Circuit Of Heaven (4 page)

“What an asshole.”

Lawrence laughed. “We couldn’t possibly comment,” he said in the British voice.

“So what’re you supposed to be?” Nemo asked. “My butler or babysitter or something?”

“Caretaker. We’ll take care of you.”

“If I’m being stuck in boarding school, what do I need you for?”

“Plenty,” Lawrence said, and laughed again with several different jerks and gestures that Nemo figured was the whole gang of self-consciousnesses in there whooping it up.

Nemo asked Lawrence if he wanted to listen to some music, and he shrugged and said sure, but when he got a glimpse of Nemo’s grandmother’s CD player, his face lit up, and he got up off the bed quicker than Nemo would’ve thought possible.

“That’s quite an antique,” he said, looking down at the player as if it were a baby in a cradle.

Nemo hit Play and Bob Dylan singing “Frankie and Albert” came through the speakers, but the machine was acting up again, and the song sounded as if it were being chopped up into little pieces. Nemo started to hit it—that sometimes worked—but Lawrence laid a huge hand on his arm. “Let us,” he said.

He took a screwdriver out of a pouch he wore at his waist and opened up the machine. His fingers poked delicately among the wires and circuits. He made a few adjustments—wiggling this and that, tightening a screw—and closed the case. He started it up again. Dylan’s voice came out whole, in all its fierce glory. “That’ll do till we’ve got a soldering iron.”

“Cool,” Nemo said. “How’d you know what to do?”

“One of us used to take these things apart and put them back together again, took damn near everything apart and put it back together again. That was back in Texas.”

“So how many of you are there? I mean…”

“Good a way to put it as any. Three.”

“The Texan and the Englishman, and somebody else?”

“English woman. She was what they used to call a nanny.”

“So who’s the third one?”

Lawrence’s hands fluttered in the air in a quick series of mysterious gestures. “He was a mute,” the Texan said quietly. “We talk for him now. He lived in Nagasaki. We’re honored to meet you.”

Nemo tried to imagine what it would be like to be three different people from three different countries, living their lives inside one strange body. “Could you teach me sign language?” he asked.

“Sure enough,” Lawrence said, moving his hand slowly so Nemo could watch what he was doing.

“What does that mean?”

“
I would be honored
,” he said.

Nemo practiced it over and over, following Lawrence around the room as he examined the CD player, the
VCR
, the ancient TV. “We all liked old things,” he said.

“I hate virtuals,” Nemo told him. “I just want to listen to the music. I don’t want the whole damn band in my bedroom, you know what I mean?”

“Indeed,” Lawrence said, and laid one of his huge hands on Nemo’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

THEY’D
LISTENED
TO A
COUPLE
OF CDs,
AND
LAWRENCE
had the back of the TV off, explaining to Nemo how it worked, when Nemo’s folks called them downstairs and led them into the living room. It was all done up in white—white carpet, white furniture, white drapes. Even the fireplace, a virtual fire blazing, was white. Nemo was never invited there unless there was trouble. It was part of the mid—twentieth style of the house, Nemo figured, that there be a room set aside to receive strangers and to discuss serious family matters.

“How do you like Lawrence?” Dad asked Nemo, as if Lawrence weren’t sitting right across the room. Nemo just nodded his head and looked over at Lawrence, who was studying them all with his big green eyes, not missing a thing. Dad seemed to think Nemo didn’t know what was going on, but he had most of it figured out. He only wondered what sort of spineless excuse he was going to give for dumping him.

“Lawrence is going to be looking after you for a little while,” Mom said.

“For quite a while,” Dad corrected her.

They glared at each other and forgot about Nemo momentarily so they could bicker.

Mom said, “Do you always have to make things so difficult? Winston says the law will change any time now.”

“I don’t give a damn what Winston says!”

“Do you always have to be right, Todd? Is that all you care about? If it makes you happier to think you won’t see your son for eight years, then go ahead and think it—just so long as you’re right!”

“For godsakes, Elizabeth, I’ve told you a million times—you can see him every damn day if you want to—he just won’t be living with us!”

Mom didn’t say another word. She just glared at him, until he turned to Nemo, his smile back in place.

“We’re confusing the boy,” he said.

“The boy isn’t confused,” Nemo said, and everything got real quiet. “You’re going into the Bin, right?”

Dad didn’t even bother to tell him not to call it the Bin. His dad didn’t have to fight with him anymore. Mom started crying and telling Nemo everything was going to be all right, and Dad launched into his prepared text. “It’s very simple, really,” he said several times, telling Nemo about the Bin as if Nemo were visiting from another planet, a stupid planet: They were going to be uploaded into the Bin, shed their bodies, and live forever. But, unfortunately, children couldn’t go because the law still foolishly said they were too young to make such a decision. Nemo had heard it all before.

“Why now?” Nemo asked.

Dad stopped talking. He could see Nemo wasn’t fooled. “My doctor’s advised me that it’s time for me to go in.” He paused dramatically. “I have a heart murmur.”

“A heart murmur,” Nemo said. “That’s it? A heart murmur?” He turned to Mom, now sitting on the edge of her chair with a tissue to her face, trying to be brave. “What about you?” he asked her, more gently than he’d intended. “Do you have a heart murmur, too?

Fresh tears sprang to her eyes. “I’m going in to be with your father, dear.”

“We don’t want to die, son,” Dad said.

Nemo stood up and glared at them both. “Go ahead and kill yourselves,” he said. “But you’re wrong about one thing. You’ll
never
see me in there!
Never
!” He hit the back door, opening the screen door wide so it’d slam shut with a crack like a rifle shot. They wouldn’t follow him; they never did. They said that was because they respected his need for privacy. Nemo figured it was because they didn’t give a shit.

By the time he’d gotten to the end of the driveway, Lawrence was walking alongside him, taking one long, easy stride for two of Nemo’s. Lawrence was looking down the street like some hero in a twentieth-century movie.

“You don’t have to follow me,” Nemo said. “I’m all right.”

“We know that,” Lawrence said.

They were walking by a
FOR
SALE
BY
OWNER
sign, the paint peeling away. The house had been empty for as long as Nemo could remember. “How could they do this?” he asked, chunking a rock at the sign and wiping away his tears with the palm of his hand.

“They don’t want to die,” Lawrence said.

“But they won’t be real.”

“There’s two schools of thought on that.”

“Not to me,” Nemo said.

“There’s two schools of thought to most everything. We’re used to having at least three most of the time.”

“So when are they going in?”

“Tomorrow morning. We’re to take you to your new school.”

“You spending the night at my house?”

“If you like.”

I’d be honored
, Nemo signed.

IF
HIS
PARENTS
HADN’T
GONE
IN,
NEMO
ALWAYS
REMINDED
himself, he never would’ve met Lawrence. And Lawrence had been right. He’d needed him for plenty. Four years of boarding school, crammed to overflowing with pissed-off kids, stuck in a world that was falling apart, went a lot easier with a seven-foot companion who, among other talents, was a martial arts expert. And then, when Nemo was fourteen and the law’d finally changed so that he could’ve gone into the Bin if he’d wanted, Lawrence had stayed with him when he ran away from school and moved back into the house his parents had abandoned, helped him fix the place up so they could live in it again, taught him everything he knew. Lawrence took care of him all right.

As it turned out, Nemo didn’t make good on the threat he’d shouted at his father. He had been in the Bin many times, visiting his parents. But he hadn’t gone in for good. Maybe that was because he could still get pissed off twice a year, though he’d convinced himself he had good reasons for what he was doing, but as Lawrence had taught him, there were two schools of thought on that.

Over the years, Nemo had whittled down his parental visits to his birthday and Christmas. So twice a year he visited the Bin and remembered when they went in, and twice a year he let himself get pissed off about it. The rest of the time, he lived his own life and didn’t give the Bin much thought—until he was on this train going to visit Mom and Dad again. Merry Christmas—Happy Birthday—Merry Christmas—Happy Birthday—Clickety-clack—Clickety-clack.

“What time is it?” he asked Lawrence in the seat beside him. Lawrence had that look he took on when he was talking to himself in his head. The scales over his eyes fanned out like a peacock’s tail, and his eyes had a faraway, glassy stare.

He pointed patiently to the digital clock at the end of the car, ticking off the seconds. It read 7:43:32.

“What time are we supposed to be there?”

“Eight o’clock,” Lawrence said in his nanny voice.

They could’ve just gone into the Bin at Richmond and taken the Metro in the Bin, but Nemo always insisted on going as far as they could on the real train. He didn’t want to spend any more time in the Bin than he had to.

“We’ll be late,” he said.

“No doubt that will please you,” Lawrence said.

Nemo sat watching the clock tick off the seconds, listening to the wheels on the rails. At 7:49 he looked over at Lawrence, swaying back and forth in his seat, his eyes already closed in one of his catnaps. He never slept more than an hour at a time. He’d told Nemo it was something the Texan had taught himself to do as a little boy after reading a book about Thomas Edison—so that he too would have more time to make things.

Nemo rested his forehead on the glass and watched the Metro fly past rows of drooping metal buildings, past weed-grown highways scattered with rusted-out cars, past a housing project covered up in green mounds of kudzu, making it look like elves lived inside. Probably only rats and roaches. They finally had the place to themselves.

The former residents had all gone into the Bin, except for the handful who’d squatted in the abandoned homes of surgeons or stockbrokers. But most of them didn’t last long when they figured out they couldn’t burn enough wood to heat those big barns, and that, if they wanted water, they’d have to dig a well with a pick and shovel, and if they wanted electricity, they’d have to rig up a generator—and then find or make fuel to run it. Sooner or later, most everybody went into the Bin. It was just too easy, too hard not to. Too hard to turn down paradise.

The doors at the end of the car slid open and a fundie came down the aisle. She was fifteen or sixteen, her long hair braided and wound into a bun. She wore a camouflage print dress, a flaming cross stitched above her left breast. The tracts in her hand read
ONWARD
CHRISTIAN
SOLDIERS!
SATAN
IS
WINNING
THE
WAR
! She half-heartedly offered Nemo a tract, and he shook his head. She slumped against a pole, looking toward the two remaining cars of the train, both empty, then sat down across the aisle. “There’s six people on this whole train,” she said to no one in particular. The train dove into a tunnel near Fredericksburg, making the fluorescent lights inside the car seem brighter. She turned toward the window, looking at her reflection, or at the tiled walls of the tunnel, scrawled with graffiti going by too fast to read.

There wasn’t anyone left for her to save anymore. She absentmindedly riffled the tracts in her hands like a deck of cards, her pretty face reflected in the window, her eyes wet with tears. Nemo figured pretty soon she’d go into the Bin, defect to the winning side. Let the real world go down the tubes—leave it the wackos and creeps with their God or their scams or their paranoia. It’d never worked out anyway. About the only things still working were these trains. They were built by Constructs in the late thirties and early forties. They still kept them running for reasons known only to themselves, though the trains pretty much ran on their own, connecting every major city. They were operated by computers, powered by some geothermal plant somewhere, built before they figured out they didn’t have to make a bunch of machines, they could just climb inside one enormous one.

The train stopped in Alexandria and a lone old man got on the car behind them. He was lugging two car batteries with a harness that went over his shoulders. He dropped the batteries down in the aisle and sat on them. The fundie girl glanced back at him but didn’t bother to get up and offer him a tract.

When the train started slowing down for Pentagon Station, she got up and stood in front of the door, leaving her tracts on the seat. “You want these?” Nemo called after her and pointed at them. She shook her head and turned back to the door.

Nemo nudged Lawrence awake. “We’re here,” he said.

Lawrence blinked his eyes and rose to his feet, immediately awake. They stood behind the fundie girl as the doors slid open and followed her up the escalators. She smelled like chamomile. At the top, she turned right toward Receiving. Lawrence and Nemo turned left toward Visitors. She looked back over her shoulder and gave Nemo a small, sad smile.

He wondered where she was from. You could visit the Bin from almost anywhere. There were at least a couple of VIMs at all the Metro stations. But if you wanted to go in for good, you had to go to one of a dozen Receiving Points throughout the globe, but most people came in here. Over the years, it’d become the thing to do to come in at D.C., make a pilgrimage to the Rogers Memorial to thank him for eternity.