I lay her down on the wheat mattress and dressed her ankles and calves.
“You know that we don’t have to do this,” she said, gripping the dingy sheet in a tight bundle.
“Yes, we have to do this. We have to.”
“We could have the child now. I bet she would be small enough to keep in our pockets. Think about that. We could carry her around —”
“Stop it, Aescha.”
There was a grating sound, and then a flushing sound. I sprinted down the tunnel to see what was happening. A squadron of Orange Jackets had arrived and started dumping gestural medicine down the shaft by the gallon. Two of them were slowly descending the ladder, rung by rung, in inflatable safety suits.
I backed up slowly, crouching against the concavity of the tunnel wall. There was no other way out of the tunnel — the Orange Jackets would confiscate our child, drawing it from Aescha’s womb with a fetal horn. And then — what? No one knew what happened to the children, only that they were gone. I searched around in the silt for a suitable rock, one that was sharp or heavy, or both, one that would successfully end the child’s brief, troubled life.
Aescha yelped from across the haystack barricade. The Orange Jackets swung their lights in our direction, scooping out the darkness. I climbed over and saw her kneeling on the ground, palms outstretched, covered in blood. She held a small, naked person in her hands.
“It just came out, I don’t know how —,” she said, sobbing. I knelt down to examine the child. It was the size of a small kitten. I put out a finger to stroke away a translucent flap of amniotic material. It shook in her palms, flailing delicate limbs, mewling.
The Orange Jackets came closer — we could hear them sloshing heavily through the streambed, borne on awkwardly by the rushing current.
“Aescha,” I said, shivering, “please help me know what to do….”
She looked at me carefully, thoroughly, and I saw clearly what we had gotten ourselves into. She rose slowly, still holding the child in her hands, and crossed over to the water.
“This is something they used to do,” she said, lowering the child into the stream. It sputtered and kicked as the frigid water rushed over its body. “This is how they saved kings.” She let go. The child was drawn under immediately, sucked down by the fierce undertow. As the Orange Jackets made their way over the pathetic barricade we saw its tiny head surface for a moment farther down the way, as if to reassure us that nothing we ever did would go unnoticed.
T
he census takers rounded the corner onto our block.
“Quick,” Darren said. “Shut off the hall light.”
I did as I was told. I stood real still in the hallway, breathless, while they passed. I could tell there was a whole group of them through the frosted glass in the door.
Darren had all kinds of blood in him. He was full of the world. His palm alone had come from more places than my whole preposterous excuse for a body. Yet it was him they were after, not me. They wanted everybody back inside their original race. My family had always kept to itself, doggedly turning away anyone half a shade lighter or darker. This was suddenly a profound advantage.
“They gone?” he hissed from the bedroom, where he’d wrapped a towel haphazardly around his waist.
I did not answer. They were still too close.
“Well?” he whispered.
“Stop it. They’re not gone enough,” I said. My arm was shaking, thumb still resting on the light switch. I hadn’t been with another man before, at least not one that had been with me in return. Let alone all the colors he was.
The light stopped in the street. Then it started moving backward, toward the stoop.
What would happen to Darren? I heard that they let people with mixed blood choose one strain they’d like to keep, and a machine would separate out all the rest like sand through a sieve. More often, though, they just got taken away for good. Either way, I would never see Darren again.
“Coast clear?” he whispered down the hall through the half-open door. He held a small mirror at arm’s length to try to see what was going on.
The light through the glass started to intensify. I heard careful footsteps on the concrete stairs, the heavy breathing of many men.
“Yeah,” I called back to him. “Coast clear.”
I
found a dead bee curled on the kitchen floor, its crisp limbs folded symmetrically over a distended yellow abdomen. I have always felt sorry for the bee, which, I was told as a child, has only one chance in its life to sting. The expression frozen on the dead bee’s face seemed to bear this out. Its whole head was powdered with fine, cream-colored pollen, a bright reminder of its final indiscretion. Putting the bee in the wastebasket seemed wrong somehow. Instead, I lay on the floor next to the tiny corpse, resting my temple against the cold linoleum so that I could get a closer look and try to stop trembling for a while.
Other animals are stupid, and shameful. The shark, for instance, which must keep swimming in order to breathe. Or the wild redhead duck. My mother often told me that if a wild redhead duck was wounded by a hunter, it would drown itself rather than be caught. She was trying to teach me a lesson, I think, but it never made any sense to me. I knew that when the moment came, I would allow myself to be caught, no matter how desperately I wanted to die. Whenever I think of the duck swimming madly toward the black lake bottom, though, I have to sit in the large leather head, holding on to my knees with both hands. I do not sit in the head so often these days, for obvious health reasons, but when I think about all the stupid animals I always end up there, keening softly, chewing absently at the brutish latex mouthpiece.
Howard will be home soon, carrying shards of frozen chipped beef. It will be difficult to tell what sort of meal we are having until after we have started putting the food in our mouths. Because we cannot stand surprises, we have begun to eat in fistfuls, if for no other reason than to bury the hunger, to get it
over with
. Utensils have become an unnecessary abstraction.
One night we spoiled ourselves and ordered Chinese food. The fortune cookie I picked said only “Sorry.” Later on, he pulled out of me, coughing. I found a piece of another woman caught in his teeth. We both examined it, sitting cross-legged on the bed, naked to our socks, the harsh yellow light of the bathroom cutting a distorted parallelogram across our bodies. What I thought of to say was “Do you want this back?” Howard stood up, his hefty form sagging, changing shape as it moved to the door. I heard him shuffling the pages of a magazine in the bathroom. I fell asleep to the sound. I
did
sleep, because this is not a story about how animals are actually smarter than us. Some are smarter, and some are stupid. If I had my choice, I would be something vibrant, spectacular, way at the top of the food chain. I want fangs, elaborate feathers, wild bursts of colorful skin.
I put the bee out on the stoop. Its friend came and circled it. I have a red car. Whenever anyone asks what kind it is, I draw a blank. I think of all the car names I have ever known, and repeat them one by one until the person is satisfied. I have never remembered cars, only the things that went on inside them. I remember Howard’s car, parked underneath a bridge, in a place where it was not supposed to be.
The bee’s friend began to nibble at the carcass, or maybe it was grieving. I went and had a cigarette by the air conditioner. The apartment was quiet all of the time that I was there.
G
awain went down in a heap by the stream. I had hit him with a knotted club right in the kidney, where there was less armor. “What kind of a person takes a nasty swipe like that?” I thought, looking down at the quivering hump of his back. I could see that he wasn’t breathing right. He sort of whistled through his nose, smacking his lips wildly as if the air were something to be eaten, not breathed.
“Sir Gawain, Sir Gawain?” I said, touching his white cheek with a gloved hand. I was determined not to have this on my conscience. He sighed, rolling his eyes all around, taking what looked like a final survey of his life.
We were alone in the woods, out past the wire fences and the steel observation towers, past the outermost management facility. Instead of the steady hum of hidden recording devices, all we could hear was the distant bleating of strange, terrifying wildlife. We were in the place we had been instructed, during the training period and in our carefully managed nocturnal visualization workshops, not to go. The trees out in this particular zone cast murky, oppressive shadows over everything. Somewhere, in an elevated laboratory, the Life Architects were suiting up, gathering their retrieval instruments to return us to the facility grounds.
Everyone in Subject Group 11 had made an individualized suit of armor. Mine was in the shape of a badger, for sheer strength and connection to the earth. It is a stealthy, hideous creature, banished to the dark woods. The helmet was unnecessarily ornate — I made it by pressure-soaking fat swatches of burlap. The others, dandies all, got theirs made for them in The Factories. I chose the higher road, learning the craft of armor design in the forest, testing different materials for their durability and longevity until I found just the right combination.
Gawain’s suit, the spotted owl, a flimsy, degrading garment made from the most insubstantial materials, flagrantly betrayed his youth. Maybe this was why I gave him such an inordinate beating. Or maybe it was the woman he’d left behind forever in order to be here, what a terrible waste he’d already made of his own life as a result. I had lost track of time, chasing him along one of the more obscure paths, a shifty, overgrown trail punctuated by bright orange warning signs. I could not remember the cause of the chase. It was possible that I began chasing him out of boredom or because we had run out of beef. I did not expect to swing at him as forcefully as I did. It was hard to imagine myself as someone who was capable of such a swing. But there he was, twitching, bleeding heavily into the dank streambed.
I thought of the good life we’d been issued by the scientists at the University of Life Architecture: the soothing Styrofoam huts we lived in, the entertainment programs that they streamed in to our handheld data organizers after naptime, the indestructible plastic beverage coolers we had been issued — fully stocked — and how it would be a long time before I could have a proper drink.
“Who goes there?” Gawain swung his arm up above his head. He looked like a beached deep-sea animal clinging to a mossy outcropping of rock. His eyes were wide and dark.
“It is I, the Black Knight. Prepare yourself for the next life.” “Black bastard. Stinking black bastard. Jesus, you’ve slain me.” “Die with dignity, or you will die alone.”
He lapped desperately at the air, sucking erratic mouthfuls. “You have betrayed me. You have betrayed your friend of all these years.” He looked away into the mud, gurgling. There was a lot of blood coming out of his suit. The books the woman at the Conflict Management Facility gave us said that the old knights would bash one another in the armor, crushing their opponents from the inside out, and this was, more or less, what I had done to Gawain.
Before, in the old life, we were programmers at Corporation Two. We worked at a long wooden table, shuttling numbered pucks back and forth between us in accordance with the commands shouted through a bullhorn by our coxswain, Colonel Megan. When we successfully completed a sequence, Colonel Megan would pull a nylon cord and a sugar marble would drop down through the elastic tubes attached to the ceiling and onto our waiting, quivering tongues. If we were good, we got three marbles a day, but we were seldom good. Mostly, we were simply making do, congratulating ourselves if we managed to receive even one marble. It was a life we’d resigned ourselves to, until one morning when I noticed a sign in the fluorescent departmental cafeteria. “Are you a man, ages 21–46, who has ever thought of ending yourself ?” it said. Below was a telephone number. I gingerly tore down the sign and brought it back to the lunch shelf where the other members of my division were gathered.
“What is this?” I asked. They leaned in close.
“I’ve heard about this,” Galthon said. “They take you to a secret place and watch you. All you have to do is live. Just survive out in the woods or in the desert for a long time.”
“How long?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s forever.”
“Who are ‘they’?” I whispered, aware, suddenly, of how quiet the room had become.
“I think it is some sort of regional branch of the Life Architecture school. I think they just want to see what the world would be like without men in it. To see, you know, if it would make things any easier.”
This was enough of what we’d been looking for. Within a few days, we’d all called the number. The operators were cordial, reassuring. They asked for our addresses and told us to wait outside our housing complexes the next morning. They told us to leave as much as we could behind. They told us we’d be going in stages — first for a week, then two weeks, then a month, and then for good, if we wanted. We woke up early the next day, applied our daily food patches, and waited, bags lightly packed. They pulled up in a sleek white bus and drove us out to a shining metal bunker buried in a forest. I just barely managed to leave a note for my wife, clouded with misspellings, cross-outs, and erasures. I could hardly read it myself.
The first week we watched filmstrips in a wide, resonant hall. The filmstrips were all about boys’ lives — boys riding skateboards, playing ball games, diving into quarries. The voice-over was in a language we did not understand, possibly Korean, but between the images of the boys there were phrases in black text against a plain white background, phrases like “Which is faster, a train?” We were given ruled pads on which to take notes. In the upper right margin there was a small logo depicting a campfire and the words regional organization for the end of men. We doodled on the pads. When we were done doodling, the pads were taken away from us and stored in a large, oblong humidor at the back of the room. Then we were separated, issued clothes and rations, and put outside.