by S.A. Bodeen
Despite being a devoted fan of Bob Dylan and similar musicians, Dad had stocked the CD collection with every genre, including music more off the mainstream. Grunge bands, punk, alternative, indie rock.
He’d actually been selecting it for me, since the media library was so big and I didn’t know what to look for half the time. When he managed to find some bands I liked, I had to transfer them to my player. No problem. I was made of time.
My mom came into the gym as I hit mile three. She raised her eyebrows. “If I can hear your music, it’s too loud.”
The music was too loud to hear her, but she’d said that so many times I could read her lips. The volume went down.
Naturally her balance was a bit awkward. She clambered onto the recumbent bike. Her long hair was in a ponytail and she wore an oversize YK T-shirt and black velour bottoms, the waist folded in order to accommodate her huge, pregnant belly.
She started pedaling, and then smiled at me. “I’m feeling cumbersome.”
I didn’t answer. My mom and I never really talked. To clarify, she talked to me all the time. I usually just grunted and nodded my head.
The only sounds besides the music were the whine of the treadmill and the whir of the bike.
“Today I’m craving peanut butter and banana sandwiches. On white bread even, if you can believe that.”
I didn’t feel like talking about her cravings. I had plenty of my own.
Mom pushed some stray hair out of her eyes. “Eli, you should visit them one day.”
I lost my footing and had to grab on to the rail to keep from falling off the treadmill. Did she say that just to get me to talk? It worked, because once I had found my rhythm again, I responded. “How can you say that? You know what they are.”
Mom fiddled with the control buttons. They beeped along with her words. “I know what your father thinks they are.”
She’d never broached the subject of the Supplements with me before, even though it was always there, hanging over our heads. She probably thought it wasn’t worth it, me being the cold loner that I was. Why would I give a crap about them? But maybe her catching me in Eddy’s room changed things. She’d figured out, despite my trying not to show it, that I did have feelings.
What the hell, the cards were on the table. It was the time to ask what I’d always wondered, but never had the guts to talk about. “Why did you do it? Agree to it?”
Mom stretched her arms, then folded them behind her head and leaned back, still pedaling. “It didn’t start out to be … Your father said we might be the only ones left. Or some of the few left. And we owed it to the world to give it the biggest population we could.”
I rolled my eyes. “And you bought that story?”
Her eyes narrowed. “He wouldn’t do it unless I agreed entirely. And I understood.” She set a hand on her bump. “Obviously I was the key.”
That much was clear. “But why? I mean, the situation changed once the food supply … was compromised. It was no longer about rebuilding the planet, was it? You knew what he wanted to do.”
Her shoulders went up and down once. “I love you and your sisters so much. Your father knew that; I’d do anything for you. After losing Eddy, your gram … I was just in a daze. It seemed like I was doing the right thing, saving the children I had left, securing your future. Something Eddy didn’t have anymore. Now, seeing them every day—”
“Supplements, Mom. That’s what they are. That’s all they are.” I picked the bottle out of the holder and took a cold drink.
She sighed, and her tone softened. “No, Eli. That’s not all they are.”
I turned up my music. With one motion, I undid my ponytail and let my hair drift over my face. I had nothing more to say to her.
Mom finished and took her time standing. She leaned toward me, her hands reaching on either side of my head.
I tried to move away as she grabbed the headphones out of my ears. “There’s a lot you don’t know, Eli.” She backed off, her eyes looking down.
I wanted to spit the words out. “Like what?”
She tried to find my eyes behind the curtain of hair. “I’m not sure, because there are things I don’t know, either.” She took a brief glimpse around before lowering her voice. “Your father has always kept things from me, even before we came in here. Lately I feel it even more. He’s got secrets, Eli.”
Her voice changed, lost its gentle tone. “And if those secrets affect you or your sisters or … the others?” With one sweep of her hand, she wiped the sweat off her forehead. “He may be my husband, but I don’t trust him. Not anymore.”
“Why not?” I’d never had this kind of conversation with my mom. It felt strange, having her open up so much. But I wanted to know.
“The other day I was in the bedroom. My feet smell bad when I’m pregnant, did I ever tell you that?”
I shook my head. Of course she’d never told me that. We hadn’t had a talk this long for the last six years. I slowed the treadmill down so I was walking.
“Only when I’m pregnant. It’s odd. So I got a bottle of talcum powder to sprinkle in my tennies, before I came to work out. But I’m so clumsy now, and I tripped on the carpet and dropped the bottle. The powder went all over the rug, everywhere. I pulled out the hose from the central vacuum to clean it up, but my hands were slippery, because I’d just put on some lotion. The hose snapped out of my hands and hit the headboard, knocking down the painting.”
“The Monet.”
She smiled at me. “You remember.” I nodded.
“I always knew it was merely a reproduction. How could it be anything else? We were camping, right? So far from home. There was no time to bring the original. But when I lifted the painting to hang it back up, I looked at it closely for the first time.”
Her smiled faded. “Do you remember the Monet?”
I nodded. The painting was of a woman wearing a white dress, viewed from behind, and her shoulders were bare, her hair piled on top of her head. The woman could have been my mother.
“Your father gave it to me the day you and Eddy were born. Could you imagine how it felt? To come from where I did, and then be given a painting worth millions, such a beautiful piece, to have for my very own? I looked at it every day for nearly nine years.” Mom’s eyes misted a bit with the memory.
“Once we came here, I never so much as glanced at the one on my bedroom wall. I didn’t want to see a reproduction, because everything in the Compound was that; the air and the light and even our daily life. They were all just reproductions of the real thing. But when I picked the Monet up to hang it on the wall, I did look at it. For the first time, I really looked.”
She paused, resting one hand on her belly as the other still held my headphones.
“The Monet is real. The Monet hanging on the wall of my bedroom in this godforsaken Compound, three stories underground, is the real thing. How do you explain that, Eli? How do you explain that?” Her eyebrows went up.
My mouth dropped. Was she waiting for me to give her an answer? Because I only had questions. “What? How can that be?”
“If your father had time to switch the paintings, it would mean he knew, somehow, he’d been warned of the attack. And if that’s true, why wouldn’t he have told everyone? Why wouldn’t we have come here earlier with your brother and my mother?”
“Did you ask Dad?”
She shook her head. “I have to wait for the right time. And I don’t think that’s now.” Her hand reached out with my headphones. “And he’s wrong, dead wrong, if he thinks I will let him go through with any plan involving … involving anything so horrendous.”
She handed me the headphones. I watched her leave. The treadmill beeped as the incline moved upward, starting a long ascent. I realized it was a mistake to assume gentleness was akin with weakness.
I turned off the treadmill, hair hanging in my eyes, sweat running down my neck as I stood there panting, thinking. Mom’s mistrust of my dad, Terese’s rant in the gym, how co
uld I be such a fool? For six years I’d been feeling sorry for myself and shutting out my family as much as I could, going through the motions, convincing myself we were the lucky ones.
Everyone on earth perished, right? Didn’t they? With all of Dad’s technology, wouldn’t he want to know what was happening aboveground?
He was keeping something from us.
Something big.
I skipped lifting weights and my shower, too. I had to get back to Dad’s office. I would make up a story about a chemistry experiment gone awry. I stopped in my room to grab a notebook. My laptop was in the chem lab and I didn’t feel like running all the way there and back, so I picked up the laptop I’d found in Eddy’s room and took that, too.
Dad’s office door was shut. Through the thick wood, I could just barely hear him talking to himself. His tone sounded perturbed.
Suddenly my plan didn’t seem so great after all. I didn’t want to disturb him in the middle of work, especially if he was frustrated. The moment had to be right, and I sat down on the floor to the side of the door to wait. I tied back my hair, then pulled out the laptop from Eddy’s room.
The laptop came on. Out of habit, I clicked on the Internet icon. Because it was there. I waited for the message to come up and tell me I was not connected to the world.
But it didn’t.
Instead, another message came.
Wireless Network Now Connected.
My jaw dropped. “What the hell?” Words formed in my mouth. I fought the urge to call out to Dad. But I remembered the promise I made to Mom, the promise to keep the laptop a secret.
The leather of his chair squeaked. “Is someone out there?”
I shut the laptop and cleared my throat. “Yeah, Dad, me. I wondered if you could help me with some experiments.” I stood up, scrambling to cover the laptop with my notebook. “Later’s fine, though, if you’re too busy.”
The door swung open. “Now’s fine.” Dad stood there in his usual jeans and T-shirt, a sheaf of papers under his arm.
I held my breath, trying to resist the urge to look down at Eddy’s laptop, hoping that, half covered by the papers, it resembled my other laptop enough to not draw his attention.
Dad moved toward me as the door shut, but I still got a glimpse of his office.
Although it was infinitesimal, I noticed something. My father had always been meticulous. He believed in a place for everything, everything in its place. No variations; things were always in their spot as if glued there. So when my glance revealed something out of place, it didn’t take long to notice what item was not where it was supposed to be: the Seattle Seahawks football phone.
We headed toward the lab, Dad poring over a sheet of paper as he walked. He went into the hallway restroom, and I took the opportunity to open the laptop back up, see if the message was still there. There was a message. Just not the one I wanted to see.
Wireless Server Not Available.
I shut the laptop. Had it been my imagination? Did I want to see something so badly that I hallucinated? In the lab, I slipped the laptop in a drawer before Dad could notice it.
“Oh, Eli. Here.” Dad handed me a CD.
Still freaked by the laptop, I just thanked him for the CD. I didn’t look at it until I was back in my room. The band was Cake. Never heard of them. The song started and my pencil started tapping.
Reluctantly crouched at the starting line
Engines pumping and thumping in time
The green light flashes, the flags go up
Churning and burning they yearn for the cup
I liked it. Which wasn’t always the case with the songs Dad gave me.
The song ended and I ejected to find out the name of it.
The door stuck, trapping the CD halfway out. I noticed the label on top of the CD had an edge sticking up. Took me a little while to get a good enough grip before I could yank it out.
The label was simply a printout, made with high-quality photo paper, somehow heat sealed or laminated. Tearing it all the way off revealed a recordable CD. In black Sharpie, the name of the band was written in Dad’s handwriting.
CAKE
A date followed: a very recent date. My hand slapped over my mouth.
How was that possible? How in the hell did I come to be holding a copy of a CD made only weeks ago?
It was like the dated note I’d found in the chapel. But I wasn’t going to dismiss this one so easily.
I’d been holding my breath. It came out in a rush.
Unless we always had the music and Dad simply made a copy of it, adding the date as he always did.
I dug through the stack of CDs on my desk, all given to me by my father. For the next hour, I used the sharp side of some scissors to scrape away at several labels. All fake. All PC-recorded CDs with handwritten names and dates.
All the dates well after we were in the Compound.
In the media room, I found the catalog that listed every CD we had with us. I took it back to my room.
My finger tracked down the list as I perused it for any of the groups on my desk. I went through the entire stack, dozens. There wasn’t a listing for any of them. This was no small omission on my dad’s part. This was colossal.
I WAS AWAKE ALL NIGHT, THINKING. I WAS PISSED, PISSED AT the possibility that my father was keeping things from me, maybe even lying. And if that was true, I would be even more upset at myself for being such a dupe, just taking things lying down, believing everything he said.
But I was also afraid of what would happen when I did ask him for the truth. What if he didn’t give it to me? Worse, what if he did and it wasn’t what I wanted to hear?
But I knew what Eddy would do. I also knew he wasn’t here to do it for me.
Right away the next morning, before I could chicken out, I pounded on Dad’s office door.
He opened it. “I’m busy, Eli. Can it wait?” There were deep circles under his eyes and his jaw was covered with stubble. Must have been one of his sleepless nights. He was wrapped in a plaid fleece blanket in his chair, leaning out the door just enough to see me.
I handed him the Cake CD and waited.
“What’s wrong? Doesn’t it play?” He noticed the missing label, the date written in his own handwriting. His face paled.
“Dad, I think …” I suddenly wasn’t sure what I thought. My carefully considered argument abandoned me. So, heart pounding, I stammered out what I could. “I’ve felt for a while like something isn’t right.” A bit of a lie, since it had taken Terese to open my eyes.
Dad opened the door wider and scooted his chair back to his desk. He set the CD down, then leaned back in his chair. I couldn’t believe he was being so open, ushering me into his inner sanctum. I froze, and wondered if I looked as dumbstruck as I felt. He motioned for me to sit down on the couch, where a pillow and blanket lay, and I realized he’d been sleeping there. I moved them aside to make room.
I sat, then untucked my hair from behind my ears and let it fall forward over my eyes. My eyes strayed to the padlocked door, but I dismissed it for the moment. One thing at a time.
Dad removed his reading glasses. He took his time folding them before he placed them on his desk. He yawned and pulled the blanket up around him.
Inside, I screamed at him to get on with it.
“Eli, there’s something you don’t know.”
You think? I remained silent.
“I’ve always told you the Compound is wired for communication. Of course, I never expected to use it, given that all communication would be decimated: phones, Internet, fax. But a while ago, I got a wireless Internet signal.”
My mouth gaped.
Dad smiled, nodding. “I know, I know, it felt like a miracle. I didn’t want to say anything.”
Even though I knew he’d been keeping stuff from us, that revelation threw me. “Why not?” My words were full of disbelief. With a subtle trace of accusation.
One of Dad’s hands crept up to scratch the back of his neck. �
��It was sporadic. Limited. Some days it worked, some days it didn’t. I didn’t want to get your hopes up. And of course I didn’t communicate with anyone at first.”
The accusation went from a trace to full blown. “At first?”
“About a year ago, I did get in touch with another survivor. A music-label mogul from L.A., has a shelter in a remote area of Canada. He prepared in much the same way I did. His kids were older when they went in and he offered to send some of their music for you. So I downloaded it.”
I pushed back my hair as I tried to sort the new information. “That’s it? The Internet comes back up and you download music?”
Dad scrunched up his forehead. “Mmm, noooo. Things are slowly coming back out there. Of course most of the satellites would still have to be intact. I’m thinking a government somewhere, maybe ours, spread wireless Internet like a blanket, so survivors could be in contact with one another. Remember that place we went to in Colorado, on our skiing vacation?”
I nodded. “Yeah. They had free wireless all over town.”
He laid his hands out toward me, like he was giving me a gift. “There you go, just like that.”
It seemed so simple. Too simple. “So what else have you found out?”
Dad crossed his arms. “Not much, as far as conditions and such. I’m hopeful, if it was the government who got the Internet going again, that they’ll start giving us updates.”
“What about the phone? Does it work, too?”
Dad frowned. He shrugged slightly. “I try it now and then.”
I sat up straighter, faced my father. I was nearly breathless. “Why can’t we go outside now, and see? See what it’s like out there?”
“Eli, you know what it’s like out there.”
“Dad, it’s been years.” I knew I was on the losing side of the debate due to the grim reality of radiation sickness; vile beyond belief, endless puke and diarrhea until you die. Oppenheimer’s cholera.
“Eli, think about who you’re talking to. I do know what it’s like out there. And we’ve got to follow the plan if we have a chance of survival. The day will come when we open the door.”
“How?”
