Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (39 page)

Tomorrow,
I told myself. Tomorrow I’d find the courage to go see her.

The opulence of my upbringing came back in a flash. My mother’s home was more a compound than a dwelling, with tall brick walls that faced Nebraska Avenue and had been topped with broken glass. A wrought-iron gate swung slowly while I waited, and before I had even mounted the front steps to the door, her butler had opened it, stepping outside to keep me from getting too close.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I couldn’t hear you clearly through the intercom. What did you say your name was, and what business do you have with Mrs. Wendell?”

“Just tell her I knew her son. I go by my nickname, Scout.”

“Scout.”
He said it the same way you’d look at a bug, unsure if you should just let it crawl away or stomp on it. “One moment.”

A few minutes later someone came to the door. She was older than I remembered, and her hair had gone completely white so that as she stared from behind thick glasses, it gave me the odd sensation that a stranger had taken over my mother’s body. Still, something in me shifted. I didn’t know why, because I hadn’t spoken with her in years, but I felt my insides begin to slide, like they had all softened and melted at the edges, and for the first time since my return, it felt like everything would be OK.

“Can I help you?” she said. “I’m told that you knew my son. Is he dead?” She said it with such detachment that it surprised me.

“No. He’s not dead. He’s me, Mother. Oscar.”

A look came over her face. You’d think it wouldn’t
be possible for someone so pale to turn white, but she managed, and with one hand she grabbed the doorframe while clutching at her chest with the other.

“Oscar?”

“Yeah. I…

She grabbed me. It was the second surprise of the morning, because for the life of me I didn’t recall ever having been hugged by my mother, and yet there it was, her holding on with such force that for a moment I thought she’d knock the wind out of me.

“They all said you’d died. You didn’t keep in touch and so I thought you were dead, because we heard so many stories about what happened over there.”

“I made it. I’m home.”

She hugged me some more and then cried for about five minutes, and then we walked into the sitting room, where she stopped to wipe her tears away, which was when the woman I remembered came back. Her voice went cold. She sat on a chair across from me and straightened her skirt before replacing the glasses and fixing me with a stare that I’d never forget.

“Your father died without knowing where you were; he died assuming that you were gone.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“Did you come here for money? He left you a lot of money, but I’m guessing that you’ve already spent most of it on drugs.”

“I didn’t come here for money, and most of what he gave me is still there. I just came to let you know that I was OK, and to say that I was sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

I thought about how to answer her. What
was
I sorry
for? For wasting the time I’d had with my father, for spending most of it stealing from both of them or fighting, or for being, in general, such a selfish prick that it had taken a war to make me figure it out? It finally registered that it was a question that had no answer, so I shrugged and looked at the floor.

“I guess I’m sorry for everything. I should have stayed in touch, and it was wrong for me to not let you know I was alive.”

Her face softened some, but I could tell she’d regained control. There wouldn’t be another hug. That had been a lapse in sanity as far as she was concerned, but although she didn’t know it, that hug would be the last good thing I remembered about her, the one moment that stayed with me, even after she died a year later.

That was the thing. I’d been scared to see her because up until then, I’d assumed that it had been up to me to make everything better, to make up for everything I had done. But that thinking had been all wrong. Nobody could make up anything to her; it was the way she’d been wired—to think that in D.C. society you just didn’t do certain things, and once you had, forget it. You’d never be let back inside. And I held a special place among the fallen, because I had invented
new
ways to offend her, ones that involved so many drugs and so many girls—some the daughters of her closest friends—that there had never been any hope for atonement. So if the goal had been to change her opinion of me, then I
should
have been scared and dreaded the meeting, because no words in the universe could have been assembled in the right order to make her change her opinion of me—to get her to forget what I had done, or let bygones be bygones. It was only
much later, maybe after she had gone, that it became clear: I’d done exactly what needed to be done. It made me feel better to know that by the time she died, I’d taken care of my problems and gone to see her, to try and make it up, even though I knew there
was
no making up for things; I’d made the effort, and that was what counted.

For what seemed like hours she went on about my father, and it got to me. Nobody needed to point out that I hadn’t been there when it happened, or that the last conversation we’d had was for shit; I knew that. And she
knew
that I knew that, which made it a thousand times worse, because I had to just sit there and take it, knowing that she was right. It occurred to me to run, but I couldn’t do that, since this was a sort of penance, my sitting there and giving her the chance to describe what a shithead I was, a punishment that I’d evaded for as long as I could but that, in the end, found me anyway. There was nothing else I could do. He was gone, and for the rest of my life I’d regret the way we’d left things, but I had to figure that if my dad ever spoke to my friends in the afterlife, he’d understand why I’d done the things I had. At the very least he’d know I’d finally straightened up.

When the topic finally shifted to my facial scars, I explained what had happened, and she sunk into a horrified silence. I almost thought she’d hug me again, but the moment passed. I stood, taking advantage of the respite, and she walked me to the door.

“Where are you off to now? Hookers? Go and get drunk?”

“Actually, I’m heading to Thailand. I met a girl and she’s waiting for me there.”

“How nice.”

“No, really, I think you’d like her. I met her in the war.”

“Give me a break, Oscar. There aren’t any women in wars these days; the only ones they have are leftovers, high-ranking officers or those…
Oh dear God.
”

I turned and walked down the stairs, smiling as I left, and called over my shoulder, “I’m serious. You’d like her. When I get there, I’ll send you my contact info so you can fly out and stay with us for a while. You always said that Thailand—”

But the door slammed before I could finish. It was true: she’d always liked Thailand. That was where she and Dad had gone for their honeymoon.

Now that I’d done what I’d come to do, there was nothing in D.C. to keep me there. As it turned out, she never made it to Thailand again, and later I got a letter from one of her friends that she’d died angry. Alone.

I hopped into a cab and had the driver stop at my apartment so I could grab a few things and then hit the airport. It took a while to find my passport. By the time I got back, he’d downloaded the day’s news, and he handed me the reader so I could see my picture on the leading story, “One Last Dispatch,” by Phil Erikson.

“You’re famous,” the driver said.

“Great.”

When I handed it back to him, he gave me a look as though I was crazy. “You’re not going to read it?”

“I don’t need to read it. I lived it.”

“Where to?”

“National Airport.”

Driving down George Washington Parkway was one
of the best moments of my life. Not because something happened or occurred to me, but because
nothing
happened or occurred to me, only a general sense that the war was really over and that as soon as I stepped on the plane, I’d be shutting the door on a part of my life that I didn’t care to see again. It was sunny. Joggers moved along the bike trail near the river, and alcohol-burner motorcycles flashed by every few seconds or so, making me feel as though everyone else was in a hurry, concerned about getting somewhere on time, while for me time had become something meaningless, a thing usually to be endured or feared, except that for the moment it was enjoyable. Sophie might not be in Thailand yet, and it would take a while for my flight to connect and land in Bangkok, but who cared? There was a sense of
everything-will-be-all-right
in the air, and I breathed it in.

By the time I bought my ticket, checked my bag, and boarded the plane, six hours had elapsed. It was nearly dinnertime, and if I managed it, I’d sleep through the first leg of the flight. It couldn’t have been more perfect. But then a pair of flight attendants saw me from the other end of the cabin and whispered something to each other. After I had seated myself, one of them came over.

“Are you the guy from the news story today?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh my God, you’re like a celebrity. What was it like?”

“What was what like?”

“The war. We heard a lot about it for a while, but then other things started happening, and now the Chinese and Russians are at it. So
what was it like
?”

I wanted to scream at her. For a second my hand
clenched into a fist, preparing itself to slam into her windpipe and knock her back into the seats, wipe that smile away, because she had just proven herself an idiot. It might have been honest curiosity, and it probably was, but that didn’t matter, because she had just erased the entire day, robbed me of the warm feeling, one that I hadn’t had in years and that now was sure never to come back, so the only thing to do was to ruin her day with violence.

“It was awful,” I said instead. “You couldn’t shower for months on end, and you had to take dumps in your suit so that by the end of a rotation on the line, your ass had developed all sorts of skin infections that no amount of medication helps.”

“Ew,” she said.

“Exactly. And that’s not even the worst part. Do you even know how hard it is to shoot children when they’re running away? I mean, they’re such small targets. and I’ll be damned if they can’t run just as fast as an adult. I swear it took twice as many rounds to take down your average kid as it did a woman, but that’s if you include pregnant women, who were really easy to hit.”

Her smile faded and she stepped away, glancing back at her friend, who was still smiling from the front. “That’s really sick. You killed pregnant women?”

“Lots of them. You killed anything that moved.”

I got the best service during that flight. The attendants left me alone unless I wanted something, and always made sure that I got a soda as soon as I asked for it, and I never regretted anything I’d said to the one girl—because to hell with her. To hell with all of them.

A day later we circled over Bangkok and I nearly lost it. Out the window I saw the city, its towering buildings
visible from some miles out, bordered on every side by lush green fields, so green that they reminded me of something. Then I felt it all shift: it wasn’t a passenger plane; it was a drone, and the kid was strapped in next to me as we circled around the Almaty airfield, turning west for Tashkent. General Urqhart waved at me from the ground, and for some reason I could see him clearly, saw his mouth move as he tried to tell me something, and then his face melted to be replaced by a Russian genetic’s, and he slowly raised a carbine to point it at my face.

When I came back, the plane had landed and emptied, and my hand gripped the flight attendant’s wrist, twisting her arm to the point where she cried out.

I let go before it snapped. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”

“Get off the plane before we call the cops.” She screamed at me:
“Get off, you freak!”

I’ve avoided air travel ever since; you never knew what would set you off.

It was the fourth week, and still no Sophie. A typhoon warning had been issued and I watched while the locals scurried along, tying their boats to docks on the Chao Phraya as its muddy water turned white in gusts of wind. The lights flickered off, but from my balcony I could still see, because the sun hadn’t set, although thick clouds made it gloomy enough that I couldn’t see far. Tomorrow would be another Sunday. Maybe she’d be there, but it was getting harder to hope every week, and each trek to the lobby to wait for her seemed to make the hole in my gut grow larger. I’d seen a genetic or two already and
called out to them, but each time they’d scurried away in fear, running for the nearest alley. The concierge explained it all when I asked. He said that Americans disguised as tourists had been showing up, and that the Thai government thought they were hit squads sent to eliminate as many of the girls as they could find before the assassins disappeared over the border into Burma.

In the dusk and without any lights, the city became like a ghost town, and I imagined that every building was empty, the spires of high-rises vacated to create a theme park of desolation. I couldn’t see the port from the hotel, but I’d gone there every day to check for the Korean ship, cursing myself for not having made sure to remember its name. But it had happened so quickly in Bandar. There hadn’t been time even to say goodbye before she left, and then I’d had to board my ship, so it had never occurred to me to take note of the name. The dockhands had gotten so used to my asking every time I showed up that they greeted me with either “no, no Koreans today” or “yeah, yeah, over there, go check,” which would send me running. Two weeks before, I’d found a ship that might have been the one, rusted so badly that its name flaked off in chunks, but its crew had disappeared, and the next time I returned, it was gone, so there hadn’t been a chance to know for sure.