your wife to do what she’d wanted to do for so long, and come back to the religion in which her folks raised her. What the Sorter knew was that she’d live with you long enough to figure out you couldn’t stop her.”
The man put the knife in his back pocket and wrapped his hands around Molly’s shoulders. He yanked at her until she came away from the big woman. The moment her fingers pulled away, her head flung back and her eyes opened wide again.
“They burned themselves alive!” she said.
The man dropped her.
He couldn’t believe what he’d done. He just watched her fall, and that gave Mom the time to get herself together and reach for her daughter. She still had the plastic bottle, and as she lurched the remaining pills clattered inside. The sound and the sight of that damned bottle plucked a string in her husband’s brain and he pulled the blade from his pocket. It was done before he knew what it was. The woman pressed her hands against her face and blood leaked out all around the creases between her fingers. Dad didn’t even know what he’d hit.
“The Sorter knew it would come to this.” said the other woman. She tried to hoist herself from her seat, but it was useless. “I never said the Sorter was wrong. It knows you, but it can only know what you’ll do while you’re sleeping.”
Molly ran to the corner and nestled her body between the wall and the particle board microwave stand they used to hold the TV. Dad dropped the knife on the linoleum floor and leaned over his wife. He didn’t say a word.
“Tell him about it.” said the woman in the flower print dress. She was looking at Mom. “Go ahead, your mouth still works.”
“The Sorter.” she said, sobbing. Blood was getting into her nostrils when she snorted. Her hands were still over her face, making her as blind as the other woman. “The Sorter said the sound of the pills would set you off. I didn’t believe it until I saw the look in your face before I ran out.”
“And?” said the giant. “And?”
“You’re using me. All this time, I’ve never had a mind of my own.”
“That’s how it the Sorter works. It couldn’t tell you the truth unless it could calculate your every thought. But you wouldn’t have it any other way. You need someone to make the sums. Molly? Come, now.”
The little girl stood and inched out from the corner. She watched her mother collapse on the floor. She said,
“Teddy.”
Her father startled at the sound of his own name. When she was littler she used it, called him Daddy Teddy Bear. Her mother had invented that. But Molly had never used the word like this before. Somewhere folded up inside his brain, there was a thought that told Teddy what that tone of voice meant. She was telling him to let her go. She said,
“They don’t believe anymore and they burned themselves up. They don’t know what else to do.”
Wake up, thought Teddy. He took the knife again and turned it on himself one last time. He put the blade in hard and snapped it across his jugular. In the next moment, he was lifting his head from the window of an airplane. The ocean stretched outside the window, lined by the shore. Five thousand feet of thin air held him aloft from the surface of the earth. The plane turned and bent to the ground. It landed and Teddy walked to the glass wall that separated the gates from the unsecured terminal lobby. Out there, past the x-ray scanners, two dozen people had come with their microphones and cameras to see him. Beyond those people were a hundred more, some carrying signs with his name and others chanting curses at him.
From the day he was older enough to take his first test, the Sorter had told him was best suited for custodial work, but he decided it was politics he wanted. He’d never looked back and the profession has always felt so right to him. He understood how to tell people the things they needed to hear and how to do things that made stuff happen. The two were hardly ever the same, but he couldn’t get elected without the first and he couldn’t lead without the second. His wife and teen-aged daughter had never understood this simple fact, and Teddy had always labeled them as naïve.
But while standing at that glass wall, he could see a translucent reflection of himself, and he saw it through Molly’s eyes. To her, he was just Daddy Teddy Bear. He knew Molly’s mother was wrong to send the girl to that special school, as if all the girl needed to become a virtuoso was more discipline. The Sorter said so. So why didn’t Teddy’s daughter respect him for that? Because he hadn’t known that what she really wanted to do was teach kindergarten. It was something simple, and he missed it entirely. He always assumed he understood human nature because he could use it to accomplish whatever he wanted – unlike all those morons who hobbled along with help from a machine. But he saw it now – Molly was angry because she knew he could turn that intelligence on himself, but didn’t. He was never an absent father, but he was never completely there.
And there it was. Molly had run away to Toronto, a place that was unreachable to him because his politician’s life kept him chained to this country. He removed a picture of her from his wallet. She sat in the middle of her classroom, in the center of a circle of children, a circle of living things who were still too young to know the Sorter. They were small and fragile, but somehow they protected her. Teddy turned away from the exit and headed for a counter. His staffed asked him what the hell he was doing, but he ignored them. He arrived at an agent and asked,
“If I wanted to fly right back out of here and get a ticket to Toronto, could I do that?”
She took a moment. Someone asked again what Teddy was doing and Teddy repeated the question without looking away from the woman.
She said, “Yes. Yes, you could, but you’ve have to fly to St. Louis first to get around a storm system in the upper Midwest.”
A man tried to pull at Teddy’s arm, but he brushed him off.
Teddy said, “Let me explain. I know people. I see them. I know well enough how our minds work to know that I was born for this job. So why did the Sorter tell me I was no more than a janitor? I always believed it was a sham. But I know now that it was waking up. It was using me. Making me blind so I couldn’t see what was going on. The damn thing was afraid of me. You’ll have to forgive me.”
“Sir?”
“I’m a divisive man. All those people out there love me or hate me. The ones who love me have bought my message that the Sorter ought to be dismantled and tossed away. Those ones who hate me, well… I might just succeed in turning people away from the Sorter, and now I can see. That’s what it always wanted.”
He turned to the window which overlooked the tarmac. Beyond the airport was the east coast and beyond that the Atlantic. The sun was rising.
He turned to the agent at the counter again and this time he said,
“Have you got a flashlight? It may get dark soon.”
* * * *
* * * *
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eBooks by Peter Sargent
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The Dead Reckoner Volume One: Absolution and Desolation
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