Virtual Affairs

Chapter 3: Cristal

“It’s only for three hours,” I told Chloe when I dropped her off at Beverly’s. “I’ll be back to get you before you know it.”

“I don’t like her bathroom,” she wailed.

I squatted down to look my daughter in the eye.

“What scares you?”

“It’s a secret.”

“You said that yesterday, too. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me.”

She hesitated for a second before she answered.

“The picture, the picture on the wall watches me.”

“I’ll see if I can get that picture taken out of there.”

“Beverly won’t let you if you ask her.”

“Then we won’t ask.”

Chloe smiled and I stood up as Beverly opened the front door. Once inside, I asked to use the bathroom. I took the picture of a man in an Army uniform off one wall and stashed it underneath a pile of magazines on top of a chest of drawers outside the bathroom. A picture like that didn’t belong on a bathroom wall, anyway.

I got to the railroad depot just in time. The new solar-powered train was inching toward the platform and thanks to that slow speed I had time to park my car and get into position at the tour marker. The mayor of Newburg, Stanley Dale, was already at his position.

“Cristal,” he said, nodding at me. He’d been mayor for fifteen years and most Newburg residents regarded him as the de facto king of the place.

“Mr. Dale,” I said, smiling at him and watching the train come to a halt.

“How many times do I have to tell you to call me Stanley?” he asked, and I was spared from having to answer by the hissing of the train doors.

The tourists were mostly Asian and mostly Chinese. The season had opened the week before, I’d already done two solo tours, and I felt confident I could make this the best tour yet.

“Hello,” I called out to the gathering throngs, grinning like mad. “This way for the tour!”

Thirty people separated from the crowd of about two hundred. All had ear buds and I exchanged pleasantries with the translator who was wearing a tiny microphone on his shirt. I turned my own little mike on, adjusted the volume, and attached it to my spring jacket. We then tested the connection from my mike to the translator and to everybody else.

I watched Mayor Dale from the corner of my eye. He was busy talking to everybody, shaking hands, squeezing shoulders, and showing his teeth. This was Newburg, the town tourists maintained, and he was making sure everybody felt welcome. He was doing the same work I was doing. Our eyes met, a silent understanding passed between us, and we went our separate ways.

“The tour is about one and a half hours long,” I said, and the translator said a sentence in soft undertones. “We will do a lot of walking and some bus riding. If you are wearing formal shoes and you have more comfortable shoes with you, now is the time to put them on.”

A number of women and at least one man began the process of changing their shoes. Some used the park benches to sit for the operation, others managed to do it standing up. A babble of voices rose up from the group. I saw the mayor taking some tourists into the train depot building, talking excitedly, while the majority of the people who had disembarked were sauntering toward the compact downtown area, cell phones at the ready.

I shielded my eyes from the sun and surveyed my group. Most of them were done with whatever shoe or wardrobe changes they’d needed to do, and I was about to commence the tour when I saw her.

She looked like a teenager but the way she kept an eye on the people around her told me she might be older than she looked. She was about five foot five, her hair was straight and black, her skin tone was light brown, she had green eyes with a hint of Asian in the eyelids, she had loose jeans and a dark sweater on to keep warm in the sixty-five-degree weather, and her wheeled carry-on suitcase bulged in a way that would have made it hard to fit it underneath the seat in front of her or in an overhead compartment.

“Wannabe,” I thought. “Great.”

“All righty, folks,” I called out, leaving thoughts of the wannabe behind, “let’s get rolling. We need to cross the footbridge first.”

I started off walking backwards toward the bridge. I probably wouldn’t have had to do that, given the translator and the ear buds in people’s ears, but I wanted to conduct the tours the same way I would’ve done them had all the people been English speakers without ear buds. It brought some old-world charm to the tour and that’s what the tourists were here for: old world charm coupled with the comfort of modern conveniences.

“This suspension bridge was built in the first half of the nineteenth century. It sways if many people walk on it at the same time, so try not to tread too heavily or other people might get seasick.”

I turned around to ascend the stairs and walked with measured steps to the other side of the bridge. When I turned back to watch my group, they were throwing pieces of white bread down into Spring Creek.

I watched them laugh every time a fish swam up to grab a crumb or a duck snatched a morsel in front of its peers competing for the same stuff and I wondered how bad it was all going to get before humans either choked in their own pollution or cleaned up their act. I’d heard rivers and lakes in China and the sea around it were too dirty for fish to live. You didn’t hear much about it in the media because the big multinational corporations paid hush money to keep their dirt under the rug, but I believed the rumors. The delight in the feeders’ faces was proof enough. They’d never seen water wildlife like that before.

I also wondered how much of the Asian pollution was finding its way to our nook of the world. How would Chloe live in this dirty world, or how would her children live if she’d be even able to conceive? I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind and cleared my throat.

“I’m sorry, but we need to keep moving.”

The people in my group frowned in my direction, but gradually dragged themselves off the bridge. They could come back to that bridge to do more throwing on some other day of their stay.

“We are walking past the bust of Abraham Lincoln in the George Grey Barnard Sculpture Garden. This patch of land used to have a gas station on it and the land was donated to the town by Gulf Oil Corporation in 1978. Soon we will approach the renovated Match Factory, home most notably to the headquarters of the American Philatelic Society.”

I fell silent to let the tourists take videos and photos of our surroundings with their cell phones. Some of the trees around us were blooming, the grass was green, and despite the noise from the nearby road you could hear some birds chirping. We crossed a small bridge over a portion of Spring Creek, which really was the remnant of the waters of the Big Spring that wasn’t being piped to people’s homes. The sun peeked from behind white clouds and a fresh breeze tousled people’s hair.

Spring was in the air.

“On the left you see the Big Spring building with the covered water on the other side. Now we are coming to the lawn area of the park beyond which you can see the Match Factory and, of course, the Street Corner Center.”

Everybody knew what the SCC was—I read it on the faces following me. Barnaby Street’s masterpiece was made of local rocks and concrete. It wasn’t big, but it could accommodate a few dozen people at a time.

I nattered on about the little edible garden on the other side of the park’s grassland (my term) and threw in a few facts about how the new, expanded town had pulled together to renovate historic buildings after the storms of ’39 and ’41, but all eyes were on the structure we were walking toward. It had gone up in a former parking lot space by State Route 144, beside a fast food restaurant and across the road from two service stations.

It had two levels, upstairs and downstairs. You did your business upstairs and washed up downstairs. About ten feet of flowerbeds extended out from the outer walls all around the structure.

“Does it cost anything to get in?”

The question came from the interpreter. Judging from the expression on the faces of my group, they all wanted to know.

“Oh, no. It’s totally free. In fact, you get a flower after your deposit.”

An excited murmur rose from the crowd. I smiled and turned away to ascend the steps of the “bridge” that would take me over the railroad tracks and straight into the SCC’s second floor.

“Ladies go to the right and gentlemen to the left. We’ll meet on the ground floor in ten minutes to continue the tour,” I said, opened the door on the right, and smiled at the women filing into the building. The interpreter held the door open for the men.

I got into the first open stall I saw. The fact I saw an open stall at all meant there were less than fifteen women in my tourist group: That was the number of stalls on the women’s side. Men had the same number.

I turned my mike off, locked the door behind me, hung my backpack-handbag from a hook on the door, pulled my pants down, and sat on the wooden seat without bothering to wipe it with one of the wet wipes offered from a slot in the stall wall. The women’s side had its own attendant and she wiped the seats whenever possible. I peed through the round hole my butt was hanging out of, wiped myself with the recycled-paper toilet tissue, and got up. The fans hummed overhead and I was glad to pull my pants up again because the gentle breeze I could feel on my butt made me feel strange.

I avoided looking into the vat that held the pee and the poop for my stall. The raw materials composted in a year, the new soil was spread out onto the flowerbeds, and the process began all over again with empty vats that filled according to how many people made deposits into them. Most of the waste material was water that evaporated with the help of the fans. Smell in the stall was minimal and was accented by eucalyptus. I’d read it was Barnaby Street’s favorite scent. The attendant most likely spritzed it around the place a few times a day.

I got out of the stall and made my way to the stairs that took me down to the first floor. Skylights lit my way—none of the electric lights were turned on upstairs and only a couple spotlights were lit on the ground floor.

“Yeah, I know you have to pay to get into many European bathrooms, but it’s not that way here,” a young man wearing a Street Corner Center T-shirt was explaining to a half-dozen of my group members. “Like Barnaby always says, ‘You make a deposit, you should get something back.’ So here you go! You can all get one of our tulips in a recycled, biodegradable pot. Would you like me to wrap it up for you?”

People lined up to get their tulips and I had a feeling they’d try to smuggle them back to China or whatever their home country was. I was about to take a tour around the whole floor, look at the educational displays and whatnot, when the wannabe approached me.

“I have to get back home. Family emergency.”

“Right. You need a ride?”

“Yeah.”

“Go across the street to the convenience store. They have a taxi service. You should ask for Harriet at the front desk.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Good luck.” I smiled and snapped a picture of her with my cell phone as I was pretending to fiddle with my mike.

She tried to smile back and headed for the door. No one else noticed her leave.

I watched the people in my group trickle downstairs. The interpreter came to see me.

“Everybody’s accounted for except one,” he said.

“It’s fine. One person had to leave, family emergency.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, and the creases on his forehead disappeared.

We left the SCC, piled into a bus, drove around the downtown area, toured two Victorian mansions, visited Union Cemetery, talked about the Underground Railroad, walked down High Street, and disbanded. All in all, a successful tour, but my mind kept wandering. I thought about the wannabe and wondered if she’d be taken in.

The start of the second tour of the day took my mind off her.