by Ian Whates
“I don’t care! I hate you!”
The nurse, a scrawny old woman in stupid clothes with teddy bears on them, smiles at Daddy. “They always want more parent than they can get, Dr. Jaworski.”
“Shut up!” I say. I hate the nurse, too.
“Caitlin, apologize,” Daddy says.
“I’m sorry,” I say, but I don’t mean it. I don’t mean that I hate Daddy, either. I know he was on the other side of the world, doing important work in physics. Everybody knows who Daddy is, and everybody knows about the new thing he invented, the clear energy walls to keep bad people from hurting little girls. It’s wonderful and important, but I wanted him here when my appendix broke. Before that, I didn’t even know I had an appendix. He never told me.
Daddy says to the nurse, “Can’t she have more pain killers?”
“Her chart says absolutely not,” the nurse said. “Her atypical allergies –”
“Never mind,” Daddy says, in his important voice. “You can go.”
The nurse looks startled, then frowns, then goes. Daddy sits in a chair beside my bed, still holding my hand. “Pumpkin, I know something better than painkillers.”
“What?”
“It’s a game that makes everything stop hurting. Close your eyes. Now think of a place where you were really, really happy... Are you thinking of one?”
“Yes.” I think about being in the car with him, back when he sometimes had time to take me to school. Talking with him, laughing with him, the smells of leather and aftershave... me so happy I thought something in me would burst. Not, though, my appendix.
“Picture that happy place in your mind, Catie. Are you doing it? Good. Now picture even more of it. More of all the good things.”
More. I saw the car driving on and on for the whole day, not just the morning. With a picnic basket. More talking, more laughing. More Daddy.
And it worked. I forgot that I hurt, and Daddy sat there holding my hand until his cell phone rang and he had to go. He didn’t visit me in the hospital again.
WAYNE AND I have it out that night. Tara has gone to bed, and the welcoming party held for me is over. I’d sized up the ‘eco-terrorists’ gathered in the compound: one-third free-loaders professing beliefs they wouldn’t act on, one-third committed to the same soft ‘education’ of voters that had accomplished squat in the last fifteen years, and one-third fiery enough but incapable of planning, of detail, of an after-life spent underground. They wanted to blow things up, all right, but not to live with the consequences. Useless to me.
“The tunnels are the weak point,” I say to Wayne. “I studied everything in the prison library.”
“They let you have access to articles on dome construction?”
“No, of course not. But there were ways.” In prison, there are always ways.
Wayne fiddles with his beer. We sit at a homemade wooden table, lovingly carved by someone who could better have used his or her time in subverting the domes, not creating tiny local beauty outside them. The TV is on, as it has been all evening, to the state-sponsored news channel. I need to keep up.
“Catie, I’m not going to engage in anything illegal. Not with the baby coming. I have family responsibilities now.”
“You mean that you’ve caved to the system.”
“I mean that your arrest and imprisonment should have taught you that your tactics won’t work.”
“‘Your’ tactics? They were yours, too, Wayne! We made that plan together!”
“I know.” He raises his eyes to mine. “Do you blame me for not getting caught along with you? For staying outside these fifteen years?”
I am astonished. “No, of course not. What good would it have done for both of us to go to prison?”
He laughs, reluctantly. “You always had courage.”
“So did you. But I was the one stuck with the Jaworski name.”
“Yes.” For just a second the old feeling sparks between us, but it’s only an ember, a pathetic flicker of what once was. I don’t bother to fan the ember. Wayne had courage, all right, but never vision. Not really. He could kindle small fires to attract attention to injustice, but he would never start a conflagration that would burn the old order to the ground. I would have to do that.
I had tried to do that. This time, I would succeed.
Wayne says, “The domes are impregnable.”
“Nothing is impregnable.”
“Okay, that’s the wrong word. But I think that if the tunnels –”
“Wayne, don’t you –”
“Catie, give it up. We can succeed best with the slow drip of water on stone. Law makers are starting to come around. The Goodman-DiBenetti Act –”
“Is a sop to environmentalists! A pathetic old dog with no teeth!”
“No, it –”
“You’re a coward, Wayne. Admit it.”
He slammed down his beer glass on the table. “I’m a realist!”
“You’ve been seduced by the same thing the people living under the domes have sold their lives to: more. More security, more comfort, more soft living. More more more, and the rest of the world be damned!”
“And you think you’re any different? You want ‘more’ as well! No incremental victory is ever enough for you. They have to be bigger, gaudier, more spectacular, because what you really love isn’t winning battles to help the poor, it’s the excitement of the battles themselves!”
Silence. There isn’t any more to say. Except maybe one thing.
“Wayne, was it you who made that call fifteen years ago?”
“No.” He’s telling the truth. But the way his gaze shifts to the left, the slight droop of his head –
I say, “You know who did.”
“You weren’t doing what everyone agreed on! You made that substitution of –”
But abruptly, shockingly, I’m no longer listening to him. For fifteen years I’ve wondered who betrayed me that night, and now I’m no longer listening. The TV screen suddenly shows my father, wearing his solemn-exalted look. The news guy beside him looks not just exalted but positively beatified. I turn up the sound.
“– such a major breakthrough! Now no family need choose between living near a job or living near loved ones! Can you tell us, Dr. Jaworski, any more about the science behind this development? Of course we all know that HomeWalls Incorporated possesses all its tech on a proprietary basis and –”
I watch the entire program, and then the next one. My father has discovered a way to extend the force fields of the domes. The new tech will allow them to cover not just a maximum of thirty acres but entire cities. The rich and middle-class will never have to see, hear, or even be aware of the domeless poor again.
All my plans will need to change. Attacking the tunnels will not work now. My father has ensured there will be no more tunnels.
Wayne has slipped off to join Tara. I don’t see him again before I leave the compound in the morning.
THE FIRST HOMEWALLS went up when I was fourteen. They went up around our house.
The house sat on the shores of Lake Michigan, on Chicago’s Gold Coast. Twenty thousand square feet, plus guest cottage and pool house and boathouse by the dock. The force field ‘circle of protection’ extended six feet below ground, into ditches dug for the purpose, and out onto the lake, where it had to stop at the surface of the water. Those early walls were opaque and, of course, open at the top; the tech to create domes came later. We had weather. We had seagulls and winter snow and seismic detectors to warn of tunneling beneath the walls and complete safety from kidnapping. The dome had to be turned off briefly to let yachts sail to and from docks, but this was considered a minor inconvenience.
The thieves swam in from the lake, at dusk, when they were least expected because my father had a house full of guests. I had had some teenage argument with my father, gone into sulks, and refused to attend the party. So I was loitering by the curved eastern wall, finishing off a bottle of wine I was not supposed to have, when the intruder
s in their wet suits reached the control room and shot the guard. One of them – inadvertently, it later came out at his trial – deactivated the walls. Not a good step if you plan on stealing valuables and then slipping silently away. Most thieves are stupid.
So was I. Until then I hadn’t known anything, not anything at all. When the wall collapsed, dissolving like dark rain, I lurched into squatters that the police had not yet removed, huddled around a small fire.
“No!” I screamed, smashed the bottle on the ground, and held out the jagged neck as a weapon. Who the hell did I think I was, some video fighter?
“No!” screamed a ragged woman, clutching two kids to her.
No men. After a moment the older kid, a girl maybe nine years old, snatched up a rock and threw it at me. It hit me in the arm and, drunk, I started to cry.
“Annie, you stop that!” the woman said. “Don’t you be throwing no rocks!”
She was protecting me.
I dropped the bottle. The stupid tears came faster. Alarms sounded from the house, police sirens from the street, shouts from all sides. The woman came up to me, her face creased with fear, with resentment, with hope. “Miss, Annie didn’t mean nothing. Please don’t tell the cops that she –”
“I won’t,” I had time to gasp, before I vomited up a bottle of wine on both of us.
Later, I looked for the woman and her kids. I didn’t find them, of course. They’d vanished into the growing horde of the homeless and the desperate. As well look for a single pebble on the shores of Lake Michigan. No, not on the lake – under it. The country was sinking into economic collapse, into despair, into violence. The demand for my father’s walls was immediate and enormous.
But I did look for the woman. And looking, I saw.
By sixteen, I had found Wayne’s group. By seventeen, I was gone. I didn’t see my father again for four years, at the Cook County jail, where we shouted accusations at each other and he did not even try to make my bail or find me a lawyer.
“SUNNYJAY,” I SAY. “You haven’t changed.”
This is a blatant lie. Unlike Wayne, SunnyJay has decayed over fifteen years. Fat now, bald, food stains on the shirt that stretches across his vast belly. But the black eyes still shine with malicious humor. He is the smartest man I’ve ever known, and I include my father.
“How you find me, snowflake?”
“Oh, drop the lingo, SunnyJay. Please.” He is about as down-home as a Jesuit scholar.
He laughs at me. “By what means did you manage to locate me so quickly after termination of your incarceration, Ms. Jaworski?”
“You aren’t exactly a secret on the street.” Nor does he intend to be. For twenty years SunnyJay has eluded legal conviction, in an age of sophisticated military surveillance, with two simple stratagems: First, hide in plain sight. Second, keep everything in your head, with no electronic footprint at all. Everybody, including several levels of law enforcement, know where he is and what he does. None of them can prove anything at all in court.
“Buy me a cup of coffee,” I tell him.
He leads me about a mile from his house, then another mile, through the slums and ruins of Spokane. No one bothers us. By the time we reach a more-or-less middle-class coffee house, SunnyJay is puffing and sweating. He sinks appreciatively into a chair and looks around as if he’s never been here before. I would bet he hasn’t. The feds can’t bug every place in the entire city, although certainly they try.
When we have our coffee, I say, “I need something.”
“We all need love, Catie.”
“Love, yeah. I need love. Can you find me the right man?” SunnyJay knows exactly what I mean.
“Depends on what kind of sex you like.”
I tell him. Do those dark eyes widen a little? It isn’t easy to shock SunnyJay, who’s seen everything. The thought that I might have shocked him is exhilarating.
“Heavy price for that,” he says.
“To you?” The trust my grandmother left me has been piling up for me for fifteen years.
“No. To you.”
“I know.”
“You still want love anyway?”
“Yes.”
“You’re that angry?”
“About injustice I am, yes – that angry!”
“Uh, huh. Sure you are. This is all about social injustice.”
“It –”
“I’ll do it.”
I look down, into my coffee cup. There is risk here to SunnyJay, too, and he’s going to take it. I say, “Who was it?”
He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand me. “My mama.”
“How?”
“Stroke. She died on the ground outside the private hospital.”
“The hospital was behind a HomeWall?”
“You know it. I was eleven.”
I don’t ask what had happened to SunnyJay after that. I know. But, on impulse, I ask something else.
“You ever gone away in your mind? Just eased the pain by picturing someplace where you were really happy and then willing yourself there?”
SunnyJay’s lip curls. “Transcendental shit. Buddhist meditation. Christian mysticism. Taoist fucking pathways. No, I never do that.”
“Sorry I asked.” In prison, going away in my mind had saved me. How dare he sneer at it?
SunnyJay says, “Go to the Hammet Hotel, on Sixth at West Carrington. Live there a while. Maybe love will find you.”
Two cops walk in, staring hard at SunnyJay. He beams at them as if they are his long-lost friends.
I AM THE reason that my father’s company’s walls became domes.
I gather that the physics to do this – to maintain a force field that curved at the top and then left a gap for air exchange – was very difficult. The air exchange is necessary. Sealed biodomes have never worked for long: without weather, atmosphere separates into layers, soil- and rock-fixed molecules break loose, trees become etiolated and weak-wooded. For four years my father’s company produced energy walls that circled two, ten, twenty, or a maximum of thirty acres. The walls went up around mansions, gated communities, prisons, factories. Then they went up around empty swatches of land and new communities were built inside. Only certain people could buy their way in. You needed money, of course, but you also needed a clean criminal record, a thorough drug screen, a psychiatric evaluation. You needed to agree to rules of behavior. If you violated those rules, you and your family were out. But inside – ah, inside! Safety for you and your children! No ugly poor people pan-handling, no desperate homeless squatting in the flower beds, no need to think about those stuck outside. All across the United states HomeWall communities sprang up like mushrooms after rain.
The community leaders weren’t stupid. They knew that twenty-feet-high walls, the most that the technology permitted, could be gotten over. The richest of them cleared a wide area around the outside of the circle and put it under continual electronic surveillance: visual, infrared, and metal detection.
The plan that Wayne’s group – we never gave ourselves a name – came up with was ingenious in its simplicity. We joined a tent community just beyond a cleared area. Inside a ragged tent we built a medieval catapult of wood. We obtained a canister to be lobbed over the wall and break apart on contact, releasing tear gas into the gated community right at dinner time on a sweet summer night, when everyone was outside barbequing, playing tennis, drinking cocktails in designer lawn chairs whose cost would have fed the hungry people all around us for a week. Everything was in place.
Except that the week before, in the tent camp, I had met Aisha.
She was skinny and Muslim and starving and she reminded me of myself, who had never been any of those things. She was six years old, and she was dying. She coughed blood. I took her and her frantic mother to a hospital, but even though I paid for her care, she died. Too little, too late. I never even got to tell her to go to that happy place in her mind.
The doctor, not knowing I was with her mother, said to me, “Just as well. One
less sewer rat in the world. Keeps the rest of us safer in the long run.”
I heard my father’s voice: “The weak look pitiable, Catie, but they’re actually dangerous. They will bring down the strong if they can – from envy.”
Two days later Wayne sent me to buy the canister. I made an elaborate, blind-folded journey through Chicago, arranged by SunnyJay, and followed by even more elaborate blind transfers of electronic funds. On the black market, you can buy anything, and it was my money, from grandmother’s trust. I didn’t get a break-apart canister of tear gas. I got one of sarin.
THE HAMMET HOTEL, named for a famous seaside resort in Tunisia, is seedy but not overly dangerous. I wait there, paying cash for everything and producing SunnyJay’s fake ID as needed, for fully three weeks. Most of the time I watch TV, newscast after newscast about the breakthrough that will permit HomeWalls to “shield entire towns from terrorists and violent criminals.” No one ever said how many would be evicted from those towns, or where the evicted would then go. Hour after hour I watch these state-run broadcasts. It’s pretty much like again being in prison.
Then my ‘lover’ arrives, with my package. The next day I catch a greyhound to Chicago.
EVEN FIFTEEN YEARS ago, Wayne was a careful person. Inside our tent, beside the catapult, he meticulously examined the canister. “It doesn’t look like tear gas.”
“It is. Unless you think they pulled a bait-and-switch on us?”
“No, I don’t think that.” And then, “Catie?”
“It’s tear gas.”
And he nodded. We were sleeping together, we were passionately in love. The canister went into the catapult.
But someone else in our group must have checked, too. Because there was an anonymous call – not to the cops, who would eventually have ferreted out the caller. The call was to my father, on condition that he not reveal it to the cops. He agreed. The cold-feet traitor to our unnamed movement told him that people, inhabitants of a HomeWall his company had created, were about to die.
