Wool

by Hugh Howey

Page 7

 

  Jahns didn’t laugh. “Thanks,” she said, with a mask of false pain. “But no, not to kiss babies. ” She turned her back and resumed walking; Marnes followed. “It’s not that I don’t trust your professional opinion about this Jules lady. You haven’t picked anything but a winner since I’ve been mayor—”

  “Even—?” Marnes interrupted.

  “Especially him,” Jahns said, knowing what he was thinking. “He was a good man, but he had a broken heart. That’ll take even the best of them down. ”

  Marnes grunted his agreement. “So what’re we checkin’ at the nursery? This Juliette weren’t born on the twentieth, not if I recall—”

  “No, but her father works there now. I thought, since we were passing by, that we’d get a feel for the man, get some insight on his daughter. ”

  “A father for a character witness?” Marnes laughed. “Don’t reckon you’ll get much of an impartial, there. ”

  “I think you’ll be surprised,” Jahns said. “I had Alice do some digging while I was packing. She found something interesting. ”

  “Yeah?”

  “This Juliette character still has every vacation chit she’s ever earned. ”

  “That ain’t rare for Mechanical,” Marnes said. “They do a lot of overtime. ”

  “Not only does she not get out, she doesn’t have visitors. ”

  “I still don’t see where you’re going. ”

  Jahns waited while a family passed. A young boy, six or seven probably, rode on his father’s shoulders, his head stooped to avoid the undersides of the stairs above. The mother brought up the rear, an overnight bag draped over her shoulder, a swaddled infant cradled in her arms. It was the perfect family, Jahns thought. Replacing what they took. Two for two. Just what the lottery aimed for and sometimes provided.

  “Well then, let me tell you where I’m going with this,” she told Marnes. “I want to find this girl’s father, look him in the eyes, and ask him why, in the nearly twenty years since his daughter moved to Mechanical, he hasn’t visited her. Not once. ”

  She looked back at Marnes, saw him frowning at her beneath his mustache.

  “And why she hasn’t once made her way up to see him,” she added.

  • • • •

  The traffic thinned as they made their way into the teens and past the upper apartments. With each step down, Jahns dreaded having to reclaim those lost inches on the way back up. This was the easy part, she reminded herself. The descent was like the uncoiling of a steel spring, pushing her down. It reminded Jahns of nightmares she’d had of drowning. Silly nightmares, considering she’d never seen enough water to submerge herself in, much less enough that she couldn’t stand to breathe. But they were like the occasional dreams of falling from great heights, some legacy of another time, broken fragments unearthed in each of their sleeping minds that suggested: We weren’t supposed to live like this.

  And so the descent, this spiraling downward, was much like the imagined drowning that swallowed her at night. It felt inexorable and inextricable. Like a weight pulling her down combined with the knowledge that she’d never be able to claw her way back up.

  They passed the garment district next, the land of multi-colored coveralls and the place her balls of yarn came from. The smell of the dyes and other chemicals drifted over the landing. A window cut into the curving cinderblocks looked through to a small food shop at the edge of the district. It had been ransacked by the crowds, shelves emptied by the crushing demand of exhausted hikers and the extra post-cleaning traffic. Several porters crowded up the stairs with heavy loads, trying their best to satisfy demand, and Jahns recognized an awful truth about yesterday’s cleaning: The barbaric practice brought more than psychological relief, more than just a clear view of the outside—it also buttressed the silo’s economy. There was suddenly an excuse to travel. An excuse to trade. And as gossip flowed, and family and old friends met again for the first time in months or perhaps years, there was a vitality injected into the entire silo. It was like an old body stretching and loosening its joints, blood flowing to the extremities. A decrepit thing was becoming alive again.

  “Mayor!”

  She turned to find Marnes almost out of sight around the spiral above her. She paused while he caught up, watching his feet as he hurried.

  “Easy,” he said. “I can’t keep up if you take off like that. ”

  Jahns apologized. She hadn’t been aware of any change in her pace.

  As they entered the second tier of apartments, down below the sixteenth floor, Jahns realized she was already in territory she hadn’t seen in almost a year. There was the rattle, here, of younger legs chasing along the stairwell, getting tangled up in the slow climbers. The grade school for the upper third was just above the nursery. From the sound of all the traffic and voices, school had been canceled. Jahns imagined it was a combination of knowing how few would turn up for class (with parents taking their kids up to the view) plus how many teachers would want to do the same. They passed the landing for the school, where chalk games of Hop and Square-Four were blurred from the day’s traffic, where kids sat hugging the rails, skinned knees poking out, feet swinging below the jutting landings, and where catcalls and eager shouts faded to secret whispers in the presence of adults.

  “Glad we’re almost there, I need a rest,” Marnes said, as they spiraled down one more flight to the nursery. “I just hope this feller is available to see us. ”

  “He will be,” Jahns said. “Alice wired him from my office that we were coming. ”

  They crossed traffic at the nursery landing and caught their breath. When Marnes passed his canteen, Jahns took a long pull and then checked her hair in its curved and dented surface.

  “You look fine,” he said.

  “Mayoral?”

  He laughed. “And then some. ”

  Jahns thought she saw a twinkle in his old, brown eyes when he said this, but it was probably the light bouncing off the canteen as he brought it to his lips.

  “Twenty floors in just over two hours. Don’t recommend the pace, but I’m glad we’re this far already. ” He wiped his mustache and reached around to try and slip the canteen back into his pack.

  “Here,” Jahns said. She took the canteen from him and slid it into the webbed pouch on the rear of his pack. “And let me do the talking in here,” she reminded him.

  Marnes lifted his arms and showed his palms, as if no other thought had ever crossed his mind. He stepped past her and pulled one of the heavy metal doors open, the customary squeal of rusted hinges not coming as expected. The silence startled Jahns. She was used to hearing the chirp of old doors all up and down the staircase as they opened and closed. They were the stairwell’s version of the wildlife found in the farms, ever present and always singing. But these hinges were coated in oil, rigorously maintained. The signs on the walls of the waiting room reinforced the observation. They demanded silence in bold letters, accompanied by pictures of fingers over lips and circles with slashes through open mouths. The nursery evidently took their quietude seriously.

  “Don’t remember so many signs last time I was here,” Marnes whispered.

  “Maybe you were too busy yapping to notice,” Jahns replied.

  A nurse glared at them through a glass window, and Jahns elbowed Marnes.

  “Mayor Jahns to see Peter Nichols,” she told the woman.

  The nurse behind the window didn’t blink. “I know who you are. I voted for you. ”

  “Oh, of course. Well, thank you. ”

  “If you’ll come around. ” The woman hit a button on her desk and the door beside her buzzed faintly. Marnes pushed on the door, and Jahns followed him through.

  “If you’ll don these. ”

  The nurse—Margaret, according to the hand-drawn tag on her collar—held out two neatly folded white cloth robes. Jahns accepted them both and handed one to Marnes.


  “You can leave your bags with me. ”

  There was no refusing Margaret. Jahns felt at once that she was in this much younger woman’s world, that she had become her inferior when she passed through that softly buzzing door. She leaned her walking stick against the wall, took her pack off and lowered it to the ground, and then shrugged on the robe. Marnes struggled with his until Margaret helped, holding the sleeve in place. He wrestled the robe over his denim shirt and held the loose ends of the long fabric waist tie as if its working was beyond his abilities. He watched Jahns knot hers, and finally made enough of a mess of it for the robe to hold fairly together.

  “What?” he asked, noticing the way Jahns was watching him. “This is what I’ve got cuffs for. So I never learned to tie a knot, so what?”

  “In sixty years,” Jahns said.

  Margaret pressed another button on her desk and pointed down the hall. “Doctor Nichols is in the nursery. I’ll let him know you’re coming. ”

  Jahns led the way. Marnes followed, asking her: “Why is that so hard to believe?”

  “I think it’s cute, actually. ”

  Marnes snorted. “That’s an awful word to use on a man my age. ”

  Jahns smiled to herself. At the end of the hall, she paused before a set of double doors before pushing them open a crack. The light in the room beyond was dim. She opened the door further, and they entered a sparse but clean waiting room. She remembered a similar one from the mid levels where she had waited with a friend to be reunited with her child. A glass wall looked into a room that held a handful of cribs and bassinets. It was too dark inside to see if any of the small beds stirred with newborns. Jahns, of course, was notified of every birth, signed a letter of congratulations and a birth certificate for each one, but the names ran together with the days. She could rarely remember what level the parents lived on, if it was their first or second. It made her sad to admit it, but those certificates had just become more paper for her to sign.

  The shadowy outline of an adult moved among the small cribs, the shiny clamp of a clipboard and the flash of a metal pen winking from the light of the observation room. The dark shape was obviously tall, with the gait and build of a man. He took his time, noting something as he hovered over a crib, the two shimmers of metal uniting to jot a note. When he was done, he crossed the room and passed through a wide door to join Marnes and Jahns in the waiting room.

  Peter Nichols was an imposing man, Jahns saw. Tall and lean, but not like Marnes, who seemed to fold and unfold unsure limbs to move about. Peter was lean like a habitual exerciser, like a few porters Jahns knew who could take the stairs two at a time and make it look like they’d been expressly designed for such a gait. It was height that lent confidence. Jahns could feel it as she took Peter’s outstretched hand, his grip firm but not showy.

  “You came,” Doctor Nichols said simply. It was a cold observation. There was only a hint of surprise. He shook Marnes’s hand, but his eyes returned to Jahns. “I explained to your secretary that I wouldn’t be much help. I’m afraid I haven’t seen Juliette since she became a shadow twenty years ago. ”

  “Well, that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about. ” Jahns glanced at the cushioned benches where she imagined anxious grandparents, aunts, and uncles waited while parents were united with their newborns. “Could we sit?”

  Doctor Nichols nodded and waved them over.

  “I take each of my appointments for office very seriously,” Jahns explained, sitting across from the doctor. “At my age, I expect most judges and lawmen I install to outlive me, so I choose carefully. ”

  “But they don’t always, do they?” Doctor Nichols tilted his head, no expression on his lean and carefully shaven face. “Outlive you, I mean. ”

  Jahns swallowed. Marnes stirred on the bench beside her.

  “You must value family,” Jahns said, changing the subject, realizing this was just another observation, no harm meant. “To have shadowed so long and to choose such a demanding line of work. ”

  Nichols nodded.

  “Why do you and Juliette never visit? I mean, not once in almost twenty years. She’s your only child. ”

  Nichols turned his head slightly, his eyes drifting to the wall. Jahns was momentarily distracted by the sight of another form moving behind the glass, a nurse making the rounds. Another set of doors led off to what she assumed were the delivery rooms, where a convalescing new mother right now was probably waiting to be handed her most precious possession.

  “I had a son as well,” Doctor Nichols said.

  Jahns felt herself reaching for her bag to procure the folders within, but it wasn’t by her side. This was a detail she had missed, a brother.

  “You couldn’t have known,” Nichols said, correctly reading the shock on Mayor Jahns’ face. “He didn’t survive. Technically, he wasn’t born. The lottery moved on. ”

  “I’m sorry—”

  She fought the urge to reach over and hold Marnes’s hand. It had been decades since the two of them had purposefully touched, even innocently, but the sudden sadness in the room punctured that intervening time.

  “His name was going to be Nicholas, my father’s father’s name. He was born prematurely. One pound eight ounces. ”

  The clinical precision in his voice was somehow sadder than his processing any feelings might have been.

  “They intubated, moved him into an incubator, but there were…complications. ” Doctor Nichols looked down at the backs of his hands. “Juliette was twelve at the time. She was as excited as we were, if you can imagine, to have a baby brother on the way. She was one year out from shadowing her mother, who was a delivery nurse. ” Nichols glanced up. “Not here in this nursery, mind you, but in the old mid-level nursery. Where we both worked. I was still an intern then. ”