Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  “The general, Nenonene? He wants to visit Dayton?”

  English smiled tightly, his eyes searching the cell behind Tuuro. Is he looking for a camera? Tuuro thought. But when English spoke his voice resonated with the wistful admiration Tuuro had heard before—but not from a white man—when people mentioned the Alliance general. “He’s not your average person, Nenonene.”

  When English left, Tuuro curled back on his side again, his hands rubbing his arms. The cold air was still blasting. Before English’s visit he’d felt as if he’d been tossed into a big forgotten hole. Now it seemed this hole wasn’t forgotten at all. He glanced up at the vent, wondering whether the cold air was reward or punishment.

  Years ago he had been wanted. He’d been fought over.

  —Darling little boy, that little boy’s not growing up to be a stucko addict like some people.

  —Look at you, all scrawny. Those ribs stick out like corrugation. Why don’t you play outside, boy? Build up some meat on those bones.

  —Reading already! I’ll bring him some good books for him to read.

  —Tuuro, look what Tati found. Almost full!

  —I hate to see a child of intelligence living in a house without words.

  He had never seen it as bliss, his childhood. Quite the opposite. But now he understood the comfort of being wanted.

  some tales of sanity

  AMONG THE MANY rescue stories of the Torah, Chad’s mother’s particular favorite was the tale of Joseph, the boy with the coat-of-many-colors that his father had given him, the youngest son so hated by his brothers that they planned to kill him.

  Of course that wasn’t the good part. That was the nasty part.

  The good part was that the oldest son, Benjamin, persuaded his brothers not to kill Joseph but to abandon him in a pit, then take Joseph’s coat and stain it with animal blood and take it home to their father to show him that Joseph was dead.

  The best part was that Benjamin planned to rescue Joseph from the pit, although when Benjamin went to do this he ran into traders traveling to Egypt who bought Joseph from Benjamin as a slave—a twist of fate that worked out well for everyone in Joseph and Benjamin’s family, because it led to Joseph being accepted in the royal Egyptian court as an interpreter of dreams, which led, over time, to a position of authority for Joseph in the Egyptian government, which led to Joseph eventually identifying, testing, and helping the brothers who had abandoned him years before.

  Benjamin, in Chad’s mother’s opinion, was the stealth hero of the Joseph story. Not that Benjamin was perfect, not that he did everything he hoped for, but he was the brother with a good heart and a plan, and those two things together could lead to greatness.

  IT’S WELL KNOWN—as Chad said in his Dayton course—that in 1913 John Patterson saved Dayton. John was born in the town, and he grew up to head National Cash Register, known locally as NCR or “the Cash.” He started the company in 1885, and was its CEO until he died. By 1890 National Cash Register was the biggest employer in Dayton, and by 1911 it had sold a million cash registers, a huge volume at the time. They were the cash register company. Their products showed up in the paintings of Edward Hopper. In building his company Patterson made innovations that transformed business: clean and well-lit factories, the whole idea of a sales force with “territories,” international sales. For Cash employees he set up night schools, gardens, group exercises, and a credit union. In exchange for this attention to his workers, John Patterson had certain expectations. He could, and did, fire a room full of people in one outburst. An executive who’d disappointed him came back from a trip abroad to find his desk and chair in flames on the company lawn. (That last story was apocryphal, but Chad always used it, admitting its unlikelihood only after the class reacted.)

  Patterson was—no surprise—insanely competitive, and he saw no reason for cash register companies other than his to exist. He condoned certain shenanigans. A defective register might be affixed with a competitor’s name. A merchant who mentioned purchasing another company’s product could be threatened. NCR lawsuits for libel and patent infringement cluttered the courts. All this resulted, in 1913, in an antitrust conviction for John Patterson and the sentence of a year in jail.

  Notice my words, Chad would say: the sentence. Patterson appealed, and five weeks later it started raining. You could almost say that the resultant disaster was the answer to Patterson’s prayers.

  LYING CURLED UP in his cellblock bed, Tuuro thought of Nenonene. Everyone knew the stories. What Nenonene had done, originally, was what most of the world thought impossible: he unified Africa. Oh, not totally, and not without grief and murder, but Africa was now a different place. It was a threat. After all those years of Muslims versus Christians, of famines and epidemics and tribal warfare (and it wasn’t just Africans who noticed that word “tribal,” as if African hatreds were primitive and inescapable), now the African Union was a player on the world’s stage. Of all the African countries, only Egypt was not part of the AU—a reflection of the U.S.-Egypt alliance forged in the early twenties.

  It helped his rise that Nenonene was from Gambia, an out-of-the-way country that threatened no one; that he was educated, the son of a doctor and trained as a doctor himself, although he never practiced; that he was an unevangelizing Christian as likely to quote Mohammed as Jesus or John Wesley; that he was, in the peculiarly un-self-conscious way of some people of faith, comfortable with his own power. It also helped that he rose to leadership under the wing of Mamawe, whose cheesy corruptibility (he had once sold mineral rights to two provinces for American cash, two thousand pounds of pornography, 720 German rifles, and a case of Cointreau) made Nenonene appear all the more virtuous, at the same time Mamawe’s unvarnished power gave Nenonene protection and clout. And Nenonene made his mark. He saw himself, during the siege of Rabat (known by some as the Massacre of Rabat, or the Forty Days), as the embodiment of Pinchas, the priest in Numbers who ensured his place at the top of the rabbinical line by impaling an Israelite and his heathen bride together in their private parts.

  When a colonel had betrayed him, Nenonene had shot the man in the heart himself, Nenonene standing right in front of him, his jaw set and a video camera running. He was from an older time; a warrior, a man as capable of violence as of self-restraint.

  I could talk to him, Tuuro thought. He would understand me. Tuuro saw them in two wingback chairs, half facing each other, coffee in china cups on the table between them. Tuuro would wear his gray suit, Nenonene his full uniform with medals. Tuuro would tell the general about the brown streaks, the cupboard, his grandson who reminded Tuuro of himself.

  “I am lucky you came upon him,” Nenonene would say, in his deep, British-accented voice. “Thank you.”

  An audience, that’s what they called it. An audience with the pope, or with the president. All Tuuro wanted from Nenonene was an audience.

  He spent hours thinking about Cubby, going over all the steps he’d taken with his body; he thought about Nenonene, what it must have been to be the smartest child in a small town in Africa, sensing you were born to a great destiny; he thought about Lanita eating his nine-minute eggs. When he jerked off he closed his eyes and remembered Naomi. Kelso, the guard who brought him his meals and sat reading magazines in the common room, had become a companion: a squat man with bushy eyebrows and a bad back and a wife he described as “not 100 percent.”

  “What do you do in here?” English the lawyer had asked, pulling at the neck of his shirt with his index finger. There was an old-fashioned TV in the common room, but it was broken. “Aren’t you going crazy?”

  Tuuro said nothing. He was supposed to go insane? Insanity was the expected state for a Melano man in jail with no entertainment? His own mind couldn’t be enough? In the middle of a morning on his twenty-fourth day in jail, Tuuro spat at the wall. In five minutes the spit was dried and vanished.

  Tuuro remembered Dakwon, his aunt’s downstairs neighbor in the apartment building, a man in his twen
ties who could walk everywhere on his hands. Down steps, along ledges, on top of a log. Dakwon’s shirt fell around his shoulders, the twitches of skin and muscle in his chest and belly exposed. Tuuro thought of Dakwon’s hands, their sudden grips and accommodations. When someone tossed a ball at him or placed a brick in his path, Dakwon turned his body into a line of concentration. That must be sanity, Tuuro thought: keeping yourself, by attention and adjustments, upside down yet upright in the world. Insanity was nowhere near as compelling. Insanity was the fall.

  Tuuro regretted the explosion of spit that had escaped his mouth. He thought of God and Nelson Mandela. He watched a spider in a corner build its web. He got Kelso to talk about his family. He smiled.

  CHARLES AND DIANA managed to avoid each other for days, despite their being the only two people in the Audubon Center. Diana wandered in the woods, Charles at the edges of the fields. Diana got her water from the pump in the old garden, while Charles got his from the stream and chemically disinfected it. It wasn’t apparent to either of them why the city water had disappeared, but it had, about three weeks before.

  He’d forgotten the spring, Charles realized. The spring wasn’t technically on Audubon land, but it was close, bubbling out of the ground in a grassy cleared concavity at the top of a wooded hill. Charles hadn’t been there since winter. A tiny pool filled with running water and native watercress, feeding a stream that ran off down the hill. The spring was less than two miles away, and Charles could take thermoses to fill. He was sick of chemicals.

  The trail to the spring was overgrown but trampled. Deer path, probably. The day was hot with thousands of mosquitoes, and Charles hurried through the woods up the hill. By the time he reached the clearing he was breathless and sweaty. There, in the center of the pool, sat a naked Diana.

  She had to have heard him. Charles was filled with fury. That Diana had stayed on in his nature center. That she had found his spring. That she had the audacity to sit in it. He stood on the ledge above the pool and waved his thermoses. “Not very sanitary for drinking water now!”

  She didn’t answer, just shook her head and crossed her arms over her breasts and glanced behind her to her clothes, maybe ten feet away on the grass.

  Charles pictured throwing her clothes into a tree. “I thought you got your water from the spigot in the garden.”

  “It’s a peaceful spot here. Was a peaceful spot.”

  Charles banged his thermoses together. “Until you spread your human juices all over it.”

  “My what?”

  Suddenly Charles knew just how he looked and sounded. He thought of the loincloth he had worn during the last three Indian summer celebrations, how he’d imagined it had made him look earthy and appealing. “Getting a little ventilation?” one of the elderly volunteers had asked, making him jump as she flicked the leather with her finger.

  “I’ll just go back,” he said now, backing away. “I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

  Diana looked up, startled. “Didn’t you come here to get water? I’ll get out.”

  “Oh, no. This is your spring.”

  “I can’t say it’s my spring.” Diana stood, one arm across her breasts, the other guarding her crotch. She looked like Venus. “That’s like saying it’s your sun, or my summer.” She backed up to her clothes and, after a second’s hesitation, pulled on her shirt first. “It’s the world’s spring, bubbling out like this,” she went on. “I mean, who can own water?”

  “Artesian,” Charles said. “Pushed out of the top of the aquifer.” Using, as he often did, a bit of knowledge as conversation.

  They made love on the grass, and when they were done Charles too took his clothes off, and then they stretched out on their bellies and lay—as Charles pointed out—like two happy turtles basking on a shore.

  CHAD BURROWED THROUGH the clothes in his chest of drawers. He had no hope of wearing his old pants, but there was a shirt from high school he could still button, barely. He turned to the side and pulled his gut in and looked at himself in the mirror. Not bad. His hair was thinning but not gray. The creases his father had had around his mouth were only fine lines on him.

  “What are you doing?” Sharis was standing at the bedroom door. “I thought we could look up my family,” she said, waving something in her hand. Chad turned toward her, confused and embarrassed, then realized what she was holding.

  The Triple-A maps of old Ohio had taken on the glow of artifacts, kept in drawers to be carefully unfolded, or preserved between sheets of plastic and hung on walls. Plain City, Van Wert, Bellevue: erased, eradicated, absent. The new maps had no town names at all in the Grid section, only a vast green space, crossed only by the superhighways, labeled “The Heartland Grid.” Some of the maps bore agricultural symbols—ears of corn, sheaves of wheat. There was such a sameness to the maps these days, Chad thought, as if even their designers had become cautious. Yet perhaps in every era there was sameness, so ubiquitous that no one even noticed.

  “Be careful,” Chad said, because Sharis’s unfolding the map seemed dangerously quick and young to him.

  Sharis sighed and spread the map out on the bed. “There,” she said, pointing. “My mother’s parents were from Greenville. Lloyd and Jessica Henson.”

  There was a museum in Indianapolis called the Heartland Heritage Museum. It was filled with school board notes and scenic postcards and sections of gates from large houses and other flotsam that had been, in the confusion and intensity of Grid Day, retrieved. The museum, privately funded, had a warehouse in Indiana close to the Ohio River. Few people were aware of this, but there had been a fire at the warehouse, and the artifacts of northwest Indiana were gone.

  Sharis had never mentioned her mother’s parents. Since the boys had been born it was as if her life before had never existed. Chad said, “Are your mother’s parents still living?”

  “Dead. But my mother had a big sister. Her name was Aunt Margie and she lived …” Sharis bent over the map, brow wrinkling “… here. Defiance.”

  He said, “You think your aunt could still be alive?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Was she married? Did she have children?”

  “I had a cousin. Rachel. She was two years older than me. They lived in town. I don’t think they’re effs now.”

  What was Rachel like? Chad wanted to ask. Did you like her? Did you spend Christmases together? But all those questions seemed too intimate. He blinked. “What about your dad’s side?”

  “His parents were divorced. I don’t think I ever met his dad. His mom used to live with us. Meemaw.”

  Chad’s mouth went dry. “Your grandmother lived with you? Was she with you when … ?” He couldn’t bring himself to finish.

  There had been a fairly concerted effort by the government to promote the Grid transplants to the general U.S. public as heroes (giving up their homes for the common good), but the more vocal transplants tried to grab the microphone with complaints, and after a few years the government’s attitude became benignly forgetful.

  “Oh, no,” Sharis said, her eyes still roving the map. “She had another son besides my father, and he got killed in a motorcycle crash, and she had his photo of him beside her bed with a cross next to it, and when my father got all crazy-religious he said his brother’s photo was Meemaw’s idol. He wanted her to burn it. So she left.”

  Chad swallowed. “Could your grandmother still be alive?”

  “I doubt it. She was already an oldie.” Sharis’s gaze returned to the map. “And I don’t see where she lived. It wasn’t far from us. In Beulah.”

  But they couldn’t find a Beulah. “Belle Center?” Chad suggested. “Botkins?”

  There were only two and half million transplants, a drop in the American bucket. The Ohio transplants (that was the word that was used, not “refugees”) were settled largely in the Dayton/Cincinnati area (population over six million) or in southeastern Ohio, which was technically part of Appalachia and too hilly and rocky for farming. The In
diana transplants had a new city built for them in the karst country between Indianapolis and the Ohio River. All the transplants got government pensions and housing allowances. “Maria Stein?” Chad, still searching the map, asked Sharis. “Ada?”

  Arguing during a meal: there was a weighted moment. Didn’t so-and-so remember fourteen, fifteen years ago before the Grid, when breakfast cereal cost three times what it did now and there was a shortage of corn syrup to make candy? Even Sharis, who was young and healthy, had been too underweight to have periods when they first married. Conceiving Howard had taken some time. But conceiving Leon was effortless. Effortless! It was fun! The way it should be. How could someone disagree with food? Right there on people’s plates was Chad’s argument.

  “Bellefontaine,” Chad said. “That sounds like Beulah.” He waited a moment, thinking maybe Sharis hadn’t heard him. “Bellefontaine?” he said again.

  She was crying. Chad scooped her up and sat them both down on the bed. He stroked her hair and said that he was sorry. In an odd way, he thought, these were his happiest moments.

  “WHAT ARE YOU trying to do, exactly?” Kelso the guard asked, looking at Tuuro wedged upside down in his cell.

  Tuuro told him about Dakwon walking on his hands.

  “I could stand on my head once,” Kelso said. “When I was about twelve. Come on, I’ll unlock you and you can practice out here.”

  They shoved the chairs and table and TV aside in the common room, leaving a bare patch of wall against which Tuuro could lean.

  “I’ll hold your ankles,” Kelso said.

  Fortunately, Kelso caught Tuuro before he crashed. “Try it again,” Kelso said.