Brian snapped back into the present, nauseated. The experience of his father had flown off the old, fragile paper directly into his brain, as if he was there with Sam, feeling the horrific revelation.
One’s normal reading of the discovery of the Merkers salt mines, which held gold, art, and some of the first evidence of the depth of Nazi atrocities, did not give the full import of being there. He mopped his forehead with his T-shirt, and got to his feet, shaken. Yes, of course: After that experience, anyone would want to stop war—and that was far from the worst of it. Compared to the discovery of conditions at Bergen-Belsen a few weeks later, compared to a day of combat in which soldiers saw their buddies blown to bits, or parents their children killed, this was nothing. Brian didn’t know if he could stand reading Sam’s next entry while in this new, strange state of mind.
But he had heard about the war all his life, at second- and third-hand; these atrocities were common knowledge. New genocides occurred constantly, worldwide, a steady, somber note beneath humanity’s bustling, forward-leaning gloss of civilization.
Was he inured, somehow, to the outrage and astonishment that stunned Sam in that salt mine? Was that why he lacked—even mocked—Jill’s antiwar fervor?
Jill was always talking about ending war for all time, but then, she was a bleeding-heart liberal, who deeply believed in the goodness of humanity. In fact, before he’d come up to the attic, they’d had quite a discussion about the Q-Schools, which would grow from artificial DNA and cure the world of war, never mind those who didn’t want them.
Brian was a cynic. It had always seemed so easy to defeat her arguments, to ridicule her utopias, although while she was working on her doctorate, it had become more of a challenge. She had studies and statistics at her fingertips, a great and unfair lot of them. History, however, was squarely on his side.
Brian reread the last few lines. Wink and Sam had to make what work? The question sprang a lock deep inside of him, one of those things from childhood, when he’d overheard his parents arguing.…
Closing the notebook, he placed it back in the box. There were several boxes of material, and he carried them all to the top of the stairs, his sweat making little plops onto the dusty cardboard. Each drop spread out in the dust like a tiny bomb crater landing, the dirt landscapes where his beloved little green Army men had attacked, rallied, and moved strategically across the creek. He’d carried them around most of his childhood, setting them up and knocking them down with incoming rocks. Spacies had taken over that mental space in most kids’ psyches years ago. They battled not one another but ignorance, greed, and oppression.
He went back and got the instruments, turned off the lights, and stepped onto the landing. The air, a mere ninety degrees, washed over him with marvelous coolness. He remembered to turn around and close the attic door.
After assembling his finds at the bottom of the stairs, he pushed open the kitchen door just a crack. Nobody was in the kitchen. Good. He hoped to smuggle the saxophone out the back door, and then somehow get it into his truck, without Jill noticing it, and then the boxes.
Whens galloped into the kitchen. “Uncle Brian! Come and play with us! What’s that?”
“What’s what?” asked Jill, as she approached down the hallway.
Brian shoved the saxophone under the table. He held one finger over his mouth. “Shhh.”
As Jill came into the room, Brian opened the other case. “Look, Jill. It’s your old trombone!”
She looked at him suspiciously. “You know I never liked playing the trombone. I really liked playing the saxophone.” She bent down, looked under the table, and pulled out the saxophone case. She sat on a chair and opened it, picked up the tarnished instrument. “Look, Whens. This belonged to Grandpa.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “How do you play it?”
“Well…” She took the mouthpiece from its separate compartment, then searched the entire case. “You can’t, without a reed.”
“That’s right,” said Brian. “I’m going to get it spiffed up and working again.”
“And then you’ll bring it back.” It was a command.
“I played this saxophone too.”
“I played it better.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” His own kids were in the kitchen now, with Cindy and Abbie. He really wanted to say “Finders, keepers,” but it would be such a bad example for the children.
He smiled. “Jill, why don’t you show them how to play the trombone? I’m sure it still works.” The kids dragged Jill and the trombone out of the kitchen; soon he heard the blatting, sliding notes of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” issue from a thankfully distant part of the house.
Fortified with iced tea, Brian began to clean up the sax, polishing the nickel until it shone. In some places, the metal was pitted. The pads were in bad repair; many of them were missing felt and the leather had been eaten by some strong-jawed insect.
As he worked, he recalled sitting on the stairs one night in the wee hours, watching his father play. The radio, records, and live music of his father were a hardwired part of his nocturnal life as a child.
His father would put a record by Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, or Ben Webster on the turntable and play along about ten times. Then he’d try to play it without the record until he faltered. Maddeningly, he’d put the needle on the part he was trying to master again and again, until it was perfect, and then he’d try to play the whole thing again. Even though it looked and sounded tedious, it fascinated Brian so much that he’d taken saxophone in band.
Over the years, the sound of distant jazz at night became as familiar, as soothing, as the sound of wind combing the trees. Now, when he found it hard to sleep, he’d switch the twenty-four-hour jazz station on low and lie on the living room couch. It always worked.
He hadn’t mentioned his other recurring nightmare to Megan. In that one, he was flying a bomber over, improbably, Cambodia, one of the most peaceful countries in the world, bombing the daylights out of it. Until he himself went down in flames while on his way back to his base in Vietnam.
It was horrifyingly real. As real, actually, as being at the Merkers salt mines in April 1945.
Cindy stood in front of him. “Head in the clouds again? Time to get to work. Do you even know how to play it?”
“Kind of. I played it in high school band. I never told you?”
“Jill said you were awful and would drive us out of the apartment and the neighbors would call the police.”
“Just an underhanded ploy to try and get me to leave it here. Pretty unfair, if you ask me.”
Brian put the saxophone back into the case and carried it out to the truck. Then he went back to the kitchen and opened the door to the attic stairs and picked up the first box of his father’s journals. He paused for a moment, struggling. Jill would want to hoard this too, if she saw it. He’d bring it back as soon as he’d read everything. How long could it take to read this stuff?
The coast was clear. He went outside with his haul and slipped it into the backseat of the truck. As he slammed the door, he sighed. He had to tell her.
He went back to the kitchen, where Jill stood on a stepstool, rummaging through a cupboard. “Where would the paper cups be?”
“Jill, remember Dad’s journals?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I just put them in my truck. I’m going to read them.”
“What? I’m going to read them.” She slammed the cupboard door, climbed down, and leaned back against the counter, a wild, lost look on her face.
Even afraid? wondered Brian. “When?”
“Soon. Any day now. Maybe tonight.”
“That would be great. Come over to the apartment. We’ll order a pizza and read them together.”
“I don’t—” She shook her head.
“What’s wrong?”
“I— Oh, I really don’t have time to read them right away. Take good care of them, okay?”
“Are you kidding?” Once again, there was something she was not telling him. “Jill, do you remember—” He was going to mention the weirdly haunting space under the loose attic floorboard.
“Mommy! Help!” Whens had suspended himself upside down by the knees from a crossbar on the swing set.
“Be right there,” she yelled out the window.
“Jill—”
“Look, don’t worry about it.”
“But—”
She snarled—Brian could only think of it as a snarl, flung over her shoulder as she ran down the back stairs—“I said, never mind!”
With Jill, that was that. He and Megan planned to sit down and try to hash things out with her, but this certainly was not a good time to mention it.
* * *
Zoe, upstairs, was hard at work.
It had been a day of awakening when Zoe realized that she could hear her mother even when she couldn’t see her. Using her markers, she could write her mother’s sound when she was in another room, when she was at work. Sometimes she was baroque, sometimes she was rock ’n’ roll, sometimes she was a cello concerto or a funny cartoon piece, rushing fast toward a roaring conclusion.
She could hear her father too, and write him, but sometimes she didn’t want to listen, because her father was complicated to listen to. His music was strange and sometimes even unpleasant, so that it might make Zoe sick to her stomach. She guessed she couldn’t really hear everyone, at least not all of them.
Bitsy was just too simple. Happy, all primary colors, the sound of water burbling over smooth rocks in a creek, an unending roar of good stuff.
Whens?
Whens was distant, like a star. His explosions of color were symmetrical and so intense that they sometimes gave Zoe a headache. But he was always there, there, there, like daylight, the sun-star come close, like he was bathing everyone in light but he didn’t know it. One Christmas Eve her Crazy Aunts, which was what she and the other cousins called them, had taken everyone to midnight Mass at their old Episcopal church on Connecticut, even though they never went there any other time. Aunt Jill handed her Whens, and Whens was six months old and kind of heavy but not too.
The service was most soothing to Zoe, and deeply beautiful. Candles flickered in wall sconces and the organ music was so magnificent that tears rolled down her face.
Whens was just as deeply happy. Zoe had been afraid that the baby would wail, or squirm, and disturb her enjoyment of the music, but he just stared in wonder at everything around him and Zoe could hear him absorbing everything, like a reverse kind of music. That was when Zoe fell in love with Whens, who before that had just been another boring baby. And after that night, Whens started giving off that music, like a switch had been flipped inside of him, like he was suddenly himself and knew it.
It was really, really cool when the change came to all the kids in the world.
Zoe would always remember it. It happened on a Tuesday night, at least for her, but for other kids it was Wednesday morning, or Tuesday afternoon.
She was lying in bed, almost asleep, when she saw a light on the ceiling, and heard a brilliant music, so brilliant that toes and fingers and even her hair ached with it, brilliant beyond beautiful.
She got up to see what the light was, moving through skeins of color and sound, and saw that it was her classbook, all lit up.
Picking it up and holding it in front of her face, she was profoundly transformed. The voices were all singing, and she sang with them, adding her own notes now and then, listening for a few seconds, then joining in.
She didn’t know how long this happened. But the next day, kids started talking to one another and they talked so much in their own languages and worked so hard that words started meaning the same thing to them as they did to other kids. It was kind of like swimming in the ocean, being pushed here and there with words and meaning and sense, and the words were ground down to sand and re-formed into new words that meant the same thing to everyone, until one morning you understood what everybody was saying, you could stand up, you were on land and could walk where you wanted to go. It was like that. But those were the simple early times and then the words got so you could say more complicated things. They called their talk Zozo. Whenever someone started talking in their own language, lots of kids would shout “Zozo!”
One day when she was much younger, just six, and missed her mother, she had walked out of school and listened for her. She had a kids’ pass for the Metro and just went on this bus and that and sometimes Mom got faint but then Zoe would find a bus going the right way. And she walked into her mother’s meeting, just opened the door where her sound boomed and soared and Mom saw her and stopped talking. She stared at Zoe. She said, “Excuse me, that’s my little girl,” which made Zoe mad, because she was not little, and then Mom took her out to lunch and asked how she knew where she was and why she was not in school and there was a big flurry of unpleasant stuff and she found out that it was not good to just go wherever you were hearing said you ought to go. So she found out when it was okay and when it was not.
She had only been two when she last saw Grandpa Dance. They told her she was too little to remember, but she did. He used to grab her up, in the living room downstairs, while he played those jazz records, and swing her around the room as she shrieked and laughed. He took her out in the garden and taught her names: peony, tulip, hollyhock, lily-of-the valley, which were poisonous. He told her about Ohio, and riding on the Queen Elizabeth, and played any song she wanted on his saxophone for her, and the songs were always stretched with lots of notes and more interesting than hearing “The Erie Canal” on her record player. He’d play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and it never sounded the same twice, yet she always recognized it somehow.
She remembered running out the door screaming when her daddy told her that Grandpa Sam might not come back, and his big footsteps behind her as he ran and caught her before she could run across the street in front of a car.
Now that she was older, she could see him more strongly, more clearly, in music. He was half a rainbow. The other half was missing. She could still feel him somewhere looking for the rest of the rainbow. She dreamed of him as a walking rainbow with legs and arms and a hat and a saxophone, like a cartoon, but the rainbow had eyes and they were his.
Now the other half of the rainbow was here: Grandma Dance. She and Abbie and Whens were big enough to keep the secret, probably. Maybe. Bitsy was definitely a blabber. So little that nobody would believe her, though. Zoe knew what that was like.
Now that Zoe was older, a whole new stream flowed through her, especially when she came here to Crazy Aunt Jill’s house. There were a million sounds and colors here, things she just could not write down no matter how hard she tried, because it radiated from everything, from vases and furniture and walls, and most strongly from the attic. The ballroom was the quietest place, really, like a sunlit meadow in the middle of a forest, and its music was more focused, and older, and clearer. Her aunts were nuts, of course, although it was more than that. Crazy Aunt Megan was crazy in a different way from Crazy Aunt Jill. Crazy Aunt Jill was like a lot of beautiful marbles all rolling around on the floor, sometimes clacking together with glassy sounds, and there were different levels, and the marbles could roll upward, defying gravity, and then back down. Crazy Aunt Megan was a smooth sheet of glass that you could see things through, things like the circuit board of a computer, brightly colored and precise and organized, but that you worried about what would happen to it all if the glass broke. There were an awful lot of colors and sounds at Crazy Aunt Jill’s house that could break the glass of Crazy Aunt Megan, which was why, Zoe supposed, she wasn’t there often. Her dad was kind of like that too, but he was more like melting glass, and the colors of the glass were melting together and swirling around and then they would stop and he would just be in one pattern for a while. Dad didn’t seem to mind all that. He wanted more melting, more swirling. But sometimes Dad was way too swirly. That’s what made Zoe sick, like being on a roller coaster. She tried to throw up in very, very private, otherwise they kept taking her to doctors, and they wanted her blood and she was forced to scream about the needles, at least when she’d been little, and they wanted to take pictures of her brain. There was nothing wrong with her, she knew. It was just everybody else.
The other kids called her mom Crazy Aunt Cindy, but that was because she was just so much fun and so funny and made them all laugh. There was nothing crazy about Mom. She was like a long walk through a beautiful garden and she was always working in the garden too, like she was the garden and the worker in the garden, planting new flowers, planting herself, and dusting off her hands.
There were frightening musics too, that came from other kids, from other people in the world, and then sometimes too from people she saw downtown, maybe in a nice restaurant where she had to really behave herself (though that had become easy years ago). She’d heard a lot of scary music in those places, from men and women wearing really nice clothes, and the times when that happened she actually threw up, which was pretty boring for her, it happened so often, and upsetting to everyone around her, so they didn’t take her to restaurants much anymore. They just said that she was nervous and had a reflux problem, but it wasn’t that at all.
Zoe and the new friends she found on Q talked in notes and colors. Some of them, like Indians, and Arabs, thought in colors more naturally than they did in Western music, and had different forms of notation, which Zoe learned readily. They used cool words like jins, and maqam, and although there were musics she could not play on the instruments around her, she could at least hear them, and now she could write them down and share them. So she was very glad to find that the complexity she longed for when composing had been thought of before, by other people, and that she was not alone.
It was very important not to be alone, and she had been alone since Grandpa left. Finding other kids like her was the happiest thing that had ever happened to her, other than playing her beloved instruments.
So all day, while the adults did their boring things, Zoe was enthralled to be able to play violin in the ballroom.
Fallen bits of the plaster ceiling lay on the herringbone floor, which needed sanding and waxing, and it needed a new metal beam underneath to hold it up. According to her parents, there was so much work to fixing up the ballroom further that they had no idea if they’d ever do it.
The windows were tall and had half-circles over them with thin pieces of wood like the rays of the sun holding the glass. Old furniture covered with sheets had been pushed over to the walls, spoiling the acoustics. She had tried moving some pieces to different places, but it didn’t help.
She had, though, discovered a spot at what she had decided was the front of the ballroom; Jill had even mentioned that they’d found an old photo in the attic and that was where a small stage had raised the musicians a few feet higher. She dragged a chair and stood on it as she played; then the sounds echoed back, absolutely beautiful.
She especially liked Vivaldi, and was right now playing Summer. She played her part very slowly, because it was quite complicated, but heard all the other parts as she played. She wanted the whole world to hear how beautiful it was. So much was wasted. Hardly anyone else could hear it. Sometimes this made her so deeply sad that she cried. At the same time, she cried because she was deeply happy that at least she could hear it.
Zoe was often distressed that other children did not feel the same joy about music. And that they could not hear the music of other humans, not to mention the music of a tulip, or were even unable to meld the perfect with the imperfect musically, for that wide view of everything in one great music, which filled her with light.
She never told anybody else about the filled-with-light feelings. She could show them, with music, and yet her control of her instruments, the violin and the piano, was imperfect, as far as she was concerned, despite how adults raved. That was only because of her age; she knew that she had a long way to go to reach her own goals. Presently, writing her music was the only way to actually transmit that light.
Unfortunately, no one else knew how to read her music in its entirety.
On her classbook, though, she’d met a girl in China who was the same as her. The classbook translated their spoken language, and they also spoke in Zozo. They both understood that people were music and that the parts of them they tried to hide, even the parts of them that they didn’t know about themselves, were music. But each used a different method to write their music. The Chinese girl, Dawei, sometimes used equations hyperlinked to her notations. When she tried to explain them, Zoe realized the equation’s similarities to her colors, with their infinite hues.
There was also Adam, twelve, in a small town in Cameroon. He too had colors for sounds, but they had a different correlation than Zoe’s. He spoke French and some other African language, and again the translator helped, along with their new language. Adam used a lot of drums. The drums themselves, in all their varieties, often comprised an entire piece in Adam’s repertoire. Zoe imported many of Adam’s sounds into pieces she composed on her classbook.
These, and other kids like him, were Zoe’s friends, much more than the kids around her in school. Her schoolmates made fun of her, and called her a snob. She minded at first, a long time ago, but now she didn’t care. Since she was little, she’d had an imaginary older brother, Paul, who was very kind. She often heard other kids complain about their brothers, so she was glad Paul was kind, and fun too.
She wanted, someday, to be able to teach other kids about music. She wrote her heart out for them and put her pieces out there, on Q, the writing that had no physical manifestation except perhaps in people. She could make music out of people.
As she thought all these things, she was playing, and playing, and playing whatever came into her mind, Vivaldi having been left far behind.
When her father stuck his head in the door and told her it was time to go home, Zoe protested, “I just got started.”
Her dad got a funny look on his face. “It’s almost six, sweetie. You’ve been playing since eleven. Did you get yourself anything to eat?”
Zoe shook her head. She carefully put her violin away. “My fingers do hurt, I guess.”
* * *
Bette, up in the attic, had heard someone stumbling around earlier in the day. Listening in, later, she discovered that Brian had taken Sam’s notebooks, his saxophone, and the trombone.
Without any eavesdropping equipment, she had also felt, as much as heard, otherworldly violin music so sweet it almost made her weep. For some reason, it reminded her of Sam.
But she had been weeping a lot, anyway. She wandered the house when it was empty, and at night, trying to recover her own lost past, her own lost life, wondering if what she had been a part of had been worth the sacrifice.
The threat that had sent her timestream-hopping was still here, although now its origin was not her former employer, the CIA. It seemed as if the CIA had forgotten about the Dances completely. Perhaps in this timestream, the Dances had never been the subject of intense, crippling scrutiny. Bette, at overwhelming cost to herself, had sacrificed those growing-up years for their safety, so perhaps it had been worth it.
But this threat was from a source more mysterious, and thus more unsettling.
She nudged the little window a few inches higher, but with trepidation. Someone might notice the open window, although it was mostly hidden by an ornate gable. It crossed her mind that maybe she wanted to be discovered.
She turned on her vent fan, closed the window, and recalled the discussion Brian and Jill had had about her Q-Schools earlier in the day while she had somewhat guiltily eavesdropped. What right did anyone have to distribute such schools—that is, if the design even worked?
Jill had asked Brian, with some heat, what gave old men the right to mire nations and all their treasure and lives in horrific, endless war?
Not a new question. The answer had always been, because they had the power. Bette tapped a cigarette out of her pack and lit it.
War was just a biological tradition, according to Hadntz, one that could be broken, a terrible dream that humanity could wake from, if properly inoculated, via education. Inoculation could be many layered as well. It might consist of even deeper biological agents, akin, say, to vaccines for polio and smallpox, or any other world-changing drug. Disease, like war, was a natural biological occurrence, but that didn’t mean that people had to suffer from curable disease. These Q-Schools, like the Device, were a product of the human mind, as were war, commerce, medicine, and literacy.
She and Sam had endlessly questioned the rightness of the self-reproducing Device, but had never found an exit from the problem—or the promise—its mere existence posed. Unlike its cousin, nuclear energy, it worked directly on the functioning of the mind, of collective consciousness as reflected by the constant feedback of news, education, and communication in all forms. The stuff that informed cultural-racial constructs, the roots of power, the biological evolution of the human brain, and its inherent plasticity were all laid bare by the Device, like rock strata revealed by a receding river.
What would true, radical democracy, put in place virtually overnight, look like? For instance, if girls in certain countries attended these Q-Schools, who would defend them? Armies of other children, perhaps? Child Soldiers for Education? Mothers and Fathers for Education? Would their former oppressors change, overnight? Who knew what might happen?
Bette was indeed in a world that was different, and, in myriad ways, better, than many spun from the timestream in which JFK been shot, despite its problems. Without the Cold War, with which politicians and manufacturers could justify staggering expenses, the wealth of this world was more equally distributed. The marvelous rail system was just one tiny facet of the differences. But one of the roots of war—extreme religious persuasion, which by definition bypassed reason and conferred great power on some—still existed here.
Bette let her imagination run wild. These Q-Schools could, conceivably, lure fundamentalists of all kinds—those who used religion to control others—strip them down to childhood, and give them the gift of neuroplasticity. Help them—Bette grinned and closed her eyes, hearing herself and Sam, arguing again through long summer evenings down by the creek—understand that true religion was a matter of personal choice and conscience, an experience of natural transcendence, rather than a tool, like totalitarianism, just more subtle, with which to hijack the unwary.
Perhaps just as important, these environments might provide a cure from strokes, a reorganization of the brain, neurogenesis. People might even take month-long neuroplasticity vacations to rediscover the joy of learning and pursue new, enriching paths of study.
It didn’t really matter. It was out of her hands, and, probably, had never been in her hands. It was out of Hadntz’s hands too. The Device had been born, survived infancy, and was entering another of its own developmental stages. It was human, and was taking humanity with it.
* * *
Jill stood on the porch and waved as Brian and his family left, then dropped into the rocking chair and crossed her arms. She probably couldn’t keep this up much longer. Brian had the notebooks, which probably had something about what their parents had been up to. Maybe all the information about the Game Board was there—if, as she suspected, the Game Board was actually the Device that that caller had demanded. She was curious, herself. What did Megan and Brian think? What had happened to them, to their memories. What had lately given them this bug? They’d gone for years—decades—without mentioning that anything strange had happened.
She recalled the menace in the caller’s voice the other night. Maybe she should tell them. Maybe together they could figure something out, do something.
Like what?
Whens ran in through the screen door, which slammed behind him. “I’m hungry. What are you frowning about?”
She grabbed him and put him on her lap. “I’m thinking that I have work to do. But I’m hungry. Do you want to walk over to Bazanno’s and have a pizza?”
“Yeah! They have Slingers there.”
“But not for you. Ready?”
* * *
Later that night, when Jill opened her school-planning folder, she noticed that some of her tabs—half-inch, flexible, translucent squares that one pressed to the Q-screen to transfer information—were missing. She’d planned to properly integrate the Q-School plan into the Future Possibilities section tonight.
That was the problem with tabs—they were too small; easy to lose. Manfred could have licked them up. Surely someone without dogs, children, or a portable office had designed them. She searched the carpet, went through all her papers, folders, the top of the desk—and after a few hours, finally fell into bed, too tired to look any longer.
* * *
In her garret, her fortress, Bette went over the plans for the school seed many, many times, wondering what it might truly do.
She Q’d it to Hadntz, not expecting a response—or, if any, just feedback. Advice. She had no idea where the woman was. Then she returned it to Jill’s rather haphazard notebook.
To her surprise, she got a very quick reply:
Good work. Manufacture in Kyoto set up.
Estimated time of manufacture: ten days.
Immediate worldwide release and distribution scheduled.
For the life of her, though, Bette couldn’t raise another damned word from Hadntz.
* * *
The minute Jill got up the next morning—well, after some very strong coffee—she resumed her search for the tabs. When she opened her notebook, they were there in their little slots.
“I could have sworn,” Jill said, then shrugged.
Relieved, she quickly transferred the information to her International Schools presentation.