Q

by Christina Dalcher

  Freddie watches me open the envelope a second time and slide out the most damning page, folding it into thirds, and then into thirds again before tucking it up my sleeve. “Don’t say anything about this,” I whisper to her. “Not to anyone.”

  She nods.

  And the door creaks open.

  I’m going to be caught.

  Freddie starts crying, putting the waterworks into full gear. I can hear Oma through the phone, telling her everything’s going to be fine.

  “Sorry,” Underwood says and slips out again.

  She’s smart, my daughter.

  In the seconds before Martha Underwood comes back into her office for the final time, I lick the gummed strip on the envelope, press it shut, and arrange it cockeyed on the desk. Freddie tells her great-grandmother a tearful goodbye.

  “I’m sorry,” Underwood says, standing next to me. “It’s always hard to hear bad news.”

  Yes. It is.

  On the way back to my apartment, after hugging Freddie and feeding her another set of reassurances that I won’t be able to fulfill, I study the barred windows on the dormitory building. If what I’ve read is right, soon there won’t be a need for bars. Or state schools or yellow buses or Q scores. Within a few generations, everyone will be perfect.

  The unanswerable question I ask myself when I enter the faculty building is whether I would have believed Oma if I hadn’t seen the contents of that envelope.

  Fifty-Six

  Everything about the puzzle that’s been slowly piecing itself together is wrong: the shape of its parts, the ugly picture beginning to form, the sinister sounds of its individual words, the numbers of Q scores, test grades, colored armbands on children.

  The apartment is empty when I return. Only a note from Lissa and a heavy book with generic brown library binding are on the kitchen table. Read p. 460, the note says. Back soon.

  I open the book to the page Lissa marked and start to read. The section header is long and rambling, but its message is simple.

  Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders’ Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population.

  There’s an audible gasp, and I realize the sound is coming from me. I reread the second part of the title: Cutting off the defective germ-plasm in the human population.

  Defective.

  Germ.

  Human.

  Cutting off.

  I’m expecting to see a list of names with “Grand Dragon” or “Imperial Goblin” next to them, those ridiculous ranks of America’s premier racist club, the Ku Klux Klan. That, maybe, I could swallow. It would taste like shit, but I could handle it. I’m not expecting three out of the five committee members of the American Breeders’ Association’s eugenic section to be medical doctors.

  “Jesus,” I say to the walls, and I let my eyes roam over the page, reading aloud. “Doctor. Professor. Judge. Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton. Columbia.” All men, of course, except for the single female listed next to Woman’s Viewpoint. She was Mrs. So-and-So from Hoboken.

  I turn to the front pages of the book. Lissa’s copy is old, yellowed with time, and frayed at the edges. The article on page 460 is relatively short, only one of thirty-some papers delivered at the First International Eugenics Congress held in the summer of 1912. Not in the backwoods of some underpopulated town in the middle of nowhere. In London. I scan the table of contents, my mouth dropping at every fresh theme: education before procreation, new social consciousness, healthy sane families, the influence of race on history. It reads like something from the Third Reich, but it isn’t. The authors are French, English, Italian, Belgian.

  Eight of them are American.

  My fingers fly through the brittle pages, hurrying back to the chapter where I began. There’s another list, ten lines of blurred, black ink headed by a single word:

  Remedies

  Number eight, unlucky and unhappy and foul-smelling number eight, stands out.

  I’m not a sociologist. I don’t know shit about economics or labor forces or how to manage population dynamics. I know, though, about animal shelters. Any mother with a pair of young girls dying for a puppy does.

  Euthanasia.

  Like an unwanted dog. I think I say it out loud—I don’t know.

  The world begins a slow spin, gaining momentum. It’s the feeling of being drunk and high and sick all at the same time. I fall back, but I don’t sink deeper into the chair. I go straight to the hard tile floor of the kitchen, breaking the fall with my head.

  Fifty-Seven

  THEN:

  Malcolm wouldn’t have any of it. Between the threat of fleas and the inconvenience of twice-daily walks, he had zero enthusiasm in us getting a dog. I took Anne and Freddie to the local SPCA anyway, behind their father’s back.

  This was a major life mistake.

  Inside the barn-sized building were rows and rows of kennels, each one the temporary—and, in some cases, extremely temporary—home of an animal no one wanted. While Anne and Freddie ran up and down the corridor in search of fluffy little beasts with big eyes and paws they hadn’t yet grown into, I counted the pit bulls, the thin hunting hounds that had been turned in (or—more often—discovered starving in the woods) when they lost their scent or their sight, the street dogs with ribs rippling underneath flesh. There were scabrous old Labs, once-handsome German shepherds with eyes that said, Don’t kick me. Please don’t kick me, when my shoes clicked on the concrete floor. There were barks and yelps and whines. One sign said Queenie. Twelve years. No further information available.

  Queenie. Someone had named this dog Queenie once.

  Queenie had been deposed.

  “There aren’t any puppies, Mom,” Anne said. “How come there aren’t any puppies?” She had gone from gung ho to bored in the space of a few minutes, finally stomping out to the entry room, where she sat with her arms crossed and a frown as long as a rainy Saturday afternoon plastered on her face. “Not one single good dog.”

  She was right. There weren’t any good dogs, not the kinds of dogs people wanted. I took Freddie’s hand and led her away from the world-weary—and, apparently, kick-weary—shepherd.

  I should have left sooner.

  A young woman came in through a door at the end of the corridor, a door marked Staff Only. She flipped the latch on Queenie’s kennel and clicked a lead onto the dog’s collar. “Ready for a walk, girl?”

  Queenie, despite her tired legs, looked ready. You could see it in her eyes.

  “Sometimes,” the woman said, “I hate my job.”

  So get another one, I thought. What I said was, “You don’t like dogs?”

  “You kidding? I love dogs. What I don’t like is that we just got ten more in this morning. Ain’t no room; ain’t no money. Ain’t never enough money. And Queenie’s been here the longest.”

  I watched them leave, and I saw Queenie’s whole life in a flash. She was a newly whelped pup, suckling at her mother’s teat, nestled together with brothers and sisters. She was rolling in grass as high as her little legs, warming herself in the sun. She was playing with a ball, with a squeak toy, with one of those hard rubber things you stick peanut butter in. Her head out the car window, she was tasting air as it whistled by. She was curled in a corner, head down, knowing she shouldn’t have peed on her master’s rug, knowing she couldn’t help it. She was being walked into the sterile, bleach-scented SPCA, sitting obediently while forms were filled out, signed. She was watching out the window as the young man who once named her Queenie drove away.

  I couldn’t cry on the drive home. And I was harsh with Anne, telling her to shut up after she’d complained about all the sucky dogs I took her to see. Roads and trees blurred together as I steered through late-afternoon traffic. All I really wanted to do was howl and scream at the humans around me. But I didn’t do that, not with the girls in the backseat. I waited until we pulled
into our driveway, and I made some excuse before running to my bathroom, turning the tap on full, and bawling until I didn’t have any tears left.

  Fifty-Eight

  “Slight concussion, but I think you’ll be all right,” a voice says. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, only that it’s soft, and that it rounds off the edges of the pain on the left side of my head. For an amount of time I can’t measure, all I know is the voice.

  New sensations come in, slowly, one following the other. Something like ice close to my temple. The pressure of fingers opening my eye wide. Another eye, only an inch from mine. Girlish sounds, thick with the strains of Appalachian English, worrying, ordering me to lie still and hush.

  Concussion or not, I need to move, and I need to speak. Ruby Jo’s right hand disagrees, keeping me down on the sofa while Lissa talks, telling me what she believes. “Yeah, we’ve been tracking the Fitter Family assholes for a while now. Trying to find out where the money comes from, who they’re backing for seats in the legislature, what their plans are. Bonita Hamilton’s been on them like flies on shit, and all we come up with is a fistful of nothing. But she’s got a theory.”

  “Eugenics,” I say.

  “Bingo.”

  “Most people don’t know about it,” Lissa says. “I taught history for almost thirty years and never saw a textbook mentioning the Human Betterment Foundation or the Eugenics Research Association. Not a single one. Like it’s our dirty little secret, an embarrassment we think we can get away with not talking about by sweeping it all under a rug.”

  She boils water on the small stove and pours a double dose of coffee grounds into the filter-lined funnel, while I listen to facts, numbers, the movement of oodles of money from Progressives like Rockefeller and Carnegie and Harriman, the Ivy League scientists who mangled data.

  “It was huge,” Lissa says. “And really got rolling in 1912 with that paper.” She nods toward the kitchen table.

  “It says—” I begin, my voice shaking. “It says euthanasia.”

  “We don’t think the FF will go as far as a lethal solution,” Lissa says. “They didn’t try it a century ago. Not here, anyway.”

  “That’s reassuring,” I say.

  Ruby Jo frowns. “They did so. My granny said they did all kinds of things. Most of it was passive. You know, not feeding a baby, accidentally forgetting some old man’s antibiotics if he came down with an infection. She had a million stories from working in the town hospital. But, yeah, Lissa’s right. They had other ways. I think if the institution my granny was in hadn’t closed down, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

  We all look at her. Even me, although it hurts to move my head.

  “What?” I say.

  Ruby Jo puts on a sour face. “Don’t you get it? I just said I almost wasn’t. Like, at all.”

  I do get it, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to get it in the same way I don’t want to get leprosy or syphilis or cancer.

  Ruby Jo looks us over and shakes her mop of red hair. “Remember how I told you about Oliver Wendell Holmes? There’s something else he said. He said that if we had laws to cover mandatory vaccinations, we could have laws to tie up your Fallopian tubes. And that’s what they near about did to my granny back in 1957. Someone figured out they didn’t need to kill anyone. They just needed to stop them from breeding.”

  Lissa pipes up. “And it went on for decades, right up until 1979.”

  I fight my way to my feet, taking the folded paper from my sleeve. “No. You’re wrong. It’s still going on.”

  If there’s a thin strand of light in this room where Ruby Jo sits lost in thought and Lissa presses a cool cloth to my head, it’s the documents I found earlier this afternoon. None of them points to a solution as final as the eugenics committee’s proposal of elimination. This is when I push the women away and go back to the kitchen table; I page through the appendix of Lissa’s book. My eyes float down to number nine on the list and I will them to focus, concussion or no concussion.

  What I read in Martha Underwood’s office fits perfectly with the ninth remedy proposed by the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders’ Association:

  Neo-Malthusian doctrine, artificial interference to prevent conception.

  Ruby Jo has been quiet, staring out of our barred window toward the larger building across the grounds, and this time I’m the one asking if she’s all right.

  “Sure. Just thinking there ain’t enough room for all of them,” Ruby Jo says without turning. “The dormitories are large enough to handle a few hundred boys and girls each, but not much more. And I haven’t seen any signs of construction on the grounds of State School 46. Then again, it’s a big country. They could always build new schools. Or—”

  “Or not. They could stifle population growth,” I say, smoothing out the page I stole, closing my eyes and trying to picture the other sheets of paper, recalling the salient terms. “But everything I saw smacks of sterilization—permanent contraception.”

  Lissa nods, expressionless, waiting for me to go on. The hardness in her eyes tells me she can handle it.

  I hope I can. I take a deep breath, slide a sheet of notepaper toward me on the table, and draw a line vertically from top to bottom. In the first column I write the heading Fertile Stage; in the second, Pre-Fertile Stage. “Premenstrual girls are in the second category,” I explain. “Everyone else is in the first.”

  Again, a nod. Lissa gets it.

  The second part is trickier to explain, so I simplify. “If you want to prevent conception in fertile women, you have two main choices: surgical or chemical. Surgical is riskier—not that I think anyone gives a shit, but they might care about the cost and logistics of opening up millions of abdomens just to tamper with a pair of tubes. Chemical sterilization is easier. Less risk, less time, less cost. And it’s just as effective.”

  Lissa wants to know how it works. I’m not sure I want to tell her. The thought of someone pushing a bunch of quinacrine hydrochloride through my cervix with the intention of burning my insides is too gruesome to articulate. But I tell her anyway. “The idea is to initiate sclerosis in the uterus.” I draw her a quick sketch of an isosceles triangle with the acute angle pointing down and circle the upper two angles. “Here and here,” I say, tapping the right and left sides with my pencil. “So you end up with scar tissue forming—”

  “At the juncture where the Fallopian tubes enter,” Ruby Jo interrupts from the window. “It’s basically a barrier method. But a permanent one.”

  Lissa is still all business. “Side effects?”

  I blow out a massive puff of air. “Cancer. Ectopic pregnancy. Uterine damage. Central nervous system fuckups. Burning in your vagina. The stuff was banned after a few test subjects suffered uterine perforations and went into septic shock.” The thought makes me shiver. “Not a nice way to die.”

  “Reversible?” Lissa says. She’s gone a shade paler now.

  “Not without invasive surgery.” I tap the left and right edges again. “And you’d have to undo the scarring on both sides because you can’t predict which ovary is going to produce the egg that ends up fertilized. But yeah, it’s technically reversible. So is messing around with gene drives, I guess, but that’s newer research.” I explain, as simply as I can, the technology behind altering trait transmission from parent to offspring through genetic engineering. I don’t add that there’s plenty of room for screwing it up, especially when I remember Alex’s paperwork noted the insertion method as “TBD.” It might as well have said “No fucking clue yet.”

  By the time I’m done walking Lissa and Ruby Jo through selective gene propagation and DNA tampering, through the manipulation of genetic patterns that can be passed down from one generation to the next, it’s four o’clock.

  Time to go see Alex. Time to find out what I have to trade for a ticket out of State School 46.

  “You have to find a way, Elena,” Lissa says. “I’d do it myself”—she looks down at the flat front of
her uniform—“but something tells me you’ve got better odds. I’ll stay here and write up something for you to take with you.”

  When I leave, she’s at the table drafting notes, her mouth moving and vocalizing as she works through our talk.

  Fifty-Nine

  I reach Alex’s apartment door feeling more like Mata Hari than a demoted biology teacher in her early forties. Ruby Jo straightened out my hair, unleashing it from a ponytail holder and arranging waves of blond over my shoulders, fixing them so they lay in long curls above my breasts. One look in the mirror and all I could see were those horrible Q tails waiting to trap some unsuspecting failure and whisk it into state school hell.

  I’m hoping the curls and the breasts and the makeup will be enough.

  A girl in my fourth-grade class was the first person to tell me about sex. She had a big sister who had filled her in on everything.

  “And the boy gets all hard and then he sticks it in you,” she said, as we nestled into sleeping bags in her parents’ den. I went wide-eyed at this revelation. “And then he shoots this stuff out and it’s all over. No big deal. Except you don’t want to get pregnant.”

  To me, it sounded like an enormous deal. It sounded disgusting and terrifying at the same time. “Has your sister done it?” I said, not really wanting to know, but this seemed like the grown-up thing to ask, something she would like.

  “Not yet. But two of her friends almost did. They’re fifteen.”

  That night I lay in my sleeping bag, unable to stop thinking about this new, unexplored territory called sex. My friend told me where they put it, and I let my hands find that place, careful to not rustle the sheets in case she woke up and caught me. Certain things, like teaching yourself about sex for the first time, are better done without interruptions.