Connor has to smile. “Truer words were never spoken.” As far as he’s concerned, Proactive Citizenry is like a turd on the face of humanity. But whether or not it can be excised without killing the patient, only time will tell.
“So who’s in charge of Proactive Citizenry now?” Grace asks.
Connor shrugs. “Damned if I know.”
“Well, tell me when you find out. ’Cause that’s someone I’d love to play in Stratego.”
• • •
The dynamic between Connor and Lev has changed. Before, they were a team, single-minded in purpose, but now their relationship is strained. Any talk of moving on is met by Lev’s thinly veiled impatience, or a quick exit from the room.
“After all he’s been through, he deserves a little bit of peace,” Una tells him after one such exit. Connor likes Una. She reminds him of Risa—if not in appearance, then in the way she won’t take crap from anyone. Risa, however, would be urging Lev to get on with it rather than planning his vacation.
“We don’t deserve peace until we’ve earned it,” Connor tells her.
She smirks. “Did you read that on a war memorial somewhere?”
He glares at her, but says nothing because, actually, he did. The Heartland War Memorial. Sixth-grade field trip. He knows he’s going to need a better argument than granite-carved clichés if he’s going to stand toe-to-toe with Una.
“From what I understand,” says Una, “he saved your life, and you came pretty close to ending his when you hit him with that cop car. At the very least, you could cut him enough slack to recover from his wounds.”
“He threw himself in front of the car!” says Connor, beginning to lose his temper. “Do you honestly think I meant to hit him?”
“Race headlong and blind, and you’re bound to hit something. Tell me, was nearly killing your only friend the first obstacle in your journey, or were there more?”
Connor pounds the wall with Roland’s hand. He holds a clenched fist, and although he doesn’t release it, he forces the fist down to his side. “Every journey has obstacles.”
“If the universe is telling you to slow down, maybe you should listen instead of putting your head in the ground like an ostrich.”
He snaps his eyes to her, wondering if Lev told her about the ostrich—but nothing in her expression gives away whether she said it intentionally or if it’s only a coincidence. He can’t say anything about it, though, because if he did, she’d probably insist that there are no coincidences.
“He feels safe here,” insists Una. “Protected. He needs that.”
“If you’re his protector,” Connor asks, “where were you when he was turning himself into a bomb?”
Una looks away, and Connor realizes he’s gone too far. “I’m sorry,” he says. “But what we’re doing . . . it’s important.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” says Una, still stinging from his jab. “Your legend might be larger than life, but you’re no bigger than the rest of us.” Then she storms off so quickly, Connor can feel a breeze in her wake.
• • •
That night he lay in bed, his thoughts and associations spilling into one another, a product of his exhaustion. The small stone room feels more like a cell, in spite of how comfortable the bed is.
Perhaps 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?