This Shared Dream (35 page)

Megan climbed the ladder and poked her head over the ledge’s edge. Megan looked up and said,
“Arabwa—mama aqui.”

“Arabwa,”
said another child’s voice.

“Who are you talking to?” asked Megan. “What is that?” She crawled into the loft and nestled next to Abbie.

“It’s, ah, it’s a new classbook.”

“Oh. Did you get it at school?”

Abbie nodded.

“Turn it back on. I want to see it.”

Abbie sighed and touched it.

Megan saw the back of a boy’s head. He was black, and his head was close-shaven. She heard jungle birds and monkey calls and padding feet.

“What is this?”

“Shhh,” said Abbie.
“En finate?”

“Na,”
said a girl’s voice. The screen’s view moved dizzyingly, and Megan saw a girl’s face. Her skin was very black, and her hair was braided in an intricate, beautiful pattern. She was sweating.
“Un garo.”

“What are you saying?” asked Megan.

“I asked her if they were safe and she said no.”

“Safe from what?”

“Soldiers are following them.”

As Megan watched, the scene veered wildly. The children appeared to be running.

Then the view turned into a map with a blinking red dot and a blinking yellow dot.

“Eh, vega abuente nin oest. Oest! Bey ingo! Now!”

The red dot veered left suddenly, then stopped.
“Oosha,”
whispered another voice.
“Oosh.”

There was no sound. The yellow dot bypassed the red dot, and after a few more minutes turned right.

“Abwe,”
said three voices at once.

“Thank be,”
said the girl whose screen it was.

“Welkum thee,”
said another child’s voice.

“Who are you?” asked Megan.

There was no answer.

“She doesn’t speak English, Mom.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. Kids’ language. Zozo. We make it up.”

“Where is that girl?”

Abbie touched the pad a few times and the view enlarged, showed a continent. “Africa,” she said. “The Congo. It’s really bad there. We help kids get away from soldiers and find food. It’s really, really educational.”

“I see. What else do you do?”

“When kids need help, like when parents are hitting them, we call police. There was a girl in New York City last week. Her dad locked her in a closet. We saw it all on her classbook. The police came and got her. Look, here’s an SOS.”

Megan’s head reeled. “Have you seen any—really bad things?”

“Lots.”

“I mean, like…”
Shootings. Sex.

Abbie shook her head, still looking at the screen. “
Shanwee ib jump.
No. The screen won’t let us. It goes blank. It won’t show people hurting other people. I think that maybe that information is somewhere. But I’m too young to see it.”

Megan was relieved. “How old do you have to be?”

“I don’t know. Way old. When you’re older, the
system
knows. Then you can see and do more.”

“Can I use it?”

“Won’t work for you.”

“Why not?”

“You’re old. The classbook can tell.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But you can’t even talk like us. Adults aren’t allowed. They just want to fight with one another and boss kids around.”

“I don’t want to fight. I am your mother, though.”

“You have your own places to go. Kids have this place. It’s our own place.”

Megan recalled Jill’s garden. She’d planted it when she was ten. She studied a garden book from the library, in her typical Jillish way, and planted bachelor buttons and carnations and snapdragons. Jill would then take a book inside her private kingdom and lean against the tree trunk and read. Sometimes she would just think, or draw. Maddeningly, Jill would not let Megan or Brian inside, or even pay a bit of attention to them or their distracting antics as they tried to annoy her. It was as if she were protected by an invisible curtain when she was in there. Sam and Bette enforced this. “She needs a private space,” Bette said. “You can make your own if you want.”

“I don’t want my own,” Megan said. “I want Jill’s!” She hadn’t understood her mother’s smile, but she did now.

“Does Miss Ginny know?”

Abbie was silent for a moment, watching her screen. She did not raise her eyes as she spoke. “Miss Ginny told us not to use this part in school because she thinks it’s distracting.”

“Imagine that.”

“Some kids said that their parents wanted it blocked, but other parents got mad and said their kids need it for emergencies. I think people have tried to block it but they can’t.” Her fingers whitened as she gripped her classbook. She all but curled herself into a ball around it, and glared at Megan.

“Listen honey, I need to take your classbook for now and ask some questions about it.” Megan felt very predictable.

“No!” Abbie held it close to her chest. “We need it!”

“We?”

“All of us kids. We made it. It’s ours!” She shouted at the screen.
“Mommy quieras abro!”

The screen was instantly filled with the faces of angry children, of all colors, all kinds of interesting hair, bright and dull clothing, each in their own little window, and all of them were shouting, in their strange new language.

“What are they saying?” asked Megan, although she had a feeling she knew.

“They say … not to let you. They say … hide it from the grown-ups.” She looked up at Megan, tears in her eyes, and Megan knew she was in for a righteous-passion meltdown, level ten. “I was! You came home early!”

Nevertheless, Megan pried it, as gently as possible, finger by tight finger, from Abbie’s hands. “Your father and I will talk about this and decide if it’s safe for you.”

Abbie burst into loud wails and slid down the ladder, releasing her feet so that she bumped against every rung.

“And don’t bother your father now!” Megan yelled, as Abbie slammed the door behind her. Megan sighed, climbed down, and went to grab her before she could bother Jim.

Jill

FUGUE

July 1

A
FEW DAYS BEFORE HER PARTY
, Jill was in her office at the Bank. So far, she kept telling herself, she’d been doing just fine being back at work. Her colleagues were looking forward to her party, curious, of course, about her house. No one but her boss and good friend, Don Robertos, knew about her St. Elizabeth’s sojourn, and it seemed he had not told anyone, because there had been no sidelong glances or any change in manner among her fellows—except, perhaps, a wee bit of jealous surprise that she now had her own office, complete with a window and a door, thanks to her doctorate. That was a part of the deal she’d made a while back.

She was only a few blocks away from the Serendipity Books, so it was easy for her to take evening shifts, if necessary, and Elmore had no problem with picking up Whens from school on those days.

Six floors below, outside of Jill’s unopenable window, a summer morning in Washington slid into afternoon. Busses, cars, and cabs rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, and pedestrians thronged the street.

Jill tried to concentrate on reading a report on riots in Nairobi. They were worsening.

One school, an earlier project, not one of the new domes, was now occupied by militants. Anyone who could, escaped out the windows, even from the second floor. All the girls that couldn’t get away were raped; all the boys were marched off to join the insurgents.

She was reading the report for the third time because it seemed that when she read it the first two times the words just beaded up like raindrops on a windshield. They didn’t penetrate her mind. Where she wanted to see “Reading scores up” and “Fifty percent of graduates find jobs,” she saw
rape,
murder,
and, even though the words weren’t actually there,
propaganda
and
religious ideology
. She saw
Us
and
Them,
words she wanted to see used in less extreme ways.

She closed the screen, picked up her purse, and stepped out of her office into a large room filled with corrals, locking her door behind her.

Bill Anderson—someone who she would just as soon not talk to right now—showed up instantly, meticulously dressed, as usual. She never saw him with rolled-up shirtsleeves, much less scuffed shoes. His ties were beautifully coordinated, and his haircut probably cost him fifty bucks every ten days. He stood in front of her, looked past her, looked at the floor, and finally came out with, “How about lunch?”

She smiled, she hoped. At least, she made her mouth into an approximation of one, and said, “Not today.” Everyone knew about her separation and pending divorce, and she knew that he was working himself up to asking her for a date. For some reason he made her uneasy. He liked to stand in her doorway and talk about Germany, which was his specialty. Hers too, but he once or twice dropped in seemingly casual questions about her mother and father. He was not very good at it. Why would he want to know about Sam and Bette? He tried to cover it up by talking about his own parents, and he was clumsy about that too, insisting on some storybook tale of immigrants from Germany in the 1700s farming and living in nice little farmhouses in Pennsylvania. Of course, tens of thousands of people had done just that, but he made it sound like something he’d learned from reading children’s primers from the 1950s. She wished she could have uninvited him to the party, but she could hardly have left him out.

That was just a small niggle, left behind as she headed toward the elevator. The real problem was that she felt stiff inside a straightjacket of ineffectiveness. The World Bank was not supposed to distribute classbooks, a powerful learning tool, proscribed by international law from containing “propaganda.” Some people believed that language itself was propaganda, that words, inflections, idioms, all contained cultural biases of which the user was often unconscious. Fair enough. But words were all they had, right now, to combat images of violence in video games, in movies, in real life—images that Megan claimed activated something called mirror neurons, which caused people to imitate one another.

Her International Schools Project was garnering kudos from thousands of sources. She ought to be very happy about that, Don had told her just this morning.

Wasn’t she?

Jill slid down from the sixth floor of the World Bank in the elevator, which was sleek and like The Future, like the ideas of The Future she’d absorbed in the fifties, and moved into a different state of mind.

*   *   *

Exiting the air-cooled building, she smiled at the security guy who greeted her each morning and biometriced her in.

She paused in the doorway, hot already, but cooled by bursts of cold air as people went in and out of the building, at a loss. What should she do now? She certainly wasn’t hungry.

Cars poured down Pennsylvania Avenue when the light changed. A bus stopped in front of her; the doors accordioned open.

For an instant she almost jumped on. It was a number ten bus; she used to know the routes of all the busses, although they surely had changed since she rode them everywhere as a child. Streets of small, decades-old shops—drugstores, grocery stores, restaurants—opened in her mind like scenes on a splayed fan: the bus could take her there, there, or there. As she mused, the bus pulled away, the fan closed.

Crossing Pennsylvania Avenue, she quickly entered a neighborhood of town houses. She hiked uphill, angling up the small blocks until she came out on Connecticut Avenue north of Dupont Circle.

The maples lining the sidewalk were quiet, alien creatures in the loud city, and yet, she mused, they would be here, and they would multiply, when the city was gone. It was strange to think of the city being gone, but of course, eventually, it would be. Plants had plenty of time to wait.

Everywhere she looked she saw people—not dense, but quite present, walking in the dappled sunlight beneath trees, each of them made of an uncountable number of cells, each cell capable of generating humans; each one of them constantly, waking or sleeping, generating stories, universes, everywhere, everywhere.…

She realized, distantly, that she was in a fugue state, like the one that had put her in the hospital, but didn’t care. This one was deeply pleasant. She just walked, and walked, among the alien trees and infinite-celled people, and didn’t notice the art store until she was right next to it.

The window was full of completely seductive objects that she had to have. Blank notebooks in many formats, including landscape-sized. Banks of brilliant markers. Easels. Brushes. Watercolors, oils, pastels. Fine paper, in all varieties and weights and tooth.

Though it had been years since she’d done anything in an artistic vein, she felt the thrill of a siren’s call. Painting Woman had been asleep for a long, long time.

Asleep since her mother had disappeared. Asleep since Dallas, and having nightmares of debilitating guilt.

Jill gazed at the window display, and let Painting Woman awaken, stretch, and take a deep breath. She was voracious with memory, eager for the delicious joy of drawing, painting, representing. Her hands fairly ached to move, to draw all that she saw—in hopes of what? Interpreting? Remembering? Laying down a record that said to those who followed
This this! is what it was, when
it
was everything, and everything was magnified; intense, demanding
.

She had used pencils, first, and green Morilla Clipper Ship sketchbooks, to bring Gypsy Myra to life. Before that, she had sketched for years, simplified her lines, studied the classics from Harriman to Kelly, acceded when images called her to record them: Megan, asleep on the couch on a summer afternoon; the polished dining room table holding a vase; the intricate frills and leaf veins of a partially shaded rose.

When Underground comix first came out she felt curiously not a part of it. All of the artists were males. They were all males writing about, and drawing, sex. Because her characters were hard-edged and original and wanted to save the world like all good counterculture kids did, she was accepted, but it was kind of as an honorary male, and she was quickly famous—at least in that small, but national, community.