Underground Airlines

1.

One more hotel room.

Motel, maybe. I don’t know. Morris drove for a while, some dull collection of dark hours, with me in the back of the unmarked silver sedan he had shoved me into by the top of my head, and then I saw neon that said VACANCY. I saw a squat one-story building, and then I was at a door with a number 4 on it. One more ugly hotel room, facing one more deserted parking lot, in one more invisible town.

Morris knocked on the door marked 4, and it was Willie Cook who answered-Cook with his shark’s smile, his dancing eyes. He was out of uniform, sleeves rolled up, chewing a piece of gum and holding up his hands as if to welcome an old friend.

“Well, all right,” he said. “You made it.”

“Oh, my God,” said Martha behind him. “Oh, my God…” Her voice reminded me what I must look like, battered and bandaged and chained. Cook, without turning, said, “Now, you stay where you are, baby.”

I watched Martha sit slowly back down on the edge of the bed. I formed my mouth into a smile. It’s fine, I thought, just as loudly as I could. Not as bad as it looks. Morris had taken me out of the leg shackles, at least. At least I had my pants back on.

I let Morris push me into the room, and I stood where he placed me: in front of the rickety little motel table between the kitchen area and the bed area. Cook settled into the table’s one wooden chair and put his feet up, like a working man relaxing at the end of his hard day. There was a gun on the table, too-not his service weapon; some snub-nosed thing-and a laptop showing a screen saver of the Indy 500, colorful race cars moving in patterns on the sleeping monitor.

Morris tossed Cook the envelope, and he caught it, held it a second, then set it down on the table. His big gold class ring made a hollow knock on the cheap wood.

“Well, all right,” he said again. “Nicely done.”

Morris fetched himself a beer before settling with a sigh into an overstuffed chair beside the window. He had the bottle in one hand and his service weapon in the other, pointed at Martha.

She looked bad. She looked half out of her mind with weariness and confusion. There were, at least, no bruises on her face, no blood at the corners of her lips. Her eyes were dark and panicky, roving back and forth between Morris and Cook, Cook and me.

God, that girl should have run. She should have run from me in Indianapolis; in Green Hollow, Alabama; at Garments of the Greater South; she should have run. She should have run from me a million different times.

“I don’t understand this,” I said to Cook. “What is happening? What is she doing here?”

He blew a bubble, destroyed it with his teeth. “Did you forget?”

“What?”

“Your leash, son. Father Barton’s laptop, tapping into your tracker, keeping tabs.” It was the same laptop on the table in front of him, next to the gun.

“I didn’t forget,” I said. “But it was my understanding that when I had the lost package in hand, I would return directly to Indianapolis and give it to Father Barton.”

“Yep. That was indeed the plan.”

Questions were struggling to the surface of my mind, one by one, then all together, like animals emerging from mud. Had they known the whole time that I was planning to double-cross them, to turn this goddamn envelope over to the marshals? Was it just Officer Cook who had been on to me, or was it Barton also? And what about Morris, who, Cook had told me, knew nothing about his Airlines service-what was he doing running these kinds of errands, not to mention how? How had Morris come by the authority to get a man sprung from the bowels of a megaplantation?

The only question I said aloud, though, was my first one again. “What is she doing here?”

“She’s insurance,” said Cook. “To make sure we get what we need.” He pivoted in his chair, pointed at Martha. “Tell him, honey.”

“They’ve got him,” she said, her voice coming like from under water. “They’ve got Lionel.”

I turned back to Cook, caught him poking his tongue through his gum, stretching it into a thin pink membrane. “Why?” I said. “Why?”

“Settle down, boy,” said Morris, shifting his pistol from Martha to me. “You settle down.”

Martha stood, hands clenched at her sides, and Morris brought the gun back to her. “You, too.”

“Please,” I said to Martha. Trying to calm her down. Calm myself, too. Whatever was going on, I didn’t think these guys were kidding. “Please. Sit.”

This now, for Martha, on top of everything. What she had learned only hours ago, about Samson, and now this. Martha sat on the edge of the bed and tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling, and the moonlight coming unevenly through the blinds washed the side of her face and made her look old and sad.

“I was bringing it to you,” I said to Cook. There was a fresh dark feeling blooming in my stomach, filling me up like internal bleeding, and I heard that darkness come into my voice. “I was going to bring it to you all.”

“Sure you were,” he said. “Sure.” And then, new subject-oh, just by the way: “You know, I don’t think you ever told me what your man’s name is. Your agent, I mean. In the marshals.”

Oh, Martha, I thought. Oh, Martha. This on top of everything.

“Bridge,” I said quietly. “Louis Bridge.”

“Oh. Huh.” Cook snapped his gum. “I was thinking, wouldn’t it be funny if I had the same guy?”

There it was. An answer. A lot of answers, actually, all arriving together, all at once.

“Actually, my man’s a lady,” Cook added. “Deputy United States Marshal Shawna Lawler. I never met her, but she sounds sexy as hell on the phone. If you’re into white women.”

He flicked his eyes toward Martha.

“I don’t…” she said. “I don’t…” She stood up again, and Morris said, “Sit,” and she said, “What does he mean?”

“Me and your boyfriend here, Jim, or Victor, or-what’d you call him? Brother. I like that. Me and Brother, we’re just the same. Same little secret.” He stood up solemnly from that wobbly motel table, pointed a finger at me, slow, and intoned: “Nigger stealer. Soul catcher. Government man.” He lowered the finger, sat back down. “Just like me.”

I waited for Martha to say something else, anything else, but she didn’t. She might have said, I don’t believe you; she might have said, It can’t be true; but from that corner of the room there was nothing.

I didn’t look at her again. I couldn’t look at her anymore.

Cook was done smiling, at least. All the winking and smirking, all the wiseass man-of-the-world business had fallen away in an instant. Without that smile, he looked like a different human being. He sat rigid in the chair, and his face became tired, closed, with sadness behind his eyes, like the shadowy water just visible under the surface of the sea.

I wondered what I looked like now, when at last I wasn’t trying-not pretending anything. I wondered what I was looking like in that small room, alone with Cook’s revelation, with the truth of what I was at last filtering out into the world.

“Please believe me, man. I’m not happy about this,” said Cook, his voice low. “About none of this. But you’re my chance. Okay? You’re my chance.”

He stood up again at the table, leaned forward while he talked. While he explained-while he tried to explain. “All I’m supposed to do is get Barton’s secrets. That’s the job: get the man’s secrets, and they set me free. That’s my deal. Two years I been at it, and two years he’s been keeping me low on the pole. Errand boy, muscleman, bullshit. Two years.” He put up his hand and spread apart two fingers.

He turned abruptly to Martha. “Then here comes your friend.” I did not look at her. I couldn’t. “Sad little mush-mouth Jim Dirkson. Talking about this wife in the mines. Here’s my chance. I push you on the priest, let’s do this one, let me quarterback it. Tutor me, Padre, you know? Here’s my chance to learn some secrets, get into the inside. Agent Lawler keeps saying, get what we need and you’re done. You’re free.”

Every time he said that word, free, I felt sick. Lord, what they had done to this man. What they had done to me. The monsters they had made us into, prowling along, sniffing for chances.

“But then you”-he pointed one finger at me, wagged it-“you go and turn out to be what you are. Turn out to be like me. And I was like, whoa, whoa. Wait. This is even better.”

Morris belched, long and loud. Settled in the armchair, coasting through this dull guard duty with the bored confidence of a white man lording it over a black and a woman. I stared at Cook, remembering his excitement that morning on the banks of the White River. Kevin lying dead, Maris furious, Barton grieving, Cook seizing the moment. I was having my realization in that moment, and he was having his.

“I explained to Barton that he should send you to go and get this thing. I told him how we could tap your chip, how I had me a solid connect in the marshals. Then I called up Agent Lawler.”

Me on the phone with Bridge, sending him to BWI airport, and Cook-or whatever this man’s name was-on the phone with Lawler. Phones ringing off the hook in Gaithersburg.

“I said, listen, baby, remember this evidence Barton’s been so hot on? What about I get that for you? Illegal collusion. Major federal lawbreaking. Well, she liked that a lot. She loved it.”

There was no point in explaining to Cook that his agent wanted her hands on the evidence for the same reason mine did: to get rid of it.

“And better than that, I said to her, I said, what if I can get you one of me, a nigger-catcher soul-stealer motherfucker like me-except this one’s gone to the dark side? He’s working freelance for the Airlines. What if I get you all that? If I get you all that, you gotta let me go, right? Then you gotta set me free.”

He lifted the envelope off the table, and I was surprised at the sudden pain I felt. I felt it in his hands like it was a part of my body, like it was my heart he was holding. The idea of that thing going back to Maryland, getting buried by the marshals, after all Kevin had gone through to get it, all that Luna had gone through. Even me. But that’s where it was always headed anyway, wasn’t it? I was never really going to bring it to Father Barton so he could announce it to the world.

But somehow in the wake of Cook’s revelations, I was mourning that alternative future, longing for a victory I had never really contemplated.

“So here’s what’s up, man,” said Cook. “We’re going to take out this hard drive, hook it into the laptop here.” He gestured to the computer on the table. “Just to make sure you didn’t pull a fast one, like my pops used to like to say. Make sure we got what we think we got. And then I’ll call Agent Lawler.”

He tore the envelope open at the top. I held up my hands, the chains rattling.

“Wait, though. What if Barton’s right?” I said. “What if there really is information on here that could”-what were the words, all those hopeful, lunatic words?-“shake the foundations? Change the world? Just-what if?”

“Come on, now,” he said. “Barton’s full of shit.”

“Yeah, I know. I know.” I took a step toward Cook, aware of Morris in the corner of my eye. “But we’re talking about the future. The future of the country. Talking about three million slaves.”

Cook said something familiar; something I had thought to myself-and not long ago, either. “I ain’t thinking about the three million” is what he said. “I’m thinking about me.”

“Wait…”

“Hey. Hey!” He had the package open. He pulled out what was inside. He looked up at me. “What the fuck?”

Motion from the other side of the room, Morris rising from the chair. “What is that?”

We were all staring at what was in Cook’s palm, then suddenly Martha was moving. She was off the bed just as Morris was off the chair, quick as choreography. She grabbed Morris’s beer bottle and smashed it on the edge of the table, making a weapon that caught Morris in his rush, so it was really his own running that drove the broken edges into his belly.

He screamed while Martha turned the bottle deeper, and I lurched my body forward, overturning the table into Cook, knocking him against the wall and banging his head hard into it, sending a small burst of plaster out onto the both of us.

“Goddamn it,” he said and reached for his gun where it had skittered on the tabletop, but I put my hands on top of his hands on top of the weapon, and we were struggling for it when over my shoulder I heard Martha shouting, “Shit! Asshole!” I jerked up, hard, bringing all four of our hands up off the table, Cook clutching the pistol and me clutching his fingers, both of us yelling. Morris was holding his wounded guts with one hand, but the other hand held his automatic, and he was trying to get a bead on Martha, who had just rolled behind the bed.

I wrenched Cook’s finger, and the shot was an explosion in the small room. Morris fell but got off one shot at me as he was falling. I did not feel the bullet-didn’t feel it because it had caught not me but Cook, and a geyser of blood erupted from the center of his throat, and his eyes went wide and white, wide like Castle’s eyes. His eyes in the darkness. Pleading eyes, wide in the rain. Castle wanted to go back and help Reedy, and I said no we couldn’t go back, and I was scared, too, but there would be no more chances, not like this one. Reedy was dying and the rain was pounding and that fence post was loose, I had seen it come loose, and this was the only opportunity we were going to get, the only one we would ever get. I told Castle what he’d told me, so many times he’d told me, that we were different, that there was more for us, but he said not if we died! Not if we got caught running and they put us down or sold us offshore! And he was scared, I understood that, goddamn it, I was scared, too, but standing out there in the rain arguing made no sense, we had to go, we had to fucking go. I grabbed him by the neck and told him we were going and he said no again, fighting and pushing back at me, and I squeezed his throat and his eyes went wide and wider till he stopped fighting and then I ran, I ran away alone. Rain washed the blood from me while I was running, and everything I’ve gotten since I have deserved.

“He’s dead,” Martha was saying. Yelling. “Victor! Brother! He’s dead. It’s too late.”

Cook was under me. We were on the ground. I had my hands on his neck, trying to hold back the blood, push it back in. I was trying to heal the man, but his eyes were open, staring, white.

Very slowly I let him go. There was blood all over me, blood on my hands and up my arms and on my naked chest. I stood up. The room was full of red.

“Okay,” Martha was saying. She was trembling. I was trembling, too. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

2.

The steps of the monument were gray and slick with rain.

I stood beneath the Martyr with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t tilt my head up to feel the drizzle on my cheeks. I didn’t move. I stood beneath Old Abraham, quietly fiddling with the green bracelet I was still wearing on my arm. Doing nothing but waiting.

The streets were empty, more or less. Laughing voices, now and then, carried over from Georgia Street, the blocks of bars a quarter mile or so away. I saw a couple leaning into each other, climbing unsteadily into the back of a cab, way down on Market Street.

But the ring of shops and office buildings that wreathed Monument Circle were all closed this late at night. Here in the bull’s-eye of the city, at this hour of night, it was just me out here, just me and the likeness of Lincoln. Both of us likenesses.

And just what was Victor feeling, anyway, as he stood there waiting? What about Old Victor-what was going on inside his mind?

I don’t know. I was drained of emotion, washed out by the rain. I suppose there’s a version of this story in which I’m standing there crackling with joy. Maybe I should have been crying, tears carving rivulets in my stone cheeks. Monumental. There might even have been, in some other reality, knives of regret scything away at my insides.

But none of that, not for me. Just standing, just waiting, coat shrugged close around me, my hands jammed in the pockets of my coat.

In one pocket was the gun, a loose heaviness in the pocket’s depth.

In the other pocket, my right hand was clasped on one corner of the envelope, folding and unfolding one ragged corner.

Up in the sky was the dim, grubby outline of the moon. Abraham Lincoln’s giant disapproving features in shadow above me, staring at the city, the country, all this unfinished business.

“Victor?”

“Yeah. Come on up.”

There was Mr. Bridge, coming carefully up the steps, one step at a time, not wanting to slip, and despite myself I felt the tiniest prickle of disappointment. There must have been some part of me hoping for a surprise. What if Deputy United States Marshal Bridge had turned out to have about him the smoldering air of a secret agent? What if he’d been six foot six and thin as a rail, wearing Loyal Texan cowboy boots and a battered Stetson? What if he wore a yarmulke? What if he were black?

Alas. Bridge was Bridge. A bushy gray mustache and a sloping forehead below a receding hairline. Tan slacks and brown dress shoes, poorly chosen for rainy late-autumn Indiana. He stood before me, me and my Abraham, a supplicant before the prince and counselor. He was the puffy, dull-eyed middle manager of my most contemptuous imaginings. This, my tormentor.

I raised my hand as I came closer, and he raised his in return. Bridge’s tie was brown and plain.

I fidgeted with the envelope’s dog-eared corner while Bridge came up the steps.

Bridge was alone, per my instructions. I could see down Meridian Street the car from which he’d climbed. He’d emerged from the driver’s seat, and I couldn’t tell if there was someone in the back or not, but it didn’t matter. Here at the steps it was just me and him, Bridge approaching, no bag or case, his hands raised as instructed. I had thought through all these details, got the setup straight: a public place, but a public place wreathed in darkness, a dead downtown in the middle of the night. It was 1:00 in the morning, Sunday morning. Two days since Martha and I returned to the North. Almost two weeks since Kevin was stuffed into the barrel, rolled onto the truck. Eleven days since I checked into the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, just down the hall from Martha and her son.

I ducked my hand into my other pocket, and Bridge stopped abruptly and raised his hands higher. I smiled. A glimmer of feeling reached me, distant but clear: it felt good to be in charge, even of one man, one small moment, one instant.

I wasn’t reaching for my gun. It was the envelope I took out.

Mr. Bridge’s eyes flooded with relief. He was easy to read, easier than ever, now that not even a phone line separated us. He was just here, ten feet in front of me, his features as open and plain as a child’s drawing. He reached out, as though I was just going to hand it over, and I could see it all in his face, the pressure that had been applied on him from wherever it had come.

I dropped the envelope back in my pocket, and he darted out his tongue quickly, licked his lips.

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, licked his lips again. “I must hand it to you, Victor. That was well done. I don’t know how you did it, but that was well done.”

“I’m a professional.”

“Yes.” He nodded: yes. “Well, I hope you will not be surprised to hear that I am prepared to live up to my end of the bargain as well. If you would just…”

He took one more step up the stairs, and now my other hand came up, the gun hand. He stopped.

“What is it?” I said. “What’s in there?”

He stopped. “Have you opened it?”

Bridge. Question with a question. I went back on him: “What do you fucking think?” His eyes above the gray mustache were growing fretful. He didn’t like my tone. “Of course I opened it.”

It was still open, as a matter of fact, and it was in my pocket with the open end up. I took it out and held it up in the dim rain-flecked moonlight. A small flask of sturdy plastic or polystyrene, full of clear liquid, secured with a screwed-on cap. Still floating in there, after all this time-after Luna smuggled it out, got it into William Smith’s coat, after Billy panicked and stuffed it in his fridge, after I had it and Morris had it and Cook had it and I had it again-still floating inside that thin flask was something else. Something microscopically small.

“Well?”

Mr. Bridge’s lips were pursed. They disappeared beneath his mustache. “I’m not a scientist.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

I waited. Bridge could see what the deal was now. I wasn’t turning anything over without this conversation.

“What it is…my understanding is…that what it is is cells.”

“Human cells?”

“Yes and no.”

I aimed my gun at him. “Bridge.”

His face contorted. He didn’t know how to answer. He didn’t know whether he could. Of course I already knew what it was. I had been to Saint Anselm’s. I had found Father Barton, as I expected to, in a wretched state, his man Cook having mysteriously disappeared along with his means of tracking me. I got the drop on Mr. Maris, whispered sweetly to him a little with my weapon in the small of his back, and then me and Father Barton had done some talking. I had done just what I was doing now-held the gun in one hand and this tiny vial in the other, held both before his pale staring eyes, and said to him, this isn’t the financial records of any fucking Malaysian shell company, is it?

At gunpoint he had told me what it was, admitted what he had known all along-that he had sent me down there, run me through all that he had run me through, run Kevin through all that he had run Kevin through, all on the basis of a lie. The truth was too heavy, too serious to be trusted to the poor dumb Negroes he was working so hard to save. Another layer, another layer down.

I had held the damn thing up in front of that monster and threatened to destroy it-burn it before he could show it to anyone. I had flicked my cigarette lighter open beneath the envelope until his soft young face melted with fear. Please, he had said. Please…

And now here was Bridge, the same desperate expression, the same worried Please. He rubbed the corner of his mustache.

“They are hybrid cells, Victor. From eggs that are…eggs that have been harvested from human subjects.”

“Slaves.”

He sighed. He looked up toward the statue, as if the Martyr would provide him some relief. I just wanted it. I needed it. I needed for him to say it.

“What is it, Mr. Bridge?” Now I was walking, coming down the steps toward him, gun in one hand, envelope in the other. “You think I’ll back out? You think this is the one thing I can’t live with? After everything I’ve lived with, you think I can’t live with this?”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. GGSI has a medical facility. Okay? The egg is harvested from a human subject, and-my understanding-the nucleus is removed. And then new material, not new, but taken from other subjects…look, what they’re working on, on making…” He wasn’t a scientist. It sounded insane, but it was true, so he said it. “On making people. It’s hard to understand.”

But I did understand. I understood better than he did. In that black building on the map, auxiliary to the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, they were taking girls like Luna and stealing their eggs, separating out the DNA, forming hybrids, breeding cell lines.

Barton had had his own language for it, had turned it all into biblical horror: They are casting themselves as God. They are bringing forth the stuff of life.

I put it more plainly still, my gun still trained on Bridge’s wide midsection. “They’re growing slaves.”

“Well,” he said, “they are trying.”

It was coming up, my anger, my disgust, my wild red feeling. It was coming up fast and I knew it was going to and I struggled to keep my voice even. Keep it calm.

“What’ve the marshals got to do with this?”

“Elements within my service,” he began, and from the way he was looking at me, weighing me, I could tell he was trying to find my breaking point. See how much I could take. “Not me, mind. But others-have been involved. In helping to make arrangements to provide some of the necessary technology.”

“Arrangements.”

Bridge nodded. “Again, not me. We are a large organization, Victor, with many layers. But yes. If the population held in bondage, if they were-not technically…people any longer. Certain constitutional issues, certain political issues…would be resolved.”

I tilted the vial one way and then another in my hand, felt the small movement of the liquid. This is what Barton wanted to publicize, this is what the marshals were desperate to have kept secret: not some banking irregularities, not fiscal collusion. This. The next step. They’d been improving the machinery of slavery for two centuries, inventing new tortures to make people work harder and longer. Stripping slaves of their names, their families, their spirits. This is where it went next: people with no bloodline, people with no past and no future, people with no claim to freedom. These strong hands belong to you…Hands and back and spirit, too…

Bridge took a step up toward me. “You can appreciate, I think, why it is important, for a variety of reasons, that this experimentation, at this delicate stage, not become public. That’s all.” Now he was getting bold. Now some steel was coming into Bridge’s voice. He saw the end; he was ready. “So you’re going to hand me that package, Victor, and I’m going to take it. We are going to determine that it’s the right material, then we are going to destroy it. And then we are going to do as you have asked. We are going to set you free.”

“When? And who’s we?”

“Right now.” Just like that, his voice had taken up its old boss-man confidence. “I have traveled here from Gaithersburg with a technician named Lance Cormer. Dr. Cormer works in a special division in our service, and he has come prepared.”

“Prepared for what?”

“Prepared to take care of both ends of this. He can quickly do some initial testing on the materials you’ve provided to make sure it’s what we’re looking for. Make sure you’re not-that you’re not pulling some trick here.” He rubbed his forehead. “Mind, I don’t think you are. You’re a straight shooter, Victor. You’ve always been a straight shooter.”

He puffed out his cheeks a little, and tilted his head, and I felt that he had somehow shifted, started singing in a new key.

“And, Victor, further to that, I did want to say: thank you for your service to your country.”

I had to laugh. I laughed. “Okay,” I said. “You’re welcome.”

“And also, uh-good luck to you.”

I didn’t laugh any more. What was next? Was he going to give me a gold watch?

I tried to see behind Bridge’s eyes, see how deep he went. Was he saying merely what he was saying, or was he saying he was sorry for what he had done to me, what all the world of Bridges had done to all the world of me’s?

Should I have felt in that moment a matching spirit of magnanimity and grace? Should I have extended my hand for him to clasp, placed my black hand in his white one and smiled, no harm done, life goes on? I could not feel that spirit of grace, not in that moment. Not after all I had been through in the preceding two weeks and in the six years before that. I would have had to be superhuman, I think, to feel that forgiveness. I was and am possessed of all human flaws and weaknesses. I did not want to forgive him, so I did not. On the other hand, I wanted to fire the gun and watch him fly backwards on the steps, but I did not do that, either. Call that even.

“It is important we both realize, Victor, that it’s merely an accident of history that created this problem. An accident of timing. Do you see what I mean? We were precipitous, and agents of my service were too eager to be helpful. That was all. But in time, this”-he gestured to the vial, and I saw the energy in his fingertips, wishing he could just grab it from me; I held it together-“will all be perfectly legal.”

“I don’t think so. I think in time…”

I couldn’t finish the sentence. Because what I was thinking was, of course he’s right. Of course he’s right. Because this is what happens: shit gets worse. It doesn’t get better. It gets worse. Incidents ripple up, then they ripple away again. Batlisch appears, troubles the surface of the world, but then is destroyed. Disappears. Time makes things worse; bad is faster than good; wickedness is a weed and does not wither on its own-it grows and spreads.

“One more time,” said Bridge. “So we are clear. We walk together, four blocks, to a van, where Dr. Cormer is waiting. You continue to hold those materials. Dr. Cormer performs the minor surgery to remove the transmitter-responder from your spinal column. That will take about four and a half minutes.”

Four and a half minutes, I thought. Four and a half fucking minutes.

“And then before Dr. Cormer and I allow you to leave the van, you will give us the materials and Dr. Cormer will conduct the verification process. When that is done, we go our separate ways. You need never see me again.”

I nodded.

“Yes? Is that good?”

“Almost. What about papers?”

Bridge nodded, all eagerness now. “I have a set for you. Wilson Teller, born Albany, New York. No marks, no record. Passport and driver’s license.”

“Clean?”

“Clean and clear.”

“How will I know?”

“You will know because…” He shrugged. “You will have to know because I am telling you so. Is that acceptable to you, Victor?” He smiled, very, very small. “Mr. Teller?”

I eased my head back and forth. I shifted from foot to foot.

“Victor, can you live with that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can. I can live with that. Fine and dandy.” I said those last three words with special distinctness, fine and dandy, to ensure they would be registered by the microphone I was wearing. Button-small, tucked inside my ear like a hearing aid. Barton had fitted me for it. He had all kinds of gadgets hidden in Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise, behind his false walls and hidey-holes. I said it loud and clear. “Fine and dandy.”

Mr. Bridge drove the van, and I rode in the back with Dr. Cormer, who did not wear a white coat or any other indication that he was a doctor; just a black suit and black shoes and no tie, and-for security purposes, or so he said-a featureless plastic face mask, drawn tight across his whole face like a second skin. Eyeholes, a hole for his nose, and one for his mouth. I rode in the back in silence staring at the blank face of Dr. Cormer, forty-five minutes across from one another in the bench seats of the van, as if descending deep into some sort of meaningful dream.

We arrived, forty-five minutes outside of Indianapolis, at the only kind of place that is forty-five minutes outside of Indianapolis: a cornfield, empty and endless. I saw it out the tiny rear windows of the van. The van turned down a tiny gravel spit of a road, and we bounced along it deeper and deeper into the corn until we pulled up outside a white tent, erected in the middle of a dirt circle between two corn rows.

Bridge killed the engine, came around, and opened the back of the van. Dr. Cormer in his mask got out, and I got out behind him, and the three of us walked from the van into the tent, through that big Indiana darkness. The rain had stopped and the moon was out, a flat, tarnished coin. Stars scattered like pinprick wounds. The white tent glowed dully in the moonlight.

Inside was a table covered in white paper, surrounded by surgical lights. A generator chugged in the corner, powering the lights and a squat silver machine, no bigger than a dorm-room refrigerator.

“If you would remove your shirt and your undershirt, please.”

It was the first this doctor, this ghost, had said, and by old instinct I tried to get a read on his accent, tried to find the man inside his voice. Nothing came.

“Lie down, please, on your stomach.” Neutral voice. Empty. Something beautiful in that nothingness, something pure. “Yes,” I said. “Okay.”

I lay down and heard the machine humming to life, and I saw Bridge with my half-closed eyes, shifting from foot to foot. I heard the pin in my back, calling out, protesting.

Four and a half minutes. I counted them down. A minute of preparation, some sort of gel being spread across my back, cool and clammy, like Vaseline. A flat disk placed halfway up my back, then moved, in small circles, up and up; I heard it beeping, one beep every two seconds. Listening. Up and up the ladder of my spine, by two-second intervals. Beep, beep, beep.

Bridge watching from his corner, brow furrowed, frankly fascinated. My body trembled. Dr. Cormer moved his disk more slowly, then there was one long beep, and then a sudden sharp pinch as something was inserted into my flesh. I heard the doctor murmur, “Okay, there. There we are.” I thought of Martha, sweet Martha, pulling free the bullet from my shoulder-There! Got the little fucker-and I smiled. Bridge saw me smiling, and he looked troubled, wondering maybe how I could be smiling, as he stepped forward, got down on his haunches.

“Dr. Cormer, are we clear?”

“We are clear,” said the doctor in his voiceless voice. “We are engaged but not yet withdrawing.”

“Now, Victor,” Bridge whispered, “I need you to give me the package.”

“What?”

“The envelope, Victor. We will need to see it right now and test its contents. You will need to wait.”

“What-why?”

“We need to make sure this is real before we let you go.”

“You said-”

“I know what I said, and I apologize that it was necessary to mislead you. But it’s important that everyone is pleased before we complete the surgery. This is the only way.”

“Mr. Bridge,” I said.

“What?”

“It could have been…”

“What?”

“Now,” I said, “now,” and Bridge said, “What?” but I was talking to the microphone, and the explosion was loud and immediate, a huge noise and a rush of wind from the cornfield as the tent flew away and the dirt patch was flooded with lights.

Bridge was armed, of course, a nice government handgun, and so, it turned out, was Dr. Cormer. Both of them were armed, but they weren’t armed like Mr. Maris was armed. A tank of a man, black boots and camouflage pants and shirt, holding a shotgun and backlit by truck headlights, throwing forward his tall shadow while he shouted, “Drop your weapons; drop them; drop them now!”

Bridge tossed his gun so it landed in the dirt at Maris’s feet. Maris fast-walked with his shotgun, paramilitary style, and stepped on Bridge’s gun, pushing it into the soil. I was still down on the mat, still attached to the machine-the needle in my back, the long thin cord stretched across my back. Not yet free.

Dr. Cormer, the man with no face, wasn’t ready to give up. Maris shouted “Drop it” again, but he stood defiant, surely in violation of his training, and Maris, with a burst from the shotgun, sent him spinning backwards into the dirt.

“No!” I cried from the table. “No!”

Maris said nothing. He moved swiftly around the perimeter, searching for more adversaries. Father Barton emerged from the front seat of the truck and walked calmly toward Mr. Bridge, holding in one hand the hilt of a long curved knife.

I rolled myself off the table to the place where Dr. Cormer was slumped at my feet.

I had to save him. That was all I could think of. I had to fix him so he could finish fixing me. I felt under his collar and found the edge of the mask and peeled it off. A kind-looking young black man with a pencil-thin mustache.

But he was dead. The government technician was stone dead, laid out beside me, as dead in the dirt as Cook had been on the motel carpet. Father Barton, with his left hand, held the precious envelope clutched to his chest; he held the knife in his right. Bridge was on his knees with his hands behind his back, the barrels of Maris’s shotgun against the back of his head.

Barton knelt beside him, exactly like a consoling priest, though his words were a low, cruel murmur. “I do not know the extent of your crimes, sir, but I know how they are to be purged. They are to be purged in blood. They are-no,” he said sharply and seized Bridge’s face. Seized his eyelids, pulled at them. “No, you may not close your eyes. You may not.”

Barton’s arm, though, lacked the conviction of his voice. He raised the knife slowly, creeping toward Bridge’s fat throat, uncertain of his angle. Maris held the shotgun, impatient.

“No,” I said. “No; stop.”

Maris looked down at me, confused. Barton, though, he was nodding. He understood-he thought he understood. “Do you want the gun?” he asked me. “Or the knife?” He didn’t wait. He lowered his wicked blade, handed it to me where I was crouching on the floor, the thin wire still trailing out behind me, tethering me to the machine. “Go on, then. Go ahead.”

“No,” I said. I put the weapon down. “Let him go. You have what you wanted. What we wanted. Go on with it. Tell the world. But let this man go.”

Maris looked at me coldly. “Your sympathy is misplaced.”

“He was doing his job.”

“No excuse,” said Maris. “Absolutely not.”

But Barton was not so certain. He looked like the timid young priest he had pretended to be when first I met him, at the Fountain Diner, stammering, apologetic. He lowered his knife. “I’m not…I don’t know,” he said. “How can we let him live? A man like this.”

“A man like this?” I said softly. “What’re you? What’re you?”

When they were gone, when we were alone in the field of corn, Bridge stood up slowly. His pants were untucked, his hair a wild mess. Inside man, desk man. All this adventure was new to him.

“Thank you,” he said. “My God, Victor. Thank you.”

He held out his hand to help me up, but I crawled back up onto the table. I was still hooked up. I was ready to go.

“Mr. Bridge. Do you know how to work this goddamn thing or not?”

I could feel it as it happened. Feel it tearing free of me. Letting go the nerves, nerve by nerve, bursting stars of bright pain flying out along my spine. I screamed, but there was no turning back, there was no way to undo it now. He had grasped it, fished it out with that flat disk and conjured it up, yanked it from my flesh, and I screamed and screamed and everything went black, black as a gunshot, black as a disappearing sun.

When I woke up I was alone.

Bridge was gone. All remnants of that tent were gone, the poles and the canvas, the machines and the generator.

I was alone in the cornfield, lying on my back, aware first of the clot of bandages on my back, the blood seeping around me in a puddle. It was like I had been left behind by aliens. Like I was a fossil from an ancient evaporated sea.

I lay there until I felt I could stand, then I stood until I felt I could walk, then I started off in search of a phone.

3.

Martha’s beloved wasn’t dead. He had been sold offshore. He was in the Special Economic Zone. That’s what I’d discovered on the TorchLight search in Newell’s office.

Samson, being recaptured, after his brief, happy, free life, after falling in love with Martha and fathering Lionel and being found again, suffered the fate of many escapees who are subsequently caught: he was sold, for pennies on the dollar, to the controllers of an oil rig called the High Water working in the SEZ.

The SEZ was created during the Texas War, a nautical territory of the United States to be jointly administered by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. Because the gulf rigs and the oil they bring up are considered of vital national interest, laws have been passed to modify or suspend regulations regarding the treatment of Persons Bound to Labor inside its boundaries. No Franklins out on the waves.

At Bell’s, when we were tempted to misbehave, when we got out of line, and when we cautioned each other-Hush up, now; Don’t be dumb, man-it was always the SEZ we were thinking about. What you trying to do? we’d say. Get your ass sold offshore? In the times of Old Slavery, in Maryland or Virginia, they would trade rumors about the hot hell of the cotton lands; at Bell’s we sweated over the SEZ. It floated in our imaginations then, as I saw it floating terrible now in Martha’s, thinking about the man she loved. A machine island floating on dark water, shrouded in black smoke. A fortress carapaced in scaffolding and metal decks, masted with smokestacks. Gas fires burning orange in its vents, satellite dishes rotating slowly on its towers.

“Might be better,” I said to her, “if he was dead.”

“No,” she said. “No.”

I told her everything. I told her about you, darling. I told her the whole story. Sitting on the thin bedspread in the hotel room, told her about Bell’s and about you, told her about Chicago and about Bridge, told her about Barton and Jackdaw and Dr. Cormer in the field of corn.

About what you said, about two worlds, this world and another one, us now and us later, what we are and what we are going to be.

We’re in Chicago, and I still have never been to Canada. We’re in Chicago, not permanently, but right now. Today. Everything I see I wish that you were seeing. I went to a hot-dog cart for lunch. I ate three hot dogs, thinking of you. I bought one for Lionel, then another one.

And here I am, on an elevator, riding the elevator up to visit a company that makes elevators. Martha and her boy are across the street at a coffee shop called Joey’s. Martha is reading the Chicago Tribune. Lionel is reading the comics and drinking chocolate milk. Martha’s hatchback is directly outside, visible from the front door of the building I’m in, parked in such a way that we can get out quickly if need be. Lionel knows only that we are on an adventure, and that is enough; that is more than enough.

In this world, in the real world, I am stepping off the elevator onto a thin green carpet. My shoes are black and highly shined, and my gait is confident and purposeful. I am a few minutes early for my appointment, here at the offices of Hugh Moorland Elevator and Escalator Company, a privately held corporation: established in 1927, annual sales of just under $1.2 billion, corporate parent to Murdock Elevators of Murdock, Louisiana.

“Good morning, sir. What can we do for you?”

“Hi. How are you? I have an appointment.”

The gentleman smiles. He invites me to have a seat. I sit and leaf through a magazine.

Martha and I have learned that elevator design varies widely between companies and involves a large amount of highly technical proprietary information: the mechanical functioning of the pneumatic systems, the tensile strength of cables, the interior electrics, the design and movement of the counterweights. Even the size and shape of elevator buttons, their response times, their relative luminosity when depressed.

You never know which of these details, if any, will prove relevant to your goal, which is, in this case-as one small part of a much larger plan-to simultaneously shut down elevator service in every building on a plantation that comprises thirty-two separate structures.

“Mr. Powell?”

“Guilty as charged,” I say. I hop up.

“Great to meet you,” the woman tells me. “Come on back.”

“You betcha,” I say, finding a voice, a happy midwesterner, road warrior, traveling salesman.

This is today. More plans are in motion. More ideas are in play. Every day is two worlds; every day we split into two.

A map of the Gulf Coast with the current location of all the rigs was hard to find, but we found one. A technical diagram of an individual rig such as the High Water is proving much more difficult to find, but difficult does not mean impossible.

Everything can happen. Everything is possible.