The Emergency, page 9
“I guess it depends which Yeomen you mean,” Rustin said. “I know a pig farmer. He’s a friend of mine.” He hesitated before adding, “The answer’s complicated.”
“You’re making it complicated,” she said. “Some of them aren’t bad as individuals, but the Yeomen people, of course they’re against us. They want to start a war. There’s no way we can live with them, in my opinion.” The eagerness faded from her eyes, replaced by a staring insistence that fastened on to his so that he almost had to agree or take a step away.
A noise rose from the interior of the circle. The rumble of another voice-wave was approaching. The woman turned from him and stood on tiptoe. Around them people fell silent and listened. The question grew more distinct as it neared the outer edge.
“Can we live with Yeomen?”
“Ha! That’s a first.” The woman rapped Rustin’s shoulder with the back of her hand—she had anticipated the question.
This time it was impossible to tell who answered first. The voices came together at a single instant in a single word: “No,” and again, “No, no,” and that syllable was so majestic and triumphant that if the solitary voice hadn’t come from just a few yards away he never would have heard it say, “Yes.”
The chorus of no’s grew louder as it moved toward the center, but in the area around Rustin and the woman in the purple raincoat the no’s began to ebb. Then they were drowned out by a rhythmic clapping, which quickly spread across all the gatherers so that everyone who a moment before had been chanting no stopped chanting and began beating hands together in time with everyone else. Then the clapping stopped.
Another backhand from the woman in the purple raincoat. “Told you. Now watch.”
The damp afternoon light was beginning to die, and it was hard to see who had said yes. Fifteen or twenty feet to Rustin’s left, people were backing up, making room for someone. In the clearing stood a girl with a ponytail and goggles over her face. She was dressed in a loose tunic and pants, but not the Together uniform. She was wearing hospital scrubs. Rustin knew her at once. It was the girl from the Restoration Ring—the nurse assistant, Lyra.
“Goggles off, goggles off!” a male voice chanted.
She raised a hand to her face and lifted the goggles from her eyes in the same tentative way Rustin had seen at the hospital. She appeared startled to find herself isolated in this huge crowd and the focus of all its attention, as if she hadn’t meant for her answer to be overheard.
“Speak, speak!” the male voice commanded.
“I”—she hesitated and gestured at her clothes—“work at a hospital.” She spoke so softly that it would be impossible for anyone farther away than Rustin to hear.
Before she could go on, voices around her called out in unison: “I work at a hospital.” Voices farther off repeated the words, and the words echoed like an unwilling body tossed from hands to hands across the crowd until it reached the pedestal, where it lay naked in a sudden silence. Everyone waited for the girl to continue.
Rustin’s heart had gone cold. She was going to announce his offense—expose him to a thousand inflamed Burghers, an enemy in their midst, and their chant would carry his words across the square: Who do you think is in charge here? You child! He looked around for a way to escape, but he didn’t move. Everything was following a dreamlike logic that required his participation.
“We had to operate on a Yeoman boy.”
“We had to operate on a Yeoman boy.”
“I was having a bad day. I’m not going to tell you why—that’s private.”
But nothing was private any more. Every word from her solitary voice was taken and lifted to the chorus of We Are One. She told the story in short bursts: how she had checked on the boy in the recovery room after surgery. How she was there when he woke up. How the first face he saw was hers. They were both having a bad day, but she smiled at him and he smiled at her. She left the room feeling that she had done one good thing for one person that day. She had been about to quit nursing, but the moment with the boy changed her mind. And that was the story. That was why she had answered yes. They could live with Yeomen.
As soon as her last words died at the pedestal, the brick pavement began to tremble under Rustin’s feet. People were stomping in a rapid march-in-place and chanting in time: “Yes, yes, yes!” But the stomping and chanting were quickly overwhelmed by a stranger and far louder noise. It started in the area around the nurse assistant, and at first it sounded like wails of pain, but as it spread he identified a trilling of tongues and throats, high-pitched, ever rising. Hundreds of people were ululating, “No no no no no no!” The noise was thrilling and horrifying, as if a flock of furious birds had suddenly alighted and begun to peck Lyra to death. The whole square, even the yeses of a moment ago, was making the same sound.
The woman in the purple raincoat came close to Rustin. She raised her face to his ear and opened her scarlet lips. Her tongue fluttered, a pink blur inside her mouth, driving the sound deep into his brain.
“That’s how we disagree.”
Rustin turned away and looked for Lyra. He wanted to tell her something, he didn’t know what—“You’re here and I’m here”—but she was gone. And Selva, too, had vanished in the anonymous crowd as a light rain began to fall.
13
At dinner Pan recited the first half of “Brave Bella,” Annabelle discussed the aspirations and aspersions of Mr. Monge, and Selva reported important decisions made at We Are One. Rustin was silent. But after the plates were cleared and everyone had returned to the table for tea and fruit, he said, as if he were announcing that he would go to bed early:
“I think I’ll look for the boy.”
“What?” Annabelle said at once.
“What boy?” Pan asked.
Rustin glanced at Annabelle. “A Stranger boy who’s lost in the woods near the Place.”
Annabelle shook her head. Selva took off her goggles and laid them on the kitchen table, and Pan grabbed them. She was looking at her father with new interest. “What are you talking about?”
“Mr. Monge was separated from his son on the way here,” he said. “I’m going to take an extra day off work and find him.”
“For God’s sake, Hugo,” Annabelle said. “That’s a crazy idea. You don’t know where he is. He could be dead. It’s far too dangerous.”
“How did the boy get lost?” Pan asked.
The fantasy had been playing over Rustin’s thoughts all the way home from We Are One and throughout dinner. Nothing more than an image of himself walking through woods with a pack on his back, the sun warm on his head, the smell of pine needles, a boy tied to a tree, bloodied clothes—but he felt the pressure in his chest ease, the knot of grief under his sternum come loose. To be away from the eyes of the city, alone, longing for his wife and children, missed by them, to do something simple and good and then return home with the boy to the love in their eyes. Testing the fantasy, saying it aloud, was confirmation: this was the thing for him to do.
“I don’t want you to go,” Selva said. “Yeomen are man-eaters.”
“Don’t call them that.”
The slur was becoming popular. Rustin had heard it from a table of orderlies in the canteen. He’d wanted to go over and remind them of certain Together principles, but he’d thought better of it.
“Everyone at We Are One agreed,” Selva said. “Yeomen are enemies.”
“Everyone?”
“Papa, they’re eating each other out there. The Safety Committee made a presentation to our class.”
“And what do you suppose they’re saying about us? We know Yeomen—the Cronks,” he went on. “Last year Pan wanted to see their piglets. We still speak the same language, we belong to the same empire—the same land. They’re still human. They’re not eating each other.”
Annabelle leaned toward her husband and spoke quickly in a low, firm voice. “It’s not the same now. We don’t hear much, but what we hear is all bad. They killed that poor man from the Water Committee who went out there to discuss the river level. They’re blocking trucks we depend on.”
“How do you know they killed him?”
“Did he ever come back? Hugo, even before the Emergency Yeomen didn’t like Burghers, they just kept it to themselves. You’ve always had a romantic idea about them. They hate us.”
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “They’re still living by the old code out there. They haven’t burned it all up in a bonfire and called it ‘Together.’ This Burgher preciousness—I’m sick of it. We think we’re better because we say ‘Friends.’ Are Yeomen killing dogs?”
The whole family looked at the sofa where Zeus lay sprawled asleep in flying frog position, his long black muzzle nestled between his front paws.
“It doesn’t matter if Yeomen aren’t killing dogs,” Annabelle said. “They want to kill Burghers.”
Selva sided with her mother, but she was looking at her father in a way he remembered from early colloquies, with a hundred questions in her eyes. Now that he had no answers for her, his mind was made up.
“Let me do this,” Rustin said. “Mr. Monge can show me where he lost the boy. And I’ll take Zeus—he loves those woods. We’ll camp overnight at the Place. I might even be back in a day.”
“But Hugo, why?”
He slapped his palm on the walnut tabletop, surprising himself more than anyone. “I have to do something!”
He went to bed and dreamed of the Yeoman boy with the gunshot wounds. The boy was on the operating table wide awake with eyes that said Don’t lose me while Rustin dug deep in his chest with forceps for the bullet, but the boy sat up and wrapped his arms around the surgeon’s neck, and blood was getting everywhere, on his gown and neck and face, and with all the blood leaking from the wound the forceps kept slipping and couldn’t grasp the bullet, but when he tried to make the boy lie still the boy rose again with those skeletal arms reaching for him, Don’t lose me.
14
Suzana lived in the Heights, a hilltop district near the hospital that was coveted for spectacular views of the park and the river. Its residents took pains to keep their gardens tidy and their façades fresh, aware that neighbors would notice any dead leaves collecting in tulip beds or paint peeling off brightly colored front doors, and then neighbors would talk, and a cloud of disapproval would settle over an offending house. Every year on the summer solstice—it was called Visiting Day—people in the Heights opened their homes, and Burghers from other districts were allowed to wander through rooms and gardens, oozing with compliments while trying to hide their envy or disdain. The whole district became a hive of comparative gossip, and though no prizes were given out, by the end of the day everyone in the Heights knew the winners.
Before the Emergency, the district was governed by a council notorious for the strict tests it applied to newcomers, who had to present paint samples and interior decorating plans as well as brief life histories and testimonials from longtime Heights Burghers in order to be considered for residency. Suzana once told Rustin that she received her permit only because the council chairman’s gallbladder had been removed on their operating table.
With the Emergency, of course, the Heights District council, like all the others in the city, was disbanded. The chairman, a hostile old man who kept an eye on his domain from his front-porch rocking chair, died soon after of heart failure. The new Heights self-org committee abolished Visiting Day and replaced it with Belonging Week. For seven summer days Heights residents left their homes at dawn and descended on the Warehouse District and other disfavored neighborhoods with hammers, handsaws, shovels, seed bags, and worked late into the long evenings. Despite their ineptitude at manual labor, these Burghers brought the same competitive intensity with which they’d once perfected their homes in preparation for Visiting Day to repairing the broken cabinets of homebound pensioners and planting lilac saplings in trash-strewn lots. Heights children gave an impromptu performance of “Brave Bella” for the residents of the old people’s home where Annabelle’s father was ending his days, while he muttered from his chair, “Who needs it?” On the morning after Belonging Week, Suzana returned to the hospital with gashed fingertips, her eyes sunk deep in darkened sockets. “The price of living in the Heights has gone up,” she told Rustin as they scrubbed before surgery.
He had visited Suzana several times at home, where she lived alone. But he hadn’t been to the Heights since it became a hotbed of Together zeal, and now he was having trouble finding her house. Street signs with the names of ancient district councilors had been replaced by BELONGING ROAD and THE WAY OF THE YOUNG. Placards with slogans were planted in gardens, and entire blocks of front doors, once painted in sober grays, were immaculately purple and yellow.
The morning was overcast and warm for mid-autumn. Rustin turned into a steep side street that looked vaguely familiar. In the middle of the block there was a big tree. He began to climb toward it. He remembered that her house was the smallest on its street, with most of its façade hidden by a chestnut tree, and when he came to the tree he caught his breath and tried to figure out if the yellowing leaves were those of a chestnut. A sign was planted in the mulch: I AM NO BETTER AND NEITHER ARE YOU.
“What are you doing here?”
Fifteen feet away, the purple-and-yellow door was open just enough to reveal Suzana’s narrow, tense face.
“Exploring the city,” he said. “At the director’s suggestion.”
She glanced up and down the street. “This is not a good idea. Stefan lives right around the corner. Oh”—she waved him forward—“hurry up, just for a minute.”
She let him in the door and quickly shut it. They faced each other, Suzana in a blue silk robe as if she’d just gotten out of bed. The entry smelled of fresh-cut flowers. A dark hall led to a bright overhead light illuminating a table neatly set for two—but the doorway was as far as he would be admitted.
“You don’t want to be seen with me?” She didn’t answer. “You’ve repainted your door.”
“Just tell me why you’ve come.”
“I don’t want to make trouble for you. I need a favor.”
“I already did you a favor.”
“When was that?”
“In the Restoration Ring, when I didn’t tell them what it’s like working for you.”
Rustin had made up his mind not to take offense to anything she said. “What’s it like?”
“Nothing criminal, just a lot of criticism and arrogance.”
“Our colleagues have decided I’m a bad person. My daughter thinks so, too—possibly my wife. Am I?”
“‘Bad’ according to whose standard?”
“Yours!”
“Is that what you came for?” Her eyes shifted away as if the question embarrassed her. “Why ask me?”
“Your opinion matters to me.”
“Then let me add ‘getting dimmer with age.’ Didn’t that unpleasant experience at the hospital teach you our opinions don’t matter, yours and mine? I’ve always liked you well enough, Hugo, but the standard changed. That’s all that matters—not what I think.”
Rustin searched her eyes for a flash of irony, but there was only the annoyance of a teacher faced with a slow student just before the bell.
“A week ago you were chief surgeon,” Suzana went on. “What are you now? I have no confidence that my thought of the moment won’t be obliterated tomorrow. We live in this city with other people—ask yourself what they think. What if your children grow up and decide that everything about us, clothes, houses, food, words, all of it makes us the worst people who ever lived? Would you be able to stand up to them?”
His plan had put him in a practical mood, and this mood had brought him to Suzana for a favor, but now that he was here he wanted to talk with her in the old, intimate way. Worse, he wanted her approval. “I didn’t take the Emergency seriously enough.”
“You took it too seriously!” Her voice rose before she caught herself. “Why couldn’t you just keep your head down and wait it out? This isn’t going to go on forever. But damn you, Hugo, you wanted to be the Last Honest Burgher, and now I’m stuck with those fools because of your vanity.”
They fell silent. Eyebrows arched, she waited for him to leave. Instead, he asked about the hospital. She told him that in the days since his departure things had changed dramatically. Saron, flush with his triumph in the Restoration Ring, and without going through any of the senior people, had formed a new self-org committee entirely of younger staff called Wake Up the City. Its first decision was to stop admitting patients from outside the city—to stop treating Yeomen.
“They can’t do that!”
Suzana put a finger to her lips and shushed him. “But they did.”
He lowered his voice. “They took an oath when they entered the guild.”
“They think Together is higher than their oath.”
“The director’s allowing this?” She didn’t answer. “How can they justify refusing Yeomen?”
Suzana explained: according to the new committee, the disruption of livestock trucks and other sources of essential goods proved that Yeomen in the region were trying to strangle the city, and Burghers losing faith in Together were letting them do it. The others—the “wide-awake ones,” Saron called them—needed to retaliate by blockading goods from the city that Yeomen depended on: not fuel or food, but medicine and education. Saron was talking to the School Committee about joining Wake Up the City’s new policy.
Rustin had trouble understanding what she was saying. None of it made sense; everyone was falling into a fever dream. He stood in a stupor of his own, until Suzana put her hand on the doorknob and he recalled the purpose that had brought him here.
“One thing—the favor. That cousin of yours who works in the vehicle trade. Where can I find him?”
