Gretchen drove in silence. Someday she would tell him all about it, how she felt out there, hanging on the VP’s flank, deep in what the agents called vacant mode, a stone defensive Zen, the mind both clean and empty except for what it sees. People leaning out, straining, almost falling over ropes. They touched his hand and took his hand, falling back to reestablish balance, and the mass effect of these human movements was to slow the VP, pull him closer, hands now up his arms and around his neck, dangerous, so dangerous. Every crowd sucked them in, a blind hydraulic suck. Gretchen’s job, straddling his leg, her shoulder to the crowd, was to counteract the suck, to drive and guide him through her pelvis to his thigh, to force him down the ropes, and yes it was a bit like giving birth, the push against the suck, and yes it made her think of Tevon and the night she forced him into light, pop and burst, the openness, pain hallucination, and no man to help her there, no so-called man to help. It was brutal in that way, saving the VP. Later, on the plane, she would cramp up from the pushing. She’d be talking to some colonel, he’d be talking flight plans and MAC-hops and gunship-tasking, his lips moving, and she would be so cramped up inside that she couldn’t listen to the moving lips. She’d sign off on whatever this fool wanted, then hurry to the nearest empty head, slide the latch and lock the door and sit on the pot, her skirt hiked up, fat hands between fat legs, and massage herself through scratchy pantyhose until her knots went slack and she could think again. She’d splash her face and try to picture Tevon growing up in Maryland, growing up in peace, growing up with soccer balls and roller blades and shoot-’em-up computer games and every other gift she could think of and afford. Life in vacant mode — someday she would tell him all about it.
Tevon ate the pizza, left a gummy crust. He said, “Do you love him?”
Gretchen said, “Who? The VP?”
“You’re always hanging on him on the news. It’s like you two are dancing.”
“No, son, I don’t love him.”
“Is he like your friend then?”
“He’s a politician, Tev, same as all the rest. He’s less than a nothing. No, he’s not my friend.”
“Why do you go with him then — if he’s not your friend?”
“It’s not about friends, Tevon. They killed Dr. King, they killed Robert Kennedy. Leaders died and cities burned and everything went bad. I saw it happen, son. People tell you that it couldn’t happen now. Sure, look out the window — what do you see? Houses, lawns, SUVs, everybody’s rich. Well I’m not so sure. The country is a piece of supermarket meat. It looks pretty good, all tight and shiny in the cellophane, but if you break the package even just a little bit, the meat starts going bad inside. My agents are the cellophane. That’s why I go with him, that’s why I’m not around as much as other moms, whatever. We can’t let a handgun pick our leaders, son. I refuse to see you living in that world.”
This seemed fundamental to her, driving past the Jewish spaceship and later waiting at a stoplight.
Tevon said, “Would you die for him?”
“Tevon, please — where is all this coming from?”
“Well isn’t that what you’re supposed to do — someone shoots, you step in front?”
She thought, he’s old enough to put it all together now, the meaning of the clips and what I do. He’s scared that something bad will happen on the news and, as a precaution, he’s preparing a new parent for himself — a new home in California, a new Dome, in case he loses what he has.
Gretchen said, “No one’s gonna die.”
Tevon took this in. They drove awhile.
He said, “How do you know?”
Well, this was a question, wasn’t it? They pulled into the driveway. He was waiting for an answer and she knew it.
Gretchen did not believe in lying to a child except when absolutely necessary.
“Tev,” she said, a little hoarse. “I’ll tell you a secret, son. The secret is important and it’s just between us two. Don’t tell Grams, don’t tell the kids at school, don’t tell your little chat room pals, because it’s an absolute top secret government scientific invention, and it’s called, it’s called the two-three-one-two-three-six-P. You can’t see it on TV, this special P machine. You can’t see in real life, but it’s real — I swear to you, it’s real — and you don’t have to be afraid when I go away, because I feel it when I’m out there in the crowds, it’s like a shield of energy, and it’s all around me in the air.”
5
Vi had lived in Tower South since coming to Protection, but standing at the window of her studio that morning, she wondered for a moment if anybody lived here. Her plants lived here, three geraniums along a dusty windowsill. Her clothes lived here, her suits and blouses in a shallow closet, her woolens still in boxes stacked against the wall. Her books lived here, or some of them, a carton’s worth of fitness guides and sports biographies, but Vi herself was generally gone, and most of her possessions, the truly precious things — a box of family pictures, three unmatching chairs, a stand-up lamp with clawball feet — were taking up a corner of her brother’s basement in New Hampshire.
Vi was making coffee in the kitchenette. The studio was puny, dim, and noisy through the walls, though she didn’t really mind the noise. The life of Tower South was in the narrow halls, which were carpeted, generic, and bewilderingly long, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope at the faraway nirvana of the elevator bank. The complex, a multitower Habitrail on the Virginia side, was equally convenient to the Pentagon, the Metro, and Ronald Reagan Airport. Vi shared the floor with pilot-looking guys — Air Force? airline? — and their flight-attendant-looking wives. In a funny way it reminded her of the Coopers and the Buckerts on Santasket Road back home. Maybe this was why she didn’t hate the noise. She heard families going and arriving, the jangling of keys, the crackling of grocery bags, the vump of garbage sailing to perdition down the chute. She heard the children too, laughing, shouting, sugar-rushing, the parents saying Wait, wait, wait, the kids not understanding that the corridors of South were like a church, a place reserved for no unnecessary noise, not home — home is when we close the door — but not the playground either, where a kid was free to scream.
Vi listened to the coffeemaker huff and start its trickling. The phone rang. It was Bobbie Taylor-Niles, Vi’s roommate on the road.
Bobbie said, “I had a great idea. Let’s go malling, you and me.”
Malling was Bobbie’s word for a certain type of shopping, not the hasty dash to Wal-Mart for a pack of razors, nor the duty-driven trudge for weekly groceries. Malling had more style, more serious intent, like going to an art museum except it’s a mall. Vi didn’t feel like malling on that Sunday morning, her first day off since Iowa, but Bobbie was insistent, as Bobbie often was.
“I’ll pick you up,” she said. “Which tower is yours again?”
“The southern one,” said Vi.
“Is that the real, real ugly one right next to the Christian all-news cable network?”
It was.
“See you in an hour,” Bobbie said.
Vi finished dressing for a run and took the elevator to the lobby, riding with the girls she called the Fiends, somber Arab sisters, diplomatic brats. The Fiends stood together, veiled to their eyes, holding their twin monkey bikes by the handlebars. The Fiends lived in the penthouse, up there with the weather and the blinking aviation beacons. They started on forty, racing through the corridors, taking corners at full tilt, touching every doorknob, or seeing who could go the slowest without tipping, moving down to thirty-nine when forty got boring.