Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Page 20

  It was January 7 before the calendar arrived, and they used Diana’s perc to tune into media, which told them that the Grid had announced its succession ten days before. Dayton, Indianapolis, and Columbus had all been quarantined and were allowed no exits or entrances other than trucks and planes containing supplies deemed “vital to local living” (VLL). All the Grid borders were surrounded by American troops—a naval fleet sat in Lake Erie north of Cleveland—and, although there had been some tense moments, stray threats, and gunshots, no actual fighting had occurred. The U.S. had not officially declared war. Negotiations were in process, talks termed “sensitive” and “high-level.” The Grid wanted recognition by the U.S. of their own president and government, control of their own production, and the ability to market their commodities to entities other than the United States. Their provisional constitution was loosely based on the U.S. Constitution. The Alliance countries, with the exception of the EU, which was stalling, had officially recognized the Grid as a nation. There were rumors of a Grid-Alliance pact, although both sides claimed no more than friendship. President Baxter had “every confidence” that food from the Grid wasn’t needed for the U.S. Grain supplies, even subtracting the Grid’s output, were forecast to be more than adequate through the summer.

  “Let’s run away,” Diana said, eyes fixed to the screen. They had noticed more planes overhead recently—they’d even commented on it—but since they were near the old airport they often heard planes.

  “We are away,” Charles said. “Look.” And he turned off Diana’s perc.

  “I HAD A dream.” Sharis told Abba.

  The boys were at school, and Chad was outside chopping wood. Sharis was scrubbing wild onions in the sink. Chad had dug a hole in their backyard to store their extra vegetables. “You know where our root cellar is?” Sharis had asked the boys, stamping her foot on the dirt. “Here!” Abba very much approved of the winter cellar. She hadn’t realized Chad had married such a practical girl.

  “All of us,” Sharis said—by this she meant her immediate family not including Abba, but that would have been cruel to mention—“were walking down a road lined with trees—it was beautiful, it was like France—and suddenly things were shooting up from all around and we were screaming but it was nothing, it was fireworks, it was a show for us because we were walking down that road.”

  “Good attitude,” Abba said. “That’s a dream with a can-do spirit. Have you been to France, Sharis?” She went on, not waiting for Sharis’s answer. “I like the French, I don’t care what people say. And they do have a beautiful country.”

  Sharis opened the utensil drawer. She knew Chad found Abba difficult, and she did talk almost constantly, but she gave off the reassuring hum—the refrigerator hum, Sharis thought—of an appreciative life, a noise that transmitted itself through all her stories: her friend’s children went bad, but the grandchildren turned out to be wonderful; her friends (they were all women) lived with impossible husbands, but got nice houses and went on cruises when the men died. Sharis had come to anticipate the final line of these tales: “Things worked out.”

  Abba slept on the sofa. Their communal bed on the floor wasn’t right for her—the surface was too hard and no one really wanted to touch her—and the upstairs bedrooms were too far away, but the sofa, like Mama Bear’s bed, Abba said, was just right. And she’d agreed (after Chad, to Sharis’s embarrassment, threw a fit that first night) to use the dining room to listen to her bedtime music.

  Chad was ungenerous with Abba. If Abba said she was cold, Chad would turn up the thermostat one degree. She complained again, not quite directly (“Golly, it was warmer than this in Siberia! Did I tell you about that trip? We …”), and Chad found her a sweater. When five degrees would have made her toasty, would have made everyone happy.

  “We’re headed for a war!” Chad had bellowed the night before at dinner. “Haven’t you heard of ‘gathering storm clouds’?”

  Abba said, “Don’t pop a hernia over it.” Sharis and boys couldn’t stop laughing. Chad got up and started on the dishes.

  Honestly, the quarantine had changed their daily life more than Abba had. Cook, clean, sleep, cook, clean, sleep. Daily life was as stubborn as time.

  A SHORT WOMAN with pulled-back hair and the pinched face of someone who didn’t wear her dentures was banging at Tuuro’s back door. Tuuro recognized her as his upstairs neighbor. “You got something for me?” she said.

  Tuuro patted his pockets, confused. Possible, more than possible, that she was a spy. The woman glared. In her hand she clutched an empty string bag. No one in Cleveland looked happy. She said, “I don’t got what you got, okay? White women don’t bring me groceries.”

  “Here,” Tuuro said, hurriedly pulling things out of his fridge for her.

  “And some crackers?” she suggested, peering past Tuuro’s shoulder.

  Her parting gaze was shrewd. “We all got to look after each other, these days,” she said. Tuuro sighed, remembering the minister and his munificent ministrations, the gifts of soul and body that could heal the fractious world. There was ice on Tuuro’s steps, and the woman gripped his railing with both hands.

  “YOU THINK IT’S right to let them go where we can’t see them?” Chad asked from beside the window.

  Outside it was almost fifty, a January thaw, the ground a mixture of melting snow and mud. Chad ran the media on his perc all the time these days. The situation was terrifically unstable. The Gridians had—as Herbert Daniels, Chad’s favorite newsman, said—“the fire of revolution in their eyes.” Plus, they were well armed. On top of that the Grid was peppered with defensive missiles, installed at its creation to protect it from the rest of the world. Who controlled these devices now was a matter of intense conjecture. Chad was sure there were U.S. government employees busily calculating the military cost and political ramifications of blowing the Grid to smithereens.

  “Chad and Sharis, stay calm and alert,” President Baxter’s latest personalized perc message had said. “It’s always safe to stay inside.”

  “They’re right behind the Hofmeisters,” Sharis said. “I saw them three minutes ago.” Chad was home all the time now, because UD had been closed—“mothballed,” the administration called it—with its employees placed on skeleton pay. The boys’ school had been shortened to five hours four days a week, and grade levels had been consolidated. This was in the suburbs. In Dayton proper school had been canceled.

  Chad, his hand on the doorknob, glanced at Sharis. She was measuring flour, a look of intense concentration on her face. “I’m going to find them,” he said.

  “Go right ahead.”

  “I care about my children.”

  “Really?” She dumped the cup of flour in the bowl, releasing a white spray.

  Chad stopped, turned to stare at her. “I don’t know why you want to make things worse. Why can’t we pull together, be a family again?” Damn Abba. Their only moments of peace now were when she was asleep.

  Leon came streaking across the lawn, something striped in green and yellow across his shoulders.

  “Leon, where’s Howard?” Chad shouted out the door. “Leon, what is that?”

  Leon lifted his arms like a bird and came hurtling toward the house. “I’m a Hopi Hellion!” he yelled. “I have the power to swoop and save! Howard’s coming,” he added at the door.

  “Wipe your feet.” There was Howard, a striped thing across his shoulders, also, ambling toward the house.

  “Is that one of the Hofmeisters’ awnings?” Sharis asked.

  Leon twisted to look at his shoulders. “Is an awning the thing that hangs over a window?”

  Their laughter was like an umbrella, pulling them in. They laughed so hard they woke Abba up.

  EARLY IN JANUARY, during a thaw, Lila, still on crutches, returned to her office to work. The ragged strip of wound in her leg was filling in from its bottom and sides; she had been in the hospital for Christmas, and later Kennedy brought her meals and stayed up la
te with her watching old movies on New Year’s Eve. News of the Grid’s secession had been almost a relief to Lila, because now she understood what was going on. Wonderwater was a Grid site, its tiny star as well as the mysterious icons betokening something only Gridians should know. It was likely Seymour had been shot by someone atop the Grid barrier. It was likely the Grid was water-bleeding Dayton.

  “Not bad,” the nurse in the emergency room had said, glancing at Lila’s leg. She looked again at the substance the pilot had sprayed in Lila’s thigh. Her voice changed. “Where’d you get the Gelfoam?”

  “An army pilot fixed me up. His helicopter crashed near where we were”—Lila faltered, not sure exactly what had happened—“shot.”

  The nurse gave her a quick glance. “Lucky girl. A helicopter right there, Gelfoam …”

  It hit Lila for the first time that the pilot’s presence had perhaps not been random, that he could have been watching the border, or her. The nurse peeled the Gelfoam off Lila’s wound, and Lila was surprised that the only sensation was a tugging. “It’s impregnated with anesthetic,” the nurse explained. “What happened to your Sir Galahad?”

  Impregnated, ha! Thank God she was too old to worry about that.

  Sir Galahad, right.

  In the emergency room, Lila pushed up on her elbows and shifted her bottom. She didn’t think she was imagining the sensation of Sir Galahad’s semen still leaking out of her, a disconcerting sensation. It had happened. She wanted to tell someone, but in the light and brightness of the emergency room she didn’t know how to bring it up. And she was alive. Perhaps that was worth whatever price she’d had to pay.

  Lila said, “He flew away when the ambulance arrived. He and his copilot.”

  “His helicopter crashed, and he flew it away?”

  Lila felt—with a sort of whooshing thud—a large dark curtain fall over part of her mind, and she was relieved to see that it completely blocked her view of the pilot, the field, Seymour’s body, all the events she had started to think of as that day.

  “You’ll need to stay here a while,” the nurse said crisply. “Dressing changes, antibiotics, rehab. I’ll call the coroner’s office, find out about your coworker’s body.” Her voice dropped. “How far were you, exactly, from the Grid barrier?”

  Lila frowned. She had never been good at distances; surveyors used to laugh at her estimates. “Length of a football field?”

  “One hundred yards,” the nurse said, nodding. “That’s plausible.”

  “Are you seeing many wounds like this?”

  “No. We’re seeing these wounds, mostly.” The nurse tapped her head. “A wound like yours is almost refreshing: it tells us what we’re dealing with.”

  “What are we dealing with?” Lila said. Even as the thought of knowing more alarmed her (did she really want to lift up a corner of the curtain?) she wanted the nurse to take the question in the largest possible sense.

  “Oh, just a physical wound.” The nurse smiled. “A basic, limb-sparing wound.”

  “Good,” Lila said.

  The nurse lifted her hand to signal an orderly, and Lila was wheeled upstairs.

  DIANA PICKED THROUGH the discard pile of clothes, looking for mittens. Did Charles have a dry pair? She wanted to walk outside. If he didn’t have a pair, she’d use her pockets. She was hankering for some water from the spring.

  Charles was shut up in his office, as he was for an hour or so each day. He kept a perc journal of the weather and the birds he’d seen and various natural phenomena, complete with photos and rudimentary drawings and graphs of temperature and precipitation. She’d never barged in on him before, but they were getting along so well it didn’t seem like barging.

  Charles was sitting at his desk with the holo-screen open in front of him, and he startled and twitched and made the screen disappear the second she walked in.

  “Whatcha doing?” It was so clear she’d caught him at something, she kept her tone light. “Dirty pictures?”

  “You caught me.”

  “Charlie,” Diana chided, sidling up to him, “aren’t I dirty enough for you?”

  “Oh,” he said, his voice suddenly thick, “are you dirty.” But he didn’t have an erection, and Diana was sure whatever he’d been viewing had no sexual content at all.

  A TALL, FRECKLE-FACED woman with Seymour’s delicate features appeared in Lila’s office. It was Cora, Seymour’s older sister. Lila had a soft spot for Cora. Neither Cora nor her mother approved of Seymour’s proclivities, but Cora was the one who made sure that Seymour was invited to family events. “I’d like to hate her for being pious,” Seymour used to say about his sister, “but no one can hate her.”

  Cora said, “ … what Mom and I really want are the personal details. We know he was hit in the abdomen, but did he suffer?”

  “Who talked to you about him?” Lila asked, startled. Seymour, hit in the abdomen? His face was gone.

  “Mr. Wilder,” Cora said. “The man from the government. The man you talked to.”

  “But I never …” Lila started, then stopped.

  “Did he suffer?” Cora asked again.

  “No,” Lila said. “It was instant.” She’d been wondering whom she should talk with about the Grid stealing Dayton’s water. Agro? The air force? The mysterious Mr. Wilder? The Dayton mayor was at his vacation house in Florida, Lila was sure. The city commissioners hadn’t held a public meeting in months. The city manager ran things, but he was shut up in his office and never answered messages. Lila felt a rush of nostalgia for Gerald Ferrescu, the city manager during the New Dawn Dayton times. Yes, Ferrescu had been ridiculously corrupt, but protecting his own interests made him as alert as a guard dog. His ears were up and his eyes open all the time.

  “I’m wondering if you saw his face. Did he look at peace?”

  Maybe Lila was wrong, maybe an entity other than the Grid was bleeding her. “He looked surprised,” Lila said, surprising herself. “But not bad surprised. He looked”—she searched for something—“surprised by joy.”

  Cora’s small face lit up. Lila felt a strange sensation in her chest, as if two torn halves of sweater were being knitted together. She had given Cora a gift. The gift might be a lie—and where had it come from? how in the world had she found those words?—but still, it was a proper gift, gratefully received.

  Long tears and worn spots had appeared in the occluding curtain in Lila’s mind. The moths were going at it, and soon that day would be revealed. Who the hell was Mr. Wilder? If the shot had indeed come from the Grid, why hadn’t the story made it into the media? How had a pilot in a crippled helicopter flown away? If Lila had indeed found herself in the middle of something, was there any way to guarantee her safety? She couldn’t call anyone, she realized. There was nobody to trust. As Cora reminisced about her brother—his size eighteen shoes, his hopelessness at piano—Lila was hardly listening. Seymour’s death she could survive. The things the pilot had done she could survive. What she might not survive was treachery.

  There was something people always equated with power. “Blank is power.” Something basic. Knowledge, she thought suddenly. Knowledge is power. Well, she knew the water map. She plotted the steps to make herself indispensable, composing in her mind what she’d tell Nelson and Solganik, the computer genies who could clean under the tabletop.

  “VERY GOOD,” GENERAL Nenonene said. “Convincing.”

  Tuuro nodded. He had kept his eyes closed through the viewing of the tape.

  “A splendid performance!” the General said, his voice rising. “You could be the next Manning Lennon!” The General smiled broadly, then seemed to notice Tuuro’s face and silence. He waved the men accompanying him aside, then closed the door to the room. “You’re performing a great service,” he said to Tuuro. “You may not understand this now, but you will later.”

  Tuuro shrugged. These cheap compliments were worse than silence. Performance. Oh yes, Tuuro was performing. The General, too.

  The General
touched his shoulder. “No harm will come to you or anyone in your family, I assure you.” He hesitated, made a considering face. “People need a story, Tuuro. Something to bridge the barriers between them. And you are helping me make that story.”

  Tuuro nodded, but only because he had to. The scene wouldn’t end—he understood this—until the General had wrested from him this nod.

  “DID YOU WATCH his confession? Oh, God.” Gentia shivered.

  “The worst was that he looked like a normal person. When he started I felt sorry for him, but the more he went on …”

  “Sick, sick, sick. That little boy could have been Leon.”

  Sharis closed her eyes. “Maybe I shouldn’t let them play outside. But I hate to keep them cooped up, they’re normal kids …”

  “Honey, these are abnormal times. Don’t talk to me about it, you know what I think. I’m in security. George would probably forgive him.” Gentia drew out the “forgive” in a mocking way. “Did I tell you he’s turned into a religious fanatic? Every time he doesn’t answer me, he’s praying. At least that’s what he says. Did you hear about the truck?”

  “What truck?”

  “A Dorothy Lane Market delivery truck, full of gourmet food. It was headed to some Consort party, and it went over the Salem Street bridge and guys jumped out at it and starting firing. They got the truck. Yesterday. Aren’t you getting any media? It’s all over. Lots of questions about where the police were, I’ll tell you that.”

  Sharis nodded, but she wasn’t really listening. “I wonder what Nenonene will do to him.”

  “I have to say the General has a sense of justice,” Gentia said. “What would you do to Tuuro Simpkins, castrate him? Stick his balls in his mouth and let him hang?”

  “Gentia!”

  “Okay, time to go home.” Gentia pushed herself upright. She stood for a moment getting her balance, the tip of her tongue protruding like a strawberry. Only fifty-two—Sharis knew that from the tapes—but she seemed a decade older. Chad was looking ragged lately, yes, but still it seemed impossible that he was closer to Gentia’s age than to Sharis’s. “Okay, the Sunday after this we’ll get the verdict,” Gentia said. “He said it took twelve days, right? Some African thing.” She lumbered to the door. “I can’t wait. I’ve already got his confession on a chip, and I’m going to record the verdict for my grandkids. Honey, I love what you do, but this is what we call history.”