The City, Not Long After Excerpt
PROLOGUE
The early morning breeze blew through the vegetable garden in Union Square, shaking the leaves of the bean plants and the lacy carrot tops. The city of San Francisco was asleep. The city was dreaming.
In the Saint Francis Hotel, just off the Square, Danny-boy was dreaming of the color blue. With a paint roller on a long pole, he painted the sky. He had been at work for many hours. At least half of the expanse above him was smeared with paint of a thousand different shades: royal blue, navy, turquoise, baby blue, teal, the fragile hue of robins’ eggs, the treacherous blue-gray of the ocean at dusk. Toward the horizon, where Danny-boy’s roller had not yet reached, the blues faded to misty gray. But overhead, luminous colors swirled and flowed like the water in a river.
In the middle of the changing pattern, two patches of blue-gray coalesced. Bright eyes watched Danny-boy from the center of the sky. Dark blue shadows defined the angles of a face, the curves of a woman’s body. As Danny-boy stared upward, a young woman stepped out of the sky, looking more than a little confused.
The city slept, and its dreams drifted through the minds of its inhabitants, twisting and changing their thoughts.
The man who called himself The Machine dozed on a narrow cot at the back of his workshop. In his dream, he was constructing an angel from objects he had gathered. The angel’s bones were pipes from the plumbing of an old Victorian mansion; its muscles were masses of copper wire, torn from the cables that ran beneath the city streets. On the angel’s massive wings, thousands of polished bottlecaps overlapped, making a pattern of scallops like the scales on a fish.
The Machine welded the last bottlecap to the wing and stepped back to admire his work. As he gazed up at the angel, he realized suddenly that his creation was not complete. Its chest was hollow: it had no heart.
He heard footsteps and glanced behind him. A woman was walking toward him, carrying something in her cupped hands. He could not see what she carried, but he could hear the steady pounding of a heartbeat, keeping time with her footsteps.
Dawn broke in the city: gray light shone on the gray stone buildings that surrounded the Civic Center Plaza. The statues on the façade of the public library showed signs of neglect. Over the years, pigeons had adorned the statues’ heads with streaks of white and deposited a clutter of feathers and broken nests at their feet.
In a tree that grew in the Plaza, a gray-muzzled monkey, one of the oldest of the troop that lived in the city, dreamed of the Himalayas. Icicles hanging from the eaves of a temple roof melted in the morning sun. Drops of falling water struck a bell, and the metal rang with a musical note. The water trickled away, whispering and crackling softly as it melted a path through the snow. The monkey stirred in its sleep. Changes were coming.
# # #
The sun was rising when Ms. Migsdale stepped from her house on Kirkham Street and headed for Ocean Beach. She wore sensible walking shoes, woolen stockings, a tweed skirt and man-tailored blouse, and an overcoat that would protect her from the wildest storm. Ms. Migsdale believed in clothes made to last.
The delicate watch on her wrist seemed incongruous: a dainty bit of gold with sparkling diamonds set around a tiny watchface. Ms. Migsdale had found the watch in a gutter near a jewelry store, dropped by looters as they fled. Though she would not touch any of the sparkling baubles that grew dusty in the display windows of other stores, she had taken the watch from the gutter, justifying it to herself by saying that she had found it, she hadn’t taken it. Finders keepers.
Before the Plague, Ms. Migsdale had lived alone. She had worked as a librarian at a nearby elementary school. After the Plague she continued living in the same small house, dedicating herself to publishing the New City News and sending messages out to sea.
Each day, at ebb tide, she walked along the beach, carrying a shopping bag. In the bag were a dozen green glass bottles that had once contained wine. Now the bottles held squares of white paper on which Ms. Migsdale had typed messages.
Each note was different. On some, she wrote proverbs or quotations. (“Opinions are like noses: everyone has one.”) On some, she wrote short statements of her beliefs. (“I do not believe in God and I must assume, therefore, that God does not believe in me.”) And on some, she wrote poetry — rhymed couplets, sonnets, and an occasional villanelle.
The bottles rattled and clinked in her shopping bag as she walked down the cement stairs to the beach. Seagulls took flight at her approach, shrieking as the wind caught them and blew them away like dirty scraps of paper. The retreating tide had littered the beach with clumps of seaweed and bits of driftwood. On her return trip, she would fill her bag with driftwood to burn in her wood stove.
When she reached the water’s edge, Ms. Migsdale set the shopping bag on the sand and swung her right arm in wide circles to loosen the muscles. Then she selected a bottle and waited until a wave crashed on the beach and began its retreat to the sea. Taking a running step onto the wet sand, she threw the bottle with a graceful overhand pitch, a throwing style she had perfected over the years. The bottle arced high, tumbling end over end before splashing into the water just past the breakers. Ms. Migsdale took a step back so that her shoes were out of reach of the next wave, and watched as the bottle bobbed in a passing swell.
Ms. Migsdale liked this time of the day, when she was awake but the rest of the city was still sleeping. Sometimes she saw things that emerged from the city’s dreams: Once a mermaid with long dark hair sang to Ms. Migsdale in a language she could not understand. Another time she met a wolf loping along the sand. The animal wore a red kerchief around its neck and smiled at her as it passed, a casual greeting between neighbors.
Ms. Migsdale picked up her shopping bag and strolled along the water’s edge. A flock of small brown shorebirds that moved like clockwork toys ran just ahead of her, peeping furiously. The flock split to rush around a clump of kelp and reunited on the far side.
Ms. Migsdale hesitated beside the kelp, noticing the glitter of glass among the tangled strands. Sometimes she found her own bottles, washed back to shore. With the toe of one of her sensible shoes, she nudged the kelp aside, revealing an amber-colored bottle that had once held Scotch. Not one of hers. She pulled it from the seaweed. Through the brown glass she could see a ragged-looking scrap of paper.
Her hands shook as she unscrewed the bottle’s plastic top. In fifteen years of sending messages, she had never once received a reply. She tried to shake the note out, but the paper wedged in the bottleneck and did not move. Realizing the futility of that approach, she scooped up her shopping bag and hurried toward the seawall, where winter storms had deposited rocks of all sizes.
With her strong right arm, she swung the bottle against a boulder. The brown glass shattered, sending chips flying in all directions. She snatched the scrap of paper from the bottleneck and unfolded it.
The paper had been torn from a newspaper published before the Plague. The message read: “A stranger brings interesting news. Join with like-minded friends to prevent interference in your affairs. Look ahead.”
Ms. Migsdale recognized the writing style and the typeface: the scrap had been part of the daily horoscope column that had once been published in a local newspaper. She read the words again, then slipped the paper into her pocket. Without her usual ceremony, she flung her remaining bottles out to sea and headed for home.
“Join with like-minded friends . . . ” the note had said. She wondered what her friend Edgar Brown would think of this.
# # #
Edgar Brown, the man most people called “Books,” smoothed the scrap of newsprint on his knee and peered at it. Ms. Migsdale waited impatiently. She liked Edgar, but found him exasperating at times. Ask him how to boil an egg, and he would shake his head in puzzlement. A week after he would emerge from the library with a bibliography listing sources that covered every aspect of the operation, from the denaturation of egg proteins at 100° C to the role of the egg in Chinese literature. Before the Plague he had been a research librarian at the University of San Francisco. He approached every problem with the same careful scholarship he had applied to major theological controversies.
“I’d say it was torn from a newspaper,” he said at last. “Perhaps from the Examiner. I’ll compare the typeface,
“I know that,” Ms. Migsdale interrupted. “But what do you think of what it says?” She did not give him a chance to respond. “I think it means that trouble’s coming. That’s what I think.”
“That seems like a hasty conclusion, Elvira,” Books said.
“It may be hasty, but that doesn’t mean I’m not right.” She leaned back and looked across the Civic Center Plaza. They were sitting on the steps of the public library, where Books lived. Across the Plaza, Danny-boy and Gambit were constructing something of shiny aluminum reflectors and wire.
“Gambit’s building an Aeolian harp,” Books said. “He’s stringing wires from the top of City Hall down to the Plaza. The reflectors will amplify the sound that the wind makes when it blows through the wires.”
Ms. Migsdale glanced at his face. “It’s no good trying to change the subject.”
He frowned. “Well, suppose you’re right and trouble is coming. Remember when the Black Dragons decided to expand their territory into downtown? The city took care of that quickly enough.”
“Ghosts,” Ms. Migsdale said. “The city scared them off with ghosts. But what if we’re up against someone who doesn’t scare as easily?”
“I don’t see what you’re so worried about,” Books grumbled. “If something comes up, we’ll deal with it.”
She shrugged, watching Danny-boy and Gambit. Tommy, Ruby’s son, was helping — or more likely, getting in the way. The sunlight glinted on the aluminum reflectors and Ms. Migsdale suddenly felt sad, as if she were remembering this from some distant future, looking back on happy times.
“I haven’t heard from Leon,” she said, admitting at last her real concern. Leon was one of the traders who always brought her news of the rest of the state of California. “I expected him a few weeks ago, but I haven’t heard.”
“He’s been delayed, that’s all,” Books said.
“Maybe.” She shivered, feeling a sudden chill. “At night, when I listen to the waves, they seem to whisper warnings.”
Books rubbed his hands together nervously.
“You feel it too.”
“I suppose I do,” he admitted reluctantly. He put his arm around her shoulders and she was glad of that. He was a stubborn man, a stodgy man, but a good friend for all that. Together, they would weather whatever trouble came their way.
PART ONE: City of Dreams
CHAPTER 1
Sixteen years before Ms. Migsdale found the bottle, Mary Laurenson had given birth to a daughter. Mary lay on a double bed in an abandoned farmhouse, clinging with both hands to the brass bedstead. With each contraction, she moaned in pain and fear, but no one was there to hear her.
It seemed to her that the moaning came from some external source, only incidentally linked to her body. She could feel the cries vibrating in her throat, but she had no control over them. She could not stop them any more than she could control the contractions that racked her body.
She was alone. When she had run away from San Francisco, she had wanted to be alone, wanted to crawl away and hide. But she had not imagined the consequences of that action.
She had felt the first contractions early in the evening. Her water had broken at midnight. Now sunlight shone through the window. In the almond trees outside, blackbirds sang and flitted from branch to branch. In the blessed moments when her muscles relaxed between contractions, she could hear the birds. But when the contractions came she could hear nothing but her own moaning and the pounding of her heart.
Her body was no longer her own. For hours she had fought for control, struggling to breathe as she had been taught, to relax between the spasms. Now she gave up, letting her body do as it would. She released her grip on the bedstead and put her hands at her sides, trying to find a position that would free her from the pain. Another contraction, and she gripped the sweat-drenched quilt beneath her, tearing the fabric with her hands.
Her mind was as willful as her body. She had no control over her thoughts. She hallucinated, imagining that her dead husband sat on the edge of the bed, telling her to breathe the way she had learned to breathe in class. What he asked was impossible: her body did as it wished and she had no say in the matter.
“Help me,” she sobbed, reaching out to the ghost of her husband. Her hand passed through empty space. “Goddamn you, help me.” He vanished, fading into the golden sunlight that filled the room.
Not sunlight, she realized suddenly. The golden light shone from a winged figure that stood beside her bed. She reached out and felt the warmth of the light on her hand.
“I’ll help you,” the angel said. She felt the voice in her body, like the trembling in her legs and the contractions in her belly. “Let me name the child and I’ll help you.”
She panted, arching her back with the next contraction. “Yes,” she cried. “Yes, help me. Please help me.” The warm light shone on her face and she closed her eyes against it.
The contractions came closer together, one long unending rush of pain. She closed her eyes and concentrated on pushing. She felt the tearing as the baby’s head came free. Again she pushed, seeking relief from the pain that was ripping her apart.
Relief came suddenly as the baby slid from her body. For a moment she lay quietly. Then the spasms returned as she pushed out the placenta.
She felt the movement of a small hand against her thigh and she reached down for the baby. With a corner of the quilt, she wiped the blood and mucus from the child’s face. The girl gasped once, whimpered, then opened her eyes and regarded Mary with an unfocused stare. At last, with her baby at her breast, Mary fell asleep, waking only when the night breezes blew in through the open window.
# # #
Mary never gave her daughter a name, calling her “baby” or “child” or sometimes “daughter.” She did not know whether the angel would return to name her daughter, but it seemed wisest to wait. Losing her husband and friends to the Plague had made Mary cautious. Naming the child seemed a foolish risk, as if a name would attract the attention of a malevolent universe. Namelessness offered a kind of protection.
When she considered the matter, Mary realized that choosing not to name the child made no sense. But sense did not play much of a role in Mary’s life. Besides, the girl really didn’t need a name. When Mary called to her daughter, she simply called “Come here.” The girl knew her mother was calling her. There was no one else around for her mother to call.
The baby grew up to be a wild, skittish, tree-climbing girl. She roamed the open lands around the farmhouse, chasing the feral cattle that grazed in overgrown pastures. She seemed to have no fear, this child. But then, she had no trust either. Somehow the two seemed linked in Mary’s mind.
Late at night, when the girl was sleeping, Mary crept into her bedroom. Her daughter lay on her side, curled up like a fox in its burrow, her breathing soft and steady. Mary unconsciously matched her own breathing to her daughter’s rhythm. She gently touched the girl’s hand, taking comfort from her living warmth.
On nights like that, Mary waited for something that she could not admit, even to herself. She waited for the bright angel to come and name her daughter, then steal her away. Mary guarded her daughter, falling asleep in the chair by the bed.
More often than not, she woke to find an empty bed. Her daughter had slipped away in the early morning, leaving a tangle of empty blankets. The girl was off searching for birds’ nests, snaring rabbits, catching crayfish in the creek, scavenging in abandoned houses for things to trade at market.
# # #
When the girl was nine years old, she found the globe in a nearby farmhouse. It was on a shelf of knickknacks, wedged between a metal replica of the Empire State Building and a china figurine of Minnie Mouse. With her fingers, she wiped away the furry layer of dust that covered the glass. Though the afternoon was cool and only a little sunlight filtered through the dirty window to shine on the shelf, the globe felt warm to the touch.
The girl peered through smears of dirt at the vague rectangular shapes inside. When she shook the globe, she saw flickers of movement through the glass.
She moved to the front porch where the light was better, polished the glass on the sleeve of her shirt, and peered inside again. Tall buildings with square windows stood side by side. The tallest of the buildings came to a point, making a triangle rather than a rectangle. When she shook the globe, flecks of gold rose in swirls and showered down on the buildings.
She had never seen anything so beautiful. The glitter caught the sunlight, sparkling like flames. If only she looked closely enough, she thought, she might see people in the tiny cars that stood motionless in the street. She turned the globe over and over in her hands, liking the feel of it. On the black base, raised gilt letters read: “Souvenir of San Francisco.”
Her mother had told her about San Francisco. Bedtime stories always began, “Back in San Francisco, before the Plague . . .. ” The stories were odd and disjointed, fragments of her mother’s life. Bright memories of the Chinese New Year’s parade, touched with the scent of gunpowder from firecrackers. Remembrances of neighbors: the old woman with twenty-nine cats, the young man who practiced Tai Chi on the roof.
From her mother’s memories, the girl had created her own picture of San Francisco: a place as exotic as Oz, with tremendous hills over which cable cars rolled. She had asked her mother once why they could not go back there. Her mother had shaken her head. “Too many ghosts there. I can’t go back.”
The girl took the globe home with her, along with the other trinkets she had found: a jackknife with an imitation pearl handle, a deck of playing cards decorated with photos of naked women, a set of embroidery scissors in the shape of a stork. When she got home, she put the jackknife and playing cards with the other things she would take to market. She gave the embroidery scissors to her mother. But the globe she kept for herself. That night, before she went to bed, she shook it once more and watched the gold flecks drift around the towers of the city.
# # #
When she was still quite young, the girl taught herself to hunt. Not far from her home was a tumble of concrete slabs, where a freeway overpass had collapsed in an earthquake. The rubble provided a maze of ready-made burrows, and the rabbits were abundant. At first she snared them with cunning loops of fishing line, set in faint pathways that the animals had worn in the grass. When she was a little older she made a slingshot with the metal tubing from a rusted bicycle frame and the rubber from the bicycle’s inner tube. With slingshot in hand, she would lounge on a sun-warmed concrete slab, waiting in the soft purple twilight for the rabbits to come out and feed. Even in dim light, she rarely missed.
In a neighboring farmhouse, she found a Golden Book Illustrated Encyclopedia. Though her mother had taught her to read, she liked the Encyclopedia mostly for the pictures, and she carried it home, several volumes at a time. After five trips she had the whole alphabet. On winter evenings she lay by the fire, studying pictures of exotic places and things. In the volume marked W she found pictures of weapons. From a picture she got the idea for her crossbow. She cut saplings from the almond orchard until she found one with the right springiness for a bow. She whittled the stock from lumber that she found in the barn. On long summer days she practiced target shooting in the orchard and became an excellent shot.
In the summer the valley was hot; in the winter the rains came. Each spring the almond trees in the orchard bloomed, and each fall she and her mother gathered nuts and hulled them for market. Before she went to bed each night, the girl shook the glass globe. Sometimes she dreamed of San Francisco.
CHAPTER 2
When Danny-boy was eight years old, he learned that art could change the world. The lesson began in an alley off Mission Street in San Francisco. Danny-boy crouched behind a garbage dumpster and watched a man paint a wall.
The man was dancing; his bare feet beat a rhythm on the asphalt. He wore a red kerchief around his neck and a pair of ragged jeans, cut off above the knee. In each hand he held a can of spray paint. His arms moved in sweeping gestures, leaving trails of paint on the red brick wall. As he painted, he chanted in a guttural voice. Danny-boy could not make out the words of the chant — could not even tell for certain that there were words, and not just grunts and nonsense syllables.
A ring of upturned abalone shells surrounded the man. In each shell a clump of herbs burned, sending clouds of pungent smoke swirling through the alley.
Through the smoke, Danny-boy could make out the pictures on the wall. A herd of barrel-bellied horses with manes as stiff as toothbrush bristles galloped toward Mission Street. A stag tossed its rack of antlers toward the foggy sky. A curve of red-brown paint formed the great humped back of a bull buffalo. As Danny-boy watched, the man added a slash of red for the animal’s eye.
Without hesitation, the man stooped to discard one spray can and pick up another, making the motion a part of his dance. He reached high on the wall and painted birds — or rather, pairs of curved lines that somehow suggested birds. Danny-boy recognized them as geese, flying in a V-formation.
Fascinated, Danny-boy crept closer, always ready to dash back to his hiding place. His feet must have made a sound on the asphalt, because the dancing man glanced his way, smiled quickly (a flash of white teeth in a darkly bearded face), and gestured to a stack of herbs by the wall.
Cautiously at first, Danny-boy took bits of sage and yerba buena and added them to the abalone shells. The thick clouds of smoke filled his lungs and made him feel a little dizzy. Tentatively, he began to match the man’s movements, dancing outside the ring of abalone shells, waving a branch of sage to stir the smoke.
The man painted a meandering blue line. Beneath it, he sketched a school of fish and the enormous body of a whale. His chant changed, growing higher and faster. He painted a herd of deer, another herd of wild cattle. He danced more wildly, sweat glistening on his bare back. He snatched up a can of gray paint and quickly drew a wolf in the right-hand corner of the wall. Without warning, he dropped the can of paint and leaped away from the wall and over the ring of abalone shells, landing beside Danny-boy.
Danny-boy’s ears rang in the sudden silence. He stared up at the man, curiously unafraid. Curly brown hair covered the man’s arms, his back, his chest. Beneath the hair, his skin was reddish brown, the color of a newly cut redwood. Something about the way he stood — relaxed, yet ready to move — reminded Danny-boy of the wild dogs that prowled the streets of the city.
“My name’s Danny-boy.”
The man glanced down at him. “Call me Randall.”
Danny-boy watched curiously as Randall squatted beside one of the abalone shells and poked at the smoldering herbs with one paint-smeared finger. He picked up the shell, dumped the ashes into his big hand, then rubbed them on his face and body. Glancing at Danny-boy, he said, “Take some. It’s good. Purifying.”
Danny-boy pulled off his T-shirt and gingerly rubbed ashes on his chest and arms.
“Come,” said Randall.
Danny-boy followed him to the stream that ran along Eighth Avenue. Over the years, the flowing water had eaten away the asphalt, exposing the rocks and sand that lay below. Grasses that had taken root between the sidewalk stones grew thick and green beside the water. As Randall approached, a bullfrog leapt from the curb and swam for safety.
Randall splashed cold water on himself and scrubbed his face and chest with a handful of grass. Danny-boy imitated him, shivering a little in the cold. When he had scrubbed off most of the ashes, Danny-boy dried himself on his T-shirt and lay down on the sidewalk, glad of the sun-warmed concrete at his back. Randall sat beside him. Danny-boy studied the man.
“How come you were painting pictures on that wall, Randall?” Danny-boy asked at last.
Randall rested one big hand on the cement and turned to examine Danny-boy more closely. “We need more game around here. Buffalo, deer, fish. We need better hunting.”
Danny-boy frowned. “What does that have to do with pictures on the wall?”
Randall plucked a grass stem and nibbled on the end of it. He hesitated for so long that Danny-boy thought he might not answer at all; then he said, “If I did it right, the pictures will bring back the game.”
“Yeah?” Danny-boy considered the idea for a moment. “You think so.”
Randall tossed the grass stem aside. “I think so.” He shrugged. “I’m only one-sixteenth Cherokee. Raised up in white man’s schools. The stuff I know about this — it comes from here.” He patted his hairy stomach. “I may not have done it right. But I think I did.”
Danny-boy frowned, considering Randall’s words. “If you want to bring back those animals, why’d you paint a wolf then? Nobody wants more wolves around.”
Randall smiled suddenly, showing his white teeth. “It’s a signature of sorts,” he said. “Besides, I wouldn’t mind having a few more wolves around. Just a few.” He grinned at Danny-boy and Danny-boy grinned back, though he didn’t quite understand the joke.
# # #
Danny-boy had grown up in San Francisco. He was born a few years before the Plague, but his memories of those early years were hazy. He remembered the plush rabbit that had been his favorite toy, and his mother’s hands lifting him when he fell on the playground and skinned his knee. Other than that, his early past was a blank.
After the Plague, a middle-aged woman named Emerald found him wandering in the street and adopted him. His name came from a song that Emerald liked to sing.
Emerald’s grasp on reality was tenuous at best. Sometimes she believed that Danny-boy was her own son, and claimed that she was a holy virgin and he was the new Messiah. At other times she remembered who she was and where she was, and she told Danny-boy stories about the world before the Plague.
As a child, Danny-boy explored the skyscrapers that fronted on Market Street, wandering through oak-paneled conference rooms and offices that smelled of dust. Sometimes he read the papers that he found lying around — Books, the old man who lived in the library, had taught him to read. But usually the papers were dull — memos about mergers and financial statements for companies that no longer existed.
Most of the ground floor offices had been vandalized: windows broken, desks upturned, files opened, and papers scattered. Danny-boy avoided such scenes of violence. He preferred to explore offices that had remained undisturbed. There, dust had settled on papers that lay untended on the desks; mice had deposited turds in the drawers and among the keys of the typewriters. In dry flowerpots, only the plastic plants were still green, and even their persistent color was muted by a layer of dust.
Danny-boy sensed that these offices were still alive somehow. If someone were to wash the dust away and rinse the plastic plants clean, he believed that the telephones would start to ring and the typewriters would hum. People would rush into the offices, pick up the papers, and take up where they had left off. Danny-boy prowled the offices, fascinated and terrified by the notion that the old days might come back.
While exploring one office building, he found a red switch marked EMERGENCY GENERATOR. Without considering the consequences, he flipped the switch.
The building came to life around him. From somewhere beneath the floor came a low-pitched rumble that became a steady hum. A subtle vibration traveled through the floor and made him tremble. Overhead, the fluorescent tubes flickered, then glowed with an unnatural blue-white light. There was a clicking sound, like the chattering of teeth. Cold, stale-smelling air blew from a vent, etching patterns in dust that had been undisturbed for more than a decade.
He waited. The cold air made him shiver, but nothing else changed. Cautiously, he began to explore, venturing into windowless interior offices that had always been dark before. He jumped at each unfamiliar sound: the hum of a copy machine, the whispering of the air-conditioning system, the soft click-click-click as the second hand of an electric clock made its rounds, ticking off the seconds of a time long past. He glanced behind him, but the dust was marked only by his own footprints. On a corner desk, a small red light glowed on a cassette player. He ran his fingers over the black buttons, wiping away the dust. Hesitantly, he pressed the key marked PLAY.
Danny-boy watched the tape turn, dimly visible behind the dusty plastic cover. A tinny voice spoke from the headphones that lay on the desk. When he picked them up and held them to his ear, he heard a man saying: ” . . . delays caused by the illness of delivery personnel. The following locations have reported shortages: . . . “
Danny-boy threw down the headphones and ran, caught by a primitive terror. He did not fear the voice in the box, but he was caught by the feeling, so strong in this enclosed room, that the past would return to reclaim the city. Emerald had told him of all the people in suits who had worked in the buildings downtown. Suddenly he feared that the gray faceless people who used to sit at these desks would return to find him playing with their things. They would catch him and put an end to all his games. He fled the building and never went back.
When Danny-boy was eight, Emerald tumbled from the window of an apartment building, fell five stories, and died. Danny-boy was never sure what had caused her to fall, but he suspected that she had fallen while reaching for the full moon that hung low in the sky.
CHAPTER 3
When he was fifteen years old, The Machine fell in love with his biology teacher. Of course that was before the Plague and before he knew he was a machine. His father called him Jonathan and he believed he was human, though clearly different from his mates.
He attended a private high school for gifted students. He did not like it much — the class work was too easy and his classmates were fools. He knew, from the time he had hacked his way into the school’s database and read his confidential files, that his teachers thought he was antisocial. So did Dr. Ward, the psychologist he visited once a week. He did not participate in class discussions; he hated sports; he avoided group activities. During class he spent most of his time designing and sketching intricate mechanisms: a ball-and-socket joint for a mechanical walking machine, a spiraling digging apparatus for a burrowing machine, rotor blades for a flying machine.
His father was an engineer engaged in robotics research. He was a balding man with a weak chin and brilliant blue eyes. His mother was an engineer of some kind as well. She had left The Machine’s father when The Machine was only six. Occasionally, mostly on holidays, she flew in from Tokyo, where she worked for a multinational corporation. On her rare visits The Machine’s father treated her with brittle respect, politely inquiring after her latest research project.
The Machine’s mother seemed uncomfortable around him. She was a sweet-smelling stranger who brought him clockwork toys from Japanese shops. After she left he took them apart in his basement workshop, marveled at the intricate gearing mechanisms, and rebuilt them with minor improvements.
Ms. Bruner, his biology teacher, was slim and dark-haired like his mother. The Machine fell in love the moment he saw her. On the first day of class she smiled at him and asked him to sit up front. That was enough. In her class, he paid attention. When she perched casually on the edge of her desk and talked about mitochondria, his breathing picked up speed. He still did not participate in class discussions, but he smiled at her and he thought that the smile she gave him back was special, somehow different from the way she smiled at everyone else.
Shortly after school began, he started work on a prosthetic hand for his science fair project. He had originally planned on constructing a six-legged walking machine, and he had been doing research into robotics for months. With Ms. Bruner in mind, however, he shifted the emphasis of his research, reasoning that she would best appreciate the interface between body and machine. For weeks he did research into artificial joints and prosthetic devices, reading journal articles that he obtained through his father’s home computer. Using his father’s access codes, he tapped into a bulletin board for robotics researchers and orchestrated a continuing discussion of possibilities for the human/machine in-
.
In his home workshop, he worked for long hours on the mechanical parts. He could have opted for silicon/plastic joints, but he preferred working with metal, machining tiny parts that fit neatly together. He liked the look of the metal and the cool feel of it in his hand.
Using his father’s credit card, he ordered sensors that would pick up the EMG signals of his muscles and relay them to the prosthetic hand. The science fair came and went, and his project was not done, but he continued working, dreaming of Ms. Bruner’s reaction when he showed her the completed hand.
The completed project was elegant: a third hand that strapped neatly onto the side of The Machine’s arm. Electrical signals from the muscles in his abdomen controlled the hand’s movements. He practiced yoga for hours, regulating his breathing and learning the careful muscular control necessary for dexterity. He could rotate the hand at the wrist, make the thumb and index finger come together in a pinch, grasp something strongly by wrapping his fingers around it. When he flexed the fingers, the joints made gentle clicking sounds that reminded him of the clockwork toys his mother had given him.
On the last day of the school year, he brought the hand to school, carefully packaged in a cardboard box. He did not want to show it in front of the other students, so he kept it hidden in his locker for most of the day. But he could not help smiling to himself whenever he thought of it.
“You seem awfully cheerful today,” Ms. Bruner said. He was scrubbing down one of the lab tables, helping with the last day’s cleanup. “Looking forward to summer vacation?”
“I have something to show you,” he said quickly. “After school,
OK?”
She frowned, then nodded. “All right. I suppose.”
For the rest of the afternoon, he worried about that frown. But he reassured himself with the knowledge that she would be excited about the hand. He would demonstrate how he could write with it, comb his hair with it. She would be thrilled.
After his last class, he collected the box from his locker. The hallways were filled with kids emptying their lockers and noisily discussing their summer plans. For once, no one had time to bother or bully him. He walked through the corridors, carrying his box proudly beneath his arm.
The science wing was almost deserted. Outside her room the hallway was quiet. He hesitated by her door, anticipating his triumph. From inside, he heard her voice. She was talking to Mr. Pearce, the calculus teacher. He waited for a moment, reluctant to share his creation with anyone but her.
“I’d love to go out for a drink, but I told the Monroe kid that I’d take a look at something he wanted to show me. He said he’d stop by after school.”
A low rumble from Mr. Pearce. The Machine had never liked Mr. Pearce much: he had confiscated some really great designs for a burrowing machine and had torn them up in front of the whole class.
“Yeah, you’re right there.” Ms. Bruner’s clear voice carried well. “He’s a weird one. He’s always smiling at me in this really peculiar way. I’d guess that he’ll grow up to be either a mass murderer or a genius like his dad.”
The Machine froze, clutching the box. Mr. Pearce was saying something.
“A crush on me?” Ms. Bruner’s laughter chilled him. “Jesus, I hope not. Thank God the school year’s finally over. He won’t be in my class next year.”
A chair scraped across the floor and The Machine jumped. “Sure,” Ms. Bruner was saying. “Let’s go. I can’t wait around all day.”
The Machine escaped into another corridor before they stepped from the room. His father was waiting in the car in front of the school. When he asked what was in the box, The Machine shook his head. “Just some stuff,” he said.
That summer, the Plague came. His father came down with the first symptoms while he was at work. His co-workers took him to the hospital and The Machine talked to his doctor on the phone. The doctor spoke slowly, as if he were very tired. “We’ll do what we can,” he said. “No, I don’t think you’d better come and see him. You sound healthy. Try to stay that way.”
The next day, when The Machine tried to call the hospital, the telephone was busy. He set his telephone to redial the hospital’s number every five minutes, but the line was always busy. He wandered the quiet house and watched the television news. “The following hospitals have beds available,” his local newscasters advised him. The woman co-anchor looked pale.
The next day, the hospital line was still busy. The woman co-anchor was gone, replaced by another woman. The Machine tried to call other numbers: he called Dr. Ward and got an answering machine.
