“We’re going to visit her for Thanksgiving again, aren’t we? And Christmas.”
“Yeah, but …” Abby sighed. “You know how the holidays are. We’ll be busy all day cooking and cleaning, and Val and Hank will be there, and it’s just gonna be … stressful. It always is. I’ve been thinking about a little summer vacation. Just you and me and the kids. Popponesset is lovely in the summer, and you know how the kids always complain that they can’t go to the beach in November and December because of the weather.”
“And?”
She looked at Harrison. “And what?”
“You’re not telling me everything,” Harrison chimed. “I can feel it.”
“Oh for crying out loud!” Abby threw her arms up in the air. “I hate when you do that!”
“Do what?”
“Read me like an open book!”
Harrison shrugged. “Sorry, honey. Can’t help it, and as far as books go, you are one of my favorites.”
“Excuse me?” Abby looked at him with her eyes wide open in mock outrage. “I’m only one of your favorites?”
“Okay, you’re my favorite, but let’s stay on topic, shall we? What is it you’re not telling me?”
“All right, all right! Mom said she wants to move house in August. She wants to get it over and done with before the fall storms start.”
“I knew it!” Harrison said triumphantly. “You want me to spend my hard-earned and well-deserved vacation helping your mother move house!”
Abby shook her head. “You know it’s not like that. She won’t need much help anyway. She’s going to use the same relocation service as last time. They will do all the heavy lifting. It’s just … I don’t want her having to organize it all by herself. She’s only been at her current place for four years, but still, it’s not easy giving up everything and starting anew. Again. No less at her age. I just want to be there for her and give her some moral support. Especially now that Val is being such a …”
“Go on,” Harrison encouraged her. “Say it.”
“… such a bitch about it.”
“There you go.”
Abby looked at him apprehensively. “So what do you say?”
“I say the kids are absolutely right.”
“What do you mean?”
“It sucks that we can’t go to the beach in November. So yeah, let’s have a little summer vacation on Popponesset while it’s still there.”
Abby jumped out of her seat and tiptoed around the table giddily like a little girl. She stood behind Harrison, draped her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek against his. “You’re the best.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Harrison said nonchalantly and patted her arm. “And you totally deserve me.”
“Really? Do I deserve someone who’s so full of himself?”
“Yep.”
“Okay then,” Abby said and kissed him on the cheek. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
For a moment, Abby kept standing there, holding on to Harrison and letting the warmth of his face caress hers. Harrison pulled his blanket up to his chin and put his hands on Abby’s arms. The night was cold, too cold for the end of May, although expressions like too hot and too cold in regards to the weather had long since lost their meaning. Since the middle of the twenty-first century the runaway greenhouse effect had created erratic climate patterns all across the world, with local weather running amok in many places. In Southeast Asia, the rainy season now lasted nine months while most of Southern Europe was rapidly turning into desert wastelands. Here in New England, only two of the original four seasons remained—summer and winter. The last snow had melted away only three weeks ago. Since then, the temperatures had been rising steadily, although some nights were still cold. By mid June they would reach the eighty to ninety degree range where they would stay—most likely without a single drop of rain—until October. Then they would continually drop and usher in the first winter storms with torrential rains colloquially dubbed ‘hot showers’ because the temperature of the raindrops falling from the sky often reached seventy degrees or more. The reason why the kids couldn’t go to the beach during their yearly visits to Popponesset was not that the weather was too cold. It usually wasn’t. It was because at that time of the year, the ocean was too dangerous. A couple of years back, Harrison and Abby had taken Connor and Lily on a walk along the beach not far from the home of Abby’s mother. The weather was dry and still warm enough for them to wear shorts and T-shirts, but the ocean was a raging maelstrom. Only twenty yards away from them, a sixteen-year-old boy was standing too close to the shoreline when all of a sudden a wave had swept him off his feet and dragged him into the sea. Five weeks later, fishermen found his naked body in their nets—in his death struggle the monstrous undercurrents had literally torn the boy’s clothes to pieces. That’s why Harrison and Abby had decided that the beach was off limits when they visited Abby’s mother for Thanksgiving or Christmas, much to the children’s dismay since they loved swimming. Connor especially had made his indignant protests against these seemingly arbitrary restrictions on his personal freedom a Conway holiday tradition. Both he and Lily would be thrilled to visit Popponesset in the summer. Harrison looked at his watch and wondered if 9:47 p.m. was too late to go and tell them about the good news.
“Did you check on the kids before you came down?” Harrison asked.
“Connor was watching a documentary on the Mars landing. Lily was asleep.”
“First or second Mars landing?”
“You can’t really call the first one a landing, can you?”
“A crash landing is still a landing.”
“Whatever,” Abby said. “He was watching the second one.”
“Really?” Harrison frowned. “That’s odd.”
“Why?”
“It seems boring in comparison to his usual taste in entertainment. I know my son. If it doesn’t involve carnage, he’s usually not interested.”
“Give him a break,” Abby said as Harrison pulled out his phone to monitor his son’s media activities.
“See,” he said, exasperated. “I knew this couldn’t be right! He fooled you! He feigned interest in scientific history, and the moment you turned your back, he switched back to The World’s Deadliest Home Videos. How many times have we told him he’s not allowed to watch that show?”
“I’ve never told him that,” Abby said. “You tell him practically every week.”
“Yeah. And thanks a lot for backing me up on this one.”
Abby shrugged. “It’s just a TV show.”
“It’s not ‘just a TV show.’ It’s blood porn!”
“It does have some educational value.”
“Oh please.” Harrison scowled. “Nobody needs to see people being maimed or killed to know you’re not supposed to ride on top of a car at a hundred miles an hour or jump head first into a pool with no water in it. This program panders to the lowest of human instincts. It’s our modern-day equivalent of watching people getting torn apart by lions at the circus in ancient Rome. But not in my house!”
Harrison tapped a few keys on his phone. “There you go, ConCon564,” he said, referring to his son’s Internet handle—Connor Conway, born May 2064. “Electronic media access blocked.”
“Please don’t do that,” Abby said, finally letting go of Harrison. “Do we have to have a perfectly nice evening end in a fight again?”
“What are you talking about? We don’t fight.”
“You’re fighting all the time!”
“Honey, it’s called banter. Besides, my house, my rules. End of story.”
“Yes, my dictator.” Abby sighed and returned to her chair. “Did you never break any rules when you were young? Did you never watch stuff as a kid that you were not supposed to watch?”
“First of all,” Harrison said, “yes, of course I did. I have broken more rules in my time than I care to remember, and I’ve had to face the consequences. Second, we didn’t have trash like tha
t when we were young, Abby. I mean, we had a lot of trash on TV, but we didn’t watch people getting severely injured or even killed for our amusement. Funny home videos have been around for a hundred years, but back in the day, a TV producer’s idea of funny was birthday cakes getting dropped on the kitchen floor, babies falling asleep with their heads in a bowl of cereal, or grandma and grandpa falling over while they were dancing at a wedding. To keep us entertained they never had to show us the version where grandma hit her head on the edge of a table on her way down and cracked her skull open, or a kid trying to do a back flip, breaking his neck and ending up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. People getting injured or killed used to be news. Now it’s entertainment, and I’m not having any of it!”
“Yeah, yeah, the good old days when life was still pure and children were well behaved and obedient. But nowadays children indulge in luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority, they disobey their elders, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers, right?”
Harrison nodded. “That is exactly right.”
“That’s a quote from Socrates, fifth century BC. People have been saying the exact same things about their kids for two and a half thousand years. Probably even longer than that.”
“And for two and a half thousand years they’ve been spot on,” Harrison said and emptied his glass. “Spot on, I’m telling you.”
Abby shrugged. “Boys will be boys. They need to find their own way, and the sooner the better. They have to rebel and defy authority. It’s part of their hardwiring.”
“I know,” Harrison said.
“So why do you keep giving Connor such a hard time then?”
Harrison looked at her. “Think about it. What does he need in order to defy authority? An authority he can defy. What does he need to overstep boundaries? Boundaries he can overstep. I’m providing a valuable service here. What I do is necessary to help him become a strong person. The amount of authority you exercise as a parent or the rigidity of the boundaries you set will always be up for debate. Am I a strict parent? You bet I am. Am I too strict? I don’t think so. Are my punishments harsh sometimes? Maybe. Are they too harsh? Hardly. Unlike my own father, I’ve never raised my hand against my children. I don’t send them to bed without dinner like my father did. I don’t sentence them to weeks of physical labor around the house. This is not the Gulag. You see, finding your own way is very nice and all, and I’ll always encourage my kids to do that. But I’m not gonna just stand there and watch him tear down a wall if he wants to get from the kitchen to the bathroom. Not as long as we have perfectly nice doors and carpeted hallways.”
“You know what?” Abby said and got out of her chair. “Here he comes now, so why don’t you explain that to him?”
Harrison looked at the slope leading down from the house and saw Connor walking towards them, his tablet computer in his hand. He didn’t look happy. A sigh escaped Harrison.
“I told you not to block his access,” Abby said. “What did you expect? That he’d just turn off the lights and go to sleep?”
“Yes!”
Abby sighed. “Anyway, I’m going up to the house. You want some coffee? Maybe it’ll help you calm down.”
“You know I don’t drink coffee so late at night. It gives me heartburn.”
“Right,” Abby said. She dangled the empty wine bottle in front of his face. “You want me to get us another one of these then?”
“Definitely,” Harrison said and nodded as Connor stood in front of him with his arms akimbo.
“What?” the boy demanded to know.
“What what?” Harrison asked, pretending to be oblivious to Connor’s anger.
“This is going to be fun. I’ll leave you guys to it,” Abby said and strutted off towards the house.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Dad. You blocked my access!”
“And why would I do that?”
“Well, exactly,” Connor said, raising his arms and dropping them in resignation. “Why would you do that? What have I ever done to you?”
“What, you mean apart from that one time when you peed all over me?”
“Stop bringing that up every time you need someone you can blame for your miserable existence. I was five months old when that happened!”
“That is such a convenient excuse, isn’t it?”
“Dad! I’m being serious! You have to restore my access. I need it for school.”
Harrison chuckled as he fondly remembered his parents finding porn videos on his computer when he was thirteen. He had tried to pass them off as learning material for his sex education class, but to no avail.
“Can we at least talk about this, or are you just going to mock me?” Connor asked.
“Okay, let’s talk,” Harrison said. “But for Christ’s sake, son, don’t stand in front of me like the Spanish Inquisition. Do your mother a favor and keep her seat warm for her until she gets back, will you?”
“I need you to restore my access,” Connor said as he sat in Abby’s chair. “This is not the fifties anymore when electronic media were a fancy toy. Access to digital services is a basic human right, and having my access blocked is like solitary confinement. It’s worse, actually. It’s like being gagged and blindfolded.” He tucked the blanket under his arms and put his tablet on the table. “Oh, grapes!”
“Oh, grapes indeed,” Harrison said, “and if you touch them, I’ll break your fingers one by one.”
Connor leaned across and plucked a handful of grapes from the already decimated cluster.
“That’s it,” Harrison said, staring at his son as he popped a grape in his mouth. “Go pack your things. We’re putting you up for adoption.”
“Wow,” Connor said. “These are good! How can we afford grapes like these?”
“They came out of your allowance which, by the way, has been canceled.”
“Right.” Connor popped another grape.
“Also, we’re taking you out of school and sending you to work on a farm.”
Connor chuckled.
“You don’t give a damn about a single thing I say, do you?” Harrison asked.
“I sure don’t.”
“See, and that’s why your access is blocked. How many million times have I told you I don’t want you to watch that stupid Deadliest Home Videos show?”
“Zero,” Connor said. “Zero million times. For you to have told me a million times you would have had to tell me a couple of hundred times every day since the day I was born. Pretty sure I’d remember that.”
“All right, smartypants, it’s called hyperbole. The point is I have told you more than just once or twice, but you just don’t give a damn. And that is not how a dictator-subject relationship is supposed to work.”
“Look, Dad, I know you’re trying to be funny, but I need to watch that show because I’m doing research for a term paper for sociology class.”
“Oh is that so? Well, prove it then. The term is almost over, so your paper should be almost done. Go on then, let’s see what you have so far.”
“All right,” Connor said and grabbed his tablet from the table. “I’ll show you, except oh shoot, somebody blocked my electronic media access, so I can’t!”
“Cheeky little bugger,” Harrison said, and after tapping a few keys on his phone, the screen of Connor’s tablet came to life. Connor opened the file and handed it over. The screen read The World’s Deadliest Home Videos – How TV Cruelty Coarsens the Mind, by Connor Conway.
“What do you know,” Harrison muttered under his breath. He swiped through the pages. “So the title of your paper suggests,” he said, “that TV cruelty is bad for you.”
Connor shook his head. “The title merely says that it coarsens the mind of the viewer. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is a different question.”
“Right.”
“Spoiler alert: it can be pretty bad.”
“And you really need to conduct an experiment on yourself to come to that c
onclusion? Whatever happened to common sense?”
“Common sense is actually not very common,” Connor said. “But these videos also have a good aspect.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
“Raising awareness. They show you that accidents will happen. Not only when you’re trying to pull a breakneck stunt, but even when you’re doing simple everyday things.”
“I call that common sense,” Harrison said.
“Yeah, but the thing is, being told something or just thinking about it doesn’t have the same impact as experiencing it yourself or seeing it with your own eyes. Do you remember how I burned my hand when I was little? On that candle on my birthday cake?”
“Yeah, that was pretty stupid. I said, ‘Son, these are candles. Don’t touch the flames. They’re hot and you’re gonna burn yourself.’ Next thing I knew, you got that defiant, rebellious look on your face, and you put your hand right into the flame. Second degree burn. Doctor at the hospital wanted to call the police and report it as child abuse. Instead of just listening to me …”
Connor sighed. “Did it ever occur to you that I didn’t know what ‘you’re gonna burn yourself’ meant? I mean, how was I supposed to? I was two years old. It’s like explaining to a blind person what the sky looks like. You can try to explain the beauty and the ugliness of life to people all day long and with all the fancy words you can come up with, but nothing beats seeing things with your own eyes. A picture is worth a thousand words, you know?”
“Right,” Harrison said, still swiping through Connor’s term paper. “So what’s the conclusion here? TV cruelty numbs people, but it’s a good thing?”
“I wouldn’t say it numbs people per se,” Connor explained. “It’s more like it prepares them for reality.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure I agree with that.”
“That’s okay. You don’t have to. In my paper I don’t come to a definite conclusion. I just argue points back and forth. But in the end it is possible to learn from other people’s mistakes. It raises awareness of the dangers of everyday life but at the same time it does numb people. I think it’s an interesting dichotomy. Everything comes at a price.”
“Deadliest Home Videos as a health-and-safety program,” Harrison sneered. “What has the world come to?”
Eschaton - Season One Page 2