It’s past midnight when we get to India Garden, the terrible restaurant just off campus that was, for some reason, Nathanael Palace’s dining selection when I was a high school junior and we came to tour the campus. Dim multicolored lighting, indifferent employees; abundant portions of barely edible food, strangely textured and overly spiced. I had zero interest in attending the University of New Hampshire anyway. You only needed sixty credit hours for the Concord PD, so that’s what I did: sixty hours exactly at the New Hampshire Technological Institute and then off to the Police Academy. I figured Grandfather would be proud eventually, once I was on the force, but by the time I graduated he was dead.
Nico and I kickstand our bikes and wander through the abandoned restaurant like visitors from a foreign planet. The sign’s been torn down and the windows and door smashed with a blunt object, but the inside is untouched, preserved as if for a museum display. Long rows of chafing dishes under long-cold heating lamps, rectangular tables tottering unevenly. The smell, too, is the same: turmeric and cumin and the faint resonance of mop water from the linoleum floor. The cash register, miraculously, has money in it, four limp twenty-dollar bills. I feel them between my thumb and forefinger. Worthless bits of paper; ancient history.
Houdini has fallen asleep in the wagon, nestled amongst my jugs of water and peanut butter sandwiches and Clif Bars and first aid supplies, eyes fluttering, breathing softly, like a child. I lift him out and place him gently in a bed of empty rice sacks. Nico and I roll out sleeping bags and arrange ourselves on the floor.
“Hey, what’s she paying you for this gig?” she asks.
“What?” I say, pulling the little Ruger from my pants pocket and placing it beside my bedroll.
“Martha Milano. What’s she paying you to find her deadbeat husband?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing really. I just…” I shrug, feeling myself get flush. “He promised her he would stay till the end. She’s upset.”
“You’re a moron,” says Nico, and it’s dark but I can hear in her voice that she’s smiling.
“I know. Goodnight, Nic.”
“Goodnight, Hen.”
The flag of the state of New Hampshire has been removed from above Thompson Hall, and a new flag has been raised in its place. It depicts a stylized asteroid, steel gray and gleaming as it streaks through the sky, with a long sparkling contrail flashing out behind it like a superhero’s cape. This asteroid is about to smash not into the earth, however, but into a clenched fist. The flag is enormous, painted on a bed sheet, rippling buoyantly on the summer wind.
“You shouldn’t be wearing a suit,” Nico tells me for the third time this morning.
“It’s what I brought,” I say. “I’m fine.”
We’re making our way up the long hill, overgrown with crab-grass and onion grass, toward the imposing castlelike facade of Thompson Hall. Houdini trots along behind us.
“We’re going to a utopian society, run by hyperintellectual teenagers. It’s July. You should have put on some shorts.”
“I’m fine,” I say again.
Nico gets a pace or two ahead of me and raises a hand in greeting to the two young women—girls, really—coming forward off the steps of Thompson to meet us. One is a light-skinned African American girl with short tightly braided hair, green capri pants, and a UNH T-shirt. The other is pale skinned, petite, in a sundress and a ponytail. As we get closer, past the flagpole, they both raise shotguns and point them at us.
I freeze.
“Hey,” says Nico, nice and easy. “Not with a bang.”
“But with a whimper,” says the white girl in the sundress, and the guns come down. Nico hits me with the smallest, sliest of winks—all the signs and shibboleths—and I exhale. This entire moment of peril has escaped the notice of my vigilant protector: Houdini is sniffing at the ground, digging up tufts of wild grass with his teeth.
“Oh, hey, I know you,” says the short white girl, and Nico grins.
“Yes, indeed. It’s Beau, right?”
“Yeah,” says Beau. “And you’re Nico. Jordan’s friend. You were here when we put up the greenhouse.”
“I was. How’s that going?”
“So-so. We got great dope, but the tomato vines will not take.”
The black girl and I look at each other during this exchange and smile awkwardly, like strangers at a cocktail party. We’re not alone, I’ve noticed: Hanging out on the stone wall that extends from the right side of the building are two kids, all in black, each with a bandana pulled up over the lower half of his face. They’re stretched out on the wall, relaxed but watchful, like panthers.
“You’re working perimeter now?” says Nico to Beau.
“I am,” she says. “Hey, this is my girlfriend, Sport.”
“Hi,” says the African American girl, and Nico smiles warmly. “This is Hank.”
We all shake hands, and then Beau says, “Listen, sorry,” and steps forward, and Nico goes “Totally okay,” and they frisk us, one at a time, quick perfunctory pat-downs. They open the heavy duffel bag that Nico took with her from India Garden, unzip it, peek inside, then zip it back up. I’m empty-handed, just a couple of blue notebooks in the inside pocket of my suit coat; the handgun, Nico strongly suggested I leave back at the restaurant.
“Why are you dressed like that?” Sport asks.
“Oh,” I say, looking down and then up. “I don’t know.”
I can feel Nico’s irritation rolling off her. “He’s in mourning,” says my sister. “For the world.”
“All right, you guys are clean,” says Beau brightly. “As you know.”
“Oh my God,” says Sport, bending to pet the dog. “So cute. What kind of dog is she?”
“He,” I say. “He’s a bichon frisé.”
“So cute,” she says again, and it’s like we’re in one of those alternate dimensions, just some folks hanging out on the front steps of campus: green lawn, blue sky, white dog, a group of friends. Detective McGully has remarked on the gorgeous run of summer weather this year. He calls it nut-kicker weather, as in, “that’s just God, kicking us in the nuts.”
Good old McGully, I think in passing. Off and running.
The boys on the wall are not introduced, but their aesthetic and affect are familiar; the kinds of young men one used to see on the evening news, rushing through city streets in clouds of tear gas, protesting the meetings of international financial organizations. These two seem confident and calm, long legs dangling over the stone walls of the university, passing a cigarette or joint back and forth, strips of ammunition pulled across their chests like seatbelts.
“So, hey,” says Nico. “Hank is coming in with me, just for the day. He’s looking for someone.”
“Oh,” says Sport. “Actually—” She stops, tenses up, and looks to Beau, who shakes her head.
“You’ve been here before, so you’re good,” says Beau to Nico. “But unfortunately your friend has to be quarantined.”
“Quarantined?” says Nico.
Quarantined. Terrific.
“It’s a new system,” Beau explains. She’s a small woman with a small voice, but she’s clearly not timid. It’s more like she’s insisting that the listener pay attention. “The idea came from Comfort, but there was a whole Big Group vote on it. In quarantine, newcomers are instructed in the function of our community. Divested of their old ideas about living in the self, and at the same time divested of their personal possessions.” She’s fallen into a rhythm, here, she’s reciting a set speech. “In quarantine a newcomer learns the way thing are handled at the Republic, and to prioritize the needs of the community over their needs as an individual.”