Sharp and Dangerous Virtues

by Martha Moody

  “Could be better,” Gentia said. “We’re not getting what we expected from our darker clients.” Chad winced. “We billed for a lot of those units. We set up automatic monthly deductions. But people are emptying their bank accounts. I’d be happy with cash, but I’m not going west of I-75 anymore to get it. People are desperate.” Gentia made a face. “Not attractive.”

  I bet not, Chad thought. The luckiest citizens of Dayton were the south suburbanites like them. Even now the sheriff’s car made a trip down their lane once a day. Squatters were heading south from northern Dayton, the grocery store manager had warned Chad, but so far no squatters had arrived.

  In the back of George and Gentia’s yard Howard picked up speed; he swooped and lifted something with both hands. “Is that an egg?” Chad gasped, for a fleeting second thinking it was something terrible, a bomb or a grenade. Abba opened her eyes.

  “Esther Price,” George said, naming the local chocolate company, and later Chad would realize those were the only words George spoke all afternoon.

  “But it’s cheaper to live now, don’t you think?” Sharis was saying to Gentia. “I mean, there’s nothing to buy but food and fuel.”

  “Our fixed expenses are fixed,” Gentia sighed. “But we’re looking into other income. That reminds me, dear, your edits are wonderful, but I think we’re too boring for every week.”

  She’s firing me, Sharis thought. Because I sent her the loop without images. Because I said we could live more cheaply. “We got one loop without us on it,” Gentia said. “What happened there?”

  “It was an experiment,” Sharis said quickly, avoiding looking at Gentia’s unhappy face. “You don’t have to pay for it. I could do every other week for 50 percent,” she suggested, hating herself for being such a suck-up.

  “Perfect. And you know that camera in the living room? It’s acting up.” This was true: lately, Sharis had noticed whole days without input from that station. “I’ll pull it down. We’re never in there anyway.” Gentia frowned, looked across the lawn. “What is wrong with that large son of yours? After the big egg he’s not going to look for more? He’s going to just sit?”

  Sharis didn’t answer. Gentia knew perfectly well that Howard had been one of the Webelos.

  “I hate those Taconoutes,” Gentia said. “They should take people like that and shoot their heads off.”

  Shoot their heads off? Had Howard seen something like that?

  “I hope not,” Abba said from her chair. “Not much point.”

  “They’re kids,” Sharis said. “The media says they’re troubled children their parents shipped away. They’re thirteen or fourteen years old.” She thought how she’d been that age during the Gridding, but she had never been a youth that anyone would call disturbed.

  Leon was standing in front of them. “It’s not fair. How come Howard gets the big egg?”

  “There’s a big egg for everyone, honey,” Gentia said. Her voice was unusually harsh, almost glittering; Sharis pictured gemstones spitting from her mouth. “But sometimes you have to look hard.”

  GRADY WENT RUNNING down the hall, into the locker room, and his copilot was already there, half dressed, reaching to pull up the back of his flight suit. “They found ’em,” Grady burst out. “Up in this suburb just south of the Grid. They have this underground bunker that opens out under a tree. It’s less than a mile from the air force base, can you believe it? And they’d flown over it fifty times, but this time they were lucky, people had the top of it open for some reason. The FBI’s going in. They’re Gridians, definitely. They’re not Americans.”

  “What about you?” the copilot said, and Grady, really looking at him for the first time today, was struck by the tension in his copilot’s shoulders, by his stare so intense an electrical current seemed to jump between his eyeballs.

  “What?”

  “I said, what about you?” The copilot straightened. “I mean, aren’t you like a grown-up Taconoute, too?”

  Grady was stunned. Later, it would seem that all that came after was no more than the comet’s tail of this moment. “Me?” he squeaked. “You think I’m that kind of person?”

  “WHAT?” JANIE SAID, sitting up suddenly on her bed, pressing the “home” button on her perc.

  “Aren’t you fixing supper? I got the stuff for pigs in blankets.” Janie cooked for them: spaghetti, tuna noodle casserole, soy-meat stroganoff. She had dug out an old cookbook and she loved it.

  “I forgot. I’m sorry.”

  Lila’s gaze lingered on the default image on holo-screen. “What were you looking at? Mesclun?”

  Janie reddened. “I don’t want to tell you.” She hesitated, sucked her lips in so they disappeared. “Okay, I’ll tell you. Boys.”

  “Boys?” Lila gripped the doorframe with the both hands, the bottle making a clunk against the wood. It was funny, really. Boys. She knew she should say something, but she couldn’t think what. So hard to know what the truth was anymore. Rape. Ugly word, but it had only been that sewing machine needle. Maybe her rapist’s penis was tiny, so tiny it fueled him to rape more. She had no idea. Lila’s brain seemed overloaded, a warehouse in disarray, essential items tossed in recesses with party favors and plastic flowers. She couldn’t find the main thing she was looking for; no, she’d forgotten what the main thing was.

  Janie said, “I’m messaging to one. A boy.” First Janie used her finger to twist a strand of hair, then, as Lila watched, she was twisting everything: her knees, her elbows, her ankles, her wrists, everything was twisting in.

  “What’s his name?” Lila said, and Janie’s sudden stillness brought back to Lila those days when saying a name was freighted, when uttering “Debbie” or “Serena” or “Linda” seemed like both an incantation and a claim.

  Even, not so long ago, “Michelle.”

  “Alan,” Janie said. She stayed still another moment, as if the name were lying on the air. “Alan,” she repeated, louder. “He lives in South Carolina.” Then the twisting resumed.

  “I’ll fix dinner tonight,” Lila said, swirling away, the brandy in her bottle making its reassuring slosh. She could open up two soup cans and cut up hot dogs. That she could do.

  “IT’S OKAY, HOWARD,” Chad said. “They’re dead. All of the men who attacked you are dead.”

  The men. The oldest was only twenty—he was called the Havoc Handler, while the younger people were called the Taconoute Havoc Squad. There were many other Havoc Squads, some of whom had not yet been released from their Esslandian home. Chad could only hope that Howard would never have to testify.

  “Well, thank God,” said Abba. “Don’t need those people messing up the world.”

  Sharis looked toward Howard, who looked ready to cry. “So they were really Gridian kids?” Howard asked.

  “The Grid delinquents,” Chad said. He gestured to Sharis to lean over, brought his mouth close to her ear. “One was a girl,” he whispered.

  “They weren’t all bad,” Howard said, his voice quivering. “Really, they weren’t all bad!”

  “Are you crazy?” Leon scoffed. “Don’t tell me you feel sorry for them!” This only made Howard cry more. Sharis reached for Howard but he shook her off. “Stones,” she said. “Wall it up.”

  “They weren’t all bad!” Howard repeated.

  GRADY, OF HIS own volition, made an appointment with a psychiatrist. “Why do I seem like something I’m not?” he burst out. “What’s wrong with me?” There, he thought, sinking back into his seat. Those are the questions.

  “A thinker, eh?” the psychiatrist said.

  Grady had always had certain facilities—handling an aircraft was as easy for him as kicking a soccer ball or playing an visu-game—but this was a new sort of challenge, one that required a purposeful concentration. The copilot, who knew him as well as anyone, had believed he could be a crazy, brutal person. The worst shock in Grady’s life. The worst pain in Grady’s life. His copilot might be checking the indicators, half hidden by his helmet,
and Grady would glance at his profile almost shyly, wondering if he had the slightest idea how he’d hurt him. This notion brought the Grady to a deeper grief, that somehow he himself was not quite human, being capable of evoking such suspicion.

  FOR THE FIRST day in a month, Chad didn’t go to the police station. He did the Wright brothers again, because Howard liked them. Two days later he did Inventions of Dayton, including Freon and the folding ladder and the pop-top can. For Abba’s sake he touched on retailing.

  “Can a store elevate a community?” he asked. He talked about Rike’s Department Store, founded in 1853 as a dry-goods shop and growing through three buildings and three generations of male Rikes into a million-square-foot downtown institution. Escalators, high-speed elevators, the Thanksgiving Day toy parade: what more could a city ask for? The original Rike shocked Dayton by hiring, in the 1870s, a female as a clerk. His son could be found, after the Great Flood, in his store with boots on, cleaning out mud. In 1954 the original Rike’s grandson was presented a “Retailer of the Year” award by no less than J. C. Penney. People got dressed up to go to Rike’s. Forty years after the store’s passing (it became a division of a chain of stores in 1959, and quickly lost its distinction), former salesclerks still straightened their aging bones and lifted their chins when reminiscing about their departments.

  Howard’s eyelids were sinking. Abba looked tired, too. When Howard’s eyes closed Chad decided to go press on with it. “But what does it mean when an institution excludes a whole segment of the community?”

  “You mean blacks,” Abba said.

  “Melanos?” Howard said, his eyes flying open. “They didn’t like Melanos?”

  Damn, Chad thought.

  “OH, BOY,” SAID the tech with the pinched face, adjusting the transducer on Diana’s belly. They were the only two people in the building; when Diana arrived the waiting room was dark. “It’s a goner.”

  Goner? The tech was allowed to say that in a doctor’s office? Even in an empty doctor’s office in a dying city? Diana had been bleeding two days and didn’t hold out much hope, but the shock of the tech’s words sent a squeezing pain through her pelvis. She pictured Charles’s sweet dead body, her fingers gently touching its wounds. My hero. “Are you sure?”

  “Sorry,” the tech said. “Wait a minute, you’re not attached, are you?” The tech’s face lit up. “Doc got in some great sperm last week.”

  But Diana wasn’t listening. Diana wanted, suddenly, only him—the specialist, with his cheerful sharp face and uncontrollable eyebrows. He would listen. He would do what she wanted. “I’ll probably do it somewhere else,” she mumbled. “I have sperm.” And then, because it seemed almost dangerous to offend this tech, she added: “I’ll get it done somewhere outside Dayton.”

  “How do you plan to get to somewhere outside Dayton? Have you heard of anyone leaving Dayton?”

  “I’ll find a way.” She pushed herself upright.

  “Muchos dolares,” the tech said, rubbing her fingers together. “Or maybe …” She thrust out her pelvis several times. “But you’re in no shape for that.”

  CHAD WOKE UP. Sunlight pooled on the bedroom floor. Birds were chittering; outside tender leaves unfurled. Beside him the sheet was draped over Sharis’s naked shoulder. Some petals of the tulips in the yard were hinged and hanging, giving the blossoms a wanton, iris look. Chad stood up, put his nose to the glass. Every blade of grass stood erect as a soldier. Across the street the roofs and the antennae patched so sharp against the sky they looked as if they’d score his eyeballs. Painfully beautiful, he thought.

  The whole human population of Ohio could be wiped out and the state would be none the worse. The highway seams would fill with grasses. Roofs would cave in; rabbits and rats would make their homes in indentations humans had called basements. Poison ivy would vine over foundations. Even the Grid, that apotheosis of man’s power over the earth: would it be any less fertile if it weren’t plowed? Less green? Maybe it would be more green, the bodies of the fallen Gridians life-cycled into grasses and trees.

  “I’ll stay down here with the boys,” Abba had said an hour before. “You two have some time to yourself.” Leon and Howard had fallen asleep on the family room floor as Chad delivered his talk on the birth of the baseball team, the Dayton Dragons.

  “She’s our marital aid,” Sharis had said of Abba when they got upstairs.

  “I don’t need an aid,” Chad answered.

  Now, Chad looked down to the hairs sprouting from his belly. He thought of his family: Howard’s bad breath, the long scratch on Leon’s leg, Abba’s whole failing and wrinkled body. Only Sharis was anywhere near physical perfection. Damn humans, Chad thought, smiling.

  A timid knock at the bedroom door. Chad pulled his pants on and answered. It was Abba, a strand of her hair poking straight out above one ear. “Chad? The boys are starting to stir down there. And I hate to bother you, but I’m counting out my pills, and it looks like next week I’ll need everything.”

  “Next week?”

  “Thursday. Everything. Chad”—a big smile—“I’ve watched it twice, and your class is wonderful.” So far, he’d ended every talk with something upbeat. Even Rike’s Department Store: at the end they’d seen the problem, and they’d tried.

  Pills were becoming difficult. “No sweat,” Chad said.

  The next morning he suggested a treat, a family drive to go get Abba’s pills. Excited, everyone took their usual seats in the car, but as they drove down the streets of their suburb the adults knew they’d made a mistake. The broken windows and roof tiles were sad enough; worse was the sheer overabundance of the natural world, its encroachment, its invasion. As if their city were a plate of food and the plants were swarming over it like ants. In some yards weeds reached up to the windowsills; from the sides of the road grass nipped at the tires. The previous fall the public spaces—the sidewalks and yards in front of the strip malls and office buildings—had been kept up, but now these areas were as overwhelmed as the yards. The honeysuckles, even in late April, were already thick enough to hide snipers or a whole squadron of Alliance soldiers.

  Abba’s pharmacy was closed. It wasn’t clear when or if it would reopen. There were goods on the shelves inside and no message on the door, but at almost noon the place should be open. They drove home.

  “That’s okay,” Abba said. “Those pills just made me sick.”

  ON A SUNDAY afternoon, on a fresh spring day, Tuuro wrapped a few warm cookies in a napkin and walked the steps to Chelsea’s house. He rang the bell his customary three short rings. The door cracked open and a sliver of face appeared. “Get out of here,” Chelsea growled.

  He thought it was a joke. “Chelsea?” he said. “Is Chelsea in a bad mood today?”

  “Get out of here!” she said, opening the door two inches more. “I don’t even know you. I don’t know you! You took advantage of my eyes.”

  One of the neighbors? The chubby woman one street over that Chelsea said Tuuro had “supplanted” as her favorite young person?

  “Chelsea. It’s me. It’s Theodore.” Maybe she had had a stroke. He reached to touch her arm.

  She backed away. “Theodore,” she spit, her voice hateful. “That’s not even your name. You have a stupid other name. A lying, cheating, ugly, stupid name!” Her lips tightened. “That Akira woman told me.”

  Akira. Tuuro’s fist clenched and the cookies crumbled. “Why do you believe her? You don’t even know her. She’s just a woman who works for Nenonene …”

  “General Nenonene,” Chelsea’s eyes narrowed. “She said you didn’t treat him with respect. She said you didn’t have gratitude. Oh, I saw you on TV! And you know what? I hated that man. And that man was you! I can’t help it I can’t see. I can’t help it all you people look …”

  Tuuro pushed the door open, grabbed her elbow. “Why do you believe a general who murders instead of me?” He recognized that he sounded like someone frightful. “I loved that boy! I looked after that boy!�
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  “Let go of me, you’re not African! I spit on you, I spit on you.” Chelsea’s lips closed. She made a weak attempt at a spit.

  And there was Dakwon walking upside down, down a stairwell, around a corner, across a driveway slippery with leaves, over small sharp stones that cut his hands. The will it took. The strength it took.

  Tuuro, exhausted, let her go. “I’m your friend. I brought you cookies.” He gestured at the pile of crumbs on the floor.

  “That’s what bad man does, makes an innocent person fall for their tricks. And I did that, didn’t I? I fell right down into your rabbit hole. Does that make you feel clever?”

  He could cry. “I’m me, Chelsea,” he pleaded.

  “There’s nothing about you that’s decent!” Chelsea said. “There’s nothing about you that’s African. You’re nothing to me, do you hear me? You’re nothing!” And then, chokingly (because there were his hands on her neck, and he didn’t want to rape her, no, rape was not one brushstroke in this picture), “What are you going to do now, rape me, too?”

  Insanity is the fall:

  migrations, implantation

  “I NEED TO get back to Dayton,” Tuuro said when Akira arrived. She came in through the back door, into the kitchen, where Tuuro kept his TV on the table and where he spent most of his day.

  “Dayton! Why would anyone want to go to Dayton? I have people there, and you know what? Everybody in Dayton is living in a basement. So much stealing and looting and shooting people moving downstairs like a cave. You don’t like Cleveland?”

  Tuuro glanced out the window over the sink. “It’s cold here.”

  “What do you mean it’s cold here? We keep it sixty-three. You never turned your heat past sixty back in Dayton.” Akira gave him a crafty smile. “Yes, I know that. I know all sorts of things. I know you’ve been consorting with an old blind white woman. What do you expect when you do something like that? Grief and pain.” Tuuro turned away, busied himself with the dishes in his sink. “Grief and pain,” Akira repeated.