I wasn’t surprised that he’d removed all of her clothes. He couldn’t very well have begun exploring, with those lathes and tools, her curves and whitenesses and alabaster skin, without doing so. He couldn’t otherwise determine the appropriate pitch and camber to make vases and penholders and miscellaneous receptacles. He couldn’t know what to do next time, when she would be alive and when it would be a matter of romance, and not teaching himself battlefield surgery—
One of the girls, from our school, had come to use her shoulders in the room that I shared with one of the other guys. She had come in her pajamas, to make contact, because it was after hours, and she could do what she wanted here.
—Here, there was a new politics, because there were no parents around to fuck the Great Chain of Being. To mess with the order of things. I didn’t know enough to be anything other than casual, to pretend this was normal, so I only glanced at the security guard’s corpse in the corner. They would have taken his radio after they began Arriving at the school, after the Event. They’d had to consider their Place enemy territory, and he was only the first of many on which they’d have to learn to play doctor.
Because what else could they have done? The nurse’s office was in someone else’s territory. It wasn’t part of their Place.
Later, we crossed the border from the catacombs into Austria, where we necessarily said good-bye. We had only been a Group for a short time, some weeks, in Italy, where we’d established our own body politic, where we’d been parented by only two trip coordinators. In Italy, we’d been allowed to do what we wanted with our currency. We’d been allowed to wander the Grand Canal in Venice, where, in one instance, the girl who had worn pajamas into my room had been chased by Outsiders. Two of our Primaries managed to chase them off, but not before she fled straight into the brackish water of a back-alley canal. We’d been allowed to sneak onto hotel rooftops, to smoke cigarettes at night and sit in closer proximity than we would during the daylight. I’d found my way into a bar, at one point, to order a glass of wine. Which is what my old fantasy-book heroes and Romantic idols would have done. While they smoked their pipes, which I’d already learned how to do.
• • •
We couldn’t have a guide around us for this operation, so we killed Promo.
I’d gotten the signal from Mark. Promo was going to take us in the wrong direction, when we reached the end of the hall, so we needed to solidify ourselves, to free us up from being found out, or forced to actually Trade intel—
We were on our way to a small town outside Vienna, where I stayed with a family in a hillside château. One of the surrounding mountains was missing an entire, symmetrical wedge of trees. We were told the devil had taken them.
—I could have done it. I could have ordered Mary to do it. I could have ordered her to order one of the Jacks to do it, but she needed to order it herself. All of this needed to happen.
Matthew borrowed a knife and a last-ditch syringe from Pump—
From the man who owned the château, for a hike through the trees, around the property.
—Matthew used the knife to cut the sticky greenbrier when it grabbed at his sleeves, and he watched in the dark, on the way back, as the man pointed to the slab where he and his son were going to build a family chapel. Before the son died. Before I came home to a dying father.
—Before he could rethink things, Matthew pulled his shirttail over his face and then cut Promo across the arm, so he would turn his head. He jammed the syringe into Promo’s neck and depressed the plunger.
We left Promo around the corner. We wanted it to look like a border skirmish, and here, he wasn’t far from the morgue ward, where he could be used to teach his surgeons better ways of bringing broken things back together.
Circe watched Luke watching Mark watching Matthew. Seeing things in reverse. Mary cupped Matthew’s face in her alabaster palm. She took the knife, cleaned it on Promo’s shirt, and gave it back to him. She took Promo’s pistol and shoved it behind her waistband, the barrel in line with the crack of her ass. I wondered about Matthew’s hobbies, about his two friends, about the new girl and reducing oneself, one’s friendships, by sex. I wondered if he knew yet what a woman’s fingers on his face might mean.
“What you did was right.”
We ducked into a dark classroom when some skirmish broke out. In some distant part of the school. It was difficult to gauge the number of participants because the gunfire echoed, and no doubt, many combatants weren’t using firearms. They may have been fighting to find out who took the fire from Prometheus.
I knew what Luke was thinking, looking at Circe. Looking at the grenade asleep in its sling—
When I had met Her. After Jon had met his Her. When things changed among all three of us—Adam and Jon and me—my worries shifted. Sex was everything, and that meant, every time, that She and I were making grenades of our own, between us. Even if we used things like condoms and gels, because we were terrified of what we might make together. We’d had scares of our own, because we were too stupid to recognize the difficulty in creating children. We knew only our fear.
—so I knew what Luke was thinking, staring at that sling, at Circe’s unbound hair. He knew the first Circe to use the name had given birth to a minotaur. He wondered how he could love such a thing as she could make. As he made with her.
• • •
When we finally arrived, in what had originally been the corridor of the Sons of Man, we ran. Mark took the point position on my orders, to direct our course, and we ran across enemy territory that had new lines, new cardinal measures, that the Jacks didn’t even understand anymore. They’d been away too long, and territory shifted too readily in the high school. There was an explosion downstairs. In the half-light of a passing window, we saw the buckets of fertilizer burning on the football field.
Another Party found us, running in their own direction, away from their own things. Their faces were obscured by black-on-white paisley-and-filigree bandannas. They lifted the same guns we did, there in the corridor.
“Wait—” Circe said. “—Ishmael.”
They lowered their guns. We didn’t.
He stepped out from behind his ghost-faced escort.
“It’s us,” she said. “What the fuck?”
“Who the hell are these others?” Ishmael asked.
“Additions,” Luke said, a butane lighter between his fingers. He stood just behind Circe’s sling.
“Where the fuck were you guys?” Matthew asked.
Ishmael sent a runner back the way they’d come. He slipped his bandanna off his face. He was pretty, with black hair and blue, blue eyes. They drew in the weak window-light. He looked surprised to have caught his Secondaries, floating downstream.
“We were … caught.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You were supposed to wait.”
The way Circe was looking at him—this wasn’t just “Ishmael.”
He looked at us. “Lower your guns, assholes.”
I didn’t send any signals. I let Mary lower her guns on her own. I couldn’t look like a Leader here.
“You didn’t fucking come,” Circe said.
“I came back,” Ishmael said.
He was their Leader. He would have been the one to convince them to start cooking. Got them into Salvage. First Circe, then Luke—who would have brought Matthew and Mark, even though they weren’t invited to Adam’s house to play D&D.
“You … fuck you, Jason,” Circe said.
Ishmael reeled.
He said “Morgan.”
“We were nearly blown apart by the Guard,” Luke said. “By our own fucking trap.”
And Luke had stayed with Circe in the darkness.
“Shut up, Carson,” Jason said to Luke.
Wait.
Ishmael was probably the one with the fast car, the one who could get her out, out, out of this shit town with its shit farms and shit people and shit family businesses. Its shit college students and their shit venues
because there was nothing to do underage but hang out on the Strip and sell pot.
Circe’s hands were shaking. “I can’t believe—”
I imagined that Luke had listened to her—in algebra class, maybe—when she might have complained about how easily jealous Ishmael could become, for what idiotic reasons. Luke might have listened, commiserated, because he would have been competing for resources, namely the ways in-and-out of Circe.
I didn’t want to hear these names.
“You know what, Jason,” Luke said, stepping out from behind Circe. “You know fucking what?”
But Circe wasn’t an overflow lot. There wasn’t some back road upon which Luke could arrive early to effect his exit strategy. There’s only one way underground, and that’s the direct path, in front of the school. Its entrances stoplighted by things like boyfriends and the order of authority in the Group.
Ishmael grabbed Luke and shoved him against the wall.
And when Ishmael had convinced Circe to cook dynamite, she convinced Luke, who followed her underground because what other fucking option did he have?
They’re not wearing paint.
Luke shoved back. With his knife.
No.
“Hiram!”
There was thunder coming up the stairs behind us.
Luke took a bullet to the face, from Ishmael’s posse. Pump took one to the chest. I hadn’t had time to create histories for all of them yet. I hadn’t had time to care that they would die, which would have to be good enough.
Four grabbed Circe and pulled her against the wall. Mary and I murdered the other Sons of Man—the rest of Ishmael’s posse. We didn’t eliminate them because we were using the wrong words. The wrong names. We were our wrong selves here. This was wrong.
Merlin and Voice ducked into the chemistry classroom. I saw Voice throw a chair through the window. Matthew climbed onto the fire escape, waiting to be the first one down. With the gear, from six Groups, from a lot of clandestine fucking Salvage, when it was handed to him. Mark was watching Matthew not watching Luke.
I sent Mary through, to see to the gear, with an armful of the Sons of Man’s guns. I waited with Four in the hallway, waiting for the storm climbing the stairs. She planted a slow kiss on Morgan’s forehead, who stared at her with wide, unseeing eyes.
They lit the grenade and threw it down the hallway. When it exploded, it tore the doors from the lockers and collapsed the ceiling. Born without a father. Born out of wedlock. There was no option but to destroy it. I knew this.
We heard the storm screaming as the shrapnel flew into it, defying the laws of normal motion.
We weren’t wearing paint. They were using their old names.
What we did was wrong.
THE BOOK:
“THREE” (“ARRIVAL”)
(cont’d)
[6] (i) Should the Party encounter potential Additions, these Additions must present a worthwhile contribution to the Place, such as necessary knowledge, valuable equipment, or the capability of physical labor. (ii) Accepting Secondary Membership Additions will be determined by the number of such Members already in your Group. (iii) The precise ratio of Secondary to Primary members will vary from Group to Group, based on such factors as the martial stability of surrounding territory, the abundance or availability of resources, or the need for manual-labor workforces. (iv) The Leader should not authorize a Forage for others’ supplies, should the Party encounter individuals with such in their possession. (v) The reasoning behind this is that now that you have Arrived at your Place, it is important not to establish military authority on the idea of wanton barbarity, for this can lead to divisions of power between combatant-Members and noncombatants. (vi) You must maintain your combatants as a militia, not an army, for they must be as invested in the equality of the Group and the Place as are working noncombatants.
I.
[1] (i) You will require Special Days and Monuments. Both strengthen your Narrative.
I.A.
“SPECIAL DAYS”
[1] (i) Your first Special Day should be “Arrival Day”—an after-the-fact remembrance of your Arrival—and it should be a Day of Rest. This is a Day for telling and retelling Narratives of the Evacuation and Arrival. This is a Day of celebration. (ii) Watch rotation is not a violation of the terms of rest.
[2] (i) If you have fermented drink, tobacco, or esoteric herbs and chemicals among your supplies, offer these for use upon Arrival Day. (ii) Secondary Members with musical skill, storycraft, or other Expressions-of-Society abilities should contribute these to Society on Arrival Day (and other Days to follow), thus graduating into Primary Membership. (iii) From this point forward, it will be part of their contributions to arrange new material that is a specific expression of Place-culture instead of recycling Old Trade expressions.
[3] (i) Do not restrict the content of Place-expression, even when it seems to threaten prosperity. It is necessary that Members express their frustrations and losses. Doing so, in fact, strengthens prosperity, contrary to what you may think. (ii) Censorship initiates Collapse and Failure, at any stage in a Place’s history.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
listening to the walkie-talkie, I heard phantasmal half conversations between Groups, on the way back to the HOC. We had the Jacks’ gear. We were situated.
There was more static than normal, and it sang between transmissions. Everyone sounded distant. A few of the clearer voices were running amplifiers, which made them sound electric. It gave them more range, the first word on the waves across the ocean—the first draw that would suck at distant ships, the Charybdis in charge of everyone’s directions, even if no one knew. Even if everyone thought he had dead-reckoned his own course. Even if it would take a thousand miles to get sucked between a rock and a hard place.
I thought about tin-can voices, playing telephone in grade school with a line of twine. Mostly what you heard was your own voice, sounding hollow. Foreign. You were someone else when you spoke into the can, and it was nice to hear your own voice, like staring at that mirror, sounding distance in the dark, making noise. Wondering if Bloody Mary would ever show up.
• • •
When I was young, when we were still a family, I heard those amped CB voices out in the dark. Out west, where there were no lights on the highways, and you could see every star while your sisters slept on the bench, in the van, beside you. A road trip. Family vacation. Your mother’s head nodding, knowingly, as she dozed with the highway next to your father.
Back then, I read only fantasy novels and books about space. NASA technical manuals describing the space shuttle, its SRBs, pitch and yaw, and reentry. I planned on joining the air force, to pilot shuttles. Out there in space, where there was no one.
But in the dark, in the van, I didn’t read. I looked at those too-many stars, winking darkly through the tinted glass, and I breathed deeply when clouds of dark smoke from my father’s pipe moved over me. It was dusty, out west, and you could see devils twirling when truckers’ lights painted them, out there among the brush. My father drove, the spill of the headlights the only measure against unseen holes in the earth. We listened to old recordings of Hank Williams, and Willie Nelson, and Randy Travis, because that was what he liked. Songs for Orpheus on his way down, into the Texas darkness, through the tobacco smoke, and over the holes in the earth. He explained to me then why some of the voices on his CB—which he kept on, even when we didn’t need it—sounded so strange. He told me about the amps, about how they broke FCC regulations. Between songs, I would listen to those voices, to that language I didn’t know yet.
I was little then. I didn’t know better.
Levi’s voice cut through the halftones and static. “Copy, Party, this is HOC. Go ahead.”
“Target acquired,” I said. “Over.”
“Copy, Party. Did you sustain casualties?”
Yes.
“Affirmative.”
He was quiet for a minute. I listened to the ghosts on the waves talking abo
ut Dallas. They were explaining, in their one-sided conversations, that it was to blame for the glow to the southeast. They were still driving their trucker rigs. Still shipping bullshit nowhere, across state lines, to sell to no one.
“Copy. The rest of the stations have gone. The Northern Lights are over.”
“Copy,” I said, watching the truck’s headlights paint glowing road onto the band of darkness in front of us.
“What’s your ETA?”
On Scripture Street, I saw one uniformed cop, his massive, flashlight-cum-club waving—a torch in the darkness. There were others with him, marching, in civilian clothes. They moved up a sidewalk, toward someone’s front porch. There were other flashlights glowing, on other porches, all the way down the block.
“Ten minutes.”
“Copy, Party. You are not cleared for deviation. I don’t want any spontaneous recon. Do you copy?”
“Copy, HOC.”
“Salvage has started Clearing. We’re going to have to wait.”
“Copy. See you in ten.”
“Copy.”
“Levi?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m all right.”
The static washed, like waves ashore, between us. One wave carried all the way from across the sea. From the Charybdis we couldn’t see coming, sailing so far away.
• • •
We left Zero and Silo on watch once we got back. It was getting late, and we’d need to start a rotation soon. But not yet. Matthew and Mark stowed the new gear while Merlin and Voice took inventory. Everyone needed something to do. I made each responsible for something. Only Patrol Leaders could carry compasses. I needed them all to be important to the troop.
Inside, there were candles. The black-and-white offered only static light. The digital, of course, had no power. I handed Circe off to Penelope, and she went willingly. She had nothing-distances to stare, to orient herself in the darkness, to think about who’d died, and how. Penelope was sounding things back to her, even if Circe wasn’t sounding them herself.
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