liberty or give me death,” her father whispered, downing his drink in one gulp—a line that made Sharis giggle because it was so corny.
“Unto you, Lord, I commend my spirit!” That was her mother, surprisingly loud.
“Come on, people!” There was a low babble of voices, then the buzz of a drill. Sharis stood, dropping her glass onto the table. She ran out through the kitchen to the back door, glancing back at her heap of family. Her glass had toppled, purple liquid spreading on the wood.
“I know she wanted you to run away,” Chad told Sharis. “She had a plan for you.”
“I wanted to live,” Sharis said. “I’m not insane.”
“Koogie,” Howard said. That was a new word to Chad, but from Howard’s tone he took it as an affirmation.
“Jesus,” Chad said after a few moments watching the new pitcher. “He can throw.”
Everyone who attended that game remembered it, not just for the helicopters but for its other phenomenon: Joe Mateus pitching for the first time. Later, Mateus said the helicopters were an inspiration. He wanted to throw hard enough the pilots couldn’t see the ball. The attendance that evening was just over a thousand, although later maybe a hundred thousand people said they’d been there. Chad remembered it as the day he started locking his car, the night he realized bondad was not enough.
true believers
JOHN PATTERSON, DAYTON’S flood-time hero, made his fortune in cash registers. Cash registers are—think about it, Chad said—an open admission that money is a temptation and people steal. The early National Cash Register sales literature stated this fact quite freely. Why should a merchant spend big money on a machine to tally sales and issue receipts? So an employee couldn’t charge nothing. So an employee couldn’t slip a friend two dollars of change instead of one, or pocket a customer’s payment, or miscalculate a sale. So a customer couldn’t return a sales item and say he’d paid full price. The cash register business was founded on the propositions that employer and employee have inherently different interests, that transactions benefit from daylight, that money is a powerful lure. None of the cash register’s suppositions about human behavior is positive. It is, in its essence, a surveillance machine.
The other invention associated with Dayton—Chad went on—is more uplifting. Wilbur and Orville Wright were the bottom half of four brothers; their father, with whom they lived his entire life, was a United Brethren bishop known for his devotion to his family and his obstinate, often divisive, theological convictions. Their mother died of TB before Wilbur and Orville reached adulthood, and Wilbur nursed her in her final days. Their sister, Katharine, who also lived with their father, was the rare woman of that time who sought and obtained a college degree. The Wright brothers were not college-educated; in fact, neither of them finished high school. They were bright enough—the family had hopes of sending Wilbur to Yale, and Orville in seventh grade won an award as the best math student in the city—but for years they bounced around, the sort of young people that in a higher social stratum might be labeled dilettantes. When Orville tried to date a young woman from a prominent local family, her mother said, “You stay away from that boy. He’s crazy.” As a youth, Wilbur, after a hockey injury, was laid up for years with heart palpitations, writing later, with some passion, of how a man can become “blue.” He worked as a clerk in a grocery store, as a printer, and briefly published a local newspaper. Eventually he and Orville opened (Chad winked at this moment, said, “this is the famous part”) a bicycle shop, where they built the bicycles they sold. The Wright Brothers were slight, neat, slim-hipped men—birdlike, you might say. They always wore business suits, Orville’s much nattier than his brother’s. Shy and awkward, they never courted or married. Wilbur wrote to a relative: “I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are lacking in determination and push.”
And yet. “For some years,” Wilbur wrote in 1900, “I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man.”
“Afflicted,” Chad said. “Isn’t that an interesting word?”
“EDUARDO, MI HOMBRE,” the man in the booth said. “You guiding the woman’s tour today?” Lila was the sole passenger in a truck entering the Grid, her car left behind in an underground garage. She had been iris-scanned, beamed by a materials detector, and patted down. She would be spending the night in a Grid guesthouse. She had been told to bring a change of clothes and toiletries, but no percs or phones were allowed. Her driver, Eduardo, had driven right up to the Grid barrier and through an archway that led to a checkpoint. Behind the checkpoint was a slightly shorter wall that was curved to block any outsiders’ view. There were soldiers with rifles on either side of the road; on the left, beside the checkpoint, a woman soldier seemed to be making time with the man in the booth.
Eduardo had a definite accent, and Lila wondered where he’d come from. He was taking her, he said, to the guesthouse at Village 42. Other than that he’d said little. Perhaps his English was a problem.
“Shut your mouth!” the female soldier cried to the man in the booth. She leaned into Eduardo’s truck and spoke directly at Lila. “Don’t let these mariachis give you a bad first impression.” Lila nodded awkwardly. “You been on the Grid before, darling?” the female soldier asked. Her hair beneath her hat was poufy and clearly took effort.
Lila, stiffening, shook her head. She didn’t expect another woman, especially one younger than her, to call her darling.
“You’ll love it,” the woman said. “Everyone loves it. Best place in the world.”
This surprised Lila speechless, and suddenly the checkpoint man was handing back her pass card, the gate was raising, the female soldier was waving, and Eduardo steered them right then left and there they were, two people in a truck with a wall behind them, looking out under a heat-hazed sky over 25 million agricultural acres that used to be part of Ohio.
It was less flat than Lila expected. Oh, it was flat: flat and huge and green (although the acres of wheat had their golden look) but flat less like a plain than like a beach, with small rises and hillocks and ridges. There was a road straight in front of them going north and a crossroad that extended east and west, and Lila knew from her reading that ten miles north there’d be another crossroad, with another crossroad ten miles beyond that: not for nothing was the transformed landscape called the Grid.
“We go north first,” Eduardo said. And suddenly, with the fields falling from the road around her, it wasn’t enough for Lila to be here, on the ground: she wanted to be in a plane above the landscape. She wondered at her own greediness, reminded herself she was lucky to be here at all. She sneaked a glance at the speedometer: eighty. Eduardo’s hand was relaxed on the steering wheel; he looked around the Grid with possessive nonchalance. “Corn’s good this year,” he said. And indeed, the corn plants were erupting from the ground like thousands of green fountains. Thousands? No, millions, and Lila, who in water was used to big numbers, felt almost humbled by the thought.
“Wait a minute,” she said after fifteen or twenty silent minutes. “Can we stop and look?”
He glanced at her, then halted the truck in the middle of the road. Lila almost objected, but of course no one else was coming, and if they did Eduardo’s truck could be spotted from miles away. “Look,” he said, waving his hand, and Lila got out and stood in the road.
So this was the Grid. It was broad and not quite flat, and it was alive. Vegetatively, not humanly, alive. Lila’s forehead was slick with sweat. The Ohio sky had been transformed into a Big Sky. Every few miles there was a row of ten or twelve trees. She pointed at one
