by Vassar Smith
The State takes great pride in its transportation system. Years ago, people operated private and commercial vehicles that not only generated horrendous pollution from their gasoline or diesel fuel exhaust, but also, because of their great weight and number, necessitated constant and expensive maintenance for the roads and highways. Nowadays the aircars and airtrucks, hovercars and hovercycles are powered by hydrogen or alcohol, and the underground trains can take one anywhere in the metropolitan area in less than half an hour. For short distances, one can walk or bicycle on the streets and boulevards, or step onto the FTS (Fast Track System, as we call the moving sidewalk) and let it carry him along. The aircars, airtrucks, and other vehicles are almost as quiet as the bicycles and electric cars. Moreover, all engined vehicles for urban transportation today have such a superb system of monitors and emergency backup power, that traffic accidents are now extremely rare, fatalities almost unheard of. Disasters in long-distance travel, like the Barkers’ ill-fated trip to Denver, were usually caused by freakishly sudden, severe weather conditions.
When I consider the vast improvement achieved in transportation in the present age, I wonder how much more it could be streamlined if they ever perfect teleportation. So far they haven’t worked out the glitches. Oh, they have managed to teleport small objects, and they’re doing it more and more all the time. But it has to be nonliving matter. Any living organism put through a teleporter rematerializes in the receiver as some kind of unrecognizable but definitely nonliving jelly.
Tim and I met after our appointments and rode home together as planned. Thereafter we spent time with each other nearly every day. Our parents had little else of common interest, but they were pleased with our friendship and association—until or unless we gave them reason to feel otherwise, they were quick to add.
Besides recreation and leisure, Timmy and I kept each other company and gave each other assistance during one of our few regular chores, namely doing laundry. It must have been an impossible or certainly very oppressive task for a child centuries ago; but nowadays, with the baskets, cart, elevator, and each other’s assistance, we could easily take our families’ clothing and linens to and from the laundry room in the basement of our building. Machines there did all the work of washing and drying. When the two of us helped each other, loading and unloading the machines was a task that required more patience than actual exertion. Even with several loads, the whole job rarely took longer than an hour. Still, since his parents and mine all worked full time, they were pleased that they could depend on us to do this, thus affording them a bit more free time and one less responsibility.
In the summer we usually went to the laundry room on a morning in the middle of the week. In that large room with the stark overhead lights and its walls and floor all the same shade of pastel green, there would always be machines available on a mid-week morning. In fact, at such a time we were usually the only ones availing ourselves of the facilities—unlike the weekends and evenings, when one occasionally had to wait in line and always saw other residents socializing as well as doing their laundry.
On the last Wednesday in June, while we were doing our families’ laundry in the basement, a new resident came in, a cheerful young man whom we had never met before. We introduced ourselves. His name was Marshall Myers. He had moved to town only last week, but he already had a job. He worked the night shift at a food-processing plant. We observed that he and Timmy had the same name—Marshall—printed on their laundry bags and baskets. It seemed quaint to us, since that was the young man’s first name.
“That was to keep my clothes from getting mixed up with my brothers’ when I lived at home,” he explained.
“You have a brother?” Tim asked.
“Brothers. Three of them. Our folks always said having four boys made running the farm so much easier. Yep. I have three brothers—two older, one younger. I’m the only one to try living in the city.”
“Wow!” I exclaimed. “I don’t know anyone else who has three brothers.”
“Yeah,” Marshall grinned. “It’s pretty neat, though Mom and Dad say that we three older ones were kind of a handful when we were little. My little brother Ryan is about your age. He loves for me to pick him up and wrestle with him.”
“What kid doesn’t?” Timmy remarked.
“Sounds like someone would like some attention,” Marshall replied.
“Maybe.”
Taking the hint, Marshall picked Timmy up, supporting him so that their faces were on the same level for a few seconds. Then Marshall set Timmy back down, gave him a playful swat on the rear, and said: “Your dryer’s beeping. The rest of your clothes must be ready.”
Since this was the first load in the dryer that morning, it sounded rather puzzling for him to have said “the rest of your clothes” just now. Still, neither of us commented, just folded and sorted clothes with Marshall’s welcome help. After that, Marshall took care of his own laundry, and then helped us with the rest of ours. His point became clear when he mentioned it again, this time in a question:
“What about the rest of your clothes?”
“These are the rest of our clothes,” Timmy told him.
“No!” Marshall exclaimed with a mixture of amusement and disbelief. “You’re not serious! You’ve got some jeans in another machine. You’re not walking out of here like that!”
“Marshall, this is what we always wear. We don’t have a choice,” Timmy explained.
“But those, ah, shorts... They look like...”
“We know what they look like. They’re called scants. By law we have to wear them year round. We’re retros.”
Marshall looked thunderstruck: “No! You’re kidding, right?”
Our silence and straight faces told him that we weren’t joking.
“You mean it,” he continued: “You really once were older than me?”
“We’re still older than you—way older: I’m 44, Michael’s 53.”
“I can’t believe it! You both look like little kids—nice little kids!”
In a different context or from someone else’s mouth those words could have been offensive or even scary. But this young man was so obviously both ingenuous and kind-hearted. We knew that he meant no harm to us, not even to our feelings.
“Thanks, Marshall,” Tim replied with a smile of genuine pleasure. “We are nice little kids. It just so happens that we used to be adults older than you. Then we got retrogressed. It’s nice to have met you, Marshall. We’ll understand if you don’t care so much for us now.”
Marshall became indignant, almost tearful: “What kind of guy do you think I am? Whatever you did that was bad, you’ve paid your debt. I’ve never known any retros before. But I bet you understand a lot more than...than other kids.”
“Primos,” Tim prompted him. “We call kids in their first childhood ‘primos.’ It’s not an insult, just a term to make the distinction.”
“Okay. So, you understand a lot more than primos do. And I bet you don’t start acting silly the way kids do when they’re tired or bored or too excited. Let’s do this: I’ll go up with you and help you put your laundry away. Then I’ll show you my place.”
Our parents probably would have had apoplexy if they had known that we had let a stranger into both apartments. We didn’t lie to them, though. When Tim’s parents complimented him—as mine did me—on the extra-fine job of folding, stacking, and putting away the clean laundry, we told them that we had made a new friend—Marshall—who had helped us. They all said how nice it was that we had a new friend, especially one who didn’t mind sharing in a little work. They looked forward to meeting him... Then they went on to other matters and forgot all about Marshall.
True to his word, after Marshall had helped us put away the laundry, he took us to his apartment—two stories below ours—and showed us a great time. While we never saw anything dangerous or illegal, he had all sorts of packaged snacks that were much more to a kid’s liking than to a parent’s approval. He got them f
or little or nothing at the company where he worked, which produced them.
The curious thing was, Marshall himself liked nothing better than fresh fruits and vegetables. Now, I like most kinds of fruit, and I don’t mind a good salad. But if I’m going to eat a raw vegetable, there had better be some tasty dip to go along with it. Marshall, on the other hand, actually liked raw celery, raw carrots, broccoli, etc. So, we repaid his hospitality by bringing him most of the carrots, celery, zucchini, and other raw vegetables that our parents expected us to eat during the day while they were away at work. Weeks went by, and our folks were none the wiser about our new arrangement.
Working nights, Marshall often slept till noon and was usually gone by 16:00. But nearly every weekday afternoon he’d be at home by himself, and we were always welcome to drop by at that time of day. He shared the place with two other guys, but every time we were there, they weren’t. The doors to their bedrooms were always closed. We didn’t pry.
We had fun at his place—talking, joking, listening to music, playing games, doing basically whatever we were all in the mood for. Age seemed irrelevant. We were neither two little boys with a young man nor a young man with two considerably older men, simply three good friends, young at heart and ready to enjoy themselves. Suddenly Tim and I had a companion who treated us as equals instead of little kids or freaks. We knew this arrangement would not continue after school resumed in September, but we hoped it would last the rest of the summer.
It didn’t. One afternoon as we were enjoying a holofilm, Marshall answered a knock at the door. There stood Frances Marshall, Tim’s adoptive mother. As soon as they had introduced themselves to each other, she declared:
“You look so young to be a father!”
“Why do you think I’m a father?” he asked, obviously puzzled.
“Well, then, perhaps you’re an uncle or a guardian. Doesn’t a little boy named Marshall live here?”
“No. I’m the only one named Marshall living here.”
“I see...” she said in a tone that was civil at best. “Come along now, Timmy and Michael! Good afternoon, Mr. Myers.”
The Farrells weren’t happy, either, to learn that Marshall Myers was an adult. Both Tim and I apologized to our folks for the misunderstanding. Both Tim’s parents and mine, with something approaching indignation, replied that neither we nor they were so naive. The fact was, they insisted, we had too conveniently withheld from them the information that he wasn’t a kid of our phenotypical age. We were therefore grounded until further notice.
Although we swore that Marshall had never done anything illegal or immoral around us, our parents still disallowed us any further association with him. The day after they had grounded us, our parents set our “sentence” at two weeks. However, before that time had elapsed, an incident occurred that removed Marshall from the building—at least Marshall as we had known him.
The Saturday before we were to become un-grounded, the police showed up at our building in the dead of night, but not on our floor. Next morning word went around that Marshall and his roommates had been arrested for trafficking in illegal drugs. This news took Tim and me totally by surprise. We had attributed his unusual hours to his job. his good-hearted, happy, rather simple nature to his youth and his rural background. Naturally, now we had to face some additional hard questions from our adoptive parents. Still, we managed to convince them that if there was any such aspect to Marshall’s life, we had no knowledge of it.
The arrest of Marshall and his roommates was mentioned in the media, though only in the briefest detail and only for one day. Thereafter we heard nothing about him, nothing about any trial, conviction, or sentence. There was always the chance that he could have been quietly released. Yeah, and I’d be elected the next Pope! No, when anyone vanishes that suddenly, it’s a pretty safe bet that they’ve been retrogressed—and that they consented to such.
I suppose he found it preferable to the alternative. Cases like his usually drew a sentence long enough to allow retrogression as an option, but not long enough to mandate it. At Marshall’s age a prison term of seven, eight, or nine years may have seemed like a life sentence. Certainly he would be wise to reject the other commonly offered alternative, namely service in the Haz-Mat Decontamination Corps. That would be tantamount to a death sentence.
Whatever had happened to him, Timmy and I felt sure that that was the last we would ever hear of Marshall Myers.
Three months later a new family, the Bridgmans, moved into the building. Of course, there were always individuals, couples, and families coming and going, moving in and out. The Bridgmans caught our notice because, though the adults were in their fifties, their child was only two years old. That the boy was an adopted child was fairly obvious; intriguing to Timmy and me was that the little fellow was named Marshall.
After Timmy and I had turned “nine,” Mrs. Bridgman would occasionally engage one or both of us to look after little Marshall for an hour or two—never longer than that. The Bridgmans had no idea why their little boy’s face lit up with delight when he saw Tim or me, nor why, in a room full of people, he frequently sought us out. They only knew that for some reason their little Marshall loved and trusted us, and that we liked him and took good care of him. Even though we were retros, they regarded us as a godsend.
Timmy and I could not help speculating, but we weren’t sure... Then in December, Marshall began talking in phrases and short sentences. One rainy afternoon when we were looking after him at their place, he suddenly asked us: “Michael, Tim, don’t you ’member me? You knew me when I was big!”
First Tim, then I held his little hand and hugged him—even longer than he as a little tyke usually hugged us in greeting and in parting.
“We wondered whether it might be you, but we weren’t sure,” I explained. “Now we know beyond a doubt.”
“Welcome back, Marshall!” said Tim, at least as delighted as I was.
For the moment our joy was unalloyed. By the next day the same question had occurred to both Tim and me, and it led us to quite a troubling discovery. Why had Marshall been put up for adoption? Unlike any other retros known to us, Marshall had family already—living parents and grown brothers. Surely they would have—must have—applied to take him in and rear him again. That would seem the most natural, logical, and humane course of action under the circumstances. Why hadn’t it been followed?
The question troubled me so much, that I begged Dad Farrell, who knew some important people, to find out what he could. To his credit, he did: The Myers family had indeed applied, but had been refused not only custody of Marshall but also any information about his condition or whereabouts. A court had recently interpreted the law to mean that any contact between a retro and his original family (his “pre-Procedure environment,” as they termed it) was strictly forbidden.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
V. W. Smith was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and has lived his adult life in California. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has been internationally published as a poet and humorist as well as a serious scholar and translator of Russian literature. His published translations include the novels Bad Dreams and Consolation by F. K. Sologub and numerous lyric poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, Sologub, Blok, and other Russian masters. Smith's work has appeared in such diverse periodicals as The Russian Literature Triquarterly, The Delta Review, The Classical Outlook, and The Pentatette. Published collections of Smith's original poetry include: Byzantines Amok (1990), Under the Limerick Tree (1991), The Oven-Bird Chorus (1993), and The Calipatria Triolets (2008). Michael Remembers is Smith's first published novel of original fiction.
/>
