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Risa and Lev’s pictures appear on the screen as well. Not Lev as he is now, but as he was in the old days. Clean-cut, innocent, and ignorant.
“Is this bad?” Grace asks, then answers her own question. “Yeah, this is bad.”
The news cuts to an interview with a pompous representative of the Juvenile Authority, holding a picture of Connor with a grungy-looking guy, who Lev assumes is Grace’s brother. The Juvey rep appears irritated that he must divulge this information, yet needy for the public’s help.
“Our analysts have determined that this picture is authentic and taken a little over two weeks ago. The young man in this picture, Argent Skinner, and his sister, Grace Skinner, are now missing, and we believe Lassiter either kidnapped them or killed them.”
“What!” It comes out of Connor like a quack.
“Anyone who has any information on this fugitive should contact the authorities immediately. Do not try to approach him as he is considered armed and dangerous.”
Lev turns his attention from the TV to Connor, who is quickly slipping into fury mode. To anyone who doesn’t know him, he would look pretty dangerous at this moment.
“Take it easy, Connor,” Lev says. “They want you to be angry. The angrier you are, the more mistakes you’ll make and the easier you’ll be to catch. The fact that they felt a need to go public with it means they have no clue where you’ve gone, which means you’re still safe.”
But right now, it seems Connor won’t hear anything but the turmoil in his own head. “Damn them! If they could pin the whole goddamn Heartland War on me, they would. Sure, I wasn’t even born then, but they’d find a way to blame me for it!” Connor punches the wall with his grafted arm and grimaces from the pain of it.
“A lie,” Elina says calmly, “is a powerful weapon that the Juvenile Authority certainly knows how to wield.”
Grace looks at each of them, a little bit frightened. “Why’s Argent missing? What happened to him?”
And then from behind them. “Who’s Argent? Is he really dead? Did Connor kill him?”
ps it’s just because he’s an outsider, but to Connor, the Arápache live a life of contradiction. Their homes are austere and yet punctuated by pointed opulence. A plush bed in an undecorated room. A simple wood-burning fire pit in the great room that’s not so simple because logs are fed and temperature maintained by an automatic system so that it never goes out. With one hand they rebuke creature comforts, but with the other they embrace it—as if they are in a never-ending battle between spiritualism and materialism. It must have been going on so long, they seem blind to their own ambivalence, as if it’s just become a part of their culture.
It makes Connor think of his own world and its own oxymoronic nature. A polite, genteel society that claims compassion and decency as its watch cry, and yet at the same time embraces unwinding. He could call it hypocrisy, but it’s more complex than that. It’s as if everyone’s made an unspoken pact to overlook it. It’s not that the emperor has no clothes. It’s that everyone’s placed him in their blind spot.
So what will it take to make everyone turn and look?
Connor knows he’s an idiot to think he can do anything to change the massive inertia of a world hurtling off its axis. Una’s right—he’s no bigger than anyone else. Smaller really—so small that the world doesn’t even know he exists anymore, so how can he hope to make a difference? He tried—and where did that get him? The hundreds of kids he’d tried to save at the Graveyard are now in harvest camps being unwound, and Risa, the one good thing in his life, has gone as far off the radar as him.
With the impossible weight of the world on their shoulders, how tempting it must be for Lev to imagine disappearing here. But not for Connor. It’s not in his nature to be one with nature. The sound of a crackling fire doesn’t calm him, only bores him. The serenity of a babbling brook is his version of water torture.
“You’re an excitable boy,” his father used to say when he was little. It was a parent’s euphemism for a kid out of control. A kid uncomfortable in his own skin. Eventually his parents weren’t comfortable keeping him in his skin either and signed the dread unwind order.
He wonders when they truly made the decision to unwind him. When did they stop loving him? Or was lack of love not the issue? Were they conned by the many advertisements that said things like “Unwinding—when you love them enough to let them go,” or “Corporeal division; the kindest thing you can do for a child with disunification disorder.”
That’s what they call it. “Disunification disorder,” a term probably coined by Proactive Citizenry to describe a teen who feels like they want to be anywhere else but where they are and in anyone else’s shoes. But who doesn’t feel like that now and then? Granted, some kids feel it more than others. Connor knows he did. But it’s a feeling you learn to live with, and eventually you harness it into ambition, into drive, and finally into achievement if you’re lucky. Who were his parents to deny him that chance?
Connor shifts positions in his bed and punches his swan-down pillow with his left fist, but switches, realizing it’s far more satisfying when he uses Roland’s hand for punching. Connor has built up his left arm so that it’s almost a match to his right, but when it comes to sheer physical expression, Roland’s arm is the one that makes his brain release endorphins when violently used.
He can’t imagine what it would be like to have an entire body wired to wish damage on everyone and everything around it. Sure, Connor had a little bit of that in him all along, but it only came in fits and starts. Roland, however, was a bashing junkie.
Sometimes, when he knows no one’s watching or listening, Connor will say things to his surgically grafted limb. He calls it “talking to the hand.”
“You’re a basket case, you know that?” he’ll say, when the hand won’t stop clenching. Occasionally he’ll give himself the finger and laugh. He knows the impetus for the gesture is his, but imagining that it’s Roland’s is both satisfying and troublesome at the same time, like an itch that gets worse with each scratch.
Once, at the Graveyard, Hayden had slipped Connor some medicinal chocolate to get him to mellow out a bit. Pharmacologically compounded, genetically engineered cannabis, Connor learned, packs a hallucinogenic wallop much more severe than smoking tranq. The shark on his arm spoke to him that night, and in Roland’s voice, no less. Mostly it spat out strings of cleverly conceived profanities—but it did say a few things of note.
“Make me whole again, so I can beat the crap out of you,” it said, and, “Bust a few noses; it’ll make you feel better,” and “Spank the monkey with your own damn hand.”
But the one that keeps coming back is “Make it mean something, Akron.”
What exactly did the shark mean by “it”? Did it mean Roland’s unwinding? Roland’s life? Connor’s life? The shark was maddeningly vague, as hallucinations often are. Connor never told anyone about it. He never even acknowledged to Hayden that the chocolate had any effect on him. After that, the shark, its jaw fixed in a predatory snarl, never spoke to Connor again, but its enigmatic request for meaning still echoes across the synapses between Roland’s motor neurons and his own.
Roland’s fury at his parents had been far more directed than Connor’s. A nasty triangle of pain there. Roland’s stepfather beat his mother, so Roland pummeled the man senseless for it—and then his mother chose the man who beat her over the son who tried to help her, sending Roland off to be unwound.
Make it mean something . . . .
