The Resisters Read online

  Then, always, it was back to baseball.

  I’m not sure what it says that I thought both girls were naturals; perhaps my amazement says more than I’d like about my assumptions about girls. But what long days of happy engagement those were, in any case, not only for them but for me. I loved being able to teach again, and especially to be able to teach, for the first time in my life, children. Was this fathering? Whatever it was, for a few sweet years I taught Ondi as much as I taught Gwen. When Ondi said she was interested in catching, for example, I taught her not to be afraid of the ball. And no throwing the ball back to Gwen from her knees: in what I believed to be one of her first lessons in discipline, I made Ondi get back up on her feet every time. When she said she didn’t think she’d ever be able to throw all the way to second base, I set up boxes for her to try to knock down. And as for her batting, I tried to get her to relax her shoulder, and not to move around so much in the box, and to grip her bat with her eight middle knuckles all in a row—things I tried to teach Gwen as well, though the girls had that tendency I had seen in my sisters, when they were young, to divvy up their expertise. For Marie-Elena and Elaine, it had meant that if one hiked, the other swam; if one caught fish, the other caught birds. They were complementary to a fault. And so, too, it was as if, since Gwen was so good at pitching, Ondi took catching and batting as hers. It was frustrating. Still, we were all happy and who knows how long our idyll would have lasted had Ondi not fallen afoul of the Enforcers.

  * * *

  —

  Who knows, that is, how long it would have gone on but for, of all things, knitting. Other Surplus dealt with the boredom of our lot by beating one another up—such beating having become so accepted a part of Surplus life that girls especially clucked over pretend injuries the way they had once played house, as if simply rehearsing for adult life. But in our household, we played baseball when outdoors and, when indoors, knit. Eleanor’s father having hailed from the Aran Islands, Eleanor knew how to do everything from the moss stitch to the trellis stitch to the tree of life—stitches her grandmother had taught her and that she now passed on so zealously that even at age eight or nine, the girls could do cables. They could tell you, too, that the basket weave represented a fisherman’s creel; they knew that the zigzag stitch evoked the ups and downs of marriage. They knew that the honeycomb stitch honored the hardworking—and now extinct—honeybee.

  And for her part, intrepid Ondi had by age twelve even taught herself how to card and spin wool. Eleanor always emphasized that Ondi was welcome to the trunks of yarn Eleanor had amassed; it would be no exaggeration to say that Eleanor told her this dozens of times. But not wanting to be dependent on us, Ondi had proudly sourced raw wool from backward parts of the country, like Vermont—even managing, once, when the girls were fourteen, to pick up her supplies herself.

  Will we ever know what our lives would have been had she not made that trip—a trip that Aunt Nettie would have deemed Problematic even if Ondi had not gone on to SpritzGram various people while she was there? In any case, she did. First she SpritzGrammed farm smells to Gwen, as proof she really had made it to Vermont. Then she SpritzGrammed the various bullies in their class. And when she was done with Winny Wannabe and Leila Clutch and Cara Jack, she went on to SpritzGram the Enforcers who had been swimming under her family’s houseboat at night and slitting their pontoons with knives.

  As for the immediate result: the Nickelhoffs lost so many Living Points that their phone links were shut off and their zone-heat, too. Gwen and Eleanor made them blankets and sweaters; I fashioned for them a kind of messenger pigeon out of a yard-sale photo drone. All of which was a help, since their trial did not go well. Indeed, the Nickelhoffs were, surreally, Cast Off—set to drift on the high seas, with every harbor closed against them, for a month. Did they blame us, as Gwen later said they did, for Ondi’s misconduct? Did they believe we’d led her astray and were finally responsible for their ordeal? Perhaps. Nonetheless, we worried and wondered about them. Silly as we’d always thought WishDrones, we even launched round after round of them into the atmosphere, with our heartfelt good wishes. The messenger drone I’d made for them having been immediately swept overboard, though, we heard nothing until the ordeal was over, and then the report was brief.

  We were all, I remember, in the library—a corner of the house, really, not a room, but full of bright, enormous floor pillows, among which Ondi had snuggled with a book many a time. Now she refused to sit, much less roll herself up like a hedgehog, as she had when she was little. She was so thin that, side-lit by the afternoon sun, you could see, as though through a time warp, how she would wrinkle in another twenty years—something we Surplus would all do, of course, not having access to WrinkErase. But how strange to see, already, how she would have worry lines across her broad forehead and grooves from the sides of her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. Her hair was still a red-and-gold glory, but there were such massive bags under her small eyes that her lids seemed almost closed. And, always prone to tics, she now put her hand up to her mouth again and again—her broken nails a sad reminder of how much more in her was broken as, in so small a voice we could hardly hear her, she said, “It was terrifying.” Then she went on to describe how her family could not tie up with anything, even another boat, the whole time. The waves were like tankers capsizing on top of them, she said, and her grandfather died while they were out there.

  “Which maybe he would have anyway?” said Gwen finally, after a long silence. I can still remember the moment, and in Gwen’s tentative offering, I recognized an awkward helplessness of my own—an impulse to do something, anything, to help, crossed with an unfortunate paucity of bona fide helpful ideas. Really, Gwen was only meaning to ease Ondi’s heart, and Ondi’s grandfather was, after all, 115. Which even in these days of ever longer life was not young.

  All the same, Ondi abruptly turned heel and left. No I’m sorry, I have to go—she simply slipped out as if she had been more visitation than visitor.

  Leaving already? said the house. But you’ve only just arrived. And, Of course, you have a choice. You always have a choice. But you’ve only just arrived.

  Still, the front door opened, then closed, and Ondi never had anything to do with wool or sheep again. Instead, the first chance she got, she dropped off on our front walk the knitted goods Eleanor and Gwen had made for her family. Or maybe she had someone else do it for her? The delivery having been made in the middle of the night, we never knew. We simply woke to find our gate open and a pile of woolens dumped on the concrete. Sweaters. Blankets. Hats. A few more items were splayed across the front bushes, as if they had been hurled; all were being investigated by the geese. And this just because Gwen had said one wrong thing? She couldn’t believe it, she said. She couldn’t. She couldn’t. When Eleanor and I said Ondi might be in shock, Gwen did give her friend, as we counseled her to do, time. Grief deranges, we said. To which she echoed, “Grief deranges.” Healing is slow, we told her. “Healing is slow.”

  But when Ondi’s phone link was finally restored, and Ondi did not link to Gwen, Gwen took a break from knitting. She was not quitting, she said. She would never quit. As we had more knitted goods than we needed for now, though, should we not unravel the stuff we’d made for Ondi’s family? So we could reuse the yarn? Eleanor and I agreed. It made sense. Still, how hard to see Gwen emerge from her room the next morning, her hair cut so savagely short that all that was left of her beloved blue dye was a kind of patchwork. While still not as wayward as mine, her hair was gnarlier than it was when it was longer—and now, the way that she had cut it, raggedy. Her eyes, too, were almost as swollen as Ondi’s had been, as she settled down to undo all the work she had put into sweaters and blankets for her friend, including a tubular scarf she had knit to match Ondi’s red-and-gold hair. This had involved an intricate pattern of gold vines against a red background, across which were strewn tiny dark green leaves. Different-colored
birds flitted among the vines—birds she had never seen in real life but had read about in books—and at one end, above the fringe, Gwen had fashioned a bird’s nest full of eggs hidden in a bower.

  Of course, we knew Ondi had been traumatized. We knew she was not herself. Yet even so it was hard to believe that Ondi had let the scarf be thrown—maybe even threw it herself—into the rosebushes. But we had indeed found it there, twisted and tangled up, its fairy-tale leaves caught on the all-too-real thorns. And to watch Gwen unravel it now, crying—untwisting the red and gold yarn, and unknotting every knot the start of a new color required—was so unbearable that finally we took the scarf away and finished the job for her.

  At least the Nickelhoffs had used some of what Eleanor and Gwen had made. We were heartened to find the yarn still damp in places and felted from friction. It smelled of salt, and there were bits of fishstuff in it—bits of shell, too, and splinters. So there was that to hold on to. As the yarn balls grew and grew, Eleanor tried to help Gwen. Do you know what trauma is? she would ask. Do you know how it can change people? And, You have to ask, Who what when where how why. Starting with who did this—the old Ondi or the new? But Gwen would just say, over and over, You don’t understand. Indeed, she said it so often that the house began to echo her, saying, You don’t understand. You don’t understand until Eleanor threw a plate of bacon and eggs out the window and yelled, “Shut up!”

  Shut up is what we say when we’ve lost an argument and don’t want to admit it, the house said. And, That is quite a mess. Shall I clear-float that? Because that is quite a mess.

  Still, it did shut up—some algorithm wisely advising it, perhaps, that as Eleanor’s mother was from Sichuan, home of hot peppers and hot tempers, it had best back down.

  As for Gwen, she seemed happiest sitting silently with me. Sometimes I could coax her to come throw a bit out under the grape arbor, where I’d set up a sandbag target. But other days, she would ask me if it really was true that right makes might, as we had always taught her. Because it seemed to her that right had no might at all. And when one day she finally turned to AskAuntNettie and seemed to settle down as soon as she heard I’m here and Is there something on your mind? And, Tell me all about it, we could hardly blame her.

  * * *

  —

  Luckily, NettieSchool, as we called it, ended about then. School had always been difficult for Gwen, freakishly athletic as she was, and hailing from such a strange family, to boot. But once she no longer had Ondi to stand up for her, things got much worse. Slovenly Leila Clutch planted a live roach in Gwen’s glove. Ward of the state Cara Jack snuck a dead rat into Gwen’s locker. Of course, Cara Jack slept on an inflatable raft at night and washed her face with napkins from the mall trucks; she was just the sort of sad target who will desperately target just about anyone else. Gwen understood.

  Still it was hard, especially when after the incidents themselves came GotchaGrams of Gwen opening the locker! Gwen jumping back! And so on. Gwen did have ScrewU blocks on most of her classmates, and since she had not gotten a phonegraft as had so many of them, she could at least remove her handphone from her wrist. We had that to give thanks for until Winny Wannabe hacked her phone and got 3-D HoloPix to leap clear out of it, at her. Of course, Winny was frequently bullied, too, his parents being so absurdly set on his becoming Netted. The word was, after all, that you had to be an Eleanor to be invited to Cross Over—Eleanor having famously been invited to Cross Over not once but twice—and Winny Wannabe was no Eleanor.

  But Gwen had nightmares for months. We were just lucky that from Aunt Nettie’s point of view, it was one thing to indoctrinate the young and another to educate them. By high school, classroom learning ceased. Surplus students were simply placed in a cafeteria, enjoined to concertedly consume the racks of food all around them, and left to send FriendGrams and watch VirtualFlix all day. It was an easy decision for Gwen to leave school and, starting in ninth grade, elect to be homeschooled instead.

  * * *

  ◆

  Homeschooling meant math, science, and history, but mostly as much reading as I could get Gwen to do of the books she had inherited—lucky her—from her grandparents on both sides. It was true that her library was a bit of a hodgepodge; her grandparents would never have imagined they were putting together a curriculum. But there it was. She inherited the Harry Potter series, Little Women, and The Island Stallion Races along with my mother’s Shakespeare and Homer. Thanks to Eleanor’s mother, she had The Analects as well, and The Book of Changes, and a marvelously stirring translation of Beowulf. And as my mother was from Saint Emile, Gwen of course had her Fanon and her History of Sugar: Slavery and Rebellion, in which we Chastanets took up a full inch of the index. (My mother might have been the first feminist in our family but she was hardly the first rebel.) I could not manage to interest Gwen in Marx or Locke or Rousseau—introducing them, I see now, with too much enthusiasm and forgetting how assiduously the young will reject exactly what it seems to their parents most important to get. But Thoreau piqued her interest, as did Jane Austen—full as those Austen novels were, she said, of Surplus girls. And she did love Dickens and, if not all of Melville, then at least “Bartleby the Scrivener,” from which she learned the most useful line any teenager could have in her arsenal, “I would prefer not to.”

  I would prefer not to, I would prefer not to, I would prefer not to, she’d say. Yet the days were actually peaceful and rich, with the reading going on until three or four o’clock most days, after which came fencing with Eleanor. Of course, former foil champion that she was, Eleanor believed herself woefully out of shape; ex-champions all do. But in fact, double-jointed and tiny, she still slipped, as if by magic, into spaces that did not seem entirely there. She still had her gift, that’s to say, for reconceiving the possible, making her a marvelous guide to a land beyond skill. Indeed, with her white hair and high cheekbones, and her ears popped out in all their elfin glory, she seemed like nothing so much as the warrior mistress of some enchanted forest as she set about teaching Gwen all manner of thrusts, parries, and ripostes—flipping from camaraderie to contention in a flash, as mothers and daughters will, but with a series of moves literally more breathtaking. To watch them was like watching a lightning storm at sea: the bolts rained so fast and hard that one could not quite see how the ocean would survive.

  And probably that should have been the highlight of Gwen’s day. But finally, after the foils were put away, came the activity she inexplicably truly awaited—pitching practice. Did holding literally steady now steady her in other ways? Gwen, in any case, could hold her balance pose for an hour if so inclined, which was not to say she didn’t hone every part of her mechanics—repeating and repeating each motion, as all the greats do. And when she wasn’t practicing physically, she was practicing mentally—visualizing the movements. Breaking them down. Putting them back together. Making adjustments. Most strikingly, though, she was a stork. At yet another underground yard sale, I found a portable pitcher’s mound for her, as well as a nine-pocketed net to help her place her throws. And I caught for her and, as best I could, batted. But to coach was one thing and to play another. She mostly practiced alone; I was simply no substitute for Ondi, whom we missed.

  As for who it was that, watching Gwen throw one day, declared her in need of a team—that was perspicacious Eleanor, naturally. And as a team was in need of an opposing team—indeed, several opposing teams—so was born the Underground Baseball League.

  The League, I should point out, would not have had to be underground had we been willing to use the Surplus fields. However, thanks to their emanations, about which Eleanor had been planning to file a suit for some time, we were not. Did not the kids who played there become enfeebled, after all? People said they became noodly, spastic, unglued. Flingy. Wobbly. Atonic. For all the different adjectives employed, though, their upshot was the same. We had to play elsewhere.

  T
he wrinkle was that gathering in unsanctioned spaces was Unlawful Assembly, and that Unlawful Assembly had been banned since the Automation Riots of twenty years ago: for what with the millions upon millions of Unretrainables pouring week after week onto Capitol Hill, Congress had declared itself to have no choice but to microchip people. (As more than one congressman put it, it was chip them or shoot them.) Expert testimony had held that chipping had worked in ChinRussia, and, lo and behold, as it had worked there, so it did eventually work here. Not immediately and not completely—our Total Persuasion Architecture was never as total or persuasive as theirs. Still, we Surplus were now RegiChipped at birth and easily trackable. If we wanted to play baseball, we were going to have to hack the chips—a daunting prospect.

  All the same, I had been hard at work at it down in the basement. Tinkering, my mother would have said—no longer able to add, as she had when I was a child, Is that how you are going to make a living? You can be a tinkerer when you have found a way to live on palm leaves and air. There was that bit of liberation in being Surplus, anyway; we were done with the exigencies of respectable life. And as I had done some coding in college, look: to my astonishment, I had managed to make some progress. Beginner’s luck, no doubt. Still, I had figured out how to unlock a RegiChip with a wand, and I had figured out a way of appearing to be consuming in one location while in fact located elsewhere—a way of consuming remotely. This was hardly Total Protection Architecture. Enforcement had only to chip-search you to find you. But as Enforcement mostly tracked consumption, the hack did promise to keep you off their radar to begin with.