The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3)

by Anthony Caplan

  There was a pause, a second too long.

  “I have nothing else I can help you with,” said Dr. Edwards. He had his back to her again. For an instant she was tempted to push him, batter his face against the floor. This was the old Corrag.

  For the sake of her daughter she checked herself and kept breathing.

  Outside on the street, she held Hera for a long time in her arms. The crowd swirled around them. Hera understood, and her eyes crinkled with a smile.

  “It’s best for you, Hera.”

  “What is?”

  “To keep you free.”

  “What is free, Mom?”

  “It’s when you can think for yourself and not have others make your mind up for you.”

  “But you can always help me with that.”

  “Some day you won’t have me, honey. That’s why Ben and I are trying to teach you everything we know. You have to remember. That way you will always have us where it counts. In your heart.”

  “But what do the other people have? They have hearts.”

  “They have the Augment.”

  “But that’s better.”

  “No. They have no memories anymore. Not their own.”

  “Do they have someone else’s?”

  “They have collective, normalized behaviors that act on the level of instinct. Do you understand?”

  “I do understand. They feel better that way because their hearts and memories are not good.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t judge others. Except their way takes away the choices we have left.”

  “How do they learn their way?”

  “There is no ‘they’ anymore. It’s like when we used to make the mud balls down by the creek, remember that?”

  “Kind of.”

  “You were four years old. Remember the Juanacinta canyon creek in the spring? You and I liked to pretend they were people. We set them up on the rock to dry. Remember when it stormed that time? I picked you up, and we barely made it back to the front porch. Lucy was on her chain. She was barking.”

  “I remember that.”

  Corrag walked down the street, gently tugging Hera by the hand. The crowd swelled as the daylight faded into a golden afternoon, glowing but cold.

  “Imagine if you took all those mud balls and rolled them together into one big mud ball. That’s the Augment. It’s one big mud ball but without physically rolling the balls together.”

  “Like magic.”

  “Sort of magic, yes, but also dangerous. What happens when that big mud ball rolls down the hill?”

  “It can crash.”

  “Right.”

  Ben was in the room napping. Hera pushed in the door and ran over the floor, tripping across his curled-up body. She went sprawling across the faded carpet. She tried not to cry. Corrag pulled back the curtains and hung the black plastic sheet back on the room’s nano-unit to block Hera’s cries. Ben struggled awake as he held Hera on his lap. The mid-afternoon sun made a feeble attempt to get in the tinted windows. The shabby room decor looked even more lacking in style than usual. Ben carried Hera across the room to Corrag and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Corrag, pulling away.

  "I fell asleep,” said Ben.

  Corrag stayed silent.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “We went to Dr. Edwards.”

  “Dr. Edwards? Can you put the coffee on, Corrag? I’ll never make it to rehearsal.”

  Corrag busied herself at the stove with the coffee maker, boiling water and assembling the metal press. Ben dressed and studied his face in the wall mirror. He went for the plastic on the nano-unit.

  “No. Leave that,” said Corrag, turning from the stove.

  “Why? It’s too dark in here,” said Ben.

  “Leave it. I want privacy. No oversight.”

  “What did Dr. Edwards say?”

  “There is no Dr. Edwards. He’s a borg.”

  The stage went quiet and the floodlights dimmed. The gaslight, mimicking a bonfire, threw its blue, garish light across Ben’s face. Fisher assembled the loose pages of his paper script and waved his hand.

  “Take it from the top of scene one now,” he said.

  Eustace: (Retreating from the fire.) Go easy at first. Use your back yard to practice. Take it step by step. Develop your basic skills. Listen to all the sounds.

  Elizabeth: And when do we get to Halifax?

  Eustace: (Stamping his foot.) You have it all wrong. Halifax? I don’t ever want to get to Halifax. That’s the point.

  Elizabeth: (Tipping the plastic lawn chair back on its two legs.) I don’t know why you should be afraid if we get there.

  Eustace: Don’t be coy. (He walks to the other side of the fire and stares into the distance. Spitting.) It’s not about Halifax. It doesn’t have a name. I can feel it. I know it in my heart. Plato said all learning is remembering. Remember?

  Elizabeth: Plato and I are on good terms.

  “Hold on. Right here,” Fisher interrupted. He strode to the middle of the set and pointed to a spot on the floor. “You should be standing right here.” He pulled Ben’s arm and straightened him around the midriff, pointing him towards Corrag and the others in their metal chairs in the grass.

  “But she’s behind me. How would I talk to her sitting behind me like that? I’d never do that in the night with a fire.”

  “Stagecraft 101, me bucko. It’s not about veracity. It’s about getting the point across to the audience. That’s who you're speaking to. Pretend you’re at a party talking to an ugly girl and the real object of your attention is behind you.”

  “That’s offensive, Paul,” said Uko, sitting next to Corrag.

  “We have too much inoffensivity. You know what I’m saying, Ben.”

  “When we were in the Basin, we used to talk to the Naguani. We didn’t know where they were. Just out there somewhere. We knew they could hear. It didn’t matter where we stood or which direction we faced.”

  “Well, this is not like that. Let’s pick it up from Plato and I. Ready Shelly?”

  “I’m not sure what that means,” said Shelly, the actress playing Elizabeth. She was eighteen, from a commune in Ontario. She had moved into the Hilton to convalesce from an overdose in the spring. Corrag tried to feel bountiful, but Shelley was a drama queen of the first order.

  “How so?” said Fisher.

  “Well, is she being sarcastic or cute or what? She doesn’t seem like someone who actually has read Plato.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben, agreeing and coming over to the corner of the stage with Fisher.

  “Look, she’s a cypher. She just wants to be with him. She’ll say anything,” said Uko.

  “I don’t think so,” said Corrag. “She actually is agreeing with Eustace that all learning is remembering. She’s just on point.”

  “Okay, okay. There’s various alternatives. We don’t have to know exactly. Find it somewhere, Shelly,” said Fisher, scratching his bald spot.

  Elizabeth: Plato and I are on good terms.

  Eustace: Some day. There’s an infinity of some days. That’s what I’m talking about.

  Elizabeth: (Sarcastically.) Boom.

  Eustace: (Cracking a stick and adding it to the fire.) When I was a little boy, my daddy and I used to go to the Fat City Casino out on Route 109. There was always a poker game there on Friday night, and my daddy would play. He never said a word aside from "hit" or "fold". The other men would always talk, exchanging little pleasantries, you know, about the corn or the beans or the Bengals.

  Elizabeth: Those were the days.

  Eustace: They were.

  Elizabeth: But we can have those poker games. I’ll be like your daddy. I’ll never say a word.

  Eustace: The point is you have to start small. Take baby steps.

  Elizabeth: I’m scared. Aren’t you?

  Eustace: If you’re scared of suffering, you’re already suffering. />
  Elizabeth: But who are you? What if you die tonight?

  Eustace: And don’t ever know who I am?

  Elizabeth: Yes.

  Eustace: I’m not my daddy. I know that. Somewhere out there, there'z other worlds and other men and women. Other intelligent beings. Please, God. Did you ever dream of the light, the living light?

  Elizabeth: What’s my name?

  Eustace: I’ll call you little grasshopper. No. (Shaking his head and going to his knee.)

  Elizabeth: (Standing and walking around the fire to his side.) You can call me that if you want. Mrs. Gilbert said my name was Elizabeth. She said I could write my name on the underwear with the indelible marker. I used to always just write Liz. Then one of the older girls started calling me Lizard and wrote it on the bathroom wall. Lizard. Was. Here. (She writes in the air over him as if blessing him with the writing.) You can call me anything you want.

  After putting Hera to bed in the foyer, in the loft alcove Ben had built for her, Corrag and Ben turned off the radiating, incandescent bulbs set in the wall sconces and sat on the boxes at the window and looked at the display of drones and aerial transport craft tracking across the city's skies and beyond into the plains to the north and west. The window was open for the white noise it let in. It aggravated the taps in the wall, made it harder to filter sounds for meaning. The Augment was getting lazy, but so were they. She hardly cared now what would happen to them.

  It was a nightly ritual to see who would speak first. Corrag thought it might be her turn but wanted to give Ben a chance to clear his mind. She had stuff she wanted to air. She knew it was best to come at it after giving him a chance to say whatever was uppermost to him at that moment. It was just one of the little ruses that had developed with life together. He probably had his own little tricks that he liked to use. In general, she wished he would take more of a lead. But his drinking during the day was a manifestation of a deeper wound in him that had yet to heal. She doubted sometimes that it ever would. Hera was the one thing in his life that roused him to go beyond himself. Corrag’s threats and admonitions had had no sway in the long run. She thought of her father’s gentlemanly habits and how he would bend to Alana’s rule with an air of tolerance and managerial acumen. He’d had his professorship, of course, as a natural retreat. Ben was like that on the surface, but it was only because his harbored resentments were drowned in binge escapes into alcohol and three-day rides with the zipbiker club that ended at the Trujillo dam and orgies of self-destruction. If someone got badly hurt, all the better in Ben’s eyes. Someday it would be him, and then she and Hera would be fending for themselves without his DDW pension as a supplement to the Repho Creative subsidy.

  “It’s not a bad play. I mean for Adam Tyuvoldt. It’s not one of his best,” said Ben.

  “It’s something we can do. With the people we have,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  She was quiet, letting the moment sink in and set a tone between them.

  “What happened this afternoon?” asked Ben.

  “Edwards, or the fake Dr. Edwards suggested a course of extraction for Hera,” said Corrag, grateful that he'd given her the conversational opening.

  “For Hera?”

  "Exactly. Using some newfangled surveyor. He swore it wasn’t a memory sponge, but I don’t trust him at all.”

  “There’s no way we’re doing that,” said Ben emphatically.

  “It’s getting weirder and weirder around here,” said Corrag.

  “I heard there’s talk this might be our last tour. The Department of Education is making sounds like there could be forced allocations and duties and stuff,” said Ben.

  “They’ve never tried that, have they?" asked Corrag.

  “They've threatened it in the past. It would be desperate. But they say the Augment’s critical capacity has been plateauing for awhile now, and nothing they’ve tried has worked.”

  “What would we do?”

  Her voice was purposefully measured and calm. All was good in their world. Hera was asleep. Her dreams refreshed the entire universe, and nothing could hurt any of them tonight in this room, under the drones and their useless surveillance.

  “I don’t know. We’d have to leave the hotel.”

  “That would be okay, right?” She was probing for weakness and doubts in him -- just like Elizabeth, she realized.

  “It would be, but we’d have to use faculties that we haven’t used in awhile. We’d have to hope they were still there.”

  “They're there,” said Corrag. Ben smiled at her. Even in the half-dark of the hotel room, with the slumbering city out the window, his smile had a mysterious power that lit up her life.

  They slept fitfully under the sheets. Ben sighed and turned, and Corrag seethed and sensed, her mind turning over thoughts like gemstones, searching in their facets for either solace or insight. She thought, as she often did at night, of her father and Arthur and their common loneliness. She wondered if the roots of their pain lay perhaps in some original fault. But she could not grasp it. She wanted to understand a matter closer to her, the source of Ben’s unhappiness. Was it the survivor guilt and trauma of his military years? Or perhaps it was his brush with power, the years he’d spent blunting his pain with painkillers as a Repho internal security administrator? He'd always wanted something more, and she was never sure. Did it mean she was not enough? He would never turn to her for comfort. It just wasn’t in him to do so. He would rather suffer alone and lash out with his heartfelt cry that nobody else in the world cared. In his isolation, he found a rationale. So he never sought to remove the thorn in his side that gave him so much more than she could. But she needed him. She needed his raw strength, and ultimately she needed his debilitating needs. His neediness gave her a leg to stand on in this unbalanced life she had carved out for the two of them, for herself and Hera. Leaving the hotel meant stepping into a void with no bottom in sight. It was not an adventure, she told herself. It was an admission that they were lost. Still, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Their life in the Hilton was based on a fiction that somehow the two peoples, the augments and unaugments, could coexist. Ricky had always warned her about the lies that were told in the midst of comforts, the spread of a contagious amnesia about the past and the inevitable turning of the world screw. In sleep and death there was an escape into thinner, less toxic air.

  The room was always silent in the middle of the morning. Hera was out with the school age children at the courtyard school doing gymnastics and completing lessons in civics and history as required by the state. Corrag saw her off at the elevator. She always walked back slowly, pausing to listen at the doors to the other rooms for interesting slices of conversation. Corrag hated the school curriculum. It stressed a competitive version of progress that assumed a machine intelligence as the culmination of all evolution. But she was glad that Hera had friends, and she liked the teachers, two young Augment volunteers from Denton that taught interesting collaborative lessons in games and colors. The color spectrum held a lot of importance for them, and Hera was always talking about things Corrag herself had never learned.

  Ben was still sleeping. She got down a box from on top of the refrigerator. It held her old emosponders, the interpersonal communication devices that predated the artifex. They still powered on. The old glass batteries had life in them. She looked at visuals of friends and family and wondered where they were. She found the one she was looking for. It was Ricky and Arthur at the Rosaria beach with surfboards, laughing and mugging for the shot. Arthur was the same size as his grandfather. Ricky had a broad smile. He loved to surf and had kept it up until the Repho had shut down the coop and moved all crop production indoors, under lights, in vertically integrated production units on the mainland, near Monterrey. By then he’d recovered speaking and writing. He found a niche as an independent researcher carrying on the work of his father, Corrag’s grandfather, Albert Lyons, whose books on varied subjects had gained prominence with the Reph
o academic world after his death. Eventually Ricky had moved north, to the island off the New Albion coast, Sealscroft, drawn by the opportunity of a rent-free cottage in exchange for a percentage of his royalties. Alana’s family, originally from New Albion, had scattered in time and been swallowed up by the wars and chaos of the consolidation years.

  She was so immersed in this communion with old memories, she didn’t hear Ben come out of the bedroom and fill the coffee press and put it on the stove. By the time she turned, he was standing by the open window looking out at the courtyard, watching the porterloads of Chinese tourists that had begun to assemble at the main hotel entrance on San Jacinto Avenue.

  “I hate this time of day,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Corrag, trying hard to keep the weariness out of her voice. It was a well-rehearsed routine.

  “It’s just such a waste. They don’t care. Nobody cares. We laugh. We struggle. What for?”

  “To bring joy into the world. That’s good enough, don't you think?”

  “I wasn’t meant for this. It’s not what I was supposed to do with my life.”

  “But you tried. You tried the Augment. It didn’t make you happy.”

  “Under the pressure. You don’t understand. How could you? I was a valued citizen, a government rep. You've never been there, Corrag.”

  “If it was so good, why did you give it up?” she asked coyly.

  “I knew the war was wrong. They lied. There was never a threat from the people. They didn’t have to round up folks. People like your father, Corrag. There was no need to hound him. He was a good man.”

  “Was and is. “

  There was a long silence. Finally Corrag broke it.

  “This isn’t good enough. Is that it?”

  “It’s just hard to be evaluated constantly based on their ridiculous, meaningless metrics. I mean, they don’t even work for their purposes, do they?” he asked rhetorically.

  “It’s as faulty as any human institution,” said Corrag sagely.

  “Yeah, but they claim to surpass that.”