Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  All the intentional villages had numbers. Village 28 people had heard about: it was the processing center for perch and walleye from Lake Erie. “What number’s that?” she called to Eduardo, pointing to the buildings.

  Eduardo frowned and turned off the engine. The whine of an insect became audible. “Oh,” he nodded when she repeated her question. “Village 104. They got a school there. We’re going to 42.” He pointed east.

  In the middle distance a reaper crossed a field of wheat, shooting out a spray of chaff. If Lila strained her ears she could possibly hear it. Other than that there was no human sound or motion. The fields of wheat had a teeming look. A fly landed on Lila’s shoulder.

  “How many kids in the school?” Lila called, unwilling to leave her spot in the road. A bead of sweat ran down her forehead and stopped at her eyebrow.

  Eduardo climbed out of the truck and approached her. “Thirty? They got two teachers, I know that.”

  How did they get teachers? Lila wondered if they advertised on the media. No one really had contact with the effs: rumors said they were clannish, suspicious. They married only each other. They rejected embryonic preselection. The Grid had its own message and info system, and data from outside were blocked. Family members that had been removed during the Gridding could send perc messages to the family members who stayed to become Gridians, but in return the outsiders got rare, sporadic answers, usually around holidays. The religion of the Gridians might have changed. There were stories of churches with stalks of wheat on the altar and roasted soybeans in place of communion wafers. “What are they like?” A friend of Lila’s had asked a waitress once in Florida, where the effs took their group vacation. “They’re people,” the waitress had answered. Then, unburdening herself (and the Florida workers, Lila’s friend pointed out, surely signed confidentiality agreements and were monitored): “They dress like bumpkins, and they don’t tip diddly.”

  “Where do you live?” Lila asked Eduardo, glancing at his clothes. A buttoned shirt, jeans, work boots: he looked well-dressed enough to her, but she’d never had much sense of fashion.

  “Twenty-nine. Nice place. Good people. We call it Gayville.”

  It surprised Lila enough to hear Eduardo’s town had an actual name and surprised her more to hear what the name was. She wondered what things about her the youngie in Columbus had read on the computer, what information had been passed on. Suddenly she wondered why Eduardo had been sent to guide her, if he … “Why Gayville?” she burst out, regretting her question right off. She shouldn’t ask questions. They might kick her out.

  Eduardo shrugged. “It’s always been called that.”

  As if the origins of the name had been lost in time. The Grid was only thirteen years old, and it had taken a good year, Lila had heard, for the villages to be established. Until they were built, the effs lived in clusters of trailers.

  “Do you have a mayor?”

  Eduardo laughed. “There’re only three hundred and six of us. We don’t need a boss.”

  “Are you married to a woman?”

  “Tamara.”

  “Kids?”

  “We have three.” He reached for his pocket. “Want to see them?”

  “Cute,” Lila said, inspecting the photo. Like normal kids, she thought. Everyone in the country distrusted, even feared, the effs: people who’d agreed to stay when towns they’d lived in or near were destroyed; people who seemed to thrive in communal isolation; people who apparently had no desire to escape the life their government had planned for them. Their staying on the Grid was like a collective back turned upon what people had taken to calling Free America.

  She got back in the truck and Eduardo drove on, a series of small hillocks breaking the cornfields around them, surrounding a very round hill that reminded Lila of something. She twisted her neck to look back at it, a mound like a dromedary hump against the sky, and then she remembered the Indian mound near Lancaster, her hometown. That was when it hit her: this hill, like the Indian mound, was a burial hill of sorts: in it lay the remains of a town.

  Bombed, then bulldozed. A new style of B-and-B.

  Lila had never really liked this part of Ohio. Too flat, boring, windy. Yet suddenly she was overwhelmed with recollections of things that were gone: the stands of trees lofty as mesas, dark entrances like caverns at their base. Propane tanks tethered like dogs beside small houses. Farmhouses with green-black roofs and a baffling array of vents: square pillows, spouts, chef’s hats. Cows nosing their way across the fields. Gone, all gone. And that was forgetting the towns.

  She turned her face to the window, and Eduardo must have picked up some distress in her posture, because he seemed to be driving faster. The fields around them went to wheat and wheat, then corn on one side and wheat on the other, then corn and corn and corn. Lila found to her surprise that she was blinking back tears.

  “Mile per mile, America’s most wanted,” Eduardo announced, repeating a slogan. He slammed on his brakes and Lila was thrown forward. “Almost missed the turn. Sorry.” They squealed to the right, onto a road that looked exactly like their first one.

  And, a few miles later, he stole a look her way: “Were you from around here?”

  “From Ohio, but not Grid Ohio. I was born in Lancaster.” A town that still existed.

  Eduardo twisted his mouth in a considering way. “Southeast of Columbus?”

  Lila was surprised he knew.

  “Pretty down there. Hilly,” Eduardo said. He hesitated, then hazarded a confession: “I like hills.”

  “Me too.” Lila thought of the mounds behind them. “But not your kind of hills.” She glanced at Eduardo to see if he realized she knew. Best place on earth. Everyone loves it. Like hell.

  His eyes stayed on the road. New hillocks appeared to the north, far away. “It’s good here,” Eduardo said after a pause. “Wait until night.”

  They rode for an hour, skirting distant villages, and far away Lila spotted a farmhouse, which as they got closer looked exactly the way it should—two stories, painted white wood, wrap-around front porch, side door with a concrete stoop. A vision from her childhood, the old Ohio back in the nineties and aughts. A free-standing garage stood in the back. The mailbox was spotted like a Jersey cow. All that was missing was the barn with peeling red paint.

  “Home, home on the Grid,” Eduardo said, half-singing. He was from the hill country of Texas, he told her, and grew up speaking Spanish. He was one of the rare people accepted on the Grid as a volunteer. They pulled into the crushed stone driveway. “This is the guesthouse,” Eduardo said. He pointed at an upstairs window. “You’ll sleep there.”

  White curtains tied open with sashes marked the room that was surely the kitchen. A gray striped cat sat on the stoop in front of the side door. He eyed them warily, then streaked off as Eduardo opened his truck door. This is spooky, Lila thought. This is worse than Disney Universe.

  A woman was already coming out the side screen door as Eduardo and Lila approached. She was forty or forty-five, wiry, short haired, wearing a simple white shirt and khaki slacks and a bangle on her arm. She wasn’t unattractive, but her facial features and expressions seemed, like her body, pared down, as if she’d been constructed for efficiency. “Allyssa Banks,” she said, holding out her hand to Lila. “Welcome to the Grid.”

  Allyssa and Eduardo chatted in the driveway for a few minutes—about weather and some new storage system for grain—and Eduardo got back in his truck and drove off. Lila realized it had been years since she’d heard the sound of pebbles under tires.

  “Come on in,” Allyssa said.

  The kitchen floor was linoleum patterned to look like bricks. The lighting fixture was a frosted square of glass tucked up at the corners like a hankie. The refrigerator was a large white rectangle that hummed. “Incredible,” Lila said. “Just like I remember.”

  “Wait until you see one of the villages,” Allyssa said. “They’re real, too. Tomorrow we’ll go over to 88 for breakfast and a tour. I�
�ll orient you this evening. Your room’s upstairs.”

  They passed through a small dining room, its table covered with a white plastic lace overlay on top of a green tablecloth. In the living room sat a long curved sofa, an old-fashioned glass-screened TV, a Stratolounger, and two plastic deck chairs. A lamp with shells pressed into its base stood on an oak coffee table. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, all with double beds, and one narrow bathroom. Electric fans were fitted in the front two windows.

  “Your choice,” the woman said. “If you pick the room without the fan I’ll move it.”

  Lila picked the room at the back, farthest from the road.

  “My room’s off the kitchen,” Allyssa said. “You can clean up and I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  “Best food in the world,” Allyssa said at dinner, setting Lila’s plate in front of her. People certainly are prideful here, Lila thought, but as she ate she thought Allyssa might be right. Soy loaf, mashed potatoes, fresh green beans with mushrooms, and lettuce and tomato with Thousand Island dressing. “We grow the green beans and potatoes at Plant City,” Allyssa said. Where’s Plant City? Lila wanted to ask, but something about Allyssa discouraged questions. She did request seconds on her food, thinking Allyssa could only take this as a compliment. She wondered how Allyssa stayed so thin. Knowing Lila was in water, Allyssa spent the dinner talking with clear knowledge about the Grid’s average rainfall, irrigation system, and drainage, sounding, Lila thought, like some educational tape.

  “I’ve never seen so much corn,” Lila said at one point.

  “That’s just around here,” Allyssa said. “Wheat and soy are the major Grid crops.”

  “How long have you been here?” Lila asked during dessert, peaches on soy ice cream, a treat Allyssa didn’t partake of.

  “Me? Personally? Almost fourteen years.”

  “Since the beginning?” Lila said in surprise, and this question seemed to release a switch inside Allyssa, because suddenly she started to talk like a real person.

  There were no other Grid visitors tonight—a relief, Allyssa said. The Consort people had been here three weeks ago and refused to share beds: they needed cots in all three bedrooms. Nothing was right for them. They wanted peas instead of cabbage, decaf coffee, air-conditioning. As if this was a hotel instead of someone’s home. “So you do all the cooking?” Lila asked. “Clean people’s rooms?” She was having a hard time figuring his woman out.

  “I do everything,” Allyssa said, her low-pitched voice almost purring.

  Lila felt a tug of wistfulness. Lila had said things like that, once. She asked, “If you’ve been here fourteen years, were you in on the planning stage?”

  “Of the Grid?” Allyssa gave Lila a respectful look. People didn’t wonder about her, Lila realized. They took her as a simple hostess. “I was at an experimental farm in Australia called Lindisfarne.” Not only Allyssa’s voice, but her whole body was relaxing; she reached with her bangled arm to scratch the cat under the table. When Lila caught her breath, Allyssa looked up sharply. “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Vaguely,” Lila said. “Didn’t they develop a good desalination system?” Allyssa nodded vigorously, and Lila had the sensation she had just avoided a landmine. She knew the desalination system had been renowned, but that wasn’t why Lila remembered the farm’s name. Something odd had happened at Lindisfarne, some scandal or crime, but Lila couldn’t quite remember what.

  “The government people who were interested in maximal production came to us—it was during the Short Times—and asked us to help plan an agro area. It only took us six weeks to scout possible locations, and another six months to plan. We worked day and night, studying data from all over the U.S., picking the site, planning the crops. I came over here in ’32 with the study group. Basically, we thought it up, and then the government took care of the logistics.”

  Bigger than the Hoover Dam, people said. A more ambitious project than the Yangtze flooding. As world-changing as the Panama Canal, as the A-bomb, as the Weather Station. And here Lila sat in the center of it with one of its founders, in a farmhouse designed to look innocuous. The enormity of it made Lila dizzy. Back in Dayton she was being marginalized; she might never sit talking to power again.

  “Are there other people here from Lindisfarne?”

  Allyssa frowned and counted mentally a moment. “Six others.” Very serious, Lila thought. And, oddly, all one color: her eyebrows and skin and hair were medium beige, broken only by a sprinkling of freckles on her nose. Born in Washington State, she’d said, although her mother was originally from Ireland. “I met my husband at Lindisfarne,” Allyssa said.

  “He’s one of the six?”

  “No. He lives in Paris.”

  “France?” Allyssa flashed a rare smile, and Lila shook her head in surprise. Almost impossible to imagine a man in Paris married to a woman living here. Outside, the crickets had started. “Is he French?”

  “American,” Allyssa said. “He visits every couple of months.”

  “Do you have children?”

  A tiny wince, then Allyssa waved her hand toward the window. “This is a magical place. How could a child compete?”

  Lila felt a chill. She was sitting with a true believer. She saw in her what Lila had once possessed: excitement, faith, fervor. Yet Lila had never been selfless. She’d wanted game tickets, messages from the vice president, children. She’d never spoken of Dayton as magical. In the spectrum of social believing, this woman was way beyond her.

  IMAGINE (THIS IS Chad’s example) you are sitting with a friend on a hillside, watching the buzzards. “Look at the way the tips of their wings bend,” your friend says.

  You watch a minute. “So?”

  “It helps steady them in the air.” Your friend gets out a paper and pencil.

  “Interesting,” you say, not really meaning it.

  Your friend (his name is Wilbur) is frowning, drawing.

  Afflicted. It is not too strong a word.

  LILA SAT IN the Stratolounger, Allyssa in the deck chair. They talked for hours.

  A social structure modeled on the Amish, leavened by some of Janet Hailey’s ideas about pioneer family resilience and data from the long-term space flights.

  An Israeli-German defense system at the northern border.

  Town architecture done by Kyoto Masuki, based on photographs of farmhouses and towns from the American 1950s, a famously stable era.

  Old-time computers and phones in centralized, communal locations. No percs.

  Two-parent families.

  Grandparent-centered, communal child care.

  Persuasion, not coercion.

  The likelihood of a “farmer’s gene.”

  Small schools with low teacher-student ratios and specially trained teachers.

  A theologian of sorts, Richard Osbourne, living in Village 57.

  Pride in their products, their lifestyle, their Gridian way of life.

  Gridian sports.

  Lila suddenly remembered why Lindisfarne was famous. They’d had a zero population growth policy, and their leader (Germant? Germantz? he was a home-schooled product from somewhere in the Midwest, patchily brilliant, charismatic, handsome, the usual commune-leader combination) developed a policy of forced abortions. There’d been a video, Lila remembered—a screaming and thrashing woman being carried through a clinic’s doors.

  “What about birth control?” She blurted.

  Allyssa hesitated. “We have excellent medical care. Everything’s up-to-date. There’s a nurse-doctor at Village 88, where we’re having breakfast. I’ll introduce you.”

  “But what about population size? Do you try to limit that at all?”

  “Gridians are very responsible,” Allyssa said. “This life is paradise to them. I really think part of the Grid’s genius was its self-selection, and Gridians have farming in their blood. To be able to do it, year after year, to see and eat the fruits of their labors … They have no desire to change.”

 
“But what about accidents? Don’t people ever have accidents?”

  “Accidental children? Unlikely.” Allyssa rapped the arm of her deck chair. “Come on. Let’s go outside.”

  They walked silently across the grass into the fields, the cat darting between them, the moon glowing and elliptical like a slightly worn coin. Eduardo was right, it was a different thing at night, with the crickets and the rustling corn, water trickling from the irrigation tubes at their feet and the whole sensible world a wide and seemingly endless expanse of fertile earth. Lila felt the dome of heaven above her, like the first person in centuries to believe in a flat earth. But everyone who lived on the Grid must feel this. In the kitchen of the guesthouse hung the famous satellite picture of ’35: the United States a patchwork of brown, green-brown, gray, and beige, the Grid in its right center glowing like a great rectangular emerald. Grid green. That green was a declaration: an inarguable abundance, a wet slap in the face to those who said it couldn’t—or shouldn’t—be done. It was done. It worked. People ate, people lived. The Gridians lived their insular, useful life, so content you never heard of anyone escaping it. And now the rest of the world—Lila thought of the occupiers of Cleveland, the gray- and mud-faced soldiers with their shabby uniforms and ill-fitting hats—wanted the Grid too. She couldn’t blame them.

  Lila turned back toward the guesthouse, her heart suddenly hard. The Suds and the Afros and the Euros would never get this. Never.

  “See?” Allyssa smiled.

  always a story

  THERE’S ALWAYS A STORY, Chad liked to tell his students: that’s how the news media work. And a proper story has a beginning, middle, and end. There may be epilogues and prologues (there usually are); someone in the future may pop up with a reinterpretation; one story may segue into another. But there’s always a story. In essence the news media couldn’t be more conservative. Their thought is highly traditional, like human thought, and it hasn’t changed in the two hundred and fifty-plus years of Dayton’s history.