But somehow the infernal shoes, they have a plan of their own. It involves going back over to those windows, just one more time, to look out over the dark blanket at the horizon line that represents what’s left of our precious lake, and to watch the helicopters streak in blinking rows through the night. I have to admit I like the shoes’ thinking here. Who knows when I’ll ever get to look out at the lake again? Even if someday Fred decides she’s willing to deal with me, Ken Walker’s not going to be excited about letting Uncle Carter into his carpeted beige palace.
Those teeth.
I turn away from them, their gleaming power, and find myself facing the wall of black glass at the farthest end of the room. I’ve shuffled my way over here without attracting too much attention, it seems, but now a small, polite space is clearing around me, embarrassed partygoers moving discreetly aside, so that I can do what I really want to do, what I’ve wanted to do all night, which is lean my stitched-up forehead against the glass and fog the pane with my breath a bit and look out at what there is to see, which is nothing, a high-up hot lonesome nothing. The lake is black and invisible. The moonless night sky, same. The blinking helicopters are all there is, chopping through the blackness, back and forth, back and forth, mindless like overgrown drones, which I suppose is pretty close to what they are.
“You must be Fred’s brother, Carter,” someone says. “Are you all right?”
I stand at something like attention and try to focus my eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You sure?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. Just a little tired.”
“Hm.” She’s a bit on the short side, with rounded everything, like a picture of a snowman. Her hair is curly and graying, around a small circular face. Older. She’s looking at me with so much kindness and interest, I can’t bear it.
“I’m really okay.”
“Are you now.” She sighs and turns one shoulder on the room, angling herself toward me and the darkness outside the window. “Fred doesn’t have many friends here tonight. I was hoping I would meet some of them.”
I’m embarrassed. I never even thought about Fred having friends here—I haven’t been to any weddings before, I don’t know how these are supposed to work. “This is my first time at a wedding. Are you supposed to invite your friends?”
“Oh, sure,” she says easily. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m being really rude, I know. But . . .”
“Who am I? Right. I’m one of Fred’s former professors. I advised her thesis project. Brilliant.” The woman smiles at the glass.
“You’re a . . . technology teacher?”
“I’m a technology teacher,” she affirms, still smiling. “Not as busy as I used to be, but. Margaret Pierce. Very nice to make your acquaintance.”
“Did you, um, did you get to speak to Fred?” I ask, trying on small talk and finding it’s not exactly one-size-fits-all.
“Yes.” Professor Pierce is still looking out the window, not at me. “I did. I’m very proud of her.” She blinks. Her eyes are shining. “I hope she’ll be happy.”
I don’t have anything to say to this. But then I recognize her, Professor Pierce. I saw her two days ago, too, in this same room, in this same place, with her back to the room, looking out the window. I saw her crossing the room toward these windows after she bumped into me. The woman who reminded me of Gard, or my mother, at the warm-up party, right here. It’s her.
Professor Pierce now glances at me. “You were in the Wars, I understand. Fred’s told me a little about you. Dropped out of college to enlist.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I can see she’s of the blunt, no-bullshit tribe my older sister also belongs to. I might even be looking at the elder who initiated her, made her what she became.
“Speaking as a professor, you understand, dropping out to fight in a war seems like a poor choice.”
“School and I were natural enemies, ma’am.”
“School was your enemy. Then the native West Coasters were your enemies. Now that you’re back from being over there, who are your enemies going to be next?” She smiles at me. I don’t expect she wants a real answer, so I don’t offer one.
“It’s a pretty long list, Professor.”
“Is it?” That kind, knowing smile again. I’m not sure what I did to deserve it, but I like it. “Your new brother-in-law on that list by any chance?”
I stare at her. Then I laugh. I can’t help it.
“Hm.” She nods, raises an eyebrow. “Say no more.”
I’m not sure why, but that encourages me to elaborate. “He’s not the kind of person I think she’d be happy with,” I admit.
“Hm.”
Something about that grunt, the quality of it, makes me go on rather than stop. “In fact, a few hours ago it looked like she wasn’t going to go through with it.”
Her smile grows wider. “That was the scuttlebutt all night.”
“But then she did.”
“Yes, she did.” Professor Pierce rocks toward the window, seems to examine something in the blackness. “Any idea why?”
This is probably one of the stranger questions anybody’s asked after watching two people get married, I’m guessing: Any idea why she married the guy? But there’s only one answer, so I hand it to her. “Because I failed her. I couldn’t—I didn’t find her something she needed. Someone. The person who could have maybe helped her find another way out.”
Professor Pierce turns her curiosity on me. Her round face is drawn and sorrowful, the smile has gone out of it. “Why on earth would you say a thing like that?”
“Oh”—I shrug, take a warm swig of whatever the mostly finished drink in my hand is—“don’t know. It’s true, I guess that’s why. You seem like a person who likes the truth. So.”
“Well. It’s a bit self-pitying,” Professor Pierce observes. I bow my head, don’t bother denying it. “Fred’s choices are hers. They should stay hers. Don’t you go mixing up your hopes for your sister with whatever mistakes or good steps she decides she’s got to make.”
“It’s good advice, Professor.” I tip my drink at her. “Good night, ma’am.” Now it’s time to move the shoes in the direction of the door, but they’re slow to go. Slow enough that she has time to grab my arm, in fingers surprisingly strong.
She leans in toward me, her eyes shining with emotions I don’t really know her well enough to read. “Don’t worry about your sister, Carter. All you have to worry about—this is everything—is just being a good man. Be a good man. That’s all she needs from you. I promise.”
I give her a nod. It’s about all I can manage.
She releases my arm. I take that as my cue. Turn away and make for the door.
She had me by my right forearm, right where Wash’s disinterment of my wearable left a raised edge, and I can still feel the warmth of her grip as the repeated message from Natalie wings in, lights up, insistent.
Dec 20 10:00 PM
23 15 42 02 52 53 87 69 23 92
23 15 42 02 52 53 87 69 23 92
23 15 42 02 52 53 87 69 23 92
23 15 42 02 52 53 87 69 23 92
I stop short. “Professor. You’re good with codes, right?”
“I’d better be,” she says behind me. “You know what a person has to do to get tenure?”
I can take this risk. This one is okay. I think. “Can I show you something, ma’am? Maybe you’ll know what it means?” When I turn back to her, she’s got an expression on her face that makes me like her even more—something crafty and witchy about it, but excited, warm.
“Oooh. I love a challenge.”
“Well. I don’t know if it’s a challenge. I don’t know if it’s anything. I’ll pull up a virtual share—you can see—” Swipe of the forearm, a flick to activate the share control, there she is, labeled mp.ncu.edu, selected, she’s swiping on and seeing the invitation to share my view in her own virtual portal, and in less than a second I’ve got someone I can only assume is a sharper,
clearer mind than my own by a factor of several hundred million looking right at Natalie’s code, blue and insistent, sent and resent, timestamps going back to this morning. Professor Pierce also sees my own pitiful replies, begging for clues, for help, for forgiveness.
Tactfully, she says nothing about that. But her voice has an edge when she says, “I don’t know what this means. This isn’t code. This is just—oh, I see what you mean. It’s not code, but it’s encoded in some way.” She spares a compassionate glance up at me. “I mean, I’m no cryptographer, Carter. I write software, not spy novels.” She lasers a long look into her virtual portal. “Are you sure this is . . . deliberate? That it’s not being sent in error? It could . . . no . . . I’m sorry. I’m just not sure.”
“It’s not the same, is it?” I can’t help but feel miserable at this new evidence of how stupid I can be. Of course code and encoding aren’t the same—maybe they’re related, it’s all a question of coming up with a language and trying to communicate in it—but I don’t feel capable of explaining how I made the leap, which I’m sure leaves Professor Pierce freshly convinced of my idiocy.
“I’m afraid not,” she says. I flick the share control off, exposing the layer behind Natalie’s message, which happens to be a mapping I pulled up earlier today, drunkenly following a beacon from the autobus back to Pop’s corner dive because I didn’t trust myself to make it otherwise. That’s when I see it, and the world drops fifty floors around me, my ears are ringing, I’m standing in a tower surrounded by a whistling nothing.
Gard. Her avatar. Her ghost. Lit up. Pulsing gently, a beacon, a beckon.
Blindly, I whip around, trying to look in all directions and seeing nothing. As if she’s in the room, but invisible. But she’s not in the room. Focusing in at the mapping function, I can see she’s not even close by—she’s somewhere miles north, an old, rundown neighborhood where families used to live but which is now mostly rattling old storefronts. Outside the New Chicago rehabbed zone, which stretches north about to the old Calvary Cemetery, then peters out for about a mile before the New Evanston rehabbed zone picks up tentatively in the blocks around where the university used to be, before there stopped being many students to teach, and the New Chicago University formed around the profs and academic types who were willing to pack up and downshift for the sake of the city. Our Professor Pierce one among them.
“What is it? Are you all right?”
“I’m— My— I need to go. My sister Gardner’s wearable just came back online for the first time since— I have to go.” My heart is in my throat. Whatever this could mean, I’m not sure I’m ready to know.
Professor Pierce’s round face records a stunned pause, then she nods briskly.
“Then you should go. Good man.”
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
March 1, 6:31 a.m.
Hi, CQ.
I miss you. I’m praying for you. I hope you know we all love you. Please be careful with yourself.
Had to get that out of the way. Sorry to start heavy. I had a heavy sort of day, I think, at work, so that’s the context. But I know you’re not supposed to compare battlefields; it’s disrespectful. I don’t know what it’s like for you, I could never guess. You know what, though? I’m on the bus a lot these days, and while I’m on the bus I have this thing where I try to imagine where you are and how you are and what you’re doing. So that’s, like, ten to twelve hours a week that someone on earth is doing nothing but thinking about you and sending good wishes and love your way. How do you like that? How many people can say that, right? And those are hours I could be spending zoning out on my wearable, so, you know. You’re welcome.
Whenever I picture where you are, I’m thinking hot, because Pop told us it was hot, and I’m thinking dusty and destroyed, because of what happened over there. Other than that, I don’t know. They’re blocking photos from out west in the news these days. When we were kids, I feel like you couldn’t escape the news about what was happening out there—I remember seeing the LA wildfires on all the portals. I remember the day they announced they were going to have to abandon any survivors behind the fire line. It was right after Mom. I was five or six. You were just a little squirt. Now it’s like nobody wants us to know what’s happening over the mountains. Can you see the mountains? Probably not, too much particulate in the air. I’m guessing you probably couldn’t see the mountains until you were right on top of them. Going toward the mountains in the dust and the smoke you would just gain and gain altitude without realizing you were headed up into the hills until you were already there. Maybe the air is clearer up there? God. We can all hope.
When I picture what you’re doing, I’m thinking it’s a lot of routine, a lot of patrols, a lot of long walks and long days and nights, because that’s what Pop tells me about infantry—you don’t tell me anything.
And then, when I picture how you are, I get stopped. You’re my little brother and I can’t bear to think of you hurt or in pain or even tired. I would just want to tuck you into bed. Picture me tucking you into bed. Whenever you’re tired. Just picture that.
So I don’t know what it’s like for you but I can tell you what it’s like for me. Oh I’m just tired all the time. I know how that sounds, me telling you I’m tired all the time. Don’t laugh at me! I have this second job now, you know, I can never remember whether I’ve told you about it, or who I’ve told and who I haven’t, but it doesn’t matter. Anyway, I’m there most nights. I get the bus from my day job and eat dinner on the way there and think about you while I’m riding. Although, okay, I guess I’m not thinking just about you on the bus for ten to twelve hours a week, because I’m also thinking about how much I hate the taste of engineered food, but that’s what I can afford, so. Subtract, what, five minutes a day for hating food. Anyway. I’m at my nighttime clinic until the early, tiny hours of the morning, and then I get the bus back home, and I dutifully think about you on the way and wish you from harm, which is sort of my daily prayer session, and sometimes I eat breakfast on the way home but it depends on when I get off work. I sleep for a couple of hours and then I go back to work at my day job, but it’s so dead in there I can usually sneak in a nap at my desk. Seriously, no one notices. There’s not a single pregnant middle-class woman left in all of New Chicago, I think. They’re all either rich or broke, there’s no in-between. They’re Insemina or they’re lucky accidents.
That’s why I took this other job, actually. I felt like I had to help somebody, somehow, and while my day job pays the bills, almost, it’s not work. It’s naps.
Anyway. I’m not comparing myself to you and what you’re doing, and I never would, because from the outset I’ve always been pretty sure this wasn’t going to kill me, or cause me any kind of, I don’t know, bodily harm or trauma. But I like to imagine that I’m on patrols with you, just moving back and forth between my posts, and thinking about all the people that I want to keep safe.
Stay safe, honey. And write me back, you little turd. I totally sounded like Fred just then, right?
Love,
Gard
FOURTEEN
Finding Fred is not difficult—she’s a planet of her own, surrounded by several orbiting, irresistibly attracted clusters, an assortment of sparkling gray-haired women and their husbands, robust older guys. All of them are beaming at Fred, talking at and around and about her. Several have their hands on Fred’s body: her belly, mostly—a couple of the women are petting it tenderly, and in fact it looks as if these women have formed a line just to touch Fred’s belly—but also, one woman in a smart floor-length green dress has her arm around Fred’s tense shoulders and is talking to her earnestly while Fred attempts to ignore all the people touching her own midsection. To the small development inside her, I laser a thought: Hang in there. I think i
t at Fred, too. Her face is pale and worn-out looking and it’s obviously costing her something to endure all this; I can’t imagine what or how much. Poor old Fred. Jesus.
But I can’t wait for these women to each take their turn fondling the miracle Fred’s carrying. I’m keeping the mapping function of my wearable open and checking it constantly, making sure Gard’s beacon doesn’t suddenly disappear, which it could—it could—and that’s why we’ve got to go, now. We’ve got to get to it, now.
“Excuse me.” I shoulder my way in, none too delicately, but these hale and happy people are hard to shove past, their delight and their satisfaction have rooted them in place. Fred sees me from the corner of her eye, manages to give me a hostile look—the fuck, CQ?—using just the facial muscles that control her peripherals (and if anything is the exact definition of highly specialized oldest-sister skills, that’s it right there) and continues listening to the woman in green. “Excuse me, ma’am. ’Scuse me, sir.” The shoulder pads; the twinking necklaces; the jewels hanging from lobes; the soft, mobile jawlines. I’m only about a third of the way into the cluster when it occurs to me to drop my drink with great force.
Glass shatters, everyone scatters, and I have just a half second to contain the smirk on my ugly mug and replace it with something like embarrassed contrition before I find myself standing alone in the middle of a shame circle a few meters wide. Did he throw that? She’s right there; imagine what could have—! Someone hustles off for Sophie, who appears in an instant as if teleported from wherever she’s been, and begins to direct the cleanup, not before shooting a surprised, wounded look at me. Which I don’t have a proper answer for, just muttered apologies.
Fred and the woman in green haven’t moved. Fred appears frozen, until I see her just-perceptible shake of the head at me.
“Fred, can I talk to you?”
The Completionist Page 26
