The Emergency, page 26
That guard was gone. In his place stood a very tall young man, no more than twenty, with a narrow face and eyes set close together on either side of a protuberant nose. Instead of blue overalls, he was wearing the same green uniform and cap that she had seen on Lynx and on the two teenagers outside her house. When she moved toward the doors, he stepped in front of her.
“My son needs to use the bathroom.”
“Identification please.”
She had no idea where she’d put her certificate of citizenship—anyway, it was no good now, and the notion of issuing new papers went against the spirit of Together. “Well, I don’t have any.”
“All visitors must show identification.”
“Are you expecting trouble?” He didn’t answer, but his possum’s nose twitched in some discomfort that pleased her, for she had taken an immediate dislike to the old guard’s replacement. “I’m Doctor Rustin’s wife, and my son needs a bathroom.”
“Who’s Doctor Rustin?”
“The chief—”
She felt Pan’s hand give hers a tug. It pulled something loose in her like a rip cord, freeing all the rage that she habitually turned on herself, releasing a surge of energy with which she pushed past the guard through the glass doors and sailed across the lobby floor and down the bright corridor while Pan kept yanking her hand, saying, “Mama, Mama,” until they reached the bathroom and she took off his coat and saw the dark stain spreading between his trouser legs.
Annabelle washed her son’s body and clothes. It was cold in the bathroom, and she wrapped him in her coat, which covered him down to his knees. She waited until he stopped crying, then left him and went off in search of a hospital gown to hide his humiliation.
She had been hurrying too much to notice the signs posted all along the corridor walls. Instead of the handholding cutouts and childlike scrawl of TOGETHER signs, simple block letters stood out on white paper.
DO NO HARM. DO ONLY GOOD.
IF YOUR HEALING RECIPIENT IS A YEOMAN, INFORM SELF-ORG.
THE TRUTH IS ON OUR SIDE.
WHAT YOU THINK IS OUR BUSINESS.
ARE YOU WIDE AWAKE?
Halfway down the hall a door stood open. Annabelle stopped short and peered inside.
“You shall be as gods,” said a young doctor she didn’t know. He was holding hands with those seated in chairs on either side of him. He was broad-shouldered, good-looking, with thick-rimmed glasses and a neatly groomed beard, and under his white coat his scrubs were olive green. Then he dropped the hands and leaned forward, elbows on knees, clasping and unclasping his own hands as if working a piece of putty into submission while he listened to a woman Annabelle couldn’t see.
“And she believed him?” the young doctor asked.
“I’m not sure. I found her hard to read.” It sounded like Hugo’s deputy, Suzana.
“What did he tell North Gate Safety?”
“A, quote, humanitarian mission,” said a woman seated next to the young doctor. She looked around thirty, with an oval face perched on a tense neck. “Something about saving a Stranger boy.”
“Rescuing toasted marshmallows.” The flat, charmless voice sounded like that of Hugo’s rival, the chief of personnel. There was muted laughter.
The young doctor (Annabelle thought of him as the leader) clapped twice. “Let’s stay focused. When did he leave?”
“Thursday.”
“Gone four days in Yeoman country. Lying to North Gate Safety or his wife—or both.” The leader sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “What does that tell you?”
“Reckless.”
“Unreliable.”
“Or conspiring,” the leader said.
“He took his daughter,” Suzana said. “Maybe they did go camping.”
“It isn’t even the season. She’s in school. And no one is leaving the city.”
“But that would be just like Hugo. A grand gesture to show his faith in humanity.”
There were scoffs and snorts.
“Wasn’t there something anti-Together about his statements in the Restoration Ring? Even pro-Yeoman?” The oval-faced woman was bobbing her head and enunciating to give each word its import. “Does it matter whether he’s trying to save the world or join the enemy? He harms us by word and thought. Together lives in the mind. It’s woven with gossamer.”
“That’s beautifully put,” the leader said, “but I’d still like to know what he’s up to. Your cousin—what’s his name?”
“Kask,” Suzana said. “Not really my cousin.”
“But Hugo wanted to see him. What do we know about him?”
“He does some sort of manual labor in the Warehouse District. We’ve lost touch.”
“He didn’t answer the orientation summons, like half the Yeomen in the district,” the chief of personnel said.
“And we have no idea who they are,” the leader said, “thanks to the terrible recordkeeping of the Imperial Census.”
“We’ll find them when they need a doctor. They’ll come out of the woodwork.”
“Isn’t it interesting that the summons scares them?” the thin-faced woman said, steepling her fingertips together and tilting her head to demonstrate her fascination. “As if ‘orientation’ means physical pain to them, not cognitive expansion? Doesn’t that tell us something dark about Yeoman culture?”
“I want this Kask brought in,” the leader said. “I’ll bet he’s up to something—maybe with Hugo. And I want to find Hugo.”
Annabelle shivered—the hospital seemed to have no heating. And she was looking at someone who deepened her chill. A smooth-faced, ponytailed girl in scrubs, maybe a nurse, with a pair of goggles strapped over her eyes, sat up straight and perfectly still, never shifting her head toward the speaker or changing expression or adjusting the hands in her lap. It was hard to tell where her scrubs ended and her arms began, for there was something shiny and impossibly youthful about her skin, as if age hadn’t left a single mark on her. And still she didn’t move.
Pan was waiting. Reluctantly, Annabelle turned away from the open door and the obscure talk about herself and Hugo and a man named Kask and orientation—about anything but medicine. Troubled and hurried, she went in search of an extra-small set of scrubs. Nothing was as she remembered it: the floor kept sticking to her shoes, the odor of incontinence pervaded the halls. No orderlies rushed by pushing stretchers, no nurses stood around in loud groups. She seemed to have the place to herself, other than the patients she glimpsed entombed in beds as she passed their rooms, and an old man shuffling along the hall in a gown that bared his wasted hams.
Maybe she was the credulous wife they’d been discussing. She still didn’t know why Hugo had gone away. Perhaps even he didn’t know; perhaps his idea about Mr. Monge’s boy was like a dream he’d tried to explain to her and failed, since telling any dream left you more alone. No one ever revealed more than a flicker of the empire within.
For her, that was the real point of Together: to make them all less alone, to dream less private dreams. But a higher command was to be true to herself, and she obeyed it so faithfully that Hugo once said her religion prohibited her from laughing at any joke she didn’t find funny. With the Emergency this command had taken her away from him. Now she worried that it was taking her away from Together.
At the end of the hall there was a closet door with two signs: a piece of paper that said DON’T BE A HUMAN. BE A BETTER HUMAN, and above it, in stenciled letters from another time, the word SUPPLIES. Inside, Annabelle found folded stacks of towels and gowns, and a pile of mildewy scrubs that had been in use before the yellow-and-purple of Together and the green of the Wide Awakes. She grabbed the smallest pair she could find and returned to the bathroom, where Pan was boxing with the mirror in her winter coat. She looked away and bundled up his damp trousers while he put on the scrubs.
“We can’t stay any longer,” she told him. “We’ll go straight out the way we came in.”
As soon as Annabelle stepped into the hall, a small female voice behind her said, “Mrs. Rustin?” She turned: it was the girl from the meeting. Only she was no longer wearing goggles, and up close her face was neither shiny nor expressionless. Pulled high by the ponytail, her brow was furrowed, her wide mouth pursed in a tense smile, and her eyes peered up at Annabelle’s with timorous curiosity. “The director would like to see you.”
9
Annabelle didn’t care for the hospital director. He was smooth and insincere, and she doubted his loyalty to Hugo if self-interest ever got in the way. He and his wife had once hosted a dinner at the Physicians Social Club, and the director had spent the evening condescending to Annabelle while looking down the front of her dress. But it wasn’t hard to rattle a man like that—she called attention to the bit of food at the corner of his mouth and let him know when he was repeating himself. Afterward Hugo reported with pride that Annabelle had impressed his boss. He was the only one of her husband’s colleagues who might tell her why Hugo had gone away. This was the reason she had come to the hospital: to see him.
The director’s office stood at the end of a narrow hall leading from the admittance desk. But when the girl ushered Annabelle and Pan inside a windowless, wood-paneled room, the person seated behind the mahogany desk wasn’t the blandly smiling sixty-year-old she’d expected. The armchair was occupied by the young doctor from the circle. On the front of his white coat, its sleeves pushed up to the elbows, the word DIRECTOR was stitched in red thread.
He reached across his desk to indicate a chair. “Annabelle, please sit down. Lyra, do we have anything to occupy this young man for a few minutes?”
“Do you like building blocks?” the girl asked Pan.
“I’m too old for that.”
“What about sketching?”
Pan looked at his mother, who had not yet sat down. “Do I have to go?” When Annabelle hesitated, he added, “What if you need me?”
She told him to let Lyra entertain him—how often did he get to spend time in his father’s hospital?
“I’m Saron,” the young doctor said when they were alone.
“I expected someone else.”
“Ah. My predecessor retired last week. We owe him a great debt—but as he told us, ‘Time to listen to the young.’ Tea?”
Annabelle didn’t want to accept Saron’s hospitality, but even with her coat on, she was cold. “Black, please.”
Saron smiled to himself as he steeped fresh leaves in a steaming tea service and poured out two cups. By the room’s dim light Annabelle recognized that she was in the presence of male vanity. She had known many varieties; Hugo’s was among the subtler, largely consisting of affected modesty. Over the course of her life she had learned to tolerate it while occasionally passing inward judgment. But today she did not feel like being quiet.
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
“Who do you mean?”
“The hospital seems empty.”
Saron laughed and ran his fingers over a bearded cheek. “I wouldn’t call it empty. Some of our patients come from outside the city, and we’re no longer seeing them.” After a moment he added, “They’ve stopped coming.”
“Yeomen no longer get sick?”
Saron didn’t answer but sipped his tea and watched her through the rising steam. “What brought you to the hospital?”
“My son needed a bathroom.”
He seemed to weigh whether to accept this explanation or scoff at its absurdity. “Anyway, Annabelle, I’m glad you’re here. Can I call you that?” He set his cup beside a folder on the desk. “Let’s speak freely. Where is Hugo now?”
“Camping with our daughter.”
“Where?”
She described the Place in vague terms—she honestly wasn’t sure of its location and couldn’t have found it on a map.
“That sounds like the heart of Yeoman country.”
“We go there every year. It’s a lovely area.”
Saron had begun to flex his jaws, clenching and unclenching. “Why did he tell the North Gate that he was on a, quote, humanitarian mission?”
Annabelle tried to think through the consequences of lying and kept getting lost in thickets where Hugo’s behavior only seemed worse. Instead, she told the story of Mr. Monge’s son, trying to imagine her husband and daughter searching the woods for this elusive boy, losing faith in her own words as she spoke them, while Saron sat back in his armchair and sipped his tea and slowly nodded as if a problem he’d been parsing was finally solved.
“So not camping—that makes more sense,” he said when her story faded into an unresolved end. “But do you really believe he’s taking this enormous risk out there just to provide first aid to a Stranger boy?” Annabelle was silent. “Of course, you know him better than I do.”
Irritated, she said, “I’m sure I do.”
“Hugo was asked to leave the hospital. Did you know that?”
She shook her head. It was a pathetic thing to have to admit.
“It had to do with the woman who’s outside with your son.”
The steam was fogging up Saron’s thick-rimmed glasses, and when he took them off, Annabelle suddenly imagined how he must see her: a nice Burgher wife, still attractive in her forties, an ornament at her husband’s side, spoiled by a life of peace and prosperity, titillated by the Emergency, proud to be dabbling in self-org—utterly ignorant of the hard world.
She sat very still, warming her hands around the teacup, avoiding his eyes, and listened. He told her the story as if describing an interesting medical case, and in contrast with Saron’s factual tone Hugo’s words sounded so extreme that she could hardly believe he would have said such things, or fathom why—they seemed unprompted, unmoored, lunatic. He had once given her a very different account of the same incident, a self-pitying version to win her sympathy. Remembering it now disgusted her. She wanted to rush out and apologize to the girl, but she didn’t move. As she listened, she was watching Saron’s hands. They were clasped together on the desk, annihilating the piece of putty again, and the effort engorged their veins and rippled through the muscles of his forearms.
When she looked up, his eyes were locked on her.
“I’m very sorry,” she said. “Ashamed, honestly.”
One of the hands reached across the desk and gave the back of her hand a reassuring rub. The touch made her heart beat a little faster. “You didn’t know. He kept it from you.”
“Did he apologize to her?”
“Yes—and that might have been the end of it. There’s a lot of pressure here, people lose control. But Hugo’s pride got the better of him.” Saron explained that Hugo had turned his apology into an attack on them all—on the hospital self-org, on Together itself, antagonizing his peers on the committee, demoralizing the younger ones, almost forcing the hospital to send him away for the sake of its own integrity. “He couldn’t accept that our city no longer revolves around chief surgeons.”
Now she couldn’t look away from his eyes. In the gloom they glowed with boyish energy, and with a confident intimacy that belonged to someone older.
“Families are changing, too,” Saron went on. “I hate to say this, but in a way he was attacking you, Annabelle. I’ve heard about your Stranger Committee—you’re an essential worker for Together. You’re wide awake. You and I want the same thing.”
She didn’t know if everything he said was true, but the vision of a world she could be part of drew her toward him. At the same time, she felt an urge to close a curtain, to protect herself and her family from this distractingly handsome doctor whom she didn’t know.
Seeing her hesitate, Saron leaned back in his armchair. “Let me explain to you where we are. They’ve cut off our food supply—you know that. They’re building a network of spies in the city, boring from within. And right now, while Hugo is on his humanitarian mission in Yeoman country, they’re preparing an attack.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because they need us more than we need them. Because we have hospitals, schools, inventions—brains.”
“They have farms.”
“We’re already learning to grow our own food. Annabelle, help us. Help us find Hugo.”
“You think he—”
“I’m not saying he’s joined them. Has he gone that far? I don’t know. Maybe he wants to be the man who brings us back together, with reason and compromise and all those nice empire things. But he’s in over his head, and he could get himself and other people killed.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“If you hear from him, let us know. If he comes home, bring him here.”
She was angrier with Hugo than she’d ever been—less for what he’d done to anyone else than for what he’d done to her—lying, concealing, shaming her. Most of all, for leaving her out. But the thought of her husband coming home gave her an image of him at the dinner table, in his weekend flannel shirt (was there ever a greater creature of habit?), after a “project day” of weeding the garden or repairing closet drawers. He would go around the table and have each of them in turn—first Pan, then Selva, then Annabelle—report highlights from their week, unaware that his face was glowing, not at anything they said but at the pleasure of their company. This image was utterly ordinary, and therefore sacred. It didn’t matter to anyone else. Compared to the future of the city it was trivial. The four of them were trivial. One by one they would all disappear, while Together would continue indefinitely. She was thinking wrong thoughts and wouldn’t repeat them to this young doctor, wouldn’t submit fragile sketches of her private life to the scrutiny of the sum of us. She wanted to go home, even if a calamity was waiting.
She shook her head to clear her mind of the hands and eyes. “You don’t know my husband.”
“We just want Hugo back safe.”
“My son is waiting.” Annabelle stood up, but she didn’t leave. “Can you explain something? The Wide Awakes—these green uniforms, Yeoman orientations, training Strangers. Was Together always about this?”
