It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  Definitely, I was not aggressive in class. I don’t think so. But compared to my mostly meek classmates, some of whom sat small in their desks like partially folded-up papier-mâché dolls, it is possible that Adriane Strohl stood out—in a bad way.

  In Patriot Democracy History, for instance, I’d questioned “facts” of history, sometimes. I’d asked questions about the subject no one ever questioned—the Great Terrorist Attacks of 9/11/01. But not in an arrogant way, really—just out of curiosity! I certainly didn’t want to get any of my teachers in trouble with the EOB (Education Oversight Bureau), which could result in them being demoted or fired or—vaporized.

  I’d thought that, well—people liked me, mostly. I was the spiky-haired girl with the big, glistening dark-brown eyes and a voice with a little catch in it and a habit of asking questions. Like a really young child with too much energy in kindergarten, whom you hope will run in circles and tire himself out. With a kind of naive obliviousness I earned good grades, so it was assumed that, despite my father being of MI caste, I would qualify for a federally mandated State Democracy University.

  (That is, I was eligible for admission to one of the massive state universities. At these, a thousand students might attend a lecture, and many courses were online. Restricted universities were far smaller, prestigious and inaccessible to all but a fraction of the population; though not listed online or in any public directory, these universities were housed on “traditional” campuses in Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton, and so on, in restricted districts. Not only did we not know precisely where these centers of learning were, we had not ever met anyone with degrees from them.)

  In class, when I raised my hand to answer a teacher’s question I often did notice classmates glancing at me—my friends, even—sort of uneasy, apprehensive: What will Adriane say now? What is wrong with Adriane?

  There was nothing wrong with me! I was sure.

  In fact, I was secretly proud of myself. Maybe just a little vain. Wanting to think I am Eric Strohl’s daughter.

  2.

  The words were brisk, impersonal: “Strohl, Adriane. Hands behind your back.”

  It happened so fast. At graduation rehearsal.

  So fast! I was too surprised—too scared—to think of resisting.

  Except I guess that I did—try to “resist”—in childish desperation tried to duck and cringe away from the officers’ rough hands on me, wrenching my arms behind my back with such force I had to bite my lips to keep from screaming.

  What was happening? I could not believe it—I was being arrested.

  Yet even in my shock, thinking, I will not scream. I will not beg for mercy.

  My wrists were handcuffed behind my back. Within seconds I was a captive of Homeland Security.

  I’d only just given my valedictorian’s speech and had stepped away from the podium to come down from the auditorium stage when there came our principal, Mr. Mackay, with a peculiar expression on his face—muted anger, righteousness, but fear also—to point at me, as if the arresting officers needed him to point me out at close range.

  “That is she—Adriane Strohl. That is the treasonous girl you seek.”

  Mr. Mackay’s words were strangely stilted. He seemed very angry with me—but why? Because of my valedictory speech? But the speech had consisted entirely of questions—not answers, or accusations.

  I’d known that Mr. Mackay didn’t like me. He didn’t know me very well but knew of me from my teachers. But it was shocking to see in an adult’s face a look of genuine hatred.

  “She was warned. They are all warned. We did our best to educate her as a patriot, but—the girl is a born provocateur.”

  Provocateur! I knew what the term meant, but I’d never heard such a charge before, applied to me.

  Later I would realize that the arrest warrant must have been drawn up for me before the rehearsal—of course. Mr. Mackay and his faculty advisors must have reported me to Youth Disciplinary before they’d even heard my speech—they’d guessed that it would be “treasonous” and that I couldn’t be allowed to give it at the graduation ceremony. And the Patriot Democracy Scholarship—that must have been a cruel trick as well.

  As others stood staring at the front of the brightly lit auditorium, the arrest warrant was read to me by the female arresting officer. I was too stunned to hear most of it—only the accusing words arrest, detention, reassignment, sentencing—treason-speech and questioning of authority.

  Quickly then, Mr. Mackay called for an “emergency assembly” of the senior class.

  Murmuring and excited, my classmates settled into the auditorium. There were 322 students in the class, and like wildfire news of my arrest had spread among them within seconds.

  Gravely Mr. Mackay announced from the podium that Adriane Strohl, “formerly” valedictorian of the class, had been arrested by the State on charges of treason and questioning of authority; and what was required now was a “vote of confidence” from her peers regarding this action.

  That is, all members of the senior class (excepting Adriane Strohl) were to vote on whether to confirm the arrest or to challenge it. “We will ask for a show of hands,” Mr. Mackay said, voice quavering with the solemnity of the occasion, “in a full, fair, and unbiased demonstration of democracy.”

  At this time I was positioned, handcuffed, with a wet, streaked, guilty face, at the very edge of the stage, a few yards away from the flush-faced, indignant principal. As he spoke, from time to time he glared at me, even pointing at me once with an accusing forefinger. As if my classmates needed to be reminded who the arrestee was.

  Gripping my upper arms were two husky officers from the Youth Disciplinary Division of Homeland Security. They were one man and one woman, each with razor-cut hair, and they wore dark-blue uniforms and were equipped with billy clubs, Tasers, Mace, and revolvers in heavy holsters around their waists. My classmates stared wide-eyed, both intimidated and thrilled. An arrest! At school! And a show-of-hands vote, which was not a novelty in itself except on this exciting occasion.

  “Boys and girls! Attention! All those in favor of Adriane Strohl being stripped of the honor of class valedictorian as a consequence of having committed treason and questioned authority, raise your hands—yes?” There was a brief stunned pause. Brief.

  Hesitantly, a few hands were lifted. Then a few more.

  No doubt the presence of the uniformed Youth Disciplinary officers glaring at them roused my classmates to action. Entire rows lifted their hands—Yes!

  Here and there were individuals who shifted uneasily in their seats. They were not voting, yet. I caught the eye of my friend Carla, whose face too appeared to be wet with tears. And there was Paige all but signaling to me—I’m sorry, Adriane. I have no choice.

  As in a nightmare, at last a sea of hands was raised against me. If there were some not voting, clasping their hands in their laps, I could not see them.

  “And all opposed—no?” Mr. Mackay’s voice hovered dramatically as if he were counting raised hands; in fact, there was not a single hand, of all the rows of seniors, to be seen.

  “I think, then, we have a stunning example of democracy in action, boys and girls. ‘Majority rule—the truth is in the numbers.’ ”

  The second vote was hardly more than a repeat of the first: “We, the senior class of Pennsboro High School, confirm and support the arrest of the former valedictorian, Adriane Strohl, on charges of treason and questioning of authority. All those in favor . . .”

  By this time the arrestee had shut her teary eyes in shame, revulsion, dread. No need to see the show of hands another time.

  The officers hauled me out of the school by a rear exit, paying absolutely no heed to my protests of being in pain from the tight handcuffs and their grip on my upper arms. Immediately I was forced into an unmarked police vehicle resembling a small tank with plow-like gratings that might be used to ram against and flatten protesters.

  Roughly I was thrown into the rear of the tank. The door
was shut and locked. Though I pleaded with the officers, who were seated in the front of the vehicle, on the other side of a barred Plexiglas barrier, no one paid the slightest attention to me, as if I did not exist.

  The officers appeared to be ST4 and ST5. It was possible that they were foreign-born indoctrinated NAS citizens who had not been allowed to learn English.

  I thought, Will anyone tell my parents where I am? Will they let me go home?

  Panicked, I thought, Will they vaporize me?

  Heralded by a blaring siren, I was taken to a fortresslike building in the city center of Pennsboro, the local headquarters of Homeland Security Interrogation. This was a building with blank, bricked-up windows that was said to have once been a post office, before the Reconstitution of the United States into the North American States and the privatization and gradual extinction of the Postal Service.

  (Many buildings from the old States remained, now utilized for very different purposes. The building to which my mother had gone for grade school had been converted to a Children’s Diagnostic and Surgical Repair Facility, for instance; the residence hall in which my father had lived as a young medical student, in the years before he’d been reclassified as MI, was now a Youth Detention and Reeducation Facility. The Media Dissemination Bureau, where my brother worked, was in an old brownstone building, formerly the Pennsboro Public Library in the days when books existed to be held in the hand—and read!)

  In this drafty place I was brought to an interrogation room in the Youth Disciplinary Division, forcibly seated in an uncomfortable chair with a blinding light shining in my face and a camera aimed at me, and interrogated by strangers whom I could barely see.

  Repeatedly I was asked—“Who wrote that speech for you?”

  No one, I said. No one wrote my speech, or helped me write it—I’d written it myself.

  “Did your father, Eric Strohl, write that speech for you?”

  No! My father did not.

  “Did your father tell you what to write? Influence you? Are these questions your father’s questions?”

  No! My own questions.

  “Did either of your parents help you write your speech? Influence you? Are these questions their questions?”

  No, no, no.

  “Are these treasonous thoughts their thoughts?”

  I was terrified that my father, or both my parents, had been arrested, and were being interrogated too, somewhere else in this awful place. I was terrified that my father would be reclassified no longer MI but SI (Subversive Individual) or AT (Active Traitor)—crimes punishable by Deletion.

  My valedictory speech was examined line by line, word by word, by the interrogators—though it was just two printed double-spaced sheets of paper with a few scrawled annotations. My computer had been seized from my locker and was being examined as well.

  And all my belongings from my locker—laptop, sketchbook, backpack, cell phone, granola bars, a soiled school sweatshirt, wadded tissues—were confiscated.

  The interrogators were brisk and impersonal as machines. Almost, you’d have thought they might be robot interrogators—until you saw one of them blink, or swallow, or glare at me in pity or disgust, or scratch at his nose.

  (Even then, as Dad might have said, these figures could have been robots, for the most recent AI devices were being programmed to emulate idiosyncratic, “spontaneous” human mannerisms.)

  Sometimes an interrogator would shift in his seat, away from the blinding light, and I would have a fleeting but clear view of a face—and what was shocking was that the face appeared to be so ordinary, the face of someone you’d see on a bus, or a neighbor of ours.

  My valedictory address had been timed to be no more than eight minutes long. That was the tradition at our school—a short valedictorian address, and an even shorter salutatorian address. My English teacher, Mrs. Dewson, had been assigned to “advise” me—but I hadn’t shown her what I’d been writing. (I hadn’t shown Dad, or Mom, or any of my friends—I’d wanted to surprise them at graduation.) After a half dozen failed starts I’d gotten desperate and had the bright idea of asking numbered questions—twelve in all—of the kind my classmates might have asked if they’d had the nerve (some of these the very questions I’d asked my teachers, who had never given satisfactory answers)—like What came before the beginning of time?

  And What came before the Great Terrorist Attacks of 9/11?

  Our NAS calendar dates from the time of that attack, which was before my birth, but not my parents’ births, and so my parents could remember a pre-NAS time when the calendar was different—time wasn’t measured as just a two-digit figure but a four-digit figure! (Under the old, now-outlawed calendar, my mother and father had been born in what had been called the twentieth century. It was against the law to compute birthdates under the old calendar, but Daddy had told me—I’d been born in what would have been called the twenty-first century if the calendar had not been reformed.)

  NAS means North American States—more formally known as RNAS, Reconstituted North American States—which came into being some years after the Great Terrorist Attacks, as a direct consequence of the Attacks, as we were taught.

  Following the Attacks there was an Interlude of Indecisiveness, during which time issues of “rights” (the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, civil rights law, etc.) versus the need for Patriot Vigilance in the War Against Terror were contested, with a victory, after the suspension of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by executive order, for PVIWAT, or Patriot Vigilance. (Yes, it is hard to comprehend. As soon as you come to the end of such a sentence, you have forgotten the beginning!)

  How strange it was to think there’d been a time when the regions known as (Reconstituted) Mexico and (Reconstituted) Canada had been separate political entities—separate from the States! On a map it seems clear, for instance, that the large state of Alaska should be connected with mainland United States, and not separated by what was formerly “Canada.” This too was hard to grasp and had never been clearly explained in any of our Patriot Democracy History classes, perhaps because our teachers were not certain of the facts.

  The old, “outdated” (that is, “unpatriotic”) history books had all been destroyed, my father said. Hunted down in the most remote outposts—obscure rural libraries in the Dakotas, belowground stacks in great university libraries, microfilm in what had been the Library of Congress. “Outdated”/“unpatriotic” information was deleted from all computers and from all accessible memory—only reconstituted history and information were allowed, just as only the reconstituted calendar was allowed.

  This was only logical, we were taught. There was no purpose to learning useless things, which would only clutter our brains like debris stuffed to overflowing in a trash bin.

  But there must have been a time before that time—before the Reconstitution, and before the Attacks. That was what I was asking. Patriot Democracy History—which we’d had every year since fifth grade, an unchanging core of First Principles with ever-more-detailed information—was concerned only with post-Terrorist events, mostly the relations of the NAS with its numerous Terrorist Enemies in other parts of the world, and an account of the “triumphs” of the NAS in numerous wars. So many wars! They were fought now at long distance, and did not involve living soldiers, for the most part; robot-missiles were employed, and powerful bombs said to be nuclear, chemical, and biological. In our senior year of high school we were required to take a course titled Wars of Freedom—these included long-ago wars like the Revolutionary War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the more recent Afghanistan and Iraqi wars—all of which our country had won—“decisively.” We were not required to learn the causes of these wars, if there were actual causes, but dates of battles and names of high-ranking generals and political leaders and presidents; these were provided in columns to be memorized for exams. The question of Why? was never asked—and so I’d asked it in class, and in my valedictory addr
ess. It had not occurred to me that this was treason-speech, or that I was questioning authority.

  The harsh voices were taking a new approach: Was it one of my teachers who’d written the speech for me? One of my teachers who’d “influenced” me?

  The thought came to me—Mr. Mackay! I could blame him, he would be arrested . . .

  But I would never do such a thing, I thought. Even if the man hated me and had had me arrested for treason, I could not lie about him.

  • • •

  After two hours of interrogation it was decided that I was an “uncooperative subject.” In handcuffs I was taken by YD officers to another floor of Homeland Security, which exuded the distressing air of a medical unit; there I was strapped down onto a movable platform and slid inside a cylindrical machine that made clanging and whirring noises close against my head; the cylinder was so small, the surface only an inch or so from my face, I had to shut my eyes tight to keep from panicking. The interrogators’ voices were channeled into the machine, sounding distorted and inhuman. This was a BIM (Brain-Image Maker)—I’d only heard of these—that would determine if I was telling the truth or lying.

  Did your father—or any adult—write your speech for you?

  Did your father—or any adult—influence your speech?

  Did your father—or any adult—infiltrate your mind with treasonous thoughts?

  Barely I could answer, through parched lips—No. No, no!

  Again and again these questions were repeated. No matter what answers I gave, the questions were repeated.