her, in fields as thick and lush as a giant’s carpet, was soy, the new American mainstay, usually processed into fake meat. Northeast, miles away, beyond acres of corn, buildings of a village shimmered on the horizon. They looked wavery and insubstantial in the heat. No cars.
All the intentional villages had numbers. Village 28 people had heard about: it was the processing center for perch and walleye from Lake Erie. “What number’s that?” she called to Eduardo, pointing to the buildings.
Eduardo frowned and turned off the engine. The whine of an insect became audible. “Oh,” he nodded when she repeated her question. “Village 104. They got a school there. We’re going to 42.” He pointed east.
In the middle distance a reaper crossed a field of wheat, shooting out a spray of chaff. If Lila strained her ears she could possibly hear it. Other than that there was no human sound or motion. The fields of wheat had a teeming look. A fly landed on Lila’s shoulder.
“How many kids in the school?” Lila called, unwilling to leave her spot in the road. A bead of sweat ran down her forehead and stopped at her eyebrow.
Eduardo climbed out of the truck and approached her. “Thirty? They got two teachers, I know that.”
How did they get teachers? Lila wondered if they advertised on the media. No one really had contact with the effs: rumors said they were clannish, suspicious. They married only each other. They rejected embryonic preselection. The Grid had its own message and info system, and data from outside were blocked. Family members that had been removed during the Gridding could send perc messages to the family members who stayed to become Gridians, but in return the outsiders got rare, sporadic answers, usually around holidays. The religion of the Gridians might have changed. There were stories of churches with stalks of wheat on the altar and roasted soybeans in place of communion wafers. “What are they like?” A friend of Lila’s had asked a waitress once in Florida, where the effs took their group vacation. “They’re people,” the waitress had answered. Then, unburdening herself (and the Florida workers, Lila’s friend pointed out, surely signed confidentiality agreements and were monitored): “They dress like bumpkins, and they don’t tip diddly.”
“Where do you live?” Lila asked Eduardo, glancing at his clothes. A buttoned shirt, jeans, work boots: he looked well-dressed enough to her, but she’d never had much sense of fashion.
“Twenty-nine. Nice place. Good people. We call it Gayville.”
It surprised Lila enough to hear Eduardo’s town had an actual name and surprised her more to hear what the name was. She wondered what things about her the youngie in Columbus had read on the computer, what information had been passed on. Suddenly she wondered why Eduardo had been sent to guide her, if he … “Why Gayville?” she burst out, regretting her question right off. She shouldn’t ask questions. They might kick her out.
Eduardo shrugged. “It’s always been called that.”
As if the origins of the name had been lost in time. The Grid was only thirteen years old, and it had taken a good year, Lila had heard, for the villages to be established. Until they were built, the effs lived in clusters of trailers.
“Do you have a mayor?”
Eduardo laughed. “There’re only three hundred and six of us. We don’t need a boss.”
“Are you married to a woman?”
“Tamara.”
“Kids?”
“We have three.” He reached for his pocket. “Want to see them?”
“Cute,” Lila said, inspecting the photo. Like normal kids, she thought. Everyone in the country distrusted, even feared, the effs: people who’d agreed to stay when towns they’d lived in or near were destroyed; people who seemed to thrive in communal isolation; people who apparently had no desire to escape the life their government had planned for them. Their staying on the Grid was like a collective back turned upon what people had taken to calling Free America.
She got back in the truck and Eduardo drove on, a series of small hillocks breaking the cornfields around them, surrounding a very round hill that reminded Lila of something. She twisted her neck to look back at it, a mound like a dromedary hump against the sky, and then she remembered the Indian mound near Lancaster, her hometown. That was when it hit her: this hill, like the Indian mound, was a burial hill of sorts: in it lay the remains of a town.
Bombed, then bulldozed. A new style of B-and-B.
Lila had never really liked this part of Ohio. Too flat, boring, windy. Yet suddenly she was overwhelmed with recollections of things that were gone: the stands of trees lofty as mesas, dark entrances like caverns at their base. Propane tanks tethered like dogs beside small houses. Farmhouses with green-black roofs and a baffling array of vents: square pillows, spouts, chef’s hats. Cows nosing their way across the fields. Gone, all gone. And that was forgetting the towns.
She turned her face to the window, and Eduardo must have picked up some distress in her posture, because he seemed to be driving faster. The fields around them went to wheat and wheat, then corn on one side and wheat on the other, then corn and corn and corn. Lila found to her surprise that she was blinking back tears.
“Mile per mile, America’s most wanted,” Eduardo announced, repeating a slogan. He slammed on his brakes and Lila was thrown forward. “Almost missed the turn. Sorry.” They squealed to the right, onto a road that looked exactly like their first one.
And, a few miles later, he stole a look her way: “Were you from around here?”
“From Ohio, but not Grid Ohio. I was born in Lancaster.” A town that still existed.
Eduardo twisted his mouth in a considering way. “Southeast of Columbus?”
Lila was surprised he knew.
“Pretty down there. Hilly,” Eduardo said. He hesitated, then hazarded a confession: “I like hills.”
“Me too.” Lila thought of the mounds behind them. “But not your kind of hills.” She glanced at Eduardo to see if he realized she knew. Best place on earth. Everyone loves it. Like hell.
His eyes stayed on the road. New hillocks appeared to the north, far away. “It’s good here,” Eduardo said after a pause. “Wait until night.”
They rode for an hour, skirting distant villages, and far away Lila spotted a farmhouse, which as they got closer looked exactly the way it should—two stories, painted white wood, wrap-around front porch, side door with a concrete stoop. A vision from her childhood, the old Ohio back in the nineties and aughts. A free-standing garage stood in the back. The mailbox was spotted like a Jersey cow. All that was missing was the barn with peeling red paint.
“Home, home on the Grid,” Eduardo said, half-singing. He was from the hill country of Texas, he told her, and grew up speaking Spanish. He was one of the rare people accepted on the Grid as a volunteer. They pulled into the crushed stone driveway. “This is the guesthouse,” Eduardo said. He pointed at an upstairs window. “You’ll sleep there.”
White curtains tied open with sashes marked the room that was surely the kitchen. A gray striped cat sat on the stoop in front of the side door. He eyed them warily, then streaked off as Eduardo opened his truck door. This is spooky, Lila thought. This is worse than Disney Universe.
A
