Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  “I’m really useful,” Lila said. “I know water.” Right foot, right foot. With his holding her, she didn’t have to use her injured leg at all. It was weird, the pilot seemed to be palming her breast, but maybe she was imagining it, the air cold and getting blacker, and when she next awoke it was dark and she was alone. Where’s Seymour? she thought, remembering his delight about the diamond in his tooth, and tears slipped from her eyes.

  And then Michelle was bothering her again—Get out of here, let me rest!—and when she woke up again the pirate was sitting beside her, staring down at her face. She squinted as she looked up at him, not against the light—it was barely light out, dawn? dusk?—but because she wanted better to see him. Odd face, with that scar: half handsome, half deformed. But his eyes (this was the strangest part) were looking at her caressingly, as if, in her sleep, she had turned into someone else. “You have a strong nose,” he said.

  “I’m a lesbian.”

  Asleep, awake. At least she guessed she was awake, since she was trying to figure out if she could move her injured leg and leave. Wait a second, was her leg injured? Yes, it was her leg. But she could move her toes on both feet, and rotate her ankles, and she realized to her surprise that her legs were warm, in contrast to her cold nose and ears, and when she managed to crack her eyes open she saw that it was daytime and somehow she was in an open-air bed, on a mattress, under what must be an insulating blanket, a pillow of some sort beneath her head. When she looked directly up she saw the shiny belly of the helicopter. The cow, Lila remembered.

  The pirate was ten feet away from her on a fold-up stool, reading something on his perc. “Hey,” she said, “did you set me up like this?”

  He turned to face her, and the corner of his right eye fanned out in happy wrinkles, although his left eye, scarred, stayed flat. “We fly prepared. My copilot’ll be back soon. We’ve been checking out the area.”

  “Isn’t someone coming to rescue you?”

  The pilot smiled. “They know we’re okay.” He stood up, reached inside the helicopter for the canteen. “Here.” He dribbled a stream of water into her mouth.

  “Beautiful nose,” he said, and she realized he was stroking it. She couldn’t keep her eyes open, she was that warm and tired.

  “Where’s Seymour?” she mumbled.

  “I told you. He’s all tucked in.”

  A woman of power. A valuable woman. An interesting woman. He was stroking her cheekbone now, his fingers making a detour around her mole. Beauty mark, ha! At a certain age a mole becomes a mole.

  “When my copilot gets back, we’ll get you to the hospital.”

  His hand was on her collarbone, her breast. It moved down across her belly, ferreting, warm. But he’s a man! Lila thought.

  “Can you open your eyes?” His voice was very gentle. “I don’t want to keep going unless I know you’re cool with it.”

  She opened her eyes. His head above her was a featureless shadow. Cool? His hand was so very warm. “Okay,” she said, not sure what she was agreeing to.

  “I’ll have to arrange your leg so I don’t hurt you.”

  All she wanted was to sleep. She knew she needed to survive, but survival seemed like too much work. If I let him do what he wants, he’ll let me sleep.

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  How very peculiar. Something was burrowing between her legs, something fatter and somehow warmer than a finger; there was a weight against her pelvis and a smell.

  The pirate moaned.

  Oh! His penis was inside her. This had never happened. But the sensation was inoffensive, a thing bouncing up and down like a sewing machine needle. Lila decided to ignore it. Because this was rape, wasn’t it? Men did this. And she was almost half asleep.

  “YOU CAN’T LEAVE.” The soldier leaned into Chad’s window, the sky behind him gray and spitting snow. Enough of a shock to see Far Hills Avenue blocked off with military vehicles, soldiers walking around with rifles, but these words hit Chad like a shot. He should have realized, Sharis said later. She had suspected half a mile away, when she spotted the dark forms of the parked trucks across the road. But Chad hadn’t noticed the trucks. He’d been thinking about Omaha, wondering just how monstrous his niece Lily really was. She would undoubtedly be nicer to Chad and his family than to her parents.

  “What are you talking about?” Chad said to the soldier.

  “Presidential orders. No one can leave greater Dayton.”

  “Why? What happened?” A sensation of scrambling, Sharis now lying across Chad and looking up at the soldier.

  “Of course I can leave Dayton.” Chad pushed Sharis back into her seat. The soldier looked jumpy, unformed, the rifle over his shoulder too big for him. “I’m an American. People have been leaving Dayton for years.” His voice raised. “Since 1796 they’ve been leaving Dayton!”

  “Not since six this morning, sir.”

  Chad glanced at the dashboard clock. Nine twenty-three. He looked into the backseat, where Leon and Howard sat surrounded by blankets and clothes. He could get on the freeway and go south. He could cut across 725 and go south on 741. “I’ll go another way.”

  “The whole area is surrounded, sir. All the routes out are blocked. If you’re spotted at three separate checkpoints, they’ll impound your car.”

  “Is this martial law? We don’t live in a country with a history of martial law.”

  Sharis laid a restraining hand on Chad’s knee.

  A mad dash in the car across a field. A walk through the Sugarcreek Reserve and keep on going.

  “Don’t you watch TV?” the soldier said.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Chad said. “Sometimes we watch. But we don’t make a habit of …” Chad trailed off, seeing the soldier’s face.

  “The Grid succeeded, sir,” the soldier said. “That’s what happened, the Grid succeeded.”

  Nothing made sense. “What do you mean, succeeded? You mean the Alliance finally attacked it and … ?”

  The soldier’s voice took on a new tone, part pity and part triumph. “The Grid pulled out. It says it’s not part of the United States.”

  “You mean seceded,” Chad said. “S-E-C- …”

  Sharis leaned over him again. “When did this happen?”

  “Last night at midnight. They sent their lady senator to the president with a Declaration of Independence. She’s in jail.”

  “Have we declared war?” Sharis asked.

  The soldier’s expression contorted. “It’s not like declared declared, it’s like they want to declare it but if they do it’s like admitting the Grid’s separate, and the Grid doesn’t say it’s part of the Alliance yet, at least, and … everything’s all bungy. See?” He addressed the boys in the backseat. “This is a serious day. You’ll remember this day. Look”—he turned back to Chad, addressing him, Sharis realized, as if Chad were mentally defective—“you’ve got to go back to your house. Don’t you have a perc? Turn on your perc. President Baxter is speaking to everyone at noon.” He pointed helpfully. “You can turn around in the dry cleaner’s.”

  “Fuck you!” Chad screamed, lurching the car forward. They turned around in the dry cleaner’s and screeched onto the road toward home. Chad could imagine exactly what Sharis was thinking. We should have left days ago. If you hadn’t been so slow getting … He was ready to erupt with any provocation, but as the blocks passed in silence his anger ebbed. He had underestimated her, he realized.

  He supposed he should turn on the car radio, but all he wanted now was silence.

  Chad turned left on Custard, their own lane. “I don’t know why you started to spell for him,” Sharis said.

  “How could we have left earlier?” Chad screamed. “I had to get the cash! I had papers to grade! I had a whole house to pull together! Was I supposed to know the Grid was going to secede? Did I know today we’d end up with martial law?” We should have left yesterday, he was thinking. Why didn’t we leave yesterday?

  “In my e
xperience,” Sharis said after a pause, “shooting off your mouth is rarely helpful.”

  “Piss on your experience,” Chad said, and Leon, in the backseat, giggled. But Chad had envisioned the night of the Gridding so often—the heap of family on the sofa, Sharis slipping out the back door—that the thought of what she’d been through did calm him, returned him to his bigger, better self.

  Chad let the car roll down the Custard Lane hill without his foot on the gas. He looked into the backseat. “Tree or not?” Their little ritual.

  “Not,” the boys chorused. The car made it about a quarter up the hill—just shy of the big tree—before Chad needed to press the gas pedal again. “Phooey,” Chad said. “You boys were right.” The boys bumped their fists in celebration.

  “What’s there to be afraid of, more ice?” Chad asked as the car climbed the hill. And to Sharis: “We’re lucky you did all that canning.”

  They had bled the pipes, turned off the heat, boarded up the windows with limbs and firewood. All that could be undone. Most of their food and some of their clothes they’d brought with them. “We’ll survive,” Sharis said as their car pulled in the driveway. “We will. I guarantee it.”

  “She guarantees it,” Chad echoed, grinning back at the boys. Persistence. Optimism. My God, he thought, we are insane.

  A stooped woman was standing at their front door, her head topped by a bowl of straight white hair. No one spoke. Chad’s heart pounded in his ears: one thing to meet a scrawny soldier two miles away, another to see a strange person in your doorstep.

  Chad thought: it’s a man in disguise, come to kill us.

  Sharis thought: it’s the woman from the troll bridge, come to kill us.

  Harold said, “Mommy, is that Abba?”

  “Oh, my God,” Chad said. “It is Abba.” His mother’s aunt from Cleveland.

  “Remember Abba?” Howard said to Leon. “Did you know a woman can go bald?”

  “Hi, kids!” Abba turned and walked toward them, waving both hands and smiling. She wore a green coat with missing buttons, and knit gloves thinning at their fingertips. Behind her on the doorstep were a suitcase and a string bag full of canned food.

  Abba was barely taller than Leon. “Now don’t start worrying, I’m not a big eater,” she said as they got out of their car. “I got into Dayton at two this morning, can you imagine? The bus drove us down I-75 from Cleveland to Columbus and then I-70 from Columbus to here. Right through the Grid. I’ve never been there—have you been there? But on the highway they have these blockades and you can’t see …”

  She’s even worse than my spoiled niece Lily, Chad thought. For a second he envied Sharis’s lack of family.

  “ … and when we got here some people were going to hotels or calling their families and I said, I’ll just sleep here on this bench, use this as a pillow.” She pointed to her suitcase. “And I did, I slept very well, I didn’t wake up till almost nine.” Her voice went up and down, up and down, like a child’s roller coaster. “Don’t I get a hug?” she said to Howard and Leon.

  “Why come here?” Sharis said, aiming Abba toward their front door. “Why now?”

  “I came in by bus, honey. Like I told you.”

  “We were just trying to leave,” Chad said.

  “Don’t you know? You must know. Well, I didn’t know exactly but I got a message from the very highest levels. They said I should get out of Cleveland if I could, and I knew I could because I …”

  Chad was busy calculating Abba’s age. She must be over ninety. When Chad was a child she’d already been an oldie. Oldies get funny, his mother used to say. She’s got a good heart. He’d come upon his father and Abba in the living room once, his father asleep and Abba talking on. “The word count on that woman!” Chad’s father said.

  “Here you go, Leon. One for you, too, Howard.” Abba handed each boy a hard candy. “I wish they were made with honey, because the man who drove me to the bus last night used to keep bees, but …”

  “Are you planning to stay here?” Sharis said, her eyes meeting Chad’s over Abba’s head. “Have you left Cleveland for good?”

  “I’m not a Nervous Nellie, but when someone from the very highest level calls and …”

  Abba had worked for a man whose brother was a Cleveland official. “It’s fine,” Chad said. “We have plenty of room.” Thinking bondad, bonehead. Thinking of Prem, who noted that in his country all the generations lived together, even though some of them were not the easiest people. Before Sharis had gotten the door unlocked, Abba had mentioned her old boss, the other passengers on the bus she’d come in on, Sharis’s shoes, the boys’ haircuts, how rotten Dayton looked compared to Cleveland.

  She had asked that the date of Chad’s high school graduation party be changed, because that Sunday was not a good day for her. She had shown up at every family gathering with a can of peas for her personal consumption. “I wanted to get married,” she used to say, “but the man God meant for me got killed in Desert Storm.”

  Yes, she was old, she was family, but did that give her the right to take over their life? Her presence in her long dark coat in their living room was like a smudge on their domesticity. Beyond her lay the pile of blankets and pillows they spread out on the floor to make their nest, and as Abba appraised the room and offered her thoughts on their sofa, their lighting system, and the temperature of the house, Chad kept thinking, over and over: there’s a war on and I’m stuck with Abba?

  2048

  tuuro’s confession

  TUURO WAS EXPECTED to memorize his confession. There was nothing for him to take home and study because nothing should be leaked out. The confession was extremely explicit, because—Mrs. Calder said—people were idiots and needed things spelled out. Something came over me. I took out my swollen penis and I forced …

  He couldn’t read it.

  “What do you mean you can’t read it? You can read, can’t you?” Mrs. Calder tugged her cross out of her cleavage. She had worked for twenty-eight years for a man she called the crown prince of Cleveland newscasters. He had retired to California, so now she worked for Nenonene. “Everyone trusts me,” she’d told Tuuro. “I’m what you call impeccable.” She was certainly not what Tuuro would call impeccable, her feet up on her desk, boots dripping melted snow.

  Tuuro read the speech again. The only way he could get through it was to say each word alone, as if he were reading a list.

  “You don’t sound real,” Mrs. Calder said. “You’re worse every time.” She bit her thumb. “Haven’t you ever totally lost control? Think of a night you got drunk and hit somebody.”

  Tuuro looked at the floor. He had been moved from Allyssa’s two weeks before to a Cleveland apartment—the first floor of a frame house—by a woman named Akira who referred to herself as the General’s henchwoman. Another henchwoman brought him groceries. He understood from the beginning that Nenonene had plans for him, but plans like these had never crossed his mind.

  “Are you perfect?” Mrs. Calder said. “Are you one of the chosen few who’ve never done anything wrong?”

  He thought of his feelings about the pastor; of the girls he looked at late at night on his computer back in Dayton; how he’d walked off from the message center in Cincinnati, knowing that the lipsticked man was about to shoot the customer. He said, “No.”

  “Then can we have a little passion? A little remorse?” Mrs. Calder’s eyes narrowed. “Your daughter’s how old, six? They say a kid can only remember one month back for each year of their age. She’s probably forgotten you by now.”

  She will want to forget me, Tuuro thought. Nenonene, he thought, almost choking. The conversation he’d imagined them having—what a joke. Instead Tuuro had been prepared as an object of use, brought to Mrs. Calder’s office to practice a script about his performing acts worse than any he’d ever imagined, all at the will of a man who would use anything, even his own grandson, to consolidate his power. The monstrous thought filled Tuuro that Nenonene could have
arranged Cubby’s death himself. He had certainly arranged for the demise of Tuuro. Tuuro saw again Allyssa at the end of the stone driveway, waving after him until he couldn’t see her from the back window of Akira’s car. Would Allyssa, at least, understand that he was mouthing a lie?

  Tuuro tried to speak, but his emotions were too much for him. “Just keep reading the thing, okay? We’ve got a timeline here.” Mrs. Calder said. “Jesus, I told Neno it’d be easier with a pro.”

  IT WAS THE Audubon calendar arriving in the mail that made them think to turn on Diana’s perc. They hadn’t had mail for weeks. The road to the Center over the Englewood Dam (one of the famous Dayton-saving dry dams—a giant earthen wall with an opening at its base for the Stillwater River) was less than a mile away, and the electric mail carts were as solid and reliable as any vehicle. But Charles suspected the mail carrier let their letters accumulate until he could no longer postpone the trip.

  They didn’t look like people worth visiting. Charles had stopped shaving, and the hairs of his lower beard caught on the upper buttons of his shirts. Diana, who had only summer clothing, had taken to raiding the lost-and-found boxes, and often felt so cheerfully motley she’d rush into the bathroom to gape at herself in the mirror. The women’s lost clothing was decorated with flowers and squirrels and pine trees, as if a visit to a nature center required a sartorial nod to nature. The men’s clothing was at least practical.

  She and Charles were once again happy. It had struck Diana that she wasn’t all that nice, or all that stable. Charles, in contrast, was both. She starting liking him again the day in December the trees were encrusted with ice, and Charles chipped away at the frozen limbs that had pushed the bird feeders to the ground. He used his breath to melt the openings to the finch feeders, and refilled each container with seeds. “Rough time of year for birds,” he said, his eyebrows bristling with frost.

  “Napkin,” she might say, handing it to him, waving her hand under her chin.

  “Is that supposed to be a bluebird?” he might ask, peering at her shirt.