The Breeders
Page 9
Linda stopped outlining her letters and looked up. “Honey, is everything all right?”
Grace was about to cave in, but she screamed inwardly at herself. Keep it together! Keep it the hell together! She would have to employ the tactic she had used with Dex. Feel Linda out. She was liberal, but was she liberal enough? When Grace spoke, the words were fragile as glass about to shatter.
“What do you think it’s going to be like when we have to say goodbye, Lin?”
“What do you mean, ‘say goodbye’?”
“I mean, like, Mandate 43. The camps they’re making for heterosexuals. I’ve heard rumors it’s going to happen sooner rather than later.”
Linda lowered her voice to a healthy rasp. “They’re not going to fucking round you guys up. They can’t! Nobody is going to stand for it. If they actually do, I’m taking Rita and getting the hell out of here. Off to the mountains in Alberta, or something.” Giving a dismissive wave of her pencil, Linda turned back to the Christmas banner.
“I’m serious, Lin. What could you possibly do but watch it happen? I think we both know this whole gay world just tipped over into something pretty serious. There’s nobody to check the power, and nobody but the NRO has access to weapons. So . . . what could you really do?”
A lock of Linda’s beautiful blonde hair fell over her eyes. She stopped writing again, gathered her hair back behind her ear, and stared at the banner on the gym floor. What followed was the first instance of verbal calculation Grace had ever witnessed in the woman. “You know, I think I’m actively avoiding it all. I don’t want to think about it. I think nobody wants to think about it.”
Grace watched her own hand spread the red paint into Linda’s big, bubbly R, feeling completely detached from it. “I guess I meant to say . . . I might not be around much longer. I’ve been scared to see you, because it might mean goodbye. A real goodbye.”
Linda’s chest, full under her blue wool sweater, rose and fell as her breathing became heavier. She kept her gaze glued to the paper. “What are you saying, Gracie?”
“I’m saying that something’s wrong. I can’t really say anything else.”
“Of course you can!” Linda jerked her neck around and looked Grace in the eyes. Hers were suddenly full of tears, as if she already knew what Grace was about to tell her.
“I think it’s safer for you if I don’t.”
“Bullshit. Grace, is this whole Mandate 43 thing about to get real and affect my life directly? In a bad way? Tell me. Tell me now.”
“It’s not just Mandate 43. There’s something else.”
“Did this Dex guy drag you into some rebel shit or something?”
“No. Not directly. It’s more like . . .”
Just tell her, Grace thought. If you don’t, you’re going to regret it forever. She’ll never stop wondering what happened to you once you disappear.
“It’s not fair,” Grace whispered. “Lin, I’m . . .”
“Wait. Don’t say it. Don’t tell me.”
Relief flooded Grace, but— “What? Why?”
“Because I get it. If there’s something you can’t say and you’re keeping it quiet to save me from those fucking faggot Nazis, it’s okay.”
“Okay.”
But Linda was fuming. She hunched over her letters again and began tracing stars around them with a furious sort of gusto. “Promise me one thing.”
“Anything.”
“Promise me you’ll say goodbye if something happens and you need to disappear. Until then, let’s pretend you never even brought this up.”
“You brought it up. You asked about Dex.”
Linda shrugged, let out a chuckle that did not match her panicked expression, then fell backward, onto her rear. She sat cross-legged, her face now waxen. Decorating Deephaven Elementary seemed to have lost its appeal. “Grace Emilia Jarvis, you’re not scaring me for no reason, are you?”
Grace shook her head. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Then what do we do, here? I have a pretty good guess as to what’s going on, because only one thing scares a heterosterile enough to talk like this. But do I pretend I have no idea? Do we just spend this time like it’s any other, like they won’t ship you off to Antarctica if they find out?”
There. She said it. She knows.
When Linda finally turned back to her letters, Grace followed along in silence, wishing she could have had one more day with her, just the two of them, friends forever without a care in the world.
CHAPTER 18 (HIM)
CHRISTMAS APPROACHED, and on the nineteenth of December, Dex, Grace, and presumably all of society’s registered heterosexuals received via com their Bio Police summons. Social assessments would begin on the first of February, and those who were not present on their specified date would face arrest and incarceration.
Grace was slated for February twenty-second; Dex, for March ninth.
Dex accompanied Grace, her fathers, Abraham, and his boyfriend Daryl to Lars and Rita’s Christmas program the following Friday. At the reception in the school cafeteria, Dex met Grace’s best friend Linda Glass, who shook his hand with tepid enthusiasm before suddenly grabbing him into a monster hug. “Be careful,” the blonde beauty whispered, almost inaudibly. Just before she escorted her sprite of a daughter out of the cafeteria, Linda hugged Grace as well, then gave her a voluptuous kiss, right on the lips. It was an inside joke of some sort, and Dex watched both women laugh until tears shone on their faces. Amid the clamor of the children and their parents, few others noticed the bittersweet exchange.
Christmas dinner with the Jarvis household came and went without a single mention of the social assessments, but there was a Bio Police car sitting on their tranquil Wayzata street all afternoon, just outside the driveway. Stuart pulled Dex aside to help him prepare the living room fireplace.
“What is that police car doing out front?” There was a tremor in his voice.
Dex had no good response. When the fire was blazing, he joined Stuart and Grace on the couch, and they watched in silence until it was nothing more than a pile of glowing embers.
Later that night, Dex received a call from a scrambled com address. It was Fletch Novotny, and he had two things to say: First, his friend Sheila had finally answered his com messages—quite enthusiastically, but he wouldn’t explain why—and demanded he set up a meeting with Dex and Grace for the morning of the twenty-seventh. Second, he had experienced an altercation with the Bio Police three Thursdays prior and been charged with a petty misdemeanor for verbally accosting an officer who had unlawfully initiated questioning of Sterile Me Susan’s’ patrons. It was his second offense since August, and if the Bio Police were following routine protocol, they would again be monitoring his com and investigating all his known contacts, which could include Dex.
“I think they’ve been doing just that,” Dex confirmed. “And just so you know, you’re a dipshit for not telling me all this sooner.” He had to be cautious with his words. The Bio Police would be able to run a voice filter on his side of the conversation but not on Fletch’s, due to the scrambled address from which the man was calling. “Either way, tell me where we’ll be meeting this chick. She sounds like fun.”
“The Fallopian on Thursday,” Fletch said. “11:00 a.m. sharp.”
When Dex hung up, the only thing he could think to do was clean out his apartment. It started as a minimal attempt at creating order out of his possessions, but by the end of the night, he had discarded everything that might soon become a trace of who he once was.
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Dex drove the forty minutes to Nowthen and visited his mothers.
“It’s about time you showed up for Christmas, Dexter!” Roberta said, rushing like a bull to the door for a hug. Dex grabbed her closer than usual. His mother Karen, who came to greet him with far less enthusiasm, fostered their usual tension by patting his back while he hugged her.
As it had snowed the night before, Dex shoveled their driveway before going inside. The
ir home was modest but functional, and the ones around it all looked identical save for the decorative choices that distinguished them from one another. Beyond the houses stretched what surely had once been farmland: low, rolling mounds that would simply look flat from a distance. Dex preferred this to the city; it felt more peaceful, less tarnished.
When he finally settled into a chair at his mothers’ kitchen table, the words came more easily than they had in his imagination. Perhaps it was a good sign.
“I’ve had to face some significant life choices in the past few months, and I’m here to say goodbye.”
Even Karen’s knuckles turned white as she clenched her coffee mug.
Roberta’s eyes widened, and she held her own mug to her chest with two hands. “What do you mean ‘goodbye,’ honey? Did you . . . are you getting sent to . . . ?”
“No, not Antarctica. Not yet. It could come to that, unless the rumors are true that something’s gone wrong there. The Mandate 43 concentration camp thing makes me wonder. Nothing is for sure, yet.”
With a stony expression, Karen pushed her chair out and stood up. “I can’t hear this. I won’t.” She turned her back to them and began walking toward the living room.
“Mother, sit down. You might not have to deal with having a failsafe son for much longer.”
At this, Karen stopped. With a slow turn, she revealed a tortured expression. Dex could swear the lesbian who never cried was on the verge of tears.
“I know I haven’t visited as much as I could in the past twenty years, and I’m starting to realize that it didn’t do me any good,” he continued. “I don’t have a lot of people in my life whom I can call close, and now the only ones I have are ones I might never see again. I wanted to give you both the benefit of knowing how much you’ll always mean to me.”
“Dexter, honey, what happened? Why are you saying this?”
“I don’t want to say, because if things go wrong, the NRO might come here and ask about it. They’ve already called me in for the new ‘social assessment’ measure, and the rumor is they’re going to start branding us as heterosexuals in a more obvious way than our TruthChip does, or worse. If they’re getting ready to ship us off to these new and separated communities, like they say they are, then I’ll be in a load of trouble anyway.”
“It’s just a protective measure,” his mother said with harsh resilience.
“Who’s to say they won’t do the same for lesbians next?” Dex retorted. “It happened with sterilization. It could happen here. You know the fags in charge are looking for an excuse to have an all-cock world, if they’re going to keep humanity around at all.”
“Honey, don’t talk like that!” His mom blushed, but it appeared to be more from her fear than from embarrassment at Dex’s crassness.
“I’m not sure what my timetable will be,” Dex continued, “but there’s a chance I might be accompanying someone to the very end, if that makes sense. At least that’s what I hope I’ll have the balls to do. If it somehow turns out okay, and judging by the NRO’s track record, I can’t see how it will, I will come visit you both every day. That’s a promise.”
Roberta was crying now.
Then, the simple truth sounded almost elegant as Dex said it. “I like my life. Even the hard parts. Except saying goodbye. I don’t even know how that part is possible.”
It was Karen who stood up to fix an early dinner. Working in the kitchen had always been her way of processing life’s conundrums. Dex and his mom continued to sit at the table, making circles around the facts of the situation he refused to reveal. In the space and time that passed between them, Dex evaded the terror threatening to consume him. It circled him with every breath, trying to get in his face, jeering at him over the futility of the courage he was projecting in front of his mothers. When his mom grabbed his hand, begging with her tearful eyes for something, anything, even a shred of a reason for his fateful visit, the notion he dreaded crept up behind his neck and took him like a frozen vice:
Hope really is dead.
An hour later, Dex and his mothers ate. By nightfall, he was driving away, watching them through his rearview mirror. They were standing under their front porch light, holding one another, just two women trying to cope in a rotting world.
CHAPTER 19 (HER)
THE BELL ON THE FALLOPIAN’S DOOR jingled, and heavy boots stomped away snow. Fletch, who looked surprisingly unkempt, looked over Grace and Dex’s shoulders. “There she is. She’s a peach. You’ll love her.” Yet his eyes were exuding nothing but anxiety.
The Fallopian was one of the scrappiest bars in town. Grace had been waiting with Dex and Fletch for nearly an hour, picking over a grubby-looking breakfast that was now cold. She had spent the morning milling about Wayzata’s greenhouse farmers’ market, hoping to avoid any possible police surveillance, before taking the train into the city. On the corner of Washington and First Street she met Dex, and together they had bussed to the fringes of Obesaland to meet Fletch’s contact.
The woman was thickset and short, not obese but clearly on the edge of acceptable attractiveness. Her dense and dry red hair didn’t help, as it made her look like a Halloween scarecrow. But her eyes, sea blue, were those of a muse—beautiful, observant, and wildly experienced. What Grace noticed in them first was a level of fear that told its own story. Not only was this woman unhappy, but she had seen the side of life that could scar a person forever. Grace wondered if she would bear similar marks were she to come out of this pregnancy alive.
“Dude, this is Sheila.”
Sheila gave Fletch a sour look as she took a seat on his side of the booth. When she turned to the two breeders, she did not extend a hand. Her gaze lingered on Grace for a moment before shifting to Dex.
“You’re Dexter, I presume?”
As blunt as Sheila immediately was, Grace liked her. Something in those blue eyes.
Dex nodded and did extend a hand. “You can call me Dex. Nice to meet you.” He and Sheila shook, slow but firm.
He didn’t introduce me, Grace thought. Perhaps it was just to stay careful, but he seemed distant this morning, afraid.
Eyeing Dex, Sheila grabbed a toothpick and stuck it in her mouth. “You were the one in love with Diana Kring.”
Grace blushed at this, but Dex did not seem to notice. Nor did he refute Sheila’s statement. Fletch had finally explained upon their arrival at the Fallopian that not only had this woman known Diana Kring, but she was also involved in some sort of large-scale resistance effort against the government. Grace wondered if it was a faction of the one Theodore Bozarth had already made her a part of.
“So, you knew Diana then?” Dex asked. “How come I never knew you?”
“We were secret friends, if you get my drift.”
Dex glanced at Grace, then looked at Sheila again. No, he did not get her drift.
“She found me at an underground abortion clinic I sometimes visit, in the last month before she left. She was pregnant, just like you thought, Dex. We did a lot of talking, and I introduced her around my circle. She had already found her way pretty far into the underground, but not quite far enough. Fletch, hon, can you go buy me a mint julep—extra sugar, no water?”
It was eleven-thirty in the morning. Fletch glanced at Dex, then at Grace, then at the bar, where a lone male patron was swirling a martini. The bartender was nowhere to be seen. Fletch threw a peculiarly submissive smile at Sheila, then rolled off the table to hail him down.
“That’s my good little follower,” Sheila said. “He’s a lousy fuck, though. Thinks he’s all that until he cums, and then it’s abundantly clear he’s just a little boy trying to find his way back to the mommy he never had.”
A chuckle escaped Grace’s mouth, then jumped back in. She smiled at Dex, who grinned with a sparkle in his eye.
“We should have guessed,” he said.
As it turned out, Sheila Willy was a trove of secrets, one in particular she had not revealed to Fletch: she had been an accidental
carrier, too. Her words were clear—not a genetic mistake, but an accidental carrier. This meant the switched-off Lrh1 genes accounting for sterility had been correctly engineered prior to her conception, and there were post-birth records to prove it, yet fertility had somehow slipped through the cracks.
“But first things first,” Sheila told them. “I’m sure you’re most interested in what happened to Diana.” The woman twirled a strand of her arid red hair. “She started getting her periods about four months before you started dating. Periods, you know? Menstruating? Always hiding it from everyone, even to the point of being abstinent, at least up until she met you, Dex. But it happened out of nowhere, from what she told me. She was terrified. Any heterosterile would be. Same thing happened to me five years ago, but I had only one period before getting pregnant. I thought I was a genetic mistake. Anyway, I was too scared to do anything but let the baby grow until it was impossible for me to hide, and then the Bio Police arrested me, gave me an abortion, and even showed me the parts of the baby after their doctors took it out. ‘So I’d never do it again,’ they said. Apparently they thought I’d gone and had an underground Lrh1 reversal procedure so I could secretly start popping kids out for myself. Of course, that was right before Mandate 42, so I had a choice between an abortion and Antarctica. I chose the abortion.”
She looked back at the bar, where Fletch was still waiting to get her a drink, next to the failsafe with the martini. When Sheila turned around, Grace noticed tears in her eyes.
“Then the faggots took out my uterus. No questions, no choice. They said I was a threat, and they gave me six months in the old prison up near Sandstone. And that was immediately after the surgery. Barely gave me time to heal.”
Under the table, Grace felt Dex squeeze her hand.
“So, I came back to the Twin Cities, right? Started doing some poking around. I was confused as all hell, and man, I was crazy-fuck angry about what they did to me. I wanted to have a baby then, just to spite them and fight the system, you know? If I could, I’d risk it again. But they took that away from me. It was a beautiful feeling, knowing I had the ability to do that. To create life, you know?”