style="font-size:15px;"> “I’m sure all their food’s delicious. It couldn’t be fresher.”
“They won’t let you spend the night. They say they have too much work.”
Chad gave a noncommittal grunt. He didn’t believe that too-much-work line, not for one minute. He said, “The Gridians have always been clannish.”
Howard shot Chad a questioning look. “They stick together,” Chad said. “They live in special towns the government built for them. They don’t have visitors or talk with other people. They don’t even mo-com with people who aren’t them.” He searched his mind for an example. “Kind of like the Johnsons”—their next-door neighbors, an older couple with a grown son.
“They’re gone,” Howard said.
“What do you mean they’re gone?”
“The Johnsons moved out. Their house is empty. There’s furniture in there, but no car, and no more Johnsons! The Gilberts are gone, too.” Neighbors down the hill. “Atunde told me and Leon they were leaving. His mom said Atunde wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but he knew we’d come by wanting to play.”
“When did this happen?”
“I don’t know. A few days ago. The Johnsons went first.”
Good Lord, Chad thought. He had heard of people leaving the city itself, but not suburban neighborhoods like theirs. He felt ill. He thought of the party at their neighbors George and Gentia’s a few weeks before. George had said they were sniggering idiots to stay, and Sharis, Chad’s own wife, had spoken up to say she wasn’t going to teach her kids to flee. “Dayton is our home, and we’re staying,” she had said.
“Have they told you much about the war in school?” Chad asked Howard now.
Howard looked confused. “You mean the trouble up north? Miss Bishop says it’s really far away.”
Chad had had, between the ages of about six and nine, a terrible fear of earthworms, not of the worms themselves but what they did. He imagined them writhing and burrowing underground, riddling the soil with tiny tunnels. A footstep in the wrong place might end up with Chad swallowed by the earth. His relatives would never know what happened.
“I mean the conflict. I mean …” Chad was filled with the prickling dread he used to feel when he was sent into his yard to fetch the paper. Parks and the schoolyard were okay—every square inch had been tested—but how could Chad trust his own lawn? “Want me to draw it for you?”
“Sure!”
“Good,” Chad said, relieved. Calm them both down. “Where’s Leon? Leon should hear this.” Leon was seven and had a personality as spiky as his hair. “What do you mean put my head on my pillow? I put my feet on my pillow!” And that was indeed how Leon slept.
“Leon!” Howard screamed. “Daddy wants you!”
Chad went to the kitchen desk drawer for a piece of paper and an old-fashioned pencil. “What’s up, Daddy-o?” said Leon. He lit up when he saw the paper and pencil in Chad’s hand.
Chad sat down at the big blue kitchen table and pulled out chairs for Howard on one side and Leon on the other. He drew a rounded rectangle wider than it was tall and decorated with appendages—Florida, Maine, Texas. “Okay,” he said. “So here we are”—he put an X denoting Dayton below the protuberance that was Michigan (the one entity he’d drawn accurately, he thought, because it looked like a mitten.) “And this whole country, all the U.S., used to be rich and happy and basically the center of the world.” To the right of his map, Chad drew a stick figure with a big head and smiling face. Not enough. He put a crown on top.
Chad’s father had been an upright, even boring, man, an auditor for American National Bank. But every morning before he went to work he waited with Chad and his brother at the school bus stop and a weird merriment exuded from him. It was only then that Chad’s father used The Voice.
“Oh, oh, you boys you are zee terror.”
Or: “Your boos driver, she look like a beeg potato.”
What Chad remembered most fondly of his father was The Voice. Chad hoped his own boys remembered him by his drawings.
“So that was then,” Chad said, waving at the stick man with the crown. “But then the U.S. got into wars, and then the economy went bad, and then the weather got all crazy—for example, you didn’t have hurricanes come inland like we do now—and there were new pests that ate crops, and before you knew it, it was the Short Times.” He drew an arrow from the figure with the crown to another figure below it, this one slumped and mournful. He sprinkled some tears down the page and put an upside-down crown at the figure’s feet. Howard and Leon laughed in delight.
Chad felt a pang at making jokes about these things. “But it was really bad, the Short Times,” he said. “It went on for years. People didn’t have enough food, and they got tickets for gas and electricity, and the health system got overwhelmed, and … Up in what used to be your mom’s old town there was an outbreak of rabies. You know about rabies?” Leon shook his head. “It’s a disease,” Chad said.
“From raccoons?” Howard asked, sounding pleased.
“Exactly.” To brighten the mood Chad started drawing a raccoon. “People were looking in the dump for food, and the raccoons that lived there bit them.”
Leon said, “That looks like a cat.”
“I made the legs too long.”
“Give him big teeth for biting.”
Chad did. Leon giggled.
“But it wasn’t funny, really,” Chad said. “It was terrible. I mean, I was a kid and I wasn’t worried, it was normal life, and then my parents died.” He immediately regretted mentioning this, but Leon seemed unperturbed.
“From raccoons?” Howard asked, his voice anxious.
“No, not from raccoons,” Chad said. “From pneumonia. Infections in their lungs. Don’t worry, that wouldn’t happen now. We have better antibiotics.”
Chad’s father, in fact, had died over thirteen years before, in February, two months before the announcement of the Grid. Chad’s mother died a month later. They were both fifty-four. People died then, during the Short Times. Doctors saw diseases they’d only read about: tuberculosis, measles, cholera. For people with only National Health Care, like Chad’s parents, there were shortages of antibiotics. Chad felt a certain gratitude for the timing of his parents’ deaths. Most people who’d had friends and relatives die during the Short Times found comfort in their loved ones’ unknowing. A death before the Grid was an innocent death.
“At any rate, it was bad,” Chad said, putting a big X over the raccoon. “People were desperate. This was the early thirties, and there were all sorts of ideas about how to get more food—that’s when people stopped eating meat, for one thing—and then the government destroyed a couple towns in Oregon”—he went back to his map of the U.S., drew a star near the left upper corner—“to set up this enormous farm and, well, that farm was terrifically productive, so the government looked for place to make a humongous farm.”
“And
