by Kelly Link
Someone hands you a gun, you don’t check it out before you use it, be sure of its function, you’re a fool. Same with false papers. Next morning I crossed the southeast border into Palms, a city with no industry or trade centers and of scant strategic interest, populated as it is by the aged afloat on their pensions.
Cities, like the civilizations they reflect, find their rhythm. Their surges, falls. Areas within falter, decline and bottom out, open to new strains of inhabitants and push their way back up. Palms for now was on hold, a single sustained note.
From town’s center I walked out to the grand artificial lake where picnic tables, benches, and teeter-totters squatted at eight-meter intervals around clear water. Teeter-totters, one assumes, for visiting grandchildren, though that day there were none. Plenty of elderly folk at the tables or sitting with feet in the water on low-slung walls, people a generation or two younger standing by. Caretakers.
I ended up back in town at a sparsely populated outdoor café, server and barrista of an age with those around. Bob, the server, put me in mind of oldtime French waiters, professional mien and mantle donned with his apron. The barrista’s demeanor came from warmer climes; she tapped on cup bottoms, swiveled about, triggered the steamer in syncopated bursts as she worked. Mildred’s a peach, Bob said, directing his gaze briefly that way when I commented.
A couple I’d estimate to be in their eighties sat across from one another at a table nearby, each with a link propped before. She’d key in something on hers, he’d look at his. They’d both look up and smile. Then it was his turn.
Children? Images from long ago—a vacation on the big island before the embargos, places they’d lived, concerts and celebrations attended, their younger selves?
Even stolid Bob registered their happiness, careful not to interrupt but repeatedly locating himself close by lest they need something.
A frail-seeming man in eyeglasses sat reading an actual book whose title I eventually made out to be A History of Radical Thought. Interesting, that use of the indefinite article, I thought, a instead of the; one had to wonder at the content. There could be so many such histories.
When Bob set down a tea cake at another table, the woman there waited for him to walk away then quickly dipped her head and with one hand in half a moment sketched a shape in the air before her: silent prayer, and what few would recognize as the sign of the cross.
Across the street, in a park bordered on the far side by offset stands of trees, two women in sundresses, a style I recalled from childhood, were flying a kite made to look like a huge frog and awash with bright yellows, crimson, metallic blues. The runner had just let go the kite; both laughed as the frog took to sky.
Smelling of fresh earth, rich and dark, the coffee was good. I had three cups, took another walk round the lake, and remounted the train without challenge or incident. On the trip back, mechanical or guidance problems delayed us, and it grew dark as we reached the city, lights coming on about us, curfew close enough to give concern. Officials waited on the platform to issue safe passes. Elsewhere, automatic weapons cradled in their arms, soldiers who looked to be barely out of adolescence patrolled.
2.
So there I am in a room, rooting about in the few personal belongings left behind, listening for footsteps outside in the hall or coming up stairs. How did I arrive here? We wonder that all our lives, don’t we?
It was as much the idea of a room as it was a room. Plato and Socrates might have stood at the door arguing for days. A single small window set high, its plastic treated so that light blossomed as it passed through, flooded the room with virtual sunshine. From one wall a lower panel let down to become a bed, another panel above to serve as table or desk.
Where a man lives and what’s inside his head, they’re mirrors of one another, my trainers said. In which case there shouldn’t be a whole lot going on in Merrit Li’s. And if I had the right person, I knew that wasn’t true.
My inventory disclosed a packet of expired papers and passes bound together in a drawer, a thin wallet containing recent travel visas, a drawerful of clothes, some disposable, some not, all of them dark and characterless. On his link I found itineraries and receipts, forty-six emails that seemed to be business related, though what business would be impossible to discern, and a young adult novel about the Nation Wars.
Elsewhere about the room, apportioned to the innards of various appliances, a Squeeze, a cooker, a coffee maker, I found what could only be the components of a stunner, cast in a hard plastic I’d not seen before, doubtless unkennable to scanners.
Immediately I became aware of a presence in the doorway behind me. There’d been no warning sounds, no footsteps. Right. So he had to be who and what I thought.
“We have mutual friends,” I said, turning.
“Else you wouldn’t be here.”
Older than myself by a decade and more, conceivably old enough to remember the wars he’d been reading about. No sign of recognition at the safe word. Stance and carriage, legs apart, shoulders and hips in a line, confirmed other suspicions. Military.
I glanced up from his feet at the same time he did so from mine. Anticipating attack, one sees it begin there.
“Your belongings remain as they were,” I said.
He nodded. Waited.
“Three days ago you were in Lower Cam, at a train stop where an attack took place. Two citizens were injured. The target, Frances diPalma, fled.”
“Leaving a body behind her. That one not a bystander.”
He held out both hands to signal non-aggression and, at my nod, stepped to the console to dial open the built-in screen. Habit—and of little benefit should we be on lens, but one takes the path available.
A spirited discussion of the city’s economic status bloomed onscreen: female moderator, one man in a dark suit, one in a sky blue sweater. It’s really quite simple, assuming you have the facts, the suit-wearer said. The other’s expression suggested that not once in his life had he encountered anything other than complexity, nor could he anticipate ever doing so.
“You believe I was there to take her down,” Merrit Li said.
“Yes.”
“I was there, but to a different purpose than you suppose. She is in fact a mutual friend. I know her as Molly.”
Rueful Tuesday, two days before. I had the windows dialed down while watching a feed on vanishing species. I sat back, dialed the window up, the screen down, to look across at the next building. Uncle Carl used to tell me a story about how this early jazz man, Buddy Bolden, threw a baby out the window in New Orleans and a neighbor leaned out his window and caught it. That’s about how close we were.
For a moment I could make out moving shapes over there, people, before they dialed down their window.
I had punched back in for the sad tale of vanished sea otters and was remembering how when we’d first come here to the city, half-jokingly calling ourselves settlers, jumpy with wonder, with the effort and worry of fitting in, there’d been a linkstop showing disaster movies round the clock. World after world ravaged by giant insects, tiny insects, momentous storms, awakened deep-sea creatures, carniverous plants, science, our own stupidity.
With no forewarning, otter, shore and sea contracted, siphoned down to a crawler.
Warren’s face above.
“This,” he said, then was gone.
Rosland, time stamp less than an hour ago. A train stop. Single tracks up- and downtown, a dozen people waiting. Strollers, shufflers. Solitary busker playing accordion, license pasted to his top hat, little movement otherwise. Then suddenly there was.
A man walked briskly towards a woman waiting by the uptown track. She turned, transformed at a breath from citizen to warrior, everything about her changing in that instant. She shifted legs and feet, leaned hard left as he fired, followed that lean into full motion.
Moments later, the man lay
on the platform, face turned to the camera.
Then another face glancing back, gone as its owner sprinted up the walkway Fran had vanished into.
Merrit Li’s face.
Whereupon Warren’s returned.
“We think there were two other incidents, but this is the first we’ve had surveillance.”
“Fran took one of the attackers down.”
“Cleanly.”
“The second attacker followed her.”
“In the tunnel they’re off lens. We lost them. Nothing topside, nothing on connected platforms.”
“Any luck flagging her follower?”
“Check your drops. The bundle I sent should help with that.”
“We fought together at Kingston,” Merrit Li said. “Deep penetration. She had the squad.”
Doing what Rangers do.
“Not many walked away, either side.” He thumbed the sound on the room’s screen up a notch. “With the years, details have taken on a life of their own. You know the song?”
Two of them, actually. The official version, Kingston as a triumph of patriotism and the human spirit; the other underscoring the battle’s death toll, social cost, and ultimate pointlessness.
“Three of us came out of the fire. Two walking, one on Molly’s shoulder.”
Onscreen discussion of city economy had given way to the latest stats on immigration. Full-color graphs rolled across the screen. Authorities revoiced the stats and graphs: a marked uptick in Citizen Provisionals from rural regions far south, this fueled by border disputes among neighboring city-states. Graphics and voice-over were out of synch. Technician error, I thought. Then for a moment before getting shut down, voice and content changed drastically. Revisionist overdubs. Official news reestablished itself.
Li pointed to the screen, one of the southern borders. Drones from a couple generations back floated above scattered groups of ragged troops and rioters.
“I’m supposed to be there. Just about now, my CO is discovering I’m not.”
Even those you never see cast shadows. What I’d had were forests of filters and firewalls, limited access to public records, and no idea at all to whom his allegiance belonged, or if he might be off the grid entirely. But I also had Li’s face, by extrapolation his body volumes, and the way his body moved. It had taken me the best part of the two days since Warren dialed in with the clips, and a sum of chancy data diving, to find him.
“I assume your story varies little from my own,” Li said.
“Little enough.”
He waited a moment, then went on.
“One of my links stays on free scan, reach-and-grab for anything that hints of undisclosed military activity. Tagged one that felt half solid. Then another came through ringing like bells. Not much to doubt there. A takedown, and good—but it didn’t work. And seeing how it unrolled, I knew why. Molly. That first time too, I figured, so now they’d come at her twice and she put them down. They’d be getting ready to kick it into overdrive.”
“You have any idea why she was targeted?”
“It’s not like we were sending Union Day cards to one another, with a nice write-up about our year.”
“Right. Time to time, I’d hear things. She married and had a family up in Minnesota or Vancouver. She was consulting for or riding herd on private companies. She’d taken up teaching. Until last week, as far as I knew, she was dead.”
“While on assignment.”
“What we all heard. Turns out we weren’t the only ones.”
Li didn’t react, didn’t ask where that came from. The pieces were falling together in his mind. “A crawler,” he said.
“Followed by full-frontal assault. Once that closed down, Fran elected to stay off chart.”
“The moves on her could be flashback from that.”
“Could be.”
“And we don’t know who the crawler found.”
“What we know between us doesn’t take up much space in the world.”
Li glanced back at the screen. Forsaken drones. Ragtag troops and rioters. “Everything’s like paper folded so many times you can’t tell what it is anymore.”
I remembered Warren’s rhetorical How did we come to live in a world where everything is something else?
“Molly called out to you,” Li said.
“Relayed a message with a trigger word.” I told him much of the rest as well.
“Wanted you at her back.”
“As you said, they’ll be stepping it up.”
“And you came to me.”
Yes.
“So now she has us both.”
“Or will have.”
Li pulled his duffel from a shelf by the door. “Not much here I can’t leave behind. Give me ten minutes. Molly, you, me. Damn near have the makings of a volunteer army here, don’t we? A militia—just like that hoary old piece of 1787 paper said.”
3.
What I remember is questions, questions that should have been easy enough but weren’t, and I had no idea why. What is today’s date? Do you know where you are? It took time before I realized the voices were speaking to me. They were voices beamed in from some far-off world that had nothing to do with me, grotesque half-faces hovering over me, random collections of features that changed and changed again.
Do you know where you are?
No—but at some point I began looking about for clues. Hospital, I said early on, but that wasn’t good enough.
Gradually I came to understand that at the end of each night shift someone wrote the new day’s date on a whiteboard at one side of the room along with the physician, RN and NA assigned that shift, so pretty soon (with no idea what soon in this circumstance might encompass) I had that much covered.
Progress.
Good boy.
They were so pleased.
Over time, too, I learned to fake recognition of staff members, and to look for the hospital’s name, which I never could keep hold of in my mind, on nametags.
Yep, I know where I am all right.
And it’s the 21st. (Though if they pushed for day of the week I foundered. That wasn’t on the whiteboard.)
Seizures? I answered. Stroke?
Then the questions got harder. After which they said let’s go for a walk why don’t we, an absurd goal given my inability to turn unassisted in bed or move my legs, the physical therapist’s verbal commands meeting with no greater success in converting directive to action than those coursing along my nervous system.
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But I needed ambulation to qualify for further rehab. So therapist Abraham sandbagged me into sitting position, hauled me to our feet and, with mine dragging and scraping at the floor, carried me the required half dozen steps, the unlikeliest dance partners ever.
We were on our fifth, maybe sixth provisional government by then. Some were ill-advised, rapidly imploding coalitions, so . . . five, six, seven, who can be sure? This one had begun to look as though it might stick, like the stray cat that follows you home and, once fed, stays.
I learned that later, of course.
Three worlds, Abraham said, coexist. There was the old world of things as they are—of acceptance, of discipline, where we take what pleasure exists in what we have and expect no more. There was the new world, in which everything, country, selves, the world’s very face, becomes endlessly reinvented, remade, refurbished. And now this third world struggling to be born, where old world and new will learn to live with one another.
Like Abraham and myself scuttling across the hospital’s tiled floors.
I’m not supposed to be talking like this, Abraham said.
We were on a break, and he’d pushed me outside, to a patio bordered by scrubby bushes and smelling of r
osemary, where with minimal help I’d successfully tottered from the wheelchair and stumbled five terrifying steps to a bench. Applause would have been in order.
I asked if reinventing myself was not what I was doing.
More like rebuilding, he said. Refurbishing.
When I was a child, living in the first of our many homes, money was aflow, families and the neighborhood on their way up. If you tore a house down entire, you had to apply for new building permits. Leave one wall standing, it could pass as a remodel. So crews arrived in trucks and on foot to swarm over the site, piles of roofing, earth, brick and siding appeared, and within days, where the Jacobs or Shah house had been, there stood, in moonlight among hills of rubble, the ruins of a single wall.
Ready to get back to work? Abraham said. Patiently they await: Leg lifts, stationary cycling, weights, countless manifestations of pulleys and resistance. Row . . . Pull . . . Hold . . . Hold. Stepping over minefields of what look like tiny traffic cones. Balancing atop a footboard mounted on half a steel ball. Both of those last while clinging to walk bars and waiting for the state to wither away as Abraham said the old books predicted.
But five weeks further in, buckets of sweat lost to history, I’ve still not progressed past totter, trip and hope like hell I’ll make it to the bench. A convocation gets called. The physician I’ve taken to thinking of as Doc Salvage is spokesperson. Here’s the story, he begins. He smiles, then puts away the smile so it won’t get in the way of what he has to say.
They fully appreciate the work I’ve done. My attitude. My doggedness. My determination. They know I’ve hung on like a snapping turtle and refused to let go. The consensus is that we (pronoun modulating now to first-person plural) have gone as far as might reasonably be expected. In short, I can stay as I was, with severely diminished capacities, or.
Or being that I undergo an experimental procedure.
They would reboot and reconnect synapses, restore neural pathways, rewire connections that had failed to regenerate autonomously. And while they were in there they’d go ahead and rearrange the furniture. Spruce things up here and there. New carpet, fresh paint.
