Islands in the Net (47 page)

Jofuette shook her head, said something in Bambara, and plugged the tape back in. As she did so a folded slip of tissue, cigarette paper, fell from a crevice in the box's cardboard side. Laura picked it up.

She unfolded it as Jofuette watched the TV, riveted. It was covered with smudgy, minuscule writing. Not ink. Blood, maybe. A list.

Abel Lacoste—Euro. Cons. Service

Steven Lawrence—Oxfam America

Marianne Meredith—ITN Channel Four

Valeri Chkalov—Vienna

Georgi Valdukov—Vienna

Sergei Ilyushin—Vienna

Kazuo(?) Watanabe—Mitsubishi

(?)Riza-Rikabi—EFT Commerzbank

Laura Webster—Rizome IG

Katje Selous—A.C.A. Corps

and four others

10

The second year went faster than the first. She was used to it. It had become her life. She no longer thirsted for the things she had lost—she could no longer name them to herself, without an effort. She was past thirst: she was mummified. Monastic, sealed.

But she could sense the pace picking up, spiderweb tremors of movement in the distant world outside.

There were shootings almost every night now. When they took her down for exercise in the yard, she could see bullet-pounded patches in the wall, cratered, just like the Lodge had been. Below the pockmarks the baked bare earth had turned foul, carpeted with swarming flies and the coppery reek of blood.

One day the desert sky outside the wall hole of her cell showed endless dark skeins of drifting smoke. Trucks squealed in and out of the prison for hours, and they shot people all night. Assembly style: shouts, orders, screams, pleading, fierce chatter of machine-gun fire. Quick finishing shots. Doors slamming, engines. Then more. Then more. Then more again.

Jofuette had been frightened for days. Finally the goons came for her, two women. They came smiling and talking her language, seeming to tell her that it was over, they were going to let her go. The bigger goon grinned suggestively and put her hands on her hips and did a bump-and-grind. A boyfriend, she was saying—or Jofuette's husband maybe. Or maybe she was suggesting a night on the town in glamorous downtown Bamako.

Jofuette smiled tremulously. One of the goons gave her a cigarette and lit it with a flourish.

Laura never saw her again.

When they brought in the video recorder for the usual weekly session Laura waited till they were gone. Then she picked up the machine with both hands and smashed it into the wall repeatedly. It came apart, a tangle of wiring and circuit cards. She was crushing them underfoot when the door rattled and two of the male goons burst in.

They had drawn clubs. She threw herself at them with her fists clenched.

They knocked her to the ground immediately, with contemptuous ease.

Then they picked her up and began beating her. With thoroughness, methodically. They hit her on the neck, on the kidneys. They threw her onto the bunk and hit her across the spine. Lightning flared inside her, great electrocuting swathes, white-hot, bloody-red. They were hitting her with axes, chopping her body apart. She was being butchered with sticks.

Roaring filled her head. The world faded.

A woman sat across the cell, sitting in Jofuette's bunk. A blond woman in a blue dress. How old—forty, fifty? Sad, composed face, laugh lines, yellow-green eyes. Coyote eyes.

Mother …?

The woman looked at her: remembrance, pity, strength. It was restful to look at the woman. Restful as dreaming:
she's wearing my favorite shade of blue
.

But who is it …?

Laura recognized her self.
Of course
. Rush of relief and joy.
That's who it is. It's me
.

Her Persona rose from the bunk. She crossed the cell, drifting, graceful, soundless. Radiant. She knelt silently by Laura's side and looked into her face: her own face. Older, stronger, wiser.

Here I am.

“I'm dying.”

No, you'll live. You'll be as I am.

The hand stopped an inch from her face, caressed the air. She could feel its warmth—she could see herself, face-down on the bunk, beaten, paralyzed. Sad Laura. She could feel the warm torrent of healing and sympathy rush in from outside, Olympian, soaring. Poor beaten body, our Laura, but she won't die. She lives. I lived.

Now, sleep.

She was sick for a month. Her urine was tinged with blood: kidney damage. And she had huge aching patches of bruises on her back, her arms, her legs. Deep bruises, into the muscle, bumps swollen on the bone: hematomas, they were called in first-aid. She was sick and creaky, barely able to eat. Sleep was a struggle for position, for the least amount of pain.

They had taken away the wreckage of the video machine. She was pretty sure that someone had shot her up with something, too: there seemed to be an injection bruise just above her wrist, one of the few spots the goons had missed. A woman, she thought: she had seen a woman medic, maybe even spoken to her semiconscious, and that was it: an Optimal Persona experience.

She had been beaten up by fascist goons. And she had seen her Optimal Persona. She wasn't sure which was the most important but she knew that they were both turning points.

It was probably a medic that she'd seen. She'd just slotted it in, dreamed of seeing herself. That was probably all that an Optimal Persona ever was, for anybody: stress and illusion and some deep psychic need. But none of that mattered.

She had had a vision. It didn't matter where it came from. She clung to it and she was glad they were leaving her in solitary because she could chuckle over it aloud and hug it to herself. And cherish it.

Hatred. She'd never really hated them before, not like she did now. She'd always been too small and too scared and too hopeful of figuring some angle, as if they were people like herself and could be dealt with like people. That's what they'd pretended, but now she knew their pretense was another of their lies. She would never, ever join them, or belong to them, or see the world through their eyes. She was their enemy till death. That was a peaceful thought.

She knew she would survive. Someday she would dance on their graves. It made no sense, not rationally. It was faith. They had blundered and given her faith.

She was woken by a roar. It sounded like a giant water faucet, rush of water and the high-pitched scream of a vibrating pipe. Coming nearer. Louder.
Wa-woosh
.

Then: monster drumbeats. Boom. Boom. Boom-wham-bam, firecracker sounds. Her cell wall flashed as hot light flickered through the window hole. Then another flash. Then a sudden thunderous explosion, very near. Earthquake. The walls shook. Hot red light—the horizon was on fire.

The goons ran up and down the hall, shouting at each other. They were afraid, and Laura heard the fear in their voices with a wild leap of animal joy. Outside, the feeble crackle of small-arms fire. Then, distantly, belatedly, the banshee wail of sirens.

A burst of pounding from inside the prison. Someone on level two was beating on his door, not the bathroom pounding, but sheer ferocious battering. Muffled shouts. The upper-level prisoners were yelling from their cells. She couldn't make out the words. But she knew the tone. Rage and glee.

She swung out her legs and sat up in the bunk. In the distance, belatedly, she heard antiaircraft guns. Crump, whump, crump, spider webs of flak searing the sky.

Someone was bombing Bamako.

“Yeah!” Laura screamed. She jumped from bed and rushed to the door and kicked it for all she was worth.

Next night they came in strafing. That sudden
wa-whoosh
again, treetop-level fighter jets in close formation. She could hear their aircraft cannon cutting loose, a weird convulsive belching, thup-thup-thup-thup, the sound of it dopplering off as the jets peeled away over the city. Then the sound of bombs, or missiles maybe: whump, crump, sky flashbulb-white as explosions hit.

Then the belated antiaircraft. There was more of it this time, better organized. Batteries of cannon, and even the hollow roar of what must be rockets, surface-to-air missiles.

But the jets were already gone. Mali's radar must be down, she concluded smugly. Otherwise they would surely fire at the jets as they were coming in, not too late, after they'd already blasted the living bejeezus out of something or somebody. The attackers had probably knocked out the radar first thing.

She had never heard anything that sounded so sublime. The sky was full of hell, the rage of angels. She didn't even care if they hit the prison. All the better.

Outside the guards were firing machine guns: staccato bursts into the black sky. Bullets would rain down somewhere on a slum. Fools. They were fools. Amateurs.

They came for her in the morning. Two goons. They were sweating, which was nothing new, everyone sweated in the prison, but they were twitchy and wired, their eyes wide, and they stank of fear.

“How's the war going?” Laura said.

“No war,” said goon #1, a middle-aged male thug she'd seen many times. He wasn't one of the ones who had hit her. “Practice.”

“Air-raid practice? In the middle of the night? In downtown Bamako?”

“Yes. Our army. Practice. Do not worry.”

“You think I believe that bullshit?”

“No talking!” They clamped her into handcuffs, hard. They hurt. She laughed at them, inside.

They marched her downstairs, and into the courtyard. Then they prodded her into the back of a truck. Not a secret-police paddy wagon but a canvas-topped military truck daubed in dun-and-yellow desert camouflage. It had wooden benches inside for troops, and jerry cans of water and gasohol.

They shackled her legs to one of the support bars beneath the wooden bench. She sat there exulting. She didn't know where she was going, but it was going to be different now.

She sat sweating in the heat for ten minutes. Then they brought in another woman. White, blond. They shackled her to the opposite bench, and jumped out, and slammed the tailgate.

The engine started up with a roar. They jolted into movement. Laura examined the stranger. She was blond and thin and bony and wearing striped canvas prison garb. She looked about thirty. She looked very familiar. Laura realized that she and the stranger looked enough alike to be sisters. They looked at each other and grinned shyly.

The truck cleared the gates.

“Laura Webster!” Laura said.

“Katje Selous.” The stranger leaned forward, extending both cuffed hands. They grabbed at each other's wrists and shook hard, clumsily, smiling.

“Katje Selous, A.C.A. Corps!” Laura said triumphantly.

“What?”

“I don't know what it means.… But I saw it on a list of prisoners.”

“Ah!” Selous said. “Azanian Civil Action Corps. Yes, I'm a doctor. Relief camp.”

Laura blinked. “You're from South Africa?”

“We call it Azania now. And you, you're American?”

“Rizome Industries Group.”

“Rizome.” Selous wiped sweat from her forehead, a jailbird's pallor. “I can't tell them apart, the multinationals.…” She brightened. “Do you make suntan oil? That oil that makes you turn black?”

“Huh? No!” Laura paused, thinking about it. “I dunno. Maybe we do, nowadays. I've been out of touch.”

“I think you do make it.” Selous looked solemn. “It's very important and wonderful.”

“My husband used that stuff,” Laura said. “He might have given Rizome the idea. He's very bright, my husband. David's his name.” Speaking of David made a whole buried section of her soul rise suddenly from the tomb. Here she was, chained in the back of a truck headed for God knew where, but with a few revivifying words she was part of the world again. The big sane world of husbands and children and work. Tears gushed suddenly down her face. She smiled at Selous and shrugged apologetically and looked at the floor.

“They kept you in solitary, eh,” Selous said gently.

“We have a baby, too,” Laura babbled. “Her name's Loretta.”

“They had you longer than me,” Selous said. “It's been almost a year since they took me from camp.”

Laura shook her head, hard. “Did, uh …” She cleared her throat. “Do you know what's going on?”

Selous nodded. “I know a little. What I heard from the other hostages. The last two nights—those were Azanian air raids. My people. Our commandos, too, maybe. I think they hit some fuel dumps—the sky burned all night!”

“Azanian,” Laura said aloud. So that was it. What she'd just lived through. An armed clash between Mali and Azania. It seemed obscure and improbable. Not that an African war was unlikely, they happened all the time. Back pages in newspapers, a few seconds on cable news. But that they were for real, they took place in a real world of dust and heat and flying metal.

The South Africans weren't in the news much. They weren't very fashionable. “Your people must have flown a long way.”

“We have aircraft carriers,” Selous said proudly. “We never signed your Vienna Convention.”

“Oh. Uh-huh.” Laura nodded blankly.

Selous looked at her clinically, a doctor hunting for signs of damage. “Were you tortured?”

“What? No.” Laura paused. “About three months ago they beat me up. After I wrecked a machine.” She felt embarrassed even to have mentioned it. It seemed so inadequate. “Not like those poor people downstairs.”

“Mmmm … yes, they've suffered.” It was a statement of fact. Curiously detached, a judgment by someone who'd seen a lot of it. Selous glanced out the back of the truck. They were in the middle of Bamako now, endless nightmare landscape of foul shacks and huts. Wisps of evil yellowish smoke rose from a distant refinery.

“Were
you
tortured, Dr. Selous?”

“Yes. A little. At first.” Selous paused. “Were you assaulted? Raped?”

“No.” Laura shook her head. “They never even seemed to think of it. I don't know why.…”