The bathroom is the first stop. The sani helps a bit, but not enough. I’m still seeing stars, I step on the cat. I shave; there’s some friendly fire. I dress. I have to keep moving. Today’s the day. I’m going to see Natalie B. again, at the clinic where she worked with Gard. I’m looking forward to seeing her. And I’m going to find out where Gard is. I know she knows.
• • •
I’ve never been inside Gard and Natalie’s clinic, and I couldn’t tell you the address, but I know where to find it, regardless. Gard told me, without realizing she was telling me. Even now I have to wonder if she knows how much she gave away. It’s all the way down where the train lines used to roll out to the western suburbs, in an unrehabbed part of the city; a train to a bus to a walk. Suits me fine. Just keep moving.
Everybody on my route’s just staring at their wearables. There’s advertising to watch on the train and on the bus, but no one but me takes any notice. I love watching ads. Drugs and gum and sanifoams and appliances. I seriously love it all, especially the sanifoam ads, all the fragrances and textures you can get. In the military, it goes without saying, when you got sanifoam at all it was industrial-grade pipe cleaner stuff, fake-pine green or toilet-bowl blue, goopy and viscous and unpleasant to clean yourself with. My father’s the only person I know who’s old enough to remember when water used to come out of the sinks and the bathtub faucet. Most people have refitted their bathrooms by now, taken the old fixtures out entirely, put in some nice dispensers. Pop’s bathroom looks just like it did before the water went off. Like he’s waiting for it to come back on someday, or for engineered water to get cheap enough to run through everyday people’s pipes. It’s inconvenient as hell, but I wouldn’t presume to tell him so. It’s still his place.
When I get tired of watching the ads, I pass the time pressing my forehead against the bus windows, watching drones in their laneways scoot and soar alongside the traffic, and overhead, with deliveries, with messenger packets, with subpoenas. There are more drones than cars out at this hour of the day; it’s too late in the morning for commuter traffic. I’ve slept in. Although “sleeping in” makes it sound gentler than what I was really doing, which was more like being attacked by unconsciousness.
When I’m bored looking out the windows I rescan the messages on my wearable. Rereading messages from my sisters to me is a familiar habit from my years out West, and now I have a few messages from Natalie B. to read and reread, too. The repetitive flicking and scrolling is calming somehow. Makes me feel like I’m doing something, studying something for clues, even when I have nothing to show for it. From Fred. It’s been weeks and we’re running out of time. From Natalie. I don’t owe you anything. From me to both of them. Sorry again, but I’m just trying to . . . Sorry to bother you again, but . . . Sorry, Fred, but . . .
I’ve made this same autobus trip a number of times already, over the past two weeks. It hasn’t helped me find Gard, but still it’s comforting, in a weird way, to do some of the things I know Gard used to do. Riding her bus, for instance, just feels nice. Maybe because she actually told me, once, that she had a habit of praying for me while she rode the bus to and from work. That’s Gard for you. That’s the kind of person she is. At any rate, by now, a couple of weeks into my search, Gard’s route is just familiar enough that I don’t have to watch to make sure I get off at the right stop. Each time, I think of Gard making this same trip, taking this same bus. Her apartment isn’t far from Pop’s, so it’s been easy for me to pick up her habits, mimic some of her routine.
What I know about her routine I’ve pieced together from her messages and from Fred: She worked an afternoon-to-evening shift at the same sleepy walk-in Completion service she’s worked at since nursing school, in a rehabbed, gentrified neighborhood that’s been slowly empyting out for years. The fertility crisis being what it is, there’s been less and less for her to do at her day job, since only rich women can afford Insemina. But for the last ten months, when Gard got off her day job, she’d been taking an evening bus out to the edge of the rehabbed zones and from there walking to her other job at the clinic where she worked with Natalie B. According to Fred, it’s a health and Completion clinic for low-income women—the sort of folks who can afford to live in New Chicago but not in the rehabbed zones. Service workers, food-production workers, sanitation workers, and so on. Not glamorous, not comfortable, and judging by the location, not particularly safe. From what I understand from Fred, the work was not well paid, either.
In one of Gard’s messages to me from earlier this year, one of the ones I’ve reread so often I practically know it backwards and forwards, she told me that she had gotten into the habit of working at her second clinic most nights all night, sometimes until the early hours of the next day. She ate dinner on the way there, ate breakfast on the way home, slept a few hours, got up, did it all over again. Slept at her desk at her day job, sometimes. She wondered if it was like patrols, if how she spent her days had anything in common with what I was doing over there. I don’t remember how I responded to that.
Gard’s last message to me was sent back in October, and her last contact with Fred was at the end of September. Fred says she tried messaging Gard a few times in early October but didn’t hear back. It wasn’t until a few more days passed, and Fred checked her wearable for Gard’s geo and got no response, that it occurred to Fred to worry. In any case, the best I can put together is that a week or so after Fred’s last contact with Gard, but before Fred noticed she’d disappeared, I got a message from Gard. It’s not much of a message. But she’s definitely saying goodbye. Out of nowhere. I’ll be in touch when I can. Take care of Fred.
I don’t know why I wasn’t more alarmed by it, at the time. All I can say is that I read it. I thought nothing, literally nothing, about it. I read it, and then I went back on patrol. I probably hurt a few people, but I don’t remember it, and I probably fucked up something basic, but I don’t remember it. I went back to base. I got up the next day. I did that again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It was what I did every day all day long over there: think nothing, about anything. I was not prepared, in that place or in that state, to question a weirdly unemotional farewell message from one of my sisters. Gard’s note might as well have been written in hieroglyphics for all the understanding I had of it. She said goodbye to me, and I did exactly nothing.
The one thing I did notice about it, I guess—the one thing that might have given me my first half second of concern, although this could just be hindsight on my part, or my conscience kicking up—was that the message was time-stamped but not geo-stamped. That was unusual. Gard had overwritten the address so it would read simply “New Chicago,” because she didn’t want me to know where she was when she sent her last message to me. And after her last message to me, in October, there’s no geo history for her on my wearable, on Fred’s, or on Pop’s. We’re the only family she has—wherever she went, we should be able to see her on our wearable maps, whether moving or still, a little ghost in the shape of an orange pin, labeled with her name and image. Sometime in late September, early October, Gard slipped right off our maps.
But something I learned from my friend Wash, over there, was how to find the lat/long for messages sent to your wearable. What gets displayed in the message is just the nearest known address for the sender’s coordinates; the message data actually captures the exact latitude and longitude of the sender. All the illusion of privacy, without the inconvenience of causing someone somewhere to be missing data about you and your whereabouts and your relationships with other people. It takes some work to get the data out of your wearable, and it hurts a little bit, but it’s not hard if you know how. So, as Wash explained it, if your girlfriend is sending you a message from some other guy’s house but overwrites the address line to read like it’s coming from home, you know where your first stop should be when you get leave.
Wash was our company’s communications specialist. He was the one who dug out the lat/long from Gard’s message for m
e, once Fred’s messages started getting really panicky and I started making plans to come home. It was against regulations, obviously, but Wash was perfectly willing, partly just to show me it could be done, and partly because we were bored, so painfully, crushingly bored all the time we weren’t mortally terrified and running for our lives, or running after someone to try to kill them. And I was willing because I wanted to hurt myself all the time over there and this seemed at least like an interesting way of doing it. Once Wash had the lat/long, and once he’d taped me back up, he sent it to my wearable.
I still have Gard’s last message on my wearable, and Wash’s message, too, with the lat/long of where she sent it from. One of the first things I did when I came back home to look for Gard was try to connect the coordinates with an address. There isn’t one. There’s no building. There’s just a playground.
• • •
It’s not much of a playground. No gate, no checkpoint. Rubberized surface, a couple of swings, some complicated-looking climbing structures. It’s been at least 80 degrees out every day since I’ve been back, and there’s no shade, because this far from the city center you don’t find too many parks that have been relandscaped, but where I’m sitting, on a bench, drinking from a cold can of engineered beer tucked inside a paper sack, there’s a strip of marginally cooler air to be found in the shadow of a flagpole. On a hot day like this one, you wouldn’t want to play here unless you had no place else to go, but there aren’t many kids left, in this part of town or anywhere else. And it’s a school day anyway. The remaining children of New Chicago are all in classes, training up to be national treasures and counting down the days to Christmas break. The playground is deserted except for me, and a hot breeze is kicking up wrappers and papers around the monkey bars.
As the crow flies it’s not far from here to the New Chicago Medical Complex, and the old VA hospital where Pop used to work before he retired. His army medic buddy has his office there—his number’s in my pocket. I brought it because I was thinking I’d stop in on the way back, even though it’s not really on my way, and there’s no chance the guy will actually be in his office, much less taking appointments, because that’s not how the VA works. How the VA works is, you pick up your severed limbs and get in line with them, get in all the lines, ever, all combined in one gigantic line. And then wait. And hope you don’t bleed out while you’re waiting. But I can stop in, I figure, and leave my name at the desk. Just to show Pop I’m not completely ignoring him. Just to tell the old man I tried. That much I figure I can do.
I’m sitting and drinking and thinking as much, when I see her: a youngish-looking woman, round-faced, short, a bit of belly. Early twenties, I would say—about my age. She’s wearing a long-sleeved hoodie against the heat and walking fast through the park, like she’s on her way somewhere. Which I’m willing to bet she is.
She hasn’t seen me—I’m too far across the park for that, and too low here on the bench to be in her natural sightline. But I know better than to rise up out of nowhere on her. I first stash the beer in its sack carefully under the bench, allowing myself a half second’s regret for its loss, for the cold fizz left to warm and flatten, abandoned under a park bench in the heat of the day (no kids left to find it here, a cold beer, a lucky find to brag to the other kids about at school).
I start walking slowly, making sure she sees me approach. Making sure I look like a guy who’s looking for a little help and not trouble.
Still, she’s obviously spooked when I call out after her, “Miss?” I can’t help that, I know—and she’s smart to be scared, since who the hell am I?
We’re alone out here. It’s broad streaking daylight and there’s no shade, no cover. I am harmless. I am harmless. I stop a few yards away. She keeps walking.
“Miss, I’m sorry. I’m looking for my girlfriend. I’m supposed to meet her.”
She glances back over her shoulder, makes sure I’m keeping my distance.
“So go meet her.”
“I don’t know how. She gave me directions but I can’t figure them out.” She looks back over her shoulder again, and her pace slows. “I thought maybe we might be going to the same place.”
Now she stops, half turns. Gives me the squint eye.
“Can you take me there?” I hold my hands out, palms up, and wait.
It’s hard to be patient. I’ve sat on that bench many afternoons over the past two weeks, waiting, messaging Natalie every few hours to beg her to meet with me, drinking beer from a sack (or coffee, sometimes, since I’m not a drunk) whenever being ignored got frustrating, trying not to look like the stalker that I suppose I am every time a woman passes by—always walking alone and walking fast, just to disappear from sight. I’ve never been able to follow where they were going, not until today. Today, through no fault of her own, this woman happens to be heading where I need to go.
I can see she’s worried.
“I’m sorry to ask. But—I’m just trying to get there. I’m late. She’s gonna be freaking out.” I know how to look worried, too.
“She scared?” The woman is looking at me differently now. “This her first time?”
Play it out. “Yeah.”
She shakes her head, one quick toss. “The dumb ones always bring their man the first time,” she says dismissively.
“She’s not dumb. She’s just scared.” I glance down at my feet, in my familiar and beloved combat boots, which look like they have seen a bit too much action—and if this woman looks hard enough at them she might guess I’m not just some poor guy who managed against all odds to get his girlfriend in the family way. So I meet her eyes again, look hangdog, as I’m well able to do. “We both are.”
She sighs. “Come on, then.” And then picks up her pace so fast I have to skip a bit to catch up, my not-quite-healed feet stinging and singing inside my boots. “You got nothing to worry about, hon. It’s nice in there. You’ll see.”
I follow her through the park and across the street, where she heads straight for a bricked-up building that might once have been a small-parts factory or a warehouse. Long lines of cloudy windows, revealing nothing inside. It looks abandoned. But the door has been more or less recently painted, cadet blue, and it’s open when she yanks on the handle.
From behind my guide, as we enter a narrow, dim hallway that seems to lead deep into the first floor of the building, I see papers taped to the walls, fluttering community notices and part-time, off-the-books job postings—house cleaning, office cleaning, home health care, food prep. On an interior door to the left—so small you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it—there’s a painted yellow arrow, pointing diagonally down, and two small words. THIS WAY. This is the second door we go through.
Concrete and metal stairs lead down a flight underground to a third door at the foot. Bright lights, white walls, smudges above the railing where hands have trailed. On the door, also cadet blue like the others, a sign with an arrow pointing left. THIS WAY.
A long concrete corridor leads back in the direction we just descended, back under the street we crossed to reach this place. Someone’s done their best to make it look cheerful, but it’s still a tunnel. The concrete floor has been painted the same blue as the doors, and the walls are white with big yellow letters tipped in arrows pointing the way (THIS WAY). Round globe lights hang evenly spaced in the low ceiling. It’s an echo-filled, hard place all the same. Something’s humming hugely, an air filter, maybe.
Through another door, and suddenly we’re in a carpeted hallway with pale walls, a level underground but still looking like every other carpeted hallway outside every other doctor’s office on earth. Letters painted on the wall in blue, violet, and green spell out WELCOME, lead to a final cadet-blue door. The humming of the air filters is louder in here, like a missile about to launch.
Everything in me is telling me to bolt, abort mission, fall back. Whatever’s behind that door is something I’m not supposed to see. Whoever it’s for, it’s not for me.
&
nbsp; “Hang on—” I start to say. To my astonishment, the woman reaches back and takes my hand in hers.
“You got this. Don’t worry. It’s not as bad as you think.”
She pulls on the door handle and then we’re through.
And now, of course, I have to think fast. I would be lying if I claimed that I had a plan for what I would say or do if I ever finally got in here.
The woman is right, for what it’s worth: Gard and Natalie’s clinic is a pleasant place. In the small waiting room where we’ve arrived, there are fake potted plants in the corners, sweet pictures by kids hung in frames on the walls. The carpeting is that low-pile industrial stuff you see in every office, but it’s a nice color, somewhere between blue and purple, and it absorbs sound and makes everything feel sort of hushed and sleepy, like someone’s napping in the next room and no one wants to wake her. Cheap wooden chairs with padded seats line the walls, and there are a few low tables stacked with flyers about children, babies, how to take care of them, and there’s one Department of Health flyer called Meeting the Standard of Care that seems to be on all the tables; there’s a woman on the cover who’s looking at the camera and holding her own arm like it’s a wounded animal. Waiting in the seats I see an assortment of women in their twenties and thirties. Only one of them is obviously pregnant so far as I can tell, but some others might be in early-stage Completion. They all look at us as we enter.
It takes me a half second to recognize why—why everyone in the room looks up, right at us. What’s not quite normal about this waiting room: no one’s looking at her wearable. There must not be any signal down here. A quick glance at my own wearable confirms it.
The Completionist Page 6
