Pure (3 page)

They walk him down the shiny halls, past the oil paintings of two headmasters—one fired, one new—who both look pasty, austere, and somewhat dead, then down to the academy basement, which is on the monorail line. They wait in the airy underground, silently. This is the monorail that takes the boys to the medical center, where Partridge’s father works three times a week. There are floors in the medical center reserved for those who are sick. They’re kept cordoned off. Sickness is treated very seriously in the Dome. Contagion could wipe them all out, and so the slightest fever can result in short-term quarantine. He’s been to one of those floors a few times—a small, boring, sterile room.

The dying? No one visits them. They’re taken to a floor of their own.

Partridge wonders what his father wants with him. He’s not one of the herd, not destined for anything elite. That was Sedge’s role. When Partridge entered the academy he wasn’t sure if he was better known for his father or his brother. It didn’t matter. He didn’t live up to either reputation. He never won a physical challenge and he sat the bench during most games, regardless of the sport. And he wasn’t intelligent enough to go into the other training program—brain augmentation. That was reserved for the smart ones like Arvin Weed, Heath Winston, Gar Dreslin. His grades have always been borderline. Like most of the boys going in for coding, he was clearly garden-variety, basic overall enhancement to better the species.

Does his father just want to check in on his garden-variety son? Maybe he was struck by a sudden desire to bond? Will they even have anything to talk about? Partridge tries to remember the last time they ever did anything together for fun. One time, after Sedge’s death, his father took him swimming in the academy’s indoor pool. He remembers only that his father was an excellent swimmer, he slid through the water like a sea otter, and when he came up for air, toweling off, Partridge saw his father’s bare chest for the first time in as long as he could remember. Had he ever seen him only half dressed before? His father’s chest had six small scars on it, on the left side, over his heart. It wasn’t from an accident. The scars were too symmetrical and tidy.

The monorail comes to a stop, and Partridge has a fleeting desire to run. The guards would hit him with an electrical charge to his back. He knows that. He’d have a red burn spread down his back and arms. His father would be told, of course. It would only make matters worse. Why run anyway? Where would he go? In circles? It’s a Dome, after all.

The monorail delivers them to the entrance of the medical center. The guards show their badges. They sign Partridge in, scan his retinas, and walk through the detectors into the center itself. They wind the halls until they come to his father’s door. It opens before the guard has time to knock.

A female technician is standing there. Partridge can see beyond her to his father, who is lecturing half a dozen technicians. They’re all looking at a bank of screens on the wall, pointing out chains of
DNA
coding, close-ups of a double helix.

The technician says “Thank you” to the guards and then ushers Partridge to a small leather chair to the side of his father’s massive desk, which is on the opposite side of the room from where his father and the techs work.

His father is saying, “There it is. The blip in the behavioral coding. Resistance.” The techs are all darty-eyed geese, terrified of his father, who’s still ignoring Partridge. This is nothing new. Partridge is used to being ignored by his father.

He looks around the office, notes a set of original Dome blueprints now framed and hung on the wall over his father’s desk.

Why is Partridge here, he wonders again. Is his father showing off, trying to prove something to Partridge? It’s not like Partridge doesn’t know that his father is smart, that he commands respect, even fear.

“All of his other types of coding have gone so well. Why not the behavioral coding?” his father says to the techs. “Anyone? Answers?”

Partridge taps his fingers on the arms of the chair, glancing at the wisps of his father’s gray hair. His father looks angry. In fact, his head seems to shake with anger. He’s noticed anger flaring up like this in his father ever since Partridge’s brother’s funeral. Sedge died after his coding was complete and he’d made it into Special Forces, the new elite corps made up of only six recent academy graduates. “A tragedy,” his father calls it, as if giving it a proper name makes it acceptable somehow.

The technicians look at one another and say, “No, sir. Not yet, sir.”

His father glares at the screen, his brow knotted, his fleshy nose reddened, and then he looks at Partridge, as if seeing him for the first time. He dismisses the technicians by waving them off. They leave hurriedly, scuttling out the door. Partridge wonders if they are flooded with relief each time they leave his father’s presence, the way he is. Do they all secretly hate the old man? Partridge wouldn’t blame them.

“So,” Partridge says, fiddling with a strap on his backpack. “How are things?”

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve called you in.”

Partridge shrugs. “Happy belated birthday?” His seventeenth birthday was almost ten months ago.

“Your birthday?” his father says. “Didn’t you get the gift I sent?”

“What was it again?” Partridge says, tapping his chin. He remembers. The gift was a very expensive pen with an illuminated bulb on top.
So you can study late
, his father wrote him in a little note attached to the gift,
and get an edge over your classmates
. Does his father remember the gift? Probably not. Was the note even written by his father? Partridge doesn’t know his father’s handwriting. When he was a kid, his mother used to write riddles to help them find where she’d hidden presents. She told him that it was a tradition his father started when they were first dating—little rhyming riddles and gifts. Partridge remembers this because it struck him that they’d been in love at some point, but weren’t anymore. Partridge doesn’t remember his father even being there for his birthdays.

“I didn’t call you in for anything birthday-related,” his father says.

“So I guess next comes a fatherly interest in my schooling. You’re going to ask,
Are you learning anything important?
”

His father sighs. Does anyone else speak to him this way? Probably not. “Are you learning anything important?” he asks.

“We weren’t the first to invent Domes, I guess. They’re prehistoric—Newgrange, Knowth, Maeshowe, et cetera.”

His father sits back. The leather of his seat creaks. “I remember the first time I saw a picture of Maeshowe. I was a kid, fourteen or so. I saw it in a book on prehistoric sites.” He stops speaking and raises his hand to his temple, which he rubs in a small circle. “It was a way to live forever, to build something that lasts. A legacy. It stuck in my mind.”

“I thought having kids was a man’s legacy.”

He looks at Partridge sharply. “Yes, you’re right. And that’s one reason I’ve called you in. There’s some resistance to certain aspects of your coding.”

The mummy molds. Something is wrong. “What aspects of my coding?”

“Sedge’s mind and body took to the coding so effortlessly,” his father says. “And you’re close to him genetically, but—”

“What aspects?” Partridge asks.

“Oddly enough, the behavioral coding. Strength, speed, agility, all the physical aspects are going well. Are you feeling effects? Mental and/or physical? Lack of balance? Unusual thoughts or memories?”

The memories, yes, he’s thinking of his mother more, but he doesn’t want to tell his father this. “I felt really cold,” he says, “right around the time I heard that you’d called me in. My whole body, really cold.”

“Interesting,” his father says, and maybe for a split second he’s injured by the comment.

Partridge points to a framed wall hanging. “Original blueprints? They’re new.”

“Twenty years of service,” his father says. “A gift.”

“Very nice,” Partridge says. “I like your architectural handiwork.”

“It saved us.”

“Us?” Partridge says under his breath. They are the only ones left now, a family shrunken down to an embattled pair.

And then as if this marks a natural segue, his father asks questions about Partridge’s mother before the Detonations, the weeks leading up to her death, a specific trip to the beach that she and Partridge had taken alone, just the two of them. “Your mother made you swallow pills?” his father asks.

There are people on the other side of the wall-mounted computer screen, most likely. It has an observation mirror’s blank stare. Or maybe there aren’t. Maybe his father’s waved them off too. They are being recorded, though. They have to be. A beady-eyed camera is mounted in each corner.

“I don’t remember. I was a kid.” But Partridge remembers blue pills. They were supposed to make the flu go away, but they seemed to make it worse. The fever made him shiver under the blankets.

“She took you to the beach. You remember that, right? Just before. Your brother didn’t want to go. He had a ball game. They were in the championships.”

“Sedge used to love baseball. He loved a lot of things.”

“This isn’t about your brother.” His father can barely say his brother’s name. Since Sedge’s death, Partridge has kept count of how many times he’s heard his father say it—only a handful. His mother died while trying to help survivors get to the Dome on the day of the Detonations, and his father used to call her a saint, a martyr, then slowly he stopped speaking of her almost completely. Partridge remembers his father saying, “They didn’t deserve her. They took her down with them.” There was a time when his father used to talk about the survivors as “our lesser brothers and sisters.” His father used to call the leaders in the Dome, including himself, “benevolent overseers.” Language like this still comes up from time to time in public addresses, but in everyday chatter the survivors outside the Dome are called “wretches.” He’s heard his father use the term many times. And Partridge has to admit, he’s spent a lot of his life hating the wretches for taking his mother down with them. But lately, in Glassings’ World History, he can’t help but wonder what really happened. Glassings hints that history is malleable. It can be altered. Why? To tell a nicer story.

His father says, “This is about your mother giving you pills, making you swallow something, during the dates of your absence.”

“I don’t remember. I was eight years old. Jesus. What do you want from me?” Even as he says it, he remembers the sunburns they both got though it was overcast and how, when they were sick, his mother told him a bedtime story, a swan wife with black feet. His mother, he sees her in his mind often—her curly hair, her soft hands with their bones as fine as a bird’s bones. The swan wife was a little song, too. It had a tune. It had words that rhymed and hand motions. His mother said, “When I tell you the singing version of the story, hold this necklace in your hand.” He gripped it tight in his fist. The edges of the swan’s flared wings were sharp, but he didn’t let up.

One time he told the story to Sedge. This was in the Dome, a day when Partridge missed his mother sharply. Sedge said it was a girl’s story. It was for kids who believed in fairies. “Grow up, Partridge. She’s dead and gone. Don’t you see that? Are you blind?”

His father now presses him. “We’re going to have to do more tests on you. Batteries of tests. You’ll be poked with so many needles, you’ll feel like a pincushion.”
Pincushion
—it’s one of those words that no longer mean anything. A cushion for pins? Is this some kind of a threat? It sounds like one. “It would help us out if you could tell us what happened.”

“I can’t. I’d like to, but I don’t remember.”

“Listen to me, son.” Partridge doesn’t like the way his father says the word
son
, as if it’s a rebuke. “You need to get your head screwed on right. Your mother…” His father’s eyes are weary. His lips are dry. He seems to be talking to someone else. He’s speaking in a voice that he uses on the phone.
Hello, Willux here.
He crosses his arms on his chest. His face goes slack for a moment as if he remembers something. There’s the shaking of his head again. Even his hand seems to quiver with anger. He says, “Your mother has always been problematic.”

A look passes between them. Partridge doesn’t say a word, but his mind keeps repeating.
Has always been. Problematic. Has always been.
This isn’t the past tense. This isn’t the way you talk about the dead.

His father recovers. “She wasn’t right in the head.” He rubs his hands on his thighs and then leans in. “I’ve upset you,” his father says. This is strange too. He never talks about emotions.

“I’m fine.”

His father stands up. “Let’s get someone in here to take a picture of us. When was the last time?” It was probably at Sedge’s funeral, Partridge thinks. “Something you can have in your dormitory so you’re not homesick.”

“I’m not homesick,” Partridge says. He hasn’t ever felt like home was home, not here in the Dome, so how can he miss it so badly that he’s sick?

His father calls a tech in anyway, a knobby-nosed woman with bangs, and tells her to get a camera.

Partridge and his father stand in front of the newly hung blueprints, shoulder-to-shoulder, stiff as soldiers. There’s a flash.

EVEN
A
BLOCK
AWAY
, Pressia can smell the market—spoiled meat and fish, rotted fruit, char, and smoke. She can make out the hawkers’ shifting shadows, and she knows them by their coughs. This is how death is sometimes measured. There are different kinds of coughs. They rattle crisply. They begin and end with a wheeze. They begin and can’t end. They churn up phlegm. They end in a grunt—this is the worst kind, her grandfather tells her. It means the lungs have taken on fluid—death by infection, drowning from within. Her grandfather rattles by day, but at night he makes the grunting cough in his sleep.

She sticks to the middle of the alley. Passing the lean-tos, she hears a family fighting, a man’s loud bellow, something metal banging against a wall. A woman screeches, and a child starts to cry.