Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “By marrying an American? But hadn’t she already applied for political asylum?”

  “This was the Twenties, Joan,” Archie reminded her. “The immigration quota for penniless Russian Jews was a negative number. Just to get a tourist visa she had to fib to the American consul in Latvia about having a fiancé back in Leningrad.”

  “So does that mean Ayn Rand was an illegal alien?”

  “No, she was legal. A legal visitor, who found a way to stay and make good.”

  “Hmm. And how long did that take her, to make good? Did she stick with screenwriting, or did she quit that to write novels, or—”

  “She struggled at both, for years. But she didn’t really strike it big until The Fountainhead came out and became a word-of-mouth bestseller and then a movie, and that wasn’t until the early Forties. She and Frank were touch and go financially through most of the Great Depression, and there were a lot of disappointments careerwise: her first original screenplay was optioned but never produced, and her first full-length novel, We the Living, went straight out of print after the New York Times stomped it to death in a review.”

  “Why’d they pan it?”

  “Too P.U”., Archie said.” We the Living is about a woman fighting to save the life of her lover in Soviet Russia. The Times reviewer called it vicious anti-Soviet propaganda, said Rand had tarnished the noble character of the socialist experiment.”

  “A Times reviewer wrote that?”

  “Yep. A lot of folks forget because of all the bad press surrounding McCarthyism, but there really was a serious communist movement in this country at one point. In the Thirties, you could be blacklisted in Hollywood for being an anti-communist, and Rand had trouble finding work for a while because she was too outspoken about the realities of the ‘noble experiment.’ And at the same time all these American Marxists were lining up in support of the Comintern, Roosevelt was centralizing control of farming, banking, and other businesses as part of the New Deal. Which may have been a far cry from Stalin’s mass murder of the kulaks, but still, you can imagine how it must have looked from Rand’s perspective.”

  Joan nodded. “Hence Atlas Shrugged.”

  “Probably had a lot to do with that, yeah,” said Archie. “So if her defense of capitalism strikes you as being kinda loony, you have to understand, she had her reasons.”

  “Well so did the Bolsheviks,” Joan said, “but reasons didn’t make them right. If the dictatorship of the proletariat didn’t work out so well, neither would a Greek pantheon of industrialists.”

  “Yeah, well. . . given a choice between the two, I know which one I’d pick.”

  “Given a choice between the two, Archie, you wouldn’t pick either. You’d tell Marx and Rand both to get bent, and write your own manifesto—and so would I.”

  Archie grinned. “Of course,” he said, “mine would be the true manifesto.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Joan. “At least on those points where it agreed with mine.” She turned once more to the portrait on the back cover of Atlas. “You know, it really is too bad she’s dead . . .”

  “Well, Joan,” said Archie, “if you’re serious about meeting her, there’s always the afterlife.”

  “Afterlife? But Rand was an atheist, right?”

  “You don’t believe in God either, though, do you? Religious vocabulary notwithstanding.”

  “I don’t believe in the pope,” Joan said. “God I’m a little more ambivalent about.”

  “Well last time I checked my catechism,” Archie said, “the atheists and the ambivalents were both headed to the same place. Unless God’s a bleeding heart who lets everyone into heaven after all. Either way, you and Rand should have plenty of time to get acquainted. And who knows, Joan—where you’re going, you might not even need a cigarette lighter.”

  2023: War Stories, and a Call from Lexa

  Ayn Rand said: “You have no right arm.”

  Kite sat at the kitchenette table with the Stone Monk, working Hoover’s puzzle box. She and Joan had spent the train ride back from Atlantic City trying to open it, without success; a second attempt over dinner had likewise ended in frustration, after which Joan had become otherwise occupied and Kite had gone to bed. Up with the sun, she’d decided to give it another shot, and had actually made progress. Or at least the little plastic slides were shifting into a different pattern than the one they’d started in.

  Kite glanced over at the Electric Lamp, which rested atop the microwave. She wondered what had prompted the sudden comment; Ayn had been watching her in complete silence for more than an hour.

  “Observant of you to notice,” she replied.

  “The technology exists,” Ayn said, “to replace such a severed limb.”

  “If you have the money, it does. And the inclination.” Kite shrugged. “I’ve done without since I was twenty-two years old, Miss Rand. Not really worth the bother at this point.”

  “No sensible person would choose to remain a cripple.”

  “Guess I’m not sensible, then.”

  Ayn huffed a smoke ring. “And how was your arm severed?”

  “Failure to be sensible. There was a war. I volunteered.”

  The Stone Monk grunted; it might have been a chuckle. The Stone Monk had lost his face in Syria and kept a bandanna wrapped around his head to cover the damage, which even modern science could not repair. His hands, though, were still good as new. When Kite stopped to roll a cigarette, he took the puzzle box from her and studied it with his fingertips.

  “I was with the Second Michigan at the start of the fighting,” Kite said. “Started as a nurse—a male nurse. And my first nurse’s assistant was a Chinaman, one Sub-Private Ting Lao . . .”

  “Sub-private?”

  “Well, that was a special rank they made up for him. Because he was Chinese. Born in Flint, Michigan, but Chinese to look at, which people did in those days. They almost didn’t give him a rank at all, but I think some of the boys in the Blue officer corps thought it would make a good joke, like putting pants on a woodchuck, so they stitched half a chevron on a blue tunic and gave it to him.

  “My big mistake—my second mistake, after assuming that war would be a grand adventure—was that I treated Lao like a human being. I’d never seen an Oriental before, and I’ll grant you he did somewhat resemble a field rodent (so I thought then), but that didn’t strike me as being reason enough to torment him. Unlike some other members of our army of emancipation, I showed him kindness and respect, and in return the little bastard fell in love with me.

  “When I decided to switch from nursing to front-line infantry—mistake number three—Lao stayed with me. ‘Big Brother Thompson,’ he called me. During our first field engagement he hid behind me like a storm-watcher behind a windbreak, for which I can’t blame him. If you want to witness irrational behavior, Miss Rand, try watching a line of grown adults marching headlong into a barrage of minié balls and cannon shot. I saw fifty men killed that day, including one at close range, with a bayonet, after which war lost any romantic quality I might have imagined it to have.

  “I considered deserting. It would have been easy enough to shed weapons, uniform, and trousers and leave camp, once more a woman and civilian. I’d like to claim that I stayed on out of a belief in the justice of the Union cause, but the truth is a murkier hash of motives, some less noble than others. Not the least being, of course, that it’s difficult to abandon an adventure even after it’s revealed itself to be a treacherous farce.

  “I didn’t desert; I did change units, though, more than once, in order to avoid exposure. First time was in late ’61, when one of my brothers-in-arms looked a little too closely at me during the evening mess. Of itself, the fact that I was female didn’t bother him much, but he was furious at having been deceived through six months of what he’d thought was an honest friendship. Given time to reflect, he probably wouldn’t have turned me in, but I erred on the side of caution . . . and shame. We were encamped with another regiment at th
e time, and on the morning the tents were struck I gave myself an unofficial transfer. Faithful Lao transferred with me.

  “Three bloody years passed; Lao clung to my shirttails through fire and mud, through every exchange of ordnance and insignia. By the summer of ’64 we were with a signal unit in northern Georgia, covering Sherman’s flank during the siege of Atlanta. Our principal duty was supposed to be aerial surveillance, but Gray snipers had destroyed both of our observation balloons. Nathan Bedford Forrest was harrying our supply lines, and it might have been many weeks before replacement balloons reached us; but Lao, unfortunately for me, chose that moment to reveal his native ingenuity.”

  “The Orient!” Ayn suddenly interjected. “A hotbed of mystics and irrational philosophy. Buddhism. Snake charming. Soybean farming . . .”

  “Yes, well, you see, the trouble was that Lao was rational, at least in terms of primitive aeronautics. He had a puzzle box, not unlike this one, which he used as a miniature footlocker, and inside, along with a few personal effects, he had several Chinese blueprints sketched on rice paper, penned originally by one of his great-ancestors. He took these blueprints to our commanding officer, who was, regrettably, in a listening mood.

  “The Imperial Chinese army had practiced aerial spying over a thousand years before the Montgolfier brothers, according to Lao: not balloons but kites, large enough to loft an archer into the sky above a battlefield. Of course the Western way was better, he hastened to add, but in a pinch such as this one, mightn’t we fall back on Ch’i Dynasty methods?”

  “Kites?” said Ayn. “You mean kites such as children fly?”

  “Bigger,” Kite said. “Ours was fifteen feet across, half again as tall, fashioned from quilts, baling wire, and wood planking salvaged from sacked plantation estates; a tow cable was attached so that two dozen men could grab on and give it a running start. To choose the passenger, we used a livery scale to determine who among us was the lightest. You might think that would have to be Lao, a head shorter than the shortest full private present, but Lao was wide, and I suspect he had heavy bones; the depth of his footprints in mud made it clear that nature hadn’t ever intended him to leave the ground. As it fell out, eleven of us tied for featherweight—the scale was graded in twenty-pound increments—but of the eleven I had the reputation of being the best shot and hence having the sharpest eyes. So I got to be the test pilot.”

  “And this contraption flew?” Ayn asked, wide eyed. “With you on it?”

  “Lashed to it is more accurate. Our captain loaned me his revolver for the flight, though with my arms crucified on the kite’s crosspieces I couldn’t actually reach the holster. The order to proceed was given: one group of men raised the kite clear of the ground, another group grabbed the tow cable and ran, the wind gusted obligingly. In a moment I was airborne.”

  “How marvelous!”

  “Marvelous my ass. I was barely above the trees when the tow cable broke. By then the wind was steady enough that I just kept rising, hundreds of feet and more; the last thing I saw before clouds swallowed me was that damned Chinaman, pointing at me and screaming, ‘Kite! Kite!’ as if he’d just won the Irish Sweepstakes. Not to be vindictive, but I hope they demoted the little hamster.

  “The wind was out of the southwest, though I was lost in whiteness and disoriented for much of the flight. Cold, too; summer only extends so far above the earth. By the time the clouds spat me back out, shivering and truly Blue, I was across state lines and over the Carolina Appalachians. Could’ve been New Hampshire for all I knew. Thermals carried me a bit farther, warming me some, though not enough to stop my trembling. The kite finally augered in in sight of a lone plantation in a valley; I had hopes of touching down in a tobacco patch, so I’d have a leaf or two to chew on while my broken bones settled, but my Chinese hang glider fell short, into a stand of trees. And there I dangled, caught in the upper boughs of a sycamore, until I was discovered an hour later by a white officer and two dozen Cherokee in Gray.”

  “Cherokee?” Ayn said.

  “The Confederacy’s version of forty acres and a mule, Miss Rand. Jefferson Davis promised to give the Five Civilized Tribes the equivalent of what is now Oklahoma, along with seats in the Confederate Congress, if they’d help him win the war. A lot of those Indians owned slaves, as well, so they had common cause with the South beyond the incentives.

  “The ones who found me kitewrecked were known as the Standing Bear Platoon, and their white commander was Captain Chester Baker of Alabama. Chester was what in your day would have been politely called ‘a confirmed bachelor,’ and in our day dared not have a name, polite or otherwise—despite which I believe he did get married after the war, to father a son. Chester’s own father was a cabinet aide in the Davis administration, and he’d arranged the Cherokee command to keep his boy out of trouble and to minimize embarrassment to the family as a whole. Chester was a bit flamboyant, you see, and full-dress Gray only brought out the show queen in him.

  “They got me down from the tree and tended my bruises. Branches had torn my tunic, so Chester gave me his spare uniform to wear. He even let me keep my revolver after I promised not to shoot him with it. My story clearly fascinated him, though he pretended to have trouble believing that anyone could mistake me for a man. ‘Your face simply beams femininity,’ Chester told me. ‘I’d just kill for skin that smooth!’ You see why he was considered an odd number among the southern gentry. Still, I relished the compliment, and often recalled it in later years when I was trying to seduce some man one-handed. The disfigured need an edge, and mine was that I believed that I could beam.

  “I told my story, Chester and the Cherokee Chief Mankiller told theirs. It turned out the Standing Bear Platoon was lost, as I was, separated from their regiment after a skirmish with Union troops. Safe in Carolina woods, they were in no hurry to regroup—battle had become as tiresome to them as it had to me, and Mankiller and his kin had realized by now that they were going to get shafted on the land grant no matter who won the conflict.

  “We thought we might wait out the rest of the war there, in those woods. We had food, and water from a stream, fuel for fire and lumber for shelter. No one in our respective armies would likely miss us, though Chester might ultimately have to make up a story to tell his father. Resolved to sleep on the plan, we bedded down, and I got my first honest rest in nearly three and a half years. I slept till noon of the next day. Woke fresh, had a cup of Confederate coffee—Mankiller brewed it from river moss and weeds—and went off on my own to answer nature’s call.”

  The Stone Monk clucked what was left of his tongue.

  “I know,” Kite said. “Breach of discipline . . . but after what I’d just come through, it felt right that I should be able to relax my guard. And so of course no sooner had I found a secluded spot and hunkered down, trousers around my ankles, than he appeared before me: a black soldier in Blue, with the greenest eyes I’d ever seen on an African. Green eyes and a saber. There was no greeting or challenge, no chance to explain myself or attempt surrender, he just waded in and hacked at me.

  “Naturally, a clean cut would have been too much to ask. His blade was pitted from use. It passed through sleeve and muscle, but only halfway through bone. I won’t bother trying to describe the pain; I expect a gut shot from a rifle would have been easier to bear. The only positive aspect to the situation was that this fellow was a southpaw, same as me, so his cut traversed left to right, into my right arm. My revolver was on the ground to my left; when I recoiled sideways from the blow, my smart hand came down on the gun. That’s the only reason I’m still alive.

  “He wrenched his saber free—more pain, blood pouring down my arm, turning that Gray sleeve red-black—and I had an inkling the next blow would be to my neck or my collarbone, after which lights out. What I did was pure reflex: brought the gun up, drew the hammer back, took a bead right between those green eyes. One shot.”

  Kite worried the still-unlit cigarette between her thumb and forefinger; flak
es of tobacco and paper shreds sifted to the table top. “One shot,” she repeated. “Strange, what’s always bothered me most about it is not so much the actual killing as the fact that he never knew we were on the same side. And then, of course, gunfire broke out all around following my trigger-pull, as Blue and Gray both rushed in to aid the fallen. Twenty-four landless Cherokee blasting away at God only knows how many avenging freedmen, all because a Canadian picked the wrong spot to pee. Exactly the sort of thing that makes me doubt the concept of a just war. And then the capper: Chester Baker reached me under a hail of covering fire and dragged me to safety . . . hauling on the wrong damn arm.”

  “Excuse me,” Ayn asked. “To clarify: When did this take place? Repeat the year.”

  “’64” said Kite. “Eighteen sixty-four. August. . . 30th, I believe. My amputation was performed the same day. At the first break in the fighting—the Standing Bear Cherokees suffered four dead, seven wounded—we withdrew. Chester got us to a house up the valley, though I don’t remember the details of the journey, or whether the man who operated on me there was a surgeon or a carpenter. He used a hacksaw to finish what the saber had started. Mankiller fed me hard cider as an anesthetic, which wasn’t sufficient. My woodworking surgeon’s poor etiquette didn’t help either: he was cutting off my uniform, pre-operation, and suddenly shouted ‘My God, he’s got tits!’ I’ll never forget that. . . or the first rasp of the saw.”

  “But that isn’t possible,” Ayn said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Unless my internal clock is in error, the present date is November 1, 2023.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But if you had undergone surgery in 1864—”