I rub my forehead with the heel of my hand, staring at the edge of the station lawn where it becomes the woods, seeing her, our nameless sleeping girl, racing through the darkness, hand clutched at her throat, trying to scream, unable, blood exploding from her wound.
It was not a trap after all. There really was a small-town zoo and these two well-meaning foolish teenagers really had freed the animals and the girl’s brother really was now trapped by a tiger. This was in early September, about two weeks ago, sixteen days maybe, halfway through our tortuous journey. Seneca Falls was a gray town, uneasy calm, people out in the streets, some armed, some not armed, some in groups and some alone, everybody grave and on edge. Ten miles out of town is where we spotted the girl waving her arms, and we put her in the golf cart and drove at top speed, shivering and jolting over back roads to this tiny zoo and there he was, tank top, jean shorts, barely sixteen and scared out of his head, quavering out on a top branch, his fidgeting weight bending the branch low to where the animal was snarling up at him. Mangy coat stretched thin over the rickety ribs.
“What are we going to do?” said the girl, and I said, “Well—” and Cortez brought down the animal with one shotgun blast in the center of the nearer flank. The boy yelped and dropped out of the tree into the dirt, beside the dead animal. Gore and steam rising out of its exploded orange side. Cortez jammed his gun away and looked at me and said, “Can we go now?”
“Wait, wait,” the sister said, rushing after us as we clambered into the golf cart. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“If I were you,” said Cortez, “I would eat that tiger.”
“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED… DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”
Cortez is in the dispatch room, standing mesmerized in front of the old foot-switch RadioCOMMAND, a solid black piece of dispatch-specific communications equipment, relaying the same emergency-band warning message over and over. It’s a calm voice, the kind of dull affectless tone you used to hear waiting for tech support: press one if you’re calling for help setting up your device…
“Check this baby out,” says Cortez. “Still kicking.”
“Oh, sure,” I say, feeling a rich wash of nostalgia. “These machines are indestructible. And it would have been installed with multiple battery backups.” I’m remembering the same console at Concord PD. It was rendered obsolete by the digital laptop systems that were installed a couple years before I took the oath, but somehow no one ever wheeled it out of Dispatch, and it sat there in the corner, black and shiny and immovable, a monument to traditional police work.
The message coming out of the Rotary RadioCOMMAND shifts: “FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES… FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES…” and then the lady starts to list them, good old-fashioned Norman Rockwell town names: “CONESVILLE… ZANESVILLE… DEVOLA…”
I run my finger along the dusty top of the machine. It’s a beautiful piece of police equipment, the RadioCOMMAND console, it really is.
“FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES…”
We stand there side by side, Cortez and I, listening to the charmless recital of town names. It is creating this low wistful feeling in my heart, the woman’s voice, the drone of the machine, and I think it may simply be that I miss information. For most of my life the world was awash with news, with reports of things happening; and then in the last year they blipped off the radar, one by one, the Concord Monitor and the New York Times and then television, the whole concept of television, and the Internet with its ceaseless froth and churn, all of it just gone. For a while back in Concord, before my house burned down and I left, I had a ham radio tuned to someone named Dan Dan the Radio Man, and I listened to him all through the Mayfair Commission hearings. Dan Dan reported out the last round of IPSS legislation, hurriedly passed by the rump Congress, nationalizing grain silos and redesignating all national parks as camps for the internally displaced.
On the road you could get only the swirl of gossip and unconfirmed reports, the nervous trading of rumors, speculation, and fantasy. Someone says that the Hoover Dam has been dynamited by downstream Nevadans desperate for fresh water. Someone waves a paper, supposedly a copy of one signed by the president, declaring the United States to be “a sovereign and enduring nation, retaining in perpetuity its privileges over all territory currently encompassed.” Someone says that the city of Savannah has been “taken” by catastrophe immigrants from Laos, who have turned the town into a fortress and are shooting white people on sight; someone else says no way, it’s Roanoke where that happened, it’s totally Roanoke, and the CIs are from Ethiopia.
And now here we are, this is what’s left of the outside world: packaged sandwiches and Band-Aids are being handed out under a tent somewhere in Apple Grove, Ohio.
“THE ‘BUCKEYES HELPING BUCKEYES’ PROGRAM WILL CONTINUE THROUGH IMPACT AND BEYOND,” says the RadioCOMMAND. “THE ‘BUCKEYES HELPING BUCKEYES’ PROGRAM WILL CONTINUE THROUGH IMPACT AND BEYOND.”
I turn to head back outside, and a great rush of sparkles and stars paint the inside of my eyelids, and I stumble and catch the doorjamb and hold myself steady.
“You okay?” say Cortez, and I wave over my shoulder, I’m fine, here I go. But when I let go of the doorjamb and try to walk again I get another fireworks head rush, and this time I’m seeing bloody splatter patterns burned across my retinas. A girl facedown in a field. A door in the floor. A rack of red knives behind a red sink. A candy machine emptied of its candy like a gutted animal.
“Palace?”
I take a step—I’m very tired. I fall down.
6.
“Henry. Hey. Get up.”
That voice. I wake up and that’s it—mystery solved. Nico is simply present, her eyes flashing in the darkness like a cat’s. She is kneeling at my side where I’m lying on the ground, waking me up like she used to wake me up to make her breakfast, poking at my chest with two fingers, sticking her face right up close into my face. “Henry. Henry. Hen. Hen. Henry. Hey. Hen.”
She jabs a thumb over her shoulder, at Lily, the unconscious girl next to me on the thin jail-cell mattress. Cortez must have hauled me from the dispatch room and laid me down beside her in the bed.
“Who’s your friend?” says Nico.
I start to talk, to say oh, Nico, I thought you were dead but she puts one finger over her lips to hush me, and I obey, I hush, I stare at her in silence. The smell of Cortez’s cigarette lingers in the room.
“So, listen,” says Nico, and just the sound of her voice is forming the heat of tears in my eyes. “It’s happening. It’s a go.” She looks exactly as she did the day of the yearbook photo, the picture in my jacket pocket: she’s grown her hair back out and she’s wearing her glasses again, her old ones, from when she was in high school. I can’t believe she even still has them. I want to leap up and hug her. I’ll put her on the handlebars of the bike, I’ll put Houdini in the wagon to ride behind us. I’ll take her back home.