Our story so far: Alice Stickly, a hardbitten science writer for the New York Times, has fallen into an alternate reality on her way to cover a biotech conference in San Francisco. Desperate to get back to her highly competitive job, her ailing mother, and her fiance, she is searching for the mysterious Wizards' Collective. Her journey takes her to the children's house in the Wetlands Block.
Mercedes,
my charming hostess and guide, had to go home
and pound some comfrey with a pestle, or whatever
one does to make tinctures. To my own surprise,
I felt a small twinge of mixed regret and panic
watching her walk away. She seemed to somehow
represent such security as I had in this odd place.
Tad and Lilly, those two smiling children, offered
to guide me to the children's house. We set off
down another long pathway that wound between more
gardens, but this one had a bicycle/skateboard/rollerblade
path down the center, where kids on various sets
of wheels hurtled by in headlong abandon. The
path curved and meandered, and in the bends were
charming little gardens of tough but child-friendly
plants: lamb's ears to stroke, dandelions to blow,
snapdragons to snap, and honeysuckle to suck.
There were small ponds where groups of toddlers
squatted, watching fish flit between the roots
of water lilies, and there were swings and slides
and merry-go-rounds shaped like animals and birds
and faery boats, and climbing structures like
giant spiderwebs--all in all, it was a children's
paradise, and indeed, I seemed to be the only
adult on it, which gave me a rather insecure feeling.
"This is the kid's track," Tad told
me. "It goes all the way from downtown out
to the edge of the city, on the Bay. There's one
in every direction."
"Only kids are allowed, or grownups if they're
with a kid," Lilly said, "so we can
ride our bikes all over the city, without worrying
about cars and stuff."
"What about, uh--" I didn't know how
to broach the subject of kidnappers, child molesters,
pornography rings, and the odd psychotic who plagued
children in my world. Even thinking about such
things seemed to taint the atmosphere, and I must
admit I felt no nostalgia for the nastier side
of life in my world. "Problems? Safety?"
Lilly pointed at a house down the block that had
a big sunflower painted on the door. "Every
block has a Kid's House" she said. "You
can always run in there if you need a grownup
for something--if you fall or get hurt or get
scared."
Down the block stood a giant sculpture, depicting
a woman with her arms stretched wide.
"Who are the culture heroes?" I asked.
"The statues?"
"They are famous childcare workers,"
Tad said.
"Oh. What did they do that was so heroic?
Save kids from a burning building? Repel an attack
of muggers?"
Tad shrugged. "No. They were just people
that kids liked a lot."
"Where I come from, we have statues of generals
and statesmen, important people," I said.
"Not babysitters."
Lilly made a face. "Eww. How weird!"
"Why would you want a statue of someone who
killed a lot of people?" Tad asked. "I
think it's better to remember people who were
nice to kids."
At this point, I was getting tired, and grumpy.
"How much farther is it?" I asked.
"About a mile," Tad said.
"A mile! My feet hurt!" I longed for
a civilized place, where I could hail a taxi,
make my daily contribution to global warming,
and buy a pack of cigarettes. It seemed rather
petty of me, to miss my poisonous comforts in
the face of all this shining peace and health,
but I am who I am: a dark stain on any rainbow.
In fact, the radiant health all around me felt
a bit oppressive. I couldn't live up to it.
"Let's get bikes," Lilly suggested.
A thought appeared to strike her, and she turned
to me anxiously. "Can you ride a bike?"
"Twenty years ago I could. They say you never
forget."
I had vaguely happy memories of summer vacations
on Cape Cod, wheeling along in the sea air, but
I hadn't been on one of the contraptions in at
least twenty years. We ducked into one of the
houses with a sunflower painted on it. In the
back yard stood a rack of white-painted bicycles.
A group of kids were shooting baskets against
the house, which must have created a hell of a
racket indoors. At a picnic table, a young woman
was supervising a group of toddlers who were fingerpainting
all over each other, it seemed, as much as on
the papers before them. She smiled at us.
"We're taking bikes," Tad called, and
she nodded.
"The white ones are borrower bikes,"
Lilly said "Anyone can use them, and when
you're done, you just leave them off."
"And who takes care of them?" I asked.
"The kids on each street maintain whatever
ones are at their house," Tad said. "It's
how we all learn bike mechanics."
I picked a large bike from the rack, and looked
at it a bit dubiously. It was a decent ten-speed,
not a clunker. But it had indeed been years since
I'd ridden, and I wasn't too sure about the project.
But I mounted, and it didn't buck or kick. Lilly
and Tad followed me out, and back to the street.
After one terrible moment of vertigo, I found
my balance. We rode out into the wider pavement
in the middle of the lane. My skills came back
to me, and my muscles were strong from the many
hours I'd spent at the gym on the exercise bike.
And I had to admit it was pleasant, gliding along
past gardens and artworks and small groups of
children playing happily together--that is, when
I wasn't gasping in fear as small forms on rollerblades
darted in front of me. I almost felt like a kid
again, myself. Maybe if...no, when, I got back
home I'd talk Jason into renting bikes in Central
Park some Sunday. Although I had to admit it seemed
unlikely--I couldn't picture him on the back of
a bicycle. Mercedes, now, I could picture her
wheeling down the pathway, looking back and smiling,
her long hair flowing out in the wind. For the
first time I began to feel a slight sense of regret
when I thought about getting home. I pushed it
firmly away Idyllic utopias were for weak, passive,
dreamy sort of people. I had important things
to do--not the least being that biotech conference
I was supposed to be at tomorrow.
In almost no time at all, the pathway ended at
a large, circular playground with a carousel in
the middle. Tad and Lilly took me over to a big
house painted in bright colors, with a mural on
the garage door depicting what appeared to be
a happy African village in the midst of a dance
festival. I would have given a lot for just one
mural showing a group of sullen-faced delinquents
about to mug some hapless pedestrian, or anything
other than this relentless cheer, but I was stuck
here. I followed the kids in.
A tall, smiling young man with very dark skin
and a flashing smile was surrounded by a pack
of kids, tugging at his shirt, slapping him on
the back, asking him ten questions at once. He
extricated himself and greeted me. "I'm Dialo,"
he said. "I'm the head childcarer here. What
can I do for you?"
"I'm looking for the Wizards," I said.
"I'm trying to get back to reality--my reality,
the real reality, that is. I was told they could
help me."
"Ah, another Slipper. What a shame, you just
missed them," he said. "But since you're
here, do you want to look around?"
The bottom floor of the house was devoted to children,
full of toys, games and books, and devoid of anything
sharp or inflammable. There was a toddler's room
full of big blocks and dolls and stuffed animals,
and rooms for older children full of art supplies.
The back yard had play equipment, a garden, and
a treehouse.
"This is the very first kids' house,"
Dialo said with pride. "It set the pattern
for them all. Once, before reality split, this
was a housing project so dangerous that kids couldn't
go outside to play. Some of the grandmothers started
talking one day, about how they hated to keep
the kids cooped up all the time, watching TV,
never being able to roam free like they used to
do when they were kids. They started asking, 'What
would it take for the city to be safe for kids
to run around and play and ride their bikes?'
So they organized the people on their street.
Some of them volunteered their homes to be to
be safe houses for kids. Others kept an eye on
the street, watching out for bad folks or just
for kids who needed a grownup to set them straight
on something. They got their street together,
and then organized the next block, and the next,
until they had safe path from out here down to
the downtown public library.
"Then they started to think about the childcare
thing. There were a lot of single mothers on the
street, who were paying half their salary in childcare.
They got this idea, and decided to pool their
money and rent a big house where kids could go
any time of day or night. They got a couple of
the women who on the verge of homelessness to
live there and paid them something just to be
there, to bake cookies when kids came in after
school, to watch the little ones. That way the
kids on the street always had a place to go. If
they had trouble at home, or if their parents
had to work late, they never had to be alone.
There were always other kids to play with, and
a shoulder to cry on if they needed it."
"Sounds good," I said. I was beginning
to feel restless. I'm not fond of children, as
I've said, and packs of them were swarming about
my feet, looking up at me curiously, and interrupting
Dialo with demands for attention. My friends who
do have kids seemed to spend all their time arranging
for them to be driven to various lessons and play
dates, and all their conversational time obsessing
about which school to send them to, bo-o-oring!
"It was such a successful model that it spread
throughout the city," he went on. "In
the old days, when we were still part of your
reality, we used to have two tiers of kids--the
upper middle class kids whose lives got more and
more structured and scheduled, and then the poor
kids, who got plopped in front of a TV. And none
of them got to run around freely and play outside,
like kids should. But now, all our kids run together,
all of them have safe places to go to, any kid
who has trouble at home has someone to listen
and offer help."
"This is all very admirable," I said.
"I'd love to write an article about it, if
I had any hope of publishing it. But I really
need to find those Wizards."
"Oh, right. The Wizards. Well, from here
they were heading down to the Bioremediation Sites,"
Dialo said. "Tad and Lilly know their way
across the Wetlands. They can take you there."
I thanked him, and with a sense of relief, bid
goodbye to the children, and headed out again.
To Be Continued
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