It was at this point that the first signs of a collective interest in Fan appeared. Of course, she was not the first B-Mor to have left these kind confines but she was certainly the youngest (and littlest!) to do so on her own. Every other instance was someone who was forced out because of a certain scandal or crime, and only after that person had exhausted all means, official and otherwise, in the hope of being pardoned. Nobody sane would ever do otherwise. Why invite ready hardship or possible doom? And yet Fan was as sane — and comfortably situated — as any young woman in the prime of her B-Mor life. She was quietly admired for her tank skills. For her innate gracefulness and gentility. She was sociable enough, and filial enough, which is as much as anyone can expect. There was not a molecule of wrongness about her.
Which may be why Fan captured our imagination. The very imagination, to be honest, that never seems terribly vital or necessary when things are going right, when we are eating well and sleeping well and lacking only certain exalted luxuries. For doesn’t B-Mor as conceived and developed and now constituted obviate the need for such purposeful dreaming?
But now look at all the unusual activity. Someone got ahold of the video archives of the feed at the main gate the day she departed and posted it on the grow-facility page, embedding it in an ad for a take-out chaat shop in the underground mall. You clicked it to get your free-drink-with-meal coupon and instead of a beep and a code there was a silent vid of Fan, viewed slightly from above and in three-quarter profile, a small backpack slung over one shoulder, an umbrella in hand, and dressed in a bulky dark-hued counties style, so unlike the colorful loose-fitting pajama-type outfits B-Mors usually wear. Beyond the shelter of the entrance you could see the rain coming down in drenching curtains — yet another storm had blown in — and then being whipped sideways by winds so strong that the sentry very quickly scanned and checked her out, not bothering to see that she wasn’t a counties peddler who was having no luck in the miserable weather and was giving up for the day.
And that was it. Merely a few seconds of Fan, standing before the sentry booth, looking nothing like she was about to mount an expedition. Her expression as glum as cold rain. Word spread about the ad — it was a real shop, whose owner contended he knew nothing and that his ad had been hijacked — and until it was removed several hours later, it was the most popular clip on the B-Mor web, outpacing even that night’s showing of the boys’ and girls’ swim championships. And though it made no sense whatsoever, crowds soon descended on that otherwise ordinary snack shop, the long line of people attracting more people to the line, until finally the owner decided to lease a much bigger space in order to offer table service, which for a brief time did a great business, until suddenly it didn’t, and he had to shut down.
Another camera showed Fan walking out the main gate and taking the access road out of B-Mor to the main tollway. The official record ends there. But the story of what happened afterward is well-known, or at least it has been recounted by everyone in B-Mor — and maybe beyond — many times over, in messages and postings and vids and songs and, yes, in plain words, too, spoken to one another in the quieter moments of the evening, when the muscles are all used up to the point of near numbness and we feel more as though we are piloting our bodies rather than being at one with them, cooped up at the top and looking outward and uncertain of what is real and what is perceived. And in this state of mind we can’t help but build upon what is known, our elaborations not fantastical or untrue but at times vulnerable to our wishes for her, and for ourselves.
4
So Fan went this way: instead of heading north or south on the main coastal tollway she veered westward, onto the olden roads, thoroughfares that once meandered through farmland and forests and that linked antique-style settlements that the Charter villages are modeled after and you can really only see in movies now, communities where people strolled with shaggy dogs and children licked ice cream cones and where the benches were occupied by the contented elderly or smooching lovers and trains came and went all day, shuttling people back and forth to their jobs.
But what Fan encountered that sodden evening was nothing like that. It was — and is — a landscape of bushy weeds grown so thick and high their hollows are often used as rooms by wanderers and thieves. Weeds are the trees because in most of the inhabited sections the trees have been cut down and in the warmer months the punky reek of their pollen overdoses the breezeless air. It seems nearly impossible to breathe. The derelict houses that anchored the streets have long been bulldozed and carted away, the once paved streets devolved to a more elemental state, the asphalt ground down to drifts of blackened dust. The more passable streets are pocked by calf-deep potholes and waves of buckles from the serial deluges and freezes and droughts, and because of their poor condition, the truckers and Charters move about exclusively on the secured, fenced tollways that few counties drivers can afford, and are often banned from anyhow, for justified reasons of their slower, much older vehicles that are breaking down constantly, hoods up and steaming. So counties drivers travel fitfully on the leftover roadways, swerving and mincing along, and one of these, maneuvering in the blinding gray chaos of that early evening’s downpour, squarely struck Fan.
She was knocked into a ditch half filled with rainwater, her temple striking a partly buried chunk of curb. She would have cried out from the pain running from the top of her thighbone to the point of her hip but the blow to her head was a thunderclap and all she could do was numbly move her fingers. The car, an old VW electro-diesel, kept on for twenty meters before stopping. It reversed and the passenger window rolled down halfway and a woman’s scratchy voice pronounced, It’s no deer.
A dog? a man asked.
Looks like a little girl, she answered.
Silence.
Is she dead?
Not yet. She’s moving a little.
Silence again. Then the driver’s door creaked open.
No way I’m nursing her back to health, if that’s what you’re thinking.
The man ignored her. He trudged around the front of the car without an umbrella and stood over Fan, his head and shoulders partly shielding her from the dense warm drops of the rain. She kicked her leg to try to move but could only lamely push mud against one side of the ditch.
Goddamnit, Quig, the woman cursed.
He pressed his foot down upon Fan’s ankle, pinning it beneath the water. Fan looked up but in the dimness and rain could just make out the contours of his face under the dark shadow of his baseball cap’s bill. He was bearded and had a wide frame to his jaw, and his nose looked like it had been broken multiple times, and the expression in his eyes was that of someone who has seen the worst of this life and would not be disturbed to see whatever measure more.
Let’s go! We have another three hours’ driving at least, and I’m starving!
Be quiet, Loreen.
Something in his tone silenced her, and when he reached down to Fan with his rough-hewn hands, both the woman in the car and Fan flinched, for what he might do. But instead he cupped her beneath the knees and arms, and lifted her swiftly enough that she didn’t have time to resist. With one arm holding her, he lifted the rear hatch of the station wagon and then laid her in beside a greasy tangle of ropes and tools. She tried to kick at him but a shot of pain in her thigh practically choked her and she lost consciousness as he shut the tailgate.