Dancing in Dreamtime (19 page)

Over its shoulder, the monkey muttered, “A bunch of pure-D ingrates, right chief?”

“But you stuck around. Why?”

The monkey beamed its eyes at him, a blinding glare, and then looked ahead down the tunnel. “Oh, I thought about high-tailing it, but I knew you'd croak if we all ran off.”

“You could have told me about Mooch long ago.”

“Like I said, the others threatened to shred me if I squealed.”

“But why did they care?”

“They figured you'd lasso them and stick them back in that rinky-dink circus.”

“It
was
pretty wretched,” Orlando conceded. Wanting reassurance, he added, “But you were going to stay with me, even if that meant being cut off from Mooch forever?'

“Not forever, no. Just until you cashed in your chips.”

Orlando shuffled painfully along, his feet growing heavier with each step. “Mooch never sent back word that I should come?”

“Only word she sent back, chief, was don't any of us dare tell you her whereabouts, because she was afraid to see you.”

“Afraid? Of me?” Orlando ground to a halt.

“She told us you hated her because she'd messed up your life. We swore you'd never breathed a mean word about her, and she said you were just hiding your feelings.”

“Me hate Mooch? How could she imagine that?”

Orlando slumped to the floor of the tunnel, where the air seemed thick enough to chew. It smelled of parking lots, overheated circuits, spoiled food. He imagined that millions of people had already breathed this air and left in it their hearts' poisons and worn-out thoughts. The monkey jumped around him, tugging at his arms, jabbering. When Orlando's headlamp played over his outstretched legs, he noticed the stains, the ragged patches, the holes where his knobby knees showed through. It used to be quite a fine tuxedo. He couldn't remember why he had bought it. Sitting felt so good that he slid further down and lay flat. The monkey's malarkey played about him like a gang of kids yelling, and then it was gone. Orlando gulped for air, which came laden with whispers, kisses, curses, murmurs, and lies.

When light divided momentarily from darkness, the first object Orlando could make out was a woman's face, screwed up with worry, fox eyes peering from within a halo of orange hair. “Mooch?” he muttered. He felt a hand on his chest, where the burning had been so fierce, and the darkness washed over him again.

Mooch it was, all right. The monkey had fetched her—Orlando had passed out within a hundred meters of the dump—and she had come running with a cart and oxygen tank. She was amazed, lifting Orlando first onto a stretcher and then onto a makeshift pallet in her shop, at how little of him there was. She remembered him as bulky, a filler of doorways, and she found it hard to believe that this scrawny man was Orlando, who had offered to become her father and whom she had scorned.

“He made me show him the way,” the monkey whined from its redoubt among the packing cases. “He's a holy terror when he's riled.”

Mooch laughed, but softly, leery of waking her patient. Orlando was the most peaceable soul she had ever met. Whatever else might have changed in the eight years since she destroyed the disney and doomed him to prison, his deep sea of gentleness could not have evaporated.

“I'll jerk a knot in your tail later, Mr. Mud,” she said to the monkey.

She gave Orlando a few more whiffs of oxygen, to wash the poisons from his lungs, and then pulled the blanket up to his chin
and let him sleep. His old face, as cracked and stained as an antique leather purse, was beautiful to her. The rim of white hair encircled his bald scalp like frost-covered bushes around a winter pond.

“The show kept getting worse,” the monkey said.

“You hush,” said Mooch.

“It was bush. An old clown and his fagged-out beasts.”

I reduced him to that, thought Mooch. To the monkey she whispered, “Why don't you go mess around in the warehouse with the rest of the menagerie?”

“They'll hammer me into a cookie sheet.”

“No they won't. I told them to leave you alone.”

“I want to see the chief when he wakes up.”

“Go,” Mooch hissed, “or I'll turn you into a squirrel.”

The monkey scrambled away into the storage bay, where the refurbished circus animals were milling about. Mooch bent over Orlando and stroked his forehead, which was creased as if the skin were a letter that had been folded too many times. His eyes twitched beneath the lids but did not open. She felt ashamed, thinking of the pain she had caused him. During the year she had lived with him in the disney, loving him and afraid of loving, straining against the strange new bonds of affection, she had tormented him in every way her adolescent mind could imagine.

Despite the shame, Mooch looked back on that year as the brightest chapter in the gloomy tale of her life. The years before had been spent in the orphanage, and the years since had been spent first in the wilds, which turned out to be poisonous and murderous; next in a reform school, after she had surrendered to the Overseers; and finally here on parole in the bowels of the city, supervising the electronics dump, and living among machines, which she found more reliable than people. A single bright year
amid twenty dark ones—a single kind man amid legions of the heartless—and she had been too stupid, back at age twelve, to realize how blessed she was.

Now here he lay on a pallet in her shop. Why had he come? For years she had longed for and feared such a reunion. Once, she had worked up the courage to go in disguise and watch him from the crowd during a circus performance. It was all she could do to keep from leaping into the ring and wrapping him in her arms. But she feared he would turn a cold eye on her, for he had good reason to hate her, and she couldn't bear such a rebuke. These past two years, each time one of his animals had come to her, shabby and confused, telling her stories about Orlando's pathetic circus, a new layer had been added to her guilt. Once the beasts found her, they refused to leave. They possessed an elaborate mythology about her, in which she figured as a savior, a mechanical genius, a comforter.

Orlando stirred, mumbled, and then resumed snoring. The smile on his battered face reminded Mooch of sunsets from her time in the wilds. She waited nervously. When he'd called out her name a few minutes earlier, he was still groggy, and she could read nothing in his face. Soon he would come fully awake, and she would feel his gaze on her, and find out whether she might be forgiven.

Orlando, meanwhile, was dreaming of his beasts. One by one they were returning, crowding around him, their pelts shiny, their eyes lit up with a secret they could not wait to tell.

The mountains of Oregon City closed each night between 22:00 and midnight to allow for cleaning. Even in this spick-and-span metropolis, where dirt cost more per kilo than sugar, a mountain could become remarkably filthy in a day's time. Children climbing the flexiglass trees shook down a litter of twigs. Cups and wrappers spread about the vending machines like glacial moraines. Deltas of metal shavings accumulated at the ends of pedbelts. Hikers who refused to ride the belts, toiling instead uphill with the aid of trekking poles, often punctured the inflatable rocks, which then cluttered the mountainside like cast-off skins. Idlers on benches pared their fingernails and some even blithely spat on the walkways.

There were three such mountains in Natureland Park, out near the edge of the city where the curving, translucent dome met the sea. The summits rose high enough to offer views into the upper windows of skyscrapers. Molded with quickfoam over aluminum skeletons and named for the corporations that sponsored their construction, they were supposed to make up for the mountains of stone from which the citizens had been cut off by the move into the Enclosure. These days only old-timers, gazing at the fake peaks, could remember the Appalachians or Rockies or Sierras.

Each night, as the last of the idlers and gawkers withdrew at 22:00, detergents gushed from nozzles on the mountaintops and scoured the slopes. Drains siphoned the run-off into recycling vats down below, where the muck was reduced to its pristine molecules, which would be refashioned eventually into some new doohickey or other.

Mt. Texxon, tallest of the three, was honeycombed with caves. Stalactites dangled from the ceilings, mushrooms sprouted from the floors, albino crayfish speckled the walls, bats glided through the dank air, every feature having been made out of rubbery gunk. Hidden tubes dripped water into murky pools. The hollow chambers echoed with the grunt of circulating pumps. The psycho-architects who had designed Natureland Park, as they had designed every last nook and cranny of the Enclosure, believed that even space-age citizens would need some place for making stone-age retreats. The citizens thought otherwise. Each year fewer of them ventured into these clammy pits, and those who did often returned gasping from the gloom. So the caves were slowly filled by the groundskeepers with outmoded vegetation, deflated rocks, broken trees, shattered creek beds, sacks of frogs, tangles of snakes. These shaggy and bulging items only rendered the darkness more frightening. After a few spelunkers lost their wits in the labyrinths, the Overseers closed all entrances to the caves, leaving open only the ventilator shafts.

If, like Humphrey Tree and Grace Palomino, you were looking for a hidey-hole where you could stash away tons and tons of junk, then Mt. Texxon was just the place. The elderly couple had been collecting rubbish for years in the streets of Oregon City, not from any habit of tidiness, but, on the contrary, from a desire
to spring a messy surprise on this oppressively neat hive. The two old scavengers usually reached the foot of the mountain at 24:00, an hour they persisted in calling midnight even though midnight looked no different from noon under the dome's eternal blaze of lights.

Tonight they arrived a few minutes early, while cleaning fluids were still pouring down the slopes. So they sat in their zip-carts talking over old times, which in their case stretched back nine decades. They had known one another since kindergarten in the suburbs of Old Portland. They married right after college, then served in the Pollution Corps, moving around the country as, bit by bit, the whole of North America was declared uninhabitable. They knew the history of one another's wrinkles. Over the years they had come to smell alike, a blend of fish oil and wintergreen. The sum of their weights hardly varied, so when Humphrey put on a kilo or two, Grace lost the same amount, and vice versa. By now they had loved one another so long that the edges of their personalities were fuzzing together. When either one began a sentence, the other could finish it.

Peering up the flank of Mt. Texxon, Humphrey sighed. “Won't be long now—”

“—before it's filled up,” Grace added.

“Seems like only yesterday—”

“—when we started hauling.”

At ninety-seven, Humphrey had a face that brought to mind a crumpled brown sack. Fortunately, Grace never gave a hang about looks. After his stint in the Pollution Corps he became a chip inspector, a tedious job from which he was now blessedly retired. His eyes and heart were electronic and one hand was synthetic,
but otherwise he got by with his original joints and organs. Due to his monumental appetite, he had accumulated a big man's body on a small man's frame, so the flesh now sagged over his bones like a garment he would never grow into. Grace was three years younger, a retired dance therapist, not so quick on her feet since acquiring new hips and knees. Shriveled now, she possessed the antiquated beauty of a palace awaiting restoration. When she was feeling her oats, she still ran circles around Humphrey.

“What'll we do with ourselves when it's full?” he mused.

“Move on to Mt. Pepsicoke and start over,” said Grace.

“Remember Pepsi?”

“Remember Coke? My mother would shake all the fizz out of it and feed it to me with a spoon when I had a fever.”

Their youth was so far in the past it had taken on the blurry contours of myth. Grace was half convinced that her mother, an oceanographer, used to ride whales. Humphrey was persuaded that his coal-mining father had brought him ingots of goblin iron hot from the core of the earth.

At length the cleansing of the mountain was finished and the gates opened. Driving their zip-carts, which as usual were heaped with junk, Humphrey and Grace climbed the glistening slope. Everything shone as if newly made, the quickfoam gullies and hillocks, the flexiglass bushes and trees. Below, the avenues were marked out in a grid of lights, orderly, immaculate, as if Oregon City had just that moment crystallized out of the air like a snowflake. This geometrical perfection, false to everything they knew about the funk and mess of living, made the old couple grit their teeth.

While they had the peak to themselves, Humphrey and Grace climbed out of their zip-carts and peeled back the tarps
and showed one another the treasures they had collected on their separate rounds that day.