The New Order Read online

  Ed: “Okay. Tell me more about your ‘tribe.’ How many people?”

  Me: “Two hundred, more or less. Less now, I guess, since people are probably still aging out.”

  Ed: “From the Sickness.”

  Me: “Yeah. Or violence, or starvation. But mostly the Sickness. I only made it because of what Brainbox and the Old Man came up with in the lab. How did you guys make it? If you have a cure, Ed, you have to give it to my friends. You have to take it to New York. Kids are dying.”

  Ed: “Like your friends in Washington Square.”

  Me: “Yeah, but there’s more than us. Thousands. A lot of them are assholes, but still.”

  Ed: “You mean your tribe has enemies?”

  Me: “Sure. There’s the Uptowners. There’s the Ghosts at the library—they’re cannibals. There’s—”

  Ed: “What do you mean by ‘cannibals’?”

  Me: “What it sounds like. They eat people. They cook them first, I’ll give them that much credit. Smelled pretty tasty, actually, until you found out what it was. My stomach was growling. Kind of makes you think differently about people and animals and… and everything.”

  Ed doesn’t say anything. I shake off my little Existential Horror Moment.

  Me: “But, hey, whatever floats your boat, right?”

  Ed: “But you say there was no central authority. No one tribe predominated?”

  Me: “No. There were a bunch. Some were stronger than others. The Uptowners had plenty of guns. They had a good chunk of the island. The kids from Harlem might take over soon, though. They were making guns? With three-D printers?”

  Ed: “Three-D printers.”

  Me: “Yeah. Melting down LEGOs and using computers to, like, extrude plastic AR-15s. They’re really smart. And pissed off, on account of, you know, centuries of oppression and unfairness and stuff?”

  Either Ed has a great memory or somebody is recording this, because he never writes anything down, even though I can tell from the way his eyes move that he’s intrigued by this little tidbit. His pupils do these abortive little orbits as he fits the pieces of my story together.

  Me: “Tell me a little about you, Ed.”

  But Ed is not feeling communicative. After a few more questions, he gets up and goes back to wherever it is that he spends his coffee breaks, thumbing through copies of Interrogator Monthly or something.

  Later comes dinner—I can tell it’s dinner because two meals ago it had been powdered eggs and these quadrilateral bacon strips that looked like they were snipped off a spool.

  Something’s different this time.

  The sparrow’s-egg-blue plastic plate is perched on a pedestal that turns out to be a book as thick as a brick. It’s called On Politics by Alan Ryan. On the back it says that “As an accessible introduction to the nature of political thought, On Politics could scarcely be bettered.”

  An accessible introduction to the nature of political thought. Just what I always wanted.

  I heft the book in my hand and riffle the pages, all eleven hundred or so. I inspect it for pictures. For exclamation points. For anything that might be considered vaguely interesting. I don’t know, philosopher dish. Metaphysical dirty laundry. Who wore the toga best? Nothing.

  Somebody has already taken a run at reading it, and judging by the wrinkles along the spine, he didn’t get past this dude Machiavelli. I remember that he was the “ends justify the means” guy. Except he probably hadn’t said that, because all the things people were supposed to have said turned out not to have been said by them, or it turned out they were being ironic. Pretty much no way of getting at the truth. Just like every time “they did a study” proving something, some other “they” did some other study that proved the opposite. That was why I hadn’t been nuts about literature the way Jefferson had been. Not that it was so hard to get a handle on, but it turned out what you thought was a handle wasn’t a handle after all, or somebody would just point out that there was a better handle. Plus, it was all just stories about imaginary people. What the hell could you get from stories about people who never actually existed? That’s why I like the hard, gritty truths of Cosmo and Teen Vogue. Or hamsters eating miniature burritos.

  And as far as intellectual pursuits, I preferred medicine. At least you knew you were doing something that was of some good to somebody. Maybe, just maybe, if everything hadn’t gone to shit, I would have studied medicine. Mom, who was a nurse, would have pissed herself with joy at that. Of course, since I wasn’t, like, a genius, I’d probably have had to take out huge loans and then have been stuck going into plastic surgery or something to pay them back. So, thanks to the Sickness, instead of a future in silicone boob installation and Botox, I’d had a crash course in combat medicine. Broken bones and lacerations and ballistic trauma, cavitation and hydrostatic shock.

  I think about SeeThrough and how I managed to stop her sucking chest wound with a square cut out of a plastic bag before the internal bleeding got her. I decide to try to stop thinking about that.

  So I nudge my mind back to Jefferson and how we didn’t get enough time together. I mean, we had loads of time together. Since we were in first grade. But we didn’t have Time Together until it was too late. Only one night on the Annie as she lolled in the swells off Plum Island, before the Islanders slipped over her sides and took us.

  The impossibly lovely weirdness of lying next to someone, breathing his spent air, seeing your face in his eyes, and realizing that, after all, your purpose is happiness.

  But this line of thought isn’t any good, because I have no idea where he is, if he’s even alive, if they’re at this moment dissecting his body.

  I pick up the book again. The front cover shows a picture of a bunch of beardy ancient dudes hanging out in togas.

  I thumb my way to the first chapter. Apparently it has something to do with how the Greeks were all sort of chilling in their poleis, which were kind of like cities except also like countries. The Persians, who had a big-ass empire ruled by one guy, Xerxes, who was a major a-hole, wanted to take over all of Greece. They figured it’d be easy, because the Greeks were divided and squabbling over the remote and talking shit over and taking votes and everything, but it turned out that the Greeks actually got their act together and ended up kicking some Persian ass. There was a movie about that before What Happened, with all these buff dudes called the Spartans killing bajillions of Persians and saying badass catchphrases and wearing loincloths and generally being hot and awesome. I remember I appreciated all the glutes and biceps and abbage, but at the same time, I was just a little put off by the fact that all the bad guys had been sneering brown-skinned people with funny accents, while most of the Spartans looked like blond surfer dudes, which seemed kind of unlikely. Whatever.

  Anyhow, in real life, as opposed to movie life, after the Greeks win, they all be beefing with one another, especially Athens and Sparta. The Athenians, who have a democracy, keep fucking up because they’re arrogant and pissy and easy for politicians to fool. Plus, there’s a plague (been there, done that) that weakens the Athenians to the point that public order totally breaks down (ditto). The Spartans win the war. Then they set up an oligarchy, which is Greek for a few dudes calling all the shots.

  And you did not fuck with the oligarchy. This guy Plato, whose name means “fatty,” writes about how Socrates, who was kind of his mentor, got brought up on charges that he was dissing the gods and “corrupting the youth.” Despite the fact that this sounds like he was feeling kids up, it’s actually because he was teaching them philosophy, which in this case meant, like, questioning the logic of everything.

  Anyway, one of the big questions in The Republic, which was, like, Plato’s bestseller or whatever, is what is justice? Socrates is at this sort of cocktail party, and he’s all, “What is justice?” Everybody jumps right in, despite the fact that Socrates is famous for giving out intellectual pimp-slaps, so it’s like Bruce Lee has just shown up and sort of innocently asked if anybody feels like spa
rring or whatever, like, no biggie.

  So one after the other, Socrates pwns the different views of justice that the other dudes put forward. Like, helping your friends and hurting your enemies doesn’t make for justice, because we don’t really know who our friends and our enemies are. The strong forcing stuff on the weak doesn’t mean justice, either, because it doesn’t fit in with “virtue” and “wisdom.”

  After thinking about it a little, I start suspecting that Socrates is just playing word games. I mean, that’s all you can say justice is for sure—a word. Everybody has their own private definition of that word, but it probably doesn’t match up exactly with anybody else’s. But these Greek dudes are acting like there is this thing called Justice that exists out there, outside of words, and if only you could see it clearly, you’d know how to act. Which, given everything I have seen and done, strikes me as pretty much bullshit.

  Plato has Socrates lay out this plan for the perfect city, the Republic. Which is a nice idea, except Socrates comes up with all these totally shit-for-brains laws like shared property that you wouldn’t follow unless somebody was watching you 24/7 making sure you didn’t slip up. Not only that, some of the rules are downright evil. Like slavery is fine. And women should be owned communally by men. Which reminds me of the Uptowners. Those dudes got off on controlling women. And I don’t mean controlling them, like, “don’t talk to any other bros.” I mean, like, owning them.

  I think back to Evan, the Uptowner we called Cheekbones, lecturing me about how some people were better than others, his gun laid on the table pointing at my chest.

  Well, fuck him, and Plato and Socrates and all of them.

  The problem is, all of these totally ratched ideas, which were safe enough in a paperback, are possible in the new world. Or maybe I should call it the young world. What Happened has cracked life into pieces, and you can put them back together in all sorts of weird ways. Nothing is true, and everything is permissible. Jefferson told me that, too, though I can’t remember where he got it from.

  I flip through the rest of the book, annoyed. And then I notice that even though the cracks in the spine leave off after a few hundred pages, somebody kept underlining words in the rest of the book, as if they’ve carefully marked stuff out beyond where they’ve actually read. The marks go all the way through the book.

  The individual underlinings make no sense. They start in the middle of sentences and sometimes leave off halfway through a word.

  But then—it’s probably because I’m so bored—I try reading just the first word of each underlining, looking for a code. Very Encyclopedia Brown. And damn if they don’t spell out a message:

  your

  friends

  are

  safe

  do

  not

  cooperate

  with

  the

  investigators

  they

  are

  not

  on

  your

  side

  we

  are

  working

  to

  free

  you

  When my breath comes back, I pore over the book again. Could I be imagining this? Finding a pattern where there’s none? I want to show it to Jefferson. I want to show it to Brainbox—he’d probably be able to prove statistically how likely it is for random words to form sentences that have meaning.

  No. I don’t need them to tell me this is for real. Somebody is talking to me. And telling me that Jefferson and Brainbox and Theo and Peter and Captain are alive.

  I hadn’t realized how afraid I was for them until now, and I cry grateful tears.

  WE ARE SWALLOWED down into the gut of the ship; we are a virus in the works with our elbows grabbed by antibodies. A twisting rectilinear corridor opens to a vast hangar bay as full of weaponry as a child’s toy box. I see helicopter gunships, brutal snub-nosed jets, elegant swallow-tailed fighters, cadres of marines. The whole lethal package hanging over the horizon like a little kid who’s tucked himself behind the corner of a wall, waiting to pull some kind of mischief.

  Underneath the plate with the ribbons of bacon, I find a copy of Us Weekly magazine.

  I look at the hatch through which the guard came to deliver the meal, but it’s already closed again. There’s no note, nor any other indication of why it’s arrived or who sent it.

  Even though I never had time for celebrity gossip, or what Donna calls “pre-apocalyptic social structures,” I smooth the paper down carefully. It’s a luxury from the world outside, and I haven’t read anything for weeks. It’s all I have to put my mind to.

  It’s an old copy, from well before What Happened. Even I had been aware of the “Cheating Bombshell” on the cover. Still, information is a delicacy. The Ghosts, holed up in the public library, had been right about that, even if they had been horrifically wrong about so much else. So I ration it out, morsel by morsel, and shortly find myself, against my inclinations, getting attached to the people in the stories, who are alternately too fat or too thin, have made fashion blunders or have been seen kissing someone who isn’t their girlfriend. Starved as I am for company, they become almost like real people to me, welcomed into the charmed circle of my empathy.

  And, at the same time, removed for years from the society that produced these grotesques, I begin to see them through a different metaphorical filter than before.

  People used to say that since Americans didn’t have a royal family, we projected our urge for hierarchy onto entertainers. That does explain some of the fawning and fetishizing, shadow desires cast by the matter-of-fact glare of democracy. But now I wonder if the deficit being filled wasn’t in fact deeper than the need to be subordinate. Celebrities, as described in Us Weekly, behaved more like Greek gods than aristocrats. Beautiful, fickle, arrogant, angry, slothful, jealous, occasionally taking a bride among the humans, spawning demigods and fabulous monsters. And what did that make the public? Not just commoners, but celebrants. Libation bearers, worshippers sacrificing to the holy mystery of Importance.

  Reading it this way, translating the tack and folly to the sphere of mythology, I manage to enjoy myself and am genuinely sad when I reach the last page, having sucked the pith from every scandal and puff piece.

  Only the crossword is left. But somebody has already done it, and not even correctly. The answers penciled into the boxes have nothing to do with the clues.

  But after a while, they make a sort of sense of their own. If I ignore some random letters put there just to make it less obvious, I can read a message:

  Your friends are safe. Do not cooperate with the investigators. They are not on your side. We are working to free you.

  From somewhere out there, among a crew of thousands, someone is making contact.

  My head buzzes, my veins run hot with adrenaline. And I worry that my feelings can be picked up by the surveillance equipment they must have trained on me. I make a show of obliviousness to the message, flipping the pages back and forth randomly.

  We are working to free you. It brings home fully for the first time that I am imprisoned. I’ve been coddling myself with the thought that, like the interrogator said, I’m under a sort of quarantine rather than just locked up.

  If they’re not going to punish me, why am I stuck here? The initial pretext of protection against the virus has dropped away. The comical scenes of interviews with men in full hazmat suits have ended, and now my captors show no fear of transmission.

  They want something from me, that much is clear. But amid all the questions, I can’t figure out what the something is. Except that, again and again, their curiosity is directed at the lay of the land in Manhattan—what tribe is in control of what turf—and at events immediately before the Sickness took down the grid.

  What on earth can they be afraid of?

  Donna is safe. I haven’t allowed myself to think I’d lost her, not after everything, but they haven’t told me anything, and the news lets me
lower my guard. I wallow for a while in the pangy sensation of wanting her here, now.

  And the others…

  And the kids back at the Square—what do the adults want with them?

  There’s a metallic rap on the door. I’m up and ready for whatever, a fight if they’ve discovered the message in the magazine. I roll it up tightly, slightly skewed so that the tensed and packed pages make a truncheon to jab into someone’s eye.

  When the hatch swings open, it’s a new face, a balding man with a weary smile. He looks bemused at my tensed crouch and menacing magazine. He has a pair of marines with him who eyeball me as if I were a wild animal, but his body language is casual, a little slipshod, like his rumpled uniform.

  “You want me to lay him out, Doc?” says one of the marines flanking him.

  “No, thank you,” he says. He holds out his hand to me.

  “I’m Flight Surgeon Morris,” he says. “I’ve come for your blood.”

  He has a sort of wry smile as he says it, as if we’re both involved in some funny game of pretend.

  I leave him with his hand outstretched, and he shrugs as if to say, I get it. Looks at the rolled magazine in my hand. “You can take that with you, if you like.”

  “Take it where?”

  “Sick bay. Hardly the most exciting spot, but it beats being stuck in here all day.” He smiles.

  “You don’t seem like the others,” I say.

  “These guys are lifers. I was a civilian until I turned thirty,” says Morris. He clears his throat and, somewhat ceremoniously, motions me through the hatch.

  It has been more sleepings and wakings than I can count since I have been out of my gray rectangle. If I run through the hatchway and close the door behind me—I try to remember if there is a latch on the other side or if it’s opened by a key. Then what? Try to negotiate my way through the intestines of the ship, to get—where? Should I call for my mysterious pen pal?