Ben Winters - Countdown City

“Here, wait,” I say. “Here’s a map.”

“I don’t need it,” she says. “I know where I’m going.”

“You sure?”

“Stop asking me that.”

It doesn’t matter; the map, when I look closer, has been imaginatively graffitied, the place names all crossed out and replaced: “Perdition.” “Deathtown.” “Dragons Here There Be.”

“We’re fine,” says Nico, taking a seemingly arbitrary left turn onto a narrower path with a light handrail. “Come on.”

We cross over a brown, bubbling creek and pass one more building, a dorm, with loud insistent music pouring out along with a series of modulated groans. There’s a man on the roof, naked, waving to passers-by as if from a parade float.

“Holy moly,” I say. “What are they doing in there?”

“Oh, you know,” says Nico, looking down, blushing, uncharacteristically. “Fucking.”

“Ah,” I say, “right.”

And then, thank God, we get to where we’re going.

In Dimond Library, on the way to the basement stairs, I see a pale boy hunched over the desk in a carrel, sipping from a Styrofoam cup, surrounded by books, reading. His face is gaunt and his hair a greasy mass. On the ground beside him is a clotted leaking pile of discarded teabags, and beside that a bucket that I realize with horror is full of urine. There’s a tall stack of books on one side of him and a taller stack on the other: out pile, in pile. I stand for a second watching this guy, frozen in place but alive with small action: muttering to himself as he reads, almost humming like an electric motor, his hands twitching at the edges of the pages until, with a sudden flash of motion, he turns the page, flings it over like he can’t consume the words fast enough.

“Come on,” says Nico, and we continue down the hall, passing four more of these carrels, each with its quiet intent occupant—earnestly, frantically reading.

In the basement, Nico slips in through a pair of green double doors marked BOOK REPAIR and I wait outside, until a moment later she emerges with a friend behind her. Jordan, presumably. In the few seconds before the door swings closed I glimpse a big workshop with the tables pushed to the sides, people sitting cross-legged on the floor in loose concentric rings. As the door opens, someone is saying “Agreed, with reservations…,” and the rest are raising their hands in the air—two hands up, palms out—and then the door closes all the way.

“So this is the brother, huh?” says Jordan, sticking his hand out. “I seriously don’t think I’ve ever met a real cop before.”

“Well,” I say, shaking his hand, and I’m going to say that I’m not a cop anymore, actually, but then he says, “What’s it like to shove a nightstick up someone’s ass?”

I let go of his hand.

“I’m totally serious,” he says. And Nico says, “Jordan, don’t be a moron.”

He looks at her, all innocence. “What?”

I just want to find my missing person. That’s all I want. Jordan and Nico lean against a wall in the hallway, and I stand across from them. He’s short, baby faced, fatuous, with a pair of Ray-Bans pushed back high on his head. Nico pulls out a cigarette and Jordan gives her an expectant expression, and she lights one for him, too, on the same match.

“How’s Ars Republica?” she asks.

“Boring. Stupid. Ridiculous. As usual.” Jordan looks over his shoulder at the BOOK REPAIR door. “Today it’s immigrant policy: take ’em or leave ’em, basically.” He talks fast, taking quick little puffs of the cigarette between choppy sentences. “Crowd mood is definitely take ’em, especially now with this quarantine jazz. How’d you get him in, by the way?”

“We told a story.”

“Nice.” Then, to me, “Like that outfit, by the way. You look like a funeral director.” He keeps chattering, hyper and self-important. “Not that many of ’em are making it up here. The CI’s I mean. Coasties must be doing a bang-up job of rounding ’em up and taking ’em camping. Oh, wait, not camping. Internment camp . My bad.”

He smirks, then leans his neck one way till it cracks, and then the other way. “Okay, what do we need?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Someone specific, jackass,” says Nico, and sticks out her tongue at him.

If it turns out that my sister is romantically involved with this man, I might actually have to murder him.

“A former student here,” I say. “Would have been a senior last year, when all of this started up. Whatever this is.”

“‘Whatever this is’?” Jordan’s face becomes serious. “I’ll tell you what this is, asshole, this is the apex of civilization. Okay? This is what democracy looks like, real democracy, you fucking Nazi cop asshole.”

Jordan stares at me and I grope for some sort of placating language, wishing more than anything in the world that I didn’t need help from this particular person—and then he drops the stone face and giggles like a hyena.

“I’m jerking your chain, man.” He points back over his shoulder at the committee meeting. “These dingleberries are in there for forty-five minutes arguing about toilet paper rationing, even though the world is about to explode. It’s fucking retarded.”

“I see,” I say, speaking slowly to control the anger in my voice. “If that’s how you feel, why are you here?”

“Resources. Recruitment. And because I happen to know that the world is not about to explode. Right Nico?”

“Damn right,” she says.

“The woman that I’m looking for is named Julia Stone.” I give him the campus address that I have from the file: Hunter Hall 415.

“She won’t be there,” he says. “Nobody’s stayed put.”

“I figured. I need to know where she is.”

“You got a picture?”

“I do not.”

He whistles, jogs his head back and forth, blows out a plume of smoke.

“Well, Nico’s brother the cop, it shan’t be easy. Everything is scrambled like an egg around here. I’ll do what I can.”

“Okay,” I say. I’m thinking of Brett slipping away, further and further into the future—thinking, too, of the four hours I’ve been given by my new friends at the entrance to Thompson Hall. That dog has suffered enough already. “How long?”

“How long ?” Jordan turns to Nico. “Is that how policemen say thank you?”

“God,” she says, laughing, shoving him lightly in the chest. “You’re such a prick.”

“Meet me in the grub tent in an hour and a half,” Jordan tells me. “If I don’t have something by then, I never will.”

Around the corner from Dimond Library is a cluster of residence halls, each shaped like a parenthesis and arranged around a shared courtyard, where, at present, there’s a dozen or so young people playing a game. A kid in some sort of Victorian derby hat shakes a Styrofoam cup to spill dice out onto the sidewalk with a loud clatter, and the other players cheer and then start racing around the courtyard. A chalk sign says ANTIPODAL VOLCANISM WORKING GROUP.

“Do you know what that means?” I ask Nico, and she shrugs, lights a cigarette, disinterested.

The players aren’t just running, they’re drawing, stopping to make marks on a massive game board that’s been drawn out on the pavement. The kid with the hat gathers up the dice, puts them back in the cup, and hands it to the next player, a homely girl in a flowing skirt and Dr. Who T-shirt. These kids remind me of certain people in high school I was never friends with but always liked, the ones who played D&D and worked backstage: scruffy, unstylish, ill-fitting clothes and glasses, deeply uncomfortable outside their small group. The girl tosses the dice, and this time everyone yells “ka-boom!” I take a step closer, and now I can see that it’s a map of the world they’ve drawn, laid out on the hot unshaded pavement of the courtyard, a big blown-up Mercator projection of the earth. Now they’re unspooling long loops of ribbon along the map, tracing trajectories somehow keyed to the numbers that came up on the roll of the dice. The ribbons go off in various directions, out from the impact site: one wave of destruction rolling over southern Europe; another through Tokyo and on across the Pacific. A dark-haired young man is squatting over cities, one after another, joyfully marking them with big red X’s.