American War(41)

Gaines removed from his breast pocket a gray silk handkerchief and wiped the blood from Sarat’s knuckles.

“Good girl,” he said.

He released her wrist. Up close, Sarat could better see the pockmarks in his face. They put more years on him, and yet he did not look as aged nor as tired as the men who lived in the camp. There was a vibrancy about him, a burning bulb of confidence lighting his ashen blue eyes. He sat different, the spine stiff and tall. He had about him a kind of calmness that reminded her of her father.

“Thanks,” she said, pocketing the money. “I’ll see you around, I guess.”

She turned to leave.

“Sarat,” Gaines said. “Would you like to join me for a late dinner?”

“You got a tent here?” Sarat asked. “I thought you were one of those Free Southerners here from Atlanta.”

“I do not and I am not,” Gaines said. “But I do keep an office here, and I suspect you’ll find the few provisions I keep there, meager as they are, to be a welcome respite from the sludge they feed you in this place. Come.”

Sarat followed him to the back of the main administrative building. He unlocked a side door. Since the day she arrived at the camp, she’d only set foot in the supervisors’ offices a handful of times. It was a dim, unremarkable building, the walls painted the sickly pinkish ivory of fingernails.

They descended a staircase she’d never seen before, and past a metal door to a small basement. Here the single hallway was narrow and the concrete unpainted. At the end of the hallway was a door. Gaines unlocked it and held it open.

Sarat stepped inside. The room smelled of mahogany and citrus. Behind her, Gaines flicked the light switch.

“Make yourself at home,” he said. “It’s always a pleasure to receive visitors.”

It was a low-walled room, narrow but long, with a couple of small windows that were level with the ground outside. To her left Sarat saw a desk of thick chocolate mahogany, its legs like the bottom halves of hourglasses. On the desk was a neat stack of manila envelopes and an old teardrop-tipped fountain pen from a previous century. Next to those lay a letter opener with a golden blade.

On the wall adjacent to the desk there were a series of maps—one Sarat recognized as the Mag, another seemed to detail the Tennessee line, where so much of the worst fighting took place. The third and fourth maps were alien, covered in strange circular doodles and large painted swaths of red and blue and brown.

The two maps furthest down the wall Sarat had seen before, in a book long ago. They were maps of the whole world—one from a hundred years ago, one from today.

“Do you know where you are?” Gaines asked, standing behind her.

She pointed vaguely at the square of land on the left side of the map.

“That’s Georgia,” Gaines said. “But that’s very close.” He took her hand in his and moved it a few inches northwest.

“And do you know the places where the aid ships come from? The places that send us all those blankets and all the food that ends up in the cafeteria?”

Sarat stared at the map.

Gaines pointed first to a big mass of land on the right side of the map. “Some of it comes from China.” Then his finger moved to the center, to a country whose sprawling borders covered the northern third of one continent and the rectangular peninsula to its east. “And some of it comes from the Bouazizi Empire.”

“What’s an empire?” Sarat asked.

“An empire is when many small countries become part of one big country, willingly or otherwise,” Gaines said. “An empire is what we used to be.”

Sarat looked over at the old map, the one from a hundred years earlier. The area Gaines had pointed to was, in this map, a mess of doodled borders, some describing countries so small, their printed names overlapped. On the new map, the entire mass simply bore one word: Bouazizi.

“Back when I was your age, the people in these countries had a revolution,” Gaines said. “It failed. Then they had another one, and another, and on the fifth try, they finally won.”

He pointed to a stretch of blue that marked the boundary between the Bouazizi Empire’s northern edge and the European continent.

“If you ever stand anywhere on this shore, say in New Algiers, you’ll see fleets of ragged little boats headed southward from the European shore,” he said. “Boats full of migrants from the old Union countries, looking for better lives.

“That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.”

As Sarat continued to study the map, Gaines retrieved something from a small refrigerator nearby. A moment later she was interrupted from her thoughts by the smell of toast.

“Have you ever tasted honey?” Gaines asked.

“Yeah,” Sarat replied. “They give it to us every few months with the rations. It’s fine, I guess.”

“That’s not honey. That’s mush, grown by scientists in a lab in Pearl River.”

Gaines set the toast on a plate and the plate on the table. Sarat watched him unseal a small glass jar in which sat two hexagon-gridded sheets, sunk in a caramel-colored liquid. He spooned some of the honey on the toast.

“This comes from something living,” he said. “What you get from the living you can never truly copy, you can never fake. Taste it.”