Things Fall Apart
Page 36
Bryce seemed okay . . . for a while. He was clumsy in bed, though—not that Peter’d been any too wonderful along those lines himself. And Bryce was horny all the damn time. When he wasn’t horny, he didn’t want to do anything except read or get into arguments on the Greek-history message boards (there were such things, no matter how perverse the notion seemed to Vanessa). He didn’t want to shop. He didn’t want to dance. She decided she was better off without him.
Which led to Hagop. He wasn’t horny all the time. One of the things that had interested her in him was that he was twice her age. Hagop certainly knew things about screwing that Bryce wouldn’t find out in a month of Sundays. But he was a self-centered bastard. He wanted her on his arm to show his fellow rug merchants what a stud he was.
If she hadn’t followed him to Denver like a fool, she wouldn’t have nearly died when the supervolcano blew. That Hagop almost certainly did die was some consolation—some, but not enough. Because getting out of Denver meant getting stuck in Camp Constitution.
You couldn’t live without men, but Vanessa could have lived forever without Micah Husak. In exchange for services rendered, he’d got her better quarters and less obnoxious tentmates. In exchange for services rendered, and for her self-respect. Millions of people remained stuck in resettlement camps all these years after the eruption, New Homestead Act or no New Homestead Act. Vanessa would have bet anything she had that Micah and other FEMA flunkies still had more than their share of women who did what they wanted.
She’d managed to get away from that. It hadn’t even cost her a zipless fuck—only a zipless blowjob to a National Guardsman whose name she never found out. You couldn’t get much more zipless than that, could you? Erica Jong would have been proud . . . or appalled, depending.
After that, Bronislav. She’d been sure Bronislav was the real thing. Well, she’d been sure with Hagop, too (or as sure as she could make herself with him), and with Bryce, and even with Peter way back when. Being sure was part of what made her tick. She’d dumped Bronislav’s forerunners. Getting dumped herself—and getting ripped off in the process—was a new, and nasty, variation on the theme.
So, while you couldn’t live without them, you also couldn’t live with them. Every so often, one of the guys at Nick Gorczany’s widget works would try his luck with her. With monotonous regularity, she turned them down and shot them down. She’d always got as much mileage as she could out of being pretty. Now she wondered if it wasn’t more trouble than it was worth.
Some of the engineers and programmers must have decided that, because they kept striking out with Vanessa, she had to be a lesbian. They must have gossiped about it, too, because a short-haired female programmer came on to her. She wasn’t as blatant as the guys were, but she also struck out. Vanessa was straight. Choosing the right guy was the problem. So was wondering whether she could find him, and wondering where to look. Aside from not at the widget works, she didn’t know.
Oh, she had an electronic profile or two out there. Who didn’t, as long as the power stayed on? But, after meeting a couple of men that way, she decided those profiles weren’t worth the paper they weren’t printed on. The fellow who said he was five-eleven turned out to be five-five. Since he hadn’t lied about his weight, he was also a good deal wider than advertised. The one who gave his age as forty had to be fifty-five. The pale band on the first joint of his ring finger said he was probably married, too. She made an excuse about needing to road-test her hamster and left as soon as she could.
She discovered that her high-school achievement-test scores qualified her for membership in Mensa. She sent in her forms, paid a year’s dues, and got a membership card. She went to one, count it, one, meeting. The people there were smart. Very few had anything else going for them. They talked about how they’d be on Easy Street if only this, that, or the other thing hadn’t happened to them.
Vanessa had plenty of complaints of her own along those lines. She didn’t feel like listening to anyone else’s. She wanted a winner. Winners plainly didn’t go to Mensa meetings. After that first one, neither did she.
She was eating a dinner that made her long for MREs (and they said it couldn’t be done!) when her phone rang. The displayed number and name seemed vaguely familiar, so she said, “Hello?”
“Hello, Ms. Ferguson. This is Agent Gideon Sneed, from the FBI,” the man said. That was why she knew the name. He’d told her he wasn’t interested in going after Bronislav.
“Yes?” she said. Her opinion of the FBI hadn’t been high even before they didn’t want to throw her thief of an ex in the slammer. In that, she took after her father. He respected the Feds’ courage and diligence, but didn’t think they were long on brains. Because they had jurisdiction over a relatively small range of crimes, they didn’t need to be—not if you listened to him, anyhow. Vanessa had, for years, at the dinner table and in the car and while she was watching TV. His attitude sank in, and became hers without her ever noticing.
“I wanted to tell you that we may possibly be opening an investigation of Mr., uh, Bronislav, uh, Nedic”—Sneed made a horrible hash of both names, the way most people would reading them cold off a sheet of paper—“over issues that are unrelated to yours. If we do, we may append your charges as well, to increase our chances of winning a conviction on one count or another.”
“Well, all right!” Vanessa said. “That’s the best news I’ve had in I don’t know how long. What’s the asshole gone and done now?”
“You understand, at the moment these are only unsubstantiated allegations,” Sneed told her. And only somebody like an FBI man could say unsubstantiated allegations often enough to bring it out as if it belonged to the English language.
For once, Vanessa had no trouble stifling the urge to copyedit. “Yeah, yeah, fine,” she said. “Cut to the chase. What’s he unsubstantiatedly alleged to have done?” If you couldn’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Sneed didn’t think her repetition was funny—he sure didn’t laugh, anyhow. For all she could tell over the phone, he didn’t even notice. Cops got so used to cop jargon, they took it for granted. “There is a certain level of tension between the Serbian and Croatian communities in Mobile,” the FBI man said carefully. “It is possible that Mr. Nedic has participated in activities which would escalate that level of tension.”
From what Vanessa knew of Bronislav, he didn’t participate in activities. He shot people or blew them up. If those people were Croats, he got drunk on slivovitz and sang songs and danced afterwards, too. “That sounds like him, all right,” she said. “But how big are the Serbian and Croatian communities in Mobile goddamn Alabama? Seventeen Serbs and nineteen Croats?”
“Larger than that,” Sneed said. “Large enough that an incident between them could be a significant incident. If Mr. Nedic is trying to create such an incident, we need to prevent him from being successful.”
“And stop him, too,” Vanessa murmured. She couldn’t help herself, or stop herself.
“I beg your pardon?” Sneed said.
“Never mind,” Vanessa said. “So if you bust him on the terrorism rap, you’ll toss in stealing my bank account and taking it across state lines like a cherry on top of the sundae?” God, when was the last time I had a sundae? Much too long ago—probably before the eruption. Have to do something about that.
“Yes, that’s about right,” Sneed said. “You have an interesting way of talking, you know?”
“I’ve heard people say so,” Vanessa replied, which was true. Sometimes they meant it for a compliment. The FBI man seemed to.
“You do,” he said now. “I noticed it when we met in person. I was very sorry that our prioritization process prevented me from implementing proceedings against Mr. Nedic at that point in time.”
“So was I,” Vanessa said: growled, really.
“That makes me especially glad to be able to bring you this information now,” Sneed said.
“Okay,” Vanessa said.
“In fact,” the FB
I man went on, “I wondered if it might be possible for the two of us to meet some time in a social setting.”
“You mean, like, a date?”
“Yes.”
She almost hung up on him right there. She wondered if the whole call was a setup. FBI guy finds a bulge in his pants, comes out with some bullshit about dropping on Bronislav so he’ll look cool to the woman who can’t stand the dude, then tries to get into her knickers. He hadn’t said they were actually doing anything about the damn Serb, just that they were looking at it. If they didn’t, he had all kinds of built-in excuses: Bronislav got cold feet, or there wasn’t enough evidence, or some judge wouldn’t issue a warrant, or yaddayaddayadda.
On the other hand . . . That he’d gone to the trouble of cooking up the scheme (if he was) said he was interested. And he was a cop of sorts. Vanessa knew how cops worked. She knew it the way a fish knew water: she’d grown up with it. That might turn out to be a plus, and maybe not such a small one.
“Ms. Ferguson? You there?”
“Yes, I’m here. Maybe we can try it,” she answered.
“Good!” He sounded happy and surprised, which was about the way he should have sounded. Amazingly lifelike, she thought.
They settled on dinner and a movie Saturday after next: the opening of the great American mating dance for as long as there’d been movies. Vanessa went back to her current, interrupted supper. Getting cold hadn’t made it much worse, because it hadn’t been that good to begin with. When she finished, she added her dishes to the pile in the sink.
You couldn’t win if you didn’t bet. You also couldn’t lose, but she chose not to dwell on that side of things. She hadn’t told him to fuck off. Not this time. Not yet. Maybe I’ll get lucky this time. Maybe I really will. If you told yourself something often enough, you could make yourself believe it. Maybe—just maybe—you could even make it true.
• • •
Across the street from the buildings and parking lots at Wayne State lay tennis courts, a soccer field (a pitch, if you were feeling like a Brit), a baseball field, a softball field, and a golf course: lots and lots of wide-open spaces punctuated by chain-link fences, a few rows of trees, and some bleachers. Snow held sway over them all, like the Red Death in the Poe story.
It drifted against the trees and the fencing. It turned the bleachers into mounds of white. The ground was white. Everything for miles around was white—white as snow, Bryce thought, and sneered at himself for perpetrating a cliché, even if he did it only inside his own head. Here and there, roads shoveled clear scribed asphalt-dark lines through the whiteness. He stood by one of them, waiting for the bus to town. It wasn’t snowing right this minute—no more than a few scattered flakes, anyhow—so he could see the campus buildings, which were also unwhite, or at most dappled. When he pulled back his mental horizon, they didn’t seem like much.
They didn’t seem like much because they damn well weren’t. Snow covered the whole damn continent north of the Rio Grande, with minor polychrome enclaves in SoCal, Arizona, and Florida. It lay thicker in some places, thinner in others, but it was everywhere. Europe was no better off. Most of Europe was worse off, because the settled parts there sat farther north than they did in North America.
Asia . . . Northern China had always had hard winters. Now it had worse ones. Southern China had been subtropical. It wasn’t any more. People in Afghanistan were saying the winters they’d been getting (and the summers they hadn’t been) were God’s judgment upon them. God’s judgment for what? For their sins, of course. And, in arguments over what those sins might be and just who’d committed them, several different ethnic groups were shooting at one another. As far as Bryce could tell, several different ethnic groups there had been shooting at one another since at least the days of the Persian Empire. Only the weapons and the excuses changed through the centuries.
“Hi, Professor Miller!” a coed called. She waved a mittened hand his way.
“Hi, Peggy!” Bryce waved back. She was cute. She wasn’t dumb. The combo made her a pleasure to have in his class. Were he single, he might have tried to get her phone number once she wasn’t in his class any more.
Not being single didn’t stop everybody. The anthropology department had recently had a small scandal about a married prof carrying on with an ex-student. That the prof was female and the student a forward on the men’s basketball team added variety to the spice but didn’t change its essential nature.
A crow perched on the BUS STOP sign. People gathering close by didn’t bother it. People who gathered at the bus stop often ate things while they waited. They didn’t always throw what they couldn’t finish into the trash. Knowing such things was one of the ways college crows made their living.
“C’mon, you stupid bus! I’m cold,” said a guy who’d been standing at the stop longer than Bryce had. Several heads, Bryce’s among them, bobbed in agreement. He’d spent more time than he wanted the past few years standing on one corner or another with his mittens jammed into the pockets of whatever overcoat or anorak he happened to be wearing. He’d been cold just about all that time. His nose, not the smallest peak in the range, felt as if it wanted to fall off.
He’d read somewhere that Asians might have evolved their flattish features during the last Ice Age, as a response to extreme cold. He didn’t know if that was true. The anthro prof who’d frolicked with the basketball player might have had a better idea. It did strike him as reasonable, though.
Here came the bus at last. People climbed aboard with sighs of relief. It wasn’t much warmer inside than out-. They’d escaped the wind blowing down from the North Pole, though. And they weren’t just standing there. They were on their way into Wayne. We’re going somewhere, man, Bryce thought.
A few hardy souls on bikes were also pedaling between college and town, and a few more coming the other way. Bryce wouldn’t have wanted—hadn’t wanted—to do that in weather like this, but no accounting for taste. College kids were a hardy bunch. They were also often a crazy bunch.
The bus shuddered and wheezed when it stopped in the center of town. The small local bus fleet had been old and rickety when Bryce came to Wayne. It was older and more rickety now, and smaller, too. A couple of the buses that had finally crapped out were being harvested for spare parts to keep the others going. There was no money to buy new ones. Bryce wasn’t sure anyone in the United States was making new buses these days. Demand had fallen into the Yellowstone caldera.
He got off. The bus chugged away, leaving a trail of diesel exhaust in its wake. Global warming wasn’t the big worry any more. Al Gore probably burned trash in his back yard nowadays.
A team of six or eight glum-looking men and a couple of glum-looking young women were shoveling snow off the sidewalk. Bryce remembered a New Yorker cartoon about synchronized snow shovelers. Then he noticed the bored cop keeping an eye on the team. His perspective shifted. Suddenly, the scene looked more like a frozen outtake from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
In Wayne, people didn’t get jail time for misdemeanors any more. As the town couldn’t afford new buses, so it also couldn’t afford to house petty criminals and feed them while they sat on their unproductive asses. It put them to work instead. About half the shovelers looked like college kids. Bryce recognized one unshaven older town guy who fought the cold by constantly keeping a high level of antifreeze in his blood. And he would have bet that the others were New Homesteaders. He wondered what they’d done, or whether they’d done anything. No, the town and the people who’d come here to get out of the refugee camps didn’t always get on so smoothly as they might have.
The cleared sidewalks helped him get back to his apartment building more easily than he would have otherwise. Susan seemed happy when he walked in. That made him happy. He still wondered whether he would have to move back to SoCal when the spring semester ended. If the choice was between job and marriage, job would have to bend.
“How’s it going?” he asked after he kissed her.
“Cool,” Bryce said. “What is it?”
“I want to see if I can connect Frederick’s ideas about falconry with his foreign policy,” Susan said. The renegade Holy Roman Emperor had written an enormous tome about hunting with hawks. Where he’d found the time, Bryce had no idea, but Frederick II was the kind of guy who made time when he felt like doing something. As for his foreign policy . . . The way it looked to Bryce, Frederick had flown himself against the whole damn world. He’d made it work for most of his reign, too.
“That is cool,” Bryce said now. “Or it will be, if you can do it.”
“Always if,” Susan agreed. “But it’ll keep me busy for a while, anyway. And when I publish it, maybe it’ll make somebody notice me and go, like, We need her in this department. I can hope, right?”
“Sure, babe.” Bryce nodded. You could always hope. A lot of the time, you had to hope. You could even live on hope for a while. Why not? What else was the whole country doing?
• • •
“Darn!” Colin said as he combed his hair.
Kelly knew that would have been something a lot stronger if she weren’t around. “How’s it doing?” she asked.
He looked down at his left shoulder as if it had betrayed him. Well, it had, but you couldn’t blame it after a bullet smashed up its workings. “Y’know,” he said, “I think the rehab’s gone about as far as it’s gonna go.”
She’d been thinking the same thing for the past couple of weeks. She hadn’t wanted to say so, because she kept hoping she might be wrong. All she said now was, “Are you sure? They say time—”
“—wounds all heels,” he finished for her. She winced. While she was wincing, he went on, “It may get a little better. I may be able to move it a little more without feeling like somebody’s driving nails in there. But I won’t go back to being a real, no-kidding, two-armed human being again. I wish I would, but I won’t.”