by Neil Gaiman
“I’ve got State of the Union tomorrow,” the Man said to the preacher. “Teddy got off on hunting, Ronald on his horses. Sports just don’t cut it for me. I have to have my stress release or who knows what wrong decisions I might make?”
The preacher said, “You don’t have to convince me. I’m just happy to be part of the smooth running of the government. ‘Remembereth me as thou dwelleth in thy kingdom.’” He smiled a chilling smile.
“Another go-round,” said the Man. “Please. That would be good.”
The preacher pulled a small pistol from his black jacket. His smile was gone, but in its place was not anger, just emotionless duty. “To the river,” he said.
Darla was crying. She stayed on her knees until the preacher put the pistol to her head. “To the river,” he said. “We don’t have time for this shit.”
Darla stood up beside Paul. The preacher led them to the river’s edge. He took white strips of cloth from his pocket. He tightly gagged Darla’s mouth. Then he gagged Paul.
“Silence of the lamb,” said the preacher. “And the lion.” He laughed.
Paul began to choke against the dry cloth. He could not swallow. He felt his nose could not take in enough air. Had the wars stopped? Had the peace come?
“Hands back,” said the preacher.
Darla shook her head violently. The preacher put the mouth of the gun against her teeth and she stopped. She put her hands behind her back, and the preacher tied them with cloth. Then he looked at Paul.
Paul put his hands back. “Good little lion,” said the preacher, and he secured Paul’s wrists. “You won’t be shot, though. Morons drown so much more naturally.”
There was a rumbling from the woods, and Paul looked behind to see a van moving out into the pasture. The Man stepped back to give it room. It stopped, and the engine was cut.
Darla’s eyes widened in hope. Paul tried to stumble forward. Rescue, oh, God, yes, thank God, thank God! He uttered a choked whine of agonized appeal.
The driver of the van swung out and around, then opened the sliding door on the side. Two blindfolded people climbed slowly into the daylight.
A young blindfolded man. A young blindfolded woman. “They’re going to save the world, too,” said the preacher.
Ee-ii-ee-ii-oh, thought Paul.
The preacher baptized Darla and Paul in the brisk, running water of the river.
Willow Tests Well
BY NICK MAMATAS
Savvy business types with their eye on the future have long been keen on recruitment techniques. Genuine talent is often easy to spot, straight out of the cradle, if you know what to look for. And some skills are more useful than others in the massive scheme of things.
Doubtless, little Nick Mamatas was quickly pegged as a snarky subversive, roughly twice as smart and three times as tart as his teachers and classmates combined. No wonder he grew up to be nothing but trouble.
Here to help decipher systemic psychosis on a grand scale is “Willow Tests Well,” a Machiavellian meme already in progress through much of the so-called civilized world.
Willow got her first birthday card from a stranger on her ninth. Not a stranger, really. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was on TV so frequently that he was practically a friend of the family. Her parents insisted on watching the news—both the fun local news where people smiled, did banter and half the stories were about great red smears and ruined cars on the nearby streets, and the boring national news—every night during dinner. Willow liked the director of the FBI. His name was Bottomore and he had a dimple right in the middle of his chin. Where she liked it.
When Bottomore died some months later, Willow wasn’t sad. Not exactly sad—tingly, upset, anticipating something that could never be. Because Willow was never sad. She always felt just fine.
“How was school?” her father asked. “Fine,” she said. No need for father to pry any further. Willow tested very well—she was already reading and performing mathematics on a twelfth-grade level. Willow could probably skip a grade if she wanted to, and by the time she was fifteen take community college classes for full credit.
“What do you think of this sweater?” her stepmother asked, pointing to the picture on her laptop. Willow’s real mother had run off some time before. “They have them in, uh, Bubble, Amaranth, or…Durian. Geez, what do these colors even mean?”
“Blue, green, or brown,” Willow said. Then she said, “Any of those would be fine. Thank you, Doris.”
“So clever,” Doris said.
Tenth birthday: greeting cards from the CIA and NSA. Willow had scored ridiculously well on the Race to the Top tests, and even discovered the instructions for and answered the questions in the secret test integrated into the exam. Questions like
What does the old saying “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” mean?”
a. birds are unpleasant because they need to be cared for
b. it’s better to own something than risk what you have for a potential reward
c. if you have a bird in your hand, you can squeeze it, you can kill it…
d. possession is nine-tenths of the law
Willow knew that the answer was C. So various intelligence agencies began negotiating. Who would get Willow? Three weeks later her parents were killed in a terrible if well-choreographed car accident. Her father’s head was sheared off—his face was nothing but a jaw topped with meat sauce. Her stepmother died in the hospital of less photogenic injuries. Willow was sent to live with her biological mother, whose economic situation had taken a turn for the worse since her flight and abandonment. For some reason, she had a coroner’s photo of her ex-husband in the bottom drawer of her pressed wood bureau, and Willow found it easily. She lived in the city, in a sweltering one-room bedsit with cinderblock walls atop a dying florist.
The florist was an NSA front. Willow would stop in after school to look at the flowers while waiting for her mother to get home from her job at an industrial bakery. The whole neighborhood smelled like cinnamon and burning plastic.
“What’s this flower?” Willow asked one day. “Those are chrysanthemums,” the florist said. He always had a pair of clippers in hand.
“They look like people’s heads,” Willow said. “I mean, more than other flowers. Like a big round head full of curly hair.”
The florist smiled and said, “I know a flower that looks like you. I have it in the back.” He left his clippers behind as he turned to go to the cooler in the back room. When he came back, the mums were all headless, but he kept smiling and presented black-haired Willow with a black-petaled flower. “It’s a black beauty hollyhock,” he said, and presented it to her. Willow brought her hands out from behind her back and knew she didn’t need to hide the clippers anymore.
“It does look like me,” she said as she accepted the flower. “Just like me. Black all around, with a yellow spike in the middle.” The florist’s tight-slipped smile betrayed a twitch at that.
Willow’s grades began to falter. She was new in school, and quiet, and large-eyed and wore clothes that were popular two years prior. Some of them had stains on the sleeves, from their original owners. Boys mostly ignored her, but occasionally pulled her hair as they passed her in the hallways. Girls were much worse.
They worked in groups, surrounding her.
“So your dad is dead, huh? Must have been a suicide.” “How does your mom afford your fancy apartment? Is she a prostitute?” “What are you going to do for Take Your Daughter to Work day?” “She’s upset. Look, don’t be upset, Willow. There’s nothing to cry about. We’re your friends. Are you getting your period?”
“Your first period?” “Does your mother take a few days off from work when she has her period?” “Will you have to take over for her,” the main girl said, even taking Willow’s hand in her own and patting it comfortingly, “when she is so indisposed.”
Willow stood there, hair over her face, taking it. Surveillance cameras, parabolic mics, satel
lites that could find a 1976 bicentennial quarter flipped into the Grand Canyon, all focused on her. She didn’t snap. The ringleader didn’t end up with a pencil in her eye, the others weren’t beaten with a pipe or pushed in front of a city bus. Willow just went home after school let out, as she did every day, except that three blocks from her apartment she made friends with a little four-year-old boy and, taking him by the hand, walked him face-first into a lamppost, then left him on the corner to cry and bleed.
There are two kinds of children who attract the attention of the federal government’s alphabet soup. They are both prodigies in their way. Kids with a knack for math and lateral thinking are recruited early on. Birthday cards embla-zoned with the seals of major intelligence and law enforcement agencies still mean something special, even in these days of single-digit approval ratings. Those numbers are only for the electedgovernment. The permanent government has a more entrenched reputation. So the little smartypantses get their cards and parents get the hint—judo lessons, laptops, tutors, Chinese and Arabic flashcards. Despite the best efforts of the petit-bourgeoisie, there’s a strong regression toward the mean. Most genius ten-year-olds are utterly ordinary sixteen-year-olds. Only a few retain the interest of federal recruiters, and otnly a fraction of those suitable can be lured away from the business world with appeals to the spirit of public service and promises of proximity to power.
There are other organizations that keep track of girls like Willow.
Willow continued to do very well on her tests, even as her attendance in school grew increasingly erratic, and her work indifferent. She sucked her first cock at thirteen, and started smoking cigarettes. She got bombed out on cheap bourbon on her fourteenth birthday. Her boyfriend was nineteen, and fancied himself the local Great White Hope at the boxing gym where he trains four days a week. He loosened two of Willow’s teeth with an open-handed smack once. She left a stray cat in the trash, its head turned one hundred and eighty degrees. Mother had to take a second job—industrial bakery in the morning, night shift at a Dunkin Do-nuts. Somewhere in Langley, Virginia a mouse was clicked and an insurance settlement check in Willow’s name fortuitously kept the family from eviction, making community college a possibility after all.
Willow didn’t need to go to the doctor for an abortion. She drowned her fetus in her belly with sizzurp and shellfish. She finally broke up with her boyfriend after three years and found him another fourteen-year-old—that’s how he liked them, just wisps down there—and thus he promised not to kill himself after all. Memoranda flew back and forth. High-priority emails were sent, read, deleted. Hard drives zapped with powerful magnets the size of shirt buttons. But they are powerful enough to drag a boat. There was only one question left to answer: Does Willow have too much empathy, or not enough?
At community college, there were more tests, but those were specialized, not standardized. Willow wore a skirt with a hem just three inches over her knee, and some purple stockings, to class the first day, and was called a “cheap fucking whore!” by some weedy-looking boy in the parking lot. She kept her head up, walked to her class. PSY 101, her only elective. A vending machine malfunctioned, taunting her with a Three Musketeers Bar hanging from its loop, refusing to fall. She learned about childhood sexual urges, about the Stanford prison experiment. An older woman, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, burst into tears in English class one day, as everyone but Willow struggled through “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Back in PSY 101, Willow watched an episode from a late-night television news program about sociopathic youngsters. A cute young blonde girl says on the show, “I wish I could kill everybody; then I could have the world all to myself.” An infant stares over the head of her mother and smiles at some invisible thing in the air. Willow’s pulse remained steady. She wrote a term paper about a famous female serial killer whose jailhouse correspondence revealed a strong belief in UFOs, ancient astronauts, and an inevitable invasion. The killer’s last words, said even as she was strapped to a gurney, with three different poisons pushing in to her veins, were, “I’ll see you on Independence Day.” Willow’s Facebook timeline was full of photos, but when her friends smiled and hoisted their drinks with one hand and flashed faux gang signs with the others, she stood in their midst, square-shouldered, arms at her side, just smirking at the lens. On one wintry night, an agent damaged Willow’s car in the community college parking lot. She had to walk home, on the shoulder of the highway. She was half blind from the ice rain in her eyes, and snow was piled in drifts along her path. Her left foot sunk into the ruined carcass of a raccoon that had managed to drag itself to the side of the road. She walked on without flinching.
Even better, on the sidewalk outside the door to her building, she scraped the letters I, C, and U into the dusty snow with the toe of her winter boot. Another secret test that only she perceived; another correct answer.
“What have you figured out so far?” her case worker asked Willow. She was a beautiful girl now. Black hair pulled into a thick and complex braid, light blue eyes, just enough acne scarring to seem accessible to the average pig. French manicure, eyebrows waxed and arched. No tattoos or piercings—very clever. She can hide that way, when she needs to. The case worker didn’t look like an intelligence agent, but she was one. She knew how to hide as well.
Willow said, “Well you can’t use just anyone, can you?” They were in a twenty-four thour diner, three hours into a new day. Willow had ruined the yolks of her eggs the moment her plate was placed in front of her, because she hated being stared at. She made a point of gesturing with her fork at the agent as she spoke, between bites and breaths. “For most jobs, anyone will do. Give them a uniform, a job title, some resources, and they’ll do whatever you want. Be a hero or a villain, be a victim or a martyr. So you don’t need me for the basics—extradition, enhanced interrogation, infiltration, propaganda. Not even wet work. That’s boy stuff.”
The agent didn’t nod or shift her eyes in return. She just bit into her toast, flipped through the first few pages of the newspaper before her, chewing.
“Any girl would suck a cock straight from her own shitty asshole for a few extra dollars and a shot at Internet fame,” Willow said suddenly. She shoveled some hash browns into her mouth and peered at the agent. “Any boy too.”
The agent nodded solemnly, like God might from his throne atop a cloud. “Big picture stuff,” Willow said. “Positively enormous,” the agent said.
The agent had forms for Willow to sign. They were a dream come true, in form form. Willow accepted a place in Princeton University as a transfer student, and a full bank account, and a lease to an apartment in Trenton co-signed by the agent herself. The agent happened to have the same last name as Willow. At the bottom of the forms lay a glossy photo of Willow’s father’s head. She shuddered, but didn’t scream and scream and dig her fingernails into the flesh of her arms till she felt something hard until later.
Princeton was challenging. Trenton more so. The building to which she was assigned was in a slum area, her apartment a joke—bathtub in the kitchen and just enough floor space for an air mattress, no climate control save a space heater that fired off sparks when plugged in, rats with no fear of human beings and an appetite for uncooked supermarket pasta. The interior of the refrigerator was heavily stained with what looked like mold and dried blood. It was only blood, courtesy of the previous tenant and his unfortunate lover. Her neighbors were drug addicts and petty criminals who had nothing to lose—smashing someone’s head in with a pipe wrench for ten dollars was worth the risk of a twenty-five year prison sentence. Willow took to carrying a box cutter, but she didn’t use it at home. She used it at school.
Willow’s coursework was selected by her case worker. Arabic, Russian, constitutional law, organic chemistry for a change of pace. Big picture stuff, but with an added fringe benefit—Willow’s classmates were hypercompetitive young men and women who never abandoned their childhood dreams of being President or curing cancer. Clever boys and girls, sensitive a
nd discerning. They could smell a sociopath a mile away. A bit overconfident, though.
Gordon and Camile were lovers, and very cosmopolitan. They both liked to watch the other fuck third parties. Gordon zeroed in on how Willow’s hair was always in her face. “That girl got herself daddy-raped,” he said to Camile. They were loitering outside the lecture hall as Willow moved past them.
“Girls like that will suck you off before dinner,” Camile said. She chortled at her own ribaldry. “So that you’ll like them.” No need to keep their voices down. A deal was struck.
Gordon made his move later that day, buttonholing Willow and talking up the alacrity with which her Russian vocabulary was expanding. He knew to throw in a “neg”, and mentioned something about Willow’s Jersey accent interfering with a few of her pronunciations. He was on her side, ready to help her out. Maybe tonight, at his apartment, they could work on some lingual exercises?
“Sure,” Willow said. She went home and dressed for the occasion—sun dress for easy access, oversized purse with a whole other outfit, hair pulled back, flats for running. She withstood four blocks of catcalls to catch the bus, which took her to the rundown district adjacent to Gordon’s nice neighborhood.
There was wine waiting, and dumb music—Vangelis, the Bladerunner soundtrack of all things—and fresh sheets on the bed. Gordon kept the bedroom door open, so he’d have some place to nod toward after the academic preliminaries. Willow took her glass, kicked off her shoes, smiled at the right moment and let her tongue slip between her lips when she spoke. Gordon moved in. Willow put up a hand and excused herself to the bathroom. “I need to do something important,” she said, snatching up her purse for effect.
She locked the bedroom door behind her, pulled Camile from the closet and slit the girl’s throat to stop the otherwise inevitable scream. It was an expert cut, but a cheap box cutter, so there was gurgling, and blood all over the sheets and a puddle of the same slowly expanding toward the bedroom door. Then, in the bathroom Willow washed up, changed her outfit and waited for Gordon to either bust down the door to his room and confront her, or rush to his car, the tires of which Willow had already slashed. She heard him howling and screaming outside, right by his parking space. Willow waved to him, then sat on the toilet, lid down, bloody cellphone in hand, and called for her case worker to come shoot Gordon and pick her up.