Mark Costello - Big If

Tevon ate the pizza, left a gummy crust. He said, “Do you love him?”

Gretchen said, “Who? The VP ?”

“You’re always hanging on him on the news. It’s like you two are dancing.”

“No, son, I don’t love him.”

“Is he like your friend then?”

“He’s a politician, Tev, same as all the rest. He’s less than a nothing. No, he’s not my friend.”

“Why do you go with him then — if he’s not your friend?”

“It’s not about friends, Tevon. They killed Dr. King, they killed Robert Kennedy. Leaders died and cities burned and everything went bad. I saw it happen, son. People tell you that it couldn’t happen now. Sure, look out the window — what do you see? Houses, lawns, SUVs, everybody’s rich. Well I’m not so sure. The country is a piece of supermarket meat. It looks pretty good, all tight and shiny in the cellophane, but if you break the package even just a little bit, the meat starts going bad inside. My agents are the cellophane. That’s why I go with him, that’s why I’m not around as much as other moms, whatever. We can’t let a handgun pick our leaders, son. I refuse to see you living in that world.”

This seemed fundamental to her, driving past the Jewish spaceship and later waiting at a stoplight.

Tevon said, “Would you die for him?”

“Tevon, please — where is all this coming from?”

“Well isn’t that what you’re supposed to do — someone shoots, you step in front?”

She thought, he’s old enough to put it all together now, the meaning of the clips and what I do. He’s scared that something bad will happen on the news and, as a precaution, he’s preparing a new parent for himself — a new home in California, a new Dome, in case he loses what he has.

Gretchen said, “No one’s gonna die.”

Tevon took this in. They drove awhile.

He said, “How do you know?”

Well, this was a question, wasn’t it? They pulled into the driveway. He was waiting for an answer and she knew it.

Gretchen did not believe in lying to a child except when absolutely necessary.

“Tev,” she said, a little hoarse. “I’ll tell you a secret, son. The secret is important and it’s just between us two. Don’t tell Grams, don’t tell the kids at school, don’t tell your little chat room pals, because it’s an absolute top secret government scientific invention, and it’s called, it’s called the two-three-one-two-three-six-P. You can’t see it on TV, this special P machine. You can’t see in real life, but it’s real — I swear to you, it’s real — and you don’t have to be afraid when I go away, because I feel it when I’m out there in the crowds, it’s like a shield of energy, and it’s all around me in the air.”

Vi had lived in Tower South since coming to Protection, but standing at the window of her studio that morning, she wondered for a moment if anybody lived here. Her plants lived here, three geraniums along a dusty windowsill. Her clothes lived here, her suits and blouses in a shallow closet, her woolens still in boxes stacked against the wall. Her books lived here, or some of them, a carton’s worth of fitness guides and sports biographies, but Vi herself was generally gone, and most of her possessions, the truly precious things — a box of family pictures, three unmatching chairs, a stand-up lamp with clawball feet — were taking up a corner of her brother’s basement in New Hampshire.

Vi was making coffee in the kitchenette. The studio was puny, dim, and noisy through the walls, though she didn’t really mind the noise. The life of Tower South was in the narrow halls, which were carpeted, generic, and bewilderingly long, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope at the faraway nirvana of the elevator bank. The complex, a multitower Habitrail on the Virginia side, was equally convenient to the Pentagon, the Metro, and Ronald Reagan Airport. Vi shared the floor with pilot-looking guys — Air Force? airline? — and their flight-attendant-looking wives. In a funny way it reminded her of the Coopers and the Buckerts on Santasket Road back home. Maybe this was why she didn’t hate the noise. She heard families going and arriving, the jangling of keys, the crackling of grocery bags, the vump of garbage sailing to perdition down the chute. She heard the children too, laughing, shouting, sugar-rushing, the parents saying Wait, wait, wait , the kids not understanding that the corridors of South were like a church, a place reserved for no unnecessary noise, not home — home is when we close the door — but not the playground either, where a kid was free to scream.

Vi listened to the coffeemaker huff and start its trickling. The phone rang. It was Bobbie Taylor-Niles, Vi’s roommate on the road.

Bobbie said, “I had a great idea. Let’s go malling, you and me.”

Malling was Bobbie’s word for a certain type of shopping, not the hasty dash to Wal-Mart for a pack of razors, nor the duty-driven trudge for weekly groceries. Malling had more style, more serious intent, like going to an art museum except it’s a mall. Vi didn’t feel like malling on that Sunday morning, her first day off since Iowa, but Bobbie was insistent, as Bobbie often was.

“I’ll pick you up,” she said. “Which tower is yours again?”

“The southern one,” said Vi.

“Is that the real, real ugly one right next to the Christian all-news cable network?”

It was.

“See you in an hour,” Bobbie said.

Vi finished dressing for a run and took the elevator to the lobby, riding with the girls she called the Fiends, somber Arab sisters, diplomatic brats. The Fiends stood together, veiled to their eyes, holding their twin monkey bikes by the handlebars. The Fiends lived in the penthouse, up there with the weather and the blinking aviation beacons. They started on forty, racing through the corridors, taking corners at full tilt, touching every doorknob, or seeing who could go the slowest without tipping, moving down to thirty-nine when forty got boring.

Vi smiled at the Fiends and they ignored her, swapping comments in fast Arabic. Their mouths were shrouded. Vi couldn’t see who was saying what. The conversation, disembodied, was sound and black expressive eyes. The elevator opened. Vi held the bucking doors. The sisters pedaled off into the lobby.

Vi stretched her hamstrings from the heel, pushing on the marble wall. She saw the Fiends circling the atrium, thumbing their bells, the doormen in pursuit. Vi kneeled to tie her cross-trainers, unbunching the tongue, looping double knots.

She set off at an easy pace from Tower South to Tower West to Tower Mezzanine. The lobbies and sublobbies and retail esplanades went on for 3.7 miles. The brochures in the rental office said so. Vi took this run whenever she was home, pounding over catwalks, weaving through the crush on weekday mornings, tenants, shoppers, office workers.

She ran through the tubes, past the drugstores, the dry cleaners, the Thai place and the MIA memorial, the BYOB bistro, the indoor junior college, the new luggage rental place for people sent on unexpected trips, the Cinema 1-2-3-4-5 and, around the corner, 6-7-8.

Vi had joined Protection out of New York stationfor a mix of cloudy reasons, most of which, in retrospect, seemed uninformed or misinformed or barely formed at all. In part, she had wanted to get out of New York, the grim routines of Crim, the days spent watching soaps and frisking prisoners. In part, she’d thought the travel and the challenge would drag her out of the numb and stupid grief she had felt since her father’s death. In part, she saw the move as a tribute to her father, the dutiful adjuster. Insurance and Protection — a metaphor so obvious it had felt like destiny. She put in for a transfer. The transfer was approved. She was sent to the Protection Campus for a training tour in weapons, tactics, doctrine, the whole theology known as the Dome. At Beltsville, the instructors taught it as a diagram, a picture on a page, circles within circles, zones of pure control, a dot inside the circles labeled P for protectee. The diagram had looked to Vi more like a target than a shield, though it was an awesome shield of poised defensive force. She spent three months in Beltsville, a full winter, sleeping in the dorms, eating in the dining hall, showing her ID at every door, reading old white papers in the lamplight on her bunk, the physics of a hit and how to throw it off, dense, technical and terrifying. Then she joined the VP’s team and went to work for Gretchen Williams and Gretchen’s deputy, a senior special agent named Lloyd Felker.