Chapter Twenty: Giving Notice

And so it went for them. Time passed while they planned their escape to Alaska, plans achieved through intense and constant argument. They ate a vegetarian diet mostly with the occasional fish for which they had both developed a craving, sometimes polishing off an entire two-pound pond trout in a meal. Weeks of chilly rain, hard and relentless, were punctuated by hot hazy days when the naked branches of trees glowed in the strange yellow light. There were storms with 175k an hour winds that bore tunnels into bamboo groves and wrecked douglas firs.

They met after work at the gym, a place they once loved but now found barely tolerable. The Cafe Arcadia, (located in the faux tropical rain forest, once so beautiful and lush), looked like a gimmick and like everything else was pervaded by a musty chemical odor slightly burnt at the edges. But they exercised anyway and delighted in the sight of their sweating bodies. He could smell her passing by the florid, sickening bodies of the other women. They stood out with their thick, oily hair and skin. Others watched them, warily, and turned their heads if they should catch them at it.

Sometimes they ate together at Les Jardeen, sometimes Felix stopped in alone after work. On weekends they strolled along the levee and watched the boats on the river, or roamed the park. They went to the Broadway Inc. theater and watched holographic aliases perform Shakespeare, Marlowe and Kyd.

And they went each night to the garden. At first the garden seemed to be endlessly various and they were unable to direct their travels, but over time they seemed to take control, moving about by instinct, creating each place they desired to be. It wasn’t conscious and yet they usually started out from the courtyard with the fountain and then wandered, down to the lake or a river to swim and fly. Once they crossed the lake to the far shore and climbed the red cliffs, trying to reach the mountains, but no matter how far they walked the mountains receded in the distance and they never got any closer than the foothills. Sammael explained that the mountains formed the edge of paradise. On the other side were the gates, a thousand metres high, forged of steel, locked and protected by the cherubim, angels with flaming swords.

There were others. People it seemed, from their world, whom they avoided. Once there was a bonfire with singing but Sammael drew them away and they sat beneath a couple of spreading plane trees and watched the river, drinking sweet, purple wine out of a gourd. The river had a rapid current and as it raced by Sammael explained to them that here, everything is alive, all forms migrate in and out of paradise. “It isn’t about four rivers and trees with seven jewels and all that nonsense.” He grew an enormous erection. Veronica lay back and smiled. Felix watched a bead of water form in her navel and drank it. “You’re limited, after all, by your bodies. There are things you just can’t see. Still, over time enough of you make it here. The lunatic, the lover and the poet as they say.” Then strange men came on a boat and spoke in a language they half understood, about a voyage. Once a lion fell on a couple of startled people and Felix and Veronica stood in horror as it killed and ate them. Felix felt the jaws of the lion crush his own neck. Sammael smiled and said, “Is there no change of death in paradise? Some people shouldn’t leave their beds at night.”

Moving worried Felix. Veronica wanted him to give notice soon but he resisted the idea, hoping it was just a passing enthusiasm of hers. But Veronica was adamant. Her eyes would lock in on him and she would speak in a voice with an oracular timbre as if it came from another place. “Don’t you see,” she’d say. “Don’t you understand? I want to get out on the open road, drive for days and sleep out at night, listen to the coyotes cry and cook on a wood fire. Aren’t you dying to snuggle naked in a sleeping bag far away from people?”

Trying to deflate this he’d say, “But you can’t live out a dream.”

“If we don’t live our dreams then what do we live for?”

“I can’t.”

“Isn’t it clear?” she’d ask again.

“What?”

“Don’t resist, don’t do that. You know what I want. Do I have to say it?”

“Yes! Say it, now, what you want.”

“You! I want you Felix, all the time, everywhere, always, forever.

You, me, us, together, absolute, pitched against time, against the world.”

“That’s childish nonsense.”

“That’s what I want. I’ll settle for less, I’ll settle for getting out of this weak, pale image of a life, these attenuated bodies drained of all but the most tepid desires, treading into the void with nothing but fear for their dull, sexless companion. I want to be where life and death sing out their arias in bright beautiful tones, not the pusillanimous warble dying in the throat of some flightless, transgenic bird. The odor of burning crap in my nostrils all day long. Escape from here, where the only beauty lies in sleep: I’ll take that.”

“I thought you were better.”

“Better? I’m alive. What’s the cure for that?”

He couldn’t answer. He felt the same way.

But still, as they walked arm in arm along the levee high above the

Hudson in a slapping, briny wind, watching the sea gulls circle and swoop down on schools of fish, the barges hauling equipment or composite ingots and I-beams, the prefab walls of buildings, and the tugs and ferries, he felt it was beautiful and it did feel like home. Clays had been on or near this water since the 18th century when they were conveyed as slaves to Brooklyn. They moved into lower Manhattan, up the Tenderloin and into Harlem, then onto the Bronx, Yonkers and Yonkers, all the way up to Albany. They started out as blacksmiths, carpenters and tanners. They sold goods from horse carts, were rag pickers, barbers and Pullman Porters. They worked in factories, laid bricks and drove cabs. They fought every war. There was a Clay in the Basie band. Another played first base in the Negro Leagues. There were gangster Clays, bootlegger Clays, crack dealing Clays, Clays in the NBA. There came a string of lawyers, teachers and administrators and then they began to rise through the ranks of city government, becoming engineers and commissioners. A great aunt was Bronx Borough president and then from 2061-2069 served as mayor of New York.

Her brother, Felix’s great-grandfather, Cassius George Clay (named for the boxer) died a hero, sand bagging the Harlem River during the worst storm ever recorded in the northeast, the second of two consecutive hurricanes, with 340k winds and a ten meter storm surge that killed thirty thousand people and left millions homeless in New York City alone. Cassius was a sort of mayor of the South Bronx, young, charismatic and reckless. He stood his ground, laying up the 50-kilo bags even when it was hopeless. His son, Young Cassius, became city commissioner in charge of reclamation in the Bronx and supervised the design and construction of that portion of the levee. He too died on the wall, as an old man, of a heart attack.

Felix’s father went into the army corps of engineers and practically worshipped these two men. As a child he took Felix to see the bronze memorial erected in their honor. He showed him the bust of

Rosemary Clay in city hall and then took him up to Clay Park in Riverdale. And Felix, who was no hero, dreamt of one day taking his children to these places. Clays had always been on this river, their blood flowed in it, swirled around the island of Manhattan and met again in the Atlantic.

Often at his BioWatch WorkStation he wondered what had brought him here, and how, like his father, it would be his wife who took him away. And her proposed trip to Alaska was farther west than any Clay had gone before. Clays had vanished in the west before, it was true, a hippy in San Francisco, a prospector into Mexico and a saxophonist who got drunk on a train and woke up in Kansas City, never to return.

But how Felix ended up anywhere was a mystery. They had just drifted like everyone else, more or less discontented, moved by peristaltic action beyond their control. What did it mean to break free? Was it a rebellion or an expulsion? Was the system choking on them? The price of freedom, a long life denied, security gone. And yet, what savour did a long life without meaning have, what could security bring but boredom?

He thought about all the others from whom he felt so disconnected and yet were always there, chugging along on the same current. Was he really so different? Everyday they stood together, walked the halls, rode the Amphibatrains. Side by side they urinated, ate and defecated. At the gym they sucked the same steam in the shower room. They shared mutual suspicions, traded knowing looks. Not all of them befriended each other either. He lived in a society of loners, of couples who kept to themselves, of families living for generations behind walls. And then there were the announcements at work. The ones who fell away, colleagues who had killed themselves or murdered their spouses and were in jail awaiting execution; and some who disappeared without a trace, either vanished into the river or madness or addiction. Some ended their days on the streets in the city or out in the GMZ, others sank into the swamps of Florida. Some moved to Alaska. They all seemed so two dimensional, shades shivering in the shadows while he felt so full and alive and yet he felt no pride, in fact he felt more alone than ever before. Maybe they weren’t any different, maybe they were only mad. They weren’t deciding to do anything at all but were merely being swept up into a different current, leading to a different circulatory system, which would in the end excrete them into a different place.

It was possible they were all chattering away in their different dreams, that by day they floated on decisions made by vast, interlocking committees made up of intelligences only tangentially touching their physical bodies, plebiscites in eternity, transhuman fields of determination invisible on earth but present in the garden.

It did not matter. He loved Veronica absolutely. He would follow her wherever she went. Their current was the current of desire, pulled by imagination, the gravity of a greater place, a more intense beauty and involvement, of matter less constrained.

He knew what he had to do. One Friday, at the end of the day, he dictated the following words to his computer: “Dear Supervisor Wong Peterson and Chairman Aung Thwin, after ten years of dedicated service I am tendering my resignation, effective in two weeks’ time. I am leaving of my own accord and would like to thank you both and the entire Intellatrawl family for these ten years of gainful employment. Best regards, Felix Clay, Virtual Remote Supervisor, Suite 8.”

He blinked. The message was written and gone. It would arrive. He had lit a fuse but to what end and of what length he had no idea. He watched it burn but without a destination its speed was indeterminable. The screen zipped out, he yanked his CellPack cap off and stood up from the chair, propelled by fear and buoyed by elation. He took his place in the swarm of associates headed up to the auditorium for the Friday evening kiss off. Chairman Aung’s alias strode to the podium and flickered but his message, whatever it was, failed to find Felix, whose attention was fixed on the burning fuse.

The pressure outside had dropped. The southern sky was black. Occasional gusts of wind rustled the bamboo and they smelled of rain and hail. There was a feeling of anticipation. Everyone cast uncertain, fearful looks at the sky and hurried for the amphibatrains.

Felix couldn’t wait to tell Veronica. On the amphibatrain he imagined her elation at the news, that he had done something spontaneous, risky and concrete to further her plans. He was now an active participant in their manumission, not a scold or a brake.

Now that the job was about to become past tense he could view it with objectivity and put things in perspective. It was important not to hate and vilify something he had done for so long. The job after all had sustained them through their ordeal, was even the means by which they discovered the garden. The job wasn’t evil in itself but a catalyst, a necessary phase in their journey, midwife to a better future. He would miss the sustaining, nurturing aspect of the job. But once suckled one must be weaned. It was time to move along so he had lit the fuse and now the fuse burned.

The weather had only grown more ominous. The wind gusts were strong enough to make walking difficult and lightening flashes lit up the clouds piling up overhead. Thunder shook the ground. Rainsqualls erupted and stopped. He ran for Les Jardeen. The monkey in the window, looking a bit tawdry of late, beckoned him to take a seat at the bar and celebrate his good fortune.

He popped up onto the stool and drummed his fingers on the zinc top. Peter was mixing up a blender full of pina coladas. Three female Intellatrawl associates sat at the bar in party hats, Nadine, the red head and another one he had seen before. They were opening gaudily wrapped presents. Ice crunched and whirred in the blender, the females laughed, the one he didn’t know pulling at the silver ribbon of a large cube wrapped in glossy black paper. Her long red fingernails gnawed like rodents at the tape till the paper fell open. Peter filled three highball glasses with the ivory liquid and garnished each with pineapple, orange and cherry on a spear.

“Oh god!” exclaimed the woman, lifting up a sphere of pink spines. “It’s so beautiful.” She wiped a tear from her eyes.

Nadine fussed with a napkin and said, “I saw it and just had to get it.”

The redhead said, “It’s for the mantle piece in the bedroom.”

“Of course,” said the recipient, still crying a little. “Where else could it go? I love you guys so much.”

Felix called Veronica. “Hi,” he said, trying to repress his heartbeat. “I’m at Les Jardeen.”

“I thought you were coming home.”

“Well, there’s a storm up.”

“Can you beat it?”

He looked out the window. The facades of buildings were flashing white in the lightening and rain pounded down so hard it bounced. “No, I’d better eat here. I’ll be home as soon as it clears up. Unless you want to try to make it down.”

“No,” she sounded disappointed.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Huh? Wrong? No, not at all. I was just, you know. Missing you. It’s silly. I’m tired.”

“Well, wait up for me cause I have news. I’ll bring home some champagne.”

“What kind of news?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“A good one I hope.”

“Don’t worry. Bye now.”

“Bye.”

The drinks warmed up Nadine and the Intellatrawl associates even more. They were often together on the train, drinking hard in a large group of boisterous commuters. By the time the cars hit the river they were usually ripping along. Now the red head was pulling a pink ribbon off a luminously lawn-green cube. Her nails matched her synthetic hair and lipstick and disagreed with her butterscotch skin; she used them to pick apart the wrapping paper, which, on closer inspection, proved to be lizard skin.

“Holy fucking jesus,” she said. “It’s lizard!”

“It’s a snood!” shrieked Nadine.

The red head touched her hair gently and then wrapped it in the green lizard skin. “How do I look?” she asked.

“Deee-voyn,” said the other two in unison before dissolving into a babble of laughter.

“I can’t wait to see what’s inside.”

Peter eased up to Felix.

“Well Mr. Clay, you look very happy tonight.”

Felix continued to watch the females and said, “Next round’s on me. Is it a birthday?”

Peter looked at them disdainfully. “Some sort of an anniversary. I think they may be married to the same man.”

“He must get spread kind of thin.”

“That’s the whole idea.”

“Three wives!”

“Well, it used to be illegal.”

“They oughta just marry each other and cut out the middle man. How about a martini? And Peter, can you ice down a bottle of Veuve Clicquot?”

“Is Mrs. Clay coming in on a night like this?” “No, I’ll bring it home to her. It’s a celebration.”