THE DAY AFTER RODRIGUEZ LEFT, Jax sat on the roof of the Saint Francis Hotel, fletching a new set of bolts for her crossbow. The shaft of each new bolt was made of quarter-inch aluminum pipe, taken from a downtown hardware store. At Jax’s request, The Machine had sliced the pipe into one-foot lengths and fitted each one with a sharpened stainless steel tip. The Machine had offered to fletch the bolts as well: he had some thin copper sheeting that would substitute for feathers. But Jax had declined, preferring the feathers she had gathered in Golden Gate Park. Feathers of hawks and feathers of owls—it seemed to Jax that these would make a bolt fly better than fletching of lifeless copper. It only made sense.
The sky was a clear pale blue, washed clean by the afternoon’s rain. A puddle of water had collected in one corner of the roof, and three sparrows were bathing in the water, splashing and chirping noisily.
Jezebel eyed them but did not stir from her place at Danny-boy’s side. Danny-boy lay on the rooftop with one hand tucked behind his head.
Jax set a feather on the roof. With her pocketknife, she split it neatly along its quill. She trimmed the two halves to the proper dimensions.
“Why are you making those bolts of metal?” Danny-boy asked.
She glanced over and found him studying her. “All your old ones are made of wood.”
“They’ll be stronger,” she said. She offered him one of the completed bolts.
“You’re making a lot of them.”
“I figure I’ll need a lot of them.” She watched him run his hands down the metal shaft and test the point. “Ms. Migsdale thinks that we have about a month before Fourstar and his army arrive.”
Danny-boy rolled the bolt between his hands. “You plan to meet him with a crossbow?”
“It’s better than nothing.”
He handed her the bolt and returned to his perusal of the sky. “Seems like there should be a better way.”
“Yeah, maybe so.” She set the bolt with the others and selected another feather. “Snake’s been looking for guns, but most of the obvious places were cleaned out years ago. He found a stash hidden in a house in the Sunset, and he’s looking for more. But ammunition’s still a problem.”
He watched her, still holding the bolt. “But one way or another, you want to kill them?”
She frowned, wondering what he was getting at. Of course she wanted to kill them. “Sure. Kill them before they kill me.” She tried to slice another feather along its quill, but the knife slipped, ruining one half. His questions made her uneasy.
“Something’s wrong with that,” he said softly.
“Oh, yeah?” She started to trim the undamaged half of the feather, but the knife slipped again. She sheathed the knife and gave Danny-boy her full attention. “All right—so tell me what’s wrong with it.”
“Fourstar come after us with guns and violence and we fight back with the same. That doesn’t seem right. The gun and the knife—those are Fourstar’s symbols. If we adopt his weapons, it seems like we’re no better than he is. We become the enemy we want to defeat.”
She stared at the half-finished bolts. She did not like this way of talking. Why would they become the enemy? “I don’t know what you mean.”
“We can’t win by using guns,” Danny-boy said. “It’s not that simple.” He turned on his side and lifted himself on one elbow, watching her face.
“Don’t talk like that,” she said. “We can win. We just need more guns. Or explosives. We could blow up the bridge before they get here.”
Danny-boy shook his head. “That’s the wrong approach. We won’t win that way.”
She crossed her arms to keep her hands from trembling. “Then what is the right approach?”
“Don’t be angry,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You know, Duff once taught me to play a game called poker. And I always lost.”
“So?”
“When I asked Duff why I lost so much, he grinned and told me that you can’t beat a man at his own game. I think he’s right.” After a pause, Danny-boy continued. “You think there’s only one way to fight—with guns and knives and killing. But the way I figure it—you’re playing into Fourstar’s hands. That’s Fourstar’s kind of war. That’s his game, and he’s good at it. We’ve got to get him to play our game, not try to beat him at his.”
“What’s our game?” she asked.
He was looking down at his own hands. Beneath each fingernail was a crescent of pale blue paint, reminders of the Golden Gate Bridge. “Our game? We’re good at making traders unwilling to visit downtown. We’re good at keeping farmers at Duff’s and away from the rest of the city. We’re good at showing people a view of the world that they’ve never seen before. We’re good at making people uneasy. We’re good at convincing people to see things differently.”
“So far, those don’t seem like real useful talents. Not in a war,” she said.
He looked up from his hands and met her eyes. “They could be,” he said. “We don’t have to kill Fourstar’s soldiers. All we have to do is change their minds. We just have to make them think that we could kill them at any time. That would be enough. Let’s think of this war as an art project.”
Jax shook her head. “No.”
He didn’t seem to notice her denial. “I’ve been talking to Books. He says that the outcome of a war depends largely on the morale and conviction of the people who are fighting it. He told me about this war that America fought in a place called Vietnam. A little tiny country, Vietnam, up against the enormous military force of America.” He sat up, caught by his own enthusiasm. “But Vietnam won. They drove the Americans out.”
“Without killing any soldiers?”
“Oh, they killed plenty—but that wasn’t the important part. What was important, Books says, was the loss of morale among the American troops. They didn’t believe they could win. And so they didn’t.” Danny-boy leaned forward, holding out his hands. “Books also told me about this guy called Gandhi. The country where he lived had been taken over by the British. And Gandhi drove the British out by fighting a new kind of war. Rather than attacking them, he just got in the way. Passive resistance. The British didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to deal with this guy. So eventually, they left. Seems like we could manage something like that.”
Jax shook her head. “You don’t understand. War can’t be art. We have to kill them.”
Danny-boy reached out, taking her hand. “Look, they’re people too. You may not like them, but I don’t think we should kill them while we have other alternatives. It seems to me …”
She pulled her hand away and stood up. “You don’t understand,” she repeated. She turned away from him, abandoning her crossbow and bolts, running away across the roof and down the stairs. She heard Danny-boy calling after her, but did not stop to listen.
Somewhere in her stomach was a knot of feeling that she could not allow herself to touch. She could skirt the edges of it, chart its size and location, feel it hard and heavy in her belly. But she could not touch it. When she probed the edges, she felt the cold sensation that comes with a great injury, like the chill that follows the cut of a knife, just before the pain hits.
She stood at the front entrance to the hotel. In the center of the square, the nameless bronze lady on the pillar lifted her trident over the rotting remnants of squash vines and tomato plants. The rain had washed her clean, and she glistened in the early afternoon light. Like the bronze statue, Danny-boy had his eyes fixed on the sky, ignoring the rubbish at his feet. Fourstar would walk in and take over the city while Danny-boy stared up at the clouds and talked about symbols.
With no destination in mind, Jax began walking. Puddles in the street reflected the buildings of downtown. Each puddle offered a slightly different view of the city, showing it from a different perspective.
She kept walking, leaving Danny-boy behind. He frightened her. She did not understand him. The words he spoke made sense individually; together they were nonsense. But he believed his own words, and that was the most frightening thing of all.
He trusted the world, trusted the people in it—and that terrified her. He told her to relax—as if she were the one who needed to change. She told him that she was right and he was wrong, and he just smiled. He was the water in a stream, gently wearing away the rocks on the bank. Which is stronger: the rock or the water?
She kept walking, watching the reflections in the puddles. She could leave the city, she told herself. Leave before Fourstar came, and save herself at least. But she knew, even as she tried to convince herself, that she could not leave. She belonged in the city now.
After a time, she noticed that the buildings in the puddles no longer looked familiar. She had left downtown and was in a residential neighborhood. She kept walking.
The awareness of her mother’s presence crept up on her slowly. She could not pinpoint the moment when she knew that her mother was leading her somewhere, but when she saw her mother’s reflection in one of the puddles, she was not surprised. As Jax watched, the image of her mother caught her eye, smiled, then vanished.
Jax looked up from the puddle. She stood in front of 738 Ashbury Street, a two-story Victorian that had once been painted royal blue with white and gold trim around the bay windows. The paint had faded and cracked over the years. A roof that extended out over the front steps shaded the trim surrounding the front door. There a spray of golden wheat stalks stood out against a cream-colored background.
It was her mother’s house. Jax knew that with a strange certainty. She climbed the steps and tried the knob. The door was locked.
As she stepped back from the door, a squirrel scolded her from the branches of a camphor tree. The tree grew in a square of dirt in the sidewalk. Over the years it had outgrown its confines: its roots had cracked the surrounding cement; its spreading branches brushed against the house. Jax eyed a thick branch that passed quite near the small roof over the front door. From that roof she would be able to reach the upper-story windows.
The camphor tree had generous branches that gave her good footing. The jump from the branch to the roof was only a few feet.
White rice paper blinds hid the room’s interior, but Jax could see that the window was not latched. She pushed up on the window, but it did not open. She tried again, harder this time. The frame shuddered, but remained closed. Chips of cream-colored paint flaked off and showered onto the roof. She braced herself and put her shoulder into the push. The window frame moved reluctantly, opening a few inches. Jax slipped her fingers into the gap and heaved up on the window. It slid another few inches, then a foot, a foot and a half. She pushed the blind aside and squirmed headfirst through the opening.
The air smelled of dust. She could make out the vague shapes of furniture: some bookcases, an upright piano, a sofa, two overstuffed chairs. On top of the piano was a vase that held several withered flower stalks.
The past was thick in the air around her. It crowded her, pressing close. She walked across the room, her footsteps loud on the hardwood floor. When she played a few tentative notes on the upright piano, they hung in the air, like a question she had not intended to ask.
From the mantelpiece, she picked up a photograph of a smiling family. In the dim light Jax could see a dark-haired woman, a man with curly red hair, and two young boys. The woman leaned lovingly against the man; she had her arm around his waist. Her right hand rested on the shoulder of one of the boys.
Jax carried the photograph to the window where the light was better. The woman in the photo looked very much like her mother, but she had never seen her mother smile like that. It was a happy, open smile; the woman in the photo was calm and at ease with herself. Jax peered at the faces of the man and the boys, wondering what it was about them that made her mother smile so.
She set the photo back on the mantel and prowled through the house. She was used to empty houses: shelters bounded by walls and roof and floor, places where people had lived and died, leaving behind bits and pieces of their lives. She had wandered through many houses, examining photos, books, bowling trophies, children’s drawings held to the refrigerators with magnets shaped like fruit, ceramic knickknacks of horses and dogs.
But this house felt different. These things meant something. She had lived with her mother for sixteen years, but somehow the mother she had lived with seemed like an abandoned hull, a mechanical woman. The essence of her mother was here, still in this house, still in this city, lingering here with the things that her mother had left behind.
When she was a child, she had sometimes watched her mother in secret. Once she had climbed a tree that grew by the garden. All day long, she hid among the leaves. Through the hot afternoon, she had watched her mother pull weeds and pick cutworms from the tomato plants. Late in the day, after her mother went inside, she had climbed down and noisily returned home, claiming that hunting had been bad. She did not know what she had expected to learn by watching her mother, but she could not stop herself from doing it.
One evening, when her mother had sent her out to get wood for the fire, she had stopped at the window and stared in. Her mother was reading a book by the light of the kerosene lamp. Jax remembered feeling as if her chest were being squeezed by a big hand. She had not been able to breathe. Her heart had pounded as if she had run a long way. She had turned away from the window, gotten the wood, and fed the fire, saying nothing to her mother. She had not known what to say. Exploring the house now, Jax felt as she had when she stared through the window at her mother.
In a bedroom decorated with pictures of dogs, she found her brothers, the two boys from the photo on the mantel. They lay in twin beds. Their flesh had decayed; only discolored bones remained. At the head of each bed was a miniature license plate that identified the bed’s occupant. Mark lay on his back, with the covers drawn up to his chin. John was curled up on his side. On the table between the beds were medicines: a jar filled with pale blue capsules, a bottle in which cough medicine had crystallized.
Jax sat for a long time in the rocking chair that was between the two beds. This was where her mother had sat when she read bedtime stories to the little boys. Jax tried to imagine her mother, the mother in the photograph, sitting in the chair and telling a story in a low soft voice. She closed her eyes, but the only sound was the chirping of a bird outside the window.
She left the children’s room and stepped back into the hall. Beside the children’s room was a small study. Here Jax felt her mother’s presence most strongly. She sat in the oak desk chair in front of a cluttered desk. A color snapshot was tacked to a bulletin board: her mother stood with two other women beneath a banner that read “Peace In Our Time.” Beneath the photo was a political cartoon: a scruffy-looking monkey stood between two men: Uncle Sam and a portly man wearing the emblem of the hammer and sickle. Each of the men held one of the monkey’s hands.
Jax examined the clutter on the desk. In the center was a folder stuffed with yellowed newspaper clippings. A rubber band was wrapped around the folder, holding it closed—as if her mother had prepared to take the folder with her, then changed her mind. The rubber crumbled into stiff pieces when Jax tried to remove it.
Jax shuffled through the clippings. They all seemed to be about the movement that Books had described, the one that had brought the monkeys to San Francisco. She flipped through them idly, wondering why her mother had bothered to clip them out. “Girl Scout Troop Raises $10,000 for Peace Monkeys,” “Zoo Director Welcomes Peace Monkeys,” “100,000 Attend Parade.”
Halfway through the stack, Jax found a photo of her mother, beneath a headline that read “Buddhist Activist Struggles to Bring Peace Monkeys to San Francisco.”
By the dim light that filtered through the dirty window, Jax read the story. The reporter told the legend of the monkeys in much the same way Books had. The article described the movement to bring monkeys from Nepal to the United States and quoted Jax’s mother at length.
“‘People say that the monkeys are just a symbol,’ Laurenson says. ‘I agree. But you must not underestimate the power of symbols. The Christian cross, the Star of David, the swastika—these are all just symbols. But they are symbols of great power. People have fought wars over symbols. It only seems right that we should use a symbol to bring about peace.
“‘Don’t get me wrong—I’m not opposed to all conflict. Conflict is, unfortunately, inevitable—there will always be arguments, marital spats, and territorial squabbles. What I’m against is war: the institutional dehumanization of the group of people that we label the enemy. The Bible says, “Thou shalt not kill,” but that refers to people, and when we’re at war, the inhabitants of another nation are no longer people. They are the enemy, and therefore we can kill them.’”
Jax shifted in her chair. Reading her mother’s words made her uncomfortable.
“‘Of course there are things that I would fight for: I’d fight to protect my children, my home. But I might not fight the way you expect. I think we’ve become, over the centuries, locked into one way of fighting: kill or be killed. That’s why the British were so startled by Gandhi’s approach to conflict. He came up with a new way of fighting, a method that recognized the essential humanity of the people on the opposite side. The British didn’t know what to do with him.
“‘The military establishment recognizes that the peace movement has found a new way of fighting, a new weapon, in the peace monkeys. They’re still trying to figure out how to deal with this movement. They’ve tried dismissing it, discrediting it, suppressing it. But none of their traditional tactics has worked. I can only hope they choose the next obvious tactic.’ She grinned, as if at a private joke when asked what that tactic might be. ‘They join us, of course.’”
Jax slipped the article back into the folder and looked quickly through the other articles. In the back of the folder, tucked behind all the rest, was the front section of a newspaper, doubled over and stuffed into the folder. Jax unfolded it carefully, trying not to crack the brittle newsprint. The letters in the headline were three inches tall: “PEACE MONKEYS LINKED TO PLAGUE.”
Jax did not read the article. She put the paper back into the folder and left it on the desk. Leaning back in the chair, she looked at the snapshot on the bulletin board. Her mother was smiling. Her mother had led her here so that she could read these clippings and think about symbols and peace and the humanity of the enemy. Jax did not want to think about such things.
Jax left the study and stood for a moment in the hallway. The door at the end of the hall was open, and she stepped quietly inside. On the white wall behind the bed hung a Japanese scroll on which a rain-drenched landscape had been painted. The pastel colors of the painting were muted by a layer of dust. Except for the dust and the dead flies that lay in the corners, the room was tidy, with no signs of a hasty departure.
Jax sat on the chair by her mother’s dressing table. The things on the table were covered with dust. One by one, Jax wiped them clean with her fingers and studied them. She picked up a hairclip made of enameled metal, decorated with flowers and birds. With one hand she wiped part of the mirror clean, then held the clip up to her hair and looked at her reflection: small, dirty face; ragged hair uncombed since yesterday, broken fingernails. She carefully placed the hairclip back on the table.
The hairbrush held a few dark hairs. A small cut-glass bottle still held a trace of her mother’s perfume. Jax pulled out the stopper and the room was filled with fresh wild scent, like spring flowers after a rain.
Each object in the room seemed touched with power: a hand mirror in a silver frame; a rhinestone bracelet; a crystal box that held a jumble of earrings; a silk scarf, faded from the sun; a silver pendant dangling from a silver chain.
Jax picked up the pendant and examined it. Carved on a circle of silver was a man, sitting cross-legged. He held one hand up in what looked like a benediction; the other hand pointed at the earth beneath him. His face was untroubled. A peaceful man. Dannyboy would like him.
In the distance, she heard faint sounds: the laughter of children, muffled by the bedroom walls; the sound of light footsteps coming down the hall. She clung to the pendant and closed her eyes, afraid that by looking she might break the spell.
The footsteps came closer. The room was filled with the scent of her mother’s perfume. She felt a breeze tickle the back of her neck, a faint breath of fresh air. Someone reached over her shoulder and took the pendant from her hand. Still Jax did not move. She felt the chill of the silver chain against her neck, the light touch of fingers fumbling with the latch. The pendant was a cold circle in the hollow of her throat.
Jax reached up. “Wait,” she whispered. Her mother’s hand brushed lightly over the back of her hand, an urgent caress. “I don’t like this. I don’t understand any other way to fight. Wait.” She heard the sound of retreating footsteps.
Jax opened her eyes and she was alone in the room. Watching herself in the mirror, she touched the silver Buddha. “I don’t like it,” she said, protesting to the empty room. No one answered.
She fled like a thief through the open window.
Danny-boy found Jax in front of the hotel, curled up in the easy chair. She was watching the monkeys play in the abandoned cars. When he came and sat on the curb beside her, she did not speak.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
She glanced at him, but he could not interpret the expression in her dark eyes. “I found my mother’s house.” Her voice was rough, as if she were fighting to keep it under control. “My mother would have agreed with you.”
He noticed the silver pendant hanging around her neck.
“I can’t say I like it,” she said. “I can’t say I agree. But I’ll help you fight this stupid war your way. I’ll do what I can.”
Her voice broke and he reached out to take her in his arms, murmuring reassurances. “It’ll be all right. Take it easy.”
She shook her head and pulled away from him, rubbing her shirtsleeve across her eyes. “It won’t be all right. No good lying about it.” She gazed at him steadily. “But I’ll see it through to the end. I guess I’ll stay and die with the rest of you.”
“We may not die.”
She shrugged, as if she had already accepted the inevitable. “Maybe not. But I’d say there’s a good chance of it.”