THEY REACHED Chicago under cover of darkness, and she soon lost track of their direction along the ribbons of asphalt. What was the shape of the city? A ring road? A cross of highway like a sniper’s view of the world? She had no idea, and asking Mary—the tired Vietnamese med student who had picked her up outside the Pelham train station, and with whom she’d shared a room in a motor lodge outside Youngstown, Ohio—seemed pointless, so she just waited. She decided to trust. It was a decision she’d made time and again since yesterday morning.
During those first hours, as they had gradually escaped the congestion of Westchester County and crossed through New Jersey headed west, Mary had been chatty. She was an intern at Montefiore in the Bronx, a person used to the sight of damaged humanity. “And blood,” Mary told her. “Not at first—when I first observed an operation I seriously considered changing my major to gender studies.” But her parents had forced her to stay on track, and by now she was over being resentful—she was proud of what she did.
“So why this?” Ingrid asked.
“I’m proud of what I do, not proud of how this country and the drug companies run my profession. And without good doctors, the Revolution will burn out before it’s gotten started.”
“Revolution?”
“Well, right now we’re just trying not to get arrested.”
“I see.”
“What about you?”
“Me?”
“Why this?” Mary asked.
Ingrid mulled over that, because though later she would be able to describe the cause and effect that had led her to this car, so soon after her escape the only answer she had was “Because this is the only thing that makes sense to me.”
“Foreclosure Lane,” Mary said now as they cruised down an unlit, pockmarked Chicago street lined with dilapidated, abandoned row houses half obscured by overgrown postage-stamp yards. The toddler-high grass and boards over the doors brought to mind postapocalyptic movies, Nature coming back to consume the works of Man. And it was hot, the city heat settling into her even with the windows down. Mary pulled up to one of the rougher-looking houses and killed the engine. Unlike the others, this door was unblocked, and there was dim light coming from deep inside, glinting off the jagged edges of a broken window.
“You can go in,” Mary said.
“You’re not coming?”
“Each of us has a role,” Mary told her. “Right now mine is to go from point A—here—to point B.”
“Where is point B?”
“Your role is to enter that house. What you do from there? It’s not up to Martin. Not up to me. Not up to anyone, just you. Remember that.”
Ingrid exhaled, only now in the silence hearing that music was coming from the house—short stabs of punk rock, a female voice shouting accusations.
Mary started the engine, and Ingrid got out. She wanted to say something else, to thank Mary for the ride, maybe, anything to keep their connection alive a little longer—but the car was already pulling away, heading to another stop where another naïve American would be waiting to vanish from his or her life.
Then she was alone.
She took a moment to breathe in the faint smell of exhaust and burned tires, then walked through the chain-link gate, through the high weeds, and up a few spongy steps to an aluminum screen door. She didn’t know if she should knock or just enter. Then she spotted a rusty doorbell. She pressed it and heard, through the faint thrashing of guitars and wild horns, a happy three-tone melody. After ten agonizing seconds, the door jerked open, and she was faced with a shirtless, finely muscled black man, shiny with sweat, eyes bloodshot.
“You Ingrid?” he asked, though it sounded like an accusation.
She nodded.
He looked out past her to the dark, empty street, then pushed open the squeaky screen door. “C’mon, then.”
She, too, glanced at the street, hesitant, before stepping inside. The light and music came from a back room. These two front rooms were barren, the old wallpaper scratched and marred by patches of water damage.
“I’m Reggie, by the way.” He was smiling and sticking out his hand, so she took it. His handshake was strong and quick. He led her to the back room, where, illuminated by a single floor lamp beside the kind of old boom box she hadn’t seen since the nineties, Martin Bishop set aside a laptop and rose from a foldout chair, smiling at her.
“Oh, Christ,” she said without thinking. “It’s good to see you.”
She was surprised but relieved by the way he embraced her. After her long journey the hug felt right. “You made it,” he said into her ear. Then they separated, and he offered her a chair. Was she hungry? They had pizza in the kitchen. He asked about her journey, and she praised Mary in the way you praise an employee to her boss.
“And … David?”
“Let’s not talk about him.”
She couldn’t tell if Martin approved or not. Then she caught herself—why would it matter either way? Not up to anyone, just you, as Mary had said.
“And you’re sure about this?” he asked. When she gave him a look, he raised his hands. “It’s just that you’re going to be living rough. At this point, all you’ve done is take a break from your life, and you can step right back into it. Once you stay, you’ve made a commitment. That’s how the Feds will see it. You stay, and you’re on their lists.”
“How about you tell me what the plan is?”
He bit his lip, hesitant.
“If you don’t think you can trust me, then okay. Then I’m leaving. Because by showing up, I’m trusting you, and I’m too old to go into an unrequited relationship.”
He smiled and rubbed his face. “There is no plan, not really. We had to get all our people out of harm’s way. It’s not like we wanted to disappear.”
She was surprised. “I thought that was part of the master plan.”
His smile grew, and he shook his head. “It’s what Ben wanted. He’s been pushing for us to move underground for months. He set up the whole communication structure, the safe houses, the triggers. But using that—actually performing our vanishing act—that was a defensive move. But Ben’s happy. He’s been vindicated.”
It was something to wrap her head around, and with this knowledge her own escape lost some of its luster. It wasn’t a sprint to something but a panicked flight. She said, “How many are there?”
“A few hundred.”
“Hundreds?” she asked. “Just vanished, like me?”
He nodded. “That missile launcher they found? It’s not ours. The Feds planted it in order to arrest me and Ben. We were lucky—a friend called to warn me. First arrest us, then everyone. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this country’s been turning into a police state for years.”
“That’s it?” she asked. “You get hundreds of people to drop out of their lives, but you’re not going to use them for anything?”
“We’ve got some ideas.”
“Such as blowing up buildings?”
“There are more poetic ways of making a point.”
What could he be thinking of? “Mass strikes?”
“Sure. Or maybe it’s as simple as disappearing and then, all at once, reappearing.”
She thought about that. Hundreds of people vanishing for weeks or months and then, one day, showing up again. “It would depend on what they said when they returned.”
“And what if they said nothing?”
“What?” she said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Maybe it is, but then again maybe it’s not.”
Reggie, eating cold pizza in the kitchen, said, “Martin?”
“You think on it,” he said, then left to join Reggie at the counter, where they huddled over a large map. Beside the map lay a revolver.
She turned to the windows that gave way to blackness, thinking of hundreds of vanished people reappearing, mute … and then what?
On a doorframe she saw pencil lines notated with dates that had marked the growth of a child up to about four feet. Standing there, it didn’t occur to her that maybe the family had moved to another, better neighborhood; she could only imagine that the family had been evicted. Children weren’t only suffering in Nigeria, she thought. They were suffering all over.