This Perfect Day (27 page)

One day in the mine, toward the end of the fifteen-minute lunch break, Chip went over to the automatic loader and began examining it, wondering whether it was in fact unrepairable or whether some part of it that couldn’t be replaced might not be by-passed or substituted for in some way. The native in charge of the crew came over and asked him what he was doing. Chip told him, taking care to speak respectfully, but the native got angry. “You fucking steelies all think you’re so God-damned smart!” he said, and put his hand on his gun handle. “Get over there where you belong and stay there!” he said. “Try to figure out a way to eat less food if you’ve got to have something to think about!”

All natives weren’t quite that bad. The owner of their building took a liking to Chip and Lilac and promised to let them have a room for five dollars a week as soon as one became available. “You’re not like some of these others,” he said. “Drinking, walking around the hallways stark naked—I’d rather take a few cents less and have your kind.”

Chip, looking at him, said, “There are reasons why immigrants drink, you know.”

“I know, I know,” the owner said. “I’m the first one to say it; it’s terrible the way we treat you. But still and all, do
you
drink? Do you walk around stark naked?”

Lilac said, “Thank you, Mr. Corsham. We’ll be grateful if you can get a room for us.”

They caught “colds” and “the flu.” Lilac lost her job at the clothing factory but found a better one in the kitchen of a native restaurant within walking distance of the house. Two policemen came to the room one evening, checking identity cards and looking for weapons. Hassan muttered something as he showed his card and they clubbed him to the floor. They stuck knives into the mattresses and broke some of the dishes.

Lilac didn’t have her “period,” her monthly few days of vaginal bleeding, and that meant she was pregnant.

One night on the roof Chip stood smoking and looking at the sky to the northeast, where there was a dull orange glow from the copper-production complex on EUR91766. Lilac, who had been taking washed clothes from a line where she had hung them to dry, came over to him and put her arm around him. She kissed his cheek and leaned against him. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “We’ve got twelve dollars saved, we’ll have a room of our own any day now, and before you know it we’ll have a baby.” “A steely,” Chip said. “No,” Lilac said. “A baby.” “It stinks,” Chip said. “It’s rotten. It’s inhuman.” “It’s all there is,” Lilac said. “We’d better get used to it.” Chip said nothing. He kept looking at the orange glow in the sky.

The
Liberty Immigrant
carried weekly articles about immigrant singers and athletes, and occasionally scientists, who earned forty or fifty dollars a week and lived in good apartments, who mixed with influential and enlightened natives, and who were hopeful about the chances of a more equitable relationship developing between the two groups. Chip read these articles with scorn—they were meant by the newspaper’s native owners to lull and pacify immigrants, he felt—but Lilac accepted them at face value, as evidence that their own lot would ultimately improve.

One week in October, when they had been on Liberty for a little over six months, there was an article about an artist named Morgan Newgate, who had come from Eur eight years before and who lived in a four-room apartment in New Madrid. His paintings, one of which, a scene of the Crucifixion, had just been presented to Pope Clement, brought him as much as a hundred dollars each. He signed them with an A, the article explained, because his nickname was Ashi.

“Christ and Wei,” Chip said.

Lilac said, “What is it?”

“I was at academy with this ‘Morgan Newgate,’” Chip said, showing her the article. “We were good friends. His name was Karl. You remember that picture of the horse I had back in Ind?”

“No,” she said, reading.

“Well, he drew it,” Chip said. “He used to sign everything with an A in a circle.” And yes, he thought, “Ashi” seemed like the name Karl had mentioned. Christ and Wei, so he had got away too!—had “got away,” if you could call it that, to Liberty, to Uni’s isolation ward. At least he was doing what he’d always wanted; for him Liberty really
was
liberty.

“You ought to call him,” Lilac said, still reading.

“I will,” Chip said.

But maybe he wouldn’t. Was there any point, really, in calling “Morgan Newgate,” who painted Crucifixions for the Pope and assured his fellow immigrants that conditions were getting better every day? But maybe Karl hadn’t said that; maybe the
Immigrant
had lied.

“Don’t just say it,” Lilac said. “He could probably help you get a better job.”

“Yes,” Chip said, “he probably could.”

She looked at him. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Don’t you want a better job?”

“I’ll call him tomorrow, on the way to work,” he said.

But he didn’t. He swung his shovel into ore and lifted and heaved, swung and lifted and heaved.
Fight them all,
he thought:
the steelies who drink, the steelies who think things are getting better; the lunkies, the dummies; fight Uni.

On the following Sunday morning Lilac went with him to a building two blocks from theirs where there was a working telephone in the lobby, and she waited while he paged through the tattered directory.
Morgan
and
Newgate
were names commonly given to immigrants, but few immigrants had phones; there was only one
Newgate, Morgan
listed, and that one in New Madrid.

Chip put three tokens into the phone and spoke the number. The screen was broken, but it didn’t make any difference since Liberty phones no longer transmitted pictures anyway.

A woman answered, and when Chip asked if Morgan Newgate was there, said he was, and then nothing more. The silence lengthened, and Lilac, a few meters away beside a Sani-Spray poster, waited and then came close. “Isn’t he there?” she asked in a whisper. “Hello?” a man’s voice said.

“Is this Morgan Newgate?” Chip asked.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“It’s Chip,” Chip said. “Li RM, from the Academy of the Genetic Sciences.”

There was silence, and then, “My God,” the voice said, “Li! You got pads and charcoal for me!”

“Yes,” Chip said. “And I told my adviser you were sick and needed help.”

Karl laughed. “That’s right, you did, you bastard!” he said. “This is great! When did you get over?”

“About six months ago,” Chip said.

“Are you in New Madrid?”

“Pollensa.”

“What are you doing?”

“Working in a mine,” Chip said.

“Christ, that’s a shut-off,” Karl said, and after a moment, “It’s hell here, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Chip said, thinking
He even uses their words. Hell. My God. I’ll bet he says prayers.

“I wish these phones were working so I could get a look at you,” Karl said.

Suddenly Chip was ashamed of his hostility. He told Karl about Lilac and about her pregnancy; Karl told him that he had been married in the Family but had come over alone. He wouldn’t let Chip congratulate him on his success. “The things I sell are awful,” he said. “Appealing little lunky children. But I manage to do my own work three days a week, so I can’t complain. Listen, Li—no, what is it, Chip? Chip, listen, we’ve got to get together. I’ve got a motorbike; I’ll come down there one evening. No, wait,” he said, “are you doing anything next Sunday, you and your wife?”

Lilac looked anxiously at Chip. He said, “I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

“I’m having some friends over,” Karl said. “You come too, all right? Around six o’clock.”

With Lilac nodding at him, Chip said, “We’ll try. We’ll probably be able to make it.”

“See that you do,” Karl said. He gave Chip his address. “I’m glad you got over,” he said. “It’s better than
there
anyway, isn’t it?”

“A little,” Chip said.

“I’ll expect you next Sunday,” Karl said. “So long, brother.”

“So long,” Chip said, and tapped off.

Lilac said, “We’re going, aren’t we?”

“Do you have any idea what the railfare’s going to be?” Chip said.

“Oh, Chip . . .”

“All right,” he said. “All right, we’ll go. But I’m not taking any favors from him. And you’re not
asking
for any. You remember that.”

Every evening that week Lilac worked on the best of their clothes, taking off the frayed sleeves of a green dress, remending a trouser leg so that the mend was less noticeable.

The building, at the very edge of New Madrid’s Steelytown, was in no worse condition than many native buildings. Its lobby was swept, and smelled only slightly of whiskey and fish and perfume, and the elevator worked well.

A pushbutton was set in new plaster next to Karl’s door: a bell to be rung. Chip pressed it. He stood stiffly, and Lilac held his arm.

“Who is it?” a man’s voice asked.

“Chip Newmark,” Chip said.

The door was unlocked and opened, and Karl—a thirty-five-year-old bearded Karl with the long-ago Karl’s sharp-focused eyes—grinned and grabbed Chip’s hand and said, “Li! I thought you weren’t coming!”

“We ran into some good-natured lunkies,” Chip said.

“Oh Christ,” Karl said, and let them in.

He locked the door and Chip introduced Lilac. She said, “Hello, Mr. Newgate,” and Karl, taking her held-out hand and looking at her face, said, “It’s Ashi. Hello, Lilac.”

“Hello, Ashi,” she said.

To Chip, Karl said, “Did they hurt you?”

“No,” Chip said. “Just ‘recite the Vow’ and that kind of cloth.”

“Bastards,” Karl said. “Come on, I’ll give you a drink and you’ll forget about it.” He took their elbows and led them into a narrow passage walled with frame-to-frame paintings. “You look great, Chip,” he said.

“So do you,” Chip said. “Ashi.”

They smiled at each other.

“Seventeen years, brother,” Karl-Ashi said.

Men and women were sitting in a smoky brown-walled room, ten or twelve of them, talking and holding cigarettes and glasses. They stopped talking and turned expectantly.

“This is Chip and this is Lilac,” Karl said to them. “Chip and I were at academy together; the Family’s two worst genetics students.”

The men and women smiled, and Karl began pointing to them in turn and saying their names. “Vito, Sunny, Ria, Lars . . .” Most of them were immigrants, bearded men and long-haired women with the Family’s eyes and coloring. Two were natives: a pale erect beak-nosed woman of fifty or so, with a gold cross hanging against her black empty-looking dress (“Julia,” Karl said, and she smiled with closed lips); and an overweight red-haired younger woman in a tight dress glazed with silvery beads. A few of the people could have been either immigrants or natives: a gray-eyed beardless man named Bob, a blond woman, a young blue-eyed man.

“Whiskey or wine?” Karl asked. “Lilac?”

“Wine, please,” Lilac said.

They followed him to a small table set out with bottles and glasses, plates holding a slice or two of cheese and meat, and packets of cigarettes and matches. A souvenir paperweight sat on a pile of napkins. Chip picked it up and looked at it; it was from AUS21989. “Make you homesick?” Karl asked, pouring wine.

Chip showed it to Lilac and she smiled. “Not very,” he said, and put it down.

“Chip?”

“Whiskey.”

The red-haired native woman in the silvery dress came over, smiling and holding an empty glass in a ring-fingered hand. To Lilac she said, “You’re absolutely beautiful. Really,” and to Chip, “I think
all
you people are beautiful. The Family may not have any freedom but it’s way ahead of us in physical appearance. I’d give anything to be lean and tan and slant-eyed.” She talked on—about the Family’s sensible attitude toward sex—and Chip found himself with a glass in his hand and Karl and Lilac talking to other people and the woman talking to him. Lines of black paint edged and extended her brown eyes. “You people are so much more
open
than we are,” she said. “Sexually, I mean. You
enjoy
it more.”

An immigrant woman came over and said, “Isn’t Heinz coming, Marge?”

“He’s in Palma,” the woman said, turning. “A wing of the hotel collapsed.”

“Would you excuse me, please?” Chip said, and sidestepped away. He went to the other end of the room, nodded at people sitting there, and drank some of his whiskey, looking at a painting on the wall—slabs of brown and red on a white background. The whiskey tasted better than Hassan’s. It was less bitter and searing; lighter and more pleasant to drink. The painting with its brown and red slabs was only a flat design, interesting to look at for a moment but with nothing in it connected to life. Karl’s (no,
Ashi’s!)
A-in-a-circle was in one of its bottom corners. Chip wondered whether it was one of the bad paintings he sold or, since it was hanging there in his living room, part of his “own work” that he had spoken of with satisfaction. Wasn’t he still doing the beautiful unbraceleted men and women he had drawn back at the Academy?

He drank some more of the whiskey and turned to the people sitting near him: three men and a woman, all immigrants. They were talking about furniture. He listened for a few minutes, drinking, and moved away.

Lilac was sitting next to the beak-nosed native woman—Julia. They were smoking and talking, or rather Julia was talking and Lilac was listening.

He went to the table and poured more whiskey into his glass. He lit a cigarette.

A man named Lars introduced himself. He ran a school for immigrant children there in New Madrid. He had been brought to Liberty as a child, and had been there for forty-two years.

Ashi came, holding Lilac by the hand. “Chip, come see my studio,” he said.

He led them from the room into the passage walled with paintings. “Do you know who you were speaking to?” he asked Lilac.

“Julia?” she said.

“Julia
Costanza,”
he said. “She’s the General’s cousin. Despises him. She was one of the founders of Immigrants’ Assistance.”

His studio was large and brilliantly lighted. A half-finished painting of a native woman holding a kitten stood on an easel; on another easel stood a canvas painted with slabs of blue and green. Other paintings stood against the walls: slabs of brown and orange, blue and purple, purple and black, orange and red.