“That was probably me. I barely saw Donald smoke a cigar in all the time I knew him.”
I feel him pause, testing the words before he says them. Fifty years of sleeping beside Rick—living with Rick—and I know him well.
“Karma… do you still miss him?” His voice is tentative, full. “Do you still… love him?” I hear the vulnerability in his tone.
In the dark, I think for a minute.
“You don’t have to answer,” he says, and there is sadness now, too.
“I want to answer,” I say. “Do I miss him? No.”
I feel Rick exhale beside me.
“Do I love him?” I say, and the tension returns to his body.
“What I feel is… nostalgia. A little sadness. For what might have been. For the life we never got to live together.”
“You don’t have to—” he starts.
“No, let me tell you. This is a conversation that has been a long time coming.”
I pull away, a little, there in the dark, just to get my boundaries. To collect my thoughts. Do I love Donald, whom I haven’t seen for half a century? Do I love the memory of Donald? Do I love Rick?
I can feel the dread of the man lying beside me. He is afraid of what he will hear.
“I do feel that. I have to be honest. A wistful kind of ‘if only’ along with a lot of curiosity. Where is he? Well, I know where he is… he’s right over the hill.” I laugh, a little. “What is he doing; what is he thinking; what was he thinking, back forever ago when he went into Silo 1 and sent me into Silo… which one are we?”
“Two. We are Silo 2.”
“Oh.” I laugh again. “That’s funny, to know we have a number. Well, at least it’s a pretty good number.”
Rick isn’t laughing.
“So. That’s what I think about Donald.” I hug Rick.
He is silent.
“But what I think about you is… I love you.” There is a sound that could be a repressed sob, and he reaches for me.
“I love you, Rick, and I have for a long time. We’ve been together so long—we’ve gone through so much. You used to be… closed. Maybe even cruel. When you were head of IT.”
“I know, Karma. I’m sorry, I—”
“Shh.” I put my finger over his mouth. “I’m not looking for an apology. That was decades ago. Since the time of the uprising—or the manufactured uprising—when we were locked downstairs in the floor under IT—you’ve been different.”
He waits for a moment. “I wanted to be different… I came out of that changed. The violence, all the deaths… everything we went through down there. It made me question everything.”
“Do you remember all that?”
“I didn’t at first. It came back in bits and pieces over the years. I can’t remember most of the time we were down underneath level thirty-four. But I remember, of course, the night Jeff tried to kill me. And you saved my life.” He wraps his arms around me. “You saved my life, Karma. Everything was different after that.”
“It was different for me, too.”
“Is that when you… started to love me?”
I smile, in the dark, and lean in to kiss him. “I don’t know when it started. Maybe I even loved you a little bit when I was married to Donald.”
“Really?” he says. “You naughty girl.”
I laugh. “Only in the sense that you were the hot guy that was free… and I knew you were attracted to me.”
“I always tried to keep that hidden.”
“Well, you might have kept it hidden from Donald, but I could tell. I found it flattering. I loved Donald desperately, but I was so lonesome, and bored, and it was nice to know that someone seemed interested, when Donald was far away and busy all the time—”
“He was totally loyal to you. Always.”
“Yes. I figured that. I hoped so, anyway. But there was Anna….”
“Right. The beautiful ex, always lurking around him.”
“And now he’s with her.” A visceral anger flows through me. “I could kill him. I could kill her.” I’m surprised at my venomous thoughts. After all these years…
“Don’t blame him. Donald was a pawn.”
“What is he doing now, Rick? Can you ask them—over there in Silo 1? I would give anything to know.”
“I don’t know… and I don’t think they would tell me, or Mars, if he asked. I can’t talk to them. No one communicates with them except the IT head.”
He pauses. “Anyway. Donald would be doing something quite deadening, I’m sure. That’s the job I trained for. Living here is—it’s no picnic, but it’s much better, Karma, I can tell you.”
“Better to be a puppet than a puppetmaster?”
“Hell, yes. The puppetmasters have to live with themselves.”
I breath slowly for a moment, and feel Rick beside me, still waiting.
“I love you, Rick. You are my husband. I’ve spent most of my life with you. Living in the Silo has its hellish moments, but being with you is one of the blessings.”
He rolls over and puts his old, whiskery face beside mine. A face I’ve known for so long.
I can feel him smiling.
15
Ruth walks beside me as we make our way up to the next meeting. There is no one else on the stairs, and I speak softly.
“How much does Mars tell you, Ruth?”
She snorts quietly. Instead of answering, she turns to me. “How much did Rick tell you when he was head of IT?”
“Nothing. Then.” I look at the lovely woman who married my son. “But now he tells me everything.”
Ruth’s eyes widen.
“You didn’t answer me, Ruth. What does Mars tell you?”
“Hardly anything. But I find things out. I snoop.”
“Snoop? Does he bring… papers home?”
“No. But he has a computer hookup at home. I’ve hacked into it.”
“Do you think he knows?”
Ruth hesitates. “How loyal are you to Mars, Karma? I mean… would you say anything that would put me in danger?”
“In danger?” My whole body stills at the thought. “In danger from your husband? From Mars?” I find the idea shocking. “What… what do you think he’d do?”
“I don’t know. Would he… send me out to Clean?”
I look at her to see if she is joking. “No, Ruth. No, I… don’t be ridiculous.”
She looks down at her hands, small and still girlish, though she has a twenty-four-year-old daughter.
“Ruth.” I take one of those hands in mine, as we stop on a landing to let me breathe. She looks up at me. “What have you been doing?”
“For years… I’ve been feeding information to my family in Mechanical.” She is whispering now. “Whatever I could find. On the computer, in the rare paper he brings home in his pockets. I’ve been searching for information about how this… this whole thing works. And I’ve been telling them.”
Once again, she pauses, and I can see her gauging my loyalties.
“Karma, I went after Mars. I saw him, and I liked him… years ago, before we were married. But to my family, this was a political marriage. A way for me to marry up, literally.” She gives a rueful laugh. “To get connected with the upper echelons of the Silo—and the IT hierarchy. They voted on it.”
I drop her hand, stunned. My mind can’t wrap itself around this.
“Ruth… do you love my son? Did you ever love him?” I face her directly. “Or was this all a set-up?”
She doesn’t answer, and I can’t read her eyes.
I remember the beautiful wedding day, the ceremony. And the explosion down in Mechanical, perfectly timed so that the head of IT and his shadow would be fully occupied and as far away from the Down Deep as possible.
“Answer me.” I grip her arm with an anger that frightens me.
“I do. I love him, Karma,” she says. “Now.”
There are emotions swirling in her gaze that seem to include shame and fear and a request for unde
rstanding. I drop her arm and step back, remembering to keep my voice low.
“Why did you tell me this? After all these years?”
“Because… Karma. Loving Mars now might not get us through this. At least not… together.”
16
I’m on the landing for seventeen when I hear the shouting. A group of teens—I recognize some of the Daggers from the resistance meeting—is standing a level below, and someone is in the middle who is definitely not one of them. The few people around me have stopped and are clustered at the edge of the stairway, gaping and pointing.
It’s a girl. It’s Sheela, the girl from the Mids that Ben likes—he introduced me to her. I can’t tell what’s going on except that she is surrounded, and being taunted. There is a feeling in the air of expectation, as though something is just about to give. I lean over the railing and shout her name.
“Sheela,” I shout again, even louder.
She looks up. There is at once fear and defiance in her face, and a strength I am pleased to see. I wave my hands wildly in an attempt to get the attention of the Daggers, but if they see, they don’t care to pay attention.
They start to push her. Slowly at first, then faster. As if she is a toy, or a ball, being shoved between all the young men. Her movements, at first controlled, become panicked. She is lifted—and is now well above their heads, being passed back and forth among the gang members. She is nearing the edge.
I hear her screaming.
What can I do? I am too slow on the stairs. By the time I get down there…
I remember my canteen, in my small pack, and scramble to pull it off my shoulder. Reaching into the bag and grabbing the canteen, I open it with trembling hands. I lean over the edge of the stairs and let the water arc out, doing my best to send the stream in the direction of the Daggers. A trickle and then a small stream of water hits one or two of them on the head.
“What the hell?” Faces tip up to see me and yell upward, distracted from their intensive focus on Sheela. She is still being held, her feet thrashing, but the passing around has stopped.
The other people on my level, who were standing, transfixed by what was happening, get the idea. Two others empty their canteens in a wide swath of liquid that hits most of the gang members. Someone throws down a scarf, another something heavy that misses and caroms into the empty space beside the stairway to fall fast and hard far below, landing with a sickening crunch. Others on my level start to race down the three spiral turns to the next landing.
Amidst shouts and confusion, Sheela is hustled to safety.
I sit down on the last stair and try to stop shaking.
17
Abe sits in my kitchen, his strong arms crossed on his chest. “I thought it was going so well,” he says.
“Have they been working with us on the… project?”
“Absolutely. The Daggers up top, the Dirts in the Mids—they’re making a huge difference. With another three dozen eyes and ears to ferret out suspicious pipes and find those hidden charges, we’ve made more progress in the last month than we have in the last couple of years. The Down Deep is way ahead of us—and now that they’ve got the Gears working with them, because of Mom’s family connections down there—it’s only a matter of time before they find the cameras too. We’re going to map this whole silo in the next few years.” He stops and looks at his hands. “There hadn’t been any problems until now. We set up a kind of buffer zone between the gang territories—”
“So what happened?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.” He reaches across the table to me and gives a grim smile. “Thank the Silo you were there, Grandma.”
18
I am dying. I can feel my heart stuttering occasionally, my breath shallow in my lungs. My legs slow and weaken every day.
One day soon the breath will stop sweeping through my body and the swish of blood will cease forever.
Often I dream of dying and seeing the sky again.
The sky of my memory is glorious in variety and colors. From the salmon pink of dawn over a still lake to the clean clear blue of the heavens above a mountain range. A riotous sunset reflected by the ocean as the tropical sun sets in a sizzling path of red. A spangled night where the Milky Way makes a trail through the heavens and the moon is the faintest fingernail of white.
19
Ruth walks with me as I slowly make my way up the stairs. My knees ache as I lift each leg. She is patient.
We talk, quietly, as we walk. When someone comes by—and everyone overtakes us—we turn the subject to something bland.
“What are you having for dinner tonight?” she asks me as a porter hustles by.
“Depends on what Abe brings home from the Mids,” I say. “I think he’ll have some greens, from the farm Ben works on.”
As soon as we are alone on the staircase again, she lowers her voice. “He has some good news, too. It looks as though we have breached the impasse between the Daggers and the Dirts. They’ve agreed to put up with each other—if reluctantly.”
She stops talking as a couple of young people make their way down the stairs.
“That’s great,” I say after they pass. “So we’re in good shape.”
“Yes. We’ve done so well in finding cameras that we think we must have all of them… or nearly all. Much faster than we would have expected. But of course, we won’t do anything about cutting them off until we are ready to go dark. Which could be a long time.”
I nod, and stop for a breather on the next landing. We keep our faces outward over the railing so no one can hear.
“What we could really use,” Ruth says under her breath, “is a peek at the outside. To find out about exterior cameras, and anything else that might give us a clue on pipelines—though they’re probably underground.”
I let out a puff of air meant as a laugh. “Good luck with that. How is anyone ever going to see what’s on the outside of the Silo? Unless they’re sent out to Clean.”
“I know,” she says.
“And anyone who’s sent to Clean is going to have more important things on his mind, don’t you think?” I turn toward the stairs again and resume the climb. It doesn’t take long before I’m out of breath. “How about the other… items you’ve been looking for?” I ask.
“Still work to do on the explosive charges. We think we’ve found the gas lines that are coming in from outside. But we don’t know what they’re used for, so that’s a big puzzle.”
A family with a baby comes up the stairs and smiles at us when they pass, the father proud of the little bundle on his chest.
“And supper for you, dear?” I ask Ruth.
“Oh. Probably just soup. Not much cause for cooking these days.”
“Oh?”
“Mars and Celeste usually eat down on thirty-four. I don’t see much of either one of them lately.”
I take her elbow and pull her around to face me.
“They don’t come home at the end of the day?”
“No.” She rubs her eyes. “Not for the last… month or so. Celeste comes home late, to sleep. And Mars… Mars doesn’t come home at all.”
“Where is he sleeping?” I try to keep my voice low, because there are others behind us now, about to embark on another spiral of the great staircase.
“I don’t know,” she says, and she folds her arms across her chest. “And I don’t care.”
20
I’m sitting down to tea when there is a knock on the door.
“I’ll get it, Karma,” Rick says, and he pushes himself up from his chair. “Mars,” he says, swinging the door open. “How nice to see you.”
Rick turns to me with raised eyebrows, and I know he’s wondering why we are getting this unexpected visit.
“Mars, honey,” I say, and make my way to the door to hug him. “I didn’t know you were coming over tonight.”
“It’s not a happy occasion,” he says. “Do you have any wine?”
“Um….” I have
to think for a minute. “Rick, do we have anything left of those bottles we got for that dinner in the cafeteria?” I start to move toward the cabinet where we might keep such things.
“Never mind,” Mars says, and he slumps down into his father’s chair without asking. I can smell wine on his breath, so this wouldn’t be his first drink. “Ruth left me.”
“What?” I struggle to understand his meaning. “Ruth left you?” I look at my son’s face and see the pain etched there. “Oh Mars.”
“Are you certain?” asks Rick. “I mean… maybe she went down to see her family? I’m sure—”
“Yes. I’m positive!” Mars stands up and begins pacing around the enclosed space. “She left a note.” He pulls a scrap of paper out of his pocket and throws it on the table.
Rick picks it up. “I’m sorry Mars,” he reads aloud. “We aren’t a family any more. I’m going back to my people in the Down Deep.”
I’m stunned. “I just saw Ruth… yesterday. She didn’t say anything….” But even as I say that I realize that she’s been talking about the problems between her and Mars for years.
Mars is standing beside the stove, balling one hand into a fist and hitting his other palm.
“Were you… fighting?” Rick asks.
Mars shakes his head. “We’re weren’t fighting. We weren’t speaking. We haven’t really been… happy… for a long time. But I never thought—”
I stand up to hug him, and he allows me to put my arms around him, but he’s like a rock, taut with tension, bristling with anger. “I’m so sorry, Mars. I’m sure she’ll cool off in a bit, and—”
“Why is she always so stubborn?” He is walking in circles again, the kitchen seemingly to small to cage him. “Always running off to those meetings—trying to save the Silo. Trying to get us all killed.”
He punches the wall beside him, hard, and winces as his knuckles come away raw and bleeding.
And then he turns toward me, his face a mask of anger. “You encouraged her! With all this nonsense about memories of some paradise… some magical land that people used to live in. Filling them with myths about trees and flowers and butterflies. Who gives a shit about butterflies?” His voice is threatening but his expression betrays agony and despair. “These meetings, and all that talk about what was. As if that had anything to do with reality. As if we had any choices about how we live. How we survive here.” He stares down at me.
Karma of the Silo: The Collection Page 21