But a lot of guys my age were already over there fighting, not sitting in classes wasting time. I could have tried to explain to Fred that I felt like a coward, that I felt like I had to do what real men do, what Pop himself had done, and she probably would have let that be the reason. Eventually, she would have accepted that, and that’s one true reason, for sure.
And then there’s the other reason, the one that sticks in me like a thorn I can’t remove, and it’s one I’d just as soon not discuss with my ambitious, accomplished sister: Even if I’d stayed, kept at it, graduated college, what would it have meant for me? The guys who stayed out of the Wars were sons with connections, guaranteed careers in health or reconstruction or banking. I wasn’t going to finish school and rise up to start saving the world, like Fred and Gard had done. I’m not smart like they are, I don’t surge like they do. The only way for me to amount to anything was not to try to be anything like them. Meanwhile, guys I knew were fighting and dying while I was sitting in class. I made myself sick. I didn’t even want to think about what my father thought of me.
We’re almost to his place now. The streets outside are familiar, the old pale brick two-flats and the bars still hanging the Old Style signs outside even though there’s been nothing to drink inside but engineered beer for about twenty years.
“Listen,” she says to me suddenly. “You know I didn’t mean to get pregnant. I’m assuming you know that.”
“Are you kidding me? Fred.” I laugh. “I mean, I haven’t met the guy, but I know you.”
“Okay.” She touches her belly lightly, appears to be studying something written in invisible ink across her own blouse. It comes as a painful surprise to see that Fred’s hands are shaking. “So that’s no secret. But there is something I was . . . keeping from you. Not about Gard, what happened to her, nothing like that—about me. I didn’t want you to know. But Gard, before she disappeared, was helping me, in a way that maybe now you understand.”
Fred leans back over at me, and her eyes are steady and clear, her face grave and pale, and here we both are, and it’s up to us, and not for the first time I hope to God we don’t fail, I hope we’re good enough. I hope we’re smart enough. I hope we’re together enough to find Gard. She’s the best thing we ever had.
“I still can’t believe you got in, but . . . You saw where Gard worked. You saw what they do there.”
All I can do is frown, shake my head, deny it. Because what did I really see?
Gardner made some mistakes. She got into some dangerous territory. I tried to help her. . . . Gardner didn’t want to be helped.
“So now you know,” Fred says. My sister has my attention. In the serene blue of the car dash lights I’m trying to read her face, and failing, and it actually bothers me that I can’t. Pop I’ll never understand, I’ve given up trying, but Fred and Gard—I’m their kid brother, I’ve spent my whole life watching them, looking up to them, studying how they got what they were after. Imagining I could protect them, if it came to that. If I know anyone on earth, if I belong to anyone on earth, if anyone on earth made me, it’s my sisters. “And you know why Gard might be better off staying lost. From Pop’s perspective.”
“Fred, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. And even on a clear fucking day with visibility for miles, I couldn’t see Pop’s perspective. Do you?”
An unpleasant triumph dawns across Fred’s sharp face. Smug old brat.
“Ha. You don’t know.”
Just like that, I’m the left-back little kid again. Which brings on a typically immature response from me. “Fuck you, Fred.”
She smiles at me craftily. “I’ll tell you, if you tell me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You tell me what you need to ask Pop. And I’ll tell you what Gard was doing.”
If I want to hear what Fred hasn’t told me, I have to tell her what I don’t know. What a beautiful circle of lunacy, what a crapfuck. As Fred herself would say. “You first.”
“You first.”
“No, you first.”
“Fuck off. You first.”
We’ve arrived, and the car is gliding up to the curb outside Pop’s house. We’re out of time.
I give up. You can’t win with Fred. She’s just always going to win. She’ll make sure of it, one way or another.
“Someone—Natalie, Gard’s coworker—told me Pop knows where Gard is. Okay? Or”—because Fred’s immediate reaction is thunderous enough that I feel the need to qualify my statement—“or she seems to think that Pop can tell me. All right? I was just trying to keep it to myself until I could find out whether it was even true. There. You happy?”
“Happy.” She shakes her head and barks that unlovely laugh again, glancing out the window at the front of Pop’s building.
Now I wait. It’s her turn.
But she’s calling something up on her virtual portal. I’m already irrelevant. It’s amazing how quickly Fred can make a person feel small. Finally she adds, “I’m not going in. This is your stop. I have to get back.”
“What? Fuck you, Fred. I thought we had a deal.” She doesn’t respond, attention locked on something in her portal that I can’t see. The unmistakable shield stare of someone looking through you at something that’s not you: that’s the gaze of these days. Fred, of course, got the fancy upgrade, multiscreen built-in retinal display, the works.
I’m sick of being ignored. I heave myself out of the car and onto the sidewalk. After a half hour’s ride in the cool, sweet-smelling interior of Fred’s sedan, it’s hard not to feel like the hot winter night is mugging me, lifting me by the armpits, grabbing me by the face. I start making my way up the cracked and unkempt front walk, wondering how on God’s formerly green earth I’m going to get my beaten ass up the flight of stairs to Pop’s apartment.
Behind me I hear the sedan’s expensively sealed driver’s side window slide open.
“I just sent you something. Check your wearable. You should understand what this little rescue mission is really going to cost me, Carter.”
I turn around, but the car is already rolling away, back to what was the lakeshore, before I was born.
Dec 19 9:37 PM
Go to Gard’s house to read these.
Don’t try to open this file unless
you’re using her portal, at her place.
You’ll see why.
GARDNER QUINN
2556 ASHLAND NORTH, APT. B
NEW CHICAGO 0606030301
NEW STATES
PFC C. P. QUINN 2276766
MCC 167 1ST MAW
FPO NEW CHICAGO 06040309
August 13, 6:35 a.m.
Hi.
I got arrested, CQ. I was at a protest and they just rounded everybody up. Pop is so mortified, angry like I’ve never seen him. His reaction is the worst part of all this, to tell you the truth, and having seen the inside of a Security interrogation room now, I can tell you that’s saying something.
They didn’t ask me much. Gentle pressure, relentlessly applied.
I was there with a friend of mine from work, Natalie B. I can’t remember whether I told you about her, but she’s great, you’d like her. Natalie and I got separated, on opposite sides of a barricade—Security forces were corralling people off New Michigan and onto the side streets, and I got swept up into a van and she didn’t. Anyway, she arranged for me to be released by telling them one of my clients was going into labor, but it’s on my permanent Security record, and who knows what that means.
Pop is so angry. So angry. It’s embarrassing enough to him that I would go to an antiwar march, but then to go and get myself arrested . . . I know why he feels that way, really, I do. But I don’t think he understands what’s happening over there anymore. I don’t think he understands that is what’s in the way between us—between me and him, but you and him, too.
You’ve just been gone for so long.
I can’t forgive myself for how long you’ve had to be over there. None of us
should be able to forgive ourselves.
And for what? For H2.0? When we know what it does, when we know? We should all be rioting in the streets. But most people our age, we just don’t care. The fertility crisis feels like freedom. You can do whatever, screw whoever, you never have to worry about anyone but yourself. Given what’s happening in the world, that feels not just like freedom but like license to survive.
But the mothers I work with, the ones who beat the odds somehow or just get unlucky . . . That’s what kills me. Other than you, they’re the only ones who see that freedom’s exactly what’s been lost.
Anyway. Pop’s pissed at me but he’ll get over it, I hope. I’m a little worried about Pop, to tell the truth, but he keeps telling Fred early retirement agrees with him, he’s going to slow down and take it easy, catch up on some reading and see some old friends. Which sounds nice, I guess, but I just don’t want him to get depressed, or bored—he’s a guy who’s lived his whole life with this purpose, you know, and I worry about what’ll happen to him now that he’s just living a regular old-guy life.
He’s actually not speaking to me at the moment.
And I guess I’m telling you all this so that you know why I went to protest a war my own brother is fighting in, and I hope you’ll forgive me. I went because I love you.
Gard
EIGHT
Whatever Rafiq gave me, it’s not going to last the thirty-six hours he promised.
I’m in the dark, smelly foyer of Pop’s building, facing the stairs up to my pop’s place on the second floor, Fred’s message glowing in my eyeball. Wiped out in a way that I’d like to say feels new and terrible but which just feels familiar and sick. The symptoms are not going to stop. . . . It follows a certain course.
I’m just going to have to run up the stairs. No way gotta run PT it’s lots of fun. If I take it stair by stair I’m pretty sure I’ll make it halfway up and then never want to move again. They’ll find me in the morning on the landing, passed out against the wall.
Once, when I was a kid, back in the dark years when the city was really falling apart, that had really happened, but not to me. Fred and Gard opened the door to the landing, about to head down for the bus to school, and there was a guy on the stairs in our building, unconscious. Skinny. I remember seeing him. Thinking, That guy is sick. I would have been, what, four? That was the year Fred started taking Gard to school, when Fred started sixth grade, so, I’m four. Maybe three and a half. It’s not a great memory, by which I just mean it’s spotty and degraded, but it’s also from a point in my life when I was noticing a lot of things for the first time.
Our mother died when I was two. Hit by a driverless car, but as we got older my sisters and I gradually understood what people really meant when they said that. My mother had been left alone with three kids when my father was mobilized in the First Wars, and by the time he’d been gone a couple of years, it wasn’t clear he was ever coming back and it was just as unclear whether anybody else was going to make it. The water had just stopped coming into people’s houses back then, and there were food shortages and lots of desperate and hungry and thirsty and lost people everywhere, the weather violent and unpredictable in a way that made you scared to go outside—dust storms, hail storms, wind storms, dying-bird and -insect storms—the East Coast flooded and the West Coast on fire and everybody in the middle hoarding and walking and suffering, trying to get into the rehabbed zones, where at least you could get rations and sanifoam and send your kids to something like school. Dark years. I can’t blame her. She wasn’t the only one, far from it. I hardly knew her. Fred, though, remembers her—she was old enough to understand what was going on when Pop had to be brought back from the Wars to take care of us. Fred was old enough to comprehend just how scary those times were, in a way Gard and I weren’t.
By the time I started kindergarten, enough H2.0 was making its way over the mountains that food production had started up again for the New Cities, even though there was never water in the bathtub and except in a book I’ve never seen an apple that cost less than $20. That was the miracle of engineered water, the greatest invention of our lifetime, of a hundred lifetimes, made just in the nick of time in what was left of the technology belt in California, right before the big quakes and the big fires and the mass evacuations. The collapse. The military kept the H2.0 production running, though, securing an uninhabitable wasteland and getting engineered water back to the New Cities.
Of course, no one making money off H2.0 seems to be in any kind of hurry to build an H2.0 plant in a location that would get us out of the Wars. You could make the argument, I suppose, if you’re a particular kind of person, that the H2.0 production facilities are actually safer over there, even with the raiders and the quakes and the storms and the environmental hazards. Because no one crosses the mountains. No one is left, over there, who isn’t descended from someone who was left behind the wildfire line in ’72, or been left there themselves. And how long can they last? So why rush things. Wait for the mountains to grind themselves down to dust; everything’ll be easier then. My mother couldn’t wait that long. She was afraid. I understand. I can’t blame her. I can’t. I’m not sure Fred or Gard feel that way, but I can’t.
Anyway. That was what my pop had fought for, and later, what I would fight for. What it meant for him was different from what it meant for me. What it bought the New Cities was some kind of return to what people remembered as ordinary life. Fred saw all of it. She was just a kid.
She was the one who saw the maybe-dead guy in our stairwell first, and pushed me and Gard back behind her. He was slumped at the foot of the stairs. I remember the looks on the girls’ faces, white in the gloom, dark open mouths and eyes. Dismay is a series of concentric ovals. All of us standing at the top of the stairs looking down. Pop had just finished giving us breakfast, probably the fortified cereal bars all the kids got on rations back then, and he’d been trying to hustle us out the door, single file, single-dad style: the girls to the autobus stop, me to the neighbor lady and her daughter next door, and himself to work at the VA hospital.
It’s funny to me how much I’ve forgotten from those days, but I remember this.
Pop shooed us all back into the apartment, left us in there, disappeared down the stairs. We waited. The girls missed their bus, and I remember Fred was stressed out about that. Then Pop came back, said he’d take the girls to school, Carter, you come, too. When we went down the stairs together, the guy wasn’t there. A little stain on the carpet, dark. A smell. I held my breath.
• • •
I’m not home yet. I can’t stand down here all night in the dark and the smell, thinking about a dead guy. (Was he dead or just nearly?) Time to get my tired sorry ass upstairs.
Ready, Marine: Let’s go. No way, gotta run PT; it’s lots of fun.
Catch your breath, lean your forehead against the door. No one’s looking.
I haven’t eaten all day, and food is all I can think about. Also I’m just about dying for a beer from Pop’s fridge, and my whole body is a contused throb. I picture myself on my narrow bed in the dark with a cold bottle pressed into my stomach and Pop’s despicable cat curled up against my side, purring away in the bootprint left by that Security prick. I want that moment bad enough that it makes my head swim.
But before unlocking Pop’s door and going in, I reread Fred’s message. Don’t try to open these unless you’re using her portal, at her place.
As badly as I want to go to bed, I know I’ve got to get to Gard’s apartment.
But first I’ve got to get her key, which I know is hanging from Pop’s key hook on the kitchen wall, and I’ve got to eat something soon or I’m afraid I might actually drop. Again. For the . . . what, fourth time today? Third? What happened to you, CQ? On patrols we sometimes went a couple of days without more than a protein pouch, every ten hours a long gamey swallow of the stuff, then the pouch carefully resealed and tucked away for the next time, no matter how hungry you were, no matter ho
w tempting it was to guzzle the whole disgusting mucousy globber.
Quiet, dim, dusty in here. I slip inside, shut the door behind me. This isn’t the apartment where I grew up—we moved a few times when I was a kid, starting with my mother’s death—and I don’t feel any special connection to it. It’s just an apartment, brown and smallish, accumulating the atmosphere of Pop’s lonely old bachelordoom, which seems to have left an imaginary coating, like silt or cobwebs, on every surface, despite the fact that the place is always, in reality, meticulously clean. Slobs don’t make it in the service.
“Carter.” Pop’s voice, emanating from some unspecific point in the gloom, is just as sudden and unwelcome as an angry ghost. I’ve just spent probably ten minutes trying to psych myself up the goddamn stairs and in the door, and still I’m surprised at how much I’ve been dreading this moment. “We should talk.”
Of course, he’s seen it all. He’s got access, on his wearable, to practically everything I’ve been doing today—he’ll already know about the $15,000 fine. He’ll already know that I almost got picked up by Security and that Fred paid me up and brought me home. If he bothered to look at my med status he might even be able to guess that I saw Rafiq and got dosed with something, although he might not know what, or, just as important, where.
“Hey, Pop. Let me just—I gotta eat something.” I switch the kitchen light on and it’s stunning, hideous, star-producing.
“You get picked up by Security for God knows what and then you come home and expect to eat my food?” Pop emerges around the corner from his darkened den into the kitchen, swift as if he’s on wheels, blinking furiously at the change in the light, and then stopping short at the sight of me.
Even after Fred’s reaction in the car, I wasn’t worried about myself—I was still riding on Rafiq’s magic wonder juice. But I must look like some real shit for Pop to be staring at me like this.
The Completionist Page 13
