On a Clear Day

  “We don’t have to fly completely blind if we make agent-based computer models,” I said. “We’ll know what we have, organize our database, and try to figure out what C-8 is looking for. Then we can use the information to model all the groups in the States and start formulating a plan.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” I looked over to where the Asian girl talked with her head to one side. “If we knew what C-8 was looking for, we wouldn’t need to go to London.”

  “We know that they’re expanding in an economic world they’ve created. If anybody grows, it’s because someone else somewhere is losing. So since we know their past history, and we have an idea about how the other groups around the world react to them, we can create a model,” I said. “As we learn more, we’ll make the models better.”

  “And that’s suddenly going to predict what their intentions are?” she asked. “I don’t think so. They avoid obvious patterns.”

  “Then I can factor that in,” I said. “Thanks for reminding me.”

  Her coal-dark eyes never seemed to blink. Her face, smooth and white and circled by a carefully styled bob, made her look more like a decoration than a person. She stared at me, and I forced myself to stare back. I saw her fingers were on the black guy’s forearm.

  “Get some rest today,” said Michael. “There’s information on the computers in your rooms you might or might not want to use. There are also profiles of the members of group, but don’t make too much of them. We’re going to have to learn about each other as we go along. But one thing I hope is that we can get to trusting one another as soon as possible. I trust all of you. I hope all of you can trust me.”

  I felt tense as I picked up the yellow pad in front of me. I thought the Asian girl was challenging me. I didn’t like it.

  In the room. There was a basket of fruit and two bottles of water on my table. Good, but where was the money coming from? I was still upset with the girl saying my computer models didn’t make any sense. I remembered Michael saying that there were profiles on the computer. I turned it on. I navigated through some game apps, then found the profiles. They were listed as “one time only” apps that would be erased once I went through them.

  “People grow as they question what they are doing and who they are,” he said. “We examine our lives and prosper.”

  There was a microwave and a small cabinet over the sink in the room, and I looked through both. The fridge had a pint of milk and some cheese. The cabinet had some crackers. I laid out some of the fruit and the crackers and the cheese on a plate and took it to the bed. Then I clicked on the profiles.

  The first profile was Michael’s. Naturally.

  Dark screen, then a guitar wailing as if it could have been a crazy chick screaming. It played louder and louder, a deep bluesy sound; then it softened and another voice came up. Then the image of a dude in a leather jacket facing away from the camera. I knew who it was right away.

  I’m sailing to the edge of the Uni-verse

  I’m scratching for love out there

  I’m grabbing the souls of all my children

  And anyone who cares

  Oh, oh, oh-oh yeah!

  It was Michael, and he sounded gravelly and funky. His face was white as anything, and his streaked hair and lined eyes made him look like something invented, but his voice was cool-strange, as if it was coming from another place altogether.

  Then his image was covered up by a shot of a storm at sea. There were fragments of wood floating—perhaps a boat had capsized. The guitar kept getting wilder, and it sounded as if there was somebody crying in the storm. A headline flashed:

  Plato’s Cave Sold Out!

  I knew the group, but I had never seen them live and hadn’t really gotten into Michael. It was the band that had been swinging. They must have sold a million downloads every time they put out a jam. And I couldn’t think of them as ever doing anything in the Real World. No way. But here was Michael, wailing away on guitar and calling up the blues like they went to school together or something.

  Then Michael was looking into the camera, saying something about “times have changed,” and the world was calling.

  “We’ve been seduced,” he said. “Seduced into our own little comfort zones, into our own little fantasies, and away from self-examination, from nation examination. We have to unseduce ourselves. It’s as simple as that.”

  I’m sailing to the edge of the Uni-verse

  Leavin’ all my thoughts behind

  Wrapped in gauze and tinsel paper

  In the black hole of my mind

  The music went on for another full two minutes and then stopped. It was some deep theatrical crap, but it was effective.

  This was a Michael behind the Michael I saw. He was strutting as something special, and I was believing it.

  The screen went dark for about thirty seconds, and I was just about ready to see if something had gone wrong when a shot of Javier’s face came up. He was smiling.

  “Well, this is my résumé and I hope to get into Yale Law School. My name is Javier Gregory and I live in Morris Plains, New Jersey. I attended St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City although I’m Jewish, and then Princeton. My folks are rich, so I won’t need a scholarship. I hope that helps.

  “My GPA is competitive and I’ve done some extracurricular stuff that’s typical of someone who is bright enough but also confined to a wheelchair. The good stuff I’ve done is a series of articles on the legal strategies of the civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and how they evolved and also how more students participated than in any other movement. I think the success of the movement was at least partially, perhaps even mainly, due to the involvement of young people.

  “I also have published a number of articles in law journals around the country, mostly historical surveys examining the legal crusades that helped to shape the nation as we know it.

  “I played hockey in high school and during my first year at Princeton. A drunk driver on Route 287 ended my athletic career and left me wheelchair-bound. I do have some residual bitterness.

  “Yale is my first choice because I’m excited about meeting the kinds of students that the university attracts. Students, and the discussions they generate (hopefully it will be we generate), make Yale a special place to be.

  “My long-term goals involve working toward a justice system that is blind to individual desires, a truly justice-based system with fairness for everyone. I am not sure that this is possible, but I am absolutely certain that it is worth working toward.

  “I consider myself a decent human being and think of decency as an important trait. If accepted into Yale, I will do my best to make the school proud of my future accomplishments.

  “Adding that my father, David Gregory, is a member of the Alumni Board of Governors is something I am hesitant to do, but it seems pretentious not to do so. Thank you for your attention and consideration.”

  Good résumé. I would have let him into Yale.

  The next profile started out with an image of a big-headed white dude. He looked to be about fifty years old, maybe even older. There was an array of mikes in front of him, and you could tell it was some sort of press conference.

  “I don’t think we should—can everybody hear me?—I don’t think we should get too happy with this situation. This Small kid—he’s not small, but that’s his name—Drego Small. I don’t know what kind of name Drego is either, or even if that’s his real name. A lot of these people have made-up names. I don’t know why. That’s just what they do. Anyway, the mayor—Mayor Andrikson—is all excited about this kid because he’s stopping the fighting between the Miracle Mile Gang and the 187 First Gang, and that’s supposed to make Chicago a safer place. Okay, on the face of it, it all looks good, but you got to ask yourself how he did it. The Chicago Police Department’s gang unit couldn’t stop those people from shooting each other every day and they’re experts. Then all of a sudden this kid shows up—how old is he, fifteen or sixteen or something?
And he stops the fighting.

  “I see that this kid has both of these gangs listening to him, but I would like to know what he is telling them behind closed doors. Because I tell you this: if he can get these people to stop shooting each other, even for a weekend, he’s saying something or doing something that’s got a lot of power to it. And let me say this: I’ve seen his rap sheet, and he ain’t no Gandhi or no Martin Luther King. This is a slick guy who’s beaten some heavy charges. I’m willing to follow the mayor’s line and give this guy some slack, but I think we shouldn’t trust him until we make sure he’s legit. Any questions?

  “Would it have made a difference to me if he was white? Race ain’t got nothing to do with this. The safety of people living in Chicago is the only thing on my mind. I’m asking myself the same questions every cop in the city is asking. Who is this guy? You don’t see nobody walking on water and then you see this guy dancing across the waves. He don’t look like Jesus to me. That’s all I’m saying.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid of his power. No, let me put that differently. I’m damned afraid of his power. There are about 150,000 gangbangers in Chicago and maybe that many and a half more guns floating around. We got 14,000 cops on the force. So we’re outnumbered ten to one, outgunned, and I hope this kid isn’t outmaneuvering us. I’m not kidding about this, either. If my sister came on like this Drego does, I’d be afraid of her. This is a street guy with a lot of power. I’m asking the mayor to keep an open mind. That’s it. An open mind.”

  A picture of Drego. It was a mug shot. He looked young. There was a picture of Drego in a prison jumpsuit. He had his hard pose on. Under it was his record. Attempted murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, RICO violation, possession of stolen goods.

  I wondered how the hell Michael ever hooked up with him.

  The next profile started with a beefy-looking dude standing in front of a group of younger men who could have been soldiers or college guys.

  “The difference between show-off push-ups and the real thing is that there aren’t any gimmicks to a real push-up. You keep your body straight, you go down, you push up. You see these guys coming up and clapping their hands in front of their chests. That’s bullshit, because when you do that, you’re relaxing on the way down. You see some guys putting their feet on a locker or chair. But they only do ten or fifteen push-ups, and then they switch to some other sort of show-off stunt. As your physical instructor, what I’m going to do here at the academy is work on getting each of you to do fifty strong push-ups. That’ll get you five points on the FBI test and pass you on the SEAL screening test. In other words …”

  There was a guy walking out in front of the group, about ten yards behind the guy speaking. A name scrolled across the top of the screen. Tristan Braun … Tristan Braun … Tristan Braun.

  “What can I do for you, mister?” the instructor asked Tristan.

  Tristan didn’t answer. He took his shirt off and got down into the push-up position.

  “We have clowns here the same way we have them everyplace else.” The instructor addressed the guys he had been talking to as Tristan began doing push-ups.

  As the instructor kept talking about pacing yourself, the attention of the students—I guessed they were students—kept switching back to Tristan. Then the instructor pointed to Tristan too.

  “How many has he done?”

  “Twenty!”

  “He’s a show-off, which means his head is halfway up his ass even before he starts,” the instructor said. “That’s not the way to physical fitness.”

  There was a close up of Tristan doing push-ups.

  “Thirty!”

  The instructor looked at his watch, and the camera went to a clock on the wall.

  “Forty!”

  I watched as Tristan did one hundred push-ups in just under two minutes. Then he stood up, wiped his hands, and walked away.

  He was a show off. I didn’t think I liked him at all.

  I saw a shot of a circle of cinder-block-and-wood huts. There were a few black women between the huts. They were tall, thin, with small breasts. They moved gracefully. A camera crew gathered outside one of the huts. It was badly staged. Out popped a young white girl. She was smiling. I think she was embarrassed, but her smile touched me.

  “Hello, I’m Anja Marlena,” she said. “We are in Zomba, Malawi. I came here six months ago to help clean up a site that, I guess, failed. It was an NGO—nongovernmental organization—site dedicated to helping the people of Zomba organize their economic lives and make a kind of progress. A team of small-village specialists, trained at Stanford and backed by the University, was going to teach their organizational skills to the people of Zomba and try to create a kind of model village.”

  From the same hut, a black woman emerged. She was taller than Anja and glanced at her with interest. Anja, without looking at the taller woman, slipped her arm around the slender waist and left it there as she continued.

  “The modeling didn’t particularly work out and the funding dried up. So everyone went home, and later me and two workmen came to reclaim the copy machines and fertilizer, but mostly we didn’t want to leave anything behind that would embarrass the NGO.

  “So we got here and one of the guys I came with got sick and had to leave right away. He took a minibus up M-3, which is really just a dirt road, and then hooked up with some other people to get back to wherever he could get a plane to Egypt. That left me and a guy named John to gather up everything.

  “It didn’t look like we were making a lot of progress at first but the people helped us. Mostly, the kids helped us. Then one day John was gone. He just split. I knew he was going. I could feel it, so it didn’t upset me too much. Some of the women told me that they could arrange for me to leave on a bus that came the following Thursday. My friend here, Cheza, let me move in with her instead of sleeping by myself in the school building. I didn’t much know what to do, so I thought I would help her with the cooking. That amused her, and she called all her women friends over to watch me cook. They started teaching me to cook. Cassava, sweet potatoes, lots of rice, and sometimes chicken.”

  “She cooks like an English girl, but she sees like an African,” Cheza said. “She sees with her heart.”

  “Then I started helping out at the primary school. The books are old and they don’t have many, but the children want to learn. The children taught me ring games.

  “Half of why I was doing this was because the place is so beautiful. You don’t ever expect to be in a place this beautiful. You look into the distance and it gets hard to breathe. You look around you, at the people’s faces, and you want to touch them because they are so sweet. That is a good word for the people in Zomba, sweet. Isn’t that right, Cheza?”

  Cheza shrugged and kind of grunted.

  “What I don’t like is the outhouses,” Anja went on. “Nasty. That’s what they need—more than organizational help. Some indoor plumbing would make this the best place in the world. Or at least okay. When I get back to the States, I’m going to recommend just sending plumbing supplies. If the men don’t know how to fix up toilets, the women will learn and teach them.”

  “You have to be good to her because she sees right through you!” Cheza said. “Maybe she was born with a veil over her eyes. She don’t remember.”

  The next profile started oddly. There was an Indian-looking man sitting and staring down. I couldn’t see what he was staring at, but the camera just stayed on his face. Every once in a while there would be a movement, an eyebrow would go up, or there would be a twitch in the corner of his mouth. It went on for a long time before I looked at the clock in the corner. The camera stayed on the guy for another two minutes as I wondered who he was.

  Then he looked up and quickly down again, then shook his head, and the camera followed his hand down to a chessboard. He took one brown finger and knocked over a piece. Then he stood up and walked quickly away.

  The camera moved around to the other side of the board. There was a young girl
sitting there. It was the Asian girl from the meeting, Mei-Mei, the one sitting next to the black guy, Drego. Someone was pushing a microphone in front of her face and asking her questions.

  “This is the third tournament you have won this year,” the interviewer said as a caption in Chinese scrolled across the bottom of the screen. “How does it make you feel to win in a tournament of this magnitude?”

  “All tournaments have their interesting aspects,” Mei-Mei said.

  “Your rating is 2515, which is phenomenal in the chess world. How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Do you have ambitions to become the top female player in the world?”

  No answer. Just the dark eyes looking at the interviewer, boring into him.

  “Do you think you can compete with men on an international level?” The interviewer was trying to back away.

  Mei-Mei didn’t let him. She stared at him until the camera went away and the screen was full of Chinese characters. I wished I could read Chinese.

  I thought her profile was finished, but the screen lit up again and it was Mei-Mei from the waist up. She looked about the same as she had at the meeting. This time she was sitting at what looked like a teak desk. On the desk there was a green box. Either jade or plastic.

  “I’m called Mei-Mei Lum. My real name is Lum Mei Lan. I play chess and go. I like games because I like to win. That is about all that you need to know about me.”

  Then she opened the box and took out three black rings and put them on the fingers of her left hand. She held them briefly up for the camera to see, and then the screen went dark.

  What the hell was that about?

  The screen was dark for twenty seconds, perhaps a minute. Then it lit up and there was a bunch of kids sitting in what looked like an auditorium. The camera panned the kids, lifted to some kids on the stage, and then stopped at a little girl. The same hair, the same face, but my eyes looked like pasted-on doll’s eyes. They were so big. Where did they get the tape? It had been made over six years ago, when I was in the sixth grade.