Sharp and Dangerous Virtues: A Novel

Always a Story

94 always a story There’s always a story, Chad liked to tell his students: that’s how the news media work. And a proper story has a beginning, middle, and end. There may be epilogues and prologues (there usually are); someone in the future may pop up with a reinterpretation; one story may segue into another. But there’s always a story. In essence the news media couldn’t be more conservative. Their thought is highly traditional, like human thought, and it hasn’t changed in the two hundred and fifty-plus years of Dayton’s history. In 1913 the story started with catastrophe. The Great Flood death toll was in the three hundreds, much smaller, thanks largely to the efforts of John Patterson and his company, than it could have been. Still, property damage was tremendous . On top of that the city was faced with a new enemy— anxiety. Shortly after the waters receded, a local businessman named Adam Schantz made the rounds with an “audacious” proposal: the private fundraising of a million dollars for flood prevention for Dayton. The campaign started immediately. John Patterson spearheaded the effort. A slogan—“Remember the Promise You Made in the Attic”—was introduced and the fundraising goal more than doubled. The story of Dayton’s 95 always a story 1913 flood ended in triumph with the construction of the five dry dams above the city. The epilogue was public praise and the city’s survival. That summer, 2047, the story was the Alliance and its threat to the Grid. The story started with the invasion of Cleveland , and it was in its expository phase now, with Nenonene and his cronies hanging on to Cleveland by their fingernails, talking up its orchestra, its art museum, arranging payments to its politicians. Why was Nenonene there, if an assault on the Grid wasn’t expected? And if the Grid went, what would happen to Dayton? It had its air force / army base (northeast), its factories (north and west), its nuclear power plant, a stable aquifer and flood protection. What invader wouldn’t want it? And if Dayton’s people kept leaving, at what point would an invader need only to show up? Could Dayton end up as farmland , too? Charles and Diana moved in together at the center. They positioned their bed—a mattress they carried in from the interns’ house—under the flying owl, next to the exhibit of stuffed turtles. They spent hours talking. Charles thought he really hadn’t lived compared to Diana, with her romances and failed marriage and fertility clinic job. Every incident she recounted emphasized to him his lack of worldly experience. What could he talk about with her? Mostly he asked questions. “Most clone-parent relationships are normal,” Diana said at one point, not wanting to discuss it more, but Charles had heard stories: mothers who, obsessed with their cloned daughters , tried to erase all the grievances of their own childhoods. “Some people think it’s not normal,” Charles said. “You can love your clone too much.” Diana rolled her head in Charles’s direction and smiled. Of course he would think of self-love: he was that sort of man. You could tell by looking at him his mother had adored him beyond reason. But Diana knew that self-love wasn’t the 96 s ha r p a n d d a n g e r ou s v i r t u e s problem, the problem was self-hate. She had a terrible memory of the clinic, the woman with blue eyes and a tangle of dark hair screaming, “Get rid of it! Just get rid of it!” and all the commotion and fear it had taken to do just that, with the pregnancy being so far along. But the specialist had done it, the fetus lying in pieces on the surgical tray, its disarticulated arm as big around as a hotdog, because, as the specialist said, this was the woman’s decision completely, being that the fetus was her clone. Like brushing your teeth, he said, or defecating : in so many of your daily acts your own cells are destroyed . The specialist was a pleasant man. He parted the sea of children at the yearly fertility picnic like a guardian angel, but there was the mad scientist in him, too. Let’s try this; no, let’s try that! What...