by D. J. Molles
As though they could really do anything else.
As though if Walt decided to do something else with his life besides farming, he wouldn’t live the rest of his life broke and hungry, relying on Fed handouts simply to subsist.
That was how they got you. That was how they beat you. That was how they eventually learned to engineer the society that suited them. How do you make a free people beholden to their government, and not the other way around? Slowly. In small ways. In little taxes here, and little rewards there, making success a measure of how much you stayed in line with the government’s plan for your life.
Frog in the pot of boiling water.
But they’d been boiled to slag a long time ago.
That’s what Grandpa Clarence used to say. And Roy after him.
But Walt did his best to keep his head down.
Do what they told him to do.
Let the wind blow where it may.
Lunchtime ended and Walt and Carolyn separated, but not before he figured out what time she got off work on Saturday, and when she was expected to be back at the foster home. Then he showed up to her work in his ancient, rusted pickup truck that had once been Grandpa Clarence’s, and then Roy’s, and finally his. She spotted him sitting there at a rumbling, creaky idle, just outside the gates to the hangar where she worked, and he watched her break into a big smile.
He drove her out to a place where nobody was, because their whole lives were surrounded by others. There in those rural Agrarian Districts, supposedly the least-populated in the country, where civilization was kept to a minimum in order to increase the amount of untouched, farmable land, they somehow managed to never be alone. They lived in small, crowded houses, and they went to small, crowded schools, and after work they sat in small, crowded bars and drank their sorrows away.
Not tonight, Walt thought.
He took her down to the old Rocky River Bridge, and it was empty and forlorn and clear, and you couldn’t tell that the water was a murky orange color because it was just liquid blackness that trickled moonlight. He parked his truck on the side of the road where an old checkpoint used to be stationed to keep all the mischievous kids at bay, and he led her down to the water.
They passed old graffiti, and new. Most of it angry young folks, ranting about the Fed, or the CoAx, or both. Some of it scrubbed away, or whitewashed over. More painted over the fresh canvas of whitewash.
At the water’s edge, they stood and threw rocks in the quietude of the moving river, and they simply enjoyed this moment of solitude in the darkness, in the presence of a kindred spirit.
It was in that long, quiet moment, that Carolyn became still and stared out at the darkness all around them, and Walt could see her eyes were wide in the moonlight. She held a rock in her hand. Then she looked at him.
“What happens if you yell?” she asked, barely audible over the water.
Walt scratched his toe in the clay, unsure of the question, or the answer. “If you yell?”
“Yes,” she nodded, quickly. “If I scream.”
Now he was even more confused.
She clarified: “If I was to scream something, would anybody hear me?”
Walt looked around. “Uh…I guess not.” He scratched the back of his neck. “I mean…hell…closest house has gotta be about a mile away. At least.”
She raised her head to him. “Yell something.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Yell something.”
He laughed at her. “Like what? What do you want me to yell?”
Carolyn considered this, tossing the stone up in the air and catching it. “I don’t know.” She pointed to the columns of the bridge supports. “Imagine those are the CoAx. Look at that. There’s three of them. That could be the Three Brothers, right there. Imagine that it’s the Three Brothers standing there, but you can’t get in trouble for anything right now. What would you yell at them?”
He stared at her, the curious smile falling away from his face. He looked out then, and imagined all three of them standing there, big, body-modded men in their bulky armor and their thick battleshrouds that covered everything but their cold, cold eyes. Stubby black rifles strapped to their chests. Standing there. Still and silent. Waiting for him. Waiting to hear what he had to say.
“I want my brother back,” he suddenly blurted, only slightly louder than the river itself.
He looked at Carolyn, wondering what her judgement was of this.
She didn’t judge the fact that it came out so quiet. She looked at him from behind a curtain of her dark blonde hair, twisting around in the wind. Then she turned, shaking the strands of hair out of her face and she took a deep breath.
“Fuck this place!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.
It made him jump. He almost laughed from sheer surprise, but there was a certain gravity to it that killed the laugh before it came out.
From the sandbar where they stood, Carolyn reeled back and hurled the stone at one of the columns. Walt watched it glide through the air and clack off the face of one of the columns, then splash into the water.
“Fuck you!” she screamed again, fists clenched at her sides, veins standing out on her neck as she yelled it out. “Fuck this place!”
Just like the first day he had met her, Carolyn’s boldness emboldened Walt. He watched her thrusting her face out into the windy darkness and yelling, and he felt that he should have yelled louder at those fantasy enemies made of old concrete. So he stooped down quickly and he scooped up a stone and he flung it hard at the nearest column.
“I want my brother back!” he yelled at the column.
Carolyn threw another rock. “I want my parents back!”
“I don’t want to live here for the rest of my life!”
“I don’t want to be afraid anymore!”
Then they stood there in stunned silence as the moonlit ripples were caught and obliterated in the never-ceasing current, and the wind carried the echoes of their voices away, and their throats burned with their secret rebellion. They looked at each other then, needing to see another person in the darkness, as though they both suddenly felt how small and insignificant they were in this great, violent scheme of things.
Just two more little worker bees.
Just two more little cogs in the machine.
Their existences were inconsequential.
They held hands on the way back up to his truck.
Chapter 7
He asked Carolyn to marry him when he was nineteen. She said yes, and they weren’t wasting time. He had asked in March, and they planned the wedding for July. Walt didn’t have a large family, and Carolyn didn’t have a family at all. It would be a small affair. They planned to host it at his parent’s house.
Then, in April, a giant train-wreck of a bill called the Social Recovery Act passed through its necessary channels and was force-fed to them as the law of the land. The reality of it came crashing down on their heads and smothered their tiny dreams.
The “Two Child Rule” had been enacted when Walt was a young child, when his parents were past their child-rearing years. He’d grown up with the reality of it, and so it seemed normal. And it wasn’t that, bad, really. They weren’t saying you couldn’t have more than two children. This was America—you were free to do what you wanted. But the Federal Government had let the Chinese and the Russians in, and it was like the old tales about vampires: if you invited them in, you would have no power over them.
They’d never admit it, but behind closed doors, they’d let the CoAx have control. He who had the gold made the rules, as they say. And under the guidance of the Chinese, the Fed decided that they would allow their citizens to use healthcare to pay for only two children—one girl, and one boy. And because the Fed provided the only healthcare available, the alternative was simple: You can have the amount of children you were told you could have. Or you could somehow scrounge up the $75,000 to pay for the medical expenses on your own.
Which was, of course,
virtually impossible for most.
And don’t even think about having it at home, using “natural birth” or some other old-fashioned thing. Natural births were considered felony child-endangerment. The punishment was severe.
But…this was all old news.
Walt had grown up with this. It had chapped his parents’ ass to no end, but they hadn’t been all that outspoken because they were already done having children and so it didn’t affect them really, so why rock the boat about it?
It was just a fact of life.
So the wind blows.
The Social Recovery Act was a new punishment. Supposedly so that the Fed could “limit the healthcare expenses associated with hazardous genetic matches,” and “relieve the taxpayers of an unnecessary burden.”
From the date of the bill and onwards, anyone that wished to have children had to first be tested for genetic compatibility, to ensure that their child would have the best chance of coming out without some sort of mental or physical defect that might put a strain on the healthcare system.
Walt and Carolyn were shell-shocked, but they stayed hopeful.
Stupidly hopeful.
Like the good citizens they were, they went to get tested, hand in hand, not yet married but inextricably committed to each other. Small hopes, small dreams, held close in their chests. The audacity just to do what they thought they were allowed to do—accept their prescribed careers according to the APT, stay in the District, pay their taxes, have their two children, and live quietly with their heads down. Those were the big plans.
They were not a match.
***
He went down to the river again with her, the afternoon they found out that they were not a match. That their genes were “incompatible.”
How incompatible? They had asked them that question.
8% incompatible, was the frank, pragmatic answer.
“Does that mean that we’re ninety-two-percent compatible?” Carolyn had demanded of the technician at the clinic. And, sitting beside her, Walt could hear the volume of Carolyn’s voice going up.
The technician blinked, a little nervously. “Yes.”
“So there’s still a ninety-two-percent chance that we’ll have perfect, healthy kids?” Carolyn’s chest was rising and falling quickly, her pulse quickening in her neck, her tan features flushing. “And that’s not good enough? Ninety-two-fucking-percent?”
The technician glanced at Walt, like she hoped that he would be the voice of reason.
But he didn’t trust himself to speak. He felt a big black hole in his gut. He felt beaten down. Cheated, really. He had played by the rules. He had kept his head down. He had done what they’d wanted him to do, hadn’t he? Was it too much to ask that he had the two children that they’d told him he could have, with the woman that he loved? He didn’t want a giant house or nice cars. He wasn’t going to buck the system and try for a career outside of the one they’d recommended for him. He didn’t fight back over the fact that foreign soldiers patrolled the streets of his hometown.
What else did they want?
Why could he not have this one thing?
“The cutoff is six percent,” the technician said, carefully. Then she closed her folder and drew herself up. “I’m terribly sorry about this. I don’t make the rules, you know. They are what they are.”
They are what they are.
It is what it is.
So the wind blows.
Right?
So they sat, down at the river, him next to her, but uncomfortably distant for some reason. They would usually sit so close. Now there was space between them. Carolyn sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, her chin resting on her knees, and her arms wrapped around her legs. He wanted to give her comfort, but he wasn’t sure she wanted him to touch her.
This is how it is when nothing is sacred. When you are not secure in anything—not your house, not your property, not your person. Not even your choices. When there is no security to anything, you distance yourself from everything. Because it all has teeth, it all bites, it all stings.
And Walt remembered thinking to himself that maybe he wanted to jump out of the pot of water now. Or was he too boiled already? Boiled into paralysis? Boiled to slag, just like Grandpa and Roy used to claim?
He looked out at the big, wide ribbon of glistening orange that floated past them. All that chemical runoff from the hydroponics in the nearby fields, blooming that orange algae, season after season.
Blooming that red cancer in their lungs.
He wondered, if his parents had been tested, would they have been compatible?
“Listen,” he said, and he disliked the coldness of his tone. “If you don’t want to marry, I’ll understand.”
“What?” she asked, quietly.
Walt figured that she’d heard him, so he didn’t repeat himself.
She turned her head to look at him. “What did you just say to me?”
“I said…” he wasn’t quite sure of his footing here. He didn’t really mean the words that he was saying. It just seemed like the…honorable thing to do, he guessed. But it was a damn nightmare. The thought that she might actually say “okay” and then get up and walk away from him seemed like the worst thing that could possibly happen.
It was the worst thing that could possibly happen.
But what the hell did he expect?
They couldn’t have kids together. They couldn’t have the family that they both wanted. Their dreams were crashed before they even started. Did he expect her to just stick around for the hell of it?
“I heard what you said,” she snapped at him, suddenly.
She’d been angry at him only a handful of times.
He didn’t like it. It made his spine prickle, and he disliked it in one aspect, because he didn’t want to let someone else have that kind of control over him, but he also recognized that that ship had sailed quite a while ago. That was what a relationship was, right?
He clenched his jaw. “Well…why’d you ask, then?”
She reached across and slapped his shoulder. Not in the friendly way she would sometimes do. This one was hard. A whip. He could see how angry she was by the set of her mouth. She was not joking with him. “How dare you say that to me!”
Walt spread his arms out, taken aback. “What do you mean? I’m trying to give you the choice here!”
She slapped him again. “The choice?” And again. “The fucking choice?”
He grabbed her wrist to keep her from slapping him again. “Stop.”
She twisted her wrist out of his grip and pointed a finger at his face. “Walter Baucom! Don’t you ever say some shit like that to me again, do you hear me?”
He was still mystified. He had no idea why she was mad at him.
She pointed to the pillars holding the bridge up. Like they were still the imagined Three Brothers of years ago. “They don’t get to decide our lives! They don’t get to tell me who I marry. They don’t get to tell you either. They control every other aspect of our lives—a tax for this, a subsidy for that, and don’t ever do what we don’t want you to do or we’ll turn you out into the cold. But not this! I won’t let them have this! I won’t let them ruin my one good thing!”
It was strange. Love can be so one-sided. You know how you feel about a person, but you have to take their word on how they feel about you. But sitting there, staring into the eyes of the woman that he loved while she shouted angrily at him, he heard the truth of what she was saying.
He was her one good thing.
And she was his one good thing.
He couldn’t let her go. He couldn’t just offer her up like that.
He grabbed her and held onto her. Held onto her like the world was space, and she was the only handhold keeping him from flying out into the endless void. Like catching the edge of a cliff before you plummet to your death.
“I’m sorry,” he said, shakily. “I don’t want you to go. Please don’t go.”
***
&nbs
p; Driving home from his father’s duplex at night, with that box of medicine still nestled in the front passenger seat beside him like a quiet little hitchhiker that he’d picked up, Walt thought about the years gone by, and how they were not so many, but they felt it sometimes. He felt it in the hollow places inside of him. He felt it in the heavy shell of himself, the exposed parts of himself callusing over and over and over again until he felt very little, and maybe that was best.
But this, this bright little possibility in his future, it shone through the stone-skin of his regular self. It was the thing he allowed himself to feel strongly about. It was a secret thing. And secret things could not be touched. The CoAx couldn’t touch them. The Fed couldn’t touch them. The resistance in all its multiple facets and autonomous branches couldn’t touch them.
He had saved every penny that he’d earned doing this filthy work—the only work he could find outside of driving tractors and occasional over-time on the maintenance lines. But overtime didn’t help his cause, because that was paid to Walter Baucom, and it would go to bills and scratching out his subsistence.
This money, no matter how dirty, went to John Tapper. And he hadn’t touched any of it. Not for overdraft fees. Not for special things that he knew Carolyn deserved, but he couldn’t afford. He was more than two-thirds of the way there, and by this time next year, God willing, he would have enough money saved, and he and Carolyn would be able to afford to have a child.
Just thinking about the surprise of it made him grin foolishly in the darkness of the cab of his truck. The little sliver of road in front of his headlights—a simple pathway in the immense expanse of darkness stretching out to either side, like a road through an abyss—turned into the mile-long dirt stretch that cut through the fields of just-planted corn to the little house where he and Carolyn lived.
