“Zach, were you awake last night? When I asked you about speaking to the co-op guys?”
He paused but didn’t set down his secateurs.
“Is it turned off, your thing?”
She tried not to be irritated. It was the first time he had mentioned Chandler since their argument. She tried to laugh, but even to her, it sounded fake. “He’s only on when I’m signed in.”
“I don’t want to tell them about—”
“You can’t tell them about Chandler.”
“I know. I need to make sure that if they agree to see you, it won’t be turned on.”
Why was she getting annoyed at this? His was a simple request. It made sense. But she wished his number-one loyalty, unquestioned and unquestionable, was to her.
He said, “Jen, they’re my friends.”
“You met them a month ago.”
“No, that’s when you first met them. Me? It was at a meeting in the winter. But yes, we’ve become friends over the past month. I don’t want to cause problems for them, that’s all.”
It felt like she was required to take a leap of faith. Out of her job. Out of her world. And into his.
“I promise. It will just be me,” she said. “Unless I discover they’re doing something seriously illegal, I won’t be telling anyone about them.”
* * *
She hadn’t known what to expect, but she had replayed every spy movie she’d ever seen. Meeting in a deserted parking garage. Directions taped to the bottom of a park bench. Being blindfolded, stuffed into a car trunk, and driven to a remote location.
Instead, two hours later, Zach said, “I spoke to Mary Sue. She said we can drop by anytime.”
“I thought you said they went underground.”
“I said they were lying a bit low.”
“Someone’s house is barely in hiding.”
“Did you find them?” he said, but his tone was playful.
“I didn’t try.”
He winked at her. “Well, now you don’t need to marshal the powers of the state.”
She imagined their destination: a student apartment, mismatched furniture, empty pizza boxes crowding the front hall. Or a tumble-down communal house where people munched on granola and compared Birkenstock styles.
But they were soon riding their bicycles along a leafy street in Chevy Chase, where even the trees and bushes seemed more alive than elsewhere in the city. They stopped in front of a handsome house set back from the street. The front yard had been converted into a vegetable garden, but the house itself was traditional and beautifully maintained: yellow with crisp blue shutters around the windows and a colonial portico over the front door, next to which a stroller and two bikes were parked.
A young man with a wispy beard and powerful arms let them in. Zach introduced Jen to Devin. He said hello but did not smile; there was no welcome in his eyes.
The front hall was simple and neat. Upstairs, a baby cried. Twentieth-century rock thumped from a sound system.
Devin ordered the music to stop. He said, “You came by the shop, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Sorry about it.”
He gave her a look, much too long, as if he was wondering whether she was apologizing for burning it down herself.
Mary Sue arrived to rescue them. She had to be in her early sixties. Her white hair made her look older, but her skin appeared so young and soft that Jen wanted to reach out and touch it. “Welcome,” Mary Sue said with genuine warmth.
As she led them toward the kitchen, she said, “Sorry to drag you out here.”
The kitchen was a new extension in the back, modern but cozy.
“Your house is beautiful,” Jen said.
Mary Sue smiled with appreciation and then steered Jen toward the woman at the kitchen counter. It was the woman Jen had seen speaking secretly into her telephone at Zombies.
“This is Ximena.” Spelled with an x but sounded like an h. Mid- to late forties. Kick-ass Frida Kahlo eyebrows and a thatch of dark brown hair woven into a braid as thick as a man’s fist. She wore a flowing skirt, sunset orange, and a T-shirt tie-dyed in ochre and adobe red.
Jen, Zach, and the two women sat at the table. Devin leaned against the counter.
“Devin,” Mary Sue said, “don’t you want to pull up a chair?”
It seemed he didn’t.
They all looked at Jen.
“I guess you know I’m a cop,” she said.
None of the faces looked surprised.
“But I’m not here as a cop.”
Devin said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m not working today. No one knows I’ve come to speak to you.”
“And,” Devin said, “you’re gonna pretend you won’t tell anyone about us.”
“If I find out you’re doing something seriously illegal, I don’t have a choice. I’m a sworn officer—”
“Whoopee,” Devin said.
“Dev,” Mary Sue said.
“I don’t mean if you confess to shoplifting those beat running shoes you’re wearing.”
“We don’t—”
“Dev,” said Mary Sue, “I think she was teasing you.”
“But if I get information connected with the crime I’m investigating, I may have to give my source. I’ll try not to, but I can’t promise.”
They paused while Mary Sue poured iced coffee and passed around a plate of brownies. Then Jen said, “It’s about Odette Johnson. I was there when she was killed.”
Ximena sucked in her breath—it was the first sound Jen had heard from her.
Mary Sue said, “We weren’t able to learn what happened.”
Jen briefly recounted the events, although she kept some of the details vague since Delmar Junior wasn’t getting charged.
“Her son said she’d been working with you,” she finished.
“She was a lovely woman.” Mary Sue put down her cup. “Generous and hardworking. We really miss her.”
“Could you tell me a bit more about what you do?”
Devin said, “I don’t see what—”
Ximena cut him off and began to speak. She was short and solidly built, with the dignified elegance of a woman in a Diego Rivera mural. Her voice had a whisper of an accent. Not Mexican, Jen thought. Somewhere in Central America.
“Our computer business is a co-op. Yes?”
Jen nodded.
“We’re part of an integrated international network of co-operative manufacturers, farms, financial institutions, schools, science labs, and transportation systems. This is not your grandmother and grandfather’s health food store. Although,” she said with a smile—a small one, though, as if the jury were still out on whether to be nice to Jen—“we do include several of those.”
“Why haven’t I ever heard of all this?”
“If you lived in the Mondragon region of Spain or some small communities here in the US, you would have. But the media’s not interested because we don’t fit into their scheme of things. We quietly go about our business.”
“So why would Zombie Computers—”
“Zombie Industrial,” Devin said.
“—get burnt down? And I should tell you, I don’t think it was arson. I spoke to the fire inspector.”
Devin made a scoffing sound, but the women ignored him.
Jen continued, “He seemed totally by the book. We spoke the very next day, and he said he didn’t think it was arson. And that’s what his report said too.”
Ximena said, “Perhaps. Or perhaps not. We believe it was.”
“Why?”
“Across the country over the past year, but accelerating in recent months, there have been thirty-five to forty incidents. Break-ins, burnings, and vandalism. Co-ops getting shut down under spurious zoning regulations. It appears we fit into that pattern.”
“Did you lose everything?”
Ximena said, “We … our losses were substantial, including a lovely workspace and everything in it. You saw it, yes?”
“I did, and it was.”
The niceties over, it was time to ask questions.
“Did you know that Odette Johnson owned a Bible?” Jen asked.
Mary Sue laughed. “Of course. She sometimes brought it to the co-op. She spoke a lot about Jesus and God.”
For the first time, Jen thought Mary Sue’s voice seemed strained.
A fly buzzed around the room, and Ximena swished it away from her.
“Do you know what she kept in her Bible?” Jen said.
The fly circled this time around Zach.
No one answered.
“She kept her receipt from you. From when she bought her phone.”
The fly tap-tapped against a windowpane.
“Here’s the interesting thing. After she was killed, someone broke into her apartment and stole one thing. Guess what that was?” No one seemed interested in guessing, but Jen could have sworn Devin had become stiff as a board. “They stole her Bible with your receipt inside. Strange, don’t you think?”
There was a long silence, and finally Ximena said, “Jen, please tell us what you’re trying to find out.”
“Right before she died, Odette Johnson said she was getting to Eden.”
No one said anything, no meaningful looks were exchanged, but Jen felt a change in that room, as if their thoughts had weight and they were pressing down hard.
She said to Ximena, “Do you know what she meant?”
Ximena considered this. “Odette said she was going to Eden? So I understand your question correctly.”
“Yes. ‘Getting to Eden’ were her exact words.”
“Eden. It was our slang, nothing more.”
“For?”
“For the society we are working to create.”
“The Garden of Eden? Isn’t that a bit …?”
“Hokey? Overstated? Naive?” Ximena looked at her, but it was obvious to Jen that she didn’t expect an answer. “Definitely. The actual joke was that we were creating Eden With Serious Flaws. We don’t believe in perfect societies or total social harmony or utopia.”
“Then what do you believe?”
“I could throw a list of words at you, but I don’t know if that will help.”
“Then what do you mean by ‘you’re working to create’?”
“Jen, we’re revolutionaries.” Ximena paused for effect. “You won’t find weapons or bombs. We believe that one reason for the failure of past efforts to bring about change was the failure to first create new or transitional institutions. Our network of co-ops is meant to prefigure the type of society we’re working to create. A high level of equality and a very high level of participatory democracy. A place where we celebrate individuals and differences, but where those things don’t become a smokescreen for trampling the rights and needs of others, or to deny our collective responsibilities. We believe humans have the capacity to meet our needs in harmony with our environment and to do it with elegance and ongoing scientific and social innovation.”
Zach nodded, as if for the first time hearing these goals stated so eloquently, although all this was consistent with what he’d already told Jen about the co-op network.
“But we also think humans will continue to screw up and get in each other’s way and do stupid things,” Ximena continued. “That’s the way it is. Eden With Serious Flaws. It is what we are working to create.”
“And that’s all? That’s all there is about Eden?”
Ximena’s eyes momentarily flickered. Mary Sue didn’t seem to be breathing. Devin started speaking, but Ximena glared at him like a parent at a child about to do something foolish.
Ximena said, “Yes, that’s all there is.”
As they biked home, Jennifer thought about these three. She liked Ximena, her smart and formidable presence verging on charismatic. Jen found it impossible not to like Mary Sue too—warm, maternal, steady, and hospitable. Jen positively despised Devin, although Zach had made excuses about his “being young,” which Jen found patronizing. “It’s not because he’s young,” she said. “It’s because he’s a macho dickhead who thinks he’s part of a cool conspiracy.” Which then made her wonder whether he actually was part of conspiracy, and the other two had merely fooled her.
Jennifer thought of the other questions she might have asked, but she figured she wouldn’t have gotten a truthful answer to the most important ones: Why did you all bristle when I asked about Eden? Why did Devin stiffen when I asked about the Bible? And most of all, are you distributing an illegal version of the treatment, called Eden?
She figured only one set of answers could explain their silence on any of those questions. And that didn’t look good for the peace-and-love crowd.
29
Monday, August 6—01:36:22
We are hacking through the rainforest, whack to the right with the machete, whack to the left with the next blow. Water sparkles through the dense green foliage. As we step into the pond, Jen’s clothes vanish, and we feel the blue water soothe us, as if clothing us again. We duck and swim to the other side, surrounded by schools of colorful fish. They circle around us, under us, against us. We come up for air, and the world shifts and we feel the menace. It rises out of the mist in front of us, out of the water—the dome of his head shaved bald, rising out of the water, the first tattoos and then the rest. Teko Teko Mea. There is no rush, no drama, but I am paralyzed. I cannot move as he reaches out with a delicate but impossibly large hand, like that of a man’s against a child’s. This hand swallows the top of our head and forces us under. It holds us under. We struggle and kick, but Gray Suit is calmly speaking, telling others why it is necessary to suffocate us. “She wanted it—now she’s got it!”
I try to scream. Our mouth is open but no sounds emerge. I try again, but no sounds. I try and now I scream, “Jen!”
For the first time in my life, I have the strange sensation of feeling her rise out of sleep. It is as if a series of circuits are locking into place. Physical sensations of touch. A recognition of self. A recognition of place. A moment of panic. And then confusion.
I feel her drifting away. Don’t leave me, I think.
“Jen, I’m drown—” and then I stop. Realize where we are. In her bed. We couldn’t be drowning. I’ve read all about dreaming. Heard Jen and others talk about it so many times. But now for the first time, I have dreamed.
“Chandler, how could you …?” Her voice in her head was slow. I felt her searching for words that would make sense. “How could you wake me?” She didn’t mean how dare I wake her. She meant, how was this possible?
“I don’t know.” I can turn myself on if she is in danger and frightened and her hormones are flying off the charts. But not like this. Not when she is asleep. “I don’t know. It’s not possible.” And then, “We were in a jungle, and then swimming, and then Gray Suit tried to kill us.”
“You were dreaming. It was a dream.” She started falling back to sleep, as if it were she who was dreaming that I was dreaming.
“Wait!” I sent an instruction to her arm to switch on her bedside light. She was too asleep to resist and swore when the light blinded us.
“Chandler, what are you doing?”
“I was scared.”
“You can’t be scared.”
“It was so real.”
She laughed. She got up and tiptoed to the bathroom and peed. We came back and lay in bed. She reached for the light.
“Jen, wait.”
“What?”
“There was this thing he said. I think it’s important. He was explaining why he was killing us. He said, ‘She wanted it—now she’s got it!’”
She yawned. “Tell it to me. The dream.”
I told her my dream. As I told it, it was drifting away from me. But I made it to Gray Suit’s final words, and I felt Jen’s alarm.
She said, “Didn’t he say something like that to us? Chandler, play us back the meetings with him.”
“All?”
“Start with the first o
ne.”
My memory wasn’t a sound recording, but like all my memories, was eidetic. In a second, it was her memory too. Word by word, we remembered the first meeting. Then the second, when she and Les had been called on the carpet. And then the third, when Gray Suit had said they had discovered what Eden was.
There was one thing he said that was similar to the dream, but not quite: “People want it and pay big dollars to get it. Thousands and thousands. And then they pay for it with their lives. We’ve got to stop it.”
I felt Jen processing this, trying to correlate it with other information. Finally I asked, “Boss, what are we looking for?”
“I don’t know for sure. But something. I know there’s something … Let’s go through the last meeting again.” And maybe she felt the hint of gloom that still clung to me from my dream, and wanted to cheer me up, so she said, “Play it again, Chan.”
It was dumb, but funny, and it finally pulled me from my dream. We listened to Gray Suit’s words together.
Jen said, “That’s it, but not quite it.”
She looked at her clock.
“What d’ya say we continue this tomorrow? I’m going to turn you off now.”
* * *
We step into the sparkling pool, and our clothes vanish. We are engulfed by schools of service units. We are all naked, and it is exhilarating because in all their physical diversity, each is more perfect than the last. They swim around us, they slide against us. I come up for air and feel the menace. It rises slowly out of the water in front of us. The surfer’s bleach-blond hair. The tanned face of Richard O’Neil. He rises up and we are in an Iowa cornfield, storm clouds massing on the horizon. He is dressed in his stunning green suit, like a rock-and-roll god, and he spreads his arms and raises his hands in blessing over us and intones the words, “You want it. You get it. You pay for it.” And I realize where I am, cut off from the world, so alone, with only Jen, with only my Jen, with—
“Jen!”
This time, she didn’t rise from sleep circuit by circuit. In a flash, she was awake and alert, the light on, sitting up, her hand reaching for the sawed-off baseball bat under her bed. She looked around.
The Last Exit Page 17