“I used to live here.”
“Migration is back up that way.” She hooked her thumb. “See about getting in with them. I don’t do that.”
Martin shrugged and hobbled further along. The old dress shoes the hospital gave him were uncomfortable, and he could feel the heat spots of future blisters.
A mile or so up Fremont there was an official crossing. Several police officers and a few more Sherwood guards stood on opposite sides of an opening in the barrier, and a dozen or so people milled around performing the shady under-dealings that border leeches perform the world over. He looked for someone he knew. A man with a beard down to his chest and no shirt offered him something in a whispered garble of syllables and Martin elbowed past him. Even the drugs were unfamiliar to him now. How could so much change in so little time?
A car roared toward them and came to a screeching halt in front of the border. During the conflict, a passel of border-junkies faded quickly toward the crossing and Martin joined them, pushing across the threshold nonchalantly. Once through, they burst apart like dandelion seed, separating into the citizenry of Sherwood as best as they were able. The illegal border crossing was noticed and an alarm was sounded. Rangers began to spill in from side streets to round them up. Rather than run in his blister-inducing shoes, Martin sat down heavily on the curb of the busy block and took off one shoe for inspection. The pursuing guards ran right past him.
Martin smiled into the leather of his shoe. Too smart for management, he thought. After they’d passed, he limped up the sidewalk to the house he’d sat in front of, and barreled through the front door.
What a shitty father he was. If they could get through this without Jason having a permanently bent arm, he thought, grown into some strange hook or backward-facing appendage, he’d close the tunnel, live right, get a new job, pay attention to his family.
After he’d parked at the hospital, he picked the boy up in his arms and Jason groaned and passed out. The arm slipped out of his hands and flopped backwards, hanging down, at a new joint above the elbow. “Shit shit shit,” Nevel said. He used his knee as a table to hold him and grabbed the errant arm before setting out.
On the other hand, he thought, maybe he would take his tunnel deep into Sherwood. He could run an underground railroad—literally underground—transporting injured children to Sherwood’s clinics.
Thirty or so people stood in front of the entrance, in a queue. They were quiet, shuffling from foot to foot. At his feet the pavement was stained and still slick with repeated paintings of blood, the trail of it actively reapplied through the day as patient after patient added their own Pollock contributions. There were too many emergencies to treat, and far too few working hospitals. A nurse came every few minutes to catalogue the newly arrived, whisking, when she could, any life-or-death cases to the front.
When it had first become clear that the city—the entire west—was in for a hard haul, hordes had left. They migrated east or overseas. The wealthiest, and especially those whose skills were valuable everywhere—doctors, dentists, nurses—had to consider the well-being of their families over that of the city. Who could blame them, Nevel thought. And why hadn’t he gone? When he still could—before the east had closed its doors to most immigration. They could go nowhere but here now. Just stay where you are, the world told them, hunker down, do not move or squirm, consume nothing. Someday it will be over.
Several places in front of them a man passed out and fell, a hard and solid sound. The line continued its glacial pace around him, their guilty, self-pitying eyes making awkward glances until paramedics came for him. Nevel noted the way in which they carried him, exhausted and callous.
Inside the crowded waiting room he spoke with a kindly nurse. She put her hand on Jason’s head and said “poor thing” and then he found a seat on the floor and waited, with Jason still in his arms, until his muscles burned from the effort. Jason woke and cried until he’d cried himself out and still they waited. They talked about the tunnel and giant robots in hushed tones and tried not to speak about broken arms.
Nevel told him every single detail he could remember from the first three Star Wars movies. The fellow patients around leaned in close, with their own broken bones or bleeding wounds or cancers, adding a missed line or detail here or there, until it became a collective retelling, with side commentary and trivia and the occasional sound effect by a wild-looking, bushy-bearded gentleman with a makeshift bandage across his neck.
Jason was transported by it. He held the broken arm across his lap like a dead eel and did not move except to ask for clarification, “What do the sand people eat?”, “Which is faster, an X-Wing or a TIE fighter?”, “What if you have to go to the bathroom and you’re in a battle?”, “Did Luke ever get a broken arm?”, “Is Maid Marian like Princess Leia?”
The last question caused laughter and interested debate in the patients around him. Nevel paused in his telling as he thought again of the mayor’s gift. He had slipped some into their own rations. He topped off bottles at night, taking advantage of his wife’s absent-mindedness to make their life a little easier. But now, as he framed it in the black and white universe of Star Wars, he realized his son would interpret his actions as belonging to the dark side. Right? Remembering his attempt to use the clinic in Sherwood earlier, he gritted his teeth in anger again. His boy had a glazed-over expression now, in his lap unable to sleep. He whimpered from the pain and held very still.
Deep in the night they moved on to the prequels until a little before dawn they were called in. As the doctor set Jason’s arm the boy screamed. By ten in the morning they left with a plaster cast and a weak chorus of “may the force be with you” and headed home.
Cora met them on the porch. The night had been hard on her. She embraced Jason and steered him into the house and Nevel knew they would argue later. He sat down on the first step and looked across at the border, busy as always. He was exhausted. Nevertheless, he’d taken care of things. It may have been his fault, but he’d taken responsibility, and there was some satisfaction and relief there.
When the children were asleep he grabbed hold of Cora’s arm. He would show her his water stash and tell her the truth. He would free himself of guilt.
He led her into the tunnel, his flashlight’s beam absorbed in the dirty brown of the walls. Finally he came to a small grotto, against one wall of which he’d leaned a number of flattened cardboard boxes.
“Nevel,” she said. In her voice there was a tinge of fear. She didn’t like being in this far.
“No, come on,” he said. He pulled away the cardboard boxes, revealing a four-foot hole behind. “In we go,” he said. He crouched down and stepped in, taking the light with him.
“Nevel, please.”
She was in the dark on the far side of the hole now. He skimmed over the tops of the bounty in his cave and the light reflected marvelously along the walls, warped and brilliant through the glass. He gave the bottles a tap with his shoe so that the light danced. “Cora,” he said. He leaned down and went halfway back through the small tunnel and put his hand out. “Come now, it’ll be OK.”
She took his hand and followed behind. When she saw the bottles she stopped, her mouth agape, and he watched the light play over her face now. He couldn’t remember being more in love with her.
Mayor Brandon Bartlett stood at his balcony window and watched the commander of the National Guard drive away. His vehicle, a black armored SUV, was accompanied by an armada of similar vehicles which traveled everywhere with him, so that when you saw him he seemed to be part of an angry swarm of metal, all protecting him. The whole lot of them continued on below his balcony, and the mayor raised his middle finger to send them off properly.
The mayor hated himself just then, as the last of the SUVs rounded the corner and Roger retreated toward their airport base.
The commander, he remembered, had even brought his own water with him. When the mayor’s assistant offered the commander a drink, one of his own
tight-buttoned underlings swept forward with a glass and filled it for him from a canteen. Did the commander think the water from the office of the mayor was undrinkable?
He sat on the couch and waited for Christopher. It was intensely sunny out and dry as a goddamn bone. The whole city out the window was a baking hot desert. There would be unrest to deal with, amid the normal schedule of concerns. He closed his eyes to ward off the sun glare on the television set. Christopher abhorred the commander, and had visited friends close by while the meeting was in progress. He wished he’d return soon.
The only explanation that he could think of—it came to him suddenly—was that the commander suspected that he himself, Mayor Bartlett, might try to poison him. He held still, in mid-motion, his head tilted in revelation, as the discovery dawned on him, surprised at its implications and its possibilities. And then he laughed for a long time afterward.
They’d never officially started sharing a room together—perhaps because of the foreboding, serious, and protective presence of Bea. Or perhaps they’d never shared a room because Renee was too preoccupied, or wanted to keep their relationship a secret, or because Zach had never demanded it.
So he lived in the map room. He worked on the project obsessively and Renee would find him asleep at a table at one or two or three in the morning and take him to his makeshift bed, a ratty sleeping bag in the corner behind the couch, there she’d strip him down. Or she’d be wandering around the house early when all was still silent and slip into his bed and they’d fuck.
An appropriate word for it, Zach thought: fuck. The word had its sexiness, but there was mostly a utility to it, a violence even. There’d always been a sort of violence to Renee—an unpredictable, usually charming suddenness, a physicality, but the job was changing her, he thought.
The time he spent here was straight out of his teenage geek self’s wildest dreams. Sex at all hours with a wild girl, and a game-like puzzle where he was actually making a difference in the world. The chief of intelligence, the conductor of information. But as was the case with all teenage fantasies, he supposed, things turned out to be more complicated in real life.
Of the nights they’d been together—and he had to sift back through his mind, through the string of late nights and early mornings, through the behemoth project, for the few nights they hadn’t been together—there hadn’t been any variation to them. There were no moods in their relationship anymore. There weren’t intimate, slow nights or nights of idle sex or much talking at all. She came to him and he could see how deeply preoccupied she was, transported and unreachable, exhausted beyond measure by the day’s work and the night’s nightmares.
At first it was nothing. He held her while she slept, though he longed for a moment of slowness or tenderness with her. But more and more he felt he was only the object of a cold, endless hunger.
He enjoyed it some, sure. But it haunted him, flustered his concentration when he should be working, made him pine for the early days of their relationship. It created a mass of sorrow in his ribcage, so that every time he saw her it ached and throbbed like some small animal living there, awake only in her presence.
After, when she fell asleep finally against him, in the times where he could reach above his own self, he felt sorry for her. Her time was no longer hers, she was getting used up by the country she gave everything to, and so of course this was a sort of recourse, and he tightened his grip around her.
They fought fiercely and often.
He told her the new clinic was in the wrong spot, that she was too hasty.
She told him nothing would ever get done if it was up to him.
He explained how it wouldn’t have to ever get redone once it was done.
She told him he was stubborn and that he never got out in the neighborhood, he was a goddamn homebody and it was leading to incompetence.
He told her she was arrogant and regal, running a dictatorship like some queen, that her aggressiveness would lead to violence, that she was trying to build everything in a day and it would end in ruins.
Is this about Sherwood or about us? she said.
Sherwood, he yelled.
You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, she said.
Yes I do, he said, but you’re too megalomaniacal to see it.
Then she threw her mug at him and struck him in the forehead.
The two Rangers in the room disappeared through any available entrance like a wind.
When Bea finally came in, Zach was sitting on the couch tentatively mapping out the new bruised terrain on his forehead, and Renee was standing at the window looking at the giant dead hedge that sat like a castle wall at the front of the house.
“You OK, Zach?” Bea said.
“It hurts,” he said honestly, rubbing the swollen spot. “She threw a cup at me.”
Renee turned and walked from the room. Her footsteps retreated loud and angry down the stairs and out of the house.
“She’s under a lot of stress,” Bea said.
“I know! That’s what we argued about. More or less.”
“I’m sure she didn’t mean it,” Bea said.
Zach spread his hands and stood up, not caring who heard him. “She threw a cup at me.”
“But Zach, you’ve got to understand.”
“I do understand! I totally understand.” He started to pack his few possessions, stowed behind the couch, into his backpack. How long had he been there, waiting for a change? A month?
“What are you doing?”
“But you know what? I don’t have to be cool about it. She doesn’t get a special exemption. You don’t resolve arguments by throwing shit at people.” Zach winced as he saw Bea try to make some kind of rebuttal in Renee’s defense and come up with nothing. “Anyway.” He put his hands over his face. “Maybe she’d be better off with some solo time.”
“Zach, please.”
“Why are you in here making her case—I’m flattered, honestly. Not in a million years would she ever do this.”
“Because, goddamnit—” Bea gestured to the walls covered in maps, to all of his work. “I’m not making her case, I’m making this case.”
Zach looked up and felt an immense remorse, but he knew he had to leave, that he could not back down. It was devouring him, the house, the map room, Sherwood, Maid Marian. “I need to check on my house, Bea. I need to reset. When I hang out around her I feel like I’m a subject, like I’m competing for her love with forty thousand other people.”
“So do I,” Bea said quietly.
He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “You know what happens here, the Rangers do.”
“Zach,” Bea said, and he was surprised at the tone of her voice, so often toneless. There was an edge of panic to it. She was afraid he’d leave. He wondered again if there was something he didn’t know, information he didn’t have. He looked at the walls, studied the trouble maps and resource indicators and realized that of course he didn’t have all the information. He’d been privy to the primary channel, the main floodgate of information, but there were other channels that went over his head. Renee could easily have her own spy network without his knowledge. She could be bribing public officials, could be bringing in weapons, operating with the government, anything. Would she do that? Perhaps there was even another map room. It was his shortsightedness that led him to believe his data was all the data. He stood there for a moment, stunned by this possibility.
“What do you know, Bea?” Zach whispered.
Bea looked taken aback. She turned away slightly, as if ready to flee. “I know you can reach her sometimes, that’s all.”
“Is something else going on in Sherwood I don’t know about?”
Bea shook her head at him, her eyes steady and complex, and then she shrugged.
Zach looked around the room again and tried to memorize it. No, he thought, this was an information minister’s paranoia, wasn’t it? This was only about him and Renee, that’s where the complexity was. It w
as too late for him to back down, he thought, for his own self. He realized that deep down it was tantrum instincts and pride that made him go. He wanted her to realize she needed him. The system here was delicate and finely tuned, and he didn’t know to what fate he left it.
Looking at the resource indicators he saw they were all near the top. As a whole they said: The nation is thriving! At least according to the scale in which he’d drawn the indicators. They said: The government is rich and powerful. They said: We’re winning.
“Bea,” he said, “do me a favor—redraw the scale on those indicators. All of them. Double or triple them. Understand? Like for water—draw it up to, I don’t know, a half million gallons.”
“But we don’t have that much storage.”
“Exactly—perfect. We don’t control the data, we control the data’s perception. It’s important, OK?”
Bea nodded and Zach stuck out his hand and she awkwardly shook it and he pulled her into a hug.
“Please. Are you sure?” she said.
He nodded. “I’ll probably be back in a few days.”
Zach turned and left, leaving Bea alone in the nerve center. His head hurt but it felt good to be outside. The dust was light in the air and the sun shone. A slight cold edge to the air was pleasant and he had to remind himself that autumn brought no rains any more.
If you didn’t count the backyard, he’d been away from the house very few times in the last couple of weeks. He’d poured too much into the job, and he felt the knot of sorrow contract upon finding one of Renee’s arguments already turn to truth. He found his bicycle and set off for home.
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