Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Page 21

  “THANKS FOR COMING here. I’m worried. Our department computers have been sabotaged.”

  Nelson and Solganik, the legendary computer broads from Cincinnati, exchanged glances. Today their matching tops were pale yellow and their fingernails gold. How they’d gotten past the barriers into Dayton Lila didn’t know, but neither of them looked the worse for wear.

  “I think it’s the Gridians,” Lila said. “I’m sure they’ve been bleeding our system, and now I’m looking at our maps and they’re not accurate, they’re showing flows and variances we’ve never had, and I think that they think they can use the computer to keep covering their tracks. So all we want is the local water maps eradicated. At every level. You know, the way you said you could.”

  Nelson extended an admonitory finger. “But your system is a government system. We can get in deep doo-doo messing with a government system.” Her thick eyelashes twitched.

  “Don’t you already mess with government systems?” Lila said. “I mean, you made it into quarantined Dayton.”

  A pause. “We don’t want to mess with systems that will mess with our systems,” Solganik said. “If you catch my drift.”

  “You ladies remember my assistant, Seymour? He was here when you got us into Wonderwater.”

  Solganik frowned. “Long fingers? Had to bend down to get in the door?” Lila nodded; Solganik looked at Nelson for confirmation. “Sure, we remember him.”

  “He’s dead,” Lila said. “He and I went up north to look where they were bleeding us and the Gridians blew his face off.”

  “But I didn’t, they never …”

  “It’s never been made public,” Lila said. “The media ran his obituary, no cause of death or anything, but other than that there was no publicity.”

  The genies’ mouths were gaping; for the first time, to Lila, they looked old.

  “They used our maps to lure us up there, okay?” Lila said. “On the maps, they dropped the flows so low it didn’t make sense to us, so Seymour and I had to go up there, and that was when they struck. They must have shot at us from over the Grid barrier.” All of this except the last sentence was a complete invention; the last sentence, Lila realized, could well be an invention, too. “So I hate our map, okay? I don’t trust it, I don’t like it, I don’t want to move it elsewhere. I just want it gone.”

  Nelson and Solganik exchanged glances.

  “Who else is going to help us? Look.” Lila stood and rolled up the leg of her pants; her leg wound, under its clear covering, still gaped like a slashed piece of steak. “That’s where I got hit.”

  Lila sat back down. Nelson had gone pasty, and Solganik looked as if she were about to retch. “I’ll pay you, of course,” Lila added.

  “No.” Solganik said. Her face had become ferocious. “We’ll do it for free.”

  “WE WERE LUCKY to get it.” Gentia held the tray propped on her belly and moved through the crowd in her living room. “Don’t ask.” Sausages wrapped in puff pastry, a bowl of mustard dipping sauce perched in the center. An impromptu party, she’d said when she’d messaged Chad and Sharis. A celebration of three weeks barricaded in Dayton. Show old President Baxter he could coop them up like chickens and they’d still have a good time.

  “Gosh, and these shrimp! Where did you find shrimp, Gentia? I’m so sick of fake meat I could scream.”

  “You sell alarms, you meet people,” Gentia said. “We know everyone worth knowing. And some people not worth knowing!”

  Chad was talking to a UD anthropologist he recognized from faculty meetings—an older man with a permanently surprised expression and full tenure—and an engineer who did something with optics at the air force base. “Is it tomorrow already?” Chad said.

  The engineer nodded. “Twelve days. That’s an African thing.”

  “Building suspense,” the anthropologist said in his unfortunate haughty tone.

  “Oh, sure,” the engineer grinned. “But that’s the African custom, twelve days.”

  “I’ve studied African society for over thirty-five years, and I’ve never heard of a prescribed time between confession and judgment,” the anthropologist said. “I think Nenonene simply …”

  “Are you an African?” the engineer interrupted sharply.

  “You know I visited Africa once”—Chad heard Abba’s voice behind him. “Such a large place! I remember I was sitting in our boat and I thought: Here I am eating a doughnut in the center of the Congo.”

  “All right, everyone!” Gentia was standing in the center of the carpet, cheeks flushed. She clapped her hands high in the air. “Tin roof sundaes in the kitchen!”

  Leaving the kitchen with his sundae, Chad felt a pang of sadness for Sharis, so proud of flavoring her cabbage soup with frozen chives and dried tomatoes from their garden. He would have sat with her this moment, but she was sitting with Abba. “Oh, she’s adorable!” Gentia had said. “How old is she again?” Facing out the window, Chad found a seat on an ottoman in the family room, away from the other guests. Vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, peanuts, maraschino cherries: everything was delicious. Months since he’d been this full. As he ate, the reflection of Gentia wandered past in the window, and outside a large van pulled into George and Gentia’s drive. The driver got out, opened the back of the van and struggled to unload an upholstered chair. His feet cracked the snow. Who had the money or will to buy furniture these days? The doorbell rang. “Oh, look!” Gentia said. “My wonderful chair!”

  Into Chad’s mind, unbidden, inarguable, swam the picture of the hijacked grocery truck, the dead driver pinned behind the door. The more he ate, the more he recognized the taint of the food, the salty wash of blood coating even the luminous cherries. But he ate everything.

  esslandia

  TUURO’S TWELFTH-DAY MEETING with Nenonene was carried on the media in real time on a Sunday afternoon. At the last moment the Baxter administration withdrew their case (the Supreme Court was sure to rule against them, all the analysts said) and permitted the show to go out on American media. Everyone watched. Four o’clock in the afternoon, with three inches of snow on the ground in Dayton. January 20, one week before the Super Bowl.

  There had been rumors. Nenonene would dress in African regalia. He’d wear his army dress uniform / fatigues / white priestly robes. He’d wear a business suit and hold a gun. He’d have a saber. The scene would end with Mr. Simpkins’s execution by the General. The execution, like the sentence, would have to wait twelve days. The General would/wouldn’t do it himself. A beheading / hanging / firing squad / an injection. Or banishment: there was a prison in Nigeria, people said, with rats as big as groundhogs, where prisoners were chained to the walls. President Baxter noted that Cleveland legally, if not practically, was still under federal jurisdiction. Tuuro was an American citizen who’d been cleared (cleared! the genetics were incontrovertible) of Nenonene’s charges by the police and prosecutors of Dayton. Perhaps his confession had been obtained by torture. But (the media were all over this) no ambassador or agent of President Baxter’s had gone charging north from Washington to Cleveland. Perhaps secretly, everybody said, Baxter was hoping for the sort of gruesome spectacle that would turn public opinion away from Nenonene.

  People in Cleveland, people said, were more frightened now of the Gridians than the Alliance. Who knew what the Gridians would do? They drank real blood at their communions, people said; they were training kamikaze soldiers.

  The moderator, a former UN secretary general, gave some brief remarks, then Tuuro’s confession was replayed on a screen behind Tuuro and Nenonene, both men watching it impassively as somber music played.

  “General Nenonene?” said the moderator.

  Nenonene turned, still seated. The camera zoomed in surprisingly close. “My fellow world citizens …” Nenonene began. Of course this coverage was orchestrated—there was only one media feed from Cleveland, controlled by the Alliance.

  He’s very smart, Chad thought. A public relations genius. Such simple phrase
s: There must be justice, but also kindness. Nenonene’s face filled the screen, his pores visible and sweat beading his brow. There must be grief, but also hope.

  “What I want to know is, where’s the mother?” Sharis said. “All this big drama between the criminal and the grandfather—but where’s the boy’s mother? He had a mother.”

  “I hate to say it, but the General is handsome,” Abba said. “Beautiful uniform. My boss had a uniform from the Navy like that, with lots of ribbons and …”

  Chad couldn’t stand it. “What, would you think Hitler was good-looking?”

  “It’s totally different,” Abba said, unperturbed. “Hitler was a weasely fellow, and this man …”

  Nenonene stood. The camera angle changed and took in the whole stage: Nenonene standing, Tuuro sitting in a chair in profile looking up. And it was a stage, Chad realized. This whole thing was bogus, scripted, moving toward a predetermined end. Chad looked at Sharis and Abba to see if they recognized the theater of it, but they both looked rapt. Simpkins’s arms were pulled behind him in the chair: he was manacled, Chad realized. Nenonene slipped his right hand to his hip.

  “Tell me when it’s over!” Sharis said, jumping up and running into the kitchen. “I can’t stand it.” They’d sent the boys to the basement.

  “Tuuro Simpkins is a kind-looking man,” Abba said. “I don’t think a man like that would …”

  “Shut up,” Chad said. “Please.”

  It wasn’t a gun. It was something smooth and round, the size and shine of a silver dollar, that Nenonene took from his pocket. And Nenonene’s words, which had droned on like background music, now lengthened, slowed down, stopped. Silently, Nenonene lifted the silver disk and approached Simpkins. He pressed it into Tuuro’s forehead and it stuck there.

  A target? Chad thought. A new delivery system for poison? He glanced at Abba, astonished at her silence.

  “I forgive you,” Nenonene said. His voice broke. “I forgive you.”

  Ridiculous. Tuuro knew it was time to break down and sob, and he wanted to, he yearned to, but the tension in the studio was so great—a charge in the air as if everyone’s tiny hairs were standing on end—that he knew if he tried sobbing he’d risk laughing, and laughing would never do. He was worse than a trained monkey. Even though the whole thing was planned down to the placement of his feet, and all twelve people in the studio knew it, in the air was the feeling that they didn’t know it, that Nenonene could still surprise them. Tuuro realized that he wasn’t raising his face as he was supposed to, and he felt the pressure of Nenonene’s two fingers—dry, warm—under his chin, lifting his head into position. The metal on his forehead had lost its reassuring cool. “Don’t be afraid, little man,” Nenonene said. “Your life will be your penance. I forgive you.”

  A uniformed woman stepped behind Tuuro and removed his handcuffs, and Tuuro found himself grabbing at Nenonene like a man pulled from a fire. His ear pressed into Nenonene’s belly. The camera moved in for a close-up of his tearstained face.

  THAT EVENING TUURO climbed the steps to his porch, the snow already marked with footprints. The tires of the car that had dropped him off spun on the ice, then gripped and drove away. Sitting beside his back door was a paper bag containing a half-eaten box of crackers, a near-empty bag of sugar, and five eggs. Taped to it was a note. I don’t need this from you you scum.

  Why now? he thought. Why now and not after my confession? But then he understood that those around him had been waiting for a punishment, and only now, with no punishment forthcoming, did they feel the sting of being cheated.

  Lanita. He would never see his daughter again. He sat at the kitchen table and closed his eyes.

  “Should I get a job?” Tuuro had asked when the show was finished. “Do I need to stay in Cleveland?”

  Nenonene looked surprised and vaguely irritated. “Akira will help you out.”

  Tuuro felt not like a man but like the hollow shell of a man, a pumpkin with its innards scooped out. But he had been a great success. When he left the studio, the approval rating for Nenonene in Cleveland (the U.S. numbers would take a day) had risen from 35 to 68 percent. Nenonene was triumphant, shaking hands with Mrs. Calder, with the director, the cameramen, the moderator, everyone in the room. He used Tuuro’s back as a surface to sign autographs. “Very, very useful,” he said.

  I want my daughter, Tuuro thought. I want my life back. “Are you the light man?” the young woman had asked him. It was the night after the Gridding, and she was one of the relocatees, sequestered for an evening in his church. She was lying on a mattress on the floor, her hair fanned on her pillow and her armpit gleaming whitely. For a moment Tuuro had been confused, then he realized what she wanted.

  “I am,” Tuuro had said, reaching for the switch, “I am the light man.” And for years he had been just that, a man who could maintain calm and order, who always left a room improved. An expression of his grandmother’s flew into his mind: No good deed goes unpunished. He had hated those words, linking them with empty bottles rolling on the floor, his grandmother’s scoffing looks when Aunt Stella arrived with books. But now Tuuro remembered his grandmother’s sharp eye, the way she said, “Whee, don’t we look pretty!” She was right about many things, his grandma. What she said was rarely pretty, but that didn’t make it wrong.

  CHARLES HAD A confession. The perc stuff Diana caught him at, the stuff he’d tried to hide? He was talking to people about trees.

  “Trees?”

  He looked excited. His ears were pink and his mustache trembled. “There are a group of us, okay? We communicate. We exchange ideas.”

  “Tree Lovers of America.” Diana laughed awkwardly. “TLA.”

  “TLW. It’s people all over the world. It’s a burgeoning field. Trees communicate with each other. They release all sorts of chemicals. There’s this guy Moskowitz who followed an olive grove all through the West Bank War. This grove got bombed, it had troops hiding in it, part of it was bulldozed … These trees thrived, I’m telling you. They thrived.”

  “Even the bombed ones?”

  “There was some individual loss of life. But as a population, I’m telling you, these trees did great. Moskowitz found out they were releasing this chemical called lepogen into the soil, which seems to be associated with growth and longevity. Moskowitz died of cancer, but his grove is still going strong.”

  Diana didn’t know what to say. Trees. In a way it was unsurprising.

  “There’s another guy did work in Australia. They had a wind-erosion problem, and they put in rows of trees as windbreaks, but then this guy thought wait a minute, these trees are too linear, it’s not like a forest, and he put in wind clumps instead, with a thicker spot at the center, and those trees put out lepogen like crazy.”

  His lip was actually twitching now, and his hands were trembling. Diana glanced toward his crotch.

  “This is a laboratory here, okay? These woods have been untouched for ninety years. There’s every reason in the world not to destroy it. They took Brukner, you know.” Diana looked at Charles inquiringly. “The nature center outside what used to be Troy. They Gridded it.” He talked as if this grievance were still fresh. “Led to a big rodent problem. You can’t destroy woodlands without consequences. Can’t destroy anything without consequences.”

  “No,” Diana answered, thinking of the screaming woman at the clinic.

  “I’ve been talking to the Grid arborist. He heard about me and he messaged me. The Grid could annex us,” Charles said. “We’re basically contiguous.”

  It took a moment for the concept to sink in. “You mean the Grid would take us over?”

  “For our protection. For the trees’ protection.”

  “The Audubon Society’s going to love that.”

  “They don’t even call me.” Diana was startled and moved by the grief in Charles’s voice. He had gone to Audubon summer camps, she knew. The Audubon Society had paid for half his college. He had been, at one point, Audubon Intern of t
he Year.

  “So we would become Gridians?” she asked, incredulous. He shouldn’t make this decision without her. She was now as much at home in this place as he was.

  “Why not? They’re farmers: they understand the land like no one else.”

  “They’d take our dollars?” The Gridian currency situation was reportedly dire: the American government had cut off the Gridians’ salaries, and they were bartering among themselves and selling stores of grain to the Alliance in exchange for American dollars. There was a whole black market in currency, apparently, with Cleveland as the usual entry point. Diana had moved her perc next to her side of their bed; she made a habit of keeping up with the news.

  “Right,” Charles scoffed. “They want us for our money.”

  “Oh, Charles. I’m not doubting them,” she said.

  A few days before, on the clear melting day after Nenonene’s Great Forgiveness (that was what the Alliance had termed it), Diana had walked across the Englewood Dam to K-Bob’s to buy socks. Standing in the store waiting for her debit card to clear, listening to music and watching the few other shoppers, Diana felt as if she had landed on another planet. She realized at that moment how much of her and Charles’s isolation was self-imposed. She trudged gratefully back to Aullwood, wondering why no one else ever came here. Were there rumors about this place? Had she and Charles, in people’s minds, metamorphosed into murderous hermits? Not even teenagers bothered them.

  “It’s not like we have to maintain everything; the paths can overgrow,” Charles was saying. “These last six months we haven’t served any educational function. We don’t need the asses’ money.” The asses’ money? Diana realized he was referring to the Audubon Society by its initials: the AS’s money.