by Martha Moody
When he opened them he realized he was indeed alive, untouched, and the soldier was grinning. “See?” The soldier said. “Left ear.” Another shot.
“Don’t move now!” The soldier shouted. “If you move I can’t be responsible!”
“HERE’RE YOUR GROCERIES,” Akira said, setting down the bag on Tuuro’s kitchen counter. “I don’t know why you need two boxes of crackers.”
Tuuro said nothing. Akira walked to the wall and checked the thermostat. “Sixty-five is plenty warm,” she said, turning the dial.
“I talked to your boss,” she said, glancing into Tuuro’s living room. “You could work a little less hard; your boss says you’re intimidating the other workers.”
Live here, eat this, do that. This was not a life with choice; his was the life of a slave. Tuuro understood, for the first time, the anger of the Gridians—every slogan or hoarded cucumber or scrap of rogue liturgy manifesting a sequestered rebellion against the people who had planned their lives. Of course they hated the rest of the U.S. Of course, in their minds, there was only us and them. In Tuuro’s mind there was only me and them, and the me was getting dull and indistinct. Something in the very air around him was tarnishing his vision of himself. Sometimes his hands when he reached for a paring knife looked like a villain’s hands; sometimes his penis, hanging limply, looked as if it had indeed once been a weapon. “I raped him”: those were words that he had spoken, and it grew more and more difficult—in this house, this kitchen—to convince himself those words had been a lie.
In Chelsea’s house the chairs wrapped their arms around him. In Chelsea’s house he took his tea with sugar. In Chelsea’s house he was himself, a free and noble human being. Hard to comprehend, much less express, the gratitude he felt in Chelsea’s house.
You take away the freedom, you take away the man.
“I’ll check on you day after tomorrow,” Akira said at the door.
“HOWARD HONEY?” SHARIS said to the figure in the chair, as she and Chad and Leon huddled together on the floor. Abba was lying on her side on the sofa, eyes wide open. “Aren’t you going to sleep?”
Howard didn’t answer. He was back home but he was different: he was a walking silent room, a room whose door you couldn’t find and wouldn’t want to. Sharis knew better than to touch him. She and Chad were sure he shouldn’t be alone, and they had moved their family bed back to the family room floor.
Howard had only been missing for an hour, until the police, alerted by Leon, found him seated alone on a fallen tree in the woods, the bodies of his four fellow Webelos and Terleski scattered up and over the hill. Leon had jumped behind a tree when the men appeared, and in the furor of the next few minutes scampered back to the parking lot, where he startled a couple by pounding on the window of their car. “He didn’t hurt me,” the rescued Howard kept saying. He was taken to the hospital, where his body and blood and urine were checked, his story examined by police, military police, and a man described as a “trauma counselor,” where everything but his soul was probed. “Retrospective amnesia,” the counselor called it, noting that the syndrome had been studied extensively in people who’d been Gridded. “Bring him back to me in a week.” A new drug could “unlock” RA, the counselor said, and he would appeal to the Health Service to get it.
“Why don’t you make a nest for just yourself, Howard?” Sharis peeled off a blanket from their bed, unfolded another from a pile in the corner. “Here,” she said, holding the blankets out to him, “try these. At least lie down,” she added in a firmer voice. “You can’t sleep sitting up.” It was the firmer tone that seemed to do it. Howard took the blankets and lay down not on the rug but the wooden floor, curled up away from them, alone.
Sharis crept to sit on the floor beside him. “It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “We shouldn’t have let you go.” I, she was thinking. I shouldn’t have pushed for you to go.
“Did you see anything, honey?” she had asked Leon.
“I got out of there!” Leon said. “Those men had guns!”
“Howard?” Howard’s eyes were closed. The firelight flickered on his thatch of hair. Sharis’s hand hovered in the air above him. She finally settled on touching his eyebrow, one quick stroke, and nothing about him flinched. She went back to the family nest, telling herself Howard would be all right. Basically. Like she was all right. She wondered if she remembered everything, if the drug that “unlocked” memory would offer something new to her. What a horrible thought. She had no intention of letting Howard take that medicine.
“Can you sleep?” she whispered to Abba, lying on the sofa. Abba shook her head no, and Sharis wished that she would start her usual babbling. Her silence was hard to take.
In the morning, when he turned on his perc, Chad thanked God for the timing. The dead Webelos could have dominated the media for days, but instead they were a local story overwhelmed by an international one. Esslandia had officially announced its allegiance with the Alliance. The negotiations in Sweden had ended when the Esslandians walked out.
A pill to make Howard remember, Jesus. Where was the compassion in modern medicine, the pill to make you forget? Chad pictured Howard grown up, an empty ache of a man. “You were one of the Webelos, right?” someone would say. “What was it like?”
“Oh, the usual,” Howard would answer, knowing how to shut them up. “Murder, rape, depravity.” Although he hadn’t been raped, the doctor had said. So far as they could tell, he hadn’t been touched at all.
The next day Chad went to Terleski’s funeral, held in a church downtown. He didn’t go to the services for the boys. Terleski’s wife had on a lavender outfit, and Terleski’s son, wheezy and pale, struggled down the aisle with his corner of the coffin, looking—damn it, Chad thought, damn it to hell—even more the perfect victim than Howard. Why couldn’t Terleski’s son have been out there walking with the Webelos, why hadn’t he been the one terrorized instead of Howard? My God, Chad thought, what am I thinking? He pictured himself—getting older and frailer, Howard getting larger and lumpier—guiding Howard to seats in public places, shielding him from people’s eyes. “My son is damaged,” he imagined himself saying, wondering if other people would understand the fate this word implied.
“When Orville had that crash in Virginia, why do you think he didn’t die?” Howard had asked him. The crash was in 1908, and Orville’s passenger had been killed.
“I don’t know, Howard. I guess it wasn’t Orville’s time.”
Howard had nodded.
“Why did that man in Cleveland murder that little boy?”
“I don’t think he did it, Howard,” Chad had said. “But whoever did was just plain evil.”
“I know,” Howard had said.
Did he know? Did he know? He knew now.
Terleski’s wife, heading down the aisle behind her husband’s coffin, gave a tiny wave; a woman several rows in front of Chad waved back. Women. How was it that women managed to keep going? Chad closed his eyes. To keep himself from crying, he had to twist—hard—the skin between his thumb and index finger.
You could say that what had happened was simple punishment for pride. Terleski, the dead Webelos, Howard—were any of their fates surprising, considering they had walked into that wood? (—Is it safe?—He says it is.) The minister talked about Terleski’s moral courage—he even used the word “hero”—but Chad understood that it had been hubris to believe that in the midst of war and chaos they could live a normal life. It was like jumping off a boat into the ocean when you couldn’t swim, like walking into a lightning storm holding a key above your head. It led to tragedy and grief, to a grave where the dirt tossed over you tasted of tainted water and machinery, of the barrel of a gun.
In the back of the church Chad might have heard someone say “taco news,” but at the time he brushed past everyone, hearing nothing but the roar of his own mind.
“BUT DAYTON SURVIVED,” he would say in class. “Dayton survived.”
&nb
sp; Remember—he would say—the four investors who bought the land for Dayton? Remember the surveyors who blazed the three riverside trees? In 1799, Congress decided that the man who’d sold to the land to these four investors had never really held the land’s title. The investors, their claim canceled, lost all interest in the baby settlement. The federal government, claiming itself the original owner of Dayton’s land, demanded two dollars an acre, an exorbitant sum, from the people who’d built cabins. People left the settlement of Dayton, other people didn’t come. A young man named D. C. Cooper who had arrived in 1796 and set up several businesses (corn cracker, sawmill, distillery) bought up all eight hundred disputed acres and arranged for the other settlers to repay him over time. Among his many talents, D. C. Cooper was a surveyor. He platted Dayton’s streets, making Front Street, First Street, and Second Street parallel to the river, then crossing them with Ludlow, Jefferson, and St. Clair. He raised pigs. As a maid for his wife, he brought a black woman to Dayton, a woman who eventually gave birth to a son who was presumably DC’s.
Still, when Dayton was eight years old there were only five men in it, and one of them was a drunk. But it survived. The canal was to come. Mills were to come. The local limestone was waiting to be discovered. And in 1804 D. C. Cooper built, at First and Ludlow, a brick house that reeked of permanence, the nicest house in town.
“Look ahead,” Chad would say, almost rising on his toes. “Look ahead.” Sharis could tape it.
talking to howard
LILA IMAGINED A cartoon of herself sucking on a lemon (of course), trails of smoke coming out the top of her head. What do you mean there are Alliance troops heading for Dayton? How dare they head for Dayton? Down I-75, the media said, their armored personnel carriers and trucks and tanks greeted by the Gridians with shouts and food and flowers. (No one in America would call those traitors Esslandians.) Suds and Africans were heading straight through the Grid toward the American border and the Consort nuclear power plant beyond it! A brazen show of force! But what could the U.S. do until the Alliance troops crossed into the U.S.? The Gridians, it seemed, had somehow gotten control of the “defensive shield” missile sites protecting the Grid. Yes, but how? How? It was a scandal.
Where the hell do the Alliance people think they’ll get water for their power plant in Dayton? Lila thought. Out of a goddamn faucet? Out of a giant green hose? She smiled at herself in the mirror. Something funny, sometimes, about an angry person. She started ranting out loud, raising her voice when Janie approached. “Have you purged yourself yet?” Janie would ask, raising her eyebrows. A joke of theirs.
There were almost no cars on the streets; people were moving as far from the Grid as possible within the quarantined area, calling up friends in the south suburbs asking about empty rooms. Lila couldn’t take it seriously. She imagined a hundred stick figures running to one side of a raft and sinking it. Pilots riding their planes like wild ponies. Tanks shooting balls of flame that bounced off other tanks and ricocheted back to their throwers. Lila carried her bottle of brandy by its neck and set it down on whatever surface she was next to.
Snap out of it, she’d think. Be adult. You’re a threat. You know water.
“Come here, Aunt Lila!” Janie was on Lila’s perc. “Look at the chervil. Isn’t it char, Aunt Lila? Things are growing like crazy.” She grinned. “You can see why people love it.”
You can see why people love children, Lila thought. Their clear voices and thoughts. Their shoulders that were happy and unburdened.
Janie moved the bottle from beside Lila’s perc to the floor.
“Can we talk to your friend there, Aunt Lila? Please? Can we meet Allyssa?”
FOR A CHANGE, the police had some information. “We’re not sure, but we’re thinking that the guys who got your Webelos could be Taconoutes.” Detective Kettlebaum gnawed at his thumbnail and frowned. “That mean anything to you?” Chad shook his head no.
“Remember that guy from the nature center, declared it part of Esslandia, got himself shot? Taconoute.”
“He was Taco-noot? How do you spell that?”
“Taconoute. Not him, the shooters.” The detective spelled the word. “They’re young, they’re male, they’re demons. They travel in packs and they kill people. We think they got a woman from Consort out doing a reading at a power station, and a guy from water visiting a monitoring shed. Right up there along the Grid border, that’s a hotbed. They’ve hit around the Grid in Indiana and Illinois, too.”
“Are they Gridians?”
Detective Kettlebaum stopped his gnawing. “Yes.”
“How’d they get that weird name?”
“Who knows? Thought it sounded scary, maybe.” He hesitated. “Ed Meisner—he’s retired now—said the name reminded him of Tonton Macoutes, which was the name of the secret police some old dictator had. Rumor has it the Gridians have been keeping their problem children in encampments, and these Taconoutes are kids they’ve let out to cause trouble.”
A MESSAGE ON Sharis’s perc from Mrs. Schneider in Texas. Of course we’re reading the news and we’re beside ourselves with worry. If you and your family can get out of Dayton and get to Houston you could stay with us. I know that’s easy to say but … And the closing: You’re phenomenal. Before we only had our life, but you turned us into a movie.
Sharis sat for a moment staring at the holo-screen. One of Mrs. Schneider’s bursts of attention, this time directed at her. She couldn’t say it wasn’t flattering. Chad was again at the police station. Leon was downstairs spelling out his name by banging nails into a piece of wood. Abba was asleep with the TV on, old CSI episodes playing in front of her. Howard was sitting in an armchair near Sharis staring at nothing, an open picture book on his lap. Through the open window she could hear the whine of protector planes circling the city. Sharis and Howard both wore sweaters against the chill, but their windows were open. Outside, the daffodils were blooming. I wouldn’t want to be a movie, Sharis thought. I wouldn’t be better as a movie.
I’m glad you like my work, Sharis typed back. Thank you for your offer but we’re here for the duration. We couldn’t get out if we wanted to. We’re quarantined.
NOW, HERE’S THE thing,” Sue Nelson, computer genie, said. “We can get through on our side, but if you’re hoping to communicate with a Gridian, they’re going to have to let you in themself. It’s one hell of a firewall. You’re best off addressing a single person. If you address everyone, no way it’ll get through. They’re trying to block what they call propaganda.” Nelson screwed up her face.
Lila gripped the edge of her desk to keep herself upright. “Here, Aunt Lila,” Janie said, hopping up. “Take this chair.”
Lila sat. “I have a friend up there.”
“I know you have a friend. But that friend is going to have to accept your message.”
“She likes me,” Lila said, wondering if Allyssa did.
“Good. Then you know she’ll want to hear from you.”
Nelson used Allyssa’s old address, the only one Lila had. She typed in something, and then Solganik, over her shoulder, made a few corrections. Lila remembered her meeting with Allyssa in the high office downtown, the ache Lila had in her chest when Allyssa told her there was no place for her on the Grid. “Okay,” Nelson said, standing up. “Lila, put in your message now.”
Lila had some trouble shifting chairs. Then she had trouble with her fingers slipping on the keyboard, then some difficulty remembering how to spell. “Want me to type, Aunt Lila?” Janie said. “You can dictate.” Lila almost said no, but then she recalled that Allyssa had called her “interesting,” and this lifted her spirits. She spoke, and Janie leaned over her to type. She was thinking of the Gridians and Allyssa and wishing everyone there well. She had a young friend who loved watching the lettuces.
“Can you leave for a minute?” Lila asked the genies.
They glanced at each other, affronted. “We’ll wait in the hall and you call us. We’ll need to go over the entry sequence
with you before we leave, though.”
“Okay, now type this,” Lila said to Janie once they’d gone. “Are you borrowing our water? I have the means to send you even more.” She looked at Janie and grinned.
“Oh, Aunt Lila!” Janie said. “This is the charrest. Do you think they’ll ask us up there?”
“You can come back now,” Lila called to Nelson and Solganik, the message sent on. Janie sat down in Lila’s easy chair and rubbed her eyes; she and Lila had been up almost all night talking. Nelson reappeared and crouched at Lila’s side. “Okay, you’ll need ten commands to get to the U.S. platform, then …” She droned on and Lila didn’t really listen, knowing Janie would remember this and anyway Nelson would write it down. The brandy was interesting: sometimes it made her sleepy, sometimes it perked her up. Lately she skipped the honey and lemon. She wanted breakfast. She wanted not to deal with Nelson and Solganik, who were talking now about services and payment. But there was Janie’s voice, giving Solganik an answer, and Janie could handle it, yes, Janie was competent. Lila’s eyelids drooped and for a moment, as she struggled to open them, she thought that she was dreaming, because the holo-screen in front of her was deliquescing into greenness, with words like distant beings streaming towards its surface.
WE ARE ESSLANDIANS. WE NEED NOTHING.
“Wow,” Nelson said. “Awesome interface.”
“What?” Janie bounded to look. “What?”
Lila had a desperate urge to block the holo-screen with her body, to protect Janie both from Lila’s mistake (she had called them Gridians!) and from the message itself, a statement whose fairy-tale arrogance would only—Lila was sure of this—inflame Janie more. But Lila was too late.
HE HAD TO knock ten or twelve times before Chelsea answered, and then she opened the door wearing a nightgown, although it was only seven at night. “Theodore,” she said in a peculiarly grateful tone, as though—Tuuro thought this later—she had been getting ready to kill herself and his knock had called her back to life.