Gifted (33 page)

The light assaults her eyes. She squints and turns away to find herself inside a room with someone at the window. Her body feels heavy, as if gravity has shifted and weighs her down. She tries to sit up but her arms and legs are tethered to the bed. She tries to remember what came before. Why she's there. Was there an accident, is she sick, did she do something wrong? She calls out to the person on the other side of the window but her voice is a dry little rasp. Nothing more than desiccated willow leaves skittering across the ground on a blustery fall day. The weeping willow by the river. Her solace and her hiding place when she was young. She sat in it for hours, talking to her father after he was gone, and then later she found someone else hiding there but she can't remember who it was.

She swallows and tries her voice again. It's never failed her before. “Hey,” she cries in a husky whisper. “Hey, you there!” She wiggles her arms and legs, trying to loosen the straps around her wrists and ankles. She bucks her hips, slams her body against the bed. “Hey! You! Help me! Get me out of here!”

Orpheus looks up but his breath has fogged the window. He can't see inside. Then he hears footsteps and voices in the hall and knows they're coming for him now. Through the foggy window, he sees Zimri's shape struggling to get up. He throws himself against the glass but he does not yell. Footsteps and voices bounce down the corridors, obscuring their location, but they are getting closer. He motions to Zimri—his hands out straight and he lifts. He wills her body off the bed.
Get up! Get up!
he thinks but doesn't dare say it out loud. She fights like a fish in a net desperate to be free. The sheet slips off and he sees that she is strapped down.

Zimri kicks until one foot comes loose. She manipulates her long, dexterous fingers—fingers suited to keyboard keys and guitar strings—to loosen the clasp at her wrist until she can slide her hand through the thick fabric loop. She uses her free hand to undo the other two tethers, then swings her legs over the edge of the bed, which sends her head spinning.

Orpheus knows he needs to move to a safer place. The voices are getting closer. He can't tell how many people are looking for him in this maze. They seem to be coming from all directions. He hears his name echo down the hall, but he can't take his eyes off Zimri. She hoists herself off the bed and loses her balance. Woozy and weaving, she hangs on to a metal bar as if she's fallen overboard and feels the tide dragging her toward the darkness.

From the other side of the window, Orpheus wills her to go faster. To morph back into the fleet-footed, nimble girl he chased through warehouse aisles. The one who stomped around on stage as if indestructible. But he knows how quickly a person can go from invincible to fragile. How fast a life can plummet, like a songbird dead in flight.

He grabs the doorknob and rattles it, pointing to the handle inside, hoping she's lucid enough to understand she must open the door. She squints at him. The light is too bright. The window is too foggy but she sees the door. She doesn't know where it will lead, but it doesn't matter. Any door is a way out and she forces herself in that direction.

On the other side of the room, the sound of an opening lock reverberates against the tiles like a thousand tiny doors about to open, but none of them big enough for Zimri to go through. Orpheus sees a nurse come in. He's wearing blue operating scrubs. His head is down and he is focused on a tablet in his hands. Then he glances at the bed and does a double take as he zeroes in on Zimri.

“Hey there,” he says gently, as if talking to a mischievous child. “You're not supposed to be up.”

Somewhere in the muddle of Zimri's mind, she knows she must get away despite the kindness in the man's voice, so she propels herself forward, lurching and stumbling toward the boy in the window, but when she looks again he's not there and she wonders if she's hallucinating and if any of this is real.

In the hallway, Orpheus crouches below the lip of the window so the nurse will not see him, but he keeps the handle in his grip.
Open, open, open,
he silently commands. At the far end of the corridor, three women dash by but do not turn the corner. He presses hard against the door, trying to force it open without being seen.

Zimri fumbles with the handle. Her fingers are thick and useless.

The nurse laughs. “Where are you trying to go?”

After three clumsy tries, Zimri catches hold, pushes down, and the door swings inward. The boy falls at her feet.

“What the…!” the nurse yells.

Orpheus scrambles up, clawing at Zimri who reaches down for him. For one quick second he smiles, relieved to be in her arms, and then she knows that he is real.

She takes his hand and they bolt.

The nurse panics. “Security!” he shouts, but a guard is already in the hall. He heard the commotion. Ran down to check. Now there are two kids, hand in hand, in surgical gowns, trying to run.

“You take the girl,” the guard shouts to the nurse while he lunges for Orpheus. He gets one arm around the boy's waist as the nurse pulls the girl away.

Zimri grips Orpheus's hand tighter. She won't let go. But the guard is strong and rips them apart.

“No!” Zimri screams as the nurse drags her away.

“Let me go!” Orpheus demands, writhing and kicking, not willing to surrender because from the moment he first met her, he wanted to fall into her hug, singing,
We belong together!

Orpheus charges backward across the hall, slamming the guard's head into the wall. Then he shouts her name and reaches for her, dragging the guard behind him who won't let go. “Zimri! Zimri!” The notes are urgent and full of despair. A dirge, a funeral song, a death march.

She twists so she can see him, but her body is slow and heavy as if all her muscles are waterlogged.

“No, you don't!” The nurse yanks her away.

“Orpheus!” she screams as it all comes raging back to her mind. His smile, his kisses, his belief in her. Her frantic high-pitched scream bounces off the metal and tiles in the room. There is nothing to absorb the noise and she thinks it will echo on forever. She bends her knees deeply, sinking to the floor, pulling the nurse down with her. They tumble. Zimri smells the biting antiseptic of the nurse's scrubs and gloves. She kicks, trying to catch a soft spot, something vulnerable to make this man leave her alone. Behind them in the hall, the guard loops one arm around Orpheus's neck and heaves him, arching backward.

“No!” Zimri cries. She sees Orpheus's face, red and enraged, as he grapples with the guard's arm. He pulls down to free himself but the guard's grip is too tight. The nurse scrambles away toward the medical supplies across the room. Zimri tries to push herself to a stand but she is slow and off-balance, lurching as if being tossed by relentless waves.

Then she hears other voices. Someone yells, “Down there!” The sound of pounding feet comes toward them. More guards, she thinks and knows she must get to Orpheus, but she is knocked sideways into the wall. The nurse, with gritted teeth, is on her, pressing into her so Zimri cannot move. Then she sees the needle in the nurse's hand. A bead of liquid quivers from the tip. Zimri's arms are pinned. Her body is smashed tight and her feet slip on the tile floor so she can't push away. The nurse jabs the needle into the flesh of Zimri's upper arm. She gasps and winces at the pain as the cold serum quickly spreads through her veins. The room begins to spin. She wobbles and feels her legs go slack. Orpheus has given up the fight, too. He slumps in the guard's arms as if being cradled. Zimri feels herself begin to float away. The edges of her vision become dark and blurry again.

In the hall, she sees three more bodies. Women. Tati, Elena, and Brie? No. Smythe and Beauregarde and Medgers? No, not them either, but somehow they are vaguely familiar. If only she could concentrate.

“Calliope? Mom?” Orpheus yells. “You found us, thank god! Who's that?”

Then, from the other direction, two more people run. A man and a woman.

“Dad! Esther!” Orpheus shouts.

Calliope Bontempi shoves the other woman, the stranger who is somehow familiar, ahead of her. “Tell them!” she cries.

Zimri feels the world slipping away. Her eyes are heavy, her mind spins. Who is that at the door? A woman, hair spiraling out like tendrils reaching for the sun, long legs and arms reaching, too. Zimri wonders if she is seeing herself, years from now, when all of this is over.

“I'm DJ HiJax,” the woman says.

“DJ HiJax!” Orpheus, Harold, and Esther say together.

“But I thought you were a man?” says Orpheus.

From the ground, Zimri blinks up. “It's you,” she whispers.

HiJax pulls a small digital recorder from her pocket. “I have Zimri Robinson singing ‘Nobody from Nowhere' before the release of Arabella Lovecraft's song. It's time-stamped from when she released it on the waves. I recorded it and replayed it many times since then.”

Esther grabs Harold's arm and blinks, her mouth agape. “Rainey Robinson?” she says.

DJ HiJax whips her head around. “Yes,” she says. “That's me.”

“Mom?” says Zimri as she's pulled under. Then she knows that she must be dreaming because everything is warm again and she's in Orpheus's arms.

 

CODA

ZIMRI

When the meandering
lights along the river come into view through the window of Orpheus's Cicada, I squeeze his hand.

“Do Nonda and Rainey know you're coming back today?” he asks.

“No,” I say, basking in the golden light of early autumn dusk. The sky is turning pink around us, illuminating the yellow- and orange-tipped leaves on the treetops down below. I sigh happily. Coming home is my favorite part of being on the road. “I want to surprise them,” I tell him and he grins. He knows how much it means to my mom to have me in her life again.

“Prepare for self-navigation,” the car announces and Orpheus takes the wheel.

I roll down my window to inhale the river air as we land on the road a few miles outside of Old Town. Things are looking nicer around here these days. Ever since Libellule and Calliope moved in, our town has become the newly minted mecca for musicians existing outside the patronage system. Orpheus and I are part of a tribe of touring artists on a small circuit of communities, like ours, scattered around the country, that value authenticity over the slickness of patron production.

Only a few 'razzi bother us anymore, like the stalker drones that just picked up our trail. They still follow us around, always hoping something sensational will happen. But, it's been over a year since my trial so we don't get much Buzz these days, which is fine with us. Sometimes, Tati likes to catch the drones and reprogram them to do subversive things like roost in trees or dive-bomb the river or record audio of birds singing to confuse the algorithms searching for good songs.

In town, we drive past the school, the old brick buiding where Nonda learned to read. We reopened it with some of my settlement money from Chanson. Elena and Brie left their warehouse jobs and abandoned their PODs to live in Old Town and work with the kids along with several other fine folks who were eager to swap the Complex life for our community. So far, the student body is small, but it's growing as word gets out about our radical ways with human teachers and a curriculum that values art and science. Plus music, of course. Always music whenever I'm in town.

In the playground next to the Paramount Theater, we see kids playing.

“Look, there's Xenia,” I tell Orpheus as we drive by a little girl with beaded braids and polka-dotted pants. “She's the one I was telling you about. She soaks up everything. Matches pitch, can keep any rhythm that I throw at her. She loves the ZimriDoo. I told her I'd teach her how to make one of her own the next time I was home.”

“Can't wait to meet her,” he says, then he points out his window. “It's Captain Jack.”

We wave as we pass the funny three-wheeled electric car that Tati built so Jack could get back and forth from the school (where he does maintenance) to his bungalow near the river. He's even got a little boat he takes out fishing on calm days.

“Look at that!” I point at yet another little shop that's cropped up on the Strip like mushrooms after the rain. Each time we come back, more people have moved in.

“I heard it's a bakery,” Orpheus says. “And there are rumors someone's thinking of opening a restaurant.”

We pass by Calliope's big brick house near the Old Town square. The stalker drones leave our trail to dart over and scan the license plates of two nice cars sitting in the driveway. So far no bona fide celebrities have sought Project Calliope's help. Mostly we get young PONI artists wanting to know how to navigate the tricky world of copyrights and distribution for their original music, but you never know who's going to jump ship and come to our side, especially with Libellule on board.

At the corner where Tati's shop still sits, we turn right and head to Nonda's old house, where she and my mother live again.

“Hello!” I call when we walk inside, leaving the drones roosting on the porch.

“Zimri!” my mother yells. “Is that you?” She rushes down the hallway, arms open wide.

At first, I didn't like having her around. I needed answers from her.
How could you have spent five years so close to me but never once reached out? Didn't you hear me calling you over the waves?
She said it was for my protection. She said she was trying to reach me through the music she played on air. She said it's more complicated than I understand. But I don't believe her. As far as I'm concerned, she went on the run as DJ HiJax for herself, and for herself alone. But, as Orpheus and Nonda have pointed out to me, Rainey has suffered for her sins and so I let it go.

The Arbiter was forced to overturn my case when Calliope produced my mother who had a recording of my version of “Nobody from Nowhere,” snatched off the waves. It was proof that Arabella and Piper stole the song from me and I was set free. Libellule prevented Orpheus's ASA, but Harold Chanson still got his revenge.