by Bob Proehl
“My apologies,” she says. “I thought after what happened, he’d take some time.”
“That’s what I said, too.”
She pulls a notepad out of the air in front of her and passes it to Clay. “Would you mind writing down the address where he works?” she says. Clay takes it and does as she asks without hesitation. The best way to get through a casual encounter with a Faction agent is total compliance. “Thank you,” she says, folding the notepad and disappearing it with a gesture too fast for Clay’s mind to register fully. “Since I have you here, may I ask you a few questions about your husband?”
“I’ll tell you what I can,” he says. “But Dom doesn’t tell me a lot about his business.”
“Of course,” she says. “Work-life separation is important, I hear. This is more personal, so maybe you can help.”
“Shoot,” says Clay, trying not to sound reluctant. Faction agents have a way of making people feel like they have something to hide even when they don’t.
“Does Mr. Pastorius have any friends in the baseliner communities? Maybe acquaintances in the Bronx?”
Clay shakes his head. “I don’t want to sound racist or anything,” he says. “We don’t have anything in common with those kinds of people. I mean, what would we even talk to them about?”
“Do either of you have family that went west?”
“Dom and I are both only children,” Clay says. “And our parents, mine and his, all passed away before…” He waves his hand in a slow-motion version of the way she’d disappeared the notebook. “All this.”
“Thank you,” she says. “We’re looking at all possibilities with an incident like this.”
“I completely understand,” Clay says. “I—” He’s about to say used to be one of you but catches himself. Faction might have a way of making everyone feel guilty, but with Clay it’s more pronounced. He deserted, after all. He never violated a law or broke a promise, but he left. He figures someday there’ll be a reckoning for that. “I’m glad no one got hurt,” he says.
“We lost a good agent,” she says. “Died protecting Damps from Damps. Someone’s going to settle up that bill.”
Clay opens the door for her, gripping his towel with one hand. “I hope you find whoever did this,” he says.
She stops in the doorway and shakes her head. “There’s no who to something like this,” she says. “It’s all of them. It’s how they are.”
Waking up next to someone changes the shape of the day. When Fahima reemerges into consciousness in contact with another body, it orients her attention to the world around her rather than inward. It precludes that first moment of self-examination and assessment. I am here, in this body. Am I all right? Asking the question introduces the possibility of a negative answer, the idea that she’s not all right. There have been many mornings when Fahima’s lain in bed tangled in the sticky threads of this thought. Am I okay? Do I even know what it might mean to be not okay? Have I gone too far to see the way back?
To wake to another set of questions, to start the morning with an external crisis, a concrete problem to be solved, has a relief to it. She feels Ruth’s arm around her waist and is forced to recall the night before. She creates a plan to extricate herself from the arm. These are things she’s good at, tasks suited for her particular skill set. Self-psychoanalysis not so much. Any mental apparatus she constructed for it was nothing but an intricate, redundant set of grinding gears.
She gingerly lifts Ruth’s limp wrist, but Ruth is so nearly awake that even this stirs her. She pulls Fahima closer in. It’s a shock, as it had been last night when Ruth finally and definitively leaned across the gap between them and kissed her. Fahima is so good at making decisions and acting on them when the choice involves assessment of known facts, but she’s in awe of people who act in the face of unknown emotional variables. For a second she feels trapped. Then she lets all of that go, sinks into the body next to hers, and falls back to sleep.
The second time, she wakes to the high whine of coffee grinding in the kitchen. She pulls on a robe, noting she’s missed Fajr. The operating system of her mind plays its error alert, the sound of Fahima’s mother sucking her teeth. She thinks of something Ruth said last night after the initial kiss, when Fahima was unsure. “Let this happen,” she said, pleading. What Fahima heard, how her mind translated the words, was Let yourself have this. They were two different sentiments, but they were connected. Both were about permission and surrender that wasn’t native to Fahima.
Drawn by the promise of coffee, Fahima doesn’t notice that the pile of blankets next to her in the bed still includes Ruth. She opens the bedroom door and sees Patrick Davenport in her kitchen, measuring out coffee spoons with a shaky hand. Sarah sits bolt upright at one end of the couch, staring blankly forward. Fahima closes the door behind her, wishing she could lock it from the outside, and Patrick turns at the sound.
“Fahima,” he says. “Thank goodness you’re all right.”
Patrick Davenport does not look well. His skin is pale, which is understandable because he rarely leaves his office at the top of the Bishop building, much less the building itself. But it isn’t the pallor that makes him look ill; it’s the way the skin hangs off him. He looks deflated, like something’s drained away his insides, and the fluidity his ability once gave his body has slumped into a boneless droop that turns all the straight lines into bowed umbras. His attention flits around the room as if there’s a fly circling his head. When he smiles at Fahima, one corner of his mouth doesn’t join in the act and he has to shove it upward with the palm of his hand, which pushes the whole side of his face out of place, giving his right eye a look of surprise.
The kettle whistles on the stove behind him, and he turns to get it, twisting at the waist like a hunk of taffy. “I hope you don’t mind I let myself in,” he says. “I heard what happened.” This is obvious bullshit. Nothing happens that Patrick doesn’t know about. His waist untorques; his face molds itself into a perfect imitation of concern. “Are you all right?”
“Super,” says Fahima. She stays in the doorway, blocking it and pulling the knob to hold it shut.
“Patrick’s here,” Sarah tells Fahima brightly. She pauses, her whole body frozen, unsure what to do next, what she did a second ago.
Patrick pours two cups of coffee. One of his arms extends across the room to give Fahima hers. “You still take it black?” he asks. He walks over to Sarah, his arm distended between his torso and Fahima like a clothesline. Fahima takes the cup from him with both hands, and the arm retracts. He arranges Sarah’s hands into a bowl shape in her lap and puts the coffee cup into it.
“Terrible stuff,” he says. “I know we approach these issues from opposite sides”—he touches his index fingers to each other, and when he pulls them apart, the tips stick, stretching like two pieces of chewed gum a second before separating—“but a thing like this is on both of us really. A security failure and a failure to…” He puts a hand out toward Fahima, spinning it at the wrist as he searches for a word. “To try to make everyone happy.”
“I don’t feel responsible for what happened last night,” Fahima says, thinking about the man who wasn’t Eito Higashi and the way his lips moved in sync with the bomber’s.
“That’s because you’re not,” Patrick says. “Any more than I am. It seems so preventable, though.”
The doorknob twists in Fahima’s hand, and there’s a tug too strong for her to pull against without spilling hot coffee on herself. Ruth pulls the door open wearing a med school T-shirt Alyssa left behind. “Hey, boss,” Ruth says, wiping sleep from her eyes. “I was wondering if you wanted to—”
She stops, looking at the full room.
“Hey there,” Patrick says cheerily. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had a guest.” He moves from Sarah’s side back to the kitchen like paint being tossed out of a bucket, re-forming behind t
he counter. “How do you take your coffee?”
“To go,” says Fahima. “Ruth, you should get going.”
“Don’t be silly,” Patrick says, pouring another cup. “Fahima, introduce us.” It’s a request, not a demand. It’s always requests with Patrick. If he demanded anything from her, Fahima would tell him to fuck right off, but his requests seem impossible to deny.
“Ruth, this is my roommate, Sarah Davenport,” Fahima says, gesturing to Sarah on the couch. “And this was her brother, Patrick.”
Patrick’s smile tightens for a second, baring teeth.
“I’m Sarah,” Sarah says, less to Ruth than to herself. Patrick’s hand stretches across the room for Ruth to shake, which she does warily.
“Fahima and I go way back,” Patrick says. “We went to school together in the Dark Ages.”
“Ruth should really get going.”
“Were you there last night, too?” Patrick asks with feigned concern. “You weren’t hurt at all, were you?”
“Sugar but no cream,” Ruth blurts out. She blinks rapidly, trying to absorb and assess what’s going on.
“Of course,” Patrick says. “I almost forgot. Fahima, where do you keep the sugar?”
“I don’t have any,” Fahima says.
“Black’s fine,” says Ruth. “I’m fine.”
“Fahima, I don’t want to be indelicate,” Patrick says. “But what is Ruth’s level of clearance?”
“I’m just the—”
“She’s not attached to Tuning Fork if that’s what you want to talk about,” Fahima says. “If that’s what this is, she has to go.”
Patrick sucks a long hissing sound between his back teeth. “I’m afraid it is.”
“Give us a minute,” Fahima says.
“Of course,” Patrick says. Fahima leads Ruth back into the bedroom.
“What the fuck?” Ruth says. “I thought Sarah Davenport was dead. They taught us she—”
“She’s not; she’s just not in great shape,” says Fahima.
“And no one’s seen Patrick Davenport, like, ever.”
“Now you have,” Fahima says. “Which is not a great thing.” While Ruth hurriedly dresses, Fahima opens the drawer of the nightstand, which pulls out only halfway. Fahima jimmies the back panel, and it opens. A collection of old flip phones spills out, each one with a white nub of Hivestuff for an antenna. Ghost phones. She removes one, then packs the rest behind the panel, clicks it into place, and shuts the drawer. She presses the phone into Ruth’s palm.
“Hopefully this will never ring,” she says. “If it does, it’ll be me. When that happens, I need you to do exactly what I tell you.”
“What if I need to call you?” Ruth says.
“Emergencies only,” Fahima says. “This will always find me, but there might be consequences.”
“Why are they here?” Ruth asks.
“We used to be friends,” Fahima says. “All of us.” Ruth is fully dressed, the phone secreted somewhere on her person. Fahima opens the bedroom door and pilots Ruth through the living room to the front door. She pushes her out and shuts it behind her.
“No kiss?” Patrick says.
“Fuck off,” says Fahima, picking up her coffee and taking a sip. “This is terrible,” she adds. “You have to let it steep. You were always impatient.”
“I know what you’re hinting at when you refer to me in the past tense,” he says. “But it’s me, Fahima. I’m different, but we’re all different. Everything’s changed.”
“What do you want?” Fahima asks.
“About last night,” he says.
“Other than the bombing, how was the party?” says Fahima. Patrick smiles, and Fahima feels the same urge. There’s a relaxation that comes from being around someone you’ve known forever. Too often when talking to him, she’s drawn into it and has to remind herself it isn’t entirely Patrick in there. Or at least, he’s not alone. “No surprises,” she says. “Green lights across the board.”
“What coverage does that give us?”
“Most of Europe,” Fahima says. “Africa with a couple of holdouts. Southeast Asia. Saudi Arabia, but not much traction in the Middle East.”
“But nothing from Russia or China?”
Fahima decides to keep her suspicions about Russia to herself. “I hear the Chinese are working on a device of their own.”
“Have they had any luck?”
“They don’t have me,” Fahima says.
Patrick smiles. “And where are we in terms of research?”
“We’re around the same numbers,” says Fahima. “Affected range tops out at three miles. Within affected range, 50 percent actualized, 50 percent dead. Give or take, depending.”
Patrick nods as if she hasn’t said the devices would have a fatality rate in the billions. “It’s a shame we don’t have access to Emmeline Hirsch.”
“Access to her?” says Fahima. “She’s dead. She died in the riot.”
Patrick looks at her, surprised, and for a second Fahima is sure he knows.
“You never call it that,” he says.
“She died the day the war started,” she says. “Better?” Neither of these is how she thinks about that day. For Fahima, it will always be the day Patrick and I took over Bishop.
He laughs. It’s an unpleasant strained sound. A burp of air squeezed out of a bubble. “I have to say, eliminating nonactualized humans would simplify things.”
“I had someone who worked for me who thought that way,” Fahima says. “I had his ass arrested.”
“I know,” says Patrick. “It was my people who took him. I’m suggesting you should be open to outside viewpoints.”
“We don’t turn the devices on until I fix the numbers,” she says. “That was our agreement. I have enough on my conscience.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to. I keep count of the dead, too,” he says. “But sometimes what seems like a bug turns out to be a feature. Didn’t you tell me that once?”
“I told Patrick that,” she says.
“It’s still me, Fahima,” he says. “The person you went to school with. Your friend. I’m not a monster.”
“Not yet,” Fahima says quietly. But she has reports of villages in the Wastes wiped out by Faction squads, of plans to nullify the Chicago Accords if there’s any threat of an uprising. Things the Patrick she knew never would have done. He smiles. It’s supposed to look kind, but he misses the mark, extending the corners of his mouth too far into a pained rictus.
“Sorry about the coffee,” he says, walking casually over to Sarah and kissing her on the cheek. Her hand goes to the spot he kissed a second afterward, wondering what the lingering moisture is from. “And the interruption. I was worried about you. I’m glad you weren’t hurt.” Fahima is terrified that he’s about to hug her, an outcome that would be awful enough if it were Patrick Davenport she was speaking to. Instead, he makes a bow and leaves the room.
“Fahima, Patrick’s here,” says Sarah.
Two fliers double helix overhead, then circle back and buzz so close to the Kia’s roof that Carrie can hear them laughing over the stereo. The Armistice says no Resonants between the boundary and the West Coast territories, but kids come out here all the time to fuck around, sometimes worse. When they do, they stay near the interstates to avoid getting lost, even fliers.
Spooked, Carrie takes the next exit and from there on keeps to winding roads and crumbling asphalt. The tiny car rattles like a mechanical bull underneath her, jostling at every pebble and divot. Her ass is numb by the time she gets to Sioux City. Two years ago, this was one of the stable cities. Ten thousand people lived here, safe beyond the boundary. The ones who understood the terms of the Armistice had an advantage. They bought houses in second-rate cities out west before property values skyrocketed. They rented vans or drove with
whatever they could load into their cars without Faction agents looming over them in a forced evacuation. Accepting the horror of their situation gave them an edge. Some people settled on the western bank of the Mississippi, like dogs at a screen door, waiting to be let back in. They caught another kicking when the border was pushed back. Others went farther west, knowing it bought them more time. They’d never be at peace, but they could approximate it for a while, maybe until they died. Everything between the big rivers is subject to evacuation with no notice. Most of Sioux City’s residents packed up and kept going west. The people here are stragglers and risk takers, willing to stay until they’re rousted rather than move on now.
Carrie’s learned it’s possible to autopsy a city once it’s died. She can see the eventual cause of death and the marks of the sickness that came before. She maps the history of the city’s body over time. None of her theories about particular towns and cities can be confirmed. She’s become a storyteller for dead cities, eulogizing them without any facts. Sioux City, she assesses, hit its heyday in the mid-1980s: the architecture of the center downtown is hack postmodernism, a hodgepodge of styles mashed together in a way that felt fresh and new for three minutes but now shows branded scars: empty Pizza Huts and abandoned Blockbuster Videos. Sioux City was half empty before the war, but there are patches where life has pushed back up from fallow ground. A block of coffee shops and bars and pizza places where young people who had money but lacked the drive to leave had tried to make the place livable. Some look open; people out front of a coffee shop smoke the herbal cigarettes popular and easy to get out in the Wastes if you didn’t live near one of the new tobacco farms, or have a line on cigarettes snuck over from the Carolinas. They’re tight sticks of mullein, mint, and sage that smell lovely but are harsh on the throat. Carrie makes a habit of bringing proper cigarettes, less for barter than as a handshake, a way to establish trust.
The smokers stare at the Kia as it passes. They don’t see many cars out here because most of the gasoline denatured years ago. She’s well enough known here, her presence associated with the things she brings. She’s not welcome, but she’s tolerated.
