Mysterium

The military forces had occupied a Days Inn on the highway east of town. All the civilian automobiles had been bulldozed out of the parking lot and replaced with military machines—tanks, troop carriers, “Jeeps.” The flag of the Consolidated Republic flew from a newly installed wooden staff, snapping in the brisk October breeze, and Evelyn gazed at it while Feliks performed his own chore: delivering a dossier to one of the military commanders.

The flag was blue with white bars and a red star in the middle. It might have been any country’s flag, Evelyn thought; it was not the American flag but it was not threateningly strange. She had gradually grown accustomed to the idea that Two Rivers had somehow traveled by standing still, that it had arrived in a place where things were substantially foreign. As an idea it was incomprehensible; as a fact of life—one adjusted. Or at least one ought to.

She had adjusted to other changes. Evelyn had been married for three years to a man in Traverse City, a notary public named Patrick Cotter. She had believed that would last forever, too, and it hadn’t; her connection to Patrick had been as fragile as the connection between Two Rivers and the United States of America. And her engagement to Dex: that had foundered just as quickly when the lieutenant moved in. The lesson? There was no reliable glue to bind the parts of the world. Nothing was certain except change. The trick was to land on your feet.

Dex had not adjusted; that was his problem. He was still chewing some old bone of self-loathing. It had made him eccentric and stern.

Feliks drove her home. In contrast to the military, the Proctors were relatively few and had chosen a headquarters by the lakeshore. Most of them were bivouacked in the Blue View Motel; civilian employees of the Bureau de la Convenance had a wing to themselves. The highest-ranking Proctors, including the lieutenant and his pions, had lodged at Evelyn’s B B.

She still liked the way the house looked, three stories of Victorian gingerbread with a view of Lake Merced. She had paid for a great deal of restoration when she bought the building and it was still clean despite a summer of neglect. The white paint hadn’t faded from the siding, or the robin’s egg blue from the trim. She left Feliks to tend his car and hurried inside. It was almost time for lunch. She didn’t serve lunch; there was a kitchen at the Blue View with a gasoline-powered generator and provisions shipped in daily. Most noons, she had the house to herself. She opened a ration can, one of the military rations the lieutenant had brought her, contents nameless but not bad if you were hungry enough, and she heated a kettle of her new water over a Coleman stove on the back porch. Tea bags, her last two, went into the china pot. She added hot water and inhaled the earthy fragrance. Would there ever be more tea?

Yes, she thought, there would. Things would be normalized. She would adjust. There was always a reward for adjusting. Small pleasures. Tea.

She took a careful, precious sip and gazed across the water. Lake Merced was choppy in the autumn wind, empty under a blue sky … as empty as Evelyn wished she could be, utterly empty of all thought.

∞

The lieutenant came home at dusk.

She still thought of him as “the lieutenant,” though she knew his full name: Symeon Philip Demarch. Born in Columbia, a town on the Chesapeake River, to an English-speaking family with long-standing Bureau connections. Forty-five years old. Symeon, Evelyn thought. It sounded almost like Simon. Like the flag of the Republic, his name was strange but not completely foreign. She had adjusted to it.

He came to the kitchen and asked her to brew coffee. He gave her a bag of military-issue ground coffee, almost half a pound, Evelyn guessed, and whispered to her, “Save some for later.”

He finished business with two of his adjutants and sent them out of the room. The house was dark now and Evelyn began rummaging for lamp oil.

“Don’t,” the lieutenant said. (Symeon.) She put the bottle back on its high shelf and waited for him to explain.

He smiled and went to the dining room table, where there was a military radiotelephone in a scuffed black case. He took up the receiver, cranked the handle, and said a single word: “Now.”

“Symeon?” She was bewildered. “What—?”

And then a remarkable thing happened. The lights came on.

∞

Clifford Stockton was in his room when the electricity came back.

He had gone to bed early. He went to bed early most nights. What else was there to do? Under the blankets he was at least warm.

But now the ceiling light winked on—tentatively, at first, as if distant turbines were struggling with the load; then brightly, steadily. And Clifford winced at the sudden glare and wondered whether everything had changed again.