Hadrian's Rage

by Patricia-Marie Budd

  “Please,” a voice begs. “Please let us in.”

  Wolf’s head drops in shame. He can’t even bring himself to look up at this week’s latest starved and desperate refugees begging for mercy and salvation inside Hadrian’s borders.

  “Please!” The voice is so desperate Wolf glances up momentarily, regretting instantly this fatal mistake. It is the rhetoric drilled into every detritus fisherman’s brain from day one until the day he or she dies. (No one has ever lived long enough to retire.) Never look at them; never engage them. If you do, you will fall prey to sympathy, and Hadrian can’t afford to extend any aid to the outside world!

  Wolf tries to warn them off. “The water patrol guard will be returning shortly.” The pleading voice, he notes, is that of a dark-skinned older man. Probably African, Wolf muses. For the love of Hadrian, Wolf spits, he looks to be fifty or sixty. Wolf suddenly considers as he shakes his head, He’s probably no older than me. (Wolf is a mere thirty-three years old.) Fuck, who am I to judge? Wolf considers. No doubt I look fifty years old or more myself. The years have not been kind to men and women like Wolf. Age lines crease his face, his skin is tanned to thick leather; his work, however, has given him a very strong, muscular body. Even so, a small belly protrudes, from the overconsumption of beer and junk munch. The beer medicates the psychological pain, and the junk munch, well, junk munch is simply more affordable than healthy food. And although every home in Hadrian is built to accommodate home gardens, either in a yard or on the roof, the twelve-hour shift work, coupled with the long bus ride to the docks, followed by an even longer boat ride to the piers and back again, can make Wolf’s work day anywhere from fourteen to eighteen hours, so Wolf has little, if any, time for gardening. And since his job is so low paying, Wolf, like many other detritus fishermen, fights for the luxury of working overtime on his days off in the hopes of a little extra pay.

  “Dear God, please,” the older man’s voice rasps. “Help us. We can’t go home.”

  Wolf quickly looks down at his rubber steel-toed boots. Sludge has stained the right toe. He spits on it and tries to rub it clean on the leg of his coveralls. “They’ll kill you,” Wolf warns. “You’re too close to the pier.”

  “They’ll kill us if we go home. We’re gay,” the man begs.

  They’ll fire me if I help you! Wolf reminds himself. Who knows? It might even be punishable with expulsion. Would I drink Black Death? He wonders. Squeezing his eyes tightly, Wolf desperately fights back painful memories. Every level one DF has a story like his, and every DF hates to talk about it. Wolf is aided in his attempts to forget by the return of the older man’s raspy voice.

  “We had to leave because the penalty for gay sex is death. They will stone us if we go back!”

  Wolf shudders. These words, this very real threat to their existence, is one with which he can relate. Leona, he groans inwardly. The thought of Black Death followed so quickly by the mention of a death penalty made it impossible for Wolf not to remember her. Leona was thirty-one, he nineteen. Long black hair, hazel eyes, rich caramel-brown skin, lush lips, and breasts he could hide his face in. They had met at the Midwest Gate where both were stationed. Wolf, like all eighteen-year-old citizens of Hadrian, had been conscripted into military service on the first Monday following the last day of high school. Hadrian’s government dictates that all Hadrian’s citizens serve in the army in order for all its citizens to gain a clear understanding of the dangers threatening them from the outside world. Not everyone, Wolf grimly reminds himself. A very lucky few win academic or sports scholarships, exempting them from military duty. These fortunate individuals are deemed Hadrian’s intellectual and physical elite. Each of Hadrian’s eight unis offers one full academic scholarship and one full sports scholarship per annum. The lucky recipient of such a prestigious award must maintain a 75 percent average if a sports beneficiary or 85 percent for the academic scholarship. Failure to maintain this standard means a loss of scholarship and immediate conscription into the army.

  Wolf had not been so lucky as to win a scholarship. His 88 percent average was insufficient, though high enough to ensure entrance into the uni of his choice after his years of service. Wolf had planned to go on to college after the army, until he met Leona.

  Leona de Bruijn. Wolf was still a virgin when they had met. They had fallen so deeply in love they had even plotted out how they might be able to escape Hadrian. In the end, they realized the only thing to do was wait until Wolf was twenty-one, and then they would simply have to walk up to the gate and ask for it to be opened. But that was still two years away and, although the couple had been circumspect, they had been found out—caught in the act. Leona was exiled instantly by her commanding officer. She chose Black Death. Wolf, being but nineteen, was shipped 100 kilometers east to the Midwest Reeducation Military Facility. All members of the military discovered as strai are sent there. The military feels it best that it run its own reeducation camp since all the strai sent there are trained soldiers, thus their potential to become dangerous foes is too great. Wolf had heard that the military reeducation camp was the least abusive of all the camps. This notion always causes Wolf to shake his head in wonder. Perhaps that was the reason why he was able to survive over two years inside that prison. Wolf had only succumbed to the denial of his sexual orientation a few days before his twenty-first birthday when he knew his only other choices would be exile or Black Henbane. The years spent inside a re-ed camp had taught him to give up on death, but they never helped him deny who he was or made him choose to be gay. It is hardly a choice to deny who one is, Wolf thinks. And these poor buggers can’t do it any more than me. Wolf looks up and holds the old man’s eyes in his. For a brief moment, their spirits unite. “All right!” he shouts back. “I’ll talk to my foreman. But you gotta move back a good ten kilometers, or they’ll shoot you on sight.”

  “How will we know? How will we know?” Their pleading becomes even more desperate.

  Wolf spits. Taking a small knife out of his pocket (also fished out of the Bay), Wolf opens it and stabs it into the pier. “Back off ten kilometers from this point. That way, if they let you in, they’ll know how to find you.”

  “How long?”

  Wolf grimaces, spitting once before lying. “Two days, three at most.” More like hours, he shouts inside his mind.

  The small boat heeds Wolf’s warning and begins to back away from the pier. Soon it is out of sight. Knowing what he is about to do is utter folly, Wolf feels obliged to try at least. He has, after all, given his word.

  *****

  Matthew Molloy pulls his fingers through his dirty, matted red hair, ripping through a few knots in the process. Shaking what he is allowing to turn into dreadlocks, Matthew gets rid of most of the wet grime that had settled there from a long day of slugging through the slimy muck of the Bay. After zipping off his overcoat and kicking off thigh high water boots, Matthew steps out of his coveralls. Turning to toss them in the laundry bin, he spies a lone figure leaning against the pier railing, looking out towards the shore.

  “Will that fucking boat ever get here?” Wolfgang mutters.

  “Hey, Wolf,” Matthew observes, “you’re cleaned up awful early; I hope it’s not a medical appointment.” Matthew works the morning shift, which overlaps the evening shift by an hour. To see Wolf standing and waiting for the boat home when his team works nights is odd.

  Wolf spits between his teeth into the water. “Nope,” Wolf grumbles. “The fucker fired me.”

  “What?” Matt is truly dismayed. Everyone knows Wolf to be a hard case, but he always does his job with no slacking. “Why would Malco fire you?”

  “Because he’s a fucking dick; that’s why.”

  Matthew crosses over to Wolf and puts a hand on the older man’s shoulder. “I know you’re pissed, man, but come on; what happened?”

  “It’s simple; he called me a dirty strai, threatened to expose me, and when I told him he couldn’t get me exiled anymore, he decided the next best t
hing was to fire me.”

  “But,” Matthew stammers, “he can’t do that, can he?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Wolf grimaces, “he can and he did. There ain’t no law protecting us, you know. Just because the government passed a law saying it won’t exile us or try to force-feed strai rats henbane anymore doesn’t mean we can’t still be legally fired just for being straight!”

  “Yeah, but,” Matthew feels almost stupid saying this, “you did the re-ed thing, too, didn’t you?”

  “Fuck, yeah, I did that shit. Fat lot a good it did, too, except scare the emotional shit out of me for life.” Scowling now, Wolf adds, “You, too; don’t fucking pretend otherwise, Matty, me lad. Me little paddle me backside leprechaun.”

  Matthew had confided in Wolf shortly after taking on this job. He told the older man about Gideon Weller’s treatment and that horrible day he had suffered a second paddling, by Gideon Weller’s hand, and his having passed out mid-beating. Although he never saw it, he was told how the paddle dripped blood when the vicious beating was over. “Don’t—” Nearing tears, Matthew barely manages to hold them back. “I meant, well, he can’t claim you’re still straight, not after graduating re-ed and all.”

  “He says I confessed—fuck,” Wolf mutters. “I almost practically did.” Seeing deep concern in Matthew’s eyes, having mentored the youth when he first came to the docks to work, Wolf softens some and explains. “There was a boat of refugees, a small group of gay men. Fuck!” Near exasperation, Wolf utters “fuck” with a guttural grunt. “Ten of them—there were only ten of them. They had escaped persecution, I don’t even know from what fucking country. They said if forced to go back, they’d be stoned. In their country, being gay is punishable by death. I guess, in those countries, they bury the poor fuckers up to their chests and then pelt them with rocks until rescued by death.”11

  Matthew shudders. “I’d rather drink henbane.”

  “Yeah, that sounds more merciful, doesn’t it?”

  The acerbic slurring slaps Matthew as if he were to blame. “Gee, Wolf, come on.”

  “I’m sorry, kid; this whole thing’s got me messed-up in the head, a real mind fuck. I have no fucking idea what I’m gonna do now. It’s hard enough getting hired as a re-ed, but to be a fired re-ed, fired for being straight—I might as well drink the fucking henbane anyway.”

  “Tell me what you said—everything, exactly like it happened.”

  Matthew’s earnest plea makes Wolf feel compelled to comply. “I felt something for these men, you know, living a similar sort of persecution. I figured, ‘Why the fuck not? They’re gay, there’s only ten of ’em, and shit, it’s not like the country’s busting at the seams with people like the rest of the planet,’ so I took their petition to Malco. I thought he might listen, talk to bigwigs, maybe do something to help them.” Sighing now, Wolf continues, “I sure as hell never expected what happened. Next thing I know, he’s spitting in my face all kinds of rhetoric about population control, diseases of the outside world, and they’re not really gay but a bunch of fucking strai liars trying to play on our sympathies to get inside our borders.” Then, shaking his head in dismay, Wolf cuts his story short. “I don’t know what the fuck was said after that except a bunch of yelling and him calling me every fucking het’ro slur he could muster, and he threatened to expose me. He even blinked open his voc call display so I could watch him place the call. That’s when I told him to go right ahead, that they don’t exile heterosexuals anymore.” Sighing deeply, Wolf concludes, “He took that as a confession and fired me on the spot for being straight.”

  “Well,” Matthew responds confidently, “I’m gonna help you get your job back.”

  “How?” Matthew’s assertion is so strong Wolf is almost inclined to believe him. Cynicism, however, quickly quells any stirrings of hope.

  “You remember that kid, Todd Middleton?”

  “Yeah, the b-ball star.”

  “And a confessed strai. I was in re-ed with him. I met his father and his papa at his funeral.”

  “Middleton’s?”

  “No, fuck, I mean Hunter’s—that Hunter kid that killed him.”

  “Hunter?” The name comes out in a whisper. Understanding begins to dawn. “You met the big guy, Geoffrey Hunter?” Wolf allows some feeling of hope to prevail. “You think…you think he might help…might help me?”

  “Well, I’m gonna fucking try and ask him,” Matthew asserts with conviction.

  Too easily swayed by bitterness, Wolf spits out, “They won’t even let you talk to him.”

  “I’ll tell ’em I knew Todd Middleton; that’ll get his attention. I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, fuck, why not? You try, why not? Try for me, kid. It probably won’t work, but I appreciate you trying.”

  “It’ll work,” Matthew reassuringly promises. “It’ll work.”

  A horn sounds off, signaling the arrival of the return ferry. Wolf offers the youth an appreciative nod, clasps Matthew’s shoulder, and then playfully shoves his young friend towards the boat. They ascend the ramp together, both men almost smiling.

  *****

  10 https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-buzz/adidas-creates-

  a-shoe-made-from-illegal-fishing-171835933.html

  11 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/21/

  gay-teen-stoned-somalia-sodomy_n_2916655.html

  Salve!

  Discrimination in the Workplace

  HNN—Melissa Eagleton Reporting

  As many of you are aware, there is an ongoing debate regarding the treatment of the reeducation class in the workplace. Those who graduate from reeducation often find themselves working in less desirable positions, the least of which is the lowly one of the detritus fisherman. These men and women toil endlessly to clean Hudson Bay by retrieving reusable wastes and disposing of toxins pulled from the heavily polluted waters. Stats indicate that at least 65 percent of all detritus fishermen are re-ed. This, of course, is due to Hadrian’s previous education policy that denied re-eds uni entrance. At the request of the Dean of Augustus Uni, the policy was revised after President Stiles signed the bill making heterosexuality legal. This once fine institution has suffered greatly due to the stigma of the nuclear attack against that city on that fateful day of 6-13—Ironically—the uni’s decision to be inclusive of heterosexuals has hindered the uni’s growth, which is now associated with nuclear radiation and—and—rampant—heterosexual orgies.

  Excuse this divergence as the focus of tonight’s Salve! is workplace discrimination. While many argue that no such discrimination exists, members of the re-ed class, feeling emboldened by President Stiles’s recent change in laws regarding heterosexuality, have come forth to register complaints. Pazima Zulu, Quadrant Four’s Ombudsman spokeswoman, has reported a significant increase in complaints from re-eds employed as detritus fishermen. Quadrants Four and One, as you know, are the home to the majority of our re-ed class as, besides Antinous City, the majority of detritus fishery factories are housed nearest to the Hudson Bay waters. Zulu believes our re-ed citizens, especially detritus fishermen, need greater protection under the law. One recommendation she makes is that management, especially of the detritus fisheries industry, undergo sensitivity training to better help employers understand the individuals who work in one of our most dangerous industries. “Not only do these workers suffer from numerous medical issues due to the exposure to chemical pollutants, they also have to incur discrimination on a daily basis. Even after having been reeducated, many of them still suffer the stigma of being considered straight.” Her reasoning is sound a—I’m sorry?—Yes—I said, yes!

  Humph. I’ve been asked to remind our viewers that all of Hadrian’s citizens are employed—but no one wants to be forced to work alongside heterosexuals—which is—understandable. Employers simply ask that you use common sense and not reveal any unseemly attractions to persons of the opposite sex. Individuals are urged to repress offensive sexual inclinations. If you do not act upon repugnant desires,
you will have no issues to deal with at work.

  Va—

  I’m sorry—it is also important to remember—What?—Heterosexuals are—are—dangerous members of society—if you think—no—if you believe—a coworker might be—strai—report him—to your employer immediately.

  Vale!

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