Ben Winters - Countdown City

“No kidding?” says Jordan thoughtfully. “See? That’s interesting. And… and…” He looks me up and down, his mouth slightly open, eyes squinting, like I’m a manticore or a griffin, some exotic species. “And why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I’ve had enough of this. I’m ready to go. “Because I told her that I would.”

“Well, well.”

He gives me the rest of the information I need: R&R stands for Respect and Restraint, and they are meeting in Kingfisher room 110, a big lecture hall. They’re meeting “right this exact second,” as a matter of fact, so I better hurry up. I stand and Jordan takes Nico by the elbow and murmurs in her ear. “You’re staying with me, right? Because we have big fun things to discuss.”

“Henry?” Nico’s eyes are bright again. She reaches up and pats me on the cheek. “See you in a few?”

“Sure,” I say, swat her hand away.

I’m close—I’m this close. I start to go, and then I stop. “Nico? What’s in that duffel bag?”

“Candy,” she says, and laughs.

“Nico.”

“Dope.”

“Really?”

“Handguns. Human skulls. Maple syrup.”

She cracks up, they both do, and then they’re walking away arm in arm, the two of them slipping through the front flap of the grub tent and off into the crowded campus. Nico Palace, ladies and gentlemen. My sister.

Lining the approach to Kingfisher Hall are stately oaks, flanking the pathway, upright and orderly as a praetorian guard. They’re strung with banners, primary colors and simple bold fonts, each announcing an extinction or near extinction: the Justinian Plague, 541 A.D. Toba supereruption, 75,000 years ago. The Permian Extinction. The K-T Boundary Extinction… on and on, a parade of pandemics and catastrophes and species genocides festooning the approach.

In I go, into the building itself, into a spacious and sunlit atrium with a vaulted ceiling, then down a long hallway lined with bulletin boards, somehow untouched, still offering grants, scholarship money, internship opportunities for engineering students.

When I push open one of the big double doors to room 110, my immediate impression is that here we have another party, an auxiliary of the ongoing festivities on the main quad. It’s a big lecture hall, packed and noisy, citizens of the Free Republic relaxed and at ease in their varied costumes, from track suits to tie-dye to what appears to be an adult-sized set of My Little Pony feetie pajamas. People hollering or engaged in intense conversation or, in one case, stretched out over three seats, asleep. As I pick my way as inconspicuously as possible up the raked tiers of seating in search of an empty spot, I count at least three ice-packed coolers, full of small unlabeled glass bottles of beer.

It is only when I have found a seat, in one of the very last rows, that I can focus my attention on the front of the room—and the young man standing with his back to the crowd, naked to the waist with his hands tied behind him with a length of bungee cord. Across from him, seated at a folding table on the shallow stage, are two men and a woman, all of approximately student age, all wearing serious, intent expressions, huddled together and whispering.

I settle into my seat, cross my long legs with difficulty, and watch the stage. One of the three at the table, a man with glasses and a head of wild curly hair, looks up and clears his throat.

“Okay,” he says. “Can we get quiet?”

The man with hands tied shifts nervously on his feet.

I look around the room. I’ve seen plenty of trials—this is a trial. The curly-haired man asks for quiet again, and the crowd settles down, just a little bit.

She’s in here. Somewhere, in this crowd, is Julia Stone.

“So we’re down with the decision to proceed?” says the woman at the center of the little triumvirate on the stage. “Can we go ahead and just by voice vote reaffirm the provisional authority of R&R over maintaining safety and peace in our community. Everyone?”

She looks around the room. So do the other two judges, the one with the hair, and the third, the one farthest to the right, who has a small pudgy face and a turned-up nose and who looks to me no more than eighteen years old, if that. Most of the audience seems to have little interest in the proceedings. People keep talking, leaning forward in their seats to poke a friend or back to stretch. From where I’m sitting I watch a man rolling what will be, if completed, the largest marijuana cigarette I have ever seen. Two rows up from me a couple is vigorously making out, the female partner shifting as I watch into a full straddle atop her companion. The guy on my right, a sallow figure with hairy forearms, is absorbed in something he’s got in his lap.

“Hello?” says the young woman on the stage. She has sharp small features, black horn-rim glasses, and pigtails. Taped in front of her is an eight-by-eleven piece of paper reading CHAIR, a slap-dash designation of authority. “Are we okay to proceed?” The crowd, those paying attention, half maybe, make the under-arrest gesture I spotted earlier in the library, hands in the air with palms up. I take this to be some understood signal of assent, because the young woman nods, goes, “Great.”

The defendant cranes his neck around nervously, scanning the crowd. I whisper to my seatmate, “Who is he?”

“What?” he says, looking up blankly. It’s an iPhone he’s got in his lap, and even as we talk he runs his thumb over the blank dead screen, absently, over and over.

“The defendant?”

The guy scrunches his nose, and I realize too late the word defendant might be considered significantly rearview. “What did he do?”

“I don’t know, actually,” he says, peering down at the shirtless shivering man at the front of the room as if for the first time. “Something, I guess. The next agenda item after this is the nudity policy. Pretty sure that’s why it’s so packed today.”

“Oh,” I say, and the guy turns back to his iPhone.

“So, okay,” says the chair, addressing the defendant directly. “We should start by apologizing to you, as a member of our community. We understand there was some unnecessary violence involved in your, uh, your detention.”

The prisoner mutters something I can’t hear, and the chair nods. The other judges have notebook-paper signs, too. The curly-haired one’s sign says VICE, and the pudgy-faced boy’s says VICE TO THE VICE.

“If you couldn’t hear, everyone,” says the vice, “he said it’s cool.”

Scattered laughter from the crowd.

“Oh, great,” someone yells sarcastically, and everyone turns to see who it is: a great big fat dude in overalls and a painter’s cap. “It’s cool, everyone. He’s cool. Don’t worry.”

More laughter. More people seem to be paying attention now. Someone from a distant corner, by the door, shouts “Thank God!” The couple making out a few seats up pause in their exertions for a moment, glance in the general direction of the stage, and then get back to business. During all this back and forth, I’m trying to work out a plan, trying first of all to figure out how many people are in this room: maybe a hundred rows of seats, maybe fifty to seventy-five seats per row, maybe eighty percent occupied, maybe fifty-five percent female. I have no photograph of Julia Stone, no physical description of any kind: no race or ethnicity, no distinguishing characteristics, no distinctive mode of dress. All I know is that she is a female between twenty and twenty-four years of age, and I am seated in a room with between one hundred seventy-five and two hundred people matching that description.

“Okay, so,” the chair is saying. “Theft from the community of the Free Republic is among our most serious infractions. It’s a big fucking deal. There are a lot of things we might do to handle this sort of situation. But it’s obviously important that everyone gets a chance to give their input and have their feelings on the subject heard.”