by Jesse Karp
"What do you mean?"
"When my father died, I was supposed to go back to my mother. I could see the problem with that, but it seemed like it might be a way back to Tommy, too, to make up for leaving. And to have at least part of a family again. My own family. It didn't matter, though. She wouldn't take me. She filed papers with the court, said I was threatening and abusive."
"They believed her?" Laura was incredulous.
Mal's jaw was tight, fighting the explanation.
"Tommy," he said, "gave testimony backing her up."
"Oh, Mal." She touched his face.
"That was the last thing I ever heard about him, before all this started." Mal's face was a flat blank. "So I went into foster care. It didn't really take. I snuck out sometimes. When I came back a little beat up, they thought I was into drugs or something. They kicked me out after a few months. The next one, the father knew who my dad was, wanted to see if I was as tough. I learned. I learned that I don't have to get to know them or let them get to know me. I learned we don't actually have to be a family, that I can stick it out until I'm eighteen. It's less than a year now, then no more school, no more foster parents. I just go and live my life."
She looked at Mal. He didn't put up a fight, he had said. But that's exactly what he was doing. Not with his mother, maybe, but with his own life. He could easily have bunked in the gym, asked Stoagie or even Brath for help. But he stuck it out in foster care and at school, both of which clearly held no interest for him, because to walk away from them would be giving up.
"Then there's only one place to go, isn't there?" she said quietly.
They came to the eastern edge of Manhattan, where the huge gray dome shone dully, like a bug's carapace. Its bloated body, the size of a tidal wave, loomed over everything and looked as if it were preparing to swallow buildings whole. The creature's shadow spread across the surrounding neighborhood, and the air smelled of something nauseatingly metallic. The buildings around Mal and Laura were cracked and decrepit, as though the shade of the thing were eroding them, and they could feel its presence like a physical weight. People had scrawled their despair low down on the shell's surface. We got what we deserved, claimed one message in bleeding paint. The Old Man did this—what will He do next? asked another fading entreaty.
Mal led her finally to a squatting, dirty building, and they stopped at the metal door with the wire-reinforced window. He stared at it long enough that Laura put her hand on his arm and squeezed it softly.
"Do you want me to come up with you?"
He stood silent, then shook his head once and pushed his way in.
The city was running out of Starbucks. The vast corporate dynamo seemed to have given up on the city as the city had started to give up on itself. Once ubiquitous, these commercial shrines to coffee-worship were now so sparse as to be nearly forgotten. But here, amid the cracking buildings, in sight of the dome itself, Laura had found one, remaining perhaps as an outpost to witness the final decline and internment of the city and its people.
She sat sipping coffee that was too sweet, looking around her. Remak had said to find places that were crowded and anonymous. She had shelled out five dollars and forty-eight cents from their dwindling supply of cash and had to suffer for it, too, because paying cash meant having to type your order and feed your money into the sticky and neglected manual order-station.
Other people beamed their orders from their cells to the express order-station and lined up to collect their drinks. Then they sat around, sipping, engaging with the same cells, looking up distractedly from time to time, blinking at the flickering HDs mounted on each of the walls. Laura stared at one absently, showing a dignified man with perfect hair speaking soundlessly from in front of rows and rows of body bags laid out in the background. A picture of Isabel, a hole over her left eye, burned unexpectedly into Laura's head.
The world was slipping away from them. Now, with their regular food and drink orders digitized into their cells, they could simply use the order stations and didn't even have to bother with the most rudimentary human contact of asking for something to eat or drink. The world was slipping away from these people, all right, and something else was slipping in. They were forgetting to care. When they finally bothered to look up, there would be nothing to keep them going. They'd never even put up a fight, because they let desolation consume them bit by bit without even knowing it.
Shadow poured in the window instead of light. The vast smudge of the dome was nearly all you could see through the window. If you bothered to look out at it. Laura's eyes moved from face to face, wanting one of them to look up from a cell and out, to see the darkness infecting them; just see it.
She rose and tossed her coffee disgustedly into the garbage. She walked out and went to wait for Mal, unconsciously huddling her body as she walked along the edge of the dome.
At the sound of the bell, Sharon Graham pulled herself away from the flickering faces on the television and, more painfully, from the glistening bottle sitting on the counter.
On the other side of the door was a big man with broad shoulders wearing dirty cargo pants and a dirty T-shirt. He was a kid, really, but his face was bruised and marked like he'd gone fifteen rounds with a pro or three. He was looking at her queerly, expectantly.
"Yeah?" she said, when he offered nothing but his mute gaze.
"Sharon," he said, as though trying to shake her out of a trance.
"Yeah?" She had a buzz starting, a warm light suffusing the edges of her vision. But she would surely have recognized someone who looked like this, and she'd never seen him before in her life.
The look on his face got stranger still, from shock to—almost too briefly to discern it—desperation, to disgust, and hell if she was going to stand in her own goddamned doorway and let some stranger be disgusted with her. She swung the door closed, but his hand came up fast and stopped it dead.
"It's Mal," he said in a hard voice, and when she only squinted back, his body shifted, loosened, lost some of its tension. She wondered briefly and distantly why she would be so acutely aware of the expressions and body language of a total stranger, and particularly in her state. "My name is Mal," he said again, in a softer tone.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Mal?" She hoped the sarcasm came through.
"I'm"—he blinked twice—"I'm looking for Tommy. I'm a friend of his. It's very important that I see him."
"Good luck," she said. "I have no idea where he is."
She flinched back as utter rage reddened his face. He poured into the room, shoving her casually out of his way, and when she felt his strength, she realized if he'd pushed harder, he could easily have broken her against the wall.
"What the hell are you doing?" she shouted after him, her voice both slurred and shaking. "My husband will be home any minute!" What a joke that was. George was about a third this kid's size.
The intruder stopped in her living room, looking left and right, searching for something.
"Pictures," he demanded.
"What?"
"Pictures, photos, an album you have of your family."
"I don't have—"
"Show them to me!" he thundered.
She grabbed her cell from the tabletop, keyed for the album. He ripped it from her hand, glared down at it, then threw it on the floor.
"Older pictures," he demanded. "From your first marriage."
Who the hell was this kid? Her body worked almost mechanically, went to the small closet, removed a thick book with hard photos crammed into it, and held it out before him.
He took it, opened it to a page.
"Who is this?" he said, pointing at a picture of her and Max, long ago, sitting at a table in a restaurant where they used to go to dance after a night at the fights.
"That's my first husband, Max," she told him.
He whipped through more pictures.
"This." He jabbed at another picture. She looked down and saw little Tommy playing with her sister Nancy's two girls
from years and years ago. She hadn't seen them, or her sister, in person for more than a decade.
"Tommy and my nieces. They—"
"No!" he screamed in her face. "That's my brother and me!"
She shook her head desperately at him, her mouth agape. Was he saying that she and Max had been his parents? She and Max had Tommy, and that was it for them, more than enough. The trouble that kid caused, who would ever want another? The intruder flung both albums away. He pulled a picture from his pocket, Tommy and a girl she had never seen before.
"How dare you give up on him?" he said, his voice suddenly as quiet as death, conveying far more rage and danger than his hollering had.
She was sure he was going to hammer her into a bloody pulp with those terrible, jagged knuckles of his.
"Hello?" came George's voice from the hall, and she was blessedly relieved for just an instant until she saw that her visitor had taken George's arrival as a cue to start looking through the house again. He walked straight by her, ignoring the figure in the hall, and went into the bedroom.
"George." She hurried to him.
"What the hell is going on?" George saw the man and her obvious consternation.
She explained to him what she could while the intruder walked back past her, with George, ineffectually stuttering threats, storming after him. George could yell at the guy and threaten to call the police, but that was about it. Some men would fight even knowing they couldn't win, or fool themselves into thinking they could win. But George was not that kind of man. Sometimes she hated him for it and sometimes she loved him for it, but she never wondered how she ended up with him. Her father had been a quiet man with vast reservoirs of violence tumbling beneath. George was a quiet man with vast reservoirs of more quiet beneath.
"Time for you to get out of my house," George said from a safe distance of nine or ten feet.
The intruder had stopped in the kitchen, staring at the bottle sitting on the counter. He glared at Sharon briefly, then turned back and snatched up the bottle by its neck. George stumbled backwards, putting his arms out in an attempt to protect his wife, as the intruder turned it over, clear liquid pulsing out and splashing on the floor, then flung it as hard as he could against a far wall.
It blasted apart, showering glass and liquor in a wide area. George and Sharon stared, paralyzed, as the intruder walked up to them.
"How could you let this happen?" He burned them with his glare. "You're supposed to protect your children."
He walked away and slammed the door behind him so hard that their ears rang with the harsh echo of it.
THE COOPERATIVE
REMAK AND MIKE, their faces grim, were waiting for Mal and Laura among the crowds in the movie theater.
"I assume," Remak said when they reached him, "you've discovered that Laura's problem now extends to all of us."
"You, too?" Laura said, her eyes like those of a drowning woman who's just had a potential savior push her head deeper underwater.
Mike looked beaten by it, worn down to a husk. Only Remak seemed beyond pain. He nodded and rubbed the back of his head, recalculating his equation with the new numbers.
She wondered about Remak: Who had forgotten him? Where did he no longer belong? Maybe, Laura considered, that wasn't as important as his reaction. This was all starting to seem like a science experiment to him.
"Are you okay, Jon?" She asked him for her and Mal's sakes as well as his. They were looking to him for their next move.
"I'm frustrated, naturally," he said. "Without the cooperative, our choices are very limited."
"I meant, how are you dealing with it? Where's your head at?"
"What's that got to do with anything?" he said, and before she could press him further, he nodded out the door. "Let's get going."
He walked out with purpose, and they, of course, had no choice but to follow.
Where he led them was to a parking lot rising seven stories from Forty-Fourth Street up toward the soggy gray sky. He spoke to the attendant, and they exchanged information and items. The four of them got onto the elevator and went to the top floor, where the cars were scattered intermittently, several with a rental car logo swooshing across their sides.
Remak took a quick inventory of their choices and went straight to one of them and pulled a keycard from his pocket that opened the doors. They climbed in, Laura getting the front passenger seat by default, though she'd have far preferred sitting next to Mal in back.
Remak, in the driver's seat, scanned the area through the windshield and then took the gun from the small of his back.
"What the hell are you doing?" Laura's eyes went wide, and she felt a shifting in the back seat.
Remak reversed his grip on the weapon and began hammering at the GPS panel in the dashboard with the butt of the automatic. Laura pulled herself away as metal and plastic shrapnel sprang out onto the seats.
"A GPS works both ways," Remak informed her. "A car with a GPS could be tracked as easily as a person with a cell." His arm worked back and forth, but the expression on his face didn't change.
Once he had turned the thing into a jagged cavity, he leaned over, peered inside, and jammed his hand into it. He tugged hard and came out with a small chip, trailing wires. This he tossed out through an open window, and then, as though strapping in for a ride through the country, he buckled up.
"Where are we going?" Mal said.
"That's complicated," Remak said, starting the engine.
They drove. Mike wasn't heeding the other human beings around him anymore. He looked out the window at the trees and fields that flashed by along the side of the highway. The sun, which had appeared after the city was long behind them, was just starting to duck below the horizon, and a bright point of reflection flickered in his eyes as the trees opened here and there to let it shine through.
"I work for a cooperative," Remak said through the hum of the car, "whose efforts are concerned with cataloging the social flow in the world. There are certain details of human life that serve as red flags, warnings of upcoming events. Like when you hear thunder and you know rain is coming. It's a matter of discerning our collective social unconscious and watching it closely. This is a phenomenon we call the Global Dynamic."
He glanced over at Laura in the passenger seat, who nodded back at him, before he continued.
"There are things you might never think to associate with one another, things you'd never even think to compare, that are tied together as tightly as our conscious and unconscious minds. In Middle Eastern nations, the consumption of chickpeas, a mainstay of the Middle Eastern diet, drops sharply before a shakeup in governance occurs, a coup, for example. Western Europeans and Middle Americans tend to let the upkeep of their lawns and gardens slip shortly before financial recessions. In the United States, sales of action figures skyrocket before our country engages in military actions."
"Action figures?" Laura said.
"Yes. The little dolls that children, mainly boys, play with. Their sales are an indicator of when this country's aggression is on the rise. There may not be anything in the papers about foreign trouble; the issues may not have even come to a boil at the highest levels of government; yet the sales of action figures boom. Our attitudes are bound together not merely on the level of individual contact but like a giant body of water that ripples all over even when a tiny pebble is thrown in at one small corner. Few people know the aggression even exists yet, but we feel it. All of us feel it. And some of us act on it. We buy action figures. These feelings, these indicators, are called the Global Dynamic."
Laura glanced behind her: Mal listening intently, Mike in a dead stare locked on nothing. She wanted to prod him, let him know something important was happening, but Mike looked as if his mind had taken him so far away that he wasn't really here anymore, just a man digitally inserted into an environment he wasn't a part of.
Behind them, the dome, glimpsed between buildings, edging over roofs, receded as they left the city behind. It had becom
e such a part of what the city was that Laura couldn't even imagine the city anymore without the image of it being slowly swallowed by the thing.
"So we catalog these indicators," Remak said, "and we watch them, and when there's an obvious anomaly, either an aberration from previous statistics or indicators suddenly pointing toward something significant, we investigate."
"And that's what you were investigating this time?" Laura asked.
"Yes." Remak nodded slowly. "The occurrence of desolated response—that is, behavior indicative of apathy or desperation on a large scale such as street crime, domestic violence, and suicide. The occurrence of desolated response experienced a massive spike in the neighborhood of Mike's school." Mike looked up absently, having heard his name, then looked away again just as quickly. "A certain level of desolated response is standard in low-income, high-need neighborhoods, and while the sudden rise was astonishing, it wasn't the only notable element.
"Out of fourteen acts of random violence, five of them had been committed by people of widely varying demographics simply passing through the neighborhood. A teenage girl who had just disembarked from a bus, for instance, attacked her mother. The family, who owned a chain of Laundromats, were quite well to do. Of thirty-one reported domestic disturbances, eight were likewise committed by people who just happened to be in the neighborhood. A stockbroker began beating his wife as they passed through the neighborhood on the way to a restaurant. The traffic accidents actually reflected a higher number of perpetrators among those driving through, especially taxi drivers. Even among the shocking twelve suicide attempts, four of them had been by visitors: two cheerleaders, for instance, from out of town and separated from their group, were waiting for a train and threw themselves in front of it.
"Of course, we know the cause now," Remak concluded. "To some degree."
"The doorway," Mal said hollowly.
"Yes. The building you were in contained some sort of psychic virus. But when the door was left inadvertently open, it escaped through Mike's school and into the outlying neighborhood, affecting everyone who lived there, or was just passing through."
