Underground Airlines(100)

Barton’s arm, though, lacked the conviction of his voice. He raised the knife slowly, creeping toward Bridge’s fat throat, uncertain of his angle. Maris held the shotgun, impatient.

“No,” I said. “No; stop.”

Maris looked down at me, confused. Barton, though, he was nodding. He understood—he thought he understood. “Do you want the gun?” he asked me. “Or the knife?” He didn’t wait. He lowered his wicked blade, handed it to me where I was crouching on the floor, the thin wire still trailing out behind me, tethering me to the machine. “Go on, then. Go ahead.”

“No,” I said. I put the weapon down. “Let him go. You have what you wanted. What we wanted. Go on with it. Tell the world. But let this man go.”

Maris looked at me coldly. “Your sympathy is misplaced.”

“He was doing his job.”

“No excuse,” said Maris. “Absolutely not.”

But Barton was not so certain. He looked like the timid young priest he had pretended to be when first I met him, at the Fountain Diner, stammering, apologetic. He lowered his knife. “I’m not…I don’t know,” he said. “How can we let him live? A man like this.”

“A man like this?” I said softly. “What’re you? What’re you?”



When they were gone, when we were alone in the field of corn, Bridge stood up slowly. His pants were untucked, his hair a wild mess. Inside man, desk man. All this adventure was new to him.

“Thank you,” he said. “My God, Victor. Thank you.”

He held out his hand to help me up, but I crawled back up onto the table. I was still hooked up. I was ready to go.

“Mr. Bridge. Do you know how to work this goddamn thing or not?”

I could feel it as it happened. Feel it tearing free of me. Letting go the nerves, nerve by nerve, bursting stars of bright pain flying out along my spine. I screamed, but there was no turning back, there was no way to undo it now. He had grasped it, fished it out with that flat disk and conjured it up, yanked it from my flesh, and I screamed and screamed and everything went black, black as a gunshot, black as a disappearing sun.



When I woke up I was alone.

Bridge was gone. All remnants of that tent were gone, the poles and the canvas, the machines and the generator.

I was alone in the cornfield, lying on my back, aware first of the clot of bandages on my back, the blood seeping around me in a puddle. It was like I had been left behind by aliens. Like I was a fossil from an ancient evaporated sea.

I lay there until I felt I could stand, then I stood until I felt I could walk, then I started off in search of a phone.





3.



Martha’s beloved wasn’t dead. He had been sold offshore. He was in the Special Economic Zone. That’s what I’d discovered on the TorchLight search in Newell’s office.

Samson, being recaptured, after his brief, happy, free life, after falling in love with Martha and fathering Lionel and being found again, suffered the fate of many escapees who are subsequently caught: he was sold, for pennies on the dollar, to the controllers of an oil rig called the High Water working in the SEZ.

The SEZ was created during the Texas War, a nautical territory of the United States to be jointly administered by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. Because the gulf rigs and the oil they bring up are considered of vital national interest, laws have been passed to modify or suspend regulations regarding the treatment of Persons Bound to Labor inside its boundaries. No Franklins out on the waves.

At Bell’s, when we were tempted to misbehave, when we got out of line, and when we cautioned each other—Hush up, now; Don’t be dumb, man—it was always the SEZ we were thinking about. What you trying to do? we’d say. Get your ass sold offshore? In the times of Old Slavery, in Maryland or Virginia, they would trade rumors about the hot hell of the cotton lands; at Bell’s we sweated over the SEZ. It floated in our imaginations then, as I saw it floating terrible now in Martha’s, thinking about the man she loved. A machine island floating on dark water, shrouded in black smoke. A fortress carapaced in scaffolding and metal decks, masted with smokestacks. Gas fires burning orange in its vents, satellite dishes rotating slowly on its towers.

“Might be better,” I said to her, “if he was dead.”

“No,” she said. “No.”

I told her everything. I told her about you, darling. I told her the whole story. Sitting on the thin bedspread in the hotel room, told her about Bell’s and about you, told her about Chicago and about Bridge, told her about Barton and Jackdaw and Dr. Cormer in the field of corn.

About what you said, about two worlds, this world and another one, us now and us later, what we are and what we are going to be.

We’re in Chicago, and I still have never been to Canada. We’re in Chicago, not permanently, but right now. Today. Everything I see I wish that you were seeing. I went to a hot-dog cart for lunch. I ate three hot dogs, thinking of you. I bought one for Lionel, then another one.

And here I am, on an elevator, riding the elevator up to visit a company that makes elevators. Martha and her boy are across the street at a coffee shop called Joey’s. Martha is reading the Chicago Tribune. Lionel is reading the comics and drinking chocolate milk. Martha’s hatchback is directly outside, visible from the front door of the building I’m in, parked in such a way that we can get out quickly if need be. Lionel knows only that we are on an adventure, and that is enough; that is more than enough.