Famous Men Who Never Lived

by K. Chess

  No one remembered her book.

  “Carlos, tell me something. Why do you think I should go back to work? As a doctor, I mean. Because work is good for people generally? Or are you thinking of me in particular? Or is it because of the kind of work I’m trained for? Like, I owe it to humanity to use my medical skills to heal others?”

  Or was it, she wondered, because surgeon reflected better on UDPs as a group than bum?

  “I’m not going to scold you today.”

  “Good,” she said. “You shouldn’t.”

  “I often consider the fact that as UDPs, each of us has been rent from our social fabric. It’s not just our world that is gone but our individual parents, our children . . .” He looked at her keenly. “Also our mentors and friends. Everyone we might once have wanted to impress. Anyone we might try especially hard not to disappoint.”

  “I’m not your daughter.”

  He sat on the aluminum bleachers. He reached for a kickboard, setting it across his bony knees. He smoothed his arms across its surface. “No. You’re not. Tell me how I can help you.”

  “Ayanna Donaldson stole something from me. I don’t know how to get it back. I confronted her, but she denies it.”

  “What was it that she took?”

  The Pyronauts.

  If she spoke the title aloud, how precious his recognition would be to her. Yet a part of her didn’t want him to know the specifics. “An important cultural artifact,” she said instead, watching his expression. Where did his loyalty lie? Would he believe her at all? “I showed it to Donaldson at that party, and she took it from me—took it from my hands, goddamn it—and acted like she wanted to be involved, but now she won’t answer my calls. And she says she doesn’t have it, and I have no proof of any of it.” She couldn’t keep the words, her frustration, from spilling out.

  “You feel she’s deceiving you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet no one knows what the item is. Its very rareness prevents widespread recognition of its value. This isn’t the Rosetta Stone. It’s not the Elgin Marbles.”

  “Right,” Hel said. “That’s it—the problem—exactly.”

  “Well, what do you think I can do about it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. That’s why I came—”

  “No, I’m really asking: What do you want me to do? Shall I accuse her? Expose her? Even if I believed you, do you think I have any real power in this world? To the extent that I have accrued a sort of capital, why would I spend it on this? You must look at it the way everyone else is going to. Disgruntled, unemployed trauma victim, missing some property that may never have existed at all.”

  “You’re saying you don’t believe me?”

  “On the contrary, my dear. Museums steal from the vulnerable. They always have. You’re Greece in this situation. You’re Egypt.”

  His warm brown eyes, nested in kindly wrinkles.

  “You do believe me. But you won’t do anything for me.”

  “I’m not your father. Even if I were. I have to behave myself.”

  She remembered her first trip on a commercial airship, years ago, when she was a medical resident. She’d sat in the back row, just in front of the vending machines, crowded next to an elderly couple who looked far too elegant for third class. Midflight, somewhere over the Great Plains, turbulence took hold of the ship, shook it like a toy in the sticky grip of a child. Though the captain kept his voice soothingly routine over the communications system as he reminded passengers to return to their assigned seats and put on their harnesses, Hel felt herself becoming upset. Her sister had warned her, half joking, to do her own Truth reading before the trip to see if transcontinental travel was auspicious, and Hel had refused and now here she was, unprotected, without forewarning of her own demise.

  This metal tube is going to crash, she’d said to herself. It is going to break in half.

  The airship had bucked, shuddered. The aisle lights dimmed. She became possessed of the conviction, all at once, that she was seeing herself and her seatmates from the outside, looking down at them the way an outsider would observe them, God or an alien or the person dealing out the cards.

  Below her, she saw the girl with the dark hair in the aisle seat, noticed how she curled her fingers around the buckle of her harness over her heart. Overwatched, too, the silvery lady in the window seat, how she slid down the shade and closed her eyes. Those paper-thin lids, that fragile skin dusted with powder. Those fretful shallow breaths, quicker now, distractingly audible. She saw the man, the lady’s husband, seated in between, reach for his wife’s hand. He took it in both of his.

  She saw that the girl noticed this gesture of comfort and that she was touched by it.

  Then, gripping his wife’s hand tightly, the man turned her wrist. He rotated it, angling her watch so that he could read its face. Gentle movements. Checking the time.

  There was no mercy, she realized, floating outside herself. There could be no kindness for its own sake.

  Hel found she had that same floating sensation now. She saw the pool, big and square and reeking, strangers laboring in their separate lanes. She saw the old man get up from the aluminum bleachers with his kickboard and walk five steps to the edge of the tile. She saw him lower himself awkwardly to his knees, and then swing one leg and then the other around, careful not to put too much weight on the ends of his poor, shortened arms. There he sat on the lip of the pool, his feet dangling. She saw the woman—herself—alone on the bleachers now, saw her disordered hair, the bruised, stupid look on her face. Saw herself take the damp towel in her hands and wring it.

  Without turning around, the man spoke. “I have to behave myself,” he said, “behave the way they expect me to. I have to be unfailingly polite, dignified—maintain that image. I can be angry only at specially chosen times, and only in response to egregious injustices against my people. I have to, or I’ll give it all away.”

  Hel saw the woman drop the towel and follow him to the pool. She saw that woman place a booted foot between the man’s shoulder blades and shove, pushing him right over the edge and into the water with a messy splash.

  She saw the young lifeguard sit up in his high chair, suddenly alert.

  She didn’t care. How fearless of consequences she’d become. How shameless. Who did that? What kind of a person did that to a cripple?

  She nudged Oliveira’s kickboard into the pool after him. “You fucking gootch. You traitor.”

  The interloper came over the ashy ridge one day while Asyl and John Gund patrolled. When they spotted the figure in the distance, they stopped walking to watch his approach; a man, moving easily, unencumbered by a protective suit—he wore a cloth mask tied over his nose and mouth and a ragged jacket and pants the color of the wasteland around them, and shoes, and that was all. To the pyronauts, it was inconceivable that he had not been sickened by the fumes from burned stubble and dying plants all around them, but he did not seem to exhibit any of the typical respiratory symptoms of those few stubborn folk they’d encountered in the past who insisted on living outside the safety of the bunkers. Still, they hailed the stranger at twenty paces to demand that he stop, and stop he did, once he saw John Gund’s sidearm leveled at him. He stopped and laughed at them.

  He told them his name was Aitch. (Vikram said that he had once written and attempted to publish an entire scholarly paper on the possibility that John Gund had misunderstood the stranger, that he was actually going by an initial, H. What, then, might the H have stood for? Heaven—or hell? Hiram, the name of Sleight’s uncle, who’d succumbed to the dreaded battle flu? The slang term for heroin, a vice in which certain biographers believed Sleight occasionally to have indulged? The H train that rumbled on its elevated tracks down New Lots Avenue two blocks from the cottage in Brownsville where he wrote the book?)

  Aitch lingered, conversing with the pyronauts. He was a strongly built young man with a ruddy, untroubled countenance and broad shoulders. Asyl, a member of a
postapocalyptic Christian sect whose adherents believed that they had each been personally pulled from the pit by the hands of God, maintained perpetual celibacy as penance. But surely, John Gund thought to himself, she must notice how handsome the stranger was.

  John Gund ordered Aitch to find shelter; he was in violation of the quarantine laws and anyway, no man could last long out in the Neverlands. Aitch disagreed. He’d been born in the Never, he said, and there were plenty of others like him who survived off the bounty of these abandoned lands and had never been sick a day in their lives. Still, when the stranger looked at Asyl, taking in her features through the smeared crystal of the faceplate of her suit, he agreed to come with them to the nearest settlement.

  The three of them walked all day together through the ashy fields of former farmland, and Aitch explained about the quick-developing shoots and roots his mother had taught him to find and harvest out in the wastes before the periodic patrols arrived to test and burn. At first, it seemed to John Gund that Aitch was watching Asyl too attentively as he spoke, directing all of his remarks to Asyl in a disconcerting manner. It made him feel itchy. Yet as soon as John Gund developed this opinion, Aitch abruptly turned his attention.

  He began asking pointed questions of John Gund instead, questions about his past before the aliens’ advent. These, John Gund found even more uncomfortable. Asyl was well attuned to those topics he preferred not to discuss, but this stranger lacked her sensitivity. Though John Gund remained convinced of the necessity of his protective gear out in the poisonous open of the wastes, he felt foolish addressing this man whose only barriers against it were fragile cloth and skin.

  They walked together as the shadows lengthened, as the silhouette of the skyline of the abandoned city in the distance blurred and grew indistinguishable. When they reached the outskirts, it was time to set up camp. Asyl argued that it would be cruel to leave Aitch at the mercy of the wind. At her insistence, the stranger joined them in their tent. As usual, once the seal was set, Asyl removed her suit, and John Gund did not like the way that the stranger watched her then in her modest but clinging undergarments. She touched the man’s face mask, and he showed her how it was constructed, how he’d cut a salvaged pillowcase into a shape that would cover the lower part of his face, fitting over his short beard. “It’s not one of those fancy filters, like what you’ve got,” Aitch said with a grin, “but it’s lighter to wear and it keeps the dust out well enough.”

  John Gund himself elected to sleep in full protective gear that night, and he kept his flame pistol close to hand.

  In order to fit into the two-man tent, they arranged themselves head to foot to head, like the rationed sardines in tins back in the stores of some of the more frugal communities the pyronauts had visited. John Gund couldn’t sleep for a long time. He watched, over the lump Asyl’s upward-pointing toes made in the blanket, the other man’s face—eyes scrunched up and lips unselfconsciously parted, baby-like in sleep. Finally, John Gund’s vigilance and worry slipped away as he drifted off.

  In the morning, Aitch was gone.

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: MICAH LEE, AGE 24, BROOKLYN

  When I was called, I wasn’t supposed to answer. Keepers don’t participate in any kind of gambling, no matter what the stakes, because the Commentaries prohibit the casting of lots. So when my number got called in the evac lottery, that was the final break. Other members of my church felt they had nothing to fear from the plant meltdowns and missile strikes. They were counting on a continued life in heaven, so they said no. I said yes.

  In my world, the Keepers of the Covenant was the fastest-growing Christian denomination on the planet. Now, I’m the last Keeper there is, if you can still call me one, after my heresy.

  I was already lost to them, way before the evac. I remember it to the day. I just didn’t want to admit it.

  Here’s how it happened. I was about to finalize my engagement to marry this girl. And when I say girl, I mean it. She was fourteen years old. The official date of our union was two years away still, so that she would be legal in the state of New York by our wedding night, but she was set aside for me and I had paid the bride price agreed on by our parents. I knew her name was Hannah, but I hadn’t even seen a picture.

  My uncle and I took a velocab to meet her at the Keeper Hall in Midwood where her family were congregants. Having fixed the match, my uncle was extremely pleased with himself. He kept leaning back to make conversation with the driver. I scrambled out of the velocab as soon as we arrived and stood on the stone steps of the hall—an old one that used to be a Methodist church. I’m trying to remember how I felt then. Excited, I think.

  After a minute, my uncle took my arm and led me inside, where Hannah’s oldest sister was waiting to bring us to the classroom next to the sacristy, where Hannah waited. On Tuesdays after school, she volunteered in the child-care center there.

  Though I tried not to look at Hannah’s sister’s body, I couldn’t help noticing that her bottom was round and shapely. Was it a family trait? Her attractiveness filled me with nervous anticipation. It seemed to take a decade to walk down that corridor with the music of the service leaking right through the floor, the faithful singing at their worship, and as we drew closer, I could hear kids calling out too, shrill voices laughing.

  The sister indicated the classroom door. I stepped near. A narrow window allowed me to see inside. There was a group of lower-form children sitting on the rug, and kneeling in the middle was Hannah. My uncle, crowded next to me, drew in an approving breath.

  The first thing I noticed about her was how serene she appeared. Her eyes were almost shut; her lips moved faintly as she talked to her charges. She had very black hair, like her sister, and though it was twisted up into a knot at the nape of her neck, I could see how heavy and full it was. I imagined it unpinned, spilling over shoulders and breasts in the conjugal moment the two of us would someday share.

  Yes, she was beautiful.

  I looked more closely down at Hannah’s hands. Small and delicate. In each one, she held a figurine shaped like a giraffe, one just a little taller than the other. She made the two giraffes waltz up a ramp built of plastic blocks toward a cardboard box meant to represent, no doubt, the Ark. Her students also clutched toys. Animals from Africa, mostly—elephants and antelopes and lions—all part of the same cast-resin set as the giraffes. I also saw two mismatched toy bears, a stuffed rabbit, and a wooly dog. The kids copied Hannah, marching their own animals up the drawbridge as she smiled at them with delight.

  And then it hit me. She wasn’t teaching these children. She was playing with them.

  I go to Reintegration Education. I go to Adjustment Counseling. I go to therapy. I have a profile on a nondenominational Christian dating website, and though I’ve enjoyed messaging back and forth with some women on there, I don’t go on dates. When I see a Bible Numericist on a street corner, preaching about how UDPs are God’s chosen, I cross to the other side.

  Hannah’s probably dead now, wherever she is. There would have been riots and food shortages after we left. Experts predict that everyone in the tri-state area would have been sickened by the radiation. There may have been more bombs, too, after the plants. So Hannah’s dead, with the rest of our people.

  “Knock,” the sister urged me, that day in the hall, but I didn’t need to. Hannah saw us through the window. She stood up to greet me, smoothing her skirt and smiling. A smile for her future husband; not the same smile from a minute before. An expression she’d learned to make.

  You could see it as God’s will. But that only would make sense if I’d turned away. If I’d told our families I wouldn’t. I didn’t do that. I just went along. Like she did.

  I think of the animals. Two of a kind, two by two, or one at a time like the toy rabbit, the dog. It doesn’t matter. I tell myself it’s all right that I’m not sad all the time. No one can be sad all the time.

  No one on the Ark had regrets.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wes
and Dwayne, who’d come to some kind of a financial understanding in the past week, had excavated enough junk from in front of the kitchen door in the cottage that it could be opened for the first time in a decade. The three men stood on the rotten boards of the back porch and looked out over a three-foot drop onto a rubble-strewn patch of dirt seeded with fragments of broken glass that sparkled in the midmorning light. “Pretty ugly back here,” Dwayne said.

  Vikram handed him one of the sandwiches he’d brought from the deli around the corner. “I don’t know how long I can stay today.” His sleep hadn’t been good since the encounter with Cristaudo in the warehouse, and he had priorities he ought to keep in mind that were more important to him than Dwayne’s cleanup efforts. Like keeping his job. Like maintaining his relationship—not that Hel seemed to care much when he told her how he spent his days.

  Wes jumped down into the yard. “Hey, it’s a lot of space for New York, though, right? It’s not so bad. You could get a little picnic table or something, if you wanted. Or grow stuff back here. You know, basil, tomato plants . . .”

  “Yeah,” Dwayne said, “I think my grandma’s mama had a garden here, back in the day. World War II. Dig for victory.”

  “How long has this house been in your family, anyway?” Vikram had never before considered the question of how Sleight came to live on this particular street in Brownsville. Was some long-ago Sealy this white man’s landlord? Had Sleight bought it from some alternate-world progenitor of Dwayne’s? He couldn’t figure it out.

  Dwayne shrugged off the question. “Got to look into that.”

  “I like how much meat they put on,” said Wes. “They’re serious about this. It’s two inches thick.”

  “It is good,” Vikram agreed, looking down at the sliced turkey piled on the roll he held in his hand. He squeezed gently and extra mayonnaise and shredded lettuce splattered between his shoes.