Welcome to Dystopia
Page 7
Bald isn’t so bad, and it does grow back faster than you might think, you’ll be fine!
Love to you both, Carrie.
From: Michelle Farley
To: Carrie Westlyn
Date: Tuesday, September 4, 2018 at 2:18 PM
Subject: Re: Re: Back from the hospital
Dear Carrie,
What a nightmare! I don’t understand why your country doesn’t have better healthcare, the United States is so big and so rich compared to little old New Zealand! But I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising, given who you all voted for over there.
Can’t you see if you can find a clinical trial of some kind that might want to treat you with a new drug or something? I’ve been enrolled into two, the cancer research here is pretty amazing—one is a study on the nerves in my eyes, and the other is a new drug that’s supposed to lessen the side effects of chemo, doesn’t really have anything to do with cancer itself. But I say why not? Doesn’t cost anything and might help. I’m sure there must be something out there for you, you just need to look a bit harder maybe? God does help those who help themselves, so they say.
We’ve had to cut back as well, since even though my treatment is covered by the state (it’s why we pay our taxes after all!) it’s still taken a bite out of the bank account. We did have plans to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary with a cruise to Singapore next year, might have to just make do with a trip over to Ozzie and see mates on the Gold Coast instead.
Hugs to you and Scotty,
Michelle
From: Carrie Westlyn
To: Michelle Farley
Date: Friday, November 23, 2018 at 11:15 AM
Subject: Just a quick update
Dear Michelle,
Sorry for not getting back to you sooner, things have been a bit hectic around here. It sounds like you’ve got your cancer treatment well in hand, doubt there’s much I can tell you that would be of much benefit.
Yes, I had hoped for better, too, although I’m not sure it makes much difference who anyone votes for anymore, and wish everything weren’t a choice between bad and worse. The mid-term elections were very confusing, hard to know who has won anywhere, nobody seems to know anything.
ACA (God forbid you call it “ObamaCare” anymore!) hasn’t been replaced, and it’s only getting worse. There aren’t any clinical trials being run here much, at least none that focus on anything to do with women. Jenny is having trouble finding anyone who will prescribe her birth control for her endometriosis, it’s all registered on a national database now and doctors don’t like having visits from Homeland Security about who they treat and for what. Poor kid, she’s barely eighteen. I feel so guilty and worried that she’s inherited my cancer genes.
In any case, we’ve got bigger problems to worry about. The insurance company turned down our appeal over Scotty’s injection, and we have to find the money to pay for that somewhere. But I did manage to finally see my specialist in Des Moines, and she had bad news, the cancer has come back and is spreading. I’m not feeling particularly sick just yet, but the cost of the drugs I’d need is more than we can pay for, now that Scotty isn’t working any more—did I tell you? The factory closed, everyone in town is pretty much unemployed. It’ll be some time before we can even dream about cruises to anywhere.
We’re scraping together every penny we’ve got left to help Dave, our oldest. He went to Canada without telling us a few weeks ago with some of his friends from college to try to buy me the drugs I’d need since they’re about a tenth of what they are here, but at the border US Customs confiscated them all along with his passport and told him he could be charged with a felony drug offense. He can’t even prove he’s an American citizen and he can’t get back into the country. But the American embassy in Canada keeps telling him he has to get a replacement passport here, they can’t issue him one! He says he’s being looked after okay, but we just want our son home.
Sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you, hope you understand and that your chemo is going well,
Best wishes, Carrie
From: Michelle Farley
To: Carrie Westlyn
Date: Sunday, November 25, 2018 at 12:26 PM
Subject: Re: Just a quick update
Oh my god, Carrie, that’s awful! How can Dave be arrested for chemo drugs, it’s not like it’s heroin! I’m bald now, chemo hurts a lot, although the clinical trial drugs seem to be working well. I wish I had more energy to write a longer email. But I’ll keep you all in my thoughts and prayers, do let us know how you get on!
Big hugs to you all,
Michelle
From: Carrie Westlyn
To: Michelle Farley
Date: Thursday, December 20, 2018 at 4:15 AM
Subject: Re: Re: Just a quick update
Dear Michelle,
Not sure if you’ll get this email or not, since I’m having to write from one of those internet café places. I saw my oncologist a few weeks ago. It’s too late to treat my cancer, it’s gone to my bones and gotten very aggressive. She was very nice, didn’t charge me for the visit, which is just as well since we couldn’t have paid for it anyway. The prognosis she says is, with treatment, maybe a few years. Without, maybe six months, if I take care of myself. We can’t afford it, we have no insurance left. So six months, if I’m lucky.
Thing have spiraled out of control here anyway, the cancer is ironically the least of my worries. We lost our house. We had police serve us notice that because of Dave’s so-called drug offense, under RICO law our property was forfeit and they confiscated it along with what money we had left in our bank account. Scotty managed to get Jenny and the cat along with at least some of our possessions into the car before that was confiscated as well and they’re on their way to California to apply to one of the sanctuary cities there for refuge. There’s no point in me going, not with the condition I’m in. Nobody is going to take in a terminal cancer patient, no matter how generous they try to be.
I may never see either of them again, just hoping they make it in time—it’s hard to figure out what’s “fake” or not anymore now that the news is so regulated and my access to a lot of internet sites is restricted, but it seems the entire west coast is about to secede for real. The National Guard has already been deployed in Des Moines, where I’m staying with some friends. Nobody you know, and I don’t want to say who, because you never know who’s reading this anymore. We’ve got tanks on the streets and you can’t tell who the cops are from the military, there’s protests and riots breaking out everywhere. It’s like a war zone. Part of me is scared, but part of me feels oddly liberated. I’ve got nothing left to lose, and if one sick fifty-five-year-old woman who can barely stand up without a walker can do anything at all to help, I’ve already knitted myself one of those silly pink hats—it’s cold on the streets of Des Moines this time of year!
See you on the news, wish me luck.
From: Michelle Farley
To: Carrie Westlyn
Date: Monday, August 13, 2018 at 1:51 PM
Subject: Are you there?
Yes! I got your email! Carrie, please don’t be stupid, you can’t take on the government and win. Surely there’s something you can do, but protests are just going to get you hurt, they can’t fix anything. You’re in no fit state for that anyway. I rang Julie the other day, she suggested maybe you could try to get across to Canada like all those immigrants do, surely they’d help you? Be sensible, think of your family, they need you. I’ll pray for you, just please be careful and let us know you’re okay.
Love from us both, Michelle
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BIRDS
Deepak Unnikrishnan
Anna Varghese worked in Abu Dhabi. She taped people. Specifically, she taped construction workers who fell from incomplete buildings.
Anna, working the night shift, found these injured men, then put them back together with duct tape or some good glue, or, if stitches were required, patched them up with a needle and horsehair, before sending them on their way. The work, rarely advertised, was nocturnal.
Anna belonged to a crew of ten, led by Khalid, a burly man from Nablus. Khalid’s team covered Hamdan Street, Electra, Salaam, and Khalifa. They used bicycles; they biked quickly.
Anna had been doing this for a long time, thirty years, and many of her peers had retired—replaced, according to Khalid, by a less dependable crew. Seniority counted, and so Khalid allowed her to pick her route.
Anna knew Hamdan as intimately as her body. In the seventies, when she first arrived, the buildings were smaller. Nevertheless, she would, could, and did glue plus tape scores of men a day, correcting and reattaching limbs, putting back organs or eyeballs—and sometimes, if the case was hopeless, praying until the man breathed his last. But deaths were rare. Few workers died at work sites; it was as though labor could not die there. As a lark, some veterans began calling building sites death-proof. At lunchtime, to prove their point, some of them hurled themselves off the top floor in full view of new arrivals. The jumps didn’t kill. But if the jumpers weren’t athletic and didn’t know how to fall, their bodies cracked, which meant the jumpers lay there until nighttime, waiting for the men and women who would bicycle past, looking for the fallen in order to fix, shape, and glue the damaged parts back into place, like perfect cake makers repiping smudged frosting.
When Anna interviewed for the position, Khalid asked if she possessed reasonable handyman skills. “No,” she admitted. No problem, he assured her, she could learn those skills on the job.
“What about blood, make you faint?” She pondered the question, then said no again.
“Okay, start tomorrow,” said Khalid. Doing what, she wondered, by now irritated with Cousin Thracy for talking her into seeking her fortune in a foreign place, for signing up for a job with an Arab at the helm, and one who clearly didn’t care whether she knew anything or not. “Taping,” Khalid replied. “The men call us Stick People, Stickers for short. It’s a terrible name, but that’s okay—they’ve accepted us.”
Construction was young back then. Oil had just begun to dictate terms. And Anna was young, too. Back in her hometown, she assumed if she ever went to the Gulf she would be responsible for someone’s child or would put her nursing skills to use at the hospital, but the middlemen pimping work visas wanted money—money she didn’t have, but borrowed. Cousin Thracy pawned her gold earrings. “I expect gains from this investment,” she told Anna at the airport.
When Anna arrived, flying Air India, Khalid was waiting. “Is it a big hospital?” she asked him as he drove his beat-up pickup.
“Hospital?” he repeated. Over lunch, he gently broke it to her that she had been lied to.
“No job?” she wept. There is a job, Khalid assured her, but he urged her to eat first. Then he needed to ask her a few questions.
“Insha’Allah,” he told her, “the job’s yours, if you want it.”
Anna built a reputation among the working class; hers was a name they grew to trust.
When workers fell, severing limbs, the pain was acute, but borne. Yet what truly stung was the loneliness and anxiety of falling that weighed on their minds.
Pedestrians mostly ignored those who fell outside the construction site, walking around them, some pointing or staring. The affluent rushed home, returning with cameras and film. Drivers of heavy-duty vehicles or family sedans took care to avoid running over them. But it didn’t matter where labor fell. The public remained indifferent. In the city center, what unnerved most witnesses was that when the men fell, they not only lost their limbs or had cracks that looked like fissures, but they lost their voices, too. They would just look at you, frantically moving what could still move. But most of the time, especially in areas just being developed, the fallen simply waited. Sometimes, the men fell onto things or under things where few people cared to look. Or they weren’t reported missing. These were the two ways, Anna would share with anyone who asked, that laborers could die on-site.
Then there were those who would never be found. A combination of factors contributed to this: bad luck, ineptitude, a heavy workload. A fallen worker might last a week without being discovered, but after a week, deterioration set in. Eventually, death.
Anna had a superb track record for finding fallen men. The woman must have been part-bloodhound. She found every sign of them including teeth, bits of skin. She roamed her territory with tenacity, pointing her flashlight in places the devil did not know or construction lights could not brighten. Before her shift ended in the morning, she returned to the sites, checking with the supervisor or the men disembarking Ashok Leyland buses to be certain no one was still missing, and that the men she had fixed, then ordered to wait at the gates for inspection, included everybody on the supervisor’s roster. The men were grateful to be fussed over like this.
Anna wasn’t beautiful, but in a city where women were scarce, she was prized. She also possessed other skills. The fallen shared that when Anna reattached body parts, she spoke to them in her tongue, sometimes stroking their hair or chin. She would wax and wane about her life, saying that she missed her kids or the fish near her river, or would instead ask about their lives, what they left, what they dreamt at night, even though they couldn’t answer. If she made a connection with the man or if she simply liked him, she flirted. “You must be married,” she liked to tease. If she didn’t speak his language, she sang, poorly, but from the heart. But even Anna lost people.
“Sometimes a man will die no matter what you do,” Khalid told her. “Only Allah knows why.”
Once, for four hours, Anna sat with a man who held in place with his right arm his head, which had almost torn itself loose from the fall. A week prior, Anna had a similar case and patched the man up in under two hours. But in this case, probably her last before retirement, nothing worked. Sutures did not hold. Glue refused to bind. Stranger still was that the man could speak. In her many years of doing this, none of the fallen had been able to say a word. “Not working?” he asked. Anna pursed her lips and just held him. There was no point calling an ambulance. No point finding a doctor.
“Remove the fallen from the work site,” Khalid had warned her, “and they die.” It was simply something everyone knew. Outside work sites, men couldn’t survive these kinds of falls. If the men couldn’t be fixed at the sites, they didn’t stand a chance anywhere else.
The dying man’s name was Iqbal. He was probably in his mid-thirties and would become the first man to die under her watch in over five years. In her long career, she had lost thirty-seven people, an exceptional record. She asked about his home.
“Home’s shit,” he said.
His village suffocated its young. “So small you could squeeze all of its people and farmland inside a plump cow.” The only major enterprise was a factory that made coir doormats. “Know when a village turns bitter? If the young are bored…” Iqbal trailed off.
He’d left because he wanted to see a bit of the world. Besides, everyone he knew yearned to be a Gulf boy. Recruiters turned up every six months in loud shirts and trousers and a hired taxi, and they hired anyone. “When I went, they told me the only requirement was to be able to withstand heat,” Iqbal said. Then there was the money, which had seduced Anna, too. “Tax-free!” he bellowed. They told him if he played his cards right, he could line his pockets with gold.
Before making up his mind, Iqbal had visited the resident fortune-teller—a man whose parrot picked out a card that confirmed the Gulf would transform Iqbal’s l
ife. He packed that night, visited Good-Time Philomena, the neighborhood hooker, for a fuck that lasted so long “a she-wolf knocked on the door and begged us to stop.” Then he sneaked back into his house and stole his old man’s savings to pay for the visa and the trip.
“Uppa was paralyzed—a factory incident. Basically watched me take his cash,” Iqbal said. Anna frowned. “I wouldn’t worry,” Iqbal reassured her. “My brother took good care of him.”
“And how is he now?” Anna inquired.
“Died in my brother’s lap,” he replied. “I couldn’t go see him.”
As Anna continued to hold Iqbal’s head, he told her he expected to have made his fortune in ten years. By then, he’d have handpicked his wife, had those kids, built that house. His father, if he’d lived, would’ve forgiven him. Former teachers who scorned him by calling him Farm Boy or Day Dreamer would invite him to dine at their place. But then he fell, didn’t he? Slipped like a bungling monkey. He was doing something else—what, he seemed embarrassed to share.
“What were you up to?” Anna urged. “Go on, I won’t tell a soul.”
Iqbal smiled. “I was masturbating on the roof. The edge,” he confessed. He had done this many times before. “It’s super fun,” he giggled. “But then a pigeon landed on my pecker….” The bird startled him. He lost his balance.
“You didn’t!” Anna laughed.
“Try it, there’s nothing like it. It’s like impregnating the sky.” Or, he added, “in your case, welcoming it.”
“Behave,” Anna said. “I could easily be your mother’s age. Or older sister’s.”