The New Order Page 16

  And all its charms, like death without its terrors.

  And the sense and music of it work through my brain, two lines like a spring-loaded machine of meaning, and I think of a night long, long ago when I looked at a sleeping Jefferson and wanted to tell him everything. And for a moment, the pain is almost too much, but then knowing that somebody had felt just that way, hundreds of years ago, makes it better, and then a duck quacks at its family from the bank, and I trail my fingers in the cool water, and the white limestone underbelly of Clare Bridge is passing overhead as Rab kneels down and threads the punt through the gap with the pole trailing tail-like behind. In the gloom under the bridge, he looks at me, and I feel or fear that he can read my face, so I look away, start joking around with Michael and Soph.

  Am I disappointed that it’s not just him and me? Of course not. Why would I think that? We come to the lock between the upper river and the lower river, under the windows of an old pub called The Mill. We get out of the punt and push it up the rollers to the upper river—a tough effort after all the champagne, but passersby help us—and then Michael punts us another half mile or so, to a field that rolls down from Grantchester. We tie up the punt to a tree by the water and hike up a field of cows to a pub called The Green Man. They get me to try warm beer. I like it. We eat fries and mackerel pâté and Scotch eggs and then visit the little old church, cool and quiet and dreamy, and then we head back to the punt and find crows eating our bread and cheese, and then we set off again. A little tougher now, since our heads are lighter, and I give punting a try, and I’m absolutely terrible at it, zigzagging the punt from one side of the river to the other, and Soph takes over, and she’s great at it, and Rab and Michael try bridge-jumping, which is when you stand at the front of the punt as it’s moving and lift yourself onto a bridge as the boat passes under it and then run across the road and jump back in before the punt is gone past, and Michael manages it and Rab falls into the river, which is hilarious, except that people say the Cam is infected with rat syphilis, whatever that is.

  Laughing, we pull Rab back into the boat. He takes off his shirt to dry, and I watch the water drip from his hair down the rounded sluice of his collarbone, down the muscles of his stomach. Rab sees me seeing him, and I stop. Frankly, I don’t know why I’m doing it. I mean, I guess I’m a little tipsy. My brain is just taking everything in randomly—nice sunshine, nice leaves, nice water, nice muscles. Anyhow.

  By the time we’re back at the boathouse, the buzz is wearing off and turning into a dull headache. We scrabble together all our stuff and return the punt and the pole to the boatman, and I head back to my rooms, dazed.

  Past Titch, sullen and resentful from being left behind. Welsh is waiting in my living room for tea. That’s what he prefers to call what, back on the Ronald Reagan, they would have called a “debriefing” (which always made me feel like I was supposed to take off my underwear) and I would have called an “interrogation session.”

  Welsh always brings something from a French patisserie in London, carefully tied up in a powder-blue box, to break the ice.

  He knows that I love almond croissants and pistachio macaroons; he has even gifted me an espresso machine with climate sensor. Such is the intimacy of “handler” and “agent,” which is how he defines our relationship.

  It always begins very easy breezy, glancing off the surface of things, like an awkward parental visit. How am I settling in? Making friends? Anything I need? I point out to him that, since I appear to have an open line of credit, if there’s anything I need, I can just get it.

  Me: “Which I meant to ask about. I really appreciate the, uh, bottomless allowance and everything, but given as how I am not likely to be a big earner anytime soon, what am I going to do when the bill comes due?”

  Welsh: “In fact, you’re already paying your way. Her Majesty’s government is very happy to employ you as a consultant. You’re quite a rare commodity.”

  Me: “Commodity?”

  Welsh: “I thought I wouldn’t sugarcoat it.”

  Which is funny, given that he’s bribing me with pastries, but…

  Something occurs to me.

  Me: “Why did the US give me up so easily?”

  Welsh: “Who said it was easy?”

  Me: “What did you pay for me?”

  Welsh: “Oh, nothing like money. That would be unseemly. Besides, you’re invaluable. You were part of an accommodation with the Reconstruction Committee.”

  I don’t like the sound of that. Makes me feel like an object.

  Welsh: “And, your higher-ups had determined that they had reached the end of their workable relationship with you.”

  Me: “Whereas you felt like you could still get me to put out?”

  Welsh shifts uncomfortably.

  Welsh: “I am continually impressed with the… pungency of your turn of phrase. But… yes, I suppose we felt that there might be information that had been overlooked, or forgotten, or seen from the wrong angle.”

  Me: “You think I’m holding out.”

  Welsh: “We think you may have forgotten something that might be useful.”

  Me: “So what about hypnotism?”

  Welsh: “Fanciful.”

  Me: “Truth serum?”

  Welsh: “Overrated.”

  Me: “Torture?”

  Welsh: “Counterproductive.”

  I look at him. The way he answered makes me think that, if it actually were productive to him, he might be just fine with torture.

  Welsh: “And not something that allies engage in, of course.”

  Me: “If I have all this useful information, wouldn’t other people want it, too? How about, like, China? Or Russia?”

  Welsh: “Oh, I don’t see how you’d want to assist them. Everything I know about you tells me that you are devoted to the idea of individual liberty.”

  I think of the Uptowners; I think of my people at the Square. Yeah.

  Welsh: “But—yes, you would be a subject of great interest to foreign powers and enemies of our governments. That is why we take such pains to protect you. And why your… spree the other night was of such concern to us.”

  He means the townie ass-kicking evening. They’re still mad at me about that. I change the subject.

  Me: “So—on the individual liberty thing. I’ve noticed that, like, not everybody has the liberty to enter and exit the city limits.”

  I’ve been wandering, kind of ruminating. That’s a word Jefferson told me about once. It has to do with cows. People associate it with walking around, which is what cows do, except really, it refers to the biggest stomach that a cow has, the rumen, which is where food goes first before it’s vomited back into the mouth as cud for chewing. A person wandering and chewing over thoughts again and again is like a cow chewing grass, except he’s belching ideas back and forth in the different parts of his brain. Sometimes I find myself at the city limits after a long session of brain-cud-chewing; and there I see cops and soldiers, standing by unobtrusive laser-light-and-sensor barriers. Lots of people can pass back and forth without any to-do, but sometimes an alarm goes off, and the cops and soldiers cluster around the offending passerby like white blood corpuscles around a virus, and they go over a bunch of authorizations on their iPhones. I’ve never seen anybody let through after that. There are always a few people lurking at the end of the road, checking out the back and forth, but the vast majority just go about their business and don’t try their luck, like dogs that have been trained by those Invisible Fences they used to sell in SkyMall.

  I might ask anybody about this, Rab or Soph or whatever, but I don’t want to seem like I don’t know something I should. Besides, I’d prefer to get an answer from the horse’s mouth, presuming the government is the horse and Welsh is the mouth.

  Welsh: “Yes. That’s a result of the Safe Cities Act.”

  He appears ready to leave it at that.

  Me: “Safe Cities Act?”

  Welsh: “Back in the old days, before the…
considerable increase of the already considerable influence of your country’s politics on mine, it would have been known under a more—shall we say—honest name. Something like the ‘Restriction Act,’ say. But ‘Safe Cities’ has a certain ring to it.”

  Me: “And?”

  Welsh: “And, in brief, every citizen—you’ll be amused to know that for my countrymen, the official term is subject, by the way—has a freedom of movement corresponding to his individual security profile and residency status. Of course, most law-abiding and economically participatory citizens can go most places, and the Home Office’s system handles automatically any requests for travel outside personal boundaries, through their app. Most people have very few issues with it.”

  He takes a bite of macaroon.

  Me: “Economically participatory?”

  Welsh: “Those who have not opted out of the system or been encouraged, indirectly or directly, to opt out. What in your country you would have called good citizens, or ‘fully functioning members of society.’”

  Me: “So… some people are not allowed to come to Cambridge? Like, actually enter the city? Ever?”

  Welsh (shrugs): “Is everyone allowed into the college? No and no. Only fellows and students. Even visiting the college is restricted to members.”

  Me: “But…”

  Welsh: “Is everyone allowed onto military bases? Government buildings?”

  Me: “Yeah, but that’s because of security, right? Like, official secrets and whatnot.”

  Welsh: “You’ve hit the nail on the head, Donna. Our conception of what is secure and what isn’t has changed.”

  Me: “Why?”

  Welsh: “The tragic effects of what you call ‘What Happened’ are not limited to America. A panoply of indirect effects has caused great turmoil throughout the world. In prehistory, if an entire continent had its population obliterated, there might be no effect whatsoever on the rest of the globe. But by the beginning of this century, the economic, social, and political fabric of the world was a rather tight weave—everything was connected. Consider the damage the loss of the American market did to European industry. The reorganization of global markets toward China, Russia, and India. Massive unemployment. Social unrest. Riots. Cultural strife—as you can imagine, the apocalyptic destruction of the United States was viewed by some religious groups as a validation of their particularly extreme form of fundamentalism. Then came the US Navy’s seizure of the Strait of Hormuz and the war with Iran. You’ll hear people referring to all of these factors generally as ‘the Shock.’ A pretty apt term, if one wants to boil down a very complex state of affairs. Anyway, to make a long story medium-length, the Shock demanded what they call, euphemistically and optimistically, ‘a robust response.’ The Unity government felt it had to take steps to ensure calm at home as well as abroad.”

  Welsh eyes me over the rim of his cup.

  Me: “Well, I guess I better remember to keep my phone with me, in case I ever want to get a beer in the wrong place.”

  Welsh: “You can always get the chip.”

  He means a subdermal implant. Like the precleared status the TSA used to have. I’ve seen it on a lot of the students, a button-sized lump under the nape of your neck.

  Me: “No thanks. In my time, they only did that to dogs.”

  And that’s the thing: I’m years behind here. For starters, back in New York, we’d been plagued back to the Stone Age. And while we were slugging it away back home, the rest of the world was on fast-forward.

  My mind is kind of sorting through all this when Welsh pulls the old quid-pro-quo deal. This happens after the macaroons and the answers; as though these kinds of piddling offerings substituted for an invitation to start fiddling around in my memory.

  Welsh: “Now. The last time we spoke, you were telling me about the Uptowners. Forgive me if I’m getting this wrong—they were a fairly aggressive bunch?”

  Me: “Uh, if by ‘aggressive’ you mean homicidal, yes.”

  One part of my mind plays a video of Cheekbones, sitting opposite me in the Campbell Apartment at Grand Central, telling me that if God meant women to speak for themselves, he would have made them stronger. I tell him to try me; he threatens to torture me and the others to death.

  Welsh: “And… socially backward?”

  Me: “Like, caveman backward.”

  Welsh: “But they controlled the Bazaar, which was the central marketplace?”

  Me: “They had more guns than anybody else, so, yeah. And they wanted to run things by way of a bank. Like, reintroduce money and control the money, so they could control who got what. Brainbox called it Ferrari currency.”

  Welsh: “Ferrari currency? Extraordinary.”

  Me: “Wait. A different car. Fiat currency. That’s it. And a ‘state monopoly on violence.’ Which I guess means that it’s okay for you and your friends to kill people, but nobody else can.”

  Welsh: “I see. And this ‘state’—or rather, city-state, since we’re dealing with a relatively small geographical area—how far did it extend?”

  I think about that.

  Me: “Well, on the west, it stopped at Central Park, which is Fifth Avenue.”

  Welsh: “Someone else owned Central Park?”

  Me: “The escaped polar bear owned Central Park. Until we killed it.”

  After it killed SeeThrough.

  Welsh: “You astound me.”

  Me: “I astound myself. On the south side, I’d say they controlled as far down as the mid-Forties.”

  Welsh straightens in his chair a little bit at this. It’s like he’s a hunting dog that suddenly got a whiff of fox or whatever, except he’s trying to act cool. I might not have noticed if he hadn’t done this before; like, I can tell what he’s after by the questions he’s asking. He tries to hide the ones he really cares about by asking all sorts of other questions, but I can tell which ones he thinks are trivial by his body language and how I feel while answering them. Sometimes it seems like no big deal, and other times it feels like I’m on the spot, even though, on the surface, there’s nothing special about the way he’s asking. As though, beneath the business of the two of us sitting there and talking, there were two other selves having a different sort of dialogue.

  Anyhow, I know that he is really interested in the UN for some reason. And sure enough—

  Welsh: “I see. Did the territory extend all the way to the East River?”

  And I really want to say, “You mean did their territory include the UN?” because I know that’s what he’s really asking and I want him to know that I’m smart enough to know it; but sometimes it’s handy not to seem as smart as you actually are.

  Me: “Uh… not sure.”

  I can see that he’s disappointed, even though he’s acting unfussed. “Up on the north end, they had a border with Harlem. Bad blood up there.”

  Welsh: “Between the Uptowners and the—ahhh—”

  Me: “The black kids? Yeah. They be beefin’.”

  Welsh: “Why?”

  Welsh doesn’t care about that, I can tell, but he’s trying not to show it.

  Me: “Oh, I don’t know. Because the Uptowners are racist thugs? Because there were no cops left to keep the Harlem kids down? Because why not?”

  Welsh takes this in with an owlish look. Then he makes his stab back at what really concerns him.

  Welsh: “To jump around just a bit, I wonder if you might tell me a bit more about the final days of the Sickness, before your ‘tribe’ formed, before…”

  Me: “Before the whole Lord of the Flies deal?”

  Welsh: “Yes. As it were, before the age of city-states. I’m wondering what it must have been like, as the structure of society began to collapse. For instance—what sort of picture do you have of the Crisis Meeting at the United Nations?”

  Me: “The What Meeting?”

  Welsh: “It was known as the Crisis Meeting at the time. The president called upon the heads of state of the UN member nations to attend a summit co
nvened at the General Assembly Building. Some came. Others refused.”

  Me: “Oh, yeah. I remember that. It was on TV. Some people were pissed that people were blowing off the president. Some people sort of got it, like, who would want to fly into a crisis, even though the CDC was saying that the UN would be safe and everything? That was just before the power went.”

  Welsh: “What was the last thing you remember? About the UN meeting?”

  Welsh is acting all casual.

  Me: “It’s a little hazy. Everybody in my building was dying. Including, you know, my family and whatnot.”

  Welsh (nods): “Yes. I apologize.”

  Me: “For what?”

  Welsh: “It can’t be a very happy time to revisit.”

  Me: “Not so much.”

  He sits there a moment, perhaps pondering the awfulness of the situation, then, perhaps, considering whether he can afford, in the overall economy of cooperation, to press me further.

  Welsh: “Leaving that aside for a moment, I wonder if we might go over the list of known tribes in New York…”

  When Welsh and I are done, I go out for a little shopahol, which is what I call what you consume when you’re doing retail therapy. Consume is a strange word when you apply it to shopping, actually. I mean, it’s not the same as actually swallowing something. You still have the thing right there. Maybe the consuming refers to what’s being eaten up far away, the burning off of coal somewhere in China where the plastic is being molded, or the eking out of spindles in Bangladesh where the fabric is woven by giant machines and little children. On this end, it feels a lot more like creation—I walk in with empty hands and leave with a pair of shoes or a bag or a book. Something from nothing. In theology, this is called creation ex nihilo, which is Latin for “from nothing.” (I am loving English; it’s so much more than I thought it would be.) So maybe that’s the reason it makes me feel good—at least, it makes me feel good for a little bit. It soothes the anxiety that a visit from Welsh tends to bring. It feels like being a creator. Especially with my magical line of credit from Her Majesty.

  Of course, I know that none of this is ex nihilo. In fact, as Brainbox once told me, nothing is either created or destroyed. All of this stuff came from someplace—that’s where the factories in China and the little kids in Bangladesh come in. Trace this dress back—the cotton of the fabric from plants in Egypt, the plastic of the buttons from petroleum by-products from the ground of Iraq and shipped to Shanghai—and you start to see this web of causes, this wonder of raw stuff becoming finished stuff, raw resources becoming fine things as they travel around the world to find their way to a shelf in a shop in Cambridge. That’s the altar I’m worshipping at, the altar of the transubstantiation (not bad, huh, Jefferson?) of stuff. That’s my faith, and the blessing of that faith is the squirt of pleasure I get as I donate my tithe and carry away the miraculous product.