He threaded his way through the evening crowd on its passeggiata: strolling couples licking ice cream cones or slurping cups of boba. On the corner a barbershop quartet in full vaudeville regalia harmonized its way through “God Only Knows.” Young people in their school uniforms streamed into the drugstore on John Galt Street. He stopped to watch them piling into booths with what seemed a carefully moderated boisterousness—shooting drinking straw wrappers across the room, hazing a first-year by forcing him to carry all the older boys’ letter jackets in a heap in his arms. Their spirits were precisely elevated, prescribed, an imitation of an imitation of his own wild teen years. About to move on, Saul spotted Lila alone at the counter, the stools on either side of her unaccountably unoccupied. Saul caught his breath. It was one thing to see her in his classroom, when he was prepared. It was another to catch an unexpected glimpse like this, when the way she held herself, the dark flame of her hair, reminded him painfully of her mother.
She sat with her head propped up on one hand in front of a milkshake, her other hand pressed against her belly, as though she had a cramp. Her expression was abstracted, unreadable. He thought about what she’d shown him, and why. He thought about the Headmaster and the Headmaster’s wife. Lila’s gaze flickered out in his direction and he turned hastily away. There was a ripple, a disturbance in the crowd around him. He saw the head and shoulders of masked deputy on his stroller rolling slowly toward him and tensed. He had been reckless. The edges of Concord were closely surveilled, with motion and heat sensors—that’s why the Constable and his men had been able to react to the refugees’ “incursion” so quickly. But were there cameras, too? He tried to remember the security protocols. Had he been seen? Was he about to be arrested, dragged off to Sunrise House before his time—or worse?
Instead the crowd parted and he saw the reason for its disruption. An old woman walked heavily down the middle of the street and the people around her were moving away quickly, as though they were water and she a drop of oil. He recognized her, of course. She was a large woman in a long yellow raincoat, despite the warmth and dryness of the day the navigators had arranged, with a black cloche hat jammed down over the overripe tomato of her head, holding her arms at odd angles to one another like a broken clock. The deputy followed her at a discreet distance, head cocked slightly like a robin considering a worm. She was heading straight for him. Saul plastered a smile to his face like someone welcoming a ponderous guest. Even a village as well-maintained as this one was incapable of keeping all its walking wounded under wraps.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Moody,” he said with forced heartiness.
“Good afternoon, young man.”
Dr. Moody’s unruly body spilled grotesquely from the split banana peel of her coat. Her eyes were blue and bloodshot behind round horn-rimmed spectacles. She wore several thick sweaters underneath the raincoat, no matter the weather, and clutched a huge black handbag big enough to conceal a bomb or a baby. It took a while for her eyes to find his. She smiled vaguely, but the eyes were full of panic.
He cast about for an innocent topic. “Have you come from watching practice?” Some afternoons he saw her snoring in the bleachers or staring out over the heads of the football players running drills. Sometimes she knitted, a dark shapeless garment with no end to it spilling over her lap. Sometimes she just sat there, staring at the sky, lips moving, hands searching for each other like spiders in her lap.
She said nothing, just stood there gawping at him, clenching and unclenching her fists. “Are you finished with my sweater?” Saul said, trying for jocularity. “You said you’d knit me a sweater.”
She smiled for the first time with her eyes. “Not yet! Not yet,” she cackled. “I must take your measurements.” She spread out her hands to take him in. “You’ll be as handsome as Hemingway.” Her face clouded. “My daughter was reading Hemingway, wasn’t she? Didn’t she read him in your class?”
Now he was well and truly trapped. “She did.”
She touched the ugly hat crammed on top of her head. “I knitted this hat for her, you know. She did well in your class, didn’t she, Mr. Klein? Wasn’t she a good student? Wasn’t she bright?”
“Very bright.”
“She loved reading,” Dr. Moody said, pulling meditatively at her lower lip. “She took after me. Not like James, my husband. You remember James?
“I knew Dr. Moody well, Dr. Moody.”
She laughed crookedly, showing the black crowns of her teeth. “Ah ha. Ah ha. So you did!” She crowded in closer to him, smelling of camphor and rot. The deputy on his stroller rolled a few feet closer.
Her face was close to his. Her breath was terrible. “You mustn’t keep her from me, Mr. Klein,” she said, shaping her lips around the vowels widely like a woman screaming. “Why won’t you let me see her?”
“She isn’t in the Archive, Dr. Moody,” he said as gently as he could. “She wasn’t a shareholder, and in any case…”
“Shareholder!” Dr. Moody folded her arms contemptuously. “We decide who is a shareholder and who isn’t! We do! Me and my husband.”
They’d been known as the Doctors Moody, a married pair geneticists charged with the task, as Marco once joked, of unnatural selection. They were tasked with calculating a genetic mix of shareholders sufficient to perpetuate Concord to the nth generation without too much inbreeding. Those who didn’t make the grade were given the option of an immediate journey to Sunrise House, where their brains would be archived, preserved until the day came when Concord would return in triumph to the mainland to recolonize the world. A few accepted the bargain; others sold their shares to pre-approved prospects; still others dithered until it was too late. The Doctors Moody had judged themselves fit, of course, had begotten and raised a daughter of their own, a girl with long, wheat-colored hair she swept like a shield over frightened blue eyes. A girl with a stutter, hungry for the friendship that never found her. Her disappearance broke her parents utterly. James Moody had followed her into Concord’s wake, vanishing without a trace. His wife had been forced into an ambiguous retirement, her mental instability disqualifying her from being an archival candidate. So she remained topside, the last surviving Moody, an irritating bit of flotsam, a living ghost, a warning.
Saul felt, as he always did in her presence, a volatile mixture of exasperation and shame. “I must go,” he said. But like the ancient mariner she was, she had fixed him with her terrible eyes, and he could not move.
“Nobody knows the truth,” she whispered. “Nobody understands what we’ve done.” She looked into his face, lips trembling. “Yes. Yes. That’s my comfort.” Her face shadowed. “Do you still see him, Saul? That boy. That… that awful boy.”
He glanced involuntarily over his shoulder but saw no sign of the boy she referred to, a young man now. Nikolai. He saw again the lanky body and cruel ferret-like face, trapping Dawn Moody in a hallway of the Lyceum, one arm pinning her in place, his mouth at her ear whispering obscenely as her face mottled red. Saul, like the rest of his colleagues, had seen and said nothing. They knew full well who Nikolai’s father was.
“He can’t hurt her anymore,” Saul said softly. The deputy rolled a bit closer.
“He isn’t good for her,” she spat. “I’ve told her and told her. She doesn’t listen to me. Nobody listens to me!”
“Dr. Moody,” he said. He touched her shoulder. “Elizabeth. Please.”
Her haggard expression vanished abruptly. She reached out and patted Saul tenderly on the cheek.
“Saul hath slain his thousands,” she said dreamily. “Poor Saul.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a knitted flower, which she threaded through his buttonhole. “That’s a daisy.” She patted his cheek.
Without another word she turned and walked away from him, swinging her arms like a soldier on parade.
Saul’s gaze met that of the deputy. He shrugged. The deputy shrugged too, and wheeled his stroller to follow wherever Dr. Moody had gone.
Saul turned back to look into the drugstore window, but Lila was gone, too.
He slouched home in the settling gloom, through the curving residential streets past immaculate cottages with blue light filtering through their windows. When he got to his cul-de-sac, he saw Jean sitting on the porch swing of his rooming house, legs tucked underneath her, waiting for him. Why, Saul asked himself, am I being besieged by female lunatics? Is it some kind of punishment? If so, he thought grimly, it was no more than he deserved.
“You don’t seem very happy to see me,” said Jean.
“Of course I am.” He set down his briefcase on the lowest porch step. “Do you want to come inside?”
“You don’t,” she said archly.
“Very funny.”
“I’d rather not try and talk with you with that battle-axe Mrs. Dodge listening. Do you think she’s behind the door right now?”
“She’s probably in the kitchen. You want dinner?”
She looked up at him expressionlessly. “I want a child.”
“Christ. Not this again.”
“Yes, this again. Sit down, won’t you? You’re making me nervous standing there like that.”
He climbed the steps and eased himself down onto the swing, feeling the chains tighten. The houses of his neighbors, their windows lit like eyes, extended in meticulous rows back toward the center of town. The pines whispered in the steady breeze of evening.
“How was your meeting with Frank?” she asked.
“Nothing unusual.”
“I bet.” She studied the vape pen between her fingers. “Aren’t you ever tired of it, Saul?”
“Sneaking around?”
“Not that. It. Concord. This place.”
“If a man is tired of Concord, he’s tired of life.”
“I’m a woman, Saul, and I’m fucking tired of it. When you men made this world you certainly didn’t have women in mind.”
“It’s Marco’s world,” he said. “We’re just living in it.”
“He could never have done it without you.” An owl hooted in the dusk; projected, of course. “I wish you would be honest with me for once. Or at least with yourself.”
He said nothing.
“I just wish it would stop,” she said. “Or that I could, I don’t know, go.”
“Where would you go? Home?”
“Home.” She laughed bitterly. “Where’s that? Not here, not this goddamn Bedford Falls you and Marco designed. I’ve got to be honest with you, Saul: I always preferred Pottersville. There are places to dance in Pottersville.”
“It’s a wonderful life.”
“Isn’t it.” She offered him the vape. “I’m in trouble, Saul.”
“Not on my account.”
“Precisely on your account. Getting close to my sell-by date.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that.”
“I have to talk like that. Frank’s a good man, but he’s shooting blanks. Whereas you, old friend, won’t even aim at the target.”
She was nearing forty, childless. Frank was a shareholder, but his wife was not. Saul glanced at the darkened living room window, half expecting to see Mrs. Dodge peering out at them—her, or one of his neighbors. But there was no one there.
“If I ever want to be a first-class citizen of this fucked-up society,” she said grimly, “I have to produce. Otherwise I have to remain the consort of that oaf for the rest of my life.” She turned to him suddenly, searched his face, touched his cheek. “If the two of us had a child we could finally be together.”
“Is that what you want?” he said hoarsely.
“Don’t look so scared.” She pulled back from him, eyes burning. “And don’t be stupid. You’re like every other man on this floating prison. Damaged goods. Don’t worry, Saul. I don’t want to be Mrs. Second Founder. If Concord is all there is, I want my own share in it, that’s all.”
He made himself look at her steadily. “I’m sorry, Jean. I can’t be any part of that.”
“Of course you can. Just don’t pull out next time.”
“There isn’t going to be a next time,” he said, getting to his feet. “I can’t be anyone’s father. It just isn’t in me.”
“Isn’t it? What did you say Frank wanted to talk to you about, again?”
“Lila Vespucci,” he said after a brief pause. “She’s having problems.”
“I feel mighty sorry for her if she’s expecting you to solve them.” She got to her feet, put her hand on his chest, and looked up at him. “Don’t worry, honey. You’re not the only swinging dick around here.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
She gave him a quick, hard little peck and was gone.
Saul picked up his briefcase. He was trembling slightly. He glanced up and saw the curtains of the living room window swinging slightly. Someone had been watching.
“Fuck me,” he said.
And then he thought: Let them watch.
