The Park Service 01: The Park Service

by Ryan Winfield

  Dr. Radcliffe stands and lifts the lantern and blows out the candle. He opens the door and holds it for us and then follows us in and closes it, sealing the storm outside in the night.

  After we eat a sad supper of dried fruits and algaecrisps, Dr. Radcliffe folds the sofa out for himself, telling Hannah and I to take the beds. We share a longing glance behind his back and then Hannah shrugs and disappears into her bedroom.

  My room is small, and when I crawl beneath the covers and click off the LED light, it’s completely dark and completely silent. Sealed inside the pod, wedged inside the hill, you’d never know there was a tempest raging just outside.

  I open my eyes, close them, open them again. I can see no difference in the total black of the room and the total black of my mind. I drift off into a dream—

  I dream that I’m back underground, that I wake in my old bed and look out the window over a deserted Level 3. Dark and empty, the blue benitoite glowing in the cavern roof. I rush from our living quarters and race through the empty square to the elevators just as the door is closing on my father inside. Dropping to my knees, I scream, but my voice is swallowed by five miles of rock overhead.

  Sometime in the night, she crawls into bed with me.

  Her body presses into mine, her mouth searches out my mouth, her hands search out my hands, moving them to her, and we lie tangled beneath the sheets—excited, electric, alive.

  Then suddenly she’s gone.

  I hear the door click shut and I’m alone again.

  I smell her on my pillow and taste her on my tongue and I drift off into a sweet sleep with no dreams.

  In the morning the world is shades of gray. Gray sky, gray surf. The wet sand stretches away like a glistening gray highway littered with the green-ribbed carcasses of palm fronds torn from the trees and blown out to sea and washed ashore.

  Dr. Radcliffe seals the pod door and leads us up the steps to the waiting drone. We lift off the gray runway into gray skies, and the drone climbs high and cruises fast on a direct course northwest toward home. When we’re above the clouds, he flips a switch and the observation bubble glass tints against the sun.

  We say very little to each other.

  Midway across the Continent, we enter a thunderstorm. Outside the glass, giant clouds float across angry skies like an army of electric jellies—their ominous interiors pulsing, veins of flashing blue bouncing off one another like blind sky-bound behemoths charged with blue-beating hearts, streaks of rocket lightning striking between them in some strange transfusion of energy tethering them together in the foreboding sky.

  As we leave the dark thunderheads sparking in the distance behind us, I see the shadows of two other drones go jetting by below. I wonder where they’re off to and why.

  Part Four

  CHAPTER 29

  Days of Rain

  The next day it rains.

  Hannah and I sit in front of the fire and watch the clouds settle over the lake. We sip tea and tell each other about our lives. We have a lot in common. We both grew up isolated. We both dreamed of finding adventure. And she likes to read as much as I do. After talking with her, it’s clear that I wasn’t called up here to run things, but rather to help Hannah run things. Well, that and for my sperm, I guess. With the scientists slowly dying off, we’ll need to have children if we plan to keep the Foundation staffed.

  I ask Hannah why none of the other scientists have kids, and she says they made a pact not to have any. She says they voted and her mom and dad were chosen to freeze samples of his sperm and her eggs, just in case they needed to continue the human race. And she says she’s glad because it would suck to never have been born.

  “How would you know?” I ask.

  “How would I know what?”

  “If it would suck to never be born.”

  “I just know,” she says.

  “Yeah, but you wouldn’t know if you hadn’t been born.”

  “So?”

  “So, that’s the point. If you wouldn’t even know what you were missing, how would it suck?

  She shakes her head and says: “Boys.”

  We sit and sip our tea. After a time, I ask Hannah how she feels about our arranged relationship, about me being selected because of my DNA and a test score, about her having no choice. She tells me she hated the idea, fought with her parents about it. Says she threatened to run away even. Then she tells me she felt relieved when she heard about the train accident and that they thought I was dead.

  “Oh, really?” I say, setting my tea cup down loudly on its saucer. “You were happy that I was dead?”

  “I didn’t say happy,” she answers. “I said relieved.”

  “Same difference.”

  “No it isn’t,” she says. “Besides, I didn’t even know you.”

  “Well, what’s changed now?”

  “It’s all changed.”

  “Why? When?”

  “When you stuck your head over that fence.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. The moment that I saw you … well, I guess I liked you right away.”

  “You like me?”

  “Yes,” she says, giggling. “I guess I do.”

  “You like me a lot?

  She looks down and bites her lip. “Maybe I always have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I felt like I’d known you before. In dreams, perhaps.”

  “You knew me?”

  “I knew your face already, I knew your voice.”

  “Well, I felt the same way about you.”

  “I know,” she says. “I know.”

  “Well, don’t you want me to say it?”

  “Say what?”

  “Say that I like you a lot, too.”

  “You don’t have to say it.”

  “What if I want to say it?”

  “I won’t stop you.”

  “Fine, I won’t say it.”

  “That’s okay, too,” she says, sipping her tea.

  “I like you a lot,” I say.

  She smiles. “I know.”

  The rain falls for days.

  Dr. Radcliffe leaves for the Foundation to deal with some pressing issue, and Hannah’s mother spends most of her time sleeping in her room. It’s clear she’s not well. I ask Hannah about her mother’s health, but she only says that the fatigue comes and goes and that she’ll snap out of it soon.

  The house has a basement laboratory and Hannah spends afternoons down there working. White walls, white floor, white lab coat—the only color in the whole place is her red hair.

  At first, I hang out and watch over her shoulder as she isolates damaged brain cells on viewing slides and peers at them through microscopes. But I get bored. I get bored and a little bit embarrassed because I don’t understand what she’s doing.

  “What are you doing now?” I ask, watching as she places a slide in the centrifuge and spins it.

  “Neuron regeneration,” she says.

  “I thought neurons didn’t regenerate.”

  “That’s the problem,” she says. “They regenerate some in the hippocampus, and a few other places, but for some strange reason most neurogenesis stops after were born.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “It’s a big problem.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, when you’ve tricked your other cells into dividing perfectly forever, you end up with neurons much older than they’re meant to be. It’s the one thing we haven’t solved.”

  “Is that why your parents are dying?”

  A tear runs down her cheek. She wipes it with the back of her hand and leans over the microscope again.

  “Maybe you’d rather go read something?” she mumbles, without looking up. “I’ll take a break when this rain stops.”

  I nod, even though she can’t see me, already looking back into her scope, her body still and taut, her hair pulled back and tied. I back from the lab and head upstairs.

  As I pass the main room I see Mrs.
Radcliffe reclining in a rocker, staring out the window at the lake. I stop in the hall and look at her for a moment. Her hands are folded over a knitted blanket in her lap and her hair spills red around the dark-wood chair. She’s watching the rain tease the gray surface of the lake and her gaze is so far away she doesn’t even notice me standing just three meters from her. She looks sad. Regretful, maybe. I can’t help but see their similarity—her here dying and Hannah down below so desperately trying to stop it.

  She looks too thoughtful to disturb, so I continue on.

  I walk in the study and the lights fade on, the fire springs to life in the hearth. The wind drives rain against the windows, and through the water-streaked panes I see the trees lashing on the bluff above, like some distant world seen in a blurry dream.

  I walk the shelves of books, running my fingers along their aged spines. This must be all that remains. Out of millions of books, these alone survived the War and its aftermath. I can see the writers spread through time, thousands of years, thousands of writers, hunched over keyboards, tapping away at a tapestry of words, and I wonder if any of these writers knew that their thoughts would survive long after they were gone. These are the true immortals. I don’t see books. I see doors into other worlds. Windows into minds. The life of man spinning beyond time. This can’t all be wrong. It can’t be bad.

  My fingers stop on an ancient book, the author’s name inscribed in gold upon its spine. Melville. Now that’s a name. I slide the book out, the spine stiff, the glue cracking as I open the cover. Well, hello. Moby Dick.

  I carry the book to the chair beside the fire.

  Something outside catches my eye. I look up, focusing past the rain to the trees on the bluff. For a moment, I’d swear I see Jimmy standing up there in the wind. But when I look closer, it’s just a stump with one dead branch held up in a permanent wave, saying hello, or perhaps saying goodbye.

  I open the book and read.

  CHAPTER 30

  Gloria

  A knock on the door.

  Must be Hannah.

  “Come in.”

  The door opens, and Gloria steps in with several outfits of clothes, probably from Dr. Radcliffe’s closet. She lays them on the foot of the bed and looks me over.

  “It’s awfully early to be in bed,” she says. “Are you sick?”

  It’s the first time she’s spoken to me. Her voice is tenor soft and she reminds me a little of Jimmy’s mother.

  “I’m taking a nap.”

  “Long nap,” she says. “I haven’t seen you out once.”

  “Is it still raining?” I ask.

  “Coming down in sheets,” she says.

  “I’d be feeling fine if this rain would stop.”

  She sighs, picks up a shirt from the pile of clothes, unfolds it, and then refolds it again.

  “You know,” she says, lifting an eyebrow, “sometimes the weather is a reflection of what’s going on inside of us.”

  “You mean I’m making it rain?”

  “No,” she says, refolding a pair of slacks. “It just means that sometimes the way you feel about the weather has more to do with how you feel than it does with the weather.”

  I prop myself up on my elbows.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” she says.

  “Have you seen Jimmy?”

  She smiles.

  “Yes, I see him almost every day. He’s been helping out over at our place.”

  “So he’s okay then?”

  “He’s okay.”

  Silence now, the clock ticking loudly on the dresser. When she finishes refolding the clothes, I think she might leave, but she picks a shirt off the freshly folded stack, snaps it open, inspects it, and begins to fold it a third time.

  “Can I ask you something else?”

  “You can ask me anything,” she says.

  I look away from her and study the covers at my waist.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “I forgot already. It wasn’t anything, really.”

  “The answer is yes,” she says.

  “Yes what?”

  She sets the shirt on the stack, steps closer, and sits on the edge of the bed. She looks down at me and smiles.

  “Yes, he asks about you, too.”

  “He does?”

  “Of course he does,” she says. “He misses you.”

  “What about Junior?”

  “You mean that little pup? Ha! Other than eating us out of our bungalow, he’s doing just fine. You can’t hardly tell the two of them apart. Wherever Jimmy is, there’s that little fox on his heel mewling away about something.”

  I sit up, looking at her closer now. Her dark hair is bobbed short, the roots streaked with gray. She has deep sun wrinkles around her eyes and little brown spots on her cheek.

  “How old are you?” I ask.

  “That’s a funny question to ask a woman, you know.”

  “I mean, are you as old as everybody else?”

  “Do you mean to ask me if I’m as old as Mrs. Radcliffe and her husband are?”

  “Yes,” I say, nodding.

  “No,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t understand how they are the way they are, or what they do. But they’ve been very good to us. They found us alone after our family had been killed. They took us in. Raised us like their own. That was a long time ago. Maybe forty years now. I was very young.”

  “You said us.”

  “Me and my brother Tom. You haven’t met him yet, but he does all the maintenance and landscaping around here. He’s a hell of a gardener too, even if he isn’t much of a talker.”

  “Who killed your family?”

  “The machines,” she says, looking away.

  “Sorry.”

  There’s a long silence. I’m worried she might leave and I don’t want her to, so I change the subject.

  “Tell me about Hannah.”

  The mention of Hannah’s name makes her smile.

  “Well, she’s a special girl. But you know that. She’s full of life, that girl is. She couldn’t wait to be born. Came a full two weeks early, and even then I was in labor less than two hours.”

  “In labor?” I say. “You’re Hannah’s mother?”

  “I carried her,” she says, patting her belly. “I wish I were her mother. Sometimes I feel like I am. Other times not; mostly when she’s being a brat like only she can be. I claim nothing to do with spoiling her the way they have. But she’s a good girl with a big heart. And smart as they come, too.”

  “Maybe you could tell Jimmy that?” I say.

  “Hey now,” she says. “I’m sure Jimmy has his own reasons for feeling how he does. Just the same as you do.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  She reaches out and musses my hair with her hand.

  “How about we shake these rainy day blues together, eh? Let me make you some dinner, and then I’ll give you a haircut. See if there isn’t a young man hiding beneath this shaggy head.”

  “Okay,” I say, laughing. “But I don’t want too much cut off. I like to keep it longer. Like Jimmy’s.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Mrs. Radcliffe

  “Good morning.”

  Mrs. Radcliffe walks in the kitchen and catches me with my fist frozen in the jar of breakfast bars.

  “Uh, good morning to you, too,” I stammer. “I was just looking for something to eat.”

  “Oh, you don’t want those old things,” she says, “they’re as stale as one of my husband’s speeches. Come sit down here. I’ll make you a proper breakfast.”

  I take a seat at the table.

  She clicks on the stove and sets a kettle of water to boil. Then she opens the wood-paneled refrigerator and lays out ingredients. She chops potatoes and mushrooms and tofu. She dices an onion, turning her head away and wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her robe. She pours the water into a teapot, sets the kettle on a warmer. She takes down a pan from where they hang and sets it on the flame. She d
rizzles oil in the pan and slides the ingredients from the cutting board in. A wonderful smell of caramelized onion and roasted potato fills the small kitchen. When the skillet is sizzling, she opens a seasoning tin and sprinkles on a pinch of herbs and then tips the pan and slides the stir fry onto a plate and sets the steaming plate in front of me. She hands me linen and a fork. Then she pulls down two mugs and fills them with hot tea. She sets one mug in front of me, and she sits across from me cradling the other in her hands, sipping her tea, watching me eat.

  “Your haircut looks nice,” she says.

  “Thanks,” I say, between bites. “Gloria cut it yesterday.”

  “She told me.”

  “Where is Gloria?”

  “Sunday’s her day off. She’s a better cook than I am.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that at all,” I say, worried I’ve offended her. “This is great. Really great. I was just curious is all.”

  She smiles and sips her tea. A minute later, she says:

  “Can you believe we used to eat everything precooked, like they do below? But when you have as much time as we’ve had, you need to find some way to fill it.”

  “Who built all of this?” I say, looking up from my plate and rotating my head in a circle to indicate the house.

  “Well, the old stone foundation for the lake house was already here. We restored it. Brought up a generator. Tapped a natural gas reservoir. It was an outpost at first and we shared it with the other scientists—a place to relax and take time away from work. But it seems most of us don’t know what to do with ourselves if we’re not working. Eventually nobody else came, so we moved in.”

  “Does anybody come up now?”

  “Nobody’s been out here since Hannah was born.”

  “Was the wooden boat here, too?”

  “No,” she chuckles. “That’s Robert’s little obsession.”

  “Robert?”

  “My husband,” she says. “Dr. Radcliffe. He comes from boating people. He built that boat as a kind of tribute. It’s a replica of his family’s old cruiser. He was happier then, I think. When he had something to do with his hands.”

  She stares out the water-streaked window where the rain falls down steadily against the gray. I finish eating and rise to rinse the plate, but she waves me back down in my seat and takes my plate to the sink. She returns with the kettle and refills our teas and then sits again.