Welcome to Dystopia

by Gordon Van Gelder

  “You alright, Sam?” Thomas said, hurrying over.

  She realized that she had placed her hands on her knees. “Catching my breath.”

  “You should take it easy.”

  “The tapping season gets earlier every year. I’ve been boiling sap since six.”

  “You could hurt yourself.”

  “I’m alright, Thomas. It’s the damn hormones.”

  He spat into the ground, which Sam would never let anyone else do on her property. “Goddamn Eagles wasted a perfectly good drive.”

  “I told you, no football.”

  “Just because you’re a Jets fan.”

  “It’s their lack of ambition that offends me.”

  Thomas chuckled again—he laughed easily, and freely—as they walked through the buildings of Cumulus Maple Farm. The entire property was powered by South-facing solar panels and a geothermal well that Sam had already paid off through tax credits and by lining her home with high-density insulation. The evaporator for the maple sap was fueled by firewood to impart flavor to the syrup. There was a barn constructed from reclaimed wood and, technically, two dwellings, the family home in which Sam had grown up, which was a saltbox style with a long sloping roof and cedar shingles, and a small cabin-like structure that Sam’s daughter, Megan, called a Little House. Sam was somewhat annoyed that her daughter would rather live in a minuscule shack a hundred yards from the main house than sleep under the same roof. Megan had taken the dogma of the Levellers’ too literally, she felt, casting off her worldly possessions in favor of humble living. Megan had never quite forgiven Sam for her transformation.

  As they walked along, a sheep climbed atop a pile of wood chippings and bleated. She had a large, almost distended udder.

  “You might want to milk that one,” Thomas observed.

  “That ewe has three lambs,” Sam corrected. “They can help themselves. I spent eight years milking sheep and never made any money from it. Want to come inside?”

  “No, I’m fine,” Thomas said. He hadn’t been inside her home since her surgery, but Sam knew not to press him. Everyone had taken the news differently.

  Sam boiled water in the kitchen, watching Thomas feed clumps of grass to the sheep through the bay window. When the kettle boiled, she poured water into a rubber bucket with a steel handle.

  “Let’s move!” she said. “We’ve got to get down there fast.”

  “Want me to carry it?” Thomas asked.

  “You don’t know how easy it is to spill boiling water all over yourself when you’re walking through snow.”

  They plodded down the long slope of the hill, Sam switching the heavy bucket from side to side, until they came to the maple grove where Thomas’s son had slit the sap line. Sam set down the bucket, breathing heavily. She felt as if the wind had left her lungs, as if her blood was lacking a sense of refreshment, the hemoglobin robbed of purpose. The late afternoon sun was crossing behind the hill.

  Thomas busied himself by inspecting the line. “You say he cut it here, do you?”

  “Yes, right where it’s dripping,” she breathed.

  “Certainly, it’s been cut,” he frowned. He inspected the pipe more closely. “Where do you think he was standing when he did it?”

  “Wherever he could cut it.”

  “The angle’s a little funny.”

  Sam looked at Thomas, trying to figure out what he was doing. The pipe had been cut. Was he going to try to weasel out of blaming his son?

  “Look,” Sam said. “This water’s going to cool down soon and this whole trip won’t be worth shit. He cut it.”

  “I’m not saying he didn’t,” Thomas said.

  “Then help me.”

  “All I’m saying is that Leighton’s right-handed. I don’t know why he’d cut it from down here. It would have been above his head. He would have crossed under the line to do it from uphill. And then the angle’s wrong. Another thing,” Thomas added, leaning over to help Sam move the bucket. “Leighton uses a bowie knife. This looks like someone cut it with a laser.”

  “Are you going to help me or not?”

  “Alright, don’t get your tits in a bunch.”

  She chuckled as she grabbed the two ends of the pipe. Unlike everyone else, Thomas managed to joke about her operation in a way that set them both at ease. He was the only friend of hers who had immediately called her by her new name when she asked him to—while other people she had known continued to call her Richard or avoided her altogether.

  She and Thomas had gone to elementary school and high school together, and then veered off in wildly different directions. Thomas had gone to Trenton State, then moved to upstate New York to work as a salesman for Kodak before settling down again in Central Jersey and opening a business selling bionic limbs. Sam had attended the University of Pennsylvania on an ROTC scholarship, studied chemical engineering, and then worked for the Army Corps of Engineers for fifteen years and returned to teach hydrology at Rutgers. Both of them now lived on the properties their fathers had bought, Thomas on a two-acre clear-cut lot at the crest of the Sourland Mountains, and Sam on a forty-acre farm on the south side of the range. They could each trace their lineages back to the Colonial era when the Lenape had still roamed the woods.

  “I’m going to dip these two ends of the pipe into the water,” Sam explained, “until they get hot and expand. Then I want you to wedge in this connector joint.”

  “Alright.”

  “We’ll have ten seconds before they stiffen from the cold. Ready—go!”

  Thomas hoisted up the bucket with ease—he was thin but very strong—and Sam soaked the two ends of the pipes in the water for thirty seconds. Then she used all her strength to pull the severed strands together. Thomas did as he was told and plugged up the holes. Soon the sap was flowing again through the PVC, little air bubbles passing through the line. Some bacteria would have gotten into the pipe but Sam had invested in modern taps with ball bearings that would keep the tree from healing over its wound. Her farm featured kilometers of modern, polyvinyl chloride piping that ran from tree to tree, making the woods feel more like an intricate maze of blue and black telephone wires than an ecological Eden. Cumulus Maple Farm worked because of physics and fluid dynamics rather than some idyllic vision of a forest.

  “Did you see this?” Thomas asked, as he set down the bucket. He pointed to a triangular green blaze punched into a nearby maple tree. Sam had missed it, thinking only to inspect the lines themselves. A big L sat in the middle of the green blaze. L for Levellers. “How long do you think that’s been here?”

  Sam examined the blaze to see sap coagulated on the bark where they had driven in the punch. The sap had already crystallized—how had she missed it? “At least a day.”

  “Could be a prank,” Thomas said optimistically.

  “I don’t understand. We’re not rich. This farm isn’t rich. Rich is up the hill. Rich is that McMansion.”

  “I thought they moved out already.”

  “They did. That home’s been on the market for three months.”

  “I know who’s going to win that bid.”

  Sam did, too. The Levellers would bid at what they considered fair market value for the building materials and a standard rate for the acreage, and then tear the home down. No one would bid against them. She had watched the forlorn faces of her neighbors as they packed their belongings, the way they had snapped photos as their bucolic dream was deferred, and then moved back to their apartment in the city. While they had lived in the house they had complained constantly about the sap lines on Sam’s farm and how the web of blue PVC sullied their view into the valley below. Despite this, the family pleaded for Sam’s support when the green blazes first appeared on their property—which they had carved up with landscaping riddled with Norway maple, cypress, and Barberry bush, all invasive species. She uttered some platitudes at the time, secretly glad to be rid of the eight-thousand-square-foot monstrosity, which guzzled megawatts of fossil fuels. Then they
were gone.

  But why had the Levellers come for her? Or was it a prank, as Thomas guessed? The Levellers carefully controlled their blazes, though, identifying their targets based upon Artificial Intelligence that linked a variety of metrics, everything from tax returns to VIN numbers to lot sizes to the number of indigenous plant species on the land. Once your home was identified, the blazes would proliferate like toadstools and the process would begin.

  “This is a sustainable farm!” Sam shouted. “We’re on geothermal! We compost, for chrissake!” She ripped the blaze from the tree, feeling light-headed as she did so, and the next thing she knew she was laying on the ground. She could feel the damp snow seeping into her pants.

  “Sam!” Thomas shouted. “You alright?” He bent down to help her up, and her breast spilled out of her bra. He pretended as if he hadn’t seen it.

  “Why, you never!” Sam said.

  “Take it easy.”

  “I’m a little light-headed.”

  “Want me to call a doctor?”

  “No, it’s the hormones. They give me vertigo.”

  “You should get someone to help you out around here.”

  “Someone like Leighton?”

  “Might do him some good.”

  “Not after he called me a freak the last time he saw me.”

  “He didn’t mean it. He’s just going through a phase.”

  “Young, dumb, and full of cum.”

  “Dumb is right.”

  Once Sam collected her breath, they followed the repaired PVC line down to the sap collection hut, where the sap from the groves would flow, her checking for green blazes along the way, and scanning the trees above them.

  “Is it true what they say, Thomas? That you can see them coming?”

  “The camouflage hides them pretty well, I suppose. You can hear them sometimes when you’re up in a deer stand.”

  “What do they sound like?”

  “It’s different for everyone.”

  As a child, Sam would join her father in tapping trees that sat on the adjoining property, driving in steel taps with a hammer and collecting the sap in aluminum buckets. The McMansion had destroyed the sugar bush when they roped the hillside with grape vines, planning to bottle their own wine. Sam had secretly hoped to reseed the area and extend her grove once the Levellers restored the land, fulfilling the pioneer spirit of expansion on her own terms.

  The collection hut was basically a small lean-to shed. Sam examined the tank inside to find that it was only a quarter full of sap, realizing she may have lost much more than forty gallons.

  “You need to watch over that boy of yours better,” she complained, fiddling with the controls of the vacuum pump. The pump should have pulled in way more sap, even with the severed line.

  “I told you I’ll talk to him about it, already.”

  “Didn’t stop him last time.”

  “Listen, don’t tell me how to raise my son.”

  “I’m not telling you how to raise him, I want him to stop cutting my lines.”

  “I told you I could pay for it.”

  “That’s what you said last time, too.”

  Thomas was growing angry now, as he stepped out of the shed. “I told you I’ll talk to him, Sam. Leighton’s just acting out. Things are bad with my wife. Real bad. We fight and Leighton hears every damn word. It’s no wonder he cut your sap lines. And you know what? I’m glad he did it. He doesn’t do drugs or steal. It could’ve been a hell of a lot worse.”

  Sam looked up from the vacuum pump. “Worse, like how?” she asked quietly.

  “Oh, come on, Sam. You know about Megan.”

  “What about her?”

  “You don’t think that Little House means something?”

  “She’s going to nursing school,” Sam corrected. “She doesn’t have time for that.”

  “That’s what she tells you.”

  Sam hadn’t considered that her daughter might be lying to her. She was wearing her medical scrubs whenever she returned home.

  “Megan isn’t a Leveller. She lives here.”

  “All I’m saying is now you’ve got a blaze on your property.”

  “I don’t like what you’re insinuating, Thomas. I run a sustainable operation here. We’re carbon neutral. I’ve released my tax returns. Why do you have to go and bring Megan up? She’s got nothing to do with that blaze.”

  “Why did I bring it up? Fuck, Sam. Why did I bring it up? Look after your own kid, is all I’m saying.” He tapped at his coat pocket. “Left my vape in the damn car, too. ’Course I did. Not everyone’s a professor.”

  Assistant professor, Sam thought, with no hope of tenure. But she knew such distinctions were lost on Thomas. She fished a pack of Camels from a shelf inside the collection house.

  “You’re smoking again?” Thomas asked.

  “I keep it around. To know that I can.”

  Thomas tore open the seal and began puffing away, coughing himself to tears. “Now I remember why I switched to vapes,” he muttered. He finished the cigarette anyway, taught, like Sam had been when they were in middle school, never to waste one. Coffin nails were what they called unfinished cigarettes.

  Sam spied it now, the reason why the vacuum pump hadn’t been pulling enough sap: a small rock had plugged a valve. She pulled it out and the sap surged into the collection tank again. She tasted the mild flavor of the unfiltered liquid. Slightly sweeter than she expected. Must have meant the sugars were producing more than the reds. With another couple of freezes and thaws, she might be able to squeeze out ten thousand more gallons as the trees withdrew the sap from their roots.

  “Do you think they changed the formula?” she asked. “Think they’re considering some other factor that I don’t know about?”

  “I told you it’s probably a prank.”

  “Think it’s the size of the farm? Maple syrup is an approved commodity. Part of the barter system. They can’t take over my property like that.”

  “It would be strange,” Thomas nodded.

  “You inherited your property like I did. How do you know they won’t come after you, too?”

  Thomas looked at Sam with a skeptical glance, and shrugged. “They say you can look at the code.” He threw his cigarette into a glob of ice-encrusted snow, immediately going over to pick it up, knowing that Sam would chew him out if he left it there.

  “You would tell me, wouldn’t you, Thomas? If you knew why they did it?”

  “I’m not a member,” he said.

  “Of course you are,” Sam said, growing desperate. “Your family are descendants, right? You were disenfranchised when we brought you here.”

  “Who brought us here? You?”

  “I’m saying, all the former slave families. The Levellers grant you honorary membership. For your sacrifice.”

  “Oh, shut up, Sam,” Thomas said. “You’re belittling us both. I told you I have nothing to do with any of that. We’ve known each other since we were kids.”

  The thought of her property being seized from her, which she had fought so hard to make sustainable, was making Sam feel manic. If the Levellers seized her land, she could join one of the communes, and hope to establish herself in the organization. The Levellers eschewed all hierarchy, but she had spent enough time in the Army to learn that order naturally established itself. She might be able to navigate their internal politics—what they called “liquid democracy”—and eventually stake a claim to run the maple farm again, even if she couldn’t live on it. The alternatives—well, the alternatives were in her mind far worse: using the meager proceeds from the forced sale of the property to gain entry to the fortified enclave of Library Place in nearby Princeton. She doubted she could afford it. And she had no desire to move up to the city, which she had sworn to avoid her entire life as an orgy of consumption and environmental despoliation. She would have to give up her hormone therapy.

  Maybe Thomas could help her, she thought. Maybe he could clear away the blazes like a late fro
st could pinch the white petals from the dogwoods.

  “Listen,” she volunteered, trying to make her voice sound calm. “I saw some hoofprints where the cable was cut. A big stag ran through about ten days ago.”

  Thomas perked up. “How many points?”

  “Looked like eight.”

  “Eight? Haven’t seen one that size since the TBE came through last summer. Are you sure?”

  “Could’ve been six.”

  “That’s still pretty good,” Thomas acknowledged. “How much do you want for him?”

  “Nothing. You’ll be doing me a favor. I’ll let you take him and I won’t complain if you take a few does, too.” She’d learned to stop saying “kill” or “shoot,” because it put Thomas on the defensive. He preferred to think of hunting as a service, especially since he was a bow hunter. “Those deer are destroying our ecosystem,” she went on. “Once my maples die, no more will grow in the wild. I’ll have to plant them myself. A grove is only as sustainable as the saplings that can grow up to replace them, and the deer eat everything except the beech and the sassafras. Of course, they leave the rosebushes. If I didn’t have the sheep graze down the underbrush, we wouldn’t be able to walk through this place at all, it would be so full of thorns.”

  Her own father had told her that the Lenape had used the dark woods of the Sourlands to hunt game, too, when the deer population was a tenth what it was today, with wolves, coyotes, and foxes keeping the herds small. The soil had never been good in the mountains, and shouldn’t have been plowed by the first settlers. But the deer made it infinitely worse. The lack of deep roots meant the soil was easily leached by strong rains.