Welcome to Dystopia

by Gordon Van Gelder

  “The heat,” he said softly. “The heat felled me.”

  “Not the bird?”

  Iqbal broke into a grin. “I came on a bird once. It acted like I’d shot it.”

  Like Anna, Iqbal had known heat ever since he was a child. He knew how to handle it, even when the steam in the air had the potential to boil a man’s mind. But the Gulf’s heat baked a man differently. First it cooked a man’s shirt and then the man’s skin. On-site, Iqbal trusted his instincts. Water, sometimes buttermilk, was always on hand, but frequent breaks meant a reduced output, and Iqbal knew his progress was being monitored. He had trained as a tailor, as his Uppa was a tailor; he knew learning a new trade took time. So he followed one rule: when his skin felt like parchment paper, he stopped working and quenched his thirst, sometimes drinking water so quickly it hurt. The sun never conquered him. His body was strong. But what he couldn’t control, he told Anna, were the reactions of people he passed in the street, especially if he volunteered to go to one of those little kadas to buy water or cold drinks for his mates in the afternoon.

  “How so?” Anna wondered.

  “In the summer,” Iqbal continued, “you burn, the clothes burn. You smell like an old stove.” Then he asked her, “Don’t you burn?”

  “Everyone burns here,” she replied quietly. “But you fell today? What was different?”

  “It seemed like the perfect day,” Iqbal said dryly. “What do the others tell you?”

  “The others?”

  “Those who fall.” Iqbal didn’t wait for an answer. “Outside, whether you believe it or not, heat’s easier to handle. For me, anyway.” On building tops, he insisted, most men shrivel into raisins. “Men don’t burn up there; they decay.”

  “But it’s cooler up there, no?” Anna asked.

  “Fully clothed, in hard hats? No,” said Iqbal. “I once saw a man shrink to the size of a child. At lunchtime, he drank a tub of water and grew back to his original size.” Still, the open air allowed the body to breathe. “You have wind.” Indoors, in the camps, in closed quarters, packed into bunk beds, not enough ACs, bodies baked, sweat burned eyes, salt escaped, fever and dehydration built. Bodies reeled from simply that. Anna nodded. There was a time Anna patched up a man with skin so dry, she needed to rub the man’s entire body with olive oil after she pieced him together.

  Even though they were all immune to death by free fall, there was nothing they could do about the heat. At lunch break, getting to the shade under tractor beds and crane rumps became more important than food. With shirts as pillows and newspapers as blankets, the men rested.

  Iqbal asked Anna if she would mind scratching his hair. “You’re new,” he teased. “You look new, like a bride.”

  Anna smiled. “I have grandkids now.” She dug her nails into his scalp.

  “They told you to fear the sun, didn’t they?” said Iqbal.

  “Who?”

  “Recruiters,” said Iqbal.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Well, no one mentions the nighttime,” Iqbal sighed. “They should.” At night, heat attacked differently, became wet. “I knew a man,” Iqbal continued, “who collected sweat. He would go door to door with a trolley full of buckets. After a week’s worth, this man—Badran was his name—dug a pit near the buildings we lived in. It would take him a long time to pour the buckets of sweat into that pit. The first couple of times, I watched. Then I began to help. Soon we had a pool—a salty pool. It was good fun. We floated for hours.”

  “Didn’t Badran get into trouble?” Anna asked.

  “Badran was a smart fellow,” said Iqbal. “He resold some of that pool water to this shady driver of a water tanker. The driver would get to the camp at around three a.m., take as much water as truck could carry. Everyone knew. The important people all got a cut.”

  “Where did he take the water?”

  “I asked Badran many times,” said Iqbal. “He never said.”

  “Badran must be doing well for himself,” said Anna.

  “He was, I suppose,” said Iqbal. “He died a few months ago.”

  “How?”

  “Accident,” replied Iqbal. “Was his time.”

  “Where?”

  “We were returning home in a pickup. Near Mussafah the driver hit something. Badran fell…the wheel…” Iqbal paused.

  Anna didn’t push him. She knew what he meant. Every night, Anna told Iqbal, she had dinner at this little cafeteria owned by a man from her town who served her leftovers that weren’t on the menu. She ate for free while Abdu, the cafeteria owner, gossiped. Abdu made a good living. Where his place was, every night, trucks and buses ferrying labor would stop. Badran and Iqbal may have stopped, too, sitting by the windows, worn out.

  “Maybe,” said Iqbal. “Once I sat next to a man who was so hot he evaporated before my eyes. I took his pants; someone took his shoes; his shirt was ugly, so no one wanted that.”

  Anna laughed. Iqbal’s speech was slowing. She continued massaging his scalp.

  “I once knew a man who wanted to die,” said Iqbal. “He’d realized pretty early it was hard to die in the workplace or in the camps. He wasn’t unhappy. He just wanted to die.”

  “So, did he?” asked Anna.

  Iqbal grinned. “You see, that’s how this story gets complicated. Charley knew what he wanted, but he was also fair. He had a wife and kids back home he wanted to make sure were provided for. He’d figured the best way to do that would be to die performing some work-related task. That way they would be compensated.”

  “Did he succeed?”

  Iqbal thought about the question. “I am not sure,” he finally said.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, he asked me to help. I liked him, you know. I said yes. He said it would take some time, a year or two, but it could work. So Charley tells me that every couple of months he would give himself an accident. He’d start with small ones. Fall off the first floor, lose a few toes. Then he would build up: third floor, sixth floor. Thing is, he’d tell me beforehand. A note, some secret code indicating when he planned to do this, and where. So I’d wait for the deed, and before anyone found out I’d go to him, remove one piece of him—don’t know, a finger or something—then throw that into the trash bin. Stick People would fix him up at night, but there would be a part missing. He promised himself four accidents a year. If he played his cards right, in three years, he’d be properly broken, just not fixable, and the company would be bound to inform his family. So that’s what we did for a while.”

  “His family wouldn’t have gotten a cent,” Anna confided.

  “Let me finish,” said Iqbal. “We’d done enough for me to administer the hammer blow in a few months; it had taken longer than we had anticipated—six years. One night, Charley sought me out. ‘I want to live,’ he said. I didn’t know what to say. I had removed a few fingers, toes, a kidney, his penis. His legs were half the size they’d been when he arrived, and now he wanted to live.”

  “What did you do?” Anna asked.

  “He’s very happy now,” smiled Iqbal. “Sometimes he asks me if he can watch me jack off since he can’t anymore.”

  “Was he there today?”

  “No, not today.” Iqbal’s breath grew increasingly labored. “Soon,” is what he said. Anna nodded, gently touching his face. Iqbal turned toward her. “Do you know the prayer for the dead?” She shook her head.

  “There’s this dream I’ve been having…” Iqbal began.

  “Listening,” said Anna.

  “A man I knew, Nandan, kept a bird, a pigeon in a cage, that he brought to work every day.” As Nandan worked, Iqbal shared, he never let this bird out of his sight.

  “Never?”

  “Not for a second,” Iqbal confirmed. “The bird could fly, but he weighted it down with an iron lock around its neck. It weighed enough to make the bird stoop all the time.” Iqbal felt bad for the bird, trapped in that cage, so he made up his mind to set it free when Nandan wasn’t looki
ng. “I almost succeeded,” he said. He was on the roof, picking the lock, about to set the bird free, when Nandan cornered him. Someone had seen Iqbal headed for the roof with the birdcage. Nandan demanded Iqbal give back his bird. “I wouldn’t, of course,” said Iqbal. In a fit of rage, Nandan lunged for the bird. Iqbal slipped, losing his grip on the bird; it fell to the ground a few feet away from both men, not far from the edge of the roof, eighteen stories up. The bird, in a panic, or perhaps, hope, began hopping toward the edge and jumped. “But I hadn’t had time to remove the lock,” said Iqbal.

  “That’s terrible,” said Anna.

  “In a way,” said Iqbal. “After the incident, I began having these dreams.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Promise not to laugh,” said Iqbal.

  “I promise,” said Anna. Weeks after the pigeon fell to its death, Iqbal began having dreams in which he stood atop the roof of some building he helped construct. “My family’s with me; we all have wings. The sun’s cold. You following me? Cold! We fly.” And as they fly, he shared, he notices that their feet possess talons, with which they can grip the top of the building, and they pull, and they fly, and they pull, and they fly, or try to fly, until they rip the building off its foundations, taking it with them, toward the gelid sun.” It was Iqbal’s final tale. Before dawn, he was gone.

  Anna stayed with him for a few minutes, wondering if she ought to wait until morning, but she decided against it, filling out a note she attached to his chest. Deceased, it said, listing Khalid’s company’s name and address and a point of contact. Then she got back on her cycle.

  THE ONLY CONSTANT

  Leslie Howle

  The room was small and cold. The agent, a slender white man with fair hair, gestured to the chair across the table from him and waited until I sat before clicking his recorder on.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded.

  “State your name and age.”

  “Camila Dubois, fifteen.”

  “You’re going to have to speak up.”

  I cleared my throat and lifted my chin. My mother had whispered to me when we were getting out of the agent’s car not to show any fear, no matter what they said. I held my face expressionless.

  “Where do you go to school?”

  This was a game. I was sure that they already knew everything there was to know about us.

  “At home.”

  He tapped a finger on the table between us. “Unless you are being home schooled for religious reasons, you are required to attend one of the National Schools.”

  “The vouchers don’t pay for a school I can afford to bus to. Too bad there aren’t any public schools I can bike to anymore.”

  “Miss Dubois, your father is a professor at the university. Your mother teaches at the community college. Your family can afford to send you to one of the charter schools on a public bus.”

  “My father has been supposedly ‘detained for deportation,’ and you won’t tell us why or where you’re holding him. He used up his vacation three months ago; there won’t be any more paychecks until you release him.” My voice was tight.

  He ignored this. “Your family is keeping you out of the National Schools for religious reasons, aren’t they? Your father is Muslim; you should all be wearing the mandatory ID badges.”

  I swallowed hot words. The way he was looking at me made me want to check my head to make sure I wasn’t wearing a hijab.

  “My family feels I can get a better education at home. My father is not Muslim. He’s not anything, he’s agnostic.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Tell me about the night of your father’s arrest.”

  “The National Guard took him on Father’s Day, in June. 2019 will be over in a month and we still haven’t heard anything about when we can expect to see him again. It’s been five months! We need to know that he’s okay.” My voice cracked.

  The memory of that night still plays over and over in my head. I can’t shake it. It’s like the fly caught in a chunk of amber that my friend Charlie brought to school in sixth grade. A horrific moment frozen in time.

  One minute, we were enjoying the Father’s Day dinner of roast lamb and vegetable kabobs that my little brother and I had helped my mother prepare, and the next, Father’s place at the table was empty, his food still warm on the plate.

  “Guardsmen handcuffed him and took him away with no explanation.” My eyes blurred with moisture; I looked down.

  “What did your mother do?”

  “She called our lawyer.”

  But that was after she had chased the Guardsmen out the door, screaming at them to let him go. Only my little brother’s wailing stopped her from following them to their car. I squeezed my eyes shut. The agent was talking again.

  “Did you know that your father was born and raised in Morocco?”

  My head snapped up. I stared in astonishment at his expressionless face. “That’s a lie! My father was born and raised in Pasadena.”

  “No, he wasn’t. But you know that, don’t you?”

  “I can’t know that because it’s not true. I know you people think everybody with brown skin must be a Muslim terrorist, but this is ridiculous.”

  My heart was racing. Was it my turn to be cuffed and hauled off?

  The agent ignored my response.

  “What does your father do for a living?”

  “He’s a professor; he heads up neuroscience research at the university. He’s also a great digital media artist. He was working on a project funded by an NEA grant that he needs to finish, so how about you let him go now?”

  ‘What do you know about this project?”

  “Nothing. I was twelve when my father got the grant. I was too busy with my friends and school to pay any attention to what he was doing.”

  The agent looked at his watch and stood, his chair scraping the floor as he straightened. “Thank you for your time, Miss Dubois, we’ll be in touch if we have any more questions.”

  Relief washed through me as I scrambled to my feet. “You’re letting me go.”

  “Yes, you’re free to go.”

  I grabbed my backpack from behind the chair. Hopefully they were done with my mother and brother and we could go home together.

  The hallway was as white and featureless as the room I just left. I could see an exit sign at the far end. It was so quiet my boots echoed on the linoleum.

  A voice sounded from behind me. I inhaled sharply and jerked to a stop.

  “Excuse me, miss. I need you to come with me.”

  I turned to face the voice behind me, a burly man in a gray suit. “No, I’m done; he said I could go.”

  “I’m sorry, miss.”

  I looked longingly one last time at the exit sign in the distance and followed him back into the room I’d just left.

  A different agent sat at the table now. He had small, close-set blue eyes under bushy eyebrows and slicked-back gray hair. He was wearing a badge of some kind.

  “Sit down, please. The agent who did your interview seems to think you don’t know anything about your father’s work, yet somebody released it on the internet yesterday and it’s gone viral. What can you tell me about that?” His voice was harsh and too loud.

  The blood rushed to my head, and for a moment I thought I might pass out. So much for the lie that they took my father because they thought he was Muslim.

  “How is that possible? Nobody has access to his work. You took his computer.”

  “You tell me, Miss Dubois. Your mother and brother don’t seem to know anything, and it’s not going to go well for any of you if we don’t get some answers.”

  “What have you done? Let me see them.”

  “I’m sorry, we can’t do that.”

  His eyes were cold and his face glistened with a fine sheen of sweat. The asshole was enjoying this.

  “No! I want to see my mother.”

  He pressed on. “Right before federal funding was cut for the NEA, a small number of grants were
awarded and yours was one of them, isn’t that right Miss Dubois? Did you run out of money and apply for a second NEA grant under your grandfather’s name?”

  “It wasn’t…”

  “Your grandfather doesn’t know anything about this grant application in his name.”

  They knew. My gut clenched. My life was over, but at least my father’s program was out there now, and maybe things would change fast enough to make a difference.

  “It went viral already? How many hits?”

  He seemed to forget it was me he was talking to. “Thousands, apparently, but not for long. Our experts are working around the clock to take it down.”

  He was so sure of himself. I smiled. He had no idea.

  “This is serious business, Miss Dubois. Soldiers are putting down their guns and going AWOL, workers are walking off the oil fields.”

  It was all I could do not to jump up and whoop. Nobody could stop it now. It was the nature of the art. My father’s program was brilliant. Once people interacted with it, their desire to destroy it would evaporate.

  My father had told me about his emergency plan months ago, just in case something happened to him. The project was close to being done when he was taken, and the directions he secreted away in my closet last spring made it simple to complete. He had written the second grant and signed his father’s name to it; I only had to submit it. It was enough to keep us going while I completed the project.

  The beauty of the program is that’s impossible to look at it without being sucked in by the immersive, interactive art. You experience an orchestrated array of pleasurable colors, sounds, and images that initiate cerebral reprogramming through keystroke patterns and neural stimulation. It increases your empathy, honesty, and ability to think critically. Most importantly, it erases patterns that lead to violence. It’s a game changer.

  “Nothing to say for yourself, Miss Dubois?”

  “Can I call our lawyer?”

  The man snorted, and shook his head as he stood and told the burly agent to escort me back to my holding cell.

  I looked back at him and smiled. “My dad always says that the only constant is change. Get used to it; nothing can stop it now.”