The Resisters

by Gish Jen

  “One thing I’ve never understood,” said Sylvie, “is why ‘Aunt Nettie’ is always about maximizing efficiency or profits. Like why is she so goal-directed?”

  “You mean, like why does she always play to win?” said Gwen. “Like why can’t she just play to play?”

  “Yeah, and I mean, like why can’t she just leave stuff alone?” said Sylvie.

  “Because we didn’t design her, old people did,” said Pink. “And adults are like that.”

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile, Gwen’s GreetingGrams focused on Ondi.

  If Ondi didn’t struggle with the schoolwork, I wouldn’t see much of her outside of practice. But her parents didn’t teach her as much as you guys taught me and, fearless as she is, she’s afraid to go to help sessions or even to sign up for personalized learning. Because, she says, everyone knows. I guess she’s self-conscious because people think that Surplus are Surplus because we’re not good at school. And anyway, the help sessions aren’t to cover stuff you were supposed to have learned in high school. So I can always say, How are you doing? Want to study together? And she’ll say yes even if she’s mad at me for something else and we’ll figure out a place no one will see us.

  As best Eleanor and I could piece it together, Ondi worried about her grades because her ball playing alone wasn’t strong enough to keep her at school. She wasn’t one of the standout catchers, after all. Those were Fudge Fisk and Beetle Samsa, who apparently vied with some heat for the starting position, breaking into fights over every possible thing—“like who got the MassageBot and who got the human masseur, though they tried to keep it from the Coach’s attention—I guess because they’re afraid he won’t think them team players,” Gwen wrote, “which, obviously, they’re not.” In fact, Ondi wasn’t even third string. She was only in a rivalry for that position with somebody named Clara Zee, who told Ondi her hair was a distraction and didn’t belong on a ballfield. Ondi, for her part, thought Clara smelled like garlic and said she could neither stand nor sit beside her. As for whether that was why Ondi was not progressing as she had been, Gwen wasn’t sure. Maybe she would have plateaued anyway? But it couldn’t have helped that Ondi and Clara were always being paired for drills, and it was just lucky that, at least for now, only Ondi could catch Gwen, because while Gwen wasn’t the best on the team, she was the best freshman woman—maybe even the most promising freshman of either sex.

  This drew the side eye, Gwen said, from the other freshman pitchers—people like Righty Grove and Rube Foster and Ichiro Mariner. But luckily, since everyone except Ichiro was a fastballer, they competed more with one another than with her. And the upperclassmen, including the legendary Pietro Martinez, were happy to have a strong new woman pitcher to replace the old one, Renata the Witch. (That being polite, Gwen said, for what she found out they really called her, Renata the Bitch Witch.) Indeed, looking to the future, both Fudge and Beetle were trying to learn to catch Gwen as a way of gaining an edge over the other—something she could not discourage but knew amounted to more pressure on Ondi.

  Gwen GreetingGrammed,

  So Coach Link asked me today if Ondi was okay. And I said she was fine—figuring that was the safest answer. To which he just laughed and said, “The eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not tell the enemy of thine people squat.” Which was embarrassing. And did I just blow a chance to get Ondi out of doing drills with Clara? I told her later that if Clara’s smell was bothering her she should just not breathe through her nose. But she said that was just how she breathed, she couldn’t help it, and that she thought Clara was spritzing herself with garlic to fend off what she called Ondi’s cooties. Which I honestly couldn’t believe but Ondi said couldn’t I smell it in the women’s locker room? And when I said no, she was furious at me that I couldn’t. As if I can help what I smell.

  But in any case, Gwen herself was thriving.

  Is my back double-jointed, do you know? Because Coach Link asked me that but I didn’t know. Though maybe that is why when I go into my backward C, it’s a really tight C—like why I can draw all the way back and then snap forward the way I do. “Most men look like they’re pounding a wall,” Coach told me. “You are more like a wave. A whip.” He said I should ignore the SmartVideos. I guess there are too few people like me for them to have relevant data, and everyone’s different, anyway. “Give me seven pitchers and I’ll show you seven ways of getting the ball across the plate,” Coach said. “For example, how many people can pitch to both lefties and righties like you can? I can tell you right now. Not many.” He thought I should think about people like Satchel Paige instead—Satchel Paige being this old-time pitcher who had to play in the Negro leagues because that guy Jackie Robinson you told me about hadn’t come along yet. But Satchel was one of the best who ever laid his fingers across the stitches, Coach said. A legend among legends, even though, talk about different! “Think about that string-bean arm of his,” Coach told me. “Think about that string-bean body—six-foot-three and 140 pounds when he started out. The guy was so skinny people used to say that when he turned sideways he disappeared.”

  But Coach said I reminded him of him, what with my back and arm and balance and accuracy, and even my ankle flexibility. A female Satchel Paige! Like Coach thought what he calls my dorsiflexion may be another of my strengths. “Stride power is throwing power,” he said. “You can see how long a pitcher is going to last in their ankles.” Is that crazy? But that’s what he said. Speaking of which, he also thought my arm might be in unusually good shape exactly because I didn’t have too many chances to throw when I was young. “Every kid should be like you,” he said. “Instead they pitch too much. They pitch in the fall and they pitch in the winter and they pitch in the spring. And then they pitch in the summer. They pitch and they pitch and even when their arm’s tired and they know it, they pitch some more. Then they get hurt.”

  But of all my advantages, he thought my greatest advantage was that I didn’t have the sort of baseball dad who screamed stuff like, “What the hell was that?” and “Keep your shoulder down!” and “Move that ass!” Thank you, Dad! Because I don’t have all this inner stuff to get past. I just throw the ball. Which I guess people can tell. Like my teammate Ichiro said I was the coolest cucumber he’d ever seen. Actually, you’re pretty cool, too, I told him. But he said, Not like you. Not like you.

  Gwen could not throw as fast a fastball as the best of the men. Her accuracy, though, was apparently unmatched. In another GreetingGram, she wrote,

  Coach says I could be a truly great relief pitcher if I put my mind to it. I do need to work on my fastball. But lucky for me, the strike zone was changed not long ago. I guess because there’d been a problem even back before baseball was discontinued with pitchers getting so many strikeouts there was no fielding anymore. People had been asking, like, Is this baseball? for years. And so now that it’s been resurrected and made an Official National Pastime, the strike zone’s been shrunk here as it already was in the rest of the world. Meaning that what used to be high strikes are now balls and even the fastest of fastballs is easier to hit. So we’re about to have an off-speed renaissance, Coach says, which is great for me. Because I guess most of the extant understanding about baseball concerns the fastball. (“Extant” being the kind of word only he would use.) Most guys are not great with the what-the-hell-was-that stuff that comes so naturally to me and that Satchel Paige used to like to throw, too—pitches he named things like the “midnight creeper” and the “wobbly ball” and the “whipsy-dipsy-do.” The best of which was his famous hesitation pitch, which worked so well it got outlawed in 1948 but which Coach says he’s going to teach me. Because who even knows whether it’s still barred over a century later, and who can throw it anyway when no one has the balance? But maybe I do, he says. Maybe I do. So we’ll see.

  On the weekends, the team apparently hung out at a watering hole called the D
ugout—a ritual Ondi typically skipped, as did the three other women on the team, including Clara Zee. And Gwen initially found it foreign, too. She GreetingGrammed,

  Like there was this total silence when I walked in. You would have thought I was the president of Net U, come to tell the guys they had to switch to bowling. But Coach said it was important I get to know them. “Pitchers sometimes keep their distance,” he said. “Like they think they’re the special gift that comes with a HappyMeal. But chemistry is everything. So my advice is, Think team, be friendly.”

  He asked her if she could drink. And when she said she’d never had more than a sip of beer, he took her out for a whole beer, so she could find out.

  Which was fun. In fact, I had two!

  Eleanor and I exchanged looks.

  I know what you’re thinking. Don’t worry. Especially since Coach himself told me, “No more than two—you want to be social, you don’t want to get sloshed.” He said, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but your parents will thank me for telling you. A girl in a room full of boys can’t drink. Do not agree to any dares, and no beer pong.” In fact, his further advice was: “Do not get involved with any of these characters. It’ll screw things up tighter than a tornado. You’ll live to see cows sail through the air and the roofs of houses blow off.”

  But he nonetheless encouraged her to become a Dugout regular, if she could.

  “Give ’em their three swings,” he said. “This crew’s about as civilizable a lot as I’ve seen in a while. That’s not to say civilized, past tense, as in having been successfully subjected to a civilizing influence. But civilizable. And there’s no arm so great that it doesn’t need a team behind it.”

  And so she went and, hard as it was to believe, became a regular.

  Maybe because guys don’t ask questions. Or maybe it’s just this team. Like Coach says, a civilizable lot. Or maybe they’re just on good behavior. But they talk about a limited number of things, and while I’m an alien, at least it’s like I’m an Official Alien. Coach says with time I might even find myself a kind of mascot. That certainly has not happened. But I have an arm, and because I have an arm, I belong. I mean, the Beetle-Fudge thing turned into a fistfight the other day, and who knows what else goes on when I’m not around. Something about their wiring really limits their thinking. But they seem to like me okay.

  In fact, she loved talking about who was likely to do what on what count, and what the data really said, and whether a certain ump ought to have been retired. And was Coach Link right to have opposed, as he had, AutoUmps? And was it really too early to say who was likely to go to the Olympic trials, and why or why not? As for whether it was an adjustment to go from being homeschooled to two hours of conditioning before breakfast, then class, then three hours of practice, then homework—yes, I told them, it is a shock!

  I feel like I have started a new life on Mars—like I have had to learn everything all over, starting with breathing. Because I’d swear sometimes there isn’t enough time for breathing, or eating, either. And how do people read so fast?

  No one else, it seemed, read things at breakfast then read them over again before going to sleep, so the words would have a chance to sink in, the way I had taught her to read at home.

  Instead they plow through the reading the way they would a quad set.

  Of course, reading the way she did, she had trouble keeping up, especially since she wrote slowly, too.

  I’ve got to just try to get it done, somehow.

  But mostly her classmates marched double time through their assignments—it’s Netted culture—and were then done with thinking, while once she was done with practice, she loved to talk about all kinds of other things. Which would have made her feel weird, she said—just, I don’t know, so out of sync—except that, luckily, Coach Link liked to shoot the breeze, too.

  Like have you ever heard of this book, Michael Kohlhaas?—which Coach says is his favorite book because Michael Kohlhaas is just so stubborn! And when I said he sounded like Bartleby the Scrivener, he said that was exactly right, and isn’t it amazing how interesting we find characters who say no? In life we like people who say yes, but in books we like people who say no, he said. Which is just so true, don’t you think? I think maybe he used to be a professor.

  Other conversations were less gratifying. For example, in a PigeonGram, Gwen wrote,

  So Eugenie says, “My friend Regina says there’s another Surplus in the grade ahead of us. A guy by the name of Winny, who says he knows you.”

  “Winny?” I say.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s his name,” says Eugenie, though she does not actually sound doubtful. “Anyway, he says things really aren’t so bad for the Surplus. He says consuming is nowhere near as hard as producing, and that the Surplus don’t try very hard to get themselves out of their situation. Like he says he worked and worked to get himself into Net U, but most of them don’t. Because they’re on the whole pretty passive, he says, which is why even if AutoAmericans Against Apartheid succeeds and we allow more Cross Overs, they aren’t necessarily going to come. Because they’ve got a great deal, right? Why not let us work and support them?”

  “Is this Winny, Winny Wannabe?” I say—really to myself, I guess, since how could she know who Winny Wannabe was?

  And sure enough, she says, “I’m sorry?”

  “Winny Wannabe, we used to call him.” I tried to keep cool but honestly: Had Winny really managed to Cross Over? “And he’s right that the number of Cross Overs might not go up, but that’s about all he’s right about,” I say.

  Of course, once Gwen had heard about Winny, as if by some universal law of coincidence, she sure enough ran into him on the steps of the student center, by the DNA fountain. This report, too, came courtesy of Hermes:

  He was much taller than he was in third grade, but oddly similar in dress. The last I saw him he wore blue button-down shirts his mother bought for him—little-man clothes, we used to call them. He sometimes even wore a tie, though most days, he hid the tie in his desk—something we did not even tease him about, feeling so sorry for him. And now, too, when I saw him, he was tieless. But he did still wear a blue button-down shirt with a jacket. And his face was still oblong and doughy, like PlastiStix before they’ve been fed into the printer, and there was that same straight-line mouth, too—those ZipLips. His coloring, though, was much changed.

  As for the encounter itself, I had been lucky enough to catch that live.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “Gwen Cannon-Chastanet. I’d like to say I was surprised, but I always knew you’d cave and Cross Over.”

  “A true clairvoyant,” she said. “What happened to your skin?”

  “You watch. A year from now you’re going to get a PermaDerm, too,” he predicted.

  “Am I? And according to what algorithm is that?” she said. “Or do you speak again out of vast inner knowledge.”

  “I can see you haven’t changed.”

  “No, you’re right. I was always comfortable in my own skin, and lo and behold—here I am still in it.”

  “It’s still my own skin, Gwen.” he said.

  “So glad to hear it.”

  “You know,” he said. “When I first spotted you, I was going to ask you to lunch. For old times’ sake.”

  “Well, call me heartbroken.”

  “Gwen, stop. Do you want to have lunch anyway?”

  “No,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  The PigeonGram continued,

  But in the end, we did have lunch, and for all that I still couldn’t stand him, I have to admit it was nice to be able to come straight out and say, I can’t believe you got a PermaDerm. Which did make him look like a polar bear, especially since he’s gone whole hog—or do I mean whole bear?—and lightened
his hair, including the little mustache he now sports. It looks like it was laser-glued on, only a little too low, which is why food keeps getting caught in it. And those weren’t the only changes. He carries a SmartGun, believe it or not—a handgun, in a holster, though I guess he has others, too. A whole wardrobe, for different occasions, as a lot of the Netted men do, it turns out—so they can defend themselves against us if there is ever another Automation Riot. Which, passive as they believe we Surplus are, they are somehow still convinced there will be. Because, well, you know how menacing we are. Armed as some of us are with deadly knitting needles. I told him our house will be the armory. Still, I was surprised because how could he have a gun? Much less a SmartGun, being Surplus himself. But that was the next surprise. He isn’t Surplus anymore, or not exactly. He said he had permanent Cross Over status. Because he passed all the tests, he said, including the Final Test.

  As for what that entailed, that was the limit of our buddybuddydom. He wouldn’t tell me, except to say that I would never pass. Sounds like quite a test, I said. But he just laughed. He still laughs the way he used to, in this hehheh way—if you didn’t know him you might think he was suppressing a sneeze. And he still consumes like a Surplus, so eating like a Netted must not be part of Crossing Over. Just in the time we talked he downed three bacon cheeseburgers with fries and two chocolate shakes. Give the boy an A! It was almost as if there was a part of him that was still Surplus, much as he wanted to get rid of it, and as if he wanted me to see that since I was maybe the only person who ever would. But why did he care?