From town’s center I walked out to the grand artificial lake where picnic tables, benches, and teeter-totters squatted at eight-meter intervals around clear water. Teeter-totters, one assumes, for visiting grandchildren, though that day there were none. Plenty of elderly folk at the tables or sitting with feet in the water on low-slung walls, people a generation or two younger standing by. Caretakers.
I ended up back in town at a sparsely populated outdoor café, server and barrista of an age with those around. Bob, the server, put me in mind of oldtime French waiters, professional mien and mantle donned with his apron. The barrista’s demeanor came from warmer climes; she tapped on cup bottoms, swiveled about, triggered the steamer in syncopated bursts as she worked. Mildred’s a peach, Bob said, directing his gaze briefly that way when I commented.
A couple I’d estimate to be in their eighties sat across from one another at a table nearby, each with a link propped before. She’d key in something on hers, he’d look at his. They’d both look up and smile. Then it was his turn.
Children? Images from long ago—a vacation on the big island before the embargos, places they’d lived, concerts and celebrations attended, their younger selves?
Even stolid Bob registered their happiness, careful not to interrupt but repeatedly locating himself close by lest they need something.
A frail-seeming man in eyeglasses sat reading an actual book whose title I eventually made out to be A History of Radical Thought. Interesting, that use of the indefinite article, I thought, a instead of the; one had to wonder at the content. There could be so many such histories.
When Bob set down a tea cake at another table, the woman there waited for him to walk away then quickly dipped her head and with one hand in half a moment sketched a shape in the air before her: silent prayer, and what few would recognize as the sign of the cross.
Across the street, in a park bordered on the far side by offset stands of trees, two women in sundresses, a style I recalled from childhood, were flying a kite made to look like a huge frog and awash with bright yellows, crimson, metallic blues. The runner had just let go the kite; both laughed as the frog took to sky.
Smelling of fresh earth, rich and dark, the coffee was good. I had three cups, took another walk round the lake, and remounted the train without challenge or incident. On the trip back, mechanical or guidance problems delayed us, and it grew dark as we reached the city, lights coming on about us, curfew close enough to give concern. Officials waited on the platform to issue safe passes. Elsewhere, automatic weapons cradled in their arms, soldiers who looked to be barely out of adolescence patrolled.
So there I am in a room, rooting about in the few personal belongings left behind, listening for footsteps outside in the hall or coming up stairs. How did I arrive here? We wonder that all our lives, don’t we?
It was as much the idea of a room as it was a room. Plato and Socrates might have stood at the door arguing for days. A single small window set high, its plastic treated so that light blossomed as it passed through, flooded the room with virtual sunshine. From one wall a lower panel let down to become a bed, another panel above to serve as table or desk.
Where a man lives and what’s inside his head, they’re mirrors of one another, my trainers said. In which case there shouldn’t be a whole lot going on in Merrit Li’s. And if I had the right person, I knew that wasn’t true.
My inventory disclosed a packet of expired papers and passes bound together in a drawer, a thin wallet containing recent travel visas, a drawerful of clothes, some disposable, some not, all of them dark and characterless. On his link I found itineraries and receipts, forty-six emails that seemed to be business related, though what business would be impossible to discern, and a young adult novel about the Nation Wars.
Elsewhere about the room, apportioned to the innards of various appliances, a Squeeze, a cooker, a coffee maker, I found what could only be the components of a stunner, cast in a hard plastic I’d not seen before, doubtless unkennable to scanners.
Immediately I became aware of a presence in the doorway behind me. There’d been no warning sounds, no footsteps. Right. So he had to be who and what I thought.
“We have mutual friends,” I said, turning.
“Else you wouldn’t be here.”
Older than myself by a decade and more, conceivably old enough to remember the wars he’d been reading about. No sign of recognition at the safe word. Stance and carriage, legs apart, shoulders and hips in a line, confirmed other suspicions. Military.
I glanced up from his feet at the same time he did so from mine. Anticipating attack, one sees it begin there.
“Your belongings remain as they were,” I said.
He nodded. Waited.
“Three days ago you were in Lower Cam, at a train stop where an attack took place. Two citizens were injured. The target, Frances diPalma, fled.”
“Leaving a body behind her. That one not a bystander.”
He held out both hands to signal non-aggression and, at my nod, stepped to the console to dial open the built-in screen. Habit—and of little benefit should we be on lens, but one takes the path available.
A spirited discussion of the city’s economic status bloomed onscreen: female moderator, one man in a dark suit, one in a sky blue sweater. It’s really quite simple, assuming you have the facts, the suit-wearer said. The other’s expression suggested that not once in his life had he encountered anything other than complexity, nor could he anticipate ever doing so.
“You believe I was there to take her down,” Merrit Li said.
“Yes.”
“I was there, but to a different purpose than you suppose. She is in fact a mutual friend. I know her as Molly.”
Rueful Tuesday, two days before. I had the windows dialed down while watching a feed on vanishing species. I sat back, dialed the window up, the screen down, to look across at the next building. Uncle Carl used to tell me a story about how this early jazz man, Buddy Bolden, threw a baby out the window in New Orleans and a neighbor leaned out his window and caught it. That’s about how close we were.
For a moment I could make out moving shapes over there, people, before they dialed down their window.
I had punched back in for the sad tale of vanished sea otters and was remembering how when we’d first come here to the city, half-jokingly calling ourselves settlers, jumpy with wonder, with the effort and worry of fitting in, there’d been a linkstop showing disaster movies round the clock. World after world ravaged by giant insects, tiny insects, momentous storms, awakened deep-sea creatures, carniverous plants, science, our own stupidity.
With no forewarning, otter, shore and sea contracted, siphoned down to a crawler.
Warren’s face above.
“This,” he said, then was gone.
Rosland, time stamp less than an hour ago. A train stop. Single tracks up- and downtown, a dozen people waiting. Strollers, shufflers. Solitary busker playing accordion, license pasted to his top hat, little movement otherwise. Then suddenly there was.
A man walked briskly towards a woman waiting by the uptown track. She turned, transformed at a breath from citizen to warrior, everything about her changing in that instant. She shifted legs and feet, leaned hard left as he fired, followed that lean into full motion.
Moments later, the man lay on the platform, face turned to the camera.
Then another face glancing back, gone as its owner sprinted up the walkway Fran had vanished into.