TUESDAY
TUESDAY
(Damian)
When President Paxton woke, his first thought was about his koi.
He’d first encountered them years ago, during a tea break at a genetic pathology conference in Kyoto. He had been following the movements of a plain-looking one, almost shit-colored, alongside a path of mossy stones, when he heard the voice of a fellow surgeon behind him. No matter how carefully a breeder selects the parents for desired characteristics, this doctor said, the resulting fry, thousands in a single spawning, will be of varied color and markings, and unlike the offspring of champion-grade cattle or purebred dogs, the majority of them will not be acceptable as nishikigoi. Some may even be genetically defective. The careful breeder will cull these objectionable offspring at key stages of development according to closely guarded techniques. The koi Paxton was following, the doctor said, was a chagoi, the “tea-colored”, which can range from hazel to copper to bronze, and is famous for its calm, friendly personality and large size (like me, Paxton remembered thinking). It is prized as an indicator of good fortune.
Although people tended to focus on Paxton’s more obvious tastes – tits and Taps, pomp and debauchery – he had always been equally excited by strength in unlikely packages. He had grown up in South Africa, and on safaris with his father’s out of town guests, he asked the guides questions about the termite mounds, admired the guts of a bird called the lilac-breasted roller, knew when to bet against the lion on the patience and cunning of the tiny jackal.
He opened his eyes now in the pure black darkness of his bedroom. One of the biggest health risks to koi is KHV, the koi herpes virus, for which no treatment exists. The first case of KHV was reported just before the turn of the century. It is a DNA-based virus, and once detected, only biosecurity measures such as prompt isolation and disinfection of tanks can prevent the spread, but even this is often not enough. Most infected fish will die within forty-eight hours of exposure. Years ago, a clever doctor at Hebrew University had developed a vaccine. KV3 is injected into the carp when they’re less than a year old, and although Israel was currently the only country that vaccinated its koi, Paxton was careful. And resourceful. And planful. Before the pandemics – he’d had a pond already back then, a hotshot surgeon, consultant to the biotech houses and the Secretary of Defense, Rapid City’s most eligible – he had wangled a stock of KV3 from Israel.
And yet.
Three weeks ago, in Residence D, his farthest east, a 1997 French chateau in a development outside Fargo, he had arrived with his entourage (while an identical entourage arrived with a similar-looking man at Residences A and B), and he had walked into the palace greeted by staff members with the enthusiastic affection that was the byproduct of the perks with which he paid them. He could see on their faces that they could tell it was really him (his doubles were fine from a distance, but up close, who were they kidding?), but he knew it didn’t matter. There had been no leaks about his whereabouts ever. And why would there be? Each of them had children at a Rewards Resort (he only ever hired parents), and they knew that any attacks on his life could result in their immediate evaluation. He had accepted the glass of neat tequila, rejected the offer of lunch, and went straight to the pool room.
The indoor pool at Residence D had been drained, and its surface pressure-washed and recoated for use as a pond, but the room itself still smelled faintly of chlorine, and in it, President Paxton felt he could hear the echo of the children of a fracking magnate splashing and squealing with joy, even though now all was quiet. The room was walled in by glass overlooking what was once a golf course, and outside each window was a guard with his back discreetly turned.
Paxton had been looking for the chagoi, the tea-colored koi, his favorite, and it didn’t take him long to pick it out in the sea of more brightly colored fish. (He appreciated subtlety in everything but geopolitics and women.) Even from a distance, the chagoi’s eyes had looked sunken, and when he swam by, turning one delicate pectoral fin up to the ceiling lights, its gills opened and President Paxton saw it: a little patch of mottled white, the first trace of blood, the single blister that meant soon he would be dead.
A frenzy of activity had followed. The fish had been removed and isolated, and then, because President Paxton could not bear to see him swimming in a plastic bucket, released into his own bathtub upstairs, a delightfully tasteless hexagonal thing with gold faucets shaped like dolphins where Paxton soaked with pairs of dancers and nurses screened by his guards. The chagoi circled dolefully there, ever slower, until it died the next morning.
But that had been three weeks ago (he told himself as he struggled out of sleep in the blackness). That fish was dead, and today Paxton was not in Residence D. Sometimes (only for a second) he could not remember which safe house he was in when he woke. He had steel security shutters on the windows of his bedroom in each home, and in addition to being impenetrable by bullets and spies, they were very dark. He was in total darkness when he opened his eyes, and after hours of tossing in liquored dreams each night, his last four hours were a slumber as deep as a burial. He woke with a cottony feeling of dislocation and disorientation, and here was how he remembered: by the smell. His sense of smell was unusually keen, like a lion’s on the savannah. Residence A (that was where he was now, he was sure of it) was a mock castle built by a rancher who had boasted of eating a T-bone steak with every meal. It smelled like meat.
The koi in Residence D were miles from this meat-scented bedroom (he told himself), but they were all tended by the same man, a middle-aged Native American in flip-flops and Hawaiian shirts named Morris Has No Horse, and the disease can be spread through contact alone, not just with the fish itself, but even with the water in which it swam. It enters susceptible fish through the skin, and through the gills, and exposed fish may become infected and quickly die, or they may survive the exposure undetected and become carriers themselves, with no symptoms to betray them. The upshot was this. Has No Horse could have carried the disease to any one of his koi. Even Paxton himself (the fish were so beautiful and wanted nothing from him; sometimes he couldn’t resist reaching out to touch them; he fed them by hand and they did recognize him; any fool could see that) – even Paxton himself could have spread the disease among them.
He rose from his bed in the utter blackness. He found if he resisted opening the shades right away, he had a few moments alone, moments before the people he charged with protecting him knew he was awake, and he went into the bathroom and flipped the light switch. The light helped. The worries about his koi receded. Foolish. Children’s fears. A trick of the darkness. Here was his bathroom (the faucet handles were not real gold, but they were as gold as any construction in South Dakota had ever gotten), and the mirror reminded him of the truth. Look at him. He was strong and handsome. That was part of what had landed him here, and let’s face it, whatever people said, looks did matter. If you grew up strong and handsome, people treated you better along the way, and that did make you happier, and so you became over time the person they assumed you had been all along. Easier, more fun, more confident. More decisive. And that, my friends, my fellow Dakotans, was what people needed when the shit hit the fan. They didn’t need a political scientist or an Ivy League lawyer, they needed a charmer and a war-time consiglieri, and in this case a gloved-up, twelve-procedures-a-week surgeon who understood what the fuck was happening, and lucky them, he was the full package. Americans had made fun of this or that potent potentate, but then Paxton had come along and the truth had tumbled out of the Dakotan voters, a truth only a once-in-a-century matchup of intense fear and natural leadership can expose. The jig was up. Self-love is the source of certainty, and to the pissed-off and the panic-stricken, certainty is irresistible.
President Paxton brushed his teeth and rinsed with a mouthwash he preferred, which the Rewards staff bundled into trades barged from France in exchange for oil (that smokeshow Liv Lockhart never let him down). His koi would be fine. He had instructed Has No Horse to drain each pond and isolate each koi in a separate bucket for one week. (The incubation period for KHV was two days). He had confirmed that he had done so with photos couriered to him by a runner. Photos taken from all twenty-four buckets at each location – a trace of the flooring in each revealing that they were indeed separate: schmancy pavers at Residence B… simulated pond stones at Residence C… Photos that could not have been faked because two staff members (staff members whose children who were being lavishly tutored and eating California shrimp at a Rewards Resort, but who could, at any moment, be assigned for self-improvement) stood by holding a newspaper in each one. In the last week, the ponds had been drained, disinfected, exposed to ultraviolet light, and refilled. These fish could not have KHV. He had thought of everything.
He stepped out into the hallway, and the guard on duty there blinked with surprise. “Are you all right, Mr. President?”
“Look at me,” President Paxton said. He thumbed the lapels of his robe. It had been custom-made for him at Turnbull and Asser in London, which had been popular with just enough lucky-immune-card moguls and rulers of island nations to stay afloat after the pandemics. It was jacquard silk, patterned with masks and roses, and just a size too small, which accentuated his pecs. “How do I look to you?”
“You look great, sir, I just meant—“
“Last night I had three different women in my bed. And that happens to me every night of the week. You can stop asking me how I am in the morning.”
The kid couldn’t help smiling. (See there?) “I just… I meant can I help you with something? I thought you might need something. It’s very early.”
On a pedestal beside him steamed a samovar of coffee (they brought a new one every hour), but the newspaper was still yesterday’s (5 Days To Go! Make Them Your Best!).
“What time is it?”
“It’s only four o’clock.”
President Paxton was surprised, but he didn’t show it. This was another thing that made people trust him. He pretended at all times to know exactly what he was doing. People claimed to want honesty and authenticity in a leader, but this was horseshit. They were fooling themselves about this as well. Even Churchill knew the power of lying. (And how much better would the little guy have done if he hadn’t been so ugly?) A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on, he’d said.
“Fantastic. Just what I was shooting for.” He gave the footman a playful shove. “You know what they say?”
“No, sir.”
“There’ll be plenty of time to rest when you’re six feet under.”
He strode down the hall, and the footman followed, and as they padded along the carpet, the footman in his polished jackboots, and Paxton in his bare feet, Paxton kept up a swaggering patter of jokes and stories, and the footman kept trying and failing to interrupt with midnight bulletins from his candy-ass Chief of Staff. (A missing shipment of lab monkeys. A rash of minefield crossings. You had to be a candy-ass to take a job where all you did was hand off bad news.) But Paxton just kept going with his jokes and stories. Why did they call Lincoln “Honest Abe”? Why did George Washington have trouble sleeping? The time – mid-pandemic! part of the Dakotan lore now – that Paxton beat POTUS in a game of online Go. The time this footman – yes, you – had stood at the end of the hall to warn off any oncoming staff members while Paxton tested a blow gun given to him by the top banana of some muddy bug-on-its-back of a country. “It nearly scalped you!”
“An honor, sir.”
“Damn lucky you’re so spry. You were like a mongoose dodging a cobra.”
When they got to the door of the indoor pool, the footman paused. Paxton liked to go in alone. The doors were frosted glass, and etched with a descending eagle pattern Paxton didn’t like. Maybe he’d change that too. That’s what he was thinking when he pushed open the doors and saw that every one of the koi in his swimming pool was dead.
(Enrique)
For a split second before he was fully awake, Enrique still felt peaceful.
Every night when he got home from work, Lydia turned the stereo up loud and called him an imbecile. A pushover. A donkey for taking this job. It went on from there. Selfish. Greedy. Gullible. All to the tune of the Christmas music that was all they could get on the radio now, a nice break from the propaganda tracks but still annoying. Any music now felt like a soundtrack for her insults. Even when they went to one of the parties and she dressed up and took his arm and told people (lowlifes, she’d say later) how lucky they were to work for the president, the music in the background was a reminder of these rants of hers at home.
Funny, because when he first took the job, she didn’t congratulate him or even thank him, but she did lord it over her friends. They had been living in a low-rise in Dickinson, and he was working in a hospital cafeteria, and she didn’t say outright she thought he was smart for taking it, but she did start walking around the building giving stuff away just so she could make her friends green. “Take my toaster, take this recliner. My husband took a job cooking for the president. The villas at the Rewards Resort are all furnished so I won’t need it.” Not “Enrique figured out how to take care of our little Natalia,” just rich-soap-opera-lady airs about her stereo and her manicures and her stove. She had been giving manicures to other women in the complex for money, and now, she said, people would give them to her. A few women asked her for her kit. They could have used it to help take care of their own kids, but would Lydia give that away? No, she said, that she was keeping. Sentimental, she told them, but Lydia didn’t have a sentimental hair on her head. She was going to take it out now and then and think about how far she’d come, Enrique figured, and that’s just what she did. Kept it on display in a corner of their bedroom next to a picture of her at one of those Mt. Rushmore parties standing up on a pedestal in a dress crusted with crystals in front of the flag. She had asked Enrique to stand aside so she could take one alone.
But after the first few weeks, the fact that she could never leave began to chafe at her. “You get to leave each day, you don’t know what it’s like. You sold me into prison for a chance to hang out in a palace all day.” And the hell of it was, he could understand what she hated about that, being trapped like that, but wasn’t it worth it? He hated working for the President, hated the President himself, but his hatred was like some never-used household poison he kept safely sealed and forgotten at the back of a high shelf. Their baby girl was getting better medical care here than she ever could in a trailer or a drugstay. And look at Lydia! She was wearing these shiny dresses and her nails were a different color every day. And she did get to come out for the parties.
It was okay with Enrique. Their condo had a room on the corner so the light came in all day on his baby girl’s bed when they kept her there on weekends, and on weekdays they moved her to the hospital building where she could be tended by nurses gentler than Lydia had ever been. He liked the setup; and, for different reasons, so did Lydia.
Enrique always stopped at the hospital first on his way home from work, and that was what he had done last night. There she was, in a coma now, but they said they had seen a few others go through a pattern like this and come out of it. He felt peaceful looking at her. Certain. On track. It was almost like – it felt bad to say it, but it was true -- it was almost like the Rewards Spa staff had replaced his wife and now Lydia was just there, but good or bad she couldn’t really affect Natalia anymore. She didn’t matter.
And after Lydia’s nightly tirades were over, Enrique could read. He liked mystery novels, old Agatha Christies and Mickey Spillanes he found shelved at the Rewards Store stickered-over with the shimmering can-can-leg hologram that proved they were okay. When he took out a book, did Lydia think he was smart? No, she still called him a dullard. But he could tune her out. That mix of Christmas carols and her nagging was almost like white noise, and he skidded away in his head on the blend of violence and order that marked each book. A murder, a series of clues for him to puzzle over, a solution. Over and over again like a recipe. Like chopping. And as he drifted off to sleep, the mysteries in his books mixed with the mysteries of his own life. Why was Natalia sick? And why had he married a vain and selfish woman? Why? Enrique couldn’t remember.
(Liv)
When she set her son’s breakfast on the table, he stared at it blankly, as if he were confused. There was nothing confusing about it. It was muffins (baked fresh by a pastry chef) and mini quiches (dozens of them), and she had heated them up in a brand new toaster oven she had picked up at the Rewards Store last Wednesday. There were also oranges (imported from Florida), which were his favorite once upon a time, and she had sliced them to the size he used to like, bright smiles of rind he’d bitten clean and rushed beneath his lips to surprise her. Now a biography of Sitting Bull lay open on the table between them.
“Did Paxton say anything ridiculous on TV yesterday?” She used to be able to engage him at this angle. The absurdity of what the president was doing had been something they agreed on, and it had the added benefit of highlighting the one indisputable freedom this house allowed him. He hadn’t wanted to move, (of course he hadn’t), but at least they had no neighbors and they knew the house hadn’t been bugged. In here they could say whatever they wanted. As often as possible, she tried to call attention to this by making fun of the truths, or reciting lines from movies you could be sent to a self-improvement center for discussing, but lately he just went on staring at her mini quiches. His hair was greasy, but she had stopped mentioning showers. It was hard to argue they were important when he never left the house, and in the few cases she had pushed him, he had pointed out that when he was in the shower he couldn’t hear the dogs bark. He could shower when she was at home, she had said; she could listen for the dogs. But he said what if he was in the shower when they started? She would have to come up and get him, and he would have to get out and run downstairs, leaving a trail of wet footprints that could give them away. Safer to do a washrag and soap thing at the laundry sink downstairs where he was closer to the hatch.
She turned to the window to blow her nose (white flag of tissue from box on the sill; sting of pressure on skin; crumpled tissue to fist, behind door, beneath sink). It was still dark outside. A dog at the end of its tether had stalked a blue arc the size of a crop circle in the moonlit snow.
When she faced him again he was looking back at his book. A grainy black-and-white photo of Sitting Bull’s headstone broke up the type.
“I washed my hands before I prepped them, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He turned a page.
“And there are plenty more if you’d rather heat them up yourself.”
She doubted he was even really reading.
“They’re just quiches, Will. Delicious quiches. Made of ingredients so nutritious people fill their swag bags with them and take them home to their children. Quiches that people line up for even when the entertainment comes out. Nice people. Not just cabinet members and self-improvement coaches. Nurses who stick with it to help sick people, and firemen who run into burning buildings to rescue little dogs.”
He took a fistful of peanuts from a bowl on the table and popped them in his mouth. She reminded herself that sullenness and resentment of parental authority were part of every adolescent experience. Right now, at breakfast tables all over free America, kids just like Will were giving their parents the silent treatment.
She took a steadying look around the room. Unfinished plank walls. Drop cloths weighted by paint cans she’d never open, shrouding furniture they’d never use. Fruit and canapés spilling from gift bags. A glimpse of sequins and fringe in a spare room so full of props and party favors, she couldn’t even close the door. She didn’t understand why people avoided looking at the things they hated. It was a waste of a good resource.
She turned her back on him and ate her own breakfast: king crab legs standing at the kitchen counter. The caterers split them lengthwise and stood tiny forks like sprung arrows in the crushed ice, but there were always a lot left over. Shrimp were easier to eat with a drink in your hand. The crab was for show. She knew she shouldn’t say anything more, she should just stretch plastic wrap over his plate, fit it into the cool puzzle of her refrigerator and go, she was already dressed for work, but sometimes her powerlessness to protect him from the minor violence he did to himself unhinged her.
“You can’t grow a body on nothing but peanuts.”
A counter-argument of hairy man shin stuck out below the hem of his pajamas.
“Not a healthy body anyway.”
“You’re one to talk,” he said. Crazily, tediously, irrelevantly. It was just a cold. He’d been pressing her with naïve and reckless self-care tips for days. Ask Gary to ease up on your workload. Ask Tracy to help with some of your parties. Swing by the hospital – the hospital! – for some cold medicine or some zinc. Despite her best efforts, he had always been afraid of the wrong things. Not the traffic, but the reprimand. Not the bully, but his feelings. When they saw the first PSA’s for genetic testing, Will’s hopeful catalogue of the obedient behavior of his classmates had sickened and enraged her. She could see that the case he was building was giving him some comfort, so she let him go on, but it was exactly the kind of thinking a guy like Paxton seeded to keep things going. After twelve months of watching friends and family bleed from a pair of unauthorized lab experiments, it had been easy. Free gene therapy and a year of all-expenses-paid self-improvement coaching for anyone born with a marker for breaking rules. Votes and compliance in one go.
He popped another fistful of peanuts and chewed with ostentatious slowness, each crunch a coded grievance: No one to talk to. No plan for an endgame. No one to help.
The irony was she did have a plan, was almost done with it in fact, but she was not about to risk him derailing it by sharing it with him. A few months from now, he’d be enrolled in a high school somewhere (someplace sunny, she was thinking; Southern California maybe), and he’d be feeding a flaxen-haired girlfriend a cafeteria French fry and think maybe his mom had the right idea after all.
Liv knew what separated her from other parents in this hellish time. She was trying to do one thing and one thing only. She was keeping her son alive. No making the most of what could be your last days. No fighting for what you believe in. No helping your fellow man. It was her job to protect him, and right now, on this morning, in this kitchen, in this godforsaken cliché of a pop-up regime (if they still existed, the late night shows in the rest of the states must be having a field day), keeping him alive didn’t mean reminding him that Gary was amoral, or that Tracy was incompetent, or telling him his suggestion that she swing by the hospital was just proof that he couldn’t be trusted to help her help him either. Jesus god what a gleeful boastful spiteful prick god must be. Look what I built for you. 7 days. No humility whatsoever. Then umpteen thousand years of I’ll teach you. Show you how bad you are. Trick apple. Plagues. Locusts. A flood. His kid nailed to a cross. And now this. Well not her. She was going to make sure her son knew exactly how much she loved him. How far she would go to protect him. Protect HIM. Top priority. Numero uno. Not her and her ideas first like most parents. Go ahead. Read books about Sitting Bull. Go vegetarian. Then a hunger strike. Okay fine. You do you. Be yourself. Free to be you and me. I have a peacenik for a kid, I can work with that. She would not snuff that out. This little light of mind, I’m gonna let it shine. But if you could please just shut up and not tell anyone our secrets until I get you out of this country that wants to shove a probe up your nose and snip the separate thoughts from your brain, then you can go back to stooping in the schoolyard picking daisies while someone kicks dirt in your face. I will do all the changing. I will squeeze myself into these dresses and flirt with monsters and clean up after cowards, and I’m happy about it for god’s sake, it is me, once he said you’re one to talk, he actually said that, the self-righteousness of it, well it is me, it is me to protect you like that, and I slapped his face, sometimes people get angry, I’m sorry, but oh my fucking god, it IS me to fight for you like this, and I get it, he’s right, he has a point, I see how it looks like on the surface, but when I get out of the Dakotas I can go back to being myself.
(Gary)
Alone in his penthouse watching Liv’s sizzle reel for Saturday, Gary closed his eyes and shook his head. Jesus she was good at her job, but he had to give up. Comes in six years ago in her nurse uniform with a fresh tattoo of his logo above her left tit. Plucky single mom in a state-of-emergency? Yes, please. “I’ll quadruple your enrollments,” she told him. No joke. Crates of live doves for the party for new members. Bar-top beer derricks for the party for the frackers. Missile-shaped corn dogs served in missile-strewn bikinis for the party for the missileers. Like Leni Riefenstahl, this one. And office banter like a sexy sitcom sidekick. But anything outside the office: no.
“No woman’s an island,” he said.
“I live alone in the middle of a state forest,” she said.
“It’s elliptical,” he said, “because ‘no woman can live happily ever after as an island’ is too long to fit on the boob section of a T-shirt.”
But still she wouldn’t bite.
(Tracy)
The Bureau of Rewards for Courage was on the top floors of the old Alex Johnson Hotel. The Alex Johnson had been featured back in the 10’s on a show on the SyFy Channel called Ghost Hunters. Every time they ran the episode, the bookings went up. Why people wanted to stay in a hotel full of ghosts, she would never understand. But they did want to. To sleep right in the rooms where people had died. A suicidal bride in a suite on 8. A girl with yellow fever on the same hall. The pandemic rooms weren’t sellers yet – too soon the hotel manager said, and the fact that there were so many of them would drive the price down. They’d have to lie about that when they got around to it.
Her own office was in a dark room on 3 that Alex Johnson himself had used, and because of that it was said to be haunted with his spirit. No one ever got to stay here because the third floor had always been offices, now just spillover for the people who worked for the Bureau who didn’t fit way up high and weren’t worthy of it because they were so entry-level.
Like her.
Which is why she had been given this assignment.
Something easy. Something no one could screw up.
Here on 3 she shouldn’t be creeped out – she could hear people downstairs in the Sign-Up Bar, and in the lobby, loud with their Bonus Beers on those awful tile floors – and she wasn’t creeped out so much as badgered.
Tracy had had enough of ghosts. She heard them all the time in her own head. Looking around at the papers in front of her, she could hear every one:
Her father: you asked for this.
Her mother: for once, just once, could you do what is asked of you?
For the thousandth time, Tracy tried to recapture the feeling she had just before she threw her last snowball. The snow in front of her house had been dirty early-season snow. They had lived downtown, in a saltbox not far from the old granary, and Peter Schoenfeld was just standing at the end of the drive talking to Brad Parton, his blond hair catching the light, and what could she say? What could she ever say about these things before she did them? It wasn’t like her father said. It wasn’t that she forgot his rules or that she decided to defy him. It wasn’t either. Truly. It wasn’t against him or against anything. It was just that snow! So perfect and dirty! And Peter’s hair! So blond and fine! And suddenly a wordless thoughtless joy spread through her, and her own house with its closed-up shaded windows and its muffled angry silence wasn’t even there. It was all bright sun and ice, and her body was already moving, a smile was already spreading across her face, a squeal already ripping through her, and she packed it melting and dripping so heavy and wet and hurled it with aim more perfect than she would ever have again right at Peter’s head and struck it.
And boy did he whirl! Brad’s explosive laughter and Peter’s eyes wide. Angry maybe, but also aroused, also excited, and Tracy had squealed, a sound like a ringing bell, and her feet in the ice of her front yard made a crushing sound, like she was breaking through some barrier as he chased her. She knew he would get her, she could feel the wet ball of slush before it even hit her, and it did, like a wet cold hand grabbing her by the back of the neck, and she slapped through the door, still squealing and into the dust-scented living room and slammed it behind her.
That was when the feeling left her and changed. White frosted glass bowl covering the only bulb in the room, unlit. Dust motes danced in the weak light through the slats in the blinds. A pillow on the sad green couch, embroidered with an epigram: “Liberty consists in wholesome restraint.” Dread. Her heart pounded in her chest. A rushing in her ears. Peter wouldn’t follow her in. No one ever did; they knew about her mother, and they knew her dad was a membership guard; they wouldn’t even come onto her lawn. But it wasn’t that. It was knowing how she would be scolded. For who she was. Her mother was lying on the bed waiting for her, she just knew it. She had been sick for a year now. Forever bedridden because of what a rebel had done.
But Tracy couldn’t help it! School was so regimented and the house was so quiet. And outside people could be watching. All the neighbors were spies. Sometimes in the kitchen a scrap of a song would escape her. She remembered some from before the secession, and it wasn’t that she was trying to be rebellious, sometimes they would just slip out. Little remembered words from the past overflowing. Or she would – it was hard to explain just how irresistible it was when these ideas occurred to her – just do a handstand in the kitchen. Or pirouette, and a plate would shatter. Where was she supposed to do these things? Where was she allowed to? At her house even Rewards TV wasn’t allowed because it was supposed to be quiet, quiet all the time. Whatever it was the disease had done to her mother gave her a hyper-sensitivity to sound and light. Anything could bring on one of those migraines, and usually it was her own daughter.
And her father would be in the back, cleaning his gun, and he would come out and say, come, Tracy. Let me try to teach you. Better I should do it than the self-improvement coaches. It enraged him, she understood that. She felt bad about it even: that she could put him in this position just by being herself. He was a gold-circle guard, charged with searching houses for rebels and forcing them to be tested so they could be fixed, and to have in his house an exuberant, irrepressible girl who so obviously should be tested herself. A girl who could not even remember not to disturb her mother. A mother who would every day lose half a pound of weight until she disappeared altogether.
Tracy had frozen there, snow dripping from her neck onto the scatter rug, waiting for what must come. Usually the sound she heard first was not yelling but the sound of her father going into the bedroom closet. The belts he kept in there made a sound when he removed them, the sound of the belt buckle like sleigh bells in winter. (She was the only girl in her class who didn’t like the winter festivals, the reindeer sounds made her bladder weak. Once at the Dickens Festival she had wet her pants.) The least she could do each time she made a mistake like this, made him wonder if he was treasonous just for loving her, was to prove her submissive, prosocial nature by standing still and submitting for his beating. She slowed her breathing. She let the thought of the bright diamonds in Peter’s hair float away, and she replaced it with images from the brain of the kind of daughter her mother needed. Children standing in a silent line. Pencils in a jar. Papers. Stamps. She watched the stirring of dust motes and slowed her breathing. She prepared to be meek.
At first, standing in the living room with Peter’s snowball melting down her neck, she heard no noise at all, and she thought, I have been lucky. Maybe he’s outside. Maybe he didn’t hear me. Sometimes her father went on walks of his own. It was encouraged: a guard might see signs of things in his own neighborhood; they had quotas. And although he pretended to accept what was happening to his wife, she knew he didn’t. She knew he needed to escape it sometimes. They had planned on having another child, but even before they detected that Tracy’s kind of – spirit her pediatrician used to say (Tracy is spirited; did that pediatrician still live here? Was she still alive? Was that part of what worried them? That this pediatrician might submit a list of the patients she suspected had the gene?)– even before they detected that this was a dangerous element, and even before her mother got sick and weak, her parents seemed to have changed their minds. Tracy was too much, a handful, a hell-raiser, a pistol. Affectionate terms rolling off the tongues of other parents before the pandemics, but even then a slice of lemon in her mother’s mouth. They needed to gather their resources, catch their breath, circle the wagons, brace themselves for round two of all that. The idea of a second child went on the back burner until their strength was up again, and now of course it was gone. Instead of a baby (who might have been different from Tracy: better) Tracy’s father had her mother’s illness to tend. That was their second round of caretaking. Her illness was their second child.
He took walks to escape. And to provide. Both things were true. And happened more and more often now. That must be it – he hadn’t been home to hear her squealing in the snowlight. And her mother’s sleeps were growing deeper. And maybe she had not made so much noise slapping into the house after all. Maybe she had kept her joy outside where it belonged. Maybe her mother was just sick enough to sleep through Tracy’s happiness now.
But then, instead of the belt buckle sound, Tracy heard a wet snuffling like the sound of a pig, and somehow she knew right away that it was the sound of her father sobbing. How did she recognize it? It was not a sound she had ever heard before. She stayed frozen longer. Should she leave him alone? Should she let him forget that she had squealed? Should she give him a different memory of this moment? And if so, was it for him, or was it an act of self-protection? Because somehow Tracy had known without looking that her mother was finally dead.
Enough.
Tracy looked around her office at the stacks of paper to shake the memory, but her dread of the task just conjured them again.
Her father: you asked for this.
Her mother: for once, just once, could you do what is asked of you?
And why couldn’t she? Why couldn’t she just be like Liv Lockhart? That’s who she had been when she threw that snowball, wasn’t it? Carefree? Is that what Tracy had been? And is that what made Liv’s life so easy? Tracy didn’t know. But certainly Liv was not this, not this second-guessy person staring at a pile of papers and feeling so conflicted about something so ridiculous.
It was only a party.
She had taken this job because that’s all it was, better than most government jobs (wasn’t it?), and a way to make her father stop crying. After her mother died, he had started crying all the time, but only after beating Tracy, and she had figured out a way to make it stop, the beatings and the crying both. She had taken a job with the government, proving his job was done, she was obedient and she was safe. Then he died. Sometimes at night Tracy had the strange thought that that was why he had died. It was loss that had killed him. Not the loss of his wife, but the loss of that purpose and that outlet. No more reason to beat her or cry. No more worries about someone you love, and in a place like this, with a job like his, what did that make you? Just the bad you were agreeing to do. Not the sacrifice of tragic moral compromise. Just a coward or a monster.
And what did that make Tracy?
But it was only a party.
Wasn’t it?
Yes it was, of course it was. An amateur play of a heartening story. Cozy snacks from a steaming cart. And wasn’t it okay to give people their memories? To distract them at a time like this? To give them their fun?
But what if these parties she helped with, what if they weren’t just distracting and restoring, what if they were making people accept what Paxton was doing? What if they made people love him?
Tracy glanced up at the mirror on the wall and was disgusted with herself. She stuck her tongue out. What if? Of course she was making people love him. She hated this assignment. The Dickens Festival, for Pete’s sake. Her parents had never taken her. They worried about her at fairs and festivals. She was always getting into things, they said. There was no telling what she’d do. So she had gone just once on a class field trip, with Ms. Hamberger’s fifth grade. And here’s all it was: a festival in a town of two thousand people (eight hundred now) where people dressed up in Victorian costumes and walked around in the bitter cold and bought baked goods and handicrafts in a gym and then went to a play. But how Tracy had loved it! Why? She didn’t know. (And did she have to know? Did you have to be able to explain everything? Did she have to analyze everything? She didn’t used to. Not before she threw that snowball.) And she wasn’t alone in her love: people had come from all over the state, from more than one state actually, driving there just to be a part of that tiny thing that celebrated a time past and a writer’s imagination, a few good stories that were suspenseful and sentimental, that made you laugh and cry, and in a time like this, didn’t people need that? Why did people keep lining up for stories if tears and laughter weren’t part of what kept you alive? People had loved it so much that a few townspeople pooled their money and bought an old London double-decker they dubbed the Queen Elizabus, and people rode around the few blocks of the town between the granary and the library looking at folks’ Christmas lights, or trying to anyway because the bus’s windows would fog up with their excited laughing breaths. They kept a roll of paper towels in each row of seats so people could wipe them clear and keep gazing out the windows at the spectacle of their own easy pleasures. People gathering from miles away just to shiver together in costumes. What was it they were there for? As soon as it was dark they lit paper lanterns, colored Chinese-looking paper that floated up on the fire from these little cardboard decks dipped in fuel, and the sky full of those lanterns was part of what Tracy had loved. She had felt so far from her parents’ disappointment in her.
Tracy looked again in the mirror. So they wanted to revive that party. So it was her job to do it. They hadn’t told her yet exactly what they would promote there, but squeezed in between the kringles and the gingerbread and the tippy tall tower of wedding pastry (kranzakaka it had been called – Tracy had laughed her car-horn laugh reading that, and Ms. Hamberger hadn’t minded; she never minded Tracy’s exuberance, not even her irrepressible giggling fits over her name) there would be Rewards booths giving something away. Or advertising Courage Confession where people could rat out their neighbors for a ticket to a show. Only 4 days to go. Liv and Gary were going to give their grand prize whether she did a good job or not.
People had come from miles around for that party. They would do it again. It just seemed to Tracy you shouldn’t mix them. Maybe you should keep a memory pure. Maybe it was worse to lull people into betrayal and self-betrayal with their own memories than it was to do it with free beer and ice sculptures of big-breasted Dakotans.
Maybe the right answer was to do this job badly.
She heard the ghosts in her head again.
You asked for this.
And: Once, just once, could you do what people ask?
Then (sweetly, kindly, mercifully): You have such a good heart. (Was Ms. Hamberger still alive, Tracy wondered? Did it matter? Any memory haunts like a ghost.)
Rewards for Courage. The irony of that name!
But certainly paralysis was no kind of bravery. Tracy should do something. She should choose.
But what?
Sometimes Tracy longed to be back in that brain of hers before she threw the snowball. She’d like to take a vacation in that brain. She really would.
(Garth)
Garth said it again: “You’re worried over nothing.”
“You always say that.” Margie swept in fierce little strokes around him, although his boots were outside like always. “You say that about everything, but I have my feminine intuition, Garth Petrie.”
“Then you should be happy. It’s a woman coming, not a man.”
“What’s that got to do with anything? My radar doesn’t only tell me about bad men.”
“And she’s coming in a truck, not an ambulance.” The broom made a scratching sound that set him on edge. “Why are you doing that? I took my boots off,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s on your pant cuffs too, you can’t help it.”
“And which worry am I supposed to pay attention to anyway? You said yourself you were worried about Angus.”
“Well I am. Of course I am. Do you think they’re going to stick with just gene tests? Did you see that ad on TV?”
“You showed it to me five times, Margie, why do you think I said yes to the meeting?”
“’Dangerous Differences.’ ‘Dangerous Differences!’” she said it with a different voice each time she said it. “Why can’t anybody in this country hear a Nazi when they hear one?” She whacked the broom handle on the jamb of the open door to shake out the bristles. Garth could see the dust flying in the sunlight out over the snow. She was right, he guessed. She was always right, but he never said so. “And Ted Kaczynski was one of their big examples.”
“It’s just a history channel show.”
“For now! For now! That’s how it starts though.”
“I know it, Margie. Why do you think I took the appointment, I said?”
She started sweeping again. The loose skin at her neck jiggled when she did it. They were too old to be taking care of their grandson. They would have been too old to do it in Nebraska, for sure they were too old to be doing it here. She kept muttering as she swept. “They might as well be wearing swastikas. Why can’t anybody hear it? Too drunk or hung over is why. Or too excited about the next party to want to hear.” She jammed the bristles down and held the broom straight up and down, like a pitchfork and stared at him. “And look who you let come to our house! You just remember who she is when she gets here, Garth Petrie. Did she even say what she wants?”
“No she didn’t. I told you she didn’t.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
Garth got up to go to the bathroom. He always thought there was something a little weak about the sound of sock feet on a floor, but he couldn’t afford a second pair of boots just for house use anymore, and he understood why Margie wanted him to take his boots off. She couldn’t always be sweeping. She already swept up enough.
He passed the living room, and there was Angus hunched over the desk working on his birthday-to-deathday conversions without any books. Mahatma Gandhi: Saturday-Friday. John Lennon: Wednesday-Monday. Adolph Hitler: Saturday-Monday. Maybe they were right. Maybe there was something dangerous about a ten-year-old who could do that. Jeanette’s old See n’ Say sat on the desk beside him because they wouldn’t let him have his talking computer anymore. It was heart-breaking. When Angus heard Garth’s sock feet pause behind him, he pulled the lever, but he didn’t turn around to look at him. The spinner rattled and wound down. “Baaaa! That’s the sheep!” it said.
While Garth was peeing he swallowed back the lump in his throat. It wouldn’t do to be thinking about his daughter when the RFC lady got here. But he was right. Jeanette had fought with the school board, she had fought with the clinic, she had fought with the insurance company to get that talking computer for Angus. She fought with everyone and won, and then two months later she came down with a cough. One of the first ones to die, and Garth never said it out loud but he guessed Margie would agree it was a blessing she died before Paxton grabbed the wheel. His Jeanette would have clawed the re-allocator’s eyes out if she’d been alive when they’d come for her son’s talking computer.
Garth heard a bison lowing, and then the click, click, click that was Angus trying to force his See n’ Say to cow, the closest he had, but no crunch of tires yet. He wished she’d set the meeting for morning. He wished he didn’t have to go back in the kitchen and face Margie again. Better to get it over with. Better to find out what the prize lady wanted. Margie was right about the dirt, but she was wrong about this meeting. You had to set aside some of your fears to get things.
