Unfit

by Karma Chesnut

  “Is all this really necessary?”

  “Everyone in the terminal ward has already been sterilized,” said Dr. Smith, “and as your wife explained it, the whole point of this is to put off your sterilization, right? If you go into the terminal ward with all your original parts, and someone, patient or keeper, finds out, let’s just say you won’t get through the day before they fix that for ya. So yes, all of this is very necessary.”

  John looked towards the door that led out to the terminal side of the asylum and his mind went back to the events of that morning, back to the senseless, unprovoked violence in the yard, back to the look on Laurence’s face. He could still feel the stain where Skinner had cleaned his knife on John’s shoulder, the way the dried blood had made the fabric stick to his skin, and John began to wonder if he would be able to see this plan out to the end.

  “I’ll be safe, right?” John asked aloud, more to himself than Dr. Smith.

  The knifer’s tone turned solemn for a moment, more serious than usual. “That part’s up to you,” he replied. “Once the keepers come for you, it’s out of my hands.”

  John lay in his bed in the recovery room. He wasn’t entirely sure what time it was. He guessed it was about four in the morning but had no way to know for sure. Wide awake, he stared up at the ceiling, his entire body jittery. The tiniest sound, every creak and groan, made his heart race, thinking the keepers had come for him.

  John closed his eyes but only saw Laurence glaring down on him, holding Skinner’s bloody knife over his head. What had he gotten himself into? Shaking his head as if to shake the image from his mind, John forced himself to think of something else, anything else.

  Then Morgan’s face came to view, her smile so clear in his mind he felt he could reach out and touch her face. Steadily, his pulse began to slow, and his muscles began to relax. He could do this. Nine months wasn’t so long in the grand scheme of things. He could do this.

  The first morning light was beginning to peak over the treetops, filling the recovery room with a soft pink glow. John had only managed to stay asleep for an hour or so before his anxiety had woken him.

  Still naked, John shivered. He hated how exposed and vulnerable he felt. He scanned the room and, to his relief, found his old jumpsuit folded on a chair by his bed, the journal resting on top. John quickly put his jumpsuit back on and, taking advantage of the light and looking for any available distraction, opened up the journal.

  Francis proposed the idea in the first place. He had found the ruins of a library that had existed in the city before the plague and re-habitation. The renovation teams wanted to throw them all out, convinced the Old World had nothing valuable to teach us. Most of the books had been burned or were damaged beyond repair. Francis saved what he could.

  He found an old book on human inheritance and thought it would be helpful. It talked about selective breeding and human pedigrees. It was such a beautifully simple idea. Cultivate and encourage the best traits of humanity.

  We gathered as many families as we could, but with only two generations, maybe three if we were lucky, to work with, the sample size wasn’t big enough. I told them over and over again there wasn’t enough information, but that was all there was. Loughlin and I studied their appearance, behavior, intelligence, athleticism, everything we could think of for a confirmation that it was all hereditary. And as far as we could tell, it was.

  It was the breakthrough that the Elders had been looking for. We could breed a better human. Someone strong, intelligent, healthy. In time, perhaps we could even eliminate sickness and disabilities. We could end suffering. The possibility beamed in front of us, and we wanted it. I wanted it.

  One question got in our way. How do we do it? Emerson was convinced it wouldn’t be enough to just encourage it, we had to find a way to enforce it. The Council agreed. And so, our theory became law. It’s an intoxicating feeling, to know you are making history.

  So, to anyone who may ever read this, it was all our fault.

  The door swung open and John quickly tucked the journal back into the waistband of his jumper.

  Two keepers now stood in the doorway—Peters and another man John didn’t recognize. The plan was finally being set in motion.

  “Stand up,” Keeper Peters commanded. “Follow us”

  John stood and walked out of the room and down the hall, Peters in front of him, the other keeper behind. Dr. Smith’s reminder to limp turned out to be unnecessary. The bandages chaffed horribly with each step, forcing John to walk with a bow-legged hobble just to keep from rubbing himself raw. They walked in silence, making their way towards the center of the asylum until they came to a large doorway. At least it used to be a doorway. Now the heavy metal doors hung from the one hinge, propped up against the walls for support. Beyond the doors, the walls were marked by a thick, crooked red line. There was another red line on the floor by their feet, marking the boundary between the temporary and the terminal wards. The keepers stopped and waited here, now flanking John on both sides.

  Another set of keepers appeared at the end of the hall and made their way towards them. Their uniforms were the same as all the other keepers John had seen so far, but they wore a red band around their upper arm. These were the keepers of the terminal ward; the men John would be taking orders from for the next nine months.

  “We have a new patient for ya,” the keeper to John’s right said and handed one of the new keepers an official-looking form. He was a tall man with dark hair and even darker eyes. A jagged scar ran from his temple down to his jaw. John immediately recognized Keeper Fisher from his first day at the asylum.

  Fisher briefly looked through the paperwork, then, turning to John said, “This is verbal confirmation that you—” he paused to recheck the name on the transfer form, “Jonathan Hunter, understand that, as of this moment, you are officially confined to the terminal ward. Say ‘yes’ if you understand.”

  “Yes,” John replied.

  “Any attempt to escape the terminal ward will result in your immediate execution. Say ‘yes’ if you understand.”

  “Yes,” he said again.

  Turning back to John’s now-former keepers, Fisher said, “We’ll take it from here.”

  Peters and the other keeper turned and walked away. Out of the corner of his eye, John glimpsed Peters looking back, and John swore there was an expression of remorse on his face,

  “Follow us.” John’s new keepers headed down the hall.

  But John hesitated. Frozen in place, he stared at the red line painted on the ground, unable to bring himself to step over it. Once he crossed, that would be it. There would be no going back.

  Think of Morgan, he told himself. Think of our baby. John took a deep breath, lifted his leg, and stepped over the line.

  The new keepers led John down a series of winding hallways. There were few to no windows and it grew darker and darker as they trekked deeper into the terminal ward, their path illuminated by flickering candles mounted to the walls. It became clear to John very quickly that this wing of the asylum had no working electricity whatsoever.

  He had never been in this wing of the terminal ward before and the hallway seemed to last forever as John passed dozens of rooms. The doors here had glass windows built in, and John could see that most of the rooms were empty, but as John looked to his right, he saw a fellow inmate through the window of the room. The stranger had been locked in, whether as punishment or by the whim of the keepers, John did not know. The man sat in the middle of the floor, staring at the door, and as John passed, the two made eye contact for just a split second. A moment later, a loud bang came from the room, followed by shrill screams. The screaming and banging continued as the man threw himself against the door again and again. John looked to the keepers, expecting them to turn back and check if the man was all right, but they continued forward undisturbed by the outburst.

  The keepers led John through the maze of hallways until they came to a room that looked remarkably like a sma
ller version of the room John and his fellow inmates had been processed in on their first day at the asylum. Dingy gray tiles covered the walls and the floor. There were no windows and the only furniture was a small table and chair in the middle of the room, where a third keeper waited for them.

  “Sit down,” Fisher said to John, pulling out the chair and beckoning John forward. John tentatively sat, uneasiness building in his stomach.

  “Where do you think?” Fisher asked one of the other keepers.

  “Arm should do just fine.”

  The second keeper grabbed John’s arm, pinning it against the table. John looked from one keeper to the other, back and forth, completely bewildered.

  “We have a little tradition here in the terminal ward,” Fisher explained. “My first day on the job, one of the patients decided he didn’t like the way I looked. He got ahold of a razor blade much like this one.” He pulled a razor blade out of his pocket, the sharp edge glinting in the candlelight. John instinctively pulled his exposed arm back towards his body, but the keeper’s grip was firm. “The second I turned my back, he attacked me. Gave me this pretty souvenir.” Fisher ran his finger down the side of his face along the scar.

  He lowered the edge of the razor towards John’s forearm. John fought against the keeper’s grip, but Fisher held the razor up to John’s neck threateningly. “I would hold very still if I were you.”

  Pressing the blade against the flesh of John’s arm, small beads of blood appeared as he let out a gasp of pain.

  “You see, the poor guy was a schizophrenic,” Fisher said, hunched over John’s arm. “Had voices talking to him and everything.”

  John closed his eyes and swallowed hard to suppress his screams of pain as Fisher pressed the blade deeper into his skin and dragged it across his arm. The keeper holding John’s arm down was using both hands now to pin him into place, and another had grabbed John’s free arm and was twisting it painfully behind his back. John struggled to free himself as the blade kept digging into his flesh over and over and over again.

  “If I had known the guy was a paranoid psycho,” Fisher explained as he continued to work, each cut feeling as though it was setting John’s arm on fire, “I might have behaved a little differently around him, been a little more careful. So, to save my fellow keepers any future trouble, I returned the favor by using the same razor blade to carve ‘schizophrenic’ into the bastard’s chest, so everyone would know exactly what he was.”

  The cutting finally stopped as Fisher stood to admire his work. In bright crimson letters, the word “UNFIT” glistened across the inside of John’s left forearm.

  Fisher smiled. “And now everyone will know what you are, too.”

  The two keepers lifted John roughly by the elbows and pushed him into the corner, instructing him to change as they threw a red jumpsuit at him. John stripped out of his old gray jumpsuit, pulling the journal out of his waistband and tucking it under his injured arm, careful to keep it out of the keepers’ sight. Naked, John reached for the red jumpsuit, and the keepers began to snicker to themselves, no doubt at the sight of his bandaged groin. John didn’t care, though. After all, the joke was on them. He turned his back to them and stepped into the red jumpsuit, using his free arm to pull it up over his shoulders.

  They led John out of the room and into the corridors of the terminal ward. It was late afternoon now and patients freely wandered the hallway.

  Once inside the terminal ward, the keepers turned to leave.

  “Which room am I staying in?” John asked.

  “Pick one,” one of the keepers shouted back, their laughter echoing as they disappeared from sight.

  His arm still bleeding, John pressed it against his chest to try and stop the flow, and he could feel the blood soaking through his clothes as he staggered down the hall. The other patients stared at him. Maybe because he was new, maybe because they recognized him from the other day, or maybe because he was bleeding everywhere. John wasn’t sure which it was.

  Something about this hall seemed familiar to John. All the hallways probably looked alike, but there was something about this one that he recognized.

  “John?” a voice whispered.

  Across the way, Buck’s head peeked out from inside one of the rooms, beckoning him forward.

  As soon as John slipped inside, a small voice cried out, “My friend!”

  Tim enthusiastically threw his arms around John’s neck. “Good to see you, friend,” he beamed.

  “Hey, bud,” John replied. “It’s good to see you, too.” And John was surprised at how genuinely happy he was to see Tim. His sweet smile was a small beam of light in what was otherwise a living hell.

  “Let me take a look at that,” Buck said, pulling John’s arm towards him. “We’ll have to keep an eye on this for the next couple of weeks to make sure it doesn’t get infected. They don’t always clean the razor blade between brandings.”

  “I didn’t realize you were a doctor,” John said.

  “You don’t need a medical degree to know how to use a bandage. The knifer is the only doctor on-site and he’s always too busy to treat us terminals, so I convinced a few of the keepers to keep the supply closet unlocked now and again.”

  “Okay-kay, John? Got owies?” Tim asked, his eyebrows furrowed in concern.

  “Yeah,” John said, his arm still throbbing. “I got an owie.”

  “It’s just his brand is all,” Buck said to Tim.

  For the first time, John noticed, peeking up from the top of Buck’s shirt, the raised pink lines that began at the base of his neck and disappeared under his collar. John wondered if the keepers had pinned him, an old man, down the same way. Then again, Buck had never said exactly how long he had been in the asylum. Maybe he was a young man when he had received his branding.

  Then the scene in John’s mind changed, and the unwelcomed picture of the same keepers holding Tim down came into view, his sweet little voice crying out in confusion at why they were hurting him, and John scanned Tim’s tiny frame, wondering where the keepers had cut him.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” Buck asked, pulling a clean bandage from his pocket.

  “No,” John replied. He didn’t want to lie to Buck, but he couldn’t tell him the truth either.

  Not at all thrown by John’s bluntness, Buck immediately dropped the issue. “I never got a chance to properly thank you,” he said. “That was a truly incredible thing you did for Tim back there.”

  “I only did what any decent person would have done,” said John

  “Then I suppose there aren’t many decent people left in Haven.”

  “We can both look after him now.”

  “You got off lucky,” Buck said as he wrapped John’s arm with the swiftness and efficiency of a man who had done it too many times. “Five letters isn’t so bad. There was a time when the keepers would carve out much longer words into the patients. I once treated a man who had ‘imbecile’ carved into his back. It was spelled wrong, ironically. But the wound got infected and the man died shortly after, so I suppose it all worked out in the end.”

  John couldn’t get used to the casual way everyone in the asylum talked about death, as if it was easy and commonplace. For the first time since he arrived, John wondered what would be said if he were to die here, if anyone would think twice about him. It seemed the only way to be remembered around here was as a cautionary tale on the importance of proper rope measurements and spelling.

  As Buck continued to bandage John’s arm, John did not notice the pair of keepers that walked by the open door or the way they seemed to be watching his every move. He also did not notice as one keeper leaned over to the other and whispered, “Make sure you tell Dr. Loughlin that Jonathan Hunter has been moved to the terminal ward.”

  Katherine moved into Morgan’s, or rather John’s, apartment shortly after the visit with the medicine woman. After everything that had happened, Morgan had been concerned Katherine would decide she no longer wanted Mo
rgan’s help, that she was better off on her own than trusting the judgment of a woman who had unknowingly married and been impregnated by an unfit. But the next day, Katherine showed up at Morgan’s door with a big smile on her face and a bag in each hand.

  The success of the first phase of Morgan’s and John’s plan did little to relieve Morgan’s ever-growing anxiety. Getting him transferred had been the easy part, even though it had required her to bribe the knifer yet again. Between the two bribes, now totaling two thousand credits, Morgan wasn’t sure if she had enough left to live off of, let alone support her and John when he got back from the asylum as she had hoped. She told herself that was a problem for another day. Best to focus on the problem at hand.

  That had become Morgan’s new motto—focus on the problem right in front of you. Everything with the pregnancy and the asylum had become a waiting game now that John was successfully in the terminal ward. Not knowing what was happening or if John was safe was driving Morgan insane. Katherine’s case had proven to be a welcomed distraction from everything else in Morgan’s life that felt so hopelessly out of her control. But this, Katherine’s fight, this was something Morgan was determined was going to stay completely and utterly in her control. Problems like managing her pregnancy by herself and making it through the next nine months without her family or the Council noticing her growing belly would have to wait until another day.

  Still, the possibility of coming out on the other end of all of this with her family still intact bolstered Morgan’s spirits. It seemed to lift Katherine’s too. “If you can figure out how to keep your child against impossible odds, then you can figure out a way to help me keep mine too!” she kept saying.

  Unfortunately, Morgan was afraid Katherine’s case was hitting a dead end. All of their late-night researching sessions turned out nothing useful. There were no loopholes, no ambiguous language she could exploit in their favor. At the end of the day, she was a low-class nobody fighting against a prestigious Northridge family. All the odds were stacked against them and Morgan knew it.