I shove several of Paula’s sweaters, T-shirts, socks and her longest pairs of pants into one of two matching beat-up carry-on bags (Paula and her husband must’ve brought more presentable ones along on their trip). I even have to steal a handful of her underwear. You know you’re in a bad way when you find yourself taking someone else’s underwear and I stop and sit on the bed, replaying Lou Bianchi’s voice in my mind in the hope that it will catapult me into a vision that will offer a clue of what’s in store for us tomorrow.
It’s useless, though. There are a dozen different thoughts coursing through my brain—how my mom must be sick with worry for me, what Doctor Byrne said about the greater good, the Latham boy from my dreams, Garren’s green eyes and how I feel when they look at me, the nagging fear that Henry’s men are biding their time, just waiting for us to run so they can snatch us off the street and put us down like dogs or worse, and on and on and on. Worries and questions but not a single thing that comes close to qualifying as a vision.
When Garren and I come together again in the kitchen that evening I almost lie to him. I mean to inspire a bit of hope by saying that I had a flash of something, a feeling that we’re going to be okay, but then his eyes do their magic trick on me and I’m nothing but warm and flustered. Survival and everything else, for a couple of moments, take a backseat to the feelings I’ve been denying. “You’re so …” My voice is a swirling whisper, a dream thing. It’s not what I’d intended to say or how I meant to say it and I shake my head and leave the abandoned sentence shimmering in the candlelit kitchen like a sparkler on firecracker day.
“So what?” he asks, hanging on the freezer door, about to reach for the frozen hamburgers.
“So … familiar.” I have my voice under better control at first but then it begins to twirl and swell. “I can’t believe you don’t know me.”
Garren releases his hold on the fridge, stands with his shoulder against the wall. “It’s still weird to hear you say that,” he murmurs, and though we’re in the middle of a conversation I feel like the kitchen couldn’t get any quieter. “You’re so sure of yourself that you make me feel like I should remember.”
I yank open the fridge myself and grab the hamburgers, just to fill up the room with something other than what we’re saying. There’s too much longing inside me. Not only for him but for something he represents. Something I don’t understand. A whole world of longing.
“I wish I could remember more,” I say, draining my tone, clipping it into neutral syllables.
Garren stares down at the candles in the middle of the table. The light dances across his features, turning him golden. “Maybe tomorrow.”
I smile, solidly back in the real world of the here and now because that’s the first time Garren has sounded like there just might be a point to my session with the hypnotherapist. “Tomorrow,” I echo. His words weren’t the sign I was looking for but I accept them as the good omen they are. “I think so.”
I absolutely do.
FOURTEEN
Even Paula Resnik’s longest pants are short on me, making me look like the victim of a laundry shrinkage accident when we leave the house with our stash of clothes, jewelry, a transistor radio, both flashlights, extra batteries and a smattering of food (the rest of the peanut butter and crackers, two cans of tuna and the box of Count Chocula) early Monday afternoon. Because Paula’s boots are also too small I’ve left them behind and am wearing my Doc Martens—if we need to run for any length of time it’s important to do it in comfortable boots.
As soon as we step outside I feel separation anxiety from the house and want my Docs to sprint me straight back inside again. It’s no longer a surprise to hear Winston Churchill pipe up. In his inimitable gruff voice he declares, “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.”
I march on with Garren, each of us in possession of roughly half the money we’ve amassed over the past few days. Yesterday we decided that maybe we were being paranoid to worry that Henry could find out we’d holed up at the Resniks’ and check who we’d called from there but that it was a case of better safe than sorry. That leaves us having to do our travel research from the anonymity of a public telephone and when we reach the subway station Garren calls a bunch of bus companies and the train line. He’s just hung up from his final call when he lunges for me, throwing his arms around my waist and burying his head in my shoulder.
“Janette’s here,” he whispers, his body crammed up against mine as if that will make him invisible.
I hold him tight the way Janette would. Close my eyes so that they won’t search her out and call attention to us. Would she recognize me? She only saw me once and I was dressed so differently. I can smell Mr. Resnik’s aftershave on Garren and the mint toothpaste we’ve both been using. We should’ve brought that with us too, I think.
You think the weirdest things when you’re in trouble. Toothpaste. Deodorant. When the next opportunity to shower will come along. How my arms are holding Garren but I just feel numb. And then I begin to thaw and it’s harder not to let go. My arms and the rest of my body are flooded with feelings of self-consciousness.
If Janette had seen him surely she would’ve stalked over to interrupt us by now. “I’m afraid to look,” I whisper back.
Garren eases himself away from me and glances around the station. “She’s gone.” His shoulders relax. “She was leaving the station. She must be going home.”
“Shit, that was close.” I pick up my carry-on bag and sling it over my shoulder. Garren snaps up the rest of our things—his matching bag and then a canvas knapsack we found in the laundry room, which has the flashlights, cigarettes and some of the food in it.
We walk down to the platform where Garren tells me that train tickets to Vancouver are a hundred and fifty-two dollars each. He thinks we’d be stupid to catch the train in Toronto, where there are people looking for us, and that we need to get ourselves north to Parry Sound. “We can catch up with the cross-country train there,” he explains. “But I think the first thing we need to do after your appointment is get out of the city. There’s a commuter train that heads out to Oakville every hour. It leaves from Union Station same as the cross-country train does but the second stop on the way out of town is at the exhibition grounds. It isn’t far but hopefully just distant enough from the inner hub of the city that they wouldn’t look for us there.”
I’m amazed by how much Garren’s worked out just by spending a few short minutes on the phone. We don’t have the money for the train fare and we’ll have to find a way to get from Oakville to Parry Sound, but having a general plan makes me feel more secure, like we actually can do this. We’ll disappear and they’ll never find us.
As we speed underground towards Lou Bianchi’s place, we talk about what we’ll do once we reach Vancouver. Since Garren’s been working at a restaurant he says he knows we’ll be able to find under-the-table work in the food industry. “A lot of people I work with have been paid cash by other restaurants. I hear there’s a lot of construction jobs off the books too.”
Thinking out loud I say, “Housekeeping too, I bet. Child care. Different types of manual labor.” I drape my arms over the carry-on bag and try to picture myself doing one of those things on the other side of the country.
“It’ll be shitty in the beginning,” Garren acknowledges. “Until we have enough money to buy some decent identification and move on to something better.”
Something better. Something better, somewhere else. The vagueness of that puts my mind in free fall.
Garren adds that he has an international student identity card, in a fake name, which lists his age as twenty. He bought it from a guy at his school for drinking purposes (since the legal age here is nineteen) and says it might come in handy in the meantime.
“What did you want to do before all this?” he asks.
“I didn’t have that figured out.” I thought I’d be in school for years yet, that there’d be plenty more time to com
e up with the answer to that question. “What about you?”
“I don’t know either. I was going to take a year or so off after graduation. That’s why I was working at the restaurant, to get some traveling money together. See more of Europe and Asia.”
It’s funny, Garren’s already spent so much of his time outside the country but it seems what he wants most is to leave again. “Maybe you still will,” I tell him.
We have to take a streetcar after we get off the subway and when we arrive at Lou Bianchi’s house hauling everything we own with us, I feel as though we’re oozing teenage-runaway vibes. The homes in Lou’s neighborhood are tiny and claustrophobic but brightly painted and welcoming. There are two wicker chairs on his porch, even though it’s winter.
Lou himself answers the doorbell when I ring. I know it’s him before he asks if I’m Lisa Edwards (the fake name I gave him). I also sense, as Garren and I follow Lou into the house, that he’ll be able to help me remember but that it will be at a cost. I’m about to lose something and I can’t see what. Only that it will make me unhappy.
Lou shows Garren into a small waiting room at the side of the house and then leads me to his office downstairs. I see a tape recorder laid out on the desk. Lou notices me eyeing it and says, “So you can play back everything you had to say while under hypnosis if you want to.” He rubs the underside of his beard and adds, “You’re younger than I thought.”
“I’m twenty,” I lie. “But I get that all the time.”
Lou motions for me to sit in the lounge chair in the center of the room. As I do he hands me a release form to sign. It frees him from any guaranties or liabilities and I jot the name Lisa Edwards down on the dotted line and give the form back to him along with the forty-five-dollar fee. Lou fishes a receipt out of his top desk drawer and scrawls the date and his signature on the bottom. The entire time my stomach’s fluttering. I can’t stop worrying about the unhappiness I sense ahead.
Lou mentions my sister and stresses that there are no certainties when it comes to hypnotherapy but that he’s going to do his best to help me. He asks my sister’s name (which I give as Sarah) and whether there’s any particular information or events about her that I’m hoping to remember. I tell him that I just want to remember what it was like to be with her but also what it was like to be with my parents before her death because I sense that they haven’t been the same since losing her.
I hope I’m not fucking up my chances of success by leading Lou down the wrong path but I’m afraid I’ll scare him away if I get anywhere near the truth. Lou explains a bit about hypnosis and does a relaxation exercise with me. He has a voice like trees rustling in a warm wind. It makes me feel floaty and calm. And then we’re stepping into my subconscious, Lou Bianchi’s voice guiding me into a tranquil meadow. I hear birds sing and can feel the heat of the sun on my face. Slowly, a mist begins to descend and then he’s leading me backwards in time through the fog. “Back to when you were four years old and in the presence of your dear sister, Sarah,” Lou intones.
I’m fully aware of my lie and why I told it, but in my current state I no longer want to hide anything from Lou and I amend, “I don’t have a sister. I have a brother. His name is Latham. I think he’s dead.”
My words don’t come as a surprise to me. It feels as though I’ve always known the truth.
“Tell me about your brother, Latham,” Lou suggests.
I begin to cry under my breath. I promised Latham I’d never forget.
Lou’s Zen voice instructs me to relax. He reminds me that I am observing the past but no longer inside it. My sorrow recedes but doesn’t disappear as I listen to him say, “In a moment I’m going to count from one up to ten. When I reach ten I want you to go to a happy time with Latham. You will be fully aware of all the details that surround you—the sounds, sights, smells and whoever else is nearby. Take your time observing and when you’re ready I want you to describe everything that’s happening for me.”
Lou begins his slow count upwards and when he reaches ten I’m like a person reborn. The first time I came into the world I was a blank slate, instinct without knowledge. That was approximately sixteen years ago. The second time, a little over a month ago, others deliberately reconstructed my consciousness, playing God. This third time I’m born complete with knowledge and an unobscured view of the truth. I feel like the first astronaut who landed on the moon, like I can see the arc of twenty-first-century human existence in a way that few people would ever believe possible.
We’ve come so far but fallen so fast. We’re our own worst enemies and this time it really might be the end.
I stare seventy-eight years into the future and tell Lou everything.
FIFTEEN
The weather changed faster than expected. Too many trees died in the Amazon—billions and billions of them—and the planet lost its buffer against global warming. In the United States climate change denial was completely swept away by the late 2020s when the droughts grew longer and the storms more severe. There were heat waves and heavy downpours on a scale North America had never known. Drought ravaged the Southwest, resulting in the beginning of a mass migration north and away from the coasts. Eventually many coastal cities were entirely deserted due to rising sea levels. However, New York remained a symbol of national strength and flood barriers were erected to protect the city from aggressive storm surges.
In Canada too, certain regions were drying up while others were the victims of massive floods. Scientists throughout the continent began plans to divert major rivers to areas starving for rain and to construct gigantic dams to contain runoff from rain in mountains that they knew would soon stop freezing.
Near the end of the 2020s a fascist-leaning Canadian government ill-equipped to deal with the constant fires raging in the west and a host of other environmental disasters, provoked mass protests that led to enormous unrest. In the instability a national political party that sought to merge Canada with the United States rose. It was widely supported by a Canadian population who feared chaos and violence and was elected to power in 2031. Negotiations began with the United States government immediately and on October 26, 2032, a new nation—the U.N.A. (United North America)—was born.
In 2036 the center of U.N.A. government was relocated to Billings, Montana, where the climate was more moderate and its inland position was a strategic military defense advantage. Around this time automation that had begun in the industrial revolution evolved to include the ever-more-popular presence of robots in the home (as domestic servants and companions) and workplace. Within the next fifteen years the retail, manufacturing, hospitality, security and health sectors quickly came to rely on robots to fill the majority of their positions. In turn this caused acute unemployment and by the mid-2040s mammoth social welfare camps had been erected in the majority of inhabitable states. The citizens who resided in these camps were referred to by those still employed as “the Cursed.” Because the residents were required to perform manual labor in the camps, the very existence of the social welfare camps caused additional unemployment. Several studies documented that once the Cursed were forced to rely on a camp for basic needs, they were unlikely ever to gain employment outside one again. By 2055 the U.N.A. unemployment rate was 36 percent in a population of 500 million.
Even with these crippling economic conditions much of the world continued to regard the U.N.A. and Northern European countries (which suffered a similar unemployment rate except Norway and Sweden where robot employment was permitted only in sectors that would endanger humans) as a safer and more prosperous place to live than their homelands. For decades now large swathes of Africa, Southern Asia, the Middle East, Southern Europe and Latin America have been ravaged by drought, torrential flooding and dangerous sea level rises, making much of their terrain uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions of environmental refugees continue to sweep across Northern Europe and the U.N.A. In response Northern Europe and the U.N.A. have bulked up their defenses with a force largely composed
of robots that are commanded by human members of the military. The defense force’s chief aim is to keep foreign nationals off its soil.
In the U.N.A. the robot units that patrol and guard the country’s borders and surrounding oceans are popularly known as DefRos. Inland, homeland security units that constantly monitor highways, schools, government and public offices, shopping zones and other highly trafficked areas for disturbances are called SecRos. Because of their more direct dealings with citizens, these units are constructed to strongly resemble humans and are skilled in human communication as well as defense.
While several companies manufacture DefRos and SecRos alike, Coppedge-Hale Corp is the government’s largest supplier. Despite the omnipresent military force, terrorist attacks on domestic soil have become more frequent. There is great anger with the West, both for causing irreparable environmental damage worldwide and its continuing hostility to eco-refugees. Several of the attacks have been against vertical farms (where the majority of crops are now raised) in urban centers, others against the Zephyr, the extensive high-speed domestic railway network that expanded as world oil supplies dwindled and air traffic became heavily restricted. The worst threats have been biological in nature as terrorists designed an array of viruses. In 2058 a fast-acting Ebola-Hanta copycat causing hemorrhagic fever was deployed at Union Station in Denver, killing 113 people within hours.
These are all well-known facts children of 2063 are free to read in textbooks about the twenty-first century, and I continue to tell Lou Bianchi, who has given up questioning me about my fake sister Sarah to focus on my unlikely tale, everything I can think of about changes someone from 1985 could barely hope to understand. I explain about the Bio-net, the network of nanites operating inside people of the future. Not everything about the time is darkness and threat—many of humanity’s old illnesses have been eradicated. There is no more cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s or AIDS. The U.N.A.’s people are strong and healthy. Even unwanted pregnancy and obesity is prevented by the Bio-net. No one goes hungry (except illegals who have somehow made it past DefRo defenses), and life expectancy is well past the age of one hundred. Much human trauma is repairable thanks to the nanites. Limbs can be regrown, damaged cells repaired, heart attacks and strokes prevented.
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