Concord, Chapter 10
Higher ground
That night the smell of salt filled his nostrils as he dreamed once more of Suzanne in Venice. It began with her face in the photo, the face he saw pincered in the grips of the Painter’s strange machine. That Mona Lisa smile widened until it became a laugh, eyes angled in mockery. He felt curiously exposed, even as he returned her smile. They were together for the moment, in his dream, alone.
Marco had been called away to Brussels; he had fires to put out, investors to entice. It was as if he was throwing them together, deliberately, as a test. “Take care of her for me, Saul,” Marco had ordered, winking. “Show her a good time. But not too good a time.”
“Ha ha,” Saul said.
Now in the vaparetto speeding to the Arsenale, he said to her: “He must know. He must suspect.”
“He trusts you,” Suzanne said, a little sadly he thought. “You’re his only friend.” They watched the oily pastel swirls on the water coalesce and break apart as they flew down the Grand Canal. Her red hair was tucked under the green silk snood that had been the height of fashion that year. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. He watched as she leaned back in her seat and raised a hand to catch the wind.
“If Marco trusts me, it’s only because he thinks he knows what makes me tick.”
“You mean he feels sorry for you,” she said. Saul put his arm around her waist. The vaparetto driver, masked behind sunglasses and a thick black mustache, didn’t turn around.
“Do you feel sorry for me?”
“No.”
The Arsenale was sparsely populated with actual visitors, most of them broadcasting paras to the thousands of others who couldn’t or wouldn’t bother with actual travel to see what would turn out to be the last Biennale. The art itself brimmed expensively with premonition. They paused at the Norway pavilion, a brilliant white high-peaked structure like a circus tent made out of cream. Inside were remarkably lifelike models of polar bears dressed like people, tapping on laptops, swigging from lattes, peering into refrigerators. It was like a National Geographic spread as imagined by Duane Hanson. One polar bear in a short black dress and Jackie O sunglasses stood in what appeared to be a supermarket checkout line, a carton of cigarettes under her arm and a bottle of vodka in her paw. Another polar bear in striped pajamas knelt before a well-made bed with its paws together as though saying its prayers. Three polar bears in business suits stood in a row as if waiting for a train, all of them preoccupied with old-fashioned cell phones. Suzanne stood in the center of the exhibit with her arms crossed. “Tacky,” she said. “Dated. Obvious.”
Most of the art was like that: lugubrious where it wanted to be playful, lachrymose when it wanted to touch the heart. And backward-looking. A stack of TVs displayed antique weather reports in the Canadian pavilion; on speakers only the moans and mutters from Glenn Gould’s Bach recordings made themselves heard. “The idea of north,” she remarked, “only without any ideas.” In the German pavilion they found a grotesque collection of lifelike models of aborted fetuses in jars with half-melted posters from forgotten science fiction movies (Android, Silent Running) draped atop them; it was titled “Aborted Futures.” “Puerile,” she groaned. “Pointless.” The Japanese pavilion was, Saul thought, more effective: it was simply a room filled an inch deep with water, with holographic mirrors on every wall that subtracted the visitor’s image, leaving one’s gaze stranded in an endless silver void. But she, after turning around once to see the entire thing, only shrugged. “Too tasteful. Bloodless.”
Saul agreed, started to leave the room. Suzanne’s voice followed after him. “Wait. Where’d you go?”
“I’m right here.” He turned and saw that the room was empty. Then she flashed into existence again when she was just inches from him. They both started, laughed. But he saw tears in the corners of her eyes. He took her hand.
They stepped outside into a wall of humidity and leaned on a railing overlooking the lagoon’s green arc, watching the rows of barges heaped with broken stone, decommissioned train cars, and other rubbish, pursuing their ardent and desperate task of shoring up the barriers built to defend La Serenissima against the vaulting sea. “Successful,” she said drily, “but only on a conceptual level.” She looked at Saul. “This city never should have existed. And soon it will no longer exist. Just like a person. Can you imagine the genius of it? The madness? Who builds a city on the water?”
“They were inspired,” he said. “Men tired of war, of being vulnerable, hiding from their pursuers on marshy islands, slowly gathering confidence, the idea, building boats, logging the forests nearby. Day after day, log after log, submerged, piled together, sinking in the mud until they couldn’t sink any further. Then quarried limestone in plates on top of the piles to make land.”
She swatted him. “Don’t mansplain.”
“It’s worse than that,” he said. “Marco had to mansplain it all to me.”
She laughed.
“They made their own land,” he said. “And they built on it: basilica, campanile, square, all named for St. Mark.”
“St. Marco,” she amended sardonically.
“What began as a refuge turned into a power center. The city’s strategic location at the head of the Adriatic Sea was unrivaled. Its rise to power in the age of sail was inevitable, and all the wealth in the world followed.”
“And now it’s a museum,” Suzanne said. “An exquisite corpse.”
Her mind was dark but her skin was bright, bringing news of the little world revolving inside her, the little Lila-to-be taking nourishment from her body and returning to it every sign of life and health and hope. Saul tried to reflect that light, but his heart was ashen. He knew, he thought, too much about what was coming.
She smiled at him, only a little sadly, and reached out her hand. “Shall we go?”
They lay together in the bow of a gondola steered by a rather elderly gondolier, a bald string bean of a man with drooping white mustaches who said his name was Stefano. They glided backward, passing under the ancient stonework, she cradled in his arms, not much caring who saw. Some of the bridges were so close to the water that poor Stefano had to bend and contort himself in surprisingly sudden and agile ways to work himself and his boat underneath them. A few of the lowest bridges had become impassable, Stefano informed them in his accented but intelligible English. “Soon, no more.”
“No more going under bridges.”
Stefano lifted his white eyebrows. “No more Venezia. One more uragano and—” he made a kind of blowing noise like a walrus that lifted the ends of his mustache. “No more.”
“Where will you go then?” Suzanne asked him.
The gondolier shrugged. “Nowhere. I stay. Like my father and his father. My son and his daughter have already moved away. I told them, ‘Seek the high ground.’ He is in the north now, in Milan.”
“I wonder if that will be high enough,” she murmured. Saul only shook his head.
They drifted past buildings like faces in gaudy makeup, beneath crowds of people clustering at every viewpoint, using up their last chance to see the sights. A few tourists snapped photos of the boat as they cruised by. Drones buzzed in the air.
They kissed. Stefano tactfully turned his gaze away. “Now we’re part of the scenery,” he whispered.
“I never wanted to be anything else.”
A drone hovered over them for a moment, then sped off. He wondered idly if the images being captured of them would find their way to Marco, if they weren’t in fact already being projected from some security agent’s paramesh into Marco’s as he flew from one capital to the other. He told himself he didn’t care. They had taken reasonable precautions, gone offline, so that their meshes would hold no record of their time together. Only their own fallible and human memories would retain that langorous afternoon, drifting together down the canal, walking holding hands across one of the narrow bridges into a palazzo he’d paid for with crypto for the purpose. Up the winding stairs to the marble bedroom with its high windows overlooking the Canale, into the curtained bed to make love, and sleep, and make love again, as though tomorrow would never come.
That morning’s headache was more diffuse than usual, an amorphous wrinkling pain he almost welcomed. The headaches, he was coming to think, were emblematic of Suzanne; they were evidence of her presence, in him. He skipped his morning run, skipped breakfast. There was someone he needed to see.
Outside the sky ached pinkly toward blue and the wind gusted, signaling a change of course; Concord steering toward winter. The virtual sheep outside the Clinic baaed at him as he walked inside. In the waiting room he found Dr. Jee himself with a watering can administering precise dribs and drabs to the potted ferns thriving somehow under the artificial light. Nurse Bruce was nowhere in evidence. Jee straightened, saw Saul, and a mischievous light snapped on in his eyes. He chanted:
Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I’ve belted you and flayed you
By the living God that made you
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
“That remains to be seen,” said Saul “How can you stand to recite that colonialist crap?”
“My dad learned it at school in Trinidad, and he recited it to me,” Jee said wryly. “Once you get an imperial rhythm in your ear, you’ll never get it out again. Do you have an appointment?”
“’Lazarushian’?”
“It’s poetry, Saul,” Jee said, quirking the corners of his mouth. “It’s not supposed to make sense.”
“It’s giving me a headache.”
Dr. Jee’s expression became serious. “The pills should be helping. How bad is it?”
“I’m just kidding,” Saul said. The headache was there, but it wasn’t so bad that he felt like he was lying. “Let’s go into your office and we can discuss it.”
But in the intimacy of Jee’s surgery he wasn’t sure how to begin. He sat stiffly on the examining table and stared at the Norman Rockwell print on the wall, in which the benevolent, Irish-looking doctor pressed his stethoscope intently to the chest of a little girl’s doll. Jee sat down on his rolling stool and flicked a little penlight on and off, watching Saul. Finally he said, “Let me see your eyes.” He shone the light into Saul’s pupils. “You aren’t taking your medication at all, are you?”
Saul brushed this aside. “Have you seen Lila yet?”
He had not himself seen Lila since that day at the Amphitheater, but he had read certain signs. The cheerful face of David Ojekwu, Lila’s boyfriend, had become tense and withdrawn. In class Saul had called on him for an explanation of a passage from Emerson, but David went on staring at the textbook in his hands with vacant intensity; the book might as well have been upside-down. Saul walked in front of him. “David,” he said gently.
The boy looked up, startled. “Sir?”
“The passage.”
David grimaced. He looked down at the book and read in a sing-song voice: “The more of these drones perish, the better for the hive. If, later, they give birth to some superior individual, with force enough to add to this animal a new aim, and a complete apparatus to work it out, all the ancestors are gladly forgotten.”
“And what does Emerson mean by ‘drones,’ Mr. Ojekwu?”
David opened and closed his mouth. Saul saw fear in his eyes, but it was not the fear of being caught out by his teacher. It was something that ran much deeper. Tommy Creel’s hand was in the air. “Mr. Creel? Do you have an answer for my question?”
Mr. Creel did. But Saul hardly heard his answer. The face of David, the shape his lips made as he stumbled over the word “birth,” had told him all he needed to know.
He refocused on the present, in the surgery, where Dr. Jee measured him with his gze. “I would like to say, for the record,” said Jee slowly, “that you have no right to ask me that question, and I have no right to answer it.” Saul waited. “But yes, she has finally complied with requirements. And yes. She is indeed pregnant.”
Saul digested this. “How long?”
“Ten weeks. A little too soon to celebrate, but she’s a strong and healthy young woman. I don’t anticipate any difficulties.”
“Did she say anything about who the father was?” Jee raised an eyebrow. “It isn’t me,” Saul added hastily.
“Thank heaven for small favors,” said Jee. “No. She said very little. She didn’t seem very happy about it, even after I reminded her of the considerable benefits. It’s a first-class ticket to shareholderhood, without indenture. She’ll be taken care of. And Marco can finally sunrise.”
“If that’s what he wants.”
Dr. Jee was genuinely surprised. “Marco, not sunrise? He practically invented the process. The entire Plan depends upon it, does it not?”
Deep in the infrastructure, in a chamber as well protected as the reactor cores, Sunrise House kept its vigil. When a shareholder was ready to retire, he or she was taken there for their brain to be exfoliated in thousands of layers, each a micron thin, to be uploaded to the Concord mainframe. Though the physical brain and body would be discarded, the shareholder’s consciousness was preserved, set free in the paraverse of their choosing, to live on until such time as the Plan of Concord was fulfilled. Then the vessel would return to the mainland, cleansed of all infection, and the new world would at last be built under the guidance of those who remembered what civilization truly was and could be. Saul had believed in the Plan, once. He had been one of its principal architects. As for what Marco believed, it was difficult to say. He hadn’t been seen in public for years. And Saul himself, he realized with a small shock, hadn’t spoken to him more than twice in all that time.
“I’ve already stuck my neck out talking to you like this,” Dr. Jee said. “If there’s nothing else…”
“Does Marco know? About the baby?”
Jee looked away. “I haven’t told him.”
“You haven’t told the First Founder he can expect a grandson and heir?”
“I never said anything about the sex,” Jee said impatiently. “Of course I haven’t told him. I recognize the delicacy of the situation. Besides, it’s critical that I retain my patient’s trust.”
Saul was silent. Dr. Jee clicked his penlight.
“You’re running a risk,” said Saul at last.
“I’m very aware.”
“What if she doesn’t want it? The baby?”
Dr. Jee was genuinely shocked. “Why wouldn’t she?”
He saw her again, Lila’s face, tear-streaked yet firm in its resolve. Not here, she’d said to him. I don’t want my baby to be born here. I’d rather it die. I’d rather that both of us die.
“Just answer the question.”
Dr. Jee tapped his teeth with his penlight. “Difficult. Quite difficult. If it’s discovered that I examined her, and didn’t report the pregnancy—let alone that I administered an abortifacient—well. That would be the end of my practice.”
“I don’t think so. This is a closed system we’re in. We’ve only got so many doctors.”
Dr. Jee smiled sadly. “No one is irreplaceable, Saul. You know that. Not me, not you. Isn’t that the genius of Concord? That it preserves its past, even as it moves into the future?”
Before Saul could answer there was a brusque knock on the door, which was immediately opened before Jee could say, “Come in.” Nurse BGruce loomed in the doorway, looking at Saul with obvious distaste. Without taking his eyes from Saul he said, “Mrs. Harada is here for her eight-thirty, Doc.”
“Thank you,” Dr. Jee said. Bruce lingered. “Was there something else?”
“He’s not on the appointment register,” Bruce said harshly, gesturing at Saul with his clipboard.
“I’m well aware, Bruce. Thank you.”
Bruce glared at Saul, muttered something under his breath and stalked off. Jee shut shut the door with his foot. He and Saul looked at each other.
“Do you suppose he was listening?” Saul asked.
“That would be unethical,” Jee said. “Jesus, I hope not.”
Saul got off the table. “Keep me apprised.”
“Saul. Before you go.” Jee hesitated. “If you really want to help Lila, you’ll talk to her. Make her understand what’s at stake.”
“She understands. Better than you or I.”
Jee looked deflated. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Me too. Keep me apprised, all right?”
“Why should I?”
He opened the door and looked back. “Because I’m a friend of the family.”
Enjoyed the pavilion and the description of Venice. Can't help wondering if the potted history of Venice is meant to evoke the USA, or if that's just my interpretation.