Dystopian Novel
I wore socks that didn’t match. Sometimes my make-up or clothes were a little loud, but I always thought they were fun. I didn’t care too much what other people thought, I liked looking at my feet and seeing something that made me smile.
It hit me then. How much were those purple velvet shoes? $40? $50? Probably. Now that I have my own job, I translate $50 into hours of labor. That’s a whole days work for purple shoes. Purple shoes! That could easily be 1/6 of my rent money or a tank of gas. Or groceries for the better part of a week.
It struck me that $50 was what some people had to live on for a whole year.
I watch other people walk around with $300 purses and pay $6 for a tiny cup of coffee that’s gone in a few minutes. I suddenly want to throw up. Your purse is my half of the rent for a month.
I heard a conversation once. It was a foreign guy telling another foreign guy how much money he had, he was drunk and flashing his money around, pointing out his fancy SUV, the 4 inch solid gold cross on a 24 inch solid gold chain, the carat diamonds in his ear. “We’re foreigners. We do it differently. None of this 9-5 stuff. You know how it is man, you probably got a job on the side, too.”
My ears burn. I’d be lucky enough to rent a car like that for my wedding day so I have to use my van with the gash in the right front fender. And he’s driving around in it, wasted.
It all makes me so angry.
Not the angry that you’re probably thinking. Not that whole BS about foreigners come to my country and do better than me and I hate them for it. No, just the opposite, the foreigners are great for the local economies. Yeah they might shop at stores other foreigners own, but they shop in mine, too. With cash. Cash going right back into the local economy. Even different from that though, we’ve had such comfortable lives here, our parents took out all kinds of credit to get us our iPods and Uggs and Coach purses, and now they’re in financial hell trying to give us a life that the media tells us we deserve. No. If you buy it on credit, you don’t deserve it. It’s money you didn’t have. That’s off track. My point is, foreigners earn their money, they do remarkably well here, they thrive. While we sit on our candy asses and cry about the injustice of it all, they’re working their tails off for the life the want.
I’m not saying we’re all cry babies. Part of me wonders how it is they make money like that. Is it legal? Do they pay taxes? I have to slap myself, isn’t this whole being afraid of and jealous of your neighbor thing exactly what the government is thriving on right now? Creating hatred and dividing us?
I walk around angry a lot.
Most people just feel helpless and argue over ridiculous things, like what kind of medicine people should be allowed to have. If you don’t want to take something, don’t take it. Why waste the government’s time being petty and trying to stop people from seeking treatment. If it exists, somebody created it. Chances are that person or group of people was well funded to do it. And where did that get that funding? Mysterious benefactors? I believe that like I believe people actually win the local raffle every year.
Yeah they show us smiling faces holding a check that’s bigger than their car, but I bet that check bounces. I bet they’re paid actors. Or that they add on the extra zero’s via computer or something.
Look, I’ll be the first to tell you, I’m completely ignorant about some things. It frustrates me, all these things I don’t know. I’m always asking questions. Mostly I just want to know why things are done they way they are. Who figured out Pi r squared and why does it work? Some old dead guy said so?
I feel like the world is keeping secrets from me. It’s not that I’m too stupid learn, its just that people don’t have time to think about these things like I do, let alone to sit down with a kid and spend hours explaining these things. I don’t really begrudge them.
And after the public education, you have to pay to learn things. You get this piece of paper that says you learned it. Sometimes there’s a stamp or a seal or something. Ribbons even. I’ve seen them. But they don’t mean anything to me. I tried that route. But I couldn’t live with all that debt.
Debt is just fake money that’s been spent and someone wants payment for it.
It really disturbs me when I hear that there is national debt in an amount of money that I can’t even begin to conceive of. How many of work is a trillion dollars? Let alone hundreds of trillions of dollars. How many Coach purses is that? How many cars does the motor city produce that equates that much money? Its unfathomable. But its all money that nobody really has. It doesn’t exist. It’s invisible.
So how is it that numbers don’t lie? If numbers can be used but don’t exist … we can’t continue producing things if we run out of ways to pay people for them. Printing more currency just makes a higher number of invisible money.
I don’t get it. But I’m just a dumb girl who mops floors and sells hand lotion that goes for $12 an ounce. Another of those things I’ll never understand. But I know the product works. I use it everyday and I’ve never had prettier hands.
The rest of me has become prettier since then. Like I said, maybe the make-ups a little loud and my socks don’t match, but at least the face that people see is well made up and represents the lifestyle that I’m trying to sell.
That’s something else I get angry at myself over. Why am I selling a lifestyle I don’t even believe in? Its all so fake I roll my eyes at these people when they walk out my door.
There’s a boy who makes the expensive coffee drinks, he’s mopping his floor like I am here. I stop and watch him. He looks up and I go back to work, smiling. I feel this smile and the blush, but I don’t understand it. We play at this game for another 10 minutes before the mopping takes us out of visual range.
Later on he’s sitting at a table, smoking a cigarette. I know he doesn’t really smoke, but the thing is lit and he knocks ashes off the tip. I don’t know how I can tell he doesn’t smoke, I guess the way he’s holding the thing just isn’t right. My store’s been empty for 2 hours, so I figure its safe to go out and ask if they have a roll of toilet I can borrow. Its just a little lie, but it feels like he’s trying to get my attention. The way he sits there, not smoking his cigarette. Trying to not look into my store.
I pull my coat on and walk of the store, then sit down across from him, keeping an eye the doors in case a customer happens to walk in.
“Well hi,” he says.
“Hi yourself. What’s up?”
He shrugs. He plays it cool enough that I wonder if I’ve read it all wrong.
“Andrea says you might need a new place soon. My roommate is leaving in a few weeks, so … if you wanted to come by and see it …”
I’m smiling. I feel silly and warm. He skipped over the normal conversation, the normal everything, and just asked me to move in.
“Yeah, that’d be great. “
“You work tomorrow? “
We agree on meeting for a quick dinner at the sandwich shop and then checking the place out on my home from work. I feel like since he went to the trouble of wanting to meet me for dinner that this is more an excuse for a date.
We’d been doing the mop and stare thing for a while, and occasionally I go in for a roll of paper towel. Or a glass of water. And very once ina while, so it seems normal, I get the expensive coffee. Turns out I like the really expensive kind, the one with the fancy milk that isn’t milk from cows and the extra syrups. It tastes like liquid candy to me and I adore it. I savor it. I make it last so long I microwave it before I can even finish it. It’s a normal part of most people’s morning routines, but for me it’s a luxury and I sip on it rather than gulp it down. I don’t take even the smallest scent for granted.
I don’t smile much unless there’s somebody to smile for. I know this because my smile muscles hurt the next day at dinner. He struggles at first to get me talking, what looks good, what do I usually get, that kind of thing. Again I’m a little picky. Sandwichs with lots of meat and cheese on fancy bread are my absolute favorite thing in the world. After the liquid candy of course.
The “sandwich designer” asks me if I want anything else. I ask for shredded cheese, powdered cheese, and oregano. Chet barely raises an eyebrow at this as the designer asks me if I want any dressing. “What’s your favorite?” I ask.
He pours some on the side for me. I don’t like anything else on my sandwich because once the bread gets all soggy it takes away all the enjoyment. I carefully dip my sandwich in the oily dressing. Chet laughs at me, and after picking on my pickiness we converse easily.
There’s a bus for mall employees that takes us back to the housing. I don’t live in employee housing because I know I have to pay rent somewhere, why pay it back to the people who more or less employ me? But I moved in with my sister who lives too far away and my little 4 and 6 hour shifts don’t earn enough money for me to keep up with rent.
“Andrea said you went to school together,” Chet mentions on the bus.
“Oh yeah. We were friends on and off. We were both so different from the rest of the kids that spending time together was almost more of a stigma than being loners. Looking back I realize how stupid it was to isolate ourselves because of what other people thought. When we ran into each other here though, it’s like we had an unspoken apology and just picked back up where we left off.”
Chet nodded.
He asked me some other questions and we talked the whole ride back to the housing complex and on the walk to his unit. For the first time I wondered if it was safe to be walking into a guys apartment by myself. I never got a creep vibe from Chet, I feel there’s genuine interest there, the way he looks me in the eyes, like I’m a real person, not one of those people whose thoughts are so limited you’d rather be talking to your cat then one of them.
He’s good at getting me talking, I’m disconcerted because most people don’t care enough to ask me the questions he does. Like he’s trying to figure out where I’m coming from. I guess I impress him because he makes comments like “yeah, I heard a speaker say that when I was at university,” or “my friend whose a writer said the same thing”. The last one was “How old are you? If you don’t mind …?”
I tell him I’m 26 and he chuckles, disbelieving. “When did you get so wise?”
I shrug. I wasn’t sure if I should tell him about the two years I had been confined after an attempt at breeding. I was selected to give birth to a baby for a wealthy couple. She was too old and he was very young and handsome, probably only 10 years older then me. We used his sperm and my eggs. I thought this would be how I could pay for university myself. But the baby didn’t make it. The doctors told me only that some babies just don’t make it and I was such an emotional train wreck that I was confined for 18 months while I put my marbles back together.
I kissed college good bye. The brain doctors told me I wasn’t even ready to work. Once they deemed me ready I surprised them all by shaking and crying through my first real interview. We had test interviews that I did okay in. But the real one was just too much. I lost it again. It was another 5 months before my funding got cut off and I was sent into the world to either make it or … what? Starve? Marry well? Prostitute myself? No, even prostitution was a government run thing now. I guess it was safer for the women because there were cameras in the rooms to make sure that no abuse happened. Both parties were tested first so no diseases were passed. The women were sterilized so there were no unwanted babies. Prostitution wasn’t really what it once was.
But there was a rumor that my friend told me, that crimes against women had gone up. Her dad was on the Force so I guess she would know and I took her at her word. We finally reached his apartment and after that line of thought I was feeling a bit vulnerable, my hands were sweating.
“I had a lot of time off. I spent almost 2 years thinking about things. Everything. Especially how the world worked. It changes a person, having all that time to think about things and see them for what they are.”
He showed me around the apartment. It was tidy enough and he had things I didn’t, which was appealing. He had a computer and a big TV. He even had consoles for video gaming. I could use them as long as took care of them and put them away. I felt like somebody was giving me a present. My room would be smaller, but I hadn’t had a computer since college, so I figured it evened out.
“So just how does the world work?” He asked me, offering me a drink. We sat down on the couch and I tried to explain it. But there was a lot I didn’t understand, like the national debt.
He chuckled when I told him the bit about “how many purses is trillions of dollars?”. I probably sound completely ignorant and my cheeks flush. “The reason you don’t understand it is because it doesn’t make sense. It isn’t meant to. The purses, the TVs, the video games, the movie stars … none of its real. It’s a circus meant to distract us from the things that are. Look at that couple that adopted all the babies from third world countries. They made such a stir about things that adoptions went up almost 700% in that time frame. Then one day their house just explodes. All the hired help, all the fancy appliances and things in that house, and it was a spark and a gas leak that killed everybody? Right.”
He didn’t come out and say it but I knew what he meant. They were killed on purpose. I question this because I question everything. But this time I didn’t ask it out loud. I filed it away to answer later. Later when I could fully concentrate on it. But there was a question I did ask.
“So its all meant to distract us but from what things?”
“From the crushing poverty that over 2/3’s of the world is in. Sure there’s those commercials from the Church that show kids with hunger bloated bellies and all, but you think those kids get money? No. It’s so we can feel better about ourselves. The church gets the money, they might have a few communities they work in but most of the money goes to the church and then to the government.”
“Wait. How do you figure? I’ve seen those flashy preachers, I can see that get more then their fair share, but how the government?”
“Airtime for commercials. Taxes on shipping parcels. Taxes on trading money into another currency. Some churches have to pay a fee once they reach so many members. The government says this is for “crowd control”. What they mean is, if a church gets people riled up or thinking the wrong way, too many “thinkers” is dangerous, so the church pays a huge fee as insurance against this.”
This too sets my mind reeling. I like people who think and know things but I’ll never forget the guys in college who sat around drugged so high that they started making things up and scared themselves silly.
“How do you know about that? The riot insurance thing?”
“Friend got kicked out of the clergy because he was one of those dangerous guys.”
I wanted to ask if his dangerous friend inhaled something funny smelling but I let it go. People very rarely are asked to leave the religious sect. Whatever he did was probably due to thinking too much and asking too many questions.
Most of my friends would call this conversation anti-Patriot and we’re all Patriots here. They’d laugh it off or roll their eyes. Some would tell me that paranoia was a sign of depression and mental illness and that I should be careful because I didn’t want to get carted away like they show happen on TV. People saying weird things, screaming it before a needle is jabbed into their neck and everything goes silent.
I didn’t have as much time to spend on these thoughts lately. I’d spent the past two years working retail as much as I could, sometimes carrying three jobs and working from when one store opened until the other closed.
This was all too deep for me right now. In fact it had been too deep for such a long time that I started reading books about wizards and aliens and the ancient gods. I loved fantasy novels. Every now and then one of them got recalled and everybody would run to by the book to see why. Stores had 24 hours from the announcement to return the book the distributor for counting. I know because my first job back in the world was at a bookstore. They’d tell us the books got printed upside down or that there was too much sexual content and it had to go back and be redistributed to stores who had the proper liscense for those types of books. But my manager told me that they all got burned once they were counted back in.
I wondered about the copies in people’s homes. If you paid in cash, you were fine. But if you used credit, the government would send you a notice about the recall and where to send the book. If you didn’t have it there was a large fine.
I used to not think about any of these things. I thought they were normal.
The new normal is to buy harmless things like shoes and purses, things that are visible. If your money is being funneled into outward things I guess there isn’t much risk of putting anything anti-Patriot in your brain.
I stayed so long at Chet’s that the shuttle stopped running. He walked me back to my van and I drove him back to the employee housing. I was chilled on the walk, but having him near left me warm in ways I hadn’t known before. Once we were in my car we talked a bit more.
“If you need anything, let me know, I can get it for you.”
“Like, what?”
“Anything at all. Shoes, clothes, whatever. Most of us have a system worked out. We make trades. Its gotten tighter though,” I’m sure he meant security, “so I can’t just have you walk in and ask people about it. They don’t know you. But once you’re with me, it’ll be cool.”
“So the other managers buy things with their discounts and we swap product.”
“We call it gifting.”
He didn’t go into detail. It was clear he thought I was safe to let in, but others would be suspicious. I understood that. I didn’t ask for any information that he didn’t readily share. And he did the same for me. When I was ready, I would share. I had been worried enough about admitting to being a breeder. You had to get liscensed for that.
It meant taking several exams. Mental, physical, psychological, and a whole bunch of blood work. Probably to make sure that there weren’t any typos on my chromosomes. I didn’t understand enough about biologica from college to really grasp what they were testing for, but I knew that cells made copies of themselves and when we breed, our children inherit some copies from the eggs and some from the sperm. Apparently I checked out.
My IQ was around 130, the high end of average, but not enough to raise red flags. If your IQ was higher then 145 or lower than 100 you were not given a liscense to breed. The physical exam was literally a test of my height, weight, bone structure, hair and eye color, all of that. Again, they wanted to create average individuals. The psychological testing was the strangest part of it. But I was found to be safe because they gave me the license.
If you fail these, you are sterilized. Like if they find a damaged chromosome or something that may pass on a disability, you are immediately sterilized. They don’t even tell you. You go in for additional testing, then they destroy all your reproductive cells.
Being a breeder was kind of a big deal. I was afraid that he might reject me on this basis. I suppose that’s normal though.
“So, when is your lease up?” he asked once the conversation had reached a lull.
“5 weeks. But if I can afford to, I will move in early.”
He shook his head. “Don’t rush it. You have to apply to be on my lease with me and that can take a couple weeks anyway. We’ll go in the next week or so. You’re a key, right?”
I nodded in answer. “You shouldn’t have a problem applying then.”
I smiled. He was really very handsome. The few times I dated, I tended to date good looking men, but he was more then good looking. There was even an edge to him. Something dark. Not dangerous, just dark. Like one of the elders who survived the cataclysm. There were hardly any left, but every year they found someone to talk at the high school. It was a whole week event. We watched movies in the auditorium, read the books, talked to the survivors in small groups. There was a lot that happened before the cataclysm, but we didn’t talk about it. We knew what life was like on a small scale. How people had been very happy until men started getting called up. Even then people stayed happy, women worked outside the home. Neighbors and families banned together to take care of the children. It was a huge deal. But nobody knew why all the men had been called up.
The survivors told of unspeakable horrors overseas. Off fighting in a war, the men next to them, in front of them, behind them dropping dead. Limbs flying in the air. Bodies emaciated in hunger. Biological agents that stripped the skin from your bone. They told us all the horror stories until we had nightmares for weeks.
But there was no “why.” We didn’t talk about why. We talked about being Patriots. And how we all need to thank the survivors for what freedoms we have today. One survivor said “we could have it much, much worse dearies.” Suddenly the old woman was approached by a suit. She thanked us for listening and was escorted off stage. She didn’t come back the next year.
None of the teachers “remembered” her. We stopped asking.
We were afraid of the horrors, we understood that the horrors existed. We did not why they existed or just who it was we should fear. But we were thankful that all we had were someone elses nightmares and that they were not our own.
It hit me then. How much were those purple velvet shoes? $40? $50? Probably. Now that I have my own job, I translate $50 into hours of labor. That’s a whole days work for purple shoes. Purple shoes! That could easily be 1/6 of my rent money or a tank of gas. Or groceries for the better part of a week.
It struck me that $50 was what some people had to live on for a whole year.
I watch other people walk around with $300 purses and pay $6 for a tiny cup of coffee that’s gone in a few minutes. I suddenly want to throw up. Your purse is my half of the rent for a month.
I heard a conversation once. It was a foreign guy telling another foreign guy how much money he had, he was drunk and flashing his money around, pointing out his fancy SUV, the 4 inch solid gold cross on a 24 inch solid gold chain, the carat diamonds in his ear. “We’re foreigners. We do it differently. None of this 9-5 stuff. You know how it is man, you probably got a job on the side, too.”
My ears burn. I’d be lucky enough to rent a car like that for my wedding day so I have to use my van with the gash in the right front fender. And he’s driving around in it, wasted.
It all makes me so angry.
Not the angry that you’re probably thinking. Not that whole BS about foreigners come to my country and do better than me and I hate them for it. No, just the opposite, the foreigners are great for the local economies. Yeah they might shop at stores other foreigners own, but they shop in mine, too. With cash. Cash going right back into the local economy. Even different from that though, we’ve had such comfortable lives here, our parents took out all kinds of credit to get us our iPods and Uggs and Coach purses, and now they’re in financial hell trying to give us a life that the media tells us we deserve. No. If you buy it on credit, you don’t deserve it. It’s money you didn’t have. That’s off track. My point is, foreigners earn their money, they do remarkably well here, they thrive. While we sit on our candy asses and cry about the injustice of it all, they’re working their tails off for the life the want.
I’m not saying we’re all cry babies. Part of me wonders how it is they make money like that. Is it legal? Do they pay taxes? I have to slap myself, isn’t this whole being afraid of and jealous of your neighbor thing exactly what the government is thriving on right now? Creating hatred and dividing us?
I walk around angry a lot.
Most people just feel helpless and argue over ridiculous things, like what kind of medicine people should be allowed to have. If you don’t want to take something, don’t take it. Why waste the government’s time being petty and trying to stop people from seeking treatment. If it exists, somebody created it. Chances are that person or group of people was well funded to do it. And where did that get that funding? Mysterious benefactors? I believe that like I believe people actually win the local raffle every year.
Yeah they show us smiling faces holding a check that’s bigger than their car, but I bet that check bounces. I bet they’re paid actors. Or that they add on the extra zero’s via computer or something.
Look, I’ll be the first to tell you, I’m completely ignorant about some things. It frustrates me, all these things I don’t know. I’m always asking questions. Mostly I just want to know why things are done they way they are. Who figured out Pi r squared and why does it work? Some old dead guy said so?
I feel like the world is keeping secrets from me. It’s not that I’m too stupid learn, its just that people don’t have time to think about these things like I do, let alone to sit down with a kid and spend hours explaining these things. I don’t really begrudge them.
And after the public education, you have to pay to learn things. You get this piece of paper that says you learned it. Sometimes there’s a stamp or a seal or something. Ribbons even. I’ve seen them. But they don’t mean anything to me. I tried that route. But I couldn’t live with all that debt.
Debt is just fake money that’s been spent and someone wants payment for it.
It really disturbs me when I hear that there is national debt in an amount of money that I can’t even begin to conceive of. How many of work is a trillion dollars? Let alone hundreds of trillions of dollars. How many Coach purses is that? How many cars does the motor city produce that equates that much money? Its unfathomable. But its all money that nobody really has. It doesn’t exist. It’s invisible.
So how is it that numbers don’t lie? If numbers can be used but don’t exist … we can’t continue producing things if we run out of ways to pay people for them. Printing more currency just makes a higher number of invisible money.
I don’t get it. But I’m just a dumb girl who mops floors and sells hand lotion that goes for $12 an ounce. Another of those things I’ll never understand. But I know the product works. I use it everyday and I’ve never had prettier hands.
The rest of me has become prettier since then. Like I said, maybe the make-ups a little loud and my socks don’t match, but at least the face that people see is well made up and represents the lifestyle that I’m trying to sell.
That’s something else I get angry at myself over. Why am I selling a lifestyle I don’t even believe in? Its all so fake I roll my eyes at these people when they walk out my door.
There’s a boy who makes the expensive coffee drinks, he’s mopping his floor like I am here. I stop and watch him. He looks up and I go back to work, smiling. I feel this smile and the blush, but I don’t understand it. We play at this game for another 10 minutes before the mopping takes us out of visual range.
Later on he’s sitting at a table, smoking a cigarette. I know he doesn’t really smoke, but the thing is lit and he knocks ashes off the tip. I don’t know how I can tell he doesn’t smoke, I guess the way he’s holding the thing just isn’t right. My store’s been empty for 2 hours, so I figure its safe to go out and ask if they have a roll of toilet I can borrow. Its just a little lie, but it feels like he’s trying to get my attention. The way he sits there, not smoking his cigarette. Trying to not look into my store.
I pull my coat on and walk of the store, then sit down across from him, keeping an eye the doors in case a customer happens to walk in.
“Well hi,” he says.
“Hi yourself. What’s up?”
He shrugs. He plays it cool enough that I wonder if I’ve read it all wrong.
“Andrea says you might need a new place soon. My roommate is leaving in a few weeks, so … if you wanted to come by and see it …”
I’m smiling. I feel silly and warm. He skipped over the normal conversation, the normal everything, and just asked me to move in.
“Yeah, that’d be great. “
“You work tomorrow? “
We agree on meeting for a quick dinner at the sandwich shop and then checking the place out on my home from work. I feel like since he went to the trouble of wanting to meet me for dinner that this is more an excuse for a date.
We’d been doing the mop and stare thing for a while, and occasionally I go in for a roll of paper towel. Or a glass of water. And very once ina while, so it seems normal, I get the expensive coffee. Turns out I like the really expensive kind, the one with the fancy milk that isn’t milk from cows and the extra syrups. It tastes like liquid candy to me and I adore it. I savor it. I make it last so long I microwave it before I can even finish it. It’s a normal part of most people’s morning routines, but for me it’s a luxury and I sip on it rather than gulp it down. I don’t take even the smallest scent for granted.
I don’t smile much unless there’s somebody to smile for. I know this because my smile muscles hurt the next day at dinner. He struggles at first to get me talking, what looks good, what do I usually get, that kind of thing. Again I’m a little picky. Sandwichs with lots of meat and cheese on fancy bread are my absolute favorite thing in the world. After the liquid candy of course.
The “sandwich designer” asks me if I want anything else. I ask for shredded cheese, powdered cheese, and oregano. Chet barely raises an eyebrow at this as the designer asks me if I want any dressing. “What’s your favorite?” I ask.
He pours some on the side for me. I don’t like anything else on my sandwich because once the bread gets all soggy it takes away all the enjoyment. I carefully dip my sandwich in the oily dressing. Chet laughs at me, and after picking on my pickiness we converse easily.
There’s a bus for mall employees that takes us back to the housing. I don’t live in employee housing because I know I have to pay rent somewhere, why pay it back to the people who more or less employ me? But I moved in with my sister who lives too far away and my little 4 and 6 hour shifts don’t earn enough money for me to keep up with rent.
“Andrea said you went to school together,” Chet mentions on the bus.
“Oh yeah. We were friends on and off. We were both so different from the rest of the kids that spending time together was almost more of a stigma than being loners. Looking back I realize how stupid it was to isolate ourselves because of what other people thought. When we ran into each other here though, it’s like we had an unspoken apology and just picked back up where we left off.”
Chet nodded.
He asked me some other questions and we talked the whole ride back to the housing complex and on the walk to his unit. For the first time I wondered if it was safe to be walking into a guys apartment by myself. I never got a creep vibe from Chet, I feel there’s genuine interest there, the way he looks me in the eyes, like I’m a real person, not one of those people whose thoughts are so limited you’d rather be talking to your cat then one of them.
He’s good at getting me talking, I’m disconcerted because most people don’t care enough to ask me the questions he does. Like he’s trying to figure out where I’m coming from. I guess I impress him because he makes comments like “yeah, I heard a speaker say that when I was at university,” or “my friend whose a writer said the same thing”. The last one was “How old are you? If you don’t mind …?”
I tell him I’m 26 and he chuckles, disbelieving. “When did you get so wise?”
I shrug. I wasn’t sure if I should tell him about the two years I had been confined after an attempt at breeding. I was selected to give birth to a baby for a wealthy couple. She was too old and he was very young and handsome, probably only 10 years older then me. We used his sperm and my eggs. I thought this would be how I could pay for university myself. But the baby didn’t make it. The doctors told me only that some babies just don’t make it and I was such an emotional train wreck that I was confined for 18 months while I put my marbles back together.
I kissed college good bye. The brain doctors told me I wasn’t even ready to work. Once they deemed me ready I surprised them all by shaking and crying through my first real interview. We had test interviews that I did okay in. But the real one was just too much. I lost it again. It was another 5 months before my funding got cut off and I was sent into the world to either make it or … what? Starve? Marry well? Prostitute myself? No, even prostitution was a government run thing now. I guess it was safer for the women because there were cameras in the rooms to make sure that no abuse happened. Both parties were tested first so no diseases were passed. The women were sterilized so there were no unwanted babies. Prostitution wasn’t really what it once was.
But there was a rumor that my friend told me, that crimes against women had gone up. Her dad was on the Force so I guess she would know and I took her at her word. We finally reached his apartment and after that line of thought I was feeling a bit vulnerable, my hands were sweating.
“I had a lot of time off. I spent almost 2 years thinking about things. Everything. Especially how the world worked. It changes a person, having all that time to think about things and see them for what they are.”
He showed me around the apartment. It was tidy enough and he had things I didn’t, which was appealing. He had a computer and a big TV. He even had consoles for video gaming. I could use them as long as took care of them and put them away. I felt like somebody was giving me a present. My room would be smaller, but I hadn’t had a computer since college, so I figured it evened out.
“So just how does the world work?” He asked me, offering me a drink. We sat down on the couch and I tried to explain it. But there was a lot I didn’t understand, like the national debt.
He chuckled when I told him the bit about “how many purses is trillions of dollars?”. I probably sound completely ignorant and my cheeks flush. “The reason you don’t understand it is because it doesn’t make sense. It isn’t meant to. The purses, the TVs, the video games, the movie stars … none of its real. It’s a circus meant to distract us from the things that are. Look at that couple that adopted all the babies from third world countries. They made such a stir about things that adoptions went up almost 700% in that time frame. Then one day their house just explodes. All the hired help, all the fancy appliances and things in that house, and it was a spark and a gas leak that killed everybody? Right.”
He didn’t come out and say it but I knew what he meant. They were killed on purpose. I question this because I question everything. But this time I didn’t ask it out loud. I filed it away to answer later. Later when I could fully concentrate on it. But there was a question I did ask.
“So its all meant to distract us but from what things?”
“From the crushing poverty that over 2/3’s of the world is in. Sure there’s those commercials from the Church that show kids with hunger bloated bellies and all, but you think those kids get money? No. It’s so we can feel better about ourselves. The church gets the money, they might have a few communities they work in but most of the money goes to the church and then to the government.”
“Wait. How do you figure? I’ve seen those flashy preachers, I can see that get more then their fair share, but how the government?”
“Airtime for commercials. Taxes on shipping parcels. Taxes on trading money into another currency. Some churches have to pay a fee once they reach so many members. The government says this is for “crowd control”. What they mean is, if a church gets people riled up or thinking the wrong way, too many “thinkers” is dangerous, so the church pays a huge fee as insurance against this.”
This too sets my mind reeling. I like people who think and know things but I’ll never forget the guys in college who sat around drugged so high that they started making things up and scared themselves silly.
“How do you know about that? The riot insurance thing?”
“Friend got kicked out of the clergy because he was one of those dangerous guys.”
I wanted to ask if his dangerous friend inhaled something funny smelling but I let it go. People very rarely are asked to leave the religious sect. Whatever he did was probably due to thinking too much and asking too many questions.
Most of my friends would call this conversation anti-Patriot and we’re all Patriots here. They’d laugh it off or roll their eyes. Some would tell me that paranoia was a sign of depression and mental illness and that I should be careful because I didn’t want to get carted away like they show happen on TV. People saying weird things, screaming it before a needle is jabbed into their neck and everything goes silent.
I didn’t have as much time to spend on these thoughts lately. I’d spent the past two years working retail as much as I could, sometimes carrying three jobs and working from when one store opened until the other closed.
This was all too deep for me right now. In fact it had been too deep for such a long time that I started reading books about wizards and aliens and the ancient gods. I loved fantasy novels. Every now and then one of them got recalled and everybody would run to by the book to see why. Stores had 24 hours from the announcement to return the book the distributor for counting. I know because my first job back in the world was at a bookstore. They’d tell us the books got printed upside down or that there was too much sexual content and it had to go back and be redistributed to stores who had the proper liscense for those types of books. But my manager told me that they all got burned once they were counted back in.
I wondered about the copies in people’s homes. If you paid in cash, you were fine. But if you used credit, the government would send you a notice about the recall and where to send the book. If you didn’t have it there was a large fine.
I used to not think about any of these things. I thought they were normal.
The new normal is to buy harmless things like shoes and purses, things that are visible. If your money is being funneled into outward things I guess there isn’t much risk of putting anything anti-Patriot in your brain.
I stayed so long at Chet’s that the shuttle stopped running. He walked me back to my van and I drove him back to the employee housing. I was chilled on the walk, but having him near left me warm in ways I hadn’t known before. Once we were in my car we talked a bit more.
“If you need anything, let me know, I can get it for you.”
“Like, what?”
“Anything at all. Shoes, clothes, whatever. Most of us have a system worked out. We make trades. Its gotten tighter though,” I’m sure he meant security, “so I can’t just have you walk in and ask people about it. They don’t know you. But once you’re with me, it’ll be cool.”
“So the other managers buy things with their discounts and we swap product.”
“We call it gifting.”
He didn’t go into detail. It was clear he thought I was safe to let in, but others would be suspicious. I understood that. I didn’t ask for any information that he didn’t readily share. And he did the same for me. When I was ready, I would share. I had been worried enough about admitting to being a breeder. You had to get liscensed for that.
It meant taking several exams. Mental, physical, psychological, and a whole bunch of blood work. Probably to make sure that there weren’t any typos on my chromosomes. I didn’t understand enough about biologica from college to really grasp what they were testing for, but I knew that cells made copies of themselves and when we breed, our children inherit some copies from the eggs and some from the sperm. Apparently I checked out.
My IQ was around 130, the high end of average, but not enough to raise red flags. If your IQ was higher then 145 or lower than 100 you were not given a liscense to breed. The physical exam was literally a test of my height, weight, bone structure, hair and eye color, all of that. Again, they wanted to create average individuals. The psychological testing was the strangest part of it. But I was found to be safe because they gave me the license.
If you fail these, you are sterilized. Like if they find a damaged chromosome or something that may pass on a disability, you are immediately sterilized. They don’t even tell you. You go in for additional testing, then they destroy all your reproductive cells.
Being a breeder was kind of a big deal. I was afraid that he might reject me on this basis. I suppose that’s normal though.
“So, when is your lease up?” he asked once the conversation had reached a lull.
“5 weeks. But if I can afford to, I will move in early.”
He shook his head. “Don’t rush it. You have to apply to be on my lease with me and that can take a couple weeks anyway. We’ll go in the next week or so. You’re a key, right?”
I nodded in answer. “You shouldn’t have a problem applying then.”
I smiled. He was really very handsome. The few times I dated, I tended to date good looking men, but he was more then good looking. There was even an edge to him. Something dark. Not dangerous, just dark. Like one of the elders who survived the cataclysm. There were hardly any left, but every year they found someone to talk at the high school. It was a whole week event. We watched movies in the auditorium, read the books, talked to the survivors in small groups. There was a lot that happened before the cataclysm, but we didn’t talk about it. We knew what life was like on a small scale. How people had been very happy until men started getting called up. Even then people stayed happy, women worked outside the home. Neighbors and families banned together to take care of the children. It was a huge deal. But nobody knew why all the men had been called up.
The survivors told of unspeakable horrors overseas. Off fighting in a war, the men next to them, in front of them, behind them dropping dead. Limbs flying in the air. Bodies emaciated in hunger. Biological agents that stripped the skin from your bone. They told us all the horror stories until we had nightmares for weeks.
But there was no “why.” We didn’t talk about why. We talked about being Patriots. And how we all need to thank the survivors for what freedoms we have today. One survivor said “we could have it much, much worse dearies.” Suddenly the old woman was approached by a suit. She thanked us for listening and was escorted off stage. She didn’t come back the next year.
None of the teachers “remembered” her. We stopped asking.
We were afraid of the horrors, we understood that the horrors existed. We did not why they existed or just who it was we should fear. But we were thankful that all we had were someone elses nightmares and that they were not our own.