by Chris Weitz
He asks as though it doesn’t matter to him more than any other question he might ask.
“Yes,” I say.
A twitch of what—relief? Hope? Fear? Then the control is exerted again.
“A cure.”
“The Cure,” says Brainbox. “The only one.”
“Hand it over,” says Imani.
“Wait, Imani,” says Solon. “Let me understand. Would it work on… if the symptoms are advanced.” It’s maybe the first time his diction has altered in midstride.
“Yes,” I say. “It’ll work on you.”
“There are others… in the infirmary,” he says.
“We have enough to get started. With the right materials and your assistance, we can make more. Much more.” That’s Chapel. Solon eyes him, trying to triangulate the gist of what’s going on between all of us.
“Give it to him,” says Imani.
“Not so fast,” I say. It’s a terrible phrase, something from a bad TV show, and I don’t know why it sprang to my lips. I had imagined putting this forward calmly, rationally, sensibly.
“Oh,” says Solon. “There’s a catch.” Again I’m amazed at his equanimity. “Well. Out with it.”
“Everybody can live now,” I say.
“I gathered as much,” says Solon.
“Nobody has to die.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, if we give this to you, we give this to everybody. Harlem, Washington Square, Midtown, the Moles… Uptown. Everybody.”
“That wasn’t the deal,” says Imani.
“It wasn’t the deal,” says Peter. “It is now. It’s a lot of people you’re ready to let die. And we’ve seen enough death.”
“You’re asking us to keep from using our material advantage.” Solon glances at the gun on his desk. A gun for every girl and boy.
“We’re telling you this is how it has to be,” says Chapel.
“You interest me,” says Solon, looking at Chapel. “This is your idea?”
Chapel shrugs.
“This is my idea,” I say. “And I would’ve made that clear if you weren’t about to splatter my brains on the wall. Your people paid down a lot. They gave up their lives. And for that, you get the Cure first. But I’m not here to set off a massacre.”
Solon looks at Imani. Imani says, “Put it to the vote. Put it to the people.”
Solon says, “I can say what goes right now.” He coughs.
“No,” says Imani. “This is too big. I say put it to the vote.”
I had assumed, until now, that Solon and Imani were always in league; that she was his subaltern, with a voice of her own, but basically subservient. The advisor in the shadows. Now it looks like something else. Maybe a rival kept close by.
Solon nods. “All right,” he says. “We put it to the vote. What?” he says, looking at me. “You think I’m the king here? Doesn’t work like that.”
Imani nods, like she’s just won a point.
Solon says, “You’re gonna have to decide, are you gonna risk it? If not, I guess things start going south pretty fast.” He coughs again, but not before he grabs his gun.
I can’t help but cast a look back at Chapel, who gives no indication of what he has in mind. It’s up to me.
“Okay,” I say, not knowing what’s to come. “We put it to the vote.”
“Fine,” says Solon. “Now, just one thing.”
He pulls back the sleeve of his shirt.
“Hook me the fuck up,” he says.
FLUFFY PILLOWS, smooth white cotton sheets, doughy-soft mattress. Above me, a worked pattern tapestry held up by wooden posts at the faraway corners of the bed.
I stay frozen in place for a little while, afraid that any move on my part will smash this dream into powder. Then, when I’m certain it all really exists, I sit up, slowly.
It persists. And there’s more. I’m in a tall-ceilinged room with plank-wood floors that shine like they’re wet. There are paintings of hills and dogs and birds and other classy stuff on cream-colored wood-paneled walls with shiny brass fittings. Above the tapestried four-poster, there’s plasterwork that looks like sugar icing versions of those henna designs people used to get on their hands.
There’s a door open, and beyond it I see a gleaming ceramic sink with silver faucets and racks of plump cotton towels. By my bed, a bottle of water the label says is from a spring in Wales, and a bowl of fruit, swollen and blushing and almost obscene they’re so ripe. Pink and white lilies in a vase.
When I get out of bed, lowering my feet from the extra-high mattress, I find that I’m wearing a cotton nightgown. I vaguely recall fishing it from a delicate little box last night before I face-planted in the snowdrift of goose down.
This is all very My Fair Lady and stuff, but it makes me feel vulnerable, so I go to the chunky wooden chest of drawers in the corner to see if by any chance some other clothes have magically appeared. My current duds feel too much like I’ve stumbled into some rich, pervy English dude’s harem.
Amazingly—but then, the whole thing is kind of amazing—there are more clothes. Wrapped in tissue and cellophane envelopes with some fancy logo, a whole month’s worth of stuff, tops all the way down to socks and scarves and everything in between, all fresh and new and exhaling a breath of luxury like a sexy, throaty little whisper. I admit it, I shudder with pleasure, and I’m just a little ashamed of myself.
Doesn’t stop me, though. I’m not saying I do a full-on pop-inflected-trying-on-clothes montage, but I take the opportunity to road test some of the great new crap before the first pang of hunger hits me and I bite into a plum. The juice slicks out of my mouth and drips onto the floor, and it makes me think of childhood summers, and then I remember my brother, Charlie, and I throw the plum away.
The windows are small paneled deals that swing outward on creaky old hinges. I can see along a slanted roof tiled with weathered gray stone slates edged here and there with moss. The roofline ends in a big clock tower, and just as I sight it, some bells go Bing-BONG, Bing-BONG! And a couple of pigeons take flight.
This is all reminding me of a movie I saw when I was little. Shirley Temple has been left in a fancy boarding school by her dad, who’s a soldier and, frankly, given what transpires, not the sharpest tool in the shed. The moment he’s split for whatever’s the latest war they’ve got on, the headmistress turns into a total beyotch and starts treating Shirley like a good-for-nothing flunky. She’s got to haul coal around, serve everybody else dinner, scrub various scrubbable things, and generally do all sorts of unpleasant shit. Worst of all, she’s forced to live up in the cold and gloomy attic.
Turns out that across the way there’s this totally hype guy in a turban who sees her through the attic window and takes pity on her; and one day he rigs it so that she wakes up surrounded by opulence and warmth and delectable goodies and whatnot.
Anyhow, I’m feeling a bit like Shirley T. in the movie. The window is big enough for me to squeeze out of, and the slope of the roof looks like I could walk it, but who am I kidding? Where would I escape to?
I mean, theoretically, I should be trying to find Jefferson and the others and get them over here, pronto. But how am I supposed to do that? Scramble out the window and down a drainpipe, ninja my way back to the air base, stow away or hijack a plane back to New York? That doesn’t seem terribly realistic. I mean, I’m badass, but I’m not that badass.
The way I figure it, whoever got me here is the quickest way back. Like, there must be some reason I’m being given the Shirley Temple treatment, and probably my best move right now, until an angle makes itself known, is to play along.
Which, given the whole three-thousand-thread-count, kept-woman vibe of it all, isn’t exactly bad. At least until the bill comes due.
I scarf down a few lavishly green pears and rosy apples, put on some incredibly comfortable yet stylish flats, and venture to the door. It’s a heavy oak number, and I half expect it to be bolted shut from the outside. But it pulls back with a
friendly meowing of the hinges.
Weirdly, there’s another door about six inches past it. I hear a faint shuffling from the other side.
Not to be deterred or whatever, I open that one, too. It swings outward and stops on the metal leg of a chair that is struggling to contain the truly unlikely, almost imponderable size of a guy with a wicked buzz cut and a rugged face like a knuckled ham hock. He rises and almost bashes his head against the stone stairway leading up from the landing where he’s roosting.
At full extension, the dude is six-ten if he’s an inch. He wipes his mouth with a napkin—it would appear he’s been scarfing some sort of gooey red-brown bean situation from a ceramic plate on a wooden tray—and yanks the lapels of his unfeasibly large suit to straighten it.
“Yes—Miss Zimmerman, is it?” he says, as if people had been streaming in and out of this double-door arrangement all day and he’s not entirely sure, despite having been set up here in his chair, if I am in fact who he’s supposed to be waiting for. His voice is a barrel of honey and gravel.
Me: “Yeeees?”
He holds out a fleshy hand with knuckles like hillocks. “Titch.”
Me: “Who in the what, now?”
Him (smiles): “Titch. It’s what everyone calls me.”
I shake his hand, or rather, his hand envelops mine like a boxing glove and he levers it up and down a couple of times.
Titch: “You’ll be wanting some breakfast. A fry-up? Or something American? Frosted Flakes?”
Me: “What’s a fry-up?”
Titch: “Ohhh, it’s lovely.”
Actually this sounds more like laaavly. He’s not, like, Downton Abbey hoity-toity English; he sounds more like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Titch: “Sausages, beans”—he points at the pebbled goo he’s been eating—“mushrooms, bacon”—bi-kun—“fried bread—”
Me: “You fry bread?”
Titch: “Oh, yes. Till it’s nice and crispy.”
Me: “Okay, let’s do it.”
Titch: “Coffee? Tea?” Suddenly I’m talking to a gargantuan flight attendant.
Me: “Uh… doesn’t matter so long as it’s strong.”
Titch: “Builder’s tea it is, then.”
He holds up a metal square and starts poking at it.
I goggle at it. It’s the first time I’ve seen a cell phone in years.
Let me revise that. It’s the first time I’ve seen a working cell phone in years. With this stubby little box, he can, like, access all the world’s knowledge and contact most of the surviving humans, friend or stranger, across the globe. Or, in this case, text somebody my breakfast order.
I feel a sudden and intense urge to go online. A little anticipatory jet of endorphins squirts in my brain. And I remember, in a flash, that I’ve lost my phone, the one with my past on it.
He sees me watching his sausagey fingers tap-dance across the little screen and shows it to me.
Titch: “New. Like it?”
Me: “They’re square now?”
Titch: “Chocolate-box, they call ’em. You have been in the wars, haven’t you?”
Me: “Yeah, the wars.”
Titch: “I’m sure you’ll be getting one soon. For now… well, security, innit?”
Which I think means “right?”
Me: “Yes, innit.”
He laughs.
Titch is friendly and expansive about his roots—he’s from someplace called Clerkenwell, where he grew up as an assistant butcher before he joined the army. But he gets hazier when it comes to how he ended up here, in this suit, outside this set of doors, and beyond showing me his square cell phone, he won’t tell me anything about what’s going on in the world. So I tell him about where I’m from, the tribe and the Sickness and everything, and he’s all “blimey… blimey… blimey!”—which is kind of funny and Dick-Van-Dyke-in-Mary-Poppinsy.
Eventually a taut, dangerous-looking guy with buzzed hair and a suit that doesn’t sit right on him—I’m guessing he’s another military type in regular-people clothes—brings up my tray of food, and I invite Titch in for breakfast. Or rather, for looking at me eat breakfast. He watches me tackle the food in amazement.
Titch: “Didn’t know there was that much room in there.”
Me: “Dude, I’ve been hungry for years.”
Titch: “Rough ride.”
Me: “The roughest.”
I crunch the last shard of fried bread—it’s disgusting and delicious, sort of like toast soaked in oil—then lift the plate to my mouth and lick off the bacon grease and sausage juice and bean goo.
Titch: “Blimey.”
There’s a rap on the outside door—actually it’s more like a genteel tip-tap. Titch rises and opens both doors, and there’s Welsh, in a gray flannel number that’s similar to but subtly different from yesterday’s.
Welsh: “I see you’ve met Titch.”
Me: “We’re best buds.”
Welsh: “I thought of taking a stroll.”
He says this as if it had just occurred to him.
Welsh: “Perhaps you’d like to stretch your legs?”
It’s dawned on me that these guys have everything pretty much planned out, and that this is just a less coercive approach to getting information out of me than what Ed was doing. But I decide to go along with the game of acting like I’m some kind of indulged houseguest or something.
Me: “I could promenade.”
Titch nods to Taut Guy, who zips down the stairs double-time. It’s like I’ve got my own entourage complete with bodyguards. Welsh sweeps his hand in an after-you gesture, and I squeak my way out on my new shoes.
The stairway is spiral, medievalish, and narrow, so we end up single file, with Welsh following and Titch kind of crabbing his way down half bent over.
At the bottom of the stairs, there’s a glossy black square on the wall with a bunch of names painted on it, like a fancy-pants version of a buzzer panel. The names sit on painted-over lumps of all the names that have been there before—KENNY, R. J.; HAWKES, W. B.; RELLIE, E. N. C.; and at the top, OLD GUEST ROOM.
Me: “Uh, not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Welsh, but where the fuck am I?”
He seems unfazed by my swearing.
Welsh: “Cambridge. Specifically, Trinity College, Cambridge, is exactly where the fuck you are.”
He smiles like he’s proud of the place.
Once, before It Happened, my class went on a field trip to the Cloisters up on the Hudson River. It was a museum built by some rich dude who was crazy about the Middle Ages. It looked superold, with this cool arcaded courtyard and a garden in the middle. What I’m looking at is kind of like that but bigger—there’s a perfect rectangle of new-mown grass in front of me, enclosed by a square of gorgeous two-story buildings of crumbly old stone. To our right is a big peak-roofed building; to the left, sunlight shoots straight through the windows that make up opposite walls of a library (that’s what Welsh says it is) whose yellow sides are dotted here and there with rosy pink rectangles.
Kids about my age are wandering around dressed like normal people before the Sickness, some of them with books in their hands, a romantic couple carrying a bottle of wine and glasses. They look totally untroubled and unafraid. A couple of very, very old dudes in funny black robes are steaming across the lawn, chatting away. Birds are tweet-tweeting, bees are buzzing in the flower beds, butterflies are butterflying around.
Mind officially blown. Like, this would have been a pretty idyllic scene even before my life was plunged into chaos, violence, and brutality. Now—it feels like heaven itself.
Me: “Please, stop. I’ll talk.”
Welsh: “Sorry?”
Me: “Never mind.”
Welsh: “I thought you’d rather be here than in a sad, old ministerial building somewhere.”
Me: “You thought right.”
We take a right and head up some stairs into a little passageway that runs past the doorway to the Hall, which is what t
hey call the college cafeteria. Except this doesn’t look like a cafeteria—it looks like they based it on the dining hall at Hogwarts. A big oldy-worldy stone barn sort of thing with long wooden tables with benches on either side and a sort of low stage at the back where I guess the professors get their grub on. There’s a big portrait of fatty bo-batty King Henry VIII looking down on the whole scene, deciding which of his wives to murder next.
Then down some more stairs, and we’re in this gigantic courtyard with a big stone fountain that looks like a gazebo in the middle. Welsh gives me a whole travelogue, explaining that this is the biggest enclosed court in Europe, and it’s from three old colleges that Henry VIII turned into one big mash-up college, and Isaac Newton lived over there in that corner, etc., etc. We walk along the pathways, which are patrolled by dudes in bowler hats, and touristy-looking people stop to look at our strange group, especially Titch, who’s lumbering after us like some kind of stalker grizzly bear.
Welsh points out a tower where Byron somebody lived.
Me: “This is great, but… why are we here?”
My bullshit detector is on high alert, since I can’t figure out why I suddenly rate a tourist getaway instead of solitary.
Welsh: “We are working on a honey rather than vinegar footing.”
Me: “As in, you get more flies with?”
Welsh: “Yes. We’ve received records of your—ah—stay with the navy, of course. I apologize, but it is necessary to do one’s research.”
Me: “Sure.”
Like, no big deal that you’re looking through my interrogation recordings.
Welsh: “It struck us—by ‘us’ I mean myself and my colleagues at the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and what people like to call MI6—that you might find yourself more willing to lend a hand in helping us through this interesting period in history if you were treated as an ally rather than an enemy.”
Me: “Okay, sounds good…”
Welsh: “And I thought—I was inspired by certain answers you gave in the course of your questioning—that you might appreciate a chance to take up some studies.”
Me: “College? Uh… I don’t think I’m exactly Oxford material.”
Welsh: “Cambridge. We’re in Cambridge.” (He says this with the littlest bit of huffiness.) “People often get that wrong. At any rate, the most difficult thing about Oxbridge—I mean Oxford and Cambridge—is getting in. After that… well, if you want, it can be a bit of a doss.”
