Mysterium

right.

She even liked, sort of, the way she looked in the dress. The effect was Victorian, of course. Prim. But it did interesting things for her figure. To be so thoroughly covered and at the same time so completely advertised—it was odd, and oddly interesting. In Boston and New York, the lieutenant said, all the finer women dressed like this.

But Two Rivers wasn’t Boston or New York; it hadn’t been even in the old days. And that was the problem. She had already been accused of taking favors from the Proctors who were lodged in her house. Eleanor Camby, the undertaker’s wife, had stood behind her in a ration line and whispered the word quisling over and over again. Evelyn didn’t know the word but understood immediately what it meant. Collaborator. Traitor.

To stand in a similar line wearing green bombazine and lace collars—no, not possible.

She could have just worn her old clothes when she went into the street, but Evelyn sensed that this was precisely what the lieutenant did not want. The purpose of the dress, or one of its purposes, was to make her different, to make her unique.

So when she wanted her water ration she begged a ride from one of the junior officers (Evelyn thought of them all as “baby Proctors”; their ranks were too complex to remember), in this case a young man named Malthus Feliks. Feliks drove her downtown in one of those boxy care that looked like antique Jeeps.

Feliks wasn’t talkative, but he was courteous to her—and that was refreshing. She had learned to expect contempt or at best indifference from the junior officers. They were trained that way, she supposed; too, they must be intimidated by the strangeness of Two Rivers. The town had become a terrifyingly strange place no matter which end of the glass you peered through. Today Feliks drove along the leaf-choked streets at a less than bone-bruising clip, and even smiled once (an acrid Proctor’s smile, but genuine) when she commented on the particular blue of the sky. Last night’s rain had cleared the air. October skies, Evelyn thought, were the bluest of all.

It was the dress, she thought, that made Feliks more courteous. If not the dress itself, then what it represented. His commanding officer’s imprimatur. A mark of possession, if not rank.

No, she scolded herself. No, don’t think about it that way. Even if Feliks does.

She was dismayed to discover that the water truck had been moved. Today it was parked in the lot behind JFK High School. Of all places. She considered telling Feliks to turn around, it wasn’t worth the risk of being seen— not here. But Feliks might tell the lieutenant, which would leave the wrong impression. And what, fundamentally, was she ashamed of? Nothing. She had nothing to hide.

Water was dispensed to ration card holders between the hours of noon and six; the truck had only just arrived. Feliks exchanged words with the militiamen lounging in the cab of the tanker. The Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse wasn’t a branch of the armed forces; Feliks didn’t officially outrank these men, but Evelyn had noticed the way the military deferred to the religious police. The powers of the Bureau were vague, hence enormous, the lieutenant had told her. It was easy, he said, perhaps too easy, all things considered, for a Censeur or a senior Proctor to make trouble for an enlisted man. So, naturally, the soldiers were wary of them.

A surly militiaman unlocked the spigot at the back of the truck. Evelyn took her camping thermos from the car. Feliks wouldn’t fill it for her and she knew better than to ask. It was her water, her chore. She stooped to fit the thermos under the steel faucet and swept her dress out of the way with one hand. The water gushed out and spattered her shoes. It looked clean but smelled faintly of oil. It always did.

She filled the thermos to the very top and capped it.

As she walked to the car she risked a glance back at the school—specifically, at the second-floor room where Dex taught history to his dwindling classes.

Was there a shadow there?

Was he watching her?

Had he seen the dress?

She turned away and walked with her head high. She didn’t care whether he had seen her. She told herself so. There was no reason anymore to care what Dex Graham thought.

?

The military forces had occupied a Days Inn on the highway east of town. All the civilian automobiles had been bulldozed out of the parking lot and replaced with military machines—tanks, troop carriers, “Jeeps.” The flag of the Consolidated Republic flew from a newly installed wooden staff, snapping in the brisk October breeze, and Evelyn gazed at it while Feliks performed his own chore: delivering a dossier to one of the military commanders.

The flag was blue with white bars and a red star in the middle. It might have been any country’s flag, Evelyn thought; it was not the American flag but it was not threateningly strange. She had gradually grown accustomed to the idea that Two Rivers had somehow traveled by standing still, that it had arrived in a place where things were substantially foreign. As an idea it was incomprehensible; as a fact of life—one adjusted. Or at least one ought to.

She had adjusted to other changes. Evelyn had been married for three years to a man in Traverse City, a notary public named Patrick Cotter. She had believed that would last forever, too, and it hadn’t; her connection to Patrick had been as fragile as the connection between Two Rivers and the United States of America. And her engagement to Dex: that had foundered just as quickly when the lieutenant moved in. The lesson? There was no reliable glue to bind the parts of the world. Nothing was certain except change. The trick was to land on your feet.

Dex had not adjusted; that was his problem. He was still chewing some old bone of self-loathing. It had made him eccentric and stern.

Feliks drove her home. In contrast to the military, the Proctors were relatively few and had chosen a headquarters by the lakeshore. Most of them were bivouacked in the Blue View Motel; civilian employees of the Bureau de la Convenance had a wing to themselves. The highest-ranking Proctors, including the lieutenant and his pions, had lodged at Evelyn’s B B.

She still liked the way the house looked, three stories of Victorian gingerbread with a view of Lake Merced. She had paid for a great deal of restoration when she bought the building and it was still clean despite a summer of neglect. The white paint hadn’t faded from the siding, or the robin’s egg blue from the trim. She left Feliks to tend his car and hurried inside. It was almost time for lunch. She didn’t serve lunch; there was a kitchen at the Blue View with a gasoline-powered generator and provisions shipped in daily. Most noons, she had the house to herself. She opened a ration can, one of the military rations the lieutenant had brought her, contents nameless but not bad if you were hungry enough, and she heated a kettle of her new water over a Coleman stove on the back porch. Tea bags, her last two, went into the china pot. She added hot water and inhaled the earthy fragrance. Would there ever be more tea?

Yes, she thought, there would. Things would be normalized. She would adjust. There was always a reward for adjusting. Small pleasures. Tea.

She took a careful, precious sip and gazed across the water. Lake Merced was choppy in the autumn wind, empty under a blue sky … as empty as Evelyn wished she could be, utterly empty of all thought.

?

The lieutenant came home at dusk.

She still thought of him as “the lieutenant,” though she knew his full name: Symeon Philip Demarch. Born in Columbia, a town on the Chesapeake River, to an English-speaking family with long-standing Bureau connections. Forty-five years old. Symeon, Evelyn thought. It sounded almost like Simon. Like the flag of the Republic, his name was strange but not completely foreign. She had adjusted to it.

He came to the kitchen and asked her to brew coffee. He gave her a bag of military-issue ground coffee, almost half a pound, Evelyn guessed, and whispered to her, “Save some for later.”

He finished business with two of his adjutants and sent them out of the room. The house was dark now and