Turn and Face the Strange, Chapter 1
Here's my first chapter, finished this morning. I've already fulfilled past day two's word count requirements! Hooray for write-ins! Must create buffer for the week two storm clouds though.
Chapter One
You promised me the ending would be clear-
You’d let me know when the time was now.
Don’t let me know when you’re opening the door;
Stab me in the dark, let me disappear.
Memories that flutter like bats out of Hell
Stab you from the city spires.
Life wasn’t worth the balance
Or the crumpled paper it was written on.
- “Bring Me the Disco King,” David Bowie
Two things are known for certain about the young woman in the bright colored rags they call Wonder. One of these things is that before the man Casus found her, her name was not Wonder at all; she had no name that was spoken by the lips of men or kept in their records of the world. The second thing known is that Casus, the metalworker of the Diamond Dogs, found her as she was being pursued by those who would do her harm, and she clung to him, and he has been her protector since.
The Dogs say that her pursuers were thugs of the Bewlays, but this is unlikely. Some give descriptions of the average thugs from the street, their hands and feet wrapped in rags and their bodies hung with spangles and bits of dirty cloth like flags, their pupils dilated with drink and drug. These are all fine answers, though they are given by those who were not there.
Very few will willingly be heard saying that the men chasing her wore the garish hair and patchwork furs of the Dogs themselves. If such a topic is broached, eyes find other corners to inspect.
It matters little. Few speak of the thin, haunted girl Wonder unless there is nothing else to say. Even those who deal in gossip do not find much currency in her or the tall, forbidding Casus. In a past that none of them remember, maybe her thin and fragile youth next to his grizzled age, or her sallow, hollow cheeks and brittle-looking wrists next to his size and the crushing strength of his callused fingers would have made a scandal. There is not much in the way of scandal anymore. Nobody remembers what one looks like.
The only ones to whom the story matters are Wonder and Casus. Wonder never speaks of it except to herself, how she ran and ran and the breath became short and rough and jagged in her throat and she stumbled and she knew she could not get up again, they would be on her now and she knew what happened to girls who stumbled when the men with the great black eyes chased them, she’d seen it happen and now it would happen to her, how she cowered on the ground and waited for it.
Casus speaks of it, but only to her, at night when they lay in his bed and he wraps his too-strong arms around her and whispers roughly in her ear, telling her the story she still dreams about. How a jagged stone came zooming in from the side and struck one of her pursuers in the cheek just under the eye, how his eye and his face filled with blood. How Casus ran in and knocked another down and sat on his chest and with a crumbling brick turned the man’s face into an image of one of the muddled, shredded smiles in the advertisements on the sides of buildings and on the old, old billboards. Late at night, Casus would tell her about crushing the chest of one of them with his foot and the skull of another with a still-bloody brick, and then he would tell her the part she remembered, about how he came over to her cowering on the ground and, still covered in bits and fluids of her pursuers, wrapped his arms around her for the first time.
She remembers how she believed she was about to meet the same fate from him as she’d anticipated from them, but she was still grateful to him because it would be only one and maybe she would go away and not feel it and it would be over quickly. And he picked her up and carried her away and laid her down in a bed, and after a long time she slept. He doesn’t tell that part, late at night. He doesn’t tell her about how he brought her something to eat and drink, and how he sat by her bed and wouldn’t let anyone bother her. Because he doesn’t tell it, she tells it for him, silently, after his story is done and they are still. It’s her favorite part, so she lays awake on her back and her lips move, tracing the words for the ceiling.
It doesn’t matter, really, as long as it keeps her happy in the dark, when there’s nobody to listen or to watch her moving lips. Neither of them matter very much. This city is full of desperate characters, and there is nobody else who really cares whether what they have is love or something else.
v
Here is what matters: the best parties have moved down from forty second street to Eleventh, at the end near the docks, ever since the rainstorm when the north sewage canal overflowed. Paint parties are the latest thing, where the street people paint their naked bodies in imitation of the rich and idle, in solid colors or tattered stripes or large, crude spirals. Then they all go to a close, dark, hot room and dance up against each other until they are sweaty and smeared and the harsh chemical paints drip into their eyes.
They are, though, only the latest flavor of the clubs that people set up in the hollow buildings of Hunger City. When people stop going to the paint clubs, they will change their names or their locations or their music until the people come back. The best clubs are in the basements of the buildings, because anyone with a weapon claims the basements to live in and there are seldom any vacant.
The cheap clubs are on the roofs of the buildings, for something different. The cheaper ones are on mid-levels, but the windows are boarded up to keep the sound and the dark in and to make it seem like a basement club. The cheapest ones are outside, with boards propped up to make walls so they can try to charge entry, even though it doesn’t work. These street clubs are where you go when you’re not there to dance or to meet people or laugh or have a good time. You go to the street clubs to take a smoke or a bottle of pills from the slack hand of a patron passed out beneath a table. When you join him someone will take the pipe or the bottle from your hand. In the nicer clubs, a friend will keep your goods safe for you when you black. That’s not a problem with the street clubs. Nobody who comes to them has friends.
The West side of Hunger City belongs to the Diamond Dogs. The Dogs shave their hair into mohawks and topknots that they dye with harsh, bright dyes into colors of gore red and hypothermia blue and moldy green, and they wear bulky fur mantles, stitched together from the hides of the thin, rope muscled rabbits and wild dogs, and bloated rats and opossums that live in the streets of the City. Beneath the mantles are dirty loincloths and plate armor strapped to their chests and thighs, oddly shaped pieces of metal wrenched from building facades and defunct automobiles and painted in primary colors. They carry wicked little slingshots which they shoot with deadly aim, and the hunters speed unerringly down the broken streets on handmade roller skates that seem to glide over the faults and potholes in the roads. Usually what they chase are the furred creatures that are sewn into coats. Sometimes they are creatures unfurred that stumble in the breaks that the hunters’ skates do not find. The Diamond Dogs, led by one Halloween Jack, are raucous and simple and very dangerous, and they claim what is theirs and take care of those who belong to them.
The east side of town belongs to the Bewlay family. Only the Bewlays are allowed to be Bewlays; even the Dogs, close knit though they are, will sometimes take in strays and make them Dogs. There are very few Bewlays, and they do not add to their ranks except by marriage and birth. But the Bewlays make friends and do favors to any who need, and no wise man done a favor by a Bewlay forgets it. In a currency of such friends and favors, the Bewlays are the richest people in Hunger City.
The Bewlays pretend to remember what the world once was, what these tall shattered shells of buildings once held and how the people in them once lived and spoke. The clothes they wear are the clothes of royalty-garments from Before, clean and fragile and nearly transparent with age and washings, and with rips and holes trimmed neatly out. Real Bewlays keep themselves clean always; their faces are pink and their hands red and raw from washing in burning bleaches and alcohols and sometimes clean water. The chemicals are a status symbol as hard to come by as the water, distilled in hidden one-man factories outside of town and brought in by Suppliers along with the drink and drugs and paints they sell to everyone. The Bewlay family leader, Duke Bewlay, shines with cleanliness, pale and soft, his hair bright and dry and his backless dress shirt as white as snow used to be. He has five children by three different wives and must be called the patriarch, though he is only barely thirty. The idea of a world ruled by old men belongs to Before. There are no old men any longer.
Bevan Bewlay is one of the White Duke’s fourteen second cousins. He is twenty two, and is in love with a dangerous woman that he can never have. Bevan is a little bit more important than Casus the metalworker or Wonder the broken child, but not much. If he died, the world would not miss him a great deal.
v
Crooked Street winds from the northeast corner of Hunger City to the west side. There are a few clubs, as there are everywhere, and homes made up in the basements and some of the upper floors. But mostly Crooked Street is home to the second suppliers and city suppliers and dealers of stolen goods from which the gangs and clubs and street people buy the things they cannot make for themselves. Some of the fresh food, and the herbal and vegetable drugs and alcohols, and the chemicals more difficult and involved to make, are brought into town by first suppliers who grow and process them on farms or make them in crude laboratories just outside of the city; they sell them, then, to the second suppliers, or directly onto the street, for the discs of stamped steel and aluminum that the clubs coin, but it all ends up on Crooked Street.
It is a curious and amusing bit of trivia sometimes passed around a hookah table during discussions of days Before that the government, the law, used to stamp the currency, not the nightclubs. It is widely questioned, when such trivia is brought up, why such currency was worth anything at all. What did the law have to offer, that anyone could trade for with their coin? Why would the first suppliers want it? They could eat their own food, and living outside the city they would have no need to bribe the law off of them. If they could not turn their coins in for a spot on a dance floor, or a song from a band, or a tab or smoke or a slug, then what was the good of having coins?
Now the tabs and smokes and slugs all come from the suppliers on Crooked Street, and the best clubs get them at discount for genuine coins that can buy it all back to the tune of a skin drum and five loud guitars beneath the loud, sickly lightning of an open arc light. The Bewlays send someone to get their bleach and ammonia and cleaning alcohol here, and the vegetable wines that they drink to show they can. The Diamond Dogs buy the drugs, the hard stuff, the ice and snow, that they sell in the neighborhoods back on the west side, where even the most posh east siders have to go to get it. The smaller gangs buy a little poppy or a bit of spiked hooch that they can sell to the desperate late at night on the other end of the city. And the street people buy their food and baubles and body paints and trade a hint or two about what everyone is wearing, about how to get the latest high, how to sing the latest tunes, because if you’re the last one to hear then you’re old and it’s time to die and make way for the young and who wants to die?
One day a man walks up Crooked Street from the west side, wearing a Before style shiny black hat with a tall crown and narrow brim, and with a wide smile that shows lots of gray teeth. He smiles at everyone, and he walks without hurry. At the intersection of Crooked and Thirtieth, near the middle of town, he buys a small green apple from the pretty redhaired daughter of an out of town first supplier, and pays her in a little bottle of green chiclets, and tells her he is called the Genie. He walks nearly to the very end of Crooked Street, which takes most of the day, before he turns and enters a squat, wide building whose glassless windows were unboarded and even had some drapes hanging in some of the openings.
By the time he disappears through the door, the redhaired girl has distributed half the bottle of chiclets and had the other half and most of her apples stolen from her. And by the time the sun sets, everyone on Crooked Street, Central Street, and most of Eleventh is in a rush to not be the last to hear about the Genie.
v
There is one broken, jagged mountain, or a small cluster of mountains, to the north of Hunger City. It does not have a name that anyone remembers. Certainly nobody has tried to cross in in many, many years. The farms and chemical labs are generally south and west of the city, away from the mountain and the sea. If there are other cities beyond these outposts, carrying on in the same way as Hunger, nobody knows or seems to care much. It is hard enough to survive here without trying the wilderness. Besides, one would miss the parties.
Thus there is nobody who sees the curly headed youth walking down the unnamed mountain in the dark on the night the Genie comes to Hunger City. And if there is anyone who sees him walk through a lonesome field of opium poppies and into town, they probably judge it by such reasoning-wherever he has come from out there is cold and quiet and has no people and no parties, and it is only reasonable that he should seek out the warmth and heat and drugs of the City.
The first people he meets, as he wanders somewhere near Fortieth Street, reach the same conclusion.
“Ay!” shouts a bone-thin girl with a flat chest and long, sparse blonde hair. She is dressed only in dozens of stacked strands of beads and garlands of joined fabric scraps that drape her back and forth and trail over her shoulders to the ground. “Ay!” she shouts again, and the boy from the mountain turns around. “What are you?” she shouts from across the street when he doesn’t respond. “You a Bewlay?”
“Clam, Molly,” snaps a boy in a reedy voice. He is wearing a long skirt of streamers. He is shirtless, but wrapped around his neck several times is a long string of feathers threaded end to end like a clover chain, and there is a crown of spangly bits of metal on his messily close shorn head. He carries a bullhorn and a clay bottle that he cradles in one arm like a precious charge. “Does he look like a Bewlay? And if he was, would you want to make him mad? Eat your fist.”
“Eat your own. He’s dressed like a Bewlay, isn’t he?” she counters. “Doesn’t even have any bits cut from his clothes.” Molly is right; the young man wears a tunic and trousers in the style of Before, and although they are thin they are without holes or patches or trimmed out portions. She repeats her question, “You a Bewlay?” and barely blinks when the boy she’s with slaps her across the face lazily.
“I don’t know,” answers her addressee, and that makes her laugh.
“Doesn’t know if he’s a Bewlay, he says!” she crows, and then she sobers. “Say, Arthur, what if he’s a Bewlay that took a bad hit? We might make a friend by bringing him in.” Arthur rolls his eyes.
“Stop saying that! He ain’t a Bewlay, strump. Here.” He crosses the street to the stranger and Molly follows. He pinches a sleeve of the boy’s tunic and holds the arm out to Molly for inspection. “See? It isn’t Before, it’s new woven. And hardly white. None of the Family would be caught wearing this. You’re from out of town, ain’t you?” he says to the boy.
“Yes,” he answers. “I’m from Freecloud.”
“What’s that, a club?”
“It’s the mountain. I came from the mountain.”
Molly’s eyebrows go up. “The mountain? I didn’t know it had a name. What were you doing up there?” But the boy is saved from answering by Arthur cutting in with his own questions.
“What’s your name and do you have any money?” he asks. The boy smiles.
“I’m Johnny,” he says. “And no, I haven’t.”
“Well you can’t come in from out of town and go to a street club,” Molly says with a touch of horror. “You don’t come out of those places. And you’ll get altogether the wrong idea about the City. Come on, you’ll come with us. We were just on our way to the Web. Arthur sings there.”
“Ay! I’m not paying his way in,” Arthur objects, and Molly flicks his ear.
“Shut up. You know they aren’t going to charge an out of town. He may as well be a supplier. Besides he can be with the band and you know they’ll let him in for free! You play anything?” she asks Johnny.
“Yes,” he answers. He does not clarify but she seems satisfied.
“Right. He’s with the band,” she says firmly. “Now let’s get there already. I’m coming down, and I need a tab soon if you’re not going to give me anything from that bottle of yours.” She hooks an arm in the boy’s. “You’ll meet everybody else at the club, Johnny. They’ll like you,” she pronounces, “because I like you.”
“I don’t like him,” says Arthur without heat, and they resume their walk toward the club, Johnny now in tow. He does not look back toward the mountain, but it watches him all the way down the street.