33. ANARCHIST
Lawson—
I wake up going for my gun. My blunt nails drag across the skin under the waistband of my jeans, right where my gun should be but isn’t. My eyes fly open. Too-white walls tilt in my vision as I pat myself down and discover the knife in my pocket is missing as well. I snag the one from the top of my boot and switch it open as I roll to sitting on the bed. The walls are old-world white, the room seems to bristle with corners, and apparently I’ve never heard silence before. Not really.
I’m hearing it now, which means one of two things. Either I’ve been promoted or I’ve been arrested. I get up and check the door.
It’s locked.
The knife slips from my numb fingers to land point-down in the cork floor. The mattress hits the back of my thighs; I’ve been backing up. My knees bend and drop me onto the bed. All the edges in the room blur, as if viewed through water. Aidan was right.
Mama killed Tab.
And now I’m in a pulse-proof cell. I should pick up that knife. The handle quivers, shimmery light refracting off the blade. Tab is dead, my whole world is a lie, and all I can do is sit while sharp bursts of trembling wrack my body. The very air seems to have nerves that sense pressure and pain. Understanding, clear and cruel as acid, eats through the space around me, demolishing all my beliefs. It doesn’t feel like giving up false ideas; it feels like being melted down to nothing.
Reminds me of being small, some GEM meeting at our place. Dad sat on the edge of the sofa, all long legs and bright eyes and neat beard. He had the tidiest beard in the GEM; Mama always said so, but then she was the one who clipped it.
I was playing with an irrelevant toy. A fire engine? Dad’s head receded toward the light on the ceiling, his face taking up the whole room, the timbre of his voice filling the world. That voice sang me lullabies before bed and dropped to serious tones only once he thought I was asleep. Those nighttime murmurs didn’t matter.
These words mattered; Dad was using his wake-up voice. I widened my eyes and pushed my fire truck a little ways across the carpet and then back again.
“What we really need is a disaster,” Dad was saying. “One big enough to set off a chain reaction. If the Cascadia Fault were to go in any major…”
The way he leaned forward, light catching on the orange glints in his beard, made me want to go into the kitchen and get a disaster and bring it out to him. I glanced at Mama, half expecting her to stand up, but she stayed curled deep into the sofa. Once a photographer taking our picture had said, Sally. You’re in your husband’s light. Mama had drawn back just like this.
She watched Dad the way she watched me when I put away my toys all by myself. One of her hands was dangling off the couch, in my general direction. I reached up and grabbed her finger. Her body jerked, and she looked down like she just remembered she had a son. I smiled and made a soft fire engine noise and pushed my truck another couple centimeters.
She looked back at Dad. So did I. Everyone in our living room did.
“It’s just a matter of time,” he said, “before the earth breaks apart and grows. We need to be ready for a bigger world.”
Later that morning, after all the guests went home, my dad cracked an egg into a bowl. Slime spilled out, yellow and almost clear. I asked, “What’s inside the earth?”
“Water,” Dad answered, “lots and lots of water.”
At the same time as Mama said, “Fire.”
The next time I took a bath, I plugged my nose and lay back underwater. My eyes opened on a ceiling of silver, strands of my hair floating past. It felt like I could hold my breath forever.
Shortly, there came a hard lesson. Some things are not in my control. No matter how much I didn’t want to breathe in, I was going to.
No matter how much I wanted to breathe water, I was not a merman.
Mama charged into the bathroom when I choked, as if just realizing the sound of a child drowning is silence. She lifted me out of the tub, hands biting into the tender muscles under my arms, and shouted, “What are you doing?”
“Practicing.” I crossed my arms and no matter how many times she asked, I refused to tell her for what.
It’s clear now; I was practicing for this. My world has broken apart and my parents were both right. The world is full of burning water. Being boiled alive; that’s what losing faith in my parents—in myself—feels like.
Like I’ve stumbled around some D-town corner to find Aidan crouched over Tab’s body with a mouthful of flesh and blood. I once thought the world held something pure and beautiful but I was wrong. I was just a child, living according to the beliefs of my parents instead of my own.
Some anarchist.
I squint against the glare bouncing off the harsh white walls. Everything in this room is designed to remind me of what was wrong with the old world. But the GG world, painted in new life green, is no better. Soft lighting and pulses hide its flaws, the central one being that the whole thing is a hoax.
I thought D-town was a make-believe teenage world where everything is harder, scarier, and more painful than it needs to be. But D-town is the real world. Bruised, broken, and still-standing-beautiful. Just like Aidan.
If Aidan still stands.
The thought blooms like an expanding bullet, exploding through my insides with a shock so intense it’s beyond pain. My bowels loosen; my skin turns clammy.
Fortunately, D-town gave me lots of practice not thinking. A spy can’t afford to have any out-of-character thoughts taking over his face and giving him away. So I mentally grab hold of the character I’ve played for two and a half years. I wrap D-town Lawson around me like a moth-eaten blanket. He might be full of holes and not much more than a figment, but he has to be enough. Until I learn who I really am, he’s all I have.
What would that Lawson do?
My arms have wrapped around my middle. I force my spine straight and stop hugging myself. Can’t show vulnerability; the GeeGee might have wasted a precious camera to keep tabs—
Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think.
So…here I am. One D-towner still free of the pulses. One Real Dealer, and we work best alone anyway. This war isn’t lost yet.
I look down at my steel toes and then at the locked door. No, boots and fists won’t cut it this time. But I’ve never relied on violence anyway. I’ve always been ninety percent charm and favors and lies.
That may be nothing to be proud of but then neither is brutality. I don’t need pride; I only need to be free.
There has to be a reason I’m in here instead of a rehabilitation cell with continuous pulses piped in. The reason doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that soon someone will come through that door, probably Captain Mom. I flinch. Well, whether it’s the Captain or some other GeeGee, one thing is certain; the GeeGee want something from me. I’ll use that leverage, and every acting skill she taught me, to get access to the other D-towners.
We’ll find a way to talk—or fight—our way out of here.
Later, Aidan can teach us all to meditate. The GeeGee will no longer have the power to make us happy or to make things easy or to turn us into sheep. I'll just need to convince the rest of the D-towners to believe in Aidan as much as I do. That shouldn’t be too hard. After all, I was trained to talk them into joining the GeeGee. I was going to guarantee them a pain-free life.
New plan. I can’t offer a painless life, no one can, but I can promise a full one.
Turns out, there’s something I believe in after all. I believe in Aidan.
Loving Aidan was never part of any plan. I didn’t do it because I was a GeeGee or because I was a Real Dealer. I did it because I didn’t have a choice. Something deeper inside of me said, This one.
But I decided to surrender. Aidan didn’t; Aidan fought. Funny how things work backward sometimes. When it comes to Aidan, I always did what I wanted to do, all rules be damned, even my own.
At least I love like an Anarchist.