A Better World, page 26
—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
—Preface to Anouk Parson’s third collection of poetry, self-published, 2053.
PART IV
It’s Exactly What You Fear
(The Plymouth Valley Winter Festival)
“Gladiatorial games functioned to build consensus—a we versus you mentality. Said poet Juvenal, they were the circus to Caesar’s bread (1). The Mayans cracked skulls on the steps of Chichén Itzá (2). We can also see community-building in Plymouth Valley’s skin furniture (3) and through blood sacrifice in Holland’s 8,000-year-old peat bog fossils (4). In times of greatest scarcity, bodies were hung, stabbed, and castrated by entire communities, each playing their part as executioner, in what archaeologists term overkill (5).”
—AI-generated library research using the keywords “Human Sacrifice,” “History,” and “Scarcity,” Kings Public Library, Main Branch, 2079.
Blutkitt (blood cement)—the tendency for morally corrupt actions to calcify group attachments.
For example, when groups commit murder together, their individual guilt has the opposite of the expected effect. Instead of leaving the group, members feel they’ve passed a point of no return. They’re bonded, perceiving those outside the group as less real.
Members tend to be groomed, given morsels of knowledge and responsibility, tasked with proving loyalty at each step. By the time they commit violence, they’ve typically transgressed so far past their moral codes that they can no longer conceive of the deeper line they’re crossing.
It’s only after gang and cult members commit murder that they’re assigned the greater honors and leadership responsibilities of indoctrinating new members. This is because they’re Blutkitt.
—CORPORATE CULTS FROM SEOUL TO PLYMOUTH VALLEY, by Trebor Meier, Verlag Press, 2074.
Mirage
The Parker children were small for their ages, possibly from prolonged sickness. Their hair was black, their eyes brown. Around them, the world moved. People laughed and hugged and balloons fell. But the children were still.
In screenies about the great deserts of South America, people often imagined water shimmering off the great sand expanse. With each step, the water shifted farther away, luring coyotes crossing borders to their deaths. She thought about that as she advanced through the parlor, and the children seemed to fade.
Everything else could be ignored. But not this.
Linda pushed through the crowd of people like wading through animated dolls. Tania Janssen hugged her. “May this be the most fruitful of all years!” she cried with drunken delight, her shirt stained with wine, her mouth red with it.
“Fruitful of years,” Linda parroted.
Jack Lust stalked past the altar, a murderous dandy. His body obscured and then revealed two wraiths holding hands. Linda came closer, and as she did, she remembered the nightmare house. She thought of Gal, who’d once sewn all her children’s clothing, married to Trish, a woman who’d never examined her patients with her hands. More balloons. One of them popped with a bang!
The path opened again, and there was Zach the unctuous tour guide, who’d made PV look so fine, ushering the children to the recesses of the closed-off parts of the mansion.
Linda weaved through hugging friends and lovers and more gunfire-popping balloons. Like canned music or hundred-year-old screenies in black-and-white, it all felt dead to her, the whole valley a tomb.
She chased Zach to a hall beneath the stairs.
“Linnie?” Russell called.
He’s dead, too, a dreadful voice whispered.
She went deeper, but the door she’d seen Zach and the children pass through was gone. Did the walls move here, like in the Labyrinth?
Slow and boozy at first, Russell followed.
“Where are they?” she asked. The house steamed from so many warm, crowded bodies. Sweat rolled from Russell’s matted blond hair and down his neck. His eyes widened with terror: his wife was about to make a scene. He lowered himself, a tall man extending his arms, tucking his head over hers to keep the party from seeing her. To undo her, like a thin and badly knotted chain.
She raced around him but now all the doors were walls. She searched with blind hands for a secret passage. Everything was cold and dark and smooth.
“What are you doing?” he hissed. “Don’t you know we’re not supposed to be here?”
“Sebbie! Katie! Do you hear me?” she shouted, loud as a horn.
No answer. She swerved back along the short hall. Some revelers stayed celebrating, but just as many stopped their blessings and hugs. In bespoke Fabric Collective ball gowns and black ties, they paid witness.
“Katie! Sebbie!” she bellowed.
Everything stopped, even the music. Eyes drilled.
This felt like a nightmare. How could this be happening? How was she a screaming woman at a party? “Katie! Sebbie!” she shouted as she raced through the pool house, and then around the corner, to passed-out Rachel. The party cleared a path.
She was panting, hands on thighs beside gawking caladrius, when Russell caught up. “There you are!” he cried, affable and stage loud. “Honey! What’s the joke? Let me in on it!”
He took her hands, kissed both cheeks, then her lips. Whiskey-breathed, he held her too tight, too long. “Have you lost your mind?” he whispered.
“You didn’t see them?” Linda asked, her cheek pressed against his fancy new suit. “Gal’s kids?”
“I didn’t see any kids. There’s no kids here.”
She pushed on him until he loosened his hold. Gawkers had followed them out. The soccer parents Amir and Farah, of course. And Ruth Epstein. Jack Lust, too. It felt surreal. These people were ghosts. Everyone was a ghost, shadows of the people they’d once been. They’d lived too long in fairyland, and now they could never go home.
“I saw,” she said. But what, exactly, had she seen?
His face was smeared. Everything smeared. “Did you have the wine? It’s laced with psilocybin,” he said.
Things swam. Russell was holding her again, too tight. “Help me find them,” she said, crying now. “Why do you keep lying to me? Why won’t you help me?”
“Where? How? Do you even know what they look like?”
Everything spun. Linda stopped fighting. She leaned into Russell. The air was bending, becoming dense. She was swallowing too much. “Jack’s asked us to leave. I need to get Hip. Stay here,” he said, then thought better, and took her by the hand as they crossed back to the pool and collected their son. The party was quiet now. Between straggling balloons with curlicued pig tails, eyes watched.
They were back in the mansion. The goat wasn’t tied to the banister anymore. It lay vacant and heavy, its body too large for the altar, its head and neck sloping down on the one side, its raggedy hind weighing down the other end. Everything melted, colors all around. The goat dissolved into the floor, and blood sprayed out across the party like sprinkler water, caking them all in death.
“Do you see? Do you see the goat?” she asked, meek now.
“Affirmative,” Russell whispered, squeezing her too hard. “Quiet down.”
“They killed the goat. They’re murderers.”
“No. It’s a prop, like on Samhain. It’s not real,” he said as he reached out his finger to the red, turned it in the light where it glistened. “It’s corn syrup.” She snatched that finger, tasted its confusing sweetness.
“My God, what is this place?” she begged.
The BetterWorld and ActHollow boards of directors were by the altar. Jack’s expression stayed flat, his eyes dead as coal, but there was something in his upturned lips that seemed like amusement. Lloyd appeared horrified, his mouth gaping in shock. Daniella and Anouk followed her with their eyes. They looked through her, and it felt to Linda like a thousand small knives.
She followed Russell, pushing through to the front door and out. Lights strung across the porch smeared into lines, burned holes through the dark revealing the awful beneath.
“What happened? Is Mom okay?” Hip asked from far away. She was between her son and her husband, each of them holding an upper arm as they all headed for the car. Hip’s voice was scared. For the first time she understood that a war was happening inside him. The Farmer-Bowens were all fighting private, lonely wars.
“Too much wine,” Russell said.
A flicker, like a light switch. Hip’s compassion died. His fear won. “But everyone said to be careful with the wine. She should have been careful.”
They were in the car somehow, Russell driving.
“I saw them. I know it,” Linda said.
Russell’s jaw locked in anger. “You did a lot of damage.”
“What did she do?” Hip asked.
“Insulted our hosts,” Russell said.
“You ruined everything!” Hip cried.
She turned to Hip in the back seat. Everything was bleeding and running. The car was melting and underneath it was the Great White Caladrius from the history book, from the shelter that first day she’d toured. It had been waiting all this time. They were in its belly.
In Linda’s mind, everything went red. The belly became teeth. She kept her eyes on Hip, but she couldn’t see him. Not clearly. He was smeared. They were all bloody smears.
* * *
In the morning, everything hurt. But that didn’t stop her. She left the house before any of them were awake. She went to Gal’s house, opened the back screen, then the aluminum door, both unlocked.
Change had happened. The kitchen was scrubbed clean, the appliances all new, some still Omnium wrapped. The living room furniture was gone. In its place, two overstuffed suitcases.
The sound of a flush. Gal came out from a small washroom. Dressed appropriately for the weather for the first time, she was in slacks, her crimped fingers laboring to align the zipper teeth of a puffy, coat-length parka.
She didn’t startle at Linda’s presence. “Oh. You again.”
“You’re leaving?” Linda asked.
“Yeah.” Stiffly, she favored her left leg.
“Where will you go?”
“There’s a halfway house in PVE, I guess. So, what do you want?”
The psilocybin in Linda’s system hadn’t worn off. Things wonked and pulsed. “You said your kids were still here. You said they’re not in Palo Alto.”
“I said that.”
“Do they sacrifice a goat on New Year’s Eve at the Parson Mansion?”
“Nope,” she said, like this break-in, this random conversation, was the most normal and expected in the world. “It’s stuffed. They haul it out every year and take the real goat back to the farm. I think. I mean, I’ve never been to one of those things sober.”
“Me neither,” Linda said. “Why do they do that? Make it seem like they’re doing something awful when they’re not? They had these skulls on Samhain. They looked real, too.”
“I don’t know,” Gal said.
“Is it because they want us to be confused when they do the actual awful things?”
“I don’t know,” Gal said. Her movements were heavy, her speech slow. But her eyes were focused. This was sadness, not drugs. “I don’t care.”
“Why did you say they sacrifice people at the Winter Festival?”
Gal tried to bend her fingers to work the zipper but her scarred skin had lost all elasticity. She couldn’t get a decent grip. “Maybe they don’t. Maybe I’m crazy like everybody says. Maybe my kids are safe and healthy with their mother who hates them.”
“Is there a way I could contact Trish to verify your story? You must have a way to reach her.” Linda’s voice echoed in this house now, because it was so empty.
“Trish got what she wanted and she’s gone.”
“Where are your kids?” Linda gasped.
Gal gave up on her coat, opened her locket. Linda came closer though she didn’t want to. Gal didn’t spit or lunge or try to kiss her. She seemed just as uncomfortable with their nearness.
On the left of the locket, Katie. On the right, Sebbie. A cold chill ran all down Linda’s spine and radiated icy electric shocks.
“That’s definitely the kids I saw last night.”
Gal closed and touched the locket to her chest. “You saw them?”
“I think so. I was high. But I think so. They were okay. They were holding hands. Zach Greene took them inside the mansion and I looked for them but I couldn’t find them.”
“They were holding hands?” Gal asked. She sounded dazed.
“Yeah. I think so. It happened fast. I made a scene, looking for them. But I couldn’t find them. I could be wrong. I want you to know.”
A tear slid down Gal’s cheek. “They fight like cats and dogs. But I always knew,” she said. “I knew if things got bad, they’d be close. I did that right. I did some things wrong, but I never played favorites, never turned them on each other, so I did that right.”
“Yeah,” Linda said. “Where are they now, do you think?”
“I told you. Try the hospital. That’s where they keep them. Maybe the tunnels. But the tunnels are scary, and they want to be humane about it. They trot them out sometimes—the black ribbon winners—so maybe at some event if you pay attention.”
In the way that everything happening lately was surreal, Linda didn’t react when Gal took hold of her waist and awkwardly, painfully, lowered herself to the floor on gnarled knees. “Please,” she begged. “Get them out.”
The door opened. In came smiling Sally Claus and Cyrus Galani, both with guns holstered. Their smiles didn’t waver at the sight of Linda. It was as if no one had anything to hide, and Linda had all the reason in the world to be in this house, saying good-bye to Gal, who was begging at her feet.
“Ready to go?” Sally asked.
“No,” Gal said. Linda helped her up, lifting her by the tender underarms. Then she took the fabric of Gal’s coat in her hands. She aligned the slider and zipped her up. The gesture felt so intimate that Linda couldn’t look at her as she did it.
Sally and Cyrus each took a suitcase.
“I’ll burn this whole town down if I don’t get to see my kids again. I’ll murder every one of you,” Gal said, flat and disconsolate.
Then they were out the door, headed for the gate.
Back in the car, Linda started the engine. “Don’t panic,” she whispered to herself, hands on the wheel, heart beating unevenly, like a gunshot victim who’s bleeding out.
* * *
She didn’t let herself think about it, or the fact that it was still early in the morning. She programmed Chernin’s name into the GPS.
He lived in a tidy brick colonial on the north side of town. A nurse answered the door and led her into the kitchen, where Chernin and Louis were having morning tea, Louis through a straw. Chernin sported a two- or three-day gray stubble beard and wore a ratty bathrobe; Louis was neatly clad in crisp pajamas. Though the latter was the one in the wheelchair, Chernin looked sick. His hair was unkempt, the wrinkle crevices along the sides of his mouth stained with tea, his eyes bloodshot.
“Dr. Farmer, hello!” he said with real warmth, then introduced her to the nurse and to Louis, who nodded without looking away from his screenie. The program was puerile, a fast-paced cartoon with cats and dogs shooting guns and blowing up dynamite. Chernin acknowledged the strangeness of this to Linda with a shrug.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I have a question about Katie and Sebbie Parker.”
The air popped with sudden static. Very slowly, Louis looked up.
“The Parker children, yes? Yes, yes, what’s your question?” Chernin asked.
“Where are they?”
“Palo Alto,” he said, scratching his dry cheek, where white flakes pulled away from his skin. “I released them to their mother. Yes, yes. Clean bills of health. I suspect they’re still there.”
Her unease built like bubbles in shaken carbonation. More, faster panting. “I saw them last night at the Parson Mansion.”
“You did?” he asked with exaggerated surprise.
“Is there something special about idiopathic leukemia?”
“What’s that?” He made direct eye contact for the first time since she’d known him. The look was a warning.
Still standing, she held the back of an empty breakfast chair and squeezed. “Their cancer. That’s their diagnosis. I asked you about it. You treated them for it so you must have heard of it. You’d prescribed them a chemotherapeutic drug and I asked if that was best practice and you never answered.”
“I never answered?” he asked with mock innocence. He wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was looking at his slippered feet.
“No,” she said. Her head was hurting. A dull throb all along her temples. The room smelled like toast and medicine.
Slowly, holding on to the table, with the sounds of popping knee joints, Chernin stood. “It’s very early. Yes, an unreasonable time for a visit.”
“I know.”
“Those parties at the Parson Mansion go on. You’ve exerted yourself. Did you drink the wine?”
“I’m not confused, Dr. Chernin.”
“Yes. I believe you are. Linda, I’m going to do you a favor and forget this happened. It’s time you went home and slept this off.”
Frail and slow, he showed her to the door. When they got there, away from Louis and the nurse, he leaned in close, the skin along his uneven beard thin as the bunched membrane inside an eggshell. He put his mouth to her ear.
“It’s not your problem,” he whispered, the sound tickling her skin. “Yes. Yes. I’m trying to stop it. I’m fixing it from the inside.”
“Fix what?” she begged.
His eyes filled with water that didn’t produce tears. They were drowning.
“Mitch?” Louis called.
