“There’ve been a lot of people just, like, wandering in,” Sport adds more casually, and Beau scowls. She liked her official explanation better.
“What people?” says Nico. “CIs?”
“Yeah,” says Sport, “But also just—you know. Whoever.”
“And so in quarantine,” says Beau, reclaiming the conversation, “we learn that the Republic is a system of responsibility, not just of privilege. That there is no such thing as a utopia for one—it must be a utopia for all.”
Sport nods solemnly, picks up the phrase and murmurs it in echo: “no such thing as a utopia for one…”
Okay, I’m thinking. Got it. Let’s cut to the chase here. “How long is quarantine?”
“Five days,” says Beau. Sport winces apologetically.
Damn it. Julia Stone is in there somewhere, I’m sure of it, seated between the Doric columns of one or another collegiate hall, with Brett Cavatone laying his heavy head in her lap. In five days, who knows? I take a look at Nico, who still looks relaxed, all smiles, but I can see the unease flashing in her eyes—this quarantine business is as much a surprise to her as it is to me.
“But it’s easy,” says Sport. “Seriously. It’s in Woodside Apartments, the big dorm on the other side of Wallace? And in terms of the divestment or whatever, you can keep super-personal items. Family pictures and stuff.”
“Actually, not anymore,” says Beau.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Comfort just decided.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“I didn’t even know they were conferencing on it.”
“Yes,” says Beau. “No more personal or sentimental items. It’s rearview.”
She says the word “rearview” with a definite and meaningful emphasis, like it’s been lifted from the language and glossed with a shiny new meaning, one accessible only to those who’ve undergone five days of quarantine at the Woodside Apartments. I look up at the banner, the flapping bed sheet, the proud standard of asteroidland.
“Come on, guys,” says Nico. “Henry’s not trouble. Can we give him a pass?”
“Like a hand stamp?” says Sport, but her laugh is fleeting; Beau is quiet, stone-faced.
“No,” she says, and her hand drops back to the butt of her gun. “The quarantine is a pretty firm rule.”
“Well, yesterday—” starts Sports, and Beau cuts her off. “Yeah, I know, and they got serious shit for it.”
“Right, right.”
Sport looks at Beau, and Beau looks over her shoulders at the Black Bloc guys, the crows watching us from the wall. Nice egalitarian utopian society, I’m thinking, everybody making sure everybody else is following the rules.
“Listen—” I start, and then Nico turns a quarter turn toward me and stares, just for an instant, all the time she needs to tell me very clearly with her eyes and eyebrows to shut up. I do so. This is why I brought her, and I might as well let her do her thing; this is Nico’s element, if ever she had one.
“Look, totally honest with you? This girl that Henry is looking for? Her mother is sick. She’s dying.”
Beau doesn’t say anything, but Sport whistles lightly. “Sucks.”
I follow Nico’s lead. “Yeah,” I say softly. “It’s cancer.”
“Brain cancer,” says Nico, and Sport’s eyes grow wider. Beau’s fingertips remain on the handle of her gun.
“Yeah, she’s got a tumor,” I say. “A chordoma it’s called, actually, at the base of her skull. And because the hospitals are all screwed up, so many doctors are gone, there isn’t much they can do.”
I’m picturing McGully, of course, big vaudeville hands: six months to live… wakka-wakka. It was Grandfather who had the chordoma, though; they’re mostly seen in geriatric patients, but no one here seems likely to know that.
Sport looks at me, then at Beau, who shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “We can’t.”
“All he’s got to do is find her,” says Nico softly, “let this kid know her mom is sick, in case she wants to say goodbye. That’s all. If it’s not possible, we understand.”
“It’s not possible,” says Beau, immediately.
Sport turns to her. “Don’t be a jerk.”
“I’m just following the rules.
“It’s not your mom.”
“Fine,” says Beau abruptly. “You know what? Fuck it.”
She stomps over to the steps and sits down sullenly while Sport walks over to the two on the wall and whispers something to the one with the cigarette, jokingly plucks it from his hands. Sport and the anarchists crack up—one lunges for his cigarette, the other shrugs and turns away—Beau sulks on the steps. They’re just a bunch of kids, these people: goofing around, flirting, fighting, smoking, running their principality.
At last Sport trots back over to us, flashing a small thumbs-up, and I exhale, see Nico smiling from the corner of my eye. We get four hours, Sport tells us, and not a second more.
“And come out through this exit. Okay? Only this exit.”
“Okay,” I say, and Nico says, “Thanks.”
“She uh—” she angles her head toward Beau. “She told her mom she was gay. Because of the asteroid. Radical-honesty time, right? Her mother told her she would burn in hell. So.” She sighs. “I don’t know.”
Beau is still sitting on the steps, glaring at the sky. There are times I think the world is better off in some ways—I do—I think in some ways it’s better off. One of the anarchists slides down from the wall and ambles over, skinny and sloe-eyed, black bandana draped loosely at his collarbone. “Hey, so, four hours, man,” he says. He smells like hand-rolled cigarettes and sweat.
“I told them,” says Sport.
“Cool. And in the meantime, we gotta hold on to your dog.”
The skinny kid reaches out his arms. Nico looks at me—I look at Houdini. I scoop him up, rub his neck, hold him for a long second. He looks into my eyes, then shakes his body and pulls for the ground. I put him back down, and he resumes chewing grass under the watchful eyes of his captors.
“Four hours,” I say, and Nico heaves her duffel bag onto her shoulder, and we’re ready to go.
2.
Once, in high school, as part of a short-lived and ill-fated campaign to gain the attention of a “cool” girl named Alessandra Loomis, I accompanied some friends to a day-long popular-music festival hosted by the Manchester radio station Rock 101. This is like that, what I’m looking at now, standing at the rear exit of Thompson Hall gazing down the long slope toward the main quad. It’s like the rock-fest but to a factor of ten: brightly colored tents and sleeping bags stretch out in all directions, studded by what look like giant shipping cartons, overturned and transformed into baroquely decorated forts. Long snaking lines of drummers move through the crowds, dancing in rhythmic interlocking circles. At the center of the quad is a towering junk-shop sculpture painted in neons and pastels, built of car doors and computer monitors and children’s toys and aquarium parts. Puffs of cigarette and marijuana smoke float up, drifting over the crowds like smoke signals. It’s like a concert with no stage, no bands, no electricity; a concert that’s all audience.
Nico was right. I should have worn shorts.
“So great,” murmurs my sister. She leans back, throws her arms open and closes her eyes, breathing it in—the marijuana smoke, certainly, but all of it, the whole thing. And I am surprised to be feeling how I do, confronted with the massive and chaotic scene—not at all how I felt driving the long hour back to Concord after a day at the Rock 101 festival, my ears ringing alternately with Alessandra Loomis’s kind but unequivocal demurrals and Soundgarden’s egregious cover of “Buckets of Rain.”