Time of Leaders, Part 7 of 11

In mid-August I got an unexpected day off work, which worried me. They told me that it was for computer maintenance, which turned out to be the case. Jade was worried for me at the time, then joked later that the hiatus was necessary to get to the bottom of a rash of inexplicable implants found among the crew. (“She’s consolidating her power.”)

            That day I arranged to meet Charlie at the southeast gate of the old prison. That’s where Charlie and others observed Jade during her sorties into the funnel in the mornings and afternoons. Charlie was strongly old school, with a work-worn lunch tote at the ready and a glass core 35 ounce thermos with plaid-print finish which looked like it came from the time of the Reagan administration. Workman funky with an OD polyester jacket, he looked out over the funnel almost more with his brush mustache than with the eyes.

            “You’ve come at a time where you might see her in action.” He pointed to a stand of trees a half a mile east. “We saw something in those trees early this morning, probably a bag, but then it was gone. They stop there overnight and decide whether to continue west or not.”

            We watched Jade as she walked off the road, white and thumb-sized, into the funnel.

            “If there’s trouble, we send vehicles,” Charlie told me. “If she fires off a round, we send vehicles. Didn’t you bring something to drink? Coffee?”

            “But the sign says ‘No Food’.”

            He turned to his cohort, a sharp-looking up and comer, and they shared a chuckle.

            “We got some if you want it.”

            “No power for brewing anyway,” I told him.

            “Power’s up in Western Europe, we heard, this morning.”

            They did get some news at the old prison. I reminded myself to make my requests to Jade more specific concerning downloads. I asked Charlie how Europe had power and we didn’t.

            “France!” he said. “France has nuclear out the wazoo and they’re selling it.” He kept an eye on Jade, as I did. “But it depends on how the French people’ll take it. If they don’t like it, there’ll be…more news I guess. But it’s not like here where there were bloody endings. She saw somebody.” He unclipped his radio from his belt and put it on the counter in front of him. He glanced at me, then back over the funnel. “Then they might be trying out some hyper-privatization scheme, like here. From there, the news is full of holes, like I’m sure it is from here. But if the people don’t like it, they’ll make their voices heard. You read Les Miserables.”

            “Actually, I haven’t.”

            “Oh! That’s one I have.” His sharp subordinate snorted, but Charlie relaxed a bit for it. “Then Jade got that recording of the musical she’s all nuts about.” He turned. “You don’t fault her for things like that, do you?”

            “No! No.” I said. “I gotta see that. I’ve heard what it’s about.”

            “Yep,” he said. “She saw someone out there. Wizard mode.” He leaned to the console, fired up a closed-circuit camera, and trained it on a man coming out of the woods. “Don’t want to leave this on when we don’t need it.” He shot me a clowning look. “It’s not like we’re in Marseilles. You know why she wears the chem-suit?”

            “She said it was because of leaking barrels.”

            “That’s when she didn’t know you. She’s got a uniform here. Wears it sometimes, like when she has to sub. A uniform’s more threatening. And with the chem-suit, they follow her because they figure she knows where to go. They’re allowed to pass through, if they want to. If they sign on to wait in the routing center for a ride, they have to tell her what weapons they have, and give them up when they reach the gate.”

            I told Charlie that I’d considered going to the ceded territories myself.

            “Not much opportunity there, I figure,” he said. “We’re not getting much word back from the ones we send. But you could have signed up through us.” He shook his head. “Everyone’s internally displaced, to a degree, it seems.”

            “Where are the ones who wait here taken?”

            “Well,” he said, “they’re tryin’ to get to the ceded territories, most of ‘em. They have visas based on job offers there. But the feds offer to take ‘em to Nebraska. They jump at that. It’s closer to the territories. They’re lucky to make it this far.”

            He fixed the camera on Jade’s mask-cap, pressed a button, and it began to follow her automatically. He zoomed the focus out to include the candidate leader. She raised a hand, and he stopped. They talked.

            “She didn’t engage the radio, so it’s fine so far,” he told me. “Need us to start the AC?”

            I shook my head and asked if we could listen in. Charlie explained that not much could be heard through the radio clipped to her belt. He turned back to the monitor with another chuckle.

            “…It’s dicey.”

            The subordinate joined us at the window with binoculars. Jade and the man continued to talk. We didn’t. The man then turned around, and I could see a handful of people come out of the trees. Charlie went to his radio; then to me.

            “We’re sending vehicles up the road. They have kids with ‘em.”

            Jade turned back toward us, and the camera swung and followed. As it refocused, I just caught her reaching back to straighten the gun on her back.

            “Weapons too,” The cohort added, looking through his binoculars. “A piece, some knives. Three are staying back.”

            Charlie mentioned that his subordinate had a good eye. I sure didn’t. I’d seen the entire group on the monitor and could see no weapons. I squinted. Charlie chuckled and explained.

            “The guy told her, and she just told us.” Now he became more Charlie again, volume and all. “Didn’t catch that, did ya?”

           At dinner that afternoon, I watched her with a kind of skewed eyebrow regard, like she had watched me that first day at Rooster’s. She was particularly quiet, slurping noodles like Annie Oakley. I tried like hell to abide to our ‘no questions’ agreement concerning my observing her at work. But a general question blurted, I thought, might work.

            “How do you do that?”

            She blinked slowly.

“I tell them the truth.” Then she waved a finger in front of her mouth. “You got snail between yer teeth.”

Saturdays we would dress down and go into the funnel to forage. During one of our expeditions, Jade said that it was good for me to get away from the influence of the computer that I worked with, and then continued with the story that it inspired- that I would become more entranced by the computer’s feminine wiles, then:

“One day, without knowing it, you’ll be back from Rooster’s with a chocolate shake for her. Bought with your own money. But all you’ll know is that your legs are tired out from walking.”

            “Computers don’t drink shakes.”

            “Well, that’s the thing, you see.” She spotted nettles on the horizon and pointed. “Nums.”

            We headed up that way.

            “That’s the thing,” she told me. “She needs chocolate for lubrication. No. That’s too absurd… She doesn’t need chocolate.”

            I shook out a couple of old bags, we put on gloves and started harvesting nettles.

            “A chocolate shake is the absolute last thing she needs. She’s just testing you. If you get her the shake, you see, you wouldn’t question any order of hers, being a minion.” She stopped snipping. “I’m just warning you. I hope you appreciate this.”

            I did.

            She slipped down to sit in the grass, the bag beside her, with her voice soft and clipped.

            “But you come back from lunch, and the cup’s empty. You investigate, and the tip of the straw smells faintly of machine oil.”

            We lay in the grass and she let me know, in ways delicate and rough. But I’d found out before that Jade wasn’t disposed to any ‘splendor in the grass’, as she called it, there being too many bugs. And we did have to keep a lookout, both for candidates and potential sightlines from the old prison. We crawled up a low ridge that didn’t call for crawling and peered north. There we found some standing water close to a pond. The air was funky in a fresh sort of way. Nations were falling, but life continued at some of the most basic levels. Of course, we bathed later. We began to pluck snails. Jade chuckled to herself on the other side of a dank ditch.

            “It’s the glasses she got you, you know.”

            Early in my assignment, I was sent glasses, and the cost was deducted from my pay.

            “Shouldn’ta let her get you the glasses. Now you look like you should know, but you don’t know. Then, one day when you’re no longer useful to her- AAAGH!”

            She pretended to claw her head open and pluck out her pituitary gland.

            “Thip! They’ve got your pituitary to power their ugly grey starship. Then you’re a mutant automaton with the ability… now you can…”

            “Oh!” I interrupted. “It’s gotta be a ‘can’t’.”

            “You’re right!” she sang in surrender. “But it’s gotta be a ‘can’t’ with a capital ‘C’. Hey! Lookit this!” She showed me a monster snail she found. “That’s what your pituitary’ll look like. But in fluorescent light, though. Fuck the sun. This light ain’t scary enough. I’ll use it in prop design.”

            “Huh?”

            She cocked her head and squinted at me as if I were the one coming up with this crazy shit.

            “The television mini-series. ‘He Suspected Nothing’. Prop Design: Jade De La Roux.”

            “You’ll take on an alias for the project?”

            “Oh, I’ll have to,” Jade informed me. It was so obvious. “Look at this grandpappy snail! It’s all mottled. Yes. I’ll mope around the props department. A tortured genius. But word’ll get out why…” she rhythmically tapped the snail toward me for emphasis…

“‘She’s the one. Who lived with him. When… And now he can’t…’.” She took on a pained expression. It was all too much.

We went home with our bounty and I started to sauté the snail with wild onion, cayenne and cumin. Jade hovered in the kitchen, hung up on what I couldn’t do.

            “I hope you don’t mind being the victim in my little story.”

            “I love it,” I told her. “As long as you put my head back together.” I looked in the bag and all the snails were small.

            Jade plopped down at the kitchen table. “Be careful what you wish for.”

            “Where’s the monster snail?”

            “Oh, I put him back.”

            I turned to her. She tried to explain.

            “He would’ve been all tough and chewy anyway!”

            I spun back to the camp stove so’s not to burn the spices, but Jade may have taken it as a reaction.

            “Now he’s free to scum-suck! Surrounded by all the seed-snails…”

            I was nearly weeping over the sizzling sauce. Jade continued as I found the cutting board and performed the dastardly deed.

            “…His grandchildren. And he says: ‘Did I tell you about the time some bitch plucked me out of the pond?’ And… No!”

            I thought the snail carnage was too much for her, but Jade was just rolling on stories.

            “You gotta help me with this! Your head’s back together, but you can’t.”  

            “I can’t perform.”

            I heard a rattle and turned back. She had been tipping her chair back and nearly lost it.

            “I can’t use you then. In fact!” She raised the dreaded finger. “Without the pituitary, you’re less inhibited. More open to suggestion.” She swooped up, kissed me on the jaw, then grimaced in the general direction of the shell pile.

            At table, Jade switched between ‘yums’ and the mumbled word ‘can’t’. We were both on good terms with snail by that August. She smiled on the way to the counter, and then back with the steamed nettle.

            “I’ve got it,” she said. “It’s wordy. Still in the working stage.” She went at the food as she always did, finicky, practical, and a little adverse. “Bear with me. I’m a new-wave artist.”

            “Okay.”

            She pointed a forkful, a glop of nettle at me.

            “Since they took your pituitary gland, never again could you pituit.”

            She sold it with a bite.

            “Tragic, really.”