Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  Another blow. The house shook, and Chad hurled himself to the floor of the hallway, in case something—what?—flew in through a bedroom window.

  He listened for a whimper from downstairs: nothing. Whatever was hitting was hitting upstairs.

  He crept on his hands and knees from bedroom to bedroom. Everything as peaceful as before, everything unchanged. Someone’s mocking us, Chad thought wildly. Teasing us. We’re prey to them.

  Sharis and the boys appeared upstairs and crouched huddled in the hall. “Jesus!” Chad whispered. “Why’d you come up here?”

  “What is it?” Sharis whispered back.

  He knelt in front of them. “It’s only someone trying to scare us. I don’t think it’s a bomb. There’s no damage.”

  “A grenade?”

  “A grenade would have exploded.”

  “It felt like an explosion.”

  “But there’s no damage! Get back downstairs, if there’re bombs out you should be in the basement.” Commandos trained to creep and hide. Men under the beds, inside the closets.

  Leon whimpered. “Daddy, I’m scared of the basement.”

  Chad could handle Howard crying, but this was Leon. Chad struggled to keep his voice steady. “Sharis, take the boys to the basement.” The words came out too loud, echoing in the hallway like another blast.

  “No,” Sharis said.

  Howard had separated from his mother and was sitting with his back against the wall, staring straight ahead. “Daddy, can I die with you?”

  “Sharis …”—be calm, Chad told himself—“get—the—boys—to—the—basement.”

  “You take them! If you want a die in a cold wet place, you take them.”

  Howard did start crying now, big terrified sobs. “I want Chubby back.”

  “Chubby was an old hamster, Howard,” Chad said. He moved to Howard and tried to get an arm around his son’s shoulder, but Howard pressed his back into the wall in resistance. “He had a good life.” The smell of shit was awful. Had Howard pooped on himself? Chad wrestled an arm behind his son. The wings of his shoulders were almost unfindable under his layers of flesh.

  “Chubby was stupid,” Leon said, his voice choked at first, then rising. “All he did was sleep and run around in that stupid wheel.”

  Leon is angry, Chad thought. Good. Good. He left the hall and started crawling toward the boys’ room, aiming his beam of light under the bed.

  “He was not stupid,” Howard said. “He knew me! He liked me!”

  “Be quiet!” Chad hissed. “Do I have to hear arguing in the middle of an air raid?”

  “It’s not an air raid,” Sharis said. “If it’s an air raid, where’s the damage?”

  “That’s what I said! That’s exactly what I said! And a minute ago you were argu—”

  Another crash, very close, toward the back of the house, outside the boys’ bedroom. Howard dropped to the floor and gripped Sharis’s leg. For a moment it felt as if the air itself was pressurized around them.

  “Wait a minute,” Sharis said. “I’m thinking something.” She stood up. “Give me the flashlight,” she told Chad, and the three males watched her creep into the boys’ room and flash her beam of light onto the roof above the kitchen. They heard a low laugh. “I was right,” Sharis called. “It’s ice.”

  Under the beds was empty. The closet was empty.

  “Ice?” Chad pushed himself to standing and walked to Sharis.

  “The ice hanging from the gutters.” Sharis spoke in a normal voice, shocking Chad with her volume. She must be sure, he thought. “It’s raining and the ice is melting, and what we hear is when a big chunk falls. I’ll shine the flashlight for you. Look.”

  Across the upper third of the roof were chunks of ice the size of cinder blocks. “Wow,” Chad said. “Amazing.” As they watched another chunk fell, the sound no more ominous than the clang of a cymbal.

  Leon had appeared beside them. “Mommy? I think my tongue is bleeding.”

  “I bit my tongue, too.” Sharis switched on the bedroom light. “Why don’t we make popcorn? We’ll all get cleaned up and go downstairs and use our cozy fire to make popcorn.”

  Chad couldn’t sleep. He sat in the lounge chair in the family room, watching his pile of family. When Sharis opened her eyes in the morning, he had two words for her. “We’re leaving.”

  She nodded and sat up. “Okay. I’ll get the suitcases.”

  “In a few days. I’ve got to finish this semester’s grades, I have to get money, and I want to check out the Internet to decide where we should go. Plus we should drain our pipes and all. We can leave Friday, after Christmas. It’s not an emergency, really. We might as well be prepared.”

  “You Boy Scout, you.”

  “I was never a Boy Scout.” Chad looked at Sharis, thinking that she couldn’t understand him. In her mind, he was sure, she was already packing suitcases. The night of the Gridding had made her, truly, a refugee: unencumbered, suspicious, ready to leave anywhere at the slightest provocation, equating—when it came right down to it—survival with flight. While for Chad leaving Dayton was like giving up his childhood religion. Dayton might not survive. Bondad was not enough. Prem had left. To think of such things was terrifying. Persistence. Reliability. Modesty. Any one of those midwestern virtues—he saw this—could work against him. Perhaps already had.

  “A night like that makes you think,” Sharis said, pushing herself off the floor, still wrapped in her blanket. “You”: Chad noticed that word. Sharis sat down in the armchair across the table from his. The boys were still asleep. Chad looked at Sharis’s profile, her eyes half closed, head sunk in the upholstery, and that they were a married couple side by side in a pair of armchairs seemed almost comical—it was reality, yes, but the sort of external reality that mocked understanding. In reality, they were a couple with a chasm between them, into which either of them—or both of them, or their children—could easily slip and fall.

  Dear God, Chad thought. Dear God. It irritated him that he was thinking of praying, and in such a beseeching way. He had never wanted to be one of those people who turned to religion only when they were in trouble. After all, he didn’t lead any kind of steady religious life. His mother had. His mother, for example, would have torn off searching for that woman and her toddler.

  Chad thought: Shma Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Which meant only “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is one.” Which comforted him by not asking for anything, and by being a prayer that other Jews had recited for thousands of years.

  “WE USED TO talk about Jeff Germantz all the time. He was our standard. ‘What would Jeff do?’ Sort of a joke for us.” Allyssa stood and walked to the kitchen window, and for a second Tuuro almost thought she would burst right through it; the kitchen seemed too small and fragile to enclose her.

  “What was wrong with it, Tuuro? Did you hear about excessive force? Loss of life? Disrespect? I know there were some pets that disappeared, but … What else was there, anywhere, except a few suicides and heart attacks? The Gridding was clean, Tuuro. Perfectly clean.” Tuuro grieved at the emotion in Allyssa’s voice. “No one remembers that. The U.S. has held a grudge against us from the beginning. We give them grain, we give them food, and what do they give us? Not even respect.”

  Food for Life, Tuuro thought, recalling the post-Grid slogans. Remember that Well-Fed Feeling? It’s ba-a-ack.

  “People forget how bad it was. My husband had a neighbor who got brucellosis. That’s supposed to be from dead animals.” Allyssa passed her hand in front of her eyes. “My husband worked in Washington, he knew what was coming. People say we destroyed people’s lives. People got new lives, Tuuro. They got houses, they got compensation. And they lived. They and the rest of the four hundred million, they lived. A little relocation and property reassignment isn’t a big price for people’s lives.”

  She was arguing with herself, Tuuro realized. He didn’t even have to nod.

  “You want to talk
about victims, talk about the military. It destroyed Callahan, and Jeff thought he was the best general the air force ever had. All those Grid-shocked grunts … They didn’t get federal bonuses like the transplants, did they? They didn’t get new two-stories with swimming pools and media hookups.

  “What else could we have done, Tuuro? The Historical Society’s talking to people like it was some evil plot, like President Cooper and her henchman said hey, let’s take out the towns. And it wasn’t. I mean, sure, it was a plot, but it was a desperation plot. I heard about it from my husband. People were crying in cabinet meetings. People back then—serious people, government people—were saying it was the end of our country as we knew it. And it was, Tuuro, okay? It was. Citizens were helpless. You may not have seen it so much in Ohio, but my husband was standing in line behind this woman in Washington to collect his ten pounds of potatoes, and this woman turned around and said: So I just slice these up and put them in the oven and they’re potato chips?”

  Up here where the land is flat

  The Grid is King and that is that

  But why does sweet Allyssa feel

  In fear about her own next meal?

  “And the Oregon Project worked! People forget: that harebrained utopian project was on everyone’s mind. It only got done because Senator Goebbels wanted it for his state and not California. But it worked! No one expected all that wheat. Two loaves of bread for everyone in the country. I have to tell you, Tuuro, that made an impression. We even heard about it at Lindisfarne.”

  “You could have just moved people off the farmlands,” Tuuro said, voicing an argument he had heard. “You didn’t have to destroy the towns.”

  “And make the effs second-class citizens? Destroy their houses and not the houses in the county seats? I’ll tell you the truth, Tuuro, keeping the towns was a consideration. That’s what President Cooper wanted at first, and the Agro secretary. But Jeff Germantz was adamant the towns would have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Jeff had vision, Tuuro.” Allyssa’s brown eyes brimmed with sincerity; Tuuro wanted, more than anything, his own eyes to look believingly back. “He wanted the Grid not just set apart but uniform; he didn’t want town people and country people. There’d be sabotage from the townspeople if the towns weren’t destroyed. Plus, leveling the cities opened up more acreage, and after Oregon we knew every acre mattered. And it was kind of a lollipop for the air force, gave them something to take out.” Allyssa smiled ruefully. “Callahan was thrilled, at first.”

  Tuuro shook his head and looked toward his window; behind the clouds there was the slightest hint of sunshine.

  “You understand it, don’t you?” Allyssa asked. Her eyes were imploring and her lips slightly open; Tuuro looked away. “You’re a good man, Tuuro, and I want you to understand. Jeff used to quote Chairman Mao: A revolution is not a dinner party. It’s kind of silly, but you see the point.”

  Tuuro thought:

  What you say may not be true

  But I’ll believe what comes from you

  WONDERWATER HAD MAPS—it had always had maps—and one day Lila noticed a tiny mark, almost a star, near a blank area north of Dayton, in the suburb of Vandalia. Vandalia of the old Dayton airport, of the Trapshooting Hall of Fame; Vandalia one mile from her water tower. Lila perused maps on other websites: no marks like this.

  “Have we got numbers on output up there?” Lila asked Seymour. “No one could be bleeding us, could they?”

  “Consort?” Seymour said, sitting down. The cooling tower at the nuclear plant used an ungodly amount of water, and the head honchos there were always complaining about their water bills.

  “They wish,” Lila said. “But their plant’s ten miles south.”

  “That’s why they’d bleed up north. Harder to trace.” Even sitting down, Seymour towered over Lila. He hunched down to look at her monitor and knitted his plucked yet earnest eyebrows.

  “Or the Grid could bleed us.” Not the Defense Department, Michelle had said, not yet: they were having problems getting funding. “See, Seymour?” Lila pointed at the mark. “There’s a main right through this field.”

  “You wouldn’t hide something right out on the tabletop,” Seymour said. “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Unless you thought it was a secure tabletop. And it was, until we got in.” Lila slapped at her cheeks with her hands as she stared. “We should go up there. Physically, I mean. Poke around the monitoring station.”

  “Great!” Seymour headed for his coat.

  “I can’t go like this.” Lila gestured at her clothes. In truth, she wanted to be prepared with a change of clothes and toothbrush in her bag, in case—by some magic she half believed in—a visit to a place marked on a Wonderwater map ended with her being swept onto the Grid. She came here? she imagined some Gridian saying. She got into Wonderwater? Wow, we might as well move her in with us.

  Lila had said to Seymour: “Wear some boots tomorrow and we’ll go. Okay?”

  Now Lila and Seymour were in her car driving north. The day was cloudy and gray. Clots of ice were melting on the sidewalk. “I haven’t been so excited since Naiesha Van came here with her diamond show,” Seymour said. “And that was two years ago.”

  “Did you buy anything?”

  “That’s when I had the half carat put on my tooth,” Seymour said, pulling down his lower lip. “If anything happens to me, you take it.”

  “Oh, Seymour!” Lila made a face.

  “I’m serious. You can just use pliers and pull out the whole tooth.”

  Taking the street north from downtown Vandalia, they passed through a chicken-wire fence with an empty gatehouse. Seymour rolled down his window and peered out. “Yoo-hoo!” he called.

  In the distance in front of them, the Grid barrier loomed like a great sea cliff. Seymour hopped out and peered through the gatehouse windows. “Nobody.” He tested the door. “Locked.”

  “Strange,” Lila said, looking beyond the gatehouse to a street lined with simple one-story frame houses. “This gated community does not look very posh.”

  “Neighborhood watch gone crazy,” Seymour suggested, getting back in the car. They drove ahead. A pickup sat in the driveway of one house; another yard held a windmill painted like a man with swinging blades for arms. On the near side of the chicken wire there had been signs of life: two children pulling a wagon, a hand pushing open a curtain. Here there was nobody. Lila was filled with unease. There was a woman from Consort whose head had been found in the stairwell of an apartment building near Generator B. Very few people knew about that. Lila had heard about it at the Lesbian Holiday Potluck, where a woman who worked for Consort’s CEO had pulled her aside. “Didn’t you know her?” she’d said. “Weren’t you on some county committee together?”

  The water main ran under a field just next to the Grid barrier. It wasn’t really a no-man’s-land, but it had that look. The street they were driving on simply ended, the pavement stretching fifteen feet into the grass, then stopping. Lila parked the car at the edge of the asphalt and got out.

  She had no idea what they were looking for, what the mark might indicate. There were no paths in the grass, although in the summer it had clearly been mowed. Lila tried to remember who had jurisdiction over this patch of land. The county park service? In the distance, to their left and close to the Grid barrier, sat the typical water department monitoring shack, a wooden structure maybe four feet high, a padlocked door in its top. “Let’s start there,” Lila said, pointing to the shack, and they were halfway to it, Seymour in front of her, their boot toes wet and their treads filled up with slush, when the world changed.

  “TOUCH UP THE dining room,” Allyssa said. “I finally heard. It’ll be soon.”

  THERE WERE PEOPLE, including his brother, Chad used to message on his perc almost every other day, but about a year before he’d found he was wearying of his correspondents’ jokes, their gabbing about work and family. His friends weren’t the right e-friends, he realized
: he needed someone in Cleveland, or Detroit, another of the lost or threatened areas. He still played chess—in silence except for the moves—with a woman in Tampa. She was the e-friend he felt closest to. He saw them as an old pair hunched over the game board, occasionally grunting in pleasure or consternation at the other’s move.

  He hadn’t perc-ed anyone in so long he felt guilty doing it, and he hated to be asking a favor right off, but what choice did he have? Someone might point them in the proper direction, give them the serendipitous tip that would change their lives. He sent messages to forty-three people. Most of them didn’t respond, and the ones who did were helplessly sympathetic—“I might know someone who …”; “outside of town there’s a mobile home park where … ”; “if there’s anything I …” His chess friend didn’t message back a move.

  His parents had been right. They never believed computers would change the world. In Chad’s adolescence he’d hurled words at them: “reactionary,” “Luddite,” “troglodyte.” But now Chad decided the new world was the old world after all, a place made ungenerous by fear. In every concerned message he saw versions of his old misguided self. As if prayers and hopeful wishes were enough. Good God. His mother at least had made and delivered casseroles.

  Sure, you can come to Omaha, his brother finally answered. If Lily won’t move her stuff out of her room, we’ll give you guys the garage. If. Stupid princess. Chad wasn’t even sure he wanted to see his brother, considering that he’d raised a child like Lily.

  Chad consolidated his money and got a guaranteed cash card, cleaned out his office, carried furniture into the basement. Every physical task was a relief to him, a chance to do something real.

  Sharis was already packed and ready. She sat at her editon, foot jiggling. She had moved her work downstairs to the living room, and she found having the boys nearby made her editing faster. The editon was heavy but portable. She could edit from Bangkok, she said.