Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Page 6

  Afterwards they faced each other, strands of her curly bangs plastered to her forehead, her pubic hair clumped and dripping. She cupped in her two hands his penis, now sadly shriveled, looking down as if its power still amazed her. “We should do that every hour,” she breathed.

  Charles felt something like panic.

  She lifted her eyes to his, turquoise-blue irises flecked with orange-brown, the coloring of a bluebird. “We’re Adam and Eve,” she said.

  Trouble. She had a boyfriend, Charles knew. A man who also lived at the far end of the electric tramline. “I don’t think I’d make a very good Adam,” Charles said. “I think of myself more as a male wolf.” For several months now, Charles realized, she hadn’t mentioned the boyfriend: it was possible he’d left.

  She glanced at him from beneath her eyelashes, behavior Charles recognized as classic courtship. What a relief that he could see it for what it was. “That’s biologically predetermined, you know,” Charles said. “That little look up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That look.” He mimicked it for her. She made a quick gasp and released his penis. “I just want to be fair,” he said. “I want you to understand the sort of behaviors instincts will drive you to. It’s very common for the urge for sexual intercourse to be magnified in times of danger.”

  Her look had hardened; Charles noticed a flush across her chest. “Thank you, Professor.”

  “I don’t mean to discourage you,” he said, glancing down at her nipples. Deep in the fold of his mind there was a fact about erect nipples that eluded him. “I mean, I enjoy instincts.”

  “You seemed to, briefly.” She folded her arms across her chest, blocking his view. Her voice rose. “But I guess this is no Eden!”

  “I’ve never said it was Eden,” Charles said, surprised that, in the course of the hundreds of tours he’d led, that word had never come up. “Eden is not in my vocabulary.”

  “No. Of course not.” Diana looked around her and found a flat rock the size of a large maple leaf that she held with her left hand in front of her groin. She then uprooted a fan of honeysuckle to hold over her chest. She took a few steps backward away from Charles, turned her back on him, and reoriented her honeysuckle behind her to cover her buttocks. With a dignity as comical as it was unassailable, she stalked to retrieve her clothes.

  LANSING PETTIGREW WAS sitting across from Lila. Another messenger from Agro, several notches higher than the luscious Michelle. Lila had known Pettigrew for years. An officious, superior man. Once, in the midthirties, in the middle of a meeting with the county commissioners, Lansing had had to clear his throat and tap his finger on the table to get Lila’s attention. For that, he had never forgiven her.

  “So far we’ve supplied everyone,” she heard herself saying. “It’s a good solid system.”

  “A solid system? Perhaps you forget you’re discussing a liquid.”

  Lila shifted in her seat. I hate this man, she thought.

  “We’ve done studies,” Lansing said. “We think you could easily give up the northern aquifer.”

  “No.”

  Lansing Pettigrew smiled. “Let me use your keyboard a moment.” He reached across her desk and tapped in a code so quickly Lila wasn’t sure if it was numbers or letters. “There,” he said. “Drag up Wonderwater.” Lila opened the file.

  “You see you’re losing population,” Lansing said, nodding at a graph on the screen, “and there’s no reason to assume the trend won’t continue. Dayton’s not a lure these days. And you already have a very water-conscious populace. Your legacy.” He smiled more broadly. “So holding on to all your water is optional.” His eyes met hers. “You could even say it’s selfish.”

  Don’t be selfish

  Don’t make our city pay

  Shower for ninety seconds

  Every other day!

  A jingle from Lila’s “We Save Wawa” glory days, accompanied, during the Web and television spots, by marimbas and guitars. “I don’t know how we got so Latin,” Seymour-the-transvestite-assistant had complained one day, a comment that still made Lila smile.

  Old times. Happy times.

  Now Lila was forced to defend herself. “I’m not selfish. I’m looking out for my population.”

  “You could look out for your country.”

  “Why do you need more water for the Grid? I thought you people were swimming in water. You have some kind of water defense plan? You planning to blast planes out of the sky with water cannons?”

  Lansing snorted. “I warned Michelle you were a character.”

  The night before, while Lila was masturbating thinking about Michelle the youngie, who’d never reappeared in her office, Lila thought her labia seemed smaller. Was that possible? She checked herself in a mirror. It was possible. Her ripest parts were dry and wrinkled, the skin dull and the hairs half gray.

  What was a person, traveling through life? What did one person matter? Once Lila had mattered. For the last six months, on her office computer, Lila could get into Watersystems Dayton and Waterhouse and H2O-ville, but Wonderwater was closed to her. It had never been closed before. She wondered what it meant that Lansing Pettigrew had opened the site for her now. Was it a threat? A promise? An invitation?

  “I heard some people from Consort got invited to the Grid,” Lila said. “If you want my water, why don’t you let me visit there? Don’t I get to see how my water would be used?” Idle curiosity, she’d think later, was all that had fueled this request. Everyone wanted to visit the Grid. Everyone wanted to tell people they’d been there.

  “Lila, Lila. It’s not easy to get permission to visit the Grid. Even I couldn’t get in there.”

  Things were happening, she realized. Water was changing, and she was being purposely left out. Years before, after the Gridding, Lila had quit her Water Queen job. At the time, she felt ashamed to be in government, and guilty and confused that the Gridding had happened at all. Her quitting generated wrath and tearful, earnest moments in the Water Department, as if her leaving was a death. A year later she had calmed down, early crops from the Grid were being distributed, and Lila asked to be hired back. She was, but it wasn’t the same. People who had stayed in the Water Department didn’t know what to think of her; they couldn’t trust her; they had learned they didn’t need her. Power, Lila realized then, wasn’t just a matter of position. Power was a matter of seizing it. Now Lila wondered, almost idly, if she had the energy to grab at power again.

  “I was an Official Witness!” Lila said, her voice ringing with righteousness. “I was there at the beginning. Doesn’t all I’ve done count for anything?”

  “Lila,” Lansing said, shaking his head.

  A week later Lila was in her car driving east on I-70 to Columbus. I-70 ran all the way across the country, from San Francisco to Philadelphia. The media liked to say it “bisected” the Grid, but in reality it divided the Grid into an upper three-fourths and a lower quarter. When the Grid was conceived (this came out later, in the Waye Report), it was expected to lie only north of I-70, sparing such southern towns as New Lebanon and Yellow Springs. But the fertility statistics on the land south of I-70 were compelling, and the long ribbon of Grid land below the highway—a ribbon that stretched from Columbus, Ohio, across Indiana and Illinois all the way to the Mississippi River, interrupted only by the cities of Dayton and Indianapolis—was known as the AUL, an acronym for Area Under the Line, the phrase itself a joke, because among the engineers who planned the Grid was a cadre of mathematicians who remembered with fondness “Area Under the Curve” (AUC) from their calculus days.

  The highway was four lanes in each direction and heavily traveled. There were sections of road further east with magnets embedded in the asphalt to control traffic flow, but on this section of road a vehicle had the freedom to pass. America was much less mobile these days than during Lila’s childhood, when her family’s thoughtless drives to Montana and Colorado bespoke a reckless freedom. Amazing that people had lived for year
s with no sense of the world’s limitations. All they’d cared about was the price of gas.

  The Grid was hidden from the highway on either side by a high partition made of recycled tires and polymers and decorated with painted murals of agricultural themes. During the Grid construction the partitions were put up within days of the evacuations, before the towns were leveled. Guard towers topped the walls every five miles or so, and between the towers the wall was topped with electric fencing and surveillance equipment. No one got onto the Grid without permission. Everyone knew people who knew people who had a friend who’d tried to sneak onto the Grid and been rebuffed, who even—who knew if these stories were true?—had disappeared.

  Boring drive. Straight road, flat, and dominated by trucks. The partitions on each side gave Lila the sensation of shooting down a river through a canyon. Lila clicked her car into a maintain-speed mode and bit her lip. If the Feds truly wanted her water, they’d better give her something in return.

  “You’re security clearance P-3,” the youngie-girl in Columbus said. Lila wondered why she wasn’t higher. “Lucky I’m in a good mood,” the youngie said.

  IT STARTED INNOCENTLY, because Chad had an eye for errors. He was sitting in his bedroom chair reading on his holo-screen an article about Sharis, “the first gigastar,” and her “almost twenty-five years in show business, starting with her big break in 2023 playing Keela Ward in Dakota Blues.”

  “Dakota Blues didn’t really come out in ’23, did it?” Chad asked his wife.

  “Wait a minute, Chad. Let me finish this.”

  Chad’s Sharis was at her editon at a desk in the corner, trying to fit in the Schneiders before dinner. Sharis was a life-editor: she went through hours of footage and found for a family the few minutes a week they would want to view over and over. She had fallen into her work, really. She had artistically compiled footage of a neighbor’s wedding; people liked it and passed it around, and then a family living in Louisville asked if she’d edit scenes of them at home. After that the whole thing just took off. Sharis was hardly the only life-editor around, but she thought she had a special touch. Her editon was bulky, almost as big as an old laptop, but for Sharis the visual resolution was worth it. The Schneiders had been her clients for almost ten years, from couplehood through the births of their three children. They lived a happy life, with a house on the water in Houston and a vacation house in Mexico, yet they always worried. Sharis could edit a week of theirs in forty-five minutes. She rarely had to flow their clips on real time to hear the words.

  Chad said, “You were named for Sharis the actress, right? Your parents didn’t just dream up the name.”

  “I guess so.”

  The Schneiders—speeded up—were in their dining room at some sort of party. Sharis knew the grandparents from both sides. Suddenly everyone threw their heads back, mouths flying open.

  “Uh-oh,” Sharis said, reversing the clip and flipping on the audio. “Cute kid comment.”

  “Because if Dakota Blues came out in ’23 and you were named for her, the oldest you could be is twenty-four.” Sharis was thirty-two. “I’d’ve married you when you were ten.” Chad laughed. “What would my mother say?”

  When Chad and Sharis were married, in a judge’s office in downtown Dayton, Chad’s little brother had been the only person from either of their families at the wedding. Both of Chad’s parents and all Sharis’s family were dead. At that time Chad had had a fantasy that his Sharis would change her name, because a name as famous as hers could never be her own. Now, years later, it seemed to Chad that the only real Sharis was his wife.

  Chad read some more about Sharis the gigastar. “I can’t trust a thing in this article,” he said, shutting off his holo-screen and setting his perc on the table next to the chair. He stood and stretched his arms over his head, touching the ceiling. “How can I, when they can’t get a simple date right?”

  “Got it,” Sharis said. She was proud of her life-editing, because she gave every week a shape. She considered clients only on referral, and in the last two years her client list was full. She made twice what Chad did as a professor. “Now,” she said turning, “what’s this about my age?”

  Chad walked toward her, bent over and kissed the part at the top of her head. “Are you lying to me about your age?”

  Sharis sighed. “Okay. You’re right, I’m not thirty-two. I’m twenty-seven. I didn’t really finish high school. I added five years after the Gridding because if I said I’d just turned fourteen I’d’ve ended up adopted or something. It doesn’t matter. I’ve always been very mature.”

  The bones in Chad’s legs turned to water. He sank onto the bed. “So when I met and married you, you were … fourteen?”

  Sharis nodded impatiently, raked her fingers through her hair. “My birthday’s right, I just moved the year back.” She punched another button, and the Schneiders resumed.

  Impossible. Chad saw Sharis’s legs swinging against the bleachers. The day Chad met her he went home and looked on the Internet for the distinction between “haughty” and “insolent.” She was part of a group of young women, all refugees from the Grid, clustered on the fourth row of a stack of bleachers at a city park, yet she—with her hooded eyes, high cheekbones, her swinging legs and sweep of hair—was the only one he thought of as above him, although all of them were above him, on their perch. He interviewed them looking up, an odd sensation for a man so tall. Chad was a roving reporter then for the UD television station, working on his doctorate on weekends.

  “Your name?” Chad had asked, his microphoned hand stretched in the air.

  “Sharis Sunbury.”

  “Can you tell us about your most frightening moment?”

  Sharis said, “I wondered when I’d get to wash my hair.”

  That night in bed, Chad couldn’t keep Sharis Sunbury out of his mind. Was she shallow as a puddle, or was she impossibly deep? The other girls had been unsurprising. One had seen an old man “pass out cold”; another kept talking about her family’s dog. Those girls went on TV.

  Three months later, Chad and Sharis were married. She didn’t have her identity papers, but she had signed an affidavit. The notion that Chad had married a nineteen-year-old still surprised him (and yes, maybe titillated him, too). But … a fourteen-year-old?

  “What difference does it make how old I was?” Sharis asked now, flicking a paper clip across her desk.

  “Is it love or lust?” Chad had liked to say, rolling her on top of him. She had a way of arching her back and lifting her pelvis, sliding herself down onto what she called his maypole.

  “Love,” she’d say. “Lust. I don’t know.”

  “Good God,” Chad said, standing again and walking toward the window. “I could have been arrested.”

  “And as long as we’re being all truthful, I’m really Cheryl May Smith. I mean, that was the name I was born with. But when the army people dropped me off at that church, I decided to change my name to Sharis Sunbury.”

  Of course she had changed her name. Chad turned and moved closer to her, aware that he was using his size to make himself a presence in the room.

  Sharis said. “How boring is Smith? They didn’t have any ID on me. I could be anyone.”

  “But your parents had just …” Chad lifted his hand to his forehead. “I could have changed my name to Gamble,” he said, not sure why this seemed important. His father had offered once, very seriously, to change the family name from Gribble to Gamble, and his mother had just laughed.

  Sharis said: “After what my parents did, why should I want their name?”

  Chad felt as if the floor beneath him had suddenly gone soft. He didn’t know if he’d be able to stay upright, if he could walk properly, if to cross the room he’d have to grip the edge of the chest of drawers. He had thought he was his wife’s protector, but for years she’d been protecting him. What kind of fourteen-year-old could do that? Who was this woman, really? How much tougher was she than he was?

  “
I see your point,” Chad said, sounding calmer than he felt. “You’ve been through a lot.” A lot—he started to laugh almost hysterically at that description.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” Sharis said.

  Chad bit the inside of his lips to stop himself from sounding giddily deranged.

  “I promise you,” Sharis said. “I’m exactly the same person.”

  TUURO’S JAIL CELL was painted white and always cold. The air-conditioning never stopped. The bail was high, and no one Tuuro knew could afford it. He thought sometimes the pastor would show up with bail money, but the pastor never came. There were other prisoners in the jail—Tuuro heard them through the walls—but Tuuro was kept apart. He was in a center cell of a row of five cells facing five other cells; in this pod, Tuuro was the sole prisoner. Tuuro lay on his cot under the blanket with both his shirts on and his arms wrapped around himself and dreamed about his daughter, Lanita, and making her nine-minute eggs. Rare thing at age thirty-three for a Melano man from Dayton never to have been in jail. Well, now he was normal.

  The lawyer English visited. He came into the common room and spoke through the bars into Tuuro’s cell. “Good news,” English said. “The genetics cleared you of the rape.”

  Tuuro didn’t move under his blanket.

  “You could thank me,” English said, and Tuuro remembered cradling the boy’s buttocks and rubbing them with oil. The anti-rape, Tuuro thought, and yet at that time the boy had been dead. When he was raped he was alive. My God. Who would do such a thing? That must be sin, Tuuro thought. A thing a person would give anything to erase.

  Tuuro sat up on his cot, pulled the blanket around him like a cape. “Will they let me out, then?” There was a whomping noise, and a fresh blast of cold air shot out from the vent above the door. Outside Tuuro’s cell, Kelso the guard stood at the door to the pod and stared at the seam between the wall and the ceiling.

  “There is a charge.” English looked embarrassed. “Not murder, they don’t have the evidence. Desecration of a corpse. I know”—English took in Tuuro’s stare—“it’s a crazy charge. No one at the office believes it either. You had nothing to do with the dogs! All we can figure is that they’re wanting to flush out Nenonene.” English glanced toward Kelso and gestured to Tuuro to stand and come to the bars. “He was very attached to this grandson,” English whispered. “Supposedly he wants to visit the boy’s grave.”