Sam Weller - Shadow Show

That was what the young protesters called what they were doing in Reagan Square: commemorating the compounds’ history, demanding the realization of dreams and unfulfilled promises that reached back to settlement. As back in the summer of Joseph’s own birth in July 2015, just as mass rage engulfed the city and the birth of a child convinced Joseph’s parents that they could no longer cotton to the way of things in their Detroit home, America had conceived of a solution to the peculiar problem to which its people clung in their struggle for exceptional identification. Recompense had through separation, by choice: reconciliation effected behind steel that was imported from China.

“Joseph Charles?”

The Federals were not foolish enough to remove the cities’ colored populations all alone: too much Old World history in such a policy. The initial calls for migration included all those with cumulative credit scores below 650, recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, the aged and infirm, dwellers with histories of eviction, foreclosure, or personal bankruptcy, alien immigrants, sex offenders, social workers, and evangelical preachers. Before the academic mavens and identity warriors could claim such stipulations as mere code for the Old World’s dark, disenfranchised hordes, the Federals invited willing citizens, too—those looking for a “reboot on living circumstance”—to join the compounds as volunteer “mentor settlers.”

“Mr. Charlie…”

Joseph angled the power hose high to blast the protest graffiti loose from tile siding. Chemically treated water sprayed his goggles and gloves as he yanked the hose free from the eighth rung of his strapped security ladder. The tile siding chipped slightly around the defacing—yet the spiraling blue symbols remained in splayed place. Joseph recalled how shiny the compound’s structures had seemed on the surface, not so long before. Back when he was a child certainly, but even later, when young Chevy was still a wide-smiling toddler with brown pupils glimmering wonder.

Joseph knew that he wouldn’t be spraying the dawdle of adolescent rage till half past eleven every other night if the administration still forced the feral youths of his son’s lot to read old America’s founding constitution. If they knew the compact the people had originally made with their history (with its drafters and amenders, its appendices and its funny 60 percent math), knew that the free mass had been bound to an agreement with their appointed rulers for their own good, then they could appreciate the audacious hope afforded by their lives in the compound. Appreciate compound life as superior to any clamoring alternatives. Yet once their madness was let loose without history’s insight, it was amok, emboldening juveniles to mime tales of theatrical rebellion in a walled-off square. Rattling cages for old freedoms and emptied democracy in a rebellion spent up by bankrupted history—especially given that such insanity was all that the people were brought there, all that they’d come there to conquer.

“You are Joseph Charles, father of the one whom they call Ché, no?” The woman’s face hovered before each of the flat screens high above Joseph’s work ladder. Taut gray skin pulled into creases between her eyes and the corners of her lips, then stretched along her throat where her neck and skull met. White-blond hair hung warrior short, chopped just beneath earlobes, behind insistent chlorine-pool eyes.

Governor Westgrove cleared her narrow throat and pursed lips, waiting for the center square’s cleaning man to pause spraying the commodities building and stand at something like attention upon his municipal ladder. Her voice trembled staccato, the angels and judges of her stern tribe forever beaming down from black mountain sky over Joseph and the square, in plasma hologram.

“Chevrolet,” Joseph said, correcting the five faces. “My son is Chevrolet Charles. After the car brand, from the Old World. Not Ché, no; we call him Chevy for short.”

“Have you seen the young man?” The sound of the woman’s voice was not as curt as her glare led him to expect. Joseph heard something like an apology in her tone, or so he convinced himself in the moment. If not an apology, then at least unexpected compassion.

“No, not at all,” Joseph answered quickly, hoping not to betray anything in the way of emotion himself. “Not he, not his mother.”

“But you do know where they are?”

Joseph straightened himself up on the ladder and looked directly into the third hologram to his right. “Detroit, I suppose,” he said, before blinking away her eyewitness gaze.

The lines along the right side of Westgrove’s face lifted upward. “This is important, Joseph, critical for all of us. We may need Chevy here.”

“He won’t come back. The boy earned his pass from the last administration. With his mother.”

“Just in case. Good to know where to find him, if he is needed.” Westgrove straightened the pearls at her exposed neck. “It is an important thing you can do for us, Joseph. I have children of my own, two girls—may I call you Joe?”

The street cleaner looked away from the middle hologram before answering. “It’s fine.”

“Joe, I know how difficult it is to raise them; all we can do is hope that they choose the proper paths in this life. Even when we have circumscribed—uhm, circled—contained—”

“I get you.”

“—their paths. We do what we can, as long as we can. And then, when they go too far, we try to rein them back in as best as possible. It ain’t pretty. Order and authority. That’s what the Old World lost before we left it, brother—the settlers faced similar circumstances back with the violence of the gangs destroying their cities.”

“No need to convince me.” Joseph latched the cleaning hose to his ladder and descended backward along the rungs, peeking over his shoulder at the damp sidewalk stone. Westgrove had pronounced violence as if it were a musical instrument, stringing dated and elegant melody through tightly wound lips. “I blame it on his mother. Always was an ingrate radical—got worse as the years went on. Thought the opposite would be. Don’t most calm down as the years pass? Well, hers went the other way. How could the boy not show effects?”

Westgrove’s right hand reached toward Joseph, as if she intended to take hold of his shaved dome and bring him to her comforting, translucent bosom. “It is difficult. But we march forward. Know that this path is superior to the other. The walls keep us safe.”

“Forty-foot steel walls all around.” Joseph heard the agitation in his words, even as he could not place its source. “Safe from what?”

Westgrove’s eyes wagged and her tongue clicked softly along ivory upper dentures. “Your son was a brilliant student, something like a wunderkind from what I hear. He earned his pass. But therein lies the problem: They go beyond the walls, and you can’t tell what notions infest their minds.”

“It was the mother,” Joseph insisted.

“Who knows beyond the walls?” the governor repeated. “He hasn’t gone too far just yet; he has time to reboot. We believe that he can be brought back home.”

“If you want him to come back here to the compound, told you, he won’t. Or are you asking that I lead you people to him? Which is it?”

“I was speaking of home in the figurative sense, Joe—I’m sorry. If you can point us to your son, I believe we can help him. We can rectify this.” Westgrove’s hologram stiffened and her arms disappeared from the projection. “You’ve heard all about this terrorist threatening to attack our compound. Plotting against our people: innocents, children, for some shrill, nonsense cause.”

“Chevy has nothing to do with that,” Joseph said, careful to balance his tone. “I don’t care what these ninnies chant in the square. All the boy did is put some words on a screen. Not his fault where anybody else took it. Blame the mother for that, too. Always posed herself as some kind of artist.”