1 #5
The rise in gardening had been presented in purely positive terms, evidence of a new pastoral tranquility settling over the nation, but it’s not a coincidence, I found myself thinking, that gardening is an activity that blunts your sharpest thoughts.
I’d been at it for a while, pulling weeds and pouring fresh topsoil into ever-widening cracks, when I became aware of someone watching me.
I looked up, and almost dropped my trowel.
“Nico,” I said. “Good lord.” She looked terrible, that was my first thought. I hadn’t seen her in some months, and she looked like she hadn’t been sleeping much. There were dark circles under her eyes. She needed a haircut. “I had no idea you were in Ohio.”
Nico held my gaze, and raised her left wrist. She mimed unbuckling a watch—her wrist was bare—and throwing it away. I hesitated just a moment before I nodded. I walked quickly away, well beyond my watch’s audio range, and laid it carefully at the base of an apple tree.
When I turned back, she was sitting cross-legged between banks of flowers, close to where I’d been working. She watched my approach. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I sat too, facing her.
“Nico,” I asked softly, “is everything all right?”
“No. Not at all.” Nico sighed. “I heard you just got promoted.”
“You didn’t come here to congratulate me on my promotion.”
Nico glanced over her shoulder. No one stirred among the houses in the meadow. My parents and the neighbours were indoors. “Let’s start with the cover story,” she said. “I am going to tell you something true, and this is the moment you’ll think of when you’re asked what we talked about.”
“What?”
“I’m the only parent,” Nico said. She held my gaze.
“I make the same amount of money as my husband, actually a bit more because I have one more degree than he does, but I’m the only parent.
I think he used to love me, but now he cares about his research and literally nothing else in the world.
My kids are two and almost four, and he’s literally never brushed their hair.
He doesn’t know what food they like, or what time they get dropped off at preschool, or the name of their doctor.
The reason he doesn’t know these things is because he doesn’t care. ”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ve talked to him about it?”
“A thousand times, and nothing changes. This isn’t why I’m here.”
“Okay.”
“For the past five years,” Nico said, “I’ve been reporting on my husband and two colleagues.”
“Jesus, Nico.”
“He and two other scientists are running illegal experiments. I infiltrated the group for Service.”
“What kind of experiments?”
“Dangerous ones,” Nico said. “Experiments involving technologies that could undermine the State.”
“You reported them?”
“No,” Nico said quietly. “I want it to work.”
I sat back.
“Why would you tell me this?” I whispered. “Why would you do this to me?”
“It’s a gamble,” Nico said. “I’m not entirely sure what you’ll do, and that’s why I didn’t sleep last night. But in a few days I’m going to participate in a dangerous experiment, and I need you to promise me something.”
“What?”
“If something happens to me, don’t let my kids go into a State orphanage.”
I said nothing. Could this conversation be a trap?
It seemed possible. Nico could be recording me, I thought, waiting for an incriminating response.
The next thing I said could be the difference between continuing to live my life and spending the rest of my days in the desert prison or elsewhere, in some hellish black site in a basement under the city.
Nico was studying a cluster of snapdragons near where she sat.
“The State orphanages are terrible,” Nico said, still looking at the snapdragons. “That’s where they start training soldiers.”
I didn’t respond. But all my life I’ve known when people are lying and when they’re telling the truth, and I felt Nico’s sincerity. Whatever this was, I didn’t think it was a trap.
“Everyone knows that,” I said finally, because some response seemed to be expected.
“What else does everyone know?” Nico lay on her back, and gazed up at the sky. Her hair was in the dirt now, but she didn’t seem to care.
After a moment, I lay on my back too. Popcorn clouds passed rapidly over blue.
“Everyone knows that we pursue harmony at any cost,” I said. Speaking carefully, with an eye toward an eventual transcript. “That’s why we do what we do. That’s why we’re Service.”
“You still believe that, Detective?”
“If we didn’t have doubts,” I whispered, “we’d be inhuman.”
“Probably,” Nico said. “Promise that if anything happens to me, you’ll do everything you can to keep my kids out of the State orphanage?”
I was trying to imagine myself raising Nico’s children, who were very small and utterly mysterious to me. “Nico,” I said, stalling, “is this something you absolutely have to do? This . . . experiment?”
“I don’t want my children to grow up in a surveillance state,” Nico whispered. “Not just my children. Anyone’s children. This has to end.”
“If the experiment works,” I whispered back, “what will you be able to do? How does it work?”
“If it works,” she whispered, “we’ll have a way to spirit dissidents away to safety.”
I tried to imagine this. The borders of the State had been closed for a long time now.
Years. I lay still, not speaking, until Nico turned her head to look at me, so I looked at her too.
There were a few wildflowers between us.
“Do you know if something will happen to me?” Nico asked. “Is that unfair to ask?”
She was talking about the premonitions. I studied her face through the stalks of flowers, and I found that I did know. I was absolutely certain. This was the last time I was going to see my friend. There were tears in my eyes. She read my expression, and sighed.
“Okay,” Nico said softly. “Okay.” She returned her gaze to the clouds.
“If something does happen,” I said, and I was horrified to realize that I was crying now, actually crying, for the first time in possibly years, “I promise that I’ll do everything I can for your children.”
“Thank you.” She sat up. We were almost out of time.
“Nico,” I said, “why do you trust me?”
“You’re in a high position now. There’s a lot you can do.”
“But why do you trust me?”
Nico smiled. “Because,” she said, “I remember the glasses.” She rose, brushing soil off her clothes.
“Goodbye, Ibari.” I didn’t rise. I wanted to lie on this concrete forever.
I wanted to stop time and not see what came next.
“I hope you’re wrong,” she said, “just this once.” The last I saw of Nico was my friend disappearing behind the flowers, until she had vanished completely, and I heard her car glide quietly away.
3
On Tuesday morning I was once more in my tiny office, shaken, reading case files, waiting for the console on my desk to light up.
I had barely slept since I’d seen Nico. What had I promised?
What did I owe my friend? I had never actually wanted children and wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do to help Nico’s, if something did happen to her, which something was about to.
I want to dive off a cliff into freezing water.
I want to swim away into the dark. The desolate platform at the desert station flitted through my thoughts.
I want to jump off a train at a desert station and run until I reach the horizon line.
That platform was decrepit in a way I knew to be intentional.
It was meant to demoralize. Sometimes after all these years in Service I felt the logic of the State bureaucracy like a second consciousness, a second string of thoughts running alongside my own.
I understood it in a way I’ve never understood another living person.
Late in the day, the console on my desk finally did light up, and I was summoned to my boss’s considerably nicer office a few blocks south.
Alberto Vasquez had been with Service for his entire career.
He was a large, slow-moving person, in his seventies now.
His office would have been entirely impersonal if not for the aquarium, glowing blue on a table beside his desk.
It was stocked with tropical fish, and was his only concession to a personality, interests, or a private life.
The rest of the office was undecorated. Nothing on the walls, all spotless surfaces and closed cabinet doors.
Alberto rose and smiled when I came in, then settled back into his chair and pulled something up on his computer.
“Congratulations on your promotion,” he said, without looking away from the screen.
“Thank you. I’m very happy about it.”
“You should be.” He seemed to be looking through files, in an unhurried way.
He had a placidity about him that I knew to be entirely false, because I’d trained under him.
Alberto was a master interrogator. He noticed everything.
“I want you to know, I like that you spent some time in a lower-level position before you started moving up through the ranks.”
“Why’s that?”
“It isn’t good, Ibari—Detective Waker—only doing one thing with your life. You were excellent in your cover life, by all accounts. There was some concern that you’d abandon Service.”
“The thought never crossed my mind, but I did like the college,” I said. “It was interesting work.” Remembering my years in Fillmore was like remembering a different life. No, it was remembering a different life.
“I have people who’ve been Service since middle school and done nothing else, and they’re good at their jobs, but there’s a narrowness in that.”
Service since middle school wasn’t something I especially wanted to think about. He looked at me in a blandly appraising way. “When was the last time you saw Nico Li?”
Here it was. I ran the calculations: Service likely knew that Nico had been in Ohio, but Nico had left her phone and watch in the car, which meant that most likely Service didn’t know what she’d said.
“She came to visit me in Ohio this past weekend,” I said.
“Why did you hesitate just now?”