Plus One (25 page)

“What is true belongs to me.” You can close your eyes and have repose or speak the truth. Choose now, you can never have both.

Over the microphone I heard the curfew alarm of Grady’s phone and the phones of multitudes ring simultaneously. The din of electronic bells was louder than I had imagined possible, an aural testament to Grady’s claim of hundreds of thousands, and the prick of gooseflesh rose everywhere on my body.

“What is true belongs to me.” I will speak the truth until I can no longer speak! I will never be freer than I am now, as the Hour Guards take me! Yes, come, gentlemen. It is night and my phone says I am a Ray, but my heart says I AM A MAN.

I tried to yank my hand away from D’Arcy, and when I looked up at him with a flash of anger, his eyes were glassy and shadowed. He shook his head. He was not going to let me go. I turned in my seat to face him, pushing my bad hand against his chest to get away.

D’Arcy launched himself at me and roughly wrapped his arms around my back. I twisted my body, I wrenched my arm away, I shoved him hard. I fought scrappily, but I was weaker than he was, frustratingly weak, and as I slowly lost the battle I realized that Gigi had told him not to let me move from this spot, and that she somehow knew I would try to intervene, and the radio was meant to cover whatever noise her abuser made, and that D’Arcy was following her instructions, even though the look in his eyes revealed that he could hardly bear it, and I stopped resisting—collapsing instead while Grady Hastings’s shaking, buffeted, physically muffled voice shouted “WHAT IS TRUE BELONGS TO ME!” as the Hour Guards subdued him—and I sobbed with helpless rage into D’Arcy’s shirt.

Friday
6:30 p.m.

Brad left the tree blind first, tucking in the last stray tail of his shirt and fixing his hair. I glared at him as he made a special trip to our car to gloat. D’Arcy flipped off the radio.

“Woo.” Brad practically whistled the sound as he zipped his fly in D’Arcy’s face. Much of Gigi’s makeup—pancake white and red rouge—had transferred to his face. “I doubt you geeks were worth that, but Gigi must be keen on you. That was her personal best.”

Gigi came out of the trees, fully arranged, but with her makeup smeared and an ugly red bruise on her neck in the shape of an oval, which had the sick effect of a tag advertising Brad’s conquest.

She strode past him on the way to her car and said, “Who the fuck said you could talk to them?”

“Fuck you, whore,” he called after her. And then to us he said, “I’ll catch you later. Get it?
Catch you
later.” He laughed at his own joke as he walked to his car.

“Where is a taser when you need one,” D’Arcy muttered, putting the gearshift in drive. I slid down in the seat and wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my hoodie.

*   *   *

The Noma compound was an enormous piece of farmland outside of Clinton, Iowa. It stretched as far as the eye could see, until gentle hills muted the edges. Part of it was planted with summer and fall vegetables, and part of it was planted with mostly battered, weathered trailers and RVs. I had heard that the Noma were wanderers, but this camp, with homemade gravel walkways, makeshift electrical poles, and dirty garden ornaments, had the feel of something that had been around for a few years, like it would be a lot of work to uproot those trailers and get on the road.

We parked in a dirt lot. Gigi got out of her car and I could see that she had reapplied most of her makeup while she was driving. Around us were Noma kids and wild dogs, running and yelling and barking in the twilight, all of the girls with spiked black mullets and all of the boys with white-blond shaved heads, some of them barefoot, playing what appeared to be a game of cops and robbers with alarmingly real-looking guns, but without an adult in sight. The Night bell sounded on dozens of phones—the children’s, Gigi’s, and mine included, but the kids just kept right on pretend-shooting each other.

Gigi led the way in stony silence past trailers and suddenly gawking children. The walkway was narrow, and D’Arcy was behind her. As we made our way, he put his left hand behind him. I reached for it with my left, and he gave me a comforting squeeze. It was so reminiscent of the squeeze below the flirty hospital receptionist’s desk, I wondered for a moment exactly when it was that D’Arcy had started to find me tolerable as a human being, in the evolution of his somewhat miraculous affection for me. It could not have been as early as the hospital. Strung out on lack of sleep, food, and mostly hope, I was not remotely tolerable then.

We arrived at by far the biggest trailer, roughly in the center of the makeshift city. Before she got to the door, Gigi pointed at me with her chin and said, “Her first.”

I followed her up three short stairs and when she opened the door I saw that the room was packed full of Noma, filling dozens of chairs, with standing room only along the walls. I instinctively stumbled back down a step, bumping into D’Arcy, who caught me before it could turn into a real fall.

“More Noma than you’ve ever seen in your life, I know,” Gigi said, stepping in. “We won’t hurt you. At least not right now.”

The room was buzzing with conversation, and a booming voice rose above the rest saying, “Well, well. Who could have predicted it? Soleil Le Coeur.”

I glanced at D’Arcy. How did they know my name?

D’Arcy’s eyebrows were at quizzical angles, as if I had surprised him again. “Sol is short for Soleil?”

“We haven’t got all night, dummy,” Gigi said, so I reached for D’Arcy’s hand and stepped inside, bringing him with me.

The atmosphere was close in the room, from too many bodies crammed into one space, and the people who were standing shifted uncomfortably, irritably, like they could hardly bear another second of being cooped up. There was a strange uniformity of color—black clothes, red makeup, glinting piercings. The man with the big voice was younger than I’d first thought—maybe in his twenties—but when he stood up he was gigantic in every dimension, with a bushy black beard in contrast to the bleached stubble on his head.

Gigi said, “Gimme your phones.”

D’Arcy and I looked at each other, affirming that we didn’t have a choice. I reluctantly let go of his hand to pull the phone from my pocket. We passed them to Gigi, who gave them to the giant bearded guy, who put them on the table in front of the skinny kid next to him, who might have been all of fifteen.

D’Arcy said, “Don’t turn mine on, unless you want the police here.”

“We suspected,” the giant said.

Gigi said to me, “Red, this is our tribal leader, Fuzz.”

His eyes scoured me. He put out his beefy hand, the size of a small ham, which I thought was an oddly formal gesture for someone named Fuzz. I shook my head, held up my bandage, and said, “I’m kind of protective of this.” I turned to Gigi and said, “I never told you my name.”

She said, “You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?”

I didn’t think she was an idiot. In the few hours I’d known her she’d taken advantage of the fact that D’Arcy and I were stranded, she’d bartered for the only thing of value I owned, she’d somehow anticipated my suicidal outrage at Brad’s assault, and had used D’Arcy to subdue me.

Gigi lifted the chain of my necklace from her neck and slid her fingers back to find the clasp. “I put two and two together as soon as you showed me this.” She easily removed it, without D’Arcy’s help, and lowered it onto Fuzz’s outstretched hand. She asked him tersely, “Can I show her?” He nodded.

She turned to me and pulled the collar of her black T-shirt down in the front, almost to the nipple of her right breast, where there was a tattoo. I took a step closer. It was the full moon, about to eclipse the sun, whose rays were blazing in all directions, ending in little stars near the moon. Fuzz lifted his shirt, and over his right nipple, buried in a phenomenal amount of curly hair, was the same image. The skinny kid sitting next to him unbuttoned his black shirt and showed me the same tattoo on pale skin.

“Your pendant,” D’Arcy said in a low voice.

“No, the symbol of the Noma,” Gigi corrected him, still staring at me. “Very few non-Noma have seen it. We generally marry them or kill them if they do. Your brother must have figured it would protect you.”

“And it has. This once,” Fuzz added.

Gigi said, “Just how many redheads three years younger than Ciel Le Coeur do you think there are in the Midwest, wearing a solid gold symbol of the Noma around their necks? You’re the only one, babe.” She reached out to lift D’Arcy’s chin, admiring him. “Besides, the minute you pulled that necklace out, your little boy toy here clinched it by calling you ‘Sol.’”

I found myself blurting, “This
boy toy
happens to be the most brilliant, decent person in the room.”

Fuzz burst out laughing, a spit-spraying, cynical guffaw. “So Gigi’s texts were right: you have Ciel’s legendary temper. Not to mention his exaggerated loyalty.”

I felt a fire blaze in my chest, maybe proving half his point. “You guys throw Ciel’s name around a lot, but if you really knew him you’d realize he’s the least loyal person on the planet.”

Gigi whispered to D’Arcy, knowing I would overhear, “I’m thinking if you serviced her more regularly, that would go a long way toward taming the shrew.”

Friday
7:00 p.m.

They took D’Arcy and me away separately, with no sappy reassurances that they’d bring us together again. After three days of trying to ditch him it was like pulling my heart out and leaving it behind. I had let my guard down so thoroughly in the last eighteen hours that I’d as good as guaranteed a continuous drip of acid, burning a hole just like this in my chest until I was senile or dead.

D’Arcy caught my eye and said over his shoulder, “See you soon,” and the acid burned paradoxically deeper because he sensed what I needed.

There were several trailers dedicated to the bleaching, dying, piercing, and tattooing that were involved in being Noma. Gigi reminded me that I could be killed for knowing their secrets, and the number of vicious fenced-in mutts around their ramshackle homes made her previous threat to feed me to the dogs feel real.

It turned out that in order to dye orange hair black, you had to add an intermediate step of a warm brown first, so the hair wouldn’t look muddy in the end. If I had been even slightly more feminine, I probably would have known that. The brown step alone took an hour. Rinsing, conditioning, adding the black, rinsing again, and finally cutting the spiky mullet took another couple of hours. The camp’s resident hairstylist, a middle-aged woman named Zinnie with a surprisingly sweet smile, had no trouble giving me the cut: it was the only style female Noma wore; she must have done it thousands of times. Like Gigi, she chewed gum nonstop the whole time I was there. She asked if I wanted a stick, and when I said no she offered a chocolate candy bar, which I accepted gratefully and tried hard to eat slowly. It wasn’t long before she had given me an apple and a can of tomato juice, too—snacks she had clearly brought for herself.

My eyebrows were deemed too conspicuously ginger, and so Zinnie made me put on swim goggles in order to brush a bit of developer mixed with brown dye on those, too. When she was all done, I was shocked at the result: my murky blue eyes were enormous, in deep sockets; my skin was ghostly; my face was all angles, topped with black spikes of hair. The mullet, hanging on sharp shoulders, was ugly and punk.

“Shit,” Gigi said. “As an emaciated redhead you kind of pulled off ‘ethereal.’ Now you’re all savage hunger.”

I was scary; it was true. And I still didn’t have the piercings or tattoos, which Gigi informed me would be temporary: makeup and a magnetic nose ring.

“But we’ll do that tomorrow,” she said, yawning. “It’s midnight, and I’m on a Ray schedule right now. Fuzz wants to see you at eight, so I’ll get you up at seven for the finishing touches.”

I’m on a Ray schedule right now,
I repeated dully in my head. I was too exhausted to understand it.

She took me outside and I followed her flashlight as we made our way around the dark hulks of trailers. When we got to our destination, she held up the light to use her key and I saw the graffiti-like tag “Gigi” scrawled on the door. Inside, she flipped on the light, and it was like a filthy bachelor pad, with a weight-lifting bench in the middle of the room, free weights strewn on the dinette table, multiple ashtrays full of squashed cigarette butts, empty bottles of beer and whiskey on the kitchen counter, and dirty dishes in the sink. She locked me inside with her—it was a dead bolt—and showed me to the bathroom. From a cabinet she dug out a used toothbrush, used toothpaste, and a questionable towel, and I was grateful for them all.

When I came out, she was already curled up on the built-in sofa, with a pillow and a blanket, and the bedroom door was open with the light of a single lamp streaming out. She was giving me her bed. I stood still for a moment, stealing a look at her. She was wearing a very un-Noma white nightshirt. Her eyes were closed and her face was relaxed. She had removed her makeup and it was easier to see the contours of her face. She had fleshy cheeks with high bones. Her lips were full, her eyes slanted upward. She was quite exotic-looking.

“Shut the light, dummy,” she said. She wasn’t asleep.

“Where’s…” I hesitated, still becoming accustomed to my own vulnerability on this point. “Do you know where D’Arcy is?”

“He’s in Fuzz’s trailer. He’s fine. Go to bed or you’ll be a useless fuck tomorrow and you’ll put him in danger.”

I started for her room. When I got to the doorway I turned around. “Thanks, Gigi.”

She sighed, a long sleepy sigh. “Fuck you, Red.”

Saturday
7:00 a.m.

I slept more deeply than I expected, and about half as long as my body wanted me to, until a pile of clothes hitting my face woke me up. I opened my eyes, disoriented, not remembering where I was. I picked an article of clothing off my neck: a black jeans miniskirt. I sat up. Black fishnet stockings and a black long-sleeve T-shirt fell from my chest to my lap.