Countdown City tlp-2

by Ben H. Winters

  “Henry?” Nico’s eyes are bright again. She reaches up and pats me on the cheek. “See you in a few?”

  “Sure,” I say, swat her hand away.

  I’m close—I’m this close. I start to go, and then I stop. “Nico? What’s in that duffel bag?”

  “Candy,” she says, and laughs.

  “Nico.”

  “Dope.”

  “Really?”

  “Handguns. Human skulls. Maple syrup.”

  She cracks up, they both do, and then they’re walking away arm in arm, the two of them slipping through the front flap of the grub tent and off into the crowded campus. Nico Palace, ladies and gentlemen. My sister.

  3.

  Lining the approach to Kingfisher Hall are stately oaks, flanking the pathway, upright and orderly as a praetorian guard. They’re strung with banners, primary colors and simple bold fonts, each announcing an extinction or near extinction: the Justinian Plague, 541 A.D. Toba supereruption, 75,000 years ago. The Permian Extinction. The K-T Boundary Extinction… on and on, a parade of pandemics and catastrophes and species genocides festooning the approach.

  In I go, into the building itself, into a spacious and sunlit atrium with a vaulted ceiling, then down a long hallway lined with bulletin boards, somehow untouched, still offering grants, scholarship money, internship opportunities for engineering students.

  When I push open one of the big double doors to room 110, my immediate impression is that here we have another party, an auxiliary of the ongoing festivities on the main quad. It’s a big lecture hall, packed and noisy, citizens of the Free Republic relaxed and at ease in their varied costumes, from track suits to tie-dye to what appears to be an adult-sized set of My Little Pony feetie pajamas. People hollering or engaged in intense conversation or, in one case, stretched out over three seats, asleep. As I pick my way as inconspicuously as possible up the raked tiers of seating in search of an empty spot, I count at least three ice-packed coolers, full of small unlabeled glass bottles of beer.

  It is only when I have found a seat, in one of the very last rows, that I can focus my attention on the front of the room—and the young man standing with his back to the crowd, naked to the waist with his hands tied behind him with a length of bungee cord. Across from him, seated at a folding table on the shallow stage, are two men and a woman, all of approximately student age, all wearing serious, intent expressions, huddled together and whispering.

  I settle into my seat, cross my long legs with difficulty, and watch the stage. One of the three at the table, a man with glasses and a head of wild curly hair, looks up and clears his throat.

  “Okay,” he says. “Can we get quiet?”

  The man with hands tied shifts nervously on his feet.

  I look around the room. I’ve seen plenty of trials—this is a trial. The curly-haired man asks for quiet again, and the crowd settles down, just a little bit.

  She’s in here. Somewhere, in this crowd, is Julia Stone.

  “So we’re down with the decision to proceed?” says the woman at the center of the little triumvirate on the stage. “Can we go ahead and just by voice vote reaffirm the provisional authority of R&R over maintaining safety and peace in our community. Everyone?”

  She looks around the room. So do the other two judges, the one with the hair, and the third, the one farthest to the right, who has a small pudgy face and a turned-up nose and who looks to me no more than eighteen years old, if that. Most of the audience seems to have little interest in the proceedings. People keep talking, leaning forward in their seats to poke a friend or back to stretch. From where I’m sitting I watch a man rolling what will be, if completed, the largest marijuana cigarette I have ever seen. Two rows up from me a couple is vigorously making out, the female partner shifting as I watch into a full straddle atop her companion. The guy on my right, a sallow figure with hairy forearms, is absorbed in something he’s got in his lap.

  “Hello?” says the young woman on the stage. She has sharp small features, black horn-rim glasses, and pigtails. Taped in front of her is an eight-by-eleven piece of paper reading CHAIR, a slap-dash designation of authority. “Are we okay to proceed?” The crowd, those paying attention, half maybe, make the under-arrest gesture I spotted earlier in the library, hands in the air with palms up. I take this to be some understood signal of assent, because the young woman nods, goes, “Great.”

  The defendant cranes his neck around nervously, scanning the crowd. I whisper to my seatmate, “Who is he?”

  “What?” he says, looking up blankly. It’s an iPhone he’s got in his lap, and even as we talk he runs his thumb over the blank dead screen, absently, over and over.

  “The defendant?”

  The guy scrunches his nose, and I realize too late the word defendant might be considered significantly rearview. “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know, actually,” he says, peering down at the shirtless shivering man at the front of the room as if for the first time. “Something, I guess. The next agenda item after this is the nudity policy. Pretty sure that’s why it’s so packed today.”

  “Oh,” I say, and the guy turns back to his iPhone.

  “So, okay,” says the chair, addressing the defendant directly. “We should start by apologizing to you, as a member of our community. We understand there was some unnecessary violence involved in your, uh, your detention.”

  The prisoner mutters something I can’t hear, and the chair nods. The other judges have notebook-paper signs, too. The curly-haired one’s sign says VICE, and the pudgy-faced boy’s says VICE TO THE VICE.

  “If you couldn’t hear, everyone,” says the vice, “he said it’s cool.”

  Scattered laughter from the crowd.

  “Oh, great,” someone yells sarcastically, and everyone turns to see who it is: a great big fat dude in overalls and a painter’s cap. “It’s cool, everyone. He’s cool. Don’t worry.”

  More laughter. More people seem to be paying attention now. Someone from a distant corner, by the door, shouts “Thank God!” The couple making out a few seats up pause in their exertions for a moment, glance in the general direction of the stage, and then get back to business. During all this back and forth, I’m trying to work out a plan, trying first of all to figure out how many people are in this room: maybe a hundred rows of seats, maybe fifty to seventy-five seats per row, maybe eighty percent occupied, maybe fifty-five percent female. I have no photograph of Julia Stone, no physical description of any kind: no race or ethnicity, no distinguishing characteristics, no distinctive mode of dress. All I know is that she is a female between twenty and twenty-four years of age, and I am seated in a room with between one hundred seventy-five and two hundred people matching that description.

  “Okay, so,” the chair is saying. “Theft from the community of the Free Republic is among our most serious infractions. It’s a big fucking deal. There are a lot of things we might do to handle this sort of situation. But it’s obviously important that everyone gets a chance to give their input and have their feelings on the subject heard.”

  I look around the room, trying to narrow down somehow who Julia might be. If I were Brett, who here would I fall in love with? Who would I follow to doomsday? But I’m not Brett. I’ve never met him. Forty-five minutes until I’m supposed to be back at the Thompson Hall exit, collecting my dog and getting out of here.

  “And—sorry, were you done?” says the vice, glancing respectfully at the chair, who nods, shrugs. “And so anyone who wants to say something is invited to do so at this time.” A handful of people are already making their way down the aisles, raising their hands to speak. The third judge, the vice to the vice, turns up his chin and watches them come. He’s quiet, watchful, little beady eyes scanning the room over and over. He has yet to speak.

  There is a woman with red hair, dark red, so dark as to be almost brown. She’s three rows up from mine, across the aisle, and she seems to be taking notes or minutes on a pad of paper balanced on her bare knee
. She’s wearing a very short black skirt, black boots. Brett, I think, would have found her attractive.

  The first speaker to offer his input is a small man in cargo pants and a plain red T-shirt. He stands in one of the aisles and reads rapidly, almost agitatedly, from a stack of index cards. “The whole idea of theft from a communal store is itself a reflection of capitalist thinking. In other words, the crime of theft cannot and should not exist in a postcapitalist society, because property”—he leans into the word, his voice charged with disdain—“cannot and should not exist.” He flips to a new card; the vice to the vice looks irritated. “Our vigilance is required against attitudes that reflect not only explicit capitalist dogma, but vestigial reflections of same.”

  “Okay, thanks,” says the chair. The little man looks up from his cards; clearly, he wasn’t finished.

  “Thanks,” she says again, and someone says “Point of order” from the back—it’s the fat man in the overalls, and the chair acknowledges him with a nod. “I just want to say, in regard to what that guy just said: That’s stupid.”

  The vigilant anticapitalist looks around the room, doe eyed, wounded. The chair smiles softly and nods for the next speaker. Small lines are forming in two different aisles of the auditorium. I keep my eye on the dark-haired woman three rows up. What is my move here? How long do these meetings last?

  The next speaker is a woman with long matted dreadlocks, who wants to propose a complicated redemption-based system, wherein those accused of rule breaking would engage in a dialog with the community about the nature of their transgression. This idea the vice chair gets excited about, nodding vigorously as the woman speaks, his curls bouncing. It goes on like this, speaker after speaker: someone wonders if today’s proceedings might in fact inspire further infractions; a man asks politely if the public-nudity policy is still on the agenda, and the affirmative answer from the vice draws cheers; a young woman with earnest eyes and a single thick braid running down her back rises and says that she’s been carefully noting the speakers at this meeting, as well as the six previous R&R meetings, and can report that people of color are participating at a ratio of just one in twelve.

  “Huh,” says the vice chair. “Maybe because radical movements have always been the province of the privileged?”

  “Maybe because we’re in fucking New Hampshire,” says the class clown in the overalls.

  In the laughter that follows, the woman with dark red hair looks around and sees me watching her. She does not look down: Instead she meets and holds my gaze. It occurs to me that I could pass her a note, and the idea is so absurd that I very nearly laugh out loud. Are you Julia Stone? Check this box if yes.

  “Okay,” says the chair. “I think that’s enough. Just in terms of time?”

  The vice looks surprised, but the vice to the vice nods. The defendant shivers, hunching forward, glancing from side to side. Male shirtlessness can in the right circumstances be powerful, leonine, but it can also make a person seem exposed and helpless, the knobs of the spine quivering and fragile like surfacing fish.

  “I’m sorry,” I say “Excuse me.” I stand up. This is stupid. This is the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing right now. “What is it he is accused of stealing?”

  A room full of people turn their heads toward me, the man who fits in least with this crowd now drawing the maximum amount of attention to himself.

  “It’s not really relevant,” says the vice, after glancing respectively at the chair for permission to handle this one. “Our protocol says, given limited time and resources, to focus on outcomes when the cause of action is relatively straightforward.”

  “Yup,” says the chair. “Bingo.”

  The vice vice’s beady eyes are fixed on me, birdlike and unpleasant.

  “But he has the right to know the charges against him,” I say, nodding my head toward the defendant. The crowd has settled into near silence now, drawn out of their chatty genial atmosphere by this novelty. The guy next to me, with his iPhone, scootches over a little in his seat, putting some distance between us. My presumptive Julia Stone, the attractive woman with dark red hair, is staring at me with the same frank interest as everyone else. A wash of nervousness passes over me. This really was idiotic, but I’m still standing, so I go ahead and press my case.

  “He also has the right to face his accusers,” I say. “If someone is saying he stole something, he gets to confront them in open court.”

  The defendant cranes around, then glances anxiously back at his judges, trying to figure out if this mysterious interjection is aiding or hindering his case. I’m not sure, my friend, I tell him telepathically. I honestly don’t know. Somewhere in the room, someone opens a beer bottle with a pop and hiss. On the seatback in front of me is graffiti, RON LOVES CELIA, etched by some bored undergrad in days gone by.

  “It’s not that we are unaware of the rules of evidence,” says the vice, shifting back in his chair and squinting at me. “I went to law school at Duke, okay? But those rules are moot in this context.”

  “But how can you pass sentence—”

  “We don’t call it ‘passing sentence’—”

  “—without a fair trial?”

  “Excuse me?” says the third judge, the vice to the vice, speaking at last and loudly, his voice high and reedy and charged with anger. “Who are you?”

  I open my mouth but say nothing, cycling rapidly through a series of possible answers, sharply aware of the insufficiency of them all. They could kill me, these people—I could truly die here. The Free Republic of New Hampshire, for all its easy egalitarian spirit and New Age trappings, is a world unto itself, beyond the reach even of what little law remains; as the man said, certain rules are moot in this context. I could be murdered here, easily, if the mood of this crowd should change; I could be beaten to death or shot, my corpse abandoned in the dirt of the quad, my sister and my dog left to wonder why I never emerged.

  “Well?” says the vice vice, rising from his chair. And then the chair says, “I knew it.”

  “What?” says the vice.

  “I knew someone would be coming to find him.”

  She stares at me from the table on the stage—arms crossed, glasses, pigtails—and I stare back at her.

  “Excuse me?” The vice vice says, glaring and confused. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  But Julia Stone is unconcerned with his bafflement, with the confused attention of the crowd. She gazes cooly at me.

  “I told him they would come for him. That’s what your kind do, right? You come for people.”

  The low murmur of the room is beginning to bubble up again, people leaning across one another to whisper and nudge, people exchanging questioning expressions. I ignore them, keep my eyes locked on Julia Stone.

  “Um, yes, point of order,” says the vice, while the vice vice stands stonily, arms crossed. “What are you talking about?”

  “This man has entered our space on a false pretense,” says Julia, and points at me with one steady finger. “He’s not here to take part in our community; he’s here to infiltrate it. He is on a mission to hunt down another human being like a pig or a dog.”

  Silence, then, the room suddenly alive with tension, everybody staring at me or at Julia or back and forth, me to her. I feel it again, the dread gut-level certainty that these people could kill me: that I might die here, in this room, and no one the wiser. And at the same time, nevertheless, I am feeling these wild waves of excitement, looking at the woman for whom Brett named a pizza, the woman who drew him from Concord and from his wife, the woman I went looking for and found. I want to take a picture of her and send it to Detective Culverson and say, “See? See?”

  “You don’t understand where you are,” Julia tells me. “This is a new world. We have no room for police-style tactics here.”

  “I’m not a policeman,” I say.

  “Oh, yeah?” she says, “But you are police-style, aren’t you?”

  “What is going o
n, Julia?” says the vice vice, and he takes an aggressive step toward her around the back of the table, and the vice rises to stop him with one hand pushed against his chest. “Whoa.”

  Julia keeps her eyes on mine. “You’ll never kill him,” she says.

  “Kill him?” I say. “No, I—his wife sent me.”

  “His wife?”

  She stands breathing for a second, taking this in, deciding what to do with it, while I’m thinking: Kill him? Who would be coming to kill him?

  “Sorry about this,” says Julia to her colleagues on the tribunal, and then turns to address the room. “I call for an extraordinary postponement. I need to speak to this man alone.”

  “Oh, come on,” says the vice vice petulantly. “You just asked for an extraordinary postponement yesterday.”

  “Yes, well,” she says drily. “These are extraordinary times.”

  Julia Stone steps down over the lip of the stage and motions for me to meet her at the door. As I pick my way over legs down the tiers, the kid with his hands tied sits down, confused, and the vice chair moves that the meeting advance to the question of public nudity. Everybody cheers and raises their hands, palms up.

  4.

  The woman Brett loves, like the woman he married, is not beautiful, not in any conventional way. But where Martha Milano’s plainness is redeemed by a sweet radiant quality and warmth of spirit, Julia Stone’s small thin body and dark features are attractive in a whole other way. She doesn’t speak, she pronounces, talking fast with her black eyes flashing, each word charged with energy.

  “There,” she says. “Those kids. On the roof. See?”

  I look where she’s pointing, to a cluster of busy shapes atop one of the dorm buildings off in the distance. “Exercise machines. Maybe twelve people up there now. Sometimes we get thirty or thirty-five. Bikes, treadmills. This is an example. You join us here, you do what you want, as long as, A, your action does not interfere with the ability of others to do what they want, and B, whenever possible, your action offers some concrete benefit to the community.”