NaNoWriMo Day 17: The Last Train to Clarksville

NaNoWriMo goal: 50,000 words by November 30 Average daily goal: 1,667 Today's count: 1,372 Total so far: 29,537

Isa awoke alone. The pillow and quilt on the other bed were smoothed, as if he’d tried to erase any sign of having been there. The pajamas were folded neatly in the middle of the bed. She turned off the alarm, turned on the light, and sat up, negotiating with her heartbreak.

She had expected terrible dreams but had gotten only ordinary ones, and now she sat, half asleep still, her eyes unfocused, grasping for the threads of the one she’d had. Mr. Jonin was in it. He was showing her how to sail one of the riverboats. His hand was on her arm. She could feel the roughness of his cuticle drag against her skin. She could feel the warmth of his cheek as he leaned, in the dream, down to whisper some nonsensical dream phrase. She knew she was invisible. She chased a moth across the riverboat world, leaping across decks. There was someone in one of the boats. It was a kitten, trapped under a box. It was crying for its mother. She had lifted it in her hands, and it was as soft and light as a feather. She told it to wait, she would get food and water. She ran off. She had a sword. She sliced through enemies as if they were tofu. Her sword shone through its rust, an old sword. She stood on the deck of a ship and the sun shone through her skin, her muscle, her bone, her gut; she cast no shadow at all.

When the knock came on the door in the middle of her morning ablutions, she pulled her dagger out—the real one of Damascus steel, not the serrated plastic gift from Willy—and nimbly stepped through the array of Coke cans to peer out the eyehole. It was Annie and Kimo, looking gray and hung over, with four Starbucks cups in their four hands.

Isa latched the chain and opened it, saying, “Yes?”

“Look.” Annie yawned. “Let us in. Coffee.”

After the cans were kicked away and Annie and Kimo had squeezed themselves into the tiny room, they handed Isa a cup and looked around expectantly.

Isa shrugged, “He’s gone.”

“Aw!” they both whined. Kimo set his extra cup of coffee down on the nightstand and stuck his lower lip out an inch.

“Listen,” said Annie, “we need to know more.”

“We can’t just be saying yes to shit we don’t know what it is,” clarified Kimo.

Isa sniffed her coffee and set it down without tasting it. “I want you to help with two things.”

Kimo put up his hands. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, two things? I just don’t even know if we want one thing to do with you.”

She ignored the interruption. “One, I would like you to help my parents escape.”

At the same time Kimo said, “No!” Annie said, “That’s so sweet!”

They had a whispered discussion quickly, then turned back to Isa. Kimo explained, “Annie is interested, but let’s hear task number two before we give you any kind of answer.”

Isa pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers, closed her eyes, and breathed slowly in and out. Then she looked up and smiled. She explained.

Afterward, they came to an agreement, for fifty percent of the loot, estimated to be priceless in value. Should Isa be unable to come up with the loot, they agreed to settle for the mere sum of ten thousand dollars if they succeeded in fulfilling their end of the bargain. They shook hands, exchanged contact info, email addresses. Isa apologized for having no cell phone, but memorized Annie’s and Kimo’s numbers just in case. Then the thieves dragged themselves back to their room to sleep. Isa packed up her stuff, splashed water on her face, and was ready to leave when the phone rang.

She let it ring three times, then picked it up.

“Isa-chan. My operatives are looking for the house of your parents. They are finding out where your old school chum is staying.”

After a moment of surprise, she told him where she was going.

“I will meet you there,” said Mr. Jonin, and then there was a long silence.

When she felt sure he’d hung up, she added, quietly, in case he was still there, “I didn’t think you cared,” and dropped the receiver in the cradle with a clumsy bang.

***
Considering that it took her eleven years to get to where she was, she felt giddy with the rapidity with which she was now zeroing in, after having wandered the South China Sea, bumped from rowboat to rowboat to tugboat to ship, from port town to port town, and then on to that most difficult of passages, the trans-Pacific plane to the States, which as far as she understood was another universe where familiar physical laws like gravity might behave entirely differently. She had a map that she’d found online and printed out in the business center in the hotel—meaning just a small, windowless room with an ancient PC wired to the wall—and after turning in her room key (she’d paid cash in advance) she walked into the sunshine, dressed in standard college student garb—jean jacket, several faded t-shirts, baggy pants. But she still wore her pliable, fitted, handmade shoes, dancer’s shoes, that let her feel the ground beneath.

The BART train platform underground was sparsely populated. She’d avoided the rush hour crush. She saw several young people who looked, as she did, like students, and she scrutinized two homeless looking guys, but neither of them were ninja. She’d dressed as a beggar herself several times as a way of being unseen. There are few people in the world less likely to be looked at directly than beggars. Everyone seemed absorbed in her own private world of sensation, reading books and magazines, playing Gameboys, listening to music on headphones. She smiled to think they were invisible to each other. An older woman and a young child sat on the bench without distraction, and the child fidgeted, swung his feet, picked his nose, looked up and down at the other people. When he looked at Isa, she winked. He looked annoyed, shook his head, and became absorbed with picking at a loose thread on his jacket. The train pulled in.

She was on her way to the edge of the map, from the heart of the Bay Area and out toward the last miniscule capillary at the surface of its farthest extremity, deep inland. At the BART station, vast, with arched ribs and glass flexing above, and so new that WET PAINT signs still flapped on several seafoam green painted columns, she looked for dancers, for ninjas, but saw none. She was the last one in her train car, and the only one to disembark at the station. Her footsteps were soft, inaudible, like the sound of your finger tapping your lip. The noise of the nearby freeway obscured all sound anyway.

The suburbs of the suburbs, the places whose names and streets all ran together in a mash of Spanish and English and made-up fantasies of johnny-come-lately realtors—Camino Real next to Fremont next to Castlewood Villas or some other flight of fancy—she was going to an older development in a town whose name would mean nothing to you but which had a library, a Main Street, a few gas stations, several new strip malls, a couple of grocery stores, and where everything was poured concrete and molded architectural foam in the candy colors of a certain recent era’s convictions of elegance—mauve and teal everywhere, with flattened geometrical pillars and illuminated signs. She felt she’d landed on Mars, but that she was a Martian.

She boarded a bus to another bus. Her stomach felt empty, her mouth stale. Nothing looked specifically familiar so far, only generally familiar, the idea of streets, the idea of fences and walls, the local idea of how houses should be shaped and property partitioned. She felt as if she were seeking compulsively, without conscious purpose, without conscious goal, only waiting until she felt the pang of recognition, until she knew she was seeing something she had seen before.