by Leona Gom
“Let’s leave,” Rob said. He pushed back his chair.
“Yeah,” said Clara, “the reek of testosterone is making me nauseous,” and then we were all standing up and shuffling to the door.
“… show them who’s boss,” Dave’s voice pursued us. Rob took hold of Clara’s arm.
Outside, we all began to laugh, but uneasily, and probably for different reasons. “What a cretin,” Clara said. “What an asshole.”
The noise of the bar followed us to the bus stop. The din of inequity.
Only girls from now on. Yuck. What did I answer the boy? I can’t remember. Nothing that mattered/matters/will matter. Go to bed, Adam. The future doesn’t want your help.
* * *
Feb. 17, 2067
“I just don’t understand,” Elizabeth kept saying, sobs cutting into her voice. “Why are they doing this? Why do they hate us so much?”
I don’t know. I don’t know.
We watched the television, little moaning sounds breaking from our throats as we saw another women’s centre in — where? — London? — in flames, the crowd of men around it shouting, frenzied, the police seemingly incapable of control. Then the scene that made us both cry out in horror — a group of women caught on the street and the crazed mob falling on them, beating and kicking — the camera fell or was pushed away, or we covered our eyes, or turned off the set, I can’t remember.
Elizabeth was almost out of her mind, “Oh God, oh Jesus, oh God,” she said, her voice a strange keening I’d never heard before. I went over to put my arms around her but she pushed me away, wildly, as though I were trying to attack her.
“I have to find Jenny,” she said frantically, stumbling to the door.
“She’s okay,” I insisted. “There’re no riots here.” But she pulled away from my hand and ran out to the street. “She’s okay,” I called after her. “There’s no trouble here.”
Not yet.
Feb. 18, 2067
The riots continue. Worse than yesterday or last week. The attacks are getting more generalized. It’s still mostly women’s centres, but now the rioters seem to be taking on places like libraries, museums, universities. Hospitals. Anyplace, it seems, where they think there’ll be women. Maybe anyplace that represents to them culture, civilization. And the police and armies just ineffectual, even joining in sometimes, on the news tonight a soldier emptying his rifle into the windows of a bookstore. Insanity. I’m numb, watching it. How did we come to this?
We were all supposed to stay home again, with our doors locked, but except for a few teenage boys throwing stones through the windows of the high school everything seemed quiet. Thank God for living in what that Toronto journalist called the most boring city in Canada.
Looking out over my calm backyard, the caragana bushes with their hats of snow, old Mrs. Melmann next door ignoring the warning and starting her daily walk, it seemed impossible that there could be such chaos as we have heard, mere anarchy loosed upon the world. Mere — what the hell is mere about it?
Elizabeth phoned me, asked me again, “Why are they doing this? Why do they hate us so much?”
So I had to give her, us, an answer. “Because they see it as some war that they’ve lost and the women have won. Because they want to destroy as much as they can so that it won’t fall into enemy hands.”
“My God. War. Enemies. We’re all just people. Would they rather nobody survived at all?”
“I remember one of those old Planet of the Apes movies — at the end the main character activates the atomic bomb, knowing it will destroy everything — himself, the apes, the remaining humans, rather than have the apes win. Just pure rage, I guess, and hate, and despair.”
“That was made a whole century ago. We don’t think that way now. Do we? Do we?”
We must, some of us must.
Feb. 19, 2067:
The rioting as bad as yesterday, some in Toronto now, too, and Winnipeg, I couldn’t watch, sat here huddled in my house with the curtains drawn listening to Vivaldi, trying to read, the same page over and over and over.
I phoned Elizabeth. Jenny answered, said she was at the hospital. “Well, she shouldn’t be,” I said, and I suppose it sounded like an accusation, because she snapped, “She insisted on going. I can’t stop her.” And so I grunted something and she snarled something and we hung up.
I shouldn’t be surprised Elizabeth would be at the hospital, warnings or not, helping Dr. Kostash train the German doctors. “They won’t be able to stop us,” she’d said last night. “Too many doctors know the procedure now.” Of course that was before we’d turned on the television.
Feb. 20, 2067:
I can hardly bring myself to write this. But I have to. I have to try to understand.
I was watching television. A sea of men, somewhere in the U.S., shouting their impotent rage at the skies. I watched, unable to pull my eyes from the ugliness, the violence. For more than an hour, I watched.
And somewhere in me, in some evil black space between my bones, I felt a kinship with them, with them as men, the screen a mirror of my own face, and I felt my hands clench around the bricks they threw, my throat form the words of their rage, my heart turn black and bitter and vengeful against the women, wanting to hurt them and punish them, the ones who had beaten us at last.
It repels me to write this.
Feb. 21, 2067:
The riots subsided a little today. The films were mostly of smoky ruins, gutted buildings, crying women holding their beaten and raped and murdered sisters. Behind the shaken man reading the news I saw unreeling film clip after film clip of the destruction: a women’s clinic in London, bombed into rubble, more than a hundred dead; the Louvre, part of its collection shredded; half of Trinity University still in flames; Montreal General closed down indefinitely — How long will we be spared here, especially now that we have the coordinating hospital for the west?
When I think of how I felt last night in front of the TV, that grotesque exhilaration, some part of me participating, endorsing — I can feel nausea cramp my gut. But I have to face it. I was part of the mob. I wanted to destroy. I wanted revenge.
I talk to Fern on my desk. “What do you think, Fern?” I say. She doesn’t answer. She used to, once. She’s ashamed of me, now. They flee from me that once did etc. I take another drink. I drink too much. It doesn’t matter. I’m starting to write like Hemingway.
Feb. 22, 2067
Prince brought over some homework some of the parents had given him that he wanted me to mark. Honestly. On the last day of the bloody world some teacher will be sitting there, marking.
I made coffee and we tsk-tsked in a kind of surreal way about the state of the world. He’s not a bad guy, I guess, Prince; I’ve worked for worse.
Then we turned on the news. Awful, awful. We saw them blow up Bryn Mawr. The camera followed two women running, screaming, on fire. When they fell, the camera turned away, looking for something else. I wanted to shut it off but Prince said, no, we have to watch, we have to know. There was some feed from Argentina, I think, a reporter moving his lips in Spanish and an English voice saying that the building behind him was a nurses’ residence, and in it two hundred women had been massacred. Then some jumpy footage inside, carnage, blood everywhere, most of the women stripped naked. But maybe even worse was the talk show that came on after. The Pat Van Horn Hour. Van Horn’s guests were four guys calling themselves part of the Men’s Defence League. “We know,” said one of them sincerely, leaning his young face forward, “there’s a conspiracy. There’s no question about that. We know boy babies are being born. And killed.”
“It’s happened before,” said the lumpy older man to his left, who looked enough like the first man to be his father. “Just read your Bible. Why was Moses in the bullrushes? And why did the baby Jesus have to flee to Egypt?” He shook his finger into the screen. “
What are they afraid of out there, the boy-baby killers? Ask yourselves that!”
“Holy Moses,” Prince said, and began to laugh, hysterically.
“Lunatics,” I said. “Religious warp-heads.”
As though the younger man had heard me, he leaned forward again and continued earnestly, “We’re not fanatics. We know what’s happening. The boy killers and man haters have to be stopped.”
“And how do you intend to stop them?” Van Horn asked, his face serious, the slight practised frown not disapproval as much as simulated concentration.
“How do you think?” The third man spoke for the first time. He gave a little woof of laughter. “Don’t you watch the news?”
“We’re just fighting back,” the first man said hurriedly. “It’s self-defence.”
“Why don’t they arrest the bastards?” I heard myself shouting. “God, they’re as good as admitting they’ve murdered people! Why aren’t the police there arresting them?”
“It’s TV,” Prince said. “The police have no jurisdiction. Like the Vatican. A separate country. It makes its own laws.” He gave his weird whinnying laugh again.
The third man was speaking now, his voice hard. “We didn’t start this. We were forced into it. But we’re fighting for survival. For your future.” His finger jabbed at us. “We have to stop them. We have no choice.”
Finally Prince let me turn it off, and then he got up to leave. At the door I almost grabbed his arm and said, “Don’t go yet.” Afraid suddenly to be alone.
The house is so quiet. The TV squats there like some dirty window I’m afraid to look through.
I sit here marking the kids’ homework. Mary, her neat handwriting filling a whole new scribbler, answering the Language questions right to the end of the book. “When Timothy came home, he found his uncle had brought him a pony.” “Karen was unhappy because her friend Wendy was moving to England.” To the end of the goddamned book, as though she thinks, she knows, she’ll never be able to come to school again.
Feb. 23, 2067
Quieter today, the news just catching its breath, catching up. “Maybe it’s over,” Elizabeth said, when I finally got her on the phone. I could tell she didn’t believe it, either.
Feb. 24, 2067
They tried to open the schools again, but by eleven they called in the buses and sent us all home. They’d bombed Emily Murphy College in Calgary — almost a hundred killed, they think. And another bomb thrown into the Othervoices Bookstore but it didn’t go off. Closer, it’s getting closer, the rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Lethbridge to be born.
“We should spraypaint dy at the end of Ann,” Clara said, pointing to the big “Ann Rogers Elementary” sign above the school door as she was climbing on the bus. I don’t think she was joking.
When I got off the bus Mrs. Melmann gave me a sour look and shook her head. “You men,” she said. “You boys.” I nodded. Yes.
Feb. 25, 2067
The riots intensified again. A school in Whitehorse, for God’s sake, levelled by an explosion. Some part of Buenos Aires looking like a gigantic rubbish dump. Another bombing in Calgary. Hard to tell if it’s organized or just random. Surely those loonies we saw on TV don’t have an international network. Or maybe they do; maybe it’s been there for a long time, waiting for an excuse.
TV coverage is getting pretty spotty — some of the stations have been attacked. One of the reporters just started to cry in the middle of the broadcast, and they left it in.
No school here. Everything closed. Two women beaten up at the drugstore just a few kilometres away, and some windows broken downtown. I feel as though we’re all holding our breaths and waiting, like plants through the winter, waiting for the sun to warm us again, tell us it’s safe to unbolt our doors and unfold our arms and come out into the free air.
* * *
Mar. 5, 2067
Jenny came to tell me.
They broke into the hospital. She’s dead.
I can hardly see, my eyes so swollen. My Elizabeth, my sweet little girl.
* * *
Mar. 30, 2067:
I found the communiqué in my mailbox this morning. I’m not sure who left it, Jenny probably. It says this, exactly:
CONFIDENTIAL:
KIEV, SALZBURG, LETHBRIDGE, CAIRNS.
VIABLE SPERM BANK SUPPLIES DESTROYED,
1500 HRS M.S.T.
WOMEN’S FRONT
So that’s it, I thought calmly, holding the note in my hand for a long time. The last human male on this earth has been conceived. There will be no more.
* * *
BOWDEN HAD A HARD time struggling awake.
“Come to bed,” Delacour was saying, shaking her shoulder lightly.
“Ah,” Bowden said, sitting up, looking around the room, alarmed, confused. “I guess I was dreaming. About the riots.” But it wasn’t just the riots; it was her childhood nightmare of running, terrified, through the woods, pursued by something monstrous. The male will get you. Delacour would laugh if she knew.
“You’ve been reading the journals, I see.”
“I hope you don’t mind,” Bowden said, trying to be casual, to push away the lingering images. She picked at a grain of sleep in her right eye. “It was fascinating. All the detail. Funny how reading about something can seem so vivid. More in some ways than seeing the vidspools.” She stood up, placed her hands at the back of her neck and stretched her arms up.
“His writing is good for that. Every single day he made an entry. Some of them were up to ten pages long. How much did you read?”
“Only the pages with your orange markers.”
“Well then. You’ve missed things. I was just concerned with the history. The journals offer more than that.”
“He was likable, actually. For a male. Still, it was males that brought all that violence at the end.” Bowden shuddered. “I still find it incredible. That they would do that. We’re so fortunate, to be living so long after they disappeared.”
“I suppose so,” Delacour said, picking up the journal and opening it at her first orange marker, as though she had to check something. “It wasn’t all like that, of course. It wasn’t always as bad as during the Change. There were other males like Adam Markov. You should read the journal to the end sometime.”
“What happens at the end?”
“Oh, nothing that important, I suppose. He’s old; he dies.”
“They all died. Thank God.”
3
DANIEL
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’D treat me this way,” Daniel said. “Don’t you think I’ve any feelings at all?” He wiped his hand quickly across his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Bluesky kept saying, not looking at him. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” She stopped buttoning her tunic, and let her hands fumble to her lap, where she picked up a straw and poked it repeatedly into her palm. He could still see her breasts, and that upset him even more, as though she expected him to feel nothing at the sight of her nakedness, as though he were no more than a barn animal.
“Why did you make love with me at all,” he said, “if you feel repulsed by me?”
“I didn’t say you repulsed me,” she said miserably.
“You said it was unnatural. It’s the same thing.”
She shook her head. “I like you, Daniel, I do, I do —” She clenched her hand on the straw, cracking it like a small bone. “But I don’t feel right about this. I want a, well, a normal relationship.”
“Is my mother and father’s relationship unnatural? Is Vargas and Lawrence-Paul’s on North Farm unnatural? And the cows and the horses, even the plants — are they all unnatural?”
“You know what I mean. Maybe your mother and Vargas and the others had more courage than I have, to choose someone so — different.”
“
So different,” he echoed bitterly. “A freak, that’s what you mean, isn’t it? I’ve heard people say the word. I didn’t think you’d be like them.”
“Well, I’m not,” she insisted, looking up at him at last. She held her head carefully, delicately, as though it were a glass of liquid she had to be cautious not to spill. Tiny specks of dust from the hay swam in the air between them. “I never used that word. Never.” She lifted her hand to touch his arm.
He pulled away from her. “But it’s what you think.”
Her hand slid through the empty air where his arm had been and hovered briefly a few centimetres above the hay before she let it fall, palm up.
“Besides —” She paused. “Mary-Redwillow from North Farm. She says she desires me.”
“And you — do you desire her?” The thought of her with some-one else was like a vise in his chest.
She hunched one shoulder, twisted her head a little to that side, an evasive gesture he’d seen her use with her parents. “I suppose so. Maybe.”
“And she’s normal, of course. Not like me.”
“Please don’t be angry. You’ll find someone else.” The sunlight slitting through a crack in the boards drew a thin white bisecting line through her.
He had to get away. He stood up and stumbled over to the ladder that led down from the hayloft.
“Are you coming to Meeting tonight?” she asked brightly, as though nothing had happened, as though they were simply co-workers on the farm again.
And he realized that that was how it would have to be, that there was no escape from her, that he would have to see her every day, a cruel reminder. It seemed unbearable.
He swung himself onto the ladder without answering her and, his feet missing half the rungs, slid to the ground. Then he began to run, pieces of straw dripping from him, past his own house, around Johnson-Dene’s, around the longhouse where he heard Huallen’s voice saying to the children, “And the q is always followed by u.” It intensified his misery, hearing himself forever beyond those childhood lessons, knowing there was no learning that could educate away this pain.
