by Greg Hrbek
By which time Mitch has not even found Kate, much less confirmed her condition. More than an hour gone and he told the boys he’d be back by now but he hasn’t even found her yet. Having gone to the hospital and waited a half hour for his number (87) to be called, so he could approach the station where a woman with a tablet sat behind a barrier of clear plastic sheeting, so he could say Kate’s name, then spell it, only to be told that she was not in the system … “What does that mean?” “It means she hasn’t been admitted,” the woman said. “So let’s get her admitted.” “She isn’t here. If she’s not in the system—” “She has to be here.” “Mister—” “Wakefield. I just gave you the goddamn name. The ambulance took her a half hour ago. How can she not be here yet?” “What were her symptoms?” (Paralyzed momentarily by the question): “She was vomiting blood.” “She might be in Wilton. The most critical ambulance calls are being diverted to Wilton for triage.” “It wasn’t critical. I mean, they said they were coming here.” “That was before they got her vitals …” With the end result of being back in the car, driving to the other hospital, though not knowing for sure if Kate is even there (“I don’t have access to that database” had been the woman’s last words) and thinking: She won’t be there. I’ll get there and she won’t be in that system either because her vitals were all right though of course she was sick (is sick, I’m not denying that), just not critically—and the second hospital will have access to the information of the first and confirm that Kate is in fact there, where he just was, admitted and in stable condition, and Mitch will turn around and drive back, strangely grateful for the confusion and the scare put into him, since the resultant clarity and sense of hope will be, by contrast, sharper and more intense. While simultaneously (on a parallel plane of thought): I’ll get to Wilton and her name will come right up, all data entered into the proper fields like words chiseled in stone: KATHRYN WAKEFIELD: CONDITION CRITICAL: QUARANTINED 9:04 P.M. And also (on a third plane): that she will be as absent at the second hospital as she was at the first, her name entered nowhere, her body not to be found in space, and I perhaps to travel for the semblance of all time the road between two hospitals (signifying the interstice between two possibilities), remembering how I loved her at the age of twenty-four like someone under a spell, loved her more than he whose name will not be uttered, more than he ever did or could have. And now, the almost thirty years since then (describable as the period of celestial coloration after the setting of a hot sun, which is the bending of the light of love: in other words, the effort to love in spite of anger and regret and an implacable yearning for a path we didn’t go down), I can feel those thirty years of emotion being compacted suddenly now, like the matter of a dying star, into a mass so dense that a hole opens in my heart, and I falling into it and through its feeling-time even as I park the car and run across the pavement to the doors of the hospital, already thinking-as-saying: I’m trying to find someone. Her name is Kathryn …
While you, in the driveway of your home of the last eight years, stand with two right-wing supremacists alongside a car in the back of which sleeps a kidnapped eleven-year-old of Arab descent. No parents to help. Only a brother who is saying, “You better get lost, our father is inside.” And the response of the man (to whom, a week ago, you told the name of the boy now lying unconscious in the car) is: “No he’s not. He’s at the hospital.” (Then, looking at you): “Your mother is in my prayers, Dorian.” (Knowing things he can’t possibly know, as if he is something he can’t possibly be—until he reminds you that your father posted on the community page at 8:02, explaining about the ambulance and that he was leaving to check on her and the boys were staying.)
Cliff: “Who is he?”
“Omar Mahfouz,” Jon-David says. “But his name doesn’t matter. Does your mother’s name matter to them?”
“You said you have drugs.”
“Did I?”
“Antibiotics.”
“Not with me. I’ll tell you what. Help me get this fucker in …”
“In?”
“You help me move him into the house and Justin will go for the meds. Be back in ten, fifteen minutes.”
“No way.”
“Big brother,” Jon-David says. “Think ahead. What do you think’s going to happen next? A nice orderly federal response to this shit-storm? Three successful biological attacks, maybe more coming, every day another wave of infection. Even if there are enough drugs in the stockpile, who says you’ll ever see them. The drugs are the next target. How do they get them? Think. Some fuck like this kid walks into a clinic and blows himself into a thousand stinking pieces of raw meat. Think. Think like someone whose country is under attack. Think like someone fighting a goddamn war.”
Say: “Can I have the gun now.”
“Hm?”
“The gun.”
“This isn’t a gun, Dorian. This is a toy.”
“I know.”
He will go to the trunk of the car and open it and unzip a duffel. Then return to you holding a handgun.
“Do you know how to load?”
“No.”
“Here,” he says. (Handing you the weapon. In his other hand a rectangular rod. The ammunition.) “Push that in. Yep, right there. Now rack the slide. On top. Pull it back. Harder. There. Good. Now a round is chambered.”
“Is the safety on?”
“Yes”—and as he shows you, you are thinking: Now. Release the safety and shoot him. Not chest or stomach. Low. In the leg. Then what. What about the other one … Holding the weapon two-handed but your hands still trembling as they trembled all through the lesson. Think. Think. He knows. Knows what you’re thinking. Yet he will go down on one knee and fold his hands around yours, and you allowing him to hold your hands, holding the gun together until the shaking stops.
After which he takes back his gun and returns to Dorian the pump rifle. Saying: “Where’d you get this museum piece, anyway?” And requesting that Cliff assist the other man in carrying the drugged boy. Dorian holding the rifle. Expecting from his older brother a look of damnation, but getting only a blank expression suggesting not only the absence of any option other than compliance, but the irrelevance of any other option. Cliff’s eyes saying: What does it matter now, the end all but here and the context for all behavior being eliminated by its imminence, so what is the picking up of this kid and the taking of him into the house but the movement of a body from one point in space to another. By which time the guy named Justin is opening the door of the car, grasping Omar by the wrists, and hauling him out of the backseat, saying, “Forget it, I got him,” the boy’s legs and feet (which are bare) knocking against the rocker panel of the car and then the asphalt of the driveway, the man dragging him over the driveway and into the garage, while Jon-David, as he circles to the driver’s side, is saying, “Basement if they’ve got one,” and Dorian realizing, as Jon-David cuts the engine, that the car has been idling all this time with nightbugs orgying in the glow of the headlights, and now everything, all at once, gone very quiet, still, and dark. Watching Jon-David go to the open trunk. Listening to him saying: “What’s going to happen now is, we’re going to have a sort of interrogation.” And thinking (insofar as a knowing at one’s core that one will soon have to act in one way or another is a form of thought): But that isn’t what his eyes should have meant at all. What he should have meant in that moment of looking is that with the coming of the end, a new context is created for our behavior, and every thing we do now, in these final moments, is not less important for its proximity to the end, but more so …
“Mitch, is that you?”
A voice from behind them, from the lawn. Recognized by Dorian despite a distortion of the voice.
(Turning): “Mr. N. It’s me—Dorian.”
“Dorian.”
Seeing him now. Wearing a nuke-bio-chem mask with giant eye windows and a metallic proboscis. Carrying a baseball bat.
“Is that your father?”
“No.”
&
nbsp; “What are you holding? Is that a shotgun?”
“It’s just an air rifle.”
“Dorian, you should be sheltering.”
“Thanks for your concern,” Jon-David says. “His parents are at the hospital—”
“Who are you?”
“With all due respect, I might ask you the same thing.”
“He’s our neighbor,” Dorian says.
“Well, okay, neighbor. I’m Dorian’s cousin. I’m taking care of things until their dad gets back. I guess you saw the post …”
And Moses Nkondo breathing. Taking breaths through the filter of the mask: creature from a world where humans, insects, and robots have interbred. And Dorian listening to him breathing. Thinking: Go, Mr. N. Go. Even while saying aloud: “It’s all right, Mr. N. We’re going up to the safe room now.” Even while imagining (trying to inoculate reality against the event by a mental prediction of it): the gun firing, his neighbor spinning and falling, struck by a bullet loaded by me, while his neighbor is actually nodding slowly, saying: “All right but get in the house now, don’t stand around out here; and stay strong, okay, your mother’ll be all right, you’ll see; you need anything, you text me …” Imagining the sound that will cut the speech short: loud enough to take hearing away: the neighbor set spinning, though in reality he is turning slowly, turning away now and walking back whence he’d come, his shoes crushing the dead shells of cicadas—shp, shp, shp—and his breathing almost like the sound of waves to a deafened ear. Listening and thinking of waves a thing I won’t ever hear or see again, for I won’t ever stand barefoot on an ocean shore, I’ll never go back to California, nor see the sun set over the Pacific, never will while Jon-David turns back to the trunk of the car and lifts out and hands to Dorian what appears to be a toolbox, though it isn’t that (not a collection of small objects but one dense thing), carrying it with one hand, with some difficulty, through the garage while holding the rifle in the other, knowing the time is coming, the thing you can’t know is the shape of the time and the way you will shape it, but feeling certain, as he leads the way to the basement, that a moment is coming to be shaped in part by him.
Cliff (as they enter the basement): “Okay, so you’ll go get the pills now?”
“Big brother, chill.”
The other man: “He’s waking up, JD.”
“Good.”
Two flashlight beams, one showing the boy on the floor, the other casting around for a sense of setting.
“He’s trying to get away, JD.”
“So, impede him.”
Planting a foot on Omar’s spine and Omar going: “Umph!” While to Dorian Jon-David says, “There” (and Dorian putting it, whatever it is, on the card table on top of an unfinished Monopoly game), and then, having found a chair, says to the other man, “There” (while unzipping the duffel and removing a roll of duct tape), “let’s bind him right there.” And Omar saying as if coming out of a dream: “Wherem’I?” And Dorian thinking it will take both of them to do it, one to keep him in the chair while the other tears off the tape. And watching: Jon-David pulling tape from the roll and saying, “Hold him now,” while the other is muscling the boy into the chair, and your brother (as ordered) holding the flashlights. You watching all of this and knowing at your core that there is an act for you to perform one of the last things I’ll ever do and maybe the last thing that’ll mean anything though still unsure about the shape of it and not yet aware of the means. “Dorian, open the case.” There’s a snap button. The top flips over. Inside: an old military telephone with a hand crank and a pair of cables ending in metal clamps (like what you use to jump-start a car) which they will attach to him, one to his bare foot and the other— And then both shape and means come clearer, as Jon-David removes the gun from his pants and places it on the table. Then goes back to taping the feet. “Will you fucking hold him.” And the means within your reach, and you about to reach for it, when the shape suddenly changes. Because Omar is about to wake up. When it happens, you will be staring at the gun, about to reach, so you won’t see his body jackknife into motion—elbow to the solar plexus of one captor, knee to the chin of the other—but you will see him on one foot (the other taped to the chair) trying to run and crashing into the table, sending everything on its surface—board game, torture device, nine-millimeter pistol—to the concrete floor across which the gun is now skating. Loaded and chambered. Skating and spinning. Omar screaming. You, on your hands and knees. Feeling on the floor. And finding it. The means in your hands, but your hands so tremulous, how are you going to create the desired end? You might hit anyone. Or nothing. One flashlight showing a spot of ceiling, then illuminating a part of a body, then veering off again. The other fallen to the floor. Then picked up by your brother, shouting your name and waving the beam around, showing enough of the scene that you understand who is where. Now: the safety. On the back of the grip. Feel it? Under your thumb. Push the switch forward, the trigger will untense. One hand around the grip and two fingers on the trigger and your other hand on the barrel trying to stop the shaking. Jon-David has him. About a yard away. A knee on his spine and choking him by pulling his shirt back against his neck, and Omar hacking for air. Go closer. Cliff capturing your movement in the beam. Jon-David seeing you and saying, “Put it to his head.” And when your brother says “Dorian,” it will be like a calling from a fog at a time of perfect stillness, like a loon calling from the heart of a still lake through the fog of dawn when you’ve woken up before the others and gone down to the dock, and there you stand, alone and hearing it: the haunted call of a loon which sound I shall never hear again, never to stand again on that dock, waiting to hear it again, listening until suddenly: a stroke of wings on water from the heart of the fog and from the cabin the voice of my grandfather whose boyhood toy of a gun you have shot many times (gust of compressed air, soft pop of a pellet), but which could not have prepared you for the use of this weapon, your grip is all wrong, not firm, and when you do pull the trigger, having pressed the barrel into his body and he saying sharply, “That’s not him, that’s me,” the weapon—as you close your eyes and turn your head away—will nearly jump out of your hands. For a moment, you won’t be certain what you’ve done. What you have done is this: You have done the best you could. On the darkest of pathways, you have managed to stay true to the better angel of your nature.
•
For millennia, RS subcommittees have been issuing reports claiming that all pathways are predetermined and all actions performed therealong inevitable and unchangeable: that the notion of a choice between two (or more) possible actions is an illusion; that a choice-not-chosen, though available to the mind as idea, can never be converted by the brain into the electrical impulses necessary for the enactment of the choice.
We do not believe this to be true. We believe, to the contrary, that every pathway is created by choice, by the energy which moves (like electrons between a negative and a positive pole) between two actions, either of which may or may not be selected; and that the grid is an open system (like a brain either organic or artificial), which responds to every single choice being made across its infinitude of axes, and through which the energy of choices is carried along those axes, from one set of coordinates to another, as information in a brain is carried from one neuron to another along a synapse.
Example: Karim Hassad, who, in B39 – R61, is currently in the backseat of a moving car in the Province of New York, clothed in a vest containing enough explosive liquid to blow his body into uncountable pieces and propel ten pounds of small metallic objects in a cycloramic arc at a speed of five-hundred feet per second. At which very same moment, on another path (X4 – H18), he is in a different car, wearing not a suicide vest but a school uniform: white Oxford shirt, navy blue sweater, gray trousers, loafers, a patch on the breast of the sweater: ÉCOLE INTERNATIONALE DE GENÈVE … He is being driven through the American night, in a city robbed of power, along streets devoid of light. He is being driven through the European mor
ning, through a city aglow with sun, along a lake of sheer blue. It is nearly time to die. It is nearly time for school.
“Habibi.”
“Mm.”
“Look at the fountain.”
She is pointing at the white column of the Jet d’Eau, shedding in the breeze a curtain of mist rainbowed by the morning sun. She asks him to say something about it in French. He says: “C’est tres bon.” She gives him, via the rearview mirror, a look of disapproval. He has studied the language since the age of three, almost fluent now with a straight A in the subject last quarter, but he hates to speak it because the pronunciation makes his voice sound silly. (He likes English best, then Arabic.)
While in the rear of the other car, he is thinking of his mother. Holding the eyeglasses somehow not lost for more than a year now.
“You still have them,” Yassim whispers.
“Mm.”
(Nodding; a strange set to his jaw): “She’s waiting. They’re all waiting for us …”
And Karim thinking: No, they’re not. They’re not there, because that place is nowhere; they aren’t anywhere even as he sits in the backseat of the other car looking at her eyes in the mirror as they cross the bridge over the Rhône and drive through Washington Park where the homeless of the capital live in makeshift shelters not unlike the one we built together, Yassim, and survived in for all those months and maybe better for you and me if things had just stayed as they were and no one had tried to right the wrong, because what does it mean to be set free only to find that one has no choice—though next week vacation at last and they gave him two options about how to spend it; he could go back to that place in the Alps or there’s a camp in the States, in the Northeast, in the Adirondacks and he remembers that it isn’t true: there is a choice, a choice of when. You can sit idly with these eyeglasses in your hands until the car arrives at its destination, then get out, then walk in, and then—at the appointed time, in obedience to orders given—pull the cord. Or you can pull it now. And so in a week he’ll be on a plane to New York and his Uncle Da’ud and Aunt Mai will meet him and drive him to the camp by which time you will be dead, and a hundred people more because of you unless you pull the cord now: the energy of the choice-to-be-made moving at the speed of an angel (faster even than the nails and screws and ball bearings will be moving after the pulling of the cord) traveling over the synapses of the grid as along the rungs of a celestial ladder and reaching him in the backseat of the car as an anxiety he can’t source or define, as if there is something about his life that frightens him—but what?