by Chris Weitz
So, one fateful day, Welsh, my handler at MI5, found a job suited to a boy of my talents: to seduce a young American girl, fresh from the plague zone, newly arrived on our shores.
At first, the very idea was a shock. We had been informed, or misinformed rather, that there was no cure for the Sickness. This justified the death penalty for any travel to the plague zone (so reminiscent of the prohibition against travel to Talos IV, the planet inhabited by psionic manipulators in the renowned, rejiggered pilot of the original Star Trek, first known as “The Cage” and then known as “The Menagerie”).
Well, here I am now, on the surface, as it were, of Talos IV. The planet of death and doom. The smoke of a thousand fires climbs the sky. Carrion birds circle the air like it’s a roller rink on half-price day.
The good news was, not only have the intrepid scientists of the Reconstruction developed a vaccine for the Sickness but some bunch of post-apocalyptic street urchins in New York had developed their own home-brew version. The bad news was, a stable population in America completely gazumps the British authorities, who had planned to resume their colonial tendencies and begin anew in the Old New World after mourning the dead for an efficiently appropriate period of time.
So—my mission was to insinuate myself into the trust of the escaped tomboy. She was to be placed at Trinity College Cambridge under an alias. Unbeknownst to said dystopian nymphet, I was to befriend and if possible befriend her, and report back any findings to my puppet masters.
Donna proved to be quite a vexing assignment, what with her haunted, postlapsarian grief, her stubborn loyalty to absent tribe and paramour. What was I to do? She was too much of a coil even for me to unravel.
I complained to my superiors, and they came up with an idea guaranteed to set her fully adrift and leave me as the only harbor in her grief: They killed off her friends. Or at least they made Donna believe that her tribe had been killed. It was most likely that they had died anyway, given the hurly-burly that I understood the United States to be. At any rate, that was the cut that finally brought her down; it was also, ironically, to be my comeuppance. I didn’t expect that, in witnessing her suffering, her deep and unalloyed pain, I would fall for her.
That is my embarrassing revelation: that, after all this, I have to admit that I am, unfortunately, in love with Donna. Presumably hopelessly, as she has taken the news that I was playacting rather hard.
Hard? Diamonds are hard. This is something else.
Spare a kindly thought for poor Rab, dusting flecks of broken window off his natty camo anorak, wondering how he’s going to manage to get out of this alive. How was I to know that I would fall in love? Nothing in life had prepared me for such an accident.
Which is why I find myself off-piste, as it were, creeping through muck and snow behind a granite wall, on an utterly pointless mission to rescue some damsels in distress. Not even damsels I’m interested in. Utterly arbitrary damsels, useless damsels, may-as-well-be-blokes damsels. But what can I do? I’m in love.
And she’s in love with someone else.
The posse stops for a breather, and Donna and Jefferson stop orbiting each other for a nanosecond. As soon as Donna is out of earshot, I stroll over to him.
“My name is Rab,” I say, holding out my paw.
Jefferson looks at it and smiles, as if I’ve just swept off my plumed hat with a spiral flourish as I bowed low to the ground. He grasps it in his filthy, calloused mitt.
“I know,” he says. “Donna’s friend.”
He doesn’t say “friend” in any particularly provocative way. But it definitely puts me on the qui vive.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” I say, gesturing at the stinking wreckage of a city.
“Do you think so?” he says.
“No. Sorry. I was being ironic.”
“I figured. It used to be something.” We walk on a bit, the wall to our left, the ground dipping and rising. Donna is looking over suspiciously but wants no part of this conversation, it seems. “I went to England once. When my brother and I were little.”
“Changing of the Guard? Madame Tussaud’s?”
He shakes his head. “The John Soane museum. Brick Lane. Clerkenwell.” He even says it right, “CLARK-en-well.” He shrugs. “My parents were weird. I liked the salt beef bagels.”
I really want to dislike this guy, I do.
“Anyway,” he says, “thank you for helping Donna. She’s… she’s unique. Isn’t she?”
I want to say something clever and deflating. But all I can say is “Yes.”
He fishes around in a bag. Hands me a pistol.
“This is a dangerous place. Not smart to go unarmed,” he says. He waves off my protests. “Oh, I have plenty. Give it back to me when we’re done.”
“When are we done?” I say.
“Don’t know,” he says.
I look at the gun. Wakefield and the others, my side, did not trust me to carry one. And they want me to kill the boy who’s offering me one of his own.
Those are my orders: At all costs, sparing no harm to my companions or myself, ensure that any nuclear capability represented by the football is mitigated or, failing that, any and all copies of the launch codes are destroyed—including those in the memory of anyone I encounter. That last article, as I have been realizing, enjoins me to kill anyone who has had even the briefest contact with the football, since they might have been capable of memorizing the codes. Which means that Donna’s young swain Jefferson is on the chopping block. Wakefield would have done it if he had time and occasion to do it out of Donna’s sight, I expect; or maybe they don’t want blood on official hands. They’re like that.
Can I do it? That sort of business is somewhat outside my experience, but they did teach me, back at Central Office, how to end things quickly and painlessly, at least according to them, using little more than the nifty little dagger they’ve given me. It looks like a letter opener, only triangular in cross section. I believe it is meant to produce a puncture wound that refuses to stop bleeding. Physically, I can do it. But morally?
I know I should hate him, but Jefferson has his points. If I’m the summer blockbuster, the tentpole of guys, he’s good counterprogramming, the indie darling. If he and I had lived down the staircase from each other, he’d have made a great wingman, and might even draw off a few of the starry-eyed girls whose intuitions about my callowness were borne out by catching me in a compromising position or two.
And I daresay Jefferson has done a lot of things right, if right and wrong are the sort of thing you care about. But at any rate, there were no moral riders attached to my Faustian, Bondian contract to kill.
And now the boy who’s supposed to be my target is giving me the tool to do the deed. This is not emotionally convenient. Time and tide may require me to murder him, which does not sit well. For one thing, I find myself liking him. For another, I find it galling that my actions could be mistaken for those of a jilted rival.
Jefferson sidles up to Donna again, and I find someplace else to look. I scan the solemn avenues of wrecked buildings, the white wilderness of the park, and try to imagine my way, through it all, back into Donna’s mind, and maybe from there into her heart. Here I am in, to quote the good old King James Version, “the abomination of desolation.”
But the mountains and hills, or rather, the high-rises and skyscrapers, have not been laid low. They are still standing, only a little marred by the actions of fire and weather and vandalous teens. This is what the Reconstruction Committee wants back—the houses and flats and offices. They want all of it, the whole nation, to extract the oil and iron and anything else they can suck from it. It seems, to me, blasphemous—not that blasphemy has ever been something to frighten me. But how many ghosts must there be here? The whole city is a haunted house.
We head up the less-than-imaginatively-named Central Park West, ears pricked. Since I have no idea what to look for, I take the time to ponder Kath, the preposterously gorgeous blond with two blond litt
le flunkies at her heels. Anytime up to the near present, young Rab would have bent all his energy and skill to the task of securing some private time with such a dish. But now, to my amazement, I find that I have no interest. The conceptual framework is there—I understand how attractive she is, the curves and planes and hollows speak to me in a language I well remember—but the visceral charge is gone.
I crave only Donna. Her black eyes, her high-bridged nose, everything down to her slender little feet. But more, what she contains: Her laughter. Her thoughts. Her mind. Her spirit. It is a terrible thing, to find my talents suitable to any purpose but the essential one. I feel like a skeleton key that works in every door but the one I’m trying to get through.
Enough, my soul. Put aside such thoughts. Concentrate, rather, on not getting killed.
In the middle distance stretches a massive neoclassical pile, which can only be the aforesaid museum. I gather that it contains, like its British cousin, various skeletal dinosaurs and stuffed wildebeests and simulated Neanderthal domestic scenes.
And if our information is correct, a modern-day slave market. Charming.
We slip over the wall of the park for cover while we have a bit of a chin-wag. “Kath,” says Jefferson, “time to tell us everything you know.”
“I don’t really know many details. I never went,” she says. “I mean, I had my own problems, right? I didn’t want to know.”
Donna says, “You mean you were doing okay, so you didn’t give a shit what happened to anybody else.”
Kath looks as though she’s about to contradict her, but then she just says, “Yeah, pretty much.”
She tells us what she does know. The name of the tribe controlling the west side of Manhattan, and thus the museum, is the OGs. Despite the seeming reference to rap and blaxploitation films, said OGs are actually white kids. Control of the slave market was a concession that the Uptowners made to maintain peace so that they could concentrate on their closest enemies, the Harlemites, who are, in fact, black, or as they would say here, African American. The Uptowners retained control of the market in petrol and food. Shelter, it would seem, is not an issue, as thousands of houses and flats remain uninhabited. But how will they survive the winter?
I have a question. “So—sorry if I’m being naive, but what, exactly, are these slaves used for? I mean, nobody’s growing cotton, right?”
There’s a pause. Probably I have put things the wrong way. I never knew the ins and outs of America’s tortured and tortuous relationship with slavery, only that most Americans wanted to avoid talking about it. Of course, Britain was every bit as involved, happily dashing about the globe shipping human beings here and there for profit, until the profit margins fell. But—
“It’s not about work,” says Kath.
“You mean…”
“I mean sex. I mean rape.”
Kath laughs at what must be the shocked expression on my face.
“Oh, come on,” she says. “Are you surprised?”
“Surprised?” I think it over. “No. I suppose I’m not. But I’m disgusted.”
Kath makes a noise best rendered as pfffft! that presumably indicates her skepticism.
“Like you wouldn’t have done the same thing, all you fancy public school pricks.”
Kath, I can see, has also traveled. This makes sense. She has a certain Courchevel après-ski look to her, a private-jet-set vibe.
“Young lady,” I say, “I may not be the most evolved of males, but consent is the salt to my meat. Without that, we’re just animals.”
I am in, if not a white-hot rage, at least an off-white rage, or, shall we say, a handsomely tawny-colored rage. I think, perhaps, if I am let loose on the museum with a gun, I will have a chance to practice up for any less justified murders to follow.
We creep along the wall until we can see, on the steps of the museum, a little convocation of boys with guns. I fetch out my government-issue binoculars for a better look and spy, beneath a decaying gargantuan scorpion model that was mounted above the portico in better days, presumably to attract and repel schoolchildren, the guards, curiously done up in tattered robes. Stranger still, they appear to be sporting long beards beneath faces clearly still youthful and collagen-rich. As though they were going to a fancy dress ball having chosen a rather dubious Islamic State theme, for which they will later be made to apologize.
“We don’t have the firepower to force our way in and out,” reiterates Jefferson.
“Good. I don’t like to go anyplace I’m not invited, especially if they’ll shoot me.”
So the guns are definitely real, then, even if the beards aren’t. Not terribly surprising given that there was one firearm for every man, woman, and child in the country before the Sickness hit. I’m not 100 percent sure what led to this peculiar state of affairs. I suppose after all it was the fault of my countrymen, the British, for getting ourselves beaten by a bunch of bloody-minded, overarmed farmers. If your country gets its debut because everybody and their uncle Zebediah has a blunderbuss, you get to rating guns pretty highly.
Same thing goes for human bondage. There are millions of people enslaved in modern, progressive, technologically switched-on India to this day, working off debts or crimes for the grievous and unpardonable sin of being born into the wrong caste. The British, who in theory abolished slavery in the middle of the nineteenth century, basically just renamed it. I ought to know, for my people were bureaucrats and organizers of imperial infrastructure great and small, veritable Uncle Tom–jis, which is how I ended up, like many of my ancestors, at Eton and Cambridge.
Well, Rab, you have worked yourself into a fine moral lather, haven’t you? Let that stiffen your spine in the hours to come.
“Come again?” say I. I have not been taking everything in.
Donna looks annoyed. “I said, so we need to think of another way in, then.”
“Do we really?” It seems a question worth asking.
“I can’t expect you to understand,” says Donna. “It’s not your tribe.” Her look, not spiteful, only indifferent, tears at my gut.
“Well,” I say, “how about a little subterfuge? Give the good old Chewbacca maneuver a go? We escort in a fake prisoner?”
“Can’t say it’s the worst idea,” says Jefferson.
“Yeah, but there’s no way we can guarantee that somebody won’t recognize you. You’re public enemy number one.” Donna smiles at Jefferson. Damnation.
“I’ll go,” I find myself saying, and immediately regret it. Really, this is too much. There is no point to impressing Donna with my heroism if I die in the process. I want to be alive to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I am hoping that someone will say something along the lines of No, this isn’t your fight!
But there are no takers. Instead, Kath says, “I’ll be Chewbacca.”
“No, Mommy!” whine her two little blond shadows. “Stay with us!”
Donna says, “It’s my tribe. I should go.”
“You?” Kath snorts. “No offense, but who do you think people would want to buy more, you or me?”
Kath’s point is one of the more perverse I’ve ever seen expressed, but she’s not wrong, I suppose. With her flaxen hair and rosy cheeks, she’s a regular harem-member manquée. That notwithstanding, she’s a loose cannon, and besides, I have other ideas.
“Donna goes,” I say.
The others look at me. Yes, I stare back at them, I can make arbitrary decisions, too.
“It’s her tribe. And it’s my neck. So Donna goes with me.”
Maybe things will get hairy and I’ll get the chance to jump in front of a crossbow bolt to save her, a showy but easily reparable wound—taped up by the fair hands of Donna herself, preferably—that will shift the needle of public opinion in my direction.
Donna is not happy about this arrangement, though. It implies a sort of relationship between her and me, a partnership.
But she does not make that objection outwardly, which tells me that she and Jefferson hav
e not had The Talk, the one in which she breaks it to Jefferson that she and I have slept together. I hope it’s just that she’s saving the news for a good enough argument. More likely, she just can’t stand the idea of telling him and spoiling their glorious sodding reunion.
Well, that doesn’t stop me from dropping hints, does it?
“And if you ask me,” I say, my expression implying that I’m speaking from experience, “Donna is plenty desirable.”
Donna looks at me with utter contempt. Never mind. To make an omelette, one must annoy some eggs.
Jefferson has nothing to say to this. I seem to have carried the point with sheer bravado.
So. Over the wall, down the cobbled parkside pavement, across the street to the grand stairs and portico. The bearded boys look down at us with the studied, trigger-fondling disdain of movie gunsels. Donna, loosely zip-tied and led by the elbow, has her eyes down. The guards address themselves to me.
“Sale isn’t till Sunday,” says one of them. And I notice that his ZZ Topp look is the result of his having strung hair extensions into his best-but-still-lacking, undergrowth-like efforts at an actual beard.
I resist the urge to laugh. I tell myself, Rab, who are you to question the tonsorial choices of this young gentleman, who is a person like you, and at the same time, a special snowflake unlike any other? Also, I make it my business not to laugh at people carrying Kalashnikovs.
His colleagues are equally bebearded, in extremist rather than hipster fashion. Something, I tell myself, is up. I quickly take in the jingling metal symbols dangling like charms from their necks. Cross, Star of David, crescent. Like a version of those COEXIST bumper stickers that found their way to London before the Sickness. Curious.
At any rate, I realize that Donna is not going to supply a response to the young thug’s statement, as she is meant to be a cowed and depressed victim. So I say, “Yeah, I know. I came early to check out the competition. Wanna see what kind of price I can get.”