by Martha Moody
A man can get so angry when he feels he isn’t heard
A man is not a reptile and he’s not a little bird
A man can get so angry you might wish he wasn’t heard.
He reached Allyssa’s house outside Village 42 one morning in the first week of May, on a day that felt more like November than spring. He splashed his face with water from a drainage ditch and ran his fingers along his eyebrows and teeth before he walked up her pebbled driveway to the kitchen door.
“Why are you here?” Allyssa said, astonished, and Tuuro understood immediately she didn’t plan to let him in. He saw above her head the same kitchen light, below her feet the patterned linoleum floor.
He was always at the door. Inside or outside, greeted or reviled. But never ensconced somewhere, never permanent, never at home.
“It’s me,” he said, thinking it could be possible she didn’t recognize him. “It’s Tuuro.”
“I know it’s you.” Allyssa cast a quick glance back into the kitchen, then stepped outside. “I don’t need you here,” she whispered urgently. “I have enough going on.”
“I thought I could talk to you,” Tuuro said. “I thought I could clean.”
“Why aren’t you in Cleveland?”
Tuuro for a moment couldn’t speak. “You saw what he did to me.”
“Yes, I saw. Everybody saw. It was useful. Good publicity.”
“It was a lie.”
“Sometimes we need to lie, Tuuro.” For an instant Allyssa seemed to wince, but just as quickly her face returned to its prior hardness. “A revolution is not a dinner party. Didn’t I tell you that already?”
She gave him a sandwich, finally, and let him sit on her stoop to eat while she got more information. It was possible, Tuuro thought, that he heard a voice inside that was not Allyssa’s, and when the door opened behind him he turned to see not just Allyssa, but a girl—twelve? thirteen? she had the buds of breasts but no visible hips—almost as tall and beige as Allyssa was. “We’re getting in the car,” Allyssa hissed. She directed Tuuro to the passenger’s side and the girl to the back, not introducing them to each other. “I’ll drop you off near Dayton,” she told Tuuro. “You’re not supposed to exist, you know. I had a heck of a time even finding out that much.”
They rode without speaking, the fields vast and brown around them. For some minutes the girl in the back wiggled and sighed, but then the car became silent. Allyssa glanced into the backseat, lifted a finger to her lips, and looked at Tuuro.
“What did you expect from Nenonene, Tuuro?” Allyssa whispered. “He had to make you a villain to make himself a hero. This is war. We all make sacrifices. Esslandia is full of people willing to sacrifice even their own children. You don’t hear them complaining.”
Tuuro cast his eyes toward the backseat. “Is she your daughter?”
Allyssa bit her lip. “Niece.” She gave Tuuro a quick look, as if she were daring him to contradict her. Would you sacrifice her? Tuuro thought, but he didn’t say it, not when the girl had any chance of overhearing. “Talk about sacrifice,” Allyssa said. “This young lady gave a lot to make it up here.” Allyssa’s mouth tightened. “She’s still paying.”
More silence. The sun was setting to their right, casting an orange light upon the land. “I’m going to drop you off north of Dayton, near a dam. You can just walk around it and toward town. If anyone on our side questions you, give my name.”
Tuuro nodded. He felt like a raft passenger being ferried through dangerous waters, on eddies and currents he had no reason to understand. Lanita, he was thinking: will I ever see Lanita?
“Pretty charmed life you have,” Allyssa said, shaking her head. “I thought you’d spend the rest of your life in prison.”
For an instant, he felt like killing her. He could do it; killing wasn’t hard. Later, he would think it was that moment that changed him—or, more accurately, that gave him the strength to change. He wouldn’t kill Allyssa, no. He wouldn’t hurt her, or raise his voice, or even speak. Instead he gripped, with both hands, the handle of his door. When they reached his destination Tuuro left the car and walked away, not turning with a thank you or a wave.
lila wakes up (2)
THE TACTICIANS AGREED on water. Bombing was tired. Pestilence or gas—in such a dispersed population—was unreliable. But water had the advantages of ubiquity, of surprise, of historical recall, of metaphor. Patient water, eroding canyons and caves over millions of years. Raging water, which is irresistible. Formless water, which fills up every emptiness. Essential water, which every form of life requires. The Esslandians had come up with the plan. Nenonene, upon first hearing it, agreed totally. He had always understood the Grid to be an aesthetic as well as a practical project. Its timing and his were almost contemporaneous. While he was unifying Africa, the Gridians were creating their own world. He wondered at the time when the Americans, with their blinding self-absorption, would wake up to what they’d done, but they were even slower to recognize danger in their midst than they’d been to see it in the world around them. Something else Nenonene liked about water: its putative—its almost “American”—innocence. Nenonene remembered the meeting when the plan was first mentioned. He remembered picking up his glass and twirling it, the surprising vortex he created with that simple move.
“YOU LIKED MY last Wright brothers story, didn’t you?” Chad said. “How Dayton itself made attaining flight look easy. How the Wright brothers hid themselves away here, perfecting their plane. Well, I like that story, too. But it’s not completely true.”
The Wright brothers finished their work on the plane by 1905, and the next three years were spent waiting for their patents and sending out feelers to prospective buyers. The Wright brothers had certain demands. A potential buyer must come to Dayton. The brothers would then present to the inquirer not the plane, not the plans for the plane, not photographs of the plane in flight or on the ground, but a panel of respectable citizens of Dayton to vouch for flights they’d witnessed. Without a contract, this was all the information a potential buyer would get. The brothers saw no reason to reveal more. They were honorable men who had built a machine that could fly. It was an affront and an insult if people chose not to believe them.
There was a family history of righteousness. Steadfast in his belief that Freemasons could not be good Christians, their father had marched a renegade band of parishioners out of the Evangelical Brethren church and started his own denomination, installing himself as its bishop.
“We wanted them perfect, didn’t we?” Chad said. “Our idea of perfect. We’re midwesterners, we’re nice, we want people to conform. But if Wilbur and Orville had conformed, we wouldn’t be talking about them now. It’s astonishing that two men in a midsized Ohio city even tinkered with flight, much less attained it. Think of the possible missteps, all the various points at which an idea, or a lack of an idea, might have made them go wrong. Imagine a crash killing one of them. You have to take the Wright Brothers as they happened. You have to take it that their stars were exactly right. Take away that zealot father, and you might have different sons. Meeker, maybe friendlier men, men who’d spend their time with customers, not working on a wind tunnel in the back room of their shop.”
Because of the Wrights’ secretiveness, they were not the darlings of the flight community. Among the audiences viewing their first public flights in 1908 were men, maybe even women, whose joy was not unalloyed, whose thrill was tinged with anger, jealousy, and exasperation.
“Life is complicated,” Chad said, smiling at his audience, and all four of them, even Leon, looked back with what he took as understanding.
“WE HAVE A little problem.” Allyssa’s voice over the perc was brisk. “Janie’s pregnant.”
“What?”
“It’s not a big problem. We deal with pregnancies all the time.”
“How did she get pregnant, was it … ?”
“Her transaction getting herself up here.”
Lila’s tongue s
tuck to the roof of her mouth. “She’s twelve,” she managed to say, glancing around the kitchen for her bottle.
“You know you’re seeing puberty at lower and lower ages, because of the chemicals America has …”
“Yes, yes,” Lila cut in. My God, a girl had sold her body to get herself to Allyssa’s kingdom: didn’t Allyssa feel any guilt about the outcome? “But how is she? Does she know?”
“Of course she knows. We’re very open-information.”
Lila closed her eyes. “How is she taking it?”
“She’s fine. We have some very reassuring rituals built into the whole process. We’ll do the procedure within the next few days, but technically, technically …” Allyssa hesitated. “There’s a little pressure here to get the father’s consent.”
“The father’s? When she’s twelve years old and he …”
“Janie’s father’s,” Allyssa said. Lila was startled at the anger in her voice. “Because there are negotiations going on and every procedure like this has paperwork and even in Esslandia there are”—she was almost shrieking—“damn damn bureaucrats!”
Lila felt a pang of sympathy. “I’ll call him. I’ll get his signature for you.”
“Thank you,” Allyssa said, and Lila’s eyes got teary at the humility in her tone. “But you can’t really reach us, Lila.”
“I’ll use the code words. I’ll message you. Allyssa, is Janie really okay?”
“She’s fine.” Allyssa’s tone softened. “I promise you, she’s fine. I want her to be fine.”
Lila said good-bye and dropped her perc into an armchair.
Fine. Fine, finesse, finish. She took another swallow, sank into the chair next to her perc. What was wrong with those Grid people? Allyssa was a real human being, but the society she’d helped create seemed crazy. Where, between the potluck suppers and this, had things gone so very, very wrong?
WHEN SHARIS OPENED her eyes in the morning, Chad was already awake, facing her from the other side of Howard. Chad raised his eyebrows, pointed at Howard’s midsection. “Wet,” he whispered.
Sharis was surprised. Howard hadn’t wet himself for years, and lately he’d seemed happier. He’d picked irises from the neighbors’ and arranged them in glasses around the house.
“I’m soaking,” Chad mouthed, extricating himself from the blankets.
Howard stirred next. He burrowed his face into his pillow, rolled over to face Sharis, and wiggled his mouth. One of the joys of being in their family bed again (which they had adopted simply because they didn’t want to leave Abba alone) was seeing the boys’ faces as they awoke. Almost immediately Howard’s face crinkled with puzzlement and his eyes popped open.
“It was a fluke,” Sharis whispered. “Don’t worry.”
Abba sat up on the sofa. “What’s wrong?” Her hair was totally flat on one side and stuck straight out on the other, giving her a windswept look. Her swollen ankles were as chubby as a baby’s joints.
“Shhh. Nothing’s wrong. Howard”—Sharis had an inspiration—“remember the night of the ice? When the ice was falling and we all got scared? Leon went dirty in his pants that night.”
A smile crept onto Howard’s face. He craned his neck and looked over at his sleeping brother.
“I CAN’T HANDLE it.” Janie’s father burst out over the phone. “You’ll have to handle it.” Lila was disappointed in his reaction, but she couldn’t say she was surprised. Nothing surprised her. The crazy insularity of the Gridians didn’t surprise her. Janie’s pregnancy didn’t surprise her. Kennedy’s being found dead in her living room chair after a heart attack didn’t surprise her. Lila supposed she should feel guilty about both Janie and Kennedy, but as long as she kept drinking she felt numb.
—You can’t help it that you have alcoholism.
—Kennedy, stop bothering me. I don’t care about your stupid dreams!
—It’s a spiritual disease. It’s not a problem in Esslandia because …
What is wrong with you? Lila thought, rolling over in her bed the next morning. Her mouth was parched and her lips cracked, and even the soft skin inside her wrists looked baggy. In the mirror the mole on her cheek was so saggy she looked for the nail scissors to cut it off. No luck. She inspected her face again, and it was her eyes that scared her. She looked worse than an uto: she looked like someone who would just as soon be dead.
Lila, she thought, you used to care. Lila, you saved Dayton.
—Did I really?
—Yes, really.
—That’s an exaggeration.
—Well, slightly, but there’s truth to it.
She’d saved Dayton. If a person could save an entire city, shouldn’t that person be able to save a single girl?
She called Ferrescu and set up another meeting. He made her wait two days. “I’ll pick you up,” she told him. She gazed at her perc a moment, then turned it off and carried it downstairs into the garage. She hammered shut her bedroom and bathroom windows. She emptied the contents of her medicine cabinet into a bag she put in the kitchen, tossing her razors and scissors in the trash. She filled a pail with water to set beside her bed, and floated a one-cup measure inside it as a ladle. She shut her bedroom door, used her key to lock it from the inside, then slipped the key under the door out into the hall. Lie down, she thought, but it was hard to make herself still; inside, she was already shaking.
The night before she had thought today would be an ordinary day, but now she understood that it could not be. Self-healing, she was thinking, that whole self-healing package.
In several hours she was sweating. Her hands were uncontrollable. She used her hips to push the mattress half off the bed, then crawled under the teetering edge and pulled it on top of her. She was wedged but she could breathe. The weight of the mattress calmed her. By the time she could extricate herself from this room, she would be sober.
She would never be doing this for her own sake. She was doing this for Janie.
“WHY DID YOU tell him?” Leon demanded. “Why?”
“Leon, what are you talking about?” Leon’s tears alarmed Sharis in a way Howard’s never would. She fluttered around her younger son, making soothing gestures with her hands.
“You told him the worst thing,” Leon sobbed.
“Oh, sweet potato,” she said, understanding. “Howard felt so bad about wetting his pants and I …” She stopped herself.
“Why do you always do things?” Leon wailed. Sharis was struck by a sudden sensation, a twang as if he’d sounded a note in her that matched exactly a note she’d heard from her own mother. How can you do that? little Cheryl’s eyes had screamed, watching her mother hold her brother, and Cheryl’s mother—Sharis understood this—had had the same horrified recognition that Sharis did now: This child is right. Dear God, let this child live despite me.
Astonishing how much lighter Sharis’s chest felt, how easily she could breathe, once she realized that Chad was indeed right, that Sharis’s mother had indeed been Benjamin, the relative who schemed to save her.
“GET ME THERE tomorrow,” Lila said. She was standing behind Ferrescu in his chair in his front room, below the shoe-filled birdcage, feeling ferocious and foolish—but not wobbly, not fuzzy, not as if she couldn’t form her words. In Lila’s right hand she held a butcher knife she wasn’t certain she could use.
Ferrescu was about to cry. “Another day—please, not tomorrow!”
“Tomorrow,” Lila repeated, making a jabbing motion. Ferrescu nodded.
HOWARD WAS HAPPIER. Howard set the table for dinner. Howard slept through the night and didn’t wet at all.
“What’s with Leon?” Chad said. “He’s been sulking all day.”
“He’ll get over it,” Sharis said. “He’ll be fine, I promise.”
In the corner of their garage they stored an American flag in a fabric wrapper. In the past Chad had put it out on holidays, which always made Sharis feel like a foreigner, because after the Gridding an American flag was nothing Sharis could look at
without ambivalence. Today when Sharis spotted it, it looked heroic. The media said the Alliance troops were organizing, that ground assaults on Columbus and Dayton and Indianapolis could be expected any day. The Esslandian president made a statement. There was no need for any American citizens to be frightened: the Esslandians would treat them with respect. The Agents of Havoc had all been withdrawn. Like hell I’m cowering, Sharis thought. She brushed away the spiderwebs around the flag and unrolled it and stuck its pole in the holder by the front door. No one but they and the sheriff would see it, but when she walked across the street to look at it, she felt a happiness beyond satisfaction. She felt right.
A WOMAN IN a white uniform called Lila from the waiting room, empty except for her. Another ride in a truck to here, north up an empty I-75 and twenty miles east to this windowless cinder-block building, one story high, that sat in a cluster of similar buildings at the outskirts of a town. A wooden sign outside the door, elegantly painted and carved, read GRID CLINIC, VILLAGE 67; a cardboard addition that read ESSLANDIAN, printed in marker and covered with clear plastic, had been tacked up under the word GRID.
Through the hall doorway Lila saw Janie, fully dressed, sitting at the end of an exam table with her feet dangling; Allyssa knelt on the floor in front of her, tying the girl’s shoes.
“Do we go to the fields now?” Janie asked in a little girl voice, which Lila didn’t remember as quite so high and helpless.
“Everything went beautifully,” Allyssa said. “You did great.”
“She made it,” the nurse said, and Allyssa and Janie turned their gazes to the door. The nurse disappeared down the hall.
“Are you done?” Lila asked. “I thought you’d wait for me! Where’s the doctor? I brought the consent form.”
“Hello, Lila,” Allyssa said coolly.
“Hi, Aunt Lila,” Janie said, reaching for Allyssa’s hand to help her off the table. Lila saw that she’d been crying; the tracks of her tears had left thin strands of salt on her cheeks. “Do we go to the fields now?” Janie repeated to Allyssa. Allyssa responded with a quick and warning glance.