“I don’t understand,” I say.
For a moment he doesn’t say anything. Then, abruptly: “Do you know what my father’s problem was?” I can tell he doesn’t expect an answer, but I shake my head anyway. “He believed in people. He believed that if people could only be shown the right way—the way to health and order, a way to be free of unhappiness—they would make the right choice. They would obey. He was naive.” Fred turns to me again. His face has been swallowed up by darkness. “He didn’t understand. People are stubborn and stupid. They’re irrational. They’re destructive. That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the whole reason for the cure. People will no longer destroy their own lives. They won’t be capable of it. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” I think of Lena and those pictures of the Wilds on fire. I wonder what she would be doing now had she stayed. She would be sleeping soundly in a decent bed; she would rise tomorrow to the sun coming up over the bay.
Fred turns back to the window, and his voice becomes steely. “We’ve been lax. We’ve allowed too much freedom already, and too much occasion for rebellion. It must stop. I won’t allow it anymore; I won’t watch my city, my country, be consumed from inside. It ends now.”
Even though Fred and I are now separated by a foot of space, I’m as frightened of him as I was when he was grabbing my thigh. I have never seen him like this, either—hard and foreign.
“What are you planning to do?” I ask.
“We need a system,” he says. “We’ll reward people who follow the rules. It’s the same principle, really, as training a dog.”
I flash to the woman at the party: She looks like she can handle a litter of ’em.
“And we’ll punish the people who don’t conform. Not bodily, of course. This is a civilized country. I plan on appointing Douglas Finch as the new minister of energy.”
“Minister of energy?” I repeat. I’ve never heard the term.
We reach a stoplight—one of the few that still work downtown. Fred gestures vaguely at it.
“Power isn’t free. Energy isn’t free. It has to be earned. Electricity—light, heat—will be given to the people who have earned it.”
For a moment I can’t think of any response. Power-outages and blackouts have always been mandatory during certain hours of the night, and in the poorer neighborhoods, especially now, many families simply choose to do without dishwashers and laundry machines. They’re just too expensive to maintain.
But everyone has always had the right to electricity.
“How?” I finally ask.
Fred takes my question literally. “It’s simple, actually. The grid’s already in place, and all this stuff is computerized nowadays. It’s simply a matter of collecting the data and a few keystrokes. One click turns on the juice; one click turns it off. Finch will be in charge of all that. And we can reevaluate every six months or so. We want to be fair about it. Like I said, this is a civilized country.”
“There will be riots,” I say.
Fred shrugs. “I expect a certain amount of initial resistance,” he says. “That’s why it’s so important that you be on my side. Look, once we get the right people behind us—the important people—everyone else will fall in line. They’ll have to.” Fred reaches out and takes my hand. He squeezes it. “They’ll learn that rioting and resistance will just make things worse. We need a zero-tolerance policy.”
My mind is spinning. No power means no lights, no refrigeration, no working ovens. No furnaces.
“What will people do for heat?” I blurt out.
Fred laughs a little, indulgently, as though I’m a puppy and have just learned a new trick. “Summer’s almost here,” he says. “I don’t think heat will be a problem.”
“But what happens when it starts to get cold?” I persist. In Maine, the winters often last from September until May. Last year we had eighty inches of snow. I think of skinny Grace, with her doorknob elbows, her shoulder blades like peaked wings. “What will they do then?”
“I guess they’ll find out that freedom doesn’t keep you warm,” he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. He leans forward and knocks on the driver’s window again. “How about some music? I’m in the mood for a little music. Something upbeat—don’t you think, Hana?”
Lena
Night is coming quickly, and with it, the cold.
We’re lost.