong enough, she got up and wandered through to the next room. Rolf, two other guys, and two women were sitting cross-legged on the floor around a big bowl of brown rice and vegetables, eating with their fingers. A third woman was sitting in the corner, working on a laptop. They all looked up as Abbie came in, smiling and saying hi. A couple of them replied and the others just nodded.
“Here,” Rolf said, moving to make space beside him. “Help yourself.”
She sat down and took a handful of rice, realizing how hungry she was. The room was bigger but almost as bare as the other, with three mattresses and more heaps of junk. It was lit with candles in jars and a flickering butane gas lamp with a cracked shade. One wall was covered with newspaper clippings and photographs and scrawled graffiti.
“Do you happen to have a phone here?” she asked.
For some reason, they all seemed to find this incredibly amusing, though quite why, Abbie didn’t know. After all, the woman on the laptop seemed to be wired up to some kind of socket. Maybe it was the way Abbie had said it? She felt her cheeks coloring and hoped it didn’t show.
“There’s a phone booth down the street,” Rolf said. “Until today we did have a cell phone but Mr. Helpful here managed to lose it.” He clipped the guy next to him on the head.
“It wasn’t my fault, that fuckhead cop took it.”
“So, you were the guys dressed up as fruit, right?” one of the women said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“It was supposed to be genetically engineered fruit.”
“Oh, right.”
“Is that the kind of cool stuff they teach you about at the University of Montana?” the guy sitting next to her said. He had a tangle of dreadlocks and a silver ring through one eyebrow. Abbie wanted to punch him on the nose but decided to ignore the sarcasm and said yes, actually there were classes about the use of gene technology in agriculture, though she hadn’t taken them herself.
“Fascinating.”
“Yes, it is, as a matter of fact.”
“And are you guys, like, big environmental activists down there?”
The question came from Rolf and because it sounded genuine and friendly and she felt he might be trying to make up for the rudeness of the others, she gave a fuller and more enthusiastic reply than perhaps she should have. She spoke directly to Rolf, telling him about Hacker, whom she figured he might have heard of (he hadn’t), and about Forest Action and about the timber-sale lockdown the previous month. And though she didn’t quite know why she should want to show off to him, she didn’t exactly lie, but did find herself embroidering things a little, making her encounter with the loggers sound more dangerous than it was.
If not obviously impressed, Rolf seemed at least interested. And perhaps it was because she was a little in awe of him or mesmerized by those beautiful eyes that she didn’t notice that the guy with the dreadlocks was grinning and shaking his head and that the two women either side of him were smiling too. By the time Abbie registered this she had already gotten a little carried away and was telling Rolf about t
he student “weed buster” trips when they all went up into the hills to pull up noxious weeds.
“You mean, like, to smoke?” Dreadlocks said.
Abbie stopped for a beat and narrowed her eyes at the little creep. He looked as if he had probably been smoking himself. She turned back to Rolf without bothering to answer and went on.
“It’s amazing what you find up there. Three kinds of knapweed, leafy spurge, hound’s-tongue—”
“That leafy spurge, man, that can lift your fucking head off.”
“Cut it out, man,” Rolf said.
Abbie had taken enough. She turned to face the guy.
“Okay, what is it you people do that’s so much more important?”
Dreadlocks just shook his head and laughed to himself.
“No, seriously,” Abbie said, her anger rolling now. “Tell me, I’m interested. What do you do? Huh?”
“Little rich college girls, picking weeds, oh my, lah-didah.”
“Screw you!”
“Ooh, please . . .”
Rolf told him again to cut it out then leaned forward and put a hand on Abbie’s shoulder, trying to calm her. She shrugged it off.
“Abbie, it’s not that we think these things you do have no value. It’s just that to us, they seem a little, what shall I say? Irrelevant, marginal perhaps. Like rearranging the furniture on the Titanic.”
“Oh, okay. Fine, thanks.”
“No, seriously. I’m not being rude. Just realistic. Everything has gone too far. The big corporations are destroying the planet, and nobody’s going to listen to protests or whatever. Look at what happened today. Look at what they did to you.”
He reached out to touch her, but she moved and wouldn’t let him.
“The governments of the industrialized world are now run entirely by the transnational corporations. Politicians are merely their puppets. Democracy is just a sideshow. So, to have any kind of impact, to make the people who really run things stop and listen and think about what they are doing, you have to hurt them. Personally. Really hurt them.”
“And that was what you guys think you were doing today?” she said sourly.
Rolf laughed. “Oh, no. Today was just fun.”
The woman who all this time had been working on her laptop now came to sit down on Rolf’s other side and took a handful of rice. She looked pleased with herself. From their body language, Abbie got the impression that this was his girlfriend.
“Is it all arranged?” he asked her quietly.
“Uh-huh.”
“Good. Well done.”
Abbie stood up. She felt a little sick and wanted to leave, get some air in her lungs. Get away from these freaks, find Mel and Hacker and the others.
“You’re going?” Rolf said.
“Yes.”
“Can I have my sweater?” Dreadlocks said, smirking.
Disgusted to be wearing something that was his, she quickly pulled it off and threw it on the floor. Rolf found her parka and helped her into it. It was still wet. He followed her to the door.
“Go easy on that leafy spurge!” Dreadlocks called.
She was in the doorway and turned to look at him.
“Before the revolution, asshole, learn some fucking manners.”
She walked out but heard the roar of laughter. Rolf followed her down the stairs and out to the street then walked her down the hill to the phone booth. Hacker sounded relieved to hear her voice. He said they would come at once to collect her. Rolf explained how to find the place.
While they waited, they sat side by side on the steps of a derelict house. The whole area was being cleared for demolition, he said. They were going to build offices instead. He rolled a cigarette and offered it to Abbie but she declined. A mottled half-moon was hoisting itself over the rooftops and they sat for a long while without talking, just watching it move slowly into the sky.
“I’m sorry about what happened up there,” he said. “The guy’s an idiot.”
Abbie didn’t reply. She was feeling little and lonely and, for the first time in many hours, had been thinking about her mom and dad and what had happened at home and how sad and screwed up her whole world suddenly seemed. She felt tears welling but managed to hold them back and he either didn’t notice or pretended not to. He asked her where she came from and it was a few moments before she trusted her voice enough to tell him.
“And you?”
“Originally from Berlin. I’ve lived here for twelve years.”
“In Seattle.”
“No. Here and there. I get bored if I stay in one place.”
He took a pen from his pocket and wrote a number on the flap of his cigarette papers then tore it off and handed it to her, saying someone there would always know how to reach him. He asked for her number and perhaps because she was still slightly concussed she couldn’t remember the one at the dorm, so she gave him her home number instead. Then Hacker’s camper van came down the street. Scott was with him and they both made a big fuss of her. Mel was fine, they said. Eric was in the hospital where he would have to stay for at least two weeks. He had a broken pelvis, which didn’t bother him half as much as the loss of his accordion. Abbie introduced them to Rolf and the three men shook hands. Then she thanked him again for helping and looking after her and climbed into the back of the van.
As they pulled away, she gave him a little wave through the window and he looked her directly in the eyes and smiled back. And she knew in that moment that one day she would see him again. She carefully folded the scrap of paper he had given her and stowed it in her wallet.
FIFTEEN
It was the dawn of the new millennium and the whole world was brimming with hopes of happiness and peace and goodwill to all mankind. And all that bullshit. The century was a week old and already Sarah didn’t like it. She was sitting at her desk in the little back office of the bookstore, trying to keep her mind on what she was reading on the computer screen, which was almost as depressing as everything else in her life at the moment. Including the weather, which was cold and damp and gray and foggy, the kind Jeffrey called slit-your-wrists weather, though he hadn’t called it that today, probably because he feared she might actually do it.
The sales figures for the holiday season were even more dismal than she had feared, thanks to the chain stores and a certain online bookseller, whose name, like Macbeth in any theater, was not to be mentioned within these walls, thank you very much. Their prices were so ridiculous, they might as well give the damn books away. Through the open door she could hear Jeffrey patiently trying to charm a customer, the only one they’d had in the past hour and a half, a woman who was after a book but didn’t seem to be able to remember the title or the author or even what it was about.
“Any idea of the publisher?” Jeffrey asked helpfully.
“The what?”
“God help us all,” Sarah muttered.
Jeffrey had been fabulous. He had run the place virtually single-handed during the run-up to Christmas. Sarah had come in most days, because she couldn’t stand being home alone, but she knew she had often been more of a hindrance than a help. During that first unreal week after Benjamin left and the kids had gone back to school, Jeffrey had called her two or three times every day and had always stopped by on his way home, with food or flowers or a bottle of wine. It had turned into a kind of rolling house party or wake. As soon as her mother went home, Iris came to stay and friends kept dropping in to cheer her up, with the result that on some evenings there were half a dozen or more people in the kitchen, cooking and talking and eating and drinking and crying and laughing, none of them letting Sarah lift a finger, not even to stack the dishwasher. She talked and cried and laughed so much that in the end she was so exhausted she had to call a halt and come back to work for a rest.
“So it’s a novel, but nonfiction,” Jeffrey was saying. “A nonfiction novel. Hmm. Oh, you mean, something like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood?”
“Like what?”
Sa
rah and the kids had dreaded the thought of staying home for Christmas and the New Year, especially with all that dawn-of-a-new-age nonsense going on. Then, out of the blue, Karen Bradstock called and invited them to the Caribbean. Karen knew about Benjamin, it emerged, because Josh had e-mailed Katie. Some fabulously rich tax-dodger client of Tom’s had a house on the island of Mustique, she said, and had offered it to them—for free—for two whole weeks. Some other friends would be there, but the place had a zillion rooms, so why didn’t they come too? Sarah jumped at it.
The island was beautiful if strangely antiseptic, having nothing even vaguely resembling a local culture. According to Karen, it had years ago been bought by an eccentric aristocrat who preferred the place empty so that he could throw long and lavish parties for bored members of the British royal family. Nowadays, it was owned by a company and rigorously run as a refuge for the extremely rich.
The Bradstocks had invited two other couples from Chicago, neither of whom Sarah much took to. One of the women treated her like an invalid and kept offering to do things for her and asking with an infuriatingly caring look in her eyes how she was feeling. It made Sarah want to scream. It was funny how some people just didn’t seem to get it. Being treated normally was best, kindness was fine, but unctuous sympathy made her feel almost homicidal.
Fortunately, Karen got it exactly right. The two of them had a lot to catch up on and, despite the other guests, found time for some good private chats. Nor was the subject inevitably Benjamin. In fact some days, even when she was walking on her own along the beach or sitting by the pool reading, Sarah often managed to go a full half hour without thinking about him.
Young Will, who had grown about two feet taller since she had last seen him, was now obsessed with sports and most days disappeared with his dad to play tennis or golf. Josh didn’t mind. He was too infatuated with Katie and it seemed mutual. The only one who palpably didn’t enjoy herself was Abbie.
She announced after just one day that she detested the place. She said it was full of fascist bankers and their bulimic, Botoxed wives and that if she saw another C-list wannabe or wrinkled has-been rock star she would throw up. It would have been more embarrassing had Karen not said she absolutely agreed and spiritedly taken her side in the debates that raged across the dinner table, with Tom and Will inevitably cast as “neo-imperialists” or “crypto-colonial dinosaurs,” whatever that meant. Tom handled these skirmishes brilliantly, giving as good as he got, but always with humor. But Abbie sometimes went too far.