Some of the other ones would try all kinds of silliness. I knew one who would take them out to the middle of nowhere in the dead of the night and have them lie in open graves. He’d tell them, “This is where you’re going to end up, trapped forever in a black hole in the ground, unless you fight for the cause of your people. The Lord takes good care of those who fight for the cause of their people.” And that sort of thing was just fine if you were trying to get some burnout from the southern coast to put on a farmer’s suit, but a lot of the smarter ones saw right through it.
What I found worked best was a lie slipped in with the truth. What I’d do is tell them about all sorts of terrible things the Blues had done—show them pictures of the victims from the firebombing of Burleson, the massacre at Patience, things like that. But along with those things, I’d tell them about the slaughter at Pleasant Ridge. Now the funny thing is, not once, in all my years working for the rebel South, did any recruit bother to find out if there had ever been a slaughter at Pleasant Ridge. They just assumed it to be true. The Blues had done so much to our people, why couldn’t they have done that too? After a while, even I couldn’t remember if there had been a slaughter at Pleasant Ridge.
That’s what made it so easy to lie later on too, when the Blue surge came and they rounded us all up for interrogation. They wanted names and crimes and we gave them both in droves. One guy I knew just listed off everyone who worked on his old block. A week later the incursion force went and rounded up a bunch of accountants and butchers and grocery store clerks.
Eventually, it got to be that the Blues had so much unreliable information on their hands, they had to let all those people go. But it was like a snake eating its own tail—by the time they got around to emptying those detention camps, they’d already turned most of the people there into exactly what they’d needed them to be in the first place. I always said the camps at Sugarloaf were the best recruiters the South ever had.
IV
January, 2095
Lincolnton, Georgia
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I remember the day I first met her, the day she invaded my life.
There was an iron gate that bordered our property, its entrance at the crossroads where the road met the winding driveway that led to the house. My mother had the gate built after she found out she was pregnant. She also paid the contractors to add another foot of concrete to the seawall. She even had them put in a smaller picket fence around the house itself, a moat that split us from the greenhouses and the rest of the property. My father said it was overkill; babies aren’t made of glass. But my mother, who had once given up hope of ever having a child of her own, insisted. My father said some nights she used to stay up till sunrise, imagining all the ways that fate and the devil conspired to take her only child.
The two arms of the gate were decorated with twisting, curling bars that, when the gate closed and the two arms met, formed a metal outline of a pineapple. Near the entrance stood an old-fashioned mailbox, an antique from the days of government mail. A decorative wooden plaque atop the mailbox read: “Karina and Simon Chestnut.”
Once, when my father was in his clouded place, he forgot to hit the clicker as the car approached the gate, and accidentally drove right into it. There wasn’t much damage—he never drove very fast—and none of us were hurt, but my mother asked him not to take the car out again after that. Most days he was fine, and in regular conversation you’d never be able to guess the damage that had been done to him. But my mother said you just couldn’t tell when the clouds would come over him and he’d retract from the world. Even a pristine mind can fog over, let alone one hurt that way. You just couldn’t tell.
There was a buzzer in the grand room downstairs that went off whenever the gate opened. My mother, sick of the sharp sound it made, had recently ordered it altered to emit a prettier ring, two soft chimes followed by a faint rustling, like the sound of leaves in a breeze. On the night the stranger arrived, I heard the chimes; I climbed out of bed and ran downstairs.
My father was standing on the front steps. At the foot of our home, the driveway ended in a circle around my mother’s rose garden. The roses were a pale pink. It was said by many a visitor that no such flower grew anywhere else in the South; the magic that encircled the Chestnuts’ place sustained them.
I stood near my father and watched the car approach. It was the middle of winter. I was six years old. I still remember.
“You should be in bed,” my father said. “You’ll give your mother trouble tomorrow if you don’t get your sleep.”
But I pleaded, and he was too distracted by the looming car and our new guest to argue. I hid behind his leg and peered out, fascinated by the arrival of this stranger about whom my parents had argued for weeks.
The car pulled up to the house. The asphalt was newly laid and the wheels crunched against it. When my mother came out of the car she looked exhausted.
I’d seen her this way before—the previous winter, when Zenith came through and devastated the greenhouses. The house, made of fine red brick, withstood the storm, but throughout the property there were shards of glass, solar panels twisted and cracked. For five days straight she worked with the laborers to repair the damage. I remember seeing that drained look on her face. It was in those moments when I think she secretly wished my father was well enough to help her, that his mind was healed enough not just to carry on pleasant conversation, but to hold important things in memory, to keep from wandering to his clouded place. Sometimes, when I refused to go to bed or played in the parts of the yard that were off-limits, my mother would yell at me. It felt then like she was yelling twice at the same time, once for whatever I’d done and again because she was mad that it was always her who had to do the yelling.
The passenger door opened and from the car unfurled a huge, hunched body. The enormity of it blocked out the light from the driveway lamp and for a moment all I saw of her was a limbed wall of blackness.
“Welcome home, Sarat,” my mother said.
The stranger moved slowly out of the light. My father descended the porch steps. He looked confused, his eyes squinting as though he were trying to focus on a very faraway thing.
“For God’s sake, Simon,” said my mother. “Don’t you remember your own sister? Come here and give her a hug.”
My father stepped forward and hugged her; she tightened up at the feel of his arms around her, and did not reciprocate. When he pulled away from her my father had tears in his eyes but the stranger looked at him in a way I’d never seen before. There was a kind of vicious longing in her eyes, a recollection of something once tender, now poisoned. She looked at him as though he were a plaster mask of her own face, cast before the onset of some great deformity.
I ran in for a closer look at our visitor. I hid behind my mother’s skirt.
“Benjamin, this is Sarat,” she said, pulling me out from behind her. “This is your aunt.”
I stared at the towering woman, dumbstruck. I had seen a picture of her once. In the picture she must have been a teenager, lean and bald-headed, a menacing smile on her face. But what stood in our driveway bore almost no resemblance to that image. This woman was fat, her gut pressed against her dirty gray shirt. But it was more than that. All of her seemed oversized—her limbs trunklike, her nose flattened and wide.