We Leave Together, стр. 6
“Please, Jona don’t be like this.”
“I’ll be gone when you wake up. I just want to hold you a while.”
“What will you do when my brother and I travel on?”
“Don’t.”
“It’s not a choice we make for ourselves. Leave, Jona. Don’t come back. We’re going to have to leave soon, he and I.”
“Don’t joke about this. We’re it for each other. There’s no one else like us. There’s no one else. I really like you. I feel… I don’t know what I feel. I feel like I’m better with you. I feel like I’m not so…”
She said nothing. She looked at him with tired eyes. She wasn’t really listening.
He stood up from bed. He looked down at her. She stretched her arms over her head and rolled away from him. She placed them over her head and held very still, like sleeping.
He put his boots on in the hall, and walked away. The sound of his boots on the wood was the loudest sound he had ever heard in his life.
***
I thought we talked about this, Jona. I thought you wouldn’t come back. What if my brother shows up again?
I’ll hide under the blanket until he passes out. I don’t want you to leave. Don’t leave. You’re safe here because I can protect you.
I know that, Jona, but… Djoss could come back in the middle of the day. I honestly don’t know where he is. I don’t know what he’s doing. I’m frightened for him.
When’s your next night off? We can go see a play. There’s a new play and it isn’t so serious. In fact, Geek said it wasn’t any good. Maybe you’ll like it.
I won’t. There are only beautiful people or ugly people on the stage. There are never any people like us.
They’re like you. You’re beautiful.
Stage beautiful is different. I don’t want to see a play, Jona. You’re not listening to me. I wish you would listen to me. I have to leave the city soon.
Want me to find him for you?
You leave him alone.
If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him and see if he wants to leave the weed behind for you.
I said, leave him alone.
I’m just saying that maybe your brother is caught in the pinks, and maybe you’ll spend the rest of your life dragging him out of it until his head is gone or maybe you spend it with me, instead, and we have a good life together.
And what, then? What if we have a child?
We won’t have a child.
What if we do? We can’t keep it.
We could. My parents kept me.
No, we couldn’t. Jona, stay if you… I don’t want to argue about this. Just let me sleep. I’m so tired, Jona. I’m so tired. I wish you could just close your eyes and be still.
***
My husband tells me what he learned from Calipari’s birds. I combine this with what I know from the ragpickers that used to be kids wearing crowns and with what we know from the push of the demon weed hookah on a brain. Djoss left the three crowns in a row and the whistling boys after Turco was killed. He walked where the weed took him.
The pinks seeped into his blood. His skin began to thin like the hard users get. Eyes seeped water day and night. Clots of sleep dust needed to be brushed away all the time. They were pink clots, because they were tiny flecks of clotting blood.
Djoss felt the emptiness of his pockets when his head was clear.
Whistles in the streets from the ragpickers in crowns went ignored. Djoss walked past the boys with scrap metal crowns, and past the boys with none. Djoss went east of the Pens, then north into a cluster of nicer houses. He walked through the yards of craftsmen’s homes to the larger houses.
The children here played the same games as the ones in the Pens, but here the children had clean shirts, and they didn’t curse when they lost a round of dice.
Djoss saw a door hanging open with no one in sight. He stood still, looking slowly all around him.
Up the street…
Down the street…
Around the yards…
The door was still there, hanging open, and not a soul watched this one ragged man in the street.
The pink emptiness behind his eyes pushed his feet towards the door.
An old woman appeared in the yard from the open door, carrying baskets of laundry. Another woman swept the dust of the house out the open door.
Djoss walked away. His hands shook. He didn’t know if this was excitement or unrequited addiction or both. He shoved them in his pockets to keep them still.
A pink emptiness spread behind Djoss’ eyes like a butterfly.
CHAPTER 2
In the night, the streetlamps masked the stars with lamp light. Men in stilts walked the darkness with casks of oil on their back, to refill the lamps under the king’s command. In morning twilight, the lamps all burned down to nothing below the brightening sky.
Flying insects flew into the lamps and died with screams that only my husband and I could hear.
The king’s men on the night shift stumbled back to the station, bleary-eyed and pale. The day crew was there, bleary-eyed and tan. Sergeant Calipari called all the boys together before roll call, both day and night.
Calipari raised his hands so people would stop jabbering and listen. “We all been hearing those bloody whistles,” said the sergeant, “We seen them running like little king’s men to their little bells. They’re wearing crowns from who knows where, now. Birdies’re telling me these ragpickers are getting in deep. Dumb little ragpickers don’t know the way of things in the Pens. There’s dozens of them. More than dozens. Too many. Gonna make trouble before they know what trouble they’re in.”
The king’s men nodded. The night shift swayed their weight from one boot to the other. The