by Martha Moody
Most nights, Sharis stayed up past midnight editing. The whole family, even Abba, complained about the light from the editon, and Sharis ended up hanging a sheet from the top bunk as a screen, doing her work in what became a hot little cave. “Do you have to keep working?” Chad said. “No one else here is working.”
“I don’t want the boys to think it’s normal for adults sit around all day and do nothing,” Sharis said. “Do you?”
Even Chad admitted there was something eerie about the place, with the breakfast buffets and the sloppy joes and the fried chicken with mashed potatoes and the freshly poured concrete slabs topped by tents with names like “The Dragon’s Den” or “Orville’s House.” It was as if the few remaining citizens of south Dayton (there were three thousand Daytonians and suburbanites in this camp, a little under four thousand in each of the two others) were being seduced to think their days here were a vacation. The Elderkind camp west of Dayton, Chad heard, was much more rustic; already some of its residents were threatening antidiscrimination lawsuits.
Abba had made a new friend, Betty, a woman who had been, of all things, an acquaintance of Abba’s deceased little brother in Cleveland. Betty and Abba sat in the dining room and talked all day, a running commentary. What if you had a husband looked like that? You remember Demi Moore? I can’t stand too much salt in deviled eggs. That granddaughter of mine, I don’t know. It was a relief to both Chad and Sharis to have Abba talking.
On a warm afternoon when Sharis was working inside and the boys were playing volleyball under a sub-’urge’s supervision and Abba was chatting with Betty, Chad wandered down to the edge of the tent near the musicians. He almost envied the families there for their nightly singing, although he knew it drove Sharis crazy. Surprising how territorial they’d become: Chad was careful not to walk too close to the tent, for fear of disturbing anyone’s private yard. The Marriott people had supplied outside chairs, two per dwelling, and no one ever sat in another family’s chairs.
A bombing campaign had been attempted against the Grid (un-American to call it Esslandia; President Baxter referred to its “illegitimate government” and “de facto leader”), the goal being to soften its defenses in preparation for an American ground invasion. But things had gone wrong. The Grid’s surface-to-air missiles were very effective, and earlier in the week three American bombers had been shot down in one morning. Since then the bombing had been desultory, and rumors of dissent in the air force ranks had reached as far as the SafePlace cafeteria.
No one was at home at the singing end of the tent. There was a fire circle forty feet away, and a female youngie was hunched on a rock there with her shoes off, skirt bunched between her legs, using a Swiss Army knife on her toenails. “Hello,” Chad said, recognizing the girl as the granddaughter of Abba’s friend, Betty. “What’s your name again? I’m Chad.”
The girl looked up warily. “I know you’re Chad. I’m Flower.” Chad smiled at the name, because this girl looked more like a Thistle. Flower said, “Aren’t you going to sit down?”
Flower had ideas. Flower wasn’t happy about being stuck in some god-awful camp, but hey, what did America expect? “You think about this,” Flower said. “We were the top dogs in the world for years. And it didn’t make the rest of the world happy.”
“True,” Chad said agreeably, wondering if Flower was over twenty.
“And we weren’t the only country that suffered through the Short Times. And then we got the Grid, and then we hoarded.” Her face became severe, reminding Chad of Sharis’s face when she was planting bulbs. “You can’t eat all the apples off the tree. You’ve got to share your apples.” She hacked off a piece of toenail, flicked it into the ashes of the fire circle.
Where were Flower’s parents? Betty said they had left Dayton for Iowa months before. Betty and Flower and Flower’s football player brother had been living in a house by themselves. Flower reminded Chad of certain angry peaceniks who’d showed up in his parents’ kitchen. His mother had mollified them with food and conversation, like feeding a wild animal honey from the tip of a spoon.
“It all comes from thinking you’re special,” Flower said.
Chad thought of the strip mall of his childhood in 2006 or so, the nut and candy shop owned by Pakistanis and the gay florist with the talking bird and the crazy Jews wearing big felt hats—like Jews from old Prague—hidden behind blinds in their Jewish Information Center and the video shop with its flashing sign advertising 1000 Adult DVDs and kids hopping around in white pajamas in the tae kwon do academy (academy!) and the photo shop where the Easter Bunny arrived each year in a pink furry suit. Wasn’t that special? All that divergent life, all those various dreams, under one long L-shaped roof?
“We were special,” Chad said. “We had a special way of life.”
“You think it’s right to have everything?” Flower waved her knife. “Everything while the rest of the world has nothing?”
What had happened to those Jews? “They drove to Cincinnati to bring back kosher plates and silverware for a banquet!” Chad heard his mother say, her voice a mixture of awe and exasperation. What kind of plate did a man like that eat off now? Chad saw a bearded behatted man in a long overcoat running down the sidewalk past rows of broken windows, past teenage looters grabbing up the 1000 DVDs and suburban mothers turned scavengers poring over picture frames, picking ones to keep not for aesthetic qualities or size but because they looked like good burners. Anything for a fire, a bit of warmth. The detritus of civilization turned to fuel. But it hadn’t been like that. Some of the businesses had closed during the Great Recession, but others of them had struggled on. Later, during New Dawn Dayton, when Consort built its nuclear plant and the center-city industrial park filled with factories, the strip mall once again got busy and new strip malls were built. The Short Times hurt everyone, of course, but Dayton, because of its industrial base, less than other cities. Even in the last two years, as the city was slowly abandoned, there were occasional break-ins but no looters. Some vestige of politeness and gentility, like a man on his deathbed reaching out to shake a hand.
“One world!” Flower was saying, and Chad realized she’d been talking all along. “Don’t you think that’s a reasonable thing to hope for?”
“No,” Chad said. “Not at all.”
She didn’t hear him. She wasn’t the sort of person to listen, except to people she’d decided ahead of time were right. Chad considered arguing with her, but it seemed like too much work. He might not be able to explain the strip mall without fading into tears.
TUURO WAS WALKING back from K-Bob’s across the levee. He walked on the north side of the road, on the steep grass of the earthen dam’s side. No one could spot him except someone watching from the Grid.
Today, Tuuro was happy. He liked being outside and living alone. He liked the weather, the smell of the morning, the baby weeds sprouting all over the farm. When things had settled down he’d take a bus to Chattanooga and demand to see Lanita. If Naomi didn’t agree, he’d get a lawyer. He’d find another job in maintenance. What did they have on him? Nothing. The genetics had cleared him about Cubby, and no one in Dayton had ever heard of Chelsea. Forward, onward and upward. No more cringing.
The fireball came from behind him. Tuuro was aware of light before he felt the heat, and then he realized—this was the strangest thing—that the orb was rolling with an almost stately pace. Tuuro had time, actual time, to consider what to do and how to do it. All his life, circumstances and people and his own self had contrived to make him less. Even Aunt Stella, by leaving him, had made him less. He was sick of being less. If he survived, he would fight to be more.
DIANA WAS SITTING at her desk at the Red Cross with her monitors split into four screens, thinking about making a baby quilt incorporating some of the clothes she’d taken from the Center. A male voice spewed out from one of the feeds into her earphone. “How the hell did it happen? How the piss-ass hell do I know how it happened? All I know is there were Grid
troops camped there and apparently they’d been walking across the fucking dam for supplies. Walking across the fucking dam! Going shopping at K-Bob’s! You tell me this isn’t army incompetence.”
Levee? K-Bob’s? It sounded like the angry man was talking about the dam by Diana’s old nature center. The voice was coming from monitor 4. Diana turned the sound off on the other monitors. Monitor 4, broadcasting from a media outlet in Dayton, was displaying its usual default image of a live view of some SafePlace tents.
“Unbelievable.” A woman’s voice now.
“Damn straight it’s unbelievable. That’s why I believe it. We secured that area! We got rid of the Taconoutes and we turned it over to the army and …”
“Can we get you on camera?”
“Wait a minute,” the male voice said, “let me settle down. If those Gridians had troops holed up there since that nature center debacle …”
“Don’t calm down,” the woman said. “We love that anger.” A new image appeared on the screen: a tall uniformed man and a short blond woman in front of a white wall emblazoned with the words WAR FOR UNITY. “We’re already on?” The woman lifted a finger to her ear. “Colonel, we’re on camera now.”
I should turn this off, Diana thought. I don’t want to miscarry. But she had her job to do.
“I’m here with U.S. Air Force colonel Herman Weatherby, and …” There was a button Diana had to push to save things, and she’d pushed it a hundred times, but now she couldn’t remember where it was. “ … we have just received reports that the Englewood Dam northwest of Dayton has been destroyed, I repeat, a dam northwest of Dayton …”
Diana found the button. She dropped her right hand to her lower abdomen and cradled little Charles.
“ … and our sources believe that this was not a bomb, this is not believed to be a bombing attack, but the destruction was apparently secondary to explosive devices placed throughout the …”
Why would anyone want to blow up the Englewood Dam? Diana used to walk across it to go shopping, and she remembered looking down from it north to the Stillwater River, which in March had swollen up enough from rain that the shoreline trees looked like sticks poking out from a puddle. A dam over a hundred years old, she recalled, part of the system built after Dayton’s Great Flood.
“Of course we are treating this as a hostile”—the colonel sounded determined and almost cheerful, all traces of his earlier rage gone—“Gridian action.”
Diana in her mind saw Charles quickly turning off his perc when she walked into the room; she saw the Esslandian president beaming at her on the holo-screen; she saw the paper in Charles’s hand tremble as he headed up the hill toward the barn for his news conference. “They care about us!” Charles had cried, in his euphoria twirling her like a square dancer. “They want to protect nature!”
My God, Diana thought. We were dupes. They never cared about our trees. They were after the dam.
GRADY AND HIS copilot got into their helicopter and awaited orders. “You have to admit,” Grady said, “those Esslandians sticking around to blow up the dam was pretty smart. And did you hear how the Grid’s been selling corn to the Alliance for years?”
“Of course they’re smart!” The copilot barked. “They started out American!”
CHAD WAS CUTTING across the football field toward the bathroom when he got the news. “They blew another one!” A man shouted. “They blew Taylorsville!” Taylorsville was the concrete dam across the upper Great Miami. Chad ran to the nearest TV monitor, mounted on a pole at the edge of the football field.
But why? There was no significant water behind either dam, only two meandering rivers. “What the heck are they doing?” Chad said to no one in particular. “They going to wait till next spring and flood us out?” A crowd was gathering, and with it a crowd of opinions.
“They’re trying to goad us into doing something.”
“It’s got to be psychological, right? What else could it be except psychology?”
“They’re goading the Chinese. They know how the Chinese feel about dams.”
“It’s just to show that they can penetrate. It’s like a fuck you, USA.”
Chad pushed through the people and headed for his tent. “Where is everybody?” he said, flinging open the door.
Sharis, sitting in the inflatable armchair, looked up quickly from her editon. If Chad had been more observant, he would have heard the flatness in her voice. “They’re at laser tag. Abba’s with Betty.”
Chad sat down heavily on the edge of his bunk. His breathing was fast. “The Gridians or the Alliance or whoever it is blew another dam.” He took several slower breaths, then told her all he knew.
“But why … ?” When the Englewood Dam was blown up, Sharis had said she wasn’t watching any more news.
“Scaring us. Frightening us.” His speech was ragged and not quite coherent, and he seemed angry at her question. “Showing off their power.” They are scaring you, Sharis thought, looking at her husband. Something clicked inside her, like a knob turning off the possibility of fear.
“I have some news, too,” Sharis told Chad. “I streamed George and Gentia’s week today, and George shot himself on Tuesday.”
Chad looked at her uncomprehendingly. Sharis took her index finger and pointed it at her head. “I don’t know how I’m going to edit it. Or even if I should. I don’t know where Gentia is.”
“George is dead?” Chad’s voice was like a child’s, high and curling.
Sharis nodded.
“He shot himself on camera?”
“In the kitchen.” Sharis turned off the editon and folded down the screen. “No last words.”
“Does Gentia know?”
“You see her arm and back come in on Friday, and then the camera gets turned off.”
Chad said, “He talked to me. He worried about going to heaven.” In front of his eyes he saw both Sharis sitting in front of him and George with the gun looking at the camera, but wavy lines overlaid both these images, as if he were looking through glass brick. “You watched this just now?”
“Five times. I wanted to be sure it was real. Why would he do that?” Sharis said. “Why would any person not want to stay alive? I mean, life is scary and menacing and you never know, but, a lot of the time, it’s glorious.” She looked at Chad, gestured toward her editon. “I do these lives, and I see people getting caught up in the stupidest things, and they don’t, they don’t …”
When Sharis was a child named Cheryl Mae, her father had a joke effect he called Making Himself Big. He started walking toward her normally, but then he hunched his shoulders and lifted his arms and pushed himself onto his tiptoes, and this, coupled with his drawing closer, made him indeed look huge, made him look like a monster. Chad at this moment was making himself big. “You are insane!” He yelled. “You are sick! You have no human feelings at all!”
Sharis looked up at Chad in wonder, amazed the trick still worked. “Of course I do,” she said. Her voice sounded childlike now.
“Five times?” he shouted. “You watched George shoot himself five times? I don’t even know you!”
“Of course you do,” she said, her voice even smaller, and really, now she was afraid, not of herself or broken dams but of her husband.
“You don’t even care!” Chad bellowed. “You watch someone die and the world falls apart and you don’t even …”
“Why are you like this?” Sharis said, squirming. “Didn’t you hear me?” She wanted this to end, for Chad to return to his normal self, for there to be exhaustion and remorse and a tender groping that would make them wish for their old big bed.
Instead the door to their room flew open, and there was Abba, hunched over, mouth open, her forehead slick with sweat. “I can’t breathe,” she gasped, heading for Sharis’s chair, and Sharis leapt up so Abba didn’t sit on her.
“Are you sick?” Chad asked. “What’s wrong?”—and those question made Sharis start crying, because Abba was beyond sick: her skin was g
ray and her knuckles white and her eyes glittered with fear.
“Get help, Chad,” Sharis said, pushing Abba upright in the chair.
“How?”
“Get the ’urge.” Sharis placed herself directly in front of Abba, held her shoulders, looked her in the eye. “We’re getting help for you, ” Sharis said. “We’ll do everything we can.”
For once Abba wasn’t talking, even though her eyes were open.
Don’t die, Sharis was thinking. If you die, we die.
memorial day
“THIS IS THE first time I really feel threatened,” Sharis muttered to Chad as they ate supper, Abba-less, the four of them clustered around the table in their dwelling. They’d carried out their loaded plates from the dining tent, dodging the ’urge and her minions. “I’m glad we brought dinner home.”
Home, Chad thought with a flash of bitterness. Two and a half weeks here and we call it home. That’s what the government and Marriott wanted, right? He burrowed in his mashed potatoes. But he would have used the same word.
They’d just gotten word that the Huffman Dam, an earthen dam across the Mad River, had also been exploded, but incompletely and not irreparably. “The Alliance can’t be happy about this one,” one of the newscasters said.
“Is Abba going to die?” Leon asked.
“No,” Chad and Sharis said at once.
“EVERYTHING OKAY?” THE ’urge chirped at breakfast. Saturday, two days before Memorial Day.
The bridges were out, the dams were destroyed, they were sitting in a refugee camp awaiting the attack on their own city. Abba was in a hospital south of them, in Middletown. “Fine,” Sharis said.
For the past weeks Sharis had been living in a perpetual present—she had lost control of her own life—and in an instant another moment would be propelled at her, as sudden and mysterious as a bird (she’d been watching them all week: the way they hurled through the air like packages, their feet uselessly dangling). I want to go home, she thought, remembering lying on the family room floor and gazing out the rectangle of window, the pillow’s indentation cradling her head. “I miss my fuzzy afghan,” Abba had said. “I miss the cushion on your toilet.” Oh, Abba.