Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 37

by Kelly Link

  You have the technology to do that? I asked.

  We do.

  And I’ll be myself again, physically?

  A better version. Though we understand (the smile is back) that sentimentally you may be attached to the present one.

  And what of risks? Complications?

  Oh, nothing terribly untoward. More or less the standard OR checklist: bleeds, infection, drug reactions. A long recovery.

  You’ve all this certainty, with an experimental procedure?

  Life itself is an experimental procedure. As you know.

  And I’ve already had a long recovery.

  Ah, that. Fundamentally you will have to start over, I’m afraid. Begin again.

  And so I did in subsequent months as Doc Salvage and crew watched closely to assess development and as I pushed harder at my limits than I’d ever have thought possible. We were down in the swirly deep, in the sludge, as Abraham deemed. But within weeks the leg that before could scarcely clear the floor now could kick higher than my head, I could hop across the room, steady as a fence post, on a single foot, and fingers could pick bits of straw from off the table top. I could climb, crawl, swim, run, lift.

  And wonder at what I’d been told, what I’d not.

  You’ve taken note, Doc Salvage said six months later, how little resistance there is for you in physical activity.

  Uncharacteristically, window shades were up behind him and light streamed in, so that he appeared to have a halo about his body, or to be going subtly out of focus.

  All much as we anticipated, he said. But it is far from being the story’s end.

  He paused, letting the moment stretch. Something reflective passed outside, a car, a copter, a drone, tossing stabs of light against the rear wall.

  Our bodies teem with censors built and inculcated into us, Doc Salvage continued, censors that create distraction, indecision, delay—drag, if you will. Morality. Cultural mores. Emotions. Most particularly the last. And we have learned how to bypass those. Eliminate the drag. We can peel away emotions, mute them, dial them down to the very threshhold.

  As, he said, we’ve done with you.

  Which explained a lot of what had been going on in body and mind, things I’d been unable to put into words.

  I now fit, they believed, a container they’d made for me.

  But already, even then, I was spilling from it.

  They had given me something. They had taken something. On such barter is a society founded. How much control over our lives do we retain, how much cede to the state? What debts do we take on in exchange for the state’s benefits? How does the state balance its responsibilities to the individual and to the collective? To what degree does it exist to serve, to what degree to oversee, its citizenry?

  Theories grinding against one another in the dark.

  The truth is this: Our enemies at the time were messing about with neurotoxins. It was those neurotoxins, not a CVA, not seizures as I’d been told, that came upon me in the burned-out fields of the far northwest. Those upon whose reach I was borne to the government hospital to awaken empty, blank, and helpless, isolate fragments of the world cascading around me.

  The truth is this as well: I was changed. By the gas. By Doc’s procedure. By the experience of reinhabiting my own body. And later, by my actions.

  Only with time did I come to understand the scope and nature of the changes within. Doc was right that emotions no longer obscured my actions; about much else he was wrong.

  A single image remains from before medics scooped me up. I am dragging myself across stubble. I can hear nothing, feel nothing. My legs refuse to function. And all I can see—this fills my vision—are my arms out before me. They stretch and stretch again. Each time I pull my body forward, they stretch more. My hand, my fingers, are yards away, meters, miles. And I do not advance.

  But within a year of that meeting with Doc Salvage I was on the move. There was much, in this fledgling nation, to be done.

  The lamentations of old men forever fall deaf on youngster’s ears, my uncle said. He knew that early.

  Sometimes I imagine myself an old man tied by sheets into my chair in the day room of a care center speaking—even though there is no one listening, no one there to listen—about the things I did, things I refused to do, things I never quite recovered from doing.

  At a table nearby, two men and a woman play cards, some game in which single cards get dealt back onto the table. In at least ten minutes no one’s put down a card. It’s the woman’s turn. The men sit unmoving, hands before them, cards fanned. They could be mannikins propped there. On the screen across the day room a giant face says she loves us, in the same movie that plays at this time every Tuesday, but no one cares.

  How does one assay right and wrong? With change crashing down all around us, do the words even have meaning?

  Is everything finally relative?

  What would you give, Sid Coleman used to sing, in exchange for your soul? An old, old song.

  I know that the world of which I speak sitting here tied into my chair would be unrecognizable to the young. Unrecognizable to most anyone, really, should they chance to be around to hear. And as I speak, I watch cockroaches scuttling on the wall, lose my thoughts, begin to wonder about the cockroach’s world. They’ve been around forever, never changed.

  All this, of course, knowing that I will never be an old man.

  4.

  “This is your place?”

  “Borrowed. Property is theft—right?”

  Out on the farthest edge of the city. Forager territory. Dog-pack-and-worse territory. I looked about at the cot, racks of storage cells, plastic units stacked variously to form furniture of a sort. All of it graceless and functional, the sole concession to domestication being a plaque hung on a side wall and jiggered to look like an old-time sampler: Always Drink Upstream of the Herd.

  “You can’t be here often, or for extended periods. What happens when you’re not?”

  “I have guard rats.” He began pulling cubes from one of the stacks. “Joking. About theft and property, too.” He reconfigured the cubes as a chair, more or less. “Those who live out here and I have an understanding. Turns out we’ve much in common.”

  “Being?”

  “That you deal with an unfree world by making yourself so free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. Camus, I think.”

  “Yet you run with the marshals of that world.”

  “Their screens, drones and watchers catch most of what happens on the surface of their world. But much goes on beneath, in ours.”

  “Giants of the deep?”

  “Minnows and small fish. Thousands upon thousands of us. Where the true history resides.”

  Li pulled a link from his pocket, punched in.

  “The villagers want to climb the hill and storm the castle, and there is no castle. The castle is all around us. What we have to do is learn to live in it.”

  As he spoke, perfectly relaxed, he was sweeping and scanning at impressive speed. “Ever come across a series of children’s books, Billy’s Adventures?”

  I shook my head.

  “I read them when I was five, six. The first one started off: ‘Two years it was that I lived among the goats. Two years that I went about on all fours, ate whatever came before me.’ Like most kid’s books, as much as anything else they were put out there as socializers. Teach the boys and girls how to get along with others, shore up received wisdom, hip-hurrah things-as-they-are. But scratch the surface and what was underneath gave the lie to what was on top. The books weren’t about joining the march, they were about staying apart while appearing to fit in. They were profoundly subversive.”

  Back when this area was a functioning part of the city, Li’s squat had been a service facility, a utilities satellite maybe, a goods depot. Layers of steel shelvi
ng six- and eight-units deep sat against the rear wall. Stained and worn cement floors, splayed heads of ancient cables jutting from the wall. Steel everywhere, of a grade not seen for better than half a century, including the door that now rang open to admit an elderly man in clothing at once suggestive of tie-dye and camouflage. Balding, I saw as he slipped off his cloth cap.

  “And so here you are back with us,” the man said. Trace of a far-northern accent in his voice. “And not alone.”

  Li introduced us. “Thank you for minding the burrow, Daniel—as ever.”

  “Well then, we can’t have just anyone moving in here, can we? We do have standards.” Then to me: “Welcome to the junkyard.”

  Li had continued to monitor his link as we spoke. Now he beckoned me. The screen showed a street in the central city, masses of people moving along, dodges, feints, near-collisons.

  “There,” Li said. The cursor became an arrow, touched on one individual moving at a good clip close to storefronts and walls. “And there.” Two larger figures, perhaps six meters back, matching speed with the first. “I’m piggybacked on security feeds. Seconds ago, sniffers at the corner dinged.”

  “Those two are armed.”

  We watched as the lone figure turned into a narrow side street or entryway. Both pursuers hesitated at the mouth, then stepped in, first one, then, on a six count, the other. People streamed by on the sidewalk. We waited. Moving at an easy pace, the single, smaller figure emerged. Patently she’d taken note where the cameras were and kept her face averted, but size and carriage were unmistakeable.

  Fran.

  Molly.

  “By now she’s in the wind and the area’s spilling over with police.”

  “And those hunting her will have new dogs in the area along with them,” Li said. “Unless, of course, they’re the same.” He thumbed over to news feeds. No mention of the incident. Then to the city’s official feeds, where delays from technical problems had been reported in the area and citizens were advised to consider alternate routes. “So many multiple realities,” Li said. “Is it any wonder we’re unable to see the world straight on?”

  Time passed, as it will, however hard one holds on.

  Li told me about religious practices among the Melanese who during old wars and due to the island’s tactical location, grew accustomed to airplanes arriving almost daily filled with goods, some of which got shared, much of which got cast off and reclaimed. For many years after, with that war over, the islanders carved long clearings like runways in the forest, built small fires along them to either side, constructed a wooden hut for a man to sit in with wooden disks on his ears as headphones and bamboo shoots jutting out like antennae. They waited for the airplanes to return with goods. Everything was in place. Everything was just as before. But no airplanes came.

  It began to feel as though what we were doing in our approach to the whole Fran-Molly affair wasn’t far removed.

  Why would Fran signal for backup then fail to make contact, even to make herself visible? Leapfrog, maybe? Assuming we’d move in and her pursuers’s focus would shift to us, leaving her free to . . . what?

  Look again.

  There had been urgency, power, in that attack. The air crackled with it. Fran knew where cameras were placed, carefully kept her face averted. From visual evidence her pursuers also knew, yet took little effort to skirt the cameras. (1) They were protected or (2) They didn’t exist.

  And just what did we hope to learn by endlessly reviewing the incident? “One works with what one has,” Li said every time we thumbed up the file.

  What we had was next to nothing.

  And hellhounds on our trails. We could all but hear them snuffling around out there in the dark.

  5.

  Government after government fell, each trailing in its wake the exhausted spume of grand theories. Anomie had come piecemeal over so long a time that we were hard pressed to remember or imagine another way. Platitudes, slogans and homilies had supplanted thought. That, or unfocused, unbridled hatred.

  Was the government at which we arrived a better one, or were we simply too exhausted to go on? The bigfish capitalism we fled and the overseer government we embraced had much the same disregard for bedrock democratic principles. But each individual was housed, educated to the extent he or she elected, provided sustenance and medical care, state-sponsored burial.

  Border disputes, blockades, financial sloughs, outright attacks, the collapse of alliances. Those early years thrummed with dangers to which our nascent union, fussily jamming the day, often reacted with little regard for long-term consequence.

  Ever on the go, the world’s contours shifting and reshaping themselves even as I passed among them, I grew accustomed to media and official reports of a world far removed from that I witnessed. Which among these gaping disparities were sinister, which utilitarian? And just what was it I was doing out there? The people’s work? The government’s? That of a handful of wizards behind the curtain? One of Sid Coleman’s songs comes to mind again, “Which Side Are You On,” not all that much of a song really, but a damned good question. I wonder every day.

  I was a good soldier, as soldiers go. One would expect years of such service to fix in place conventional, conservative beliefs. Instead, they honed within me an innate aversion to authority and to organizations in general. When I rummage in the attics of my mind, what I come up with is an immiscible regard for personal and civil liberty.

  Claeton, pronounced Claytown by locals, mid-January and so cold that when your nose dripped, icicles formed. A thick white mist rose permanently from the ground. Bare trees loomed in the distance, looking as though someone had strung together a display of the hairless legs and knobby knees of old men. We inhabited a ghostly sea bottom.

  Hansard and I were squirreled down in a scatter of boulders where a mountain range ran out into flatlands. There was one pass through the range and a patrol from Revisionist forces was on it. We were waiting for them.

  Everyone knew the satellites were up there, circling tirelessly, bloated with information. And if satellites monitored even this afterbirth of a landscape, I told Hansard, they had to be watching us as well—not us here, us everywhere. Hansard shrugged and squeezed a nutrient pack to start it warming.

  Drones might have dealt with the patrol, of course. Quickly. Efficiently. But drones hadn’t the dramatic effect of a couple of warriors suddenly appearing at the mouth of the cave. Something in our blood and ancestral memory—others of our kind come for us.

  Hansard finished drinking his nutrient, rolled the pack into a compact ball and stuffed it in a cargo pocket. The wind rose then, mist swirling like huge capes, cold biting into bones. Go codes buzzed in the bones behind our ears.

  We couldn’t pronounce the name of the place but were told it translated as Daredevil or Devil-May-Care. Biting cold had turned stewpot hot, barren landscape to cramped and crowded city. The stench of used-up air was everywhere. You could smell bodies and what they left behind. Sweat mixed with fine grit, pollen and laden gases and never went away. It coated your body, a hard film, a second skin that cracked when you moved. Hansard, rumors said, had gone down up here near the Canadian border some weeks before.

  That time, we almost failed to make it out, beating a retreat through disruptions turning ever more chaotic (dodging raindrops, an old Marxist might have said) hours before the region tore itself apart, this being what happens when a government eloquently tottering on two legs gets one of them kicked out from under.

  They came for us on the bullet train in Oregon. I turned from the window where sunlight shone blindingly on water, blinked, and there they were. Boots, jeans, Union jackets with the patches torn off. I’ve a brief memory of Tomas aloft, zigzagging towards the car’s rear on the backs of the seats, right foot, left, starboard, port, before I turned to confront the others. All became in that instant clear and distinct. I could see t
he tiniest bunching of a muscle in the shoulder of one before that arm moved, see another’s eyes tip to the left before head and body followed, sense the one about to bound directly toward me from all but imperceptible shifts in footing and posture.

  I remember condensation on windows from the chill inside the car, the wide staring eyes of a child.

  Afterwards, we liberated a pickup from a parking lot nearby and rode that pale horse into Keizer to be about our business.

  Years after that day in Oregon, and as many after what I’m recounting here, Fran and I stand where Merritt Li died. In those years, wildness has reclaimed that edge of the city. Sunlight spins toward us off the lake to our left as though in wafer-thin sheets. Spanish moss beards the branches of water oaks populated by dove and by dun-colored pigeons that were once city birds. Fran touches another oak near us; scaly ridges of its bark break off in her hand.

  We’re the only ones, she says.

  Who will remember, I say.

  It’s become rote now.

  No memorials for such as Merritt Li.

  Only memory.

  For another who has been erased. Who has been gathered. And for a time before Fran speaks again, we are quiet. Our voices drift away into the call of birds, the sough of wind.

  Our kind were redundant before and will be again.

  As the successful revolutionary must always be, right?

  Okay. She laughs. They can be redundant too.

  A heron floats in over the trees and lands at water’s edge. A heron! Who would have believed there were herons left? I see the same light in Fran’s eyes as in mine. Still, after all that has happened in our lives, we have the capacity for surprise, for wonder.

  6.

  When I was eleven, a contrarian even then, I made a list of all the stuff I never wanted to see again on TV and in movies. Wrote it out on a sheet of ruled paper, signed and dated the document, and submitted it to my parents.

  People jumping just ahead of flames as house, car, pier, ship or what-have-you explodes.

  The disarming of bombs with everyone else sent away as our hero or heroine sweatily decides which wire to cut.