"She's not going to remember more than that!"
"She should at least know field numbers!"
Noam acquiesces. "Okay," he says, turning to me. "Let me give you an example. I'm Noam Feingold. I was a college professor of American history in the town you know as Roslyn. History, by the way, is the word that means a record of important events . . . of all the things that have come before. America is what this part of the world used to be called . . ."
America
?
". . . and those of us living in America were referred to as Americans."
Americans
. I cringe. Another name taken away.
"Now," Noam continues. "I'm married to Lilly Bartlett here and have been slate-free for sixty-two years." He pulls down the collar of his shirt and shows me his bare neck as proof. "I hid out here in Bond after the Pandemic and happened to meet Lazarus. He brought me down here. Saved me, really."
I can't take my eyes off Noam's sixty-two-year-old skin, marbled by time and youthful sun, but without a slate or even a scar. Beautiful.
"You forgot the field number," Lilly says.
Noam rolls his eyes. "I'm ranked seventy-second on the field list. I'm going to be a senior judge on the Checks and Balances Board."
Most of this means nothing to me. I ask the question I hope will be easiest. "What's a field number?"
It might have been the easiest question but, from their faces, I see it's not the easiest answer.
"The field list ranks our most important people into the hundreds of thousands," Noam says. "The closer you are to number one, the more guards you get when it's time to take the field."
Lilly slips her hand into her husband's. "Everyone on this list will have a role in the new government. We'll be serving in it, creating it, teaching our new world about it. Your number on the field list directly correlates to how integral your role will be to the new government's success."
It's a scary thing to consider. I wonder what number I've been assigned and Lilly can tell.
"You'll have plenty of guards." She smiles, uncoupling herself from her husband. "I'm Lilly Bartlett. I was a linguist at a university in Joad and am married to Noam Feingold. I broke my slate thirty years ago and rank sixty-eighth on the field list. I am to serve on the Board of Expression and the First Amendment Council and will focus on reconstituting language. I'll be working closely with you, Harper."
"Adams!" Ezra yells from somewhere farther back. I turn to find her patting the empty seat of an aluminum chair that's been dragged out into the middle of the space. Behind it, walls just high enough to provide the barest privacy create separate rooms. They remind me of the cubicles that fill the Murdon Building and aren't much bigger. In place of doors, dowel rods have been stretched across the openings and sheets of canvas hang to the floor. They're tiny spaces in which to live and work. About a fiftieth the size of my home.
I take a seat on the aluminum chair and face my audience.
"Name, rank, position. That's all," Ezra whispers, giving me the same advice as did Noam, then disappears.
The people queue up in a single line, become a vein that runs all the way to the stairs and halfway back again. Most of
their skin, regardless of color, is ashy and pale. Lilly tells me that despite supplements, they're all suffering from vitamin deficiencies. It explains the purple bands beneath their eyes. The sallow skin.
Those at the head of the line are older. The younger set has fallen back to give their elders first go. I listen to their ranks, from number two to the hundreds, and note the tasks they're to perform in the new world. Chief Counsel of the Health Advisory Board. Chief Architect of something called the Internet. Lead Researcher on the Semantics and Symbiotics Council. Principal Advisor to the Board of Economic Recovery.
Chief, Principal, Lead, Head
. Titles that come up with rhythmic regularity. All suggesting important roles I've never heard of.
Their pre-Pandemic jobs are varied. I don't bother to commit them to memory. Lilly tells me it's been like living inside a university. That some of the smartest people in the world are standing in line waiting to meet me. And I'm the only one sitting. I'm glad Ezra isn't here to watch them shake my hand and shuffle by. It's a strange relief when the younger set begins their introductions and the field numbers climb well into the thousands.
This community is split almost evenly between those who do and those who don't have slates. Some necks reflect the dim light like sand, some like water. Some were brought here to hide years ago when the Confederation began killing nonconformists. Others were late additions, having been slated against their will and having chosen to run. Each person is a revelation. The things they've given up astounding. I'm overwhelmed and without the proper words. Need to know what this is I'm sensing in these people, need the words so I can tell them what I admire before they walk away.
"Lilly, what makes them do this? What's the word?"
Lilly looks at me. "What do you mean? What makes who do what?"
"What makes people give up what's easy for what's right?" There's no word in the Confederation of the Willing that fits.
"Courage," Lilly says, her face turned toward the crowd. The word has to wind its way around her turned body to reach me. "It's called
courage
."
I use this descriptor for every person thereafter. Each time, my eyes water, my voice breaks. It's insufficient. Like using the word
bright
to mean
the sun
.
After so long, Lilly cuts in. "Let's stop for a while. You need to use the restroom?"
I nod.
I'm escorted to the farthest corner of the bunker, to a room made up of three walls and a canvas door. The toilet is a hole in the ground with a place marked for one's feet.
"You know where to find us when you're done." Lilly motions me in, then leaves.
I put my hands against one wall and bend over until my upper body is horizontal. I want the tears to fall straight off my face so they don't leave a trail.
These people have lived too much of their lives in a squalid basement masked by the stench of filth. I stand there, bent, leaking onto the soil for only a few moments. I won't keep these people waiting. They've been waiting long enough.
When I come back to the main room, the line has dwindled to ten or fifteen people. Gangly twenty-year-olds standing idly, scratching their elbows and hands. Softly, they give me their name, rank, jobs--past and future, their palms that feel like they've been crafted out of sandpaper.
"It's the work," Lilly whispers, holding up the line with her explanation. She says these kids with no parents, no concept of freedom, no memories to buoy them up, get the worst duties. Tearing down trees with their bare hands. Tending gardens hidden between rows of tall thistle.
"We give them the words, too, and that helps some. Most times, you need to be able to say a thing to feel it," Lilly concludes with a frown. Then, just as quickly, she smiles. "You
should see the zucchini we got this year! And the tomatoes! Oh, they were delicious! If we can get in some cheese at the same time, we make pizza!" Lilly is a sprite in her sixty-year-old body. She morphs from rage to joy like a child, exuberant over zucchini and pizza. Maybe I'll feel the same soon enough, when I've been deprived of color and taste, textures that suggest a sunny somewhere else.
"Why do the younger ones get the hard chores?" I don't understand.
Lilly rolls her eyes.
Such an obvious answer
. "Because they want to stay mad! They want to remember their mother committing suicide on the dinner table. Their sisters and brothers taken away. They sweat and bleed to keep those old wounds good and open. And they need the sun more than the rest of us." She leans in to add, "Of course, there are some kids we can't let go up top. Flight risks." She holds out her hand and motions to the next person in line.
It's a young woman with long brown hair that shields dark, recessed eyes. She's been watching us talk from beneath her bangs. Has a vertical furrow at the top of her nose and a pink slash in place of a mouth. She's showing me some of the things that have happened to her. In her features, in her fisted hands and thrust-out neck. Maybe she's been raped or lost her parents. Maybe she came home to them, like so many. I give her a look of too much softness and she hardens.
Fuck your pity.
She's a girl when she's not fighting, a woman when she is. It's the schizophrenic nature of young adulthood in the Confederation. Be water, be stone.
She sticks out her hand, ready to cut mine with her rubbled skin. "Rita Ramirez." She shakes my soft palm hard.
"Harper Adams. Nice to meet you."
Rita steps forward. "What do you want to hear?"
I look at Lilly, who offers me no help. "Whatever you want to tell me."
In short, quick sentences, Rita gives me the basics. Her field number is 12,062. She'll be a guard when we mobilize. Will
stand at the front of our line, carry a weapon. Stop bullets if she has to. She's had training and experience. Knows where to point. How to shoot. She's seventeen with a mother who died before she could form sticking memories and a father who drank too much. She fell in love at the oh so tender age of eleven. With a boy who knew how to break slates and help girls run away. He taught her to hunt, to track, to live off the land until he grew tired of her. Then he beat her and left her out in the woods. She was found by one of our runners and brought back to the bunker. The council hadn't wanted to let a left-for-dead girl stay, but Lazarus argued her case and won.
Rita doesn't seem all that pleased with her rescue. She's mottled with resentment, her skin splotched with little patches of blushing blood. She'd leave here if she could. I catch it in her eyes. She'd go back to living off the land if given the chance. As long as it meant dying there, too.
Some people come down thinking it will be one way when it's another,
my first letter had read. But Rita hadn't been recruited. She never got the fine print. Or the choice.
Rita doesn't say good-bye. Just stops talking and marches away. She's not that much older than Veracity. I wonder if my girl's coming up like that somewhere, bruised and hard. A seed pod instead of a daisy.
"That one's angry but harmless," Lilly says. "It's the ones who don't show their anger we have the most trouble with. Too quiet usually means something's brewing underneath."
I continue my introductions. Most people seem happy to have me down here. Some seem almost reverent. I attribute this to my newness. I've brought down a memory of the soil and the air. And fresh hope. They try to wipe it, like silt, off my skin. I see it in the way they rub their palms together as they walk away. In how they listen for some bit of profundity in the things I say, stopping all speech if I so much as open my mouth. They're hungry for fresh things to hear, so I find myself insinuating color into my responses. Using too many adjectives or adverbs. Bigger ones than required in small
attempts to paint them moments of a life that isn't theirs. Such misplaced faith might wither some if they knew how afraid I am of small, skyless places. How afraid I am of failing them.
I'm finishing my last introduction when a voice that sounds like gravel comes from the back of the room. "Excuse me, please." It's a man's voice, doubled. As if his vocal chords have been split and are working separately. "Yes, thank you, Nancy. We'll have to discuss that later. Hello, James. How's Celia?" The words come out with two distinct tones, one rich and deep, the other strained. It sounds like two people speaking at once. This is a slate injury. I've heard it a couple times before.
The man puts cupped hands to his mouth and shouts over the crowd. "Lilly!"
I can see his full face now, towering above the people who're collecting around him. They remind me of the moths that flock to electric lights put out in summer and spring. Eager to be in his presence, they close in tight. Flutter their arms to get his attention.
"Lilly!"
Lilly has been waiting impatiently through my last introduction, picking at a callus that's developed on her heel. She stands and puts her hands up to her mouth to shout, "What, Lazarus?"
"You clear the training room?" I can see his eyes moving, assessing the number of bodies between us. The number of people he'll have to talk to between there and here.
Lilly turns to Noam, who's leaning against the wall too nonchalantly. "What's he talking about?"
Noam looks down at the floor, then pleadingly up at her. "Just one more time?"
Lilly now understands this request. She turns back to Lazarus and shouts with a finger pointed at me. "I'm not doing it!"
"There's no more time!" Lazarus's twin voices bark, then
buckle. He grimaces, just slightly. Most people wouldn't notice but to a Monitor, it's obvious. It hurts him to talk. And yet he yells.
"Yes! There's no more time! That's exactly why I'm not doing it!" Lilly has read his lips. She points her bent finger to three men who've lined up in front of Lazarus on his slow way to me. "Edward! Daniel! Nabile! Leave him alone! You have time scheduled tomorrow night!"
The men shuffle away and the place goes silent. Like Moses through the Red Sea, Lazarus passes through the parted crowd. He walks like he talks, with great difficulty. Hands go out, assist him over a broken piece of concrete. When he loses his footing they reach out to catch him. And he does so often. These people love his every contorted joint, his softball knees, his long hands with marbles in the bending parts. It's as if he carries their collective pain. I imagine, were it more accessible, anyone here would gladly suffer his daily agony and my throat closes. Fills with emotions I haven't yet defined.
Lazarus smiles as he draws near and, immediately, I feel warm. He's seen my life, has been watching my every move, and embraces me without judgment. I feel loved, and by such a man as this. A man who makes the air bow before him.
Can I help you walk? Maybe if I take one arm, position myself beneath your weight
. . . I can see why people want to help him. He helps every one of us back.