“I am lucky you came upon him,” Nenonene would say, in his deep, British-accented voice. “Thank you.”
An audience, that’s what they called it. An audience with the pope, or with the president. All Tuuro wanted from Nenonene was an audience.
He spent hours thinking about Cubby, going over all the steps he’d taken with his body; he thought about Nenonene, what it must have been to be the smartest child in a small town in Africa, sensing you were born to a great destiny; he thought about Lanita eating his nine-minute eggs. When he jerked off he closed his eyes and remembered Naomi. Kelso, the guard who brought him his meals and sat reading magazines in the common room, had become a companion: a squat man with bushy eyebrows and a bad back and a wife he described as “not 100 percent.”
“What do you do in here?” English the lawyer had asked, pulling at the neck of his shirt with his index finger. There was an old-fashioned TV in the common room, but it was broken. “Aren’t you going crazy?”
Tuuro said nothing. He was supposed to go insane? Insanity was the expected state for a Melano man in jail with no entertainment? His own mind couldn’t be enough? In the middle of a morning on his twenty-fourth day in jail, Tuuro spat at the wall. In five minutes the spit was dried and vanished.
Tuuro remembered Dakwon, his aunt’s downstairs neighbor in the apartment building, a man in his twenties who could walk everywhere on his hands. Down steps, along ledges, on top of a log. Dakwon’s shirt fell around his shoulders, the twitches of skin and muscle in his chest and belly exposed. Tuuro thought of Dakwon’s hands, their sudden grips and accommodations. When someone tossed a ball at him or placed a brick in his path, Dakwon turned his body into a line of concentration. That must be sanity, Tuuro thought: keeping yourself, by attention and adjustments, upside down yet upright in the world. Insanity was nowhere near as compelling. Insanity was the fall.
Tuuro regretted the explosion of spit that had escaped his mouth. He thought of God and Nelson Mandela. He watched a spider in a corner build its web. He got Kelso to talk about his family. He smiled.
CHARLES AND DIANA managed to avoid each other for days, despite their being the only two people in the Audubon Center. Diana wandered in the woods, Charles at the edges of the fields. Diana got her water from the pump in the old garden, while Charles got his from the stream and chemically disinfected it. It wasn’t apparent to either of them why the city water had disappeared, but it had, about three weeks before.
He’d forgotten the spring, Charles realized. The spring wasn’t technically on Audubon land, but it was close, bubbling out of the ground in a grassy cleared concavity at the top of a wooded hill. Charles hadn’t been there since winter. A tiny pool filled with running water and native watercress, feeding a stream that ran off down the hill. The spring was less than two miles away, and Charles could take thermoses to fill. He was sick of chemicals.
The trail to the spring was overgrown but trampled. Deer path, probably. The day was hot with thousands of mosquitoes, and Charles hurried through the woods up the hill. By the time he reached the clearing he was breathless and sweaty. There, in the center of the pool, sat a naked Diana.
She had to have heard him. Charles was filled with fury. That Diana had stayed on in his nature center. That she had found his spring. That she had the audacity to sit in it. He stood on the ledge above the pool and waved his thermoses. “Not very sanitary for drinking water now!”
She didn’t answer, just shook her head and crossed her arms over her breasts and glanced behind her to her clothes, maybe ten feet away on the grass.
Charles pictured throwing her clothes into a tree. “I thought you got your water from the spigot in the garden.”
“It’s a peaceful spot here. Was a peaceful spot.”
Charles banged his thermoses together. “Until you spread your human juices all over it.”
“My what?”
Suddenly Charles knew just how he looked and sounded. He thought of the loincloth he had worn during the last three Indian summer celebrations, how he’d imagined it had made him look earthy and appealing. “Getting a little ventilation?” one of the elderly volunteers had asked, making him jump as she flicked the leather with her finger.
“I’ll just go back,” he said now, backing away. “I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
Diana looked up, startled. “Didn’t you come here to get water? I’ll get out.”
“Oh, no. This is your spring.”
“I can’t say it’s my spring.” Diana stood, one arm across her breasts, the other guarding her crotch. She looked like Venus. “That’s like saying it’s your sun, or my summer.” She backed up to her clothes and, after a second’s hesitation, pulled on her shirt first. “It’s the world’s spring, bubbling out like this,” she went on. “I mean, who can own water?”
“Artesian,” Charles said. “Pushed out of the top of the aquifer.” Using, as he often did, a bit of knowledge as conversation.
They made love on the grass, and when they were done Charles too took his clothes off, and then they stretched out on their bellies and lay—as Charles pointed out—like two happy turtles basking on a shore.
CHAD BURROWED THROUGH the clothes in his chest of drawers. He had no hope of wearing his old pants, but there was a shirt from high school he could still button, barely. He turned to the side and pulled his gut in and looked at himself in the mirror. Not bad. His hair was thinning but not gray. The creases his father had had around his mouth were only fine lines on him.
“What are you doing?” Sharis was standing at the bedroom door. “I thought we could look up my family,” she said, waving something in her hand. Chad turned toward her, confused and embarrassed, then realized what she was holding.
The Triple-A maps of old Ohio had taken on the glow of artifacts, kept in drawers to be carefully unfolded, or preserved between sheets of plastic and hung on walls. Plain City, Van Wert, Bellevue: erased, eradicated, absent. The new maps had no town names at all in the Grid section, only a vast green space, crossed only by the superhighways, labeled “The Heartland Grid.” Some of the maps bore agricultural symbols—ears of corn, sheaves of wheat. There was such a sameness to the maps these days, Chad thought, as if even their designers had become cautious. Yet perhaps in every era there was sameness, so ubiquitous that no one even noticed.
“Be careful,” Chad said, because Sharis’s unfolding the map seemed dangerously quick and young to him.
Sharis sighed and spread the map out on the bed. “There,” she said, pointing. “My mother’s parents were from Greenville. Lloyd and Jessica Henson.”
There was a museum in Indianapolis called the Heartland Heritage Museum. It was filled with school board notes and scenic postcards and sections of gates from large houses and other flotsam that had been, in the confusion and intensity of Grid Day, retrieved. The museum, privately funded, had a warehouse in Indiana close to the Ohio River. Few people were aware of this, but there had been a fire at the warehouse, and the artifacts of northwest Indiana were gone.
Sharis had never mentioned her mother’s parents. Since the boys had been born it was as if her life before had never existed. Chad said, “Are your mother’s parents still living?”
“Dead. But my mother had a big sister. Her name was Aunt Margie and
