by Moira Crone
“We just have to be smart,” Vee said. “I am sure he thought we were smart.”
Ariel proposed water burial.
Vee said we could throw the body overboard past English Turn, where the Old River took on the currents of the Gulf. Something in me recoiled at this proposition, still, but I couldn’t voice it. I couldn’t say that Lazarus’s dignity and proper respect was worth the fate of Vee and Marilee and Ginger’s children, and all that came after them.
“We do it at dusk tomorrow,” Ariel said. He had been strange the last twenty-four hours—in turns furious, and then calculating, and then inconsolable, and then calculating again. Somehow, we all agreed. We would bury at night. Throw the body overboard.
“The WELLFI investigators might come looking,” Marilee said. “When they bring the new pendant. They would have to deliver it in person, to check his identity. They said it might be a week.”
“For that, for them, I’ll come up with something,” Ariel said, calculating again. A moment later, he asked me, “Did you see this?” showing me the papers written in Lazarus’s hand.
I realized it was the second half of the manuscript. I told him I had seen the first half.
“Read this part. You should see why he did it.”
He understood. He saw my guilt. He was my brother. He understood me.
He always had.
IX
My Life, Beginning With the Early Pfiswell Trials, In Short When It’s Been Very Long, Very, Very Long—PART TWO
The Troubles weren’t really started by the stubborn fundamentalists standing up for the Wheel, nor by the fringe philosophers of the Cycle, nor by the radical Gaists with their protests, as the history books say. The Troubles were mostly fomented by the potential Third Wave. An entire generation had no future.
As I have said, we only had controlled sources of news. But underground, they were gathering in some cities, and in cells all over, making plans, beginning civil disobedience. The normal ones—by normal I mean like us, secular, materialistic, educated, modern—joined in the end with the Luddites, took up their retarded creeds. They all shared the goal of defeating us, they had nothing to lose—this was so clear to me. Of course I could see their position. My own boys couldn’t, and they disowned their own children in the end, but I saw their case. I suppose the rebels figured once they had defeated us they could sort it all out between the secular moderns, Heir children, and the fundamentalists. It didn’t turn out quite that way. As Yeats said, “The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
I didn’t believe in the violence, was terrified of the riots. I had kept myself alive so long; I couldn’t bear to be violated now. Didn’t know what to do when they bombed WELLFI headquarters. Knew less when I learned my own granddaughter Jennifer was in a cadre in what was once Chicago, one of the first to join forces with the Wild Oats, a fringe group. Terrorists, anarchists. They didn’t care. They had no future. I tried to plead with her. She wouldn’t answer.
I kept switching sides. At one point I even took what funds I had and sent them to Michael, who was in San Francisco, having joined with Free Wheelers out there, a more liberal branch, eventually defeated. I suggested he find his sister Jennifer and just go somewhere there was a cycle—England, or Canada—the old life was apparently still possible there. Most other nations were our enemies, and there was, internationally, a hue and cry about the power of WELLFI, so exile was difficult, but in those other places there were still economies, jobs, professions. Michael trained to be a common doctor, followed in his grandfather’s footsteps. That was considered something like being a veterinarian, by then. WELLFI gave them strict codes about what they could treat and what they couldn’t. He showed these to me. I was infuriated. The great Untreated, as we called them then, couldn’t even get decent ordinary care—blood pressure medicine, chemo. The Cyclers, the Mass, the Diers. Some of my cohort even said publically it was a blessing they were doing the so-long in such numbers. “Reducing the strain on our resources,” they called it.
When I spoke to my grandchildren, to that generation, it was hard to know what to do. I understood their frustration—and what kind of country is it when the only thing you can imagine your grandchildren doing is leaving it so they can grow old and die on foreign soil? While you stay home and amuse yourself and amuse yourself? There were years of turmoil. I couldn’t make up my mind. Heirs slaughtered in the streets, flayed, set on fire. The WELLFI media started saying that the Treateds couldn’t intermingle with the Nats any longer. It was just too risky. The collars were introduced. I was more sympathetic than most of my Wave who just built the great new Walled Urbs—Memphis, Bright Phoenix, Kingston, North New York, Snow White.
After the first set of uprisings, there were several more—things were unstable, dangerous, for years. Heirs couldn’t travel without being assaulted, so the bullet trains were built. The Untreated started organizing itself into affinity groups, barter syndicates, communities, economies. They couldn’t riot and wage war all the time. They traded the commodities they still needed and tried to train the doctors and teachers—their standard of living was much lower than it was before, during the fugue age. It had just gotten worse over time. Like the English who let the Irish starve at their back door while they helped their colonies improve, we let our Nats nearby waste away. Meanwhile, we fed fugue economies a world away with investment. Eventually, since there was no changing WELLFI and its interests, a minority, a few of the stronger federations, the more fundamentalist ones, just invented their own way of governing themselves.
The enclave treaties were the last thing, not a good thing, entirely. Heirs preferred to make peace with the most conservative, the most ideological. By the time the treaties were being offered and the disbanding of the idea of the nation had been seriously considered, I was pretty far in the North Camp. I had broken with my sons. This was in the late twenty sixties, early twenty-seventies. The second wave of Procreation Laws. If you had children—not that many did, during the Troubles—then you couldn’t get Treated. There were a great many riots about that, though. People didn’t like having their “generative freedom” as they called it, taken away. The word from Washington—I guess it had already been renamed New Albersia—was that the nation was just ungovernable as it was. And the new black economy didn’t pay any taxes, didn’t contribute. Eventually, the most conservative elements won. They abrogated the Constitution, set up the United Authority. I wasn’t on that side. This was a rich country, this had been a rich country. Nobody could see clearly because of the violence. I thought I could work for that: the goal of everyone being Treated. See if we couldn’t get the potential Third Wave Treated. There probably was a way. But people got scared. Heirs, that is. The people who scared people always won. They always win. They have all the money.
There were stories about my grandchildren’s generation. Lots of suicides. While the enclaves were still open, some fled to them, signed on to their rigid rules to stay alive. Some of course managed to scrape together the money to be Treated—begging, borrowing, stealing. They stopped rebelling, and started lying about their status, men disclaiming their own offspring, mothers having their pelvises surgically changed, so it would seem they had never borne a child, everybody scrambling, lying, changing their minds. So many infants were murdered, tossed out. The DNA Securitas was checking everyone they could, so children who were adopted, were saved, were added to the files. Samples were taken.
I didn’t care about the rules anymore. I went out into the open country. I saw what was really going on. What I write here is not the official version. I was all alone. My boys wouldn’t have anything to do with me—they still hardly speak to me. Michael, my grandson, I know for sure, died of natural causes in a Gaist commune in Kentucky. That galvanized me. He was only sixty. I had lived to see my grandchildren die. I had lived too long, I knew it then. But I kept up. I am a man of fixed ideas. I decided there was something I could do, good I could do. I was fu
ll of pride. Grandiosity, more like it.
About the time of the Great Rim Earthquakes, which took so many, including my granddaughter Jennifer, I got started. The U.A. had long ago deaccessioned these Gulf lands but had not really let go of them. I left the U.A. and came here.
I gathered together some of the children. And I began.
I went back to my oldest beliefs, those that had made me a doctor in the first place, back in the 1940’s. (Can you believe how far back that is?) That you can always do something to help.
And I tried, from the start, “ to make a difference.” I had all the schemes, the mailing lists, the appeals. I trotted out the foundlings and said they deserved a chance. “I-I-I,” it was always me, my heroism—I just kept going and going. Trying to save the boys, trying to find them work. I survived in this enterprise for forty years. But then, lately, the charities started to claim, along with everyone else, that there was no toss out problem anymore, and if there was, what was the point of salvaging? Salvage, that was the word they used. That was what they told me. “Why save them when they have no future, or they are only going to be Altered or become slaves or just quietly so-long? Why?” So, this year, after we sent off the most of them to labor camps in Brazil and Mexico, I went off to be redescribed—one of my sons suggested this in a letter, an attempt to reason with his ridiculous father. He told me I should stop cavorting with the great unwashed, those who are going to do the so-long anyway, it was bad for my soul, he said. Didn’t I understand the Reveal? The Elysian Reality? My associations were muddying my mind, he said. I was just living in the mire. When would I uplift myself? So I tried. Perhaps I was an old fool. But then I found myself the last few months in Memphis cavorting with my purported peers, and I couldn’t bear them. I stayed a few months to honor my son’s request, but when I came back, Vee let the last few boys go. I have made no difference at all. My last attempt, giving Malcolm’s Trust and everything else I had to Vee’s people, not needed, not needed at all. But it was Malcolm’s! I betrayed him!
So it comes time for me to arrive at my conclusions, and to complete this litany of regret, and to find what illusions I had and to grasp what their consequences were, no matter how innocently I believed them. How innocently I acquired them. Now, I think it is the greatest gift of all to have a sense of time, to know when some way of seeing things, some set of goals, is worthy, and when it has worn out its worthiness, when it no longer fits the circumstances, when its very existence is a kind of distortion.
And so I have decided, after two hundred and one or two (I’ve lost my count, along with everything else) years, that I would rather have that unchartered terrain where all my true boys are going or have already gone, and my grandchildren, and my wives. I want that undescribed place, where none of the theories pertain. Out past the last perimeter, the last of the last, for they keep building a new boundary, past the last, and past the last, so nothing is ever real, there is always more, I have lost what I believed in. I have lost, lost, lost, and now I am lost, and now I join them. This is the short of it: I am sorry we ever rebelled against the sweetness of the long night, the place past the boundary. Sorry we were ever so afraid. Sorry we chose to be so vigilant, to never sleep. The nightmares came anyway. The nightmares came in the daylight, in the nation. Exactly because we chose to wall ourselves off from them. Everything good has been lost because of a few who devised how to stay awake all night, how to prop their eyes open, to watch and watch and watch but see so little—go absolutely blind—
Goodbye to those I did love still in this mortal coil, I try here and now to shuffle it off, pull it off if I have to—Lazarus Newbirth de Gold HR WELLFI ID 237,678. October IN A VERY LATE YEAR—
X
4:20 PM October19, 2121
Audubon Foundling House, Audubon Island
New Orleans Islands, Northeast Gulf De-Accessioned Territory,
U.A. Protectorate
The next day, I sat with the scrawny, true body in the dining hall. I had helped Ariel take off the prodermis. He took it outside and burned it. Then, much later, he brought in the ashes, said we were burying them separately, “Just to be sure.” Then Marilee came in with cloth she’d washed by hand, and she moved Lazarus onto it and started to sew it into a shroud around him. When I watched her do this, I realized she had done it many times before. I found this—a familiarity with death, with its rituals—completely incomprehensible and completely ordinary at the same time.
I joined Ariel and Vee as they carried the shriveled frame (corpse, to even call him a corpse!) out to Vee’s boat, and hid it under a pile of debris and furniture from some rooms in the Home that Vee had stacked on the deck. Since these actions felt so impossible, they were almost easy to do. I employed that pretend I used to feel in my acting days, as a way to get through.
We trolled past the houses with the women smoking cigars and the dogs howling and down into the Tchoupitoulas Trench, and then away from the Quay of the Sunken Quarter and into the deeper stretches of the Old River, where, Ariel said, the Gulf traffic used to come up to the Port of New Orleans, to Henry Clay wharf right at the end of our street, and the Napoleon Wharf. He said he’d heard there used to be cranes taller than ten story buildings to pick up boxes bigger than three transports full of goods that all the people, in the regime that was here before the United Authority, used to consume, eat, dress in, break and throw out. The fugue country, the old one.
Ariel was telling all these tales while standing on the prow of Vee’s boat. Vee was agreeing that things had been like that once, very long ago. For a while they were arguing about the exact year things did happen—when the river moved its course, when the ports actually shut down. I was crouched in the stern, holding onto the grommetted tarp, which was threaded with some cord and covering the old mattress and chairs from the unused rooms of the Foundling House. We were hauling all this to hide the body. If we were stopped by any WELLFI vessel we could claim we were just taking some furniture to East Menteur’s new site. I was watching the wake of the boat, the white furrow in the water. Nothing I could think of felt worthy of being said. A bruisy thick liquid surrounded me—how I remember this day. I could not see light, even when I looked at it. Every so often, I would poke my head up, and say to myself, “You condemned him, fought with him—and, finally, you wanted to kill him. What are you?” as Tamara had accused me, and then I would sink back down into the brown and purple flow.
Finally, we reached the place in the river where Vee said the currents were infallible, always spun back out, toward the Gulf. Vee came to the stern and told me to help him slide the body out from under all the stacks of furniture. It looked as if it would be difficult, but it was not, really. The furniture was old and in places rotted, and it broke apart easily.
When the time came, Vee called Ariel back from the wheelhouse, saying the boat could drift for a moment.
I did what Vee told me to do—I took Lazarus’ feet, and Ariel took his neck, and Vee cradled our guardian, our king, our father, under his tiny waist, and we counted, “One, two, three.” Vee lifted him up on “four,” and put him over the side of the boat. Then, all at the same time, we let go and watched the sack that held Lazarus’s frail inner, true body sink in to the river’s brown depths beneath the foam, toss up, feet first, and disappear.
Vee had said a few chants, repeated a single mantra over and over, on the way back. I learned it by heart although I had no idea what it meant. Ohm mane padme ohm— And then, we sailed back to the Foundling House.
*
When we got home, very late that night: I went into the kitchen. I found all the tins and cans and jars Ariel had opened, which were still open, and in the refrigerator, and this is what I did:
I ate the anchovies: pungent, salty.
I ate the rest of the peaches, thick-skinned, blush pink, in cloudy sweet terribly rich syrup, delicious. I was devastated when they were over.
I ate mussels in olive oil—orange and swimming in pepper sauce, ten at a time
in my mouth.
I found the hearts of palm, and fished every one out of its juice in the can.
I saw Ariel had four kinds of rum. I drank white, I drank pale yellow, and I drank the brown, and then, finally, the garnet-colored rum, which I liked best.
I finished off the white greasy coconut.
I smoked a long fat cigar, smuggled from the islands.
I lay my head on the table, at the end, in my satiation, in my stupor, my longing. What would Lydia think of me? How could I go into my Boundarytime with so little discipline?
Then, in my great grief, I fell asleep.
XI
8:00 AM October 20, 2121
Audubon Foundling House, Audubon Island
New Orleans Islands, Northeast Gulf De-Accessioned Territory,
U.A. Protectorate
“Malcolm? Malcolm? Are you listening?”
Ariel woke me. I’d slept at the kitchen table the whole night, my head cradled in my arms. I could hear him, but he seemed very far away.
“We can’t stay here. Do you understand?”
I nodded again.
“You understood last night. You have to agree, and snap out of it, and come. Didn’t you tell me you were due at Serio’s arraignment? Back in Port Gramercy? Didn’t you tell me—If you don’t show, they will be around here, asking for you—”
