Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  She had heard this story from her father as well. He told it wistfully, staring off into some subjunctive hole in time that had closed forever, sealing him in, molding him into the man she knew. He appeared, at those times, to want to believe (and very possibly did believe) that they might not have ever found out what happened, had Constance, who was seventy-six and spry, not put up a bit of a fight at the counter, during which she had managed to blurt out Catherine’s name to the Finkles Assistant. Once the Specialists got Constance bagged and dragged her out by the elbows and ankles, the Assistant called and told them what had happened. At the time, of course, they’d had no idea why or by which Security Division of which corporation she’d been detained. However, it being Northeast Region 709 of the United Territories, the odds were in favor of the Hadley Corporation, whose local Security Services hotline Catherine proceeded to call incessantly. Helpful Customer Service Representatives with made-up names and impenetrable accents took Catherine’s calls, put her on hold, left her there for several minutes, then switched her to other Representatives who regretted that they were unable to help her. This went on for weeks, and months, during which Catherine did not sleep. She locked herself in the upstairs bathroom, called the hotline, and cried, and drank. According to Walter, who would pause at this point, everything went to hell from there. During the course of the rest of that year, she quit her job at Friendly Frank’s Real Estate, stopped taking most of her medication, stopped going out, stopped seeing friends, and returning their messages, and generally decompensated. Her drinking worsened, as did her insomnia. On the rare occasions that she was able to sleep, she woke him up shrieking, or sometimes cursing. The neighbors started smiling at Walter in a way that made him distinctly uneasy. Worse, the Security Services Division of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin started sending Walter a series of messages asking him, personally, and all those in his household, to please refrain from calling their hotline and screaming (in what some might have construed as a borderline Anti-Social manner) at their Representatives at all hours of the night.

  Something had to be done immediately. Sanjay Upton Douglass-Solomon, a senior partner at Pincus, Sarkovsky, made a call to a friend whose wife was on the board of the Halloran Center, a high-end facility in Region 3 that offered a range of interventional therapies to minor and former minor celebrities on a strictly semi-anonymous basis.

  Catherine was admitted, and treated, repeatedly.

  Six weeks later, a heavily medicated and much better rested Catherine Briggs was returned to Walter on Chestnut Court and took up residence on the living room sofa. A few weeks later, the Fleep arrived informing them of Constance’s regrettable demise. Catherine read it, set it aside, then went back to viewing her daytime Content.

  Throughout the twenty-eight years that followed, she had alternated between this much more manageable state, in which nothing mattered, and much less stable and more frightening states resembling, to greater and lesser degrees, the total breakdown she had suffered earlier. This was the woman Valentina had known, the one who had raised her, fed her, dressed her, bathed her, read her bedtime stories, who had stood in the dark and watched her sleep, or pretend to be sleeping, humming softly, whose kisses on her forehead felt so soft and warm and right and tender ... whispering, “I will always be with you, no matter what happens, I will always be with you” ... and who sometimes grabbed Valentina’s hand and squeezed it so hard it hurt her fingers, staring wildly into her eyes, her daughter’s eyes, her mother’s eyes, as if she were trying to keep from falling into some vacuum Valentina could never see but could feel beneath them, some horrible, bottomless, boundless abyss, some infinite nothing within which all that was was somehow floating suspended. This was the mother Valentina knew, the mother, who, despite the demons that tore her apart from inside out, clearly loved her so much it hurt ... and more than just hurt, had damaged her somehow, had forced her to fight with all her will against herself to twist herself into some acceptable version of herself, some smiling, seething sham of herself ... the ad hoc semblance of a normal mother that Valentina had tried for years, for twenty-six years, to forgive, and love, and had, in spite of everything, loved ... and yet, just after her twenty-sixth birthday, when her father called and she came and found him slumped out on the stoop that night, and he looked up at her through his swollen eyelids and shook his head, and his lips were trembling, and she knew that he had finally done it, had made the call to Breckenridge Village, every muscle in her body relaxed.

  Finally, she was able to breathe.

  She sat there now beside some mother who wasn’t the mother who wasn’t her mother, watching the sky go red and orange, their mirrored faces staring blankly back at them out of the tinted glass, each on one side of vertical strip of riser that ran up the window between them. They looked like before-and-after pictures of some green-eyed woman they both resembled, but neither of them actually was. She had been there for almost six hours at this point, sitting beside her mother’s chair, staring out at whatever Catherine was staring out at in the dead lagoon. Catherine hadn’t said one word. Valentina hadn’t eaten. Her butt muscles ached. Muzak played. The P.A. wanted Pedro to please report to Room 7. The light was fading. She didn’t know what she’d thought was going to happen there in the Seaview Unit (as in some kind of medical miracle or something), but whatever it was was not going to happen. Catherine was not going to tell her anything .

  Valentina slipped her hand beneath the downturned palm of her mother’s. She interlocked her fingers with Catherine’s. She levered her forearm up like a drawbridge, raising Catherine’s hand to the light, steadied it there, and opened her fingers. Nothing happened. The hand just lay there, resting lightly against Valentina’s palm, its fingers open, slightly bent, a plastic non-removable name tag fastened securely around its wrist. The skin of her mother’s hand was brown, paper thin, and webbed with thousands of intricate kind of diamond-shaped lines. They looked like scales or patterns made in the sand by the wind, or like waxed brown paper someone had taken and crumpled up, then uncrumpled and stretched around the bones of her hand. There were blotches of blue and purple bruises, and faded patches of old adhesive left by the strips of tape they used to hold the IV needles in place. Valentina wanted to cry. She lowered her arm, and her mother’s arm, her fingers still interlocked with Catherine’s, and sat there watching the sky turn violet.

  “I love you, mom. I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  The words came pouring out in a torrent.

  She spoke in frantic, breathless whispers, watching the reflection in the window for aides, who were shuffling about the dayroom behind them collecting Special Needs Clients for dinner. She told her everything, or nearly everything ... everything she had never told her. She filled Catherine in on her life, her marriage, her job, her resistance to medications, her latent Anti-Social ideations, Kyle, the baby, Doctor Fraser, and finally her Lomax Escalator Vision. Somewhere near the end of all this, she realized why she had actually come. It wasn’t to clandestinely interrogate Catherine (which deep down she had known would be fruitless). She had come to tell her mother goodbye. She realized this as she was begging her mother for help, a hint, a clue, anything ... anything Constance might have said, or left behind, or that might have belonged or somehow related to Stanislav Barnicoat. She explained this to Catherine, knowing that Catherine didn’t understand a word she was saying. She had to get OUT, she whispered desperately, or else she was going to end up there, in one of those chairs with Catherine and Dotty and Katja, and all her other roommates, staring out at that dead lagoon on who knew what medication they gave them ... which Valentina was so very sorry, and she wished that she could get her out of there, but she couldn’t, because she had to get out herself ... she had to get OUT, she reiterated, before they detained her and took her somewhere, and kept her alive on feeding tubes until they could harvest her Clarion baby, which was one of those THINGS that were part of IT, and were taking over, and were not human, and she t
old her she understood it all now, her mother’s inappropriate behavior, and her anger, and God ... why was it like this? Why did everything have to be like this? And if she was in there, if Catherine was in there, if any part of her was in there somewhere, hearing this, hearing these words, she wanted her to know that she had always loved her, that part of her had always loved her, and would always love her, no matter what happened, and ...

  No one was in there hearing anything.

  Catherine was staring off into the sunset.

  Valentina was talking to herself.

  The P.A. announced that dinner was going to be Salisbury steaks with peas and potatoes. The P.A. was extremely pleased about this. Valentina was trying to keep from standing up and incoherently screaming. She started to reach inside her purse to get out a tissue and dab at her tears (which she didn’t think any of the aides had seen yet), but she couldn’t, because Catherine was squeezing her hand ... which OK, this was likely just some autonomic metacarpal spasm. Except that it wasn’t a muscle spasm. Catherine was definitely squeezing her hand. Or rather, she was squeezing her finger. At some point during Valentina’s confession, she’d slipped her wrinkled, leathery thumb covertly under Valentina’s palm, and now she was pinching, and using the tip of her yellow thumbnail to gently tug at, the edge of Valentina’s wedding band.

  Valentina shifted in her chair, turned and looked into Catherine’s eyes. They were just as blank and vacant as before. Her finger was still involved with her ring. She leaned in close.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  Nothing. Not the faintest flicker.

  She gently pried her mother’s fingers off her ring and retracted her hand. Catherine’s forearm pivoted upwards. Her pointy elbow was resting firmly on the padded arm of the white recliner, but her hand was reaching, groping, clutching, her fingers grasping, as if she were trying to ... wait ... Valentina remembered this feeling. This feeling of dread ... her dread of the Hand.

  “What are you doing? Is that the Hand?”

  Catherine’s fingers titled toward her. She recoiled from them ... as she always had. She could almost hear her mother laughing, cackling, coming toward her with the Hand. She could hear herself screaming, laughing, squealing, her mother laughing, smelling like liquor ...

  A smiling aide was coming toward them, presumably to drag her mother off and stuff her full of Salisbury Steak.

  “I understand,” Valentina whispered.

  The aide was almost there by then.

  “I love you, mom. I will always be with you.”

  “Salisbury Steaks for dinner, ladies!”

  Slowly, as the aide approached, as if it were just another random muscle contraction that didn’t mean anything, Catherine’s fragile fingers closed like wilting petals into a fist.

  The Terrorists

  Now, before we go any further with our story, we probably need to take a moment and address this ... well, this Terrorist business. Because as much as we might be tempted to, you know, call it by some other name, or otherwise sugarcoat it or weasel around it, what we’re looking at here is our two protagonists, one of whom was trying to become a Terrorist, and the other of whom already was one, the latter being Taylor, of course. Which was rather ironic given the fact that Taylor, unlike Valentina, had no desire to become a Terrorist, or to join any fictive Terrorist networks, or to knowingly associate and conspire with Terrorists, or provide material support to Terrorists, or aid or abet them by word or deed. He didn’t want anything to do with Terrorists, or with any of their Terror-related activities. All Taylor wanted was to save Cassandra, and her baby, from IntraZone Waste & Security, and the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, preferably without getting wasted in the process. Unfortunately, it didn’t really matter what he wanted, or how he perceived what he thought he was doing. What mattered were the facts ... and the facts were clear. The moment he entered the Pussyhorse Lounge and sat down across the table from Sarah, Taylor, officially, became a Terrorist.

  And, all right, now you’re probably thinking ... a Terrorist? What did that mean exactly? Wasn’t that just an essentially vacuous fear-inducing catch-all term for anyone the corporations didn’t like and wanted to harass, or indefinitely detain, or summarily execute with complete impunity? And, fair enough, that’s a legitimate question, or it would be in some kind of ideal world where people weren’t living in constant fear of sudden and devastating Terrorist attacks, and were allowed to seriously ask such questions, but that’s not the world where our story takes place. On the contrary, for completely understandable reasons, in the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, where people were aware that a Terrorist attack (possibly involving some sort of home-made nuclear device or chemical agent) could happen anywhere, at any time, this question was not a legitimate question, or ground for philosophical inquiry, not even in some purely etymological way. The meaning of the term was not up for discussion It meant what it meant. Plain and simple. There was nothing ambiguous or equivocal about it. Terror was Terror. Terrorists were Terrorists.

  Which isn’t to say this was some kind of ill-defined label that could just be slapped onto anyone, this “Terrorist” label, because it wasn’t, at all. The meaning of the term was clearly defined. There were people who were Terrorists and people who weren’t. You had to meet a certain set of criteria, the wording of which had been carefully chosen by leading Security and Terrorism experts, and which was posted on some website somewhere. Valentina was a perfect example. Valentina was not a Terrorist (or at least not up to this point in our story). Valentina was sick and confused. For all her Anti-Social ideations, and paranoid fantasies, and inappropriate emotions, she was still, officially, a Variant-Positive, and Variant-Positives were not Terrorists. Taylor on the other hand was not a Variant-Positive. Taylor was a Class 3 Anti-Social Person. A Class 3 Anti-Social Person who had, with clear intent, and knowledge and forethought, sauntered into the Pussyhorse Lounge and involved himself with person or persons who were members of an actual Terrorist network, * which made him a member of this Terrorist network, or at least an associate of this Terrorist network, which ipso facto made him a Terrorist. This was not just a question of semantics or half-assed tautological reasoning. Taylor had actually, physically, done this. This was a fact, ergo the truth, the undeniable and self-evident truth.

  And, all right, now you’re probably asking ... the truth? What did that mean exactly? Weren’t there a lot of different truths? Wasn’t the meaning of “truth” subjective? And yes ... absolutely, in one sense it was, but it another sense it absolutely wasn’t. Which wasn’t quite as paradoxical, or sophistical, as it probably sounds. See, even in an unimaginably tolerant, semiotically sophisticated age like the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, where the vast majority of signifiers floated, and values other than commodity value were generally seen as totally arbitrary, some things were simply what they were. The truth, for example. The truth was the truth. And facts. Facts were pretty much facts.

  Now this is true of any age. Despite what people discover later, the prevailing facts of that age, or epoch, or civilization, or global empire, at the time, have got to be regarded as facts, undeniable, indisputable facts, or else how could the people living in that age determine what was real, or true, or make decisions about anything at all, like their medical treatments, or what to eat, or how to build things, or what to invest in, or who the actual Terrorists were? They couldn’t. They would all be walking around reading their own preconceptions into things in a kind of perceptual feedback loop, or otherwise ... you know, just making stuff up.

  Which, of course, was not the case here at all. No one was making anything up, at least not regarding this Terrorism thing. The facts here were the actual facts. There was nothing epistemologically contentious or in any way subjective about them. People who were Anti-Social Persons who joined notorious Terrorist networks, the overarching objective of which was to perpetrate a series of globally-coordinated, senseless and deva
stating Terrorist attacks, were not romantic revolutionaries. ** Such people were Terrorists ... actual Terrorists. People who were Variant-Positive Persons who had gone off their meds, and were sick and confused, and who thought they were Terrorists, or who wanted to be Terrorists, or provide material support to Terrorists, were clearly in need of immediate treatment, and were ... OK, potential Terrorists, but for the time being were not actual Terrorists.

  And yes, before you even ask, there was an actual meaningful difference between “actual” Terrorists and “potential” Terrorists. Look, let’s not get all hysterical here and blow this up all out of proportion. The Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, whatever its drawbacks and shortcomings were, was not some kind of Orwellian dystopia. Thinking thoughts didn’t make you a Terrorist. At least not the thoughts Valentina was thinking. On the contrary, they proved she was still a Normal. You had to be a Normal, a Variant-Positive, to even be able to think such thoughts, or to entertain concepts like “overthrowing IT,” and “purging your body and soul of IT,” or to decide one day to renounce your status and privileged lifestyle in your gated community for the sake of some moral or ethical belief, and set out to become a Terrorist.