The door slammed, missing my nose by an inch. I stepped back for a second, then pressed my ear to the door. Nothing—no sounds. After a few seconds, I knocked. Nothing again. The Old Man was shutting me out for no reason. I kicked the door once, then returned to the elevator. I took it up to the third floor.
The hallways were quiet. I walked into my office and sat down. At the terminal I pulled up MacGruder’s information. The vitals were still fine, the numbers normal. I watched the heartbeat monitor fluctuate from eighty beats per minute, to ninety when a nurse came into the room, and then back down to eighty when she left. The breathing rates were regular; everything was on target, from blood pressure down to cholesterol. A healthy old man had taken refuge in the hospital, probably to find a nubile nurse to woo, a May to his December. The Bureau guidelines said patients made the ultimate call whether to stay overnight. MacGruder couldn’t be turned away.
I rose from my chair and closed the office door. Sitting again, I plugged in the portable drive I had bought off one of the other doctors. I scanned through the third-floor records. It was foolhardy to use my own terminal, I knew—but it felt safer in my own space than in the rest of the hospital.
The Old Man had never sounded that way before. It scared me, I had to admit. I had no idea what the hell was going on in my hospital anymore.
The terminal search for Esmeralda Foyle still showed a young girl somewhere in the hospital, admitted for some kind of cosmetic surgery. But the bare records told me nothing more. I scoured the records of Steelman and the other patients who had died overnight and came upon the same nearly-blank screen. It had the same brief cameos of the phantasmal Shiro Ishii with each entry. A panic rose in my chest.
Using a button I had never used before—one the Bureau warned never to use, the FrackView status option—I raised the security clearance on MacGruder’s room. Now only the highest-ranking administrators—and I—would be able to access the room at all over the nighttime hours. I left a “Do Not Disturb” note for the nurses. I pulled the portable drive out, shut down the computer, and stood up. The Atman rang. I reached out and picked it up—without thinking.
“Joe Barnes,” I answered.
“Joe, don’t tell me you forgot the appointment,” Betty said at the other end.
“I did all my rounds,” I said defensively.
“No, you jerk. Your wife’s first appointment with Abbud. You know—about the baby she’s carrying. Your child.”
“Oh, shit.”
I tossed the Atman aside and ran out the door, my white coat billowing behind. Panic surged through my veins. Using the back-stairs shortcut I made it to the obstetrician’s office in sixty seconds—just in time for Mary to be walking out the door, both braids over her shoulder. She saw me, adjusted the pocketbook strap over her other shoulder, crossed her arms, leaned back on one heel. She seethed. I swallowed hard.
“You actually showed up,” she said, lips drawn tight over teeth. “How nice of you.”
“Mary,” I said, stepping close to her, as she turned away. “I just forgot. There was a lot going on. People sick, people dying, mass casualties, all that.”
“Yes. All That,” she said. She turned back to me, her brownish green eyes stony and accusing. “I thought we had that talk when we got married. Family comes first, before All That.”
“I was trying to save lives—”
“At the expense of your own,” she said. She pointed a finger at me, her teeth gritted. “Just know, Joe—in life you only get so many chances to blow it.”
Turning abruptly, her braids thwapped across my face. A floral trail from her perfume lingered in my nostrils. I watched her go down the hallway toward the hospital exit. It was no good chasing her, when she was consumed by that kind of righteous rage. I squeezed my temples, a migraine slowly wrapping around my skull. I had blown it—the most important thing in my life.
Abbud, the obstetrician, emerged from the examination room, wiping hands and wrists with a chemical towel. He shook his head.
“I couldn’t help but overhear,” he said, staring down the hallway where Mary had walked off. “I can at least tell you your child is developing as we would expect.”
“That’s great to hear,” I said.
“Of course, there’s still plenty that could go wrong, considering her chemical and biological exposures during her time overseas. But these are statistical improbabilities.”
I stared at him. I had never heard a doctor speak like that, like a mathematician. Did he always communicate to patients like that? Abbud shook his head, placing a soft hand on my shoulder.
“Nothing definite in medicine. You know this, Barnes,” he said. He smiled.
“Thanks, Abbud,” I said, tapping the hand, then removing it gingerly with my own. “By the way, have you seen or heard anything strange the last day or so?”
“I’m sure you mean the patients dying on the third floor,” Abbud said. “Can’t help you there. I don’t work nights, and I’ve been up to my eyeballs in uteruses and amniotic fluid.”
“Gotcha,” I said, rubbing my throbbing head. “Keep your eyes peeled, though.”
I walked away. Nobody knew anything. There was nothing to know, maybe. And my marriage was in jeopardy. I went upstairs, checked MacGruder’s perfect vital signs once more, then shut down my office terminal, walked down the hall, and left the hospital.
On the way home, I practiced what I would say—what I could say—to Mary. How she had to understand I was under serious strain. That I was excited about the pregnancy, but I had no time to bask in the glow like she had. How peoples’ lives hung in the balance. How I was too busy preparing financially for a whole family, while keeping my head above water in a hostile, potentially-deadly work environment. How we couldn’t, and wouldn’t, end up living in her sister’s house in Nebraska.
All That. We both knew exactly what that meant. I shook my head, smacked the steering wheel. She was right. She was always right. This time, she would make me pay for it.
We had the talk nine years before, swaying to our first dance as the cameras flashed around us. I was a good man, a good doctor, a hard worker, she had told me. She licked her lips. But I also needed to be able to devote time to a family, she had said. She knew I could do that. That’s why she was marrying me, she said. People clapped all around, cheered around our slow circling dance, unaware of our crucial moment. I looked into her eyes and nodded. I made the promise. All That was to come second to our new life together. And it was agreed. She angled her head on my shoulder, her shining hair falling over the lapel of my tuxedo just as the soul singer closed the song with a joyful croon, and the wedding photographers lowered their cameras and let that most perfect moment pass, captured only in a memory.
Even through the years of trying to conceive a child, that promise had been the cornerstone of our life together. I had managed to always honor that promise. Until now.
I turned into the driveway. I still had no idea what I could say. Slowly I got out of the car, and dragged my feet along the walk, up the porch steps.
Inside, I stepped into darkness. The alarm was not activated. But I sensed a commotion somewhere on the second floor. Something was thrown; something smashed. A muffled whimpering. It sounded like violence. It sounded like rape, or worse.
I dashed up the stairs, wrenched the loose banister near the top free—and burst into the bedroom, brandishing it over my head.
Mary sat on her hip, turned away from me, arms bracing her on the ground in the middle of the bedroom, looking down at a picture on her Atman. She looked like a painting I’d once seen with my parents in one of the New York museums, when they were still open. The painting with the disabled woman stranded in a field, leaning on her hands to the side, looking up at a house impossibly far off. It was something about that woman’s limited world, a vantage point that only she could see. My wife looked just like that woman in that instant, impossibly beautiful and frail. Mary turned to me, her eyes raw and wet, her hair
in a wild mane, unloosed from the braids. Her eyes went wide as I emerged into the light.
“Mary—thank god you’re alright…”
“Joe—is that the loose banister?”
“Oh this?” I said. “It’s nothing—I just thought you were being attacked and…”
Before I could say anything else she stood and came to me. She grabbed me around the waist. She was sobbing.
Once again, I could hear the sweet tones of that soulful singer, as hundreds watched us sway to our first dance. There, in our shared bedroom in our big overleveraged house seven years later, we looked into each other’s eyes.
“Listen, Mary,” I said. “I know I screwed up today. It won’t happen again. I’ll be there for you. I’ll be there for this child. For every appointment, for every school bus, and parent-teacher conference. I will be the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. I will be a family man.”
“Oh, Joe,” she said, looking away, trying to smile, wiping her tears with a sleeve. “I know that. You’re a good husband. It’s just…I’m remembering the streets of Tehran again. I think the hormones are knocking something loose.”
“Don’t worry. You’re going to be a mother. I’m going to be a father. We’re going to be parents. That’s enough to make anyone crazy. It’s not what happened when you were overseas in the Marines. That’s all behind you. You’re strong, and you survived. You’re here with me.”
She smiled through the tears, wiped at her cheeks, and laid her face on my shoulder.
“But one thing,” she said, her voice muffled by my shirt.
“What, my dearest?”
“I understand you have to save lives,” she said, wiping at her face, sniffling. “But promise me you won’t miss another appointment.”
“I promise,” I said, kissing the top of her head, rocking back and forth like we were dancing to the silence.
THE TALE OF THE AMERICAN MAJORITY
U.S.A., 2087
The office was dark and silent, except for the voice of Old Man Wetherspoon. I sat there and listened, as I always did.
“The Great Purge, like any historical epoch, was not known by its rightful name until it was already over and committed to textbooks. After all, you never know if an uprising will be called a revolution or a rebellion until the dust clears, the bodies are buried, and the losers are ground under heel. Frenchmen roasted alive by flamethrowers and Germans choking on mustard gas in the trenches of Europe never heard the words The Great War, much less ‘World War One.’ It would take a mustachioed villain from Germany another thirty years to bring the concept of a bigger-budget sequel to the whole concept of global conflict.”
“What? Who had a moustache?” I blurted out, exasperated. “What sequel?”
I stared in frustration at the Old Man, who took a sip from a tumbler on the desk in front of him. He had called me down to the basement, and I ran down the stairs immediately, sure he was finally going to tell me what he knew after shutting me out from his office. But instead the Old Man had started one of his crazed history lectures I had heard a thousand times before.
Old Man Wetherspoon shook his head. He was in a groove, evidently. Nothing could stop him.
“Nevermind, nevermind. You kids don’t know anything. Where was I? The Great Purge. It was nothing at first, really. After the flash-bang of the War on Terror, the United States was fat and complacent. A few iconoclasts from rural areas were elected to Congress. They were united in only one way—hatred of government. They were against public oversight of anything, for dramatic tax cuts for the top half of the country. They promised a hungry electorate they would do anything they could to smash the corrupt machine from the inside out—to build something simpler, better. They flirted with anarchy like a teenager pawing at a brastrap.”
I yawned, I rubbed my eyes. The Old Man could talk forever. He hated the world and could delineate its stupidity without end from his dark burrow in a hospital basement. But his voice was even more acidic than normal. I was in for a long one this time.
“They called themselves the Mister Smith Brigade, after a movie from way before our time. No one would have taken them seriously in normal times,” Wetherspoon continued. “But these were not normal times. The lengthening, deepening recession lasted into the second half of the twenty-first century. Taxes were out of control, military spending kept increasing as the United States kept sucking at the oil tit that funded the terrorists and their Intifada incursions into America.
“The Mister Smiths picked up a few seats in suburbia, then a few more in the deserted inner cities. Suddenly, they had what is known in democracy as an American majority. Meaning a majority of the people, as opposed to a Russian or Chinese majority, which as we know are based on a plurality of the guns.
“No one knew who the ringleader was,” he continued. “The confederation of anti-government politicians would go on the Sunday morning news shows, raving on live TV about the same policy positions at the same time. I remember one Congressman from one of the Dakotas said all we needed was World War III to spring back up on our good exceptionalist American feet. Another Senator from Ohio argued that people with darker skin were at an earlier step in evolution. But when they made these gaffes, the majority would huddle in its caucus for a few hours. They’d reemerge in front of the cameras, six instead of one now speaking the same words, like a hydra of bullshit, fangs bared, unrepentant. In all their intransigence, they could not be stopped.
“Suddenly they controlled the House of Representatives, then the Senate. And that’s when the run of bills appeared, at first from the fringe element in the Mister Smith Brigade. They had no names, only numbers immemorial—because numbers mask bureaucratic evil so much more easily. Bill 683, Proposal 713, Spending Plan 1644. They eliminated the social safety nets and funding to public libraries. ‘Trimming the tentacles of the monsterpus’ was how one Idaho senator described the cuts.
“That was the true beginning of the Great Purge. They got the bills passed during the course of an all-night session of Congress, after the few remaining reporters had left Capitol Hill. And the next week, heads rolled. Figuratively, that is. Millions of workers were cut from the public payroll. Engineers, janitors, lawyers, doctors, garbagemen, blue-collar stiffs. Unemployment doubled, bringing it almost on the level with the Great Depression. The Great Purge name was coined by a news writer who compared the happenings in America with events in Russia from several lifetimes before, with trials and executions, that sort of thing. That was even before my time. Of course, our Purge was never as dramatic as millions being executed by firing squad. But it’s tough to top the Russians when it comes to these things. They know drama.”
I yawned again. Wetherspoon scratched his unshaven chin.
“In just a few months, the world changed,” he said. “Highways looked like the surface of the moon. Schools sprung leaks and went unheated in the winter. Police departments couldn’t afford ammo. Fire trucks broke down, sewers flooded streets. Bridges collapsed. A nuclear plant had a full meltdown in the Midwest. It was like a visitation of Biblical plagues.
“Crime rates tripled, people starved in the cities. Garbage fires burned on seemingly every corner.
“Another election approached. One journalist at a gutted metro newspaper—a bespectacled, obese advocate of Darwin, in the tank for the Mister Smiths—went on one of the Sunday morning political shows. He started talking about the need for ‘more death’ in the lower-income parts of the population. With a straight face, he proposed euthanasia programs in several major cities.
“I can’t remember the journalist’s name—something with a Q, Quinlan or Quisling or Quigley or Quayle or something,” he continued. “The guy was such a cartoonish oaf, the American people suddenly woke up. They recovered their sense of tragicomedy. This Quisling, or whatever he was, became the laughingstock of the country. He went into hiding, but not for long. A week later somebody burned down his house on Long Island, with him still inside. No arrests were ever made. The man
had become the great unwitting catalyst, the rallying point for the sane among us. A few weeks later something like ninety percent of the voters in this country rose up, marched to the polls and threw out the Mister Smiths.
“In their place, Joe Q. Citizen voted back in all the normal liars. This time it was the smart decision. The next session of Congress, the usual motley characters voted for across-the-board emergency tax increases, hired back the millions who had been purged, and established the safety nets again. Things started to get back to normal. Of course, the Big Blackout made sure that would never happen…”
I held up a finger.
“Neal,” I said. “I’m old enough to have lived through most of this.”
“You may have been alive at the time, Joe, but you lack the proper context—the true panorama of history,” said Wetherspoon. “You didn’t live through the Hatfield era, or the reign of Nixon II. Those quaint nightmares were all prologue to the Great Purge. History bears repeating, again and again and again. Perhaps it’s the only thing nowadays—a human voice screaming in the vacuum.”
“Neal,” I said, measuring each word. “I thought you called me down here to tell me what the hell’s going on around the hospital. Not to wax poetic about the futility of human life.”
Wetherspoon shuffled some papers on his desk. He took a deep breath.
“Listen, Young Joe,” he said. “I know you’re appointing yourself chief investigator of everything going on upstairs. But you’re out of your depth. Trust me on this.”
He pointed a crooked finger across the desk at me.
“Just stick to what you know. Leave the rest to me. Go about your business, do your rounds. Keep your eyes open, and your mouth shut.”
I jumped to my feet and pointed right back at him. My hand quaked with anger.
“How dare you say that, Neal,” I said, a sweat breaking over my brow. “I can’t just let this go. Not on my watch.”
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