by Ben Peek
“Yet the ways of slavery still exist. We have the slave conversation every year, do you know that?”
If another person had said that, my mother would have rolled her eyes and a biting, sarcastic response would have slipped out; but to her brother, she laughed, and turned her head away from her evidence. “Why are you taking us to this thing? We’re going to stand out like eighteenth century Muslim women on a beach.”
“Not a Jersey beach.”
She laughed again.
I was forgotten in the back of the truck as their conversation, half teasing, half an argument, funny to them alone, continued. I don’t remember much more. I drifted off as I sat there and was jolted back to reality when the truck pulled up to the cracked pavement shoulder, hitting it accidentally. Ahead of us was a line of old, gasoline using vehicles, no one with an electric engine like ours.
Out of the truck, I felt my uncle’s arm around my shoulder before I saw it. “You’re going to enjoy this,” he said, closing the door. “It’s real—better than those shows you watch.”
His grip was firm and I couldn’t shrug out of it easily, but I had learned to deal with it. It bothered me that I had begun to become acclimatised to his touch, especially because I was aware that his fingers had not gotten any less confident—if anything, they had gotten more—and that I was growing to accept them, to view them as normal behaviour.
The house that he led us to was one with a large backyard. In it was a sizable crowd and in the noise and bustle of it, I was allowed to slip from his grasp and move closer to my mother, who had an uncomfortable stiffness about her. She had caught the eye of people around her: her clothes, though simple in terms of pants and shirt, were a designer label and had strong reds and oranges through them, while her hair was streaked with brown and touches of honey that only money could buy. In comparison, the colours around her were opposites: faded blacks, blues, and whites. In simple jeans and boots and a cheap t-shirt, my uncle looked earthy and honest, and he greeted people by name, shaking hands, and laughing.
The pit that the dogs fought in was in the middle of the yard. It had been dug by shovels and had chains attached to the side. As I drew closer, I saw two dogs at the end of the long, thick chains. The first was smaller, a red-haired male that moved a lot, pulling at the chain leash it was on, full of energy and anger. Opposite it was a larger dog, a big Labrador, its short yellow fur turning white around its paws and ears with age. It lay on the ground, patient, its brown eyes watching the dog in front of it with a flat, unpleasant interest.
People were calling out bets and my uncle did the same, forgetting my mother and I for the moment.
When the fight finally began, I watched, appalled. My mother was similarly affected, but buried her head in her brother’s shoulder. “Too much of that nice living,” he said to his friends when he put his arms around her. They responded with barks of laughter. I, however, could not turn away. I hated the sounds the dogs made, and the pain that was evident, but I could see something of myself in the fight. The smaller dog spent most of his time trying to escape the larger dog, using his speed, his teeth, his anger to bite and tear, but ultimately it was for nothing. The larger dog took the bites, rode through the anger—I thought, I yelled at him when he stood in the doorway of the bathroom, screamed even—and then used its experience, its size, and its strength to wear down the other, to smother it into a crying submission while men and women cheered and booed around it.
3.
The morning after I stabbed my uncle, my mother, upon returning from the hospital he was in, asked me how it felt to hurt someone I loved.
“Fine,” I replied.
In response, she slapped me.
Her brother had come into my room while she attended the retirement party of a colleague at her work. Mother had asked him if he wanted to attend but the response had been one of dismissal—a grunt and shake of the head. I do not know then if he planned to push my door open at eight in the evening and approach me; or if he planned to run his finger along my shoulder and up to my neck; or if he planned to lean against my ear and ask why I wasn’t wearing a bra; or to tell me that he knew I wore one and knew the size. I do know, however, that he did not expect your knife to slide out of the table. He gave half a laugh when he saw it in my hand, and opened his arms, as if to hug me. It was a test, a taunt, and your knife punched into him, the skin of his stomach giving way beneath my strength. He screamed and there was blood, but after that I do not remember anything. He had hit me so hard that when I came to, I was lying on the floor, alone. It was not until my mother came home that I learned that Rob had taken himself to the hospital.
My mother said she felt an immense disappointment in me over the incident; there was no hate, no anger, just a bitter taste in the core of her being. “You didn’t need a firm hand as a child,” she said when I was sixteen. “You were different from any other I had seen.” We were in the kitchen and she fed sticks of bright orange carrot into the food processor that chewed quietly with its blades. “You had such an independence that it would’ve been awful not to recognize it and to treat you like a normal child, giving you boundaries to live by. You did not care for toys, for frivolous activities, for anything that would be a disruption. You were better than that. But I was wrong, I think. No, I know. You needed a boundary. You needed to be guided. Perhaps you even needed a father.”
She told me—just as she told you—that my birth was the product of artificial insemination. The sperm was paid for, the father not required, the traditional parenting roles that had been forced upon her ignored.
At least, they had been.
My mother fed another of the chemically grown carrots into the processor. “I don’t think that I want you to see this boy.”
She was talking about Gregory. He was a year older than me: thin, tall, and white. He was the first boy that I had shown interest in. My memory of him now is static, his clothing a mix of black and white and his hair shaved fashionably close to his head. We walked home from school every day together, though it took me an extra ten minutes to go past the complex he lived in, but he waited for me after school even when he had a free period, so the trade off was fair. We talked about events outside school, but mostly about the Alrea Virus. It had been finally detected in New Orleans and the government had closed the area because of it. News feeds displayed images of empty, crumbling streets, houses boarded up, and homeless men and women living in cracks that well-paid reporters could find. These images were accompanied by videos of Baker Thomas, refusing to die.
“You should stop telling the world we are sick,” he said, his face barely distinguishable in the distorted video that all feeds played. “We are healthy. We are strong. We are change. We are evolution.”
The speech had been released the night before my mother spoke to me. It had been passed off in the same way that the videos of violent religious groups often were: a delusional threat that would be dealt with soon. Gregory, however, knew someone who was going to play a full and unedited version. Some sites on the internet had reported that only a portion of the video had been shown, and that images of New Orleans being rebuilt and Thomas’ accusations of government neglect had been edited it out. The group holding the screening was called Focus, and were planning to play it and a documentary about Alrea in Africa and its supposed origins. It interested me, but I must admit, it was Gregory himself that interested me more.
“I asked the school about him,” my mother said, the tiny blades slicing cleanly. “He’s failing all but one of his subjects, and was suspended last year for carrying a weapon.”
It had been a knife. If I had been allowed to speak, I would have told her that it had been self defense and stupidity.
Instead, she said, “Truthfully, I think I should have someone start picking you up again.”
I wanted to shout at her, but she calmly picked up another carrot and I left, wordless.
It is no
t surprising, then, that I defied her without confrontation. I did it by not returning home the day of the screening. Instead, I went directly to Gregory’s house, and then to the city where the Focus meeting was being held. Rain stained the footpaths and buildings, and left an odd sheen on the cars that sat on the sides of the streets. These were different to the gasoline run vehicles that had been in Jersey years before. They were new and with rounded, sleek frames over electric powered engines.
Focus was in a studio apartment in a refurbished factory. The cage door of the lift opened smoothly when Gregory and I arrived to reveal ten people sitting on lounges and beanbags in a room painted dark blue. Mostly, they were white and male, but there were two Asian girls, both slim and wearing thick black glasses and who looked identically cold and distant to me. That coldness touched with frosted fingers on my opinion of everyone in the room and I felt out of place. The fact that they were at least four to five years older than me did not help. This feeling persisted until one of the white men—in designer jeans and a home-made red t-shirt with a picture of a yellow clown holding hand grenades—told me that he was Gregory’s brother and that everyone within the loft attended Engelman.
“Everyone gets lost in the images,” Gregory’s brother, Dan, said. He sat next to me after introducing himself, attempting, I thought at the time, to set me at ease. That was why I allowed his hand to touch gently on my leg as he talked. “We’re fed things we want through them, fed clothes, holidays, stories and images, all of them marked by their glamour and beauty. Then, when we see these big splashes of violence, it’s this harsh, other world, as removed from us as if it were on Mars itself. But often the violence and anger is never explained, never given context, never shown how it is influenced by our world. There is no focus.”
The feed he showed, however, did not reveal much more than what the mainstream media had. Of the two differences, the first was the Alrea infected men and women working to rebuild a house that had been damaged in a flood. They were thin, the virus eating away at their flesh in its trademark symptom, but otherwise, no one looked sick, and the Diseased men and women looked happy. The second difference in the video was that Baker Thomas’ face was not obscured, and that he, unlike the others with Alrea, looked healthy and well and very, very black. When I was asked what I thought after the interview was shown, I said it was interesting; mostly, however, I thought it empty, and that Dan and his friends were playing at being revolutionary in the same way that children play at being soldiers and pilots.
I did not realize how much of my life would be connected to him, nor did it occur to me to give Thomas Baker any more than the cursory thought I reserved for the entirety of the world’s madmen. I was far more interested in the fact that Gregory sat next to me; that he held my hand lightly; and later, as he walked me down the street to my mother’s house, we kissed. We stood in the street for half an hour, holding each other, talking in whispers and kissing until I finally told him that I did not want to go back home. A week later, I didn’t.
4.
It was not surprising that my relationship with Gregory did not last long, but it was surprising that within nine months I was living in Dan’s studio apartment.
It was my mother’s death that began our relationship, and its unhealthy catalyst was apt for the nature of my love with him. I was told of her death by my uncle, who called a month after I had left. Grief lent it a roughness that I did not know: “She took a lot of pills.” We had not spoken since I had stabbed him. “Do you—do you have any idea what you did to her? What you tore from her?” Unable to endure my following silence, he slammed the phone down.
I pushed both Gregory and his parents away to deal with my immediate grief—I yelled and screamed wordlessly and cried—and so it was Dan who found me two days later, in the backyard of my mother’s house. I had not moved back in, but I needed to be alone, and had nowhere else to go after storming out of Gregory’s. I was, however, unable to enter my mother’s for any long period of time—I could see her, in my mind, curled up in pain and surrounded by vomit in the living room—so I had set up a small, faded red tent on the overgrown lawn. I slept in it surrounded by the wild, unkempt mix of purples and blues and greens of the garden my mother had taken so much pride in.
When Dan came to the house, he let himself into the backyard, and sat with me, made bad jokes when I had nothing to say, and gave me beer. Later, I slept with him.
The sex was clumsy and I cried after, but not because of Gregory. I cried because I was drunk, because I was confused, and because I was sorry.
“I had a class with your mother the first semester I was at Engelman,” Dan said, after I had finished crying. He had touched me, once, when the tears began, but after I shrugged him off he did not do so again. He sat naked and cross legged against the back of the tent, a cigarette paper in one hand while his second, his right, mixed tobacco and marijuana into it. “She was the first teacher I had there and she was so different to any other teacher I’d ever had. She challenged everything that I did. If I wrote an essay one way, she asked me why I didn’t do it another. If I wrote it differently, she asked me why I changed. When I told her that it was because she told me too, she asked me if I’d eat rat poison if she asked me to.”
“Was it her 20th Century Literature course?”
“Yeah.”
“She loved that course.”
“Yeah.” Dan’s hand touched my shoulder, held out the newly rolled smoke. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were Ms. Butler’s daughter earlier.”
The drugs were not new, but the reason I used them was. I told myself that I did not want to dull my feelings to the point that there was nothing to be felt over my mother’s death, but I failed at that, and my relationship with Dan became part of my usage. He became a way to dull the pain and after six months in his blue painted studio the drugs became a tool he could use against me. In hindsight, I realize that I trusted him too much, that you and I allowed him too much control, that we gave him too much of ourselves because we wanted not to be responsible for anything. Of course, it was not all negative, and the abuse was tempered, I argued, by the fact that he was my best friend, my love, and one of the few people that did not criticize me every time we met.
“You’ve become so thin.”
I waved my hand dismissively at Gregory when he said that.
“It’s true.” We were in a bookstore, and he was squatted down at the bottom of the shelves, rows of black and white spines pointed out to him. “I can almost see the light through you. When was the last time you ate?”
I left him there, but he called later. “I am not in need of saving,” I said angrily after I had picked up the phone. I had let it ring out six times before I snatched it off the table. “If you need to save someone, go to Africa. You could build pipes for fresh water. You could take them food. If you don’t like that, go to France and save the people who are homeless. Alrea has destroyed their infrastructure. If you don’t like Paris, go to New Orleans, Texas or even Mexico. The same thing is happening there and the people who are stuck inside need your help. The government has abandoned them. They’re not going to be given relocation papers. They will never have a life outside what they have. You’ve seen the army jeeps and soldiers in the city just like I have. It’s a different world! The borders are closed! Anyone born in a Diseased state will never be educated! Never watch international feeds! Never eat well—”
“Why are you shouting?” Dan’s voice. The metal gate was pushed up as he entered the studio, recently painted a sombre grey, a reflection of his mood when he looked out in the world, or so he said. “You’re going to have the neighbours complaining again.”
“I’m sorry.”
I disconnected the call.
“My brother?” He was wearing black pants and a grey shirt, his hair neat and cut and dyed a light blond; he worked as a psychologist now. “You know it upsets you when you talk to him.”
His hand touched my arm. “Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it to yourself.”
His grip was not tight, but it could be. It had been. The last time it was he was holding me down as I begged him for meth. He had not bought any for two weeks as a form of punishment. I didn’t have the money, as the last time I had bought my own after he had cut me off resulted in a furious search through the apartment for pipes and lighters and any debit or credit card that he could find. I had never replaced the last in a mix of apathy and a desire not to upset him, though it wasn’t uncommon for him to accuse me of some wrong doing. These things were often small, such as not cooking his food correctly, or being distant during a conversation with his friends in Focus, which was easy, given that I found them shallow and boring. But Dan had an image of what a woman should be like, and that was to be socially engaging and attractive, an object that allowed other men to envy him. In private, I was to be polite and obedient. When I was not these things, he withheld drugs and occasionally hurt me. It often ended with me begging for his forgiveness, more often than not in sexual forms. In the two years we had been together, I found myself involved in acts I would now find degrading. For Dan and my meth and heroin, however, I was submissive, and I allowed him to hurt me, to control me though it did not excite me at all. It excited him, however, and he had taken to finding increasingly minor reasons to punish me.
The final time, however, was different. It was three months after I had spoken to Gregory on the phone and we were at a party. Having smoked before, I was relaxed, easy going, and I flirted with one of Dan’s friends. It was nothing worth reacting over, and indeed, nothing he had reacted to before. Dan, however, exploded when we returned home, and demanded that I make it up to him. Rather than allow him to place the bonds around my arms and legs, I fought back, hitting him, and arguing. It was the first time I had done that and I still do not know what had changed in me to do so. There was simply a switch inside me, and his jealousy, his shouting, the way he wrapped his hands tightly around my wrists and threw me, finally flipped it. The following day I packed a bag after he went to work. It was an overnight bag, black, ordinary, and much too small to start a new life on. Yet, with a hungry, gnawing sensation in my stomach, I threw clothes into that bag and with what little money I could find in the loft, bought a bus ticket.