The Emergency, page 18
8
The whole time the boy was speaking, the rest of the group stood at a distance and watched. A few approached and interrupted: a tradeswoman with a wen on her cheek wanted to know if the doctor could remove it; an elderly man made a long speech in which the word “Yeomen” kept appearing, while young Monge listened patiently before sending him away with a joke that made everyone in earshot laugh.
When the boy finished his story, he placed his hands on the thigh he had extended on the tree trunk and bent over until his hair fell forward and his forehead touched his knee, as if talking had left him spent.
After a long silence, Selva’s father picked up his medical kit and, in the doctor’s voice she remembered from the night of the attack on Zeus, said, “I need to see that foot.”
The cloth unwound easily from Monge’s toes, but near his heel it stuck to the skin with caked blood and something yellow and sweet-smelling.
“Why have you put honey on it?” her father asked.
“To make my foot healthy.”
“But it’s already infected.”
Her father pinched the strip between his thumb and index finger and tore it free with a quick firm snap that made the boy moan. The bandage released an odor of rotten flesh. On either side of the heel deep punctures, like the twin holes of a snakebite, exposed blackened tissue. The whole foot was swollen and inflamed, reddish through the ball and arch, dark purple around the wounds. Selva told herself that she must not look away.
“Please boil a pot of water,” her father said. As she went off to search for firewood, he followed her. “Worse than I expected,” he said quietly. “He’ll have to lose the dead tissue. If the gangrene goes deeper, I’ll need to amputate the foot, and I don’t have a bone saw. Or alcohol.”
The thought of a saw made her lightheaded. But if she could just pretend to be his nurse, her mind and body might follow. “Alcohol for what?”
“Emergency anesthetic.”
“What about giving him your whiskey?”
“None left.” He shook his head, chagrined. “I wasn’t thinking.”
While the instruments were boiling, she laid out the bar of soap and a basin of hot water. She thought she scrubbed more than enough, but he told her to keep going. She longed for a compliment, but now he was Doctor Rustin, a person she didn’t know. She pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and eased Monge down onto a wool rug while he stared hard into her eyes and his breathing grew shallower. “Don’t worry,” she said, “Papa is a great surgeon.” On a platter she arranged the instruments—the folding knife, scissors, tweezers, and pliers—alongside the numbing ointment, torniquet, and gauze, just as she imagined one of her father’s nurse assistants would do it. The work made her anxiety tolerable.
“Try not to look,” her father said, snapping on his gloves. “It’s normal to faint the first time, and I’ll need you.”
The two guards held the boy down, and Selva placed a leather bit in his mouth. He kept still while her father spread the ointment and tied the tourniquet, but when the knife went to work cutting away infected flesh, the boy began to whimper and grind his pain into the bit. Soon he was screaming. Over and over he cried: “Mama, mama, mama!” The children ran away, the tradeswomen wailed, and the old man who had made the speech about Yeomen was saying something in a rapid monotone like an incantation. Selva’s circle of awareness narrowed down to the platter, the instruments, her father’s orders, and once when he spoke sharply she was glad because it meant he was not thinking of her as his daughter, had forgotten who she was, and as the metallic smell of fresh blood rose to her nostrils, she thought, Don’t look, don’t look, look, look, Brave Selva, look.
* * *
Later, after her father seared the severed vessels with an ember of firewood and bandaged the wound in gauze, and the guards laid the boy out under a canopy on a bed of pine needles with his foot raised up on a log, and the girl in the torn frock who was his little sister sang him to sleep, Selva sat and watched over him with a sense of quiet satisfaction. She had come through. The boy looked younger—so much younger that she thought of Pan, the way his brows knitted in concentration when they used to share a room and she couldn’t sleep and watched him. The memory of Pan brought to mind her mother and home, and suddenly she had to make an effort not to cry. Throughout the journey she’d hardly given them any thought; when she had, she felt a pang of guilt before forgetting again. But now she longed for them, and she tried to imagine what they were doing. It was late afternoon, the sun already sinking behind the treetops, so probably Pan had just come home from school and her mother was making him a snack of brown bread and mulberry jam before dinner. But that was her old pre-Emergency routine. Maybe she was at the hostel with Mr. Monge. Maybe they were talking about his son, about what Selva and her father were doing this very minute.
When, over family dinners, her mother talked about Mr. Monge and all the other Strangers in her hostels, it reminded Selva of the way her father used to discuss his patients—with a keen but impersonal interest, as a project that required her best effort but would never deeply matter to her. It was the Stranger Committee, not any individual Strangers, that had changed her mother’s life. Selva encouraged her work in every possible way, understanding that it had awakened something in her, but she didn’t really take it seriously. In fact, she felt a degree of contempt that she tried to conceal, because her mother would always be an amateur in self-org, a woman of the empire, a wife and mother raising two children to be good Burghers, still attached to the family’s old life, not for its status like her father, but for the deep comfort of the familiar.
Selva believed that Strangers were to be admired, learned from, aspired to—not helped, not solved. The boy’s story had done nothing to shake this belief. If Mr. Monge turned out to be a rotten father, maybe it was because he wasn’t much of a Stranger, and had never wanted to be. His jealousy, his pride and selfishness, his fragility, his ambition for himself alone, abandoning his family and clan for the city—everything about him reminded Selva of a Burgher. Before the Emergency he would have thrived in the city. But the boy sleeping on the ground beside her, and occasionally uttering a moan, affirmed her deepest feeling about Strangers. They were the better humans.
She wondered what young Monge would think when he saw the city by the river. They would take him to the hospital first, to save his foot and maybe his life. Afterward, she would insist on bringing him home to continue his care, and she was pretty sure that her father wouldn’t object, for the boy was now his patient, and anyway, her father was never as rigid and certain as when she was arguing with him in her own head. Then she would introduce Monge to her self-org friends. What would he think of Together? Some things might confuse him, like the elaborate mechanics of We Are One, or the purpose of the Suicide Spot. But she knew that he would welcome Together as much as Together would welcome him, because the ideas, if not always the practice, were alive in every moment of his story. No one is a Stranger. Listen to the young.
They had chosen him as leader, chosen him because of his superior education and knowledge. In theory this would have been forbidden by the principles of Together, but Strangers must have their own principles—perhaps even their own word for Together—principles that tied them to the land, the nomadic way of life, and one another, and that had sustained them through the harshest circumstances for hundreds of years. Who was she, a sheltered Burgher girl from the city, to judge whether Strangers met the ideal of Together, when they embodied it, lived it?
Something about Together had always troubled Selva. It was a concern so profound that it might invalidate the entire project, and she went to great lengths to hide it from herself. The concern was that she didn’t know what Together was for. Other than the experience of it, the freedom and camaraderie of starting over in a new world, what was Together supposed to do? It was easy enough to tick off the deficiencies of the old world, but if anyone asked her to explain how they should be rectified and then list the qualities of the new world that should replace them, to describe what that new world should look like, to draw a picture of its streets and buildings, to write a set of laws to govern it, even imagine a folktale to represent it, she wouldn’t have known where to begin. Together was a feeling, not a vision, let alone a plan. At its heart there was a void. On nights when she lay unable to sleep and allowed herself, or was somehow forced, to face this void, it so undid her that she immediately reached for her wrist and told herself never to think about it again, and she fell asleep hoping to dream that her Better Human would have the answers that eluded her.
But as she imagined young Monge in her city, the void disappeared. He would make life real, and the meaning of Together would become clear to her through his eyes. The thought of bringing this heroic boy into her world thrilled Selva. She would be a hero next to him. Everyone would sense it, ask her how it happened, hear the story and be amazed. Sheer vanity—but it didn’t disgust or depress her or send her pulse racing, because she was proving it every day and hour out here, with Gandorig and the farmer judges, the roadblock animals and their hanging dicks, Big Cronk and Gard the Strong, Monge, the excruciating operation they’d just performed. She had overcome terrors she could never have imagined. Her life since the Emergency—her despair after her exams-week triumph, the night with Zeus in the park, the arguments with her parents, her failure of nerve at the Suicide Spot, the goggles—all of it seemed dull and petty and horribly embarrassing, like a younger girl’s outfit that she’d once thought pretty but that no longer fit and made her look silly, that she could now throw away. As she watched over the boy and the sun sank behind the trees, her body quivered with an excitement that was almost alarming. Something incredible was going to happen to her.
She felt for the notebook in her jumper pocket and took it out. There was the name: GARD THE STRONG. What a strange, violent plunge into the mind of a boy who could never form a complete sentence in her presence. She hadn’t gotten a clear view of him as he ran the hauler through the hayfield, so she had to imagine the face of the author, and it looked nothing like Little Cronk’s: ragged beard, hard eyes, upper lip curled in a sneer. She turned the notebook’s lined pages. Across one he had drawn crude pictures, barely more than stick figures, of animals with exaggerated eyes and teeth and genitalia above name labels: WOLF, BEAR, BUFALO, WILD BORE, FOREST CAT, VIPER. On the facing page, under the heading TRUE HISTORY OF THE YEOMEN PEOPLE, she read: “Before Burghers we ruled this Land. We were not called Yeomen then Yeomen is a Burgher word. We were Natives. There was no Empyre. We did not have laws only the Law of the STRONGEST. We warshiped Animal Spirits. GARD THE GRATE ruled us. Our Bodies were”
The entry ended there, as if the author had run out of time or inspiration; and the next two pages were blank. Then the story resumed:
After GARD THE GRATE died the Empyre crost the sea and stole our Land. This was a long time ago. Burghers came and lived in Citys. They did not know Animals or farms, they did not love the Land. They loved Words and New Things. Dirt is stronger than Words and Old Things are stronger than New Things but Yeomen forgot our Ansesters. Burgher Teechers lied us to think this way. But nothing week can stand. Now Young Yeomen are digging for our Ansesters (GARD). We got strong from digging and we found DIRT THOUGHT. This is the entyre Mesage of DIRT THOUGHT.
1. Words lye, Dirt is true.
2. We belong to the Land, the Land belongs to us.
3. Men are Stronger than Womin.
4. Young are Stronger than Old.
5. Yeomen are Stronger than Burghers and Strangers.
6. Gard the Grate is coming back to lead us.
So the War of Yeomen Natives and Burghers is coming.
Other than the strange little poem about being buried under leaves, these were the notebook’s last words. Selva closed it with a tingling numbness that she recognized as the onset of fear. On the back cover, embossed in its green leather, were the name of a printer’s shop and an address in the Market District. How could she have forgotten? She’d bought this notebook before their camping trip in the last summer of the empire, as a gift for Little Cronk. She’d suggested he use it to record new vocabulary words and summarize the Child’s History of the Empire that she’d given him. He had run his fingertips over the pebbly surface of the leather cover in solemn silence, as if the notebook was some rare and precious object from another world.
9
Selva had settled her cheek against her knees and was close to falling asleep when Monge groaned and stirred. It was twilight. She became aware of the sounds and smells of food being prepared.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
He was gazing through half-open eyes at something beyond her and didn’t answer. She thought of what her father had told her when he came home from the hospital the night of Pan’s birth: “Your mother went somewhere I’ll never be able to follow.”
“Does it hurt?”
He looked down his leg at the bandaged foot as if for the answer and gave his head a brief shake.
“Papa said it went well. I don’t think we’ll have to cover you in dirt and leaves.”
She picked up the notebook where she’d left it on the ground and opened it to the poem at the end.
“You wrote this, right?”
He lifted a weak arm for the notebook and brought it to his chest.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
“The pig farm. On the seat.”
Little Cronk must have left his notebook in the hauler. “I’m glad you stole it,” she said. “Write another. I like yours much better than the other guy’s.”
The boy held the notebook out to her. “Keep for me.”
“What I meant,” Selva said, putting the notebook back in her jumper, “is at the hospital they’ll take care of your infection.”
A cloud of confusion drifted across the boy’s eyes. “What hospital?”
“Imperial College Hospital. Where my father is chief surgeon.”
Monge understood now, and he said, “No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“But this could still kill you.”
“I will not go.”
“You have to go.” This was nothing Selva had expected. “My father and I didn’t come out here just to do emergency field surgery. We have to bring you to the city so you can get better. Your father is there, a lot of your people are there. It’s too dangerous in the woods.”
In the somber light she thought she saw a look of actual dislike cross the boy’s face. “Who are my people?”
“I mean—you know, the people who came from across the mountains.”
“Strangers?”
“That’s what we call them. If it’s wrong I apologize. My mother started using ‘Friends.’ She helps your people settle in our city. They’re going to make it a better place.”
“What can they do in your city?”
With earnestness befitting a deeply felt truth, Selva said, “I don’t mean you can become more like us. I mean we can become more like you.”
Monge stared at her and laughed, the same laugh as before, more subdued but still harsh.
“Don’t you want to be with your father?” she asked.
“Who is my father?”
His questions were irritating, and her answers filled her with shame because she wanted to bring Monge back home with her like a trophy, saw herself reuniting son and father before the entire hostel, introducing him to her friends in the self-org and to the tall, quiet boy at the Better Humans workshop, presenting him in the main square to the raptures of We Are One.
“He needs you.”
“They need me.”
By now the boy was hardly more than a voice in the gathering dark, and she couldn’t tell if he was looking at the children seated under the canopy or at the women singing as they chopped by the fire, but she knew she had lost something. He was receding into the twilight, taking with him the girl made of metal and clay with the rifle at her eye, leaving Selva alone in the unrestful embrace of the past.
“They can come with you,” she heard herself plead.
Monge made a sound with his nose, an abrupt snort that signaled the conversation’s end.
* * *
Selva and her father were served chicken stew and left to eat by themselves. The two guards, the one with the pistol and the other with the machete, stood watch by the stream whose ripples glittered in moonlight. The women in the encampment were speaking in soft voices while tobacco smoke drifted through the trees. The smell was coarse, much stronger than her father’s cigars. He went to check on his patient once more, but the boy was sleeping again.
Back at their campsite, Selva told her father of Monge’s refusal.
“Then he’ll probably die here.”
“That’s what I tried to say.”
“It’s his choice. We can’t force him.” Her father lit a cigar and drew on the flame. “Maybe he’s right.”
“How can he be right?”
“You heard his story, Sel. I was looking around the camp, and there’s something impressive about these people. Do we want them depending on Burgher generosity for the rest of their lives?”
“If his foot doesn’t kill him,” she said, “Yeomen will.”
“Who, the Cronks? They thought they were shooting at pig rustlers.”
Selva told him everything. She told him about the notebook and Gard the Strong and Dirt Thought, about the stolen hauler in the hayfield, armed Yeomen in front, manacled Strangers in back, about the panic of Big Cronk and Mrs. Cronk and everything else her father had missed because he was too intent on salvaging the fragments of a belief that assured his place as a good citizen of a good empire and allowed him to persist in the illusion that he wasn’t on a side—that there were no sides. She had woken up promising herself to say nothing to hurt him, but now she threw the day’s revelations at him with the accurate fury of her own self-loathing.
