Amerika

by Brauna E. Pouns

“I’ve left him,” she blurted out.

  Cliff drew in a deep breath. “You can’t just leave somebody like him,” he said evenly.

  Kimberly spoke evenly, measuring her words. “I need a place to stay. I wanted to come to somebody I thought was a friend. Please don’t force me to—”

  She stopped, not quite knowing where the thought would lead her. “Look. Worse things can come from not helping someone than from helping them.”

  He looked at her strangely and slowly stepped aside. “Thank you,” she said, and walked into his apartment.

  * * *

  Within two days, Kimberly and Cliff were taking on some of the tics and habits of longtime roommates, effortlessly sliding past each other at the kitchen sink, unconsciously imitating one another’s gestures. Kimberly, formerly the main attraction, realized she was falling into a little-sister, tag-along role, but she didn’t fight it; there was too much comfort in it.

  On the third night, Cliff took her to a crowded downtown cafe and led her into a dimly lit back room. Jeffrey was waiting there, seated at a small table. He didn’t rise or smile as she and Cliff sat down. She stared at him, his dark face partially illuminated by the candle that was on the table. She recognized him from his Natnet appearances as a reporter and suddenly realized that he was the man who had helped her home after the raid.

  “This isn’t too smart,” Jeffrey said to Cliff. “Anybody recognize you?” He looked at Kimberly.

  “I don’t think anybody’s looking for me.”

  A smile played on his mouth, the candlelight shining in his dark eyes. “And I guess this is not the way your public is used to seeing you.”

  She self-consciously touched her hair. “I guess I’m pretty much of a mess.”

  “Let me put it this way,” he answered. “I used to think a pretty woman could never look bad.”

  “You know just what to say to a girl.”

  Jeffrey looked at Cliff. “This lady could be trouble.” “She’s a friend,” he said.

  Jeffrey nodded and looked sharply at Kimberly. “You want to be a part of the resistance.”

  She smiled softly. “Well, I think I have been, in a way.”

  Jeffrey snorted skeptically. “Yeah?”

  “I want to be involved,” she said with almost tangible determination.

  “What is it you want to resist? You got something special in mind?”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  Cliff felt Kimberly struggling. “Kim hasn’t really thought it out intellectually,” he said protectively.

  Jeffrey ignored him, staring hard at Kimberly. “You mean, you believe in capitalism instead of communism?”

  “I don’t know very much about it.”

  “As I see it, your life’s pretty good,” he said. “Things aren’t so bad that you’re desperate. Most people fight back when they can’t think of anything else. Or if there’s something personal. You want to get even with your boyfriend? Maybe bring him down a little, so he notices you a little more?”

  She shook her head.

  Jeffrey continued like a drill sergeant. “You ain’t been hurt, you don’t believe in anything—and you sure don’t understand anything. I liked you better when you were a dilettante doing outlaw cabaret because you felt iike it. Let me tell you something: the way you look here—if you get nothing for yourself, you got nothing for the resistance. You understand?”

  He stood abruptly and moved for the door. Kimberly looked down, tears welling in her eyes. Cliff stared at the candlelight, embarrassed and intimidated. Jeffrey turned at the door.

  “You want to be part of the resistance? You find out what you believe in, what really matters to you, not whether you’re a little uncomfortable, or scared and helpless. The best thing you could do for us is get back into bed with your Russian. That’s a great place for somebody who wants to help, but you’d better figure out what you really want before you start playin’ in real life.”

  He left. Kimberly and Cliff looked at each other.

  “I won’t go back,” she said. “I can’t.”

  Alan Drummond sometimes told himself that everything being relative, he was doing pretty well. He was thrice-protected from the reality of his position: by his profession, by his sense of irony, and most of all by his thick black skin. To be a doctor was important, because it was not only the Exiles who needed his skills, but the entire town of Milford.

  Irony helped too. “A gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” Who said that? No matter; it described Alan’s condition: he knew the world was mad and he was pretty damn sure it was getting worse every day. If it was getting better, the improvements were still a secret in Nebraska.

  And finally to be black was to know in your bones that white men had an infinite capacity for greed, stupidity, and evil; to expect the worst from the white race meant you would rarely be disappointed. He knew some good whites, but as a race they were definitely to be avoided.

  Still, Alan Drummond was doing okay. In Omaha, he was doing even better than he had in Milford. He’d gone to Omaha with the Milford Exiles who were wounded in the SSU raid, to oversee their treatment. No one bothered him and the hospital staff seemed oblivious to the new arrivals. He was free to go into Omaha whenever he wished. He had a small apartment on the hospital grounds, but he was rarely there, as he routinely worked sixteen- and eighteen-hour days.

  When his Milford patients didn’t need him, he volunteered to help with others.

  He had not been at People’s Acceptance long when he became intrigued by the secretiveness of the psychiatry unit. Every day he passed the door with the armed guard and the no admittance sign. The first couple of times he asked a fellow doctor about Psychiatry, he got only shrugs. “Experimental,” one said. “Top secret— don’t even ask,” another advised.

  Drummond had been helping out in Pathology when one night the corpse of a young man was brought in. A doctor named Mead puzzled over him for hours, shaking his head unhappily.

  Alan looked over his shoulder. “What’s it look like?” he asked.

  “As far as I can tell—and it isn’t much—it’s natural death. If I were going to take a wild guess, I’d say there was some similarity to the signs we used to see in acute depression patients.”

  Alan stared at Mead as if he didn’t understand. “There are people who get so depressed that they literally will themselves to death,” Mead explained. “Some of it shows in brain cells. Atrophy without any reason. In the nineteenth century they used to call it dying of a broken heart.”

  “Any drugs?”

  “Yeah,” Mead said, and looked back to the corpse. “Heavy traces of something I don’t recognize—got properties of prochlorpherazine.”

  “Behavior modification.”

  “Where’d this one come from?”

  “Here,” Alan said. “The section they call psychiatric—”

  Mead turned to Alan suddenly very nervous. “I should’ve known. Look, this could be real bad news. They don’t like anybody even close to that operation. It’s some kind of special deal that spells big trouble for anybody who gets too close.”

  “Okay,” Alan said, heading for the door. “I understand.”

  “No, I don’t think you do,” said the other doctor.

  Drummond nodded and filed the episode away. Excessive curiosity had always been one of his vices.

  Once Peter returned to Omaha, the political honeymoon was over. No more speeches to Congress, no more dinners at the White House, just plenty of hard work and uncertainty. He was governor-general of Heartland—but what did that mean? He had a big office overlooking the Missouri River, a telephone console with plenty of buttons to punch, and four secretaries bustling about his outer office. But did he have power?

  Power was elusive, quicksilver. You had to find it, create it, or steal it. The reality Peter faced was that he had an impressive title but other people made things happen. Andrei had power, because ultimately he had the Soviet military might at
his disposal. Marion had power, because of her status within the PPP and not incidentally because she was General Samanov’s lover.

  But Peter did not possess those things. Instead, he found himself talking to lawyers and administrators, trying to decide whom to trust. Dozens of people reported to him, but he had to assume that many of them gave their true loyalty to Andrei and/or Marion. Who gave a damn about Peter Bradford?

  Peter had a growing sense that his power, if it was to exist, had to come from the people. If they trusted him, and cared about him, then he would have true power,

  of a magnitude that even Andrei and Marion would have to respect. But how did you win the trust, the love even, of millions of people over a five-state area, people who had every reason to be suspicious of you? People in Milford trusted him, but that was because they had known him all his life. He didn’t have forty years to woo the good people of Heartland—he thought it might be more like forty days, before the whole thing blew up in his face.

  His first day in office was a blur of names, faces, handshakes, glib compliments, and suspicious glances —a governmental gauntlet he had been required to run.

  He had met with his department heads—his cabinet, as it was pretentiously called—and one man had made the biggest impression on him: General Fred “Bull” Sittman, a gruff, burly old soldier who headed the Area National Guard. Sittman was no backslapper.

  “Mr. Bradford, you don’t know if you can trust me and I don’t know if I can trust you,” Sittman said. “It’ll take some time to find out and the rest is mostly bullshit. But I’ll tell you this, I run a tight ship and my men do what they’re told to do. If you’re a front man for the Russians, then I say to hell with you, but if you care about this area and want the laws enforced and the peace maintained, then we might get along.”

  “I think we might get along,” Peter said, and reminded himself to find out more about General Sittman.

  Later that day, the red phone in Peter’s office rang.

  “Peter? Andrei. How was your day?”

  “Confusing.”

  “That’s to be expected. A lot of new names and faces. It takes time. I’m calling to pass on some news. Devin Milford has been arrested here in Chicago. He kidnapped his older son and was attempting to seize the younger one when he was apprehended. The older boy escaped, incidentally.”

  “Perhaps kidnapped isn’t the right word.”

  “Marion will think so. In any event, Milford was beaten, either during or after his arrest. Some overzeal-ous PPP security person, I suspect. I have had him transferred to my control. Perhaps eventually he should be under your supervision.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so.”

  “I thought you should know, but I must request that you keep the matter confidential for the time being.” “Of course. Andrei, there is one other matter.” “Yes?”

  “Someone said plans are under way for my inauguration in Chicago. But I haven’t been notified.”

  “My God. Yes, I wanted to discuss that with you, but something of an urgent personal matter came up. I apologize.”

  “No harm done.”

  At the end of the workday, he rejoined his family at the Friendship Hotel’s presidential suite, high above Omaha. A suite so large and pretentious that even Scott was impressed.

  “God, you could put a basketball court in one of these rooms,” he declared at dinner. “You know, we have the whole floor. Can you believe it?”

  “If you think this hotel is something, you should see the house,” Jackie said. “Margaret took Mom and me out there this afternoon. It’s a mausoleum.”

  “What’s that—where they bury people?” Scott asked.

  “How do you feel about the governor-general picking up where the meat-packing barons of Omaha left off?” Amanda said.

  “You said you didn’t want the White House,” Peter said.

  “I take it back,” Amanda said. “You know, our things are going to fill about three rooms in that house. At least the White House comes furnished.”

  Several waiters were moving about the big dining room now, bringing food and wine to the elegant table. There were armed guards just outside their door as well. Peter had protested that he didn’t want so much security, but the party security chief, a lean, somber man named Laird, persuaded him that he had no choice, that these were violent times and the govemor-general’s first obligation was to keep alive.

  Abruptly, Jackie said, “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “What do you mean, honey?” Peter asked.

  “I don’t know. I feel like it’s not my life anymore.” “I know, darling,” Amanda said.

  “Hey, what’s this gloom and doom?” Peter demanded. '

  “You went to your new dance class, didn’t you? Wasn’t it okay?”

  Jackie nodded. “Sure, it was great. The Russian woman who teaches the class is fabulous.”

  “Okay, I wouldn’t worry too much,” Peter said. “You guys will go to school. You’ll dance. Scott’l! play ball. You’ll make new friends. Your mom will be busy with the new house—”

  “Yeah, and you’ll rule the world,” Scott quipped. Peter shrugged. “A few more days and it’ll all seem normal,” he said.

  The kids laughed, but Amanda did not. That night, when the kids finally went to bed, Peter and Amanda retired to the presidential bedroom. It was a charming old room with its four-poster bed and huge chandelier;

  this was, Peter realized, the first time they had been alone together since he flew off to Washington. Much had happened; Amanda wondered if he understood just how much.

  They stood for a moment at the window, watching the silver ribbon of the Missouri slide by in the moonlight.

  “Remember the last time we looked down at that river?” Peter asked. “The night of the big dinner?” “A thousand years ago,” Amanda said with distance in her voice. “If I’d known all that was going to happen, I might have jumped in.”

  “Hey, come on.”

  “We were different people then.”

  “I’m the same.”

  “Are you?” she asked. “I’m not. I’ve seen things I’d never dreamed of. The Exiles—it was like finding yourself in a Nazi concentration camp. Then, presto, here I am surrounded by guards and servants with the entire top floor of a hotel for me to roam around in.” “Not to mention the meat-packer’s mansion,” he said, but his quip didn’t help. She walked away from him.

  “The Exiles in Milford, they’re all still there, their homes destroyed. What do I mean, homes? That damned camp, that shantytown, where they were forced to live.”

  Peter stopped listening. It had been a long, long day, and he had problems she couldn’t even begin to understand. He could see the big picture now, and she was still focused on one tiny corner of it.

  “Amanda, I know how you feel...” he ventured. “You don’t know how I feel. You weren’t there. It wasn’t just some incident. It was an atrocity.”

  He tried to take her in his arms but she turned away.

  “I don’t want comfort,” she said. “That’s not what I need. I saw something happen that you don’t have any way of understanding. In the middle of all the horror, when the camp was destroyed, our people took the Exiles in. At great danger to themselves, they did the decent, humane thing.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “But having the Exiles in town may not be such a good idea.”

  Peter didn’t know what else to say. Maybe the raid on the exile camp had been worse than anyone had told him; to him it remained distant and unreal, an item on an agenda.

  Amanda took his silence for indifference. “I don’t think I know you anymore,” she said.

  Peter, pained, fought back his weariness, his annoyance. He reminded himself how good she was, how decent, how much he had missed her when they were apart.

  “Amanda, when I was in Washington, I needed you so much! When I went to the Lincoln Memorial, I wrote you a letter. I’ve gotten so used to our being together. It
was hard for me not to be able to talk it all over with you. What I wrote was about visiting the memorial and thinking about what Lincoln really means, should really mean. And it was all tied up with you and all that you mean to me.” He paused and looked toward her, seeing if he should go on. She said nothing; he continued, “I guess the main thing is, no matter how bad our society may seem now, it’s going to be worse unless people like me make an effort to work things out. Not heroic stands, but hard work and compromise—dealing with reality as it is. I thought about Lincoln, what he would do if he were here now. Maybe the most important thing wouldn’t be to preserve the Union, but to hang on to some of our principles, our dignity, just the hope that things can get better. We’re more like the South, after they lost the war, just trying to survive, settling in for the long haul. Robert E. Lee was a great general, but maybe he was an even greater man after the war, when he was the president of a little college and set an example for his people of dignity and hope.”

  Amanda was moved by his sincerity, even if she didn’t fully understand his meaning. She crossed the room and took his hand. “Milford is our home,” she said. “Everything we are we learned there. We can’t just turn our backs on what’s happened there. What’s still going on.”

  Peter shut his eyes wearily. “Amanda, are you here with me, or are you still back in Milford?”

  “I’m your wife.”

  He drew her close and this time she did not resist. “Honey, we’ll work this out,” he whispered. “Just help me. I need you. We’ll do the best we can, for as many people as we can.”

  She nodded and he held her for a long time, not wanting to lose the moment. He thought briefly of Devin. He had meant to tell Amanda the news of his arrest but he knew this was not the time. So he would keep that secret from her for a while. He wondered how many more secrets there would be before this was over.

  “He must be killed.”

  Marion tried to sound dispassionate, but could not keep the fury from her voice. It was so logical to her; why couldn’t Petya understand?

  They were having coffee in his second-floor bedroom, overlooking the rolling Virginia countryside.