The Emergency, page 24
Mrs. Cronk’s fleshy features stiffened, and she returned to kneading pastry dough. “I don’t really know, but it could be true.”
“Birds trained by Burghers to eat seeds and drop them over your farm?”
“I didn’t say Burghers.” Mrs. Cronk raised her chin to restore her wounded pride. “We see things that you city people don’t, Mrs. Rustin. You think they’re fairy tales, but we know the truth.”
Annabelle realized that arguing was pointless. She and Mrs. Cronk would never move past this moment, however many more visits the families shared. They nearly hated each other. Neither spoke for a full two minutes, until Little Cronk appeared at the kitchen door with a sack of yams slung over his shoulder. Selva was standing behind him, looking as if she, too, had just had a bad conversation—as if the Rustins had stumbled into a pit that had been hidden on the farm the whole time.
Annabelle never told her family about the incident. She was embarrassed to have lost her self-restraint and offended the woman; later on, the distractions of the Emergency made her forget all about it. But now, as she turned into the street where the Rustin rowhouse stood behind its wooden fence, the memory of her unfortunate exchange in Mrs. Cronk’s kitchen disturbed her as her war fantasies did not, and she was filled with dread for her husband and daughter, out there among dangerous pig people.
4
She found Pan at home with the school day only half over and the front room in a state of chaos, games scattered across the floor, a tent of bedsheets strung between the doors. “Do you think you can do this because your father is away?” Annabelle yelled. Her son burst into tears, and she wrapped him in her arms and asked forgiveness.
At dinner, Pan pushed his food around uneaten, then set down his fork. “Why couldn’t they leave Zeus with us? They’re never coming back.”
“Just wait, they’ll be back tomorrow,” she told him, but a grief beyond her reach was afflicting him as if he’d begun to see a depth beneath the world’s bright surfaces, making him seem much older than the boy for whom every new day was a thrilling adventure, and at the same time like her little Pan-Pan again. For the first time in years he asked to sleep in his parents’ bed, and she let him, though Hugo would have disapproved.
In the morning Pan complained that he didn’t feel well enough to go to school. When she asked what was wrong, he said that his stomach hurt, but at the slightest upset he kept bursting into tears that expanded into uncontrollable sobs. For the next two days Annabelle didn’t leave the house, except once to shop at a market in the Warehouse District that was still selling chicken parts and weary-looking vegetables. Her son’s mood infected hers, or activated a latent anguish of her own, and during the long days and evenings of card games and reading aloud her stomach kept knotting tighter. Pan slept curled against her, breathing softly while she lay on her back with her eyes open and listened to the tolling of bells, unable to stop her thoughts: You found a way to take this one thing I have. It’s gone and so are you. Why? What’s happening?
By the third morning Annabelle could no longer bear to listen for the sound of her husband and daughter coming in the door. “Let’s go see Grandpa.”
It was a gray, cold Sunday, and she dug coats out of the closet for them both. This moment in the Earth’s journey, when the air sharpened and the sidewalk smelled of crinkled leaves, always reminded her of the final change—the one that waited for her father as he lay sleeping in the old people’s home, that would someday find her and the three people she cared for most. Pan clutched a bouquet of flowers while his other hand reached for his mother’s and held it tight, just as he used to every morning on the way to nursery school. The touch of his palm, larger now and less soft, awoke an impulse so old that she couldn’t recognize herself without it: to hide away so that all the changes that would eventually rob her of everything couldn’t find her.
Marriage and children had long ago taught her to embrace the early sunset, for the transformation it promised also brought love. She couldn’t flee one without losing the other. And when change had suddenly come to the city, her acquaintance with the urge to hide helped her understand what her husband, who regularly encountered death at work but almost never gave it a thought, who was so much better suited to this life, couldn’t understand—that the Emergency was a thing to welcome. It meant their world was still alive, and so was she.
At the corner, two teenagers, a girl and a boy, were leaning against a lamppost, smoking and chatting. They wore the same matching green jackets and trousers as Lynx, and the same peaked caps with eyes sewn on, like mailmen, or soldiers. The girl, her hair pulled back tight over her scalp, was doing the talking, while the boy, shorter and younger, kept glancing around uneasily. As Annabelle and Pan approached on the sidewalk, the girl hit the boy’s shoulder. Startled, he stood up straight and glanced in their direction.
Annabelle felt their eyes between her shoulder blades all the way to the tram stop.
Otherwise, the streets were emptier than they’d been since the first days of the Emergency. Had they declared a new holiday while she was indoors with Pan? The distinction between workdays and weekends had disappeared—self-org committees never stopped, because the need for them was endless. But this morning felt like a Sunday of old, when homebound Burghers sat over their paper and coffee for hours with nothing urgent to do. Except this quiet wasn’t somnolent like then, but more like a pause that anticipated a very loud noise.
The only other person on the tram was a woman seated at the far end. She looked a few years older than Annabelle, in an out-of-date dress with big shoulders and a lace neckline. Under a hat decorated with artificial roses her face was pinched and unfriendly. She kept glancing out the rear window, then across the car at Annabelle without smiling. Some matriarch with a husband in a high-status guild like banking. You still saw a few women like her in the better neighborhoods—dressed for their ladies’ brunch, untouched by the Emergency, making obsolete judgments about everyone else, filling Annabelle with defensive scorn and an infusion of sadness: all life’s meaning coming down to the silver serving platter they still brought out on Sunday evenings.
“Heights!” the driver called as the tram came to a stop. When Annabelle and Pan moved to the doors, the woman stood and joined them. Out on the curb she raised her chin and, from under the brim of her hat, gave Annabelle a significant look. Her wide, searching eyes were kinder than those of the arch Burgher wife Annabelle had imagined on the tram.
“You know they said for nonessentials to stay inside this weekend.”
Annabelle was startled. She’d never even heard the term. “Who said?”
“The Wide Awakes,” the woman replied, just the way Lynx had—as if the source was obvious and the order normal. “I certainly don’t consider myself essential,” she went on. “I’d be home if not for my aunt’s funeral.”
“But why are we supposed to stay inside?”
The woman smiled. “Oh, I’m sure there’s a good reason. They know more than we do. Something must have started out there.”
“What started? Out where?”
The woman waved her gloved hand in the direction of the North Gate. “You know,” she whispered confidentially. “Them.” She lowered her gaze to Pan. “Are you going to a funeral as well?”
“We’re going to visit Grandpa,” Pan said. “He’s still alive.”
The woman found this answer delightful. “Beautiful boy! Beautiful flowers!” She ran a furry finger along Pan’s smooth cheek. “Have a safe day.”
Annabelle watched her walk away with the brisk step, hips twitching side to side, but not immodestly, of a Burgher woman who was still sure of her place in the world—even a world in which something must have started.
“Who’s them?” Pan asked.
“The trolls!” his mother said with an effort at silliness. She sang a line from “Brave Bella,” and Pan joined her in the rest of the verse, and they would have gone through the entire song if they hadn’t reached their destination first.
5
The old people’s home was a two-story brick building on a quiet street within sight of the hospital. After her mother’s death almost two years ago, Annabelle had secured a room and put her father in it, expecting him to die soon. But his body insisted on continuing to live (as Pan had told the woman from the tram) even while he consumed nothing but salted crackers and red wine and lost the ability to hold any memory less than half a century old. His mind kept dimming like the sky at twilight without ever going dark. She had no idea what he did from day to day, and neither did he. In all the minor ways she was a dutiful daughter, and once a week she forced herself to face his spectral life.
Her husband—who had always gotten along with her father better than she had—once suggested that they bring him to live in their rowhouse. Annabelle had rejected this idea as decisively as Hugo vetoed the Stranger family. She wasn’t prepared to take on the care of a fourth person—not one who, even in his diminished state, had a unique power to make her suffer with a single, well-aimed word.
As long as Annabelle could remember, she had been at war with herself. This struggle played out in her head between a voice that sounded like her own and another voice that sounded like her father’s, though by now it, too, belonged undeniably to her—a dry voice, not harsh or brutal, at times almost encouraging but in the same instant critical, even mocking, telling her: “You could have done it. Why didn’t you?” The nature of it changed over the years, but the meaning remained the same: the gifts he’d given her—intelligence, diligence, a place in the empire—were undermined by a fatal tendency to doubt herself, hesitate before the chance, then blame the world for her own failure to follow through.
The crucial instance of it occurred when she (always an excellent student) had finished her degree and was about to follow her father into the administration guild. He occupied an important position in the regional department that supervised the collection of land taxes. Under the empire it wasn’t just normal but necessary for Burghers to maneuver their children into the family guild. The competition for high-status jobs was so intense that a solid record alone seldom got a young person through the door—an extra push was needed from an established guild member. This nepotism was officially deplored and universally accepted.
Annabelle’s father had already laid the groundwork for her to start working as head of an auditing unit, with the promise of swift ascent, when she took her competency boards. Unlike the comprehensive exams she’d sat for at fourteen, this was something of a formality—her position was practically secure. But as she sat in a stuffy room full of aspiring bureaucrats on the grounds of Imperial College, the first question literally made no sense to her. She moved on to the second: same result. She quickly realized that the problem was with her, something had seized up in her brain, neural connections were coming undone, and her father’s voice began an ironic commentary on the spectacle of his daughter defeated by a routine exam that held the key to her future. When the proctor called time, she was barely halfway done.
Her father was mortified by her failure—but also, she sensed, satisfied. He pulled a string to allow her a makeup because of ill-health. Annabelle refused, saying that she would have to face the consequences. He assumed this meant accepting a job as a lowly file clerk in his department. In fact, she had decided to leave the guild path altogether. The reason was a medical student at the Imperial College Hospital with an earnest air and an easy smile. She’d met him through her older brother (who fulfilled their father’s every wish but would leave the care of his last years to Annabelle) and found that the war with herself lost some of its intensity when she was with him. He made her feel that the minor-key notes in her character were lovable—that he loved her for them—that they signified a depth of emotion he lacked.
Suddenly the prospect of following her father into the regional department of land-tax collection was less appealing than the adventure of a life with this idealistic young doctor whose guild was a moral calling, not a ladder to status. For once, she grabbed her chance at happiness. Anyway, she told herself, the family guild system was weakening, would soon be outmoded, and then she would be free to join one for which she was better suited, such as education.
So instead of going to work under her father, she married Hugo Rustin.
“You could have done both,” her father told her after the wedding. “Why didn’t you?”
The guild system was not about to give way. It only grew more calcified as it aged, and no other guilds opened their doors to her. She became a mother, and motherhood turned out to be more interesting than anything she’d ever done. Hugo was content for her to anchor their domestic life while he steadily rose to chief surgeon at the hospital. “Humanist” continued to be a favorite word of his (though she doubted he could define it if she pressed, so she didn’t), but over time he seemed to lose interest in his patients and no longer brought home their stories. Instead he became absorbed in the professional side of medicine, especially when his name was mentioned as the hospital’s likely next director. He also began to take an intense interest in the education of their daughter. Selva became his project.
The city where Annabelle had no place because she had forfeited it was the ideal setting for her husband’s conscience and his ambition. To his mind these were as free of conflict as their marriage, which was smoother than that of anyone she knew. They let earlier friendships wither, and avoided bumping against each other’s secret wounds and shaky certainties. Hugo hardly ever said a critical word to Annabelle, and the lack of pressure made it easy to slip into a role that seemed to be laid out for her like a featherbed. She could hardly blame him when the war with herself resumed, but she could always blame herself, and did. She also blamed the empire.
One night, she attended her father’s retirement ceremony at the Administrators Social Club, in a historic stone building between the clock tower and the courthouse. His colleagues—mostly old men, a few women closer to her age—drank and chatted and made speeches about his career while Annabelle nervously downed two glasses of wine. When it was her turn to get up and say something as the daughter of the celebrated bureaucrat, a moment she’d been dreading for days, the candlelit room began to swim, the walls hung with portraits of the city’s great administrators billowed toward her, and the expectant faces of the guests suddenly appeared to be skulls set on top of elegantly tailored suits and evening dresses, grinning skulls decorated with wigs and eyeglasses and sparkling jewelry. This vision so disturbed her that she forgot all about the piece of paper on which she’d written down some loving remarks, and instead began to improvise at high speed.
“Bravo, Papa! What a career you’ve had! I’m very proud of you. How many of us can say we devoted our whole life to collecting taxes for the empire? You should all try to imagine what it was like being a little girl with Papa’s example right there in front of me like a clock that never stops, every day he went on working, tick tick tick tick. I can only say I’m sorry I didn’t live up to him. I’m sure you all know I failed his legacy. I just couldn’t have done what you did, Papa, keeping your hand on the crank and the gears turning, at some point my arm would have stopped moving like a broken axle and I would have said, ‘What’s it all for? What if this crank is grinding me to fine powder?’”
Amid uneasy laughter, the eye sockets beneath her father’s hairpiece stared at her without expression. Afterward he didn’t speak to her for two months, until he finally accepted a written apology and they resumed their relationship on even more fraught terms. Thankfully, Hugo had been home with the children the night of the ceremony—but later on Annabelle wished he’d been there to hear her rave. It might have helped him understand what was coming. The Emergency wouldn’t end the war with herself—probably that would never end—but he might have taken more care not to desert her when it came. By then she’d installed her father in the old people’s home, where he would finish his days as her last connection to the late empire.
6
In the front parlor an old man in suspenders studied his cards with a puzzled frown, while across the table his opponent dozed, chin buried in his mountainous torso. A tiny white-haired woman in an armchair was gazing into space. When Annabelle and Pan came through the door, she jumped to her feet with surprising agility. “No! No! Get out!” she shouted, waving her arms as if two demons she recognized from an earlier intrusion had come back to do more harm, though Annabelle had never laid eyes on her.
A male attendant in a white apron rushed in from the hall and seized the woman by her upper arms. “Sit down, Minna, we talked about this, you know you’re not allowed.”
Minna let herself be guided back into her chair while she stared at the newcomers with utter horror.
The attendant apologized to Annabelle. “Go on up. He’s sleeping.”
She always found her father sleeping. Perhaps, like Zeus, he did nothing else all day until someone offered an alternative. As she led Pan through the dimly lit parlor to a narrow stairway, the smell of the place enveloped her: a mix of dusty carpeting, boiled vegetables, and the sweet and sour odor of old people. It smelled of neglect—not just physical decay but mental abandonment, the airlessness of a home that no one ever thought about. Whenever Annabelle came by for a visit after a frantically busy day at the hostel or in a citywide self-org meeting, she was struck by a feeling of stopped time. The fusty floor lamp beside the card table and the tattered burgundy fabric of the demented woman’s armchair returned her to the world before the Emergency. Nothing that had happened since ever penetrated the old people’s home. They were given no role in Together; for some reason there wasn’t even an Elderly self-org (though a subcommittee of Parks took care of the municipal cemetery). She had immured her father in a museum where a visitor could spend an hour among living figures from the past.
