The Waning Age

by S. E. Grove

  Gao’s eyes narrowed and looked dangerous. “Whatever happened between you, that kind of sentiment is out of your price range, Nat.”

  “It’s not sentiment. It’s reason. Cal is sitting over there in Daisy’s recliner because of what Troy did.”

  “Because of what you did. It was you who collected the statements that persuaded Judge Horn. It was you who found Cal after the board said he was dead.”

  “I wouldn’t have had the chance to do either of those things if Troy hadn’t shot his father.”

  “That’s giving him too much credit.”

  I was still panting like a cornered rabbit. I took a few deep breaths. “Too much credit? Officer Gao. Let me tell you how I see it. I set out to find two white guys: Philbrick and Hoffman. The bad guy and the good guy. Well, kind of good guy. And both of them end up riddled with bullet holes. Not by me, but because of me. Is that the kind of credit you’re talking about?”

  Gao looked at me intently. “No. I’m not talking about a domino effect. I’m talking about choice.”

  “And what I’m talking about is how choice becomes meaningless. Explain to me why choice matters when a well-placed bullet can make all my choices irrelevant. Like, completely irrelevant. What’s a choice? A decision to do something because of the intended outcome. But if you’re robbed of the outcome, it’s not a choice, it’s just an action. One action in a chain of actions redirected to someone else’s purpose. It can end in anything. It can end in Hoffman and a dozen other people dead.” I wasn’t shouting at him, but I had gotten a little loud. Cal was staring at me over the top of his book.

  Gao thought about it for a moment. “Do you want to hear my grandmother’s story about the two emperors?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You had a grandmother?”

  “Yeah. Many of us have two.”

  “That you knew,” I clarified.

  “My grandmother raised me.”

  An interesting morsel of background on Gao. “Sure, tell me the story.”

  “Okay.” Gao sat back and put his hands on his knees. “Once there were two emperors in neighboring kingdoms. The emperor of the southern kingdom was benevolent, and the emperor of the northern kingdom was cruel. On the border of their kingdoms lived Monkey, an immortal who had lived there long before the kingdoms ever existed. No matter what the two emperors did, Monkey bestowed upon them the same good fortune. The southern emperor fed and protected his people; he upheld the laws; he gave from the royal treasury when families faced hard times. The northern emperor exploited his people; he killed and imprisoned those who opposed him; he grew rich at the expense of his subjects. Monkey gave the people of both kingdoms plentiful harvests, favorable weather, and long lives.

  “After many years, Monkey grew tired of dispensing good fortune. He destroyed both kingdoms with an earthquake, and he exiled the two emperors to a mountaintop. There, the two emperors shared their stories with each other. The northern emperor laughed and laughed when he heard about his neighbor’s generosity. ‘All your good deeds, and look how fate rewards you,’ he said, still laughing. ‘You must feel very foolish indeed.’ The southern emperor smiled. ‘Not at all. I am happy that after all these years, I can still call myself an emperor.’ The northern emperor was baffled. ‘So am I.’ ‘Begging your pardon,’ said the southern emperor, ‘but from what you tell me, you are a murderer, an extortionist, and a thief who happens to rule a kingdom. It isn’t the same thing.’”

  I waited, but that was the ending. “I think you just made that up,” I said.

  “Nope. Although my grandmother did tell it with more beheadings.”

  “So the moral of the story is that we shouldn’t worry about our choices because the feckless gods are going to ruin us all anyway.” I grinned at him. “That’s helpful.”

  “You’re thinking about choice the wrong way. You can never choose the consequences of your actions. You can only choose the action.”

  “I get it, Officer Gao. You are how you act.”

  “People do good things all the time that end in nothing. Or that end badly. That would be a stupid reason to stop doing good things.”

  I sighed. “I guess that makes sense.”

  Gao was motionless. “Okay. Good.” He leaned forward. “You’re not done with your planks.”

  * * *

  —

  Starting the following Monday, Cal took the train into San Francisco with me and then caught a bus up to Noe Valley, where Madeleine Porter resuscitated her antique lesson plans to teach him literature and history. Then she made a call to an old friend who had taught biology with her back in the day, and then she called a math teacher. There were musicians and chemists. Sculptors and physicists. It seemed to me that Cal was accruing a lot of educational debt, until I visited Madeleine’s house in early December and I realized it was the other way around.

  When I arrived at the door I could hear laughter and conversation, a little party under way. Madeleine opened the door with the traces of laughter still around her eyes. “Come in, come in!” She ushered me into the bungalow, as tidy and elegant as she was, with its Deco-era furniture and walls covered with photographs of the places she’d been. Nine white-haired teachers and one jubilant eleven-year-old were milling around the dining room, drinking tea and lemonade and waiting for me so the cake could be cut.

  “Nat,” Cal said, seizing my hand. “Come meet Frederick!” He introduced me to a stooped old man who shook my hand gravely and said he had rediscovered geometry puzzles thanks to Cal. Then I met Celia the pianist, who said she was once again playing Chopin thanks to Cal. And Beatriz the botanist, who had returned to her abandoned manuscript about ferns thanks to Cal. You get the idea. They were like the nine muses, with inspiration in reverse.

  Madeleine called everyone to attention, tapping a fork on a glass of lemonade. We fell into silence, and she made her toast. “We are here to celebrate the eleventh birthday of our extraordinary friend and beloved student, Calvino Peña. Cal,” she said, lifting her lemonade glass toward him, “working with you these last few weeks has changed my life—has changed our lives,” she amended, to murmurs of agreement. “We want to thank you for making us young again in spirit, with your boundless enthusiasm, your deep curiosity, your wonderful ability to see the world and feel the world as it really is. And we want to celebrate with you these eleven years, wishing you joy and health and many happy returns.” They cheered, and Cal had tears in his eyes, and then they sang for him and watched him blow out the candles.

  As they cut the cake and chatted contentedly about the things that filled their days together, I sat in the window seat with my cup of tea and admired what my brother had managed to do—bring together old friends, bring new purpose to their lives, bring hope to a pursuit they had considered lost. He made it look easy. Cal was happy.

  38

  NATALIA

  NOVEMBER 14

  I was not asked to testify at Troy’s trial. But the proceedings were open to the public, and I went to the courthouse on the day he was scheduled to give evidence. I wore a black dress and a pillbox hat with a short veil, thinking it would be better if he didn’t recognize me.

  There were more people than I expected at the courthouse. Most of them seemed to be reporters, which I guess wasn’t too surprising. All I could see of Troy at the start were his shoulders and the back of his head. His defense attorney was not Lester Bloom, master of wills, trusts, and subterfuge, but rather one Gordon Selvedge, a tall stork of a man with graying hair, sharp eyes, and a disdain for modern technology. He wrote all his notes longhand and used a pocket watch. I was pretty sure, from the quick glance I got when he turned around, that he was wearing a cravat. For a few minutes I was a little worried that Troy had hired the Scarlet Pimpernel as his defense attorney, a choice that seemed appropriate but destined for tragedy, given the historical record.

  And then I heard him spe
ak. He was concluding the cross-examination of a witness for the prosecution from the day before, some lady from a neighboring estate in Napa who had seen Troy arriving in the early morning the day after the murders. After a gentle introduction that seemed to repeat familiar ground, he asked her a series of quick questions that intimated, without proving, that she had unsuccessfully made a bid for Troy’s attentions and was testifying against him out of spite. She was easily twice his age. The jury looked on with expressions of (sexist) distaste, and the stork concluded his cross-examination with breezy self-satisfaction.

  Then there was a brief recess, and when the judge returned, Troy took the stand.

  He was unrecognizable. His clothes were the same good clothes, and though he’d lost a bit of the tan, his face was the same handsome face. But it was empty. Not empty like a house where the people just stepped out for a minute, but empty like a still lake at dusk, where no one will go near the water and its ominous silence. He watched the stork closely, waiting for his cues. When prompted to give an explanation in his own words of the reasons for his actions, he began a well-edited and well-rehearsed description of his adolescence that included a lot of details meant to signal emotion but contained no actual emotion at all.

  I found myself remembering the Troy who had blubbered into my shoulder, wondering where he had gone. Wondering if he’d ever been there, or if I had simply found myself drawn to a chemical concoction prepared by sadists and dressed in boys’ clothing. And I thought about the question he had asked that night, the question of who he was. I couldn’t accept the notion that there was nothing essential about him—nothing to carry through when the drops weren’t there. But I had to admit that when he spoke about riding lessons and a bully of an older brother and emotional deprivation, all in a crafted stage voice, I didn’t see even a filament of the Troy I knew.

  The judge called a break at the end of the hour. I lifted my veil and looked at Troy, willing him to see me. He did at once. He held my gaze for a long time, and I could sense him doing the same thing I had just done: searching and searching for some shadow of the thing that had flickered between us, bright and warm and unexpected. Or maybe he wasn’t looking for the thing that had appeared between us—maybe I had no idea what he was thinking.

  I winked at him. He smiled. A little ripple chased across the lake, disturbing the surface but not the air of deadly calm. Then the waters were still again. His eyes hadn’t changed. They drifted away to watch the jury returning to their seats.

  He reminded me of someone, I realized. As he sat, expressionless and waiting, his eyes trained on the people who would determine his fate, I recalled waking up and seeing my mom sitting in bed, the sheets a scrunched knot around her. She sat staring at Calv’s tidy desk. Hair rumpled, mouth set in a line. Her face was empty. No hunger or weariness or animating instinct of any kind. No reasoning sense that the day lay before her, and that she had things to do in it and purposes to accomplish. No awareness that two people near her relied on her to be a steward, a fixed point of certainty, an answer to the question of why things mattered. I had first woken to see her that way years earlier, but in the last few months it had happened more and more often. Her thoughts were as clear as if she’d written them on her face: There is no point. There is no point to any of this.

  This was the answer I’d been looking for, the answer eluding me and Cal for so long, the answer to why. Some people, like me, and Joey, and Cass, and Tabby, and Gao—most people, actually—manage to put something together for themselves in the absence of emotion that makes a bundle of fixed points, a cluster of principles and thoughts and habits that feels like a self. Gao has his moral compass. Cass and Tabby have the commitment to us and each other. Joey has a commitment to the idea of people mattering. I have Cal. But there are some people, like Troy and Mom, who, without the emotion, cannot make anything. There is nothing to tie together. They grasp at things ineffectually, like ghosts reaching for the belongings of the living, and their hands come up empty. They cannot hold on to anything.

  Troy’s eyes flickered as the judge returned to her seat, and I stood up to leave. I blew him a kiss when I got to the door, but I don’t think he saw me.

  * * *

  —

  The stork apparently did a masterful job. The trial took two weeks and Troy was acquitted—not, as I had thought, because his actions were construed as self-defense but, rather, because he was judged to have been out of his right mind, thanks to the drops, when the murders occurred. For a few days after his acquittal I half expected to find him on my doorstep—funds restored, emotions restored, relying on a regimen now of his own choosing. But that was a fantasy, and not just because he didn’t show. It was a fantasy to think that once he’d encountered the emptiness he would be able to return to the places he’d once been, the places he’d wanted to be when he was that other Troy. He had been to the emotionless void. He was someone different now.

  39

  NATALIA

  FEBRUARY 1

  The lawyers took RealCorp apart piece by piece, and the process took much longer than Troy’s trial. Most of the fragments probably ended up the way Glout did: broken edges sanded down, neatly placed in another corporation. His online profile told me he’d made head of R&D at PSA, Pearl Synthetic Affects, a quarter of a mile down the road from what had been RealCorp. I finally made myself go back to see him on the first of February. Cal was staying late with the Muses for a music lesson, and I had two hours free before meeting him. It was raining, the kind of rain that alternates showers and mist, showers and mist for days until everything smells of mildew. At least it wouldn’t be a drought year. My long trench coat was pearled with water, and in the street beside the trolley rails, someone had set a paper boat to drift in a puddle.

  Glout was expecting me. The receptionist sent me up to his office, and as I strolled down the corridor, his nearly bald head popped out of the doorway. “Natalia!” he said, as if waving me down in a crowded theater.

  “Yup,” I said, waving back. “I see you.”

  He was grinning like a bookie on payday when I reached his door. “Hi.”

  “Afternoon. I was wondering how you’d handled the shake-up. Looks like you landed on your feet.”

  His grin vanished. “It was pretty ugly, actually. I just happened to be on the winning side of it.”

  “How nice for you.” I looked him in the eye. “I haven’t had the chance to thank you in person for what you did. If you hadn’t helped me, I wouldn’t have found Cal. You saved his life. Thank you.”

  Glout blinked. “I’m not a rule breaker by nature. So it’s hard when I’m given a rule and the rule is clearly wrong.” He looked rueful. “I didn’t feel good about any of it. The other kids, Calvino, the board. I’m sorry it took me so long to help you.”

  “You’re good. Though if we ever have to do something like that again, we should work out some different codes.”

  He grinned again. “How’s Cal? How are you?”

  “Cal has found a coterie of retired teachers who dote on him.”

  “Ha! Excellent!”

  “He feels as much as ever.”

  “That’s very good to hear. And you?”

  “I’ve got my job, and I have Cal. Everything’s fine.”

  He nodded sagely. “Yes. Yes, I see,” he said, like I’d explained something of importance.

  We were silent.

  “Has it happened again?” Glout asked me quietly.

  I peered at his skeletal face, but there seemed to be nothing malicious or covetous there—only earnest interest. Still, I hesitated.

  “I assume that’s why you’re here,” Glout said. “Because of what happened when you woke Cal up.”

  I nodded. “I didn’t think anyone knew about that other than me and Cal.”

  “The room has cameras.”

  “Of course.”

  “There was a
n inexplicable error that deleted the footage of those few minutes, in case you are wondering. So I’m afraid the significance of that encounter has been lost.”

  I looked at him. “Thank you,” I said quietly.

  His grin was back. “Well, out with it, Natalia.”

  I took a deep breath. “I had tears. I felt something—I’m sure it was real.”

  “I’m sure it was real as well.”

  “How is that possible? Is it . . . Is Cal . . . Is he contagious or something?”

  Glout’s grin widened. “Contagious. That’s funny.” Then he got very serious. “Can I do a little lecturing?”

  “Sure.”

  “The early modern model of disease maintained that we were individual bodies in which cells interacted with one another and with the world, and that while we were porous, we were also discrete.”

  “Like gumdrops in a bowl. Or pills in a bottle.”

  “Sort of. More like a crowd of mushrooms growing on a forest floor.”

  “Okay. Yes, that makes sense.”

  “That paradigm has remained in place for a long time, but there are some, myself included, who think it is a faulty paradigm. They—we—think that, instead, the body is more like a cell than it is like a body.”

  “Uh . . .” I said.

  “So, what I mean is that you know how things happening in your hand affect things in your brain, even though the two are not contiguous. When you touch something hot with your hand, your brain knows.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Yes—so people are connected by processes and systems that are not entirely perceptible to us. Some of them are perceptible. Some are not. And when changes occur in one place, there are effects elsewhere, too. We should think of ourselves not as separate organisms in a given place, but as belonging to a single organism. That is, all of us together make up one organism.”