“What are cards? People mention ‘cards’ every once in a while but I have no idea what they’re talking about.”
“You’re better off not knowing.”
“But I want to know. Please,” I begged him.
He looked at me with stoic eyes. He leaned in to whisper, “All I will say for now is...the higher the better.”
He moved back and added, “Nothing but luck can win the game. The cards may be shuffled again.”
“Are we the cards?” I asked him.
He shook his head no. He moved his fingers to his lips and leaned towards me. I drew closer to him in anticipation for another nugget of secret information, “But that’s not all,” he whispered. “The zoo may have been abandoned by people but the animals are still there.”
“What was the name of the guy you said who went there once?” I asked.
“John,” he replied. “Murderer in the aquarium. 50 points.”
When you’re at your lowest and you think you’ve fallen through the earth, and when you find yourself at the end of the earth, you will see that there is a staircase so you may as well throw yourself down it, lock the door, and turn out the lights.
The sadder I get, the longer my sentences become.
SOCIETY X
After what seemed like hours and hours on the bus we pulled up to a hotel. One of those hotels that look crummy even when they were brand-new. I checked my wristwatch twice but the battery apparently went dead, frozen.
Before they shuffled us into a dusty ballroom and we were each were given a yellow laminated card. It said, “Temporary Citizenship.”
They asked me for my name and I said Pearl. They asked for my last name and I said the quickest thing that came to mind. “Johnson.” There’s so many Johnsons in the world, I don’t think they’d notice a fake one among them.
I looked for him even though I knew he wouldn’t be here. There were a few guys around my age but none with long hair like John. I don’t think most of the guys here would be interested in someone like me anyway. You know, as in someone female.
We went through an orientation and the speakers droned on and on. The key parts I remembered were that we would be placed into families in a day or so. We would actually be living in a real neighborhood (on a trial basis) that even had security guards. But were the security guards there to protect us or scare us?
We were assigned room numbers but they didn’t give me a key. I found out why.
Not only were we assigned rooms, we were assigned roommates. I got me some grandparents. Some old man who wasn’t much bother and an old woman who could barely stand without using someone (namely me) to lean against, and a much older sister.
Within the first day, certain things were excruciatingly clear. Three meals a day, you are required to be present at the table. Lights off at nine o’clock. We had to share beds with each other but luckily, (or unluckily) there were two beds.
I was the last one to arrive in the hotel room. It had no doors. None of the rooms had doors. Like I really cared to see people doing what should only be done behind closed doors. And please shave your backs next time guys, thanks.
Eventually, I tried to take a shower. But it did not work. Then I tried the sink. Also, did not work.
I noticed the older sister had wet hair. I asked her what was the trick to getting the shower to start. She told me that she didn’t take a shower. Hadn’t in too many days to count. That’s why her hair looked like that.
Nasty. Not that she could necessarily help it but I’ve never seen hair do that.
The first night, I guessed I was kicking in my sleep and I was demoted to sleeping in an arm chair. I must have had some terrible dreams and blocked them out as soon as she shook me to wake me and tell me to stop it.
I happily offered to move to the chair, since sleeping there was in my mind well before the lights were scheduled to go off. I just didn’t know how to say I would be sleeping there without hurting her feelings.
The second morning, my neck was stiff from the chair and I was afraid to move because it felt like my head would fall off and spin around on the floor like a toy. I heard that when people are beheaded, they still retain some awareness for awhile. So I kept rubbing my neck (not that it was helping much) but mostly to keep my head intact.
The old lady was getting on my nerves already. Less than twenty-four hours and she’d already made me visualize slicing up her body with a knife. But that plan would never work successfully, because of all the garbage collectors.
My family (the real one) used to be garbage collectors when it was looked down upon and before it became the norm and then illegal.
It’s amazing what people will pay for trash.
My mom and I used to dumpster dive. We’d get really cool things such as food, clothes, books without their covers. But then stores started to close up really fast and for a very short time the dumpsters were taking over the parking lots. But then we saw a bunch of people diving on our route and the dumpsters eventually emptied forever.
Someone said the garbage collectors used to take cans of trash from people’s houses once every week but it’ll be collected once a month for us. They spent an insane amount of time on how to dispose of everything. Organic in the green bin, paper in the blue, and so on. We are probably just being trained to save them time on spying on us, sorting out the good incriminating stuff from the actual trash.
My mom made me a coin purse out of a bag of Cheetos when I was little. I loved that thing. I carried it around everywhere, not that I had anything of value to put in it except for some pretty rocks I’d find outside.
For breakfast, there was burnt bread. Some of the people that were new couldn’t be bothered to eat it. I could always tell who the newbies were. Some of the signs were painfully obvious. Their clothes were clean, their nails still looked nice. They still cared about their appearance. Maybe I’d brush my hair with a fork when it was convenient but I just kept it all in a pony tail. Low maintenance.
I scraped the burnt crud off of the bread and ate it. I had some watered-down orange juice.
A family of four were waiting to be served. I only figured that out because the dad kept looking around, all impatient. So eventually, he got up and got two plates of burnt bread for his family.
He started looking around, like he wanted to ask a question and deciding who looked the least unfriendly. An old skinny guy whose stringy beard kept getting caught with whatever he was eating or a fat woman who had a stack of bread she was working through. He lingered on me the longest. I won the least unfriendly contest. That’s usually because my age and gender act as a default. “Are they serving anything besides toast?”
“What’s toast?” I scraped more black crumbs off my burnt bread.
I could hear the dad mumbling to his wife, “That can’t be all there is. Let me know when you see someone who works here, I’m going to call them over to our table.”
Could you believe that?
Miriam came through the door, almost didn’t recognize her until I saw how she walked. She has a very distinctive walk. She kind of saunters along, like she was posing for a fashion magazine and that at any second someone might take her picture. I hadn’t seen her since the buses left Camp M. She had short hair, a face clear of makeup, and was wearing pants.
She came bustling into the room and sat at an open spot at their table. The father said to her, “Excuse me, but this is my family’s table.”
“Your family’s table? You don’t have a table. You don’t have a soul. It’s been traded for a pair of pants. You don’t have anything here.” Miriam eyed the man up and down, “They’re going to take your shoes and dignity away. You may as well unlace them both and hand them over. And they’ll take and they’ll take and they’ll take. And just when you thought you had nothing left, or at least, nothing left that they could possibly want, they’ll lock the doors to that one spot in your mind where you used to go when they’re beating you, when they’re raping your fri
ends and there’s nothing you can do and you can no longer...”
Then she broke down and sobbed. Completely sobbed with snot and everything. Arms covering head on the table, the family looked around for an escape route. The father moved his chair to an empty table. I went over to their now vacant spot.
“Hey, Miriam, it’s me. Pearl.”
It’s a very, somewhat frightening experience to have someone as big and as intimidating as Miriam to just break down like that, crying on my shoulder. If someone like that can’t get through this, how would I be able to?
I didn’t like feeling heavy and empty at the same time. My throat did a funny thing at night sometimes. It’ll feel like I’m choking on an apple or something. I tried to calm myself down by inventing a breathing exercise but that only made my heart race and that apple in my throat grow larger.
I didn’t quite like thinking sometimes. And I tended to do most of my thinking at night and that kept me up. So I played this game. I didn’t have a name for it yet but I could call it “Machine.” The one who thought the least and fell asleep the quickest won. Once a memory pops into my head, I press the “stop” button in my mind. I played this game by myself. It helped me to get to sleep.
I was getting better and better at it. But that might be because my memory was getting worse and worse as I aged so I didn’t have all my memories with me. Plus, I was getting all dead inside. I thought a big, thick callous had grown over my heart and my mind. But I preferred it that way, at least for now. It was a good defense mechanism when someone tried to verbally tear you apart.
Sometimes I played the opposite game. It also didn’t have a name but I could name it something like “Memory,” like the card game where you match pairs of cards up but this one has different rules. The whole purpose of the game was to let your mind wander and stop and wander some more. You thought of any tiny memory, even a pinhole opening of a memory, and the more you remembered, the more you won. But I planned on getting myself a journal and writing down all my memories so I don’t have to play that one ever again. And I could misspell all the words I want because no one will ever read it.
It was hard playing “Machine” because you had to think about nothing. I usually won when I was really tired but that might or might not count as cheating.
I’m almost positive Dana was playing “Machine” when the soldiers came for her.
But I’m also sure that Dana had another name for the game. It would be called “Oblivion.” You let yourself into a place in your mind where only you know the numbers to the combination and then everything that was outside fades into oblivion and goes away.
I took some cushions and a scratchy blanket and spent the next night in the bathtub. I didn’t bother to tell anyone in my room why. I’m sure they thought I was strange but being forced to share a room with a strange thirteen-year-old girl was a lot better than sharing it with an old woman who would roll over you while you were sleeping and couldn’t be bothered to move. At least, that’s what I heard during an argument at breakfast the following morning.
~~~
Get up when the alarm rang. Do your assigned chores to help out your family. Don’t even try to dismantle the cameras. Stay in line.
They called us all down to the ballroom and we were assigned into official family units. Every family was very nuclear in its fashion. There was (biologically speaking) a male, a female, and at least one person under the age of eighteen. Sometimes grandparents. Each family would all be living in their own “modest” house. Pink and blue houses made out of ticky tacky, I’m sure.
Miriam was assigned to my family as well as another woman about the same age as her. They didn’t get along from the start. They knew well enough that they did not like each other and they got out of each other’s way. We stayed in our respective rooms. Miriam in the living room, myself in the bedroom, and Carol in the master bedroom.
Carol had short hair, a short temper, and short words. A simple exchange about whether or not the fridge was on the fritz could make me feel like I had done something wrong. I made sure to avoid her whenever possible.
Poor Miriam. You’d think if the people who run this place wanted to aim for the highest possible success rate of lasting marriages, they would have matched up personalities better. They probably just picked out names from a baseball cap.
I didn’t think they even took account for birthdays because this one couple down the block from us had an age difference of almost twenty years. They looked like mother and son. I guess the only traits they took into consideration when matching up people were that one was female and the other was male.
There are televisions in the house, but I didn’t care to watch them. They played the same one commercial over and over. It was only about a minute in length and it drove me nuts. It was a “welcome” to the community type of message with smiling kids running around outside. I knew Miriam turned it on just because it annoyed Carol. But I didn’t think it worked because she sleeps all day.
I watched the commercial cycle through a few more times before turning it off for my own sanity. “Welcome to your new life. We think you’re going to like it here.” Then they cut to a dad and a mom kissing and then the dad went back to grilling meat and a kid jumped in a pool in the background.
Our house didn’t have a pool, which made me mad. The family next door had one. They also had a little boy who played and yelled in it all day long. I guess I’ll have to swim in the bathtub.
There was a phone but it wasn't really a phone. It had one button and that button put you into contact with someone from the outside. Some faceless, nameless intern I guessed. It was supposed to be used only for emergencies. And I didn’t care to chit chat.
I felt like I was living in a playhouse, awaiting an alien invasion.
When we moved into the houses, our family portraits were on the wall. Our heads imposed over the heads of a real family. The photos were hanging, framed on the walls, on tables, and a few on the refrigerator. They put my head on a really tall girl, it was creepy. On another picture, my head was on a seven-year-old’s body. That one was by my bed; I turned it over. I hated having eyes staring at me, much weirder when it was your eyes but not really your eyes staring at you.
I had a bed, warmth, food, a “family,” and some books to read.
There was a guidebook. On how to live.
This stupid book was written with imbeciles in mind. How to fold sheets on a bed, how to set a table. It also had instructions for using a toilet, complete with fantastic illustrations.
There was this long, big section about the mailman and whatever else. But I didn’t really read it. I didn’t think I would be receiving much mail here.
But I was wrong.
The mailman delivered mail on Sundays. “Mom” and “Dad” told me that mail used to be delivered every day of the week except Sundays. They also told me that weather stations used to predict the weather, not make the weather.
They delivered once a week to save money. The government seemed frugal here. Garbage trucks came but once a month. The grass in city parks got mowed once it got as tall as me. The government took over a lot of private companies. Everywhere you go, you see the big ugly logo. A fat elephant chewing on an olive branch. The mascot used to be a bald eagle but was “laid to rest” a few years ago when all of them died off.
Everyone got a letter but my envelope was by far the thickest.
There was a long list of things that “met expectations” or “needs improvement.”
Miriam and Carol were both cited to spend more time with each other. And to sleep in the same bed. Miriam was also assigned to attend marriage therapy. She seemed happy about that, anything that would allow her to leave the house. They would have to speak at least 10,000 words to each other each week.
There were certain times of the day when we could open the door. The door had a box built within it that recorded each time we opened it. We could open it once in the morning to collect the mail on Sunday mo
rnings. We could open it in the afternoon for a walk. We could open it if we held special privilege.
I read my letter to myself first. Apparently, everything that I did from where to put away towels, what order to hang laundry, the best way to save space in dresser drawers, how to walk across a yard, how to peel a damn orange was done incorrectly. I was also cited several times for referring to Miriam as “she” or “her.”
I would be given one week to make corrections or else I would be evaluated.
If I didn’t meet the standards of the evaluation, then there would be an observation. Someone coming in and picking at everything I did, I imagined.
So I started to make a conscious effort not to walk on the grass and use the sidewalk instead. Have all the hangers facing the same way in the closet. It was a really big closet. I thought at least a dozen people could sit down in there, comfortably. Memorized the tetris-like mystery of how to save space in a dresser drawer. I played that game once on a phone. I hadn’t seen anyone use a phone since, unless you counted the soldiers as people. My secret was to throw a lot of things away. Call it cheating, but I saved a ton of space in there. And I no longer peeled an orange with my teeth. I had no nails, teeth made the job much easier. Although it did snag on my bad tooth and I stopped biting into the peel after my first of many oranges, anyway.
But the mailman came again the next Sunday and my envelope was just as thick as the first one.
This time, it said I didn’t wash clothes soon enough. My loads were too light or too heavy. I ran instead of walked. I shouldn’t have thrown away junk (like I really need a plastic flower knickknack with clips to hold fake creepy photographs on it). I didn’t participate in the grocery shopping. Why would I? I’d eat almost anything edible as long as it isn’t mystery slop served directly on the surface on my table. I needed to take a file to my nails, not my teeth again. I ate too many oranges.
The War Game Page 10