This little island reminds her of something, and it takes her a minute to see what. As if you could reach into the looming and prophetic landfill, that perfect negative of the city in its seething foul incoherence, and find a set of invisible links to click on and be crossfaded at last to unexpected refuge, a piece of the ancient estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening, to the rest of it. Like the Island of Meadows, DeepArcher also has developers after it. Whatever migratory visitors are still down there trusting in its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own far-from-selfless ends.
A long, eerie wait to see if they’ve shaken the feds or whoever they are. Invisibly up yonder, moving around somewhere close, heavy machinery, much too deep into these early-morning hours. “I thought this wasn’t an active dump anymore,” Maxine sez.
“Officially the last barge came and went back around the end of the first quarter,” Sid recalls. “But they’re still busy. Grading it, capping it, sealing and covering it all up and turning it into a park, another family-friendly yup resource, Giuliani the tree hugger.”
Presently March and Sid are into one of those low-volume elliptical discussions parents have about their children, in this case Tallis mostly. Who may, like her brothers, be a grown adult but somehow demands inflexible disbursements of time and worry, as if she were still a troubled teenager snorting Sharpie pen solvents back at the Convent of the Holy Ghost.
“Strange,” Sid reflective, “to see the way Ice the kid morphed into what he is today. In college he was just this amiable geek. She brought him home, we figured, OK, horny kid, way too much screen time, socially ept as they ever get, but March thought she saw good-provider potential there.”
“Sid having his little joke—hey, live forever, sexist pig. The idea was always for Tallis to know how to take care of herself.”
“Pretty soon we were seeing them less and less, they had all this money, enough for a nice li’l crib down in SoHo.”
“They were renting?”
“Bought it,” March a little abrupt. “Paid cash.”
“By then Ice had profiles in Wired, in Red Herring, then hashslingrz made the Silicon Alley Reporter’s ‘12 to Watch’ list . . .”
“You were following his career.”
“I know,” Sid shaking his head, “it’s pathetic ain’t it, but what were we supposed to do? They cut us out. It was like they actively went seeking it, this life they have now, this faraway, virtual life, leaving the rest of us stuck back here in meatspace, blinking at images on a screen.”
“Best-case scenario,” March sez, “Ice was an innocent geek corrupted by the dotcom boom. Dream on. The kid was bent from the jump, under obligation to forces which do not advertise publicly. What did they see in him? Easy. Stupidity. A stupidity of great promise.”
“And these forces—maybe alienating you guys was really part of their program, not Tallis’s idea?”
Both of them shrug. March maybe a little more bitterly. “Nice thought, Maxi. But Tallis collaborated. Whatever it was, she bought in. She didn’t have to.”
The industrial racket from back in the marshland behind the giant cliffs of ruin has grown continuous. Now and then workers, in long-standing Sanitation Department tradition, have lengthy exhilarated screaming exchanges. “Strange shift to be working,” it seems to Maxine.
“Yeah. Nice overtime for somebody. Almost like they’re up to something they don’t want anybody to know about.”
“When did anybody ever want to know?” March lapsing for a moment into the bag-lady character in her commencement speech at Kugelblitz, the one person dedicated to salvaging everything the city wants to deny. “Either they’re playing catch-up or they’re getting it ready to open for dump business again.”
A presidential visit? Somebody’s making a movie? Who knows.
Early seagulls show up from somewhere, begin inspecting the menu. The sky takes on a brushed-aluminum underglow. A night heron with breakfast in its beak ascends from its long watch at the edge of the Island of Meadows.
Sid starts up the motor finally, heads back up Arthur Kill and into Newark Bay, at Kearny Point bears right into the forsaken and abused Passaic River. “Let you two off when I can, then I’m gonna return to my secret undisclosed base.”
Around Point No Point, under the black arching trusswork of the Pulaski Skyway. The light, inexorable as iron, growing in the sky . . . Tall brick stacks, railyards . . . Dawn over Nutley. Well, technically dawn over Secaucus. Sid pulls up to a boat dock belonging to the Nutley High rowing team, removes an imaginary yachting cap, and gestures his passengers ashore. “Welcome to Deep Jersey.”
“Captain Stubing here,” March yawns.
“Oh and you won’t forget Igor’s backpack, will you my Tomato Surprise.”
Maxine’s hair is a mess, she’s been out all night for the first time since the 1980s, her ex and their children are somewhere out in the U.S. sure to be having a nice time without her, and for maybe a minute and a half she feels free—at least at the edge of possibilities, like whatever the Europeans who first sailed up the Passaic River must have felt, before the long parable of corporate sins and corruption that overtook it, before the dioxins and the highway debris and unmourned acts of waste.
From Nutley there’s a New Jersey Transit bus to the Port of Authority by way of Newark. They grab a couple minutes of sleep. Maxine has one of those transit dreams. Women in shawls, a sinister light. Everybody speaking Spanish. A somehow desperate flight by antiquated bus through jungles to escape a threat, a volcano possibly. At the same time, this is also a tour bus full of Upper West Side Anglos, and the tour director is Windust, lecturing in that wise-ass radio voice, something about the nature of volcanoes. The volcano behind them, which hasn’t gone away, grows more ominous. Maxine wakes up out of this someplace on the Lincoln Tunnel approach. In the terminal, March suggests, “Let’s go out the other way, avoid Disney Hell and go find some breakfast.”
They find a Latino breakfast joint on Ninth and dig in.
“Something on your mind, Maxine.”
“Been meaning to ask you this for a while, what was going on in Guatemala back in 1982?”
“Same as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ronald Reagan and his people, Schachtmanite goons like Elliott Abrams, turning Central America into a slaughterhouse all to play out their little anti-Communist fantasies. Guatemala by then had fallen under the control of a mass murderer and particular buddy of Reagan named Ríos Montt, who as usual wiped off his bloody hands on the baby Jesus like so many of these charmers do. Government death squads funded by the U.S., army sweeps through the western highlands, officially targeting the EGP or Guerrilla Army of the Poor but in practice exterminating any native populations they came across. There was at least one death camp, on the Pacific coast, where the emphasis may’ve been political, but up in the hills it was on-site genocide, not even mass burial, just bodies left for the jungle to take care of, which certainly must have saved the government a lot on cleanup costs.”
Maxine is somehow not as hungry as she thought. “And any Americans who were there . . .”
“Either humanitarian kids, naïve and borderline idiotic, or ‘advisers’ sharing their extensive expertise at butchering nonwhites. Though by then, most of that was being outsourced to U.S. client states with the necessary technical chops. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering.”
“Yeah. When you’re ready, tell me. I’m really Dr. Ruth Westheimer, nothing shocks me.”