The Starving Years (32 page)

Tim considered plugging his ears and breathing through his mouth. Sure, he’d look like he was crazy. Maybe he didn’t care. But the thought of the molecules that carried the stink settling on his tongue convinced him that breathing through his nose, while unpleasant, was probably the best choice—albeit a choice from a range of options that all unequivocally sucked.

The hallway was cold and hard, concrete floors and walls trimmed in metal. At the end, a T-intersection led left and right. When Tim paused at the junction, Randy tugged his sleeve. “She said to turn right.”

“I know, but….” The shrieking coming from the left passage was much more intense than the sound coming from the right.
 

“Let’s get the kid and get the hell out of here,” Randy said.

A shriek pierced the cacophony of yelling, and although Tim didn’t have a child of his own, it seemed to him that something was really wrong when a kid made a sound like that. “Just a sec.”
 

“If they catch us—”

“Then we say we’re lost.” Tim turned a corner into a hall lined with barred holding cells, each of them a bit smaller than his living room, about eight feet square. There was movement inside the cells—and lots of screaming—but the vertical bars that fragmented Tim’s vision were playing tricks on him, like a strobe light, segmenting the scenes inside the cells into a bizarre tableaux that his overtaxed brain struggled to make sense of.

A shrill scream pierced the wailing, and Tim tried to follow the sound to its source, but still his brain only read bars and motion.

Until he saw the blood.

The lighting was terrible, full of confusing shifting shadows, but once he spied that telltale splash of red, suddenly it was all he could see, everywhere he looked. Red and red and red.

Tim said, “Oh my God,” without even realizing he’d spoken, though Randy probably couldn’t hear it, not over all the screams. The children were bleeding—not all of them, but enough of them—and not only that, but they were trussed to the bars with their arms spread wide like a crucifixion, one child after another, hand to hand so that their only their fingertips brushed. One child led to another, and another, and another, like a chain of screaming, bleeding paper dolls. The child closest to Tim shook her head back and forth as she screamed, and when her hair parted, he saw a mark on her forehead—a “+” symbol that had been scrawled there in thick black marker, like an obscene parody of Ash Wednesday. And now that Tim had seen the mark, he spotted it on the forehead of the next child, and the next, and the next. “Oh my God.”

Convinced that he couldn’t possibly be seeing what he thought he was seeing, Tim turned to Randy. He was smart and practical, and he wasn’t prone to melodrama. He would understand—and then he would set Tim straight. But the look in Randy’s eyes was anything but encouraging. He scowled, pulled out his cell phone, and snapped a picture.

“What is this?” Tim said. “What happened?”
 

Randy shoved his phone into his pocket, grabbed Tim by the arm and steered him back toward the hall.

“Wait…” Tim said. “They were bleeding.”

“They said the kids were sick, remember?” Randy hustled Tim into another hallway. “What if it’s like leprosy? Or AIDS? What if it’s like that flesh-eating bacteria?”

“But it can’t…be…” Tim had read enough safe sex pamphlets that he was pretty sure it was nothing like HIV, but he had no idea if it could be like leprosy, flesh-eating bacteria, the black death, bird flu, or anything else. Nelson might understand. But Nelson wasn’t there, and without Internet access, there was no way of asking him.

Randy said, “What if we caught it just by breathing in that air?”

The thought of odor-molecules lighting on his tongue, now carrying the germ of some deadly plague, made Tim turn his head to spit—and then feel phenomenally self-conscious about spitting indoors.

Randy said, “We gotta grab the kid and get outta here. Right now. Before we catch—” they rounded the corner and stopped short, stunned.
 

The right-hand hallway, the one to which they’d originally been directed, wasn’t as loud as the one with the screaming, bleeding children bound to the walls, but it was just as bizarre—and just as horrific. The cells were the same, eight by eight and barred. But these cells were
packed
with children, as many children as they could hold. Children’s arms strained through the bars toward the man in a stained and torn uniform, a guard who walked carefully up the center of the aisle so that not a single child could touch him. A plastic bucket swung from one arm. He dipped his opposite hand in and came up with a handful of manna—glistening pale manna that quivered in his grasp. He flung it sideways as if he was scattering road salt on an icy walkway, and the manna struck the bars and spattered into the cell. Most of the children flinched back, but some did not. They grabbed the manna from the floor and swung around to turn their backs from the other children while they stuffed the soft manna flecked with hair, dirt and concrete crumbs into their mouths.

Randy wasn’t even looking. He was busy trying to locate Nelson’s son, but since all the children surged toward him, wailing for help, it was impossible to pick out the boy they’d only seen once, briefly, back at Nelson’s apartment.

The guard with the bucket rushed over to them, slid on a patch of manna, waved his arms and then righted himself. More manna spattered from the bucket, but he didn’t notice, or maybe didn’t care. “Hey, you,” he hollered over the cries of dozens and dozens of children. “How’d you get in here?”

“They sent us here,” Randy bellowed. “We got papers. We’re picking up a kid. Pham Duc Bao.”

“Well? Which one is it?”

It?

Tim turned away from the guard and searched desperately for Bobby. There he was…no, wait, that was a girl. There—no, that kid was a lot taller. Tim was looking for dark hair and almond-shaped eyes. He was looking for an Asian kid—but since so many of them had been rounded up in Chinatown, about half the children were Asian.

And while Tim had always prided himself on his civil activism and his political correctness, he realized with growing dismay that (to him, at least) all the screaming, crying Asian kids looked more or less…alike.

***

Two more blocks. Two more completely fucked up blocks full of garbage and rubble and, heck, probably a dirty syringe or two just waiting to pierce the duct tape wrapped around Marianne’s socks. If there’d been time, Nelson would have cut something up to use as a sole, and tested a few different wraps of the tape to see how he could get the most support and the most flexibility out of the job. But there wasn’t any time to screw around with homemade shoes, there wasn’t any time to screw around with anything—so he’d given Marianne’s feet a few quick wraps, then hoisted her onto his back and staggered toward Javier’s place with her bitching all the way.
 

“I can walk. Damn it, I can walk!”

One and a half more blocks. Despite Marianne’s arms in a chokehold around his neck, her butt sagged low, and was creeping lower with every step. He hitched her up and jogged forward a few steps, barely catching himself from overbalancing and sprawling face-first on the sidewalk.

“I can walk!”

“Not much farther now.” Nelson barely got the words out. He’d meant them to be encouraging, but instead they’d sounded labored and strained, like they’d come from a guy on the verge of collapse. He should have kept his mouth shut.

Story of his life.
 

Nelson dodged a skeezy-looking guy who was eyeing them with too much interest, and then swerved around a puddle of vomit at the last second.

“I can wa—”

Jimmy-leg. Nelson pitched sideways, and both of them hit the front window of a hardware store that was surprisingly intact. The Plexiglas flexed, and the image of an overturned car on the street that was reflected in its surface shifted, smaller, then bigger, then smaller again. Marianne slid from Nelson’s back. Nelson clenched himself from head to toe, curling in on himself in anticipation of the shatter. Fracture dynamics in plexi were nowhere near as hazardous as they were in real glass, but even so, getting nailed by a shard of plexi wouldn’t exactly tickle. The window wobbled, then held.

Almost there. Nelson knew he should straighten up, grab Marianne, and keep going. Except he couldn’t; he felt like he’d clenched so tight, his muscles had locked into place and they weren’t about to give up so easily. Something about assuming the fetal position made him want to crawl into a hole and simply stay that way. Because what good was he, anyway? All the forced optimism in the world wouldn’t make things right, not if he couldn’t even fucking walk.

“Are you okay?” Marianne said.

He didn’t answer. He suspected that maybe he wasn’t.

“Nelson?”

For all that most people might consider him a failure, Nelson had always seen himself instead as someone who had not succeeded. Yet. It wasn’t quite optimism, though there was some element of optimism to the attitude. Sure, Edison had invented the stock ticker, a half-dozen types of telegraphs, and, heck, even
wax paper
by the time he was thirty…but that didn’t mean Nelson was a failure. It just meant he hadn’t found his stride.

So he’d thought. Until now. Because what if there was no stride? Or, worse…what if there was? And what if Nelson wasn’t man enough to walk it?

“Nelson!”
 

Marianne shook him. He felt numb. Disconnected. Leaden.

“Oh my God, it’s not your head, is it? Please say it’s not your head.”

What good were all the brains in the world if you never did anything meaningful with them?
 

What good was it to love someone if you couldn’t protect them when they needed you the most?

“Do you need a pill? Maybe we can find a drug store. I think there’s a drug store around the corner.”

Despite the futility, despite the grief, before he could check himself, Nelson laughed. The sound was so atrophied with bitterness, it didn’t even sound like him. “How would we pay for it? By selling a kidney?” He closed his eyes against the weight of the world as if that would stop it from crushing him, but all it did was make him feel the pain of his own helplessness more acutely. “Never mind,” he said quietly. “I don’t need a pill.”

“Are you going to throw up? Should I find you some water?”

Marianne reminded him of Tuyet—of how she might be without her accent, anyway. Persistent. Loud. And thinking about Tuyet led to thinking about Bobby, and how maybe both of them would have been better off in Hanoi, markless or not, if this was all the good Nelson could do them when they needed him the most.

“Come on.” Marianne grabbed him by the arm and slung it around her shoulders. Hell, she even felt like Tuyet, same height, same stature. She heaved, and Nelson felt himself reluctantly rise, and steel himself to keep going. “We’re almost there.”

***

The sidewalk seemed unusually crowded. Javier wasn’t certain whether people were trying to get to work, or maybe checking on their loved ones, or if they were just out looking for something to steal. Whatever they were up to, most of them knew better than to trust the buses or the subways, which were running on huge delays…if they were even running at all. He watched from his front stoop as a gap opened in the crowd and he caught sight of Nelson’s hair. He walked with his arm around Marianne—poor Marianne, with her feet, and her hormones—and at first Javier assumed Nelson was helping her walk. But then it became clear that his skin was the color of chalk, and it was she who was propping him up.

Javier sighed and slipped out from the shadow of the doorway to usher them both into his shabby building, and his shabbier room.

He was still disappointed with Nelson. Livid, was more like it. The only reason he’d even spoken to Nelson was his desire to see Canaan Products held accountable for what they’d done. Now, though, seeing Nelson like this, struggling to even make it down the street…Javier felt a pang of sympathy even as he kept himself from demanding how Nelson planned to live with himself after turning on someone as decent, as trusting, as Tim. “You’re still sick?” was what he said, instead.

“No, I’m….” Nelson brushed off both Marianne’s assistance and Javier’s halfhearted attempt. “I’ll be fine. Just tell me what it is about this manna mess you need me to prove to you.”

“It’s not me you’re going to prove it to. It’s the world.”

Chapter 30

Javier’s room was spartan, like something from a 40’s noir film, minus the lit cigarettes and the bleached blonde secretaries. Once upon a time, Nelson would have found that observation interesting. Now, it was hardly even a blip on his radar.

“What I don’t get,” Marianne said, “is why you’d get him booked on a show like Manhattan Minute? Isn’t that kind of conservative?”

“I had a connection there,” Javier said. “That’s all.”

“But if Nelson can prove that Canaan Products has been messing around with the food supply, wouldn’t every news outlet be dying to snap up the story?”

“If we could get through to them. If they would take the time to check my credentials. If they weren’t being flooded with conspiracy theories from every crackpot in the city.”

Nelson didn’t give a damn if he was going to appear on Manhattan Minute or the Mickey Mouse Club. He’d told Javier he could explain the Canaan Products reformulation, so he’d damn well do it. Because explaining science was something he could do. Unlike marching down to Chinatown and figuring out where his kid was. He would have liked to think he was entrusting Tim with that job because Tim sounded like he had it under control. Really, though, he suspected he was leaving it to Tim because he couldn’t physically do it. In fact, he didn’t suspect it…he was sure of it. His legs were shaking with constant tremors now and everything looked slightly green, and much too bright. His logic told him he was better off to let someone with functional brain chemistry—and a vehicle—handle the situation.

But despite all the reasons his logical brain could provide for focusing his effort on the task he had some chance of accomplishing…he still felt like a shitty excuse for a dad.