Time Zero

by Carolyn Cohagan

  Before I was born, the Teachers closed off one of the main passages into the city, a huge tunnel for cars that ran under the river. They sealed off one end and turned the rest of it into a prison. Once you’re locked up, you have no way out but the front door, and you have to sleep at night knowing there are ten stories of water above you. I had nightmares about the Tunnel growing up. I think it’s why I’ve always hated small spaces and can’t stand the thought of being underground.

  I can’t bear to think of Nana there. I try to keep the fear from fully crystallizing in my mind. The bike ride, the heat, and the anxiety cause perspiration to pour down my forehead and chest. My cloak is drenched.

  I approach the guards at the entrance to Nana’s building. I’m at her apartment regularly, but if the door guards know she’s in the hospital, perhaps they won’t let me pass. They stand as tall and motionless as the street lamps next to them. Like Uncle Ruho, they have short beards and stern expressions.

  They let me pass without any reaction. I exhale.

  Once through the door, I make my way across the empty lobby to the stairwell. No doormen in this part of town. Nana lives on the fourteenth floor, but the elevator doesn’t work. She has a bad knee, and it’s almost impossible for her to climb these stairs. That’s why I bring her groceries every week. I once asked her why she couldn’t just come to live with us. Given that Sekena, my best friend, lives with her parents, plus three of her grandparents, and they’re all crammed into the apartment next to ours, it doesn’t seem like a big deal for us to fit Nana in. When I brought it up, though, Nana just clucked her tongue and said it wasn’t part of God’s plan.

  I wince. If she’d been living with us, she wouldn’t have tried to go down the stairs. She could have asked me to get whatever it was she suddenly needed so badly.

  Seeing no one else in the stairwell, I grasp the bottom of my cloak and pull it up as high as my knees. I jog up the stairs as fast as I can, trying not to imagine exactly where she fell. Panting, I concentrate on the pain in my lungs, hoping it will distract from the fear gnawing at my heart. What will I do if Nana doesn’t make it?

  Reaching floor fourteen, I pull open the heavy metal door, gasping for air. I curse when I see there’s a Twitcher outside Nana’s apartment. Nyek.

  Twitchers are the highest-ranking members of the City Guard. Along with their colossal handguns, always on display, they wear black jumpsuits, black gloves, and thick black helmets. Their mirrored face shields narrow into a point, making them resemble the ants that swarm the streets on garbage day.

  This one hasn’t seen me yet, which is normal. Twitchers are all wired for down-net; they get constant news and orders sent straight to their helmets and projected inside their visor grid. Standing guard, they might seem to be doing nothing, but watch them long enough and you’ll see it—they twitch. Even their hands twitch as they type back responses through their wired gloves. They must use up half the electricity in the city. I would never call one a Twitcher to his face. I don’t want to get shot.

  I approach the guard, lowering my gaze. I wait for him to speak first, because he’s male and I’m female.

  There’s a long pause before he says, “Peace,” and through the helmet the voice is distant and metallic, as if he’s answering through a pipe.

  “Peace,” I respond.

  “What are you doing here?” he demands.

  Me? What is he doing here? I keep my eyes down. “I need to enter my grandmother’s apartment.”

  His head slowly moves up and down as he uses the Senscan attached to the side of his helmet to examine me. I don’t need to worry about spiritual infractions—my cloak is the proper color and length; my hair is bound; I’m not wearing makeup, nail polish, or perfume; the clothes underneath my cloak are sufficiently modest—but I squirm anyway. I hate being scanned. Does he think I’m bringing a bomb into Nana’s apartment or something? Once the Senscan has told him that my DNA matches Nana’s, one would think he’d let me in.

  Finally, the Senscan’s light goes from red to green, which means I’ve passed. He asks, “What is your reason for entry?”

  “She wants her prayer beads.” I ask God to forgive my lie.

  Another excruciatingly long pause. Part of me wants to turn around and run. His fingers twitch, so I assume he’s typing in new information. The Senscan turns red again as he looks me up and down one more time. What’s he checking now? All the information that exists about me in the world should have come up on his first scan.

  Sekena and I have spent hours speculating about how much the Senscan can see. If it can see through our cloaks, can’t it see through our clothes, too? Are Twitchers walking around the city all day, looking at naked girls? Sekena says, “Absolutely not. The Book says seeing a woman’s flesh makes a man crazy with desire and turns the world into chaos.” So she believes the Twitchers can’t see that much, or they wouldn’t be able to control themselves. I guess I agree with her, but it’s not making me feel any better as the Senscan creeps down my body for the second time.

  Finally, the light goes green again, and the guard says, “I’m surprised she would own prayer beads.”

  Why? What does that mean? Was he checking Nana’s records, too? I search for something to say. “She uses them every time she prays, and I’m sure they’ll help with her healing, God willing.”

  After pausing again, he says, “There’s no light.”

  At first it seems like a religious message, and then I realize he’s talking about the apartment.

  He says, “There was a report of looting, so we turned off the electricity to discourage anyone else.”

  I nod my head. He stands to the side, and I can see that the lock on the door has been broken.

  “Keep it quick,” he says.

  When I enter the living room, the only light comes from the open door behind me. Nana covers her windows with old cardboard. Even fourteen stories up, she’s afraid of being watched.

  I expect to see chaos, a ransacked room, but everything seems intact. Glancing to my right, into the kitchen, I can see cupboards flung open and pots and pans on the floor. The looters must have been searching for food. So maybe we’re okay.

  I can’t have the Twitcher watching me, so I shut the door behind me, plunging myself into blackness.

  I hear Nana’s voice say, You can do this. You’ve been in this apartment hundreds of times. From memory, I walk to Nana’s comfy flowered chair. Her scent permeates it, and, for a moment, I pause and breathe her in: warm bread, jasmine soap, and the mint salve she uses on her knee. I want to hug the air that she’s left behind.

  I shove my hand under the seat cushion, and there it is. Praise God.

  I pull it out—gently, Chickpea—and, after brief consideration, I pull up my cloak and stick the Primer in the back of my pants, praying that the Twitcher doesn’t decide to scan me again. I’m about to head for the front door, when I remember the prayer beads.

  Nana keeps them with her jewelry, but getting to her hiding spot is going to be a little complicated in the dark. Shuffling around her armchair, arms in front of me, I aim for what I think is the bathroom. I overshoot to the right, stubbing my toe on the wall. I stifle a small cry, then feel along the wall until I reach the door.

  Once I’ve felt the edge of the door, I drop to the ground. Feeling the bathroom tile beneath me, I crawl on all fours until I’ve reached the cabinet underneath the sink. It’s closed, which is a good sign. Hopefully, whoever sacked the apartment didn’t think they would find anything worthwhile in here.

  I open the cabinet, feeling around with my hands. I touch toilet paper, some sort of metal can, something bristly—the toilet brush, disgusting—and then my hand lands on the simple cardboard box I’m looking for. I pull it out and stick my hand inside.

  Nana always says that no man will touch anything that has to do with feminine products. That’s why she keeps her valuables in a tampon box. She thinks this is especially entertaining now that she is well past her
menses. “A man’s embarrassment will keep him from considering basic biology,” she says. “What dolts.”

  She loves the word “dolt” almost as much as the word “git,” which, she has explained, means “moronic jerk.” When she says it, you don’t really need the definition. Her delivery tells you everything.

  I hear the front door open, a voice booming inside: “You’ve had long enough.”

  All I’ve found is a tangle of necklaces and earrings. “Coming now, sir!”

  “Why are you taking so long?” All of a sudden, the Twitcher is standing in the entrance to the bathroom, holding a flashlight whose batteries alone must be worth two thousand BTUs. “Looking for fuel to steal?”

  “No, I . . . just can’t find the beads.”

  Stepping into the bathroom, the guard snatches the tampon box away from me. Using the beam from his flashlight to sift quickly through the jewelry, he finds the prayer beads in no time. For a second, I’m relieved, but then he pulls out Nana’s opal ring and sticks it in his own pocket.

  I’m horrified.

  “Time to leave now,” he orders.

  I follow him out, and once we’re in the hallway, he shoves the prayer beads in my face. “It will be a good recovery, God willing.”

  “God willing,” I echo. I grab the beads, but I still can’t believe he’s taken Nana’s ring. And what’s to stop him from going back inside and stealing the rest of her jewelry? I want to ask him how a man of God can justify such an action, but the contraband I’m concealing is too valuable. Bowing low and muttering, “Peace,” I start to walk away from him backward, in case the shape of the Primer is visible underneath my cloak.

  He says, “Peace,” in response, but he’s no longer paying attention to me. He’s already receiving new data, uploading information, and plugging back into the world of men.

  I reach the exit, spin, shove the door open, and run down the stairs. When I reach the tenth floor, I pause for a moment and look back up the stairwell to make sure he isn’t following me. When I’m certain the coast is clear, I try to catch my breath. Am I dizzy from the running or from the number of laws I’ve broken today?

  Looking out the large windows, I can almost see the whole city. It must be close to midday, because the sun is high in the sky, reflecting off buildings in Midtown, so bright that the light sucks the color out of everything, making sidewalks and cars glow white. I can see all the way to the Fields in the Park, to the canals on the West Side and the pig farms on the East.

  The Wall blocks my view of the river. Father once told me the Wall is over seventy feet high, reaching around the entire island. It keeps us safe from the Apostates, and brought peace after the Dividing, but I wish I could see the water and the land on the other side. What’s going on over there? Is there anyone left? What I would really like to see is the famous statue that once greeted so many immigrants. Nana told me she was called the Statue of Liberty—at least, she was before the Prophet removed her head.

  TWO

  BACK OUTSIDE, I HOP ON MY BIKE. I PEDAL AS fast as I can up Park Avenue, new anxiety pooling in my stomach. Nana always says, “Don’t waste good energy on things you can’t control.” I can’t control my mother’s fury, so I try to think about something besides what her first words will be when I walk through the door.

  I choose to think about the first time Nana showed me the Primer, five years ago. When I arrived at her apartment that day, she was acting strangely. She was distracted, almost unfriendly. Nana’s not really a hugger, but she always greets me with a smile and asks how my week has been. Not that day. She didn’t even get up from her armchair. I thought maybe she wasn’t feeling well, but when I asked, she brushed me off and told me to put away the groceries and join her in the living room.

  When I did, she asked me to sit on the couch. She was sitting tall in her chair, like she had an important announcement to make.

  Nana likes to brag that, in her youth, she was nearly six feet tall. She has silver hair that she keeps short, which very few women seem to do. She likes to wear pants and men’s button-down shirts that must’ve belonged to her husband, but she won’t talk about him, or much of anything else about her past. When I see Nana interact with my father or any of her neighbors, she scowls and seems pretty unpleasant, but with me she’s always good-humored and generous. Sometimes I can hear her swear up a storm under her breath, and I can’t believe any woman knows such words.

  That day, she asked me twice if I’d locked the front door, then told me to pull down all the blinds even though she’d already covered the windows with cardboard.

  Finally, when she seemed satisfied that we had absolute privacy, Nana reached under the cushion of her chair and pulled out the Primer. I couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d pulled out a snake!

  As usual, Nana could read my thoughts. “Don’t be afraid, Chickpea.”

  Using her cane, she came to sit next to me on the couch. The Primer was crisp and brittle with age, and Nana handled it as though it were made of cobwebs and might blow apart at any moment. I had so many questions, but I didn’t speak. I sensed that, for Nana, this moment was sacred.

  The front cover of the Primer is made from thick, shiny paper, but it’s torn and the right corner is missing. I now know the big letters on the front spell “Time,” followed by another word that’s forever lost, a victim of the tear. All that remains is the letter “O.” Nana and I have spent hours speculating about that second word—“Time Over”? “Time Off”? or, my favorite, “Time Odd”? We’ll never know for sure. So we settled for “Time O,” or, as Nana says, “Time Zero.” This also became our code for the time before the Prophet.

  Nana began to turn the pages, slowly, allowing me to look at each one. Some of them had squares cut out of them. I learned later that the Primer is what people used to call a magazine, and that, many years ago, Nana’s grandmother cut out any pictures she thought were sinful.

  Nana just kept flipping the pages, showing me word after indecipherable word, until she got to a page in the middle, and I gasped. Nana’s grandmother had left a picture there, and it showed a New York of the distant past, when electricity flowed abundantly to everyone who wanted or needed it. The city was lit up like its own galaxy.

  I couldn’t contain my questions for one more second. “Nana, why—”

  “Hush,” she said. “Today is a very special day, Chickpea. It is THE day. You are finally old enough, and I can begin what I was put on this earth to do.”

  And then Nana turned to the next page and did something that shocked me down to my toenails. She began to read!

  This wiener dive offers the best Jersey-style dogs this side of the Hudson: handmade smoked-pork tube steaks, deep-fried until they’re bursting out of their skins. While you can order them wrapped in bacon and drowning in chili ($4.75), we’re partial to the classic ($2.75) with mustard and kraut.

  When she finished the passage, she looked so proud—smug, even. I wasn’t quite sure I believed her, because the words made no sense to me. “Smoked-pork tube,” “Jersey-style dogs,” and “dive”? Was this English?

  “Nana, what is this? Are people eating dogs?” I asked, worried not only that we were performing a forbidden activity but also that she was making me hear about barbaric people.

  She grinned. “No, no, dear. Don’t worry about what it means yet.”

  She turned to another page.

  This is as close as cinema gets to a fairground ride: it’s shiny, noisy, and exhilarating. Whedon directs with a sledgehammer, bashing the audience, Hulk-like, with action piled upon action, explosion after explosion.

  She stopped and said, “Today I begin to teach you how to read, just as my mother taught me, and her mother taught her. I would have taught my own daughter, but . . .”

  “You didn’t have one,” I finished for her.

  Nana’s face contorted briefly, and I wasn’t sure if it was a look of pain or disappointment, perhaps both. She only has one child, my father, and t
hey aren’t close. When I was little, before I was allowed to travel to Nana’s on my own, my father would bring me. He would politely say hello to her and leave. He’d then return two hours later, picking me up in the same formal way.

  I understand now that Nana had been waiting, all that time, to teach me.

  It’s so strange to learn that someone has plans for you that you know nothing about. I’d never thought I was special or interesting in any way. And all along, Nana had been counting down the days until I turned ten, when she could start sharing her secret with me.

  I felt a tingle of excitement, like I was finally an adult, like life was finally starting. But there was still a part of me that was terrified. “Nana,” I said, “aren’t these words written by Apostates? If I read them, won’t God be mad?” An Apostate is someone who doesn’t believe in the Prophet, who doesn’t believe in God, or who has betrayed Him in some way.

  She closed the Primer, looking me straight in the eye. “God never said women shouldn’t read. He never said that one of his creatures was built for education while another one was not. That’s a rule that a man created, and it wasn’t about his quest for Paradise; it was about his quest for power. You understand?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t understand what could be powerful about reading. It couldn’t make me rich, make me taller or stronger, find me extra food or batteries or water, keep my parents from arranging my marriage, or make my older brother any less repellent.

  “Ignorance, Mina, is the enemy of change.”

  Nana was always talking about “change.” I sensed she meant something more than just our being able to ride in a taxi alone. When most people talked about “change,” when they said they wanted perfect health or an easier life, it reminded me of the way in which the Heralds talk about Paradise—it’s not anything you can expect to experience in this life; you just have to hope you’ll see it in the next.