The Selection
by Mary Tischler
I come up to look in The Selection almost every night like the others do, to be moved about, to be whisked around. We go up and down the moving stairways, back and forth on the rolling platforms—always there’s this movement, and this open width of space. Such high ceilings, large corridors! Unlike in the crouched caverns down below. Up here I feel as if I can stretch to my limit, stand up straight—nothing rough to scrape up against, nothing jagged to bump into. And the motion! It is as if a gentle, loving, familiar friend is carrying me around in his arms. If only there were enough room to lay down, curl up, and close my eyes as it carries me. Only then, I think, would I surely understand true comfort.
When we’re not being carried and whisked around, we stand in the stationary aisle ways to gaze through the glass enclosure, to survey and consider all of the items displayed there, in The Selection, dreaming of that miraculous day when we might make it to Permission. That is a day most of us never see, but those of us who do can choose to enter The Selection and leave these dark caverns and tunnels forever behind. Upon entering, the lucky ones each get to select one of the items to call their own. I can not even begin to count how many hours a night so many of us spend gazing, searching, trying to find that one item we might dream of selecting, deciding one night, “That’s it, that is the thing I will select,” and the next night seeing something else and changing our minds.
Even after the first tumor shows up, many continue to gaze and to dream, though it is all over for them. They will never make it into The Selection. They haven’t remained free. But they have something else, something new, to look forward to. Once The Regime starts to work, there is always the Brag Pit, under the High Dome, in the middle of all the moving stairways and elevators.
Tonight as my familiar friend carries me along the “Home Furnishings” District, I am whisked past White Sale, Lamps, Couches, Dining Tables. Sometimes I like to step off the platform, stop, and gaze at the largeness of these items. I don’t know if I’d ever select one of them. They seem like more than I could know what to do with. I’d prefer something small, something I could hold, carry around with me in my pocket or my hand.
But tonight I do not stop. This is the night I go to the “Saks Fifth Ave. – WEST Exit” to see my matronhalf, to watch her lips move, to put my hand up to the glass where she has placed hers. We play games like that, play mirror, sometimes we dance, but she knows I am too crowded to move about so widely or swiftly, with so many others at my shoulders and heels, peering over me, trying to get a good look.
It will be almost sixteen Clearances, four fullcycles, now, since my ma’ made it to Permission and chose to enter The Selection. She almost didn’t go. I spent months and months before her fortieth fullcycle urging her, encouraging her, convincing her that she must choose to go into The Selection. I threatened her. Told her I would never speak to her again, if she didn’t go. She reminded me I would never be able to speak to her again if she did go. But at that last minute, on her fortieth fullcycle, along with three others who shared the same hatchday and who had yet to show signs of tumors, when the Brag Pit was transformed for a moment into the Freedom Chamber, she stepped up on the platform, announced her Selection, and was ushered away. What else could there possibly be to live for, after having escaped The Regime for so long?
She had selected a small gold ring with a green emerald, which she wears on the middle finger of her right hand. When she announced it the crowd murmured and applauded, excited for her choice, though there were some groans, some saying, “That’s what I was going to …” I was just as surprised as anyone when she first announced her selection that night. She had never mentioned that particular item. The next night, the very first time we met through the glass, she pointed to me, to her eyes, back to me again, and displayed the ring. I have green eyes. She chose it to remember me, she seemed to say.
There will be no Freedom Chamber tonight in the Brag Pit. Seems no one hatched forty fullcycles ago today has escaped The Regime. Instead, the pit is crowded with braggers, some regulars, some new, disrobed and pointing to various growths on chests, or necks, or holding up sketches or X-Rays to show the progress, the shrinking, of their tumors, offering up thanks and praise to The Regime for gracing them with Remission. Some even point to the hair on their heads that they’ve managed to keep from falling out, by some stroke of genetic luck. They are few. Most of those under The Regime lose their hair quickly—and not just the hair on their heads, but everywhere—their arms, their legs, their genitals. Smooth as a metal rail is their skin, and almost as shiny.
As for me, I have not yet had to submit to The Regime. It’s been twenty-five fullcycles for me now and still there are no signs of any tumorous growths. Only fifteen left to go. I am counting down the Clearances. I have already made up my mind. I am definitely going to choose to enter The Selection, if I make it that long. Mostly because it will be nice to be rid of this smell.
I hear it smells good in there, inside The Selection—all the time. Unlike out here, where so many taking The Regime spend so much time retching into the fonts that are placed conveniently here and there at the ends of walks or stairways. Thankfully rhythmic, soothing music is piped through all night long—I get lost in it sometimes, moving with the music along with the motion of the walkways. It helps me to forget the drifts that constantly hit my nose. The Regime makes many people throw up a lot, along with making their hair fall out. It is pretty harsh.
Every day they wake up and must swallow a handful of pills, every night they must fall asleep hooked up to a tube that infuses their blood with chemicals. Chemicals that I am now learning to make. I have apprenticed in my Sector’s Chemistry Unit for almost five fullcycles now. I will matriculate soon.
They say I must have good genes, like my ma’. Considering that, I am supposed to have contributed at least three children by now. But so far I haven’t even hatched one. I have been fertilized twice, but each time, just before the fourth month, the egg broke and I had to be suctioned. I threw up afterwards, both times. I bled for days.
It would be easier, I think, if they had paired me up with someone different, though I don’t ever mention it to him. He always speaks softly to me, and keeps a smile on his face even though I know he is always sick to his stomach. I would never want to hurt him. They keep promising me that as soon as his tumors get big enough they’ll find me another pair. Someone with better genes this time. But there’s only so many of us to go around.
As it is, when I come back to our Sector’s cavern, to the living quarters area, and enter our cave, my pair hardly looks at me—into my eyes. I think he is afraid of what he might see in there. His reflection. That is also why he never goes up above with me, all of that glass.
He doesn’t like to take his robe off when we do enjoin, as infrequently as that happens. I know he is ashamed of his tumors. But I don’t think he has anything to be ashamed of.
Mostly we play Cups all night. He tells me about the new sites his work detail is excavating. I like to watch his mouth when he talks—his lips stretch past his teeth and show a little bit of his gums. It’s kind of funny. Also, his cheeks dimple into three curves at the corners of his mouth. And his knuckles are always white and thick with wrinkled calluses. Sometimes I stare into the grooves there while he talks, and I am no longer listening. I’m watching his knuckles as they form a white foam like the kind that swirls to the top of the breakfast bowl after the wafers are dropped in the hot water, or as they fly through the air when he gestures with his hands, or when he scoops the pebbles out of one of the cups and plunks them down one by one along the board.
It’s about fifty/fifty so far. He wins half of the time and I win half of the time. But we keep on playing, almost every other night. We keep on playing so he doesn’t have to take his robe off and so I can stare at his knuckles.
The other nights I go up to The Selection alone, to meet up with my friends, or to visit my ma’. He almost never goes, and if he does go, he hardly ever lets me accompany him. He wants nothing more than to avoid the Brag Pit, I suspect, since he has nothing to brag about. Not yet, anyway. “Not yet, but you will,” I keep saying. He isn’t so sure. He’s worried he won’t last long. He thinks he’s going to die soon. It is always amazing how intensely he says goodbye to me every time I leave the cavern. He doesn’t look me in the eye when I return, but every time I leave he practically leaps into my eyes with his big brown, wide open pools, so deeply I feel as if that is all it would take to make a baby, if that was how it actually worked.
Every month now at least one person asks me if I have any good news and every month I have to tell them, “It would be a miracle!” They laugh, but they wince also. How can you conceive if the closest you get to fertilization is big brown eyes?
“We’ll find you a new pair, soon,” they keep promising. But even if they do, I couldn’t leave him. I wouldn’t. I will stay with him until he dies. He needs me more than The Regime needs a baby. The birth rate has been relatively steady, even if pre-fertile mortality rates are so unstable. So far it’s about fifty/fifty. About fifty percent die before they reach reproduction age, the other fifty go on to try to hatch a child. Our population has been in decline for three fullcycles now. It will go back up again. It always has. But it’s hard to keep up with the mutations.
As I near our meeting spot tonight I see that my ma’ is already there, waiting for me. A group of young girls, most likely not yet part of The Regime by the looks of them—their hair, their plump faces—crowds the window, pointing, squealing, poking each other. They move as a mass along the enclosure, smearing the glass with their fingerprints.
A gaunt faced woman admonishes them: “Girls, girls, hands off, now, you’re streaking the glass. Do you want me to put you on the Clean Up detail?” They all stop squealing and scatter.
I see that they have left one of their friends behind, who had been standing apart from the giggling group. The friend is a bald little boy, looks like he needs help walking. The girls push through the crowd my way. As they get closer, “You forgot someone,” I say to them, and point at the boy. They stop and look back, a hint of shame and embarrassment spreads on each one’s face.
“My brother! Almost forgot him!” one of them says.
“Hey, come on Dewly, we’ll help you down to the Brag Pit,” another one shouts. A small of chorus of “Yeah!” rings out, “That’s what we’ll do,” “He’ll feel better after that,” “He is getting better, after all.” The little boy’s eyes light up when the girls go back to get him and sweep him up into their arms.
As they push past me again they are proud. “Thanks lady,” one says. Another says, “Yeah, The Regime has definitely blessed him with signs of Remission.”
“Good for him!” I say. “Happy Bragging, Dewly.” He waves goodbye to me as they step onto a moving stairway and are whisked out of sight. His eyes are so wide, searching.
My matronhalf smiles at me as I place my hand up to the glass, on top of hers. “Good Eve,” she mouths. “Are you still free?” she asks. I nod my head yes. She looks relieved, holds up her hand and crosses her fingers as she always does. We’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out what each other is saying, between reading lips or the system of hand gestures we use.
“What about you?” I ask, pointing to her throat, where the lymph nodes are. She flashes me the okay sign, crosses her heart. If she were to develop tumors now, since she is in The Selection, she would surely die very quickly and painfully. Once you choose to enter The Selection, you can’t come back out again. The Regime’s protection is extended only to those of us who remain out here. Almost no one who makes it to the Freedom Chamber ever chooses to stay, however. “Better to die quickly inside The Selection, than linger out here under The Regime.” Most agree that entering The Selection is worth the risk, what with all of the open space, high ceilings, and interesting artifacts from the Sale and Clearance days gone by, of long ago, before The Selection was enclosed, before the Modification forced us to the caverns below.
She stopped asking me whether I’m pregnant yet, months ago. She knows how unhappy that question makes me. But it must be my puffy face, tonight, that makes her hesitatingly sweep her hands in a mound shape over her abdomen, and then clutch her chin. I shake my head no. She gestures, “Sorry.” I motion that I am tired, that I should go back.
“Why?” she mouths, worried.
“I miss you,” I say. We wave goodbye. She gives me the thumbs up sign.
As I make my way through the aisles, down the moving walks, past the Brag Pit under the High Dome, the lights begin to dim inside The Selection. There is a great scurrying about, I had almost forgotten. Such a commotion! The din of excited murmurs rises, nearly drowning out the piped music, and the Ushers appear, to help clear us out early. Four times a fullcycle a new Clearance period begins. The Selection closes early that night and everyone inside works furiously to get it all ready for opening the next evening. All of the window displays, the signs, the items for selection, are replaced with new ones. Four times a fullcycle the items are rotated—artifacts that are deep inside The Selection, hidden behind walls and stored in rooms far from sight, are brought out and displayed, and the old ones are removed, taken to those far off places the grandeur of which the rest of us can only imagine. I have as yet to see a single duplicate item in my twenty some fullcycles of memory. It is all new, it is all such a treat to the eye, but it is more than that. It is something that I suspect affects all of us out here in a similar way. It shatters the glass of expectation, leaves us forever, irreparably, changed.
Some like to linger in the nostalgia of past Clearances, remembering the items they had seen with fondness, holding an image in their minds of a particular one they might be considering, so they don’t forget it when selection time comes. Even after they know that selection time will never come for them, when they are placed under The Regime and begin to pray for Remission instead of Permission, still they continuously refresh their memories, fearful of forgetting.
I like to think it gives them something of comfort to hold on to, like my patronhalf. It is what I remember most about him. The stories he would tell in our dim cavern as I grew up and watched him go in and out of Remission several times before he finally succumbed to the death he knew was inevitable.
“You should’ve seen it Chariss, it was bigger than this cave and that cave combined!” He’d get up and stand by the wall, measuring the distance with his eye, motioning with his hand. “Yep, it was about—it went from about here all the way to the end of that tunnel, that’s how long it was, and almost as wide.” He’d chuckle and strain to pick me up, sit me down on his lap, brush my hair back, search into my eyes for that wide open space that so comforted him.
He liked the large items, the big ones that stretched his concept of space beyond the confined reality he lived in. I was always so glad for him, that he had those items to hold on to, eager to hear more. “Tell me about another one, pa-pa,” I’d say, and he’d stand up, whisk me around in his arms as best he could, and, though with labored breath and a trembling weakness in his grip, he’d begin again, a new story about another large item he had dreamed of selecting. Though he had trouble breathing, and his muscles had never recovered from the atrophy, when he was telling me those stories I was never afraid that he would drop me, that he would let me fall. The only time that I did slip through his enfeebled arms and fall to the ground was the night he stopped in mid-sentence, collapsed, and fell into a death coma on top of me.
Such gladness still makes a space in my heart for him, that his last thought before he left here was his most treasured dream. I often fancy that that is where he went, where he is now. The picture I hold of him in my mind shows him standing tall, smiling, with his arms and legs outstretched in a room that has no walls.
A new sign goes up in a window. “SPRING CLEARANCE – DAISY SALE.” Ah, spring. Is it spring time already? Arriving with all of its bright colors and pick me up patterns, it always seems to revive us. An Usher sweeps past me briskly, “Hurry on up now, closing time,” he calls out to no one in particular. I step off the last moving walk before the tunnel entrance and am almost dizzied by the stop.
Just as I am about to continue I see a bright little flash coming from a small corner on the ground. I can’t help but look twice. Automatically I look again at where the flash came from and see a half-round piece of metal there, reflecting light. Something shiny, catching my attention, like the glittery jewel that lives on my ma’s finger. I make sure the Usher isn’t looking my way, double back through the current of people flowing down from aisles and stairs and into the tunnel, bend down and try to pick it up. It’s somewhat stuck, so I have to coax it out with my fingernail.
It isn’t a half-round at all, it’s a full circle, and flat, weighs very little in my hand. It’s not quite so shiny as I had first thought, somewhat aged and tarnished, and though scratches mar both surfaces I can make out a strange portrait on one side, a winged creature on the other. A head with hair and what is called a “bird.”
Someone bumps into me and I almost drop it. “Sorry,” she says, and hurries off along with the stream. I palm the cold piece and mix into the crowd, enter the dark mouth of the tunnel that is my path home.
The whole way home the excitement rises in me, as if water filling up a cistern from a newly drilled well for the first time, and just as much of a rare treasure. I think to myself, go over and over it in my head, try to plan exactly how I will show it to him, how I should say it. “Look what I found!” or “You’ll never guess what I have in my hand” or “I brought you a surprise.” He will just love it, I say to myself. His eyes will light up, I hope. Prader’s heart will lift when he sees it. I find myself quickening my pace, impatient at the heels of those in front of me, but there isn’t enough room in this tunnel to push past them and go around.
Finally I arrive at our hole in the wall, number 30, Living Unit 4, Sector 7, and practically dive through it, calling out, “Prader! Prader! You’ll never guess what I …” But I realize I do not see him sitting next to the font, where he usually sits and waits for me to come home, sometimes with the Cups board on the table in front of him. I must be really late, I think, must have lost track of the time. “Prader?” I call out as I walk to the back chamber, where we sleep, where I help to hook him up to The Regime every night. I hope he isn’t already asleep. I couldn’t wake him. He needs as much rest as he can get.
But as I turn into the room and my eyes adjust to the darkness in there I do not see him. This can only mean one thing, my heart leaps up to tell my throat. This can only mean one thing, my nerves scream into my buckled knees. My legs pound the ground in step with the beat of my heart, I swim dazed through the thickened blood of my veins, ache with cramping muscles, bruise with each stride that takes me closer to the void of his coma, shake through the tunnels that is the path to the hospice, where most of us are delivered to die.
As I reach the thin slice of space in the rock that squeezes me through the visitor’s entrance into the cavernous hospice, a strange calm descends upon me, a flutter at first, turning whisper quiet. The hallowed space I stand in echoes with the hiss of s’s and the pops of p’s. Several nurses consult with a murmuring family, another sits at the registration table looking down at something. She looks up and acknowledges me, but I motion myself away, send my eyes over to the slate wall, walk up to it and scan the names. Prader 30-4-7, Prader 30-4-7. I do not see it. I see Pontry 45-8-7, Prenlit 19-11-7, but not Prader 30-4-7. The nurse who had been sitting at the table is suddenly at my side. “Can I help you find someone?” she whispers.
The “help” pops and the “someone” hisses. “No, no,” I say, but then, “Yesssss,” rings out, the o’s still lingering. “Prader 30-4-7.” She goes back to the expertly carved slab of rock that is her table and picks up a chart, looks over it page by page, shaking her head.
“Nope, not here. These are all the new arrivals we haven’t posted yet.” She smiles warmly as the relief spreads into my scalp and toes. I wander away, back through the slice, through the dark tunnels, back to the hole in the wall I call home.
As I walk at my ease, slowly now, quite puzzled, I slip my hands into my pockets. I feel something there, a piece of cold. The head full of hair! The creature with wings! Suddenly I remember what I had forgotten, had absentmindedly dropped into a pouch in my robe. Thank the High Dome! I say to myself, thank the everlasting Regime! I don’t even remember putting it in there, had forgotten all about it in my haste, could have dropped it somewhere and never found it again! I clutch it in my hand the whole way home, until it heats up and a sweat starts to break, making my fingers itch.
When I enter again our cavern, Prader is just getting up from his usual spot, about to go in the back to his bed. I stare and stare and stare at him. He doesn’t look at me, just keeps slumping weakly down the corridor. “I was just about to go get hooked up without you,” he says softly, a hint of laughter in his voice. “Thought you’d make it here before me, but nope, must’ve took a wrong turn.” He chuckles.
“Prader! You scared the silence out of me!” He stops immediately and turns around, questioning with his eyebrows. His eyes dart away from my gaze.
“Where were you?” I burst out. “When I got home you weren’t here so I ran instantly to hospice and— ”
“Chariss, shh, Chariss, I’m sorry.” He limps his way to me, eyes welling up with glass. “I went up to see The Selection tonight. I thought you saw me coming down. I wasn’t far behind you, even saw you stop before the tunnel and wait for me. But then you disappeared. I just figured you went on ahead, pushed off by the crowd.” As he speaks to me his arm finds its way around my waist, under my robe. The chilly surfaces of our skin warm up quickly as they press together. He leads me into the bed chamber, sits me down, draws my robe open, across my shoulders, down my back. Kisses my neck and throat and earlobes.
Interrupted by my many returned kisses I whisper, “Tell … me … you … didn’t go … up to the … Brag Pit … without me! You … promised …” He buries his smile into my neck, shaking his head no.
“I never break a promise,” he mumbles into me. It tickles. His eyelashes are still wet. I grab his head and move him back, to stop the tickle, to make him look at me.
“I went up there sort of as a practice run, just to—” Prader begins to say.
I squeal, I shake him, I kiss him deeply and cut off his words. “Is it true? Are you … really going into … Remission?” He smiles and nods yes, kissing me back as I babble and press my lips into his hair, his ears, his cheeks, his fingers, his wrists. He lifts my hands with his, brings them up to the folds in his robes, clutches the fabric, slowly pushes it open, guides my hands to help him.
The small piece of surprise in my pocket becomes smaller still, nearly fades away in stature next to the giant that is Prader’s happy nakedness.
I look up from my morning crossword to stare at Prader’s knuckles as he drops the breakfast wafers into our steaming bowls. He hums a tune as the foam rises to the top, has a lightness to his step, a strength in his stature as he sits himself down at the table. I’ve been waiting all morning for just the right time, a suitable moment, rehearsed what I was going to say over and over so much that I managed only to fill in five of the answers to my morning puzzle. “I’m so glad, Prader, I can’t tell you how much last night was … well I—”
“Everything’s going to be different for us from now on, Chariss. Is your brew hot enough?” He puts a finger in my bowl to test the temperature. “It’s fine. Go ahead,” he indicates I should drink. He acts as if every little thing around him is so fresh and new, fusses over his spoon, adjusts his bowl so that it sits squarely in front of him. The most important thing is not last night at all, but right now, and the next now, and the next. I hadn’t wanted to interrupt his reverie, the pace of his remarkable new outlook on life. Even as I watch him lift the spoon up to his mouth without shaking and drink, I don’t want to interrupt. But the little metal round in my pocket can no longer wait.
I take it out and hold it in my fist. “I have something for you, Prader. I found it yesterday, upstairs, just before the entrance to our tunnel.” He jerks his head slightly, awake to my voice. It’s not at all what I was going to say.
“Surprise!” I stretch my fingers out to show him the shiny piece of metal in my palm.
“What’s that?” he asks, putting his spoon back down on the table, staring at my interruption.
“I don’t know. I found it.”
He takes it from my hand and examines it, flips it over and over, runs a finger over one surface, flips it over and touches the other side, scrapes his fingernail across the ridged edge. “Hmmm, Liberty, In God We Trust, one nine six five,” he reads the embossed words on one side of the round. “United States of America? E Plurib… Pluribus Unum? Quarter Dollar? I don’t know where you got this Chariss, but I don’t think this belongs to us.” He places it quickly on the table as if it had started to burn his fingers. His spoon shakes as he lifts it to his lips. When he is done sipping he says, “You probably should show it to an Usher.”
“But why? We don’t know what it is. Do you have a guess, at least?”
“Not really, only I think it could possibly belong to someone at 1-96-5.”
“You mean the numbers? Yeah, I guess, maybe …”
“Look, Chariss, whatever it is, and I don’t even want to think about it, it doesn’t look like—well, it looks like it’s old, like an artifact—”
“Yesss! That’s what I was thinking. An artifact from inside The Selection. Only how—? I don’t understand how it could get out here, or if it’s been out here all along how come no one ever saw it before?”
“Those are exactly the questions I was hoping to avoid.”
“What if I—” I was going to ask what if I just kept it here, in a safe place, but his eyes made my words fall into the hole of silence where my heart had just dropped. Instead, I promise him I will give it to an Usher, tonight, when we go up, together for the first time in ages, to the Brag Pit, under the High Dome, where Prader will announce the signs of his Remission. He is humming again as he finishes his breakfast, glances at my crossword and makes suggestions, clears the table, insists that I stay seated, he doesn’t need any help, he feels so certain and strong.
I leave for my work detail and say goodbye, expecting his deep gaze, only this time he hardly looks at me, smiles casually instead, waves me off to say hurry along now, you’re late. “Everything’s going to be different for us now,” I can still hear him say. Not so heavy, not so worrisome, not so damned scary to say goodbye. It lifts me up as I spring along down the tunnel, light as the winged creature on my round, almost actually believing that I will keep my promise to him.
That crooked old complex macromolecule of a boss of mine was the first to notice, even before Prader did. My flush Spring Clearance colored cheeks, my giddy, forgetful smile. “You got something hatching in there?” he asked, all quirky smiles and proud, poking my stomach with an empty test tube.
When I didn’t respond right away, as I usually do, with “It would be a miracle!”, the test tube shattered on the ground and Shudmick started crying. He apologized, didn’t mean to interrupt our work. “It’s just that, I never thought I’d live to see the day … you know you are like a daughter to me.” We embraced, praising The Regime for its benevolent gift, and went back to our research and testing with a renewed faith.
“I will pray for your child’s freedom, Chariss. May your child forever escape The Regime, as you so far have,” Shudmick said as we parted that evening. He, like all of us, is always praying, a continuous soundtrack streaming in the background of our minds, an undercurrent in our hearts that never stops flowing, please, Creator, forgive our ancestors’ trespasses, as we forgive them, who trespassed against us, against all of the Creation, and delivered us to this dark underworld.
The effects of the Modification still lurk in every living thing. We’re never certain what new combination will form and spread yet more cancer. Thankfully we’ve managed to protect ourselves somewhat down here, in the caverns, contain the risks of genetic sequences from being contaminated, protect and purify our food and water supply at their sources, these underground wells and streams where we incubate and harvest plankton, trickleweed, seagreens, all with generators and reflectors powered by the sun that hardly any of us ever get to see.
I sit now, next to my pair, on a smooth stone slab outside the hatchery office, as we wait for the confirmation. It’s been over two months since that blessed night we shared when Prader grew as tall as the High Dome, the night I found the Liberty round, and my flow has as yet to begin. I sit and replay the events in my mind as we wait, relive the kisses, his expert exploration, and the next night, his offering in the Brag Pit, how he was so funny, under the brilliant full moon, and despite it all how I still broke the promise I made to him about the Liberty.
“Many are called, many are chosen,” Prader’s voice had rung out under the High Dome, “but hardly any of ya’s gets to keep your hair!” Prader pointed to his thick head of unusually black hair, his arms, his legs. The crowd was cheerful and enthusiastic, applauding and laughing, shouting “Bravo” or “Braggart! That’s a good one!” I had never seen him look so happy or proud. I especially had never seen him, as he continued to catch my gaze and smile all the while he was up there on stage, stare into my eyes without one hint of goodbye lurking there.
It makes it all the more difficult, sitting here just now, next to him, his hand on my abdomen, his ear occasionally drawn to my chest to hear my heartbeat and sigh, to feel good about what I’ve done. I can’t help but think that if Prader hadn’t gone into Remission this mysterious Liberty round would have been a welcome disruption to his hopelessness, a glittery new attraction to divert his attention, to startle him out of his desperation. Something he could’ve held in his hand and wondered over, that could’ve sparked his curiosity and renewed his faith in the unknown. But now that his Remission is certain, for now, the mysterious round can only represent danger. And for his sake, I knew I had to give it up. If only.
Maybe it was all of that cheerful mixture of shouts, the reverberation of voices, I got … a little confused. I thought—well it seemed to me that a message was lurking there, someone was trying to reach me, or … the woman who stared straight at me and said “Fibber thee?” and then walked away as if I didn’t exist. The roar of the crowd that at times seemed to say “Hi birdie! Hi birdie!” The Usher who glared hard and suspiciously when I neared him to hand over the round, and had to change my mind for fear of … what? I didn’t know. I keep hearing things, little whispers or echoes. Maybe it’s my imagination. Maybe I’ve been crouched in these caverns too long.
“Little tea?” a nurse approaches with a tray filled with afternoon refreshments and I am startled out of my thoughts. Liberty, I swore I heard her say, but when I see the tray filled with tea cups I realize what she said. I shake my head no but Prader lifts his hand off my stomach and extends it to accept a cup of freshly steeped trickleweed.
“Quite a treat,” he says, thanking her. “So much more flavor than the plankton wafers.”
Shortly after, the doctor calls us in to see her. It is good news. The hardest part is over, we have achieved conception. But there are still difficulties ahead to overcome. I have as yet to carry to full term. And who knows what random modifications will creep up and …
Prader lifts me up off my feet, kisses me fully, sets me down and presses his ear to my belly. I am awash in seafoam, I am swirling in a coved eddy, I am dizzy with blood pulse, I am light like winter breath. I try hard to find my feet, my feet try hard to find the ground, but I am drifting.
I realize in that moment, more than any other moments combined, that I, Chariss 30-4-7, love Prader 30-4-7, more than anything else in the caverns, more than any item in The Selection, more than my ma’ and pa’ together, more, even, than the Liberty round.
And I never meant to. And it hurts like a comatose body landing on top of me. And I should know better.
“So, did you already--?” Prader had asked, after he stepped off the platform under the High Dome and plowed through the throng of crowd to reach me that night, after his performance in the Brag Pit. I was supposed to get rid of the round, give it to an usher.
“Mm-hmm,” I nodded yes and shrugged casually, cutting off his question, hoping he would leave it at that, that we could go back home, run back, flee as fast as we …
“What’d he say? Anything?”
“Hmm? Oh, well, nothing. He just sort of took it, said ‘It’s taken care of,’ and that’s it.” I lied. I lied and I didn’t even lie very well. He knew. I know he knew it. He must have known. Only he didn’t say anything.
“Great, let’s go. I want to go back to that one store we passed, remember? The one with the glass buttons in the window? You’re always saying how you want to select something small to hold. I saw an item in there I thought you’d like.” My thoughts were drifting, my attention was far away, past the dome, up near the full round face of the moon. His words tried to reach me, pull me back, draw me back down. “Hey, it’s Spring Clearance! So many new things for you to consider selecting. Aren’t you excited? Come on!” My arm lifted without me as he took me with him. I moved freely but something was burning a hole in my pocket. The stairs whisked me away but something was churning a retch in my stomach. Prader’s loving arms carried me but something was turning me into someone else, someone I didn’t know I was capable of being.
I didn’t go back up to The Selection with him the next night, though he begged me. Nor the next night. Nor the next. I haven’t been back up since, and I am running out of excuses. He will want me to go. I will want to stay home and stare at The Liberty. Try to figure out how to get it out of my life.
Number One. Let it fall out of my hand into the flushbowl.
Number Two. Toss it into the wellpool and walk away. Don’t look back.
Number Three. Melt it down in the furnace at work until its features are erased.
Number Four. Slip it into an Usher’s pocket, pray to High Dome I am not noticed.
Number Five. Squeeze it back into the tight space where I found it.
Number Six. What if Prader dies after all? And the baby? What then am I left with?
Number Seven. What if a tumor swells to life inside me and I lose all possibility of entering The Selection?
Number Eight. I have held in my hand the realization of everyone’s dream, the object of everyone’s fascination. What we all live for. An artifact. An item from The Selection.
Number Nine. And I didn’t have to wait for Permission.
Number Ten. And I didn’t have to pick it up.
And I don’t have to give it back.
And I am getting stirred. I laugh and laugh. I whisper, “Hi Birdie! Liberty! You still have all your hair!” Sometimes I press it into my navel, for the baby to feel. “And when you grow up, I will pass it on to you, and you will pass it on to your child, and it will go on like that forever and ever. Our little secret. Our waking dream. We will have what no one else has, we will touch the privilege, we will hold the power, know the unknown, solve the mystery.” And we will work without rest until the Modification is finally reversed, until an absolute cure is found. Now that I have achieved what all of us lives for, the only thing left for me to do is die. Or find the cure.
Number Eleven. I want to live again.
Number Twelve. I love loving him.
Number Thirteen. My baby will hatch and be healthy.
Number Fourteen. Swallow it and hope the sourness in my gut makes it dissolve.
Number Fifteen. Hide it at the bottom of a pot full of compost. Give the pot to my boss for his hatchday.
Number Sixteen. Stop thinking about it.
Number Seventeen. Get up off this chair and go upstairs with Prader.
Number Eighteen. “Are you finally going to come up with me tonight?”
Number Nineteen. “Yes. Just a minute. Be right there.”
Number Twenty. Go into the back chamber. Take it out of its hiding place. Put it in my pocket. Trust that the answer will come to me. While I am up there. Somehow.
“I’m ready.”
Prader looks me up and down and whistles happily. He is so at ease. His eyes, his smile, so casual. Loose. Free. I take his hand. I love his hand. I stare at his knuckles. I love his knuckles. We go together, through the maze of tunnels, to the leg stretching space, the closest thing to true comfort but for Prader’s kisses, up above.
We come up to look in The Selection almost every night, like the others do, to be moved about. To be whisked and carried around. Prader, baby Danna, and me. I hold her in my arms, let her curl up there and sleep, she has all her fingers and her toes, her cheeks weren’t blue when she came out, she didn’t break. Prader and I gaze in the windows, still searching for that perfect item I might select, or direct baby Danna’s attention to the pretty things behind the glass and watch her face light up with curiosity. We debate, Prader and I, what she might pick out for herself, what she likes or doesn’t like, try to guess what we know about her, laugh about who knows her better, him, or me. Praying, of course, all the while, that she’ll make it to Permission.
For the three fullcycles since her birth I have carried that unending prayer around with me, as if something small I can tuck into my pocket or my hand. I take it with me when we go to the hot springs cave every seventh day, bathe and splash in the warmth of soothing waters. I take it with me when we go to the harvest, siphon plankton and whirlygish, pluck trickleweed and seagrass, dry and press the fibers into wafers for our tea and breakfast. I take it with me when I go to work detail, measure and test, combine and recombine chemicals to cure our curse. I take it with me when I am tired, I take it with me when I am afraid, I take it with me even when I have lost my hope. I take it with me because it helps me find my strength again. I take it with me everywhere, because I know I can never lose it. It will never fall through a hole in my heart and disappear.
Tonight we breeze along, through the “Sporting Goods” district, past sticks and clubs and balls, fraying nets and gloves, marvel at the new items the Fall Clearance selection brings. Danna hasn’t seen her grandma’ in weeks now. We are hoping tonight will not be like the ones before. She hasn’t shown up, at our usual spot, behind the glass, to play peek-a-boo or mirror with Danna, in nearly a month, and no one in there seems to know where she is. I can not stop thinking about what I will say to Danna, keep going over and over it in my mind. “Grammy’s been called, sweetie, beckoned past the High Dome, she is in a larger world now, a really big room, a room that has no walls.”
We pass the Brag Pit below, enthusiastic cheers and roars float up and mix with the music and foul air. With each step I still search, with each whirr am still compelled to look—if I stare long enough, something in me repeats, it may flash its signal once again.
We were on our way up that long ago night, after going over and over it again in my mind and listing it out one, two, twenty, I was ready. Prader had set a course directly to the “Saks Fifth Ave. – WEST Exit” to tell my ma’ our good news, that she’d be a grandma’ soon if all went well. He had been going up every night to see her since we found out, but I didn’t have the courage, didn’t have the solution, and couldn’t go back up there again until I gathered up my blindest faith and went along with pure trust that I would decide once and for all what to do with the Liberty round. The answer had come within moments of stepping on the moving stairway.
“She’s been asking for you, Chariss, wonders where you’ve been. It’s taken every ounce of me to stop myself from telling her without you there. I’m so glad you’re feeling better. We’ll make sure to stay close to the tubs. Incubation’s not too unlike The Regime, at least when it comes to retching, huh? Poor darling.” He went on and on like that the whole way there and I hardly listened, staring at his knuckles instead, rehearsing over and over exactly what I would do.
I would tell Prader to let me have a minute, alone with ma’, to talk to her about a surprise I have for him, that I didn’t want him to know about, that I needed my ma’ to help me with. He would leave and I would take the Liberty out of my pocket, press it up to glass and hold it there for a quick second, so she could see it. She would know what it is. She would know what to do.
We got closer to the Brag Pit and a young girl said, “Crabby baby,” staring right through me. I heard whispers echoing off the dome: Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. What did it all mean? Was there a message there, were they trying to reach me, did they want me to burst through the confines of these dark caverns, lead them into the light, to the place where there are no walls?
I have heard that there once were people of different colors, rich blacks and browns, dark like nourishing compost, deep yellows and reds, beautiful like the intricate strata of sandstone, not this pale, translucent flesh with a pinkish hue. I have heard that there once were birds in flocks so huge they blocked out the light of the sun when they passed overhead, that there once were plants that grew taller than the High Dome, in forests that blanketed a space larger than even my pa’ could’ve imagined. I have heard that the sun we can no longer look at, for even the quickest glimpse will blind our eyes, the shortest exposure will corrupt the cells of our skin, used to be considered as a God.
“There is no God but the Creator, no Grace but through The Selection, no Salvation but through The Regime.” A prayer rose up from the Brag Pit as we passed. Maybe it was there that it dropped. Or maybe it was back in the tunnel. Or maybe it was when we were on the second moving stairway.
At first, it all went as I had rehearsed it for once, Ma’ jumping up and down, excited to hear the good news. She banged so hard on the glass enclosure with her hands it actually shook. Prader smiled wryly when I told him to leave for a second, to let me talk to ma’ about a secret little something surprise for him, and he dashed away happily. Everything I said, perfect, every move I made, exact, except for the one small thing that had fallen, dropped through a hole in my pocket, and was lost.
“Cursed!” I yelled, unthinking, as I struggled in my pockets to try to find what was no longer there. I held my finger up to Ma’ to tell her to wait, wait one moment, I’ll be right back. I turned around and searched, went back over every step, pushed people out of the way until an Usher had to be summoned to tell me to calm down.
“Little calamity?” he asked. I backed away, shaking my head no, ran quick to the nearest tub and retched.
Who was I kidding? There was no such thing as freedom for us, there was only The Regime. How could there be any possibility of escape? My visions of leading everyone on a heroic journey out of these crouched caverns, past the High Dome, away from The Selection, and out the Exit to the place where there were no walls vanished completely.
Images of what the last one of us would look like flashed before my eyes—would she know she was alone, would she know she was the last of us and upon her death, we’d be extinct? Would she realize it and break down, fall apart and cry? Or would she open her heart to as much as she could before she died?
I threw up so violently I swear it would’ve cleansed and cured us all if that was how it actually worked. Everything spilled out of me and into the font, the waters rushing down the tub mixed with all of my lies, all of my fears, all of my strength, my hope, my secret, my dreams, it all came pouring out of me and was flushed away, disappearing down the drain.
I had made such a noise and commotion, people stopped around me to pat my back and whisper soothing words. Prader found me and wiped my face off in between convulsions, wetted my brow with a cool cloth, told everyone how it wasn’t The Regime, it was incubation, and they all whispered congratulations, said he should go to the Brag Pit for that one.
He actually picked me up and carried me for a moment, curled up in his arms, let me down gently as his grip weakened, made sure I didn’t fall. I was dizzy and couldn’t look down, abandoned my search and felt relieved. It was back there, somewhere, maybe down the drain where I left the sourness of my stomach behind. As cursed and careless as I felt, I also felt free.
Ma’s concerned look melted away as Prader explained the nausea, nothing to worry about, everything will be fine. He went to leave again, but I grabbed his robe and made him stay. “I just wanted to ask Ma’ what she thought about the baby’s name before I told you. We can talk about it some other time.” That was my very last lie.
Thank the High Dome, thank the Blessed Regime. After weeks of not showing up at our meeting place, Grandma’ is finally standing there all smiles, waving weakly, when we arrive. “Hi Danna, hi baby sweetie!” she mouths and winks. “I missed you, yeah, I missed you so much. I’m sorry Danna,” she animates and gestures. Danna chatters and chatters, talks a pathway a minute. Grandma’ tells us she is still free, just a little old and tired. Tried to get word to us but her friends would not leave her side. She plays peek-a-boo with Danna while Prader and I let out a sigh at the same time. His eyes are full of kindness and relief. “I thought I saw a nice little item back there you might like. We’ll stop on the way back so you can see it.”
“Sounds great,” I say. “And you, my dear, are going to the Brag Pit tonight. You haven’t been in weeks!”
“Well, we do have a lot to brag about after all, after tonight with your ma’ pulling through, don’t we?”
I grab his hand and squeeze it reassuringly, put it with mine into my robe pocket and hold it there, as I often do. Prader and I watch Danna and Grandma’ play while we press our bodies closer and rock together a little, warming each other’s hands, feeling each other’s constant pulse of prayer, holding on for dear life.
© 2001 Mary Tischler
When we’re not being carried and whisked around, we stand in the stationary aisle ways to gaze through the glass enclosure, to survey and consider all of the items displayed there, in The Selection, dreaming of that miraculous day when we might make it to Permission. That is a day most of us never see, but those of us who do can choose to enter The Selection and leave these dark caverns and tunnels forever behind. Upon entering, the lucky ones each get to select one of the items to call their own. I can not even begin to count how many hours a night so many of us spend gazing, searching, trying to find that one item we might dream of selecting, deciding one night, “That’s it, that is the thing I will select,” and the next night seeing something else and changing our minds.
Even after the first tumor shows up, many continue to gaze and to dream, though it is all over for them. They will never make it into The Selection. They haven’t remained free. But they have something else, something new, to look forward to. Once The Regime starts to work, there is always the Brag Pit, under the High Dome, in the middle of all the moving stairways and elevators.
Tonight as my familiar friend carries me along the “Home Furnishings” District, I am whisked past White Sale, Lamps, Couches, Dining Tables. Sometimes I like to step off the platform, stop, and gaze at the largeness of these items. I don’t know if I’d ever select one of them. They seem like more than I could know what to do with. I’d prefer something small, something I could hold, carry around with me in my pocket or my hand.
But tonight I do not stop. This is the night I go to the “Saks Fifth Ave. – WEST Exit” to see my matronhalf, to watch her lips move, to put my hand up to the glass where she has placed hers. We play games like that, play mirror, sometimes we dance, but she knows I am too crowded to move about so widely or swiftly, with so many others at my shoulders and heels, peering over me, trying to get a good look.
It will be almost sixteen Clearances, four fullcycles, now, since my ma’ made it to Permission and chose to enter The Selection. She almost didn’t go. I spent months and months before her fortieth fullcycle urging her, encouraging her, convincing her that she must choose to go into The Selection. I threatened her. Told her I would never speak to her again, if she didn’t go. She reminded me I would never be able to speak to her again if she did go. But at that last minute, on her fortieth fullcycle, along with three others who shared the same hatchday and who had yet to show signs of tumors, when the Brag Pit was transformed for a moment into the Freedom Chamber, she stepped up on the platform, announced her Selection, and was ushered away. What else could there possibly be to live for, after having escaped The Regime for so long?
She had selected a small gold ring with a green emerald, which she wears on the middle finger of her right hand. When she announced it the crowd murmured and applauded, excited for her choice, though there were some groans, some saying, “That’s what I was going to …” I was just as surprised as anyone when she first announced her selection that night. She had never mentioned that particular item. The next night, the very first time we met through the glass, she pointed to me, to her eyes, back to me again, and displayed the ring. I have green eyes. She chose it to remember me, she seemed to say.
There will be no Freedom Chamber tonight in the Brag Pit. Seems no one hatched forty fullcycles ago today has escaped The Regime. Instead, the pit is crowded with braggers, some regulars, some new, disrobed and pointing to various growths on chests, or necks, or holding up sketches or X-Rays to show the progress, the shrinking, of their tumors, offering up thanks and praise to The Regime for gracing them with Remission. Some even point to the hair on their heads that they’ve managed to keep from falling out, by some stroke of genetic luck. They are few. Most of those under The Regime lose their hair quickly—and not just the hair on their heads, but everywhere—their arms, their legs, their genitals. Smooth as a metal rail is their skin, and almost as shiny.
As for me, I have not yet had to submit to The Regime. It’s been twenty-five fullcycles for me now and still there are no signs of any tumorous growths. Only fifteen left to go. I am counting down the Clearances. I have already made up my mind. I am definitely going to choose to enter The Selection, if I make it that long. Mostly because it will be nice to be rid of this smell.
I hear it smells good in there, inside The Selection—all the time. Unlike out here, where so many taking The Regime spend so much time retching into the fonts that are placed conveniently here and there at the ends of walks or stairways. Thankfully rhythmic, soothing music is piped through all night long—I get lost in it sometimes, moving with the music along with the motion of the walkways. It helps me to forget the drifts that constantly hit my nose. The Regime makes many people throw up a lot, along with making their hair fall out. It is pretty harsh.
Every day they wake up and must swallow a handful of pills, every night they must fall asleep hooked up to a tube that infuses their blood with chemicals. Chemicals that I am now learning to make. I have apprenticed in my Sector’s Chemistry Unit for almost five fullcycles now. I will matriculate soon.
They say I must have good genes, like my ma’. Considering that, I am supposed to have contributed at least three children by now. But so far I haven’t even hatched one. I have been fertilized twice, but each time, just before the fourth month, the egg broke and I had to be suctioned. I threw up afterwards, both times. I bled for days.
It would be easier, I think, if they had paired me up with someone different, though I don’t ever mention it to him. He always speaks softly to me, and keeps a smile on his face even though I know he is always sick to his stomach. I would never want to hurt him. They keep promising me that as soon as his tumors get big enough they’ll find me another pair. Someone with better genes this time. But there’s only so many of us to go around.
As it is, when I come back to our Sector’s cavern, to the living quarters area, and enter our cave, my pair hardly looks at me—into my eyes. I think he is afraid of what he might see in there. His reflection. That is also why he never goes up above with me, all of that glass.
He doesn’t like to take his robe off when we do enjoin, as infrequently as that happens. I know he is ashamed of his tumors. But I don’t think he has anything to be ashamed of.
Mostly we play Cups all night. He tells me about the new sites his work detail is excavating. I like to watch his mouth when he talks—his lips stretch past his teeth and show a little bit of his gums. It’s kind of funny. Also, his cheeks dimple into three curves at the corners of his mouth. And his knuckles are always white and thick with wrinkled calluses. Sometimes I stare into the grooves there while he talks, and I am no longer listening. I’m watching his knuckles as they form a white foam like the kind that swirls to the top of the breakfast bowl after the wafers are dropped in the hot water, or as they fly through the air when he gestures with his hands, or when he scoops the pebbles out of one of the cups and plunks them down one by one along the board.
It’s about fifty/fifty so far. He wins half of the time and I win half of the time. But we keep on playing, almost every other night. We keep on playing so he doesn’t have to take his robe off and so I can stare at his knuckles.
The other nights I go up to The Selection alone, to meet up with my friends, or to visit my ma’. He almost never goes, and if he does go, he hardly ever lets me accompany him. He wants nothing more than to avoid the Brag Pit, I suspect, since he has nothing to brag about. Not yet, anyway. “Not yet, but you will,” I keep saying. He isn’t so sure. He’s worried he won’t last long. He thinks he’s going to die soon. It is always amazing how intensely he says goodbye to me every time I leave the cavern. He doesn’t look me in the eye when I return, but every time I leave he practically leaps into my eyes with his big brown, wide open pools, so deeply I feel as if that is all it would take to make a baby, if that was how it actually worked.
Every month now at least one person asks me if I have any good news and every month I have to tell them, “It would be a miracle!” They laugh, but they wince also. How can you conceive if the closest you get to fertilization is big brown eyes?
“We’ll find you a new pair, soon,” they keep promising. But even if they do, I couldn’t leave him. I wouldn’t. I will stay with him until he dies. He needs me more than The Regime needs a baby. The birth rate has been relatively steady, even if pre-fertile mortality rates are so unstable. So far it’s about fifty/fifty. About fifty percent die before they reach reproduction age, the other fifty go on to try to hatch a child. Our population has been in decline for three fullcycles now. It will go back up again. It always has. But it’s hard to keep up with the mutations.
As I near our meeting spot tonight I see that my ma’ is already there, waiting for me. A group of young girls, most likely not yet part of The Regime by the looks of them—their hair, their plump faces—crowds the window, pointing, squealing, poking each other. They move as a mass along the enclosure, smearing the glass with their fingerprints.
A gaunt faced woman admonishes them: “Girls, girls, hands off, now, you’re streaking the glass. Do you want me to put you on the Clean Up detail?” They all stop squealing and scatter.
I see that they have left one of their friends behind, who had been standing apart from the giggling group. The friend is a bald little boy, looks like he needs help walking. The girls push through the crowd my way. As they get closer, “You forgot someone,” I say to them, and point at the boy. They stop and look back, a hint of shame and embarrassment spreads on each one’s face.
“My brother! Almost forgot him!” one of them says.
“Hey, come on Dewly, we’ll help you down to the Brag Pit,” another one shouts. A small of chorus of “Yeah!” rings out, “That’s what we’ll do,” “He’ll feel better after that,” “He is getting better, after all.” The little boy’s eyes light up when the girls go back to get him and sweep him up into their arms.
As they push past me again they are proud. “Thanks lady,” one says. Another says, “Yeah, The Regime has definitely blessed him with signs of Remission.”
“Good for him!” I say. “Happy Bragging, Dewly.” He waves goodbye to me as they step onto a moving stairway and are whisked out of sight. His eyes are so wide, searching.
My matronhalf smiles at me as I place my hand up to the glass, on top of hers. “Good Eve,” she mouths. “Are you still free?” she asks. I nod my head yes. She looks relieved, holds up her hand and crosses her fingers as she always does. We’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out what each other is saying, between reading lips or the system of hand gestures we use.
“What about you?” I ask, pointing to her throat, where the lymph nodes are. She flashes me the okay sign, crosses her heart. If she were to develop tumors now, since she is in The Selection, she would surely die very quickly and painfully. Once you choose to enter The Selection, you can’t come back out again. The Regime’s protection is extended only to those of us who remain out here. Almost no one who makes it to the Freedom Chamber ever chooses to stay, however. “Better to die quickly inside The Selection, than linger out here under The Regime.” Most agree that entering The Selection is worth the risk, what with all of the open space, high ceilings, and interesting artifacts from the Sale and Clearance days gone by, of long ago, before The Selection was enclosed, before the Modification forced us to the caverns below.
She stopped asking me whether I’m pregnant yet, months ago. She knows how unhappy that question makes me. But it must be my puffy face, tonight, that makes her hesitatingly sweep her hands in a mound shape over her abdomen, and then clutch her chin. I shake my head no. She gestures, “Sorry.” I motion that I am tired, that I should go back.
“Why?” she mouths, worried.
“I miss you,” I say. We wave goodbye. She gives me the thumbs up sign.
As I make my way through the aisles, down the moving walks, past the Brag Pit under the High Dome, the lights begin to dim inside The Selection. There is a great scurrying about, I had almost forgotten. Such a commotion! The din of excited murmurs rises, nearly drowning out the piped music, and the Ushers appear, to help clear us out early. Four times a fullcycle a new Clearance period begins. The Selection closes early that night and everyone inside works furiously to get it all ready for opening the next evening. All of the window displays, the signs, the items for selection, are replaced with new ones. Four times a fullcycle the items are rotated—artifacts that are deep inside The Selection, hidden behind walls and stored in rooms far from sight, are brought out and displayed, and the old ones are removed, taken to those far off places the grandeur of which the rest of us can only imagine. I have as yet to see a single duplicate item in my twenty some fullcycles of memory. It is all new, it is all such a treat to the eye, but it is more than that. It is something that I suspect affects all of us out here in a similar way. It shatters the glass of expectation, leaves us forever, irreparably, changed.
Some like to linger in the nostalgia of past Clearances, remembering the items they had seen with fondness, holding an image in their minds of a particular one they might be considering, so they don’t forget it when selection time comes. Even after they know that selection time will never come for them, when they are placed under The Regime and begin to pray for Remission instead of Permission, still they continuously refresh their memories, fearful of forgetting.
I like to think it gives them something of comfort to hold on to, like my patronhalf. It is what I remember most about him. The stories he would tell in our dim cavern as I grew up and watched him go in and out of Remission several times before he finally succumbed to the death he knew was inevitable.
“You should’ve seen it Chariss, it was bigger than this cave and that cave combined!” He’d get up and stand by the wall, measuring the distance with his eye, motioning with his hand. “Yep, it was about—it went from about here all the way to the end of that tunnel, that’s how long it was, and almost as wide.” He’d chuckle and strain to pick me up, sit me down on his lap, brush my hair back, search into my eyes for that wide open space that so comforted him.
He liked the large items, the big ones that stretched his concept of space beyond the confined reality he lived in. I was always so glad for him, that he had those items to hold on to, eager to hear more. “Tell me about another one, pa-pa,” I’d say, and he’d stand up, whisk me around in his arms as best he could, and, though with labored breath and a trembling weakness in his grip, he’d begin again, a new story about another large item he had dreamed of selecting. Though he had trouble breathing, and his muscles had never recovered from the atrophy, when he was telling me those stories I was never afraid that he would drop me, that he would let me fall. The only time that I did slip through his enfeebled arms and fall to the ground was the night he stopped in mid-sentence, collapsed, and fell into a death coma on top of me.
Such gladness still makes a space in my heart for him, that his last thought before he left here was his most treasured dream. I often fancy that that is where he went, where he is now. The picture I hold of him in my mind shows him standing tall, smiling, with his arms and legs outstretched in a room that has no walls.
A new sign goes up in a window. “SPRING CLEARANCE – DAISY SALE.” Ah, spring. Is it spring time already? Arriving with all of its bright colors and pick me up patterns, it always seems to revive us. An Usher sweeps past me briskly, “Hurry on up now, closing time,” he calls out to no one in particular. I step off the last moving walk before the tunnel entrance and am almost dizzied by the stop.
Just as I am about to continue I see a bright little flash coming from a small corner on the ground. I can’t help but look twice. Automatically I look again at where the flash came from and see a half-round piece of metal there, reflecting light. Something shiny, catching my attention, like the glittery jewel that lives on my ma’s finger. I make sure the Usher isn’t looking my way, double back through the current of people flowing down from aisles and stairs and into the tunnel, bend down and try to pick it up. It’s somewhat stuck, so I have to coax it out with my fingernail.
It isn’t a half-round at all, it’s a full circle, and flat, weighs very little in my hand. It’s not quite so shiny as I had first thought, somewhat aged and tarnished, and though scratches mar both surfaces I can make out a strange portrait on one side, a winged creature on the other. A head with hair and what is called a “bird.”
Someone bumps into me and I almost drop it. “Sorry,” she says, and hurries off along with the stream. I palm the cold piece and mix into the crowd, enter the dark mouth of the tunnel that is my path home.
The whole way home the excitement rises in me, as if water filling up a cistern from a newly drilled well for the first time, and just as much of a rare treasure. I think to myself, go over and over it in my head, try to plan exactly how I will show it to him, how I should say it. “Look what I found!” or “You’ll never guess what I have in my hand” or “I brought you a surprise.” He will just love it, I say to myself. His eyes will light up, I hope. Prader’s heart will lift when he sees it. I find myself quickening my pace, impatient at the heels of those in front of me, but there isn’t enough room in this tunnel to push past them and go around.
Finally I arrive at our hole in the wall, number 30, Living Unit 4, Sector 7, and practically dive through it, calling out, “Prader! Prader! You’ll never guess what I …” But I realize I do not see him sitting next to the font, where he usually sits and waits for me to come home, sometimes with the Cups board on the table in front of him. I must be really late, I think, must have lost track of the time. “Prader?” I call out as I walk to the back chamber, where we sleep, where I help to hook him up to The Regime every night. I hope he isn’t already asleep. I couldn’t wake him. He needs as much rest as he can get.
But as I turn into the room and my eyes adjust to the darkness in there I do not see him. This can only mean one thing, my heart leaps up to tell my throat. This can only mean one thing, my nerves scream into my buckled knees. My legs pound the ground in step with the beat of my heart, I swim dazed through the thickened blood of my veins, ache with cramping muscles, bruise with each stride that takes me closer to the void of his coma, shake through the tunnels that is the path to the hospice, where most of us are delivered to die.
As I reach the thin slice of space in the rock that squeezes me through the visitor’s entrance into the cavernous hospice, a strange calm descends upon me, a flutter at first, turning whisper quiet. The hallowed space I stand in echoes with the hiss of s’s and the pops of p’s. Several nurses consult with a murmuring family, another sits at the registration table looking down at something. She looks up and acknowledges me, but I motion myself away, send my eyes over to the slate wall, walk up to it and scan the names. Prader 30-4-7, Prader 30-4-7. I do not see it. I see Pontry 45-8-7, Prenlit 19-11-7, but not Prader 30-4-7. The nurse who had been sitting at the table is suddenly at my side. “Can I help you find someone?” she whispers.
The “help” pops and the “someone” hisses. “No, no,” I say, but then, “Yesssss,” rings out, the o’s still lingering. “Prader 30-4-7.” She goes back to the expertly carved slab of rock that is her table and picks up a chart, looks over it page by page, shaking her head.
“Nope, not here. These are all the new arrivals we haven’t posted yet.” She smiles warmly as the relief spreads into my scalp and toes. I wander away, back through the slice, through the dark tunnels, back to the hole in the wall I call home.
As I walk at my ease, slowly now, quite puzzled, I slip my hands into my pockets. I feel something there, a piece of cold. The head full of hair! The creature with wings! Suddenly I remember what I had forgotten, had absentmindedly dropped into a pouch in my robe. Thank the High Dome! I say to myself, thank the everlasting Regime! I don’t even remember putting it in there, had forgotten all about it in my haste, could have dropped it somewhere and never found it again! I clutch it in my hand the whole way home, until it heats up and a sweat starts to break, making my fingers itch.
When I enter again our cavern, Prader is just getting up from his usual spot, about to go in the back to his bed. I stare and stare and stare at him. He doesn’t look at me, just keeps slumping weakly down the corridor. “I was just about to go get hooked up without you,” he says softly, a hint of laughter in his voice. “Thought you’d make it here before me, but nope, must’ve took a wrong turn.” He chuckles.
“Prader! You scared the silence out of me!” He stops immediately and turns around, questioning with his eyebrows. His eyes dart away from my gaze.
“Where were you?” I burst out. “When I got home you weren’t here so I ran instantly to hospice and— ”
“Chariss, shh, Chariss, I’m sorry.” He limps his way to me, eyes welling up with glass. “I went up to see The Selection tonight. I thought you saw me coming down. I wasn’t far behind you, even saw you stop before the tunnel and wait for me. But then you disappeared. I just figured you went on ahead, pushed off by the crowd.” As he speaks to me his arm finds its way around my waist, under my robe. The chilly surfaces of our skin warm up quickly as they press together. He leads me into the bed chamber, sits me down, draws my robe open, across my shoulders, down my back. Kisses my neck and throat and earlobes.
Interrupted by my many returned kisses I whisper, “Tell … me … you … didn’t go … up to the … Brag Pit … without me! You … promised …” He buries his smile into my neck, shaking his head no.
“I never break a promise,” he mumbles into me. It tickles. His eyelashes are still wet. I grab his head and move him back, to stop the tickle, to make him look at me.
“I went up there sort of as a practice run, just to—” Prader begins to say.
I squeal, I shake him, I kiss him deeply and cut off his words. “Is it true? Are you … really going into … Remission?” He smiles and nods yes, kissing me back as I babble and press my lips into his hair, his ears, his cheeks, his fingers, his wrists. He lifts my hands with his, brings them up to the folds in his robes, clutches the fabric, slowly pushes it open, guides my hands to help him.
The small piece of surprise in my pocket becomes smaller still, nearly fades away in stature next to the giant that is Prader’s happy nakedness.
I look up from my morning crossword to stare at Prader’s knuckles as he drops the breakfast wafers into our steaming bowls. He hums a tune as the foam rises to the top, has a lightness to his step, a strength in his stature as he sits himself down at the table. I’ve been waiting all morning for just the right time, a suitable moment, rehearsed what I was going to say over and over so much that I managed only to fill in five of the answers to my morning puzzle. “I’m so glad, Prader, I can’t tell you how much last night was … well I—”
“Everything’s going to be different for us from now on, Chariss. Is your brew hot enough?” He puts a finger in my bowl to test the temperature. “It’s fine. Go ahead,” he indicates I should drink. He acts as if every little thing around him is so fresh and new, fusses over his spoon, adjusts his bowl so that it sits squarely in front of him. The most important thing is not last night at all, but right now, and the next now, and the next. I hadn’t wanted to interrupt his reverie, the pace of his remarkable new outlook on life. Even as I watch him lift the spoon up to his mouth without shaking and drink, I don’t want to interrupt. But the little metal round in my pocket can no longer wait.
I take it out and hold it in my fist. “I have something for you, Prader. I found it yesterday, upstairs, just before the entrance to our tunnel.” He jerks his head slightly, awake to my voice. It’s not at all what I was going to say.
“Surprise!” I stretch my fingers out to show him the shiny piece of metal in my palm.
“What’s that?” he asks, putting his spoon back down on the table, staring at my interruption.
“I don’t know. I found it.”
He takes it from my hand and examines it, flips it over and over, runs a finger over one surface, flips it over and touches the other side, scrapes his fingernail across the ridged edge. “Hmmm, Liberty, In God We Trust, one nine six five,” he reads the embossed words on one side of the round. “United States of America? E Plurib… Pluribus Unum? Quarter Dollar? I don’t know where you got this Chariss, but I don’t think this belongs to us.” He places it quickly on the table as if it had started to burn his fingers. His spoon shakes as he lifts it to his lips. When he is done sipping he says, “You probably should show it to an Usher.”
“But why? We don’t know what it is. Do you have a guess, at least?”
“Not really, only I think it could possibly belong to someone at 1-96-5.”
“You mean the numbers? Yeah, I guess, maybe …”
“Look, Chariss, whatever it is, and I don’t even want to think about it, it doesn’t look like—well, it looks like it’s old, like an artifact—”
“Yesss! That’s what I was thinking. An artifact from inside The Selection. Only how—? I don’t understand how it could get out here, or if it’s been out here all along how come no one ever saw it before?”
“Those are exactly the questions I was hoping to avoid.”
“What if I—” I was going to ask what if I just kept it here, in a safe place, but his eyes made my words fall into the hole of silence where my heart had just dropped. Instead, I promise him I will give it to an Usher, tonight, when we go up, together for the first time in ages, to the Brag Pit, under the High Dome, where Prader will announce the signs of his Remission. He is humming again as he finishes his breakfast, glances at my crossword and makes suggestions, clears the table, insists that I stay seated, he doesn’t need any help, he feels so certain and strong.
I leave for my work detail and say goodbye, expecting his deep gaze, only this time he hardly looks at me, smiles casually instead, waves me off to say hurry along now, you’re late. “Everything’s going to be different for us now,” I can still hear him say. Not so heavy, not so worrisome, not so damned scary to say goodbye. It lifts me up as I spring along down the tunnel, light as the winged creature on my round, almost actually believing that I will keep my promise to him.
That crooked old complex macromolecule of a boss of mine was the first to notice, even before Prader did. My flush Spring Clearance colored cheeks, my giddy, forgetful smile. “You got something hatching in there?” he asked, all quirky smiles and proud, poking my stomach with an empty test tube.
When I didn’t respond right away, as I usually do, with “It would be a miracle!”, the test tube shattered on the ground and Shudmick started crying. He apologized, didn’t mean to interrupt our work. “It’s just that, I never thought I’d live to see the day … you know you are like a daughter to me.” We embraced, praising The Regime for its benevolent gift, and went back to our research and testing with a renewed faith.
“I will pray for your child’s freedom, Chariss. May your child forever escape The Regime, as you so far have,” Shudmick said as we parted that evening. He, like all of us, is always praying, a continuous soundtrack streaming in the background of our minds, an undercurrent in our hearts that never stops flowing, please, Creator, forgive our ancestors’ trespasses, as we forgive them, who trespassed against us, against all of the Creation, and delivered us to this dark underworld.
The effects of the Modification still lurk in every living thing. We’re never certain what new combination will form and spread yet more cancer. Thankfully we’ve managed to protect ourselves somewhat down here, in the caverns, contain the risks of genetic sequences from being contaminated, protect and purify our food and water supply at their sources, these underground wells and streams where we incubate and harvest plankton, trickleweed, seagreens, all with generators and reflectors powered by the sun that hardly any of us ever get to see.
I sit now, next to my pair, on a smooth stone slab outside the hatchery office, as we wait for the confirmation. It’s been over two months since that blessed night we shared when Prader grew as tall as the High Dome, the night I found the Liberty round, and my flow has as yet to begin. I sit and replay the events in my mind as we wait, relive the kisses, his expert exploration, and the next night, his offering in the Brag Pit, how he was so funny, under the brilliant full moon, and despite it all how I still broke the promise I made to him about the Liberty.
“Many are called, many are chosen,” Prader’s voice had rung out under the High Dome, “but hardly any of ya’s gets to keep your hair!” Prader pointed to his thick head of unusually black hair, his arms, his legs. The crowd was cheerful and enthusiastic, applauding and laughing, shouting “Bravo” or “Braggart! That’s a good one!” I had never seen him look so happy or proud. I especially had never seen him, as he continued to catch my gaze and smile all the while he was up there on stage, stare into my eyes without one hint of goodbye lurking there.
It makes it all the more difficult, sitting here just now, next to him, his hand on my abdomen, his ear occasionally drawn to my chest to hear my heartbeat and sigh, to feel good about what I’ve done. I can’t help but think that if Prader hadn’t gone into Remission this mysterious Liberty round would have been a welcome disruption to his hopelessness, a glittery new attraction to divert his attention, to startle him out of his desperation. Something he could’ve held in his hand and wondered over, that could’ve sparked his curiosity and renewed his faith in the unknown. But now that his Remission is certain, for now, the mysterious round can only represent danger. And for his sake, I knew I had to give it up. If only.
Maybe it was all of that cheerful mixture of shouts, the reverberation of voices, I got … a little confused. I thought—well it seemed to me that a message was lurking there, someone was trying to reach me, or … the woman who stared straight at me and said “Fibber thee?” and then walked away as if I didn’t exist. The roar of the crowd that at times seemed to say “Hi birdie! Hi birdie!” The Usher who glared hard and suspiciously when I neared him to hand over the round, and had to change my mind for fear of … what? I didn’t know. I keep hearing things, little whispers or echoes. Maybe it’s my imagination. Maybe I’ve been crouched in these caverns too long.
“Little tea?” a nurse approaches with a tray filled with afternoon refreshments and I am startled out of my thoughts. Liberty, I swore I heard her say, but when I see the tray filled with tea cups I realize what she said. I shake my head no but Prader lifts his hand off my stomach and extends it to accept a cup of freshly steeped trickleweed.
“Quite a treat,” he says, thanking her. “So much more flavor than the plankton wafers.”
Shortly after, the doctor calls us in to see her. It is good news. The hardest part is over, we have achieved conception. But there are still difficulties ahead to overcome. I have as yet to carry to full term. And who knows what random modifications will creep up and …
Prader lifts me up off my feet, kisses me fully, sets me down and presses his ear to my belly. I am awash in seafoam, I am swirling in a coved eddy, I am dizzy with blood pulse, I am light like winter breath. I try hard to find my feet, my feet try hard to find the ground, but I am drifting.
I realize in that moment, more than any other moments combined, that I, Chariss 30-4-7, love Prader 30-4-7, more than anything else in the caverns, more than any item in The Selection, more than my ma’ and pa’ together, more, even, than the Liberty round.
And I never meant to. And it hurts like a comatose body landing on top of me. And I should know better.
“So, did you already--?” Prader had asked, after he stepped off the platform under the High Dome and plowed through the throng of crowd to reach me that night, after his performance in the Brag Pit. I was supposed to get rid of the round, give it to an usher.
“Mm-hmm,” I nodded yes and shrugged casually, cutting off his question, hoping he would leave it at that, that we could go back home, run back, flee as fast as we …
“What’d he say? Anything?”
“Hmm? Oh, well, nothing. He just sort of took it, said ‘It’s taken care of,’ and that’s it.” I lied. I lied and I didn’t even lie very well. He knew. I know he knew it. He must have known. Only he didn’t say anything.
“Great, let’s go. I want to go back to that one store we passed, remember? The one with the glass buttons in the window? You’re always saying how you want to select something small to hold. I saw an item in there I thought you’d like.” My thoughts were drifting, my attention was far away, past the dome, up near the full round face of the moon. His words tried to reach me, pull me back, draw me back down. “Hey, it’s Spring Clearance! So many new things for you to consider selecting. Aren’t you excited? Come on!” My arm lifted without me as he took me with him. I moved freely but something was burning a hole in my pocket. The stairs whisked me away but something was churning a retch in my stomach. Prader’s loving arms carried me but something was turning me into someone else, someone I didn’t know I was capable of being.
I didn’t go back up to The Selection with him the next night, though he begged me. Nor the next night. Nor the next. I haven’t been back up since, and I am running out of excuses. He will want me to go. I will want to stay home and stare at The Liberty. Try to figure out how to get it out of my life.
Number One. Let it fall out of my hand into the flushbowl.
Number Two. Toss it into the wellpool and walk away. Don’t look back.
Number Three. Melt it down in the furnace at work until its features are erased.
Number Four. Slip it into an Usher’s pocket, pray to High Dome I am not noticed.
Number Five. Squeeze it back into the tight space where I found it.
Number Six. What if Prader dies after all? And the baby? What then am I left with?
Number Seven. What if a tumor swells to life inside me and I lose all possibility of entering The Selection?
Number Eight. I have held in my hand the realization of everyone’s dream, the object of everyone’s fascination. What we all live for. An artifact. An item from The Selection.
Number Nine. And I didn’t have to wait for Permission.
Number Ten. And I didn’t have to pick it up.
And I don’t have to give it back.
And I am getting stirred. I laugh and laugh. I whisper, “Hi Birdie! Liberty! You still have all your hair!” Sometimes I press it into my navel, for the baby to feel. “And when you grow up, I will pass it on to you, and you will pass it on to your child, and it will go on like that forever and ever. Our little secret. Our waking dream. We will have what no one else has, we will touch the privilege, we will hold the power, know the unknown, solve the mystery.” And we will work without rest until the Modification is finally reversed, until an absolute cure is found. Now that I have achieved what all of us lives for, the only thing left for me to do is die. Or find the cure.
Number Eleven. I want to live again.
Number Twelve. I love loving him.
Number Thirteen. My baby will hatch and be healthy.
Number Fourteen. Swallow it and hope the sourness in my gut makes it dissolve.
Number Fifteen. Hide it at the bottom of a pot full of compost. Give the pot to my boss for his hatchday.
Number Sixteen. Stop thinking about it.
Number Seventeen. Get up off this chair and go upstairs with Prader.
Number Eighteen. “Are you finally going to come up with me tonight?”
Number Nineteen. “Yes. Just a minute. Be right there.”
Number Twenty. Go into the back chamber. Take it out of its hiding place. Put it in my pocket. Trust that the answer will come to me. While I am up there. Somehow.
“I’m ready.”
Prader looks me up and down and whistles happily. He is so at ease. His eyes, his smile, so casual. Loose. Free. I take his hand. I love his hand. I stare at his knuckles. I love his knuckles. We go together, through the maze of tunnels, to the leg stretching space, the closest thing to true comfort but for Prader’s kisses, up above.
We come up to look in The Selection almost every night, like the others do, to be moved about. To be whisked and carried around. Prader, baby Danna, and me. I hold her in my arms, let her curl up there and sleep, she has all her fingers and her toes, her cheeks weren’t blue when she came out, she didn’t break. Prader and I gaze in the windows, still searching for that perfect item I might select, or direct baby Danna’s attention to the pretty things behind the glass and watch her face light up with curiosity. We debate, Prader and I, what she might pick out for herself, what she likes or doesn’t like, try to guess what we know about her, laugh about who knows her better, him, or me. Praying, of course, all the while, that she’ll make it to Permission.
For the three fullcycles since her birth I have carried that unending prayer around with me, as if something small I can tuck into my pocket or my hand. I take it with me when we go to the hot springs cave every seventh day, bathe and splash in the warmth of soothing waters. I take it with me when we go to the harvest, siphon plankton and whirlygish, pluck trickleweed and seagrass, dry and press the fibers into wafers for our tea and breakfast. I take it with me when I go to work detail, measure and test, combine and recombine chemicals to cure our curse. I take it with me when I am tired, I take it with me when I am afraid, I take it with me even when I have lost my hope. I take it with me because it helps me find my strength again. I take it with me everywhere, because I know I can never lose it. It will never fall through a hole in my heart and disappear.
Tonight we breeze along, through the “Sporting Goods” district, past sticks and clubs and balls, fraying nets and gloves, marvel at the new items the Fall Clearance selection brings. Danna hasn’t seen her grandma’ in weeks now. We are hoping tonight will not be like the ones before. She hasn’t shown up, at our usual spot, behind the glass, to play peek-a-boo or mirror with Danna, in nearly a month, and no one in there seems to know where she is. I can not stop thinking about what I will say to Danna, keep going over and over it in my mind. “Grammy’s been called, sweetie, beckoned past the High Dome, she is in a larger world now, a really big room, a room that has no walls.”
We pass the Brag Pit below, enthusiastic cheers and roars float up and mix with the music and foul air. With each step I still search, with each whirr am still compelled to look—if I stare long enough, something in me repeats, it may flash its signal once again.
We were on our way up that long ago night, after going over and over it again in my mind and listing it out one, two, twenty, I was ready. Prader had set a course directly to the “Saks Fifth Ave. – WEST Exit” to tell my ma’ our good news, that she’d be a grandma’ soon if all went well. He had been going up every night to see her since we found out, but I didn’t have the courage, didn’t have the solution, and couldn’t go back up there again until I gathered up my blindest faith and went along with pure trust that I would decide once and for all what to do with the Liberty round. The answer had come within moments of stepping on the moving stairway.
“She’s been asking for you, Chariss, wonders where you’ve been. It’s taken every ounce of me to stop myself from telling her without you there. I’m so glad you’re feeling better. We’ll make sure to stay close to the tubs. Incubation’s not too unlike The Regime, at least when it comes to retching, huh? Poor darling.” He went on and on like that the whole way there and I hardly listened, staring at his knuckles instead, rehearsing over and over exactly what I would do.
I would tell Prader to let me have a minute, alone with ma’, to talk to her about a surprise I have for him, that I didn’t want him to know about, that I needed my ma’ to help me with. He would leave and I would take the Liberty out of my pocket, press it up to glass and hold it there for a quick second, so she could see it. She would know what it is. She would know what to do.
We got closer to the Brag Pit and a young girl said, “Crabby baby,” staring right through me. I heard whispers echoing off the dome: Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. What did it all mean? Was there a message there, were they trying to reach me, did they want me to burst through the confines of these dark caverns, lead them into the light, to the place where there are no walls?
I have heard that there once were people of different colors, rich blacks and browns, dark like nourishing compost, deep yellows and reds, beautiful like the intricate strata of sandstone, not this pale, translucent flesh with a pinkish hue. I have heard that there once were birds in flocks so huge they blocked out the light of the sun when they passed overhead, that there once were plants that grew taller than the High Dome, in forests that blanketed a space larger than even my pa’ could’ve imagined. I have heard that the sun we can no longer look at, for even the quickest glimpse will blind our eyes, the shortest exposure will corrupt the cells of our skin, used to be considered as a God.
“There is no God but the Creator, no Grace but through The Selection, no Salvation but through The Regime.” A prayer rose up from the Brag Pit as we passed. Maybe it was there that it dropped. Or maybe it was back in the tunnel. Or maybe it was when we were on the second moving stairway.
At first, it all went as I had rehearsed it for once, Ma’ jumping up and down, excited to hear the good news. She banged so hard on the glass enclosure with her hands it actually shook. Prader smiled wryly when I told him to leave for a second, to let me talk to ma’ about a secret little something surprise for him, and he dashed away happily. Everything I said, perfect, every move I made, exact, except for the one small thing that had fallen, dropped through a hole in my pocket, and was lost.
“Cursed!” I yelled, unthinking, as I struggled in my pockets to try to find what was no longer there. I held my finger up to Ma’ to tell her to wait, wait one moment, I’ll be right back. I turned around and searched, went back over every step, pushed people out of the way until an Usher had to be summoned to tell me to calm down.
“Little calamity?” he asked. I backed away, shaking my head no, ran quick to the nearest tub and retched.
Who was I kidding? There was no such thing as freedom for us, there was only The Regime. How could there be any possibility of escape? My visions of leading everyone on a heroic journey out of these crouched caverns, past the High Dome, away from The Selection, and out the Exit to the place where there were no walls vanished completely.
Images of what the last one of us would look like flashed before my eyes—would she know she was alone, would she know she was the last of us and upon her death, we’d be extinct? Would she realize it and break down, fall apart and cry? Or would she open her heart to as much as she could before she died?
I threw up so violently I swear it would’ve cleansed and cured us all if that was how it actually worked. Everything spilled out of me and into the font, the waters rushing down the tub mixed with all of my lies, all of my fears, all of my strength, my hope, my secret, my dreams, it all came pouring out of me and was flushed away, disappearing down the drain.
I had made such a noise and commotion, people stopped around me to pat my back and whisper soothing words. Prader found me and wiped my face off in between convulsions, wetted my brow with a cool cloth, told everyone how it wasn’t The Regime, it was incubation, and they all whispered congratulations, said he should go to the Brag Pit for that one.
He actually picked me up and carried me for a moment, curled up in his arms, let me down gently as his grip weakened, made sure I didn’t fall. I was dizzy and couldn’t look down, abandoned my search and felt relieved. It was back there, somewhere, maybe down the drain where I left the sourness of my stomach behind. As cursed and careless as I felt, I also felt free.
Ma’s concerned look melted away as Prader explained the nausea, nothing to worry about, everything will be fine. He went to leave again, but I grabbed his robe and made him stay. “I just wanted to ask Ma’ what she thought about the baby’s name before I told you. We can talk about it some other time.” That was my very last lie.
Thank the High Dome, thank the Blessed Regime. After weeks of not showing up at our meeting place, Grandma’ is finally standing there all smiles, waving weakly, when we arrive. “Hi Danna, hi baby sweetie!” she mouths and winks. “I missed you, yeah, I missed you so much. I’m sorry Danna,” she animates and gestures. Danna chatters and chatters, talks a pathway a minute. Grandma’ tells us she is still free, just a little old and tired. Tried to get word to us but her friends would not leave her side. She plays peek-a-boo with Danna while Prader and I let out a sigh at the same time. His eyes are full of kindness and relief. “I thought I saw a nice little item back there you might like. We’ll stop on the way back so you can see it.”
“Sounds great,” I say. “And you, my dear, are going to the Brag Pit tonight. You haven’t been in weeks!”
“Well, we do have a lot to brag about after all, after tonight with your ma’ pulling through, don’t we?”
I grab his hand and squeeze it reassuringly, put it with mine into my robe pocket and hold it there, as I often do. Prader and I watch Danna and Grandma’ play while we press our bodies closer and rock together a little, warming each other’s hands, feeling each other’s constant pulse of prayer, holding on for dear life.
© 2001 Mary Tischler
