LITMIR.BIZ

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      At the kitchen table, Maiko flipped through the remaining sections of the newspaper. She was holding the classifieds section when she paused to study his features again. “What will you do here? Once you’ve recovered?”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Here in the city. For work.”

      He shrugged. He glanced at the brush she had used on him. “Paint.”

      She stared. “You’re an artist?”

      He shrugged again.

      Her gaze grew hard, her mouth turned down. “That may have been fine when your were a man of means. But now you need to survive. What kind of work do you do? Actual work?”

      He was silent. Even the thought of saying it pained him.

      “You’ll need one. You’ll need money.” She appeared very serious about this.

      “I used to work in accounting,” he blurted. “Bookkeeping.”

      It took a few years, but one day his father gave Michael an occupation to go with his new body. Since he couldn’t risk going outside and damaging himself and he didn’t want to see anybody (which was his father’s coded way of saying nobody wanted to see him), Michael was given a pile of bills to go over. Why don’t you go ahead and compare them to the checkbook ledger, his father had suggested. At the time, Michael had been drawing for hours a day and growing frustrated by the crude results. This, he realized, was his father’s way of telling him to give it up.

      Despite the sad facts of the story, Maiko’s face brightened. “Perfect. A city always needs bookkeepers. But wait, you need a work permit.”

      There was a long pause. He wasn’t ready to make a decision on working in the city. The possibilities of his new life were already narrowing; on the bus, it had seemed like an open field, and now a portion of the landscape was receding inside this mushroomy den. He wasn’t one for analyzing his emotions in the moment, only after, and usually through drawings in his notebook that were violent or otherwise transgressive. He was beginning to feel afraid, and excited, and hopeless all at once—and he felt a faint crack within a previously inaccessible region. He had never asked himself “What do I want?”, only “How can I escape?”

      “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he muttered, though his thoughts kept returning to the one-eyed man and the signal broadcasting his voice into the apartment. There was a starting point.

      “Don’t worry. I’ll show you how to survive in the city,” Maiko said. “You’ll learn from the mistakes I’ve made.”

      7

      THAT AFTERNOON, ARMED WITH JARS OF WHEAT PASTE, MICHAEL and Maiko plastered flyers advertising his services as an accountant on telephone poles and trees, streetlights and street signs. Without paying much attention, they covered posters advertising cigarettes and records and hamburgers. They hid posters insisting the south Stay Independent! They buried fliers declaring Annexation is the Only Way. He felt self-conscious, at first, but no one seemed to mind. Flyering was a way of life in the city—and for the first time, Michael felt like he belonged.

      Two teenagers in filthy clothes lingered on the steps of an empty shopfront. One of them, a boy with red hair, carried a backpack. The other, a girl dressed in black and wearing a beret and black gloves, motioned for Michael to come closer. He could no longer see Maiko across the street and hesitated. They had been flyering for hours and he was tired.

      “Hey, you,” the red-haired boy said.

      He nearly dropped the glass jar of wheat paste. The wooden applicator was becoming soggy. “Me?” he asked.

      “Yes, you! Come here. We have a question for you,” the girl said.

      Michael took a few wary steps in their direction. “Yes?”

      “What are you doing?”

      Michael thought about the trouble with the inspectors on the bus, and then the one-eyed man. He didn’t know how to answer these two now. Anything he said could make the situation worse. So he stood. Why were no other pedestrians on the street?

      “What is that?”

      “It’s paste,” Michael said. “I’m trying to start my own business.”

      “Do you need help?” the girl with the beret said. Her hand reached for the jar of paste. Michael stepped off the curb and stood in the gutter.

      “Careful, you might get hit,” the red-headed boy said.

      “You should listen to my brother,” the girl said. Michael nodded. He wished just then he had had a sister instead of two brothers. He liked how the two were a team.

      “Maybe you can help me,” he said. “Do you happen to know a one-eyed man?”

      They shook their heads.

      “Or where the radio station is?”

      “Near the lighthouse,” the boy said. “You can’t miss it. Look, do you mind if we borrow some of your paste?”

      “We’re not really borrowing it if we’re going to use it,” the girl said. “Borrowing means you’re going to give it back!”

      They all laughed.

      “What do you want it for?”

      “We’re trying to start a business too.”

      “What kind?”

      “Hey, what’s wrong with your face?”

      Michael turned away. He dropped a sheaf of flyers. The adolescents ran to him and picked up the sheets of paper. Michael was secretly thankful, and when they put their hands on his shoulders, comforting him, he had an intense desire to make them his new friends. And they had given him critical information to help locate his notebooks. He was already planning to draw them once he got his things back.

      “I can’t give you all of it,” he said, motioning to the paste.

      “That’s okay. Half should be enough.”

      The boy with the backpack produced a small empty container for butter. They used the wooden applicator to plop in half of the paste.

      “Thanks.”

      Michael eyed the boy’s hand—he was holding an elegant pen.

      “What about your pen?”

      They looked at each other. Bargaining was essential here, in the city. He couldn’t let people, even kids, simply walk all over him.

      “Give it to him,” the hatted girl said.

      They handed Michael the pen. It was beautiful: black metal and with a fine nib. Michael was already imagining the things he could draw.

      “See you around,” the red headed boy blurted with a laugh.

      The two ran off. Michael was pleased. He went along several more blocks, posting more flyers. When he was out of paste, he headed back. Eventually, he saw Maiko and crossed the street to meet up with her.

      “You still have a lot of flyers left,” she said.

      “I ran out of paste.”

      “You must have used too much, then. Oh well, let’s move on. But first, let’s stop at a pudding shop. There’s one a few blocks that way.”

      They walked on her side of the street, past jewelers, laundries, seed companies, and lithographers. Michael warmed inside. What would it be like to have his own friends to visit? His reverie broke when Maiko gasped.

      Across the way, he recognized parts of his flyers by the corners of blue paper, but now they were covered by new flyers, scrawled in calligraphy: THE NORTH IS RIGHT!

      There were hundreds of them; overwhelming the telephone poles and streetlights and clipped under the windshield wipers of

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