Look, there are cameras all around you. If you want to help your wife, you’ll have to stop drawing attention to yourself. There are hundreds of passengers and only six crew members. The crew won’t catch you; the cameras will. Let your wife be herself, and you watch. Be normal. Good luck.
He folded the napkin and slid it under the band of his watch; now all he had to do was get it to that woman’s husband without the cameras seeing him and without the navigator seeing him. What am I thinking? the captain asked himself, and the answer was in the line of that woman’s face.
When he came out of the lavatory, the navigator was staring at the lavatory door; they were ten minutes from takeoff.
“I’m going to make one last check of the passengers,” he said. “Then we can be on our way.”
As the captain walked down the aisle, he realized that he couldn’t just go to the couple directly—too obvious. Instead, he nodded at them and continued on down the aisle. In the crew’s galley he saw a bucket with water bottles and it gave him an idea. He grabbed a bunch of water bottles and headed toward that couple’s seats. When he was close to them, he started to hand out bottles of water. When he got to them, he handed the woman the last bottle of water, and handed the note to the husband in the same movement. “Wait a minute, and then read this,” he said. Then he headed back to the flight deck.
George wasn’t sure what the captain had just said. It must’ve been something about needing this, he thought, as he rubbed the napkin between his fingers. But it had sounded as if the man had said “Read this.” George looked down at the napkin. Read what? And then he saw what looked like writing.
George read the note. It started off with “Look” and concluded with “be normal,” and he thought, What the…? Be normal! Is he kidding? Then George looked around him. First he tells me there are cameras all around me, and then he tells me to be normal! All George saw around him were people whose will had been broken.
But not the woman next to him. Patsy’s will clearly wasn’t broken, and George’s expression lifted into a smile.
George had to admit that the captain’s note had a point. He had acted too nervous over Patsy, like she was an invalid. Jeez, some invalid, George thought. “Let your wife be herself.” He knew he couldn’t stop her if he tried.
Despite her will, however, Patsy was losing parts of herself every day. George could see the deterioration of her personality, but at times Patsy was no less for the loss. She was still his wife, and George was a patsy when it came to her, and that’s just the way it was, and always had been, and always would be.
He lowered the napkin into his lap, and suddenly Patsy grabbed it from him, brought it to her lips to wipe her mouth, and then squeezed it into a small ball inside her fist. George looked from Patsy’s fist to her face and didn’t notice the navigator walking by them, though the navigator wouldn’t have mattered much to George. But what mattered to the navigator was that these old fools were drinking his water, and he’d bet there was another old fool that had something to do with that.
No one saw the napkin balled up in Patsy’s fist, but everybody saw George bump his head on the seat ahead of him as he quickly bent down to look for the napkin he thought he’d lost.
When the navigator reached the flight deck, the plane had just begun to be led away from the makeshift gateway.
You gave it to them, the look on the navigator’s face said, and combined with the navigator’s dramatic entry and what the captain had just done, it made the captain believe he had been busted.
Then the navigator said, “You gave them the bottles of water, didn’t you?” And the captain looked up and said, “Sit down. You’re holding up my flight time.” He shifted the throttle, causing the plane to buck slightly, which sent the navigator flying into his seat.
The navigator had to admit that they had to get this cargo of Coots out of New York and settled in Arizona. The Coots’ property had been seized and sold. Their possessions had been processed and moved along. There was no room for these old people anymore, and there were only more Coots coming along behind them. Besides, he had his little stash of contraband to consider.
THE GALAXY HAD achieved thirty thousand feet and the captain had made the necessary adjustments for them to lock into a cruising speed of about five hundred forty miles per hour. The plane was nearly over the Ohio Valley when the captain noticed that the Galaxy had sensed the storm before its instruments had anything to report. But the captain always derived some satisfaction from feeling the plane change before anything registered on the gauges. The captain could feel the body of the plane hunker down into the accelerating wind. It was during this moment that the captain felt the plane drag for a bit, and then he heard the first raindrop smack against the windshield like a gunshot.
The captain didn’t look at the navigator but said, “Whatta ya got?” and for an instant the navigator thought the captain knew what he had been writing. Then the captain said, “Whatta ya reading?” and the navigator said, “My report.” Now the captain looked away from what he was doing to face the navigator. “What is the forecast?” he said. The navigator caught on; he’d have to improvise. “The system just went down,” he said, inching his fingers toward the off button. “But looks like we’ll be in this for a while.”
The captain had been pulling the wheel toward him to give the plane some altitude. Even though they were nearly at the maximum altitude for the Galaxy, the captain was hoping he’d be able to fly over this storm. He felt the plane lifting. He hoped to get the nose of the plane up to let air pressure get to the undercarriage and beneath the 223-foot wingspan, and maybe then he could get them above this frontal system. Just as the captain pulled as hard as he could, and hoped a little harder, he felt the plane begin to lift. He could hear the Galaxy straining against the wind until there was another change in direction, and then the captain heard nothing at all.
It felt as if the C-5 had hit something, as if the plane had stopped. And it had. The navigator wasn’t sure if he could hear the engines, or the storm, but the captain was sure. They didn’t hear the engines because the gale winds of the new frontal system were blowing straight at them with such intensity that the opposing force had stalled the engines. That was the bad news, the captain thought; the good news was that the wind was also holding them up. The captain knew it would be only a couple of seconds before the Galaxy’s 400,000-plus pounds started to plummet. He started to shut down all systems as quickly as he could. His hands flew from switch to knob. The navigator watched the captain with his mouth gaping and his grip tightening. They felt the nose of the Galaxy drop.
The captain had a plan that went back years. The plan was to jump-start the engine, just like his father had always started that red Volkswagen that stalled out in the middle of shifting gears. His father would keep that baby rolling, and then if he could get a little momentum, he’d started that engine already in gear, give it gas, and hope the whole thing caught. It usually did for his daddy, and usually with a loud bang.
What the hell, the captain thought. The silver Galaxy was only about a couple thousand times larger than that red Volkswagen.
The few seconds it took for the captain to have all of this run through his mind, and through his hands, was enough time for the Galaxy to begin its plunge. He had also been busy readjusting the instruments with the engines in the off position, and as soon as the captain had everything the way he wanted, he opened the throttle and flipped the electric ignition switch.
The Galaxy had an emergency generator with enough reserve to provide the basic electric function. It didn’t seem to have enough for the ignition system, and nothing happened when the captain flipped the switch. He quickly returned the switch to the off position, thought of his late wife, and tried the switch again. This time the captain heard the engine cough, then pop. Then there was a small explosion and the engine began to purr and the plane’s descent to slow. The thrust caused by the explosive start of the engines added enough momentum for
the airplane to regain its climb.
“Hold on,” the captain heard himself saying, and the Galaxy kept climbing. Now the captain could pray, and he did, even with several thousand feet to go.
He looked over at the navigator, whose head was bowed, and the smell of vomit began to fill the cabin.
“Are you okay?” he asked, and the navigator said, “I think so.”
They had almost achieved enough altitude to clear this weather system, or so the captain hoped, and after a couple of agonizingly long moments, they saw a rod of sunlight pierce the dark. He stared straight ahead as he flew the Galaxy through the rainbow of color that followed the storm, and wished that he had the energy to enjoy it.
The passengers, for the most part, had been too subdued by the events of the past few hours to know what was happening. The entire episode of the storm lasted about ten minutes, but sometimes the duration of time is irrelevant, especially if your life has just flashed before you.
George looked out the window while the plane broke through the gray cloud bank and emerged into a beautiful day. He thought he’d better assess the situation and force his mind to review where he and Patsy were, what had brought them here. When George thought about it, their life together, it had always been just that, the two of them, together. Back in Staten Island before they had a house, before they had their daughter, and their granddaughters, it had all started with them, and here they were, on their way to who knew where, but they would, still, have each other, still be together.
George had considered tracking down their granddaughter, who was doing pretty well for herself in the Conglomerate world, to see if Christine could help. But he couldn’t think of anything she could do for them. They had reached that age and were on their way West. There was nothing anyone could do for them now; time had taken care of that. Even though he didn’t know where they were going, or what their options were, George felt compelled to think about it, as if, if he just kept at it, everything would fall into place.
He was suddenly exhausted, and he wondered how he could possibly maintain the stamina it would require to take care of both of them.
Within the last few months, Patsy’s deterioration had been pronounced. It seemed she had simply forgotten some of the things that had been inherent to her life. Then George had seen what she had been able to accomplish today. He wondered if Patsy’s fuzziness on the details was due to a deeper understanding of the human situation. Had Patsy’s intuitive nature been left undisturbed by her disease? Does the seat where the soul resides have nothing to do with the brain? Could a disorder that debilitated motor functions, coordination, memory, calculation, and apparently all of the intellectual functions, leave the deeper understanding untouched? It must, George thought, as he remembered Patsy’s performance on the gangplank and as he looked at her now. Patsy probably did not know she was on a plane, or remember that she’d left her cat and her home behind, or know that they didn’t know where they were going to spend the night, or get their next meal. But Patsy knew how to take care of others, and how to take care of a life that had been bruised along the way.
Ximena in the Underworld
Ximena Salter, known as X, was lying with her eyes shut, but she could still see the strobe as the light hit her shut eyelids and changed from black to red to black again. She opened her eyes, but it was too dark to see much of anything. She knew enough to realize that she was underground; she was in the world of the Dyscards.
She raised herself up on her elbows, and another flare of light blinded her. She covered her eyes with her forearm and let her head fall back down. Her ears were ringing like a tuning fork; her pulse pounded behind her temples; her tongue felt thick. She could taste a residue in the back of her throat of the drug they had used to take her down. She felt a vibration beneath the small of her back, and she knew what that meant. She bolted up and crawled forward on her hands and knees, thinking that fear overcomes pain. Then she hit her head, and everything stopped while she folded up inside. She took a breath and tried to scream, but nothing came out. She balled herself up as tight as she could against the wall. She put her hand to her throat; she still wore her pendant.
The vibration and then the sound X heard was a subway train. When X looked up, she saw a pair of headlights coming straight toward her. The train roared passed her, inches from her feet, and with the passing lights she realized that what she had thought was a wall that she was leaning against was actually a steel girder. There were dozens of these girders, creating arches and trestles in layers of underground tracks stacked one on another. X seemed to be on a platform between the girders and the tracks. There was a wall across a series of tracks and there was a pattern of shapes on the wall, a word, and the word was “Welcome.”
“Welcome?” X said aloud. “What the…?”
X REMEMBERED YELLING at her mother and her mother yelling back, and there was nothing new in that scenario. That could have been any time, though this time it was different. When X thought about it, the memory hurt. X’s head was pounding and she wondered if she had taken a pounding too. At first she couldn’t remember much else, and then she did: Two guys had been waiting outside the door of their apartment in Queens. It could have been a movie, when X thought about it; they’d even had on trench coats. X had noticed them because she’d found it strange to see these characters waiting in the hall. X hadn’t known they were waiting for her, or that her mother had called them.
When her mother had started to explain, the yelling had started.
“Ximena,” her mother had said. X hated it when her mother called her that. She hated her name. It bothered her that her mother had thought it was a good idea to give her daughter such a name. She had never heard of anyone else who had this name. She had started calling herself X as soon as she’d figured out that she could, even though people looked at her funny when she introduced herself. Sometimes they would ask her what X meant, and she would reply, “Ten,” or “Multiply,” or whatever struck her, anything instead of her name. Even those lines produced less of a reaction than when she had used her full name. But mostly X hated it when her mother said Ximena, because of her tone of voice when she said it.
“Ximena,” X’s mother said again, “these people are here to ask you a few questions. To help you. In fact,” X’s mother said, “they’re here to help our family.”
What family? X wanted to shout. Your husband left you to find a younger version, and Christine couldn’t wait to leave home. But X didn’t say anything. It occurred to her that her mother must have a new man in mind, so it was time for her mother to clean house and start over. X realized she was about to be exchanged for a new baby and a new life. That was the family that her mother was talking about. And that was why her mother had been so interested in X’s grandparents’ transfer to the West. X realized her mother would have gotten a cut of her grandparents’ assets that had been assumed by the Conglomerates. Her mother would have used that money to get X off her hands and buy herself another chance.
X knew that she was about to become a Dyscard.
Though no one would admit that the Dyscard community existed—certainly not the mass media, nor the state—everyone knew about them. There was talk, no matter what methods the Conglomerates used to try to airbrush the Dyscards out of the collective culture. X didn’t like it at home, but she wasn’t about to volunteer to be discarded.
But before X could offer up too much of a protest, the two men in the trench coats were sitting in the living room. X noticed that one of the men wasn’t a man at all, and that made sense when X thought about it. They would want a woman involved if they were going to be dealing with a young female client. X wouldn’t be able to contact anyone; they had canceled her phone. She wouldn’t be able to get in touch with her sister, Christine. Even though they had never really gotten along, and had been competing against each other all their lives, the designer daughter versus the determined one. And, when X thought about it, the sisters had never given it a chance. Th
ey had been set up against each other and had never really had the opportunity to be sisters. As a result, they hadn’t spoken in a while, but Christine knew what their mother was like and might understand what X was going through. She might be willing to help. But there wouldn’t be time for that now.
X was surprised that she felt betrayed by her mother when these two were invited to sit down. But here they were, sitting in the living room. It shouldn’t have been news to her that her mother had had it with her. In a lot of ways X had made sure that she had. But still, X felt like throwing up when she thought about it.
“This is all for the best, Ximena,” her mother kept repeating. Who was she trying to convince? Herself? It was all going on in their own living room, except it wasn’t her living room anymore. It wasn’t her home anymore, and X had to wonder if it ever had been her home. Then the two trench coats intervened and it really hit home just how much it wasn’t her home anymore.
A sense of calm prevailed over the household when X heard the woman in the trench coat say to her mother that they’d be taking over. That was pretty much the last thing X recalled.
X HAD OTHER things to think about now. She was dehydrated and drugged, and it was difficult to move without pain. Sweat was rolling into her eyes. Her clothes were dirty and damp, and her shirt was sticking to her back.
“It’s got to be a hundred degrees down here,” X said, and she wiped at her forehead with the back of her hand.
“Well,” she said, “that sign, it must mean that somebody else has got to be here, and they’ll have water.” She wanted to get moving before the next train went by. The only problem was, where was she going to go?
The only thing X could see were tracks and rails and girders and beams, and everything else was black, even in the light. She could taste the dark. The air contained a smaller ratio of oxygen content to the levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and countless other impurities that trickled down into the underworld, and all of that was collecting in X’s throat. She was going to have to move. She was going to have to find something to drink and someplace to go where the air was better. Whoever had dumped her here had chosen this spot for a reason.
The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future Page 5