Adjustment Day

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Her mother stood over the stove stirring something in a frying pan. She wore a wimple. A wimple! She was so white her lips stretched as thin as pink rubber bands. Gavyn was the lucky one. Shasta, too. Shasta should just surrender for export to Blacktopia. Charm and her parents were trapped, condemned to the patriarchal, gun-toting Renaissance Faire that was Caucasia. Her mother looked up from her cooking and said, “Hello, dear.”

  Charm asked, “Beer? It’s early.”

  Her mother was sipping from a tall mug of amber liquid. “This?” she asked, offering the mug. “It’s urine. Prevents cancers. Black people swear by it.”

  Charm hummed a response. Her mouth was too full of spit to risk words. She opened the refrigerator and took out a plastic tub. Hand-lettered on the snap-tight lid was the warning: Hands Off! Charm’s Drool! She peeled off the lid and tipped her face over the tub. A thick, cloudy liquid sloshed inside, and she hawked a nasty loogie into the mess.

  Her mother winced. “Disgusting.” She tipped back another swig of medicinal urine.

  Charm spat again and snapped the lid on the tub. She’d been at this for a couple days and the tub still felt empty. “Science fair,” she said. “Pavlov’s dog.”

  Her mother leveled a worried look at her. “You know science is off-limits.”

  The moratorium, she meant. The big push to get anyone into STEM careers was dead. The edict was that white people were supposed to be breeding instead of reading. As she closed the fridge, Charm tried to change the subject. “I’ve been thinking about Gavyn.”

  Her mother’s brow pinched. She feigned confusion, asking, “Who?”

  “Your son.” Charm went to the sink and filled a tall glass with water. All her spitting had taken its toll.

  Her mother sighed as deeply as the lacings of her bodice would allow. “We have no son,” she said. “You have no brother.”

  As she drank the water, Charm weighed the statement. Was her mother cruel or just being a realist? Once Gavyn had emigrated it was unlikely they’d ever have contact with him. The best they could hope for would be a surrogate son or daughter exported by similarly disappointed parents in Gaysia. Too many parents took offense. If their children reached the Age of Declaration, eighteen, and announced an inappropriate sexuality, it looked like betrayal. Charm knew her own parents had asked Gavyn to postpone his declaration. People could wait until they were nineteen, and delaying his announcement would’ve given them two more years together as a family. But Gavyn, he’d filed his paperwork. He’d known what he wanted. He wanted to get the hell out.

  Her mother didn’t meet her gaze but continued to stir, saying, “You know you can’t go outdoors like that.” Whatever was in the pan, it hissed and spat.

  She meant bare-headed. Women of Caucasia were required to cover their heads in public. Another measure intended to instill ethnic unity. Hence the wimple. French Tudor caps were tempting fate; a girl might as well sashay around topless. Snoods? Forget it. Charm knew her parents had already lost one child. God forbid their remaining child get bounced into a heretic’s work farm or whatever.

  The school had called today. The principal was threatening expulsion. Her mother pinched up some salt from a bowl and sprinkled it into her cooking. She said, “They claim you chased more boys with your exposed lady parts.” Using both hands, she twisted a pepper mill. “Those young men were awfully shaken up.”

  Charm smiled at the memory. She’d panicked the varsity basketball team during practice. By leaping out of the girl’s locker room with no pants on, she’d stampeded a crew of alpha males out through the fire exits. Alarms had sounded. As feminist power moments went it felt pretty glorious.

  She was already trying to work up a new mouthful of spit. “You think Gavyn might be in trouble?” What she meant was that the nation of Gaysia had only recently launched its program to reproduce exports. It would be seventeen years before it yielded any heterosexuals who could be traded for the homosexuals stockpiled in Caucasia and Blacktopia. At that rate Gavyn might be thirty-four or thirty-five before he stood a chance of emigrating. Of course, some do-gooders might raise the half million Talbott dollars needed to ransom him, but the odds seemed slim. Not for all of the teenagers in retention camps.

  All the while the heterosexual nation states would already have babies in the pipeline, and over the next seventeen years a small army of queer exports was going to get bottlenecked at the retention camps. Straight folks had a history-long head start at the baby-making game.

  As her mouth filled, Charm watched her mother and tried not to swallow or speak.

  Currently nations conducted a modest back-and-forth trade in babies born with a majority of Caucasian or sub-Saharan DNA, but everyone knew the real bonanza would be in the export of mis-born queer citizens. That was the new term: mis-born. It denoted anyone born and raised in an inappropriate nation state.

  Furthermore, who knew if Gaysia would prioritize the youngest exports? Otherwise more generations would spend their youth waiting to be repatriated. If younger exports were given priority then Gavyn could spend his entire life trapped in limbo between two nations.

  His letters didn’t say as much, but Gavyn himself had stopped writing about his high hopes. Whereas he used to write about finding love, settling down, and becoming a force to help build his new queer nation . . . lately he’d taken to complaining about the camp food. It was lousy. Starchy beef stews. Watery vegetable soup. The same way that illness became the chief topic among the elderly, Charm knew that food was the main preoccupation of people in prisons.

  None of this she mentioned aloud. She just watched her mother stir. It was fried chicken, the grease popping. Potatoes boiled in a pot. Dinner rolls were baking in the oven, and the butter had already been set out on the countertop to soften at room temperature.

  Her mother reached up and pressed a switch. The hood above the stove began to hum, and the steam from the fry pan spiraled upwards and disappeared.

  The smell, so much fat and meat, the parmesan cheese she knew would be mixed into the cornmeal breading, the aroma flooded Charm’s mouth with new saliva. In another minute she’d need to open the fridge again. Her brother was a hostage, and the faster she filled that plastic tub with spit the sooner she might liberate him.

  The callers weren’t Clem or Keishaun but they spoke with the same brusque economy of words, demanding, “Get Talbott.” On those occasions Walter had clipped a hands-free phone to Talbott’s scabbed head and had retreated from the room. At Talbott’s urging he’d begun to type his notes into a single comprehensive document. To what end, Walter hadn’t a guess. It might’ve been a book in progress. Or it might’ve been just a new test. Beginning with the first test, flaying his new old man in search of a make-believe homing device, keyboarding his notes was a walk in the park.

  The men he’d enrolled, Walter had only been able to speculate about. The two heroin addicts. They might be tooling around, living large on Talbott’s dime. They might even be spreading the gospel of Talbott to their fellow junkies in support groups across the country. Not impossible was the idea that a network of desperate men was branching and spreading out to cover the nation. Or, those two men might be dead.

  Nothing about Talbott’s disappearance had ever surfaced on the news sites. Again, it was pure speculation, but the police might’ve kept the entire situation under wraps pending their investigation. That said, the FBI might’ve been closing in at any moment, staked out down the block, ready to batter down the front door. Walter had kept typing.

  Talbott’s shouts had summoned him. The old man had said, “You need to make the call we talked about.” Walter went to take the phone off the old, spotted scalp. Leakage, drops of blood swelling from old wounds had glued it in place so effectively the ear clip hardly seemed necessary. The gruesome truth was that Walter had to peel the phone off the stretching, sagging old skin, and even then the black plastic was speckled with tacky smudges and crusty scabs. So much so that Walter had been compelled to
scrub it with an antibiotic wet wipe. All the while Talbott had harangued him.

  “Tell them the code,” he’d groused from his chair. “Don’t keep the connection open longer than one minute.”

  Walter had sniffed the phone. It had smelled like nothing but rubbing alcohol. He’d punched in the number he’d learned by heart.

  A voice had answered, a woman’s voice, “Senator Daniels’s office.”

  Walter had eyed the old man while saying, “I’m calling on behalf of—”

  The voice had cut him off. “The senator’s in a meeting.”

  “Ten seconds,” shouted Talbott.

  Walter had taken the nuclear option. “This is a code 4C247M.” The connection had gone silent for an instant before a booming male voice had come on.

  “This is the senator,” the voice had announced.

  “Yes.” Walter had gone on watching Talbott for any signs of approval or disapproval. “You need to introduce the War Resolutions Act.”

  Talbott had explained the situation. How the youth bulge of surplus males threatened to destabilize this country as well as any number of foreign nations. The act would catalyze the induction of a million young men into the military, and these men would be pitted against equal forces conscripted in other countries. It wasn’t lost on Walter that whenever events in the world went south it was always men his age who’d be dispatched to clean up the mess. Walter had told the senator, “Mr. Talbott would like the war to commence no later than the opening day of grouse hunting.”

  “Of course,” the senator had said. Unless Walter had been mistaken, the man had been panting for breath as if he’d sprinted to reach the phone.

  Talbott had explained that a world war would reduce the surplus of labor. The global manufacturing markets would explode with growth. Finally, Walter had imagined he could see some big money at the end of this very long tunnel. He’d told the senator, “Mr. Talbott sends his best wishes to your wife.”

  “Of course,” the senator had said.

  “Thirty seconds,” had barked Talbott from his chair.

  Tipsy with power, Walter had baited the man on the phone. “How is Mrs. Senator?”

  The senator had hesitated. “She’s fine, sir.”

  To date Walter had never been addressed as “sir,” and it felt surprisingly good. Before he could lose his nerve, he’d given Shasta’s full name and asked the senator to expunge her parking tickets.

  “One minute,” Talbott had snapped, “hang up!”

  As one last mocking gibe Walter had asked, “Senator, when is grouse hunting season?”

  His voice reedy with stress, the senator had asked, “This year?”

  “This year,” Walter had confirmed.

  “It begins one day after the onset of World War III,” had said the senator, adding, “sir.”

  Only then, with the test complete, with Talbott glaring bullets at him, taking his own sweet time, did Walter hang up.

  One evening stood out among the many Jamal spent tipping back mint juleps and trying to study the creature. In its indigo-black hide he could discern traces of the aged belle who’d burnt her hair to a frizzed mess and daily strutted down from the attic, high-stepping and animated with Bojangles jazz hands and leering minstrel show faces. Times the creature would drop its act and reminisce about the people depicted in the portraits. Those times, the shuck and jive erased by gin, the creature would hold forth about the cemetery that lay on the far side of the field. Jamal would tour among the gravestones, big and small, and the creature would narrate about the lives of one and all.

  Examining each grave closely, Jamal asked if there was one for a woman named Belinda.

  “Dat beez in dah slay-vah sex-shun,” said Barnabas. The creature walked to a wooded area outside the family graves. There, among the rusted crosses and sunken gravesites, Jamal found a small stone, the white marble eroded by rain. Only the name “Belinda” was legible.

  On other occasions the creature would fall silent and Jamal would read aloud from the Talbott book. That gospel of the new new world. In the parlor, with a fire crackling on the hearth he’d read:

  We love to fight but hate to win. We challenge authority, create conflict, and pit ourselves against power not because we want to dominate, because we know triumph only means more fighting. We love to fight because we know that whatever irresistible force finally defeats us, we can rejoice and recognize that enemy as God.

  He’d noticed how when the creature was drunk and playing a fool, it seemed to experience genuine joy. It raised its cracked voice to belt out old spirituals. Jamal observed this with a mixture of pity and fascination. This strutting clown. It had manifested as a haunt. The spirit of this forlorn place. The sight brought to mind more from Talbott:

  To whites the most enviable quality of blacks was their capacity for happiness. They exhibited a graceful determination and good nature that whites could only covet. Over centuries of persecution blacks had evolved an enviable spirit and inner delight. To ruin that joy, whites created the grievance industry and poisoned black happiness by replacing it with rage and hatred. By sowing insecurity, whites have destroyed the greatest power blacks once enjoyed. By teaching blacks to take offense, whites have succeeded in cursing blacks with a misery far greater than any white unhappiness.

  As it slumped in a red velvet chair, the creature blinked surprised eyes. It smacked its swollen lips and asked, “Massah Jamal, dat book . . . do it reely say dat?”

  Jamal nodded.

  The creature nodded in return. “It soun’ rite.” Lost in thought, the old eyes studied their own reflection in the polished side of the silver julep mug. “Massah Jamal?” it asked, “Duz yah buh-leeves in Got?”

  Jamal was a little loaded. He answered, “I love what God creates, but I admit I don’t give him the credit.” Leaning closer to the creature he added, conspiratorially, “If I’d said prayers half as many times as I’ve been online looking for porn, I’d be saved. No doubt about it.” He smiled roguishly, “I only wish I loved God half as much as I love some of his beautiful, beautiful creations.”

  Whatever it was, the creature seemed to understand. Just then it could’ve been what it was: an old white woman in blackface afraid of being turned out of her ancestral home. Seeing the creature’s face soften, a truth struck Jamal. His worst fear was that the stooped, freakish gnome would resolve itself. It would revert back to a frightened old lady. The woman would leave this house and take with her its history. His concern was about more than writing his book. Jamal would be alone in his power, a king in a castle but without this ridiculous jester. This capering ludicrous buffoon was the only person in his new life he felt comfortable around.

  He’d never anticipated that power would be this lonely.

  No one would ever believe the word of this fool, so he could confess any secret to it. How badly he needed this lunatic as his confidant, it scared him. He wondered who needed whom more.

  To stem the moment, the king reached to a pitcher that sat sweating on a side table. Without being asked, he poured the creature’s drink full.

  Delicious poured herself another glass of wine. It was safer to look drunk than to look scared. The police wouldn’t arrest a tipsy woman, but they’d follow someone who smiled furtively and walked down the street too fast, staying in the shadows and looking away when passing headlights revealed her face. She checked her makeup in the bathroom mirror and touched a smudge of lipstick off one front tooth. A knock came at the door.

  “Just a sec,” she said. Her wine glass sat on the ledge beside the bathtub, next to the empty wine bottle. Perfume, she almost forgot. A dab behind her knees, a dab behind each ear. She downed the glass of wine, then reached up under her short skirt and wiggled the panties down her thighs and tossed them into the clothes hamper. A last look in the mirror gave her confidence. As did the wine.

  Opening the bathroom door, Delicious said, “All yours.”

  Waiting in the hallway was Felix. He was Belle
’s boy by her husband, not that Gaysian law would recognize such a union. Nowadays Delicious’s man, Gentry, was playing house with Jarvis, just as Delicious had wed Belle in a grand public ceremony in the stupendous Cathedral of Harvey Milk with a release of hundreds of white doves and a twenty-four-piece orchestra at the reception. Felix had served as ring bearer. Felix knew what was at stake.

  One slip-up, and any one of them might be detained as an export. They’d be placed in a retention center and eventually relocated to Blacktopia or Caucasia, never to be reunited with his or her beloved. To make matters worse, now they had Felix to worry about. He wasn’t like other boys. At an age when he ought to be lip synching to vintage Gloria Gaynor mixes, he was staring a tad too long at the scads of women they passed in the street. He didn’t seem the least bit interested in dating other boys, and it worried his mother. She insisted he was merely going through a phase. Weeks shy of his Age of Declaration, she begged him not to openly flaunt his heterosexuality. At the least, such risky behavior would get him bashed by self-righteous thugs. At worst, he’d be deported. That would be the last either of his parents would set eyes on him.

  Felix gave Delicious a smirk. “Don’t you look hot,” he said, his eyes taking in her smooth legs, her feet wedged in high heels, her hemline high and her neckline low. He smiled his approval at her new weave and the smudge of glitter in her cleavage. “Date night?” He nodded at the empty wine bottle in one of her hands, the empty glass in her other, her long manicured fingernails.

  It was. Date night, that is, but not with his mother, Belle.

  Delicious ignored the boy’s leer and pushed past him. “Don’t you have a circle jerk to attend?”

  “Nope.” He shook his head. “We had a big sperm drive at school today.”

  Delicious knew he wasn’t kidding but didn’t hanker to hear the details. She took her purse off the foyer table and checked inside. A certified letter had arrived that afternoon. With it safely inside her purse she headed for the apartment’s front door, saying, “Tell your mom not to wait up.”