WEDNESDAY
(Hannah)
Hannah sat on the edge of her bunk in her towel and shower shoes, looking down at her soap case. The piece of broken bottle was still buried deep in her soap. This self-improvement center dorm was just an old high school building, and the communal shower had operable windows, but still they had all agreed they would shower one at a time. They were like the passengers on Flight 93. Once a thing like murder with a plane full of commuters had happened, it could never happen exactly that way again. You can’t talk that way, her mother used to tell her. There’s nowhere good to go with outrage like that. But in high school Hannah had fallen for a girl who was dying of cancer, and her mother had argued against her love just like she argued against her rage. When Hannah read Barthes’ words in college, she clapped the book shut with satisfaction and took the bus to the cemetery to read it over the girl’s headstone, raining tears her mother would have cautioned against on her grave: “Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?”
It was almost Hannah’s turn in the shower.
She watched each of her bunkmates come back.
First Viola, her hair wrapped in a towel, awarded her scholarship for asking her neighbor a question.
A minute later Beth, her hair dripping, granted her free year because her elderly parents had tested positive for the gene.
Next Millicent, shivering. Every day Millicent had a new guess about why she was here.
But Hannah didn’t have to guess about herself. Hannah knew.
When the door to her classroom had opened last year, she’d been grading papers. Other teachers complained about it, and it was time-consuming, but it had always been her favorite part. She liked the little window it gave her into each kid’s mind and heart. They were all so different. When she was little herself, she had thought she would have a lot of kids someday, but Hannah still wasn’t married, and even if she had been, she wouldn’t want to have kids in a country like this. They had taken the fun out of the idea. Hannah liked potluck. She liked surprises.
Not the kind that had just come through the classroom door though. The guy who opened it was a membership jackass. He’d been a jackass in high school too, and his jackboots were polished to a high shine. She had set her pen down and fixed a smile on her face. The smile was all she would give him. She would not say welcome. She would not say how can I help.
“Hannah Hamberger,” he said, as if it made him a standup comedian, just saying her last name. Somehow her fifth graders’ buoyant relish when they said it delighted her, but in his mouth the enjoyment was small and witless. “Sorry to interrupt.”
But he wasn’t sorry. He was happy to interrupt, anyone could see that. He flipped up one of the flaps on his goon belt and took out an apple. He set it on her desk and smiled a little. She had known what was coming, and she knew she wasn’t going to give him everything he had come for, so she smiled a little at the apple. She even thanked him for it. As a small counterbalance to what she knew she was about to do.
“You’re welcome,” he had said. He was grinning now. He was handsome, the kind of guy in high school who you just knew spent a lot of time looking at himself in the boys’ room mirror, when he wasn’t grabbing smaller kids by the shirt collar to drag them for swirlies in the stalls. “Take a bite,” he said.
Hannah did a little calculus in her mind and took a bite of the apple. Just a regular bite, but she felt almost dirty doing it, and her heart was racing. I will do these things, because I am about to defy him. That’s what she had been thinking.
“It’s good, right?”
“Yes.”
“Imported from Washington State. They have the best apples.”
Hannah didn’t think she had to say anything to that.
“Only the best for the best teachers,” he said.
The apple had left a sweet taste in her mouth she didn’t like. She’d still be tasting it even after he left, she thought.
“I was wondering if you had anything for me this time,” he had said.
“Not yet.”
“That’s what you said last time. It’s December. You’ve had plenty of time to get to know them.”
“Maybe I’m slow.”
“You weren’t in high school, I remember. You got the best grades. I was always trying to sit next to you to get a look. Two kinds of looks, actually.”
This time she didn’t smile.
That cost her. “And you were sort of political if I remember correctly. Isn’t that right?”
But Hannah wasn’t going to let him scare her this way. She wouldn’t let him change what she was going to do. She looked back down at her papers.
“What are you doing there?” He lifted his chin like a horse, pointing it at the papers on her desk.
“Grading papers.”
“What kind of papers?”
“English papers,” she said. He already knew she was an English teacher. It wasn’t really an answer.
“What kind though? The kind where they share opinions? The kind where they make things up? I could just read them myself, you know I could.”
But he might not, she figured. He might be too lazy. Or too stupid to notice the things she noticed. After they read A Christmas Carol, she had assigned them to share a memory that made them feel some intense emotion – not a memory from the story, but a memory from their own lives. She did it every year. She told them Dickens had believed tears and laughter were an antidote to the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution. Children just like them had jobs where they were forced to stand for hours in the small spaces between parts of a giant machine and perform a single task over and over, like cogs themselves. X-rays showed the spines of child laborers had deformed to fit the shapes of their work spaces. Giving them stories they could read when they got home each day, stories intense enough to reanimate the most human parts of themselves, to make them laugh and cry, this had been an act of social redemption for Dickens. And who couldn’t benefit from a little catharsis and empathy at the ends of their days? They could get that any time from a really good story, Hannah told them. They could give it to themselves any time they wanted, by reflecting on the most intense moments of their own lives. They could transform themselves with it. They could move themselves to acts of heroic compassion. That’s all the ghosts had done for Scrooge.
“They’re just reflective pieces,” Hannah said. Which wasn’t really an answer either.
“If I read those papers myself and find evidence of things you don’t report, it will be worse for you.”
Hannah thought about that. She tried to decide whether she cared.
“Look,” he had said. “I was just down the hall in Greg Kovach’s class. He gave me the names of two students who are also in your class. Students I will now interview no matter what you say -- and only interview mind you, it may go nowhere -- and in exchange for this, I gave him a voucher for ten extra Courage Points and expedited health care for all of his family members. You could have the same, or I could make a note in my records that you tried to deny necessary services to these two students by withholding their names.”
He was still perched on the front of the little desk, but his face was red and a vein was pulsing in his forehead. Hannah thought how easily he could be lying. He could be about to go to Greg’s class and tell him the same story about his visit with her.
“How am I supposed to know which students Greg Kovach picked?”
“Everyone knows. These traits stand out like zits. And the kids who have them are proud of them for some crazy reason. They’re always showing them off.”
“Refresh my memory,” she said. “What kind of traits are we talking about?”
“Who in the class are teachers always calling a rascal? A cutup? A firecracker?”
“I can’t say I have any of those.”
“Okay, how about ‘innovative’?” He rolled his eyes and made air quotes when he said it.
“I’m not sure I’d call any of my students that either.”
“Who has the most original ideas then?”
“That depends.”
“Come on, Hannah. Every class has some. Kids who like to do things a little differently…. Kids who enjoy being the oddball… ” He seemed genuinely exasperated now.
“Maybe I’m just not that observant. Maybe I’m missing a gene.”
That was when he had stood and unhooked another flap on his duty belt. Not an apple that time.
Now sitting on the edge of her mattress with her soap case a year later, she was straining to hear the pause in the rainy sound of the shower that would tell her it was her turn. At lights-out they lowered the volume on the bunk room TV until the only sign of it was a flicker-glow she could perceive even through her closed eyelids, but as dawn approached they turned it back up until the sound of Liv Lockhart’s voice woke them. It was okay with Hannah. Soon the only voice she’d be able to hear would be her own.
(Nick)
Alone in his prison cell, Nick kept thinking about his dad. He wished he could remember exactly what he’d said. He had been lying on a gurney, they’d wheeled him out into the hallway almost two hours before, his IV bag swinging when people jostled the stand as they passed, and still he had just been waiting. Post-Pandemic Wellcare. Nick hadn’t complained, there was no point, and he’d known that if he was focused, he could have a last moment anywhere. Nick had gotten used to people dying in the open. He just needed to pay attention, not to looks and jostlings, but to whatever his dad needed and said.
Now Nick rested his eyes on a phantom of shine from the Rewards Channel brightening the steel bowl of his wall-mounted toilet, and tried again to remember.
Make this one your best?
When you get there, think of me?
Nick’s memory was no good for words -- he remembered meanings and outcomes -- but it was disappointing, not to be able to remember a thing like that. Sometimes he could recreate the sound of a moment if it really upset him, but the only noise he could hear when he replayed this clip was the reedy whistle through the tube in his father’s neck as he moved his lips.
Do this one for me, maybe.
Nick stared at the ghost of prize light on the toilet and told himself it didn’t matter. Do it for me was the gist.
(Angela)
Angela’s cell (empty now) had been in a different prison. She hadn’t known why she was there. The people who ran the prison hadn’t seemed to know either. They hadn’t even known who she was in there. She had been dropped off gagged and hooded, and there were cameras in the corridor watching to make sure they followed the procedures for solitary admissions, uncuffing her just before they sealed the door shut, and her cell was sound-proof, so no one ever heard the things she screamed up the food chute that year.
The night after Paxton had won the recall, Gary had dialed her cell phone and told her to take Fiona and drive her mom’s Mazda to Minnesota. He was in a rental car. He would meet them there. They’d been in Ellendale visiting her mom. Visiting. The term had made her furious, how small the scraps of love people accepted could get – babies soothing themselves to sleep with a strip of nightgown, grownups propping up phones at their dinner tables. But of course they went. Staying away while her mother had been sick had made them both angry enough. The government knew they would take what they could get. She just wished they wouldn’t package it up and sell it. Posters in bus shelters: a living room full of doilies and half-packed boxes, loving family members with mask-free faces holding hands around a sanitized urn of cremains. Survivor Visas. Therapeutic Aftercare. Apply for your interstate travel permit today.
She had driven their daughter toward Minnesota without asking Gary why, and when they got to the border, a pair of state troopers had escorted them to a converted Holiday Inn Express where they had detained them for two months with trackers on their ankles before pulling a burlap sack over each of their heads.
Angela’s prison cell had had a toilet, and a shower, and a TV, and she used to distract herself from thoughts of her daughter by wondering what would happen if the toilet stopped working, but soon enough she had stopped that too. The thoughts about the TV had taken over all of her time. At first she told herself that the footage was faked. Hoped it was. But eventually she had given that up as well. It was too much, she had realized. To weave in a hell so personal would have been too much energy for them to expend on her. That’s how she had known the footage of her husband was real.
What she had screamed up the food chute until this dawned on her was “My name is Angela Handler. Tell my husband we’re in here. Someone stopped us at the border. We never made it out.”
(Jenny)
Deepak set the parking brake and turned off the engine, but he didn’t get out of the car. Beside him, Jenny didn’t either. She didn’t even take her safety belt off. At the far end of the lot, a sign said Genetic and Environmental Protection Agency.
Jenny said it again: “Maybe we shouldn’t tell them.”
“We have to tell them. They’ll find out anyway.”
“But both of mine are dead.”
“They’ll ask questions about them though. They always do. That’s what Alfie Goodreau said.”
Jenny’s eyes got big. “You didn’t talk to him about it, did you? You didn’t tell him you were worried. Alfie is a huge blabbermouth.”
“No, he was saying it talking to Doug and them about Brent Widely.”
“Brent’s getting married!?”
“No, it was a joke. Like what if Brent Widely went into the GEPA office with Lisa Bismark.”
“Do you think he is one? A rebel I mean?”
Deepak rolled his eyes.
Jenny said: “Just because he smoked weed and cut classes doesn’t mean he’s one. And just because we both got good grades doesn’t mean we’re not either.”
Deepak had been one of those rare ones. A kid the teachers liked and the kids did too. It’s what had drawn her. He was fun but good.
Now he said, “You’re not worried about it are you? About getting swabbed?”
“No,” she said bravely. “Everyone is going to this month anyway. Today, next week, what does it matter? And if we are, we are. They’ll give us the treatment and that will be that. It’s not such a big deal.” She was testing out the sound of it. She wasn’t sure that’s what she thought. That’s what her Aunt Sarah said, but maybe it was easy for her to say. She had tested negative. She was happy everyone who was tested got fixed. That’s what she called it. Getting “fixed” or “sorted” or “put to rights.” It was good for the country. It made everyone safer.
“What I’m worried about is the self-improvement part,” she told Deepak. “Sounds like that might happen either way. Because of our parents’ profiles.”
Deepak seemed to understand that. He was quiet for a while. Then he laughed -- the kind of fake laugh she’d seen him use to shake off an insult.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing. It’s just --- what do you think they really do in there?”
“In the centers?” She didn’t want to use the words she’d heard people start using. Capitulation Camps. Traitor Town.
“I mean, it’s probably not just like they show on the Peace Channel with the hottie teacher and the high-fives. Alfie said he heard it was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. With a creepy quiet nurse who asks you to repeat after her while a big guy stands by with his thumb on a button…”
“I’m not afraid, I just know they’ll separate us. And it seems like it takes a long time.”
“…and pills and shock collars…”
“Think about it,” Jenny said. “Do you know anyone who has come back from there yet? It seems like they’re all still there. Everyone I know at least.”
Deepak took his keys from the ignition, but then he just held them in his lap. He had a little rabbit’s foot on his key chain. And a little plastic football helmet that said Go Bisons. “Let’s skip it then. We don’t have to get married that way. We can just say things to each other and we can know what we mean.”
“I want to live with you though.”
“It could be fun, sneaking.”
“And I want to have kids.”
“Screw them.”
She knew he didn’t mean their kids. He meant the officers inside there. He meant the membership. She liked that he had said it, but it scared her too. It hung in the air of the hatchback a moment. Part of her thought it was like a scene from a movie, but another part, an older part, a part that was ready to be an adult (because what were they playing at, if they weren’t ready for that?) thought really it was already decided, what they were going to do. A gray mood was settling in. There didn’t seem any point in pretending anymore that they were going to resist it.
“They probably have a camera on the building anyway. They see us sitting here. What else would we be here for?” Jenny looked over her shoulder. Behind her was a Quick Casino and a gas station.
He followed her eyes. “We could go in there and play a slot. To make sense of the trip.”
“No,” she said. “I want to do this. This is where we live. This is how it’s going to be.” She turned and looked at him, but the safety belt made it hard. She unbuckled it. “And I love you,” she said, because she thought that was the part that would convince him, and it did.
There was no snow anymore on the ground of the parking lot because it was so busy every day. The tires wore it away and then the cold froze the last bits and they blew away. And it was colder now. The kind of cold where you can see the dust of snowflakes in the pores of the asphalt, winking under the flood lights. This office opened early. Why was that? Jenny didn’t know.
As they got closer she could see a man in membership uniform at a desk. To one side of him was a countdown clock (3 days!), and a screen running Rewards TV. Behind him was a long high table draped with a cloth. It made it look like an altar, but she knew it used to be a countertop, and the cloth was just to cover it up. This had been a YogurtLand, she remembered. Her mom used to take her there after school. They had brought in a desk and stiff thin carpet like the kind they used to sell in the office aisle at Costco, but still it all looked weird and makeshift and wrong. A lamp sat out in the middle of the room. On the near side of the desk sat two folding chairs like you would see at a church meeting. She knew when she sat there with Deepak the backs of their coats would be bisected by that backrest for everyone in the parking lot to see. She didn’t know why she had started picturing herself places before she got there.
The man was looking at some papers on his desk, but she guessed he saw them coming.
A bell jingled when Deepak opened the door. He let her go through first, and she didn’t know whether he did it because he wanted to be a gentleman, or because he was afraid.
The man looked up. The peacemark on his neck was fresh. You could see it oozed every now and then, but he didn’t want to cover it with a bandaid. He was proud of it. There was something funny about seeing a symbol of tranquility like that on reddened skin. It was like the dove was flying through a cloud of poison. He had big nostrils and big teeth like Chiclets and a mole on his cheek the same color as his cheek. He was ugly. Jenny thought he probably was pretty happy when they issued him his uniform. They had done such a good job with the uniforms. They had gold braid and everything. And gold stars. Maybe that was why he had taken this job even.
“How can I help?” he said. The question hung there a second. He had muted the TV when he saw them coming probably, but in her head Jenny could hear the words Liv Lockhart was mouthing. It Could Be Yours…. Tune in to See….
“We—“ Deepak started, but it came out in a squeaky way. He cleared his throat. “We want to get married.”
“Good for you,” the man said. He had pens on his desk. All the same kind. For signing things. “You want kids too, I hope. We could use more members.”
“Yes,” Deepak said. He sat down in one of the chairs and that thing happened -- Jenny saw herself sitting in the chair, and then she made it come true.
“We’re very glad you’re here.” He tugged at the ends of his shirt sleeves. It was just as Jenny had thought. That uniform was very important to him. “First things first. All bundled up like that, I can’t tell. Do we need to swab you, or have you already done it at one of the checkpoints?”
Deepak loosened his scarf and removed it, and Jenny unzipped the collar of her coat.
“I see,” he said. He wasn’t that much older than Deepak and Jenny. It was like he had copied his way of talking from movies he remembered. “Well, let’s find out what nature gave us to work with.” He opened a drawer in the desk. The kits came in little paper wrappers. It was a plastic vial with a brush inside that looked like a bottle cleaner. His gloves made a snapping sound when he put them on.
Jenny forced herself to watch Deepak open his mouth and let the man hold his chin to steady it. It was the kind of thing you wanted to look away from, but she didn’t. She didn’t watch to see if Deepak looked away when she took the brush in her mouth herself.
When it was finished, the man removed his gloves and set them in the empty wastebasket. Jenny could see them there with the fingers intertwined. “Results in a couple days. Now,” he said, lacing his real fingers together on the desk, “for the environmental questions. Have you been watching the Peace Channel?” He tipped his head toward the screen beside them. Liv Lockhart’s dresses all seemed to shine. “Do you understand that there is a nurture component to the development of traits? You may have a recessive gene to pass on, and even if you don’t, there may be attitudes or habits you have learned that you could foster in your children.”
“Deepak was a member of the Youth League. And I’m a member of Women for True Peace.”
“Yes, but like a recessive gene, learned behaviors can be latent. They might come out only in stressful situations. That’s why abuse victims get married thinking, I would never do that. Never in a million years would I torture someone like that bastard tortured me, and then as soon as the going gets tough, what happens?”
“Deepak’s parents were both church-goers. Mine were educators.” There, proving his point although he didn’t know it: educators. Her mom had always said that, and Jenny had always thought it was dumb, and here it was coming out.
“It applies to anything though.” His laced fingers made a little cave on the cloth-covered yogurt counter. “Prejudices for example. You might have a racist parent, and have looked down on it, but in a mugging in a dark alley, what might bubble up? Preconceived notions. Or a parent who yells, and when your kid spills on your white upholstery, what happens? Easy enough to take care of as long as we detect it. Have you ever taken a self-defense class?”
“A what?”
“They have them in places like New York and Los Angeles. People have ways they react to an attacker, but after a while, by repeating a new response over and over, they can replace it. That’s what we’d do at the centers. That’s all we do. Nothing so mysterious.”
His hands were still laced. Jenny began to wonder seriously if he was hiding something there, what, she couldn’t imagine.
“So,” he said. “Are you ready to get started? I’ll just ask you a series of questions about your childhoods. This will be fun. It can be very interesting. Couples sometimes learn new things about each other.”
He opened his hands, and then a drawer, and out came a tape recorder. The old fashioned kind, all mechanical. He set it on top of the counter. Then he took out an old laptop and a blood-pressure cuff and some rubber tubes and said he’d like to start with the bride. He let Deepak help with the tubes around her chest, and while he did it, he told them they would also use city housing records to find neighbors and relatives to verify everything she said.
He started with Jenny’s mother. Was Jenny aware of anything in her background that she might have been ashamed of or that could have been used to blackmail her? Had she taken illegal drugs or participated in any type of criminal activity? Was she a member of any clubs, groups, or movements? Had she won any awards or filed any patents? Did she have any nicknames? How would people describe her? When she thought of her mother, did any of the following words come to mind: free spirit, quirky, eccentric?
“I don’t think of her any way. I just think of her as caring and supportive. I just think of her as my mother.”
The line on the laptop screen jumped.
“What?” she said. “That’s true.” It jumped again.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” said the man.
“She chaperoned my senior class field trip to the sample silo. She was a regular at the Church of the Long Tomorrow.”
The man looked down at their file. “Where did you say you live? In a walkup on Rayburn Road?”
“Ask me another question about her.”
“Some of the centers’ dormitories are run out of old Marriotts. You’ll be very comfortable. You might even wish you could stay.”
(Will)
When the dogs started barking, Will was listening to his own heartbeat. It happened when he drank too much coffee, which he did sometimes, less because he liked the taste than because he was frustrated and bored, and it launched a whole arc he could enjoy from beginning to end. He had to come out of the shelter to make it, and there was the dawn of real light as he climbed upstairs, and the standing at the kitchen window looking at the world outside, and then the buzz of the beans in the grinder and the pocking of the percolator, and that great great smell, and finally the sting on his lips and the weight of the mug as he descended to lay back down on his bunk, and no matter what state he’d been in before, it changed things, speeding first his pulse, then his thoughts, and finally even his feelings, steeper clicking ascents and faster falls, (a..n..x..i..e..t..y.. i..m..p..a..t..i..e..n..c..e.. angersadness) while he waited to hear it, so faint at first he was sure he was imagining it: the slow fade-in on the steady backbeat of his own heart.
He heard it best lying down, so he read his book lying down, each long-short beat like the long-short drumbeat the Indian Agency police must have been imagining Sitting Bull dancing to when they shot him. These were tribesmen white men picked to force fellow tribesmen to abandon their traditions and follow US laws. They had been sent on the rumor of one of Sitting Bull’s dreams, and at the possibility that he might do a dance tribes started dancing to bring back their own ancestors and ward off westward expansion. These agents could not have been afraid, it seemed to Will, that the Ghost Dance would work, and that their dead loved ones would help them overthrow the government. They must have been afraid Sitting Bull would dance the Ghost Dance and it would fail, and they would be condemned for not stopping his dancing. They must have been afraid of the loss of the small power the government gave them to enforce their own loss of power. Juiced up on caffeine, it took Will’s breath away, the perfect soundtrack for the story he was reading and the one he was living. Indian agents. Will’s mother. Preachers and lawmakers. Everyone losing something big by clutching at something small. Will didn’t know who he’d veer from angry-at to sorry-for from one moment to the next on all that caffeine.
He sat up to take another sip. He was careful with the second cup. If he sipped it slow it kept him there, riding high atop the wave of all those juiced up feelings, with a swollen sense that together they were about to land him on the sandy shore of some clear objective. (California, his mom wanted him to picture -- as if she could steer his imagination from sacrifice and service to surf.) Too fast and the wave crashed to pieces underneath him, one feeling churning him like a doll in a washing machine, and another trying to hold him under, and a third popping him up like a cork and trying to zip him back out to sea.
He set the cup on the milk crate. He kept one by his bunk and the other next to the hatch door where he’d set up a tiny plastic Christmas tree. Mostly the tree cheered him up, but sometimes somewhere in the second cup his old ornaments did just what his mom said they might, their weight just reminding him how small it was, and the outsized expressions on their faces seeming fake. This room was so small. Sure, it was doing its job, but its job was small. Saferoom. Right for a time like this in history, his mom said, but for Will one-hundred-percent wrong. What did safe matter if he couldn’t be himself?
And who knew what life in the states she was trying to saferoom him back to was even like? Whose version was he supposed to believe?
His own? (choppy, crayon-stroke, winning-goal or lost-in-a-parking-garage memories; he’d only been eight.)
Paxton’s? (germ-ridden, geopolitical backwater.)
His mom’s? (not a fascist theme park, so...)
He figured the truth was something more complicated, and anyway he was never going to make it there alive. It was either out over a minefield or out through a border control checkpoint where drivers were forced to step out while their cars and cargo containers sat in an airlock they gassed with nitrogen. No odor or taste, the only symptoms before you lose consciousness are anxiety, overconfidence, depression, paranoia, the full roller-coaster of things that crept up on people when they spent too much time alone. It would just kill him in her final hiding womb before he even knew what was wrong.
That’s what he was thinking when the dogs started barking, (like they were right in there with him; he could never get over how good the surveillance mics were): a squirrel, he thought at first, but even the first bark seemed a little excited for that. Maybe they were just bored like he was. He really felt for them whenever he twitched the kitchen curtains aside to look out, stalking a fifty-yard frown at the end of their chains. You and me both, one thought went, and the two other thoughts were guilty (she tied you up for me) and mad (they wouldn’t be tied up at all if it were up to him). Will’s heart was picking up. These barks were not squirrel barks, or bored barks. They were louder and more aggressive than either of those would be.
Aggression. He felt it himself at times, agentless destruction fantasies when he was mad at his mom mostly (the chair in front of him exploding in splinters; a thousand imaginary plates shattering in a clattery fall), and the part that disturbed him the most later was the way in the moment his violent yearning never made him feel empathy for the violence she did on his behalf. His seemed different to him. Justified. When it was that righteousness itself that should have made him feel the most kinship of all.
Will stood.
The dogs were going wild. Not that different from what they did in a dream he’d had once where he imagined them getting angry enough at his mom to finally break their chains, but Will knew that wasn’t it. There was somebody out there. Someone careful watching at a distance (no crunch of footsteps or tires in the snow). Usually they came at night, usually after a party at Mt. Rushmore. Not that many people knew she lived here, and the idea of coming to his mom’s house mostly only seemed good to people after a few drinks, and at night the dogs didn’t ever get around to barking this kind of bark because she was here to stop the target of their aggression. Just with words, for God’s sake, she always said to him afterward, and if that didn’t work, only with a non-arterial stab wound, and only because they wouldn’t fucking go. His rageful thrashing before during and after these made him feel impotent. The monster he was fighting had too many heads: this country, her bravery, her cowardice, her rules, his compliance, the men on the porch, her vulnerability, her strength, his vacillation, her conviction, and she didn’t even try to defend herself by pointing out how scared she must have been. She had to be didn’t she? Not just afraid of the loss of him, but afraid for her own safety? The things the three men she stabbed had said to her mixed menace with a soft pleading undertone that sickened and terrified him. It made him ashamed to be growing into a man.
He was holding so still now, standing there between the bunks. Such a funny instinct. The barking was plenty loud over those speakers, his movement wouldn’t keep him from hearing it, but when danger was high, your body really wanted to give the source of danger its all. Even when the danger was on the other side of a blast door. He could see his frozen torso in little fragments in the sink mirror. Will had hung a plastic wreath with a big fake velvet bow over it so he couldn’t catch a clear glimpse of himself moving around. The dove his mom had inked on his neck did too many different things to him. He never knew how it was going to make him feel.
When she had moved them out here, she said it was the last (always the last, she said) in the series of compromises he’d have to make to help her protect him, but it came with a lot of rules. Never open the curtains. Never feed the dogs treats out the window or their barking will stop meaning anything. Never go upstairs when they’re barking. The problem was, the thing she always talked over him when he tried to talk about it was, the people who came to her porch at night, they came here because they needed help. (Even the drunk ones probably. Not just that mother who had stripped naked to show she wasn’t wearing a wire.) She knew that. She admitted as much herself. Of course she knew that, she told him. Didn’t he think she knew that, she had screamed on the naked mother night.
Plates. He was seeing plates bouncing and shattering again. An endless stack of plates falling like water from a faucet. It’s the kind of thing he saw to diffuse his energy and keep him from doing something real. The barks were frantic now. One of the dogs barked higher and sharper, and the other had more space between his barks, but Will never got to know which was which, because he never got to see them barking. When he watched his mother feed them he always wondered about that, but he was used to that kind of mystery. You never really got to see quite enough to know what people were like inside either.
There. That was why he was holding so still. He didn’t know who was up there, but he knew it didn’t really matter. She had papered over the glass in the front door, all the curtains were closed, for good measure he could crawl, but how much could he learn from peering through a gap in a curtain? Even if he wasn’t careful, even if he walked, even if he threw open the window, even if he stepped out on the porch and talked to whoever was there, it still wouldn’t be enough. The danger wasn’t on the other side of the blast door. The danger was inside him. That was the way things worked, it seemed to Will. The danger was in what people do about what they can’t know.
(Francine)
Sometimes (only sometimes, not always, and never out loud), Francine resented that it was taking so long to get her nursing credentials. It was hard to wait, but it made sense to her, it really did, she understood. Burt’s parents were exactly the kind they had to worry about, and never mind he tested negative for the gene himself, nurture was a big part of it. Of course they’d want him to take an extra step to prove his prosocial nature, and her too, she married him after all, and what a great option they offered to couples in their situation. They could skip the year separated from their kids and even work their way up to the Rewards Membership if they both took jobs in the Surveillance and Compliance Network. So now Burt was a self-improvement coach at the perk factory downtown, and Francine was a nurse in training on the ER night shift.
The uniform took some getting used to, although again, she never said so. She didn’t like tight clothes. But it was also true that she often got cold, and she had found a way to cover up a bit and still expose the most important part, the part they were trying to draw attention to with that emblem across the breasts, which was the staff of healing, and a hint of the wings that reminded everyone of why they were lucky to live in this country. Sometimes (just sometimes, not always) she worried that her cardigan was the kind of disloyalty or dissent the eyes in the ceiling were watching for, and she would make a show of unbuttoning the top buttons when she was alone and admiring her uniform in front of a mirror, or she would talk to patients about how much she liked it, so the auditors could hear. Francine had taken to talking a lot at the hospital. Better safe than sorry, it seemed to her. She never knew for sure what it might be important to say.
She stopped there in her thoughts, just shy of the fear underneath it: that it was not just saying but also doing (maybe even also thinking) that might be important. Sometimes (she was careful not to think this, she noticed, except when she was outside, as if the buildings could be wired not just to watch and hear her, but to monitor her thoughts) – sometimes she wondered if even when she finished her training, they would not give her a membership. What if the point of the Surveillance Network was not only detection of antisocial tendencies in others through established protocols, but also detection of antisocial tendencies in the evaluators themselves, as evidenced by their failure to invent new acts of prosocial courage of their own. What if the secret was that one kind of inventiveness was wanted in this country after all? If there was something they were watching to see if Fran would do that she had not yet done.
She experienced this fear only obliquely, like a shadow in the corner you don’t look at, or a rustling noise you dismiss. Superstitious, she thought. Nonsense. Nervous over nothing. Repressive judgment, self-protective censure awakened and flying frantically in the caged space under the tight weave of the dress she secretly disliked under the thick white cardigan she pretended to need. But each time she pulled a new medical chart from the plastic tray outside an exam room door, she felt a fluttering of anticipation and apprehension. Maybe this was her chance. Most people were surprised to be lucky but Fran was never surprised. She couldn’t tell anymore whether the apprehension she felt and suppressed so often was a premonition of doom or salvation, and she found it hardly mattered. She just wanted to get it over with. Something big was supposed to happen to her, some hand of God or hammer blow from above, she just knew it, and Fran wanted it done.
(Gregor)
Dr. Scanlon (Chief Examiner Scanlon) was almost finished putting on his clean suit. He never rushed when he did it. Not because he didn’t grow impatient with the steps – there were buckles and straps; procedures with sleeves; the necessity of stepping on the adhesive to remove dirt and germs from his shoes – but because he believed in the importance of the tasks ahead of him. He simply could not die. Not yet. And he would not. In other people – the nurses and doctors who caught infections – the real cause of death was a sloppiness that would never overcome him, a side effect of an attitude that almost everyone seemed to share now, new in modern times in a first-world nation but old in humans, the peculiar freedom that comes of lowered expectations. They are more mortal than they thought. Everyone is, they tell themselves. They are going to die early, might as well cut some corners. Might as well have some fun. But Dr. Scanlon did not think this. He understood that he was not appreciated for his seriousness and his sense of purpose. That he was mostly feared. But this was fine with him. Even useful.
He passed into the main ward to look at his patients. Lying asleep, you would never know their secret, save for the handcuffs braceleting both wrists and holding them fast to the shiny rails of their hospital beds. (The Dakotas had been the first to stock up on the cheaper beds, a rush shipment in cargo containers from Mexico; say what you would about the parties and the prurience, Paxton had foresight; and he could pull a trigger; he had been ready for the volume and the hygiene challenges when no one else was.) Asleep they looked harmless. Positively peaceful. Could you see them for what they truly were when they were awake? Dr. Scanlon thought so. He believed he could see it in the way they looked at him. The way they sipped water. Just a little defiant. Even begging for morphine, they had that quality. Some little undertone.
He went to the end of the hall, past the room where twelve snow monkeys stood rapping on the inside of their soundproof cages (a side effect of version 12 it seemed), to a private room with one tall blue window and a television running a muted loop of the truths, and he saw that she too was sleeping. Her eyelids were almost translucent. He knew it was a trick of the moonlight through the window, but it almost looked as if she were glowing. Mostly the medication made her sleep now, and although this was a disappointment, he knew it was a blessing. He sat down on the sofa. He had had it moved in because it was wider and easier to sit on in his clean suit, and because he could even nap there if he chose. Once or twice a nurse had found him there in the morning, but he didn’t care. Let them talk. Let them try to fire him, with everything he knew. She didn’t wake very often, and when she did, he liked to be there.
Tonight, again, he woke before she did, not to the sound of hand cuffs clinking against the rails in the main room as the first of the therapy patients stirred from a night of free dreams (he had picked a room far down the hall for her, and he kept the door closed), or to any fitful movement of his own (he was a sound sleeper), but to a vibration of the pager in the pocket of his trousers inside his clean suit. Good. He was disappointed to leave her, but he was excited about what it might mean. Still he did not rush. He removed his face mask and mob cap in anteroom A. He bagged his jumpsuit and shoe covers for laundry processing. He disinfected his hands.
Only when he passed through the vinyl curtain and into the elevator did he look at his pager and see what he’d been hoping to see: the file for his task from the President’s Chief of Staff had been restored from the hospital archives.
(Vaughn)
Vaughn stabbed Scanlon in the trachea with the trauma shears again, and then the clink of his handcuffs against the bed rails woke him. For years, his whole adult life really, Vaughn had thought he had no dreams, but now he understood that all along he must have been leading some other secret life each night, and he felt a little ripped off wondering how good it must have been, the life he never got to know. Probably the dreams had been different back then, dreams of Lisa maybe in her sheer nightshirt, or of his brother Mack clowning in footed pajamas. Lost to history. Now his dreams were of escape and revenge (that’s probably all it amounted to; not really sparing others; not really heroic), at least five or six a night, and he remembered all of them because when we dream, we move, and now when Vaughn moved he woke to the steely clink of his own confinement.
In the trauma shear dream, the stabbing worked better than it ever would in real life. The shears were blunt tipped so you couldn’t really puncture a throat the way he did at the end of his favorites, but the blades were as sharp as they come. They’d cut through jeans, or a seat belt, or even a copper penny. When he thought about it awake, he imagined opening a pair around Scanlon’s jugular and bearing down hard like you would on a pair of bolt cutters. Vaughn’s last job was laying pipe in the floors of a Rewards Resort, so this would be a piece of cake. And it would be satisfying too, but Vaughn wasn’t really going to do it. For one thing, his wrists were cuffed. And for another it would ruin any chance he had of getting out.
There were some good parts to his day. They had him all doped up on some meds Scanlon said were on the cutting edge. A few months ago he’d gone bed-to-bed boasting about one of them with a petri dish full of goo. Something new, the kind of thing the FDA would never have approved. Vaughn’s mother had died of cancer while they waited for approval on the cure, and Scanlon wasn’t skipping trials altogether, but he was speeding it up. That Vaughn liked. Scanlon had a few monkeys down the hall in room 1042, and he tried things out on them before he tried them on Vaughn. When these sores healed up they would probably just transfer him to a self-improvement center, Vaughn knew that, but maybe, just maybe, they’d let him go. Those centers had to be getting pretty full, didn’t they? And maybe they’d want to show him off: cured by miracle drug developed here by our very own Chief Asshole Scanlon! So Vaughn had been buttering him up, calling him “Doc” like he actually liked him, and thanking him for his innovation. It turns out you can do that while you’re imagining stabbing someone in the throat with scissors. You can say “Heya, Doc, time for that miracle drug of yours? How are my monkey friends down the hall? I hear you’re cooking up another one, I’d be happy to be your guinea pig on that too, why don’t you keep me right here.”
The devil you know vs. the devil you don’t and all that. Sure, here he was cuffed all the time to a bed, but at least there was Betty, this nurse who brought him his trays. Absolutely not his type. Tiny breasts and short hair almost like a boy’s hair, and tattoos all over both arms like a garden of roses with thorns with some kind of liquid on the ends of a lot of them. He had asked her what it was once and she had said blood. There were words tangled up in there too, and sometimes he asked her about them. Vaughn wasn’t a poetry guy, but he wanted to hear it anyway. He used to go to the Indian casinos and afterwards to a strip club in Dickinson where all the girls had hair so long it whipped around and covered their tits sometimes in a way that hypnotized him. Funny that you could start out a tit-and-hair aficionado, and a string of hard knocks could change you into a guy who wants to hear poetry and looks forward all day to a visit from a girl with nothing up top.
Now the door opened, and there she was, sweet swing-shift Betty with his late-night cup, (they let him drink it round the clock now, to slow the leak from the spinal taps, they said), and it looked so good, his heart lifted so much it almost drowned out the clink of handcuffs from beyond his curtains completely. It had gotten so his whole goal was to slow this Betty down and make this little part of his day last. He had a lot of tricks. Acting too sore to move, to slow down the bed changes. Staring into the bottom of his cup for whole minutes like he was sorry to see the last of the coffee go.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. The chatter could slow her down too. “How did a girl from Garrison get all those tattoos? How many tattoo parlors can there even have been in North Dakota back then?”
She took out a joint and lit it for him. She had rolled it herself, a special kind of twist at the end he had seen her do. Sometimes she did it in front of him and he got to see her do it. That’s how he knew she had made this one for him. On the tray was his chart with the notes she wrote in her tiny crabbed hand.
“You can slip me a note if you’re too shy to say. Write me one of your poems.” She couldn’t slip him a note. The ceiling was full of eyes. And he couldn’t see her poems anymore because of the Hazmat suit she’d started wearing to see him, but he could remember.
She just held the joint to his lips and with her other hand picked up the TV remote. “Which channel?” she said.
“Don’t tease me,” he said, and this time she didn’t smile behind the plastic like she usually did. Maybe someone she loved was sick. She just switched it to the party channel, which was all he ever said he wanted. He ignored the countdown clock (3 Days!), he wasn’t winning any prizes, but the looks on the faces of people getting things they hoped for were like flickers from the lost dreams he hadn’t gotten to see.
“Ever been to one?” he said.
“A few.”
“What’d you wear?”
She set the tray with the joint and his coffee and his chart aside. “If you could slide your hips to the left, I’m going to pull the sheets up now.” All business. It was heartbreaking actually. These visits from Betty, they were all Vaughn had. He shifted his hips to make it easy for her (he was tall, a big guy, and this Betty was so small). “Now I’m going to lift your shoulders a bit,” she said, and slipped a gloved hand under his shoulder. The rubber made a crumpling sound under his weight. He couldn’t feel the shape of her slim little hands through them. Even trying to imagine it, he couldn’t. She shoved the sheet underneath him, an uncomfortable lump, and he looked at her face and saw there were tears in her eyes.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “Boyfriend troubles?”
“New detergent,” she said. “Makes my eyes water.” Something for the auditors. He should shut up, he knew it. She didn’t want people at the hospital to know she was crying.
On screen there was an ice sculpture of a woman holding a gun that looked like Cheryl Ladd from Charlie’s Angels. He had seen one like it before. It was a party favorite. She had been born in South Dakota. He tried to settle in and focus on that. Maybe soon he’d be out. They’d take him to a self-improvement center, he knew they would, but how bad could those be?
When she finished with his sheets, Betty turned to the little thermos on his tray and set up his cup. Vaughn loved this part and he hated it. The coffee was so good, but it meant it was almost over. Her visit was coming to an end. Betty cranked his bed up a little for him and let him hold the cup himself – it was one of the things he loved about her. With his wrists cuffed, he had to crane his neck at a crazy angle and lean forward and dribble coffee on himself, but at least he could do it himself, that was something, and after he got the last drop out he knew it was over, not just the coffee, but the holding something and taking care of himself, and he always held it a minute and stared.
And today Betty had given him something real to stare at. Tears sprung to Vaughn’s eyes, but he kept them angled into the cup so the eyes in the ceiling couldn’t see it, like she had known he would because he always did. She was so smart, his Betty. And brave. And she must love him a little, dreaming up a way to tell him something in a place like this, with every room bugged and the ceiling full of eyes. Because at the bottom of his mug she’d fit one of those petri dishes Scanlon was so proud of. Not full of goo this time, but a note in her own cramped hand: “None of the monkeys can move their legs.”
