Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  She was totally colorless, Tuuro thought, in that she was all one color. He thought of her like a lump of clay, something you could slice right through and find the inside and the outside just the same. She worked hard. She cleaned and answered messages and cooked dinners and made trips to this and that village. He had spotted, one evening, the sliver of pink just inside her lower lip, and the vision was so unsettling he’d gone directly to his room. Desire in this situation would mean nothing but disaster, and, for Nenonene, Tuuro understood, he must stay pure.

  “My husband heard him speak once,” Allyssa said. She recounted how the General extended his finger and scratched at the back of his scalp. “A little bald spot there,” her husband told her. “He’s worried it away.”

  Late at night, in her downstairs bedroom, Allyssa turned on her perc. General Nenonene, she messaged, I am finding Tuuro Simpkins to be an honorable man. She sat a moment looking at her words. He admires you greatly, she added.

  WONDERWATER CONFUSED LILA. There were the usual rain reports for every American county, the aquifer levels, usage tables. But there was a whole new section, too, with rain data for the rest of the world, data that must have taken considerable time and connections to obtain. There was also, at the end of these tables, tucked into a corner, as it were, a long article about world water resource management that read almost like a treatise, that had no author listed, that used words Lila had never heard in a water context. Water farming, water wickets, aqualimbo. Lila knew—at least by reputation, and she’d met two of them at conferences—the original minds behind Wonderwater, but their names weren’t on the site now. No one’s name was on the site. At the end of the article were a series of icons unaffected by clicking. That was wrong: an icon should open into something. Maybe these weren’t icons, but designs. Could they be hieroglyphs, designs with meaning? A message to those in the know? Lila copied them down and slipped them into her desk’s center drawer, thinking she would recheck the site later, see if the icons had in any way changed.

  SHARIS ATE THE last bite of Leon’s soyburger and went outside to clean the grill. They grilled through the winter on an apron of brick that jutted out from the back of their house.

  “You killed Chubby!” Leon’s voice rang out from inside. “You killed our pet!” As if Howard had finally done a worthy, manly thing.

  “I didn’t mean to!” Howard cried. “I was just holding him!” Sharis next heard blows and crying. Chubby was Howard’s hamster. Too much passion in this house, Sharis thought wearily. Let Chad take care of it.

  A beautiful night, the stars looking hurled across the sky. With the neighbors’ houses dark, the night sky was much easier to see. Sharis used a wire brush, enjoying its sound. When they went to sleep now she let Chad hold her, imagining his arms were Lars’s arms. She had made a private movie of Lars’s best moments. Sitting at the kitchen table smoking, wearing a brooding look. Dancing around the kitchen with his shirt off, his toddler granddaughter on his shoulders. She didn’t always like the things he said, so she turned off the translation feature. Something about him, every time, that stirred her. His wrists. The way he narrowed his eyes. It was becoming hard to edit him. Not that she put in more of him: if anything she put in less. But the scenes she put in of his wife were less flattering, and she overdid it with his grandchildren, presuming they were the family members he’d like to see.

  “Look at the little homemaker!” said a mocking voice out of the darkness. Gentia appeared in the pool of light from Sharis’s window, George beside her. “Nice to see someone else in this neighborhood has the guts to stick around. Does Chad have any students left in his classes?”

  “A few. How’re the security systems?”

  “Great!” Gentia said. “We’re not selling as much lately, but we’re monitoring a lot of the empty houses.”

  “Any trouble?”

  “Not like Detroit, thank God,” George said. “Michi-gone,” people called it.

  “You know who’s our biggest market now?” Gentia asked. “Those Melano neighborhoods the west side of I-75. We’ve had people pawning their media centers. They sit there in perfect peace and silence, waiting for the bombs.”

  George shifted on his heels. “Chad inside?” he asked. When Sharis nodded, he disappeared.

  Without George, Gentia seemed suddenly diminished. She walked in a circle around the patio, looking at her feet. “I’m getting sick of this, I’ll tell you,” Gentia said. “Are they going to attack the Grid or not? If they get the Grid, will they get Dayton? What would they do with the Base and the Consort plant? It’s getting on my nerves, and I can’t stand it.”

  “I’m sorry.” Sharis knew from her loops that Gentia spent most of her time in her living room messaging on her perc and making sales, while George sat in the family room in front of the TV. Sharis was grateful for the times the living room camera inexplicably was turned off. George and Gentia were incredibly boring. At Sharis’s suggestion they had cut their weekly program to five minutes. Sharis suspected that she could hit the high spots in fifteen seconds.

  “Why are you sorry?” Gentia said. “What do you have to do with it? It’s going to drop to zero degrees and what are we going to eat? Why are you staying here, anyway?”

  Maybe ten seconds. Maybe five. Sharis said, “Chad feels loyal to Dayton.” A simplistic way to put it—and it didn’t account for her not fighting him—but Gentia didn’t deserve more.

  “Right. Here’s a question for when the lights go off: does Dayton feel loyal to him?”

  CHARLES STUDIED THE birds circling a big maple. “Something’s coming in.”

  “Why don’t you check your perc?” Diana asked.

  Days since they had opened any link to the outside world. They lived like people of sixty, seventy years before, when all people had was radio and TV. Except they hardly used those, either.

  There was a storm front moving in from Canada, across the upper plains and into Ohio. Up to a foot of snow was predicted for Chicago, as the storm moved east and south in its stately and merciless way.

  “We’ve got all that food,” Diana said.

  Charles shrugged. “If the power goes, we have firewood. Might not hurt to bottle up some water, in case the pipes freeze.”

  The pipes wouldn’t freeze. They were new pipes, with thermal protection; several years ago Diana had paid the bill that brought them. “Even if we’re living like a hundred years ago, we’re still not living like a hundred years ago,” Diana said. “We have modern materials!”

  “Great.” Charles often felt he had been born in the wrong era. He mistrusted synthetics, hybrids, genetic engineering, clones. Standing in bird blinds wearing rubber boots and wool. Fucking to make a baby. Those were the days.

  He was ashamed of how he ratcheted things up for her. Making a fuss over the fruits children knew as monkeybrains, taking her on a special walk to look at puffballs big as human heads. He remembered, a mere two months before, the two of them pursuing birdsong. Delicate, transcendent, a twig of song inscribing itself on the sky. Now they were reduced to giant puffballs.

  But Diana made no mention of leaving, and for that he was grateful. He liked being alone, but when the ground froze and the snow came, it would be lovely to have someone to hold. He hadn’t had that luxury in the past. The frogs hid at the bottom of the pond, the ants burrowed into the ground, and even the gophers, in their tunnels, nestled together. That was what creatures did in winter, retreated and huddled and survived. You couldn’t get more basic than that. And Diana was a person he could huddle with.

  GRADY WAS A Gamma Force pilot who liked to say he was his own United Nations. In his blood there mingled Scandinavians, Jews, Blacks, Italians, a Polynesian, Native Americans, Poles, and a Japanese woman who claimed descent from the royal family. The only thing Grady could imagine his ancestors had in common was a ferocious urge for sex. He could make sense of his ancestry no other way.

  “He sits there looking at her, like he’s totally dazzled
by her presence, like he’s just a dull guy in the middle of his boring day and now he’s walked in and spotted this ball of lusciousness and he can’t believe it, he’s afraid if he takes his eyes off her she’ll disappear, he’s almost afraid to speak to her because clearly she’s an angel—but he’s got to speak because how can he go on living if he doesn’t?”

  Grady smiled, stared down into his drink.

  “It’s astonishing,” his copilot went on. “It’s like their clothes have dissolving seams. They just fall right off! And look at him!” The copilot waved his hand, indicating Grady’s drooping and lashless eyelid, the indentation in his forehead, the scar that carved a canyon from his ear to the side of his mouth. “It’s not the looks, obviously,” the copilot confided to the group around the table. “It’s the look.”

  “Freaks have no shame.” Grady winked his hairless eyelid. “Professional secret.” Everyone laughed, as Grady knew they would. Every once in a while he wouldn’t mind being surprised.

  “God gave you your good looks,” Grady’s mother once said, “but that bike crash made you interesting.”

  “MR. QUARIN?” CHAD looked up, started counting. Ten students. Other years he’d had thirty. But today there were only nine.

  “He went home,” said another student.

  “Home home?”

  “His parents pulled him out.”

  “Where is home?”

  “Here. Dayton.”

  “He’s from Dayton and he’s leaving? He’ll miss Paul Laurence Dunbar and his poetry. Charles Kettering and the self-starting engine. The Dayton Peace Accords. He’ll miss the whole damn twentieth century.”

  The students were looking at one another. “I think his parents just wanted him safe, sir,” said a young woman.

  “Where would we be if everyone stayed safe?” Chad’s right arm, unbidden, jerked up and down like some demented doll’s. “That’s your highest aspiration, to be safe? You think George Newcom thought he was safe?” Newcom’s tavern had been the first public tavern in the region; periodically his corncrib served as a jail. “You think John Patterson felt safe exporting cash registers to India? You think Orville felt safe in the air above two hundred cows? Cows he’d promised not to hit? What the hell kind of virtue is safe?”

  All nine students stared back at him. Jesus, Chad thought, they’ll fucking fire me. But he had tenure.

  “A midwestern virtue, sir,” someone said, and the students tittered.

  Chad’s arm dropped. “Okay,” he said. He took three cleansing breaths. “We’ll do the Dayton newspapers today,” he said. He’d planned to fit in Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Melano poet who’d died of TB, the man who knew why the caged bird sang, but that was a story so sad he didn’t have the heart to tell it.

  “I don’t want another hamster,” Howard had said as Chad dug a hole for Chubby. “You can’t buy a new best friend.”

  LILA WOKE UP at 3 a.m. and couldn’t fall back to sleep. She opened up Wonderwater and rechecked the mystery icons: no change. She collected the dried lemon rinds from around her bedroom and put them in her wastebasket. She went to the bathroom, switched the light on. A woman of power. A valuable woman. An interesting woman. Yet in her mirror she saw nothing but an uto. The horrible mole on her cheek seemed to be growing: she wished she had the guts to snip it off. Michelle had a pair of glasses she wore for reading, and on her recent visit she had grabbed them from the bedside table. “So I can see you better,” she said. As she bent over Lila, the corner of the eyeglass frame stuck out through her curtain of hair. Lila had never felt so exposed.

  Outside there was rattling and howling, a cold wind blowing in; not removing her gaze from the mirror, Lila used one hand to push the cracked window closed.

  the monitor station

  IT SLEETED FOR three days in mid-December, turning to wet snow at night. Ice was everywhere. The trees were spectacularly and weightily encrusted, twigs and branches snapping in the breeze. A mitten Leon had left outside turned as stiff as plaster.

  Sharis and Chad had turned their thermostat down to fifty, because who knew, with winters starting early now, what they’d pay for fuel. At some point the university would have to cut professors as well as staff. Some of the untenured professors had cut themselves, but Chad and his history colleagues stayed around, restless and vaguely guilty, discussing Prem and joking in the halls about the point at which a job became a sinecure. Chad worried he had no right to a continued salary. But in another way he felt he did: by continuing his teaching, he was maintaining a Dayton institution.

  These days, with the ice, Chad didn’t attempt to go to campus. The semester was over, and all he had to do was grading. He wondered if the university would reopen after Christmas break. The last few days of elementary school before Christmas break had been canceled as snow days, the frozen roads too risky for buses.

  In the family room, Sharis had strung popcorn and dried cranberries around the mantel, and sat a tinsel tree on a chest of drawers. Chad tolerated these Christmas decorations because they seemed so sad. Sharis’s family growing up had been no more interested in a garish Christmas than Chad’s father.

  On cold nights, they slept downstairs. They had a fireplace and plenty of wood (their own, and there was nothing to stop them from invading the woodpiles of their absent neighbors), Sharis spread blankets and sofa cushions on the floor in front of the fire, and the whole family slept huddled together in their clothes, under bedspreads, afghans, and old coats. “Like one of your campouts!” Sharis exclaimed to the boys. Terleski’s Cub Scout Den was going strong, although Leon had been banished from the latest sleepover after a “Mr. Wag-Wag Penis” escapade at a campfire. “I’m the den leader!” Terleski had said. “I have morals to uphold!”

  On the fourth day of bad weather—December 20—it warmed up enough for the sleet to turn to rain.

  “I want to keep sleeping downstairs,” Leon said. “I like our cozy nest.” Both Sharis and Chad found this odd: Leon, their spiky child, enjoyed sleeping nestled between his parents, while Howard, whom they thought of as the needier child, slept behind Sharis to avoid being touched.

  That night they were all warm and asleep when a thump shook the house. Everyone woke up, their fear a charged nimbus around their bodies. No one breathed. Deathly quiet except the raindrops on the roof. This is it, thought Sharis. This is what we’ve been pretending couldn’t happen. Her mouth filled with acid and regret.

  Leon’s head popped up. “Was that thunder, Mommy?”

  “Thunder,” Sharis agreed, her eyes searching the dark. Thunder in December? In the orange glow from their log she made out Chad, ten inches away from her across Leon’s head. Her arm was under Leon’s neck, and she wondered if she drew him closer if a watcher would see the movement, if a man at their front window wearing night vision goggles had Leon in his crosshairs at this instant. Her heart was beating like a running deer’s, its white tail flashing surrender.

  “Bomb,” Chad breathed, angling his mouth toward her ear. She shivered at the warm puff of his exhalation. Her eyes roved, looking for a movement or a light. Nothing.

  “You stay here. I’ll look.” Chad astonished her by raising himself on his hands and knees and crawling away.

  The space in front of the fire, which had seemed so cozy, now seemed enormous and exposed. The log on the fire was glowing, and Sharis saw them all tossed into the hearth; saw herself rolling the log into the feet of an intruder; heard Leon’s screams as his hand was held to the flame. Dear God, let it be quick. She slid her hand behind her toward Howard, and he gripped it so tightly his nails hurt her palm. The tinsel tree gleamed like a mockery of happiness. The smell of shit filled the room: one of the boys, Sharis thought.

  We were fools. We will be punished by the death of our children. No! No! Sharis almost cried. Take me instead! Why hadn’t her mother cried that? Although maybe Chad was right, and she had. “Get over me,” Sharis hissed at Howard, and Howard after a second’s hesitation scrambled over he
r hip, his elbow hitting her chin. “Lie down next to Leon,” Sharis said, pushing herself onto all fours and straddling her children. She imagined herself as a monstrous spider, hairy and ferocious.

  Chad was crouched at the door to the kitchen, looking around. Sharis lifted her head and followed his gaze. There was no chink in the front curtains; she couldn’t believe that anyone was aiming at them from there. If another person was in the house, there’d be breathing. She heard nothing.

  Chad stood and picked up a flashlight from the kitchen counter. He left Sharis and the boys frozen in position, their breathing so fast and shallow it seemed as though a sigh might crack their chests.

  “Don’t move now,” Sharis whispered to her boys, “but if I say run, you leave the house and run. Don’t worry about Daddy and me, just go.”

  “Down to the troll bridge?” Leon asked, too loudly.

  Sharis nodded. “Anywhere,” she said. “But someplace protected. Break into an empty house and go to the kitchen.”

  Chad looked through the crack in the curtains out the front window: no one. He crept to the front door, his back against the wall. No one there. The noise had come like a blow from somewhere above. But nothing suggested their house had been damaged. No wind blowing through a window, no drips or outdoor scent. Chad slipped up the stairs, and with each increase in elevation he was more sure that their house was intact and they were alone inside it: their husk, their cave, their sanctuary. He stood at the door of the boys’ room and looked in, the beds like dark boats setting out to sea. Calm swept over him: after all these months of uncertainty, their home was still their home. He pictured his family downstairs on the floor, their fear suddenly sweet, almost pathetic. Everything was intact. He glanced into his and Sharis’s bedroom and the guest room: peaceful and dark, the windows secure. He walked into the hall, opening his lips to call down the stairs: Sharis! Boys! Everything’s fine!