The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  Seventeen people (Millie had counted) fidgeted in their metal folding chairs arranged in a U in front of the projection wall. The remaining three walls repeated the lobby’s motif of attractive, flushed-cheeked parents and carriers.

  “Come on,” someone to her right groaned. “Do we have to sit here all day?”

  A soft click sounded in the back of the room, followed by, “Ms. Ludlow.”

  Everyone turned. A woman Millie had never seen stood in the open doorway. She wore a stiff, pastel-print shirt and center-creased purple pants.

  “Ms. Ludlow,” she said, “you are excused. Come with me, please.”

  Ms. Ludlow’s eyes and mouth opened wide. “No,” she said. “No. Please. I didn’t mean anything by it!”

  The woman continued to hold the door until Ms. Ludlow removed herself from her chair and, sobbing, stumbled out of the room. When the door closed behind the two women, the music stopped and the room went black for a moment before the floor’s projection lights cast a new image on the wall. A filthy, skeletal man sat at a metal table in an impossibly bright room. He faced them directly from across the table.

  The camera at his end was positioned so that the orientation class could see both above and beneath the table. The man’s clothes were sizes too small for him, his colorfully soiled shirt pulling at the shoulder seams and stretching taught over the hollow between his jutting ribs. Millie could make out the entirety of his crushed and misshapen genitals through the thin fabric of his pants. It was a wonder he’d been able to walk into the room.

  Hugh squirmed in his chair next to Millie.

  She whispered, “Exile!”

  Hugh muttered, “How could they let two reporters in here?”

  Millie whispered, “Exile.”

  He leaned sideways to say into her ear, “Anonymous source?”

  They could claim to have an anonymous source, but she expected the bureau treated each class to a unique experience to make it easier to track leaks. Since exile had begun, the Daily Fact hadn’t received a single piece of credible information about the inner workings of the facility, and no one from the press had ever been allowed a visit.

  The man slid down in his chair, as if to try to relax. His pants pulled even tighter at his testicles, which Millie wouldn’t have thought possible. Hugh and another male in the room protested with throat noises. The man raised his eyebrows and nodded.

  “I think he can see us,” Hugh whispered to Millie. “Did you see—Holy cow.” He covered his nose. The entire room did. “What is that?”

  A malodorous fog filled the previously stale air with every possible (unpleasant) body odor, plus a touch of vomit and something unnatural, oddly chemical.

  “Jesus!” one applicant shrieked.

  The man looked steadily out at them.

  The woman who’d dismissed Ms. Ludlow appeared beside the projection. She clasped her hands at her waist and pointed her chin. “I am May Cheney, proctor of each of the four stages of your evaluation.”

  Low murmurs ending in question marks skipped across the room.

  “Yes. Outside rumors limit the evaluation to two portions: a nebulous multiple choice test and a six-month dog trial. This is by design. As you can imagine—Edgar?” May Cheney looked at something on the far wall over the applicants’ heads. “Cut the atmosphere feed, please.” The odor dissipated and the applicants freed their noses. “As I was saying,” May Cheney went on, “licensing should be, and is, a critical process meticulously constructed to ensure we can identify, to the best of our ability, the most qualified guardians. Knowing in advance what will be evaluated would too easily tempt applicants to devise cheating systems. While it may serve them in the end by guaranteeing them a license, it would do a grave disservice to their children. And we are here, above all, to safeguard the needs and best interests of the children.”

  Millie had nothing to write with and nothing to write on, but this was something she realized only by reflex. She no longer cared about scoops and bylines. Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she’d ever enjoyed writing beyond the ultimately ineffective role it had played in her relationship with her mother. She deleted all of her mental notes.

  “…first is a combination physical fitness test and broad spectrum psychological analysis. Hands down, please. To answer your unasked ques-tions, we have no intention of denying parenthood to any applicants with mild or treatable psychological conditions, nor do we expect you to have endured months of strenuous training to meet an unrealistic physical standard. The purpose of the psychological portion is, primarily, to rule out violent tendencies. The physical portion ensures you don’t have a fatal or chronic illness that will lead to undue stress or emotional devastation for your offspring. Knowingly burdening young children with future caretaker responsibilities or the loss of a parent is not what we at the licensing bureau consider loving behavior.” May Cheney glanced at the projection on the wall when the man’s chair moved under his shifting. He stilled himself, and she returned her attention to the applicants. “May I continue, or are there additional questions about the first stage of the evaluation?”

  No hands went up.

  The second stage, May Cheney said, measured the applicants’ decision-making acumen, and the third, an applicant’s capacity for empathy.

  “Self-explanatory?” She waited, swinging her chin right and then left. When no one spoke, she continued. “You must pass each of the first three stages with an eighty-five percent or higher to qualify for the final stage, which as you are already aware is dog fostering. Your scores for the first three portions will be available by the end of the day. Yes, Mr. Green.”

  A man sitting to the far right lowered his hand. “Are there other animals we could foster besides dogs? In case we had a bad experience with a dog?”

  “You sit surrounded by fifteen fellow applicants, all of them presume-able strangers. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never had a ‘bad experience’ with a human being, Mr. Green?”

  The dog conversation was irrelevant to Millie, who wasn’t afraid of dogs. She wanted to move on to the next portion. She could already imagine the looks of awe and admiration directed at her carrying body.

  “Ms. Oxford.”

  Millie jerked. The rough feet of her light metal chair scraped the floor.

  “Thank you. One more such show of disregard for the process and you will be dismissed, your application privileges suspended for one year. Oh, my, but you’re twenty-nine. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. I understand. I’m sor—”

  “The man you see in the projected image to my right is Eugene,” May Cheney boomed over Millie. Millie closed her mouth. “His surname has been revoked. He can hear and see you. Please say hello.”

  “Hello,” all sixteen applicants said.

  Eugene raised a knotted finger in greeting. Scabbed blood crusted his fingertip. Dark eyebrows (surprisingly neat) pressed down, narrowing green irises floating in red and framed by matted hair.

  May Cheney turned to Eugene. “Say hello.”

  He took a long, slow breath and let it out while massaging his throat with a clawed thumb and index finger. “Hello” pushed through blistered, barely open lips. Several applicants made sympathetic noises. His was not a voice as much as it was a primitive, earthy sound that made Millie think of a dry log scraping concrete.

  Apparently satisfied, May Cheney launched into Eugene’s history “because, as you may have observed, it would take far too long for him to manage it, himself.”

  They were viewing Eugene as he sat in Exile, she revealed for those who hadn’t already guessed. Exile was not, as many imagined, a real-life Chateau d’If. There were crude, cinderblock cells, true, and the food—when they were permitted to eat—was slop, mush, and tiny animal parts (sometimes cooked, other times not) only the kitchen staff could identify. But it was not a faraway, isolated tower perched on a high cliff pounded daily by thrashing ocean waves. Instead, it was an impossibly vast system of subterr
anean tunnels and enclaves flooded day and night with the blinding glow of thousands of LED tubes.

  Eugene, she said, had been an Exile prisoner for six years, having been apprehended four days after abandoning his daughter, Hester. (“Left,” he croaked with a slap of his hand on the table, which prompted May Cheney to shush him with a splitting clap!clap! and to explain to the room that parents of the abandoned rarely used the word “abandoned,” themselves—it was too self-incriminating, morally speaking.) When Hester was three, the applicants learned, a disgruntled, out-of-work day trader with an armed black-market drone had shot Hester’s mother—Eugene’s partner of thirteen years—along with four others in various and arbitrary locations. Eugene had dropped Hester two weeks later (“Overwhelmed by the responsibility, yes, distraught over the loss of his partner, certainly, but that is no excuse,” May Cheney stressed). It had taken him two years in Exile to see the wrong he’d committed, and another four to try to escape.

  “Prior to his incarceration, Eugene was a martial arts instructor. I’m positive he thought he had every reason to believe he could overtake the guards.” May Cheney smiled widely, then controlled herself. “The room you see is what Eugene will call home for the foreseeable future. The table does not belong to him, but was given to him for this visit with you.” May Cheney passed her eyes over each and every one of them. “Doubtless you believe this facility has nothing to do with you. Am I correct?”

  Shoulders shrugged and heads nodded.

  May Cheney reminded them of the infractions that earn a sentence of exile. Only two were new to the applicants: willful manipulation of one’s personal hormone—regardless of whether pregnancy is achieved (“Starts next week,” Hugh whispered to Millie. “Leo’s writing it.”), and breaking the licensing bureau’s non-disclosure agreement.

  Because the applicants were committed enough to parenthood to undergo the licensing procedure, May Cheney said, she didn’t expect to learn in the future that any of them had tried to terminate their own pregnancy or separate from a sanctioned child. But it could be harder, she said, to keep quiet about the evaluation procedure and the secrets of Exile.

  “I suspect that you see Eugene sitting in his cell, and you think, ‘That doesn’t seem so bad. I could survive.’” May Cheney looked like she wanted to smile again. She spun on a heel and snapped at her invisible contact behind the rear wall. Eugene disappeared. “I will say only this before we move into stage one of the evaluation, and I trust it will suffice: You cannot possibly appreciate the true horror of Exile without having been exiled, yourself. You would be wise to carry on from this day forward in a manner that will ensure you never are.”

  TWENTY EIGHT

  Every rationed item Lenny had hoarded over time covered the basement suite’s coffee table: five bottles of vitamin C capsules, seven bottles of ibuprofen and aspirin (four of one, three of the other), one bunch of fresh parsley, eight containers of the dried variety, and six containers of powdered cinnamon.

  “Your call is important to us…” the recorded voice said again. She’d been on hold twenty minutes and was starting to think she should call the shelter to let them know she’d be late getting back from lunch.

  She’d left after Boris’s naming speech without telling anyone—including Floyd, who’d been standing in a corner with Boris—when the monitoring center had reported her hormone status as “inactive.”

  But first, before hanging up and running out, she’d pleaded to be transferred to the control department for reactivation.

  “How long has it been inactive?” Lenny asked the control department person as brightly as she could in the shelter’s small, locked office.

  “Just a day,” the man said. “Do you have any reason to think you might be pregnant?”

  “Pregnant?”

  “We can’t reactivate if you might be pregnant. As far as we know, the hormone doesn’t terminate a forming citizen, but we can’t risk—”

  “Oh, darlin’.” Laugh, laugh, laugh. “Pregnant? My stars.”

  “Have you had sexual intercourse in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “Sexual intercourse? Um…good gracious, no. It’s been a coon’s age.”

  “Hold, please.” He left her listening to The Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” and came back to the line full of apologies.

  “I’m so sorry, Ms. Mabary, I shouldn’t have…Your profile is… Obviously I meant no disrespect. We’ll reactive right away, ma’am, and please disregard any emails that say otherwise.”

  The emails, sent automatically upon reactivation request, he explained, assigned a mandatory pregnancy test for five days from the date of contact with the monitoring center. The hormone reactivated only after confirma-tion of a negative pregnancy test.

  For her, he had said, they would of course bypass that step, and “please have a super nice day, Ms. Mabary, ma’am, and again, I’m really sorry.”

  Lenny separated the capsules she would need and hid the rest in a secret compartment under the bed her boarders used. Her reputation meant she was probably safe from being included in one of the bureau’s surprise house-to-house searches, but the attacks on her parents had proved no one was completely safe from anything. She double-checked that the locking mechanism was still working for when Gabriella arrived. The gouge Deborah, her last boarder, had carved into the side panel with the bathroom scissors during a panic attack—“I thought they were coming to exile me, Ms. Mabary!”—looked like a knot in the wood after Lenny’s sand-ing and staining.

  The hold music paused, then re-started.

  She tried to relax. Her period had ended two weeks before she and Floyd had had sex, so there was only a small chance (very small, since Floyd was unhealthy in so many ways) of fertilization.

  She unwrapped the fresh parsley and peeled off five sprigs while waiting for what should have been a simple answer to a simple question. To the music of Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman,” Lenny took off her pants and underwear and stuffed the sprigs, stems down, into her vagina until the curled leaves touched her cervix.

  “Hormone status is inactive, Ms. Mabary.”

  “Pardon me?” She pulled up her underwear. Protruding stems poked at the cotton.

  “It’s in queue, ma’am. Sometimes it takes a little whi—”

  The basement speakers filled the suite with doorbell chimes.

  “Thank you.” Lenny tapped her earpiece and waited. The bell chimed again and was followed by rapid knocking. She swallowed a vitamin C capsule without water and ran upstairs.

  The man and woman standing on the veranda wore matching lilac suits and yellow ties. Each held a zipped yellow folder with USPLB printed on the cover.

  The woman waved at Lenny through the peep hole. “Is anyone home?” she said. “We saw—Your van is parked right out front.”

  “Good van. Shows she’s humble,” the man said to his partner.

  The woman looked up at the house, raised an eyebrow at him, and pressed the bell. “It’ll only take a moment.”

  Lenny stretched her pants at the crotch seam, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

  Everyone smiled.

  “May we come in?” the man said as he swept past Lenny.

  The woman followed and headed straight for a painting hanging on a foyer wall. “What delightful children,” she said. “Are they special to you?”

  “No, they’re—”

  The woman stepped closer. “My, such beautiful walls. Is this fir?” She reached out to touch the wood.

  Lenny watched the woman’s fingers trace the grain and glide over the seam. “Cedar!” she pipped. “Iced tea?” Her stomach bounced. She didn’t have any iced tea. She’d never had iced tea. “Silly me. I’m plumb out! Filtered water?”

  Lenny led the woman into the kitchen where her partner was already waiting and poured glasses of water. They introduced themselves as Edna and Xavier as they took stools at the island. Edna said unnecessarily that they worked for the United States Parent
Licensing Bureau.

  Xavier looked at the ceiling. “How many bedrooms?”

  Four, Lenny said.

  Xavier smiled. “That’s nice. One for you, and the others for…?”

  Guests, Lenny said. She tried not to squirm against the parsley while mentally searching each of the upstairs bedrooms for anything incrimin-ating. She had no idea how invasive their searches might be and had visions of needles and blood draws and body cavity—

  “Finished basement?”

  No, Lenny said. No. Just a very small storage area that had to be accessed from the outside. (There was such a space. Floyd had purposely designed it that way.)

  “We’re making you uncomfortable. Xavier, we’re making Ms. Mabary uncomfortable. Ms. Mabary, we’re aware that your chip experienced an interruption in the release of its hormone.” Edna pushed her long hair over her shoulder. “Yesterday?”

  Yes, Lenny said.

  “And today you called to reactivate,” Xavier said.

  Yes, Lenny said.

  Xavier sipped his water. “It hasn’t been reactivated.”

  No, Lenny said. Not yet.

  “Oh! Oh!” Edna unzipped her folder. “That’s just wonderful. We have time, yet.” She pulled out a glossy lilac booklet. “Ms. Mabary, we are so pleased to be granted this brief window of opportunity.” She licked her finger and flipped through the pages.

  “Ms. Mabary.” Xavier laced his fingers together and leaned toward her and smiled. “How much consideration have you given to becoming a member of one of the most revered communities in American society?”

  Edna slid the open booklet toward Lenny with her finger tapping a section of text. “You are what we consider a premier,” she said.