Sharp and Dangerous Virtues

by Martha Moody

  “Let me show you your room,” Lila said, taking the girl to her old office. Then she showed her the rest of the condo.

  “What’s that?” Janie asked in Lila’s bedroom, pointing at the remains of a lemon wedge.

  “Lemons,” Lila said. “I eat them.” She contorted her face, and Janie broke into a delighted, incredulous laugh. The girl had lovely eyes, brown and full. Her hair was unremarkable, almost straggly, but when she smiled her square face broke into radiance.

  “Are you really lesbo?” Janie asked. “That’s what Daddy said.”

  “Yup. Always have been.”

  Janie hesitated, twisting a plastic bracelet around her wrist, and Lila, filled with unease, was both relieved and touched by her next question: “Is it lonely?”

  “It didn’t used to be.”

  “Is Aunt Michelle your friend?”

  Aunt Michelle. Michelle was enough older than Janie that she must be more like an aunt than like a cousin. “She used to be. Not now, though. She has other friends, and we’re so far apart.”

  “She really likes you,” Janie said quietly.

  “Good. I like her, too.” Lila noted in Janie’s face both puzzlement and sadness, as if Janie, glimpsing adult life, was disappointed in what she saw. “I’ll make us supper,” Lila said.

  THE ARMY HAD sent a special ops team to check things out, with helicopters as air support. “What’s that down there?” the copilot said, leaning forward.

  “Trees are down there.”

  “I mean the body. See? The guys are gathering around it. They spotted it right off.”

  “Who is it, you think?”

  “Must be the nature center guy.”

  “The yeti,” Grady said. “People’ve got to shave their necks, man. You can’t let hair keep growing down your neck.”

  “He’s dead, okay?” the copilot said. “Grow up a little. No one’s making fun of your face,” he added in a mumble.

  THE MAN WHO’D been shot at the nature center was, the media agreed, in many ways an admirable man. Both the U.S. and Esslandia denied responsibility for his death. Nenonene, in Cleveland, had once again been startling in an interview. Who got him? he’d asked, voicing everyone’s thoughts. What good is he dead? Was he a threat, or was he target practice?

  There were puncture wounds in his scrotum. Torture? Perverse cruelty? A doctor from Cincinnati signed in with a thought: perhaps Charles really was special. Perhaps he had been killed for his genetics.

  “HERE,” LILA SAID to Janie, flipping off the TV, “try this book.” The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis.

  “What’s it about?”

  “I don’t remember, exactly, but it’s better than the news. I read it when I was your age. It’s set in a magical kingdom called Narnia. The animals talk.”

  Janie turned the book over in wonderment. Lila wondered if anyone had ever given her something to read before, or if everything Janie had read she’d had to seek out on her own.

  DIANA’S APARTMENT WAS the upstairs left rear quadrant of a two-story brick apartment building. She arrived home at twilight, relieved to find the building intact. She had in a knapsack Charles’s sperm in two syringes in a freezer bag, a few of the nature center’s cast-off clothes, and feathers she’d plucked from the stuffed owl as mementos. She walked up the building’s echoing inside stairs, put her key in the lock, and reentered her past. Her ex-boyfriend’s clothes and speakers were gone, but other than that nothing had been moved. Dust. She turned up the thermostat and crawled into her bed with all her clothes on and slept until eleven the next morning.

  Quiet, quiet. The downstairs neighbor had an alarm clock and flushed the toilet often, and the one across the hall left the building slamming doors and whistling. But not today. It took her maybe an hour to get suspicious, but by the time she had finished knocking on all the doors she wasn’t surprised. She needed groceries, and she set out to the store. The day was cold and cloudy; a frosting of snow had fallen overnight.

  The neighboring buildings weren’t all empty. Some had parked cars outside and open curtains and potted plants in the windows. As Diana walked she spotted a neighbor leaving the building two doors down from hers. “Excuse me!” Diana called.

  Diana’s building had been empty for a month, the woman said, since the man from one of the upstairs apartments committed suicide in the lobby. The whistling man, Diana realized, wishing she remembered his name. “Think you’ll move out, too?” the woman asked.

  A suicide was at least a choice. A suicide in a public space was two choices. Charles had had no choice at all. “No,” Diana said, and she walked away very erect, a dreadful spring to her step, although by the time she got to the grocery she felt beaten and sagging, the pears, the bananas, the lettuce all beclouded, the memory of Charles’s grievously wounded body floating like a scrim before her eyes. His wounds: the hole below his left nipple; the hole shaped like a teardrop below his right ribcage; the hole just above his belly button, looking like a second navel; the dark hole below his left collarbone that seemed bottomless, as if that bullet had stitched him to the earth. She understood the followers of saints begging for their bodies to clean and kiss and robe; she understood those grieving paintings; she understood everything, it seemed, in those moments when she sat beside him, her hand cradling his cold face and her eyes blessing each wound.

  She got through her shopping, not realizing until later how sparse the selections had been. She walked home.

  She had in her medicine chest some old ovu-strips she’d used for birth control. She put one on her forehead and it turned immediately red. Perfect. Meant to be.

  She’d keep one syringe for the specialist, in case. She put the contents of the other syringe into a turkey baster and carried it to her bedroom.

  It was better if the woman enjoyed it. In the old days of sperm donation, she’d been told, the specialist had handed out a dirty movie with each vial. But Diana didn’t need a movie. She lay half naked on her bed, a pillow under her hips, thinking of Charles. His mustache with its slightly red cast curling over his top lip. His rough hands moving down her body. The sweat on his shoulders, even in the winter, the way he clutched at her hips, turning her in just the right direction.

  “Fuck me, baby,” she said to herself, slipping the baster in. An old, old act, that baster: no one did it this simply anymore. And the idea of emptiness—of this room, this building—made the act something thrilling. Into the box inside the box inside the box. The plastic seemed almost human, warming quickly inside of her, and Charles became real again on top of her, with his gripping that was close to pinching, his mouth flying open and his back arched as he pinned her to the bed. Here, here, here. She squeezed the baster bulb. She wanted him smeared inside her, every cranny of her cave covered, his sperm released to their frantic swimming. The winner gets the egg!

  Make it so, she was praying. Make it so.

  TUURO TOOK TO messaging. Kelso’s wife wouldn’t let Kelso talk. Tuuro tried his old landlord, his old neighbors. Not even his former college professor neighbors wanted to hear his side. In the old days, Tuuro thought, people were more forgiving. But he had never been much of a community member, and this time he had sinned against his own. Or so they thought. Maybe. There was a lot of talk in the media about Nenonene as a master manipulator, about how he’d set up the forgiveness of Tuuro as an elaborate counterpoint to the indelible images of him with the colonel. None of this talk helped Tuuro. The Americans hated Tuuro because he’d let himself be used. Nenonene’s supporters hated Tuuro because any suspicion of his innocence tainted their hero.

  Akira found Tuuro a job as a restaurant dishwasher. He told himself it didn’t matter if the other dishwashers showed up late and didn’t care.

  Late February under a leaden sky. Tuuro was sitting on his porch with his coat on, trying to look invisible, when a thin old white lady slipped on a patch of ice on the sidewalk in front of his house. She lay on the sidewalk without moving, arms a
nd legs splayed, like someone who’d been dropped from a giant’s hand. After a moment Tuuro went up to her. Her cheek lay against the cold pavement. Her eyes were open. Tuuro peeled off his coat and slipped it under her head. “Are you all right?” he said. “I saw you fall.”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said in a creaky voice. Tuuro stood hunched over her as she lifted one foot and waved it, then the other. She stretched each arm out in front of her, like a swimmer. “I’m intact,” she said. “Help me up?”

  Her name was Chelsea, and she lived alone four doors down, in a frame two-story house she’d once shared with her husband and children. Her eyes were bad and she had trouble, chronically, with steps; it helped her to have someone to hold onto. She had always liked a strong young man. “You want to come in for a cookie?” she asked at the door.

  “You come by any time,” Chelsea told him when he left, “Theodore.”

  JANIE WAS STANDING in Lila’s bedroom door. “Aunt Lila? There’s more of them,” she said, waving the Narnia book in the air. “This one is really number two in the series.” She waggled her eyebrows and grinned hopefully.

  Lila lay curled on her side on top of her bed, thinking of nothing. “You want number one? I’ll get you number one. How many are there?”

  “Seven.”

  “Seven!” That seemed a little excessive. “Can I see the book, please?”

  Janie walked into the room and handed it over. “Oh!” Lila said in surprise as she looked through the list of other books by the author. “Surprised by Joy!”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing,” Lila said. “I’m just happy you’re here. Sure, I’ll buy you all seven books.”

  “That’s really generous,” Janie said. It struck Lila belatedly that she could have gotten the seven books from Kennedy’s library. “You’re not even related to me.”

  Lila shrugged. “That’s okay. Relation is overrated.”

  “I think so, too.” Janie smiled, glanced at Lila’s bedside table. “Can I try one of your lemons?”

  CHAD HAD HAD it all wrong; he’d thought war was pow-pow-pow, fear and excitement, but really, war was waiting. It was possible, with the winter almost broken, that there would be no pow-pow-pow at all, that the doors to Dayton would be opened and the fate of the Grid settled by the peace tribunal that was meeting now in Sweden. Still cold there, reports said. Why Sweden, in the winter? demanded the American delegation, more distressed than the Africans or the South Americans by the snow and wind.

  The Alliance would withdraw from Cleveland. The Grid would agree to stay part of the U.S. in a new category of statehood, as a semiautonomous entity a bit like Guam, free to sell its products to any market in the world, with, perhaps (this was a point of contention) favorable rates to its mother country, the U.S. “Empires are like teacups,” Nenonene had been quoted as saying. “Too much hot water and they crack.”

  The Gribble family was talking about returning to their own bedrooms. “Would you mind the guest room, Abba?” Sharis asked. Of course not, Abba said. She was the guest. And—she cast a look at Chad—in her own room she could play her music in peace.

  The history department secretary, KayLynn, messaged Chad that she’d been sick in bed all week: would he go check out the department, make sure everything looked okay?

  Chad lay on the floor of the living room in the discarded pile of blankets, watching the light through the window play against the wall. I’m sick in bed, too, he thought, but he knew that was a lie, and that a refusal to obey KayLynn would mock her doggedness and sense of duty, the very traits he claimed that he admired. She wasn’t suffering from soul sickness, not her. If KayLynn said she was sick, then she was on the floor vomiting.

  When Chad walked into his department office, he flicked the light switch without thinking, but no lights came on. He’d forgotten the administration had moved to nights-only lighting. He stood a moment and let his eyes adjust to the dimness.

  Ramsey’s office was empty except for a desk and chair; Montford’s office was full of books, lamps, and papers, as if he’d stepped out the moment before, while Hanning’s and Chad’s offices looked as sad as Prem’s did: gutted, stripped down, used. Chad wondered why no one had taken Montford’s furnishings as fuel. Montford was in London now, working for an agency that educated Americans abroad.

  Suddenly Chad missed—with a keenness that took his breath away—his department: Prem raising and lowering his eyelids in grievous disagreement with something Ramsey had said, Montford shuffling in with a cup of coffee, wearing his shoes that looked like bedroom slippers; Hanning waving her arms and shouting about some illuminated manuscript the university could never afford to buy. And in this room had sat KayLynn, who after twenty years as department secretary still was unable to enunciate Prem’s full name: Dr. Sin, she called him for short—a fine name, as Montford pointed out, for a full professor in a Catholic school. “But I am Catholic,” Prem would object, his blinking profound.

  It wasn’t the best department in the school. It wasn’t even a very good department, and there were hardly any majors, but still, it had been Chad’s place of work. You could imagine, with the quarantine of Dayton, the lights going out in microworld after microworld: a restaurant closed, a veterinarian’s, a gas station. The world of brightness, of commerce and communion, slipping away. Everyone scurrying to their dark basements, where they survived alone. This was the destruction of society, Chad realized: the word society from the Latin word meaning fellowship, companion.

  The Grid had put the lights out, too, on all those little towns.

  Chad had a hard time leaving. He stood at the door to the offices and listened to his breathing.

  LILA ALMOST HAD the water map back together. Not perfect, but close enough for anyone else to use. She kept this on a sequestered antique computer unattached to phone or cable lines. To get it she had to open her secret closet, pick the right laptop out of the pile of old ones, and type in her special code. Not likely. Still, a backup if she ever needed one. She hardly ever went to the office. Other than the air force base and Consort, water usage had dropped enough that the only problems were related to low flow. Rusty water, low pressure, standing pools. There were two repair crews left, and their supervisors were reliable; Lila contacted them when she needed them, maybe once or twice a week.

  “Aren’t you supposed to go to school?” Lila asked Janie one day.

  “No one does that anymore.”

  Lila knew that couldn’t possibly be true everywhere, but maybe it was true where Janie lived. “Okay,” Lila said. “Can you log onto some school sites? Try to learn something?”

  “Sure,” Janie said. And she seemed to: several times when Lila checked her she was looking at what appeared to be science. “I like biology,” Janie said. “I like things that grow.”

  Lila smiled. “You’re growing,” she said.

  A KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCKING AT the door.

  Sharis froze. She was upstairs editing the Schneiders. No one home but her, thank God: the boys and Chad had walked off to the grocery store. She would leave. She would slip out the back door, just as she’d done years before. Abba—they had planned this—would drop to the floor and roll under the sofa. Sharis would run to the end of Custard Lane and behind the houses and hide in the drainage ditch waiting for the boys and Chad. The Family Escape Plan.

  She crept to the window and looked out. On their front stoop stood Cubmaster Terleski.

  He had walked over to ask about Webelos. Now that it was getting warmer, he wondered about getting back to their outdoor activities. “You and Chad and the boys been okay?”

  “We’re fine. Chad’s aunt is with us. Your family?”

  “Theodosius got pneumonia in December, and I had to finagle some antibiotics out of Cincinnati, but he gets all around the house now without oxygen.”

  Finagle? Oxygen? Sharis looked at Terleski with fresh respect.

  “You think your Howie would be up to it? Our outdoor activity?” He
frowned. “Even Leon,” he added. “Leon could come.” He gave Sharis a chastened look. “What he did wasn’t that bad.” The wagging penis incident.

  “They would love it,” Sharis said, adoring Terleski at that moment.

  “I’ve lined up seven kids from my neighborhood.”

  “Seven! We don’t have any kids left here.”

  “Well, this is a nice neighborhood, Sharis. People here can afford to …” He trailed off. They made plans to meet at Terleski’s house on Saturday.

  “TEA?” CHELSEA SPILLED the hot water in an arc to the teacup. Tuuro was surprised that she could aim so well despite her bad eyesight, but certain gracious gestures must come naturally to her. “Do you miss Dayton, Theodore?” she asked.

  “I miss my daughter, but she’s moved with her mother to Tennessee. And I miss my apartment. I had a nice place. Near Paul Laurence Dunbar’s house.”

  “The poet.”

  Tuuro nodded in surprise. “The poet.” He loved Chelsea’s house. The silence, the clock ticking, the dense floral smell, the polite and slightly stilted conversation. It was the way he’d imagined a house with Aunt Stella, years before. Now he sat in a floral chair in an indentation left by Chelsea’s late husband.

  “I read about him in college,” Chelsea said. “He died at a very young age.” Tuuro noticed the elderly slackness around her mouth, the buff makeup embedded in the creases. If she didn’t wear the makeup, she would be the same beige as Allyssa.

  Tuuro nodded. “TB.” But Chelsea must have once been beautiful: those blue eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Theodore.” Chelsea leaned forward to pat Tuuro’s hand. “Would you like to eat dinner with me?”

  “PLEASE DON’T BE offended,” Michelle the youngie messaged, “but I’m back with my boyfriend.” The note went on with apologies and explanations, then ended with a surprise: “Maybe the best thing that happened out of you and me is that Janie has a mother figure now.”

  Mother figure? Lila stared at the holo-screen. No way. It was as if she’d again waked up not knowing where she was. I’m Lila, she told herself. I’m Lila the uto. I’m the Water Queen. But those definitions didn’t seem right for her—as if she were using dated equations, keys that no longer fit. Janie had just had her first period, and Lila had gone out with her to buy pads.