Countdown City tlp-2

by Ben H. Winters

  Julia pauses and stares at the air in front of her, as if scouring the words she has just said, satisfying herself of their soundness before plunging forward. We’re on the roof of Kingfisher Hall: steam pipes, a wilted rooftop garden, a weather-beaten sofa someone lugged up the concrete stairwell and out the trap door.

  “We have a team of engineering postdocs who rigged those machines to capture the electricity generated in a central battery. So that, for example…” She swings her arm until she’s pointing at another building, much closer, where on the first floor the curtains are pulled shut tightly. “… those people can watch movies. A French New Wave festival at present. Then they do Tarantino. And so on. They vote on it. There’s a committee.”

  “That’s interesting,” I murmur, still trying to get a read on her, on this conversation. Where is he? is all I want to ask. Where’s Brett?

  “Interesting?” Julia says. “Sure, it’s interesting, but that’s not the point. I’m answering your question from downstairs. How can we pass sentence on someone who might be innocent?” She glares at me through the thickness of her glasses. “Wasn’t that your question?”

  “Sort of.”

  “No, it was, that’s what you asked. Don’t backtrack. He didn’t do it, by the way.”

  She thrusts out her chin, waiting for astonishment, anger, argument. And in fact I am a little astonished; I can see him clearly, the shivering nervous defendant, barely out of his teens, hands bound, waiting for the punishment of the mob.

  But I hold my peace, I just raise my eyebrows, go, “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah. Really. I set him up.”

  She’s pushing, she’s feeling me out, and I know exactly why. She thinks that she hates me and she wants to make sure. I come to her tainted by my association with Martha, with “the wife,” and Julia Stone would therefore prefer to tell me to fuck off back to copland or wherever I came from. I therefore need to play it slow, hang back, save my questions until I think there’s a chance she’ll answer them.

  “All I meant is that the kid deserved to be treated fairly,” I say. “I didn’t say he was innocent.”

  “Oh, he’s not innocent,” says Julia, “he’s just not a thief. He’s a rapist. Okay? Don’t ask how I know, because I know what goes on here. I know. And I want him out of my community. But if I had him brought up for rape, then Jonathan—the vice to the vice? Remember him?”

  I nod. Piggy eyes, flushed face, the sneer of a spoiled child.

  “Jonathan would demand a hanging. Not because he gives two shits about violence against women. Because he wants to hang someone. I know he does. And once the hangings start—” She shakes her head, seeing the future. “Forget it.”

  I rub my forehead, finding the queer little divot in my temple, remembering when Cortez assaulted me in the elevator. Seems like a million years ago, a different lifetime. Julia is looking out over the campus again, brow furrowed, hands moving while she talks.

  “Radical social theories when put into practice have a notoriously short half-life. They dissolve into anarchy. Or the people’s power, even when carefully delegated to provisional authorities, is seized by totalitarians and autocrats. Can you think of a single counterexample?”

  Julia flicks her gaze at me.

  “No,” I say. “I guess not.”

  “No,” she says. “There isn’t one.”

  Her passion, her confidence—I can see clearly how these qualities must have sung out to Brett Cavatone, whom I have come to see as quiet, quick-minded and intense, a philosopher in the thick tough body of a policeman. How, I wonder fleetingly, did he and Martha Milano end up together in the first place? How long did it take before he knew he had married the wrong sort of woman?

  “We have this opportunity,” Julia says. “We’ve struck this elusive balance between safety and personal liberty. This balance always gets fucked up, but now there’s no time for it to get fucked up. We just have to keep the Jacobin shit at bay, keep from tipping over into Lord of the Flies for seventy-four more days.” She’s talking faster and faster, the words rattling along like train cars. “This is literally a unique opportunity in the history of civilization, and the preservation of public order trumps the specific form of justice doled out to one individual. Right?”

  “Right,” I say.

  “Yes. Right. Is she paying you?” She turns to me, crosses her arms. “The wife?”

  “No.”

  “So why are you doing it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, and give her a quick little half smile. “Although people do keep asking me that.”

  “I’ll bet.” And then she smiles back, just the tiniest secret hint of a smile. There’s a small gap between her front teeth, like a rascally ten-year-old.

  “You thought before that I had been sent to kill him. Why would someone be trying to kill him?”

  The smile disappears. “Why the fuck should I tell you?”

  “Are you in love with him?”

  “Love is a bourgeois construct,” Julia says immediately, but nevertheless she turns away from me, gazes out over the rooftops and treetops of the transformed campus. I wait, allow her a moment alone with whatever memories she’s replaying. And then I gently push forward, talking softly, telling her the story she already knows.

  “Brett arrested you a couple years ago, in Rumney, but you gave him an earful from the bars of the holding cell. You made him see the justice of your cause, and he came to respect you. You talked him out of testifying. You developed feelings for each other.”

  Julia gives me a quick sour look at the word feelings, and I nod in acknowledgment of the fact that feelings are a bourgeois construct, but I keep going.

  “But he wouldn’t leave his wife. That wasn’t in his character. So at the end of the summer you went back to school, and he left the state troopers and moved to Concord, and that was that.”

  She’s not saying anything, she’s not even looking at me now. Her eyes are fixed on her campus, her people: the exercisers, the movie watchers, the undulating swarms on the central quad. But neither is she interrupting, neither is she saying no. I keep talking, just a guy in a suit on a rooftop telling a story on a summer’s day.

  “But then the asteroid comes along. The countdown begins, and it changes everything. You think, well, maybe now. Maybe now Brett and I get our shot. You wrote him letters, told him all about the Free Republic and what you had accomplished here. You told him he should come and play chess and hang out with you until the end.”

  Now Julia raises a single finger, still staring straight ahead. “One letter. A couple months ago.”

  “Okay,” I say. “One letter. And then yesterday, suddenly, he shows up.”

  I can picture the scene, Brett Cavatone slipping into the back of that crowded noisy auditorium as I had, and suddenly Julia spots him from her chair on the stage. Her jaw drops, her commanding pose of leadership wavers momentarily like a blurry TV signal as Brett smiles up at her, self-contained and formidable and affectionate. “He tells you he’s here now, there aren’t many days left and he wants to spend them with you.”

  “No,” says Julia abruptly.

  “No?”

  At last she turns away from the rail and looks at me straight on, lips pursed with emotion, and I don’t care if love is a bourgeois construct or not, I’ve seen love once or twice before and this is the face of a woman in love. She loves him and bitterly regrets what she says next.

  “No, he did not come because there aren’t many days left and he wants to spend them with me. He came for guns.”

  “He came for—” I blink. “What?”

  Julia laughs then, once, a harsh bark, as I stare at her, open-mouthed with bafflement.

  “Come on,” she says, and flings open the trapdoor to the stairwell. “Let’s take a walk.”

  * * *

  Jeremy Canliss was right. Brett had a woman on his mind. But it was neither lust nor love that brought him to the University of New Hampshire to find Juli
a Stone; it was the lure of the weapons she had proudly described to him in that one letter, a couple months back.

  Julia Stone leads and I follow, a pace or two behind, down the path leading away from Kingfisher, under the gauntlet of extinction—Permian, K-T Boundary, Justinian Plague—and off across campus. We don’t speak, we just go, my nervous excitement making itself known in the loud rattling of my heart in my chest, my understanding of this case revolving slowly like a wall of books in a haunted mansion, revealing the hidden staircase behind. I have questions—more questions, new questions—but I just walk, allow myself to be led, Julia offering muted greeting to nearly everyone we pass on the twisting trails.

  Our destination, as it turns out, is a compact concrete shed with a flat tar roof, built along a chain-link perimeter fence separating the UNH facilities buildings from College Road behind them. The shed sits in the shadow of the hulking power station, now defunct, its coils and towers silent and cold.

  Julia opens the padlocked shed and leads me inside. It’s a single room, a perfect box: flat floor, flat ceiling, four flat walls. The sunlight filters in dimly through the low dirty windows. The walls are lined with hooks that are hung with guns: pistols, rifles, automatics and semi-automatics. On a shelf near the floor are a dozen boxes of ammunition, neatly arranged. The revolutionary Free Republic, Julia Stone explains, appropriated all this gear from the UNH ROTC program at the time of the “revolution.” What Brett told her was that he needed “serious weapons”; he asked for a pair of high-powered rifles, M140s with bolted scopes. Julia gave him the guns and pinned their disappearance on the rapist.

  “Not that the guns were mine to give,” says Julia, shaking her head bitterly. “They belong to the community. I don’t know why I let him talk me into it. He’s just…”

  She opens her hands, trailing off. But I know what she wants to say. I’ve heard it before: He’s just Brett.

  We step outside and Julia locks the door and we lean against one of the concrete sides, facing the power station, and I fight back a wave of anxiety, an intense consciousness of what’s in the shed. The destructive capability of just this one tiny building, this single small room in a world full of them. Because I’ve seen rooms like this before, since the asteroid’s slow approach became known. By now there must be millions of them, basements and attics, sheds and garages, lined with weapons silently waiting to be used, a world of tinderboxes ready to bloom into flame. I look at my watch and I am late—the deadline given to me by the guards at Thompson Hall has passed. I offer up a silent apology to Houdini, wondering whether those two girls or the guys in the black shirts would actually do anything to harm the dog.

  I circle back around to my initial question.

  “Julia, what is going on? Who is trying to kill Brett?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe no one.”

  “Is he in danger?”

  “Danger? I mean, danger doesn’t even…”

  She shakes her head with bitter amusement. She’s going to tell me, I realize—she’s already started to tell me. For the first time I feel it with a wrenching ecstatic certainty: I’m going to find him. I’m coming, Brett—I’m coming.

  “Julia?”

  But her affect changes; her face gets tight with anger. “Why the fuck should I tell you?” she says, spitting the words. She wheels away from the wall of the shed, glaring. “Why should I tell you shit?”

  I respond not to the anger but to the question. She wouldn’t be asking if she didn’t want an answer. She wouldn’t have taken me to the guns. “You care about him. Whatever passed between the two of you, it meant something to you. Perhaps you don’t love him, but you wish to keep him from harm. If I find him, maybe I can make that happen.”

  She doesn’t answer. She pulls nervously on one of her pigtails, a small human gesture.

  I’m coming, Brett. Here I come.

  There’s a motion by the chain fence, some animal or stumbling citizen of the Free Republic, moving in shadow. We both turn our heads, see nothing, and then look back at each other. I watch Julia intensely considering, weighing factors, deciding whether to reject the truth of what I’ve said, simply because I’m the one to have said it. I watch her weighing her loyalty to Brett, her anger at him, her desire to see him safe from harm.

  “I won’t tell you what he’s doing,” she says at last. “He made me promise to tell no one. I can’t betray him.”

  “I understand,” I say. “I respect that.” And I mean it. I do.

  “But I will tell you where he is.”

  5.

  I’m sorry, Martha.

  I can hear myself saying the words, imagine them hanging in the bright empty air of her kitchen, when I make it back to Concord, knock on her door like a cop with hat in hand to give her the news.

  I’m sorry, ma’am, but your husband will not be coming home.

  Had I been right, and had I found Brett Cavatone as I briefly imagined him, reclining on the thick grass of the quad, head in the lap of his long-lost love—or had I found him in a whorehouse or at a fuck-it-all beach party, staring up at the stars with something wicked sluicing through his veins—and had I then delivered Martha’s message, reminded him that “his salvation depends” on his return… had it all played out that way, there might still have been some small chance of success, some sliver of hope, that he would remember himself, hang his head, and come home.

  But now what I know is that he’s out in the woods with two rifles. And whether he’s plunged himself into some terrible danger, as Julia seems to fear, or he’s performing some great act of end-days nobility, as Martha wants to believe, it is in all scenarios harder to see him having much interest in home.

  I couldn’t find him, I could say to Martha. Neither hide nor hair of the man.

  But I’ve always been a terrible liar. Maybe the best thing to do is never report back to my client at all. I could stay here in Durham, or return to Concord but never to her house on Albin Road, let the final months roll by for Martha in hopeful silence. Let her die on October 3 with that small diamond of possibility still pressed in her palm, that Brett might return, turn up suddenly to hold her tightly as the world explodes.

  * * *

  “Sorry I’m late,” I say, panting and out of breath. One of the anarchists in the black T-shirts looks up and goes, “Oh, what time is it?” and there’s Houdini, perfectly fine, bounding around on the sloping lawn under the flapping flag of the Free Republic while Beau and Sport toss a Frisbee for his amusement.

  “For God’s sake,” I say, and exhale. The girls’ shotguns lie carelessly on the steps like pocketbooks; the Black Bloc guys are sitting languorously on the dirt by the wall, bandanas off, faces warmed by the sunshine.

  Houdini barks in recognition as I come into view but does not, I note sourly, come racing for the lap of his master. He’s having a great time, leaping delightedly between his captors, delivering the battered yellow Frisbee to each in turn. Beau crouches as if to protect him from returning to my ownership, and Sport waves merrily.

  “Oh, hey,” she says. “Check it out.” She points to my dog. “Sit.”

  He sits.

  “Roll over.”

  He rolls over.

  “That’s great,” I say. “Wow.”

  This a clear case of canine Stockholm syndrome, and I explain this to Houdini as he reluctantly falls into step beside me and we trot away back toward Main Street and India Garden.

  I eat a Clif Bar and a peanut butter sandwich, pour out a cup of kibble for the dog, reviewing my obligation in my head, my contract with my client: I will do what I can to find your husband…. The problem now is that I know where he is. The problem now is that I could be there on the ten-speed in an hour. The problem is that I want to go. I’ve come this far and I want to deliver my message. I’ve come this far, and I need to see the man with my own eyes.

  The door rings brightly. “Hey, can I get a palak paneer, please?” says Nico pulling up a chair. “And a thi
ng of naan bread?”

  She’s smiling her crooked clever smile, a cigarette hanging in the tough-girl style from the corner of her mouth, but somehow I’m not in the mood. I stand up and hug her for a long time, pressing her face against my chest and resting my chin on her head.

  “What the hell, Henry?” she says when I let her go. “Did something happen?”

  “No. I mean, yes. Not really.” I sit down again. “You smell like beer.”

  “Yup,” she says. “I drank a bunch of beer.” She runs a hand through her spiky black hair, then flicks her cigarette butt into the corner. Houdini glances up disapprovingly from his food, sniffing at the smoke.

  “So?” says Nico. “Did you find her?”

  “My witness?” I say. “I did.”

  “What about Martha’s husband?”

  “Not yet. But I know where he is.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where?”

  “Maine, south of Kittery. At a place called Fort Riley. It’s an old state park.”

  Nico nods blankly, helping herself to a bite of my Clif Bar. This is as far as her interest goes in my ongoing investigation.

  “All right,” says, when she’s done chewing. “You ready?”

  I rub my forehead with one hand. I know what she means, of course. I promised that if she guided me to and through the Free Republic of New Hampshire, then I would listen to all the sordid details of Nico’s Magic Plan to Save the World. I just wanted a couple more minutes. Just a moment or two of small normal happiness, a brother and a sister and a dog. I’m not ready, I want to say. Not yet.

  But I promised. I did promise. “Okay,” I say. “Fire away.”

  I cross one leg over the other and lean slightly forward and focus my energy on Nico, admonishing myself as she begins talking to listen with patience and good grace to whatever Hail Mary last-ditch song and dance I’m about to hear.