The New Order Page 4

  There may be some tongue involved. I don’t know.

  Like he’s catching PDAs from me, Jefferson takes my hand and doesn’t let go, even as he dispenses high fives to the others. We’d already had our own little reunion in the mess hall, or as I called it, the “hot-mess hall,” on account of things got kind of emotional.

  After the high fives comes a lot of dude-ing and hugging and I’m-so-happy-to-see-you-ing, and then the sugarcoating of seeing one another again sort of dissolves and we find ourselves in this dinky screening room thing under the eyes of our captors. Only they’re not acting like captors. They’re all of a sudden acting like our hosts, like, can we get you anything to drink and so forth, which is kind of strange, since we’d been in lockup moments before. All deeply suspect, which is not to say that I don’t scarf down three cake pops ASAP.

  The old dude seems to be running the show, and Ed the Suddenly Friendly Interrogator is alternately kissing his superior’s ass and trying to lock eyes with me and the others in a way I interpret to convey the message don’t fuck me over.

  Old Guy: “We hope you haven’t been too inconvenienced.” I laugh.

  Then, before the old guy can ask why, Ed the Interrogator says: “These are hard times for all of us. We know you understand that the precautions we took were for everyone’s protection.”

  Which, whatever. Only thing he’s protecting right now is his ass.

  Old Guy: “You are probably all wondering just what has been happening while you all have been…” He searches for the appropriate official term for scrapping it out in a post-apocalyptic shitshow. “Well, I don’t even know what to call what you all have been through.”

  He kind of chokes up, and I suddenly think he must have had grandkids, and the whole feathery-silver-hair-and-crow’s-feet thing starts getting to me, and then I remind myself that I’ve been stuck in the brig for God knows how long and Grandpa must have known.

  Old Guy: “Your government”—and he smiles and nods like he’s just told us that Santa Claus was real—“appreciates what you have… what happened. And wants to get you reintegrated into society as quickly as possible. To that end, we have a little informational film to fill in some of the gaps.”

  Then the lights dim, and a video projector bolted to the ceiling fires up. At first there’s a blue screen, then an insignia for “Carrier Strike Group Nine,” whatever that is, then an official-looking logo that reads “American Reconstruction Command—moving forward.” They look like the snippets of film that used to go in front of movies, after the trailer but before the story actually starts, when production companies and studios and whatever announced themselves with little fanfares and anthems and animations meant to show you that they were important.

  Fade to black, then up on the undulations of the flag, the old red and white nylon stripes with a blue rectangle in the corner. But instead of fifty stars, there’s just one big star.

  The urging of brass and the rumble of drums, a rousing, half-familiar tune that—to my embarrassment—strikes the anvil of my heart and sends painful sparks of tears to my eyes.

  The star fades and faces ghost into focus—George Washington. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Martin Luther King. Susan B. Anthony.

  America, intones a smoky, raspy voice. Then: Land of the free. Home of the brave. Light to the world. Beacon of freedom. Some thought that its light had been extinguished.

  The faces keep fading in and out—unknown ones now, children, elders, careworn faces, laughing faces, faces set with determination, sorrow, joy, anger, faith, hope, love, despair, desire, humor.

  A map of the United States in red, white, and blue. The rest of the continent is an unimportant gray. Black circles expand from the population centers, swamping the land. The music turns off-key and bleak.

  Self-important tobacco addict: But freedom is a fire that can’t be put out.

  “Like white phosphorus,” someone says, and I look up and see it was Brainbox.

  Images now of refugees being rescued, food being distributed, children put back in their parents’ arms by soldiers. I’ve seen these sorts of pictures before, but it was always, like—to be totally honest?—third-worldy people. Like, here, brown people, have some leftover white-people stuff. Now it’s all kinds, but the camera seems to linger especially on the WASPy blond kids.

  Slow motion as a mother and father—it has a sort of composed feel, like a scene made with actors, though the camera is kind of shaky the way they do it when they want things to feel “real”—turn their faces from the soldier who just handed them and their kids a box marked AID toward the sun, which, ooh ooh lemme guess, is meant to mean the Future.

  We picked ourselves up. We found strength in one another. We showed the world that we were not defeated.

  Gray ships plowing through the green sea, fighter jets wheeling in the sky, aligned to one another with spooky precision. Soldiers sliding down ropes from a helicopter. The big-star flag going up over a tropical island—Hawaii, I think, because next thing you know, people are, if you’ll excuse the expression, getting lei’d. A handshake. Salutes. Then, the Union Jack, or at least I think that’s what they call the British flag, a blue field with an asterisk of crosses in the center, flapping next to but ever so slightly below the big-star flag in a gray sky. A congregation bending their necks in prayer.

  And now… faces again, white and brown and every shade in between and around, staring straight ahead in confidence and hope. A blurring series of individuality. So many? I ask myself. How could death have spared so many?

  We will come home.

  And back to the flag with the big star.

  The crashing and banging of the orchestra round off and cinch shut like a garbage bag, and silence sits on us.

  I’m confused. I’m crying—snot is, like, threatening to pour out of my nose and everything—I’m torn up inside by the grief and the hope of the faces, and I’m still high on the music. But, at the same time, I have a sense that my emotions are being pushed around, that there’s something false to it all. It’s been a long time since I’ve been advertised to, but that’s the part of me that’s being touched. Touched, like, in a creepy way.

  Back at the Square we would watch anything on our movie nights, the lovingly maintained DVD player fed from puttering generators. Even ads, which reminded us of the world that was gone as much as anything else. This advertisement, if that’s what it is, promised me something fresh.

  Then again—it didn’t actually tell me anything. There was practically no information in it. What I understand is that the government, or a government, of the country, or a country that is calling itself America, has survived. Something to do with Hawaii. Something to do with England. I also understand that there’s some sort of plan to “come home.” I assume this means people are ready to go back to America and defeat the Sickness. But I can’t be sure. And I think about the message from the book: Do not cooperate…

  Ed the Interrogator: “What do you think?”

  Pause.

  Me: “You guys changed the flag?”

  A quick glance between the interrogator and the old dude.

  Old Guy: “It’s the same flag, but instead of the fifty separate stars, there is one single star, signifying unity.”

  Well, duh.

  Me: “Oh. I thought that was Texas. The Lone Star thing.”

  Ed the Interrogator (a little annoyed, as if he doesn’t know whether I’m being stupid or purposely provocative): “No, it means unity.”

  Old Guy: “E Pluribus Unum.”

  Me: “Just a little more unum than pluribus.”

  The moment sits there.

  Old Guy: “You must have something else to say.”

  A little more silence, then—

  Theo: “It looks like bullshit.”

  The word bullshit was pronounced “buuull sheeeeeeiiit,” to emphasize the bullshittiness of it all as much as possible, I guess. A way of saying it evolved to cope with thousands of hours and days of takin
g it from the Man.

  The old dude and the interrogator don’t seem to know how to respond to that.

  Ed: “How do you mean, Theo?”

  I think he uses Theo’s name to put him on alert, like, we can get personal about this if you want.

  Theo: “Look, don’t take a genius to know you’re selling us something. Question is what?”

  Brainbox: “I’d say that, given the evidence, they want us to take it on faith that they know what’s best for everyone. So we should do whatever they want us to, despite the fact that we have been kept in solitary confinement.”

  The old guy looks at Brainbox and the rest of us like we are the most heartless bastards that ever kicked a sack of puppies.

  Old Guy: “I’ve seen this before. I don’t want to hold it against you. Conflict can make a person cynical. I understand that you’re not going to find it easy to adapt to new circumstances, son.”

  Theo: “I’m not your son. How could I be?”

  Captain looks at Theo and lets him have it.

  Captain: “Man, shut the fuck up. You know what he means.”

  I’m surprised that Captain just laid into Theo like that.

  The old dude, disappointed, looks around at the rest of us.

  Jefferson: “I think it’s a little short on details.” Then, after a moment’s thought, he adds, “Sir.”

  Sir? I note his little tip of the hat to hierarchy and obedience. I look at him, and he blushes. I remember that his dad was some kind of ass-kicking Japanese-American war hero.

  Old Guy: “What kind of details do you want?”

  Then the questions come tumbling out, voices overlapping each other.

  Me: “Who’s left?”

  Jefferson: “Is this a dictatorship, or what? Who’s running the country? Is there a president?”

  Brainbox: “You mean everybody’s living in Hawaii? How is there enough food?”

  Peter: “What the hell are you doing here off the coast? Why don’t you try to save people?”

  Me: “Have you cured the Sickness?”

  Theo: “What about our allies? Are they still our allies?”

  Peter: “What happened to the rest of the world?”

  Old Guy holds his hands up and pushes down on an invisible mass, like the questions are coming out of a car trunk that he can’t get closed. The interrogator looks at him, mouth twisted, as if to say, I told you this wouldn’t work.

  Finally, we quiet down and the admiral says, “We want to answer all your questions, in good time. But first we just need you to understand that we are all in this together. And that we need your…”

  Peter: “Collaboration?”

  Ed: “Your cooperation.”

  Jefferson: “If you want our cooperation, we need yours, too.”

  The old dude’s neck straightens at that, and he’s about to answer when the interrogator gets in first.

  Ed: “Such as?”

  Jefferson (looks at me, for strength maybe): “For starters, you could stop treating us like criminals. Instead of locking us up separately—”

  Me: “Lock us up together.”

  Brainbox: “It’s pretty evident that you’re not worried about getting the Sickness from us. I’m gathering that we don’t have the virus in our bodies anymore?” No response. “That’s what I thought. So give us the run of the ship. Or at least the right to see one another and get some fresh air.”

  Jefferson: “And from now on, we talk to you, not to him.”

  He means the old dude and not Ed. Ed doesn’t look too happy about this, needless to say. He’s about to give Jefferson a grade-A can of verbal whup-ass when the old dude says, “Okay.” Simple as that. Okay. I try to keep the thought, Yeah, bitch! out of my mind or at least out of my mouth as I look at Ed. Himself, he’s swallowing whatever bile has just surfaced on his tongue. But I feel like we haven’t heard the last of him.

  It’s like the mystery man said. There’s lots of facets.

  THE “COMMON AREA” that they give us a few days later looks to be some sort of repurposed officers’ mess. The place shows signs of having been hurriedly cleared. There are drifts of paperbacks, comic books, and magazines piled into the corners, and a dry-erase board on one wall still carries an uninterpretable scrawl of symbols and acronyms that I figure must be some sort of procedural recap.

  The books are pre-Sickness, mostly dog-eared and broken-spined. But the magazines are new.

  At least—they’re new to me. Most are weeklies covering the rampage of the Sickness. I have to deduce this from the pictures, since stories dealing with the disease have been redacted; swaths of text have been blotted out with black ink. But whoever has been doing the job has been unable to deal with nuance and ellipsis; in tangential references from entertainment columns and sports reports and even from the lacunae of the dark pen strokes, I start getting a sense of the recent past, like feeling my way around a big, dangerous machine in a dark room.

  As Donna has told me, the Americas are gone. Elsewhere, science and a pragmatic brutality (the details are sketchy, but I have the sense that a homicidal quarantine, like a firebreak of living people, was instituted) staved off the Sickness. Something terrible has happened in the Middle East. And everywhere there is mention of “the Shock.” This is not the Sickness but some kind of knock-on effect, not physical but societal, that gets blamed for all kinds of political unrest around the globe.

  I’ve been under a delusion all those days in the brig. Knowing that the Sickness hadn’t eaten through the rest of the world, killing all the adults and the children the way it had in the States, I assumed that everything else remained as it had been before. As though a giant hand had plucked a continent from the face of the earth and left the rest of the world precisely the same.

  Of course that made no sense. You couldn’t have a seventh of the world disappear without pulling other things along in its wake. There’s a sort of gravity to people and to societies. I don’t understand it yet—most of the analysis that I can find is larded with terms I don’t really understand—sovereign debt, exchange balance, currency crash. I was only halfway through AP econ when the Sickness hit, and we hadn’t gotten to global trade yet. I do remember something around that word shock, though. In economics, a shock is a sudden change in supply or demand that threatens the economic equilibrium. Could that be what the stories are talking about?

  All of the weeklies with pictures of demonstrations and riot police and firefights and car bombs actually don’t even bother me as much as the “lifestyle” magazines, which balance lip service to the dead with a shrill acquisitiveness, as though the secret to maintaining sanity lies in fashioning a fictional self out of store-bought parts. We had it pre-Sickness: an obsession with weight, health, beauty, coolness, sexiness, hipness, stuff. But the tenor of it seems to have gone up an octave. And somehow this connects to the rest of it—the “Shock.” As if consumption were the cure. Readers are exhorted to buy things to keep stores and factories open, and keep workers at work, and by implication, keep the world spinning.

  In the occasional perverse and morbid flight of fancy in the rubble of New York, I had concluded that the silver lining of the extinction of humanity would be an end to global warming. But it doesn’t look like that’s on the table. They’re cranking out shit even faster than before, as if to make up for the habits of the dead billion.

  And I may be unused to it, since I’ve been away so long, but the preoccupation with youth seems to have hit a peak. All the fashions and gizmos and entertainments have veered toward an event horizon of the pubescent, as if the uncanny adolescent resistance to the Sickness has added another element to its usual fascination.

  When I look at it cynically, everything is about hormones. That was what had kept us alive in the first place, the dip in binding proteins that made teens resistant to the Sickness. And, maybe, it’s hormones that spur the youth fetish in the pages of the magazines, hormones that drive people to devise ingenious ways of killing one another,
hormones that make them cling to the life the Sickness is trying to steal. We’re puppets on chemical strings.

  This train of thought is going nowhere I want to be. So I look at Donna. That’s my favorite thing to do nowadays. Maybe it’s only hormones that connect us, too. But I think it’s more. Through all the chaos of the Sickness, and the hand-to-mouth scrabbling of the Square, and the blood-spattered road that led us here, what kept me alive was loving her.

  I think about the Annie, the stout little tugboat we took to Plum Island. That was where my and Donna’s parallel lines had, impossibly, converged. Something had warped the world’s geometry in its gravity to allow it.

  Was it love? That was just a word, like truth or justice. It was what it was, without saying it.

  But we’re on a different ship now, floating in its own saturated suspension of time. And I fall prey to the temptation to let go of my worries and take what happiness I can. Donna and I requisition one of the boxy cabins off the mess for our own and share the comically thin mattress, taking turns spooning each other through the night.

  Maybe this is what living in a dorm would have been like. Donna even decorates with pictures of palm trees and flowers cut out of the magazines. She calls it “inferior design.” But it turns out I’m easily the more domestic of the two of us, picking up Donna’s cast-off clothes and making the bed. I mind her messiness, but I do not mind having the chance to mind, the grip she has on my awareness. The disparities and difficulties of sharing with someone only make me aware of the amazing fact that I’m not alone, after being trapped so long in the echo chamber of my own brain. I tell her things that I thought would never exit my head, and she tells me her things, and the feeling is like a great pressure being released and replaced with a kindling warmth. I suppose that this is love, or if it isn’t, it will definitely do.

  There are questions baying like dogs outside of this contentment, of course. What are we doing here? What will become of us? What do the people who sent the secret messages want, and when will they contact us again?