Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  He reached over to the shelf and pulled down a portable set the size of a small jewelry box. She reached for it, but he pulled it back.

  “What?”

  “You just need to help me when they do the Calibration, okay? A couple of the guys we outed on Bert’s last project are gunning for me.”

  The Calibration was the quarterly peer assessment that President Mack had implemented early in his first term. It applied to all federal employees and any corporation or state agency that received any funds from the feds. How it worked basically was everyone you worked with ranked you in whatever categories they picked that year. Competence, attitude, team spirit, loyalty, management skills, throughput. Not just the people in your own office. You could rank anyone you worked with from other offices. Vendors. Up and down the ladder. A good score meant money and status. A bad score and you could lose your job. Or a lot worse, as people were hearing. Because, you know, it meant you were a bad fit. Tania hated it, but had gotten by okay so far. Dishonesty on the Calibration was a violation.

  “Of course,” said Tania. “I’d do it anyway, for you. But I’m not sure I’m in the best standing myself.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked as if Tania had just said she had a contagious disease.

  “Just kidding,” said Tania, smiling. “I’ll take care of you. Get me those login credentials and I’ll fix your whole damn file.”

  Todd smiled back. He handed her the set.

  When she turned it on, the picture came up like a beam of light from another reality.

  23

  Odile called her that night.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “Sort of. I need to leave town.”

  “That bad?”

  “I can’t explain. It should be okay.”

  “Let’s meet. You can tell me in person.”

  “I need to pack. I’ll see you when I get back. Shouldn’t be long.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes,” said Tania, trying to convince herself. “What did they do to you?”

  “Thankfully I’m too old for the bitch to ground me,” said Odile.

  Tania laughed for the first time in days.

  “But I think she hired a detective,” said Odile.

  “She what?”

  “Yeah. This very creepy-looking woman I keep seeing.”

  “You’re being too paranoid.”

  “There is no such thing as being too paranoid. Not here. Even if I get cocky about it sometimes.”

  “Fair enough,” said Tania. “Send me a picture if you can. I’ll call you.”

  Later, as she packed for her trip, she thought about the pictures of Sig she had seen in his file. Wondered where he had been. If her instincts were right that he would come back to Minneapolis. If he could still disappear in the city like some hairless raccoon, the way he did when he was a kid.

  As she picked out clothes, she wondered what it would take for her to blend in to a dissident crowd. It was like dressing for an alternate branch of her own real life. She just had to remember Dad’s girlfriends, or some of her own outfits from college, back before she clarified her path. The trick was figuring out what was left in the wardrobe that fit the bill. She still had that old hand-me-down black turtleneck she wore under her suit on cold winter days, and the well-worn pair of black jeans she wore on the rare day off.

  She put on the turtleneck, no makeup, and looked in the mirror. Something was still missing.

  That was when she got the idea to unstraighten her hair.

  When she stepped out of the shower and dried it off and let it express itself, there was a different person looking back at her. She liked what she saw, somewhat to her surprise.

  Maybe the computers were better at profiling than she had thought.

  She looked at the picture of Mom she kept on the dresser. Tania was pretty sure she could find Sig. What she wasn’t sure was what she would do when she did.

  Part Three

  Prairie Fire

  24

  They drove south at night, on back roads, roads that weren’t even highways. The only signs were the names of little towns Sig had never heard of, some of them named after the people who lived here before, others after the people who took it away.

  When first light started to seep over the eastern sky, you could see just how empty the country was. As flat as the surface of a lake, as if scraped by the hand of a god. And then Sig saw one of the giant machines that worked these fields, off in the near distance, sitting idle in the snow, big enough that you might think Paul Bunyan was the one to drive it. Paul Bunyan, the guy who killed all the trees that once grew in these fields.

  “Big-ass robot, right?” said Moco. Moco was the guy they sent to take Sig to the place where they said he could safely hide, and they would give him important work to do. Moco was a little older than Sig, a scrappy little Honduran guy with a lot of tattoos. He showed up wearing a windbreaker in parka weather. Moco knows his way around, they told him, but Sig got nervous when he saw Moco’s car, a beat-up old Fuji that looked like it wouldn’t even be able to make it to the edge of town.

  Sig looked out the car window at the robot, pink dawn light reflecting off its metal surfaces.

  “They can’t even grow regular crops here anymore,” said Moco. “They grow corn a pig can’t eat, from seeds they made in a lab, to turn it into fuel for machines. South of here, there’s whole big stretches where they can’t grow anything at all, no matter how they splice it. That’s why they gotta go find new land in other countries.”

  “They just need to leave it alone,” said Sig.

  Moco laughed. “You can tell them that.”

  They drove past an old farmhouse that you could tell no one had lived in for a long time. The roof of the barn had caved in, and the silo was working on it.

  Sig had slept much of the drive. The lady doctor had given him pills for the pain, but Sig didn’t like the way they made him spaced out and vulnerable, so he stuck with aspirin if he needed it. He was feeling a lot better, but he couldn’t help but reach under his shirt to make sure the scar was still holding together. When Sig fell asleep Moco had been listening to a tape of some lady talking, kind of like a speech, that he played through this beat-up little box that plugged into the radio. But now he was listening to a crackly signal coming in over the air. It sounded like a weather report, but after a minute Sig figured out it was somebody telling where not to drive.

  “What is that?” said Sig.

  “Amplitude modulation, dude. AM radio over an abandoned frequency, telling us the news.”

  “Who’s talking?”

  “I don’t know, but I always think she sounds cute.” Moco smiled, but he looked like he was thinking about something else.

  “Echo Delta One Six Fiver,” said the voice on the radio. It sounded like it was coming from the other side of the planet, even though somehow you knew the source was very close. “Walter Magic Walter.”

  Moco grabbed the map he had folded up on the center console and put it on the steering wheel where he could look at it while driving. It was an old paper road map held together with tape, marked up with extra notes in pen and pencil.

  “Hold on,” said Moco, handing Sig the map. “I’m gonna turn around and go back to go a different way.”

  Sig sat up then and took a better look at what was ahead of them, and behind. He tilted his head to look up at the gray sky, but all he saw were crows.

  “It should be okay,” said Moco. “They’re not too bad up around here. Or I should say, there aren’t too many of them. They had to move out to make room for the robots.”

  As Moco pulled off on the shoulder then made a hard U-turn, Sig saw the black pickup off in the distance, headed their way.

  “And fortunately,” said Moco, smiling but looking nervous all of a sudden, “this thing is faster than it looks.”

  25

  “I wish they’d let me interrogate one of my parents,” joked the guard who escorted T
ania down to the room.

  Tania did not comment on that. She glanced over at his face, which had the pallor that prolonged exposure to fluorescent lighting can bring out, and briefly tried to imagine the parents that had produced this corporate constable.

  Federal Annex MSP 4, aka the Box, was an almost-square five-story office building out by the airport that had been converted to the kind of cubicles where they lock you in. The perimeter of concrete barriers was the main thing that distinguished the Box from the suburban business park around it—from the outside, at least.

  Tania went straight there after she got off the plane. This time she was on the list.

  The heavy-duty elevator door opened into a hallway of bulletproof glass and floor-to-ceiling steel gates. You could hear the not-so-distant voices of prisoners caroming off the walls and floors, shouts and murmurs mixed in with the low-level machine noise of the building. Two other guards stood behind the main gate into the detention area. One nodded at Tania’s escort, hit a button, and initiated the buzzer, so loud it startled her, when she was trying so hard to keep her cool.

  They walked her back to a room with a solid metal door and a stenciled number. SB.2.223.

  “You sure you don’t want company?” asked the guard.

  “Definitely not,” said Tania. “And I don’t need anybody monitoring the feed, either. Like we discussed.”

  “Suit yourself,” said the guard as he punched in the code and let Tania enter with another buzz. “Twenty minutes is all I can give you.”

  Tania stepped through.

  Mom was sitting there, in chains.

  Tania shrieked, then swallowed it, then went in and hugged her. Mom couldn’t hug back, because of the restraints. Or at least that was how Tania explained it to herself at the time.

  “Have they hurt you?” asked Tania, a moment later after she had composed herself and taken the seat on the opposite side of the metal table.

  “I’m okay,” said Mom. “Not my first time, and others have it a lot worse than me, but I am getting too old for this shit. Maybe you had the right idea, Straight Life.”

  Tania let that jab go. She avoided Mom’s gaze, scanning the yellow jumpsuit, wondering if it was paper or fabric, noting how the shackles threaded all four limbs and connected them to links in the floor, trying to think of where to start. She looked at Mom’s hands, strong working hands, the skin still so beautiful, and so dark, darker than Tania’s, in a way that sometimes they used to joke was what explained their differences in attitude.

  “Look at me, Tania,” said Mom.

  Tania complied, wiped a tear from her cheek, and saw eyes that were angry and loving at the same time.

  “How come you’re the one who gets us both in trouble and I’m the one who feels guilty about it?” said Tania.

  “They’re listening, you know.”

  “I doubt it,” said Tania. “But it doesn’t matter if they are. Because I’m here to help you. By helping them.”

  “Is that right,” said Mom.

  “Yes, it is,” said Tania. “I know you don’t like me working for the government, but you and I are on the same side. I just like to take the fight inside, a little closer to the power.”

  “How’s that working out?” said Mom.

  “I got close enough to the President to scream in his face the other day.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. It sounded like you talking.”

  “No, I mean you seriously just yelled at him? That’s just stupid. You don’t want to know what I would do if I got that close to him.”

  “Believe me, I know. But most days I do it in the back office, one case at a time. I told you how we put away that Army colonel for importing kids through the Panama Free Trade Zone.”

  “That even made the news. ‘Guest workers.’”

  “Exactly. That’s what I do. At least until my contract is up.”

  “That’s good. Maybe next you can work on the exploitation going on right here. You think what they do in the private prisons is any different? Detroit?”

  “I didn’t come here to argue with you, Mom. Especially not about how I do my job. I came here to make sure you don’t go to Detroit. Or someplace worse. And to do that, I just need you to help me find Sig.”

  “You want to help your mother by turning in your brother.”

  She forgot to act surprised. That meant she definitely knew he was back.

  “Jesus, now you sound like them. He’s not my brother, or your son. He’s not real family.”

  “You always were a good liar. You get it from your dad.”

  “Where is Sig, Mom?”

  “I haven’t seen that little freak since he ran away after the riot. Years.”

  “And you always were a bad liar. Is he still in town?”

  Mom just gave her that look of extreme disapproval.

  “I don’t know where he is. Probably dead, if you want me to guess.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “What else is new?”

  “Mom, I just want to get you out.”

  “Then get me a good lawyer!” she erupted, banging her fist on the table. “Since apparently you turned out to be the other kind.”

  Tania growled in frustration. She stood.

  “You okay in there?” said the disembodied voice of the guard, over the intercom.

  “Yes!”

  She looked at Mom. Mom was shaking, trying to hide it.

  Tania went over, kneeled down next to her, grabbed her hand, and held it. The chains were so fucking cold.

  She ran her hand through Mom’s hair. Tried to calm her.

  “Listen, Mom. I’m sorry you don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s really going on. But I’m a better lawyer than you give me credit. I can’t get you out yet, but I got them to move you to Boschwitz House. You’ll be a lot more comfortable, and you won’t have to answer any more questions.”

  Boschwitz House was an old mansion named after a local politician who had once been placed under house arrest there in his own residence, back in the days of the General. Now it was run as a charity, a place where political “criminals” deemed sufficiently nonviolent were allowed to stay during detention, in the interest of keeping the peace.

  Mom looked like she thought that was okay, or at least better.

  “How did we get here, Mom?”

  “By compromising,” she said. “By letting them divide us. They know how to get all the people who should be on the same side to fight each other over differences that aren’t even real. Race, religion, region, reason. And people got so poor and worn out they just gave up, at least on the idea of real change. But a new wind is coming.”

  “How, Mom?” She grabbed her, like an impatient kid.

  “You should come home and find out. Work with us. You’ll see. We could really use your skills. I know you’ve got the right heart.”

  Tania looked at her. “How deep into it are you, Mom?”

  “I just provide room and board, space to meet, strong coffee, dangerous cookies, and the occasional good idea.”

  “I know. So help me find Sig, so you can get back to work.”

  She shook her head. “There’s a lot to do inside, too. You should leave him be. He’s been through enough.”

  “I know,” said Tania. “But—”

  Mom put her hand on Tania’s head now, seeming to soften for a minute. Then she finally smiled.

  “What’s up with your hair, anyway?” said Mom.

  “Huh?” Tania reached up there.

  “I kind of like it,” said Mom.

  And then the door clanked open as the guards came to take Tania away, and put Mom back in her cell.

  “Don’t save me, Tania,” said Mom, as they unchained her from the floor and let her stand. “Save yourself. Save the future.”

  26

  Sig wound Fritz’s airplane for flight, twirling the tiny propeller with his index finger. The rubber band twisted into knots along the leng
th of the balsa wood fuselage. The handmade flying machine fit in the palm of your hand and weighed no more than a book of matches.

  A cloud moved overhead, and the light brightened inside the room, a sunporch at the back of the house where Fritz and Billie lived. It was sanctuary, they said, but Sig still paid attention to every movement in his periphery.

  Sig looked out through the south window at the small yard leading to a creek. The house was off the old highway that connected Iowa City to Cedar Rapids. You could see the corporate parks off in the distance along the interstate, backlit by the burnt orange of the setting sun.

  A big raccoon appeared out of the bushes to the left, heralding nightfall. Sig watched it look around for danger, then scamper over to the gigantic compost pile in the front corner of the yard.

  “Don’t overwind it,” said Fritz.

  Sig froze his finger. Fritz looked down over the rim of his wire-frame glasses, stroked the long gray hairs of his forked goatee, and made a sound that was not quite a word.

  Fritz almost smiled, and with a subtle nod encouraged Sig to go ahead.

  Sig held up the plane between thumb and forefingers, keeping the propeller still with his other hand. He tried to sense the movement of air in the room, then launched the craft with a gentle throw, imitating what he had seen Fritz do earlier.

  The plane chopped through the warm air of the sunroom like a tiny trolling motor, barely enough to stay aloft. The balsa wood frame was wrapped in rice paper, with only tiny bits of metal to hold the rubber band and anchor the prop. It circled the room just below the ceiling, as it had when Fritz launched it.

  Sig smiled.

  “The record is fourteen minutes,” said Fritz. “In the gym at Nixon High.”

  Fritz rolled himself a cigarette. He exhaled liquid clouds that turned into wispy vortices as the plane slowly pushed through them.

  The natural dimmer switch went up another notch as the sun moved out from behind a tall pine.

  The plane touched the ceiling, then fell to the ground with sudden gracelessness.