For Quig had just traded some people away, two young men who were around Fan’s age (she was still successfully pretending to be much younger). They had come to the compound the previous week with a relation in need of emergency attention, who’d obviously decided to hand them over to Quig. They were undoubtedly brothers, sharing the same frontward stoop to their bony shoulders and a thick dark brush of monobrow. They were kept strictly inside the main house until Quig exchanged them for a fairly new vehicle equipped with four-wheel drive (which is what the three of them were traveling in now), the brothers carted off in what looked to her like a Charter medical van. They were led from the main house by a few of Quig’s men, and though they weren’t handcuffed, the expression on their faces as they stepped up into the rear compartment was the slack-eyed wonder of the damned. Fan’s heart panged with the image of Reg probably having to bend down so as not to strike his head on the door frame, and how confused and scared he must have been, not understanding why they were taking him away. Of course, she didn’t yet understand, either, what exactly was going on, but she’d overheard Loreen trying to explain to a pushy new arrival that people under a certain age were not automatically taken in trade here at Quig’s, despite the rumors that the compound was an intake facility for some purported “Charter call” for youths. And while Loreen appeared genuinely irritated and put out, hadn’t she eventually led the three teenagers being offered by the stubborn, shrill woman to the examination rooms, where Quig surely saw them? And although they soon departed with the woman and nothing else came of it, were not other healthy young people in the days since brought straight to the head of the line?
Fan didn’t remember Quig administering any blood tests on her, but in those first woozy hours she would not have noticed. He certainly hadn’t said or done anything to indicate he had discovered something special about her, like she was C-free forever, which, of course, she wasn’t. Like everyone else in B-Mor, she had been periodically tested, the last time being a year before, which was when she and Reg were just starting to talk about their future together, about marriage and children and with which of their households they might reside. By custom they would normally stay with Reg’s people, but their double row house was already at overcapacity and so was Fan’s, and they were musing about starting from scratch in a less established neighborhood of B-Mor, though realizing they would be at its head.
This was somewhat comical to them, as neither was the type to take up such a mantle, but the more they thought about it the more they felt that they should try, as they had solid jobs in the facility and could afford the loan and, most important, finally came to understand that they would be better off on their own. They were probably right to think this. We won’t say it or admit that we know, but we can all appreciate how people with some part of Reg’s native line can be very subtly or unwittingly lodged in the lee of prime conditions. Everyone knows that certain spots in the tray don’t quite receive the same flows of water and air, where perhaps the nutrients are either diluted or oddly concentrated, and the green shoots there might on first glance look fine but are, in fact, just that bit leggier, more prone to blight. We have raised this notion previously and bring it up again because it seems obvious now that Fan was not only searching out Reg because he was the father of her child and likely future husband but also that she was testing herself, seeing whether she could truly follow through on her intention of leaving B-Mor behind forever. One could argue that only if you defy from within are your demonstrations valid, but perhaps her plan was for us to have to focus on ourselves, what we and we alone would have to shoulder.
It’s not that we’re too fearful or comfortable, too cautious or reluctant, but that, as we have never experienced life outside these bounds (save for what’s glimpsed in the evening programs or, if we’re lucky, on our once-in-a-lifetime global-flight tour), the reach of our thoughts has a near ceiling. Imagination might not be limitless. It’s still tethered to the universe of what we know, and as wild as our dreams might be, we can’t help but read them with the same grounded circumspection that guided our forebears when they mapped out our walls. Fan, though, made a leap, which was a startling thing in itself.
Something she couldn’t explain, then, made her say to Quig from the backseat of the car: Whatever you’re looking for, I’ll help you find.
He didn’t answer right away, tapping at the wheel with his long fingers. Loreen was dozing, her jaw sunk, her tarnished lower teeth jammed together like kernels on a stunted ear of corn.
You’re going to help me find a well drill?
No, she said. The other thing.
The other thing, he repeated, his tone raised.
Yes, she said. This was, in fact, only the second conversation they’d had.
How do you imagine helping, little girl, if you don’t even know what I’m looking for?
You’ll have to tell me.
And if I did tell you, what would you do first?
I’d ask you to teach me how to drive.
He chuckled, the first time she’d heard him do that. He sounded exactly like one of her uncles who always had a pocketful of honey-sesame candies to give out.
And why would I do that?
So you can keep your eye out for what you’re looking for.
In the rearview mirror she saw he almost smiled. They drove in silence for another half hour when he pulled over and got out to pee. Loreen awoke and teetered out, too, half asleep, and drifted off into the bushes. Fan waited until they were both out of sight to find a spot to relieve herself, noting that her belly was as flat as ever, despite having missed her period. She was not even five weeks on. When she was done, she stepped out to the clearing while buttoning up her shorts, only to find Quig standing there, waiting.
Thought maybe you ran off.
I didn’t.
I guess that’s right, he said, his face deeply shadowed beneath the bill of his faded blue baseball cap, the cloudless sky glaring above them.
Fan stood dead still.
But he looked at her somberly and said, Let’s go.
When they got to the car, Loreen was leaning against the passenger door, her fleshy arms crossed, and before she could say anything, Quig told her Fan would be sitting up front for a while. Loreen made the sound in her throat that Fan heard whenever she was annoyed at someone in the line, but she just grabbed her knitting from the seat and climbed in the back, where she set up her pillow against the inside of the door so she could stretch out her legs. As Quig pulled onto the road, Loreen went right back to her knitting, her murmurs resuming at a slightly lower pitch as though she were growing impatient with her charge, if still doting. She certainly hadn’t been the same brambly Loreen of late, and it was obvious why; Sewey had been very sick again, the second time now in the last few weeks, and though nobody in the compound was saying anything, it was pretty much accepted that what was wrong with him was his blood (as it usually was with the younger ones), a form that was certainly treatable but so fantastically expensive to do so that the drug might as well be a global, it was so far out of reach. Plus, she had been under the weather herself, having been up many nights looking after him. Sewey’s most recent fever broke a few days before and Loreen was on this trip in part to see if she could somehow get her hands on the particular geno-chemo at this Charter, though not, of course, by paying for it. Naturally, her expectations were very low, as they are with all counties people (as is with us B-Mors, too) when it comes to the sentence of this C-fated life, and although she would try her best, the resignation, as for all of us, would come swiftly and finally once she was thwarted. There is no point otherwise.