I lowered myself
onto a section of the long, grey couch to my left. Next to me, a woman in her thirties sat with her legs crossed at the ankles, staring into her own private gushi world. If I touched her or addressed her directly she’d land back in the dormitory with the blink of an eye. Undisturbed, she could remain like that for hours, until she needed to eat or drink something or relieve herself. That was how people were in 2063. Chronically distracted by illusion.
Already I was getting restless waiting. Did the guy who’d spoken to me have any intention of returning? Michael
Neal would be wondering where I was. He must have started without me by now.
I waited another three minutes and then began wandering the aisles again, at first
only speaking to the handful of aware people I spotted, and then beginning to touch the shoulders or hands of people on gushi, pulling their consciousness back into the dormitory to answer my questions about the AWOL man. I’d just begun speaking to a dark-skinned girl no older than Kinnari when the guy who’d offered to help me materialized at my side.
“Someone wants to
speak with you,” he said. “Come with me.”
We careened past countless beds, making so many sharp turns that I wondered if I’d be able to find my way back to the elevator
s. Suddenly the air smelled liked cloves. We neared a crowd of fifteen to twenty people gathered around a lounge area that had been pushed flush against the nearest beds, giving the man in the centre of the circle room to demonstrate. He was standing in front of an easel, creating a pencil portrait of the older woman standing next to him. A bag of cloves hung from the back of the easel, which solved the mystery of where the aroma was coming from, and he must have only just begun the drawing, as the sole marking on the paper was a rough oval representing the woman’s head.
“While proportions
vary from person to person and alter with age, there are some general guidelines you can use,” he declared. “Viewed from the front, a head’s width is approximately two thirds of its height. The first quarter measures from the crown of the head down to a person’s hairline. The second quarter…”
Beside me
, the pale-skinned guy was nudging my arm and pointing me to the right, towards someone I’d—at a glance from the corner of my eye—judged to be a child. As I swivelled to take the figure in it was obvious he was a full-grown man, maybe seven or eight years older than me, yet no taller than five foot three. Virtually no adult males in the U.N.A. were that short anymore. Genetic engineering didn’t allow for things that would be considered faults. Shyness. Allergies. Colour blindness. None of these things happened anymore. Not inside or outside of the camps. Not to anyone under the age of thirty.
The short man saw my eyes on him and stepped towards us. “I’ll take it from here,” he said, giving my chaperon a meaningful look. The
younger guy nodded abruptly and spun on his heel, beginning to retrace his steps through the maze of bunk beds.
Meanwhile the man was pulling me
over to the nearest unoccupied bunk. “Just sit,” he whispered. “It’s better not to get too far from the group. They’d take more notice.”
“Who?”
I sat down next to him, less than twenty feet from the crowd gathered around the drawing instructor. “The Ros?”
“Or
one of the human administration. Anything unusual attracts them so you better show me whatever’s in your bag. We’ll pretend we’re concentrating on that.” The man scratched at his hairline, inclining his head to indicate the instructor. “Supposedly the smell helps boost his creativity. In the past they used cloves for things like bad breath and toothaches but I’m not fond of the stink. I’m Isaac by the way. Isaac Monroe.”
I opened my bag for him and pulled out the intact dish. He’d already lost me. What were we doing if not trying to uncover the identity of the AWOL man so that I could hand over my pieces
?
“I’m looking for the woman these belong to,” I said, explaining the situation that had gone down in Moss the previous weekend.
“Unfortunately, I have no idea who she is.” Isaac stared into the distance where the instructor was pencilling in his subject’s deep-set eyes. “Sorry to mislead you. I just had to take this opportunity. I’ve seen you around a few times, heard from various people that you’ve been helping out Michael Neal.”
“And so?”
My heart had begun speeding. We’d only been talking and I already felt as though I was breaking the rules.
Isaac
rubbed a hand under his chin. “So you want to be a lawyer, huh? Want to help these people?” He turned his head away as he added, “You must be grounded, am I right?”
Obviously someone had been talking about me.
One of Michael Neal’s clients, most likely.
“What’s it to you?” I said, gravel in my voice like a tough guy
.
Isaac
smiled like my defensive attitude didn’t faze him. “Maybe nothing. I thought I might know something that would mean something to
you
, if you’re serious about wanting to help.”
“
The only thing I’m serious about at the moment is trying to get this man’s stuff back to his wife.” My tough guy voice was gone. I was just like Lucy on the elevator, afraid to bring down any real trouble on myself. The corners of Isaac’s lips dipped but there was still levity in his eyes. “Wait, what do you mean by ‘these people’? Aren’t you one of them?”
“At heart I am. You can see it just by looking at me, can’t you?”
Isaac didn’t wait for me to answer. “But I don’t live here. I’m only visiting.” He took the plate from my hands and ran his fingers gently around the rim. “I can try to find the owner of this, if you want to leave it with me. You’ll never manage it on your own.”
“How do
I know you’ll give it to her?” The instructor must have made a joke we’d missed. The people around him were laughing lightly.
“What would I want with a
lone piece of china? This isn’t worth anything on its own. You’d need a set.” Isaac winked at me, laid the dish down between us, and hopped up from the bunk.
“
Wait
.” I said it loudly enough that the woman posed in front of the instructor glanced sharply over at me on the bed.
Isaac
Monroe kept walking and didn’t look back. When he’d reached the spot where I’d first caught sight of him, he folded his arms and directed his attention to the art lesson. I slid the dish back into my bag and crossed over to him, my voice a whisper. “What exactly did you mean about helping?” As anxious as I was, the thought that I could do something tangible to change things was irresistible. Staying off gushi as much as was humanly possible, paying lip service to the cause, and listening to speeches by small-time grounded politicians who would likely never get into office wasn’t enough. Neither was helping Michael Neal, and maybe law school wouldn’t be, either. There had to be something more.
“You’re moving to New York
.” He tilted his head and continued to peer fixedly at the instructor’s likeness of the woman. “Did I hear that right?”
“In September.”
“It’s important to have solid grounded allies in New York. That’s a point of entry for a lot of people.” Illegals. Refugees who came by sea and eluded the DefRos. “But this isn’t a good place to go into details. You really need to check out one of our art courses, if you’re interested. There’s a lesson coming up next Friday.”
“Art courses?” Was that all this was
—he was trying to recruit more people into an art class?
“Authentic
approaches to life through art.” Isaac tightened his grip on his arms. “You probably already know something about the importance of art in connecting people to a healthy, grounded life. But I think there could be some things you don’t know too.”
“
What does any of that have to do with me moving to New York?”
“
That depends on you. But if you want to check out the course it’s over at the main library in Billings. It might take you a couple of lessons to get something out of it. And maybe you
won’t
, but if you come, be sure to bring a pencil and sketchbook.”
My heart was
thrumming hard again. “Are these classes dangerous? I don’t want to walk into something that…” That I couldn’t walk away from. I didn’t want to be wiped and covered and sent off somewhere to die, my body riddled with toxins. That fear was what held the grounded movement in check and kept it from becoming a revolution. People were so damn scared all the time that it paralyzed them.
“
Trust me, you won’t be in any danger there,” Isaac said. “It’s just a place where things get decided.”
I didn’t ask
which things. I could tell by the way Isaac’s eyes had clouded over that he wasn’t going to unload any more useful information.
“Maybe I’ll see you there
, then,” I said, non-committal. “Did you mean it about the dishes? About trying to track down the man’s wife for me?” Because I wasn’t used to looking down at adult men, I had to put extra effort into maintaining eye contact. My eyes were getting dry from the effort of not blinking.
“I’ll do what I can.”
That was all I could ask. I had to get back to Michael, and Isaac was right, I’d never manage to find the AWOL man’s wife on my own. “Thanks,” I told him. “I appreciate it.” I stuck out my hand and Isaac snorted but shook it. Then I dug into my bag for the collection of fragments and repaired plate and presented them to him.
As I backed away from the crowd and began
threading back through the bunks, I felt a rush of wind at my side. “Malyck Dixon,” a voice said. I turned to find Isaac half a step behind me. “He’s the one who didn’t come back on Saturday and hasn’t been around since. His wife’s Cleo. I’ve never met them but their dorm is level twelve. Lots of worse things happen out there than some smashed china and a few weeks in detention, you know?”
I exhaled stiffly.
“I know that.”
Isaac
veered away from me before I could say anything more, and several minutes later I still hadn’t found the elevator and had to ask a little boy to lead me out of the dorm. Back with Michael Neal in the consultation room after the next client had left, I came clean about my search for Malyck Dixon and our accidental crossing of paths in Moss.
“You have to be more careful with the
SecRos,” Michael warned. “You don’t want too many interference instances added to your record.”
They didn’t wipe
and cover people for running their mouths off to the SecRos like I had, or normally assign detention periods for it either, but when they scanned you and saw your record, any programmed patience the SecRos ordinarily had with humans would no longer apply. They could hold you for hours at a time and would thoroughly question and investigate you whenever you crossed their path, increasing your likelihood of accruing additional charges if you happened to be involved in any illegal activities.
I nodded and pushed my hair out of my eyes. “You’re right
. I need to watch my step.”
I didn’t mention
Isaac Monroe, the art lessons he was pushing, or anything else. I sat extremely still in my seat and asked Michael if he had any background info on the next scheduled client, my pen paused at the top of the blank sheet of paper in front of me and my mind temporarily pushing the nagging curiosity about next Friday’s library meeting into the shadows.
In the morning there’s a bird singing out on the balcony. We don’t have a feeder, but lately the same brown-and-grey bird keeps returning to hang out on the railing. At least, I think it’s the same one; I don’t know anything about birds and I only wake up for long enough to register the sound before falling back to sleep, my body still spooned around Freya’s. I don’t have to be at work until noon today and the light leaking in through the curtains is an early morning blue.
The second time I wake up
, Freya’s shaking my shoulder and peering down at me with serious eyes. For a couple of seconds I think I must have overslept. I’ve already been late for two shifts since Expo opened at the start of the month; I can’t afford to screw up again.
“
Garren,” Freya says urgently, “get up. Reagan’s been shot.” The two of us have gotten into the habit of not saying each other’s names out loud much, except when we’re alone and can be our real selves instead of the Holly and Robbie aliases that have helped keep us hidden.
That makes something as simple as my name sound intimate on
Freya’s lips, but what I hear now is alarm. In my newly conscious state I don’t understand what she’s telling me. Ronald Reagan was shot back in 1981. The shooter, John Hinckley, Jr. was found not guilty by reason of insanity and locked up in a psych ward somewhere.
“What?” I murmur.
“
Again?
”
“It’s on the TV right now. He was doing a Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery
.” Freya’s changed into jeans and a maroon button-down shirt, and she folds her arms at her waist and stares impatiently through the open doorway into the hall. A newscaster’s voice is saying something about clearing the area, his tone controlled but laced with urgency.
I throw my legs over the side of the bed, grab for my jeans on the floor and tug them on. Freya and I sit
on the living room couch with our shoulders pressed together, the TV tuned in to ABC news. The correspondent on the scene in Virginia stares penetratingly into the camera as he declares, “At this time no one can confirm the president’s condition, but as we saw, the shooter has been apprehended.”
“The secret service rushed into the crowd and took him down right away,” Freya explains.
“Did you see him?” I ask. The Arlington crowd is chaos. A swarming mess of soldiers in formal military uniforms, politicians in sedate suits, and smartly dressed civilians, almost everyone but the soldiers either panicking or freezing in place.
We both must be thinking the same thing. Is the U.N.A. responsible for this? Last time
, Reagan was only shot
once
during his lifetime. The occasion back in 1981 everyone knows about. This second shooting wasn’t part of American history as we knew it. Neither was Mitchell Nelson, a congressman from Texas and America’s current Vice President. Freya and I have talked about him before, theorizing that Mitchell Nelson must have something to do with U.N.A. plans. Otherwise, wouldn’t George Bush, Sr. be the current Vice President like he was the first time around?
“Only from behind when one of the security guys tackled him to the ground,” Freya
replies. “I couldn’t even see that clearly. It happened so fast.” On screen, sirens wail, and back at the studio the anchorman is narrating over footage of the anxious crowd dispersing. Ten minutes later the network begins to replay Reagan’s Memorial Day speech. “They loved America very much,” he says solemnly. “There was nothing they wouldn't do for her. And they loved with the sureness of the young.”
That’s when it happens. A bullet to the neck brings Reagan to his knees. A burly bodyguard throws himself in front of the president and takes
one to the chest. In the crowd, security men rocket in the direction the shot was fired from. As ABC slows the footage, I think I spy the shooter holding his gun aloft, not trying to hide his guilt.
“I can’t believe they got to the
president,” Freya says, lifting her feet up on the couch with her and wrapping her arms around her knees. “He’s not going to make it.” But Freya only sees things about people close to her or events that will directly affect her; she’s only guessing about Reagan the same as anyone else would.
The bullet to the neck reminds me of a woman I knew and something that shouldn’t have happened to her. For a moment my mind races down a different track. “Maybe he will,” I say. “Maybe they didn’t get an artery.”
“Maybe.” Freya smooths her lips together. “I don’t even know what to hope for. If this is the U.N.A.’s doing, they have their reasons, but it seems wrong to wish for anyone’s death.”
Freya and I have been having versions of this conversation for over a year, questioning how much wrong a person, organization
, or country can commit in the name of a greater good and still consider itself on the side of right. I don’t know how to quantify the answer, but every time I think of the U.N.A. lurking in the shadows something inside me revolts. The fate of the entire world is at stake and the U.N.A.’s influence is great, but that doesn’t make them the voice of reason. They’ve been wrong about so many things.
And still, that doesn’t mean I want them to fail either. If global warming could be stopped in time there’d be no eco-refugees, no Pakistan-India nuclear exchange. The world would have a chance.
Freya and I hover in front of the TV for over an hour before the newscaster announces, “President Reagan has succumbed to the grievous injury he sustained while addressing the crowd gathered at Arlington National Cemetery. We have also learned the shooter is thirty-six-year-old Stephen Hewko, a motorcycle mechanic from Delaware.” The newscaster is the picture of solemnity as he adds that a statement about Vice President Nelson taking the oath of office is expected shortly.
First
, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster four months ago, and now this. The Americans will be in a tailspin.
Freya looks dazed as she gets up from the couch and drifts towards the kitchen to open a can of Coke. “They’re really doing it,” she says. “They’re changing things.”
My brain begins to race and then, just as abruptly, crashes to a halt. This is too much to process. Everything changed for us when we were sent back and now it’s time for the change to hit everyone else, only they can’t see the ripples the U.N.A. have set in motion. Aside from the directors and their teams, Freya and I are the only ones to realize what they’ve done.
Damn, I need a cigarette. What did I do with my jean jacket last night? I pad into the bedroom and throw my shirt on, scouring the bed and floor for any sign of my jacket. “I hung it in the hall closet,” Freya shouts in after me. “If you’re quitting, how come there’s a package of cigarettes stuffed into your pocket?”
“Last pack,” I swear. “When I finish them, it’s over.”
I trek back into the living room and along the hall
, where I reach into the closet and tug my cigarettes and lighter from my jacket pocket. Then I bound back across the room and pull the sliding door open. The brown-and-grey bird has flown off somewhere, leaving the balcony to me. Out there with my feet bare and my shirt hanging open I feel like someone who desperately needs to quit smoking. As the first cigarette of the day fills my lungs, my shoulders unknot and my brain begins to relax.
“Hi, Robbie,” a voice greets. It’s my neighbour’s kid, Dawn, out on the next door balcony, and I stare at my wrist to check the watch I’m not wearing. Shouldn’t she be at school now?
“Hey, Dawn,” I say. “What time is it?”
Dawn shrugs, her straw-coloured hair rippling in the breeze as she leans over the railing. She’s about thirteen years old and wearing the same purple corduroy overalls that I see her in
roughly every third day. Sometimes Freya and I hear Dawn’s mother shouting through the wall, her words thick like someone trying to speak with their mouth full, and a couple of times when I passed her in the hallway I would’ve sworn I’d smelled alcohol on her breath. But mostly when I see Dawn, her mom’s either out somewhere or asleep.
“Around eight-thirty,” Dawn adds, chewing on her hair.
“Time to do up your shirt, maybe.” Her sarcasm makes me laugh and I jab the cigarette between my lips so I can get down to buttoning. Dawn has more tolerance for Freya, who let her hang out at our apartment and fed her mint ice cream with chocolate sauce the time she got locked out, than she does for me. I think Dawn just accepts me as part of the package deal.
“Better?” I ask, turning to give Dawn a look at my buttoned shirt.
“If you could line the buttons up properly,” she says dryly.
I glance down at my wrinkled shirt and hear her snicker. The buttons are perfect; Dawn’s just
entertaining herself.
“You’re way too easy,” she says, pulling away from the railing to reach f
or the sliding door behind her. A second before she disappears into her apartment, she cranes her neck back and adds, “See ya, Robbie.”
“See you,” I tell her.
Alone on the balcony I finish my cigarette before stubbing it out against the railing. When I move back inside Freya hands me a bowl of Count Chocula mixed with Wheaties, my cereal combo of choice. We settle back onto the couch together, a worry line between Freya’s eyes as she methodically chews her Cheerios. “I’m going to be thinking about this all day,” she says, “wondering what they’re planning next.”
“Me too
. They must’ve already made a lot of changes that weren’t high-profile enough for us to pick up on.” The talking heads on the TV are long-faced and craven, and I squeeze Freya’s knee reassuringly. “They’ve probably given up on us. They have bigger things to worry about.”
I don’t entirely believe that
, but maybe it’s true. They were relentless in their pursuit last year. If Freya hadn’t seen them coming, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. But with the future’s fate resting on their shoulders, how much could two young people like us matter to U.N.A. forces anymore?
Our hands wind together as
Freya and I watch Reagan take a bullet to the neck again. People will be seeing that image repeated all day long. The entire nation must be in a state of shock.
One of the
newscasters says Mitchell Nelson is scheduled to take the oath of office in approximately an hour. Freya reluctantly stands, leaving her cereal bowl orphaned on the couch. “Let me know if anything else happens,” she says. “I have to hop into the shower.” I’d forgotten that Freya has to be over at Expo soon and automatically frown. I wish there were more time before she had to leave, that we could spend the day together adjusting to the implications of the shooting.
Freya’s
lips smack against mine just before she disappears, and when she pads into the room minutes later she’s wearing one towel and has swept her hair up in a second. I tell her she didn’t miss a thing, and Freya unwraps her hair and begins towel-drying it. Her legs are perfectly smooth under the bath towel. I can’t resist reaching out to wrap my hand around the back of her knee and running it up her thigh a little.
Freya’s fingers play with my hair. I lean my head against her belly a
nd listen to her say, “Hey, did I mention Dennis and Scott invited us to a barbecue they’re having on June fourteenth?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll try to
book the day off.” Dennis and Scott, a gay couple who helped us get this apartment, are two of Freya’s best customers at Il Baccaro. Dennis and Scott know the super because they used to live in a larger unit here, before Scott inherited a pile of money from an old aunt and bought them a house over in Kitsilano, just a few blocks up from the beach.
Freya’s really fond of them both and
has referred to Scott and Dennis as the uncles she never had. In 2063 no one would bat an eyelash at their relationship, but in 1986 there are people who hate them on sight. Those people would hate my mothers too. I think about Rosine over in Toronto all the time and wonder how she’s getting by. They stole her memories of Bening when they wiped and covered her and sent her back into the past with me, but other than that, she’s still the same person.
In some ways
, the 1980s is the time before people ruined the planet, and in other ways, it’s a nearly barbaric era. So much hate and judgment based on race, gender, and sexual orientation, things we paid little attention to in 2063.
“Okay,” Freya says
lightly as she pulls away to continue getting ready. “Have fun watching the new future unfold.”
I smirk at the phrase
‘the new future
.
’ There was a fork in the road we weren’t sure was coming, but now it has, and after Freya leaves for work I watch Mitchell Nelson officially become the forty-first president of the United States. He’s about six feet tall, pale, clean-shaven, and unremarkable looking, except for his eyes, which appear steely yet sincere. I keep staring at him, looking for signs of U.N.A. allegiance in his face.
Finally I have to cycle over to Expo to put in a four
-hour shift. A pall hangs over the crowd as I load people on and off the skyride gondolas that give you a bird’s-eye view of the fair. Snatches of conversation about Reagan and Nelson flit by my ears as I take people’s arms to help them. Only the kids seem unaffected by the news. The children are usually the ones who get most excited about the gondola, but normally it seems as if most people who pass through the fair’s entrance gates are ready to believe the future is full of promise. Today, when that might be closer to true than it’s been in a long time, people probably believe it less.