What Came After (14 page)

“To tell you the truth,” Carmichael said, “if we’d seen it coming, I don’t know that we’d have let it happen.”

“We?”

“Ownership.”

“Let what happen?”

“Let it all fall down the way it did. Once you’ve acquired everything, you’d think you should be able to keep getting more.” Expressing it as simply as he could.

“So you’d be better off if guys like me were out there building new cars.”

“We might be.”

“I’d do it if I could. If there were jobs I’d do it.”

“Unintended consequences,” Carmichael said. “It’s hard to predict the future.”

“Hey. You’ve still got the opera.”

“I don’t want the opera. I want an X9.”

“And you’ll have one.”

“Black. With the eight-cylinder engine.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I’d like something newer, but there isn’t anything newer.”

“I can’t help you there.”

“I know you can’t.”

“So tell me about Spartanburg,” Weller said.

*

Essentially, the coasts were what was left of the country. The two coasts plus Chicago and Houston, each population center isolated from the others. Transportation was the problem, transportation and people. The lack of both made big distances bigger. Chicago would have shut down a long time ago if not for the insurance business. Family Health Partnership was all that kept it alive. People out there lived on meat, meat raised by hand in walled sectors of the Midwestern Empowerment Zone and Management-butchered generation after generation. The knowledge of how to do it passed down from father to son. Who cared how much meat you ate and how high your cholesterol spiked when you owned the insurance company.

Transportation cost money. The expense of maintaining the highways. The price of diesel. National Motors that ran the trucks and MobilGo that sold the fuel couldn’t make it pay because there weren’t enough markets, and there weren’t enough markets because there weren’t enough people. Blame that on insurance if you wanted to, but the insurance folks were getting their own punishment. Those isolated carnivores out there in Chicago.

So a couple of trucks ran back and forth each week maybe and that was that. Scarcity inducing scarcity. They ran through wastelands that had once been productive farms and wastelands that had once been manufacturing centers and wastelands that had once been cities teeming with people. The Rust Belt and the Sun Belt and the Bible Belt and every other belt that there ever was. All drained of everything and everybody when gas got too expensive to burn and food got too expensive to eat. When housing went bust and nobody could afford to visit the doctor anymore. Not even doctors. When the Great Dying came, and people buried their dead and dried their eyes and turned their backs on home and went to the cities to find work and didn’t find it there either. When the last thing the federal government made stick was the division of what was left into Empowerment Zones. Suburbia plowed up. But only certain bits of it even then. Only where it made financial sense. The South was different and farther out and not worth pursuing. PharmAgra had had crops there in the old days, back when there’d been people everywhere and the need to feed them, but not anymore. A lot could have happened since. Nature could be lying dead down there or nature could have come back or something in between.

Spartanburg, then, seven hundred miles from New York and five hundred miles from Washington, was a mystery. A vacant spot on a road to nowhere if there was even a road. A place from which civilization had withdrawn, leaving behind God knew what. Maybe nothing.

Carmichael said, “Spartanburg? Hard to say. There are a number of unknowns.”

Weller said if the knowns were National Motors security and old bounty hunters cut loose from Black Rose, then he’d take his chances with the unknowns. Unknowns didn’t bother him.

Carmichael said
Now that you mention Black Rose.

Which got Weller’s attention.

“You know that they own Washington,” Carmichael said. “White Washington anyhow.” Meaning the pale limestone city. The grand old public spaces. The monuments and the Capitol building and the White House.

Weller said he knew.

“The rest of that town was never worth looking at anyway.”

Weller said that’s what he’d been given to understand.

“So here’s what I’m thinking we’ll do,” Carmichael said. “We’ll go straight to the experts. Get you down there and hook you up with Black Rose and let them decide what you’ll need in order to make this happen. We’ll spare no expense.”

Penny was stirring on the couch. Weller lowered his voice as far as he could and said that he didn’t think he’d need much of anything. Some kind of transportation. Food and water. Money.

“Money’s no good out there.”

“Money’s good everywhere in the Zone.” Hating Carmichael for sparing no expense with Black Rose but denying him this.

“We’ll ask the experts. I’ll make some calls first thing tomorrow.”

“That’ll be a big day then,” said Weller. “Between making those calls and getting us to the doctor.” Just so it didn’t slip Carmichael’s mind.

*

The hospital was on the Upper East Side and it was the Taj Majal except for being a shrine to the living instead of the dead. Weller and Penny went there in a limousine with a black-hatted Management driver in the front and some Management assistant of Carmichael’s in the back sitting on a soft leather banquette opposite them. A woman looking doubly ill at ease, uncomfortable on the deep cushions usually reserved for Ownership and uncomfortable face to face with the two of them. Forcing herself to make small talk. The weather. The traffic. Their room at the Four Seasons. Weller said the room was fine and Penny was bursting to say more but she didn’t let it out. Weller asked how far was it to the hospital. After all this time. Wondering about a few minutes after five hopeless years. She told him it wouldn’t be long, and it wasn’t.

To enter the hospital was to enter a palace of youth and light. Music soaring from invisible speakers and a spring in everyone’s step. Plate glass and falling water and banks of flowers. The assistant led the way across an atrium that reached up thirty floors and more, her heels clicking on a white marble floor inset with precious stones and grouted with gold and altogether worthy of the Medicis, to a reception desk that was more concierge station than anything else. The woman behind it raised a tiny wireless scanner and Carmichael’s assistant clasped the hand that held it and made it disappear. The subtle magic of high decorum. “This young lady is Anderson Carmichael’s guest,” she said, sliding a small white card onto the desk with one hand and indicating the poor urchin behind her with the other. Penny bent over attempting to pry a gemstone from the floor. Waiflike Penny cleaned up but in her filthy clothes still. A creature of the road, doctored at the last minute and perhaps made even less presentable for the effort.

“My, my,” said the woman behind the desk. “What a beautiful little girl.”

Penny straightened up and beamed in her direction. Her father standing behind her with one hand on each of her shoulders. “We’re here about her eyes,” he said.

The woman bent forward, enchanted. Those bottomless blue pools. “Really,” she said.

It occurred to Weller that he couldn’t guess how old the receptionist might have been. Her skin was flawless, her eyes were bright, and the movements of her compact body—sleekly clad in gray wool—were as lively as those of some small animal. She was youth and vigor made flesh, and yet there was something in her manner that suggested otherwise. Something that hinted at experience and maturity. It might have been the result of her breeding and station, but then again she was certainly Management, and therefore no higher in the scheme of things than Carmichael’s uncomfortable assistant.

The woman smiled and looked at Penny.

The assistant cleared her throat.

The woman got the idea and broke away and turned her attention to a screen mounted on the desk, shaking off the enchantment cast on her by the child. A grandmotherly reflex that she could barely help. In that moment Weller decided that she was an advertisement. An old woman made young again. A reminder that in this particular world there was no need to look at an old woman. Not even among the lower class.

An orderly who could have been the woman’s brother took them to a glass elevator and from there to a suite on the fifteenth floor. A suite with Penny’s name on the door, overlooking Central National Park just at the level of the tented wire mesh. Three rooms and a full bath. The orderly left the assistant on a couch in the first of the rooms and showed Weller and Penny into the next, where there were two enormous beds and a wall-mounted television and tall built-in closets of gleaming cherry. Clothing in the closets just their sizes. Penny tried on everything. Spinning in front of a floor to ceiling mirror and getting in close to see and then spinning away again.

Her father let her spin and put on a three-button suit himself and fumbled with a necktie for a while. Every knot he knew, until he finally gave up and put it back and cracked opened the door to the next room. Steel and rubber and tile. Hoses hung from the wall and fittings mounted along the side of an upholstered table and machinery suspended from gimbals. Bright lights overhead and a low hum of electronics. He closed the door and took her arm and sat her down on the bed. He knelt before her and looked into her grave little face and asked if she understood what was going to happen now that they’d finally made it to the hospital, and she said she did. “I’m sorry we haven’t had more time to talk about things,” he said. “We’ve been so busy these last few days.”

“That’s all right,” she said. Looking like she understood everything in the world. Everything they’d been through and everything to come.

“I’m not sure exactly what to expect next, but you’ll have the very best doctors in the whole world. What they’ll do in particular, I can’t say.” Feeling himself helpless within the machine of this medical system.

“That’s easy,” Penny said. “They’ll fix my eyes.”

“Right. They’ll fix your eyes. And I won’t leave until you’re all better.”

She said she knew that.

There were flowers in the front room when they came back out. Two bouquets as big as Penny herself and each with a card attached to it. The first card was engraved with a filigreed letter
C
and signed
Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Carmichael
in a hand that surely belonged to neither one of them. The second bore an embossed version of a familiar wheat stalk, and was signed
Your friends at PharmAgra.
Friends that she didn’t have before, but you never knew. Both cards signed by the same hand if you looked at them together. Weller put them on the table and pulled out one tulip for Penny and gave it to her. Then he sat down at the table across from the assistant and the orderly and asked when would the doctor be coming.

The assistant said soon. It was all arranged and he should be right along.

The orderly said Penny looked lovely in that new dress.

Penny said thank you.

Time passed.

The doctor arrived, a slight man built like a greyhound, shouldering the door open as if he believed in touching as little of the world as possible. Coming in with a white coat unbuttoned and a stethoscope hanging around his neck and a very white smile that was pasted on but just barely. The Assistant’s smile was pasted on too, pasted on and brittle, and the orderly rose and stepped in to negotiate between them.

The doctor had a small beard trimmed tight against his jaw and he smelled of fresh laundry and rubbing alcohol. He fastened his eyes on Penny and said, “Let’s go, shall we?” but she didn’t move. She just stood holding her tulip. He reached out a hand in her general direction but there was something disdainful in it even though he was plainly doing his best, and she didn’t respond.

Weller stood up and put out a hand of his own toward her and said, “Come on, honey.”

The doctor asked the obvious. “Are you the father?” Lowering his hand. Relieved but not entirely.

Weller allowed that he was.

The doctor said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Weller, but your daughter’s the only one I’ll need right now.”

Weller picked up Penny and headed in the direction of the examining room. Saying, “I guess you might be the doctor, but there are still a few things you don’t know.” Not confrontational. Just filling him in.

*

The tests took a week. Weller didn’t know why he’d let himself expect some kind of abracadabra, and he realized that he should have been tipped off by the suite with the two beds and the living area out front and the clothing, but he guessed you had to live and learn. Some afternoons when Penny was looking at the television or resting in the darkened bedroom with her eyes dilated, he’d walk around the hospital and see what was what. The hallways were vacant for the most part, empty and hushed. Everything that went on went on behind closed doors. There weren’t even any scanners that he could see. Freshly shaven and showered and dressed in one of the suits from the closet, he could have been anybody. He could have been Management or even Ownership. Strangers greeted him as such, strangers clutching computer tablets and strangers bearing huge floral arrangements and strangers pushing elegant carts laid out for room service, and he decided that the operating principle was always to assume upward. If they didn’t know you, then you were a patient or a patient’s family. That meant Ownership. So they consulted their tablets, hid behind a bank of flowers, or adjusted the already perfect placement of a napkin. And moved on.