“I’m not sure what you think I can do,” he said.
June gave him her serene, yoga-instructor smile. “Don’t worry. We’ll fill you in soon enough. In the meantime”—she pointed to Andy, and he and the guy with the bandolier, Randall, jumped to a stand—“these boys are going to escort you each to the privy, and then we’re going to have story time.”
Within a half hour, they had all visited the outhouse—a roomy, pin-neat structure with a padded seat and a single roll of toilet paper sealed in an old plastic food storage container. A mirror hung above a dry sink, upon which rested a bowl, a jug of water, and a rough-cut bar of soap the cloudy yellow of earwax. It wasn’t what Wes had expected. He wasn’t sure what he had expected.
Upon returning to Town Hall, they each took seats on the floor in a semicircle around June. Wes was very, very drowsy, but it was clear that an afternoon nap wasn’t an option. He pulled up his legs, wrapped his arms around his shins, and rested his chin on his right kneecap. Perhaps story time would be brief.
June lifted a hand and beckoned at someone. She had her head tilted and chin tucked, her lips pulled wide in a closed-mouth smile. It was an expression of loving indulgence, and Wes sensed that this was the closest they had all gotten so far to seeing what lay under her veneer of calculated geniality.
The person who answered her call was Violet. She dropped to the floor beside June—flopped down, like a child, or a puppy leaning into a belly rub—and placed her head in June’s lap. June brushed strands of long, light brown hair off Violet’s scarred forehead. “Tired?” she said softly, looking down into that horrifically disfigured face, and Violet said “Yes” out of her mangled mouth.
“Where to start?” June said. She was still gazing down at Violet, but her voice, louder now, was addressing the group. “I could begin with the extermination or the rezoning. I could begin with my parents, how it was they gave up their vestments and decided to raise me out here. Or I could start with the day we founded Ruby City. They’re all good stories. They’re all part of the big story.
“I’ve been thinking about this moment for a month. Ever since Andy got me the manifest for this OLE group and told me what he knew about this excursion. Why it’s special. And that very day, I imagined us all here, and I pictured what I might say to you, how I’d begin to tell our story and what I’d say to make you see why this is how things have to be, and again and again I return to Violet.”
Now she looked up.
“And what I’ve said, each of the times I’ve begun this speech in my mind, is this: If you want to understand what the world is like these days, you should look at Violet.”
Violet’s Story
I know some of what you know about life out here. What you’ve been told. We have occasional feed access. There’s a spot we know a few hours northeast of here, and it’s close enough to a gap in the TerraVibra to pick up a faint signal. So we check in now and again, and Andy’s filled us in over the years, too. Sometimes you’ve got to laugh about it. We sit together just like this and have fellowship just like this, and we look around at each other and ask, “Are you sure you’re here? Are you sure I’m here?” Because the feeds say we’re not. Or you dig a bit deeper, you go into the web’s backwoods, and there’s whispering—satellite footage of villages like ours posted on Chinese IPs, or maybe some agri-contractor comments on a message board that he got held up by a band of outlaws and the company hushed it up. But this is all part of the lie. A way of enabling the lie. Most people won’t believe the surface story that hardly no one lives out-of-zone. Not if you’ve got a lick of common sense. But there’s a second layer of story that’ll satisfy most people, and if you don’t think your government and the people who control your government shape that narrative, too, you’re a fool. And the way it works is that they let slip just a bit of what’s bad and scary, and they know that most people will stop there and won’t want to see the rest of it. It’s hard enough imagining that anyone is trying to survive out here. It’s scary to think that a pack of masked men could overcome a cargo truck, that there are men enough out here to form a pack that could form a plan like that. Imagine if your people back home knew what you all know now. Imagine if they could see this town. Imagine if they could see the life we’ve made. They might be afraid, or even angry. Or they might feel hope. And it’s the hope that’s dangerous.
I’m sorry. I’m getting abstract.
I was talking about Violet. And talking about Violet makes me angry. It makes me give speeches instead of telling stories. Isn’t that right, dear? You don’t have to listen to all of this again, my love. You can go find Vic, if you want. Tell her she can take away the dinner things. If everyone’s done, that is. Are you? All done?
There’ll be a big feast tonight. Your bellies won’t be empty so long as you’re here. I promise you that much.
OK. Good, then. Well. Where was I?
Violet. Of course.
I gave her that name. It’s been suggested to me a few times over the years that the name is an unkindness, a mockery of her. I think that says more about the people doing the suggesting than it does me, that they can’t imagine a tormented child would be deserving of a sweet name. At any rate, I called her Violet because the first time I saw her—found her is what it really was—she was sleeping in a bed of purple flowers. She couldn’t have been older than seven or eight, though I thought her younger at first, because she was small for her age. I was young myself. Not yet twenty. My parents and I were traveling west along what had been Highway 176, just wandering, gathering plant samples for my father’s work and seeing what there was to see. It was the only life I’d ever known, but even so I’d call it a strange time, a quiet time. People lay low then. You didn’t see many on the road, and the ones you saw were wary, they weren’t looking to take you in or be your friend. Big groups drew the wrong kind of attention from in-zone, unless you had some special arrangement. And those special arrangements came with their own cost.