Sharp and Dangerous Virtues

by Martha Moody

  The ash from the Grid fires spread over the entire Midwest, the satellite photo of smoke and flames displacing in everyone’s mind the previous image of green.

  2071

  not the end of the world

  HOWARD AND LEON grew up and got married, Howard to a woman who was fascinated by his story. Chad worried that Howard was a sullen husband, but as the years passed it became clear that Mella wouldn’t leave him, that the adhesive glamour of his tragedies stuck Mella to him too firmly to pick off. Chad overheard Mella once at a picnic when Howard stayed in the car. “I don’t push him, I would never push him after what’s he’s been through.” As Mella spoke she had the baby (Janeth) in one arm, and the bigger children (Howard Jr., called How, and Katherine) clutching at her legs. She was the household’s wage earner, working as a repair crew supervisor for Consort. Howard stayed home with the children, grilling sandwiches for lunch and stringing cranberries and popcorn for Christmas and making flash cards to use with How, who was a slow reader. “You’re a very active parent,” Chad had told him once.

  “Like you and Mom were,” Howard said.

  Like you and Mom were. A comment Chad remembered as he lay in bed, wondering what his life had been good for.

  Leon, in contrast, couldn’t seem to keep a family. His first wife was a beautiful woman of East Indian background with whom he had a son. After she and Leon divorced she married another Indian, and Chad often wondered if her parents resented her lavish first wedding, involving imported foods and costumes and much strained goodwill. Leon’s second wife had a stroke and six months later Leon left her, telling everyone he was planning to leave her anyway. His third wife, another beauty, abandoned Leon for a fireman after bearing Leon’s second son.

  Leon was witty and always seemed to have a crowd around him. He worked in global investments and made enormous amounts of money. He had gotten a corrective plate to fill the gap between his front teeth. To most people he appeared much more successful than his brother. Chad wasn’t sure. He wondered if Leon was capable of living in peace. Chad worried that something in Leon’s motor was broken and intrinsically dangerous. Leon gambled; he was always looking for a new vehicle or a more remote vacation spot or a better place to live. Howard’s motor was slow to start and sputtered, but basically intact. It wouldn’t rev up and fly off the boat like Leon’s might.

  Chad was thinking of boats because he, his wife, Howard and Mella and their children, along with Leon and both his sons were vacationing beside a lake in Tennessee, a TVA lake that had been created in the 1930s by flooding a valley and its two towns. This was the first group vacation they’d managed since Leon’s adulthood; in the past, Leon’s custody quarrels and travels had kept them incomplete. Chad and most of the crew were sitting on the porch of their cottage at a table overlooking the water when Leon mentioned, as he often did, his mother. “She planted all those bulbs, remember? She was a maniac for bulbs.” Leon’s glass of beer, like his forehead, was sweating. He lifted his head and squinted at something far out on the water—probably a female water-skier, Chad thought.

  “Is he talking about Mrs. Sharis?” Janeth asked her mother. How they came up with that appellation Chad never knew.

  “Yes, baby,” Mella said, wrapping her arm around her youngest. “You should have seen her. She was really, really pretty.” Of course she knew this from Howard, but also from old media images, still available on the Internet, that had popped up when Sharis was killed.

  “She’s with Jesus,” Janeth said. Chad was always startled to hear his grandchildren talk about Jesus—that was Mella’s influence—but life, he’d realized, was full of such surprises. Still, he was relieved to see his granddaughter Katherine’s quick frown. Chad suspected that Katherine, like himself, didn’t want a God to snuggle into. She and Chad both preferred a God that was grander.

  Sharis was beautiful, Chad wanted to say. Beautiful and intelligent and tough. He ached to say this as a tribute, but he couldn’t, because KayLynn, his former department secretary and new wife (not so new anymore; they’d been married over twenty-two years), might overhear him from inside the cottage. KayLynn had treated Chad’s boys like her own and cooked and saved and steered Chad through faculty politics at three separate colleges; she was undoubtedly a woman of many virtues, but tolerance of Sharis was not among them. One day Chad’s old photo chip, the one he’d brought from their house in the suburbs to the SafePlace camp, had simply disappeared. Chad was certain that KayLynn had disposed of it. At the time, Howard was having problems with school, Leon was flirting with dubious friends, Chad’s department chair was being replaced, and perhaps all that stood between the family and chaos was KayLynn’s tenacious grip on order. To KayLynn, Chad realized, his and KayLynn’s marriage was the only marriage. If it was to continue, he must pretend he felt the same. So Chad did the husbandly thing. He pretended.

  Persistence. That might indeed be, Chad thought, the only useful virtue. That and a certain generosity of spirit he always associated with Abba. “Think about it,” she told Chad before she died. “That shot could easily have hit one of the boys. So Sharis saved them. I know you miss her, but it’s not the end of the world.”

  It wasn’t the end of the country, either. It was a new America now, a country that no longer cowed its neighbors. But still multiracial, still aggressive, still (the rest of the world laughed at this) optimistic. Old America, waving its plastic sword. Yet an American type of democracy had taken hold throughout South America and much of Africa, and other countries, especially China, found the American military game and often useful. The Chinese had even implemented, on the Yangtze, the water defense barrier plan the U.S. had been planning for the Mississippi.

  Dayton itself had become famous in its destruction. Old issues of the Dayton Daily News were collector’s items. A relative who’d lived there was, if not a status symbol, at least a reliable topic of conversation. And if he cared to mention Sharis in a public place, Chad would never have to buy a drink again.

  “Mrs. Sharis was a pretty woman,” Chad agreed, touching Janeth on the nose. “Like you.” KayLynn could stand to hear that, he decided.

  “She was glorious,” Mella sighed.

  Chad reached to touch his other granddaughter’s nose, but Katherine predictably dodged his finger. Sharis, Chad thought, would have been more graceful with the grandchildren than he was. He winced to see his scrawny arm reaching over the table. He’d been a big man, once.

  ONE MORNING WHEN Chris was twelve, Diana asked him to set out his piano books for his afternoon lesson. “I’ll put them in my car,” she said, because she would be picking him up from school. But once Chris left on the school bus, Diana couldn’t find his music books anywhere. This was odd because Chris, for all his awkwardness and dubious grooming, was generally reliable. She got in her car and found the books placed on the passenger seat. At that moment she knew she had made the right decision.

  No preselects. Just a random child.

  Sometimes she would listen to other parents and worry that she rarely worried. The scrapes Chris (his full name was Charles Christopher) got into were always minor. He was working in a restaurant now as an apprentice chef and living by himself; a year before, after finishing college, he’d gotten himself a factory job and a room in a house full of youngies. She suspected he was a person who would keep testing life like this, randomly yet somehow methodically, until one day the world caught fire for him. She thought of Charles then, crouched over, eyes up, creeping his way toward a bit of birdsong. She couldn’t identify any bird sounds anymore. Pity. Or not a pity: enough else in her mind.

  Except to her son, Diana never mentioned Charles. And she’d spoken to no one, not even Chris, about her experiences during the war. She had her stock phrases. “It was a chaotic time.” “People went through all sorts of things.” She had traveled once to what used to be Dayton and tried to find the area that had been the nature center, but the bombing had destroyed the Stillwater riverbed, and a new and s
traighter channel had been laid down. Like me, Diana had thought. I’m flowing in a new channel, too.

  Sometimes she wondered if Charles’s death could have been prevented. Her and his hopeful stupidity was painful to recall, but there were worse flaws than being young and foolish. They weren’t greedy. They cared about things bigger than themselves. They had tried to improve the world.

  Diana worked as a counselor at a center for damaged women. She had started as an office person, then gotten training for client services. Clients could tell her anything. Scaldings received and given. What they really felt about their stepdads. Lusts. She didn’t ask a lot of questions, didn’t exhort people, didn’t tell them they were better than they were. She simply heard them.

  One peculiar comfort was that as she saw more and more preselects—and also, in smaller numbers, clones—she realized that they were normal people. They were only in the most limited ways distinct from other people. They were humans. They could still fall in love with the wrong person or wake up at night with dreams of drowning. It was madness—Diana had come to believe—to think that human beings were created equal, and yet they must be treated as if they were.

  Once a woman who’d been the mother of one of the infamous Jeff clones came to Diana as a client. “I don’t think I raised him right,” the mother said of her son. “He was like a baby god to me. The real Jeff’s parents didn’t treat him like that.” This woman’s Jeff had been killed during the Grid takeover; the garage that he’d been hiding in collapsed. “You think the real Jeff would’ve let himself get killed?”

  The Grid survivors, this woman told Diana, had yearly picnics. Many of them still ate in outside structures in the fall. A lot of them didn’t like talking to non-Gridians. “You can tell right off if someone was part of it,” the woman said. “Those summer nights up there? That was paradise.” At that time there was a lot of media interest in a Jeff clone who had started up a church in Nebraska. “They watch him all the time, you know,” the woman said. “Why’s a country do that unless they’re scared? And why are they scared if they’re so right?”

  “I talked to your president up there once,” Diana offered as the woman left. “President Beerbower. He was very nice.” The woman shot Diana a wide-eyed look and headed straight out the door. She never returned.

  SO IS THERE any Dayton now, Zadie? “Zadie” was the Yiddish term for “grandpa,” and what Chad had called his mother’s father. “There’s a plaque,” Chad said, answering his granddaughter’s question, “where the Mad River and the Miami River come together, and there’s a museum nearby.”

  It was like the dying out of a family, the last heirs not reproducing, but still: the species lived on. “There are houses and parks and stores,” Chad went on. “It’s a town and it’s where Dayton was, but it’s not Dayton.” The name had been too freighted to be reused. “It’s basically a town for people starting out. The developer was a man named Casey Bloom, so he called it Bloomville, but people like to call it Boom City.”

  The suburbs were still there, Chad could have told her. The Gribbles’ old house was still there, although for ten years no one lived in it because of the time needed for decontamination. Chad left this out to make the story less confusing.

  Years before, when Bloomville was first being constructed, Chad had paid a visit to the Dayton Memorial. In the museum were two early NCR cash registers and a replica of the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop. The mementos struck Chad as an insult to the thriving hive that had been Dayton. He thought with a pang of the fake Indian villages he had visited in his youth.

  Wilbur and Orville, honoring a promise they’d made to their father, flew together only once, in 1910. Two years later, sick with typhoid fever, Wilbur, the big brother, died. The brothers’ father, the bishop, died in 1917. Orville stayed on in Dayton with his sister, Katharine, making his living as what biographers call an “aeronautical consultant,” but his heady days were done. When Katharine at age fifty-four married an old college friend and moved to Kansas, Orville came perilously close to never forgiving her, although he did travel to be at her bedside when she died. Battles over patents, arguments with potential biographers, grouchy letters to the Smithsonian—these were the actions of a man protecting, not building, a legacy. Orville Wright was often spotted walking around Dayton, but he was proper and private and many people were afraid to say hello. In October of 1947 he collapsed running up the steps of the NCR main building. Employees at other buildings in the complex gathered at their windows for a bird’s-eye view. That heart attack didn’t kill him, but another one three months later did. In his will he left a large bequest to Oberlin College, his sister’s alma mater.

  Is it possible, Chad used to ask in his Dayton course, that to invent the airplane one person was not enough? Did Orville and Wilbur, by some mysterious combustion, together made a whole inventor? By 1901 they signed their checks “The Wright Brothers,” with each of their initials by the name.

  “Boom City,” Janeth repeated, grinning. “Boom-Boom City.” Chad wished that he were young again, standing at a mirror preparing for the bars of Boom-Boom City. As people aged, Chad thought, their words carried the past. A single sentence had its own long hall behind it, doors opening and closing, ghost people walking forward or away, a flickering vista out the window at the end. That was another way his grandchildren comforted him: the brilliant surfaceness of their speech, their sentences saying no more than they meant to say.

  “I want to live in Boom-Boom City,” Janeth said. “I want to live where Mrs. Sharis lived.”

  Glorious, Mella had said. Where had Chad heard that word?

  A WOMAN CAME in, picked up a candy bar, tossed it on the counter with some bills. A splatter in the neatness of his shop. “Sorry, I don’t take cash,” Bob White said. His shop was in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati.

  The woman bit her lip and picked up her money. “All the Crescent Hill shops take cash,” she said. Bob White sighed. He knew this woman’s type. He’d had protestors in front of his shop less than a year before. He shouldn’t sell beer. He shouldn’t sell tobacco. He shouldn’t sell those magazines. SHAME, SHAME read one of the signs.

  “They don’t have the clientele I’m dealing with,” Bob White said, meeting her eyes. A fine, curvy, dark-skinned woman of medium height, her hair straightened and pulled back from her face.

  The woman started to cry. “I’m your daughter, Daddy.”

  It took him a moment to form the words. “Lanita? You’re Lanita?”

  She nodded, sniffed, gave a little smile.

  “Well, well,” Tuuro said, and there was an echo in those words, an old man’s voice, maybe a grandfather’s. He wanted to walk around the counter and grab her, but such a move might frighten her away. “What brings you here?” he asked.

  “My husband and I want to have a baby, and there’s diabetes on his side, and the new research says the grandparents’ genetics matter, too, so … I want your genetics. That’s the reason.”

  “Is your mother well?”

  “She’s fine. She’s got her house in Chattanooga, got her job.”

  Bob White felt as if a huge soap bubble had filled itself between them, iridescent and lovely but so fragile a hug or a touch or even a heavy breath could break it. He wanted desperately for that bubble to stay whole. Lanita. Never had he dreamed that she would walk into the store.

  “What do you know about me?” he asked.

  “I know everything,” she said. “I know you changed your name.” He waited with an aching hope, because that was not the thing he’d prayed for. “I know you didn’t hurt that boy. I know that Nenonene used you. I know something happened up in Cleveland.” Lanita’s mouth twisted in a way Bob White recalled from years before. “I know you lived through that dam explosion.”

  “All that’s true,” he said. She knew a lot. If she could find out those things then the authorities could surely learn them, too, which must mean that the authorities didn’t ca
re. Had never cared.

  “You look different,” Lanita said.

  “They didn’t have skin quite my color.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You look harder.”

  He made a helpless shrug.

  She pulled a card out of her handbag. “If you’ll call this number, they’ll come and get the specimen. It won’t cost you anything.”

  Do you work? He wanted to ask her. What is your husband like? Do you remember me from real life, or photos? Do you hate me? But there was that bubble, and he must not break it.

  He nodded at the candy bar. “It’s yours.”

  “You’ll call that number?”

  “I’ll call today. What’s your last name, now? So I can tell them?”

  “Simpkins. Lanita Simpkins.”

  Bob White lifted his hand toward the candy bar. “Take it. Take it, honey.”

  He was not perfect, he was in many ways broken, and yet he had survived. In certain ways (his shelves of merchandise, his sparkling floor, the display in his front window) he had flourished.

  Lanita turned without picking up the candy bar. Maybe she hadn’t heard him. She said, “I told them if you call, you’ll be Bob White.” As she pushed open the door she looked back at him. “Remember three-minute eggs?” With that the bubble floated outside with her, luminous, intact.

  THERE WAS A fan of the Boom City Bombers who sat alone above the dugout tunnel every home game, wrapped in a nimbus of silence. Julie had heard he’d been a Hopi Hellion pilot. She supposed she could have asked him about the war—her experience as ’an urge would have been an entree—but she doubted it was worth the effort. A divorce, bad kids, bad job: she could predict the stories. All blamed on the war somehow, the world’s biggest excuse. Every game she said hello to him—being the Bombers promotion chief, she always greeted people—and moved on.