“So it’s true that he’s the one who told them?”
“He’s one of the ones. Soon as they started rounding people up, suddenly all these proud Southern patriots started squealing. He didn’t just give you up, he must have told them a hundred names. Truth is, I’d have killed him myself if my father hadn’t made me promise not to. But that promise is binding on me—it sure as hell ain’t binding on you.”
They traveled slowly on the highways that circled the Southern capital, theirs the only old fossil car on the road. She saw now that all the other vehicles around them were distant descendants of the old Tik-Toks, powered entirely by the sun. She remembered the old wartime footage of hollering Southerners on the back of huge fossil trucks, revving their engines in defiance. All that was gone now, and looking at the roads you’d think there never lived a single Southerner who’d ever wanted anything to do with the old fuel that started the war. Drivers in nearby cars looked at the sluggish fossil sedan in which she rode, some with curiosity at the sight of the ancient thing, others with disgust. But none tried to stop them, none said a word.
She remembered something Albert Gaines once told her all those years ago in Patience. He said when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for, you can agree or disagree, but you can’t ever call it a lie. Right or wrong, he said, a man from our country always says exactly what he means, and stands by what he says.
Even that, it turned out, was a lie.
SHE CAME HOME just before dawn, sneaking in over the eastern seawall. I cracked my bedroom window open and very quietly I leaned out to watch her. By the side of the shed she stripped naked and washed her clothes and herself with water from the garden hose.
Hers is the first naked body I remember. I looked on, mesmerized by the strange scars and disfigurements I assumed were the property of all adult skin.
Excerpted from:
REASONABLY SATISFACTORY AND ENCOURAGING TO ALL: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE REUNIFICATION TALKS
DAVID CASTRO (Peace Office Senior Negotiator, 2089–2095): I remember the day their delegation came up from Atlanta. We spent six months preparing for it, so that by the time negotiations started, we had thousands of pages of notes on every conceivable topic. Border controls, restitution, prisoner swapping, you name it. Before we came to the table, we knew exactly how far the President was willing to go, how much he was willing to concede. We thought we’d covered all our bases.
Then the first day of negotiations came around. I remember we were meeting in a large boardroom in the basement of the Peace Office. There were five of us on the Union side, a small delegation because we had no real authority. Everything had to be approved later on in the Executive Building. But when the South’s negotiating team showed up, there must have been two dozen of them. Each one had a different title, Director of Revolutionary This, Secretary of Patriotic That. One guy gave me his card; it said he was a Constitutional Defense Officer.
We thought they’d want to start with travel restrictions, or amnesty for all those rebels we had sitting in the detention camps. Or maybe they were desperate and would want to talk money. They’d held out for so long with their stubborn reliance on fossil fuels while the rest of the world moved on, their cities were falling apart, and we thought we could get them to make all kinds of concessions in exchange for infrastructure money.
We had a little agenda ready for them with a few proposed starting points to kick off the negotiations. But I still remember, the very first day, their chef de mission sits at the table, pushes the agenda aside without reading it, and says to us, “First thing’s first: I don’t want to hear a single one of you ever use the word Surrender.”
It turned out they didn’t give a damn about travel restrictions or prisoner swaps or any of those things. For three days straight all they wanted to do was haggle over the wording of the Reunification Day speeches and the preamble of the peace agreement. Every day they’d come up with something new they wanted included in the public record—one time it’d be some nonsense about courage in the face of aggression, the next time it’d be about the necessity of self-defense and the protection of long-cherished ways of living. Hell, I remember we spent a couple of hours one day planning out how the Reunification Day photo op would go. They wanted their President to be the one to extend his hand first, and ours then to take it. The next day, they changed their mind; now they wanted our President to reach out first.
Of course, the other negotiators on the Union team loved all this, because they were getting their way on all the strategic stuff. And the people in the Executive Building were happy to go along with it because they were looking further down the line, to a time when they’d have to campaign for all those Southerners’ votes. I was the only one who put up a fight. I told the President’s people if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, and not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over.
But in the end, Columbus went along with it. And even today, all these years later, we live with the consequences. They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the spring of ’95 I broke my arm. It was a small break and the bone healed quickly, but it’s the first I remember of pain.
It happened in May, at the tail end of what had been a bad few months. The stress of our new living arrangement—my aunt barricaded behind the doors of our woodshed—was starting to gnaw even at my father’s tranquility. Many nights I lay flat against the cooling vent in my bedroom and listened to him and my mother argue downstairs.
“She hasn’t said a word to us in four months,” I heard my mother say. “Not even good morning, like we don’t even deserve that.”
“It takes time,” my father replied. “She needs time.”
“Stop saying that. What she needs is a doctor, a therapist, somebody they train to deal with people who’ve been through what she’s been through. She needs help we can’t give her.”
“The man from the Red Crescent said she needs to learn how to be free,” my father said.
“Does she look like she’s learning?”
When they’d exhausted themselves arguing, they decided to drive down to Lincolnton for dinner. My mother didn’t want to leave me in the house alone but she thought I was asleep and decided to chance it for a couple of hours. When I heard her coming up the stairs to check on me, I jumped up and ran back into bed and closed my eyes.
I waited until the taillights faded beyond the iron gate. I got out of bed and turned on the lights.
I left my room. I walked down the hall and down the stairs, past a row of hopelessly faded photographs on the wall. The photographs were of my grandparents, and the woman my parents told me was my other aunt.
One of the photographs depicted my grandfather, the man after whom I’d been named. It was washed out; only the faint outline of a man was visible, his face a cloud. He cradled something in each arm, but these things too were indecipherable. For a long time I thought it was a picture taken after his death, a picture of his ghost. I started to believe that there existed another class of age, older even than the oldest of the living—a class whose citizens lost the ability to speak even to themselves, and were confined to perfect, impenetrable stillness.
I walked downstairs, intent on solving a mystery that had tugged on my mind for months. A mystery hidden within one of our greenhouses.
I went outside. In the garden the air was warm and wet on the skin. The lights that hung on the side of the house lit up as they sensed my movement, and then went dark after I walked away.
I walked south to where our greenhouses stood in rows. The greenhouses were made of a translucent glass. Inside each pane were fine copper veins, part of the circuitry that pulled energy from the sun. At the time, translucent panels were still new and largely unavailable south of the T
ennessee line; it took my mother many months of wrangling and many called favors before she managed to move them across the border. In the day they hummed and glittered, at night they were silent. And at all times, even while they worked, it was possible to look through them and see the things growing inside the greenhouses.
Near the southeast edge of the property, House Thirty-six stood unused. Instead of glass, it had plywood boards for skin. After Hurricane Zenith came through and damaged many of the greenhouses, my mother once again tried to have new panels brought in from the North. But she was only able to secure enough for eleven of the twelve damaged greenhouses. House Thirty-six was boarded up.
At night, I sometimes saw our visitor come here. Whenever she did, she carried one or two of her old paper diaries with her. But when she emerged from the greenhouse, the books were gone.
I arrived at House Thirty-six to find its door boarded shut and held with a small padlock. But along the roof there was a square of missing plywood, through which I thought I could peer inside.
The roof was too high for me to reach. I saw a ladder leaning against the side of House Thirty-five, where my mother grew fuzz-skinned okra and eggplants big as limbs. With a full-body heave, I managed to tip the ladder off the side of the greenhouse. For a moment it stood weightless in the air, and then fell back onto the side of House Thirty-six with a loud crack. I looked back toward the house and the woodshed to see if she heard, but there were no signs of movement.
I climbed the ladder. With every step it leaned slightly this way and that. But I had seen the laborers use it many times, and they were much bigger than me; I kept climbing.
When I reached the top rung I felt exhilarated. Beyond the boarded roof, the whole of our land lay visible. Not only our land, but the land surrounding it: the place where the river curved, where trees with braided hair grew straight out of the water. I looked to the south and saw the lights of distant towns.
But inside the greenhouse, I saw almost nothing. Under the silver cast of the moon, there was only the faint outlines of footsteps in the barren soil. I craned to see beyond the square of dirt lit by the moon, but there were no signs of whatever it was she came here to do.
As I readied to give up, a burst of red light caught my eye. It came from far to the north, from a place beyond the river. I turned to search for it but in an instant it was gone.
I stood perfectly still on the ladder, observing the boundary of our property. Past the levee, the river emitted a soft hushing sound as it moved. But there was something else, a break in the darkness on the far bank. It was almost impossible to see, but there was a demarcating line along the horizon—below it, the blackness was uniform and unnatural; above it was the imperfect darkness of sky, streaked with clouds and spotted with stars.
I stared at the line in the horizon, trying to make sense of it. Suddenly, the same red flash of light shone directly at me, sharp and blinding.
As I fell, I thought I saw the outline of a guard tower.
Then came the sky. I watched it as the ladder tilted. In the darkness I reached out with my left hand to break my fall.
A spear of fire unlike anything I’d ever felt before ran up my arm. I lay in the dirt and screamed. I looked away from my arm and toward the gate at the end of the driveway. I yelled for my mother, even though I knew she wouldn’t hear. I was alone.
Then I heard footsteps coming from the direction of the woodshed. For a moment I didn’t believe it was her, but when I saw that towering frame looming above me, I knew.
I was still crying in pain. I asked her to help me, but I had no idea what I wanted her to do. I only wanted the fire in my arm to end. She knelt down beside me.
“You broke your arm,” she said.
The words terrified me. I had no idea then that broken things can be repaired. Whenever something broke on the farm—a vase or a lightbulb or a greenhouse panel—my parents did not repair it; they tossed it away and bought a new one.
“Look at it,” she said.
I refused.
“Look at it.”
I turned to look at the place from where the fire came. When I saw the unnatural way in which my right arm was bent, I passed out.
WHEN I CAME TO, I was in my own bed. She was sitting beside me.
“Take this,” she said, handing me a couple of white pills. “It’ll make the pain stop.”
I swallowed the pills and within a few minutes I felt a strange, body-wide bliss, a warmth radiating outward from my stomach to the end of every limb.
“Still hurts?” she asked.
I shook my head. The world around me was hazy and unfocused, but the fire in my arm was gone.
“What were you doing out there?”
“I was trying to look inside the greenhouse,” I said.
“Why?”
“I saw you going there sometimes, and I wanted to find out what you were doing.”
I knew she’d be angry at me, but I thought she’d be angrier if I lied. And I was certain she’d be able to tell if I lied.
But she didn’t look angry, and she didn’t say anything in response. Instead I thought I saw a passing flicker of admiration in the way she observed me. And then it was gone.
“You fell off that ladder?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She chuckled. “You really are your father’s son.”
I turned to my ruined arm. I saw it had been straightened against the spine of a wooden plank. The plank and the limb were tied together with strips of torn cloth.
It seemed such a crude prosthetic. I began to wonder if I’d ever be able to use my arm again. In all the times my parents had taken me to swim and play basketball with the other kids in Lincolnton, I had never seen a boy with a wooden limb.
“Have you ever broken a bone before?” she asked me. I bristled at the silliness of the question—obviously I hadn’t; there were no other wooden planks tied around me.
“No,” I said. I tried to lift my arm, but it was as though the lines from the brain to the limb had been severed.
“I can’t move it,” I said.
“In time,” she replied. “The board’s there so the bone sets right. It doesn’t matter how a bone breaks, it matters how it sets.”
“I’m sorry I looked at your things, ma’am,” I said.
She shook her head. “Don’t call me that,” she said. “My name’s Sarat.”
“I’m sorry, Sarat.”
“Why’d you do it?” she asked me.
“I just wanted to know.”
“Don’t ever apologize for that,” she said. “That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know.”
We heard the sound of the doorbell chimes; the front gate opened. I knew my mother and father had returned, and although I dreaded their reaction once they learned what I’d done, I was unconcerned. The strange bliss that enveloped me remained.
My mother came upstairs and when she saw me her eyes turned wide as wells.
“What did you do?” she said, over and over. For a moment she ignored her sister-in-law’s presence entirely, and I thought she was asking me. Then some accusatory deduction must have revealed itself to her mind, and she turned around.
“What did you do to him?” she said.
“He fell and broke his arm,” Sarat replied. “I splinted it and gave him some Bonesetters. He’ll be all right.”
“You didn’t call an ambulance? You didn’t call a doctor? You didn’t call us?”
My mother was moving toward her now. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she said. “A boy breaks his arm and you do nothing?”
Sarat grew silent. From the way my mother was standing before her I wondered if my mother would try to strike her. But instead she slammed the window shut and locked it.
“For God’s sake, don’t you understand? The war is over,” my mother screamed. “This isn’t Patience, this isn’t the front, this isn’t the prison they locked you in. You want to keep living in that world, go crawl back into that
filthy little shed of yours and live it there. Don’t you dare try to pull us into it, you hear me? Don’t you dare.”
I watched Sarat walk away. On the way out she passed my father, who’d been drawn upstairs by the sound of my mother’s voice. She walked past him as though he didn’t exist. It seemed impossible then to imagine the two of them as siblings, as having come from any kind of overlapping past.
When he saw my arm, my father came to my bedside.
“Oh no,” he said.
“That’s all you’ve got to say?” my mother asked him. “She breaks your son’s arm and that’s all you’ve got to say?”
“She didn’t break it,” I protested.
“She’s damaged, Simon,” my mother said. “She’s a danger to us, a danger to your son. I don’t know what it’s going to take for you to see that.”
This time, they didn’t bother to argue in hushed tones. I watched them fight right there in my room. My father was upset and struggled to find the words he wanted to say, and this time my mother did not have patience. But I was not upset. At the time I had no idea it was just a chemical mirage, the Bonesetters coursing through my blood. Even later, when the warmth turned sour in my stomach and I threw up all over the floor, I still felt good.
In the clinic in Lincolnton, the doctor said the break looked worse than it was. He laughed when my parents brought me in, my arm still braced with the wooden plank. He asked if they’d found me in some old bunker on the Tennessee line, fighting the Blues.
He put a proper cast on and said in a month it’d be good as new. I was coming off the Bonesetters then, and embers were starting to glow again inside my arm, but I still remember the overwhelming sense of relief I felt when I heard those words: Good as new.
By the time we drove back to the house, it was almost dawn. My mother, who’d spent the whole car ride to the clinic digging her thumbnails into the skin of her middle fingers, had cooled enough to begin interrogating me about how I came to break my arm. But I held under the pressure. For some reason, the prospect of my parents entering House Thirty-six and discovering whatever it was that lived there was the outcome I most dreaded. When they finally laid me back in my bed, I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
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