The Power(83)

It’s taken him months to persuade her that it wasn’t him on those bulletin boards. Jocelyn still doesn’t know who she believes for sure, but she knows that her mother’s got into the habit of lying so completely that she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. Jos felt something curdle inside her when she realized her mom might have deliberately lied to her.

Ryan says, ‘She hated that I love you just how you are.’

Jos says, ‘I want you to love me in spite of my problem, not because of it.’

Ryan says, ‘I just love you, though. All the pieces of you.’

Jos says, ‘You like me because I’m weak. I hate that you think I’m weak.’

Ryan says, ‘You’re not weak. You’re not. Not to anyone who knows you, not to anyone who cares. And what would it matter if you were? People are allowed to be weak.’

But that’s the question, really.

There are advertisements on hoardings now, with sassy young women showing off their long, curved arcs in front of cute, delighted boys. They’re supposed to make you want to buy soda, or sneakers, or gum. They work, they sell product. They sell girls one other thing; quietly, on the side. Be strong, they say, that’s how you get everything you want.

The problem is, that feeling is everywhere now. If you want to find something different to it, you have to listen to some difficult people. Not everything they say seems right. Some of them sound mad.

That man Tom Hobson who used to be on the Morning Show has his own website now. He’s joined up with UrbanDox and BabeTruth and some of the others. Jos reads it on her cellphone when no one else is around. There are accounts on Tom Hobson’s website of things happening in Bessapara that Jos can’t really believe. Torture and experiments, gangs of women on the loose in the north near the border, murdering and raping men at will. Here in the south it’s quiet, even with the growing border unrest. Jocelyn’s met people in this country – they’re mostly really nice. She’s met men who agree that the laws are sensible for right now, while they’re at war. And women who’ve invited her in for tea in their houses.

But there are things she finds easy to believe, too. Tom writes about how in Bessapara, where she is right now, there are people doing experiments on boys like Ryan. Cutting them to pieces to find out what’s happened to them. Feeding them big glops of that street drug called Glitter. They say the drug’s being shipped out of Bessapara, pretty near to where she is. Tom’s got Google maps of the location on the site. Tom says the real reason the US army is stationed where she is, in the south of Bessapara, is because they’re protecting the supplies of Glitter. Keep everything orderly, so Margot Cleary can arrange her shipments of Glitter from organized-crime syndicates to NorthStar, who sell it back to the US army at a marked-up price.

For more than a year, the army had been giving her a small regulation packet of a purple-white powder every three days, ‘for her condition’. One of the sites Ryan showed her said that the powder makes girls with skein abnormalities worse. It increases the highs and the lows. Your system becomes dependent on it.

But now she’s OK. She’d say it was like a miracle, but it’s not like anything. It was an actual miracle. She was there for it. She prays every night in the dark in her bunk, closing her eyes and whispering, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ She’s been healed. She’s OK. She thinks to herself, If I was saved, there must be a reason.

Jos goes to look at the unused packets stashed under her mattress. And at the photos on Tom Hobson’s site of the drugs he’s talking about.

She texts Ryan. Secret phone, burner, he changes it every three weeks.

Ryan says, ‘Do you really believe your mom’s made a deal with a drug cartel?’

Jos says, ‘I don’t believe that, if she had the opportunity, she wouldn’t.’

It’s Jocelyn’s day off. She signs a jeep out from the base – she’s just going for a country drive, meeting up with some friends, that OK? She’s the daughter of a Senator tipped to run for the big house at the next election and a major stakeholder in NorthStar. Of course it’s OK.

She consults the print-outs of the maps from Tom Hobson’s website. If he’s right, one of the drug manufacturing centres in Bessapara is only about forty miles away. And there was that weird thing that happened a few weeks earlier: some of the girls from the base chased an unmarked van through the forest. The driver shot at them. They lost it in the end, and reported it as possible North Moldovan terrorist activity. But Jos knows what direction it was heading in.

There’s a lightness in her as she gets into the jeep. She’s got a half-day furlough. The sun is shining. She’ll drive down to where the place should be and see if she can see anything. She’s feeling light-hearted. Her skein is humming strong and true as it always does now, and she feels good. Normal. It’s an adventure. Worst comes to worst, she’ll have had a nice drive. But she might be able to take some photos to put online herself. But it might come out much better than that; she might find something that would incriminate her mother. Something she could email Margot and say: If you don’t back the fuck off and let me go and live my life, these are going straight to the Washington Post. Getting photographs like that … that wouldn’t be a bad day at all.





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