She turned her face to the window, and Eduardo must have picked up some distress in her posture, because he seemed to be driving faster. The fields around them went to wheat and wheat, then corn on one side and wheat on the other, then corn and corn and corn. Lila found to her surprise that she was blinking back tears.
“Mile per mile, America’s most wanted,” Eduardo announced, repeating a slogan. He slammed on his brakes and Lila was thrown forward. “Almost missed the turn. Sorry.” They squealed to the right, onto a road that looked exactly like their first one.
And, a few miles later, he stole a look her way: “Were you from around here?”
“From Ohio, but not Grid Ohio. I was born in Lancaster.” A town that still existed.
Eduardo twisted his mouth in a considering way. “Southeast of Columbus?”
Lila was surprised he knew.
“Pretty down there. Hilly,” Eduardo said. He hesitated, then hazarded a confession: “I like hills.”
“Me too.” Lila thought of the mounds behind them. “But not your kind of hills.” She glanced at Eduardo to see if he realized she knew. Best place on earth. Everyone loves it. Like hell.
His eyes stayed on the road. New hillocks appeared to the north, far away. “It’s good here,” Eduardo said after a pause. “Wait until night.”
They rode for an hour, skirting distant villages, and far away Lila spotted a farmhouse, which as they got closer looked exactly the way it should—two stories, painted white wood, wrap-around front porch, side door with a concrete stoop. A vision from her childhood, the old Ohio back in the nineties and aughts. A free-standing garage stood in the back. The mailbox was spotted like a Jersey cow. All that was missing was the barn with peeling red paint.
“Home, home on the Grid,” Eduardo said, half-singing. He was from the hill country of Texas, he told her, and grew up speaking Spanish. He was one of the rare people accepted on the Grid as a volunteer. They pulled into the crushed stone driveway. “This is the guesthouse,” Eduardo said. He pointed at an upstairs window. “You’ll sleep there.”
White curtains tied open with sashes marked the room that was surely the kitchen. A gray striped cat sat on the stoop in front of the side door. He eyed them warily, then streaked off as Eduardo opened his truck door. This is spooky, Lila thought. This is worse than Disney Universe.
A woman was already coming out the side screen door as Eduardo and Lila approached. She was forty or forty-five, wiry, short haired, wearing a simple white shirt and khaki slacks and a bangle on her arm. She wasn’t unattractive, but her facial features and expressions seemed, like her body, pared down, as if she’d been constructed for efficiency. “Allyssa Banks,” she said, holding out her hand to Lila. “Welcome to the Grid.”
Allyssa and Eduardo chatted in the driveway for a few minutes—about weather and some new storage system for grain—and Eduardo got back in his truck and drove off. Lila realized it had been years since she’d heard the sound of pebbles under tires.
“Come on in,” Allyssa said.
The kitchen floor was linoleum patterned to look like bricks. The lighting fixture was a frosted square of glass tucked up at the corners like a hankie. The refrigerator was a large white rectangle that hummed. “Incredible,” Lila said. “Just like I remember.”
“Wait until you see one of the villages,” Allyssa said. “They’re real, too. Tomorrow we’ll go over to 88 for breakfast and a tour. I’ll orient you this evening. Your room’s upstairs.”
They passed through a small dining room, its table covered with a white plastic lace overlay on top of a green tablecloth. In the living room sat a long curved sofa, an old-fashioned glass-screened TV, a Stratolounger, and two plastic deck chairs. A lamp with shells pressed into its base stood on an oak coffee table. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, all with double beds, and one narrow bathroom. Electric fans were fitted in the front two windows.
“Your choice,” the woman said. “If you pick the room without the fan I’ll move it.”
Lila picked the room at the back, farthest from the road.
“My room’s off the kitchen,” Allyssa said. “You can clean up and I’ll meet you downstairs.”
“Best food in the world,” Allyssa said at dinner, setting Lila’s plate in front of her. People certainly are prideful here, Lila thought, but as she ate she thought Allyssa might be right. Soy loaf, mashed potatoes, fresh green beans with mushrooms, and lettuce and tomato with Thousand Island dressing. “We grow the green beans and potatoes at Plant City,” Allyssa said. Where’s Plant City? Lila wanted to ask, but something about Allyssa discouraged questions. She did request seconds on her food, thinking Allyssa could only take this as a compliment. She wondered how Allyssa stayed so thin. Knowing Lila was in water, Allyssa spent the dinner talking with clear knowledge about the Grid’s average rainfall, irrigation system, and drainage, sounding, Lila thought, like some educational tape.
“I’ve never seen so much corn,” Lila said at one point.
“That’s just around here,” Allyssa said. “Wheat and soy are the major Grid crops.”
“How long have you been here?” Lila asked during dessert, peaches on soy ice cream, a treat Allyssa didn’t partake of.
“Me? Personally? Almost fourteen years.”
“Since the beginning?” Lila said in surprise, and this question seemed to release a switch inside Allyssa, because suddenly she started to talk like a real person.
There were no other Grid visitors tonight—a relief, Allyssa said. The Consort people had been here three weeks ago and refused to share beds: they needed cots in all three bedrooms. Nothing was right for them. They wanted peas instead of cabbage, decaf coffee, air-conditioning. As if this was a hotel instead of someone’s home. “So you do all the cooking?” Lila asked. “Clean people’s rooms?” She was having a hard time figuring his woman out.
“I do everything,” Allyssa said, her low-pitched voice almost purring.
Lila felt a tug of wistfulness. Lila had said things like that, once. She asked, “If you’ve been here fourteen years, were you in on the planning stage?”
“Of the Grid?” Allyssa gave Lila a respectful look. People didn’t wonder about her, Lila realized. They took her as a simple hostess. “I was at an experimental farm in Australia called Lindisfarne.” Not only Allyssa’s voice, but her whole body was relaxing; she reached with her bangled arm to scratch the cat under the table. When Lila caught her breath, Allyssa looked up sharply. “You’ve heard of it?”
“Vaguely,” Lila said. “Didn’t they develop a good desalination system?” Allyssa nodded vigorously, and Lila had the sensation she had just avoided a landmine. She knew the desalination system had been renowned, but that wasn’t why Lila remembered the farm’s name. Something odd had happened at Lindisfarne, some scandal or crime, but Lila couldn’t quite remember what.
“The government people who were interested in maximal production came to us—it was during the Short Times—and asked us to help plan an agro area. It only took us six weeks to scout possible locations, and another six months to plan. We worked day and night, studying data from all over the U.S., picking the site, planning the crops. I came over here in ’32 with the study group. Basically, we thought it up, and then the government took care of the logistics.”
Bigger than the Hoover Dam, people said. A more ambitious project than the Yangtze flooding. As world-changing as the Panama Canal, as the A-bomb, as the Weather Station. And here Lila sat in the center of it with one of its founders, in a farmhouse designed to look innocuous. The enormity of it made Lila dizzy. Back in Dayton she was being marginalized; she might never sit