Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Page 10

  In 1913 the story started with catastrophe. The Great Flood death toll was in the three hundreds, much smaller, thanks largely to the efforts of John Patterson and his company, than it could have been. Still, property damage was tremendous. On top of that the city was faced with a new enemy—anxiety. Shortly after the waters receded, a local businessman named Adam Schantz made the rounds with an “audacious” proposal: the private fundraising of a million dollars for flood prevention for Dayton. The campaign started immediately. John Patterson spearheaded the effort. A slogan—“Remember the Promise You Made in the Attic”—was introduced and the fundraising goal more than doubled. The story of Dayton’s 1913 flood ended in triumph with the construction of the five dry dams above the city. The epilogue was public praise and the city’s survival.

  That summer, 2047, the story was the Alliance and its threat to the Grid. The story started with the invasion of Cleveland, and it was in its expository phase now, with Nenonene and his cronies hanging on to Cleveland by their fingernails, talking up its orchestra, its art museum, arranging payments to its politicians. Why was Nenonene there, if an assault on the Grid wasn’t expected? And if the Grid went, what would happen to Dayton? It had its air force / army base (northeast), its factories (north and west), its nuclear power plant, a stable aquifer and flood protection. What invader wouldn’t want it? And if Dayton’s people kept leaving, at what point would an invader need only to show up? Could Dayton end up as farmland, too?

  CHARLES AND DIANA moved in together at the center. They positioned their bed—a mattress they carried in from the interns’ house—under the flying owl, next to the exhibit of stuffed turtles. They spent hours talking. Charles thought he really hadn’t lived compared to Diana, with her romances and failed marriage and fertility clinic job. Every incident she recounted emphasized to him his lack of worldly experience. What could he talk about with her? Mostly he asked questions.

  “Most clone-parent relationships are normal,” Diana said at one point, not wanting to discuss it more, but Charles had heard stories: mothers who, obsessed with their cloned daughters, tried to erase all the grievances of their own childhoods.

  “Some people think it’s not normal,” Charles said. “You can love your clone too much.”

  Diana rolled her head in Charles’s direction and smiled. Of course he would think of self-love: he was that sort of man. You could tell by looking at him his mother had adored him beyond reason. But Diana knew that self-love wasn’t the problem, the problem was self-hate. She had a terrible memory of the clinic, the woman with blue eyes and a tangle of dark hair screaming, “Get rid of it! Just get rid of it!” and all the commotion and fear it had taken to do just that, with the pregnancy being so far along. But the specialist had done it, the fetus lying in pieces on the surgical tray, its disarticulated arm as big around as a hotdog, because, as the specialist said, this was the woman’s decision completely, being that the fetus was her clone. Like brushing your teeth, he said, or defecating: in so many of your daily acts your own cells are destroyed. The specialist was a pleasant man. He parted the sea of children at the yearly fertility picnic like a guardian angel, but there was the mad scientist in him, too. Let’s try this; no, let’s try that! What if we … ? Oh dear, we’ll do it differently the next time.

  Diana was a counselor at the clinic. Why did the blue-eyed woman not want her clone anymore? Why, at this late date? And would she consider carrying it to term, putting it up for adoption?

  “Just get rid of it!” the woman shrieked. Something she had shoplifted, Diana gleaned, a filthy man she’d slept with. No crimes Diana would consider capital. I hate myself and want to die.

  “Get rid of it!” the woman screamed, so loudly they had to shut the fire door.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Diana sighed to Charles now, turning her gaze to the stuffed owl in suspended flight above them. Charles had a comforting armpit: cozy, with a yeasty scent. “People aren’t livestock, you know. They’re complicated.” Charles nodded, respecting her superior knowledge. And to Diana this seemed simple, lying nestled into Charles. Part of her wished the war would never end.

  “GEORGE AND I have been thinking”—Gentia moved herself heavily through Sharis’s front door—“and we want you to do us.”

  “Edit you?”

  Gentia nodded. “We have a security setup in every room. All we’d have to add is the cameras.”

  “You don’t want every room,” Sharis said quickly.

  “What do we have to hide?” Gentia laughed harshly. “Seriously, though. We want a history for our children.”

  “I’m not really taking new clients.” George and Gentia never talked about their children, both of whom lived far away.

  “Chad’s tenure that lofty, hunh? I thought you could use the business.”

  Clearly Gentia had no idea the level at which Sharis worked. “I have nine clients,” Sharis said. “Including a family in Houston and a couple in Norway. I have a Spanish family, too. Translation modules,” she added in explanation.

  “Consorting with the enemy.”

  “Their lives are like ours.” This was not quite true. The Spaniards had a whole flowchart of relatives, and the Norwegians, surprising for a northern climate, often walked around their house nearly nude. “I’m expensive.”

  “I guess you would be, with clients like that. How much do you think you could get out of us in a week? Two hours? Three hours?”

  “Maybe ten minutes. That doesn’t sound like much, but you’ve got to keep things moving.” How can I refuse business? she thought. And yet … “I’ve never had a client I actually know,” she said.

  “Do you know us?” Gentia said.

  TUURO WALKED UP the outside steps to his apartment, the brightness of the sun a relief after his days shut inside. “Mr. Simpkins, you’re free,” his lawyer, Mr. English, had said. “They dropped the charges. You can go home.”

  About 4 p.m. The door off the deck was locked, and it took a moment to remember the key in his pocket. Eight weeks of keys in someone else’s pocket. Tuuro felt a sudden lightness of heart. He waved to the sheriff’s car waiting in the alley, and it pulled away.

  His apartment was as stuffy as an attic. His landlady downstairs must have closed his windows. He went around opening things up. At his bedroom, he leaned on the doorframe and smiled. His wide bed had never looked so welcome.

  He went to the refrigerator to get a pop, and when he opened the door he felt a surge of betrayal. Dried and fissured cheese, crusted milk, a cut sandwich with mold blossoming from its seams. His landlady could have emptied out the fridge. Tuuro grabbed a garbage bag and starting tossing.

  Ashamed of him, maybe. Angry at him. My best tenant and you ended up in jail! But Kevious Welty had been arrested for armed robbery, and he still sat on the landlady’s porch and watched the street. She had a whole cadre of Brown Street tenants in and out for drunk and disorderly. This rotten food: as if she were calling him guilty.

  But then Tuuro’s cringing kicked in. Good-hearted woman, nothing wrong with her, and she had closed his windows. His fridge probably never crossed her mind. And if she had decided not to empty it, maybe that was something he deserved. He wasn’t friendly. He sat out front with the guys who played checkers and watched the traffic and drank just one beer. “The Deacon” they sometimes called him, knowing he worked in a church. Tuuro realized he was behind on his rent. His landlady could have tossed all his things out.

  Judging. There he’d been—judging, something the Lord warned against. He picked up a cantaloupe, his hand sinking in the rot of it. He wondered if his days in jail had changed him, made him not exactly bitter but less generous in thought.

  He wondered about his bank account, if the church had deposited his last paycheck. He could call the church and ask. But he didn’t want to talk to the pastor. The pastor was a merry man, jokes and asides and teasing conversation, but when you came right down to it: where was the person? The pastor was a meticulous construct
ion of a person, lifelike from every angle but hollow at the core. Tuuro remembered him backing away from Cubby’s ravaged grave. How could a man like that sustain you?

  Tuuro could sustain you. He stood up, washed his hands, twisted shut his bag of rotten food. He opened his only outside door, the door at the back of the house—what a pleasure it was to open your own door—and descended the steps to his landlady’s garbage pails. Something hit his left jaw.

  A thump which was his body hitting the stairs. The pain was tremendous. A shout, footsteps, a flash of navy blue. The garbage bag dropped from his fingers and bounced down the steps. Shot, Tuuro thought, surprised he hadn’t heard it, but when he touched his face he didn’t feel blood. On all fours he pulled himself up the few steps to his deck, then rolled himself through his door. After a few seconds he willed himself to roll backwards to push the door closed. He tried to open his mouth, but the pain in his jaw crescendoed into actual noise.

  In the bathroom he pulled himself up on the cabinet, facing the mirror. The side of his face was deformed and purplish; he touched it gently with his fingers, surprised it had swelled so quickly. He hadn’t been shot, certainly. A rock? Why? What had the voice been shouting?

  Loud steps on his outside staircase and a banging. There was a straight view from the hall outside the bathroom to the door, and Tuuro stood a moment, wondering if he should risk exposure. Another set of knocks, more insistent. “Tuuro, are you there? Tuuro, it’s me.”

  Kelso was still in his uniform. “Jesus,” he said as Tuuro let him in. “How’d they know you were out?” He hesitated, then answered his own question: “Must have someone inside.” He looked at Tuuro’s face. “What hit you?”

  Tuuro explained, ending with the obvious question.

  Kelso’s woolly eyebrows met. “Listen, some people think Nenonene wants you killed. He gave a speech in Cleveland …”

  Tuuro almost couldn’t grasp it, after his fantasies about Nenonene talking with him, thanking him, and sitting in an armchair next to him talking about the boy.

  “He said vengeance was the Lord’s, but man could be its agent, and that’s why …”

  Tuuro led Kelso down the hall to his bedroom, closing the door behind them. The safest room. The room no one could see into. “But the genetics!”

  Kelso shifted uncomfortably. “Not everyone trusts the genetics. And even if they did, they might not trust the people announcing the results.” Kelso angled himself over to the bedroom window, peered out toward the street. “This a pretty safe neighborhood?”

  “I always thought so.”

  “Can I message my wife?” Kelso asked. “I left my perc in the car. I need to keep in touch with her. She’s not …”

  “One hundred percent,” Tuuro finished, pointed Kelso to the antique PC in the corner of the room. When Kelso tried to log on the thing was dead. “Does this happen?” Kelso asked.

  For a split second, peeking out the window, Tuuro thought that he was seeing things: the phone and cable lines to his house had been cut. A bristling handful.

  Kelso breathed in quickly, almost a whimper.

  “I have friends I can stay with,” Tuuro lied. “You should leave now when it’s light out, and everyone will know you’re not me.”

  They both chuckled.

  “I don’t feel safe leaving you,” Kelso said.

  “The door to the deck is the only egress,” Tuuro said a moment later. They were crouched side by side now, leaning on the inside wall of Tuuro’s bedroom.

  Kelso smiled. “I always wanted to talk pretty like you.”

  “Thank you. My”—and here Tuuro hesitated an instant, wondering what to call Aunt Stella—“foster mother insisted on proper speech.” She had never become his mother. She had found an elderly widowed doctor and forgotten about Tuuro totally.

  “I can tell. Your mother died sometime?”

  “When I was six.” He didn’t tell Kelso she’d been shot.

  “Me too. Nine. Cancer. Your dad okay?”

  “I’ve never known my father.”

  “Oh.” Kelso glanced quickly in Tuuro’s direction. “My father was okay. Then I have that sister lives in Oklahoma.” He fell silent for a moment. “You had that brother.”

  They had talked about this when Tuuro was in jail. His brother had been killed. Drugs.

  “Your life,” Kelso said now, and he seemed to be struggling with how to phrase this: “I wouldn’t want your life.”

  “Thank you,” Tuuro said.

  “Geez,” Kelso said a few minutes later, squirming against the wall, “I’ve gotta sit down.” He dropped to the floor and stretched out his legs in front of him. Tuuro followed and looked at their four legs, a hairy bit of Kelso’s left calf exposed.

  Kelso fanned himself. “Lucky it’s cooler. If you’d gotten out a week ago we’d be melting now.”

  The sentence made no sense, but it was perfect. And suddenly Tuuro was suffused with a floating sensation he could only call happiness, that here he was back home and talking with a friend. They talked about Kelso’s current and past houses; about the high cost of remodeling; about Sharis, who, amid much fanfare, had renounced her U.S. citizenship and was moving to Australia; about ex-President Cooper’s debilitating illness, which was not quite Parkinson’s; about different brands of spaghetti sauce; about razors; about how Kelso’s wife had days so suffused with fear she couldn’t bring herself to open the oven door. During all this conversation, it was peaceful. A beam of light shot onto the bedroom floor. Sunset.

  “Tuuro, listen to me,” Kelso said. “It’s been almost two hours and we haven’t heard nothing. I want you to walk out that door with me and lay down in the backseat of my car. I’ll take you to my house. There’s nobody big on Nenonene in my neighborhood.”

  “But your wife …”

  “She can’t live wrapped in cotton.” Laboriously, Kelso got to his feet. “I’ve been thinking about this. We’ll just walk right out. You let me hold your arm it’ll look like I’m arresting you.”

  They left by the only door, walking quickly outside and down the steps, and just past the bottom of the steps a man (a kid, really, and very light-skinned, not like Tuuro imagined) burst from the side of the house and fired two shots, one pinging into a garbage can, the other piercing Kelso’s hairy calf.

  “I’m a police officer!” Kelso croaked as he went down. “You got hell to pay!”

  Kelso’s face went so white his eyebrows looked like something from a disguise kit. “Take my sock off and wrap me up, okay?” Kelso said, his hands tight around his calf, blood seeping through his pants and between his fingers. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” Tuuro’s trembling fingers tied the sock. “Here, take the keys out of my pocket. Tuuro, you get going.”

  “But where should I go?” Tuuro was appalled at his own voice. The English was perfect, but the words came out as ragged as a string of curse words or a howl of pain.

  “Somewhere south. Go south, Tuuro; it’s safer down there. Hurry. See my car there?” Kelso nodded down the street. “Blue.”

  Tuuro bent over to grip Kelso under his arms.

  “Are you crazy? I’m too big for you! Just go. Call the cops right away from my car. They know this neighborhood. They’ll be here in two seconds.”

  He was right. Tuuro nodded and ran for the car. Hurled like a stone, he thought. He screeched down his own street in Kelso’s car, turned on Third, turned on Philadelphia, passed two police cars already headed Kelso’s way. At the corner of Philadelphia and Ludlow dark figures appeared beside the car and pounded, yelling, on the passenger window. Tuuro gunned the car and headed off for I-75, the highway south to Cincinnati, filled less with fear than a sick realization—part relief, part embarrassment on Nenonene’s behalf—that the allies of Nenonene were easy to shake off.

  IN A SMALL, detached brick rental in a suburb of Dayton, an interview was going on. The interviewee had a wobbly chin and the wide-eyed, dazzled look of a baby, as if he had jumped directly from in
fancy to adulthood. Fat Boy, the interviewer thought. Can you tell me the names and ages of all your family members at the time of Gridding? What was most distinctive about [name of town]? How would you describe [name of town] to someone who’d never been there? The interviewer was thankful, as always, for the Historical Society checklist.

  Fat Boy was from Port Clinton, west of Cleveland on Lake Erie. He’d been ten. When friends visited from New York City, they couldn’t believe Lake Erie wasn’t an ocean. May-flies hatched from the lake in June, blew out of the water, and stuck wherever they landed. Fences, cars, sides of houses covered with mayfly fur. A smell to them, a lake smell.

  The interviewer paused over his perc. “Where were you resettled?”

  “Near Middletown. Oak Creek Estates. Three-bedroom detached house. Prefab.” Fat Boy looked at his knees.

  “School?”

  “Shitty school. They brought in teachers from Puerto Rico, I could hardly understand them.”

  “What did you do for fun?”

  “Fun? You know. Games.”

  “You weren’t living near any of your old friends?”

  “They didn’t do that for us. They didn’t keep our town together.” The interviewer already knew this. For some communities, there had been breakdowns in their plans for relocation. Political issues, economic issues. “I tried to meet some people,” Fat Boy continued, “but I got in with this crowd that stole, and my mother found out and she got rid of them. Then it was like, why bother? I moved to Dayton because I might as well. My big sister was here.” Fat Boy worked his mouth. “I think they’re lucky, the Gridians. They got a life, up there.”

  The Historical Society interviewer had heard a hundred variations of this line. He wondered if Fat Boy recognized what he was saying. Probably not. It was the Historical Society’s job to make the connections.