No Harm Can Come to a Good Man
No Harm Can Come to a Good Man
James Smythe
How far would you go to save your family from an invisible threat? A terrifyingly original thriller from the author of The Machine.ClearVista is used by everyone and can predict everything.It’s a daily lifesaver, predicting weather to traffic to who you should befriend.Laurence Walker wants to be the next President of the United States. ClearVista will predict his chances.It will predict whether he's the right man for the job.It will predict that his son can only survive for 102 seconds underwater.It will predict that Laurence's life is about to collapse in the most unimaginable way.
Copyright (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © James Smythe 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photograph @ Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
(Epigraph (#u6985cb33-b5fd-5aaa-bfb1-7ce8c015b729)): Extract taken from The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver © Nate Silver 2012. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007541935
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007541928
Version: 2016-02-16
Praise for James Smythe: (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
‘A writer of bold imagination and verve’
Lauren Beukes
‘Savage, intimate and inexorable’
Nick Harkaway
‘Powerful and distinctive’
Guardian
‘Smythe’s storytelling is pacey and addictive; he has a fiendish talent for springing surprises’
The Times
‘Fully formed, fundamentally affecting, forward-thinking fiction. The sort of story that reminds us why we read, and what we, the people, need’
Tor.com (http://Tor.com)
‘Like Ballard, Smythe understands, and ruthlessly demonstrates, the nightmare that results when our fantasies are realised’
Sam Byers
‘Science fiction for those who think they don’t like it’
50 Best Spring Reads, Independent
‘A book about memory, about the impossibility of making the future match the past, and the danger of following a desire too far’
Matt Haig
‘Very cleverly constructed and completely gripping’
Daily Mail
‘Creepy, compulsive science fiction, narrated with the kind of anxious interior perspective characteristic of JG Ballard’s finest work’
Metro
‘Quite brilliant’
Sunday Mirror
‘With his particular flair for speculative fiction, [Smythe] cooks up something pretty extraordinary’
Dazed & Confused
‘As if Philip K Dick and David Mitchell had collaborated on an episode of The West Wing. Unsettling, gripping and hugely thought-provoking’
FHM
Dedication (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
To my family
Epigraph (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
What is now proved was once only imagined.
William Blake
When catastrophe strikes, we look for the signal in the noise – anything that might explain the chaos that we see all around us and bring order to the world again.
Nate Silver, The Signal and The Noise
Contents
Cover (#u9fedf814-3070-5dd0-afe0-0163c156066a)
Title Page (#ua5a8724c-46bd-52df-b575-25384b923428)
Copyright
Praise for James Smythe
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by James Smythe
About the Publisher
Prologue (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
Laurence Walker presses play and the video begins.
On it, he is standing in a seemingly blank room. He is looking straight into the camera lens, or the facsimile of him is; a broken version, created from photographs and screen grabs. It looks like him, but only barely. There is something about the version of his face that the software has created – so blank and expressionless – that makes him feel sick to his stomach. Behind him he can see similarly wrong versions of his family, of his wife and daughters. This created version of him isn’t looking at them, his body language barely even acknowledging their presence. He wonders why they are so scared. Deanna and the girls are huddled together, clinging onto one another, terrified, backing away from him. Their faces are approximations of what that would actually look like: twisted and distorted and not at all real.
In the background, he hears a noise, a rustle that he cannot put his finger on; and then another noise, quieter in the mix. Sobbing. And then, finally, he notices that the version of him is holding something.
It’s a gun. He knows the thick black metal. The digital version’s thumb is on the trigger. The screen version of Laurence seems to shudder. More than a shiver: it seems uncontrollable.
Then the video cuts to black and a noise rings out that he knows can only be one thing: the crack, solid and sharp, the sound of a bullet leaving the chamber of a gun. The sobbing stops and turns into a scream, ringing through the darkness.
PART ONE (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
1 (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
Deanna wakes up. She lies perfectly still at first, because she loves these moments of being awake, of being in control of everything for just a second, before the day allows itself to interrupt. She can hear Laurence breathing, a harsh snore that’s developed over the past few years into something akin to a growl. She can feel the slow rise and fall of his chest travelling through the mattress. After a while she rolls over and looks at him. He’s still propped up as he was when she was falling asleep, his back against the giant pillows that they have taken to using as a headboard. His reading glasses are hanging off his face and his tablet is on his lap, his hands clutching it. He doesn’t move much when he sleeps these days, she thinks, not since he became a senator. He tends to sleep so heavily that he stays perfectly still. The world could shift around him and he would somehow stay static.
She doesn’t want to wake him yet – the alarm isn’t set to go off for another half an hour, and he needs his sleep for today – so she turns away from him and slides to the edge of the bed. The floor is freezing cold on her feet, the house so draughty, always carrying a breeze up through the floorboards. She pads to the bedroom door and he doesn’t even shift slightly as she opens it and sneaks out.
She heads downstairs, turning the lights on as she goes, straight into the kitchen. The glass along the back wall, looking out into the backyard, is darkened and she flicks the switches on the counter to bring it back to a clear state; no glare from the rising sun, just the light pouring in. She loves the feeling of the warmth of it coming through the glass, heating up the kitchen while she makes the coffee, selecting pods for the machine – they each take a different flavor, and she has to do nothing past setting the thing going. She stands at the counter, both hands on the marble, propping herself up; and she basks for a few seconds. All is silence.
Laurence wakes up as she comes back into the room, because she’s not trying to be quiet now. He feels his glasses on his face and swats them away, a knee-jerk reaction; and then he opens his eyes and looks at Deanna front on. He sleepily smirks at her. This isn’t the first time it’s happened.
‘I slept like this?’ he asks.
‘You did.’
‘I’m so tired. I was so tired. You know.’
‘I know,’ she replies. ‘You need to get dressed. The car will be here soon. I’ll get the shower going for you.’
‘You let me sleep, curse you.’ He reaches for her and pulls her close, kisses her. ‘I wish they’d let me drive myself,’ he says. ‘I feel like such a prick in that thing.’
Staunton is a small town, and Laurence has worked hard to win its people over. He came from the city but Deanna grew up here. When they left college, Deanna pregnant, they came back here at her behest, and he did his best to persuade the townsfolk – who knew her, who had known her parents before they moved away, before he got her knocked up and forced a retreat, law degree between his legs – that he was a good man. He’s spent the best part of the last seventeen years earning their trust. The showmanship of politics sets that trust back a good decade, he thinks. Because New York City is drivable, if there’s ever a TV show appearance they send tinted-window town cars, and that always makes Laurence embarrassed. Every time Deanna has to remind him that he has to get used to it; that if he gets what he wants from his career, he’ll have an armed escort everywhere he goes. Soon he won’t be allowed to drive anywhere by himself. He rubs his face and clambers out of bed. He stretches. ‘What tie, do you think?’
‘The lemon one.’
‘Lemon? Jesus. You want the crowd to turn on me? Start some riot about fence-sitting with my colors?’
‘It’s smart. It’s bright. You want potential voters to think you are as well, don’t you? At least, until they know you as well as I do.’
‘Ha ha.’ She kisses him as she leaves the en suite, and he strips his boxers off. She looks back at him: slightly looser around the edges than he used to be, but not totally out of shape; love handles, a slight belly, a sagging of his chest. It’s only the effects of age, of a more sedentary lifestyle, of being comfortable. ‘You want to come in?’ he asks. ‘I might not wash myself properly.’
‘I’m sure you’ll manage,’ she says. ‘I have to wake the girls.’
She goes to the twins’ room first. Alyx, their youngest daughter, is curled up on her bed, her feet hanging off the side, her arms splayed into a position not far off that of a crucifixion: spread out, extended from the shoulders. Sean, their only son, is almost textbook fetal on the other bed, rolled up as small as possible. Deanna thinks how curiously defensive it is. She wonders if he had bad dreams.
‘Hey, campers,’ Deanna says, ‘it’s morning – rise and shine.’ She raises the blinds and stands out of the way of the window, so that the light can hit her daughter in the face. Alyx giggles, and wriggles herself under the duvet. ‘Nope, not today,’ her mother says, pulling it away from her, ‘you’ve got school.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Alyx says. She’s stubborn and defiant, in that way that kids can be. All three of the children are, something that they get from their father. Sean pulls himself to sitting and then to the floor where he stands in front of the bed, swaying slightly, like a zombie. Deanna goes to him and prods him with her finger, making it rigid, and he tumbles backwards to his bed, collapsing into laughter.
‘You guys have got five minutes to get up and in that shower, or I’ll be back, and I’ll be mad as all get out,’ Deanna says. She tugs on Alyx’s ankle as she leaves the room, and the girl slides down the bed, giggling again; and then Deanna lets her go, and she tumbles gently to the floor.
The next room on her rounds is the bathroom that the kids all share. Deanna flicks the switch for the shower, letting it warm up, and then heads down the corridor to Lane’s door. She knocks on it once, a single, solid rap, but there’s no answer; so she turns the handle. The room is dark, but she can see the clutter through it. The clothes thrown everywhere, the books and vinyl sleeves scattered around the place, her daughter in bed still.
‘I’m awake,’ Lane says. ‘It’s fine, I’m awake.’
‘Just checking,’ Deanna says. The room is painted dark, grays and blacks, because that’s what Lane is into. Deanna opens the door wide and steps in, tapping Lane’s leg through the blanket. ‘Your dad’s got his thing today, so stress-free morning, please.’
‘Fine.’
‘You know what I’m saying. You want eggs?’
‘Sure.’
‘Straight home tonight as well. Like I say, no crap today, okay?’
‘Jesus, okay.’ Lane doesn’t stick her head up to look at Deanna the whole exchange; but she reaches up, to itch her head as it stays still on the pillow. She scratches at the bit where the neck meets the skull, through her hair; and Deanna sees the tattoo on the inside of her wrist, the logo of one of the bands that Lane is obsessed with: three intersecting geometric shapes, a block of symmetrical color in the center of them. It looks like a puzzle, but it’s not (or at least, it’s not one that Deanna’s been able to solve). The tattoo was the first real mark of rebellion from Lane: the lie that she told to be able to get it, and the months of hiding it to pretend that it didn’t exist. But, she promised no more.
Deanna hears the bathroom door slam shut, meaning that one of the twins is doing as they’ve been told, and she tells Lane that she’s next. Lane won’t shower: she’s started cutting back on that now, letting her hair get greasy. It’s a thing, and Deanna knows it’s only a matter of time before she cuts it off. That’s what the kids in her school are doing now, her friends: shaving their hair right back. Deanna’s begged Lane not to, simply because of Laurence’s impending campaign. They have a deal: she won’t be made to wear floral dresses as long as she covers up the tattoo and does her hair for the cameras every once in a while; and as long as she smiles when the cameras are out. It won’t be forever, but Deanna used the words consideration and family a lot, and eventually Lane agreed. Still, her second act of rebellion was to shave the underside of her hair on the sides over the summer, and then argue that she could hide it by wearing her hair down if she was ever at a public event. Besides which, Laurence – she calls her parents by their first names, a stupid and totally forced gesture which makes Deanna’s skin prickle – hasn’t formally announced yet. They have spoken about vacation and the cabin that they have bought and spending time with the children. There’s no press to worry about for just yet, she reasons. Another few months, they can have that argument all over again. I’ll even pay for the dresses we end up forcing her to wear, Deanna thinks.
She goes to the kitchen and puts the eggs into the poacher and starts the cycle. She hears the crack of their shells, the splash as they hit the water. Perfect every single time: no shell in there, no mess. It does it all for her.
‘Television,’ she says loudly. The set reveals itself in the corner of the room, the screen turning from its camouflaged setting – matching the wallpaper behind it, making it as inconspicuous as possible – and automatically boots onto the news channels, showing the four that Laurence watches most in its different corners. They’ll all be covering the announcement; they’re already hyping it, talking about what they can expect. They know, of course they know; there’s an embargoed press release already gone out, she’s sure. She hears everything from here, because you do in these old houses: the sound of the showers switching off; of feet padding across the floors; of drawers and wardrobes opening and shutting. And still, there is that feeling of the sun on her face; still, something that she will never ever tire of.
Alyx is first down, and she walks to the refrigerator and takes out a bottle of juice. Deanna passes her a glass from the cupboard, and she puts it on the breakfast bar before climbing onto a stool and pouring the juice for herself. She watches the news (not understanding it, necessarily, but it’s something to occupy her) while Deanna puts bread into the toaster and pops it early so that it’s barely browned. She puts the eggs directly onto one slice for Alyx and deposits it in front of her. The little girl breaks one with her knife and the yolk sluices down onto the bread, soaking through it. She tugs it apart with her nearly blunt kids’ cutlery, using the spork to scoop the sodden bread and egg into her mouth.
‘You’re so messy,’ Deanna says. She gives her a paper kitchen towel, and Alyx wipes her mouth with it, and her hands. ‘Mucky pup.’ Sean runs in then and sits next to Alyx. No ceremony: he just waits to be fed.
‘I don’t want eggs,’ he says.
‘No? So what do you want?’ Deanna asks.
‘Can I have a Pop-Tart?’
‘Fine. But if you have that today, you have eggs tomorrow. Deal?’
‘Deal,’ he says. There’s a trade-off in the house, Laurence and Deanna constantly trying to do what’s right by the kids, to balance and manage their food, their exposure to TV shows and music. They want to do this right – that’s their motto. She puts the pastries in the toaster and clicks it down. She stands and looks at the kids, both of them watching the news now, as if the world is something that they even comprehend yet. The toaster pops, and she puts the tarts on a plate.
‘They’re hot,’ she says, so Sean blows on them. She thinks about how cute he is; how she should relish these moments. Everybody tells her: this is all too fleeting.
‘Deanna?’ Laurence calls, from the top of the stairs. She finishes loading the dishwasher and heads out to the hallway. He’s wearing the suit that he had custom-made earlier this year; the first outing for it, having saved it for a special occasion.
‘How is it?’ he asks, raising a leg as if he’s a catalogue model. It’s something he’s always done when he should be taking himself seriously, a deflection. And it’s always made her smile. He opens the jacket at the sides, to show off the shirt that he’s wearing, and the lemon tie, and he twirls, posing again at the end. He sucks in his cheeks. She’d bought the tie for him, knowing how good it would look; how it would complement his complexion, his salt-and-pepper hair, the almost gray core of his eyes. He walks down and towards her and stands on the first step, even taller than usual next to her.
‘Perfect,’ Deanna says. ‘The tie is lovely.’
‘You would say that.’
‘It’s joyous. It makes me happy. It’ll make other people happy, and that will make them want to vote for you.’
‘Good. I’m stressing and I need to not stress.’
‘This is true,’ Deanna says. ‘Not-stress is always better.’ She reaches up and straightens the tie for him. She thinks about what she’s doing, and how many times she has done this. How many more times there will be, if the future that they are working towards all goes to plan. ‘You’re going to be amazing,’ she tells him.
‘You always say that.’
‘That’s because it’s always true.’ Lane comes down behind him, and he steps aside to let her through, pulling a face at her as she goes. She is wearing one of the band tees that she near-as lives in and jeans that Deanna’s never seen before, and she’s got a beanie carefully balanced on her head, her hair tucked up inside it. ‘Right,’ Deanna says to Laurence, beckoning him down, ‘food time. In there, sit down. Today, you relax.’ She stands and points, watches as they both go into the kitchen, then follows them. Sean finishes his breakfast and gets down from the table, and Deanna sends him to get his bag. ‘Leaving in three,’ she says.
‘I hate school on days like this,’ he says.
‘Only a few weeks until the summer,’ she reminds him. ‘Then you can have days like this over and over and over, until I’m sick to death of you.’
‘Mom!’ Alyx says. ‘You won’t get sick of us.’
‘I will. I’ll be on Xanax by the time you go back.’
‘What’s Xanax?’
‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘And you,’ she says to Alyx, ‘bag, now.’ They disappear, and Lane walks off, clutching an apple in her hand. Deanna turns to Laurence as he eats his toast. ‘I love you,’ she says. ‘Knock ’em dead, you hear?’
‘If they’re dead they can’t vote for me,’ he replies.
‘Then knock ’em into a coma until the election.’
‘Better.’ She kisses him, and she tastes the butter, the marmalade. The same taste every morning for eighteen years.
‘Right,’ she says, pushing away from him. ‘Time to go. Call me.’ She shouts for the kids and Laurence leans to one side and watches down the hallway as they all leave. They wave at him from the front door and wish him luck, and he smiles and waves back. He watches them as they get into the car. The Hendersons are walking on the other side and Deanna talks to them, as she always does, every single morning. She tells them that she’ll be along later to pick up one of their fresh loaves. They tell her that they’ll put one aside. She laughs, because every conversation about anything here is somehow gently amusing. Laurence watches it happen; he’s seen this a thousand times before. His car is waiting as well, and he grabs his jacket and briefcase. As he gets into the car he asks which way they’re going because there’s probably going to be traffic going into the city their usual way. The driver tells him a route.
‘You want me to go a different way?’ he asks. Laurence brings up the ClearVista app and searches the route finder. All the options are just as likely to get messy at this time of day.
‘It’s fine,’ Laurence says, ‘whatever you think is best.’ He watches as the driver lets the app pick the route for them. Hell or high water, it’s what’s easiest.
Deanna is at home and writing – or rather, the laptop is open, along with document that’s meant to be her new book; and she has reread what she wrote the last time, deciding that it’s fine and can stay, for now, when she hears Laurence’s name mentioned on the news, saying that it’s time for the live coverage of the press conference. She turns the volume up and watches him at the podium, surrounded by blue banners and badges. And his tie has been replaced with one that matches the color of everything else, a blunt-force sign of unity and support for the party that he seems so estranged from, at least on paper. He’s a new breed, a potential future. These are the words that he’s introduced with by the ex-President who stands by him, who is diametrically opposed to so many of his policies, but is tucking that behind them for the sake of what Laurence could do. This is an opportunity, they all know.
‘So – and I realize that I am getting ahead of myself, but what the hell, that never did me any harm before in life – let me introduce you to the future candidate for the Democratic party, and the next President of the United States, Laurence Irving Walker!’ He stands to one side and applauds so loudly that it’s all that can be heard for a beat over the microphones on the podium. Laurence looks slightly sheepish, humbled by the words, and he shakes the ex-President’s hand, almost cupping it, a gesture that’s focus tested and proven to show security, strength and power. He stands up at the front, and he smiles. The crowd cheer and he works it like a comedian; letting them have their moment, stepping back as the applause overwhelms him. He nods, and he laughs, and he steps back.
‘You’re too kind,’ he says. ‘I haven’t done anything yet.’ That gets a laugh, and he puts a hand on the podium, the other into his trouser pocket, which brushes back his jacket. Deanna can hear Amit telling him the things he can do, the gestures and phrases that will work in this situation. Humble, but not too humble; strong, but also showing that he’s human; a leader, but not unable to listen. She recognizes these things as being a part of Laurence, but not like this. This way they’re exaggerated, offered up like evidence. ‘But I hope to. And that’s what today is all about, really: hope. That’s something that the people who live in New York State tell me all the time. They say: we feel like our hopes for our children, our health, our homes – our hopes for the future – they’re being lost in the chaos of life. You wouldn’t believe how common it is to hear that.’ Everyman, but not too casual. The camera focuses on him, shows him in a good light. He’s got make-up on, Deanna thinks, and his hair has been coiffed, like something from that old TV show about advertising, a slick and neat look that’s pushed back from his face. It says he’s a family man, but not too married.
She’s heard the speech, and she knows he won’t fumble it. He’s never fumbled a speech in his life. He’s going to slyly announce his intentions, set this all up. This is how it works, now. It’s all about starting a quiet storm. She shuts off the TV and walks around the kitchen, thinks about what happens next. This house will be gone, sold to somebody else. They’ll start a family in it, and the place will get its own memories. And Deanna and the family will live … where? An apartment in Georgetown until they move. She doesn’t want to think about the end of this: a giant house where their every movement is monitored, where they can’t go for a walk without somebody wondering if they’re okay; what they’re doing; if somebody might make some foolish attempt on their lives.
She sits at her laptop and minimizes her book, and she opens a browser window. She types www.ClearVista.com into the window, and the site loads.
Will Laurence Walker ever be President? she asks. The site does its thing, the little icon spinning and folding itself into itself, a perpetual loop of folding and unfolding, and then spits out an answer. There is a sixty-three percent chance of Laurence Walker becoming President.
She stares at the screen. That’s based on today. It’s based on right now, the data mining – she hates the idea of it, as if thoughts, emotions, journalism and tweets and whatever else can be broken down into something that’s utterly tangible and totally immutable – having trawled the latest reactions to Laurence’s statement. She imagines that Twitter is full of #Walker2020 advocates, buying into both the message and the man.
For a second she hates this. For a second, she wonders what might have happened if she’d given a different answer when he told that her wanted to run; when he asked her if she thought it was a good idea. She had said, ‘It’s what you’ve always wanted’, and now she thinks that saying that wasn’t really an answer at all.
Laurence’s team takes a detour to Nassawa after the speech is done, already arranged but spontaneous-seeming. This is the start of the process: a meeting with Laurence’s current constituents, the beginning of the handshaking and baby kissing. They stop off at the town hall, and they walk in, unannounced, and the people working there laugh and smile and take photos. Somebody from the Nassawa Tribune comes down and writes an article, takes a short interview with Laurence.
‘Earlier on, your speech? Seemed like you were hinting at a bigger platform for your message. Any chance you can confirm, absolutely, your intentions of running for office?’ the interviewer asks, and Laurence almost laughs at their moxie, at their attempt to get an answer far bigger than their paper probably would usually get. Despite what others are saying, he hasn’t shown his hand yet. Everyone in the room smiles; they all know what the reporter is asking.
‘Not a chance am I answering that one,’ Laurence says, with a smile, and that gets a laugh; and he shakes the journalist’s hand and grins for another photograph. They move on, to a local café, and they eat lunch with the locals there, and Laurence fields questions about the current government, the policies being pushed through. He takes his platform stands: he believes in free healthcare for all, and he believes in the right to a free education that stands head-to-toe with the best that private education can offer. That’s where money should be going. He wants to siphon off far more money from the richest 0.5% – this isn’t about the 1%, he says, it’s those earners who manage to somehow take in the bulk of the country’s income in one fell swoop – and put that back into the country itself. ‘If you’ve got an income that would allow us to give everybody in the country a personal doctor and teacher, why shouldn’t we be taking more from you? If you’ve got money you won’t miss, that you won’t even notice is gone from your accounts, why shouldn’t you help where you can?’ That gets applause, the people cheering over their sandwiches and salads. When they’re done they go to the local high school, and there’s a buzz because this doesn’t happen often – Nassawa isn’t big on the map, one school and one hospital – so there’s an impromptu assembly, all the kids brought into the gym for the chance to ask Laurence questions. He’s one of them, and he sells it like that. He grew up in the city, sure, but he lives in the sticks now – ‘The boonies,’ he says, and that gets a laugh, because he’s old and he’s using language like that – and he answers more questions. One younger boy asks if he wants to be President somebody. ‘Someday, sure,’ Laurence says. ‘That, and an astronaut. But President most of all.’
When he’s done, Laurence calls home.
‘How did it go?’ Deanna asks.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Met some people. All very nice.’
‘That’s what it’s about,’ she says.
‘It is. Love you.’
‘Good luck tomorrow,’ she says.
‘With the big shots? They’ll take what they can get, I’m sure.’ He breaks everything down to casual dismissals. ‘We should go out for dinner when I get back. A proper night: dinner and drinks. A hotel. Maybe a weekend away, before this goes insane.’
‘It’s not insane already?’
‘It’ll get worse.’
‘I don’t even know who you are any more,’ she jokes.
‘Probably for the best,’ he replies. ‘We have a party tonight, for the team.’
‘Party hearty,’ she says, ‘then get some sleep.’
‘Yes, boss,’ he replies.
The party runs all night. Laurence’s people have hired a bar in Midtown, taken the entire place over, and they’ve had a cocktail created for the occasion, some luridly blue thing called the Walker All Over ’em, that tastes like Jolly Ranchers and the cheap flavored wine that teenagers drink. Laurence necks two before he’s even found a seat, and then is handed a third when he’s asked to make a speech. This, he’s told, is the speech for them. Not self-aggrandizing: boosting the troops. He drinks faster as he starts to slur his words (‘Couldn’t have done this all without all of you,’ he says, letting the façade slip only slightly) and then a fourth. There’s an area at the back with a dance floor and somebody puts on some new song that’s been a huge hit pretty much across the world, music made for memes, and he’s dragged out to dance, which he does. Amit stands at the side and watches and laughs, and he takes a photo – expressly banned at the party, because this stuff lingers on the Internet, and there’s always somebody on one of the political blogs who’s desperate to print anything that looks as if it could be the start of a scandal – and shouts that he’ll use it as leverage.
‘You ever fuck up, guess what’s being sent to TMZ?’ he says, and his whole team laughs.
Deanna has trouble sleeping. It begins to rain, and the weather’s so close that she can barely stand it, even with the air-con jacked up as high as it will go. It’s something about the sort of humidity they get here, because at its worst it’s a warm breeze off the top of the lake, dragging along whatever from the base of the mountains, the warm smell of somewhere else entirely, somewhere with a logging industry and factories and a whole other way of life.
She gets out of bed and goes downstairs, and she opens her laptop and the file for what’s meant to be her new novel, years in the making. It’s a book that’s three years late already, if only by her own deadlines rather than those of a publisher that it doesn’t yet have, and she’s so behind. It used to be that she could sit at a table and just write the things, and the words would come out exactly as they were always meant to: from her head to the page, in the right order, the way that she had imagined them (for better or worse). But this one has become stuck, and she can’t move past it until it’s done. She can’t abandon it, that’s for sure. She never gives up on anything. When she first hit the wall she was frustrated: a year of struggling against certain words, of rearranging sentences until they fit the best they could into what was inside her head. After a while, she almost got used to being blocked. The wall was there every time she tried to write, and it never left. Some writers she knows have cats that sit with them while they work; she has the wall.
She tells herself to not rush, because there’s no contract. She never had a real audience, the previous books appearing on shelves one day and then slowly fading from them, until you had to go online to track them down; and how would you even know to? Her agent emails every so often, asking how the book is, how life is, if she’s still writing, and she says that she is. She tells him that she’s working on it, that it’ll be worth it when she’s done. But then she hits send and looks at the word count: not quite static, but close. A few words here and there, up and down. She thinks that she should give up almost every day of her life. Laurence tells her that it’ll be different when he’s done whatever it is he’s going to do. He laughs that people will be desperate for a novel written by the First Lady. It’s only half a joke. She wonders if that’s the pressure that she needs: that maybe the scrutiny of her earlier books, people tearing them apart, looking for truth between the words, might actually drive her to finish this one. And maybe that’s why this book has been so hard, she thinks. It’s more personal than anything else she’s ever written. It’s part of her, in places: of her childhood, and about her sister Peggy, who has been missing ever since she was a small child. It’s about family, mostly, and she knows what will happen to it. The women will be read as proxy for her, the men for Laurence. She wonders if that’s why she’s so hesitant to get any further with it. She began it when Laurence first mentioned running, back when he was doing a talking-head spot during the previous election, and it’s been written in the shadow of his career ever since.
She writes the same sentence over and over, tweaking words. She tweets – which she does anonymously, because these things never die on the Internet and one day some of things she’s said could really bite her in the ass. She exercises on the floor of the kitchen, lying flat on the dark slate tiles, the moon outside, the blinds left up, doing push ups and sit ups until she leaves a patch of sweat the breadth of her body on the tiles themselves.
Twenty-three words. She counts them, and reads them, and tries to evaluate them, two sentences that she knows can’t live up to, and that can’t actually mean anything, not taken like this. She reads them so many times that they start to disintegrate, ceasing to look like actual words any more, starting to be just shapes on the page that she happened to type.
In his hotel room, Laurence dreams: of his children and his wife. And there’s a pale room, pale because the light is so bright, and pale because it’s not a place that he knows. Maybe that’s how dreams are, he thinks through it, because he knows that he’s dreaming. If they’re not grounded, if they’re not somehow stolen from what is actually real, maybe they’re just faded before they even begin. So Deanna and the kids are clear as day, but the room, the background – it’s not a thing that exists and they are taken away from him. They’re pulled backwards into the pale, and there’s nothing that Laurence can do to stop it.
When he wakes up, the dream is a memory that is barely there.
The representatives from the party’s higher echelons all stand to shake Laurence’s hand, and they smile and laugh and pat him on the back.
‘You ready for this?’ one of them asks. ‘You ready for what’s going to happen to your life, son?’
‘Not especially,’ Laurence says, moving around the room, ‘but I’ll do my best.’ They grin, waiting for him to speak more. This is him as a show-pony: put him in front of a crowd and watch him perform. ‘I’m highly adaptable, that’s my thing. That’s always been my thing. Adapt, don’t stop talking, don’t let the others get a word in edgeways.’
‘It’s his major skill,’ Amit says, ‘and it means that he never ends up listening to me as well.’ That gets a laugh, because they know it’s not true. Amit knows his own reputation, and he knows what he’s worth to the campaign. Everybody in the room does.
There are two empty spaces at the table, the chairs already pulled out for them, the glasses already filled with water, and the two men take them and sit down. The smiling doesn’t stop, nor the gentle laughs that accompany the comfort of the situation for the panel.
‘So, you’re going to be formally announcing Monday,’ an older woman at the far end of the table says, ‘making sure that we get the full week’s cycle. Are you ready for that?’
‘Yes,’ Laurence says.
‘Of course, it’ll mean you’ll have to slightly scale back your day-to-day work, but you’ll still be working for them for a good while yet.’
‘And there’s no race? No contest?’ Amit asks.
‘Nobody with any weight,’ another man says. ‘A few senators are batting their lashes, but your man here tests off the scale.’
‘What about Homme?’
‘He’s thrown his hat into the ring, sure. But you throw a hat onto the floor, it’s likely to get trodden on.’
Another of the old guard interrupts him. ‘Senator Walker, you have our full support. You go out there, you work the states you have to work, shake the hands and kiss the babies. That’s a cliché, Laurence, but clichés exist for a reason. There’s always truth packed inside them.’
‘How long are we talking?’
‘Usually it’s a twelve, fifteen-month race from announcing the intent. This time, we’re winding it back. Let’s try for six before anybody else concedes and then we can concentrate on putting the pressure on POTUS, see if we can’t get him a little scared about what we’re bringing to the table.’ The man who says this, who once ran for President himself, back in the latter part of the last decade, grins. ‘Laurence, you’re a threat. You’re what the party needs, let’s be honest. You’re going to shake this up. You’re going to drag voters in by their bootstraps and coat tails, and you’re going to win this thing.’
‘Thanks for your faith,’ Laurence says, looking around at them all. He makes eye contact with every single one of them; he wants them to know that he’s serious, that their support means something to him. That’s been one of his major arguments the last few years: politics has become about empty words and even emptier eyes, promises made that are made for self-aggrandizing reasons rather than because somebody believes that they are the right thing to do. This is how he’s become popular, a man of the people.
‘There’s paperwork, of course, and we have to talk strategy.’
‘What sort of strategy?’ Amit asks.
‘Well, for one thing, the very reason that you were hired,’ the ex-nominee replies. ‘We’re going to have to talk about ClearVista.’
The bar is in a hotel that’s full of people who shouldn’t be there at a quarter of four in the afternoon, so nobody bats an eyelid when Laurence and Amit take a table. Laurence orders an Old Fashioned, Amit lemonade. He and Amit don’t talk until the drinks arrive, brought by a waiter, brandishing them on a polished silver tray, like some service from a time long before this. Laurence sips; the drink is sharp enough, and good. The meetings with the higher echelons of the party always terrify him; they bring out the prospects of the future, and the reality of what this all could mean over time. Amit brings out the paperwork and the contracts.
‘They’re footing the bills,’ he says.
‘But this feels like bullshit,’ Laurence argues.
‘Necessary bullshit,’ Amit says. ‘Look, they want this, and everybody’s going to be using it. You know that POTUS’s team have some Here’s what Four More Years will mean stuff prepared, and you know that if they don’t, the press will. Anybody can use these stats; better we’re first out of the gate with them.’
‘So I fill this in, and then it tells me if I should be President?’
‘In theory.’ Amit flicks through the pages. ‘All this stuff, it’s all designed to use as a jumping-off point, that’s all. You answer this stuff honestly, the data miner verifies it – and then the concept of you as an honest candidate rises. It’s not rocket science, not like people think it is.’
‘It’s numbers.’
‘It’s math; they’re different things.’ Amit turns to various questions. ‘I have never cheated on my wife. You tick the True box, and you move on.’ He leans in close. ‘That is true, right?’
‘Of course it’s true.’
‘Just checking. Because this is when there’s no chance for secrets, Laurence. This is when you have to be honest. All those things people hide, they come out. Clinton never inhaled, remember? But Obama did. And that stuff seeps.’ He finds more questions and picks them out. ‘These are easy wins. I have fought in a war. I have been honest about my policies. I have never lied about my sexual preferences. These are so easy, Larry.’
‘What’s the deadline? Realistically.’
‘No more than a couple of weeks: this is new tech; you get to be the first up to bat with the new, more polished algorithm.’
‘How different can it be?’
Amit smiles and leans forward. ‘When I stopped working for them, what we were doing was small fry. Compared to that … I mean, Jesus, Larry, the software will know you. That’s how it works. It finds out everything about you, and it learns you, and it predicts you. That’s the next wave.’
‘It’s ridiculous. So my word means nothing?’
‘Of course it does. But this reinforces that. You know their slogan? The Numbers Don’t Lie, Larry. Never have, never will. The public believes math. They believe computers. People? People are harder to believe.’ He looks down at Laurence’s hands, which are shaking, the ice rattling in the bottom of the glass. He raises his hand at the waiter walking by. ‘One more,’ he says, pointing to Laurence’s glass. ‘Listen: you can’t lie, though. Seriously, I know you’re full of integrity and all that stuff, so whatever. But we all lie. You lie on that, you’ll get caught. What I’ve heard about the algorithm now, the data mining? That thing will find out any secrets you’ve got.’ He finishes his own drink. ‘Look, this is fine. It’s totally fine. It’s you and answers and some bullshit video that’s going to run and run because it’s the first of its kind. We do this, we win the election. That’s what you want, right?’
‘Yes,’ Laurence says. The drink is put in front of him and he gulps it in the way that you shouldn’t. ‘That’s what I want.’
Laurence’s hotel room is functional. He lies on the bed, his head slightly swimming, and switches on the news. There’s a picture of him on the screen, between the two anchors: the shining, smiling one that’s on the front page of his website. The hosts are discussing the rumors.
‘I think it’s safe to say that they don’t qualify as rumor any more,’ one of them says, ‘because, come on. Look who he’s hired. Look where he’s been. And his answers to questions about it have been—’
‘So who’ll run against him?’ the other anchor asks. ‘Because, for my money, there’s only one other viable candidate, unless we’re dredging up one of the failures from last time.’
‘Which they won’t do.’
‘So, Homme?’
‘Makes a lot of sense. Good profile. Family man – I mean, they’re both family men, but still … and maybe more inclined to appeal to the more traditional members of the party.’ Laurence thinks about how little he likes or trusts Homme: they’ve met a few times and their politics do not have many natural points of intersection. His would-be opponent is as red as the Democrats get, he’s wavering on choice, healthcare, war. Everything is structured as a response to the last few governments, a way of suggesting that the soft touch that has been taken hasn’t been enough. His platform is a return to more old-school values. ‘But I don’t think he’s got a chance. Walker’s going to take this. He’s going to take the White House back, and maybe he’s what’s needed. You know, he’s got some real guts.’
Laurence switches the set off. He thinks about sleep, but instead he takes up his phone and searches for his name on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. He reads all the comments, and he tries to let the negative ones slide away from him.
Deanna shouts at the twins to stay quiet and they do. She has a voice that she uses to get the desired effect – total, gently terrified silence – and she engages it only rarely, because otherwise it will lose its effectiveness. But she snaps at them, and she peers out of the windscreen at the streetlamp-lit junction, trying to see Lane coming from one of the directions. She’s already an hour late and she’s not answering her phone or tweets or messages. She said it was a party somewhere around here. Deanna thinks about driving the streets to look for it. She knows what teenagers are like when they’re Lane’s age: they can’t help but turn the music up a little too loud which makes them much easier to find from the sidewalk, at least. There aren’t many streets in this town – Parkslide being only a little bigger than Staunton is – but she worries about Lane coming here to find her and having to wait around on the corner. She knows what it will look like; she saw what Lane was wearing when she left the house, an outfit that Laurence would have freaked out about. She tries to call Lane again, and talks to the twins as she holds the phone to her ear.
‘Guys, Mommy needs silence for a little while. This is important, okay?’ It’s an apology for what she said. She wants to scare them, but not that much.
‘Okay,’ Sean says. ‘Mom, where’s Lane?’
‘I don’t know, sport,’ she says. ‘She’s on her way, I’m sure.’ The cell goes to Lane’s answering service, but Deanna doesn’t leave a message. She sees somebody walking in the distance, a girl – the figure is slim enough to be Lane, certainly – but as they get closer she sees that she is tottering along on heels. Lane wouldn’t be caught dead outside her boots, even at a thing like this. The girl is drunk, swaying and swerving along the sidewalk, stepping into the road every so often, stumbling down the lip between the pavement and the gutter.
‘Excuse me,’ she shouts at the girl. ‘Hey, excuse me?’ The girl stops and looks up at Deanna from across the road. ‘Have you been to a party?’
‘Sure,’ the girl says. She looks Lane’s age – actually, Deanna thinks, she looks younger, because Lane doesn’t wear make-up that looks as if it’s been put on by a child playing dress-up with her mother’s beauty products – and there’s a good chance it’s the same one.
‘Could you tell me where?’ Deanna asks.
‘Tim’s house. I mean, Tim’s parents’ house,’ she says, seemingly angry, as if there was ever any chance of Tim owning the place, and how could Deanna not know that? ‘They came back early, so … whatever.’
‘And where do they live?’
The girl waves behind her. ‘Just down there,’ she says. She belches under her breath and sits down by a streetlamp, pulling a packet of cigarettes from her bag – Deanna stretches her brain to think when she last saw somebody with this brand – and fumbles to light one.
‘Guys,’ Deanna says to the twins, ‘your sister is in so much trouble.’ The twins laugh at this, a shared secret. They understand: Deanna will use her angry voice on Lane. They drive in the direction that the girl indicated and soon Deanna sees where the party was: a large house, shining white with the lights that are turned on inside it, a flood of teenage bodies outside it, milling around in the front yard. She pulls over and rings Lane’s phone again, winding down the window and hearing it ringing, the tinny echo of a song that Lane loves cutting through the hubbub. Lane cancels the call, so Deanna steps out of the car. She turns back to the twins. ‘I warned her,’ she says.
She shouts Lane’s name, her full name: Lane Alexandra Walker.
‘Oh shit!’ comes Lane’s reply. The crowd seems to part like it’s a trick, and there stands Lane. She drops something as Deanna gets closer; a bottle of some cheap, sweet-smelling liquor. She reeks of pot, that sweet, sweaty smell that Deanna remembers from her own youth.
‘Get in the car,’ Deanna says. She isn’t even putting the voice on this time.
They drive home in silence, even the twins. When they’re parked, Deanna tells Lane to get inside and to take her brother and sister with her. Lane does as she’s told. The car smells of smoke and alcohol and sweat and Lane’s hair products, used to push her hair into something that makes Deanna think of the punk hairstyles that she used to toy with in the nineties. This, she thinks, is cyclical: teenagers do this. I did it, she tells herself. I was exactly like this, living in Staunton and rebelling in my own little ways. She stays in the car while they all go inside and watches the lights flick on throughout the house. The twins are well past their bedtime, which means tomorrow she’s going to have two seven-year-old nightmares on her hands. Better a weekend than a school day, she thinks.
She gets out and goes to the downstairs bathroom, finding air freshener, and she sprays the inside of the car with it, almost pushing it into the fabric of the seats. She thinks of bug bombs, and filling a space with something to purify. When she’s got a good cloud of the stuff going she shuts the doors and goes into the house. The twins are in the living room, Alyx on the iPad, Sean on the Xbox.
‘No,’ Deanna says. ‘Well past bedtime.’
‘Mo-o-om …’ Alyx says.
‘Come on,’ Sean pleads.
‘Don’t screw with me tonight, you guys. Bed!’ They both sigh – the same sound of exhalation, the same exasperation – and they put down their games and march past her. ‘You guys go to sleep, you get to pick what we have for dinner tomorrow.’
‘Can we get pizza?’ Sean asks.
‘Sure. Pizza. Deal. Clean your teeth and get to bed.’ She stands at the bottom of the stairs and listens to them doing their routine, finely tuned as it is. Always Sean into the bathroom first, then he cleans his teeth in the hallway while Alyx goes in. Then she cleans her teeth and both of them stand at the sink. They spit the toothpaste out at the same time. They get into bed, and she tucks them in, kisses them on their foreheads. ‘Pizza – if I don’t hear a peep from you,’ she says. ‘That’s the deal.’ They both do the same gesture: zipping their mouths shut with invisible zips, and they smile. She doesn’t understand them, not all the time, because there’s something she simply can’t get close to there, that only they share. She worried, when she knew that she was having twins, because she was older than she thought she would be when having another child, and because she thought that they might be too much for her to cope with. But now, eyes shut, they’re what she wants, two perfect halves of a perfect whole. She wonders if they’ll always be like this.
The sound of music, wafting down the corridor from Lane’s room, stops her daydreaming and reminds her what’s gone on here. She pulls the twins’ door shut and strides down the corridor. All the tricks that they’ve learned over the years about how to make the kids respect them – or, at least slightly, fear them – come into play now. Lane is almost too old for them, but still, they’re worth a shot; and residual feelings of what they used to inspire in her might just swing it in Deanna’s favor.
She opens the door wide, letting it swing until it hits the stopper. It thuds, and the whole door shakes. Lane is on the bed, lying back, staring at the ceiling of her room. There are still the remnants of the pale stars there that they put up when they moved in, when Lane was the same age as the twins are now. She wanted the stars because she’d had them in the old house. Laurence and Deanna relented, even though she was too old for them, maybe. It was easier.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Deanna asks. Lane doesn’t look at her. ‘Lane, you know the rules.’ She walks over, stands next to the bed. ‘You know that we don’t want you drinking, and we don’t want you smoking. You know about your father’s career – you get yourself arrested, and God only knows what that does to him, the sort of questions he’ll have to answer about that.’
‘Fuck that,’ Lane says.
Deanna steps back. ‘Okay, you’re done. Lockdown for the next week.’
‘You can’t do that!’ Lane retorts.
‘Can and will. Watch me.’ She leaves the room, slamming the door shut behind her, and she goes to the bedroom and takes her cellphone from her pocket. She starts writing a text to Laurence, explaining what has happened, telling him that he’s going to need to talk to Lane when he gets home; that she always listens to him, or pretends to. Something about the father-daughter relationship works while Deanna and Lane have always had this wall between them when it comes to basic levels of respect. She writes all of that out, and then thinks. She doesn’t press Send. Instead, she goes downstairs and she brings up the calendars on the screen embedded in the door of the refrigerator, and looks at Laurence’s. The next few weeks are brutal for him: back tomorrow morning, Sunday working in DC on policy, then leaving first thing Monday for the announcement, then on to LA, Seattle, back to DC, home for three days, then NYC for a week. She taps through the following weeks and months, looking for a break, but there’s nothing. He’s barely hers, barely part of the family with his schedule the way that it is.
She clears the text. This is hers to deal with.
2 (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
Laurence sits up in bed holding the tablet. He scrolls through the questions while Deanna reads, and he sighs exaggeratedly at them. She puts her book down and laughs at his face, a mock-grimace at the task ahead of him.
‘These fucking questions,’ he says.
‘How many are there?’
‘A thousand; a thousand questions. Which is, what, nine hundred and fifty more than for a citizen ID?’ Deanna puts the coffee down on the table at his side of the bed and leans in. She pulls the laptop away from him and turns it around to face her.
‘Aged eighteen, where did you see yourself aged thirty?’ she reads. ‘You’ve only made it to eighteen years old?’
‘Which is about a third of the way through. Because, apparently, they can tell if I would be a good president based on whether I ever gave some kid a wedgie when I was in high school.’
‘It’s not a science,’ Deanna says.
‘Probably not,’ Laurence tells her, ‘but ClearVista sure as hell acts as if it is.’ He collapses backwards in mock anguish. ‘It’s fine. I have to do it.’
‘Says who?’ Deanna touches his chest. He’s so warm, she thinks.
‘They do. Shadowy they. The would-be Illuminati of America. And Amit.’
‘Of course Amit does. He probably still has shares in the company.’
‘He says that it’s the future of politics.’
She leans in and kisses him. ‘And there was me thinking that the future of politics would be you,’ she says. ‘You ready for today?’
‘Barely.’
‘Did you sleep?’
‘Barely.’
‘Barely?’
‘Barely.’ He smiles. ‘It’ll be fine.’
‘All you have to do is dance, monkey.’ She leans in to kiss him, and he pushes his tongue behind his lip, imitating the animal. She grins as she feels it, and he pulls her towards him, onto the bed. She rests her head in the nook between his chin and his shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m going to the house, to try and make a start on stuff. Cleaning it.’
‘I’ll come and join you when I’m done.’
‘There’s no party?’
‘Don’t care if there is.’ He thinks about what happens after this, and how busy he suddenly becomes. He’s seen the effect that it’s had, his slight withdrawal from them all in the wake of his career. This is, he thinks, important.
‘I’ll wake the kids,’ she tells him, and then he hears her go down the corridor and into the twins’ room. He hears them giggling. They’ve been waiting for her. Laurence gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. He looks at his face. He thinks about how old he looks and wonders how old he will look at the end of this, what sort of effect even running for the role will have on him. He pulls at gray hairs, and he examines the lines on his mouth and eyes, the slight jowl underneath his chin. He rubs at his temples, and the spots on his head where the hair will start to go. It’s in his family, or it was; and it feels like an inevitability to him. He’ll turn forty and his stress levels will be off the charts, and then he’ll just be clinging to whatever aspects of youth feel like letting him off the hook for the longest.
Deanna reappears in the doorway. ‘Lane isn’t coming,’ she says. ‘I told her she can have lockdown here or there, but she chose here.’
‘Foolish girl.’
‘I’m going to call her every hour, check she’s not gone out.’
‘We can trust her,’ Laurence says.
‘I wouldn’t have trusted myself when I was her age,’ Deanna replies. ‘Anyway, the twins are getting dressed. What time are you on?’
‘Ten,’ he tells her. He goes to the wardrobe and pulls his suit out – the gray suit, the lemon-yellow tie – and as he dresses himself he hears her go downstairs and switch on the TV. He hears his name mentioned, and then the set goes quiet.
‘Can we go swimming?’ Sean asks.
‘Later,’ Deanna says. ‘Maybe we can go in later.’ She’s packed all the cleaning supplies and the toolkit, and she pulls them both out of the trunk of the car. She wants to start clearing the house out, getting rid of the crap that’s been left, making sure that there are no splinters. There is furniture in the house; wooden tables and chairs that match the walls and floors and make it feel like the set of a horror movie. She pulls up outside the front, driving as close to the house as she can. There’s no real space for the car, just the dirt and gravel ground. ‘Watch yourselves,’ she says. ‘No running, no picking up anything that looks as if you shouldn’t pick it up, okay?’ She looks at the twins. ‘And stick close,’ she says, ‘No idea what’s waiting to bite you in this place.’ She snaps her teeth at them, and they both laugh.
The front door sticks and she has to shoulder it as hard as she can, really putting all of her weight into forcing it open. It finally swings, a hard arc that makes it smack into the wall and kick up clouds of dust. To Deanna’s eyes the house looks as if it’s barely holding itself up. It’s a building of pencil-drawn monochrome, the walls slightly askew, in need of a ruler. Rays of light hit the dust that seems to fill every part of the place, the light coming from not only the windows, but also through the cracks in the walls. There’s a smell inside that she struggles to recognize, that’s not totally unpleasant. It’s on that fine line, and it needs such a clean. They should have hired somebody, she thinks.
‘Right,’ she says, and she opens her bag, pulling out cloths and disinfectant sprays. ‘We need to get this place a little more habitable.’ She holds a cloth out for each of the kids. ‘Help me today, maybe we think about buying you guys a videogame later in the week. Deal?’ The kids snatch the cloths from her hands, and she shows them how to use the spray on the work surfaces in the kitchen, and how to wipe them down. She knows she’ll have to go over it again, but this is fun, the three of them working on this. She knows that when this is done, the place might feel like more of a home.
There’s no water from the taps; she writes it into her phone as something for Laurence to sort out when he arrives.
The delegates usher him onto the stage. ‘This is official,’ one of them says, ‘so treat it with some goddamn respect, you hear?’ He’s smiling while he talks, so Laurence smiles too; but it sounds, for a second, like an actual threat. ‘You do us proud,’ the man says. Not, ‘Do the party proud,’ Laurence notices. He takes Laurence’s hand, reaching for it and forcing the handshake.
Laurence reaches the stage and the flashbulbs go, the cameras all pointing at him. He’s got a speech that was prepared for him and he uses it while he speaks, but only as a frame. Most of the time he tries to be as much himself as he can.
They ask questions, and he poses for photographs. He checks his phone and his Twitter, his Facebook, his emails all scream alerts at him as people congratulate him. Amit takes the phone.
‘Clear your notifications,’ he says. ‘You won’t have time to read them.’ He pulls a schedule out.
‘No,’ Laurence says, ‘nothing else today. I’m going home. Family time.’
‘Bullshit,’ Amit says, laughing.
‘No,’ Laurence tells him. He asks for Amit to get him a car and he loosens his tie. He texts Deanna: I’m coming home.
The house looks exactly as Laurence has been picturing it: the same ramshackle wooden walls; the same dock that stretches off out and over the water; the same view behind it, the mountain and the houses in the distant opposite, and the sun above them. The driver takes them along the dirt track that runs down the hill towards the shoreline and Laurence watches the house get closer, as if it is becoming more real, and it reveals itself to him in broken windows and splintered wood. He feels the peace washing over him, a sense that this is meant to be – at least for now. Barely ten minutes from their other house, yet it feels like a different place entirely. He winds the window down and smells the air, listens to the sound of the tires on the gravel.
Laurence watches as the driver takes the car back up the hill, leaving him alone outside for a second. There’s just him. He can’t hear his family, not at that moment; and then he goes up to the front door, which is opened wide, and inside. He hears them upstairs, singing some song that he vaguely recognizes from the radio. Deanna is mostly humming the melody, but the kids know every word. He doesn’t shout to let them know that he’s here, not yet.
He walks through the downstairs, which is open-plan, a living area with 1950s wood-framed sofas around a fireplace, then the kitchen behind and the table for four, the units that are the same wood as everything else. The man who owned this place must have been a carpenter, he thinks; maybe he did this all himself, and built the house with his own two hands. There are gun racks on the walls, empty slots of what was once there; and a hook with a dust outline shape of what was clearly a mounted animal head. Laurence stands by the window at the end of the house, looking out over the water.
‘How did it go?’ Deanna asks him. She’s at the foot of the stairs. He didn’t hear her come down.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘It went well.’
‘I love you,’ she says, and he smiles.
‘It’s so peaceful here,’ he tells her. ‘This is amazing.’ He’s transfixed, staring at some far-off point in the distance. There’s a thin layer of mist stopping him from seeing what’s actually over the other side of the lake, only the thin shapes of what have to be houses and trees, but that isn’t stopping him. ‘I wasn’t joking when I said that I had always dreamed of this,’ he tells her.
‘I know.’ She stands next to him while the twins run around behind her. ‘Thank god you’re here. There’s no running water.’
‘I’ll turn it on,’ he says. He doesn’t stop staring out at the lake.
The cellar door off the kitchen opens onto stairs that go down into total darkness. There’s a smell of more than damp: of absolute wetness, wet mud and wet stone. Laurence and Deanna both peer down into the black.
‘Looks like it’s flooded down there,’ Laurence says.
‘Could be from the lake.’
‘Could be.’ He pulls off his suit jacket and rolls up his sleeves.
‘You should change,’ she says.
‘Didn’t bring anything,’ he replies. ‘I can get this cleaned. It’ll be fine.’ He opens his toolbox and looks for the torch. It’s not there, so he takes out his cellphone and turns the brightness up, holding that out in front of him as he takes the first few steps down. The stairs are wooden, a stained and polished pine, and they creak underneath his weight. He puts his free hand out to the wall to steady himself. ‘I’ll do this,’ he says. ‘You stay up there and call for help if I die.’
‘Don’t,’ she says.
‘It’s fine. Joke.’ She hears him smiling. He steps down again, a few more. In front of him he can see the floor now, the bottom of the steps, and there is water there. He can’t tell how deep, because it’s black with dirt and grime. ‘Pass me a stick or something?’
‘Wait,’ she says, looking around. There’s nothing. She runs past the kids, who are now playing with their phones on the sofas, sitting in little clouds of dust that puff around them every time that they move (like Pig-Pen, she thinks, from the Peanuts cartoons), and she goes outside to the trees that line the road. She finds a branch and takes it back to him, passing it down.
‘About time,’ he jokes. He holds it in front of him and steps down again, watching the stick go into the water until it stops. ‘Ankle level,’ he says. He sits on the steps and they creak horrifyingly, as if they’re being pulled off the walls.
‘We need these replaced,’ Deanna says.
‘They’re fine. They need oiling or something, maybe a supporting strut.’
‘You say that as if you know what it means.’
‘It’s a strut. It supports.’ He pulls off his shoes and socks and folds the bottom of his suit trousers up to his knees. ‘Or something.’
‘You’re not,’ she says.
‘What else am I going to do?’ he asks. He steps down into it and the water swirls around his feet. He gasps. ‘Cold,’ he says. ‘Jesus, that is cold.’
‘Can you see the water pipes?’
‘Give me a second,’ he shouts back. From where Deanna’s standing at the top of the stairs she can’t see him now, only the faint flashes of his phone’s light as he swishes it around. ‘Okay, got it,’ he says. ‘It’s rusted to hell.’
‘Can you turn it?’
‘I don’t know. I need a wrench or something.’ She picks up the bag and takes the first few steps down, and they groan. He wades closer and she places it slightly further down the stairs, within his reach. He grabs at it, stepping up. His feet are filthy, she sees. ‘I’ll get on this,’ he says. ‘You tell me if it works?’
She stands at the sink and turns the taps on, and there’s a dribble of brown sludge from them and a gurgling, but no water. She waits, as the clangs of him struggling with the pipe echoes through the stairwell. She thinks about Lane and how it’s been a while since she last called to check in, so she dials the house; but there’s no answer; she dials her daughter’s cellphone, and there’s still no reply. She leaves a message and then tries again, letting the phone ring and ring.
‘Shit,’ she says.
‘Mom!’ Sean shouts, hearing the word.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ she mutters back. ‘Laurence,’ she calls, ‘I can’t get hold of Lane.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ he shouts up to her.
‘I told her to stay in the house.’
‘So go and pick her up. Force her to come here, be with us. She can help me dredge the cellar out when I’ve got this working.’ She hears the noises still coming, the strain in his voice as he fights against the decades-old plumbing of the house, trying to make it habitable. When they moved into their first apartment, there was a superintendent to fix anything that broke; when they bought their house in Staunton itself they had it gutted and renovated and made as modern as possible, switches and buttons put in, digital rather than analog to run their lives by. Working with the old is new to them.
‘I’ll take the kids,’ she says. ‘We won’t be long.’
‘Bring me a Coke?’
‘Sure,’ she says. She goes to the kids. ‘Come on,’ she tells them, ‘we’re going back to the house for a little while.’
‘I want to stay here,’ Sean says. He doesn’t look up from his game, but Alyx does.
‘You can’t.’
‘Mo-o-om,’ he says. He hits the whine in his voice, a note that he and Alyx have perfected over the duration of their lives; some pitch that manages to work in the same way that Deanna’s angry voice does. It’s worse when it’s in harmony.
‘Fine,’ she says. She shouts to Laurence. ‘Sean’s staying up here.’
‘Can I swim now?’ Sean asks.
‘When your father’s done,’ she says. Alyx stands up and coughs away dust, and she and Deanna leave. Sean sits and listens as the engine starts, then he watches them drive up the track until they’re gone.
Laurence struggles. It’s hot down in the cellar, or he is; he sweats, and he hears the patter of it dripping into the water around his feet. He tries again, because he’s sure that there’s some movement; an almost-infinitesimally small amount, but it’s still movement. Eventually this will open up the sluices. He stands still, planting his feet in the murky water, and he really fights the thing. It doesn’t move and he doesn’t move. Total stillness.
The light has gone out on his phone, some sort of standby mode having kicked in, and he’s in the dark now, but he doesn’t stop. This is necessary. The house means something. Securing it, actually working on it, that’s a way of making their future seem as if it’s going to happen. His phone rings, Amit’s name on the screen; the photo of his grinning face that was taken on their first meeting.
‘Where are you?’ Amit asks.
‘At the lake house.’ Laurence doesn’t let go of the wrench; he’s still forcing it, still trying to get the water to flow.
‘You shouldn’t have run off. There are people asking for you.’
‘Tell them it’s family time. Tell them this is the sort of candidate I’ll be: a man who gives a shit about stuff like that still.’
‘You done the questionnaire yet?’
‘No. Not even close.’
‘Larry.’
‘Amit.’
‘You need to, you know that.’
‘I know,’ Laurence says. He looks down, pulls the phone away from his ear. It’s wet with sweat and, as he wipes the screen of the phone on his shirt, the light dances across the muddy water at his feet. There are ripples and he feels the water lapping at his ankle, the energy that it carries coming through and tickling the hairs on his legs. The sound of it echoes in the space. He wonders if this is an effect of his effort, maybe the pipes shuddering as they try to let their water out. It picks up, suddenly more violent, tiny waves coming from the far wall. ‘I have to go,’ he tells Amit, and he hangs up the phone, shining the light again. The waves bounce the light around. He walks towards the wall that the ripples seem to be coming from. He crouches and presses his hand against it, feeling around. There’s a crack in the concrete; it’s only slight and he can’t tell if that’s the cause of this, but it feels like it is. A crack like this, there has to be repercussions. He wonders where this has come from.
The house is empty and quiet apart from the reverberations of the water in the cellar as it eases, as the waves die down. He thinks about washing his feet, which are the color of soot now, so he walks upstairs and through the kitchen, to the outside. The back door is already wide open. He pads along the dock and catches himself looking across the water again. He’s sure that he can see something in the distance, across the water, through the mist, a light, or the reflection of a light. He stares at it. It’s almost hypnotic, for that second.
It’s only so slight.
He sits and dangles his feet in the water, and they are wet, and he looks down at them to see if they’re clean yet and there is Sean, suspended underneath, the crown of his head jutting from the surface. Laurence stares for a second as he tries to parse what he’s just seen and then he hurls himself down from the dock and he pulls at his son’s head and shoulders, trying to yank him up, but the boy doesn’t move. Laurence heaves in air and then dives down, frantically pulling at his son’s limbs, using his body almost as a ladder to get lower, and then he finally feels the weeds that are wrapped around Sean’s foot and ankle, going between his toes and all around, and he wrenches but they won’t tear. The weeds are like thick rubber.
So he feels lower, to the root, thinking that might be easiest. He finds it up against concrete at the bottom of the house, the foundations at the base of the dock. This is where the weeds have grown, boring into the concrete and cracking it. The wall here leads to the cellar. This is what caused the flooding; and what Laurence felt around his own legs, his son’s frantic and desperate kicking before he stopped breathing.
Laurence pulls that part of the plant out somehow and thinks, in that second, of those moments where people find superhuman strength when in crisis, and Sean’s body drifts upwards. It’s free. He grabs it and he pushes his son’s head above water, then climbs out onto the dock, pulling Sean with him. He tries to give him mouth-to-mouth as he knows to do it. He pushes on Sean’s chest, worried about doing it with too much force. He doesn’t want to hurt him. He turns his head and he breathes into his boy’s lungs again.
‘Please,’ he says, ‘oh God, please,’ and he breathes again; and then so does Sean, coughing up water. He doesn’t open his eyes, and his breathing is shallow and labored, heaves that sound somehow less than human. Laurence runs for his phone and dials 911. He shouts about where they are but the address is hard to find. He describes it to them and they say that they’ll be minutes. Support him, they say. Keep him breathing. If he stops, breathe into him again. Keep repeating this.
He does. He hangs up and he waits for the ambulance and he watches his son’s face so closely that he hopes Sean can feel his hot breath on his skin, willing him to stay alive.
It’s only a minute before the Staunton Sheriff’s department arrives. They come tearing down the track and the deputy gets out and rushes to the boy, taking over. Laurence backs away and watches it all as if from a dream.
Deanna storms through the house, shouting Lane’s name. She goes to her room and throws the door open and her daughter is there, on her bed. There’s a boy with her; he’s not like Deanna imagined, being clean cut, wearing a bright rugby-style shirt; or, he was. Now, it’s on the floor at the foot of the bed. Deanna doesn’t even look at him; she stares instead into her eldest daughter’s eyes.
‘I’ve been calling you.’
‘I was busy,’ Lane says, but her voice is shaking and weak. She’s ashamed, whether she’ll admit it or not.
‘Get dressed,’ Deanna says, ‘you’re coming to the house with us.’
‘No,’ Lane replies, and Deanna is about to shout at her, and to shout at this boy, to tell him to get out of the room, when her own cellphone rings. It’s Laurence. She turns away from Lane’s room, hearing her daughter and the boy fumble for their clothes, and she answers. Dumbly, she listens to his slow, measured politician’s voice as he tells her what happened, or some version of it as best he understands it; that Sean is alive and being treated. He tells her about how he found him, and how he didn’t know. Deputy Robards came, and he held Sean’s tongue back, because their son began choking on his own tongue, and Sean nearly bit through the finger. Apparently that’s a good sign, Laurence says. He has bite marks, almost through to the knuckle; that detail, offered up. She didn’t need it but Laurence stresses: this is a good sign.
‘How long was he under the water?’ Deanna asks.
‘Minutes,’ Laurence tells her. ‘Six or seven minutes, maybe eight. I don’t know.’ He tells her to come to the hospital. She says that she will.
Lane stands in front of her mother. She can see it in Deanna’s face.
‘I need you to watch Alyx,’ Deanna says.
‘What’s happened?’ Lane asks. No antagonism, no challenge. She knows from the look she’s being given that this is serious.
‘Your brother fell into the lake,’ she says. ‘He’s alive.’ That seems enough; a thing to latch onto for all of them, and then she goes to the car and gets in and starts the engine. She doesn’t need anything else. She drives.
This is the first time that she’s had to go to hospital for one of the kids. They were lucky with Lane: ten years older than the twins, and Deanna and Laurence were ten years younger when they had her, ten years more stupid; but still they got through with her having nothing more major than a scrape or two. Nothing broken, nothing lost, no emergency trips to the hospital. Maybe, she thinks, they got complacent.
She thinks about the eight minutes that Sean was underwater. She wonders if eight minutes is a long time to not take a breath.
She doesn’t know the way to the hospital. She relies on the ClearVista app on her phone to tell her where to go. She listens to its voice and tries to let that be all that she can hear.
She parks in the short-stay – because, she thinks, that’s all this can be, because she’ll go in and they’ll be sending Sean home with some medicine or an inhaler or something, and a lesson learned about what to do and what to not and when to listen to your parents, because that’s the sort of injury that kids recover and learn from – and she rushes in, past the ambulance bay and into the ER reception. There’s a queue at the window, so she waits, and she looks for her son. Maybe he’ll be sitting out here waiting for her himself, because it’s not at all serious. They have let him go already, this was a false alarm. Instead, there are people with bloody noses and hands wrapped in bags of frozen vegetables, and one woman whose skin is almost green, her eyes rolling back in her head, froth around her mouth. There’s a television above them, tuned to the news. They’re talking about Laurence, running a special later on, about his political career so far. She hopes that she isn’t still waiting here to see it.
‘Miss?’ the woman at the desk says. Deanna doesn’t hear her. She’s somewhere else: imagining Sean in the water, imagining how he took his dive from the dock, and how he arced through the air; and why he didn’t come up again. She can picture it, as if she is there. She doesn’t know how. She is trying to imagine what was going through his mind. How lost he was, and how he needed her. Maybe he called her name through the water …‘Miss? Can you hear me?’ Deanna turns. The woman behind the counter is impatient already.
‘My son’s here,’ Deanna says. ‘I don’t know where he is. My husband brought him here in in an ambulance. He drowned.’ Such finality in that phrase.
‘Name?’
‘His name? It’s Sean. Sean Walker.’ The woman types and stares at her screen. Deanna imagines the notes shared on these computers: even down to letting the front desk staff know how to treat the situations. The patient is fine. The patient is in stable condition. The patient is dead. Morgan – Deanna reads her name badge – doesn’t say anything for a while. Instead she follows the notes on her screen, and then she sighs. It’s almost imperceptible, but Deanna is watching for it. She’s so focused now on this moment and nothing more. No point in dwelling on what happened before. This is all about what happens from this moment on.
‘Okay,’ Morgan eventually says, ‘so you’re going to come with me through here now.’ She stands up from her desk and lifts the entry flap, and she puts her hand on Deanna’s elbow to lead her through.
‘Is Sean okay? Can I see him?’ Deanna asks.
‘Your husband is through here,’ Morgan says, ‘and the doctor will bring news as soon as she’s got some.’ They pass bays of beds where doctors fix the damaged and then reach the room. It doesn’t have anything printed on the door: there’s a darkened glass window in it and nothing more. There are three more of them adjacent, Deanna sees, but she can’t see if they’re vacant or not. The door creaks on the swing, and Laurence is there and he rushes to her. He’s still damp, wet from having dredged Sean out of the water, but he’s got his suit jacket back on. He shakes, a towel wrapped around him, and she holds him. It’s not his fault, she tells herself. It’s not. He sits down, and she does, and they don’t talk.
The room is pale and bare. There are six chairs arranged as if for dinner, one at the head of the table, one at the foot, two on either side; and the table in the middle is low, cheap wood, covered in coffee stains. There’s a green plastic box in the center filled with tissues. The box, Deanna notices, is glued to the table. There are no magazines, no television, no water cooler: this is like no waiting room Deanna has ever been in before. The chairs are covered in a fading red woolen fabric, but the arms have started to be unpicked, the strands pulled out and played with; worried. The carpet has, around the table, been worn into a path, like a running track. The ceiling tiles are yellowed with cigarette smoke. It’s been decades since you were allowed to smoke in buildings like this, and nearly twenty years since Deanna last had a cigarette; but now she looks at that and she misses it, because if ever there was an occasion it is now.
‘I have to see if there’s news,’ Laurence says. ‘I’ve spoken with Amit, asked him to come.’
‘Okay,’ Deanna says. He stands up and leaves, padding into the hallway – she watches him, sheet draped over his shoulders, looking for all the world like any other patient of this place – and she takes out her phone. She texts Lane – No news xxx – and then opens the ClearVista app. Predict anything with our groundbreaking algorithm, it reads. The numbers don’t lie. She logs in and selects Sean’s name from the drop-down list of her dependents, and then starts to type what she’s looking for. Predict how long you can survive, she types, and it fills out the rest for her, guessing at her request. Without breathing, the second most requested search beginning with that phrase. She clicks the completed sentence. The little icon spins around (While you are waiting, did you know that ClearVista can help you predict your chances of love with a new partner to a ninety-three percent accuracy?) and then it gives her its answer.
We predict that Sean Walker can survive for 102 seconds without breathing, it says. She turns the Internet browser off and puts the phone back into her pocket. She fingers one of the tissues from the box, and she feels how thin it is, and somehow that’s what sets her off.
Deanna looks out of the window. There’s only one, and it looks out onto the gray concrete rear of the buildings. The fans from the air vents, the delivery area for medical supplies, a chain-link fence. There’s nobody walking past, gawking in, which is a relief. The afternoon sun, briefly, shining through the window and onto her face. She’s looking out when the door to the room opens and she sees the doctor’s face reflected in the glass. She turns. The doctor takes her glasses off before saying anything, and she shakes Laurence’s hand, and Deanna’s, and Deanna thinks how warm her hands are. She keeps thinking about that warmth all the way through the explanation of what happened: that there were two sets of injuries to deal with: because when he stopped breathing it caused an embolism; and then his lungs were flooded as well, because before he stopped he tried desperately to breathe, taking water in where it should only have been air. The doctor is amazed that Laurence managed to get him breathing at the scene. She says something about Sean being artificially alive; or how he was. She doesn’t say the words about what exactly happened after was, which makes it worse for Deanna, somehow. Everything sounds as if she is at altitude and her ears have popped, fading off into a fog of words that carry no meaning.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor says. That’s all they need. Laurence holds Deanna, and he cries into her shoulder, and he falls to his knees and he screams but it comes out like he’s gasping for air; but Deanna cannot soothe him. She is still picturing Sean stuck under the water, looking up at her, calling his father’s name, desperately clawing at the surface of it, unable to break out; knowing what is coming as he drowns.
3 (#ulink_a06c444b-959c-5bd6-937d-8a2385412a36)
The next year is the worst of their lives.
The funeral happens a week to the day after his death. Sean’s skin was a shade of gray when they looked at it in the hospital. The make-up artist tells them he is one of the best and Laurence wonders what scale that’s on: town, or state, or country, or even the world. He asks, bitterly, if there are competitions to decide such a thing: a parade of bodies lined up to be perfumed and preened? When they finally see Sean, his skin is the abnormal pink of a child’s doll. They refuse an open casket, then, because this isn’t their son any more. Laurence can’t stand to look at him, or even at the casket as it lies on the table. They invite anybody who wants to come to the funeral, and pretty much the whole town does. They all bring trays of pies and pasta and salads, and they leave them piled up in the kitchen, shake Laurence’s hand and kiss Deanna’s cheek, say how sorry they are. Everybody in the town knows them; most remember Deanna from when she was a child. And they all knew Sean, and they all want to say goodbye to him. Everybody steps up to the closed box on the table and stands over it; they tell Sean whatever it is that they have to say. Alyx doesn’t come, because Deanna doesn’t know if that’s right. Deanna explains it to her.
‘Sean’s gone to heaven,’ she says, almost without thinking, and that starts a conversation that she then feels pitiably unable to deal with, but she tries. She buys a Bible for the express purpose of giving Alyx the story about how it works. She argues with Laurence that grief needs an outlet and that this might be a good one for Alyx. Laurence doesn’t like it – he’s practical about religion, pragmatic, as badly as that plays with the South; and now he’s more stubborn. Any shot at belief that he maybe once had is devastated by the loss of their son – but, Deanna argues, that’s beyond the point. The point is: Alyx needs it. She was a twin, and she is now missing the person she was closest to in the whole world. She’ll never know that closeness again.
Once Sean is finally put into the ground, Deanna and Laurence take the girls to his grave, to do something that’s small and private and just for them. They stand around the stone – the dates make Deanna feel sick to look at, so she avoids that – and they all tell stories about Sean and why they loved him. They have decided to bring some of his toys, to put them in the soil with their hands. Alyx buries one of her own toy ponies, the one that Sean always used to steal when he was younger; Lane chooses a dinosaur that he claimed he didn’t like any more, but that he had absolute trouble letting go of as he grew older. They don’t say why they’re doing it, but they think that it might help. As they bury them, scooting the soil on top of them, pushing them under, Deanna feels a rip in herself: so much of her beloved son now relegated to the ground. She will miss the toys, because they would have reminded her of him. She thinks about coming back at night, when the rest of them are asleep, and pulling them from the soil; but she wonders where she would stop, or if she would just keep on digging.
They sit Alyx down and ask if she would like to talk to anybody about her brother, because they’ve heard too many stories about what happens if children are left to bottle up their emotions, how dangerous it can be. They hire a therapist, a specialist in childhood bereavement, and Lane is allowed to do whatever she wants for a while. Three weeks after her brother’s death, Lane shaves her head almost down to nothing and she doesn’t bat an eyelid when Laurence shouts – screams – at her about it.
‘We had a deal!’ he yells, and she doesn’t respond or even acknowledge it. Deanna’s listening and that evening they have a conversation about his career.
‘What was that about?’ she asks, when he gets off the phone then, because they haven’t yet spoken politics yet. She had assumed. They’re in bed and he’s propped up like always, tablet on his lap. The ClearVista survey deadline has long expired; all of that stuff was forgotten in an attempt to find relative peace in the wake of Sean’s death.
‘The delegates called,’ he says. ‘They still want me to run.’
‘This year?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know.’ She knows that this works in the party’s favor; that their loss will be used, Sean an inadvertent sacrifice to the voting gods.
They have The Daily Show on as they lie in bed and they both laugh at the same joke and immediately feel guilty, as if they’ve forgotten too quickly about Sean. Then Jon Stewart starts talking about Homme’s laughable efforts at beginning a campaign. He mentions Laurence dropping out and then he looks to the camera, full of actual sincerity, and sends out his best wishes to the Walker family. No jokes: just an appreciation of their tragedy. When they switch the set off, Deanna tries to sleep, but she imagines that she’s drowning: she can see the sky above her, but the water is between her and it, a fluid mass of tropical blue that’s destined to do nothing but end.
Amit, the man who would be Laurence’s Chief of Staff, comes to the house with a plan. It’s a year-long breakdown of their lives: of the things that they have to do and how they might set about moving everything forward. He doesn’t mention Sean either, but the boy is there, floating in the air above them. Everything that Amit says is tinged with the knowledge of how this might have been before and how it will be now. He has an argument that makes Deanna feel sick to hear: that this is a chance for Laurence to do something truly good, a chance to use his awful situation to his advantage. The words aren’t Amit’s: they come from the delegates, Deanna knows. They’re desperate to harness this. The tragedy can mark every facet of the campaign, should Laurence choose to step up again: the charities that he will vouch for; the events that he will attend; every single time that he mentions the word family in a speech. Nobody will be able to forget what has happened. Deanna is about to start arguing: that Laurence shouldn’t be running, that the family needs him, when Lane comes home. She walks into the kitchen in front of them and doesn’t say a word. A month after her brother has died and she’s tattooed herself again: this time across her right shoulder blade, a single word. It isn’t announced, but it’s flaunted, red and angry, on her thin skin, so much bigger than her past tattoos. Her parents freak out, shouting at her, and they get close to read it. She lets them, because this will happen sooner or later. It’s her brother’s name, clear as anything, in a slick, italicized script, framed on a bed of flowers and leaves, a vine stretching out and away from them. It leaves them breathless. Lane leaves the house again without saying a word.
In bed that night, Deanna asks Laurence how they can be angry with her for it. She wishes it was something else: a swear word, or the name of one of the stupid bands again. That would make it easy to have something to rally against. This, though? It’s grief, manifested as words and made indelible.
Alyx seems fine, but they know that she is not; not quite. She talks to the therapist and sometime Deanna goes along and watches through the false mirror in the room that they use. Alyx talks about anything but Sean: even when pushed, it’s as if there’s a gap there, where she doesn’t know what’s wrong and why she should be talking about him. The therapist sometimes leads her into those conversations, but it’s always stilted, and Alyx is always unwilling to give anything up. One day they leave her alone in the office and Alyx doesn’t know that she’s being watched. The therapist and Deanna talk in the little room, Alyx playing behind them, past the mirror, and she talks to him. She says his name and she holds something out, a toy pony, and then she shakes her head. She agrees with the nothingness: it’s not the right pony. In the little hidden room both women know what’s happening.
‘This is relatively common,’ the therapist says, ‘especially with twins. This isn’t something to worry about.’ She squeezes Deanna’s arm, and Deanna thinks of the hospital receptionist leading her through to the pale room where they were told what had happened. The same squeeze that tells her that everything will be all right in the end, even if it isn’t right now. She’s not sure. They don’t tell Alyx that they know and Deanna doesn’t tell Laurence about it either. Instead she stands outside the twins’ room – No, she reminds herself, it’s only her daughter’s room now, because Sean is under all of that soil, face up, maybe even trying to get out, somehow – and she listens for what might be happening behind the closed door. She imagines a conversation, or a play and she wonders if Alyx sees her brother as he was, or if he’s something else, a vague and loose version of himself. She tries to fantasize Sean into being there herself while she listens, imagining him in front of her as she attempts to re-form him. Crouched on the floor, her eyes shut, she wonders if she can hear his voice herself if she tries. It would be so easy to go in and join Alyx in her fantasy.
Laurence is asked to do an interview on one of the bigger current affairs chat shows, as a pundit and nothing more. He’s still a good talker, charismatic and personable, and he’s more willing to say what needs to be said, to give sound-bites, than many others. He is, the TV producers think, good value for money. He has to buy a new suit as the others don’t fit him any more. It’s the same color as the one that he wore when he made his announcement. He gets the size smaller around the chest and waist, because he’s lost weight. He hasn’t been trying to, but it’s happened. His middle-age puppy fat is almost completely gone. If he sucks in his belly when he’s dressing he can see his ribs.
They talk about schools and healthcare, the topics that he’s there for, to actually try and pass judgment on some of the things going on across the country. And then the host rolls that into a conversation about Sean, blindsiding him. Laurence has no choice but to go with it. They talk about how the hospital tried to save him, and how hard they worked. They talk about universal healthcare and what it needs to work properly for the people. They talk about how it felt for him to lose his son, and Laurence cries, partly from the shock of being asked and partly because he simply cannot keep it in. There’s something honest about this; everybody watching can see that.
He says, ‘We have to move on. We have to go out and brave the rain. There is no other choice.’
Deanna doesn’t watch the interview, but writes instead, her own form of catharsis, abandoning the book that she was working on (which suddenly feels like frippery), taking only fragments – themes, emotions, some passages describing events that only now she feels she can do justice to, with all that she has been through – and she starts to create instead. She’s never written anything that she would term as fantasy before, but this is it: a mirror of our world that is underwater. It is the story of a woman and her son. The book has started to write itself and, fingers on the keyboard, she is powerless to stop it.
Lane does see her father’s interview. She is in a mall, in a bar that she shouldn’t be in, and it’s on the TV. She is with her friends and they point out her father and they joke – but then they remember. He cries, and she sees it, and they all fall silent. This is serious, they know. After that, she goes back to the tattoo shop. More ink on her skin: to turn what she has, as crude a beginning as anything has ever had, into something more.
The blogs talk about Laurence’s mental state of mind. They discuss the chance of him making a comeback, of him declaring. Maybe he’s not ready for this; maybe he has been through too much. But they’re split on Homme, and the younger elements of the party, those who want to move the party forward, are willing Laurence’s return. Better a man in touch with his feelings than a man who can’t see past the past, the blogs say. Laurence can mourn for now: the presidential election isn’t for another eighteen months. They agree that he’s the best man for the job. Somehow, his son’s death is a driving force; it is, in some small way, almost a validation for his policies.
Laurence is called in front of the delegates and they ask him again. He says yes. It’s announced that afternoon. Deanna and he don’t speak, because he didn’t talk to her first. His excuses – that he has done this for the family; that he is trying to be the man he knows that he can be – fall on deaf ears. He apologizes to her, but he doesn’t back out.
The delegates remind him to complete the ClearVista questionnaire. Even since he first agreed to it, the process has advanced. More questions, more answers, more data kicked out at the end. The process can take months to get the results that they desire: the visualizations, the computer-generated videos. The report, ClearVista say, will tell you what sort of man you are and what sort of president you will be; it tells the world that they can trust you. Amit agrees: if there are any concerns about Laurence’s wellbeing, his state of mind, his ability to run the country, the ClearVista algorithm will solve them. Laurence asks him how he’s sure it will show he’s the right man. Amit tells him that that’s what the software does. It looks for best-case scenarios. It finds out who you are and it predicts what you will do. The other candidates are using it and their results will be out first, so this has got to be done. Be honest, Amit tells him.
Laurence fills in the form that night. He’s regretful about so much of his life and he wants to lie, to electioneer, even here, to a faceless computer, but he doesn’t. He tells the truth. It’s cathartic, ticking the boxes that measure his sense of his own pain. He sends the results off.
ClearVista will, the email he gets in return informs him, be in touch.
Laurence and Deanna try with their marriage as much as they can. They go out for dinners in the town, but everybody knows them and they say hello and stop them from having to talk to each other. It lets them dance around the idea of speaking about anything that is actually important. They both know that they need to talk about Sean more than they do; Laurence has finally noticed Alyx talking to herself, and Lane going further off the rails. They all need a break. One night, he suggests a vacation.
‘We should,’ he says, and that’s really it decided. He books a hotel in Rome. It’s the furthest they’ve ever been, but nobody will know them there – Laurence doesn’t want anything that will remind them of their son. They force Lane to come, but she’s secretly pleased to be getting away. Her friends talk about the same things over and over and she’s bored by them. She wants more, now. She wants a purpose. The first night they land late, after the longest flight of their lives, and they find a small restaurant in the city and eat the dishes that they recognize on the menu: pasta and pizza, the stuff they’ve eaten at home, but it tastes so much better. Even just being somewhere else makes it taste better. They’re tired, but it’s already good for them to be out of America; and they walk the streets, and see the sights at night. They pass a fountain, famous, in all of the guidebooks, and Deanna can’t help but focus on the cherubs, spitting out water into the tiered pools. She tries to not let it get to her. She doesn’t sleep, because she feels guilty that they’re having this fun without him. She tells herself that she has to get over it, but she doesn’t know how she will. The next morning, on the rooftop terrace, Lane comes out in her bikini and they see the extent of her tattoos, running up one side of her body a creeping vine and flowers budding from it. Each flower is an item, an icon. Each one has meaning, they think. Laurence stands up when he sees her, but Deanna snaps at him and tells him to leave it.
‘What will it achieve?’ she asks. That’s what she worries about. She wants the family to be what they can be: as normal and whole as possible. She has lost her son already and now there are the four of them. She will do anything to preserve what she has and Laurence would likely say things to Lane that could irreparably harm their relationship. She begs him to calm down. He spends the afternoon looking at the tattoos through his sunglasses, quietly seething. In one of them, there is a toy dinosaur that Laurence recognizes as the one that Lane buried. He thinks, by the end of the day, as the sun is setting around them, that the print on her skin is, in some ways, even beautiful.
At the end of the week, Deanna realizes that Alyx hasn’t been talking to herself. One night as she’s tucking her into bed she asks about it, asks outright if her daughter has been seeing Sean since he died.
‘Sometimes,’ Alyx says.
‘Not this week though?’
‘He can’t come on vacation,’ Alyx says, and that seems to be enough for Deanna. She holds Alyx for a while on the little girl’s bed and they both fall asleep, because there’s something about Alyx’s smell that’s calming. The next day they go walking and there’s a moment where it seems as if Alyx has reverted, but she’s singing to herself. And when they get home, after a week that they all needed, and that they are all desperately sad to say goodbye to, Deanna watches for it, but the Sean-fantasy isn’t there. Alyx cries in the kitchen when she can’t find him – or, at least, that’s what Deanna supposes. They don’t talk about it. Alyx is sick from school for a few days and she watches cartoons and eats Pop-Tarts and lies on the sofa where Sean used to lie. She takes up the whole space.
Birthdays come and go. Alyx’s is quiet, and they think about Sean, because there’s no other choice. They try, though. The therapist tells Deanna that it’s important that they don’t ignore it, but that this is Alyx’s birthday. There are ways, she explains. So they have a cake, and a party, and they try to distract themselves. They don’t know how else to do this. For Lane’s birthday, they ask what she would like. She asks for money to extend her tattoo. Laurence gives it to her, on the condition that she talks to them about it as it goes. She agrees.
His campaign begins in earnest. Laurence goes out on the road, around the state, drumming up votes. He speaks at conferences. He does everything that’s required. On the calendar, his name is blocked out on almost every single day. There’s a gap, a week where there’s nothing booked in, and none of them can avoid it because it’s the anniversary of Sean’s death. A week of nothing at all, even though there are major events he’ll be missing. It’s a countdown, they all know, as the weeks before it are ticked off. He flies home on the last day with something written in it and the very next day they all wake up early and drive to the graveyard.
There was a time that they visited it a lot, at the start, but Deanna had to stop herself. She worried that if she kept coming she would become too used to this place: to the faded glory of the more ancient headstones, the manicured grass, the wrought iron fencing that blocked some plots off from others. As if it wasn’t all the same under the soil. So now it’s once a month, or less. It’s been so long since they were all here at the same time. Grass has grown all over the plot and they can’t see where they buried the toys that day. Deanna puts flowers down, which is ridiculous, she thinks. He didn’t like flowers and here I am, having spent nearly a hundred dollars on them. But she puts them down because they make her feel better. Around them, some plots don’t have flowers at all, and she reads the headstones. Some of them were young; nearly as young as Sean was. She plucks some flowers from his arrangement and leaves them on the other graves and she says a little prayer to them as well. Alyx cries and Lane holds her close. The little girl buries her face in her sister’s stomach.
In the car on the way home, Laurence says how quickly the year has gone. He says, ‘I can’t believe it’s been a year.’ The girls are silent. Deanna thinks, I don’t know if it’s been fast or slow. Everything has slipped into an expanse. Sean might as well have died a year ago, or yesterday, or tomorrow. It can never be undone.
She sits in the back, between her daughters, and she holds them close and kisses their heads: the soft child’s hair on one side, the harsh brittle bristles on the other.
4 (#ulink_0362e667-51a3-54a9-993c-db7aaf5622cb)
Laurence brings all four of his favored news shows up in different corners of the screen and sits at the breakfast bar and eats his bacon and drinks the revolting milkshakes that Amit insists he has every morning. A blogger made a GIF from pictures of him that had been taken over the last thirteen months, showing his decreasing weight, a morphing slideshow sold as somewhere between comedy and tragedy; and that set the other blogs to speculating what it could mean. They touched on his personal traumas, of course, but also mentioned the S word: sick. They asked if there was maybe something wrong with Laurence that the public hadn’t been told about, and that made Amit flip out. He called in the middle of the night after reading something that speculated with actual medical terms and told them – told Deanna, in no uncertain words – that it was something they had to change. They must never, ever use the S word and they weren’t to let others use it either.
‘As soon as people start asking about the health of any normal candidate, their campaign is essentially screwed,’ he said. ‘Somebody can go from weight-loss to cancer in two or three posts and all of a sudden they’re out of the running. Laurence can take that even less than any of the others. Better a fat candidate than one who looks like he’s the S word, Dee.’
So she began to cook pasta for dinners. She made rich sauces, with real cream, and she started baking breads with cheese running through the dough. Amit bought them an old Paula Deen cookbook as a partial joke, along with a packet of real butter, and he told them to deep-fry everything. She sets the cooker to fry the bacon rather than griddling it, and she takes it out when it’s done and puts it into a thick-cut doorstep sandwich with full-sugar ketchup. It’s not helping. His belts are new, and his trousers. He has to tuck his shirts in more; in the worst cases, Deanna pins them at the back to make them taut again across his new frame. When he undresses for bed, she sees his ribs, a ladder of loose skin. He’s seen a doctor, quietly, to appease her – in case there was something wrong, the S word again, uttered privately – but he’s medically fine. He’s just thin. He’s not eating enough, was the diagnosis. That and stress, but one is an easier fix than the other.
He’s been away working for a fortnight, and only came back last night. Today, he’s off again. This, he’s warned them, is pretty much how it’ll be for the next year of their lives. So breakfast with him feels rare, suddenly, as if it’s a special occasion. His face appears on Fox, top right corner of the screen, and he selects it and maximizes it. He jacks the volume up to hear a man talking to camera as if it’s his friend, casual and smooth. His name is Bull Brady, the front wave of a new type of shock-pundit for the political channels as they attempt to make something dry considerably more popular. They’re met a few times. He doesn’t like Laurence, is the recollection.
‘So, most predictions have Walker managing to climb another three points in his key demographics today,’ the host says, ‘which, of course, means very little at this stage. Three is nothing: three can be lost by spending time in the wrong place at the wrong time. So how does he hold? Get out.’ The host stands and does a little walk-on-the-spot move. ‘Get out, talk to people. He’s had too much time off, and he lives in Podunk, Nowheresville; he needs to work more if he wants back in. He’s got a big old chunk of the country, catching the more, shall we say, cosmopolitan parts of our great nation; but he hasn’t got a chance in the red states. Not even close. Now, Homme might. He can win some of them, that’s the word. So Walker plays well in New York. So he plays well in Boston.’ (The host does the accent of these cities. That’s his shtick.) ‘So he plays well with core democrats. Big deal! If he can’t play well with big oil, he could lose this before it’s already begun. If they want to go Democrat, they’ll go with Homme. Walker’s going to Texas to try and see what he can do, but I’ll be damned if he’s walking away from there with anything but a suntan.’ He puts on a cowboy hat and climbs a mechanical bull in the corner of the studio, and he moos. Laurence mutes and minimizes it as Deanna walks in.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ she says.
‘I know. But people watch him. They like him.’
‘People like spectacle.’
‘He says I’m not doing enough of that.’
‘Which is why you’re up three points.’
‘That’s nothing. Three points is nothing. He said it himself.’
‘Okay,’ she says. She puts his plate in the dishwasher. ‘Go and wake the girls and say goodbye, would you? They’ll miss you.’
‘They barely noticed that I was back.’
‘Because you were only here for one night. They miss you. I don’t know what else to say.’
‘Lane?’
‘Even Lane.’ She kisses him. It’s everything, these moments: they remember Sean with every single kiss and it doesn’t stop them doing it. He calls for the girls from the hallway. School has just gone back. Alyx comes out and smiles at him in the doorway of her room.
‘Hey, Pumpkin,’ he says. ‘I can take you, if you’re quick getting dressed.’
‘In the car?’
‘In the car.’ The car is a big black cross-country thing that his party has recently leased to drive him around, less conspicuous out here than the town cars, coming complete with low-paid driver and super-strict fuel budget. Laurence knows that budget doesn’t extend to taking Alyx to school, but he doesn’t care. ‘Lane?’ he calls, ‘you up?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘I’m off soon,’ he tells her. ‘Want to say goodbye?’
‘Bye,’ she shouts.
‘Look at the college applications,’ he says. She hasn’t decided about what she’s going to do next year yet and they’re not pushing her too hard, in case it scares her off. They mentioned college once and she countered with a desire for a year to find herself. He and Deanna both hope that she likes what she finds. He rolls his eyes at Alyx who has reappeared, clutching her clothes. She starts to pull them on in the hallway.
‘No shower?’ he asks.
‘Later,’ she says, and she runs downstairs, past him and to the kitchen. ‘Dad’s taking me,’ she tells Deanna. ‘Can I have my breakfast to go?’ She says it in a voice that she’s heard on a TV show. Deanna pulls bread from the grille of the toaster and the spread out of the cupboard, and she puts it down in front of Alyx with a thick, rounded knife.
‘You get the honor,’ she says to her daughter, and then she leaves for the hallway and finds Laurence there, at the foot of the stairs. He’s in the lemon tie, and she knows exactly when he was last wearing it. Exactly what day it was. She balks and stands back.
‘What’s up?’ he asks.
‘Nothing,’ she says. If he can’t remember it, she reasons, there’s no point in saying it. The suit still hangs in the wardrobe. He hasn’t worn it since Sean died. He’s blamed it on the weight loss, but she knows that’s not true. She’s told herself that it was because of the connotations. The breast of it still has smears from her eyes on it, the dark tear-runs of her mascara like a print of her face. Deanna didn’t see the point in cleaning it. She thought, instead, that they should just burn it, but they haven’t. She doesn’t know how they go about it without making it seem like ceremony, so it’s inside a vacuum bag at the far end of the closet, beyond the part that you can see when the doors are opened. Out of sight, out of mind. But the tie is the first part of the puzzle to reappear, and he hasn’t realized what it means that he’s wearing it. Somehow it isn’t water-stained. Somehow it doesn’t need ironing.
He doesn’t comment on it. Instead, he adjusts it in the mirror.
‘I’ll take Alyx,’ he says. ‘It’ll be nice to spend some time with her.’
‘Sure,’ Deanna says. She focuses on his neck, his hands up and fiddling with the knot, and she wishes that he would realize what he’s done.
As he hands his bags to driver, he notices that the side gate to their house is open. ‘Shit,’ he says. The trashcan lids are up. He goes to them and peers in. ‘The bags are gone. Assholes.’
‘Again?’ she says from the porch.
‘I know,’ he says. He pulls the gate shut and looks at the cut-through lock that he put on after the last time that this happened, in the weeks following Sean’s death. ‘Can you buy a lock next time you’re at Henderson’s, something that’ll keep it shut, something they can’t cut through? Trent’ll know what sort of thing. A chain or something.’
‘Why do they do this?’ Deanna asks, coming out to look at the fractured remains of the cheap lock. It’s a rhetorical question. She looks at the pieces. Somebody came during the night and they were prepared. Laurence kicks the gate hard enough that it slams shut but swings right back open again, a clang of metal as the hinges meet and bounce against each other.
‘Don’t get stressed about it,’ Deanna tells him. ‘Please.’
‘I didn’t sign up for this part,’ he says. She kisses him, and he breathes out, an exhalation that’s part calm, part relief. ‘Let’s go,’ he says to Alyx.
In the car, Alyx clambers. She presses the window button, making it descend and then rise again, watching the world be taken away by the slick blackness of the glass. When it’s shut, the glass changes tone and shade, allowing just enough light in while still letting them see outside. She coos.
‘This car is awesome,’ she says.
‘I know,’ her father tells her. He puts the seat-back TV set on, flicking through the presets he’s established. Alyx turns her attention to it and the people talking.
‘Are you on here today?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Next week.’ The only time Alyx watches him on TV is when he’s in a one-to-one, because he always does a shout-out to her; always tells the family that he loves them. It’s a recent thing. The cynics, and there are many, think it’s working his personal situation to his benefit. Sometimes he wonders if he’s been that cynical himself and just not realized. ‘What have you got in school today?’
‘We’re reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,’ she says.
‘That’s it?’
‘I don’t know what else.’ She undoes her seat belt and he sees past her, to the traffic on the streets, the busy morning intersections, the reckless drivers. It’s the route chosen by the computer’s algorithm, the most likely route to get them where they’re going in the most efficient way possible. Traffic is mostly (but only marginally) better thanks to their ClearVista branded devices. But still, you can’t account for other people and human error, Laurence thinks. Some things simply cannot be predicted.
‘Sit down,’ he says, and he reaches over and clips her in himself. ‘Be more careful, okay?’ She nods and he kisses her forehead. He looks behind and out of the window, to see if anybody’s following them. He doesn’t know why, but it doesn’t hurt to be paranoid, he tells himself. This is what they want: the press, his enemies. They want him when he’s dropped his guard.
Deanna’s finished her new book. She’s opened the file every day for the last week and read it all morning, right the way through until she picks up Alyx from school. It takes that full stretch of time: not because it’s especially long, but because she focuses on it, gets as deep as she can. She’s been editing it for weeks now, going over and over the words, searching for the truth in what she’s written. It’s important to find it because that informs the story, the characters. Every word is careful; every word has meaning. It’s arduous; but, she reminds herself, it probably should be.
It’s eleven when she finally hears Lane waking up. Doors slam – bedroom, bathroom, bedroom again – and then comes the sound of her boots on the stairs. Deanna shuts her laptop, so that her daughter doesn’t see what she’s been working on – as if she would care, Deanna thinks – but then Lane is gone without even coming into the kitchen. Another slam, this time from the front door. There’s no shout of goodbye.
Deanna thinks about going after her, but it would be pointless. She would yell at her and Lane would ignore her; or she would chase her and Lane would bite her hand off. They’re losing her, Deanna thinks. She’s old enough to leave home but she has no job or indication of a desire to do anything with her life, and that’s all that keeps Deanna hopeful: that Lane’s own lack of ambition, of drive, will keep her here for a while. While she’s at home, they can keep an eye on her; and it means that the house doesn’t become even emptier. Because Lane makes noise. Alyx is quiet, appearing in doorways and padding around in her bare feet, but Lane is noisy, and she’s difficult, and she fills the house with her presence.
Deanna returns to the manuscript and her emails. As well as the new book she has got an email in draft. It’s been half written for the last few weeks, addressed to her agent. He stopped calling after Sean died, most likely because it suddenly became something that he would have to talk about but clearly wanted to avoid; and, Deanna reckons, he wrote her off. There was no chance of her finishing a book while she was still in mourning. And she felt the same, until she realized that the feeling of mourning was never going to go away. Then it became freeing, and that’s when the words came. And it might be that he’s not the best person to represent her now. Her previous books were flowing and grounded and real, but this new one is so sparse and fantastical he might be the wrong person to try and sell it for her. The email says all of this, but then it introduces the book to him anyway. Into the Silent Water, she’s called it.
She describes the setting, the characters: a woman has forgotten who she is, but she wakes in a land that’s flooded, a thick and grotesque scar marked across her forehead. Her mark means that she did not die accidentally: it means that she killed herself. In her hand there is a picture of a child, and all that she knows is that she is there to find him. But he is lost, and she wonders, as she goes, how intentional this all was; that maybe her own death was the first part of a quest that she cannot possibly hope to complete.
As she reads the synopsis, the novel, she thinks how thinly veiled it is, but that it doesn’t matter to her. Not with this book. She wants to publish it under a pseudonym, if it’s good enough to even be published in the first place. She can’t tell; she’s never been able to tell. She’s sure that nobody will want to hide who she is, especially if Laurence gets further in the race. After that, everybody will want their blood; she just hopes that it’s harder to take it if you don’t know it’s there, waiting to be tapped.
As they wait at the airport’s check-in desk, Amit talks to Laurence about how this will be once he’s secured the nomination.
‘Then,’ he says, ‘they’ll wheel out the plane to ferry you around. No waiting. Think about that. And then, you know, a couple of years down the road, Air Force One.’
‘You’re cursing it,’ Laurence says.
‘It’s not a curse,’ Amit says. ‘You’ve seen the polls. Can’t curse that.’
‘I’ve seen three percentage points.’
‘Exactly. Foundations.’ In front of them an elderly couple bicker about the flight. They throw statistics at each other like curveballs. The airline hasn’t had an accident in a while, the woman says; that means, statistically, they are now more likely to. She talks about safety protocols and how likely they are to have slipped, reading probability numbers from the ClearVista app on her phone. The man counters that, behind the scenes, the airline is likely to have picked their game up specifically because of the existence of ClearVista. They’ll want to reassure their customers that they can be trusted. The woman asks why the likelihood of an accident – a percentage that’s higher than the airline’s nearest rivals – isn’t higher, then. The man says that they haven’t taken that into account yet. It hasn’t propagated. Laurence listens while trying not to, and watches Amit tweeting about their day, about where they’ll be and what they’ll be doing.
The delegates picked him, not caring about his lack of experience. Statistics and predictions, that was the way that the business of politics was always going to be heading and Amit came from that background, having worked for ClearVista in their early days. He helped to write their algorithm, the algorithm that has now intruded on so much of the world in one way or another. Too much math, he said, when Laurence asked why he wanted out of such a big company. They were something close to friends now, sure, but business always comes first. Laurence can’t imagine this relationship going further if he loses the race. Laurence knows how this works for Amit if they fail. He will bounce back, and he’ll be here again in four years with another potential candidate. His numbers, based on his time with Laurence, will be better; his stock maybe even higher. Especially if he jumps ship before he’s pushed. If he sees the way it’s going, watches the tide.
The couple checks in, finally, and moves on, and then Laurence and Amit are second in the queue. The man in front of them holds his ticket up to the scanner and hands his ID to the girl behind the desk. He has no luggage, not even a carry-on, just a blue jacket, carried in his hand. It’s expensive-looking but bundled up. He pockets his ID, and he looks at Laurence as he steps past them. He nods, and smiles. Amit notices.
‘He knew who you were, see?’
‘What?’ Laurence is caught for a second, somewhere else.
‘He recognized you. Foundations, then a ground swell of being recognized. That’s as good as support, because he’ll remember that. He sees your face on a ballot, he’ll remember who he wants to vote for. You’ll see.’ Amit hands the assistant their IDs, and both men hold their phones out to scan their tickets. She asks them the usual questions and Amit answers for them. Laurence glances behind them.
‘I don’t like being recognized,’ he says. ‘They raided the trash this morning.’
‘Who did?’
‘Somebody in the night,’ Laurence says. ‘Didn’t see who they were.’
‘That’s what some people will do. They’re desperate for news.’
‘News isn’t in my fucking garbage cans, Amit.’
‘Yeah it is. Larry, news is and always will be whatever somebody can get their hands on that somebody else will pay to read.’ He hands Laurence back his ID card. ‘Flight’s twenty minutes late. Let’s get a coffee.’
They walk through the terminal to a coffee shop and Laurence finds seats at a table while Amit goes to the counter. This is how it is, now, until there’s a result one way or another: other people trying to bear the brunt of the stress for him, deferring whatever they’re not sure he can take and treating him as if he’s important. He doesn’t push back. Amit’s phone beeps as he comes back to the table. He grins.
‘The prediction’s done.’
‘What?’
‘The little tick boxes, Larry. Remember the tick boxes?’ Laurence hates when he calls him that. He’s the only person who does, an affectionate little tic. Larry and Dee, frivolous and light … ‘The package is being put together, should be with us soon as anything.’
‘This is ridiculous.’
‘It is. But you’ve seen Homme’s. You know that it’s effective.’
Homme had his own prediction released to the public a couple of months ago, the product of spin and facts, but also deep-rooted in his public persona. Amit thought that it was managed – it had to be – but to the public it seemed to be honest. It was in some way a truth. The ClearVista algorithm took his information – his entire life, realistically, when you break it down – and fed out a picture of a candidate who wouldn’t actually be a bad leader. Statistically, Homme was weak on so many issues, running with very few actual policies he seemed to care about but he was balanced, accessible, open to all. He would take red families in some places, that was his trick. Crossing party lines. Along with the hypothetical suppositions of what his stance would be on certain hot topics (which contradicted so much of the usual left stances, pandering to moneymen and the religious right), ClearVista created a short video. This was their most important gimmick: a new addition to the premium package, only possible with the most detailed survey and at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars; but, they promised, the trade-off was worth it. The video was useable, open source, free to be circulated however the recipient desired. Homme’s was perfect for him. It was so on-message as to be almost laughable. There he was in a helmet and a flak jacket, surrounded by swirls of dust, running to a helicopter, waving at troops; shaking their hands as he passed them, mixed gender and color (and even, in their haircuts and rainbow pin-badges, crudely implied sexuality). It was very presidential, the press agreed. They joked, the first time that they saw the tech, about previous presidents, and what it would have shown of them: Marilyn Monroe; ‘I am not a crook’; interns and cigars. A few days after the video was released – along with the full results of the tests, and the answers he gave to get the results, in the spirit of full disclosure and honesty – his numbers increased, stripping out votes from the other candidates. The video worked, even if it was only smoke and mirrors. ‘Pointless to be nervous,’ Amit says. ‘It’s done. Results come through later today, they’ve said.’ They leave the Starbucks and head for the gate, scanning their ID cards as they pass through to the departure lounge.
They join the queue to board, and Laurence notices that the man who had been in front of them at the check-in desk is in front of them again now. He’s wearing his blue jacket this time: the back is wrinkled from where he was gripping it. He turns and smiles.
‘You’re Laurence Walker, right?’ the man asks. He holds out his hand, and Laurence looks at it: something wrong about this. It’s the second time he’s been here. He’s stopped believing in coincidence. Amit notices and steps in, shaking it first.
‘You’re a supporter?’ Amit is exuberant, as he always is.
‘Yeah, I thought it was you. I’m a big fan,’ the man says. ‘We’ve been needing somebody like you for a while now. We’ve been playing safe, I think. We need a shake-up, that’s what I’m saying.’
‘Yes,’ Laurence says. ‘I agree.’ The man talks about the party and the future and Laurence nods his way through the conversation, relieved for some reason. Relieved, and yet still nervous.
The flight attendants run through the drills and show the exits; and they show the little movie about what to do in an emergency; and then the plane waits while the captain runs the airline’s custom algorithm, to take into account the names of all the passengers, to generate a final figure that’s meant to dictate their safety levels; and Amit fights the elbows of the man next to him, who reeks of cheap cologne and grips the seat’s arms as they shuttle down the runway. He leans over, looking across the aisle at Laurence and the window, and he watches the ground seemingly get faster and faster, and then it tilts away from the plane as they head upwards, pulling away from the ground. His ears pop and he shuts his eyes and opens his jaw over and over in an approximation of a yawn. He’s one of the first to his feet when the seatbelt sign goes dark, grabbing his laptop from the overhead locker.
‘You want?’ he asks Laurence. Laurence shakes his head and jacks his seat back a few degrees.
‘I’ll get some rest,’ he says. ‘Wake me when we land.’ Amit sits down and logs into the Wi-Fi. He loads the calendar app and looks at the breakdown of the next few days, structured and tweaked to the minute in order to allow the maximum time with each of the potential investors, and at each photo opportunity. The little colored bars are packed tight, and he rearranges the ones that only involve the two of them – breakfasts, dinners – so that it maybe doesn’t look too bad to Laurence’s eyes. Artificial breathing room, Amit thinks: one of his finest tweaks to the system. And each of the appointments has information attached that both men have to memorize. They have to know who donated what previously, and why; what the thing was that swayed their wallets. They have to know how deep they can make them dig. One of Amit’s junior staffers has prepared a full breakdown on every man for them, telling them who to discuss God (capital G) and religion with, and who is likely to want to talk about artillery instead of textbooks. There are lists of the names of their wives, husbands and children. One of them has lost a child, just as Laurence has; this is common ground. All of them will know everything about him; their own research just levels the playing field. Lies are pointless now, because information doesn’t die like it used to. It all sits there on some server, waiting for somebody to discover it and mine it and crosscheck it and use it. Used to be in politics that you could tell a different story to two different moneymen and they’d both buy it. Now, Amit’s rule is that you should stick to the truth, or whatever version of it is most palatable. You only work with what you’ve got. Laurence’s life is available to the world already. Everybody can read the words from the eulogy he delivered at Sean’s funeral; that’s nothing but material now.
His email pings. It’s ClearVista. The whole thing is automated: no people sitting back and watching this, making it work. That was the tech that they were instigating when he finally left working for them. For whatever reason, that stuff always used to creep him out. The email is labeled Your Laurence Walker Results: there’s something disquietingly possessive about it. Laurence opens the email.
Thank you for your contract with ClearVista, the world’s foremost predictions and statistics company, it reads. Your package [LW008] has been completed and the contract fulfilled. Please find the initial results attached. Further emails with package enhancements will follow. Thank you for using ClearVista.
The numbers don’t lie.
Attached to the email is a glossily produced PDF file, little more than a glorified spreadsheet holding a series of almost incomprehensible posits and answers. There are questions asked at the top, about Laurence’s virtues and skills, things that are ambiguous but useful.
Is LAURENCE WALKER a good man: 96% chance of occurrence.
Does LAURENCE WALKER care about his country? 93% chance of occurrence.
Will LAURENCE WALKER remain faithful in his marriage? 93% chance of occurrence.
Is LAURENCE WALKER a good father? 82% chance of occurrence.
The list goes on and on. Amit scrolls down quickly, scanning the results for anything anomalous. It’s all good; all stronger than Homme’s. The percentages break Laurence down to predicted emotional responses – and the voting public is more likely to believe that than the words of a man standing on a stage. This will all help back up what they already know about him.
Can LAURENCE WALKER overcome grief? 07% chance of occurrence.
Will LAURENCE WALKER ever commit drug abuse? 28% chance of occurrence.
Will LAURENCE WALKER ever commit sexual abuse? 01% chance of occurrence.
They are all results that work. The Grief one might hurt them, but Amit has an answer for that: nobody ever recovers from the death of a child. It would be worse if it said that he would, he spins, because that would suggest a lack of heart, of basic human empathy. He hears the words from speeches in his head, taking the data and turning it into a portrait of a man who will do his best to honor the memory of his dead son, but who is driven and dedicated to running his country first and foremost. And, if they have to play dirty, there’s the sexual abuse question. Homme had a 3.4% percent chance of committing sexual abuse, which his people spun as a number so small as to be insignificant. Laurence scored better. Amit doesn’t ever want to have to use that – not in the way that some of the dirty political games in the past might have done – but he knows that some of the blogs will run with it themselves. That’s the thing: it paints Homme in a worse light just by virtue of its existence. Nothing wrong with that.
Is LAURENCE WALKER likely to suffer from an emotional or mental breakdown? 51% chance of occurrence.
That’s harder, Amit thinks. That’s a tough one. It’s on the wrong side of the fence, irritatingly; this will mean countermeasures, therapists and counselors on call to make sure that nothing goes wrong. It’s fixable, that’s the thing; an arbitrary number based on his situation. Who wouldn’t suffer that risk? So they’ll address that. A strong Vice President will be the key. Somebody that the country feels comfortable with if they were forced to step up, even though nobody will ever say that. Not Homme, no matter what happens.
He scrolls through the rest of the document, to the section headed POLITICS, and he runs through the likely outcomes of Laurence’s voting habits. Who he will be likely to want as his political advisors, who he will want in key governmental roles, where he will side on certain issues. And, at this quick glance, the report syncs with the discussions that they’ve already had. Hundreds of answers booted out from thousands of questions, using Laurence’s past voting habits, the past results of votes, all to predict a path forwards. The report says that Laurence is liable to be fair to the oil companies, which is good – and slightly unexpected; Amit copies the line and pastes it into a new document, to use over the next few meetings. This is all ammunition. He keeps going, scrolling through page after page of the document, reading everything, trying to take it all in, and then he sees the final two questions, in their own boxed-out section at the very end of the file, printed larger, the answers to the very reasons that they got the survey done in the first place.
He doesn’t parse them the first time. He reads them, over and over.
If LAURENCE WALKER runs for the role of DEMOCRATIC PARTY NOMINEE: 00% chance of success.
If LAURENCE WALKER runs for the role of PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES: 00% chance of success.
‘What the fuck?’ Amit says. The man next to him tuts at the language, and Amit mutters an apology. He shuts the file and reopens it, but the results are the same. He pulls his phone from his pocket and turns it on.
‘Hey,’ the man next to him says, ‘you can’t do that!’
‘It’s fine,’ Amit says.
‘We’re on a plane, asshole.’
Amit looks around and sees one of the cabin crew staring at them down the aisle, looking at what’s going on. He can’t have his phone confiscated, so he switches it off.
‘Happy now?’ he asks. The man rolls his eyes, smug at his win. Amit goes back to the laptop and opens the email. He hits reply and writes to them, as quickly as he can.
There’s a problem with the results issued. See final two questions. Please address IMMEDIATELY, or we will be forced to take legal action. He hits the screen’s keyboard so hard it stings the tips of his fingers.
‘What’s wrong?’ Laurence asks. Amit looks across at his boss who is sleepy-eyed, rubbing his face.
‘Nothing,’ Amit says. He thinks about telling him – no lies, no secrets, that’s how this works – but he knows that this will be corrected. When it is, this will be something to laugh about. He doesn’t know, right now, how Laurence will react to it. ‘Somebody is wrong on the Internet,’ Amit says. He can hear the shakiness in his own voice, the lie coming through. Laurence smiles.
‘There’s always somebody wrong on the Internet,’ he says. ‘I’m going to try and get another half hour of shut-eye.’
‘Do it.’ Amit shuts the laptop. ‘Me too.’ Both men shut their eyes, but Amit clutches his phone in his hands. As soon as they land, as soon as they can get to the hotel, he’ll be calling ClearVista; and he’ll be getting angry, speaking to somebody directly, sorting this out.
He shuts his eyes and he sees the final results, the numbers flashing behind his eyelids as if they’re afterimages of the sun.
Deanna drives down to the stretch of shops that calls itself the town center. She could walk this easily – their house is at the end of a long stretch that calls itself Main Street, but it has no actual competition for that title, with almost all of the town’s houses either sitting on it or just off it in neat little clusters – but she has a list of what needs doing, and one of the things involves getting the car checked out at the garage. And there’s the shopping from Henderson’s, for food and the new lock and simply walking around to clear her head. She likes living in this place, talking to the people, being a part of life here. They know Deanna, have done since she was a little girl. That sense of belonging is nice; the community feeling like a part of their lives. As they recovered – as they still recover – from Sean’s death, the support of the town has been incredible. They have all wanted Laurence to pick himself up and, in his parlance, brave the rain. They’re all going to vote for him, they say, whether they’re Republican or Democrat, saying that they’ll plant placards in their lawns and spread the word as much as they can. It’s that sort of town.
The garage is at the far end of the street, past everything else. Deanna pulls in, driving onto the forecourt, and Ann runs out. She’s a short woman, older than she looks, hair pulled back into a greasy net, and she perpetually leans, Deanna’s noticed. On everything, resting her hands. She leans on the hood of the Walkers’ SUV as Deanna gets out.
‘Deanna,’ she says, ‘good to see you.’ She adds a J to her pronunciation of the name that makes Deanna think of I Dream Of Jeannie; a classic sitcom vision of small-town America. ‘She playing up?’
‘Not quite,’ Deanna says. ‘There was a clunking coming from under the hood a few weeks back. Thought we should probably get it checked out.’
‘I’d say you should for sure. You want me to do it right now?’
‘Would you mind?’ Deanna asks. ‘I can go do the shopping then come back?’ Everything is phrased as a question, not wanting to assume or put anybody out. Ann smiles and nods, and takes the keys from Deanna.
‘Give me a half hour,’ she says. Deanna thanks her and walks down the road towards Henderson’s: past the diner, past the church, past the gun store (which does the most trade here of anything, given how close they are to one of the North-East’s major hunting spots), past the liquor store. The owners and customers all stop and nod at her as she passes, all smiling. She goes into Henderson’s and Trent and Martha, co-owners, married for fifty years, as they’ll tell anybody whether they ask or not, and the closest thing to figureheads that the town has, come out and kiss her in greeting and tell her how happy they are to see her. They mean it, as well.
‘Where’s that husband of yours at today?’ Trent asks.
‘Texas,’ Deanna says.
‘Oil money?’
‘Oil money.’
‘That’s politics now,’ Martha says.
‘That’s always been politics,’ Trent counters.
‘As long as you’re all safe and sound, that’s all that matters,’ Martha replies. She goes to the coffee machine in the corner – they had it installed a few years ago, to offer takeout when they started stocking varieties of different coffee beans as well – and makes Deanna a drink that she didn’t even ask for. It’s the way that they do things here; the way that they always have. They know what you want sometimes before you do, even.
‘Not long now until he’ll know, I suppose?’
‘No,’ Deanna says. ‘Not long. A couple more months.’
‘So maybe this’ll all calm down after that.’
‘Maybe. Probably not, the way that Laurence tells it.’
‘Oh my word, we’ll be so sad to see you leave,’ Martha says. ‘I mean, of course you’ll come back for your vacations.’
Deanna thinks about the lake house, how that was the intention of owning it all along. Now, she doesn’t know if she can even go there. It feels wrong to her; as if it’s forever tainted. It will always be associated with Sean, with what happened. No getting past that, and the Hendersons realize that as well, if not too late. Trent and Martha shoot each other looks, not knowing whether to address the faux pas or not. It hangs in the air until Deanna breaks the tension. ‘That’s a long way away,’ Deanna says, meaning in terms of votes and time both.
‘I reckon this is a foregone conclusion,’ Trent says. ‘You can’t call these things, but as much as you can, I’d say that it’s a done deal.’ He nods at the television in the corner, behind the counter. There’s Laurence and the other potential nominees, the newscaster talking about their current vote split, the predicted results, and that 3% head start. ‘Makes it easier when the television’s saying he’s the man, I reckon.’
‘Maybe,’ Deanna says.
‘You got a list?’ Martha asks. Deanna holds it up and Martha snatches it and forces it into Trent’s hand. ‘He’ll do it. Nothing better to do. You can stay here and keep me company.’
‘Oh, no,’ Deanna says, but she knows how this goes. It’s always the same.
Trent looks at the list. ‘What do you need the chain for?’ he asks.
‘We had another intruder. They broke the old lock.’
‘Again? Somebody’s pushing their luck, you ask me. You know who it was?’
‘Laurence thinks it’s the press.’
Trent nods. ‘I’ll hate to see you leave Staunton, Deanna, you know that; but it’ll be better for you. A house with a bit more security, keep you safe.’
‘Maybe,’ Deanna says. He nods and looks at the list, picks up a basket and goes off around the shop. There’s a pain in his movements that Deanna hasn’t noticed before, a slight favoring of one leg over the other.
‘I feel terrible making him do this for me,’ Deanna says to Martha.
‘Oh, don’t, Martha replies. ‘He needs to work it or it’ll fall off.’ She smiles. They watch him go down the aisles, and they talk about the kids, and they talk about the town, the same conversations that they always have, just moved on in time, like updates to the same old information. When every item has been collected, Trent scans them at the till. The calorie counts and nutrition values tick up on the screen, ClearVista predicting the weight gain and exercise needed to counter the richer, fattier foods; and then he brings up the total before adjusting it. They always do a discount for Deanna.
By the time she gets back to the car it’s been turned around, now facing the road. Ann comes out of the dark of the garage, holding something in her hand. It’s shiny and golden, a stub of a thing. Deanna thinks that it could be a bullet for a second but then she gets closer and it’s a screw. No: a bolt.
‘Found this inside her,’ Ann says. ‘Must’ve come loose, but I’m damned if I can find from where.’
‘From the engine?’
‘It’s not a car part, best I can tell. Maybe it got kicked up there one day from the road. Happens, you’d be surprised.’
‘Okay,’ Deanna says. ‘How much do I owe you?’
‘I changed your oil, so just for that. Give me ten and we’re even.’ She leans again on the hood.
‘You sure?’
‘Ayuh.’
Deanna pulls a twenty out of her purse and hands it over.
‘Consider the rest a tip.’
‘Ha! Okay. We’re giving tips, let me give one to you as well. You need to sell this soon, I reckon.’ She puts her hand on the roof of the car. ‘It’s a few years old now, and you’re losing money on it. All the new models, the tech’s much better. That stuff ages a car more’n you’d imagine. You’ll still get a good price for this right now. I ran it for you, if you want to have a look: software says this has got years left in it yet, but that the book value’s gonna plummet.’
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James Smythe
How far would you go to save your family from an invisible threat? A terrifyingly original thriller from the author of The Machine.ClearVista is used by everyone and can predict everything.It’s a daily lifesaver, predicting weather to traffic to who you should befriend.Laurence Walker wants to be the next President of the United States. ClearVista will predict his chances.It will predict whether he's the right man for the job.It will predict that his son can only survive for 102 seconds underwater.It will predict that Laurence's life is about to collapse in the most unimaginable way.
Copyright (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © James Smythe 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photograph @ Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
(Epigraph (#u6985cb33-b5fd-5aaa-bfb1-7ce8c015b729)): Extract taken from The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver © Nate Silver 2012. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007541935
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007541928
Version: 2016-02-16
Praise for James Smythe: (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
‘A writer of bold imagination and verve’
Lauren Beukes
‘Savage, intimate and inexorable’
Nick Harkaway
‘Powerful and distinctive’
Guardian
‘Smythe’s storytelling is pacey and addictive; he has a fiendish talent for springing surprises’
The Times
‘Fully formed, fundamentally affecting, forward-thinking fiction. The sort of story that reminds us why we read, and what we, the people, need’
Tor.com (http://Tor.com)
‘Like Ballard, Smythe understands, and ruthlessly demonstrates, the nightmare that results when our fantasies are realised’
Sam Byers
‘Science fiction for those who think they don’t like it’
50 Best Spring Reads, Independent
‘A book about memory, about the impossibility of making the future match the past, and the danger of following a desire too far’
Matt Haig
‘Very cleverly constructed and completely gripping’
Daily Mail
‘Creepy, compulsive science fiction, narrated with the kind of anxious interior perspective characteristic of JG Ballard’s finest work’
Metro
‘Quite brilliant’
Sunday Mirror
‘With his particular flair for speculative fiction, [Smythe] cooks up something pretty extraordinary’
Dazed & Confused
‘As if Philip K Dick and David Mitchell had collaborated on an episode of The West Wing. Unsettling, gripping and hugely thought-provoking’
FHM
Dedication (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
To my family
Epigraph (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
What is now proved was once only imagined.
William Blake
When catastrophe strikes, we look for the signal in the noise – anything that might explain the chaos that we see all around us and bring order to the world again.
Nate Silver, The Signal and The Noise
Contents
Cover (#u9fedf814-3070-5dd0-afe0-0163c156066a)
Title Page (#ua5a8724c-46bd-52df-b575-25384b923428)
Copyright
Praise for James Smythe
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by James Smythe
About the Publisher
Prologue (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
Laurence Walker presses play and the video begins.
On it, he is standing in a seemingly blank room. He is looking straight into the camera lens, or the facsimile of him is; a broken version, created from photographs and screen grabs. It looks like him, but only barely. There is something about the version of his face that the software has created – so blank and expressionless – that makes him feel sick to his stomach. Behind him he can see similarly wrong versions of his family, of his wife and daughters. This created version of him isn’t looking at them, his body language barely even acknowledging their presence. He wonders why they are so scared. Deanna and the girls are huddled together, clinging onto one another, terrified, backing away from him. Their faces are approximations of what that would actually look like: twisted and distorted and not at all real.
In the background, he hears a noise, a rustle that he cannot put his finger on; and then another noise, quieter in the mix. Sobbing. And then, finally, he notices that the version of him is holding something.
It’s a gun. He knows the thick black metal. The digital version’s thumb is on the trigger. The screen version of Laurence seems to shudder. More than a shiver: it seems uncontrollable.
Then the video cuts to black and a noise rings out that he knows can only be one thing: the crack, solid and sharp, the sound of a bullet leaving the chamber of a gun. The sobbing stops and turns into a scream, ringing through the darkness.
PART ONE (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
1 (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
Deanna wakes up. She lies perfectly still at first, because she loves these moments of being awake, of being in control of everything for just a second, before the day allows itself to interrupt. She can hear Laurence breathing, a harsh snore that’s developed over the past few years into something akin to a growl. She can feel the slow rise and fall of his chest travelling through the mattress. After a while she rolls over and looks at him. He’s still propped up as he was when she was falling asleep, his back against the giant pillows that they have taken to using as a headboard. His reading glasses are hanging off his face and his tablet is on his lap, his hands clutching it. He doesn’t move much when he sleeps these days, she thinks, not since he became a senator. He tends to sleep so heavily that he stays perfectly still. The world could shift around him and he would somehow stay static.
She doesn’t want to wake him yet – the alarm isn’t set to go off for another half an hour, and he needs his sleep for today – so she turns away from him and slides to the edge of the bed. The floor is freezing cold on her feet, the house so draughty, always carrying a breeze up through the floorboards. She pads to the bedroom door and he doesn’t even shift slightly as she opens it and sneaks out.
She heads downstairs, turning the lights on as she goes, straight into the kitchen. The glass along the back wall, looking out into the backyard, is darkened and she flicks the switches on the counter to bring it back to a clear state; no glare from the rising sun, just the light pouring in. She loves the feeling of the warmth of it coming through the glass, heating up the kitchen while she makes the coffee, selecting pods for the machine – they each take a different flavor, and she has to do nothing past setting the thing going. She stands at the counter, both hands on the marble, propping herself up; and she basks for a few seconds. All is silence.
Laurence wakes up as she comes back into the room, because she’s not trying to be quiet now. He feels his glasses on his face and swats them away, a knee-jerk reaction; and then he opens his eyes and looks at Deanna front on. He sleepily smirks at her. This isn’t the first time it’s happened.
‘I slept like this?’ he asks.
‘You did.’
‘I’m so tired. I was so tired. You know.’
‘I know,’ she replies. ‘You need to get dressed. The car will be here soon. I’ll get the shower going for you.’
‘You let me sleep, curse you.’ He reaches for her and pulls her close, kisses her. ‘I wish they’d let me drive myself,’ he says. ‘I feel like such a prick in that thing.’
Staunton is a small town, and Laurence has worked hard to win its people over. He came from the city but Deanna grew up here. When they left college, Deanna pregnant, they came back here at her behest, and he did his best to persuade the townsfolk – who knew her, who had known her parents before they moved away, before he got her knocked up and forced a retreat, law degree between his legs – that he was a good man. He’s spent the best part of the last seventeen years earning their trust. The showmanship of politics sets that trust back a good decade, he thinks. Because New York City is drivable, if there’s ever a TV show appearance they send tinted-window town cars, and that always makes Laurence embarrassed. Every time Deanna has to remind him that he has to get used to it; that if he gets what he wants from his career, he’ll have an armed escort everywhere he goes. Soon he won’t be allowed to drive anywhere by himself. He rubs his face and clambers out of bed. He stretches. ‘What tie, do you think?’
‘The lemon one.’
‘Lemon? Jesus. You want the crowd to turn on me? Start some riot about fence-sitting with my colors?’
‘It’s smart. It’s bright. You want potential voters to think you are as well, don’t you? At least, until they know you as well as I do.’
‘Ha ha.’ She kisses him as she leaves the en suite, and he strips his boxers off. She looks back at him: slightly looser around the edges than he used to be, but not totally out of shape; love handles, a slight belly, a sagging of his chest. It’s only the effects of age, of a more sedentary lifestyle, of being comfortable. ‘You want to come in?’ he asks. ‘I might not wash myself properly.’
‘I’m sure you’ll manage,’ she says. ‘I have to wake the girls.’
She goes to the twins’ room first. Alyx, their youngest daughter, is curled up on her bed, her feet hanging off the side, her arms splayed into a position not far off that of a crucifixion: spread out, extended from the shoulders. Sean, their only son, is almost textbook fetal on the other bed, rolled up as small as possible. Deanna thinks how curiously defensive it is. She wonders if he had bad dreams.
‘Hey, campers,’ Deanna says, ‘it’s morning – rise and shine.’ She raises the blinds and stands out of the way of the window, so that the light can hit her daughter in the face. Alyx giggles, and wriggles herself under the duvet. ‘Nope, not today,’ her mother says, pulling it away from her, ‘you’ve got school.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Alyx says. She’s stubborn and defiant, in that way that kids can be. All three of the children are, something that they get from their father. Sean pulls himself to sitting and then to the floor where he stands in front of the bed, swaying slightly, like a zombie. Deanna goes to him and prods him with her finger, making it rigid, and he tumbles backwards to his bed, collapsing into laughter.
‘You guys have got five minutes to get up and in that shower, or I’ll be back, and I’ll be mad as all get out,’ Deanna says. She tugs on Alyx’s ankle as she leaves the room, and the girl slides down the bed, giggling again; and then Deanna lets her go, and she tumbles gently to the floor.
The next room on her rounds is the bathroom that the kids all share. Deanna flicks the switch for the shower, letting it warm up, and then heads down the corridor to Lane’s door. She knocks on it once, a single, solid rap, but there’s no answer; so she turns the handle. The room is dark, but she can see the clutter through it. The clothes thrown everywhere, the books and vinyl sleeves scattered around the place, her daughter in bed still.
‘I’m awake,’ Lane says. ‘It’s fine, I’m awake.’
‘Just checking,’ Deanna says. The room is painted dark, grays and blacks, because that’s what Lane is into. Deanna opens the door wide and steps in, tapping Lane’s leg through the blanket. ‘Your dad’s got his thing today, so stress-free morning, please.’
‘Fine.’
‘You know what I’m saying. You want eggs?’
‘Sure.’
‘Straight home tonight as well. Like I say, no crap today, okay?’
‘Jesus, okay.’ Lane doesn’t stick her head up to look at Deanna the whole exchange; but she reaches up, to itch her head as it stays still on the pillow. She scratches at the bit where the neck meets the skull, through her hair; and Deanna sees the tattoo on the inside of her wrist, the logo of one of the bands that Lane is obsessed with: three intersecting geometric shapes, a block of symmetrical color in the center of them. It looks like a puzzle, but it’s not (or at least, it’s not one that Deanna’s been able to solve). The tattoo was the first real mark of rebellion from Lane: the lie that she told to be able to get it, and the months of hiding it to pretend that it didn’t exist. But, she promised no more.
Deanna hears the bathroom door slam shut, meaning that one of the twins is doing as they’ve been told, and she tells Lane that she’s next. Lane won’t shower: she’s started cutting back on that now, letting her hair get greasy. It’s a thing, and Deanna knows it’s only a matter of time before she cuts it off. That’s what the kids in her school are doing now, her friends: shaving their hair right back. Deanna’s begged Lane not to, simply because of Laurence’s impending campaign. They have a deal: she won’t be made to wear floral dresses as long as she covers up the tattoo and does her hair for the cameras every once in a while; and as long as she smiles when the cameras are out. It won’t be forever, but Deanna used the words consideration and family a lot, and eventually Lane agreed. Still, her second act of rebellion was to shave the underside of her hair on the sides over the summer, and then argue that she could hide it by wearing her hair down if she was ever at a public event. Besides which, Laurence – she calls her parents by their first names, a stupid and totally forced gesture which makes Deanna’s skin prickle – hasn’t formally announced yet. They have spoken about vacation and the cabin that they have bought and spending time with the children. There’s no press to worry about for just yet, she reasons. Another few months, they can have that argument all over again. I’ll even pay for the dresses we end up forcing her to wear, Deanna thinks.
She goes to the kitchen and puts the eggs into the poacher and starts the cycle. She hears the crack of their shells, the splash as they hit the water. Perfect every single time: no shell in there, no mess. It does it all for her.
‘Television,’ she says loudly. The set reveals itself in the corner of the room, the screen turning from its camouflaged setting – matching the wallpaper behind it, making it as inconspicuous as possible – and automatically boots onto the news channels, showing the four that Laurence watches most in its different corners. They’ll all be covering the announcement; they’re already hyping it, talking about what they can expect. They know, of course they know; there’s an embargoed press release already gone out, she’s sure. She hears everything from here, because you do in these old houses: the sound of the showers switching off; of feet padding across the floors; of drawers and wardrobes opening and shutting. And still, there is that feeling of the sun on her face; still, something that she will never ever tire of.
Alyx is first down, and she walks to the refrigerator and takes out a bottle of juice. Deanna passes her a glass from the cupboard, and she puts it on the breakfast bar before climbing onto a stool and pouring the juice for herself. She watches the news (not understanding it, necessarily, but it’s something to occupy her) while Deanna puts bread into the toaster and pops it early so that it’s barely browned. She puts the eggs directly onto one slice for Alyx and deposits it in front of her. The little girl breaks one with her knife and the yolk sluices down onto the bread, soaking through it. She tugs it apart with her nearly blunt kids’ cutlery, using the spork to scoop the sodden bread and egg into her mouth.
‘You’re so messy,’ Deanna says. She gives her a paper kitchen towel, and Alyx wipes her mouth with it, and her hands. ‘Mucky pup.’ Sean runs in then and sits next to Alyx. No ceremony: he just waits to be fed.
‘I don’t want eggs,’ he says.
‘No? So what do you want?’ Deanna asks.
‘Can I have a Pop-Tart?’
‘Fine. But if you have that today, you have eggs tomorrow. Deal?’
‘Deal,’ he says. There’s a trade-off in the house, Laurence and Deanna constantly trying to do what’s right by the kids, to balance and manage their food, their exposure to TV shows and music. They want to do this right – that’s their motto. She puts the pastries in the toaster and clicks it down. She stands and looks at the kids, both of them watching the news now, as if the world is something that they even comprehend yet. The toaster pops, and she puts the tarts on a plate.
‘They’re hot,’ she says, so Sean blows on them. She thinks about how cute he is; how she should relish these moments. Everybody tells her: this is all too fleeting.
‘Deanna?’ Laurence calls, from the top of the stairs. She finishes loading the dishwasher and heads out to the hallway. He’s wearing the suit that he had custom-made earlier this year; the first outing for it, having saved it for a special occasion.
‘How is it?’ he asks, raising a leg as if he’s a catalogue model. It’s something he’s always done when he should be taking himself seriously, a deflection. And it’s always made her smile. He opens the jacket at the sides, to show off the shirt that he’s wearing, and the lemon tie, and he twirls, posing again at the end. He sucks in his cheeks. She’d bought the tie for him, knowing how good it would look; how it would complement his complexion, his salt-and-pepper hair, the almost gray core of his eyes. He walks down and towards her and stands on the first step, even taller than usual next to her.
‘Perfect,’ Deanna says. ‘The tie is lovely.’
‘You would say that.’
‘It’s joyous. It makes me happy. It’ll make other people happy, and that will make them want to vote for you.’
‘Good. I’m stressing and I need to not stress.’
‘This is true,’ Deanna says. ‘Not-stress is always better.’ She reaches up and straightens the tie for him. She thinks about what she’s doing, and how many times she has done this. How many more times there will be, if the future that they are working towards all goes to plan. ‘You’re going to be amazing,’ she tells him.
‘You always say that.’
‘That’s because it’s always true.’ Lane comes down behind him, and he steps aside to let her through, pulling a face at her as she goes. She is wearing one of the band tees that she near-as lives in and jeans that Deanna’s never seen before, and she’s got a beanie carefully balanced on her head, her hair tucked up inside it. ‘Right,’ Deanna says to Laurence, beckoning him down, ‘food time. In there, sit down. Today, you relax.’ She stands and points, watches as they both go into the kitchen, then follows them. Sean finishes his breakfast and gets down from the table, and Deanna sends him to get his bag. ‘Leaving in three,’ she says.
‘I hate school on days like this,’ he says.
‘Only a few weeks until the summer,’ she reminds him. ‘Then you can have days like this over and over and over, until I’m sick to death of you.’
‘Mom!’ Alyx says. ‘You won’t get sick of us.’
‘I will. I’ll be on Xanax by the time you go back.’
‘What’s Xanax?’
‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘And you,’ she says to Alyx, ‘bag, now.’ They disappear, and Lane walks off, clutching an apple in her hand. Deanna turns to Laurence as he eats his toast. ‘I love you,’ she says. ‘Knock ’em dead, you hear?’
‘If they’re dead they can’t vote for me,’ he replies.
‘Then knock ’em into a coma until the election.’
‘Better.’ She kisses him, and she tastes the butter, the marmalade. The same taste every morning for eighteen years.
‘Right,’ she says, pushing away from him. ‘Time to go. Call me.’ She shouts for the kids and Laurence leans to one side and watches down the hallway as they all leave. They wave at him from the front door and wish him luck, and he smiles and waves back. He watches them as they get into the car. The Hendersons are walking on the other side and Deanna talks to them, as she always does, every single morning. She tells them that she’ll be along later to pick up one of their fresh loaves. They tell her that they’ll put one aside. She laughs, because every conversation about anything here is somehow gently amusing. Laurence watches it happen; he’s seen this a thousand times before. His car is waiting as well, and he grabs his jacket and briefcase. As he gets into the car he asks which way they’re going because there’s probably going to be traffic going into the city their usual way. The driver tells him a route.
‘You want me to go a different way?’ he asks. Laurence brings up the ClearVista app and searches the route finder. All the options are just as likely to get messy at this time of day.
‘It’s fine,’ Laurence says, ‘whatever you think is best.’ He watches as the driver lets the app pick the route for them. Hell or high water, it’s what’s easiest.
Deanna is at home and writing – or rather, the laptop is open, along with document that’s meant to be her new book; and she has reread what she wrote the last time, deciding that it’s fine and can stay, for now, when she hears Laurence’s name mentioned on the news, saying that it’s time for the live coverage of the press conference. She turns the volume up and watches him at the podium, surrounded by blue banners and badges. And his tie has been replaced with one that matches the color of everything else, a blunt-force sign of unity and support for the party that he seems so estranged from, at least on paper. He’s a new breed, a potential future. These are the words that he’s introduced with by the ex-President who stands by him, who is diametrically opposed to so many of his policies, but is tucking that behind them for the sake of what Laurence could do. This is an opportunity, they all know.
‘So – and I realize that I am getting ahead of myself, but what the hell, that never did me any harm before in life – let me introduce you to the future candidate for the Democratic party, and the next President of the United States, Laurence Irving Walker!’ He stands to one side and applauds so loudly that it’s all that can be heard for a beat over the microphones on the podium. Laurence looks slightly sheepish, humbled by the words, and he shakes the ex-President’s hand, almost cupping it, a gesture that’s focus tested and proven to show security, strength and power. He stands up at the front, and he smiles. The crowd cheer and he works it like a comedian; letting them have their moment, stepping back as the applause overwhelms him. He nods, and he laughs, and he steps back.
‘You’re too kind,’ he says. ‘I haven’t done anything yet.’ That gets a laugh, and he puts a hand on the podium, the other into his trouser pocket, which brushes back his jacket. Deanna can hear Amit telling him the things he can do, the gestures and phrases that will work in this situation. Humble, but not too humble; strong, but also showing that he’s human; a leader, but not unable to listen. She recognizes these things as being a part of Laurence, but not like this. This way they’re exaggerated, offered up like evidence. ‘But I hope to. And that’s what today is all about, really: hope. That’s something that the people who live in New York State tell me all the time. They say: we feel like our hopes for our children, our health, our homes – our hopes for the future – they’re being lost in the chaos of life. You wouldn’t believe how common it is to hear that.’ Everyman, but not too casual. The camera focuses on him, shows him in a good light. He’s got make-up on, Deanna thinks, and his hair has been coiffed, like something from that old TV show about advertising, a slick and neat look that’s pushed back from his face. It says he’s a family man, but not too married.
She’s heard the speech, and she knows he won’t fumble it. He’s never fumbled a speech in his life. He’s going to slyly announce his intentions, set this all up. This is how it works, now. It’s all about starting a quiet storm. She shuts off the TV and walks around the kitchen, thinks about what happens next. This house will be gone, sold to somebody else. They’ll start a family in it, and the place will get its own memories. And Deanna and the family will live … where? An apartment in Georgetown until they move. She doesn’t want to think about the end of this: a giant house where their every movement is monitored, where they can’t go for a walk without somebody wondering if they’re okay; what they’re doing; if somebody might make some foolish attempt on their lives.
She sits at her laptop and minimizes her book, and she opens a browser window. She types www.ClearVista.com into the window, and the site loads.
Will Laurence Walker ever be President? she asks. The site does its thing, the little icon spinning and folding itself into itself, a perpetual loop of folding and unfolding, and then spits out an answer. There is a sixty-three percent chance of Laurence Walker becoming President.
She stares at the screen. That’s based on today. It’s based on right now, the data mining – she hates the idea of it, as if thoughts, emotions, journalism and tweets and whatever else can be broken down into something that’s utterly tangible and totally immutable – having trawled the latest reactions to Laurence’s statement. She imagines that Twitter is full of #Walker2020 advocates, buying into both the message and the man.
For a second she hates this. For a second, she wonders what might have happened if she’d given a different answer when he told that her wanted to run; when he asked her if she thought it was a good idea. She had said, ‘It’s what you’ve always wanted’, and now she thinks that saying that wasn’t really an answer at all.
Laurence’s team takes a detour to Nassawa after the speech is done, already arranged but spontaneous-seeming. This is the start of the process: a meeting with Laurence’s current constituents, the beginning of the handshaking and baby kissing. They stop off at the town hall, and they walk in, unannounced, and the people working there laugh and smile and take photos. Somebody from the Nassawa Tribune comes down and writes an article, takes a short interview with Laurence.
‘Earlier on, your speech? Seemed like you were hinting at a bigger platform for your message. Any chance you can confirm, absolutely, your intentions of running for office?’ the interviewer asks, and Laurence almost laughs at their moxie, at their attempt to get an answer far bigger than their paper probably would usually get. Despite what others are saying, he hasn’t shown his hand yet. Everyone in the room smiles; they all know what the reporter is asking.
‘Not a chance am I answering that one,’ Laurence says, with a smile, and that gets a laugh; and he shakes the journalist’s hand and grins for another photograph. They move on, to a local café, and they eat lunch with the locals there, and Laurence fields questions about the current government, the policies being pushed through. He takes his platform stands: he believes in free healthcare for all, and he believes in the right to a free education that stands head-to-toe with the best that private education can offer. That’s where money should be going. He wants to siphon off far more money from the richest 0.5% – this isn’t about the 1%, he says, it’s those earners who manage to somehow take in the bulk of the country’s income in one fell swoop – and put that back into the country itself. ‘If you’ve got an income that would allow us to give everybody in the country a personal doctor and teacher, why shouldn’t we be taking more from you? If you’ve got money you won’t miss, that you won’t even notice is gone from your accounts, why shouldn’t you help where you can?’ That gets applause, the people cheering over their sandwiches and salads. When they’re done they go to the local high school, and there’s a buzz because this doesn’t happen often – Nassawa isn’t big on the map, one school and one hospital – so there’s an impromptu assembly, all the kids brought into the gym for the chance to ask Laurence questions. He’s one of them, and he sells it like that. He grew up in the city, sure, but he lives in the sticks now – ‘The boonies,’ he says, and that gets a laugh, because he’s old and he’s using language like that – and he answers more questions. One younger boy asks if he wants to be President somebody. ‘Someday, sure,’ Laurence says. ‘That, and an astronaut. But President most of all.’
When he’s done, Laurence calls home.
‘How did it go?’ Deanna asks.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Met some people. All very nice.’
‘That’s what it’s about,’ she says.
‘It is. Love you.’
‘Good luck tomorrow,’ she says.
‘With the big shots? They’ll take what they can get, I’m sure.’ He breaks everything down to casual dismissals. ‘We should go out for dinner when I get back. A proper night: dinner and drinks. A hotel. Maybe a weekend away, before this goes insane.’
‘It’s not insane already?’
‘It’ll get worse.’
‘I don’t even know who you are any more,’ she jokes.
‘Probably for the best,’ he replies. ‘We have a party tonight, for the team.’
‘Party hearty,’ she says, ‘then get some sleep.’
‘Yes, boss,’ he replies.
The party runs all night. Laurence’s people have hired a bar in Midtown, taken the entire place over, and they’ve had a cocktail created for the occasion, some luridly blue thing called the Walker All Over ’em, that tastes like Jolly Ranchers and the cheap flavored wine that teenagers drink. Laurence necks two before he’s even found a seat, and then is handed a third when he’s asked to make a speech. This, he’s told, is the speech for them. Not self-aggrandizing: boosting the troops. He drinks faster as he starts to slur his words (‘Couldn’t have done this all without all of you,’ he says, letting the façade slip only slightly) and then a fourth. There’s an area at the back with a dance floor and somebody puts on some new song that’s been a huge hit pretty much across the world, music made for memes, and he’s dragged out to dance, which he does. Amit stands at the side and watches and laughs, and he takes a photo – expressly banned at the party, because this stuff lingers on the Internet, and there’s always somebody on one of the political blogs who’s desperate to print anything that looks as if it could be the start of a scandal – and shouts that he’ll use it as leverage.
‘You ever fuck up, guess what’s being sent to TMZ?’ he says, and his whole team laughs.
Deanna has trouble sleeping. It begins to rain, and the weather’s so close that she can barely stand it, even with the air-con jacked up as high as it will go. It’s something about the sort of humidity they get here, because at its worst it’s a warm breeze off the top of the lake, dragging along whatever from the base of the mountains, the warm smell of somewhere else entirely, somewhere with a logging industry and factories and a whole other way of life.
She gets out of bed and goes downstairs, and she opens her laptop and the file for what’s meant to be her new novel, years in the making. It’s a book that’s three years late already, if only by her own deadlines rather than those of a publisher that it doesn’t yet have, and she’s so behind. It used to be that she could sit at a table and just write the things, and the words would come out exactly as they were always meant to: from her head to the page, in the right order, the way that she had imagined them (for better or worse). But this one has become stuck, and she can’t move past it until it’s done. She can’t abandon it, that’s for sure. She never gives up on anything. When she first hit the wall she was frustrated: a year of struggling against certain words, of rearranging sentences until they fit the best they could into what was inside her head. After a while, she almost got used to being blocked. The wall was there every time she tried to write, and it never left. Some writers she knows have cats that sit with them while they work; she has the wall.
She tells herself to not rush, because there’s no contract. She never had a real audience, the previous books appearing on shelves one day and then slowly fading from them, until you had to go online to track them down; and how would you even know to? Her agent emails every so often, asking how the book is, how life is, if she’s still writing, and she says that she is. She tells him that she’s working on it, that it’ll be worth it when she’s done. But then she hits send and looks at the word count: not quite static, but close. A few words here and there, up and down. She thinks that she should give up almost every day of her life. Laurence tells her that it’ll be different when he’s done whatever it is he’s going to do. He laughs that people will be desperate for a novel written by the First Lady. It’s only half a joke. She wonders if that’s the pressure that she needs: that maybe the scrutiny of her earlier books, people tearing them apart, looking for truth between the words, might actually drive her to finish this one. And maybe that’s why this book has been so hard, she thinks. It’s more personal than anything else she’s ever written. It’s part of her, in places: of her childhood, and about her sister Peggy, who has been missing ever since she was a small child. It’s about family, mostly, and she knows what will happen to it. The women will be read as proxy for her, the men for Laurence. She wonders if that’s why she’s so hesitant to get any further with it. She began it when Laurence first mentioned running, back when he was doing a talking-head spot during the previous election, and it’s been written in the shadow of his career ever since.
She writes the same sentence over and over, tweaking words. She tweets – which she does anonymously, because these things never die on the Internet and one day some of things she’s said could really bite her in the ass. She exercises on the floor of the kitchen, lying flat on the dark slate tiles, the moon outside, the blinds left up, doing push ups and sit ups until she leaves a patch of sweat the breadth of her body on the tiles themselves.
Twenty-three words. She counts them, and reads them, and tries to evaluate them, two sentences that she knows can’t live up to, and that can’t actually mean anything, not taken like this. She reads them so many times that they start to disintegrate, ceasing to look like actual words any more, starting to be just shapes on the page that she happened to type.
In his hotel room, Laurence dreams: of his children and his wife. And there’s a pale room, pale because the light is so bright, and pale because it’s not a place that he knows. Maybe that’s how dreams are, he thinks through it, because he knows that he’s dreaming. If they’re not grounded, if they’re not somehow stolen from what is actually real, maybe they’re just faded before they even begin. So Deanna and the kids are clear as day, but the room, the background – it’s not a thing that exists and they are taken away from him. They’re pulled backwards into the pale, and there’s nothing that Laurence can do to stop it.
When he wakes up, the dream is a memory that is barely there.
The representatives from the party’s higher echelons all stand to shake Laurence’s hand, and they smile and laugh and pat him on the back.
‘You ready for this?’ one of them asks. ‘You ready for what’s going to happen to your life, son?’
‘Not especially,’ Laurence says, moving around the room, ‘but I’ll do my best.’ They grin, waiting for him to speak more. This is him as a show-pony: put him in front of a crowd and watch him perform. ‘I’m highly adaptable, that’s my thing. That’s always been my thing. Adapt, don’t stop talking, don’t let the others get a word in edgeways.’
‘It’s his major skill,’ Amit says, ‘and it means that he never ends up listening to me as well.’ That gets a laugh, because they know it’s not true. Amit knows his own reputation, and he knows what he’s worth to the campaign. Everybody in the room does.
There are two empty spaces at the table, the chairs already pulled out for them, the glasses already filled with water, and the two men take them and sit down. The smiling doesn’t stop, nor the gentle laughs that accompany the comfort of the situation for the panel.
‘So, you’re going to be formally announcing Monday,’ an older woman at the far end of the table says, ‘making sure that we get the full week’s cycle. Are you ready for that?’
‘Yes,’ Laurence says.
‘Of course, it’ll mean you’ll have to slightly scale back your day-to-day work, but you’ll still be working for them for a good while yet.’
‘And there’s no race? No contest?’ Amit asks.
‘Nobody with any weight,’ another man says. ‘A few senators are batting their lashes, but your man here tests off the scale.’
‘What about Homme?’
‘He’s thrown his hat into the ring, sure. But you throw a hat onto the floor, it’s likely to get trodden on.’
Another of the old guard interrupts him. ‘Senator Walker, you have our full support. You go out there, you work the states you have to work, shake the hands and kiss the babies. That’s a cliché, Laurence, but clichés exist for a reason. There’s always truth packed inside them.’
‘How long are we talking?’
‘Usually it’s a twelve, fifteen-month race from announcing the intent. This time, we’re winding it back. Let’s try for six before anybody else concedes and then we can concentrate on putting the pressure on POTUS, see if we can’t get him a little scared about what we’re bringing to the table.’ The man who says this, who once ran for President himself, back in the latter part of the last decade, grins. ‘Laurence, you’re a threat. You’re what the party needs, let’s be honest. You’re going to shake this up. You’re going to drag voters in by their bootstraps and coat tails, and you’re going to win this thing.’
‘Thanks for your faith,’ Laurence says, looking around at them all. He makes eye contact with every single one of them; he wants them to know that he’s serious, that their support means something to him. That’s been one of his major arguments the last few years: politics has become about empty words and even emptier eyes, promises made that are made for self-aggrandizing reasons rather than because somebody believes that they are the right thing to do. This is how he’s become popular, a man of the people.
‘There’s paperwork, of course, and we have to talk strategy.’
‘What sort of strategy?’ Amit asks.
‘Well, for one thing, the very reason that you were hired,’ the ex-nominee replies. ‘We’re going to have to talk about ClearVista.’
The bar is in a hotel that’s full of people who shouldn’t be there at a quarter of four in the afternoon, so nobody bats an eyelid when Laurence and Amit take a table. Laurence orders an Old Fashioned, Amit lemonade. He and Amit don’t talk until the drinks arrive, brought by a waiter, brandishing them on a polished silver tray, like some service from a time long before this. Laurence sips; the drink is sharp enough, and good. The meetings with the higher echelons of the party always terrify him; they bring out the prospects of the future, and the reality of what this all could mean over time. Amit brings out the paperwork and the contracts.
‘They’re footing the bills,’ he says.
‘But this feels like bullshit,’ Laurence argues.
‘Necessary bullshit,’ Amit says. ‘Look, they want this, and everybody’s going to be using it. You know that POTUS’s team have some Here’s what Four More Years will mean stuff prepared, and you know that if they don’t, the press will. Anybody can use these stats; better we’re first out of the gate with them.’
‘So I fill this in, and then it tells me if I should be President?’
‘In theory.’ Amit flicks through the pages. ‘All this stuff, it’s all designed to use as a jumping-off point, that’s all. You answer this stuff honestly, the data miner verifies it – and then the concept of you as an honest candidate rises. It’s not rocket science, not like people think it is.’
‘It’s numbers.’
‘It’s math; they’re different things.’ Amit turns to various questions. ‘I have never cheated on my wife. You tick the True box, and you move on.’ He leans in close. ‘That is true, right?’
‘Of course it’s true.’
‘Just checking. Because this is when there’s no chance for secrets, Laurence. This is when you have to be honest. All those things people hide, they come out. Clinton never inhaled, remember? But Obama did. And that stuff seeps.’ He finds more questions and picks them out. ‘These are easy wins. I have fought in a war. I have been honest about my policies. I have never lied about my sexual preferences. These are so easy, Larry.’
‘What’s the deadline? Realistically.’
‘No more than a couple of weeks: this is new tech; you get to be the first up to bat with the new, more polished algorithm.’
‘How different can it be?’
Amit smiles and leans forward. ‘When I stopped working for them, what we were doing was small fry. Compared to that … I mean, Jesus, Larry, the software will know you. That’s how it works. It finds out everything about you, and it learns you, and it predicts you. That’s the next wave.’
‘It’s ridiculous. So my word means nothing?’
‘Of course it does. But this reinforces that. You know their slogan? The Numbers Don’t Lie, Larry. Never have, never will. The public believes math. They believe computers. People? People are harder to believe.’ He looks down at Laurence’s hands, which are shaking, the ice rattling in the bottom of the glass. He raises his hand at the waiter walking by. ‘One more,’ he says, pointing to Laurence’s glass. ‘Listen: you can’t lie, though. Seriously, I know you’re full of integrity and all that stuff, so whatever. But we all lie. You lie on that, you’ll get caught. What I’ve heard about the algorithm now, the data mining? That thing will find out any secrets you’ve got.’ He finishes his own drink. ‘Look, this is fine. It’s totally fine. It’s you and answers and some bullshit video that’s going to run and run because it’s the first of its kind. We do this, we win the election. That’s what you want, right?’
‘Yes,’ Laurence says. The drink is put in front of him and he gulps it in the way that you shouldn’t. ‘That’s what I want.’
Laurence’s hotel room is functional. He lies on the bed, his head slightly swimming, and switches on the news. There’s a picture of him on the screen, between the two anchors: the shining, smiling one that’s on the front page of his website. The hosts are discussing the rumors.
‘I think it’s safe to say that they don’t qualify as rumor any more,’ one of them says, ‘because, come on. Look who he’s hired. Look where he’s been. And his answers to questions about it have been—’
‘So who’ll run against him?’ the other anchor asks. ‘Because, for my money, there’s only one other viable candidate, unless we’re dredging up one of the failures from last time.’
‘Which they won’t do.’
‘So, Homme?’
‘Makes a lot of sense. Good profile. Family man – I mean, they’re both family men, but still … and maybe more inclined to appeal to the more traditional members of the party.’ Laurence thinks about how little he likes or trusts Homme: they’ve met a few times and their politics do not have many natural points of intersection. His would-be opponent is as red as the Democrats get, he’s wavering on choice, healthcare, war. Everything is structured as a response to the last few governments, a way of suggesting that the soft touch that has been taken hasn’t been enough. His platform is a return to more old-school values. ‘But I don’t think he’s got a chance. Walker’s going to take this. He’s going to take the White House back, and maybe he’s what’s needed. You know, he’s got some real guts.’
Laurence switches the set off. He thinks about sleep, but instead he takes up his phone and searches for his name on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. He reads all the comments, and he tries to let the negative ones slide away from him.
Deanna shouts at the twins to stay quiet and they do. She has a voice that she uses to get the desired effect – total, gently terrified silence – and she engages it only rarely, because otherwise it will lose its effectiveness. But she snaps at them, and she peers out of the windscreen at the streetlamp-lit junction, trying to see Lane coming from one of the directions. She’s already an hour late and she’s not answering her phone or tweets or messages. She said it was a party somewhere around here. Deanna thinks about driving the streets to look for it. She knows what teenagers are like when they’re Lane’s age: they can’t help but turn the music up a little too loud which makes them much easier to find from the sidewalk, at least. There aren’t many streets in this town – Parkslide being only a little bigger than Staunton is – but she worries about Lane coming here to find her and having to wait around on the corner. She knows what it will look like; she saw what Lane was wearing when she left the house, an outfit that Laurence would have freaked out about. She tries to call Lane again, and talks to the twins as she holds the phone to her ear.
‘Guys, Mommy needs silence for a little while. This is important, okay?’ It’s an apology for what she said. She wants to scare them, but not that much.
‘Okay,’ Sean says. ‘Mom, where’s Lane?’
‘I don’t know, sport,’ she says. ‘She’s on her way, I’m sure.’ The cell goes to Lane’s answering service, but Deanna doesn’t leave a message. She sees somebody walking in the distance, a girl – the figure is slim enough to be Lane, certainly – but as they get closer she sees that she is tottering along on heels. Lane wouldn’t be caught dead outside her boots, even at a thing like this. The girl is drunk, swaying and swerving along the sidewalk, stepping into the road every so often, stumbling down the lip between the pavement and the gutter.
‘Excuse me,’ she shouts at the girl. ‘Hey, excuse me?’ The girl stops and looks up at Deanna from across the road. ‘Have you been to a party?’
‘Sure,’ the girl says. She looks Lane’s age – actually, Deanna thinks, she looks younger, because Lane doesn’t wear make-up that looks as if it’s been put on by a child playing dress-up with her mother’s beauty products – and there’s a good chance it’s the same one.
‘Could you tell me where?’ Deanna asks.
‘Tim’s house. I mean, Tim’s parents’ house,’ she says, seemingly angry, as if there was ever any chance of Tim owning the place, and how could Deanna not know that? ‘They came back early, so … whatever.’
‘And where do they live?’
The girl waves behind her. ‘Just down there,’ she says. She belches under her breath and sits down by a streetlamp, pulling a packet of cigarettes from her bag – Deanna stretches her brain to think when she last saw somebody with this brand – and fumbles to light one.
‘Guys,’ Deanna says to the twins, ‘your sister is in so much trouble.’ The twins laugh at this, a shared secret. They understand: Deanna will use her angry voice on Lane. They drive in the direction that the girl indicated and soon Deanna sees where the party was: a large house, shining white with the lights that are turned on inside it, a flood of teenage bodies outside it, milling around in the front yard. She pulls over and rings Lane’s phone again, winding down the window and hearing it ringing, the tinny echo of a song that Lane loves cutting through the hubbub. Lane cancels the call, so Deanna steps out of the car. She turns back to the twins. ‘I warned her,’ she says.
She shouts Lane’s name, her full name: Lane Alexandra Walker.
‘Oh shit!’ comes Lane’s reply. The crowd seems to part like it’s a trick, and there stands Lane. She drops something as Deanna gets closer; a bottle of some cheap, sweet-smelling liquor. She reeks of pot, that sweet, sweaty smell that Deanna remembers from her own youth.
‘Get in the car,’ Deanna says. She isn’t even putting the voice on this time.
They drive home in silence, even the twins. When they’re parked, Deanna tells Lane to get inside and to take her brother and sister with her. Lane does as she’s told. The car smells of smoke and alcohol and sweat and Lane’s hair products, used to push her hair into something that makes Deanna think of the punk hairstyles that she used to toy with in the nineties. This, she thinks, is cyclical: teenagers do this. I did it, she tells herself. I was exactly like this, living in Staunton and rebelling in my own little ways. She stays in the car while they all go inside and watches the lights flick on throughout the house. The twins are well past their bedtime, which means tomorrow she’s going to have two seven-year-old nightmares on her hands. Better a weekend than a school day, she thinks.
She gets out and goes to the downstairs bathroom, finding air freshener, and she sprays the inside of the car with it, almost pushing it into the fabric of the seats. She thinks of bug bombs, and filling a space with something to purify. When she’s got a good cloud of the stuff going she shuts the doors and goes into the house. The twins are in the living room, Alyx on the iPad, Sean on the Xbox.
‘No,’ Deanna says. ‘Well past bedtime.’
‘Mo-o-om …’ Alyx says.
‘Come on,’ Sean pleads.
‘Don’t screw with me tonight, you guys. Bed!’ They both sigh – the same sound of exhalation, the same exasperation – and they put down their games and march past her. ‘You guys go to sleep, you get to pick what we have for dinner tomorrow.’
‘Can we get pizza?’ Sean asks.
‘Sure. Pizza. Deal. Clean your teeth and get to bed.’ She stands at the bottom of the stairs and listens to them doing their routine, finely tuned as it is. Always Sean into the bathroom first, then he cleans his teeth in the hallway while Alyx goes in. Then she cleans her teeth and both of them stand at the sink. They spit the toothpaste out at the same time. They get into bed, and she tucks them in, kisses them on their foreheads. ‘Pizza – if I don’t hear a peep from you,’ she says. ‘That’s the deal.’ They both do the same gesture: zipping their mouths shut with invisible zips, and they smile. She doesn’t understand them, not all the time, because there’s something she simply can’t get close to there, that only they share. She worried, when she knew that she was having twins, because she was older than she thought she would be when having another child, and because she thought that they might be too much for her to cope with. But now, eyes shut, they’re what she wants, two perfect halves of a perfect whole. She wonders if they’ll always be like this.
The sound of music, wafting down the corridor from Lane’s room, stops her daydreaming and reminds her what’s gone on here. She pulls the twins’ door shut and strides down the corridor. All the tricks that they’ve learned over the years about how to make the kids respect them – or, at least slightly, fear them – come into play now. Lane is almost too old for them, but still, they’re worth a shot; and residual feelings of what they used to inspire in her might just swing it in Deanna’s favor.
She opens the door wide, letting it swing until it hits the stopper. It thuds, and the whole door shakes. Lane is on the bed, lying back, staring at the ceiling of her room. There are still the remnants of the pale stars there that they put up when they moved in, when Lane was the same age as the twins are now. She wanted the stars because she’d had them in the old house. Laurence and Deanna relented, even though she was too old for them, maybe. It was easier.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Deanna asks. Lane doesn’t look at her. ‘Lane, you know the rules.’ She walks over, stands next to the bed. ‘You know that we don’t want you drinking, and we don’t want you smoking. You know about your father’s career – you get yourself arrested, and God only knows what that does to him, the sort of questions he’ll have to answer about that.’
‘Fuck that,’ Lane says.
Deanna steps back. ‘Okay, you’re done. Lockdown for the next week.’
‘You can’t do that!’ Lane retorts.
‘Can and will. Watch me.’ She leaves the room, slamming the door shut behind her, and she goes to the bedroom and takes her cellphone from her pocket. She starts writing a text to Laurence, explaining what has happened, telling him that he’s going to need to talk to Lane when he gets home; that she always listens to him, or pretends to. Something about the father-daughter relationship works while Deanna and Lane have always had this wall between them when it comes to basic levels of respect. She writes all of that out, and then thinks. She doesn’t press Send. Instead, she goes downstairs and she brings up the calendars on the screen embedded in the door of the refrigerator, and looks at Laurence’s. The next few weeks are brutal for him: back tomorrow morning, Sunday working in DC on policy, then leaving first thing Monday for the announcement, then on to LA, Seattle, back to DC, home for three days, then NYC for a week. She taps through the following weeks and months, looking for a break, but there’s nothing. He’s barely hers, barely part of the family with his schedule the way that it is.
She clears the text. This is hers to deal with.
2 (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)
Laurence sits up in bed holding the tablet. He scrolls through the questions while Deanna reads, and he sighs exaggeratedly at them. She puts her book down and laughs at his face, a mock-grimace at the task ahead of him.
‘These fucking questions,’ he says.
‘How many are there?’
‘A thousand; a thousand questions. Which is, what, nine hundred and fifty more than for a citizen ID?’ Deanna puts the coffee down on the table at his side of the bed and leans in. She pulls the laptop away from him and turns it around to face her.
‘Aged eighteen, where did you see yourself aged thirty?’ she reads. ‘You’ve only made it to eighteen years old?’
‘Which is about a third of the way through. Because, apparently, they can tell if I would be a good president based on whether I ever gave some kid a wedgie when I was in high school.’
‘It’s not a science,’ Deanna says.
‘Probably not,’ Laurence tells her, ‘but ClearVista sure as hell acts as if it is.’ He collapses backwards in mock anguish. ‘It’s fine. I have to do it.’
‘Says who?’ Deanna touches his chest. He’s so warm, she thinks.
‘They do. Shadowy they. The would-be Illuminati of America. And Amit.’
‘Of course Amit does. He probably still has shares in the company.’
‘He says that it’s the future of politics.’
She leans in and kisses him. ‘And there was me thinking that the future of politics would be you,’ she says. ‘You ready for today?’
‘Barely.’
‘Did you sleep?’
‘Barely.’
‘Barely?’
‘Barely.’ He smiles. ‘It’ll be fine.’
‘All you have to do is dance, monkey.’ She leans in to kiss him, and he pushes his tongue behind his lip, imitating the animal. She grins as she feels it, and he pulls her towards him, onto the bed. She rests her head in the nook between his chin and his shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m going to the house, to try and make a start on stuff. Cleaning it.’
‘I’ll come and join you when I’m done.’
‘There’s no party?’
‘Don’t care if there is.’ He thinks about what happens after this, and how busy he suddenly becomes. He’s seen the effect that it’s had, his slight withdrawal from them all in the wake of his career. This is, he thinks, important.
‘I’ll wake the kids,’ she tells him, and then he hears her go down the corridor and into the twins’ room. He hears them giggling. They’ve been waiting for her. Laurence gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. He looks at his face. He thinks about how old he looks and wonders how old he will look at the end of this, what sort of effect even running for the role will have on him. He pulls at gray hairs, and he examines the lines on his mouth and eyes, the slight jowl underneath his chin. He rubs at his temples, and the spots on his head where the hair will start to go. It’s in his family, or it was; and it feels like an inevitability to him. He’ll turn forty and his stress levels will be off the charts, and then he’ll just be clinging to whatever aspects of youth feel like letting him off the hook for the longest.
Deanna reappears in the doorway. ‘Lane isn’t coming,’ she says. ‘I told her she can have lockdown here or there, but she chose here.’
‘Foolish girl.’
‘I’m going to call her every hour, check she’s not gone out.’
‘We can trust her,’ Laurence says.
‘I wouldn’t have trusted myself when I was her age,’ Deanna replies. ‘Anyway, the twins are getting dressed. What time are you on?’
‘Ten,’ he tells her. He goes to the wardrobe and pulls his suit out – the gray suit, the lemon-yellow tie – and as he dresses himself he hears her go downstairs and switch on the TV. He hears his name mentioned, and then the set goes quiet.
‘Can we go swimming?’ Sean asks.
‘Later,’ Deanna says. ‘Maybe we can go in later.’ She’s packed all the cleaning supplies and the toolkit, and she pulls them both out of the trunk of the car. She wants to start clearing the house out, getting rid of the crap that’s been left, making sure that there are no splinters. There is furniture in the house; wooden tables and chairs that match the walls and floors and make it feel like the set of a horror movie. She pulls up outside the front, driving as close to the house as she can. There’s no real space for the car, just the dirt and gravel ground. ‘Watch yourselves,’ she says. ‘No running, no picking up anything that looks as if you shouldn’t pick it up, okay?’ She looks at the twins. ‘And stick close,’ she says, ‘No idea what’s waiting to bite you in this place.’ She snaps her teeth at them, and they both laugh.
The front door sticks and she has to shoulder it as hard as she can, really putting all of her weight into forcing it open. It finally swings, a hard arc that makes it smack into the wall and kick up clouds of dust. To Deanna’s eyes the house looks as if it’s barely holding itself up. It’s a building of pencil-drawn monochrome, the walls slightly askew, in need of a ruler. Rays of light hit the dust that seems to fill every part of the place, the light coming from not only the windows, but also through the cracks in the walls. There’s a smell inside that she struggles to recognize, that’s not totally unpleasant. It’s on that fine line, and it needs such a clean. They should have hired somebody, she thinks.
‘Right,’ she says, and she opens her bag, pulling out cloths and disinfectant sprays. ‘We need to get this place a little more habitable.’ She holds a cloth out for each of the kids. ‘Help me today, maybe we think about buying you guys a videogame later in the week. Deal?’ The kids snatch the cloths from her hands, and she shows them how to use the spray on the work surfaces in the kitchen, and how to wipe them down. She knows she’ll have to go over it again, but this is fun, the three of them working on this. She knows that when this is done, the place might feel like more of a home.
There’s no water from the taps; she writes it into her phone as something for Laurence to sort out when he arrives.
The delegates usher him onto the stage. ‘This is official,’ one of them says, ‘so treat it with some goddamn respect, you hear?’ He’s smiling while he talks, so Laurence smiles too; but it sounds, for a second, like an actual threat. ‘You do us proud,’ the man says. Not, ‘Do the party proud,’ Laurence notices. He takes Laurence’s hand, reaching for it and forcing the handshake.
Laurence reaches the stage and the flashbulbs go, the cameras all pointing at him. He’s got a speech that was prepared for him and he uses it while he speaks, but only as a frame. Most of the time he tries to be as much himself as he can.
They ask questions, and he poses for photographs. He checks his phone and his Twitter, his Facebook, his emails all scream alerts at him as people congratulate him. Amit takes the phone.
‘Clear your notifications,’ he says. ‘You won’t have time to read them.’ He pulls a schedule out.
‘No,’ Laurence says, ‘nothing else today. I’m going home. Family time.’
‘Bullshit,’ Amit says, laughing.
‘No,’ Laurence tells him. He asks for Amit to get him a car and he loosens his tie. He texts Deanna: I’m coming home.
The house looks exactly as Laurence has been picturing it: the same ramshackle wooden walls; the same dock that stretches off out and over the water; the same view behind it, the mountain and the houses in the distant opposite, and the sun above them. The driver takes them along the dirt track that runs down the hill towards the shoreline and Laurence watches the house get closer, as if it is becoming more real, and it reveals itself to him in broken windows and splintered wood. He feels the peace washing over him, a sense that this is meant to be – at least for now. Barely ten minutes from their other house, yet it feels like a different place entirely. He winds the window down and smells the air, listens to the sound of the tires on the gravel.
Laurence watches as the driver takes the car back up the hill, leaving him alone outside for a second. There’s just him. He can’t hear his family, not at that moment; and then he goes up to the front door, which is opened wide, and inside. He hears them upstairs, singing some song that he vaguely recognizes from the radio. Deanna is mostly humming the melody, but the kids know every word. He doesn’t shout to let them know that he’s here, not yet.
He walks through the downstairs, which is open-plan, a living area with 1950s wood-framed sofas around a fireplace, then the kitchen behind and the table for four, the units that are the same wood as everything else. The man who owned this place must have been a carpenter, he thinks; maybe he did this all himself, and built the house with his own two hands. There are gun racks on the walls, empty slots of what was once there; and a hook with a dust outline shape of what was clearly a mounted animal head. Laurence stands by the window at the end of the house, looking out over the water.
‘How did it go?’ Deanna asks him. She’s at the foot of the stairs. He didn’t hear her come down.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘It went well.’
‘I love you,’ she says, and he smiles.
‘It’s so peaceful here,’ he tells her. ‘This is amazing.’ He’s transfixed, staring at some far-off point in the distance. There’s a thin layer of mist stopping him from seeing what’s actually over the other side of the lake, only the thin shapes of what have to be houses and trees, but that isn’t stopping him. ‘I wasn’t joking when I said that I had always dreamed of this,’ he tells her.
‘I know.’ She stands next to him while the twins run around behind her. ‘Thank god you’re here. There’s no running water.’
‘I’ll turn it on,’ he says. He doesn’t stop staring out at the lake.
The cellar door off the kitchen opens onto stairs that go down into total darkness. There’s a smell of more than damp: of absolute wetness, wet mud and wet stone. Laurence and Deanna both peer down into the black.
‘Looks like it’s flooded down there,’ Laurence says.
‘Could be from the lake.’
‘Could be.’ He pulls off his suit jacket and rolls up his sleeves.
‘You should change,’ she says.
‘Didn’t bring anything,’ he replies. ‘I can get this cleaned. It’ll be fine.’ He opens his toolbox and looks for the torch. It’s not there, so he takes out his cellphone and turns the brightness up, holding that out in front of him as he takes the first few steps down. The stairs are wooden, a stained and polished pine, and they creak underneath his weight. He puts his free hand out to the wall to steady himself. ‘I’ll do this,’ he says. ‘You stay up there and call for help if I die.’
‘Don’t,’ she says.
‘It’s fine. Joke.’ She hears him smiling. He steps down again, a few more. In front of him he can see the floor now, the bottom of the steps, and there is water there. He can’t tell how deep, because it’s black with dirt and grime. ‘Pass me a stick or something?’
‘Wait,’ she says, looking around. There’s nothing. She runs past the kids, who are now playing with their phones on the sofas, sitting in little clouds of dust that puff around them every time that they move (like Pig-Pen, she thinks, from the Peanuts cartoons), and she goes outside to the trees that line the road. She finds a branch and takes it back to him, passing it down.
‘About time,’ he jokes. He holds it in front of him and steps down again, watching the stick go into the water until it stops. ‘Ankle level,’ he says. He sits on the steps and they creak horrifyingly, as if they’re being pulled off the walls.
‘We need these replaced,’ Deanna says.
‘They’re fine. They need oiling or something, maybe a supporting strut.’
‘You say that as if you know what it means.’
‘It’s a strut. It supports.’ He pulls off his shoes and socks and folds the bottom of his suit trousers up to his knees. ‘Or something.’
‘You’re not,’ she says.
‘What else am I going to do?’ he asks. He steps down into it and the water swirls around his feet. He gasps. ‘Cold,’ he says. ‘Jesus, that is cold.’
‘Can you see the water pipes?’
‘Give me a second,’ he shouts back. From where Deanna’s standing at the top of the stairs she can’t see him now, only the faint flashes of his phone’s light as he swishes it around. ‘Okay, got it,’ he says. ‘It’s rusted to hell.’
‘Can you turn it?’
‘I don’t know. I need a wrench or something.’ She picks up the bag and takes the first few steps down, and they groan. He wades closer and she places it slightly further down the stairs, within his reach. He grabs at it, stepping up. His feet are filthy, she sees. ‘I’ll get on this,’ he says. ‘You tell me if it works?’
She stands at the sink and turns the taps on, and there’s a dribble of brown sludge from them and a gurgling, but no water. She waits, as the clangs of him struggling with the pipe echoes through the stairwell. She thinks about Lane and how it’s been a while since she last called to check in, so she dials the house; but there’s no answer; she dials her daughter’s cellphone, and there’s still no reply. She leaves a message and then tries again, letting the phone ring and ring.
‘Shit,’ she says.
‘Mom!’ Sean shouts, hearing the word.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ she mutters back. ‘Laurence,’ she calls, ‘I can’t get hold of Lane.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ he shouts up to her.
‘I told her to stay in the house.’
‘So go and pick her up. Force her to come here, be with us. She can help me dredge the cellar out when I’ve got this working.’ She hears the noises still coming, the strain in his voice as he fights against the decades-old plumbing of the house, trying to make it habitable. When they moved into their first apartment, there was a superintendent to fix anything that broke; when they bought their house in Staunton itself they had it gutted and renovated and made as modern as possible, switches and buttons put in, digital rather than analog to run their lives by. Working with the old is new to them.
‘I’ll take the kids,’ she says. ‘We won’t be long.’
‘Bring me a Coke?’
‘Sure,’ she says. She goes to the kids. ‘Come on,’ she tells them, ‘we’re going back to the house for a little while.’
‘I want to stay here,’ Sean says. He doesn’t look up from his game, but Alyx does.
‘You can’t.’
‘Mo-o-om,’ he says. He hits the whine in his voice, a note that he and Alyx have perfected over the duration of their lives; some pitch that manages to work in the same way that Deanna’s angry voice does. It’s worse when it’s in harmony.
‘Fine,’ she says. She shouts to Laurence. ‘Sean’s staying up here.’
‘Can I swim now?’ Sean asks.
‘When your father’s done,’ she says. Alyx stands up and coughs away dust, and she and Deanna leave. Sean sits and listens as the engine starts, then he watches them drive up the track until they’re gone.
Laurence struggles. It’s hot down in the cellar, or he is; he sweats, and he hears the patter of it dripping into the water around his feet. He tries again, because he’s sure that there’s some movement; an almost-infinitesimally small amount, but it’s still movement. Eventually this will open up the sluices. He stands still, planting his feet in the murky water, and he really fights the thing. It doesn’t move and he doesn’t move. Total stillness.
The light has gone out on his phone, some sort of standby mode having kicked in, and he’s in the dark now, but he doesn’t stop. This is necessary. The house means something. Securing it, actually working on it, that’s a way of making their future seem as if it’s going to happen. His phone rings, Amit’s name on the screen; the photo of his grinning face that was taken on their first meeting.
‘Where are you?’ Amit asks.
‘At the lake house.’ Laurence doesn’t let go of the wrench; he’s still forcing it, still trying to get the water to flow.
‘You shouldn’t have run off. There are people asking for you.’
‘Tell them it’s family time. Tell them this is the sort of candidate I’ll be: a man who gives a shit about stuff like that still.’
‘You done the questionnaire yet?’
‘No. Not even close.’
‘Larry.’
‘Amit.’
‘You need to, you know that.’
‘I know,’ Laurence says. He looks down, pulls the phone away from his ear. It’s wet with sweat and, as he wipes the screen of the phone on his shirt, the light dances across the muddy water at his feet. There are ripples and he feels the water lapping at his ankle, the energy that it carries coming through and tickling the hairs on his legs. The sound of it echoes in the space. He wonders if this is an effect of his effort, maybe the pipes shuddering as they try to let their water out. It picks up, suddenly more violent, tiny waves coming from the far wall. ‘I have to go,’ he tells Amit, and he hangs up the phone, shining the light again. The waves bounce the light around. He walks towards the wall that the ripples seem to be coming from. He crouches and presses his hand against it, feeling around. There’s a crack in the concrete; it’s only slight and he can’t tell if that’s the cause of this, but it feels like it is. A crack like this, there has to be repercussions. He wonders where this has come from.
The house is empty and quiet apart from the reverberations of the water in the cellar as it eases, as the waves die down. He thinks about washing his feet, which are the color of soot now, so he walks upstairs and through the kitchen, to the outside. The back door is already wide open. He pads along the dock and catches himself looking across the water again. He’s sure that he can see something in the distance, across the water, through the mist, a light, or the reflection of a light. He stares at it. It’s almost hypnotic, for that second.
It’s only so slight.
He sits and dangles his feet in the water, and they are wet, and he looks down at them to see if they’re clean yet and there is Sean, suspended underneath, the crown of his head jutting from the surface. Laurence stares for a second as he tries to parse what he’s just seen and then he hurls himself down from the dock and he pulls at his son’s head and shoulders, trying to yank him up, but the boy doesn’t move. Laurence heaves in air and then dives down, frantically pulling at his son’s limbs, using his body almost as a ladder to get lower, and then he finally feels the weeds that are wrapped around Sean’s foot and ankle, going between his toes and all around, and he wrenches but they won’t tear. The weeds are like thick rubber.
So he feels lower, to the root, thinking that might be easiest. He finds it up against concrete at the bottom of the house, the foundations at the base of the dock. This is where the weeds have grown, boring into the concrete and cracking it. The wall here leads to the cellar. This is what caused the flooding; and what Laurence felt around his own legs, his son’s frantic and desperate kicking before he stopped breathing.
Laurence pulls that part of the plant out somehow and thinks, in that second, of those moments where people find superhuman strength when in crisis, and Sean’s body drifts upwards. It’s free. He grabs it and he pushes his son’s head above water, then climbs out onto the dock, pulling Sean with him. He tries to give him mouth-to-mouth as he knows to do it. He pushes on Sean’s chest, worried about doing it with too much force. He doesn’t want to hurt him. He turns his head and he breathes into his boy’s lungs again.
‘Please,’ he says, ‘oh God, please,’ and he breathes again; and then so does Sean, coughing up water. He doesn’t open his eyes, and his breathing is shallow and labored, heaves that sound somehow less than human. Laurence runs for his phone and dials 911. He shouts about where they are but the address is hard to find. He describes it to them and they say that they’ll be minutes. Support him, they say. Keep him breathing. If he stops, breathe into him again. Keep repeating this.
He does. He hangs up and he waits for the ambulance and he watches his son’s face so closely that he hopes Sean can feel his hot breath on his skin, willing him to stay alive.
It’s only a minute before the Staunton Sheriff’s department arrives. They come tearing down the track and the deputy gets out and rushes to the boy, taking over. Laurence backs away and watches it all as if from a dream.
Deanna storms through the house, shouting Lane’s name. She goes to her room and throws the door open and her daughter is there, on her bed. There’s a boy with her; he’s not like Deanna imagined, being clean cut, wearing a bright rugby-style shirt; or, he was. Now, it’s on the floor at the foot of the bed. Deanna doesn’t even look at him; she stares instead into her eldest daughter’s eyes.
‘I’ve been calling you.’
‘I was busy,’ Lane says, but her voice is shaking and weak. She’s ashamed, whether she’ll admit it or not.
‘Get dressed,’ Deanna says, ‘you’re coming to the house with us.’
‘No,’ Lane replies, and Deanna is about to shout at her, and to shout at this boy, to tell him to get out of the room, when her own cellphone rings. It’s Laurence. She turns away from Lane’s room, hearing her daughter and the boy fumble for their clothes, and she answers. Dumbly, she listens to his slow, measured politician’s voice as he tells her what happened, or some version of it as best he understands it; that Sean is alive and being treated. He tells her about how he found him, and how he didn’t know. Deputy Robards came, and he held Sean’s tongue back, because their son began choking on his own tongue, and Sean nearly bit through the finger. Apparently that’s a good sign, Laurence says. He has bite marks, almost through to the knuckle; that detail, offered up. She didn’t need it but Laurence stresses: this is a good sign.
‘How long was he under the water?’ Deanna asks.
‘Minutes,’ Laurence tells her. ‘Six or seven minutes, maybe eight. I don’t know.’ He tells her to come to the hospital. She says that she will.
Lane stands in front of her mother. She can see it in Deanna’s face.
‘I need you to watch Alyx,’ Deanna says.
‘What’s happened?’ Lane asks. No antagonism, no challenge. She knows from the look she’s being given that this is serious.
‘Your brother fell into the lake,’ she says. ‘He’s alive.’ That seems enough; a thing to latch onto for all of them, and then she goes to the car and gets in and starts the engine. She doesn’t need anything else. She drives.
This is the first time that she’s had to go to hospital for one of the kids. They were lucky with Lane: ten years older than the twins, and Deanna and Laurence were ten years younger when they had her, ten years more stupid; but still they got through with her having nothing more major than a scrape or two. Nothing broken, nothing lost, no emergency trips to the hospital. Maybe, she thinks, they got complacent.
She thinks about the eight minutes that Sean was underwater. She wonders if eight minutes is a long time to not take a breath.
She doesn’t know the way to the hospital. She relies on the ClearVista app on her phone to tell her where to go. She listens to its voice and tries to let that be all that she can hear.
She parks in the short-stay – because, she thinks, that’s all this can be, because she’ll go in and they’ll be sending Sean home with some medicine or an inhaler or something, and a lesson learned about what to do and what to not and when to listen to your parents, because that’s the sort of injury that kids recover and learn from – and she rushes in, past the ambulance bay and into the ER reception. There’s a queue at the window, so she waits, and she looks for her son. Maybe he’ll be sitting out here waiting for her himself, because it’s not at all serious. They have let him go already, this was a false alarm. Instead, there are people with bloody noses and hands wrapped in bags of frozen vegetables, and one woman whose skin is almost green, her eyes rolling back in her head, froth around her mouth. There’s a television above them, tuned to the news. They’re talking about Laurence, running a special later on, about his political career so far. She hopes that she isn’t still waiting here to see it.
‘Miss?’ the woman at the desk says. Deanna doesn’t hear her. She’s somewhere else: imagining Sean in the water, imagining how he took his dive from the dock, and how he arced through the air; and why he didn’t come up again. She can picture it, as if she is there. She doesn’t know how. She is trying to imagine what was going through his mind. How lost he was, and how he needed her. Maybe he called her name through the water …‘Miss? Can you hear me?’ Deanna turns. The woman behind the counter is impatient already.
‘My son’s here,’ Deanna says. ‘I don’t know where he is. My husband brought him here in in an ambulance. He drowned.’ Such finality in that phrase.
‘Name?’
‘His name? It’s Sean. Sean Walker.’ The woman types and stares at her screen. Deanna imagines the notes shared on these computers: even down to letting the front desk staff know how to treat the situations. The patient is fine. The patient is in stable condition. The patient is dead. Morgan – Deanna reads her name badge – doesn’t say anything for a while. Instead she follows the notes on her screen, and then she sighs. It’s almost imperceptible, but Deanna is watching for it. She’s so focused now on this moment and nothing more. No point in dwelling on what happened before. This is all about what happens from this moment on.
‘Okay,’ Morgan eventually says, ‘so you’re going to come with me through here now.’ She stands up from her desk and lifts the entry flap, and she puts her hand on Deanna’s elbow to lead her through.
‘Is Sean okay? Can I see him?’ Deanna asks.
‘Your husband is through here,’ Morgan says, ‘and the doctor will bring news as soon as she’s got some.’ They pass bays of beds where doctors fix the damaged and then reach the room. It doesn’t have anything printed on the door: there’s a darkened glass window in it and nothing more. There are three more of them adjacent, Deanna sees, but she can’t see if they’re vacant or not. The door creaks on the swing, and Laurence is there and he rushes to her. He’s still damp, wet from having dredged Sean out of the water, but he’s got his suit jacket back on. He shakes, a towel wrapped around him, and she holds him. It’s not his fault, she tells herself. It’s not. He sits down, and she does, and they don’t talk.
The room is pale and bare. There are six chairs arranged as if for dinner, one at the head of the table, one at the foot, two on either side; and the table in the middle is low, cheap wood, covered in coffee stains. There’s a green plastic box in the center filled with tissues. The box, Deanna notices, is glued to the table. There are no magazines, no television, no water cooler: this is like no waiting room Deanna has ever been in before. The chairs are covered in a fading red woolen fabric, but the arms have started to be unpicked, the strands pulled out and played with; worried. The carpet has, around the table, been worn into a path, like a running track. The ceiling tiles are yellowed with cigarette smoke. It’s been decades since you were allowed to smoke in buildings like this, and nearly twenty years since Deanna last had a cigarette; but now she looks at that and she misses it, because if ever there was an occasion it is now.
‘I have to see if there’s news,’ Laurence says. ‘I’ve spoken with Amit, asked him to come.’
‘Okay,’ Deanna says. He stands up and leaves, padding into the hallway – she watches him, sheet draped over his shoulders, looking for all the world like any other patient of this place – and she takes out her phone. She texts Lane – No news xxx – and then opens the ClearVista app. Predict anything with our groundbreaking algorithm, it reads. The numbers don’t lie. She logs in and selects Sean’s name from the drop-down list of her dependents, and then starts to type what she’s looking for. Predict how long you can survive, she types, and it fills out the rest for her, guessing at her request. Without breathing, the second most requested search beginning with that phrase. She clicks the completed sentence. The little icon spins around (While you are waiting, did you know that ClearVista can help you predict your chances of love with a new partner to a ninety-three percent accuracy?) and then it gives her its answer.
We predict that Sean Walker can survive for 102 seconds without breathing, it says. She turns the Internet browser off and puts the phone back into her pocket. She fingers one of the tissues from the box, and she feels how thin it is, and somehow that’s what sets her off.
Deanna looks out of the window. There’s only one, and it looks out onto the gray concrete rear of the buildings. The fans from the air vents, the delivery area for medical supplies, a chain-link fence. There’s nobody walking past, gawking in, which is a relief. The afternoon sun, briefly, shining through the window and onto her face. She’s looking out when the door to the room opens and she sees the doctor’s face reflected in the glass. She turns. The doctor takes her glasses off before saying anything, and she shakes Laurence’s hand, and Deanna’s, and Deanna thinks how warm her hands are. She keeps thinking about that warmth all the way through the explanation of what happened: that there were two sets of injuries to deal with: because when he stopped breathing it caused an embolism; and then his lungs were flooded as well, because before he stopped he tried desperately to breathe, taking water in where it should only have been air. The doctor is amazed that Laurence managed to get him breathing at the scene. She says something about Sean being artificially alive; or how he was. She doesn’t say the words about what exactly happened after was, which makes it worse for Deanna, somehow. Everything sounds as if she is at altitude and her ears have popped, fading off into a fog of words that carry no meaning.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor says. That’s all they need. Laurence holds Deanna, and he cries into her shoulder, and he falls to his knees and he screams but it comes out like he’s gasping for air; but Deanna cannot soothe him. She is still picturing Sean stuck under the water, looking up at her, calling his father’s name, desperately clawing at the surface of it, unable to break out; knowing what is coming as he drowns.
3 (#ulink_a06c444b-959c-5bd6-937d-8a2385412a36)
The next year is the worst of their lives.
The funeral happens a week to the day after his death. Sean’s skin was a shade of gray when they looked at it in the hospital. The make-up artist tells them he is one of the best and Laurence wonders what scale that’s on: town, or state, or country, or even the world. He asks, bitterly, if there are competitions to decide such a thing: a parade of bodies lined up to be perfumed and preened? When they finally see Sean, his skin is the abnormal pink of a child’s doll. They refuse an open casket, then, because this isn’t their son any more. Laurence can’t stand to look at him, or even at the casket as it lies on the table. They invite anybody who wants to come to the funeral, and pretty much the whole town does. They all bring trays of pies and pasta and salads, and they leave them piled up in the kitchen, shake Laurence’s hand and kiss Deanna’s cheek, say how sorry they are. Everybody in the town knows them; most remember Deanna from when she was a child. And they all knew Sean, and they all want to say goodbye to him. Everybody steps up to the closed box on the table and stands over it; they tell Sean whatever it is that they have to say. Alyx doesn’t come, because Deanna doesn’t know if that’s right. Deanna explains it to her.
‘Sean’s gone to heaven,’ she says, almost without thinking, and that starts a conversation that she then feels pitiably unable to deal with, but she tries. She buys a Bible for the express purpose of giving Alyx the story about how it works. She argues with Laurence that grief needs an outlet and that this might be a good one for Alyx. Laurence doesn’t like it – he’s practical about religion, pragmatic, as badly as that plays with the South; and now he’s more stubborn. Any shot at belief that he maybe once had is devastated by the loss of their son – but, Deanna argues, that’s beyond the point. The point is: Alyx needs it. She was a twin, and she is now missing the person she was closest to in the whole world. She’ll never know that closeness again.
Once Sean is finally put into the ground, Deanna and Laurence take the girls to his grave, to do something that’s small and private and just for them. They stand around the stone – the dates make Deanna feel sick to look at, so she avoids that – and they all tell stories about Sean and why they loved him. They have decided to bring some of his toys, to put them in the soil with their hands. Alyx buries one of her own toy ponies, the one that Sean always used to steal when he was younger; Lane chooses a dinosaur that he claimed he didn’t like any more, but that he had absolute trouble letting go of as he grew older. They don’t say why they’re doing it, but they think that it might help. As they bury them, scooting the soil on top of them, pushing them under, Deanna feels a rip in herself: so much of her beloved son now relegated to the ground. She will miss the toys, because they would have reminded her of him. She thinks about coming back at night, when the rest of them are asleep, and pulling them from the soil; but she wonders where she would stop, or if she would just keep on digging.
They sit Alyx down and ask if she would like to talk to anybody about her brother, because they’ve heard too many stories about what happens if children are left to bottle up their emotions, how dangerous it can be. They hire a therapist, a specialist in childhood bereavement, and Lane is allowed to do whatever she wants for a while. Three weeks after her brother’s death, Lane shaves her head almost down to nothing and she doesn’t bat an eyelid when Laurence shouts – screams – at her about it.
‘We had a deal!’ he yells, and she doesn’t respond or even acknowledge it. Deanna’s listening and that evening they have a conversation about his career.
‘What was that about?’ she asks, when he gets off the phone then, because they haven’t yet spoken politics yet. She had assumed. They’re in bed and he’s propped up like always, tablet on his lap. The ClearVista survey deadline has long expired; all of that stuff was forgotten in an attempt to find relative peace in the wake of Sean’s death.
‘The delegates called,’ he says. ‘They still want me to run.’
‘This year?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know.’ She knows that this works in the party’s favor; that their loss will be used, Sean an inadvertent sacrifice to the voting gods.
They have The Daily Show on as they lie in bed and they both laugh at the same joke and immediately feel guilty, as if they’ve forgotten too quickly about Sean. Then Jon Stewart starts talking about Homme’s laughable efforts at beginning a campaign. He mentions Laurence dropping out and then he looks to the camera, full of actual sincerity, and sends out his best wishes to the Walker family. No jokes: just an appreciation of their tragedy. When they switch the set off, Deanna tries to sleep, but she imagines that she’s drowning: she can see the sky above her, but the water is between her and it, a fluid mass of tropical blue that’s destined to do nothing but end.
Amit, the man who would be Laurence’s Chief of Staff, comes to the house with a plan. It’s a year-long breakdown of their lives: of the things that they have to do and how they might set about moving everything forward. He doesn’t mention Sean either, but the boy is there, floating in the air above them. Everything that Amit says is tinged with the knowledge of how this might have been before and how it will be now. He has an argument that makes Deanna feel sick to hear: that this is a chance for Laurence to do something truly good, a chance to use his awful situation to his advantage. The words aren’t Amit’s: they come from the delegates, Deanna knows. They’re desperate to harness this. The tragedy can mark every facet of the campaign, should Laurence choose to step up again: the charities that he will vouch for; the events that he will attend; every single time that he mentions the word family in a speech. Nobody will be able to forget what has happened. Deanna is about to start arguing: that Laurence shouldn’t be running, that the family needs him, when Lane comes home. She walks into the kitchen in front of them and doesn’t say a word. A month after her brother has died and she’s tattooed herself again: this time across her right shoulder blade, a single word. It isn’t announced, but it’s flaunted, red and angry, on her thin skin, so much bigger than her past tattoos. Her parents freak out, shouting at her, and they get close to read it. She lets them, because this will happen sooner or later. It’s her brother’s name, clear as anything, in a slick, italicized script, framed on a bed of flowers and leaves, a vine stretching out and away from them. It leaves them breathless. Lane leaves the house again without saying a word.
In bed that night, Deanna asks Laurence how they can be angry with her for it. She wishes it was something else: a swear word, or the name of one of the stupid bands again. That would make it easy to have something to rally against. This, though? It’s grief, manifested as words and made indelible.
Alyx seems fine, but they know that she is not; not quite. She talks to the therapist and sometime Deanna goes along and watches through the false mirror in the room that they use. Alyx talks about anything but Sean: even when pushed, it’s as if there’s a gap there, where she doesn’t know what’s wrong and why she should be talking about him. The therapist sometimes leads her into those conversations, but it’s always stilted, and Alyx is always unwilling to give anything up. One day they leave her alone in the office and Alyx doesn’t know that she’s being watched. The therapist and Deanna talk in the little room, Alyx playing behind them, past the mirror, and she talks to him. She says his name and she holds something out, a toy pony, and then she shakes her head. She agrees with the nothingness: it’s not the right pony. In the little hidden room both women know what’s happening.
‘This is relatively common,’ the therapist says, ‘especially with twins. This isn’t something to worry about.’ She squeezes Deanna’s arm, and Deanna thinks of the hospital receptionist leading her through to the pale room where they were told what had happened. The same squeeze that tells her that everything will be all right in the end, even if it isn’t right now. She’s not sure. They don’t tell Alyx that they know and Deanna doesn’t tell Laurence about it either. Instead she stands outside the twins’ room – No, she reminds herself, it’s only her daughter’s room now, because Sean is under all of that soil, face up, maybe even trying to get out, somehow – and she listens for what might be happening behind the closed door. She imagines a conversation, or a play and she wonders if Alyx sees her brother as he was, or if he’s something else, a vague and loose version of himself. She tries to fantasize Sean into being there herself while she listens, imagining him in front of her as she attempts to re-form him. Crouched on the floor, her eyes shut, she wonders if she can hear his voice herself if she tries. It would be so easy to go in and join Alyx in her fantasy.
Laurence is asked to do an interview on one of the bigger current affairs chat shows, as a pundit and nothing more. He’s still a good talker, charismatic and personable, and he’s more willing to say what needs to be said, to give sound-bites, than many others. He is, the TV producers think, good value for money. He has to buy a new suit as the others don’t fit him any more. It’s the same color as the one that he wore when he made his announcement. He gets the size smaller around the chest and waist, because he’s lost weight. He hasn’t been trying to, but it’s happened. His middle-age puppy fat is almost completely gone. If he sucks in his belly when he’s dressing he can see his ribs.
They talk about schools and healthcare, the topics that he’s there for, to actually try and pass judgment on some of the things going on across the country. And then the host rolls that into a conversation about Sean, blindsiding him. Laurence has no choice but to go with it. They talk about how the hospital tried to save him, and how hard they worked. They talk about universal healthcare and what it needs to work properly for the people. They talk about how it felt for him to lose his son, and Laurence cries, partly from the shock of being asked and partly because he simply cannot keep it in. There’s something honest about this; everybody watching can see that.
He says, ‘We have to move on. We have to go out and brave the rain. There is no other choice.’
Deanna doesn’t watch the interview, but writes instead, her own form of catharsis, abandoning the book that she was working on (which suddenly feels like frippery), taking only fragments – themes, emotions, some passages describing events that only now she feels she can do justice to, with all that she has been through – and she starts to create instead. She’s never written anything that she would term as fantasy before, but this is it: a mirror of our world that is underwater. It is the story of a woman and her son. The book has started to write itself and, fingers on the keyboard, she is powerless to stop it.
Lane does see her father’s interview. She is in a mall, in a bar that she shouldn’t be in, and it’s on the TV. She is with her friends and they point out her father and they joke – but then they remember. He cries, and she sees it, and they all fall silent. This is serious, they know. After that, she goes back to the tattoo shop. More ink on her skin: to turn what she has, as crude a beginning as anything has ever had, into something more.
The blogs talk about Laurence’s mental state of mind. They discuss the chance of him making a comeback, of him declaring. Maybe he’s not ready for this; maybe he has been through too much. But they’re split on Homme, and the younger elements of the party, those who want to move the party forward, are willing Laurence’s return. Better a man in touch with his feelings than a man who can’t see past the past, the blogs say. Laurence can mourn for now: the presidential election isn’t for another eighteen months. They agree that he’s the best man for the job. Somehow, his son’s death is a driving force; it is, in some small way, almost a validation for his policies.
Laurence is called in front of the delegates and they ask him again. He says yes. It’s announced that afternoon. Deanna and he don’t speak, because he didn’t talk to her first. His excuses – that he has done this for the family; that he is trying to be the man he knows that he can be – fall on deaf ears. He apologizes to her, but he doesn’t back out.
The delegates remind him to complete the ClearVista questionnaire. Even since he first agreed to it, the process has advanced. More questions, more answers, more data kicked out at the end. The process can take months to get the results that they desire: the visualizations, the computer-generated videos. The report, ClearVista say, will tell you what sort of man you are and what sort of president you will be; it tells the world that they can trust you. Amit agrees: if there are any concerns about Laurence’s wellbeing, his state of mind, his ability to run the country, the ClearVista algorithm will solve them. Laurence asks him how he’s sure it will show he’s the right man. Amit tells him that that’s what the software does. It looks for best-case scenarios. It finds out who you are and it predicts what you will do. The other candidates are using it and their results will be out first, so this has got to be done. Be honest, Amit tells him.
Laurence fills in the form that night. He’s regretful about so much of his life and he wants to lie, to electioneer, even here, to a faceless computer, but he doesn’t. He tells the truth. It’s cathartic, ticking the boxes that measure his sense of his own pain. He sends the results off.
ClearVista will, the email he gets in return informs him, be in touch.
Laurence and Deanna try with their marriage as much as they can. They go out for dinners in the town, but everybody knows them and they say hello and stop them from having to talk to each other. It lets them dance around the idea of speaking about anything that is actually important. They both know that they need to talk about Sean more than they do; Laurence has finally noticed Alyx talking to herself, and Lane going further off the rails. They all need a break. One night, he suggests a vacation.
‘We should,’ he says, and that’s really it decided. He books a hotel in Rome. It’s the furthest they’ve ever been, but nobody will know them there – Laurence doesn’t want anything that will remind them of their son. They force Lane to come, but she’s secretly pleased to be getting away. Her friends talk about the same things over and over and she’s bored by them. She wants more, now. She wants a purpose. The first night they land late, after the longest flight of their lives, and they find a small restaurant in the city and eat the dishes that they recognize on the menu: pasta and pizza, the stuff they’ve eaten at home, but it tastes so much better. Even just being somewhere else makes it taste better. They’re tired, but it’s already good for them to be out of America; and they walk the streets, and see the sights at night. They pass a fountain, famous, in all of the guidebooks, and Deanna can’t help but focus on the cherubs, spitting out water into the tiered pools. She tries to not let it get to her. She doesn’t sleep, because she feels guilty that they’re having this fun without him. She tells herself that she has to get over it, but she doesn’t know how she will. The next morning, on the rooftop terrace, Lane comes out in her bikini and they see the extent of her tattoos, running up one side of her body a creeping vine and flowers budding from it. Each flower is an item, an icon. Each one has meaning, they think. Laurence stands up when he sees her, but Deanna snaps at him and tells him to leave it.
‘What will it achieve?’ she asks. That’s what she worries about. She wants the family to be what they can be: as normal and whole as possible. She has lost her son already and now there are the four of them. She will do anything to preserve what she has and Laurence would likely say things to Lane that could irreparably harm their relationship. She begs him to calm down. He spends the afternoon looking at the tattoos through his sunglasses, quietly seething. In one of them, there is a toy dinosaur that Laurence recognizes as the one that Lane buried. He thinks, by the end of the day, as the sun is setting around them, that the print on her skin is, in some ways, even beautiful.
At the end of the week, Deanna realizes that Alyx hasn’t been talking to herself. One night as she’s tucking her into bed she asks about it, asks outright if her daughter has been seeing Sean since he died.
‘Sometimes,’ Alyx says.
‘Not this week though?’
‘He can’t come on vacation,’ Alyx says, and that seems to be enough for Deanna. She holds Alyx for a while on the little girl’s bed and they both fall asleep, because there’s something about Alyx’s smell that’s calming. The next day they go walking and there’s a moment where it seems as if Alyx has reverted, but she’s singing to herself. And when they get home, after a week that they all needed, and that they are all desperately sad to say goodbye to, Deanna watches for it, but the Sean-fantasy isn’t there. Alyx cries in the kitchen when she can’t find him – or, at least, that’s what Deanna supposes. They don’t talk about it. Alyx is sick from school for a few days and she watches cartoons and eats Pop-Tarts and lies on the sofa where Sean used to lie. She takes up the whole space.
Birthdays come and go. Alyx’s is quiet, and they think about Sean, because there’s no other choice. They try, though. The therapist tells Deanna that it’s important that they don’t ignore it, but that this is Alyx’s birthday. There are ways, she explains. So they have a cake, and a party, and they try to distract themselves. They don’t know how else to do this. For Lane’s birthday, they ask what she would like. She asks for money to extend her tattoo. Laurence gives it to her, on the condition that she talks to them about it as it goes. She agrees.
His campaign begins in earnest. Laurence goes out on the road, around the state, drumming up votes. He speaks at conferences. He does everything that’s required. On the calendar, his name is blocked out on almost every single day. There’s a gap, a week where there’s nothing booked in, and none of them can avoid it because it’s the anniversary of Sean’s death. A week of nothing at all, even though there are major events he’ll be missing. It’s a countdown, they all know, as the weeks before it are ticked off. He flies home on the last day with something written in it and the very next day they all wake up early and drive to the graveyard.
There was a time that they visited it a lot, at the start, but Deanna had to stop herself. She worried that if she kept coming she would become too used to this place: to the faded glory of the more ancient headstones, the manicured grass, the wrought iron fencing that blocked some plots off from others. As if it wasn’t all the same under the soil. So now it’s once a month, or less. It’s been so long since they were all here at the same time. Grass has grown all over the plot and they can’t see where they buried the toys that day. Deanna puts flowers down, which is ridiculous, she thinks. He didn’t like flowers and here I am, having spent nearly a hundred dollars on them. But she puts them down because they make her feel better. Around them, some plots don’t have flowers at all, and she reads the headstones. Some of them were young; nearly as young as Sean was. She plucks some flowers from his arrangement and leaves them on the other graves and she says a little prayer to them as well. Alyx cries and Lane holds her close. The little girl buries her face in her sister’s stomach.
In the car on the way home, Laurence says how quickly the year has gone. He says, ‘I can’t believe it’s been a year.’ The girls are silent. Deanna thinks, I don’t know if it’s been fast or slow. Everything has slipped into an expanse. Sean might as well have died a year ago, or yesterday, or tomorrow. It can never be undone.
She sits in the back, between her daughters, and she holds them close and kisses their heads: the soft child’s hair on one side, the harsh brittle bristles on the other.
4 (#ulink_0362e667-51a3-54a9-993c-db7aaf5622cb)
Laurence brings all four of his favored news shows up in different corners of the screen and sits at the breakfast bar and eats his bacon and drinks the revolting milkshakes that Amit insists he has every morning. A blogger made a GIF from pictures of him that had been taken over the last thirteen months, showing his decreasing weight, a morphing slideshow sold as somewhere between comedy and tragedy; and that set the other blogs to speculating what it could mean. They touched on his personal traumas, of course, but also mentioned the S word: sick. They asked if there was maybe something wrong with Laurence that the public hadn’t been told about, and that made Amit flip out. He called in the middle of the night after reading something that speculated with actual medical terms and told them – told Deanna, in no uncertain words – that it was something they had to change. They must never, ever use the S word and they weren’t to let others use it either.
‘As soon as people start asking about the health of any normal candidate, their campaign is essentially screwed,’ he said. ‘Somebody can go from weight-loss to cancer in two or three posts and all of a sudden they’re out of the running. Laurence can take that even less than any of the others. Better a fat candidate than one who looks like he’s the S word, Dee.’
So she began to cook pasta for dinners. She made rich sauces, with real cream, and she started baking breads with cheese running through the dough. Amit bought them an old Paula Deen cookbook as a partial joke, along with a packet of real butter, and he told them to deep-fry everything. She sets the cooker to fry the bacon rather than griddling it, and she takes it out when it’s done and puts it into a thick-cut doorstep sandwich with full-sugar ketchup. It’s not helping. His belts are new, and his trousers. He has to tuck his shirts in more; in the worst cases, Deanna pins them at the back to make them taut again across his new frame. When he undresses for bed, she sees his ribs, a ladder of loose skin. He’s seen a doctor, quietly, to appease her – in case there was something wrong, the S word again, uttered privately – but he’s medically fine. He’s just thin. He’s not eating enough, was the diagnosis. That and stress, but one is an easier fix than the other.
He’s been away working for a fortnight, and only came back last night. Today, he’s off again. This, he’s warned them, is pretty much how it’ll be for the next year of their lives. So breakfast with him feels rare, suddenly, as if it’s a special occasion. His face appears on Fox, top right corner of the screen, and he selects it and maximizes it. He jacks the volume up to hear a man talking to camera as if it’s his friend, casual and smooth. His name is Bull Brady, the front wave of a new type of shock-pundit for the political channels as they attempt to make something dry considerably more popular. They’re met a few times. He doesn’t like Laurence, is the recollection.
‘So, most predictions have Walker managing to climb another three points in his key demographics today,’ the host says, ‘which, of course, means very little at this stage. Three is nothing: three can be lost by spending time in the wrong place at the wrong time. So how does he hold? Get out.’ The host stands and does a little walk-on-the-spot move. ‘Get out, talk to people. He’s had too much time off, and he lives in Podunk, Nowheresville; he needs to work more if he wants back in. He’s got a big old chunk of the country, catching the more, shall we say, cosmopolitan parts of our great nation; but he hasn’t got a chance in the red states. Not even close. Now, Homme might. He can win some of them, that’s the word. So Walker plays well in New York. So he plays well in Boston.’ (The host does the accent of these cities. That’s his shtick.) ‘So he plays well with core democrats. Big deal! If he can’t play well with big oil, he could lose this before it’s already begun. If they want to go Democrat, they’ll go with Homme. Walker’s going to Texas to try and see what he can do, but I’ll be damned if he’s walking away from there with anything but a suntan.’ He puts on a cowboy hat and climbs a mechanical bull in the corner of the studio, and he moos. Laurence mutes and minimizes it as Deanna walks in.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ she says.
‘I know. But people watch him. They like him.’
‘People like spectacle.’
‘He says I’m not doing enough of that.’
‘Which is why you’re up three points.’
‘That’s nothing. Three points is nothing. He said it himself.’
‘Okay,’ she says. She puts his plate in the dishwasher. ‘Go and wake the girls and say goodbye, would you? They’ll miss you.’
‘They barely noticed that I was back.’
‘Because you were only here for one night. They miss you. I don’t know what else to say.’
‘Lane?’
‘Even Lane.’ She kisses him. It’s everything, these moments: they remember Sean with every single kiss and it doesn’t stop them doing it. He calls for the girls from the hallway. School has just gone back. Alyx comes out and smiles at him in the doorway of her room.
‘Hey, Pumpkin,’ he says. ‘I can take you, if you’re quick getting dressed.’
‘In the car?’
‘In the car.’ The car is a big black cross-country thing that his party has recently leased to drive him around, less conspicuous out here than the town cars, coming complete with low-paid driver and super-strict fuel budget. Laurence knows that budget doesn’t extend to taking Alyx to school, but he doesn’t care. ‘Lane?’ he calls, ‘you up?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘I’m off soon,’ he tells her. ‘Want to say goodbye?’
‘Bye,’ she shouts.
‘Look at the college applications,’ he says. She hasn’t decided about what she’s going to do next year yet and they’re not pushing her too hard, in case it scares her off. They mentioned college once and she countered with a desire for a year to find herself. He and Deanna both hope that she likes what she finds. He rolls his eyes at Alyx who has reappeared, clutching her clothes. She starts to pull them on in the hallway.
‘No shower?’ he asks.
‘Later,’ she says, and she runs downstairs, past him and to the kitchen. ‘Dad’s taking me,’ she tells Deanna. ‘Can I have my breakfast to go?’ She says it in a voice that she’s heard on a TV show. Deanna pulls bread from the grille of the toaster and the spread out of the cupboard, and she puts it down in front of Alyx with a thick, rounded knife.
‘You get the honor,’ she says to her daughter, and then she leaves for the hallway and finds Laurence there, at the foot of the stairs. He’s in the lemon tie, and she knows exactly when he was last wearing it. Exactly what day it was. She balks and stands back.
‘What’s up?’ he asks.
‘Nothing,’ she says. If he can’t remember it, she reasons, there’s no point in saying it. The suit still hangs in the wardrobe. He hasn’t worn it since Sean died. He’s blamed it on the weight loss, but she knows that’s not true. She’s told herself that it was because of the connotations. The breast of it still has smears from her eyes on it, the dark tear-runs of her mascara like a print of her face. Deanna didn’t see the point in cleaning it. She thought, instead, that they should just burn it, but they haven’t. She doesn’t know how they go about it without making it seem like ceremony, so it’s inside a vacuum bag at the far end of the closet, beyond the part that you can see when the doors are opened. Out of sight, out of mind. But the tie is the first part of the puzzle to reappear, and he hasn’t realized what it means that he’s wearing it. Somehow it isn’t water-stained. Somehow it doesn’t need ironing.
He doesn’t comment on it. Instead, he adjusts it in the mirror.
‘I’ll take Alyx,’ he says. ‘It’ll be nice to spend some time with her.’
‘Sure,’ Deanna says. She focuses on his neck, his hands up and fiddling with the knot, and she wishes that he would realize what he’s done.
As he hands his bags to driver, he notices that the side gate to their house is open. ‘Shit,’ he says. The trashcan lids are up. He goes to them and peers in. ‘The bags are gone. Assholes.’
‘Again?’ she says from the porch.
‘I know,’ he says. He pulls the gate shut and looks at the cut-through lock that he put on after the last time that this happened, in the weeks following Sean’s death. ‘Can you buy a lock next time you’re at Henderson’s, something that’ll keep it shut, something they can’t cut through? Trent’ll know what sort of thing. A chain or something.’
‘Why do they do this?’ Deanna asks, coming out to look at the fractured remains of the cheap lock. It’s a rhetorical question. She looks at the pieces. Somebody came during the night and they were prepared. Laurence kicks the gate hard enough that it slams shut but swings right back open again, a clang of metal as the hinges meet and bounce against each other.
‘Don’t get stressed about it,’ Deanna tells him. ‘Please.’
‘I didn’t sign up for this part,’ he says. She kisses him, and he breathes out, an exhalation that’s part calm, part relief. ‘Let’s go,’ he says to Alyx.
In the car, Alyx clambers. She presses the window button, making it descend and then rise again, watching the world be taken away by the slick blackness of the glass. When it’s shut, the glass changes tone and shade, allowing just enough light in while still letting them see outside. She coos.
‘This car is awesome,’ she says.
‘I know,’ her father tells her. He puts the seat-back TV set on, flicking through the presets he’s established. Alyx turns her attention to it and the people talking.
‘Are you on here today?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Next week.’ The only time Alyx watches him on TV is when he’s in a one-to-one, because he always does a shout-out to her; always tells the family that he loves them. It’s a recent thing. The cynics, and there are many, think it’s working his personal situation to his benefit. Sometimes he wonders if he’s been that cynical himself and just not realized. ‘What have you got in school today?’
‘We’re reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,’ she says.
‘That’s it?’
‘I don’t know what else.’ She undoes her seat belt and he sees past her, to the traffic on the streets, the busy morning intersections, the reckless drivers. It’s the route chosen by the computer’s algorithm, the most likely route to get them where they’re going in the most efficient way possible. Traffic is mostly (but only marginally) better thanks to their ClearVista branded devices. But still, you can’t account for other people and human error, Laurence thinks. Some things simply cannot be predicted.
‘Sit down,’ he says, and he reaches over and clips her in himself. ‘Be more careful, okay?’ She nods and he kisses her forehead. He looks behind and out of the window, to see if anybody’s following them. He doesn’t know why, but it doesn’t hurt to be paranoid, he tells himself. This is what they want: the press, his enemies. They want him when he’s dropped his guard.
Deanna’s finished her new book. She’s opened the file every day for the last week and read it all morning, right the way through until she picks up Alyx from school. It takes that full stretch of time: not because it’s especially long, but because she focuses on it, gets as deep as she can. She’s been editing it for weeks now, going over and over the words, searching for the truth in what she’s written. It’s important to find it because that informs the story, the characters. Every word is careful; every word has meaning. It’s arduous; but, she reminds herself, it probably should be.
It’s eleven when she finally hears Lane waking up. Doors slam – bedroom, bathroom, bedroom again – and then comes the sound of her boots on the stairs. Deanna shuts her laptop, so that her daughter doesn’t see what she’s been working on – as if she would care, Deanna thinks – but then Lane is gone without even coming into the kitchen. Another slam, this time from the front door. There’s no shout of goodbye.
Deanna thinks about going after her, but it would be pointless. She would yell at her and Lane would ignore her; or she would chase her and Lane would bite her hand off. They’re losing her, Deanna thinks. She’s old enough to leave home but she has no job or indication of a desire to do anything with her life, and that’s all that keeps Deanna hopeful: that Lane’s own lack of ambition, of drive, will keep her here for a while. While she’s at home, they can keep an eye on her; and it means that the house doesn’t become even emptier. Because Lane makes noise. Alyx is quiet, appearing in doorways and padding around in her bare feet, but Lane is noisy, and she’s difficult, and she fills the house with her presence.
Deanna returns to the manuscript and her emails. As well as the new book she has got an email in draft. It’s been half written for the last few weeks, addressed to her agent. He stopped calling after Sean died, most likely because it suddenly became something that he would have to talk about but clearly wanted to avoid; and, Deanna reckons, he wrote her off. There was no chance of her finishing a book while she was still in mourning. And she felt the same, until she realized that the feeling of mourning was never going to go away. Then it became freeing, and that’s when the words came. And it might be that he’s not the best person to represent her now. Her previous books were flowing and grounded and real, but this new one is so sparse and fantastical he might be the wrong person to try and sell it for her. The email says all of this, but then it introduces the book to him anyway. Into the Silent Water, she’s called it.
She describes the setting, the characters: a woman has forgotten who she is, but she wakes in a land that’s flooded, a thick and grotesque scar marked across her forehead. Her mark means that she did not die accidentally: it means that she killed herself. In her hand there is a picture of a child, and all that she knows is that she is there to find him. But he is lost, and she wonders, as she goes, how intentional this all was; that maybe her own death was the first part of a quest that she cannot possibly hope to complete.
As she reads the synopsis, the novel, she thinks how thinly veiled it is, but that it doesn’t matter to her. Not with this book. She wants to publish it under a pseudonym, if it’s good enough to even be published in the first place. She can’t tell; she’s never been able to tell. She’s sure that nobody will want to hide who she is, especially if Laurence gets further in the race. After that, everybody will want their blood; she just hopes that it’s harder to take it if you don’t know it’s there, waiting to be tapped.
As they wait at the airport’s check-in desk, Amit talks to Laurence about how this will be once he’s secured the nomination.
‘Then,’ he says, ‘they’ll wheel out the plane to ferry you around. No waiting. Think about that. And then, you know, a couple of years down the road, Air Force One.’
‘You’re cursing it,’ Laurence says.
‘It’s not a curse,’ Amit says. ‘You’ve seen the polls. Can’t curse that.’
‘I’ve seen three percentage points.’
‘Exactly. Foundations.’ In front of them an elderly couple bicker about the flight. They throw statistics at each other like curveballs. The airline hasn’t had an accident in a while, the woman says; that means, statistically, they are now more likely to. She talks about safety protocols and how likely they are to have slipped, reading probability numbers from the ClearVista app on her phone. The man counters that, behind the scenes, the airline is likely to have picked their game up specifically because of the existence of ClearVista. They’ll want to reassure their customers that they can be trusted. The woman asks why the likelihood of an accident – a percentage that’s higher than the airline’s nearest rivals – isn’t higher, then. The man says that they haven’t taken that into account yet. It hasn’t propagated. Laurence listens while trying not to, and watches Amit tweeting about their day, about where they’ll be and what they’ll be doing.
The delegates picked him, not caring about his lack of experience. Statistics and predictions, that was the way that the business of politics was always going to be heading and Amit came from that background, having worked for ClearVista in their early days. He helped to write their algorithm, the algorithm that has now intruded on so much of the world in one way or another. Too much math, he said, when Laurence asked why he wanted out of such a big company. They were something close to friends now, sure, but business always comes first. Laurence can’t imagine this relationship going further if he loses the race. Laurence knows how this works for Amit if they fail. He will bounce back, and he’ll be here again in four years with another potential candidate. His numbers, based on his time with Laurence, will be better; his stock maybe even higher. Especially if he jumps ship before he’s pushed. If he sees the way it’s going, watches the tide.
The couple checks in, finally, and moves on, and then Laurence and Amit are second in the queue. The man in front of them holds his ticket up to the scanner and hands his ID to the girl behind the desk. He has no luggage, not even a carry-on, just a blue jacket, carried in his hand. It’s expensive-looking but bundled up. He pockets his ID, and he looks at Laurence as he steps past them. He nods, and smiles. Amit notices.
‘He knew who you were, see?’
‘What?’ Laurence is caught for a second, somewhere else.
‘He recognized you. Foundations, then a ground swell of being recognized. That’s as good as support, because he’ll remember that. He sees your face on a ballot, he’ll remember who he wants to vote for. You’ll see.’ Amit hands the assistant their IDs, and both men hold their phones out to scan their tickets. She asks them the usual questions and Amit answers for them. Laurence glances behind them.
‘I don’t like being recognized,’ he says. ‘They raided the trash this morning.’
‘Who did?’
‘Somebody in the night,’ Laurence says. ‘Didn’t see who they were.’
‘That’s what some people will do. They’re desperate for news.’
‘News isn’t in my fucking garbage cans, Amit.’
‘Yeah it is. Larry, news is and always will be whatever somebody can get their hands on that somebody else will pay to read.’ He hands Laurence back his ID card. ‘Flight’s twenty minutes late. Let’s get a coffee.’
They walk through the terminal to a coffee shop and Laurence finds seats at a table while Amit goes to the counter. This is how it is, now, until there’s a result one way or another: other people trying to bear the brunt of the stress for him, deferring whatever they’re not sure he can take and treating him as if he’s important. He doesn’t push back. Amit’s phone beeps as he comes back to the table. He grins.
‘The prediction’s done.’
‘What?’
‘The little tick boxes, Larry. Remember the tick boxes?’ Laurence hates when he calls him that. He’s the only person who does, an affectionate little tic. Larry and Dee, frivolous and light … ‘The package is being put together, should be with us soon as anything.’
‘This is ridiculous.’
‘It is. But you’ve seen Homme’s. You know that it’s effective.’
Homme had his own prediction released to the public a couple of months ago, the product of spin and facts, but also deep-rooted in his public persona. Amit thought that it was managed – it had to be – but to the public it seemed to be honest. It was in some way a truth. The ClearVista algorithm took his information – his entire life, realistically, when you break it down – and fed out a picture of a candidate who wouldn’t actually be a bad leader. Statistically, Homme was weak on so many issues, running with very few actual policies he seemed to care about but he was balanced, accessible, open to all. He would take red families in some places, that was his trick. Crossing party lines. Along with the hypothetical suppositions of what his stance would be on certain hot topics (which contradicted so much of the usual left stances, pandering to moneymen and the religious right), ClearVista created a short video. This was their most important gimmick: a new addition to the premium package, only possible with the most detailed survey and at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars; but, they promised, the trade-off was worth it. The video was useable, open source, free to be circulated however the recipient desired. Homme’s was perfect for him. It was so on-message as to be almost laughable. There he was in a helmet and a flak jacket, surrounded by swirls of dust, running to a helicopter, waving at troops; shaking their hands as he passed them, mixed gender and color (and even, in their haircuts and rainbow pin-badges, crudely implied sexuality). It was very presidential, the press agreed. They joked, the first time that they saw the tech, about previous presidents, and what it would have shown of them: Marilyn Monroe; ‘I am not a crook’; interns and cigars. A few days after the video was released – along with the full results of the tests, and the answers he gave to get the results, in the spirit of full disclosure and honesty – his numbers increased, stripping out votes from the other candidates. The video worked, even if it was only smoke and mirrors. ‘Pointless to be nervous,’ Amit says. ‘It’s done. Results come through later today, they’ve said.’ They leave the Starbucks and head for the gate, scanning their ID cards as they pass through to the departure lounge.
They join the queue to board, and Laurence notices that the man who had been in front of them at the check-in desk is in front of them again now. He’s wearing his blue jacket this time: the back is wrinkled from where he was gripping it. He turns and smiles.
‘You’re Laurence Walker, right?’ the man asks. He holds out his hand, and Laurence looks at it: something wrong about this. It’s the second time he’s been here. He’s stopped believing in coincidence. Amit notices and steps in, shaking it first.
‘You’re a supporter?’ Amit is exuberant, as he always is.
‘Yeah, I thought it was you. I’m a big fan,’ the man says. ‘We’ve been needing somebody like you for a while now. We’ve been playing safe, I think. We need a shake-up, that’s what I’m saying.’
‘Yes,’ Laurence says. ‘I agree.’ The man talks about the party and the future and Laurence nods his way through the conversation, relieved for some reason. Relieved, and yet still nervous.
The flight attendants run through the drills and show the exits; and they show the little movie about what to do in an emergency; and then the plane waits while the captain runs the airline’s custom algorithm, to take into account the names of all the passengers, to generate a final figure that’s meant to dictate their safety levels; and Amit fights the elbows of the man next to him, who reeks of cheap cologne and grips the seat’s arms as they shuttle down the runway. He leans over, looking across the aisle at Laurence and the window, and he watches the ground seemingly get faster and faster, and then it tilts away from the plane as they head upwards, pulling away from the ground. His ears pop and he shuts his eyes and opens his jaw over and over in an approximation of a yawn. He’s one of the first to his feet when the seatbelt sign goes dark, grabbing his laptop from the overhead locker.
‘You want?’ he asks Laurence. Laurence shakes his head and jacks his seat back a few degrees.
‘I’ll get some rest,’ he says. ‘Wake me when we land.’ Amit sits down and logs into the Wi-Fi. He loads the calendar app and looks at the breakdown of the next few days, structured and tweaked to the minute in order to allow the maximum time with each of the potential investors, and at each photo opportunity. The little colored bars are packed tight, and he rearranges the ones that only involve the two of them – breakfasts, dinners – so that it maybe doesn’t look too bad to Laurence’s eyes. Artificial breathing room, Amit thinks: one of his finest tweaks to the system. And each of the appointments has information attached that both men have to memorize. They have to know who donated what previously, and why; what the thing was that swayed their wallets. They have to know how deep they can make them dig. One of Amit’s junior staffers has prepared a full breakdown on every man for them, telling them who to discuss God (capital G) and religion with, and who is likely to want to talk about artillery instead of textbooks. There are lists of the names of their wives, husbands and children. One of them has lost a child, just as Laurence has; this is common ground. All of them will know everything about him; their own research just levels the playing field. Lies are pointless now, because information doesn’t die like it used to. It all sits there on some server, waiting for somebody to discover it and mine it and crosscheck it and use it. Used to be in politics that you could tell a different story to two different moneymen and they’d both buy it. Now, Amit’s rule is that you should stick to the truth, or whatever version of it is most palatable. You only work with what you’ve got. Laurence’s life is available to the world already. Everybody can read the words from the eulogy he delivered at Sean’s funeral; that’s nothing but material now.
His email pings. It’s ClearVista. The whole thing is automated: no people sitting back and watching this, making it work. That was the tech that they were instigating when he finally left working for them. For whatever reason, that stuff always used to creep him out. The email is labeled Your Laurence Walker Results: there’s something disquietingly possessive about it. Laurence opens the email.
Thank you for your contract with ClearVista, the world’s foremost predictions and statistics company, it reads. Your package [LW008] has been completed and the contract fulfilled. Please find the initial results attached. Further emails with package enhancements will follow. Thank you for using ClearVista.
The numbers don’t lie.
Attached to the email is a glossily produced PDF file, little more than a glorified spreadsheet holding a series of almost incomprehensible posits and answers. There are questions asked at the top, about Laurence’s virtues and skills, things that are ambiguous but useful.
Is LAURENCE WALKER a good man: 96% chance of occurrence.
Does LAURENCE WALKER care about his country? 93% chance of occurrence.
Will LAURENCE WALKER remain faithful in his marriage? 93% chance of occurrence.
Is LAURENCE WALKER a good father? 82% chance of occurrence.
The list goes on and on. Amit scrolls down quickly, scanning the results for anything anomalous. It’s all good; all stronger than Homme’s. The percentages break Laurence down to predicted emotional responses – and the voting public is more likely to believe that than the words of a man standing on a stage. This will all help back up what they already know about him.
Can LAURENCE WALKER overcome grief? 07% chance of occurrence.
Will LAURENCE WALKER ever commit drug abuse? 28% chance of occurrence.
Will LAURENCE WALKER ever commit sexual abuse? 01% chance of occurrence.
They are all results that work. The Grief one might hurt them, but Amit has an answer for that: nobody ever recovers from the death of a child. It would be worse if it said that he would, he spins, because that would suggest a lack of heart, of basic human empathy. He hears the words from speeches in his head, taking the data and turning it into a portrait of a man who will do his best to honor the memory of his dead son, but who is driven and dedicated to running his country first and foremost. And, if they have to play dirty, there’s the sexual abuse question. Homme had a 3.4% percent chance of committing sexual abuse, which his people spun as a number so small as to be insignificant. Laurence scored better. Amit doesn’t ever want to have to use that – not in the way that some of the dirty political games in the past might have done – but he knows that some of the blogs will run with it themselves. That’s the thing: it paints Homme in a worse light just by virtue of its existence. Nothing wrong with that.
Is LAURENCE WALKER likely to suffer from an emotional or mental breakdown? 51% chance of occurrence.
That’s harder, Amit thinks. That’s a tough one. It’s on the wrong side of the fence, irritatingly; this will mean countermeasures, therapists and counselors on call to make sure that nothing goes wrong. It’s fixable, that’s the thing; an arbitrary number based on his situation. Who wouldn’t suffer that risk? So they’ll address that. A strong Vice President will be the key. Somebody that the country feels comfortable with if they were forced to step up, even though nobody will ever say that. Not Homme, no matter what happens.
He scrolls through the rest of the document, to the section headed POLITICS, and he runs through the likely outcomes of Laurence’s voting habits. Who he will be likely to want as his political advisors, who he will want in key governmental roles, where he will side on certain issues. And, at this quick glance, the report syncs with the discussions that they’ve already had. Hundreds of answers booted out from thousands of questions, using Laurence’s past voting habits, the past results of votes, all to predict a path forwards. The report says that Laurence is liable to be fair to the oil companies, which is good – and slightly unexpected; Amit copies the line and pastes it into a new document, to use over the next few meetings. This is all ammunition. He keeps going, scrolling through page after page of the document, reading everything, trying to take it all in, and then he sees the final two questions, in their own boxed-out section at the very end of the file, printed larger, the answers to the very reasons that they got the survey done in the first place.
He doesn’t parse them the first time. He reads them, over and over.
If LAURENCE WALKER runs for the role of DEMOCRATIC PARTY NOMINEE: 00% chance of success.
If LAURENCE WALKER runs for the role of PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES: 00% chance of success.
‘What the fuck?’ Amit says. The man next to him tuts at the language, and Amit mutters an apology. He shuts the file and reopens it, but the results are the same. He pulls his phone from his pocket and turns it on.
‘Hey,’ the man next to him says, ‘you can’t do that!’
‘It’s fine,’ Amit says.
‘We’re on a plane, asshole.’
Amit looks around and sees one of the cabin crew staring at them down the aisle, looking at what’s going on. He can’t have his phone confiscated, so he switches it off.
‘Happy now?’ he asks. The man rolls his eyes, smug at his win. Amit goes back to the laptop and opens the email. He hits reply and writes to them, as quickly as he can.
There’s a problem with the results issued. See final two questions. Please address IMMEDIATELY, or we will be forced to take legal action. He hits the screen’s keyboard so hard it stings the tips of his fingers.
‘What’s wrong?’ Laurence asks. Amit looks across at his boss who is sleepy-eyed, rubbing his face.
‘Nothing,’ Amit says. He thinks about telling him – no lies, no secrets, that’s how this works – but he knows that this will be corrected. When it is, this will be something to laugh about. He doesn’t know, right now, how Laurence will react to it. ‘Somebody is wrong on the Internet,’ Amit says. He can hear the shakiness in his own voice, the lie coming through. Laurence smiles.
‘There’s always somebody wrong on the Internet,’ he says. ‘I’m going to try and get another half hour of shut-eye.’
‘Do it.’ Amit shuts the laptop. ‘Me too.’ Both men shut their eyes, but Amit clutches his phone in his hands. As soon as they land, as soon as they can get to the hotel, he’ll be calling ClearVista; and he’ll be getting angry, speaking to somebody directly, sorting this out.
He shuts his eyes and he sees the final results, the numbers flashing behind his eyelids as if they’re afterimages of the sun.
Deanna drives down to the stretch of shops that calls itself the town center. She could walk this easily – their house is at the end of a long stretch that calls itself Main Street, but it has no actual competition for that title, with almost all of the town’s houses either sitting on it or just off it in neat little clusters – but she has a list of what needs doing, and one of the things involves getting the car checked out at the garage. And there’s the shopping from Henderson’s, for food and the new lock and simply walking around to clear her head. She likes living in this place, talking to the people, being a part of life here. They know Deanna, have done since she was a little girl. That sense of belonging is nice; the community feeling like a part of their lives. As they recovered – as they still recover – from Sean’s death, the support of the town has been incredible. They have all wanted Laurence to pick himself up and, in his parlance, brave the rain. They’re all going to vote for him, they say, whether they’re Republican or Democrat, saying that they’ll plant placards in their lawns and spread the word as much as they can. It’s that sort of town.
The garage is at the far end of the street, past everything else. Deanna pulls in, driving onto the forecourt, and Ann runs out. She’s a short woman, older than she looks, hair pulled back into a greasy net, and she perpetually leans, Deanna’s noticed. On everything, resting her hands. She leans on the hood of the Walkers’ SUV as Deanna gets out.
‘Deanna,’ she says, ‘good to see you.’ She adds a J to her pronunciation of the name that makes Deanna think of I Dream Of Jeannie; a classic sitcom vision of small-town America. ‘She playing up?’
‘Not quite,’ Deanna says. ‘There was a clunking coming from under the hood a few weeks back. Thought we should probably get it checked out.’
‘I’d say you should for sure. You want me to do it right now?’
‘Would you mind?’ Deanna asks. ‘I can go do the shopping then come back?’ Everything is phrased as a question, not wanting to assume or put anybody out. Ann smiles and nods, and takes the keys from Deanna.
‘Give me a half hour,’ she says. Deanna thanks her and walks down the road towards Henderson’s: past the diner, past the church, past the gun store (which does the most trade here of anything, given how close they are to one of the North-East’s major hunting spots), past the liquor store. The owners and customers all stop and nod at her as she passes, all smiling. She goes into Henderson’s and Trent and Martha, co-owners, married for fifty years, as they’ll tell anybody whether they ask or not, and the closest thing to figureheads that the town has, come out and kiss her in greeting and tell her how happy they are to see her. They mean it, as well.
‘Where’s that husband of yours at today?’ Trent asks.
‘Texas,’ Deanna says.
‘Oil money?’
‘Oil money.’
‘That’s politics now,’ Martha says.
‘That’s always been politics,’ Trent counters.
‘As long as you’re all safe and sound, that’s all that matters,’ Martha replies. She goes to the coffee machine in the corner – they had it installed a few years ago, to offer takeout when they started stocking varieties of different coffee beans as well – and makes Deanna a drink that she didn’t even ask for. It’s the way that they do things here; the way that they always have. They know what you want sometimes before you do, even.
‘Not long now until he’ll know, I suppose?’
‘No,’ Deanna says. ‘Not long. A couple more months.’
‘So maybe this’ll all calm down after that.’
‘Maybe. Probably not, the way that Laurence tells it.’
‘Oh my word, we’ll be so sad to see you leave,’ Martha says. ‘I mean, of course you’ll come back for your vacations.’
Deanna thinks about the lake house, how that was the intention of owning it all along. Now, she doesn’t know if she can even go there. It feels wrong to her; as if it’s forever tainted. It will always be associated with Sean, with what happened. No getting past that, and the Hendersons realize that as well, if not too late. Trent and Martha shoot each other looks, not knowing whether to address the faux pas or not. It hangs in the air until Deanna breaks the tension. ‘That’s a long way away,’ Deanna says, meaning in terms of votes and time both.
‘I reckon this is a foregone conclusion,’ Trent says. ‘You can’t call these things, but as much as you can, I’d say that it’s a done deal.’ He nods at the television in the corner, behind the counter. There’s Laurence and the other potential nominees, the newscaster talking about their current vote split, the predicted results, and that 3% head start. ‘Makes it easier when the television’s saying he’s the man, I reckon.’
‘Maybe,’ Deanna says.
‘You got a list?’ Martha asks. Deanna holds it up and Martha snatches it and forces it into Trent’s hand. ‘He’ll do it. Nothing better to do. You can stay here and keep me company.’
‘Oh, no,’ Deanna says, but she knows how this goes. It’s always the same.
Trent looks at the list. ‘What do you need the chain for?’ he asks.
‘We had another intruder. They broke the old lock.’
‘Again? Somebody’s pushing their luck, you ask me. You know who it was?’
‘Laurence thinks it’s the press.’
Trent nods. ‘I’ll hate to see you leave Staunton, Deanna, you know that; but it’ll be better for you. A house with a bit more security, keep you safe.’
‘Maybe,’ Deanna says. He nods and looks at the list, picks up a basket and goes off around the shop. There’s a pain in his movements that Deanna hasn’t noticed before, a slight favoring of one leg over the other.
‘I feel terrible making him do this for me,’ Deanna says to Martha.
‘Oh, don’t, Martha replies. ‘He needs to work it or it’ll fall off.’ She smiles. They watch him go down the aisles, and they talk about the kids, and they talk about the town, the same conversations that they always have, just moved on in time, like updates to the same old information. When every item has been collected, Trent scans them at the till. The calorie counts and nutrition values tick up on the screen, ClearVista predicting the weight gain and exercise needed to counter the richer, fattier foods; and then he brings up the total before adjusting it. They always do a discount for Deanna.
By the time she gets back to the car it’s been turned around, now facing the road. Ann comes out of the dark of the garage, holding something in her hand. It’s shiny and golden, a stub of a thing. Deanna thinks that it could be a bullet for a second but then she gets closer and it’s a screw. No: a bolt.
‘Found this inside her,’ Ann says. ‘Must’ve come loose, but I’m damned if I can find from where.’
‘From the engine?’
‘It’s not a car part, best I can tell. Maybe it got kicked up there one day from the road. Happens, you’d be surprised.’
‘Okay,’ Deanna says. ‘How much do I owe you?’
‘I changed your oil, so just for that. Give me ten and we’re even.’ She leans again on the hood.
‘You sure?’
‘Ayuh.’
Deanna pulls a twenty out of her purse and hands it over.
‘Consider the rest a tip.’
‘Ha! Okay. We’re giving tips, let me give one to you as well. You need to sell this soon, I reckon.’ She puts her hand on the roof of the car. ‘It’s a few years old now, and you’re losing money on it. All the new models, the tech’s much better. That stuff ages a car more’n you’d imagine. You’ll still get a good price for this right now. I ran it for you, if you want to have a look: software says this has got years left in it yet, but that the book value’s gonna plummet.’
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James Smythe
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Триллеры
Язык: на английском языке
Стоимость: 152.25 ₽
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: How far would you go to save your family from an invisible threat? A terrifyingly original thriller from the author of The Machine.ClearVista is used by everyone and can predict everything.It’s a daily lifesaver, predicting weather to traffic to who you should befriend.Laurence Walker wants to be the next President of the United States. ClearVista will predict his chances.It will predict whether he′s the right man for the job.It will predict that his son can only survive for 102 seconds underwater.It will predict that Laurence′s life is about to collapse in the most unimaginable way.