by Bob Proehl
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow and we can—”
“You told us never to use the Hive.”
Fahima kisses her on the mouth. It’s a cruel, manipulative thing to do, but it’s shorthand for every contradictory thing she needs to communicate. I want you. Please go.
“You should go,” Fahima says. “There are things I need to do right away.”
Ruth kisses her again, and all the panic and shock Fahima’s body is holding floods her brain, drowning out the voice that wants to tell Ruth to leave.
Hong Wu refers to his role in the world as criminally subsidized altruism. “Like Robin Hood, but drug stuff,” he says. He produces and sells massive quantities of recreational drugs, alchemically synthesizing them on demand with his ability. They range from classics like cocaine and ecstasy to bespoke highs custom made for rich clients. Rez, which briefly simulates Resonant abilities in people without them, is still a brisk business in Chicago and out in the Wastes. Carrie handles some of the distribution, and her head spins when she tries to imagine how much money Waylon and Hong make.
Hong lives above the auto garage in Cicero that belonged to his father, although he now owns the entire block. He also owns and maintains a fleet of vehicles, mostly trucks, that ferry needed goods to the Wastes, and employs a dozen drivers to make the trips. Some do milk runs, there-and-backs to settlements over the border. A couple, like Carrie, specialize in longer jaunts, carrying contraband farther west. Those runs risk arrest by the Faction, piracy by the natives, or worse on runs that skirt the West Coast territories.
She finds Hong helping a pair of runners load a white cube van. Most people go out with a partner. Carrie’s not much for company. Hong passes a crate to a runner in the back of the van. Hong’s dark hair is shot through with wires of gray and his eyes have dark pouches, but he hasn’t lost the paranoid energy he radiated when Carrie first met him. When he sees her, he calls someone over to take his place. “Walk with me,” he says to Carrie. He puts an arm around her shoulders, pulling her conspiratorially close. “Let me ask you. Last trip, did you see anything weird out there?”
Carrie pauses to consider, then bursts out laughing. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Drug use,” he says. “Huge, weird drug use.”
“I’m not hanging around and partying with these people,” she says. “If I lived out there, I’d be high all the time.”
“I had a ton of Rez go missing last week,” he says. “A literal ton.”
“Stolen?”
“Not from what I can tell,” Hong says. “No signs of a break-in. And I have this feeling like I sold it all, but I don’t remember selling it all. And I definitely don’t have a new ton of money socked away. Look at my eye.” He pulls down the lower lid of his right eye, exposing the pink underside and a bloodshot cornea. “See anything?”
There’s a myth that people co-opted by the Faction have black floaters in the whites of their eyes, telltale spots. Carrie’s spent time at the mirror examining her own eyes.
“There’s nothing,” she says.
He nods, convinced but not calmed. “I heard they got around that,” he says. “Bleach in the suspension fluid.” Carrie marvels at the way Hong’s paranoia turns the absence of positive evidence into positive evidence. “What are you doing here?” he asks. “Waylon said you’re out of rotation for a bit.”
“Off-the-books job,” she says. “What do you have for me?”
He gives her the keys to a beat-up green Kia Sportage. “Gutsy,” he says, kicking the tires. “But she won’t carry much. How light?”
Carrie shrugs. “I’ll know when I get there, apparently.”
“Sounds like a trap,” Hong says.
“That’s what I said.”
“You hear about New York last night?” Hong asks. Carrie shakes her head. “Suicide bomber blew himself up at some foundation thing. It’s in the Trib.” He hands Carrie a copy of the morning paper, words underlined, circled in pen, connected by sweeping lines like a map of the way Hong sees the world. The picture on the front page shows a ballroom with a scorched circle in the center of its dance floor. Carrie recognizes Hayden in the huddle of the crowd in the background, their face poised as if they know someone’s taking a picture.
“Anybody hurt?” she asks, trying to keep the concern out of her voice.
“The bomber and somebody who jumped him,” Hong says. “It shows the natives are restless. I’m only sending out milk runs the next couple days.”
“This is a milk run,” Carrie says. “Out and back in a day, maybe two.”
Hong shrugs, knowing better than to argue with her. “Be gentle with my car,” he says. “They’re like my children.” He tells her this every time but never complains when the cars come back dented, shot up, gouged, half dead.
She nods to him and settles into the driver’s seat. Carrie plugs her aging iPod into the auxiliary jack. When she was a kid, before she went to Bishop, she used to listen to the college radio station out of Evanston in the car. The signal barely stretched to Deerfield. She had to lean toward the dashboard for hints of what strange bands the college kids were listening to. Her mother never tolerated it; she’d switch to the easy listening station and push Carrie back into her seat. Her father didn’t mind or at least didn’t complain. Carrie misses the way you surrendered yourself to the whim of invisible signals. That’s gone now. She clicks on Neil Young’s On the Beach and leaves the city behind.
The interstates around Chicago are still in decent shape, even to the west of the city. Concerned citizens and hobbyists do voluntary upkeep, filling potholes with black glass and voiding trash. It creates the illusion that the real world persists beyond the boundary, and for most Resonants working roads still exist as far west as they’re ever likely to go. The guitar line and harmonica whine of the album’s last track die in the speakers as the sign for the Deerfield exit looms. Once she’s off the exit ramp, there’s no guessing what condition the streets will be in. The Kia crawls pass the VILLAGE OF DEERFIELD sign, its paint chipped and faded, the stag that once emerged from the center of the letters beheaded when someone cracked the wooden crest of the sign in half.
When people talk about the war, they talk as if it happened everywhere at once. Some call it “the Uprising,” a guaranteed sign someone is bullshit. Hayden calls it the outbreak, saying that if anyone wrote a history book about the war, the maps would look like epidemic spread maps from a plague movie. Then they said no one would write a history of the war because history is over. As much as all this was true, there were places unscathed by fighting, places with zero strategic importance. Deerfield was like that. Any Resonant who lived there when the fighting jumped off went elsewhere to join it; everyone else stayed and kept their head down.
There was no physical damage except for the decay of the last seven years. As she drives through the center of town, half the shops in the redbrick strip malls look as if they’re closed for a holiday, although dust cakes the windows, obscuring the insides, and a few pieces of plate glass have been shattered by the village’s notoriously harsh winters. They think they have it rough in Chicago, her uncle Jim used to say about Deerfield weather, shaking his head and leaving the rest implied. Uncle Jim joined up with one of the Kindred Network’s do-it-yourself militias during the war and died in the early days of fighting.
The tiny parks on corners that used to be vacant lots, bought up under eminent domain as part of the New Deerfield revival the village was attempting when Carrie moved away, flourished in the absence of residents: verdant grass rises to waist height, and the root systems of trees buckle the nearest sidewalks. Carrie thinks about the fairy tale of Briar Rose, a whole city asleep, waiting for a princess at its center to wake. She can imagine Deerfield’s residents rising from slumber and emerging from their front doors to greet the new day, but every house here is empty.
The stereo hisses dead air as she pilots the Kia along the narrow suburban streets to her parents’ house. She made this trip a dozen times when she and Miquel lived together, never as many times as her mother said she’d have liked but as many as Carrie’s family could handle. When she was in Topaz, she wondered if her parents were relieved not to have to endure their visits, if the soft forgetting that settled in after she left for Bishop returned over time. Carrie pulls into the driveway behind her brother’s Honda Fit, all four of its tires deflated. They took the station wagon when they left, loaded with the oddest assortment of ostensible necessities: grocery bags of canned goods and a shoebox full of extension cords. Passports and birth certificates issued by a government that no longer existed. The manila folder with her mother’s unpaid medical bills and insurance claims, because her father had his own war and wasn’t ready to give up even after the enemy was gone. They packed as if they were coming back, as if they were going on the camping trip her parents used to threaten Carrie and Brian with. The station wagon was the last out of town that night; in Carrie’s memory, its taillights pulling onto the on-ramp were the punctuation mark at the end of Deerfield.
The door is unlocked, and the air inside tastes as if it hasn’t moved since that day. She’s glad the house hasn’t been reclaimed by nature. One broken window could be a seed that grew an abandoned house into a terrarium, letting in birds and squirrels, pet cats left to go feral, and endless armies of bugs. The Norris house is silent and feels like it’s settling into itself, prepared to collapse into nothing. There’s the echo of a bad smell, a trace of something gone to rot in a cupboard or the defunct fridge, but her father was thorough cleaning the place before they left, as if readying it for new owners who never took occupancy.
Carrie walks through the house, trying to connect to something in it. Every time she came back, she felt more like a guest. When she and Miquel came for dinner, her father invited them to stay the night, and Carrie politely declined. It was an imposition on a place that was no longer hers, and sleeping in a guest room in the house where she’d grown up was less appealing than the ride back, even after a few glasses of wine.
People look back at their childhood homes with nostalgia, filtering out anything bad that happened there to create a place that felt safe, that felt like home. For Carrie, the most vivid memories of this house are the ones at the end of her time in it, when her ability manifested and she haunted rooms, overlooked by the rest of her family. She remembers sitting at the kitchen counter doing homework as her mother readied dinner. Her mother crashed into her full bore, as if she weren’t there, and stood staring through Carrie until Carrie came into focus for her. Her terse didn’t see you there was an early sign something was wrong; she wasn’t imagining she’d become invisible to the people around her. Coming before she understood what she was, the moment was one of panic, a dream in which she shrank away into nothing.
A flush of that panic hits her as she walks through the kitchen, like passing through a patch of cold water in a swimming pool. Carrie forgets why she came; she stands in the kitchen, searching the closed cupboard doors for a sign. On the fridge, her father stuck a calendar of her mother’s chemo appointments for April, seven years ago. Carrie walks over to it, thinking back to the evacuation and landing her finger on the date. She counts the chemo sessions that would have come afterward.
She goes upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, a sanctum sanctorum she and Brian were never allowed in. Finding the door ajar makes Carrie uneasy. She imagines her mother dead in the king-size bed, rotted to a skeleton but recognizably her mother. She imagines a creature hunched over her mother and feeding, and that creature is herself.
She opens the door, and the room is empty, the air more stagnant than in the rest of the house. The room is sparsely furnished: the bed, her mother’s vanity, and the small bookshelf her father used as a nightstand. Carrie picks a couple of books off the shelf, John Le Carré and James Clavell, ones she knows her father read and reread. She takes the picture on the vanity of her parents on their wedding day, an old photo that had begun to yellow even when Carrie was a kid. She considers her mother’s jewelry but can’t tell what’s valuable and what’s cheap. She doesn’t remember her mother wearing any of it, so nothing has sentimental value. She picks up a necklace, a gold filigree flower with an opal set in its center, and holds it in front of her, letting the pendant rest below her throat, but it feels childish and idiotic, and she drops the necklace as if it’s burning, letting it land on the carpet with a dull thud. She leaves the room without bothering to pick it up.
She goes into what used to be her room, ceded to Brian when she left for Bishop. She wouldn’t know what to take; anything that was hers had been moved piecemeal from here to her apartment, more tiny erasures of her time in the house. Her toe kicks the controller of Brian’s Xbox, which had been left on the carpet as if he’d been playing it when the evacuation notice blared into his head. Carrie picks it up and sets it on the unmade bed along with the rest of what she’s gathered. She kneels in front of the television and pulls the game system off the shelf where it sits until the wires tug taut. Reaching blindly around the back, she detaches each one from its source, finishing by pulling the plug out from a breaker strip. The wires dangle like lifeless tentacles.
On a shelf above Brian’s bed, there’s an old Polaroid Sun 660. When she was nine, Carrie went around “framing shots” in the square created by her thumbs and index fingers, whispering click when she had it perfect. In a rare moment of attention to his daughter’s interests, Carrie’s father bought her the Polaroid and a stack of film cartridges, which he repeatedly pointed out were not cheap. The intervention of an actual camera revealed that Carrie had no eye for photography, and she retired the camera before using up all of the initial film, but she loved the bulky weight of the Sun 660. She hefts it in her hand, even puts the strap around her neck, before stopping herself, feeling as silly as she had with the necklace.
She tears open the packaging of the last cartridge and rips through the foil. She pushes the latch forward to open the film door and slides the cartridge into the camera, then clicks it shut. Carrie likes the mechanics of things: the click of her iPod’s wheel that she can feel in the pad of her thumb, a car’s engine coming to life, the power of it vibrating through her foot and becoming part of her. She puts the camera in the box along with the Xbox and exits the house.
She tries to pull the door shut behind her by hooking her foot around the edge of it, but it thuds weakly against the frame and swings back open. She stops and turns, then decides to leave it. She imagines wildlife waiting in the bushes to take possession. Let them have it, she thinks. She puts the things she’s gathered into the Kia’s trunk and slams it shut. She starts the car, selecting an upbeat pop album that is the exact opposite of her mood, one she knows she’ll turn off after two or three songs, and continues west.
Once Rai has left for school, Clay tries to get Dominic to skip work the next day. Dom isn’t having it. “They’re all going to be freaked out,” he says.
“Tell them all to stay home,” Clay says.
“We’ve got a wrap party for that war movie at the end of the week,” he says, packing his bag.
“That’s the end of t
he week,” says Clay. “It’ll wait.”
Dominic pauses where he’s standing, takes a deep breath, and gives Clay his you just don’t get it face. “If they stay home today, they won’t come in tomorrow,” he says. “They’ll sit in their apartments thinking about what happened and about how easily it could happen again. You can’t stop after something like this or you never start again.”
Clay knows Dom’s right but doesn’t want to say it, so he kisses him goodbye twice on the way out the door. Alone in the apartment, Clay thinks of how easy it would have been to stop Dom long enough to tell him about Rai. It’s always easy once it becomes impossible.
In the shower, he takes stock of himself for the first time that day. He has a bit of a hangover: his mouth is cottony, and he can feel the shape of his brain inside his skull, glowing with a dull pain. He dry swallows two aspirins and brushes his teeth, wandering out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.
There’s a woman in their living room, looking at the pictures on the wall, mostly Rai’s school photos. Something in her stick-up-the-ass posture telegraphs to Clay that she’s Faction. “What the fuck?” Clay says through a mouthful of toothpaste. He slows time around him in order to make a better assessment of the situation. He could be out of the room in less than a heartbeat, could even take the time to go get dressed before he rabbits, but if he runs from his own apartment, where can he run to? The other option is to take her out, but that’s a hornet’s nest he won’t poke unless he knows he needs to. He lets time come back to its normal speed.
“Sorry to let myself in, Mr. Pastorius,” she says. “I had some questions for you about the incident last night.”
Relieved that whatever the woman is there for, she’s not there for him or for Rai, Clay goes to the kitchen sink and spits, setting his toothbrush down on the stove. “I’m not Mr. Pastorius,” he says. He wipes his mouth with a dish towel. “I’m his husband. Dom’s at work.”