A Glass Of Milk (chapter three)
I was born into this, so for me, the sudden freedom was shock. I knew, with the tenacious nature of a child, that there was something wrong with the world. Everyone was unhappy and scared, and I didn't like the census man, or the priest, who we had to see once a week in the church. I didn't like the church, for that matter-the large, dark building dank with smells that weren't quite there. . . The incense that was burned always smelled foul, somehow; something sweet laced with something putrid, like the stench of rotting meat. It was the sweetness that gagged me. Even when the priest shrugged off the heavy crimson robe of office, and took on the white, conical hat of the census, that smell lingered with it. I was too young to identify it then, but I think now that it was the smell of death that lingered on him. Some people become so steeped in their profession that they will never quite rid their bodies of that aura-and an aura of death was entirely fitting for that snide, twisted old man. My mother and father had an aura of defeat, which I was able to identify, for wasn't that the pervading attitude of all of us? A select few remained with power, with the right to think…the rest of us were left to merely exist. The only clear memory I have of my mother is of a sad insanity. I must have been almost four: I remember I was mad, because mother was making me come indoors before the curfew bell, and I was still playing with Johnny. Johnny was the neighbor's son-but he was executed along with his family right after my fourth birthday, because he had two mommies and, as I overheard my father saying later, that was always found out eventually. Everything was found out eventually, he was saying, as the priest came and took mommy away. The day I remember my mother I was angry, I wanted to play. Mother called me in and I wouldn't come, she called again and I came, warily. Mother was always a soft spoken, vacant person. Father, Grandma Jean, most people were like that. But today, she sounded different. Today, she sounded... urgent, somehow. She sounded, in fact, like Johnny's mommies. They'd always had a different quality, a different aura. They sounded real, almost, though I couldn't make that distinction at the time. They sounded and acted like I felt. Mother called me into the kitchen, that day, and told me to sit in my chair at the wooden kitchen table. This picture, like a snapshot, ingrained in my mind's eye: the worn oaken wood smoothed down by long use; the red and white checkered place mats, the red fading and the white yellowing, but perfect to my innocent mind. The bread crumbs on the place mat as I finished my bread and the cup of precious milk mother placed in front of me, frothy and so cold the glass was condensing in the heat. I remember looking at a bead of water trickle down the glass, mother pleading with me to drink it, her eyes bloodshot. Something was wrong, and I knew it. I did not want to drink the milk, even though this luxury was something we rarely afforded and not at all for children. There was something wrong, I thought, and not just because milk was so highly rationed and its use limited. Not just in mother's alertness, in her eyes. Mother was crying. This in itself was not so bad, but I had never before seen another adult cry. I'd cried, long and hard, over slights real and imagined. I'd never once seen an ounce of emotion from my mother or father, from anyone in the village. Fear, sometimes, but mostly just a calm acceptance. Later I'd learn that this was the effect of the water, but now I was just frightened. There was something terribly wrong. The house felt off, and with my attuned nature I knew with all my heart that I should not touch the milk. Tears streaming down her face, she told me, "drink it, oh please, just drink it, and then I'll have some, and we'll be safe" but I slid off my chair, eyes huge and luminous in the fading light. Mother noticed the darkness all of a sudden and she turned, lighting the candle centerpiece on the table, muttering, "Though why I should bother…" I used this distraction move around the table, wanting as much distance as possible between myself and whatever was represented by that forbidden glass of milk. There was something very very wrong, something dark and unwholesome, in that glass, in mother's eyes. She'd transitioned from being indifferent to wildly, fanatically, afraid, and this fear was creeping up my shoulder and trickling down my spine. Something had snapped, and I was afraid. The candles lit, mother looked up again, and the dancing flames did something to her eyes that paralyzed me. This was not evil, not the wrongness of the priest, only fear and sadness. The depth of that sadness eluded me, but I knew mommy hurt and suddenly I started to cry. She came over to pick me up and I threw my arms around her, and we were sobbing together. My tears wet her long, reddish hair, and I clinged to her as if I was loosing her forever. It was at this moment that father returned from work, and, hearing the door open and shut and the tread of his workboots in the hallway, mother froze. Knowing something was wrong, I quieted mid sob and turned around in my mother's arms. As father's tall, gaunt figure appeared as a shadow in the doorframe, I gave a quiet hiccup-and then mother set me down, patted me on the head, and told me, in a resigned voice, "hurry up to bed now, lovey, there's a good girl". I fled, up the narrow dark stairs into the bedroom, slamming the door and scurrying into bed. I heard the sound of pouring, father's voice, questioning, then mother's whispered reply. I heard the clinking of glass and wondered if father was unhappy because mother had left the bottles she used for cleaning out next to the sink, next to the glass… No mention of the incident was made again, but a few days after we celebrated mother's birthday, she was taken away, along with Johnny and his mothers. I vaguely remember there was some argument about me, but I stayed with my father. I started school later that year and they told me that my mother was an enemy of the state. They told me that girls who love girls and boys who love boys are evil, and an enemy of the state. That people who do not toil for their supper are evil, and enemies. That people who don't follow the law are evil, and enemies. If you didn't go to church every day, and school every day, and later when you were 14 and grown, if you didn't go to work every day, you were evil. If you were ill you had to see the priest, because all illness is from the devil, and results in sin by yourself or others. The priest must determine who it was that sinned. The wages of sin is death, they taught us, and then told us that all enemies of the state are processed, convicted, and shot. Sins of the fathers reflect on the sons, they said, so children who are found to be corrupted, like Johnny, were shot-to prevent them from growing up to be evil. My father was not sinful because he reported my mother, it was told, and so he and I were spared. I was not to waste this precious gift, but should instead embrace the challenge of living an upright life. I would be under constant surveillance, listed under the "high alert" category. Because of my mother's sin father and I were granted half rations, as penance. Father's pay grade was docked, and in addition to extra shifts he had to work at the textile plant, we both had to attend both church services, instead of the requisite one a day. I was sad at first, losing my mother, but after the first few days people lost their sympathy. They told me I was lucky to be spared. The priest, in his double duty of census taker, asked me a week later how I felt about it. I told him I missed my mother, and wanted to know why she was taken away. In his soft, high pitched voice, he told me to repent my mother's lingering sin. He told me that I was ill because of my mother's sin and I needed to pray for an hour every day and drink ten glasses of water to cleanse me of the evil. I lowered my head and dashed away tears, and told him "yes, sir," with a rebellious heart.
Looking back now, this is all easy to explain. According to Alex, one of Wildwood's old "uncles" who adopted me when I straggled in, the government started putting Cariso, a derivative of carisoprodol, in the water of the major urban centers as an "immunization system" to protect citizens against bio-terrorism. The side effects, along with mild diarrhea and cottonmouth, included a decreased response to emotional stimuli. Whether its use was initiated because of this purported "side effect" or whether it was just a lucky bonus for a government needed a way to control its population is unknown at this time, but it doesn't really matter. When the mass exodus of the overpopulated cities and the residential cap on towns, the nightly governmental news channel Vox stated that the plague could be caught through drinking untreated water, and urged its citizens to purchase home treatment units or bottling water from a local city approved source. By the time I was born, the first generation to be born under the control of the Chancellor, people took the treated water for granted. Most people. The normal, law abiding ones, who never looked the other way when their neighbors lead untraditional lives, who "did the right thing". People like my mother and father. Until Johnny's mother, Satine, and her "friend", Georgiana, moved next door. The economy was frail and several families to a house were becoming the rule rather than the exception, but even as a child I noticed how Johnny had two mommies and everybody else had only one. From records found on the internal system here I've discovered that Satine DeCarte and Georgiana Johnston were tried and executed for lesbianism, indecency in the eyes of God, raising a child in sin, and blatant disregard for governmental safety warnings. Autopsy reports (which were examined for physical evidence to provide to the public: a sort of ad factum trial in the press), while not reveling any illegal drugs, did note a complete absence of Cariso in their attempted murder of a child, attempted suicide, and resisting governmental control and safety warnings. While still present in her system, the levels of Cariso were much lower than normal, consistent with several days of abstinence. The physical symptoms may have been difficult to mask, but as realization began to dawn. . . a slowly growing horror as she began to realize that we had no future, no point of living under the mind numbing tyranny of the current government. . . It was, I believe, an act of love. Misguided as it was, I feel she truly believed that she was rescuing me from a pointless existence. When I first came here, I wanted nothing to do with their war. I may not have been deluded into thinking that a humdrum, completely ordered existence without free will was a good or healthy or right thing, but I didn't see how any force could topple the current government. This changed, though, when I learned the truth about my mother. As abhorrent an act as it may seem, it was a gesture of love that I saw. She loved me; she wanted to rescue me the only way she knew. And I became determined that no more innocent children should have to suffer, as I did. Even in a society where friendship was forbidden, where we were taught never to trust, in that moment I developed a kinship with every girl who lost a parent to the Chancellor's harsh government, every mother that lost a child, every wife who systems. My mother, Rebecca Ann Lewis, was tried and executed for the sins of lost a husband. I decided to fight, and I find it fitting that the government has honed the very weapons that will destroy it.
Looking back now, this is all easy to explain. According to Alex, one of Wildwood's old "uncles" who adopted me when I straggled in, the government started putting Cariso, a derivative of carisoprodol, in the water of the major urban centers as an "immunization system" to protect citizens against bio-terrorism. The side effects, along with mild diarrhea and cottonmouth, included a decreased response to emotional stimuli. Whether its use was initiated because of this purported "side effect" or whether it was just a lucky bonus for a government needed a way to control its population is unknown at this time, but it doesn't really matter. When the mass exodus of the overpopulated cities and the residential cap on towns, the nightly governmental news channel Vox stated that the plague could be caught through drinking untreated water, and urged its citizens to purchase home treatment units or bottling water from a local city approved source. By the time I was born, the first generation to be born under the control of the Chancellor, people took the treated water for granted. Most people. The normal, law abiding ones, who never looked the other way when their neighbors lead untraditional lives, who "did the right thing". People like my mother and father. Until Johnny's mother, Satine, and her "friend", Georgiana, moved next door. The economy was frail and several families to a house were becoming the rule rather than the exception, but even as a child I noticed how Johnny had two mommies and everybody else had only one. From records found on the internal system here I've discovered that Satine DeCarte and Georgiana Johnston were tried and executed for lesbianism, indecency in the eyes of God, raising a child in sin, and blatant disregard for governmental safety warnings. Autopsy reports (which were examined for physical evidence to provide to the public: a sort of ad factum trial in the press), while not reveling any illegal drugs, did note a complete absence of Cariso in their attempted murder of a child, attempted suicide, and resisting governmental control and safety warnings. While still present in her system, the levels of Cariso were much lower than normal, consistent with several days of abstinence. The physical symptoms may have been difficult to mask, but as realization began to dawn. . . a slowly growing horror as she began to realize that we had no future, no point of living under the mind numbing tyranny of the current government. . . It was, I believe, an act of love. Misguided as it was, I feel she truly believed that she was rescuing me from a pointless existence. When I first came here, I wanted nothing to do with their war. I may not have been deluded into thinking that a humdrum, completely ordered existence without free will was a good or healthy or right thing, but I didn't see how any force could topple the current government. This changed, though, when I learned the truth about my mother. As abhorrent an act as it may seem, it was a gesture of love that I saw. She loved me; she wanted to rescue me the only way she knew. And I became determined that no more innocent children should have to suffer, as I did. Even in a society where friendship was forbidden, where we were taught never to trust, in that moment I developed a kinship with every girl who lost a parent to the Chancellor's harsh government, every mother that lost a child, every wife who systems. My mother, Rebecca Ann Lewis, was tried and executed for the sins of lost a husband. I decided to fight, and I find it fitting that the government has honed the very weapons that will destroy it.