Lighthouse Island Read Online Free

undersupervisor in Urban Drainage and Flow Control in the Eighth Gerrymander who mapped in the wee hours; Albert Burke held some kind of job with Furniture Supply and he actually walked over the rise and fall of the land, house by house, in the far north, Fourth Gerrymander, Neighborhood Fifteen, which was at one time known as Minneapolis, and drew in the topographical lines as things felt and bodily known.
    Are we truly born to formulate cities? James had himself driven to the interspaces, traveling by ambulance to the limits of his own part of the city, which was a micronation, or had been, to look out on the slums that lay between while his attendants groused and snorted. To leave the dense city, even to approach the small spaces in between urban concentrations was, to them, like approaching death and starvation. They drove for days, through the confusion of broken freeways, crowded by dense housing.
    They drove past hundreds of thousands of workers’ barracks crowded and filthy and in other areas dense fields of cactus pads fat with glycerin surrounded by a mineral landscape that long ago had been stripped of soil. They came to a place where winds tore across the interurban deserts and carried with them dust and sand grains and lost kites and clothing from distant rooftop clotheslines and wads of dried grasses as coarse as thatch.
    On the edge of the Fourth Gerrymander were one-room shacks spaced precisely three hundred yards apart so that they dotted the landscape in endless squares. James wheeled himself out of the ambulance and down a ramp. He refused to use the electric controls so his arms and shoulders were very strong. He was somewhere in one of the old national entities that had been layered on top of another and older national entity. This had once been Mexico. Then the United States. Then the Western Cessions.
    His attendants stood behind him in the unceasing wind among broken walls to look out at the wellheads that drilled for water in a landscape so simple it seemed to have just been made. Dirt. Sand. Rocks. They drilled for the gyppy fossil water of ancient seas that lay in the seeping layers of limestone at fifty-four thousand feet. At this particular place James could see great ships half buried in the sands. A gulf of the sea had drawn off and left them at some ancient port. Their rusted prows rose a hundred feet above gray dunes. The Shunta Maru, the Ramik Fane .
    Maybe we are on Mars, James thought. The wind tore at his short brown hair. That’s possible. But then would the Big Dipper look the same? Would Polaris still be in the geographical north? His attendants went back inside the ambulance and played cards and then wrapped themselves in their coats and fell asleep around a catalytic heater. The stars emerged slowly and then James sat alone under a clear black heaven where the constellations took on a fierce intensity, and indeed they were all in their accustomed places with the Dipper on one side of the firmament and the Chair on the other and between the two, Polaris dimly shining.

 
    Chapter 3
    I n the apartment building of the family that had been told to adopt her, there lived an older man named Thin Sam Kenobi who used to sit at the entrance of the apartment building and make disposable jewelry things out of the foil from cigarette packages and soy cheese packages.
    Nadia, in the ardor of her orphan heart, decided to love Thin Sam like a father and to think about him and do things for him. She and Thin Sam had made themselves a bench by stacking volumes of scavenged hardback books and putting planks across them. Nadia’s hands were short with blunt nails and still brown with last summer’s sun. The winter was dry and arctic, so Thin Sam had made a rocket stove for them and they held their hands out to it.
    It was only October and bitterly cold but sitting outside was better than inside, the TV on Deafening, all of them drinking up their gin allowance, the air clouded with