John heated up water on his butane stove, washed his hands and face, and then stepped out of the container in his underwear to sniff the morning air—the March day was about twenty degrees Celsius and clear and sunny—and to throw the water into the open ditch that passed behind the water tap, carrying sewage, waste and grey water to what everyone called the Cesspool at the far southern end of AfricTown. The end of the community where nobody wanted to live and only the most desperate did.
After pitching the water, John put on his shorts, T-shirt and runners. His school uniform, tie and dress shoes were in his locker at school. No sense wearing out the clothes on the long walk to the Bombay Booty and then to school, and no sense putting on any fancy clothes that might get him mugged in AfricTown. John’s mother liked to cook him porridge, when she was home. Raisins, cinnamon, oatmeal, a touch of cream and sugar on top—she knew how to make it perfectly. But she wasn’t home, and he didn’t have time to cook and clean, so he went to the Korner Kook, as he did most mornings.
Jerzy Kook Kook had been selling street eats, as he called them, since before John was born. John had once asked him how old he was, and Jerzy said, “Beyond dying.” He stood bow-legged at his butane-fired frying pan in his shorts, muscle shirt and sandals, with spatula in hand, taking orders from the five people lined up ahead of John. Jerzy had a box of eggs, three slow-cookers of rice that had been boiled up with onions, red peppers and carrots, and his crate of oranges, which he called Zantoroland Fresh. For fifty cents, John got one fried egg, a big scoop of rice and half a sliced orange. He had to bring his own plate and fork, but that didn’t take long to wash.
“What’ll it be, Professor?” Jerzy said, when John stood before him.
Jerzy always called him that. It annoyed John, but he had discovered that if he complained about it, the old man would just keep saying it.
“The usual,” John said.
“You’re too young for the usual. How about lox and cream cheese with, whaddya call it, eggs Benedictine?”
“It’s eggs Benedict, and you don’t have any of that stuff. Just the usual, please.”
“Thank you, Professor, for correcting my English. I charge everybody else a dollar for this meal, but you get the gifted student rate.”
“Thanks, Jerzy. I’m in a hurry today. Gotta work before school.”
“Stay outta that brothel, once you hit puberty.”
“Thanks a lot, Jerzy. I already hit puberty. You need proof?”
“I ain’t need no proof of puberty at fucking six o’clock on a Wednesday morning,” Jerzy said. “Give me your plate. Your egg is ready. Fried, over, and not quite runny. I make the best damn eggs in AfricTown.”
“Jerzy, you make the best damn eggs in the Ortiz Sea. North or south. Hell, let me be the first to say it. You make the best damn eggs in the entire Indian Ocean.”
“That’s better. Be nice to me, boy, or I’ll up your rate.”
“I’m always nice to you.”
“I’m telling you, don’t go wasting your hormones in that brothel. Not a good place for a young buck with a brain, and I’m serious.”
“Okay, Jerzy. I hear you. Gotta go.”
“Go be bright. Go be the best damn student there is. What was your rank when you finished eighth grade?”
John sighed. “Number three.”
“Ain’t good enough. Here’s what I want from you, if you want to keep up your egg scholarship.”
“Egg scholarship?”
“A fifty-cent breakfast that costs everybody else one dollar hard cash is what I mean by an egg scholarship. You want to keep it, you got to be the best damn student in the school. In the country. In the Ortiz Sea, north and south. And in the whole motherfucking Indian Ocean. From the British Indian Ocean Territory all the way south to Antarctica, and from Madagascar to Australia, you gotta be number one.”
“I’ll see what I can do about that, Jerzy. But now I have to get to work in that brothel.”
THE BOMBAY BOOTY HAD RUNNING WATER AND ELECTRICITY. Marble floors, rooms with king-sized beds and ensuites. It was the best-known brothel in Freedom State. The Pit next door, where brothel clients went to eat and drink and to watch dance and music shows and bet on snakepit wrestlers, had the finest amenities going. The two buildings were connected, so customers could move discreetly from one to the other. Lula DiStefano owned both businesses, as well as most of the fifteen thousand shipping containers in AfricTown. Of those fifteen thousand homes, only the few hundred nearest to the Bombay Booty had running water and electricity. Some of the others took bootleg electricity, but one or two people died each year trying to hook up wires to siphon electricity from the main line and run it to their homes. The containers shared public taps. There were about a thousand of them, or one for every fifteen shipping containers, with an average of seven people in each container. Some of the containers had windows, but none of them had bathrooms. You could go to the crapping grounds for free. Or you could use one of the concrete bunkers that doubled as outhouses and have somebody carry away your pee and shit, but you had to pay for that: fifty cents to pee, and a dollar for a dump. Most people just used buckets in their homes and dumped the waste in the ditches that wound through AfricTown, all sloping south toward the Cesspool.
Other than plumbing and utilities, you could get pretty well anything you wanted in AfricTown, if you were willing to pay: knives, guns, wine, whisky, cellphones, milk, cereal, eggs and bread, butane, camping lamps of every size and strength, transistor radios and batteries. You could buy inner tubes and spare parts for bicycles, and you could pay any number of “wheel doctors” a few dollars to fix a broken bike. Most people walked or biked to Clarkson and hauled their staples back. It made no sense to park in AfricTown or leave your vehicle unattended, unless you parked in the Bombay Booty’s lot and paid for the car patrol service. Just a few weeks ago, two undercover police officers had come to AfricTown in an unmarked vehicle, which they neglected to park in the secured lot. While the cops were inside Bombay Booty, the car had its tires and wheels taken. The doors were removed. The car radio was stolen. Lula expressed her regrets but said that the best she could do was have the carcass of the car loaded onto a flatbed truck and hauled back to the cop shop, and, of course, give the cops a lift into town. Discreetly, of course. As usual.
Since there was no electricity, people kept perishable goods in old-fashioned iceboxes, coolers and mini-fridges with the electrical cords coiled up. Men hauling carts walked through AfricTown every second day, selling chunks of ice.
There was a school in AfricTown, and its curriculum was based on the Freedom State standardized exams, but many parents kept their children out of it. Police raided it sometimes, arresting children who could not provide documentation of citizenship. And the teachers were not certified educators but parents who lived in AfricTown and knew about math, science, geography, English, history and French. Some of them were highly educated and truly motivated in the classroom. Others were useless. John had survived somehow through Grade 6 by listening to elders and becoming an avid borrower of books at the Clarkson Library.
John had mixed feelings about AfricTown. So far it had allowed him to live undisturbed and not become a ward of the state during his mother’s illnesses. It allowed his genius to flower. It allowed him to read thousands of books by battery-powered lamplight in the nighttime and in the early mornings. People let him be, for the most part, except for the name-calling. Vanilla cake, ice cream, stracciatella, latte boy, cookies ’n’ cream—people had every sort of food name for him, because he was blacker than white but whiter than black. He had learned to deal with that.
As soon as he bought it with his prize money, John carried his video camera everywhere he went, so people would get used to it and act natural and just carry on as usual while he filmed their lives. On his walk from Jerzy Kook Kook to the Bombay Booty for his one-hour-a-day cleaning job before school, John’s camera caught a man pulling his toddler out of the sewage ditch she had falle
n into and wiping her off. It caught a busker juggling five oranges, and a watering hole where men drank homemade beer sold at twenty-five cents a quart. And it caught a young woman fastening a baby to a sling around her back while holding a bag in one hand and shoes in the other. She looked about eighteen. No makeup, no fingernail polish, but she had a radiant face. Her hair was kept to a short, tight afro. Clean skin and clean clothes. She was walking north, toward Clarkson.
John decided to stop her. People who would watch his documentary needed to see, up close, how hard-working people—or at least some people—were in AfricTown.
“Where are you going, moms?” he asked.
“To work in Clarkson,” she said.
“What’s your name?”
“Maria Smith. Why are you filming me?”
“For a school project. For a documentary.”
“A documentary? Gonna make any money off that?”
“No. I’m a student. Grade 9.”
“You want to interview me, it will be fifty cents.”
John kept filming. “I pay fifty cents for breakfast. That’s a lot.”
“Pay me fifty cents, and make your own damn breakfast tomorrow.”
John fished two quarters from his pocket and handed them over. She slipped them quickly in her pocket.
“You have two minutes,” she said. “I can’t be late.”
“What kind of work do you do in Clarkson?” he said.
“Clean houses, fifteen dollars a day.”
“What’s your baby’s name?”
“Xenia.”
“Where’s her papa?”
“No papa around,” she said. She spat on the ground. “For all the help I get, that baby might as well have come along by means of virgin birth.”
John laughed. “Spontaneous combustion would have been more fun.”
She laughed with him. “Anyway. It’s just the baby and me. Ain’t I enough?”
“I’m sure you’re enough. I don’t have a papa either.”
Maria put her hands on her hips and stared into the camera. “Is that the kind of man you will be? Who leaves his own children?”
“Well, no,” John said. He hadn’t thought much about being a father. But no. If he ever had children, he would not want to leave them. He had never met his own father, but he did not want his kids to say the same of him. Ever. He said as much to Maria, who reached out and rubbed his head and told him that he was a good boy and should stay that way. John wished that his camera had been able to catch the head rub.
“How long does it take you to walk to work?”
“One and a half hours, each way.”
“That’s a lot of time.”
“It gets me out of AfricTown. Where I work, I get running water, fresh toilets. I can even shower. I wish I could work on weekends too, so there wouldn’t be a single day in the week when I had to shit in the pot and throw it in the ditch.”
“What do you use your money for? Clothes?”
“No, I get clothes from the women I work for. I can adjust any bit of clothing. Shorten, tighten and hem anything they give me. The clothes I get are always too big. I can take a dress apart and put it back together two sizes smaller. I’m so good that the women sometimes send me home with alterations that I do on Sundays. I charge extra for that.”
“So what do you use your money for?”
“Gonna send my daughter to school one day. Hey, your time’s up. And, boy, your shorts are dirty, and you got egg on your shirt. You can’t go to school looking like that. Don’t you have a mother?”
“I change into my clean clothes at school.”
“Okay. Clean up real good at school. You want to talk again, it will cost you one dollar. I got film experience now, so my rates are going up.”
John watched Maria walk north toward Clarkson. Over her head, and in the distance, past AfricTown and past Clarkson itself, the sun was hitting Flatrock Mountain and its gondolas, one of Clarkson’s most famous attractions. White tourists rode up in the daytime to take pictures of the city and Ten-Mile Inlet and, on a clear day, the Ortiz Sea. Young people rode the gondolas at night to dance in an upscale club on top of the mountain. But here in AfricTown, hardly anybody noticed Flatrock Mountain.
It took John ten minutes to walk to the Bombay Booty. He had a key to the door, and he had another to the caretaker’s closet, which kept the bucket, the mop and the cleaning solution. Half a cup of cleaning solution, a bucket of hot water, and off he went, rolling the bucket on wheels and mopping. Lula DiStefano did not tolerate dirt on her brothel floors. She had once shown up at the Clarkson Academy, said it was an emergency and hauled John back to AfricTown in her car to make him rewash two floors that had not been cleaned to her satisfaction. Then she made him walk back to school.
John washed the halls of the first and second floors meticulously, and he cleaned the toilets, bidets and sinks, working steadily but carefully for one hour. The floors were made of Italian marble. Imitations of works by the Impressionists covered the walls. Monet, Degas, Renoir, all the sorts of works that would be popular with people in Freedom State. People, that is, who didn’t live in AfricTown.
John wanted out of this situation. He didn’t want to rely on Lula any longer. She liked having him in her debt, but if he had his way, it wouldn’t be for long. John’s documentary was going to propel him to the number-one ranking among students at the Clarkson Academy for the Gifted. He would then ask the principal to let him become a boarding student, for free. And to cover his necessities of life: school uniforms and other clothing, books and computer supplies. When his mother was well and living at home again, John could visit her, but he’d be out of Lula DiStefano’s clutches.
John finished his cleaning and made sure that even the closet where the bucket and mop were locked was spotless. Then he walked over to Harlan’s place. Harlan was one of Lula’s personal drivers, and on most mornings that John worked for Lula, Harlan drove him to school. It saved John an hour of walking, kept his runners from wearing down so fast, and gave him time to shower and dress before class.
As he often did, John asked Harlan to let him off at the gate to Ruddings Park, which was in the heart of Clarkson and just a block from his school. With its trees and open spaces and reservoir, the park was the most peaceful place in the city. A two-kilometre footpath for runners and walkers circled the water, and from it, he could watch hundreds of floating ducks. The park was right downtown, so John could see a crush of buildings beyond its trees. Business towers. Government buildings. Telecommunications facilities. Sports arena. Movie theatre. Opera house. John decided to walk around the reservoir to calm his mind before going to school. He had half an hour: plenty of time to loop once around the reservoir trail and still make it to the locker room to shower and change and then get to his journalism class. So he began walking, counterclockwise as the signs instructed. The trail could be a busy one, so signs directed visitors’ movement to minimize congestion.
John had been walking for a minute when he heard something behind him. He turned to see a runner approaching extraordinarily fast. He was clearly a distance runner, and he was not sprinting, but he was coming toward John at twice the pace of most joggers. John, who had never seen him before, stood to the side and waved as the fellow drew near. The runner was a lithe black athlete of medium height. He wore a fanny pack strapped to the small of his back, bright yellow track shoes, black track shorts with slits high up the thighs and a white shirt. He was concentrating and working hard, but he nodded to acknowledge John’s salutation, and that made John feel good.
John removed his camera from his backpack. He watched the man run for another hundred metres and then slow to a jog and check his watch. John walked faster, keeping the man in sight as long as he could. Then the runner took off again at his high speed. John watched him pull two hundred, four hundred, six hundred metres ahead. It was hard to see him, because he had covered more than half the distance of the reservoir. Soon he would come all the way a
round and pass John again. John had been walking as fast as he could, but he repressed an instinct to run because he knew he would have looked silly. And either way, the runner would soon lap him. John had walked only one-fifth of the reservoir trail when the runner exploded past him again, then slowed to a jog.
“Excuse me!”
The man looked back at John.
“I was just wondering—what are you doing?”
“Training.”
“What kind of training?”
“Intervals. I run two kilometres in five minutes and forty-five seconds. Then I jog for two minutes.”
“And then you do it again?”
“Exactly. I must go now.”
“Wait, how many times?”
“Today, just six times. Sometimes ten.”
“Are you getting ready for a big race?”
The man lowered his voice. “Confidentially, the Buttersby Marathon. But that is just between you and me.”
“Do you mind if I film you? I’m making a documentary.”
“No, I’m very sorry. Have a good day.” He jogged another thirty metres, looked back once at John and then recommenced his insane pace.
John had never seen a runner move so quickly. The sun bounced off the water of the reservoir and caught his body as he rounded the slow curve up ahead. What could it hurt? John turned on his video camera, zoomed in and filmed him for ten or fifteen seconds. It was inspiring to watch the runner move so smoothly in the early morning in the calmest place in the city. It made John want to do something great too. From a distance, the running looked effortless, but John had heard the man breathing. He had seen the sweat on his forehead and the strain in his eyes. The marathoner ran with power and beauty, but it had to hurt like hell to work that hard.