Where the hell did you think you were going?
You can’t be more than eleven or twelve.
You shouldn’t feel good that he’s bothering. He’s got plans for you, like he’s got for everyone.
Quig returned with a sack of assorted items and tools, including a handsaw, a drill, a length of soft cord, bungees, and then an old rake with mostly broken tines. He unscrewed the rake head from the plastic handle and then held the handle against the inside of her leg, marking its length. He turned it around and did the same with the unmarked end against the outside of her leg. Then he sawed the two pieces to size. These were the splints, which he joined with screws to a short crosspiece at the bottom; her foot would sit on this. With the bungees, he bound the splints to her leg, Loreen holding everything in place while he wound it around. He rigged the cord to secure her foot to the crosspiece and then twisted it until there was a tugging force on her leg; this was the only way, he would tell her later, that it would heal right, keeping it in traction. When it was done, Quig carried her to a small room of shelves and bins that was almost completely filled with random equipment and appliance and car parts, but there was a cot in the corner with a sleeping bag and he placed her on top of it. He hadn’t said more than two words to her, nor said anything now, just giving her another injection, this one to make her sleep. She was losing consciousness when Loreen appeared and tugged the sleeping bag out from beneath her, saying it was her son’s. She tossed a thin, musty blanket atop her.
Better heal up quick, Loreen said, looming. Her breath smelled of alcohol and was sugar-sweet, from the beans. Or you won’t be around long.
For all of us here, it is difficult not to think often about that first night of Fan’s. Even now, after all that’s transpired, we still discuss how we might have fared in her place, being maybe seriously injured, stuck in a faraway counties house deep in the Smokes, and not knowing what would happen next. It’s an unnerving scenario. In fact, the circumstance is so far beyond what any of us could imagine that it seems like some evening-programs story line dreamed up with the help of one of those edgier young B-Mors you hear about these days, who, of course, still work in our facilities but “consult” for the Charter creators of such shows and sometimes even take a hand in writing them. Maybe Charter people don’t ultimately care about what happens outside their gates, but they’re certainly curious, and so you see more and more characters like us popping up in the shows, if not in starring roles. We’re mostly bystanders or else hardworking service people for Charter heroes and heroines, but sometimes more prominent foils, too, like a recent character in St. Clair Beach named Ji-lan, a beautiful woman from D-Troy, the big midwestern facility, who captures the heart of a married Charter executive and causes him much delicious and humiliating trouble. And though suffering plenty, he weathers his self-inflicted misfortune, and it’s no surprise that it’s Ji-lan who loses all in the end, everyone learning a harsh lesson in what can happen when you stray too far beyond your circle.
It’s funny, for although Ji-lan is nothing at all like Fan in either person or her situation (Ji-lan being a tall, statuesque femme fatale, mercurial and passionate, who would not hesitate to wreck the lives of others if it meant her gain), it’s almost impossible not to think of our petite, gentle Fan as the inspiration for her character. Perhaps it’s the actress’s Fan-like hairstyle that’s a cue for us, or the similar way she sometimes rides sidesaddle on her scooter (though in Ji-lan’s case it’s clearly due to the very short cut of her skirts), but whatever it is, the impression is unmistakable. Fan, of course, never knew of these developments in the show, if she ever watched the show at all. Being as modest as she was, she probably would have shaken her head at the notion of any perceived concordances, maybe even chuckled at the huge gap between the sinister sparkle of Ji-lan’s exploits and the dismal reality of her situation, what with her profound injury and the ragged conditions and being under the care of the ill-tempered Loreen and the mysterious and seemingly volatile Quig, whose standing in the Smokes, it would turn out, was much higher than he cared to let on.
When Fan awoke the next morning in the room of spare parts, she felt sick to her stomach and leaned over the side of the cot and gagged, though only a slick of spit fell from her mouth onto the dingy, scarred floorboards. It was nausea in the wake of the night’s painkillers, and probably some hunger, too, as she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous afternoon. Her leg was in the splint Quig had rigged, but she couldn’t quite bear to examine it yet and so didn’t remove the blanket. Instead she looked around the room. It had a salvaged clerestory pane installed near the top of the wall, which let in a good amount of the morning light; one could see the various plastic and metal and wire-sprouting parts set off by type with an unexpected neatness, stationed in rows rather than jammed in; in fact, the feel was somewhat similar to a parts room the maintenance workers have at the grow facility, though theirs is obviously much larger and cleaner and brighter, the atmosphere scrubbed of any foreign matter or organisms that could taint the planting beds or fish tanks. Here the air was closed off and smelled of dust and chain oil and dry-rotted wood and was laced, as was everything, with a rank counties perfume, but it was the sensibility of order, if only an order masked by roughness and grime, that Fan latched on to and could quell the brunt of her fear with and so attempt to keep her mind composed and steady. For she had to believe what we all would have believed, given our schooling and our shows, which is that she would be used up in hard labor — if not much, much worse — and only after an interminable sentence of such use, disposed of. In fact, one of the sayings B-Mors will sometimes offer to someone on an errand or trip outside the gates is Don’t become xiãng-cháng! — Don’t become sausage! — a bit of black humor that comes from a famous episode of a now classic evening program in which a group of foolhardy B-Mor teenagers goes camping out in the counties before the commencement of their facilities careers and end up having their livers cut out and made into you know what.
That’s sensationalized, to be sure, and yet there are all sorts of rumors and anecdotes and semiofficial reports that over the decades have grown into a bank of lore about the counties that each of us adds to whenever we repeat that saying or others with which we admonish our naturally curious children. Thank goodness they are curious! It’s a sign of healthy minds. And while it may be obvious, it’s our responsibility to educate them to the idea that romancing the unknown is attended by myriad possibilities, too, shepherding them through those heady periods of urge and instinct when they think they can soar, and deliver them, we hope whole, to a place where perspective begins to reign, where they know that the groggy old bear at the zoo will instantly wake the moment you step inside the cage.
But Fan, we have come to learn, was one of our number who was well aware of perils but pushed forward anyway, not rashly or arrogantly but with what might be thought of as a kind of inner faith. And as terrified as she might have been as she lay in that room, perhaps regretting herself to the core, she had already resolved not to show any fear, no matter what was in store for her. So when footfalls approached the other side of the door, Fan tried the best she could to sit up in the sagging cot, propping herself on an elbow and lifting her head so as not to look as feeble and vulnerable as she felt. A padlock was tugged at several times and the door opened and it was Loreen, holding a plastic mug with a spoon stuck in it, which she waved before Fan. Instant oatmeal.
You’re supposed to eat.
Fan nodded.