by Sam Winston
Weller said that wasn’t what he’d had in mind by way of that IOU. What he’d had in mind was getting his daughter’s sight back. It was hopeless in the Zone. Carmichael knew that. Hopeless. She’d be completely blind before long and blind forever after that.
The sound of water running. Across the screen a single electric jolt of interference from somewhere.
“Please,” Weller said. “You said you owe me one. You did. You said it.”
A muscle in Carmichael’s jaw bunched.
“That’s why I brought her all this way.”
* * *
What was the word for a person like that? A useful idiot. That’s what they called a person like Weller and they were right on both counts. He was an idiot by any measure and he could be useful if you knew how to use him.
Carmichael sat half watching the opera and thinking. He never quit thinking. That was what had gotten him where he was. What had gotten him everything he wanted in the world or almost everything he wanted and what would get him the rest of it someday.
He was thinking about Weller and thinking about the girl and thinking about cars. That yellow Hummer he’d driven down here from the apartment on the Upper East Side only to have a delivery truck just about clip it in the front passenger side. As if the driver hadn’t seen it for Christ’s sake. As if a blind man couldn’t have seen it. Carmichael had boxed the truck in and gotten out of the car to chastise the driver even though his wife hadn’t wanted him to and she’d been right. There was no satisfaction to be had. The man hadn’t even spoken English. He was Management, with a National Motors permit and everything, and he hadn’t even spoken English. What was the world coming to?
Carmichael tried concentrating on the opera. It was in Italian and he didn’t know Italian.
The surgery would cost peanuts. That was a given. So the thing that Weller wanted wasn’t the important thing. The important thing was that he was asking at all. His nerve in asking. His audacity.
It was the audacity had gotten Carmichael’s attention.
He thought about that yellow Hummer. Ever since the Boston trip he’d been making up his mind that he couldn’t trust it anymore. It was a Chevrolet under the skin. He should have thought of that when he’d paid good money for it. So what if it were the last of its kind. That was just proof that the rest of them had died. Good riddance.
His wife was watching the opera and glancing down at a libretto now and then. A libretto in her lap printed in both English and Italian. Carmichael listened to the singing for a minute and looked over at the two languages running side by side on the page and his mind went right back to the driver. No English he’d said, so apparently he’d had a little. Enough to deny it.
Give a person an inch back there in the Zone, and this is what happened.
His wife put down her lorgnette and people applauded and he applauded too. Wondering if it was the start of the intermission, but no.
Weller. Weller had poor judgment and he didn’t know his place, but he had nerve and he had a dream. Nerve and motivation could make him useful. Never mind what the surgery would cost. The real cost was elsewhere. The real question was what it would cost to acknowledge Weller’s request. What it would cost to stoop. And what he could gain from stooping.
There was a car, actually. The idea of a car. The possibility of one.
God, he loved cars. He’d always wished he owned one of those big old Cadillacs with the fins like they still drove in Cuba. How they kept them going was a mystery right up there with the resurrection of the dead. Those gigantic broad-shouldered road-eating monstrosities. Grilles like gritted teeth and fins to soar with. Here in the states they’d thrown out all of that midcentury American iron when gas first got expensive. They’d traded it for the lightweight stuff from China and Japan or at least the lightweight stuff from those countries was what lasted. What remained, now that nobody was making cars anymore. Cuba had the right idea. Cuba had a sense of history.
Cuba might as well be Mars, even for Anderson Carmichael.
He looked at the opera for a minute but his mind kept slipping.
There was this one car. He’d seen pictures of it. He owned the full run of Road & Track on paper and he kept the copies under glass and he’d seen pictures of it. There hadn’t been many made in the first place and there weren’t any left now that he knew of. None at all. It was a German car. A German car made here. The badge may have said Bavarian Motor Works, but it was put together in the southern Appalachians back in the time before the balance of trade went down the toilet and parts got scarce and the unions went under and people like Carmichael started to think Cuba had had the right idea all along. Those Castro brothers. You had to hand it to them. Extremely good health care down there and everybody qualified if you could believe it. Fidel was still kicking even now, if what you heard was true. Back on his feet and looking younger than he ever did. Younger than he did when Kennedy was alive and the Bay of Pigs blew up. A walking miracle, that Castro. According to the pictures that got out, the color had even come back into his beard.
But he’d just now realized how he could go Castro one better. A brand new BMW X9, fresh off the line in Spartanburg. Black if possible but he’d take any color. There had to be one or two left down there someplace, one or two parked on a lot gone halfway back to wilderness, one or two that they hadn’t been sold when they shut down the machinery and turned off the lights and locked the doors.
If anybody could get it for him it was Weller. Make the trip and finish up whatever needed finishing on it. If anybody had the motivation it was Weller too. That was for sure. That little girl of his.
Christ, though, it was supposed to be a no-man’s land down there. The stories you heard.
Never mind that. Not his problem.
The cost wasn’t even worth thinking about. One trifling operation. Strictly speaking he wouldn’t even have to go through with it if Weller didn’t make it back, but he was hoping he would. What the hell.
The music rose up loud and died away and the audience began to applaud again. His wife putting down her lorgnette and the lights coming up. Before she could say a word he stood and went back to the men’s room and made the call.
SIX:
Some People Wait Forever
They met upstairs in the middle of the night. On the top floor of One Police Plaza. Weller boneweary but hopeful and Carmichael with his necktie unfastened and Penny stretched out on a long low couch underneath a wide black window, sound asleep. Beyond the window was a panorama of breathtaking beauty and haunting strangeness. The city awash in windowlight and streetlight and the moving light of traffic. The river empty and gleaming, and beyond it the grayblack tenements of Brooklyn Heights rising up and lit with flame. The famous trashlit Promenade. Oil drums burning garbage, with clots of people gathered around. There was candlelight in some windows and lamplight in other windows but most of the windows were black and dead. Not even windows at all from this distance and in this light or this light’s absence.
Traffic moved on the far side of the river too, but not much of it. Buses. Long buses gliding through dim remote intersections like eels, appearing and disappearing, their segmented sides gleaming. The graveyard shift in a Management town. Commuters.
Carmichael sat behind the desk in a big low leather chair belonging to some security officer so far beneath him as to be anonymous, and Weller stood. Saying thank you, sir. I’m glad you reconsidered. You won’t regret this.
Carmichael saying I don’t know what got into me but there it is. A moment of weakness maybe. Looking over at Penny asleep.
Weller saying maybe it was just the car. Saying he’d understand if it was just the car he wanted and not the girl he wanted to help. It didn’t matter to him.
Carmichael looking up and thinking he’d found the right man for the job. You couldn’t fool this one. Not even about the thing that mattered to him the most.
Weller said, “So what’s the plan? When do we get her to the doctor?�
��
“Oh,” said Carmichael, stretching the syllable out as though he’d been required to do the impossible. The slaying of some nine-headed monstrosity. “These things take time.”
“We’ve waited five years now.”
“Some people wait forever.”
“People like me. Not like you. People like you don’t wait.”
“There’ll be patients ahead of her.”
“Not ahead of Anderson Carmichael.”
The rich man laughed. “It’s not that simple,” he said.
“I think it is. I think it is that simple.” For he was dealing with a machine, after all. A machine that had ground him down and lifted Carmichael up.
“You don’t understand.”
“I do understand.” Weller tapped his finger on the big walnut desk. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t that simple. I’d still be downstairs.”
“Don’t press me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. But fair’s fair. A deal’s a deal.”
“I know all about deals,” said Carmichael. “I know about deals if anybody does.” Turning away from Weller to look out the wide black window at this city of his.
Weller pictured Carmichael as a machine himself. Inputs and outputs. Power and leverage. He looked at his own reflection in the black window and said, “I’d really like to get started for Spartanburg, is all.” Stating his single condition without stating it. Applying weight where it would matter. “So how soon do we see the doctor?”
Carmichael didn’t pause more than a half-second. “We’ll get you in tomorrow,” he said.
“Fine,” said Weller. “And you’ll keep her in the hospital until I get back.”
“Of course. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Good. Now tell me about the car.”
Which warmed Carmichael up considerably. He said according to Road & Track there was no reason for anybody in the world to own this particular vehicle. They said there were better choices. Could you believe that? Four hundred horses and eight forward gears and all wheel drive and they said there was no reason. Of course there was a reason. It just wasn’t apparent to everybody. So the company hadn’t made many of them and that was reason enough right there, wasn’t it? The scarcity. Plus gas went through the roof and kept going and getting fifteen miles to the gallon meant you’d spend a grand just to do a week’s commute back and forth to a job that was tenuous at best, so demand dried up altogether. There were certainly people who’d had them out in the suburbs of one city or another for a while, parked in the garages of those big cookie cutter mansions they’d built with money they didn’t have before the real estate bubble blew and credit went south, but one by one they’d run their tanks dry and sold them off for scrap. Steel and glass and rubber. Transmission fluid and grease. They’d held on to their cheap little Geelys and Toyotas for as long as they could, which wasn’t long, and then they’d scrapped them too.
“To tell you the truth,” Carmichael said, “if we’d seen it coming I don’t know that we’d have let it happen.”
“We?”
“Ownership.”
“Let what happen?”
“Let it all fall down the way it did. Once you’ve acquired everything, you’d think you should be able to keep getting more.” Expressing it as simply as he could.
“So you’d be better off if guys like me were out there building new cars.”
“We might be.”
“I’d do it if I could. If there were jobs I’d do it.”
“Unintended consequences,” Carmichael said. “It’s hard to predict the future.”
“Hey. You’ve still got the opera.”
“I don’t want the opera. I want an X9.”
“And you’ll have one.”
“Black. With the eight-cylinder engine.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I’d like something newer, but there isn’t anything newer.”
“I can’t help you there.”
“I know you can’t.”
“So tell me about Spartanburg,” Weller said.
* * *
Essentially, the coasts were what was left of the country. The two coasts plus Chicago and Houston, each population center isolated from the others. Transportation was the problem, transportation and people. The lack of both made big distances bigger. Chicago would have shut down a long time ago if not for the insurance business. Family Health Partnership was all that kept it alive. People out there lived on meat, meat raised by hand in walled sectors of the Midwestern Empowerment Zone and Management-butchered generation after generation. The knowledge of how to do it passed down from father to son. Who cared how much meat you ate and how high your cholesterol spiked when you owned the insurance company.
Transportation cost money. The expense of maintaining the highways. The price of diesel. National Motors that ran the trucks and MobilGo that sold the fuel couldn’t make it pay because there weren’t enough markets, and there weren’t enough markets because there weren’t enough people. Blame that on insurance if you wanted to, but the insurance folks were getting their own punishment. Those isolated carnivores out there in Chicago.
So a couple of trucks ran back and forth each week maybe and that was that. Scarcity inducing scarcity. They ran through wastelands that had once been productive farms and wastelands that had once been manufacturing centers and wastelands that had once been cities teeming with people. The Rust Belt and the Sun Belt and the Bible Belt and every other belt that there ever was. All drained of everything and everybody when gas got too expensive to burn and food got too expensive to eat. When housing went bust and nobody could afford to visit the doctor anymore. Not even doctors. When the Great Dying came, and people buried their dead and dried their eyes and turned their backs on home and went to the cities to find work and didn’t find it there either. When the last thing the federal government made stick was the division of what was left into Empowerment Zones. Suburbia plowed up. But only certain bits of it even then. Only where it made financial sense. The South was different and farther out and not worth pursuing. PharmAgra had had crops there in the old days, back when there’d been people everywhere and the need to feed them, but not anymore. A lot could have happened. Nature could be lying dead down there or nature could have come back or something in between.
Spartanburg, then, seven hundred miles from New York and five hundred miles from Washington, was a mystery. A vacant spot on a road to nowhere if there was even a road. A place from which civilization had withdrawn, leaving behind God knew what. Maybe nothing.
Carmichael said, “Spartanburg? Hard to say. There are a number of unknowns.”
Weller said if the knowns were National Motors security and old bounty hunters cut loose from Black Rose, then he’d take his chances with the unknowns. Unknowns didn’t bother him.
Carmichael said Now that you mention Black Rose.
Which got Weller’s attention.
“You know that they own Washington,” Carmichael said. “White Washington anyhow.” Meaning the pale limestone city. The grand old public spaces. The monuments and the Capitol building and the White House.
Weller said he knew.
“The rest of that town was never worth looking at anyway.”
Weller said that’s what he’d been given to understand.
“So here’s what I’m thinking we’ll do,” Carmichael said. “We’ll go straight to the experts. Get you down there and hook you up with Black Rose and let them decide what you’ll need in order to make this happen. We’ll spare no expense.”
Penny was stirring on the couch. Weller lowered his voice as far as he could and said that he didn’t think he’d need much of anything. Some kind of transportation. Food and water. Money.
“Money’s no good out there.”
“Money’s good everywhere in the Zone.” Hating Carmichael for sparing no expense with Black Rose but denying him this.
“We’ll ask the experts. I’ll make some calls first thi
ng tomorrow.”
“That’ll be a big day then,” said Weller. “Between making those calls and getting us to the doctor.” Just so it didn’t slip Carmichael’s mind.
* * *
The hospital was on the Upper East Side and it was the Taj Majal except for being a shrine to the living instead of the dead. Weller and Penny went there in a limousine with a black-hatted Management driver in the front and some Management assistant of Carmichael’s in the back sitting on a soft leather banquette opposite them. A woman looking doubly ill at ease, uncomfortable on the deep cushions usually reserved for Ownership and uncomfortable face to face with the two of them. Forcing herself to make small talk. The weather. The traffic. Their room at the Four Seasons. Weller said the room was fine and Penny was bursting to say more but she didn’t let it out. Weller asked how far was it to the hospital. After all this time. Wondering about a few minutes after five hopeless years. She told him it wouldn’t be long, and it wasn’t.
To enter the hospital was to enter a palace of youth and light. Music soaring from invisible speakers and a spring in everyone’s step. Plate glass and falling water and banks of flowers. The assistant led the way across an atrium that reached up thirty floors and more, her heels clicking on a white marble floor inset with precious stones and grouted with gold and altogether worthy of the Medicis, to a reception desk that was more concierge station than anything else. The woman behind it raised a tiny wireless scanner and Carmichael’s assistant clasped the hand that held it and made it disappear. The subtle magic of high decorum. “This young lady is Anderson Carmichael’s guest,” she said, sliding a small white card onto the desk with one hand and indicating the poor urchin behind her with the other. Penny bent over attempting to pry a gemstone from the floor. Waiflike Penny cleaned up but in her filthy clothes still. A creature of the road, doctored at the last minute and perhaps made even less presentable for the effort.