The Returned

* * *

Harold and Lucille sat watching the news and very silently fidgeting in their own way. Jacob was upstairs, sleeping, or not sleeping. Harold sat in his favorite comfortable chair and licked his lips and rubbed his mouth and thought of cigarettes. Sometimes he inhaled, held the breath, then pushed it out firmly through lips perfectly shaped to the circumference of a cigarette.

Lucille sat with her hands in the lap of her housecoat. The news was being irrational.

A silver-haired news anchor with perfect and handsome features sat in a dark suit and had only tragic and unfortunate things to say. “In France, there are reports of three dead,” he said, a little more unemotionally than Lucille would have liked. “That number is expected to rise as police are still unable to contain the pro-Returned protesters, who seem to have lost the thread of their own protest.”

“Sensationalism,” Harold spat.

“Lost the thread?” Lucille said. “Why would he say it such a way? He sounds like he’s trying to be English.”

“I suppose he thinks it sounds better,” Harold said.

“So because it’s in France he’s gotta say something so bad in such a way?”

Then the man with the silver hair disappeared from the television and there were men in uniforms with riot shields and batons taking wide, arcing swings at people beneath the cloudless, sun-filled sky. The crowd responded like water. The mass of people—hundreds of them—rippled back as the men in uniforms surged forward. When the soldiers felt they’d overextended themselves and pulled back, the crowd immediately filled the space left behind. Some of the people ran away, some were hit in the back of the head and fell heavily, like puppets. The people in the mob surged like pack animals, lashing out in groups and slamming against the policemen. Now and again a small flame would suddenly appear at the end of someone’s arm. It would reel back, then rise into the air and fall and then there would be a great, shaggy plume of fire.

The newscaster came back. “Frightening,” he said, his voice a mixture of excitement and gravitas.

“Just think of it!” Lucille said, shooing the television screen as if it were an ill-behaved house cat. “People should be ashamed of themselves, getting all riled up like that, forgetting about basic, common decency. And what makes it worse is that they’re French. I wouldn’t expect this kind of behavior from the French! They’re supposed to be more refined than that.”

“Your great-grandmother wasn’t French, Lucille,” Harold interjected, if only to distract himself from thinking about the television reports.

“Yes, she was! She was Creole.”

“Ain’t nobody in your family been able to prove that. I think y’all just want to be French because you’re so damned in love with them. Hell if I know why.”

The news turned away from Paris and settled comfortably on a broad, flat field in Montana. The field was studded with large, square buildings that looked like barns but were not barns. “Shifting focus closer to home...” the silver-haired man began. “An anti-Returned movement seems to have sprung up right here on American soil,” he said. Then there were people on television who looked like soldiers, but were not soldiers.

But they were definitely Americans.

“The French are a sensitive and civilized people,” Lucille said, half watching the television and half watching Harold. “And stop cussing. Jacob will hear you.”

“When did I cuss?”

“You said ‘damn.’”

Harold threw his hands up in mock frustration.

On the television there were pictures of the men in Montana—but there weren’t just men; there were women, too—running in their uniforms and jumping over things and crawling under things, all of them carrying military rifles and looking very stern and serious, though failing, painfully sometimes, to look like soldiers.

“And what do you suppose this is about?” Lucille asked.

“Nut jobs.”

Lucille huffed. “Now how do you know that? Neither of us heard a word anybody’s said about all this.”

“Because I know a nut job when I see one. I don’t need a newscaster to tell me otherwise.”

“Some people are calling them ‘nut jobs,’” the silver-haired man on television said.

Harold grunted.

“But officials are saying they aren’t to be taken lightly.”

Lucille grunted back.

On television, one of the makeshift soldiers squinted down the barrel of a rifle and fired at a paper cutout of a person. A small plume of dust rose up from the ground behind the cutout.

“Some kind of militant fanatics,” Harold said.

“How do you know that?”

“What else would they be? Look at ’em.” He pointed. “Look at the gut on that one. They’re just plain old people who’ve gone off the deep end. Maybe you should go quote them some scripture.”

Then the newscaster was there to say, “It’s happening like this all over.”

“Jacob!” Lucille called. She didn’t want to scare the boy, but she was suddenly very scared for him.

Jacob answered her from his bedroom in a low, soft voice.

“You okay, honey? Just checking on you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m okay.”

There was the light clatter of toys falling down, then the sound of Jacob’s laughter.

They called themselves the Montana True Living Movement. Self-made militants formerly preoccupied with overthrowing the U.S. government and preparing for the race wars that would eventually rock America’s melting pot to its core. But now there was a greater threat, the man from M.T.L.M. said. “There are those of us out here who aren’t afraid to do what needs to be done,” he declared.

The television program turned away from the men in Montana and back to the studio where the silver-haired man looked into the camera, then looked down at a sheet of paper, while across the bottom of the screen were the words Are the Returned a Threat?

He seemed to find the words he had been waiting for. “After Rochester, it’s a question we all have to ask ourselves.”

“If there’s one thing America will always lead the world in,” Harold said, “it’s assholes with guns.”

In spite of herself, Lucille laughed. It was a short-lived laughter, however, because the television had something very important to say and it was not the patient type. The newscaster’s eyes looked uneasy, as though his teleprompter had broken.

“We now go to the president of the United States,” he said suddenly.

“Here it is,” Harold said.

“Shush! You’re just a pessimist.”

“I’m a realist.”

“You’re a misanthrope!”

“You’re a Baptist!”

“You’re bald!”

They went back and forth this way until they caught what the president was saying. “...stay confined to their homes until further notice.” Then the bickering stopped.

“What was that?” Lucille asked.

Then the words were on the bottom of the television screen, just like most information in the modern world. President Orders Returned Confined to Their Homes.

“Dear Lord,” Lucille said, going pale.

* * *

Outside, far away on the highway, the trucks were coming. Lucille and Harold could not see them, but that did nothing to make them any less real. They carried change and irrevocability, consequence and permanency.

They rumbled like thunder over the asphalt, bringing all these things, rumbling toward Arcadia.

Gou Jun Pei

The soldiers helped him from the back of the van and led him silently into a tall, alabaster-colored building with deep, square windows and an overall impression of seriousness about it. He asked them where he was being taken, but they would not answer him, so he soon quit asking.

Inside the building, the soldiers left him in a small room with what looked like a hospital bed in the center. He paced around the room, still tired of sitting from the long ride to wherever he now was.

Then the doctors came in.

There were two of them, and they asked him to sit on the table and, when he was seated, they took turns poking and prodding him. They took his blood pressure and checked his eyes for whatever it was doctors check one’s eyes for. They tested reflexes and drew blood and on and on, all the while refusing to answer his questions when he asked, “Where am I? Who are you? Why do you want my blood? Where is my wife?”

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