Skinner (37 page)

THE BOY’S REAL
name is Raj, and his father, some kind of insane fucking maniac genius, is wearing a very clean, dark blue engineer’s smock with pens sticking from the pockets, over a white collared shirt and dark tie. His thin hair is combed and his tape-repaired glasses polished, and he stands in front of the reactor containment vessel submerged in the deep pool behind him, a gantry of pipes filling the shed, his voice raised to a near shout to be heard over the high-pitched roar of the turbine.

“With the control rods at half throw we are currently producing over thirty megawatts. We have most gradually increased our production since our transformer was installed some twenty-four hours ago and we connected to the Bombay Municipal Corporation grid in order to balance our load. Engineers for the BMC will notice, I am certain, that current consumption via our transformer shows no more than two megawatts. Yet all of Dharavi is alight. This is with great thanks to many years of effort myself and my team have invested in improving infrastructure in the newly independent City-State of Dharavi in preparation for this great day.”

He pauses, looks down at the notes in his hand, walks a few feet so that a bank of computer monitors helmed by men and women in smocks that match his own are now behind him, and the man shooting him on a compact Canon 5D camera gives a thumbs-up.

Raj’s father clears his throat, glances again at his script.

“Our excellent DeltaV software by Emerson is the most up-to-date and ensures that our system runs evenly and without risk. Our Hitachi generator, while surplus indeed, is in top condition and operating well under spec. At three-quarters throw we will produce its full sixty-six megawatt output. Well beyond the needs of the ICSD. Allowing us to make our excess energy available to the citizens of the BMC. Beyond the industrious and varied people that live here, raw energy is our greatest resource.”

He shifts again, putting the reactor in the background once more, and the potbellied fighter, wearing something that looks like a police uniform, khaki shirt, epaulets, peaked cap, joins him.

“We will build no walls or fences to define our territory. Our desire is to exist as a civic sister to glorious Bombay. Our friends from the eastern forests have joined us as a peacekeeping force. Unrest is not our friend. Dharavi has long thrived on diversity and openness. The ICSD continues those traditions. Émigrés of all races and religions are welcome to visit and apply for citizenship.”

He and the Naxalite revolutionary dressed like a cop shake hands, and the Naxalite smiles at the camera and steps out of frame.

Raj’s father looks at his script, then assumes a somber countenance.

“For those of you who are thinking that we are idealists and fools, I say you are half right in this. Yes, we are idealists, but no, we are not fools.”

He folds his script away.

“We will not allow our rights as citizens of the world, our very humanity, the dreams we have for our children, to be contracted. We will not stand by, impotent, while great powers absolve themselves of great responsibility. We will not wait in blind faith for eyes and ears to be turned our way when we are in greatest distress. Silence and invisibility are the enemies of survival. If we are not known, we can be allowed to die.”

He tips his head toward the reactor.

“So we have made a great noise.”

He steps slightly closer to the camera.

“With our load balanced across the BMC grid, there is no danger of overload on our generator and no risk that our reactor can go critical. If we are disconnected from the grid, our load will unbalance and there will be unfortunate consequences. Likewise, as long as water pours from the water mains we have breached and into our cooling tank, we can safely maintain core temperature.”

He points west.

“In our next video I will take you on a tour of our Number Two Shed and show you the cooling towers. We will also soon publish online the full specifications for our equipment and infrastructure so that the people of the world can be certain that we are operating a first-class power plant. Once we are certain of our political stability, we will invite observers to inspect our facilities and confirm their operational capacity and fitness.”

He stops talking. The cameraman rolls a finger in the air.

Raj’s father takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, puts the glasses back on.

“This will be hard. We are not fools. This will be very hard. We have taken on a great responsibility. We will not abuse it. Peace is a treasure, and treasure is hard to find, always. We will dig for it. Hidden wherever it is. We have children, you see. So we must find whatever there is.”

He smiles.

“Jewels of the future, yes? Our children. All of our children. It will be hard. But we’ll sort it out. Okay. Bye-bye.”

He smiles. The cameraman turns off the camera. Thumbs-up.

Raj’s father brushes a hand at him.

“Go post it now. Quick, quick. And you kids, Twitter it everywhere. All our Facebook pages. Email to everyone. Hard copies. Everything.”

The cameraman and the kids who had been working in the media center are already trotting out the door into the rain, an escort of three fighters with them.

Raj’s father rubs his face, fingers under the lenses of his glasses.

“We must be quick.”

He walks over to them now, his wife and his baby and his son, raising his arms and wrapping them around his family. Too loud in the shed to hear what they are saying. Jae knows she wouldn’t understand anyway. Now that he is done giving his message to the world, Raj’s father can speak in his own language. He is asking questions. His wife and Raj explaining. There had been no time when they first arrived here. The video was about to be shot. No need more urgent. If they’re going to have a chance here, it will only be possible if their true nuclear capacity is known, understood, and believed.

He’s looking at them now, Skinner and Jae. He steps away from his family.

“You are hurt.”

Jae nods.

He looks at the scratched face of his watch.

“We have a doctor. And a little time.”

He leads them, Skinner, Jae, his family, out of #1 Shed. Yet another of Terrence’s oddities, this one bent on changing the world.

“He found me on the Internet. This is natural today, I think. Where we find everything. Lost toys. Education. Songs we hear. Guns. We found our generator on the Internet. So why not me?”

The doctor is very young. Jae doesn’t ask where he got his schooling or how in-depth it may have been. His office is a cinderblock cube, interior painted white, and it is very clean. His instruments and supplies are stored in small, brightly colored plastic tubs. Jae lies on a table, handmade, wood, sanded and painted white, a clean sheet beneath her. Raj’s father, his name is Aasif, sits on very small chair, something for a child, Skinner stands at the curtained doorway. Raj and his mother and the baby are on the other side of the curtain in the doctor’s home with his wife and children and in-laws. A TV is playing in there, a Hindi station. It was a soap opera when they came in, but now it has been changed to news. They are waiting.

The doctor prods her legs with his finger.

“Okay?”

She can feel the pain deep inside her leg, but not on the skin. She doubts it’s going to get any better so she nods yes.

He also nods, picks up scalpel.

“Okay.”

He did his initial examination without painkillers, listening to the pulse in both femoral arteries, feeling the extent and tightness of the swelling in her thigh, asking her to extend her leg; but cleaning the entrance and exit wounds requires a series of lidocaine injections. The exit wound is ragged, but none of the tissue appears to be necrotic, so he doesn’t trim it. The entrance wound shows black flecks of gunpowder. Result of being shot at such close range. He’ll use the scalpel to scrape them away.

Aasif talks throughout. Using what little time he has, and helping to distract Jae.

“I was at school, you know. And Terrence was looking for someone educated. Someone from the slums, but educated. Very special education. I was interested mostly in chatting with engineers. Other places. Western. Classes at the university were quite good, but slow. I am the son, you see. And in my family, the only son. You know how this works?”

He is looking at the curtain next to Skinner, his own son beyond.

“Everything for the sons. This is our culture. Right, wrong. This is what it is. What he wants, the boy gets. Eats first, plays first. Birthdays, oh my. Everything. Rich family, poor family, everything for the son. Especially poor family. My father cleaned shit. To raise his son’s caste, he lowered his own. So his son could be educated and raise the family’s caste. This is what I understand irony to be.
I will clean shit for my son to be an engineer so I will no longer clean shit.
Also so that
I
do not have to clean shit. So I wanted to work harder at school. I am not unusual in this. You ask what men are afraid of here, they are afraid they cannot support their families. Afraid. Not
concerned, worried, stressed
out.
They live in fear of this. Because if they cannot, the next step is the slum. And if you are already in the slum, the next step is living on the street. And then the garbage dump. And then you are dying and your whole family is dying with you. I was not special wanting to work harder. Simply I was very good at it.”

The doctor is done scraping the wound. He cleans it again with a mild soap, rinses it with saline. Blood is still welling from inside, but very slowly. He makes a sound in his throat, the deep contentment of a well-fed cat. He likes how the wound looks, and starts unwrapping sterile gauze pads.

Aasif is touching the pens in his smock pocket.

“There was a small financial award I found out about from an online friend in Texas. Very obscure, an energy company in the US. This was not something I knew how to investigate. Who they were or what they did. An energy company searching for new markets. So they were asking engineers, electrical, civil, nuclear, practical people, students, what were the concerns of their developing nation areas. Slums especially. And what kinds of solutions would we see moving forward into the brave new twenty-first century. A contest sort of thing. My proposal was one that was selected. So much talk about suitcase nukes. I said,
Why not a suitcase reactor?
The technology from submarines, okay? One such reactor to power a slum like Dharavi for forty years and still extra power to use for other things. Modular, you know. When it has been used up, the fuel is removed in a module and a new fuel module put in. You can do this many times. So I got some money for my idea and thank you and this man from the company started to talk to me in chats and messaging.”

The doctor is done bandaging Jae’s wound. He looks at her bare legs and nods. The pants he scissored off of her are in a waste bin in the corner along with her socks and underwear. Her boots are bloody, but usable. A sheet is draped over her lap. He raises a finger,
wait
,
and slips out through the curtain.

Aasif looks at his watch, frowns.

“I thought there was a job for me with this company. But that was not so. This man, he wanted to talk about my home. Dharavi. The practical. If there was a reactor, how would it work? Not just design theory. Wires. Cooling water. Infrastructure for such a thing. And he asked me about the future and what I wanted. And then we were becoming friends.”

He winds his watch.

“And then again one day he wants to show me some things. In person. He is here, unexpected, at the university he finds me so that he can show some things to me. That is how I find out that my friend has created an idea that lets people think about letting everyone I have ever known die.
Contraction.
”

He taps the face of his watch.

“And then he asked me what I was going to do to stop this from happening. How I was going to stop the world from ignoring my home so that when they started saying,
Oh, things are so bad now it is too late for us to help you and we can only help ourselves,
so that when they started saying those things, we could say,
O
kay, we will help ourselves. We have power to help ourselves.
It was stupid, though. The money was impossible. The reactor did not exist.”

He looks up from his watch.

“But you know my father died run over by a truck full of shit on his way to clean shit. The job he took so that I could raise our caste. And I was the son. It was my job to make it better. Things are stupid, you know. I cannot tell you how stupid. I am stupid. So I became
Shiva
.
I reached out into the world and began to talk to the people Terrence introduced me to. And I started to rewire Dharavi. I brought my degree back to the slum. My mother was not happy. She was betrayed by the son she had sacrificed for. Her husband had cleaned shit and died in shit. And I came back here to make the wires better for everyone else, but she had to live in the same shitty hut she had always lived in and then I married a little dark girl from around the corner. So my mother died. And I rewired Dharavi. And I built a network of people to go with my network of wires. You have to know everyone. The ones living in the gangwar, the cops, the Sena, Congress, water goons, electricity goons, the old men in the panchayat assemblies, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, local bureaucrats from the BMC, and all the people in their homes when I came to change their wires and they thought I was there to steal their electricity. I did it because if I did not do it then I would be contracting, too. Looking only at how I could protect what was already mine.
It’s not there, the world. Do something else and be normal.
That bullshit. So I went outside my hut and wired as much of the world as I could. For everything else there was Terrence.”

The doctor comes back with a pair of deeply stained but recently laundered green cotton shorts. His own. He holds them open and helps Jae to slip them up her legs and past the bandaged wound. He is slender but they are still too big for her. He has a solution, a length of twine for a belt. She ties it around her waist.