“Come with me,” he says tiredly after a moment.
“Pop, seriously, I’ve got to eat something.”
He grabs a blue-wrapped bar from a shelf and tosses it over his shoulder to me. “You can eat while I’m mopping you up. Come on.” He starts down the hall to the bathroom. I snick another bar from the kitchen shelf and then, quickly and quietly, swipe Gard’s apartment key from Pop’s key hook, hung inside the kitchen doorway.
Then I’m following his path down the long railroad hallway, unwrapping one bar and chawing through half of it in a bite. There’s other stuff to eat now—the food supply in the New Cities is an infinitely less grim story than it was when I was a little kid—but Pop has always been partial to food that recalls an MRE. Bars, pouches, dump-and-heats. All that can be splashed with hot sauce shall be duly splashed with hot sauce. He used to put cayenne pepper on his crackers-with-margarine. He probably still does.
“Come in here. Sit.” He’s got the medicine cabinet open, digging out his kit. I edge in behind him, perch on the toilet seat cover. The smell of sanifoam and antiseptic gel is thick, but the smell of flowers is here, too, creeping up on me like it always does when I spend any amount of time with my father. He’s sani-ing his hands already. Efficient.
I start in on the second bar, feeling just better enough that the dread and the anger have a chance to settle back into their accustomed spots in the pit of my stomach, to be digested endlessly alongside my dry dinner. What was it I was supposed to ask, Natalie B.? Just how much do you know, Pop?
I want to ask him, and of course, at the same time, I’d just as soon never talk to him again. While I’ve been humping all over New Chicago looking for a shred of a sign, a ghost of a clue, did you know all along where she was? Or not? Just how much do you know?
I’ve got the advantage on him. I could knock him down. I never would, but I could. He’s older now. His sharp face is thinner than ever, his shoulders are bony like a crow’s. His pants are baggy around his thighs. He breaks my fucking heart, is the truth.
Of course, he was a powerful guy when I was a kid. Never huge, but his hands and his arms were full of force, capable of a lot more than we kids knew.
Just how much do you know, old crow?
When I look up there’s a freshly unwrapped antiseptic gel pad balanced on his fingers. “Turn this way.” Pop has put on his reading glasses and his eyes are on my face, focusing closely without really looking at me, and it reminds me of how Fred was looking past me while staring deep into her own virtual portal out in her car at the curb, and I’m just starting to feel angry and fucked-up and pissed off, which has to be some kind of record: less than a minute of direct contact with the old man, probably fewer than a dozen words exchanged, and I’m already a ball of something frayed and hostile.
His fingers are blunt, precise, surprisingly strong. Whatever he’s doing, it all hurts and at the same time none of it does. I keep it down to a grunt, even when he presses the antiseptic into the part of my forehead above my eye that’s been bleeding on and off since I woke up on the curb with Fred screaming over my head.
One of us has to talk first. I’ll be damned if it’s me. But he starts in, of course. Saves me the suspense.
“How do you want to live, Carter?” He’s done swabbing me up and he’s threading his tool for stitches. I have about three seconds to answer him. He’s that fast.
I clear my throat, shift my ass on the toilet seat cover. “I’m not sure what you mean, Pop.”
Pop leans in and starts stitching up my brow bone. Shit and goddammit. While he’s got me pinned, he begins, “Let me start with what I know. I know what you’ve been doing today. I know you’ve been out all day, on what I know you think is your mission to find Gardner. I know you went to see my friend Rafiq. I know your sister kept you out of jail tonight. Expensively. And I know you look like someone beat the tar out of you, and I’m going to guess it wasn’t Rafiq or Fredericka.”
“Batting nine hundred, Pop.” Shit and goddammit. Shit and goddammit. I release a shaky breath and can feel myself blushing: showing how much it hurts is embarrassing, and it’s not going to stop him from doing what he’s doing anyway.
“Congratulations to me. Now let’s move on to what you know. Do you know what I did today?”
“No idea.”
“Well, this morning I got up and exercised, as I usually do, and then I came back and had breakfast and fed the cat and cleaned up around the house. I sent some messages to some friends from the service, nothing important, just keeping in touch, you know. Sometime while I was doing that, you got up and left the house for the day without letting me know where you were going, which is what you usually do.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re a grown man, you’ve got your own life,” he says, even-handedly enough. Then he goes on. “You don’t eat; you only sleep when something’s knocked you out; you don’t have any friends that I can tell; you don’t seem to want to talk to me or to your sister any more than you have to. You don’t have anything in particular to show up for, and yet you’re always running about two hours behind. You’re not reading or watching anything, other than ads on your wearable; you’re not getting in any exercise, although it’s clear from your geo status that you’re clocking impressive mileage some days, either on foot or on the bus. And when you’re not doing whatever you think you’re doing, then you’re at a bar. See, Carter, I know what you do all day because part of what I do all day is try to keep half an eye on you, because I see what you’re doing, and what puzzles me is how it doesn’t seem to add up to a life. Hence my question. How do you want to live, Carter? Is this it?”
“How do I want to live?” It’s hard not to laugh, even if it does hurt to do it. “What does that have to do with anything? How is anybody supposed to live, in this world? If there are better things to do, I’d love to fucking hear them.”
“You could drink less, for starters,” he observes quietly. “You could spend less time at the bar.”
“Hell. What do you do?” I manage, in a growl I don’t quite recognize. “Tell me again about how you spent all afternoon sitting in your chair, watching where I went, and probably Fred, too, on your wearable. Is that a habit you picked up after Gard disappeared?”
I never said I was a good person.
When Pop can speak again, he says, in the same quiet voice, “The reason I’m saying all this is because you matter, Carter. You matter, and not just to me. If this country, this civilization, is ever going to come back, it’s going to be because of young people like you and your sister. You don’t realize that, I guess, but I’ve lived long enough to know it.”
“You’re dreaming if you really think that. I don’t know what else to tell you.” Old crow.
“I know you don’t realize it. I know you don’t.” He sighs. “But you’re a Marine. You’re a Marine and you’re always going to be one. Which reminds me that I’m relieved to hear your symptoms are treatable, Carter,” he goes on, in a firmer tone. “I had a message from Rafiq this evening to say that he’d seen you, and that he was able to do a brief examination and give you something for your pain. He said you were going to be at his office tomorrow morning.” Pop pauses to press a bandage onto my forehead. “That true?”
“He’s your friend, Pop. Don’t you trust him?”
I’ve finally pushed too far. Pop takes a sharp, whistling breath in through his knife-edged nose and stares right at the little kid trembling not far beneath the surface of my stupid grown-up skull. He’s always known where that kid was, how to laser in on him and make sure he stayed small. I can tell he’s struggling to maintain his composure, and despite how much I’ve been needling him, it doesn’t feel like much of a victory.
“Let me tell you something, Carter. I met Major Rafiq when our ops convoy was fired on by a bunch of crazy gun nuts, evacuation resistors with access to way too much ordinance, and he pulled me, unconscious, out from under a bombed-out building into the middle of a firefi
ght in the middle of a dust storm in the goddamn middle of San Jose.” Pop nods at me significantly. Put that in yer pipe. “That whole night, he covered fire for both of us from the only safe spot he could drag my completely-dead-to-the-world ass to, which was behind a dumpster in the parking lot of an abandoned office building. It was twelve hours before the armored trucks could regroup and come to our aid, with sporadic fire the whole time, and the guy is not what you’d call a Green Beret, okay? Guy’s an internist. So whatever you might think of him, Major Rafiq’s trustworthiness is not the issue. Are you going to see him tomorrow morning or not? Are you going to get help for this thing or are you going to let it eat you alive right in front of me?”
As if to answer him, I stare at my finger, which is covered in blood. For the last minute or so of Pop’s little history lesson I’ve been feeling an evil tickle in my ear, like someone’s giving me a wet willy, and when I stick my finger in my ear to wiggle whatever it is around, there’s the blood.
Pop and I are both staring at my bloody finger.
I clear my throat.
“Where did Rafiq come from, exactly?”
“Rafiq’s name means intimate friend,” Pop answers quietly. “He and his family were refugees from Syria when he was a child. He made it to America, eventually got a scholarship for college, enlisted in Army Active Medical Corps. He’d been in the army eight years by the time I met him, in the shit for at least two of those.”
I can’t help the anger. I don’t want to help it. It’s not even like I’m feeling it; it’s more like it’s a wave and I’m cresting on it. Through a white-hot haze of flowers I hear myself.
“You guys are the last great Americans all right. Thank you for your fucking service.”
“Carter.”
“Must be nice. Of course you feel like you’re a great American hero. You got to actually try to help people. California’s shattering around your eyeballs? Soldier up. Get people out alive, past the crazies and the rubble and whatever fucking tsunami or wildfire or earthquake was trying to destroy the world that day. Your war, your war, was with straight-up fucking acts of God. You don’t even know how fucking lucky you are. You fought to save whatever they thought was going to be left, I guess. But all that was history by the time I got over there—the whole fucking West Coast is like Mars now. Everything you remember as a war zone is just dunes and hovels and sand made of little hooked metal particles that latch onto your skin and work their way into your fucking guts.”
“I know, Carter.”
“You and all your smug buddies from the First Wars fought to save people’s stupid skins, and me, I fought to make some people some money. Fred’s fiancé and all his friends. All those people leveraged up to their ears in redevelopment and H2.0. I killed people—women, teenagers—I fucking killed people so that some guys back here in the New Cities could keep making money. So, Pop, do me a favor and don’t try to talk to me about who was in the shit, okay?”
A little drop of blood drips down onto the leg of my pants, from my nose or my ear, who knows.
I didn’t always used to talk to him like this. When I was a kid, God no. It was yes, sir; no, sir; how high, sir? from when I was a little squirt. I worshipped him, we all did. I know, even now, on some level, that he’s a great man.
Pop turns away, starts putting away his war chest, all his precious tools and gauze pads and sterilizers. It is a valuable thing. And not just because I seem to have a tendency to require medical attention. Vintage, they used to call stuff like this, stuff that lasted beyond its expected life span, kept going, took a licking and kept on ticking.
Finally he says, “Carter, you’re suffering. I see that. All those years I was at the VA hospital, I saw a lot of men cycling through the kind of depression and hurt that I see you experiencing. I’m not sure I helped any of those men. I want to help you, if I can. But I’m not sure how. You’re stuck in some kind of trap. This is hard for me to put into words. But what I’m saying, Carter, is, is, while coming back is hard, it’s worth doing, for your family. I know what I’m saying here, Carter. Your family is worth trying to make it all the way back for. We want you here. Me and Fredericka. We’re, we’re just so grateful, you know, that you made it back home to us.”
I can’t help but laugh. “See, that’s what I just don’t get, Pop. You’re saying family, family this, family that, family will save you—I even think maybe you believe it. But what about Gardner, Pop? What about her?”
“I don’t want to talk about Gardner,” Pop says wearily, and just like that he’s already on his way out the bathroom door. In-fucking-credible.
“How can you just give up on her? You’re not ready to give up on me, but you’ll give up on her? When she’s worth fifty of me?” Standing is hard, but I get to my feet and lean out the bathroom door into the hallway in time to see him disappear into the kitchen. “Don’t walk away. Pop. Come on.”
“I never said I wasn’t ready to give up on you,” Pop tosses back drily. I hear the fridge door clink open, see a small part of the darkness light up blue-white.
If you want to know where your sister is, you should go home and ask your father.
What if I don’t want to, Natalie B.?
He doesn’t owe me any answers. He doesn’t owe me shit. In fact, it’s obviously the other way around, and I owe him, plenty. What do I have, what could I possibly even begin to say, that might make him tell me the truth about one single thing, about anything?
I feel my way down the darkened hallway and around the corner into the kitchen. Pop’s in his favorite spot, at the table in the dark, ignoring me, a bottle of engineered beer held lightly in one scaly paw in front of him. I grab another protein bar from the shelf, my bruised shoulder and sides shouting angrily about the stretch, and before I sit down at the table to face my father uninvited, I take one of his beers out of the fridge.
As I open it and take my first swig, I get an idea, or the beginning of one. How to get him to talk. How to get him off his guard enough to tell me whatever he knows, about Gard, where she went. I don’t know if it will work. But like I said, maybe I’m not as big of an ignoramus as I used to be.
“Pop. Today the major gave me a shot,” I begin. If I want him to listen to me, I know I need to start by explaining myself. “He never gave me the name of what it was. He said it was something like happy aspirin, an APC. But it had to have been more than that. I spent all afternoon feeling like . . . like I wanted to shoot something. I mean, I felt great, for a change, and maybe I just couldn’t handle that. But, Jesus, I picked a fight with a fucking drone, and then a Security officer, the first chance I got. I wouldn’t have minded fighting anybody I happened to run into. And when Fred came and picked me up out of the street with her eight-months-pregnant . . . self, I don’t think I was very nice to her. Or grateful, the way I should have been. Maybe this is just the kind of shit I do now, when I don’t feel like a nail pounded in crooked. All I’m saying is I’m not sure why I talk the way I do sometimes. I’m sorry I mouthed off.”
“It’s all right, Carter.” Pop keeps his eyes down on the table, turns the bottom rim of his bottle in a slow half circle.
“Well. It doesn’t feel all right. None of this feels all right, not to me. I don’t even know what it was I got dosed with. And the nurse at Gard’s clinic”—I pause here, then continue—“she didn’t seem to know, either. But—right before the major gave me the shot, I saw her look like she was going to, I don’t know, stop him or something. She kind of held her hand out for a second like this.” I demonstrate Natalie’s halting half gesture. “What if this shit is addictive? What if it’s illegal? And now he wants to see me tomorrow morning—at his office this time. I don’t know if I should go.”
While I’ve been delivering this little monologue, Pop’s beer bottle has come to a stop in its slow half circles. His hands have come flat on the tabletop. His eyes have lifted to meet mine. I’m looking innocent as hell, I hope. I am harmless. I am harmless.
&
nbsp; Is he?
“Let me get this straight,” Pop says slowly. “You went to Gard’s clinic this afternoon? The one here in—”
“No. The other one.”
“The . . . other one. That’s where you were.” He’s wearing an expression like a brewing sandstorm, one thing I never want to see again. “That’s where you’ve been hanging out these past couple of weeks.”
“Well. Sort of. I’ve been hanging out in a playground that’s basically on top of it.” I shrug. Harmless.
“But today you got—inside there, somehow. And Major Rafiq—is this right?—he, somehow, met you there? That place is where your examination happened? Not at the VA?”
“Yeah.” I shrug again, nonchalant as all hell. “Didn’t he say that in his message?”
“No. He didn’t.”
“I went there to ask Gard’s coworkers some questions. I thought they might know something we could use to track her down.”
Pop gives me a long, hooded look that reminds me of Fred, in her car—she’d been jealous, really jealous that I’d actually seen it, that I’d been inside Gard’s night clinic. And this is all I have, really: I’ve been there, and they haven’t. I’ve been inside a place Fred and Pop both have been worried sick about. What I’m realizing, what I guess I’ve been slow to understand, is that they’ve both been afraid of Gard’s night job for a long time. Afraid enough that Fred’s desperate to find Gard, and Pop’s desperate not to.
“What?” I finally blurt into the quiet.
“That’s not a place for you. Or for me. And it’s definitely not a place for Major Rafiq.”
“Believe me, after spending a whole afternoon there, I fucking know it.”
Pop’s eyes are still on me, hard to read, hard to see into. I hate him a little bit right now, I can’t help myself. And equally, I hate the little shaky kid he’s looking at, the one who lives inside my numb skull, the one Pop always knows how to find.
The Completionist Page 14
