Читать книгу Sharp and Dangerous Virtues - Martha Moody - Страница 14

true believers

JOHN PATTERSON, DAYTON’S flood-time hero, made his fortune in cash registers. Cash registers are—think about it, Chad said—an open admission that money is a temptation and people steal. The early National Cash Register sales literature stated this fact quite freely. Why should a merchant spend big money on a machine to tally sales and issue receipts? So an employee couldn’t charge nothing. So an employee couldn’t slip a friend two dollars of change instead of one, or pocket a customer’s payment, or miscalculate a sale. So a customer couldn’t return a sales item and say he’d paid full price. The cash register business was founded on the propositions that employer and employee have inherently different interests, that transactions benefit from daylight, that money is a powerful lure. None of the cash register’s suppositions about human behavior is positive. It is, in its essence, a surveillance machine.

The other invention associated with Dayton—Chad went on—is more uplifting. Wilbur and Orville Wright were the bottom half of four brothers; their father, with whom they lived his entire life, was a United Brethren bishop known for his devotion to his family and his obstinate, often divisive, theological convictions. Their mother died of TB before Wilbur and Orville reached adulthood, and Wilbur nursed her in her final days. Their sister, Katharine, who also lived with their father, was the rare woman of that time who sought and obtained a college degree. The Wright brothers were not college-educated; in fact, neither of them finished high school. They were bright enough—the family had hopes of sending Wilbur to Yale, and Orville in seventh grade won an award as the best math student in the city—but for years they bounced around, the sort of young people that in a higher social stratum might be labeled dilettantes. When Orville tried to date a young woman from a prominent local family, her mother said, “You stay away from that boy. He’s crazy.” As a youth, Wilbur, after a hockey injury, was laid up for years with heart palpitations, writing later, with some passion, of how a man can become “blue.” He worked as a clerk in a grocery store, as a printer, and briefly published a local newspaper. Eventually he and Orville opened (Chad winked at this moment, said, “this is the famous part”) a bicycle shop, where they built the bicycles they sold. The Wright Brothers were slight, neat, slim-hipped men—birdlike, you might say. They always wore business suits, Orville’s much nattier than his brother’s. Shy and awkward, they never courted or married. Wilbur wrote to a relative: “I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are lacking in determination and push.”

And yet. “For some years,” Wilbur wrote in 1900, “I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man.”

“Afflicted,” Chad said. “Isn’t that an interesting word?”

“EDUARDO, MI HOMBRE,” the man in the booth said. “You guiding the woman’s tour today?” Lila was the sole passenger in a truck entering the Grid, her car left behind in an underground garage. She had been iris-scanned, beamed by a materials detector, and patted down. She would be spending the night in a Grid guesthouse. She had been told to bring a change of clothes and toiletries, but no percs or phones were allowed. Her driver, Eduardo, had driven right up to the Grid barrier and through an archway that led to a checkpoint. Behind the checkpoint was a slightly shorter wall that was curved to block any outsiders’ view. There were soldiers with rifles on either side of the road; on the left, beside the checkpoint, a woman soldier seemed to be making time with the man in the booth.

Eduardo had a definite accent, and Lila wondered where he’d come from. He was taking her, he said, to the guesthouse at Village 42. Other than that he’d said little. Perhaps his English was a problem.

“Shut your mouth!” the female soldier cried to the man in the booth. She leaned into Eduardo’s truck and spoke directly at Lila. “Don’t let these mariachis give you a bad first impression.” Lila nodded awkwardly. “You been on the Grid before, darling?” the female soldier asked. Her hair beneath her hat was poufy and clearly took effort.

Lila, stiffening, shook her head. She didn’t expect another woman, especially one younger than her, to call her darling.

“You’ll love it,” the woman said. “Everyone loves it. Best place in the world.”

This surprised Lila speechless, and suddenly the checkpoint man was handing back her pass card, the gate was raising, the female soldier was waving, and Eduardo steered them right then left and there they were, two people in a truck with a wall behind them, looking out under a heat-hazed sky over 25 million agricultural acres that used to be part of Ohio.

It was less flat than Lila expected. Oh, it was flat: flat and huge and green (although the acres of wheat had their golden look) but flat less like a plain than like a beach, with small rises and hillocks and ridges. There was a road straight in front of them going north and a crossroad that extended east and west, and Lila knew from her reading that ten miles north there’d be another crossroad, with another crossroad ten miles beyond that: not for nothing was the transformed landscape called the Grid.

“We go north first,” Eduardo said. And suddenly, with the fields falling from the road around her, it wasn’t enough for Lila to be here, on the ground: she wanted to be in a plane above the landscape. She wondered at her own greediness, reminded herself she was lucky to be here at all. She sneaked a glance at the speedometer: eighty. Eduardo’s hand was relaxed on the steering wheel; he looked around the Grid with possessive nonchalance. “Corn’s good this year,” he said. And indeed, the corn plants were erupting from the ground like thousands of green fountains. Thousands? No, millions, and Lila, who in water was used to big numbers, felt almost humbled by the thought.

“Wait a minute,” she said after fifteen or twenty silent minutes. “Can we stop and look?”

He glanced at her, then halted the truck in the middle of the road. Lila almost objected, but of course no one else was coming, and if they did Eduardo’s truck could be spotted from miles away. “Look,” he said, waving his hand, and Lila got out and stood in the road.

So this was the Grid. It was broad and not quite flat, and it was alive. Vegetatively, not humanly, alive. Lila’s forehead was slick with sweat. The Ohio sky had been transformed into a Big Sky. Every few miles there was a row of ten or twelve trees. She pointed at one of them and called out to Eduardo, “What?” “Windbreaks,” Eduardo called back from the truck, and this was understandable, although today was hot and still. In front of Lila and behind her, in fields as thick and lush as a giant’s carpet, was soy, the new American mainstay, usually processed into fake meat. Northeast, miles away, beyond acres of corn, buildings of a village shimmered on the horizon. They looked wavery and insubstantial in the heat. No cars.

All the intentional villages had numbers. Village 28 people had heard about: it was the processing center for perch and walleye from Lake Erie. “What number’s that?” she called to Eduardo, pointing to the buildings.

Eduardo frowned and turned off the engine. The whine of an insect became audible. “Oh,” he nodded when she repeated her question. “Village 104. They got a school there. We’re going to 42.” He pointed east.

In the middle distance a reaper crossed a field of wheat, shooting out a spray of chaff. If Lila strained her ears she could possibly hear it. Other than that there was no human sound or motion. The fields of wheat had a teeming look. A fly landed on Lila’s shoulder.

“How many kids in the school?” Lila called, unwilling to leave her spot in the road. A bead of sweat ran down her forehead and stopped at her eyebrow.

Eduardo climbed out of the truck and approached her. “Thirty? They got two teachers, I know that.”

How did they get teachers? Lila wondered if they advertised on the media. No one really had contact with the effs: rumors said they were clannish, suspicious. They married only each other. They rejected embryonic preselection. The Grid had its own message and info system, and data from outside were blocked. Family members that had been removed during the Gridding could send perc messages to the family members who stayed to become Gridians, but in return the outsiders got rare, sporadic answers, usually around holidays. The religion of the Gridians might have changed. There were stories of churches with stalks of wheat on the altar and roasted soybeans in place of communion wafers. “What are they like?” A friend of Lila’s had asked a waitress once in Florida, where the effs took their group vacation. “They’re people,” the waitress had answered. Then, unburdening herself (and the Florida workers, Lila’s friend pointed out, surely signed confidentiality agreements and were monitored): “They dress like bumpkins, and they don’t tip diddly.”

“Where do you live?” Lila asked Eduardo, glancing at his clothes. A buttoned shirt, jeans, work boots: he looked well-dressed enough to her, but she’d never had much sense of fashion.

“Twenty-nine. Nice place. Good people. We call it Gayville.”

It surprised Lila enough to hear Eduardo’s town had an actual name and surprised her more to hear what the name was. She wondered what things about her the youngie in Columbus had read on the computer, what information had been passed on. Suddenly she wondered why Eduardo had been sent to guide her, if he … “Why Gayville?” she burst out, regretting her question right off. She shouldn’t ask questions. They might kick her out.

Eduardo shrugged. “It’s always been called that.”

As if the origins of the name had been lost in time. The Grid was only thirteen years old, and it had taken a good year, Lila had heard, for the villages to be established. Until they were built, the effs lived in clusters of trailers.

“Do you have a mayor?”

Eduardo laughed. “There’re only three hundred and six of us. We don’t need a boss.”

“Are you married to a woman?”

“Tamara.”

“Kids?”

“We have three.” He reached for his pocket. “Want to see them?”

“Cute,” Lila said, inspecting the photo. Like normal kids, she thought. Everyone in the country distrusted, even feared, the effs: people who’d agreed to stay when towns they’d lived in or near were destroyed; people who seemed to thrive in communal isolation; people who apparently had no desire to escape the life their government had planned for them. Their staying on the Grid was like a collective back turned upon what people had taken to calling Free America.

She got back in the truck and Eduardo drove on, a series of small hillocks breaking the cornfields around them, surrounding a very round hill that reminded Lila of something. She twisted her neck to look back at it, a mound like a dromedary hump against the sky, and then she remembered the Indian mound near Lancaster, her hometown. That was when it hit her: this hill, like the Indian mound, was a burial hill of sorts: in it lay the remains of a town.

Bombed, then bulldozed. A new style of B-and-B.

Lila had never really liked this part of Ohio. Too flat, boring, windy. Yet suddenly she was overwhelmed with recollections of things that were gone: the stands of trees lofty as mesas, dark entrances like caverns at their base. Propane tanks tethered like dogs beside small houses. Farmhouses with green-black roofs and a baffling array of vents: square pillows, spouts, chef’s hats. Cows nosing their way across the fields. Gone, all gone. And that was forgetting the towns.

She turned her face to the window, and Eduardo must have picked up some distress in her posture, because he seemed to be driving faster. The fields around them went to wheat and wheat, then corn on one side and wheat on the other, then corn and corn and corn. Lila found to her surprise that she was blinking back tears.

“Mile per mile, America’s most wanted,” Eduardo announced, repeating a slogan. He slammed on his brakes and Lila was thrown forward. “Almost missed the turn. Sorry.” They squealed to the right, onto a road that looked exactly like their first one.

And, a few miles later, he stole a look her way: “Were you from around here?”

“From Ohio, but not Grid Ohio. I was born in Lancaster.” A town that still existed.

Eduardo twisted his mouth in a considering way. “Southeast of Columbus?”

Lila was surprised he knew.

“Pretty down there. Hilly,” Eduardo said. He hesitated, then hazarded a confession: “I like hills.”

“Me too.” Lila thought of the mounds behind them. “But not your kind of hills.” She glanced at Eduardo to see if he realized she knew. Best place on earth. Everyone loves it. Like hell.

His eyes stayed on the road. New hillocks appeared to the north, far away. “It’s good here,” Eduardo said after a pause. “Wait until night.”

They rode for an hour, skirting distant villages, and far away Lila spotted a farmhouse, which as they got closer looked exactly the way it should—two stories, painted white wood, wrap-around front porch, side door with a concrete stoop. A vision from her childhood, the old Ohio back in the nineties and aughts. A free-standing garage stood in the back. The mailbox was spotted like a Jersey cow. All that was missing was the barn with peeling red paint.

“Home, home on the Grid,” Eduardo said, half-singing. He was from the hill country of Texas, he told her, and grew up speaking Spanish. He was one of the rare people accepted on the Grid as a volunteer. They pulled into the crushed stone driveway. “This is the guesthouse,” Eduardo said. He pointed at an upstairs window. “You’ll sleep there.”

White curtains tied open with sashes marked the room that was surely the kitchen. A gray striped cat sat on the stoop in front of the side door. He eyed them warily, then streaked off as Eduardo opened his truck door. This is spooky, Lila thought. This is worse than Disney Universe.

A woman was already coming out the side screen door as Eduardo and Lila approached. She was forty or forty-five, wiry, short haired, wearing a simple white shirt and khaki slacks and a bangle on her arm. She wasn’t unattractive, but her facial features and expressions seemed, like her body, pared down, as if she’d been constructed for efficiency. “Allyssa Banks,” she said, holding out her hand to Lila. “Welcome to the Grid.”

Allyssa and Eduardo chatted in the driveway for a few minutes—about weather and some new storage system for grain—and Eduardo got back in his truck and drove off. Lila realized it had been years since she’d heard the sound of pebbles under tires.

“Come on in,” Allyssa said.

The kitchen floor was linoleum patterned to look like bricks. The lighting fixture was a frosted square of glass tucked up at the corners like a hankie. The refrigerator was a large white rectangle that hummed. “Incredible,” Lila said. “Just like I remember.”

“Wait until you see one of the villages,” Allyssa said. “They’re real, too. Tomorrow we’ll go over to 88 for breakfast and a tour. I’ll orient you this evening. Your room’s upstairs.”

They passed through a small dining room, its table covered with a white plastic lace overlay on top of a green tablecloth. In the living room sat a long curved sofa, an old-fashioned glass-screened TV, a Stratolounger, and two plastic deck chairs. A lamp with shells pressed into its base stood on an oak coffee table. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, all with double beds, and one narrow bathroom. Electric fans were fitted in the front two windows.

“Your choice,” the woman said. “If you pick the room without the fan I’ll move it.”

Lila picked the room at the back, farthest from the road.

“My room’s off the kitchen,” Allyssa said. “You can clean up and I’ll meet you downstairs.”

“Best food in the world,” Allyssa said at dinner, setting Lila’s plate in front of her. People certainly are prideful here, Lila thought, but as she ate she thought Allyssa might be right. Soy loaf, mashed potatoes, fresh green beans with mushrooms, and lettuce and tomato with Thousand Island dressing. “We grow the green beans and potatoes at Plant City,” Allyssa said. Where’s Plant City? Lila wanted to ask, but something about Allyssa discouraged questions. She did request seconds on her food, thinking Allyssa could only take this as a compliment. She wondered how Allyssa stayed so thin. Knowing Lila was in water, Allyssa spent the dinner talking with clear knowledge about the Grid’s average rainfall, irrigation system, and drainage, sounding, Lila thought, like some educational tape.

“I’ve never seen so much corn,” Lila said at one point.

“That’s just around here,” Allyssa said. “Wheat and soy are the major Grid crops.”

“How long have you been here?” Lila asked during dessert, peaches on soy ice cream, a treat Allyssa didn’t partake of.

“Me? Personally? Almost fourteen years.”

“Since the beginning?” Lila said in surprise, and this question seemed to release a switch inside Allyssa, because suddenly she started to talk like a real person.

There were no other Grid visitors tonight—a relief, Allyssa said. The Consort people had been here three weeks ago and refused to share beds: they needed cots in all three bedrooms. Nothing was right for them. They wanted peas instead of cabbage, decaf coffee, air-conditioning. As if this was a hotel instead of someone’s home. “So you do all the cooking?” Lila asked. “Clean people’s rooms?” She was having a hard time figuring his woman out.

“I do everything,” Allyssa said, her low-pitched voice almost purring.

Lila felt a tug of wistfulness. Lila had said things like that, once. She asked, “If you’ve been here fourteen years, were you in on the planning stage?”

“Of the Grid?” Allyssa gave Lila a respectful look. People didn’t wonder about her, Lila realized. They took her as a simple hostess. “I was at an experimental farm in Australia called Lindisfarne.” Not only Allyssa’s voice, but her whole body was relaxing; she reached with her bangled arm to scratch the cat under the table. When Lila caught her breath, Allyssa looked up sharply. “You’ve heard of it?”

“Vaguely,” Lila said. “Didn’t they develop a good desalination system?” Allyssa nodded vigorously, and Lila had the sensation she had just avoided a landmine. She knew the desalination system had been renowned, but that wasn’t why Lila remembered the farm’s name. Something odd had happened at Lindisfarne, some scandal or crime, but Lila couldn’t quite remember what.

“The government people who were interested in maximal production came to us—it was during the Short Times—and asked us to help plan an agro area. It only took us six weeks to scout possible locations, and another six months to plan. We worked day and night, studying data from all over the U.S., picking the site, planning the crops. I came over here in ’32 with the study group. Basically, we thought it up, and then the government took care of the logistics.”

Bigger than the Hoover Dam, people said. A more ambitious project than the Yangtze flooding. As world-changing as the Panama Canal, as the A-bomb, as the Weather Station. And here Lila sat in the center of it with one of its founders, in a farmhouse designed to look innocuous. The enormity of it made Lila dizzy. Back in Dayton she was being marginalized; she might never sit talking to power again.

“Are there other people here from Lindisfarne?”

Allyssa frowned and counted mentally a moment. “Six others.” Very serious, Lila thought. And, oddly, all one color: her eyebrows and skin and hair were medium beige, broken only by a sprinkling of freckles on her nose. Born in Washington State, she’d said, although her mother was originally from Ireland. “I met my husband at Lindisfarne,” Allyssa said.

“He’s one of the six?”

“No. He lives in Paris.”

“France?” Allyssa flashed a rare smile, and Lila shook her head in surprise. Almost impossible to imagine a man in Paris married to a woman living here. Outside, the crickets had started. “Is he French?”

“American,” Allyssa said. “He visits every couple of months.”

“Do you have children?”

A tiny wince, then Allyssa waved her hand toward the window. “This is a magical place. How could a child compete?”