A Paper Son (38 page)

Inside the fence the road split into three—the central path was wide and paved, and headed straight down toward the bottom of the draw. The other two paths were narrower and made of gravel, and headed along either rim. We took the leftmost path, which took us back in the direction we'd come from. It wound through the trees and then fell away from the fence, taking us toward the barracks. Beneath our feet, the gravel crunched noisily.

We'd gone about fifty yards when a sudden loud snarl burst from the clearing and filled the draw with its vibrations. We stopped, crouching instinctively. A pair of loud coughs followed, and when they subsided we recognized the growl of a diesel engine. We waited and watched through the trees. On the far side of the draw a backhoe appeared, crossed a small clearing, and then disappeared again. Somewhere else, closer this time, another diesel engine awoke.

“Shit,” I said.

“So we aren't alone,” Annabel said.

“No, this is good,” Lucy said, rising and continuing down the path. “They won't be able to hear us over those engines.”

We walked along, more vigilant now. The trees thinned out, revealing a small muddy clearing on the hillside below us, crisscrossed with strips of eucalyptus bark and branches and leaves the storm had knocked down. We hid behind the last row of tree trunks and surveyed the area. Immediately across the clearing leaned a small wooden building with big holes in its wood-shingled roof. It was missing half its siding. Just beyond it was the barracks.

“See anybody?” I whispered.

Nobody did. I led the way down across the clearing, the ground soft and squishing beneath my feet. We might have sunk up to our ankles but for the thick layer of bark and leaves. Once across the clearing we hugged the crumbling wall and tiptoed to the small building's corner. I peeked around it and saw only the blue tarpaulin-covered mounds. The workers must have been on the far side of the draw.

It was only about twenty feet from our hiding place to the nearest wall of the barracks, where a door stood atop a concrete landing, with a short staircase leading up to it. I took another glance into the clearing and, still seeing nobody, I shot into the muddy gap. My bruised leg protested loudly—it had been content to cooperate so long as I'd been walking slowly on flat hard ground, but now with mud clinging to my shoes there were extra muscles being pulled into service, and they weren't happy about it. I grimaced and tried to shift more weight to my good leg. Once up the stairs I found the door locked. I looked across the clearing and saw the backhoes making their way up toward some of the buildings on the far rim. In the distance stood a half-dozen men in hardhats in a semi-circle, their backs to me, looking at something on the ground. I ran back to the hiding place, my leg growing hot as it fought through the mud.

“Men,” I whispered. I was breathing hard now. I could feel my heartbeat throbbing in the cut on my head. Dizziness threatened, but I closed my eyes and it passed. “They didn't see me.”

“Where?” Lucy asked.

“On the far side,” I said. “Facing the other way.” I squatted, steadying myself with a hand on the wall, and looked for options. The barracks sat on a steep muddy slope. With the door locked, two choices remained: head down toward the front of the building, which would take me out of the mud and onto the concrete, but leave me without cover; or I could scramble up the hillside and around the rear of the building, above a small walled courtyard that had been carved deep into the earth. And then I noticed a makeshift catwalk, made of lumber and scaffolding, stretching from the top of the rearmost wall over the courtyard to the barracks' rooftop. If I could scramble up the muddy slope and make my way along the top of the wall I might be able to reach it. “I'm going to try up there,” I said, pointing. “There might be a way in from the roof. If I can get in, I'll come and try to open that door.”

“Be careful,” Annabel said, giving my arm a squeeze.

And then I was back out in the open, struggling up the slope, fighting the mud. A chain-link fence ran along the top of the steeply sloping wall; I shoved the fingers of my good hand into its openings to help keep me upright, but the rough rusted wires scraped and clawed at my skin. It wasn't more than thirty or forty feet, but I was out of breath by the time I reached the top. I paused at the top of the wall and studied the rest of my route. I was high on the slope now, level with the catwalk, and though it was only about twenty feet away, there was no easy way to get to it. The top of the wall was narrow and the storm had covered much of it with a slippery-looking layer of dirt and leaves. A misstep could send me over the edge to the concrete twenty feet below, where I'd not only acquire more injuries but also find myself trapped. I took a deep breath, steeled myself, and started walking, kicking the edges of my shoes into the hillside, trying to create footholds, ready to sprawl onto the mud if my footing gave way. It didn't, and I wrapped my hand around the catwalk's railing with a warm flush of relief. The catwalk had weathered the storm well, and though my muddy shoes slipped on the slick wood, the walkway was firm. The barracks' roofline loomed and blocked out the anxious faces of Annabel, Lucy, and Eva. The roof was a disaster of ripped-up shingles, warped plywood, and tarps blown out of place. I crept up the slope and lifted my head over the peak. The center of the clearing held the footprint where the administration building had stood before it burned. Beyond it and up the far slope stood the hospital, as big as the barracks, where the day's construction was underway. At its base the backhoes toiled, clumsy and buzzing like oversized bumblebees. I could see more men now, perhaps a dozen, all of them distant. I ducked my head, returned to the back edge of the roof, and looked over the edge into the courtyard. Near the rear corner of the building, a covered stairway emerged from the top floor and ran down along the wall to the ground, passing beneath several windows along the way. I scurried toward it, keeping myself low, stepping carefully among the debris. I scraped as much mud from my shoes as I could and then I sat down on the roof's edge. I inched down, keeping my body twisted to the side to keep the weight off my broken wrist, and carefully transferred my weight onto the stairway's rooftop. It was badly rusted, which helped my feet stick. The first two windows I tried were locked, but the third slid open. The sill was about chest high. I tested my footing, kicked off, and somersaulted through the opening, tucking my broken wrist against my stomach to protect it. The room spun around me and my bruised leg cried out but I managed to roll onto my back and hip without incurring any real damage.

I lay there, catching my breath and listening for sounds of alarm before I climbed back to my feet. The room was large and bright, its floor covered with pieces of plywood, piles of boards, boxes of tools, spools of wire, and metal wire housing. An orange ladder rested on its side. The air smelled of sawdust. By some miracle I'd managed not to land on one of the many screws or nails that littered the floor. I slipped out of my muddy shoes, found the stairway, and padded downstairs in my socks, holding my breath. The building was silent but for the distant sound of the backhoes, their roars reduced to faint hums. The side door was held closed by a simple deadbolt, and seconds later the three women were standing inside.

“Shoes,” I whispered to them, pointing at my own feet.

They stooped and went to work.

“This way,” Eva whispered, once there were three pairs of muddy shoes lying on the floor. She led us back up to the top of the building. “This was the Chinese and Japanese floor,” she said. “Let's spread out.” Keeping away from the windows, we each took a direction and walked carefully on our unprotected feet among the piles of building materials, the tools and bits of scrap metal. We weaved in and out of the rooms, making our way down the length of the building. I didn't know what I was hoping to find. I didn't even know how to look for it. Everything up to that point had come to me on its own—the image in my teacup, Eva and Lucy and Annabel, the mazes and the book and the worlds in the bottom of the swimming pool, Rose. So I just walked, trying to keep my mind empty, picking my way among the extension cords, discarded tool belts, plywood scraps. None of it murmured familiarity.

“Shit!” Lucy hissed from a nearby room. “Come look!”

I went through the door to find her crouching at one of the front windows. The backhoes were rumbling back into the clearing, flanked by seven or eight workers on foot. Eva came in behind me, followed by Annabel.

“There's no reason to think they'll come up here,” I said.

“But let's hurry,” Annabel said. “We can hold still and wait them out if we have to.”

We crawled back into the hallway, stood, and padded toward the final set of doorways. Unlike the rest of the rooms on the floor, the last one in the back was untouched. The wooden floorboards were empty and clean. The wall's horizontal slats had been painted yellow decades ago, but now the paint was chipped and deteriorating, and freckled with exposed brown. There was a different smell to it, too—not of sawdust, but of people, of lives. Annabel stepped right up to the wall, reached out and ran her finger over something on the wood. “Look,” she said. “Poems.”

I'd read about these. I walked over to Annabel and stood so that my shoulder was just touching hers and watched her trace strokes over the wood with her fingertip. From out of the disorder of the scratched and chipped paint a single character formed, like a constellation in a sky of scattered stars. It stood alone, clear and shining, and then another appeared below it, and then another below that, and then, now that I knew how to see them, the entire wall began to vibrate with the echoes of a thousand different voices.

Outside one of the diesel engines shuddered and fell silent, and then the other did, too. Now we could hear voices in the clearing. Lucy slipped back into the hallway and then returned a few seconds later.

“They're coming this way,” she said. “If there's something here, somebody better find it fast.”

I walked slowly around the room's perimeter, scanning the walls. Some of the characters stood alone; others were grouped in long columns. Some were thick and deep, as though they'd been rubbed into the wood with the edges of coins. Others had only been scratched into the paint, as with the tips of nails. Most of them were Chinese, but there were Japanese characters, too, and characters in scripts I didn't recognize at all.

Annabel's fingertips danced across the wall's surface, tracing strokes, connecting characters. Her lips were moving.

“What do they say?” I asked her.

The workmen's voices were right outside now.

She began to mutter, first individual words—“ocean,” “loneliness”—and then whole sentences—“There are tens of thousands of poems on these walls; they are all cries of suffering and sadness.”

“Great,” Lucy muttered. “I don't suppose that guy put together an index somewhere, did he?”

Downstairs a heavy door was yanked out of a winter-shrunken frame, rocking the whole building.

“Shit,” Lucy said. “What should we do?”

“Keep reading,” I said to Annabel.

Annabel continued, her fingertips flying across the wall, the words spilling from her mouth in a soft torrent. She spoke of oceans and islands, of America and injustice, of faraway villages. She scanned the wall from top to bottom, moving slowly sideways, feeling her way along. She reached the end of one wall and turned and moved on to the next.

There was a burst of excited voices from downstairs.

“Our shoes!” Lucy said.

A dozen feet in work boots tramped up the stairs.

“I'll go head them off,” Lucy said. “Wish me luck.” She took a deep breath, put on a cinematic flirtatious smile, and headed out into the hallway. The worker's footfalls echoed through the whole floor. Floorboards creaked and groaned; loose nails rattled.

Eva said something about the room's brightness; Annabel continued, but nothing she read held any resonance. The prisoners had written of swirling fog, chirping insects, forests, the sea. One poet reminded his readers that they would endure, that Napoleon had been imprisoned on an island, too.

Someone was yelling at Lucy now. She launched into some explanation—I couldn't hear her words, but her tone was pleading. There was a beep and the crackle of a radio-borne voice. The footsteps resumed and the pitch of Lucy's voice rose markedly. “Please,” I heard her say. “She doesn't have much time left.” She backed into the room, followed by a half-dozen men in hard hats. Most of them looked at least slightly bemused, but their leader was furious.

“What the hell is this?” he bellowed. His voice slapped against the walls and ricocheted back at us. He wore stained jeans and his T-shirted belly protruded through an open flannel shirt. “Get your fucking hands off that wall.”

Annabel dropped her hands to her sides but kept reading. Her voice was barely above a whisper now and her words seemed almost to overlap one another, as though each of the lost voices was trying to move through her at once. I was all but leaning on her as I strained to hear.

“That's your dying grandmother?” another of the men said. “She looks pretty healthy to me.”

“Hey, Grandma, good news,” Lucy said. “This guy says your cancer is in remission. Isn't that wonderful?”

“I'm feeling a bit dizzy,” Eva said. She leaned against the wall and brought her hands to her temples.

“Don't you touch that goddamn wall,” the leader said. “Don't even fall on it.”

“Maybe you should sit down,” Lucy said to Eva. Their act wasn't too bad, I thought. How much time would it buy us?

“You're out here jumping fences with your dying grandmother?” another of the men asked. “Are those doctor's orders?”

“The gate was wide open,” Lucy said. “We just walked in.”