Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

RESERVATION 2020 Bayo Ojikutu

Daily, Joseph descended the stairwell, then walked along the ground-floor path aside his housing unit. He’d slip coins into a red machine at corridor’s end to buy a can of Coca-Cola—and so he’d continue to believe that the old America was nearby. No matter the ninnies’ chants, nor what he did not see along the way to that symbol of vending democracy. No flags whipped in mountain wind, nor stone totem temples to founders and settlers, nor upright souls traipsing along paved gold—yet Coca-Cola remained the Chief Bottler of Empire, never to slough off into the abyss. Joseph tasted the nectar slowly, let bubbles sting along his lip and throat, and felt the bite at what remained of his kidneys, and he knew. That pang, according to the fathers who’d settled their compound, was the magic elixir of treasure snatched up from dirt, hands raking through the bounty, suicide left as the aftertaste of plunder, masked by syrup and sugar and coca dope. The soul that sipped, for spare silver coin—that soul swallowed all that was to be had from the living earth, God bless it.

Now when those options were taken, and the compound’s admin replaced Coke machines with a new set of off-brand selections for sale—or perhaps Royal Crown blue (did RC exist still? Perhaps in the Old World?)—while still demanding the same coin for the purchase, then he would listen to the rabble-rousing youths who blocked the square’s streets each rush hour. And he might accept then that all that was good in the life of liberty was kept from them.

“They caught Chevy yet?”

There was nothing to be had in pretending the question went unheard. “Not that I know.”

“Haven’t heard from him yourself neither?” Joseph looked at the peach-skinned bit of androgyny perched beneath his elbow as he lowered the Coke can. Hair whipped all about the youth’s shoulders; earrings poked both earlobes; another joined his nostrils together while dirty silver jutted from his upper bicuspid; eyeliner decorated the blink in doughy eyes. He carried a maroon-and-pink-checkered skateboard beneath his stubby left arm. Hadn’t the settlers come to their compound to eradicate, or at least escape, such living confusion among the young? Joseph brought the beverage back to his mouth.

“Truthfully,” the boyish teen purred. “You can trust me. I’m not with them.”

“Mmmh, ‘them.’ Surely.” Joseph stepped away as he mocked, although he recognized the teen as one of his son’s young clamoring followers from the neighboring downstairs units.

“For sure,” the boy begged. “I heard them chanting Chevy’s name today in the square, after school. On my way—”

“Yeah? You made it to school today dressed like that?”

“Of course, sir, I did.” He hopped and pumped a fist as if protesting in the center himself. “Chevy! Chevy! Viva Chevy! Viva la libertad! All afternoon, just like that.”

Carbonation bit Joseph’s innards as it passed along, and the soda shivered his empty gut. “In Foreigner, hey? That’s how they said it in the square? What does that mean, even?” He crinkled the Coke can’s rim, his taste finished.

The boy dropped his skateboard to the white stone path and scooted at Joseph’s side as they headed from the machine, west toward the center square. “Not sure,” he said. Lying, most likely, Joseph guessed. “Sounds like ‘life and liberty.’ For your son. Like he’s a hero—”

“But you’re not with them?” He did not intend for the boy to answer.

“I’m not with them who’s lying about Chevy, trying to mark us with criminal insult on the fortieth anniversary. Not them, sir. I’m with the people.”

“Demo,” Joseph said, repeating the strange word Chevy had used for the rabble-rousers of his class before leaving the compound’s walls.

“Yes, sir,” the boy agreed, two words blown in skateboard wind. “Demo crazy. That’s us.”

Joseph squinted to read the sideways words scribbled along the black cotton of the boy’s T-shirt, neck to hem, as he rolled along: IN THIS DARK PIT, ALONE, YOU ARE LOST. BUT HERE, I CAN SEE. TAKE MY HAND. FOLLOW ME.

The wording recalled lines from one of the rhymeless poems Joseph had found on Chevy’s computer after the boy left to live with his mother. Joseph wondered who was behind printing and selling T-shirts of the boy’s scribble. He could fathom neither the culprit nor the youth whose skateboard cut through an alley angling toward Reagan Square. He heard no more chanting from the core of the compound either—if it had ever been more than a figment of the skateboarder’s imagination. There was only an echo of the translations of freedom and love and life. He wondered whether the skateboarder repeated the words while scooting off, singing another protest chant. Had he ever even mentioned love? The father tossed his Coke can into a recycling bin at alley’s edge.

His street-cleaning team perched at curbside, behind their electric municipal truck and its twelve-foot trailer, hiding themselves and their equipment from the rush-hour pedestrians in the square.

“You’re doing late shift, Joe.” Ali wielded no more authority within the compound’s officialdom than the others, yet he spoke louder than the center-square din, in the tenor of something more than a question: between a suggestion and a rough bit of advice for the most senior crew member. He continued, “Tonight’s your turn, all yours.”

Joseph glanced toward his chest, and his hand idly brushed the red-and-blue municipal badge stitched high on his work suit. “It’s Tuesday. I was just out here Sunday night.”

“So what?” Ali barked.

Sensing his compromised position, Joseph gazed at the white stone beneath them as he responded. “There’s still four of us.”

Marta and Harold interrupted their fiddle with the cumbersome water sprays and concrete blasters leaned between the corner and their electric truck. They watched Joseph in the corners of opposing eyes. “Can’t hold any of us accountable for this,” said Harold.

“But you,” Marta blurted in Joseph’s direction, “that’s something else. Can blame you and yours all day, hey?”

Joseph swallowed the first response to his mind. His eyes trailed along the sidewalk. The others did not continue their argument—Marta and Harold pushed the oblong cleaning machines along a ramp and into the municipal truck’s trailer, and Ali peeked around the cabin, watching as the rush-hour pedestrians faded, solemnly replaced by battalions of university youths, toting signs scrawled with demands that dripped blood—calling for recognized “dreams” and “hopes” and “changes” and “acts,” lest they begin “tearing down these walls” in their left fists, while their rights tossed cigarette butts off into the cracks and corners of the compound’s main square.

“Yeah,” Ali said over his shoulder. “You’re cleaning this mess, Joe. It’s on you.”

“By myself? Not if we’re going by a fair rotation.”

“Fair?” Ali growled. “Who promised—”

“We agreed, when we started working Reagan.”

“That was back before… ,” Marta blurted again. Harold’s and Ali’s unblinking stares stopped her.

Joseph walked the ramp’s incline, dragging a machine cord at his front. When he reached the trailer, he looked out on the center’s western arc of buildings. Glimmering steel temples of outgoing capital & commerce, energy & oversight, responsible for looming over the dwelling’s entirety and employing some 80 percent of the compound’s quarter million residents in one way or another. A bank of digital-projector screens reached from the pinnacle of each skyscraper, featuring permed and tanned bobble-head voices humming updates as to the happenings in the Old World beyond compound walls. Joseph turned to the Rocky Mountain sky above, then to the square’s crawling matinee and its repeated script. The day, time, and temperature according to the International Mercantile Bank Tower ticker blinked first and last against his eyelids as Marta and Harold jumped down from the trailer, escaping the father of the one whom the IM ticker had called an “anarchist” just two days prior.

2-July—60, 5:13P, 68 degrees-

He looked down at his coworkers. “I was out here Sunday—gets so quiet after eleven—begs you to think about things. Used to be when we were kids, remember, we all still carried the Old World’s ways on our shoulders. Still used the words we know better than to speak. My father hated the man in the unit next to ours, only because he was a foreigner, and that guy, I think his name was Arturo—Pops called him el chico próximo—his family hated us because they blamed bitter blackness for all that had gone wrong back in the Old World, said we’d ruined it for those who appreciated life bottom-up.”

“That’s what we used to say about los negros, too,” Marta recalled, glancing shiftily at Ali and Joseph. “Bitter. Not me, mind you, my family said so. No slight intended.”

“Slight?” Ali bristled. “Slight at what? Why’re you looking at me for? I look like los negros to you? You blind or something?”

Ali raised a hand to his eyes, turned the limb palm to back in careful assessment. His coworkers took him in, too, from the flared beige jumpsuit bottoms tucked into rugged work boots to the nest of wiry black wool combed skyward atop his head.

“What do los negros supposed to look like?” redheaded Harold asked between clearing his throat. “I don’t remember.”

“Who remembers?” Joseph agreed. He rubbed callous hands together hungrily, then cupped the dome of his bald head as he recalled his point. “That’s what I was thinking about here the other night, too. You take away everything they said was true in the Old World: God and tongues and skin, and who you’re fucking. The only thing left to make sense of up and down is generations. Between us and our children.”

The protest sounded three blocks west of the electric truck, a murmur to the workers. “And our fathers, too. Maybe they knew nothing for no n words.” Harold looked toward the center square, or at Ali, as he spoke. “But they sure’d still call you ‘boy’ and get away with it.”

“What’re you talking about?” Ali spit and sneered, yet never glanced toward the trailer. “Did you say ‘age’ or ‘Aids’? Jeez… do you hear them out there? What kind of way to commemorate is this? What has it come to? You’re cleaning up for sure, Joe.”

“Who would’ve thunk it could’ve been your own child? Writing such vicious muck. Your son?” Marta spoke into her chest, and Joseph was the only one of the team to hear her. “Shame, you never imagine such a thing.”

“No shame to it. They know no better. The boy is nineteen, by God. Barely started university. Never had anything like a chance,” Joseph heard himself defending. Ali lifted the truck’s steel ramp from First Street. Marta looked up from herself as the metal jammed against narrow storage slits, and Joseph leapt down to street level. “Isn’t any such thing as ‘Post-Age,’ is there? Can’t even pretend it—what would it look like? Our years is the only difference we have.”

“What do they want?” Ali’s tantrum continued. “To go back out there? What do they know?”

The echo of bobble-head words streamed along the ticker between street cleaners and protesters: Compound Police Still Seek Terrorist in Plot to Detonate Explosives Along High-Speed Muni-Train Route as Reagan Square Disturbance Heightens.

The nearest flank of protesters read the ticker, too, and they cheered. Joseph heard some small portion of the crowd chant his son’s name with clear and vigorous tongues above the murmur, just as the skateboarding boy had claimed.

He climbed into the municipal truck’s passenger seat, wondering at the connection the screens drew between plot and disturbance. He saw Chevy behind his eyelids, and he asked the specter: If a bunch of learn-ed university students went about rejecting all else the compound has told them, why were the very same ninnies so willing to cheer its most ridiculous link about you?

Ali cleared his throat behind the electric truck’s steering wheel, and Joseph caught the fake street-cleaning supervisor staring past Marta and Harold, watching him in the cab’s side-view mirror. He nodded.

“All right,” he said, and pointed to his municipal badge. “I’ll clock in to clean Reagan tonight.”

“Alone?”

Joseph nodded his acceptance again. The electric municipal truck veered to U-turn away from the compound protest. He told himself that he would decide whether some difference existed between anarchy and terror once midnight quiet fell over Reagan Square.

Their family had been among the compound’s first settlers. Joseph was five when they’d come, and he remembered only dim blinks, a few clipped and fading blurbs from the Old World. The tales of substance he’d passed on to his only son regarding the place of his birth were those given him by his elders.

They’d spoken of the end of water back home—decrepit fronts, shores, lines, and beaches where most of them had lived. They described the Old World as no different from those new compounds, except for the girded walls towering from the compound’s limits. Borders obstructing the horde’s glimpse into the world before them; blocking old privileged lenses, too, from gazing into lives led by those freed behind steel.

Otherwise, the Fed had promised Joseph’s elders—and they’d passed word on to the children—that the developments were but redesigned inner cities. A series of “Just Compounds,” they’d called the dwellings, concentrated east to west along the U.S. mountain and river chains, walled-off replicas with the red lining and crumbled rust of the belted Mid-Atlantic Mecca scoured clean. Leaving the neon, blinking amenities of civilization at the ready access of the poorest qualified souls who agreed to migrate.

Not until Joseph approached his teenage years did the few wayward teachers begin telling him and his first-generation peers unfiltered tales of nighttime torture in the Old World’s facilities, incarcerated dark men screaming at blue eclipse, pain often wrought by their own possessed hands. How the mystery of eleven shackled and mutilated brown youths washed up on waterfront sands on one bloody night spurred protests first, and then the Riots of 2015. “Willful Fury,” the teachers had called the events. No one established responsibility for what appeared mass imprisonment and murder, but it did not much matter. The appearance of the brutalized corpses afforded teeming hordes ninety summer days to set fire to the last remains of those wards and woods dark souls had called their corners of the American cities. Their flames burned even blight to embers, smoldering with a bitter black smoke that would have consumed the old cities whole had the Great Society not foreseen those urban margins emblazoned fifty years earlier and girded their towers accordingly.

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.”

“We’re not looking to indict your son necessarily, Joe. We know what he’s capable of.” The pause between the governor’s words were clips of hurried breath. “We think we know what he was intending in his messages. Correction is all that we’re after. Correction and rectification.”

Joseph laughed and shrugged at once. “Before last week, I hadn’t heard that word terrorist since I was a boy. Since my father—”

“You will lead us to him, then?” Westgrove’s withered hand reached toward her projector’s power button. “Think of this administration as extended family, and connecting us to your son as our collective intervention.”

“Everything ends in -tion, -ive, or -ist to you. Words mean more when they’re longer? Is that a rule, Governor?” He chuckled at the pallid gray woman. “So, we’re family: I should call you Big Mother Governor?”

“ Sister, just sister, Joe, my brother. History is behind us. This is for the best.”

Westgrove’s faces disappeared from Reagan Square’s skyline, and the center returned to its soft silver nighttime haze. Joseph climbed the municipal safety ladder, stopping at the fifth of two dozen rungs, just high enough to take hold of the water hose, and he looked up at the blue graffiti marking the commodities building. From that height, the circles appeared drawn in letters that spoke through fresh cracks in the building edifice. Each spiral painted in turning phrases, repeating their vandalism on the skyscraper’s alley side—REVOLUTION TURNS, BACK TO THE BEGINNING, THE ONLY WAY, SANS CHANGE, VIVA CHEVY—flushing into empty tile before repeating from the first.