But the boy wasn’t looking so squishy or weak these days. And he would show up almost daily with fresh bruises from his training. There were still hints of purple beneath both of his eyes, and his nose now rested a bit crooked on his face from when Owen had broken it a few weeks back.
Lamar had laughed in genuine delight upon seeing him that day. He looked like he had been run over by a bus. And while there was something undeniably sad and pitiful in the sight of his swollen face, Lamar saw it as progress. Gabriel was becoming something better.
“Sit, sit.” Lamar motioned to the couch with a feeble hand.
Gabriel sat.
“So then… today… that was your first quarterly summit. Thoughts? Impressions?”
Gabriel thought for a moment. “Well, Lamar, I would have to say that that was the most stiflingly silent, most oppressive room I’ve ever set foot in. And that Geena is a goddamn menace. I can’t believe she’s new to this.”
“She’s had a good coach. Did you take note of the older man to her right? His name is Cecil. She is all his.”
“Really? He was so quiet the whole time. I figured he wasn’t much.”
“Cecil… he is quiet, yes. Like a heart attack. That man is responsible for more deaths than I care to count. Thousands, if not millions.”
“Now you’re toying with me.”
“This is no joke, boy. I’ve told you that was the most dangerous room in the world. That room dictates the doom of nations, as well as the fates of the people within our own. And the members of the council itself have changed so many times in the last decade alone that I forget who has replaced whom.”
“Replaced… where do they end up from here? It seems like holding any other office would be a demotion, wouldn’t it?”
“They go to the same place we all go, Gabriel. Only they go a lot sooner.”
Gabriel felt his throat tighten. He could feel a pulsing in the side of his neck.
“And this is the room you’re sending me into? Is it too late to tell you to go fuck yourself and walk away?”
Lamar chuckled. “You can go right ahead and do the first part, but walking away is not an option and you know it.” He placed his bony hands on the knobs of his knees and leaned forward. “The council room is a chessboard. There are two kings. The other councilmen are our playing pieces. Of the current twenty-five, including Cecil and myself, eleven are mine and fourteen are his.
“We work at removing each other’s pawns and knights and bishops, but rarely have we tried going for each other. On the few occasions we have tried, we have greatly underestimated one another. At this point, I think we’ve gotten so used to the game that the thought of ousting the other man seems self-defeating. We wouldn’t really know what to do with our time if we succeeded. I suppose he will have to learn to cope when you take my seat next quarter.”
“Next quarter? So soon? I’m not ready yet! I’m nowhere near ready!”
“No, you aren’t. But you will be. We don’t have much choice anyhow. We’ve already announced it.”
“We have?” Gabriel had paid very close attention to everything that came to pass in the meeting that morning, and he was sure that Lamar hadn’t so much as sneezed during the proceedings.
“It’s tradition that a councilman’s planned replacement stand behind him during his last summit as an active member, as you did today. You will take that seat next meeting, and I will sit behind you. They’ll allow me that one last session. And you, Gabriel, you will go in swinging.”
Gabriel brought his elbows down onto his knees and braced his head by the hairline with the points of his fingers. He closed his eyes and didn’t speak for half a minute. When he did speak, he remained in the same position, and his eyes remained shut.
“And who will I be swinging at, exactly? Geena?”
“Heh heh heh.”
This laugh of Lamar’s did nothing to ease Gabriel’s mind.
“You will swipe the whole board clean! Mine and his!”
Gabriel’s head shot up. “How… wha…”
“We will clean house. And unfortunately you will have to undo much of what we worked so hard to accomplish eighty years ago. But it needs doing. There was a time when that council room was filled with men of science. But while they do still retain the same titles… Minister of Biotechnology, Minister of Nutrition, of Urban Development, of Education… these are no longer men and women of science.
“They don’t make clinical, impartial decisions. They don’t have the good of the people in mind. They are survivalists. And opportunists. And mine are no better than Cecil’s. The irony stopped being amusing years ago. We got rid of yesterday’s politicians and created new ones in their image.”
Gabriel was speechless.
“We have achieved some wonderful things with this nation of ours. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all for naught. But if our prime concern was to be the wellbeing of humanity… then a few major gears of the machinery are grinding.”
Lamar sank back into the pillows behind him and looked over to his right and out the window.
Even on a day like this, when the wind was tossing about all of the treetops, and hacking jagged white lines into the seawater beneath a tyrannical grey sky, this city’s beauty was undeniable. It was a carefully choreographed network of trees and grass and dormant flowerbeds. Every shade of green imaginable, punctured by the rounded spires of countless faint blue highrises, and dissected throughout by an eloquent veinwork of roads and footpaths.
Lamar was grinning. He felt at ease looking out on this city, forgetting for a moment the chill he felt inside of his many layers of clothing, the chill he couldn’t shake these days.
“I helped build this. All of this. It’s the one thing I know I got right. It’s… perfect.” Lamar pulled himself away from the window and looked over at Gabriel.
“I mentioned to you once, at least once, the name Eli. I’ve said that name to you, haven’t I?”
“Yes, Lamar. He was one of the original twenty-five, you said. And you said that he was instrumental in developing the EMP that our military uses to cripple the defensive forces of the lands we… expropriate.”
“Yes. Good. And he was my friend. My best friend. He was a brilliant young man, and it was he who found a solution to one of the biggest dilemmas we were facing, as we took such bold strides towards this newer, brighter world.
“This problem, as I mentioned before, was religion. We saw no plausible path for humanity to progress peacefully as long as it was acceptable to place faith and superstition above trial and evidence. But we saw no way to rid the world of religion without committing atrocities that would tower over any of the horrid shit that had been perpetrated over the centuries by the zealots of faith.
“What we sought to create, what we still seek, is a singular world. A single humanity. We wished to view mankind as a whole. Not as the fragmented mess that it has become. And in this light, in this manner of thinking, we thought of the individual as being one with the many. Any crime committed against a single person was committed against mankind. Against the world. Any piece of property ever stolen was stolen from a global community. And any time a life was taken it was a murderous act of treason.
“This was the ideal that we hoped to achieve, but we were not completely naïve to the dark realities that we faced. The road to peace has historically never been a peaceful road at all, and we knew that we couldn’t expect the nations of the world, much less their citizens, to abandon everything they had and everything they knew… their religions and their languages and their governments, merely because we told them that it made sense to do so. There was to be a large degree of imperialism… indeed, imperialism on the largest scale ever known… if we were to be successful. A lot of blood was to be shed, I’m afraid.
“We also had to come to terms with a great many theoretical problems. We had to consider the issues that would need resolving beyond the initial success of our military. A population, once conquered, might b
e forced to submit their bodies… but a man’s mind cannot be coerced, it must be given. A man’s mind will not surrender the substance of its core, and so it was that we knew what terrible problems faced us in the task of nullifying religion.
“Our initial solution, that is to say, the first one that didn’t involve mass murder, was sterilization. At this point in the process it already lay in the framework of our planning to control the population by means of regulated birth control. The numbers needed controlling, you see, but trusting millions of people to regulate this themselves would be ludicrous. It’s in our nature to reproduce. We’re hard-wired to fuck. Heh heh. Do you have a girl, Gabriel?”
The room fell silent.
“A boy?”
Gabriel shrugged. It seemed a sudden and intrusive query, and his face was beginning to feel warm. He was relieved when Lamar picked up his narrative and moved on.
“Doesn’t matter. We don’t need to introduce distractions. This is getting long-winded enough without stopping to acquire new details.
“In the end it was Eli who provided us with our solution, which, ironically enough, presented itself in the form of yet another problem… another factor in the division of humanity that we had turned a blind eye to, perhaps willfully. Eli presented us with the notion that we had missed the most divisive force of all, something that segregated humans into much smaller groups, even within communities of identical religion or language or affluence.
“Family.
“As long as there existed a family unit, there would also exist within it an allegiance. A devotion.
“If we were truly to start viewing humanity as one body, then we would have to treat it as such. The individual would have to be a direct link to the whole of humanity, without any of the peripheral pollution that was introduced by familial inclusion. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters… all of these would have their impact on the outlook, the sense of perception, of the growing child. And this without mentioning the horrors that unfit parents, an alarming percentage, often visited upon their own offspring.
“So, as a twist to our tentative plan of selective sterilization, Eli founded the Coupling Program.
“From a biological standpoint, as he pointed out, it was in our best interest to avoid the sterilization of entire ethnic communities based on their beliefs. The gene pool would be best kept as large and varied as possible. Diminished communities, left to procreate over time, will invariably breed specific features and flaws.
“We saw this when we observed our own domesticated animals, our dogs and our cats. They were selectively bred within a dwindling pool of genes to the point that they developed not only the unique and reoccurring physical qualities that we desired, such as, say, the spotted coat of a Dalmatian or the flattened nose of a Boxer. They were also afflicted with breed-specific medical complications. Hip dysplasia. Cancer. Heart disease. Reduced immune system.
“With the Coupling Program in place and functioning as it does today, we are able to minimize the occurrence of these abnormalities. We are able to maintain the broadest possible spectrum of our nation’s genetic makeup, and we have successfully absorbed those whom we have brought into the fold of our nation. And we are able to consistently make matches that will result in the least possible relay of hereditary disease.
“But as with all ideas brought to the table, Eli’s proposition had to be put to a vote. Of the twenty-five votes cast, twenty-four were favorable. The one hand that did not rise belonged to the General.
“He admitted to seeing the logic. He said it was objectively sound… impartial… untainted by our own upbringings… After all, a strict adherence to objectivity had been the standard that the General himself had insisted upon. It was the embryo from which his entire vision of a new world had arisen. But he could not raise his hand in favor of this new proposal. He drew a line, and he pleaded with us to do the same. He was not a religious man. But some things, he said, were still holy.”
Lamar was smiling, but it was the sad smile of nostalgia. It was a smile that accepted all of the happenings of the past, though it held within itself a muffled wish, borne of regret.
“As clearly as I could see it at the time, and as clearly as I can see it now, the twenty-four of us were not working against the General, but rather acting in exact accordance with his own philosophy. I wonder still if some part of him wasn’t proud of us for defying him in that council chamber. In fact I’m sure he was proud, through it all. But every day since, I have felt it in my chest that I betrayed the most noble man I ever met.”
“Your hands, Lamar… they’re shaking.”
“Hmm? Oh, yes. It’s cold in here. It is, isn’t it?” Lamar looked to Gabriel, who sat in his dress trousers and his thin, white button-up shirt. Small beads of sweat caught the light on his forehead.
“Ha. I’m old, sitting here shivering under three layers. I remember I used to ridicule elderly women, always cold and in search of the source of some imaginary draft. It’s just reduced body fat. Poor circulation. The heat just seeps from us over the years. We are all dying planets, Gabriel, each of us steadily losing the radiance from his core.”
“I’ll go get some blankets.” Gabriel ignored Lamar’s defiant waving gesture and walked down the hall to the linen closet. He returned shortly with a fat stack of thick blankets, and then helped Lamar with them.
“Maybe that will do it. Thank you, Gabriel. You really are a sweet young man. It’s a pity I have to try and beat that out of you.”
“Ha. Owen breaks my body. You crush my spirit.” Gabriel smirked as he sat back down opposite Lamar. “So let’s get back to the crushing, shall we? You left off with the General.”
“Right. The General. The General was seventy-two years old, though he had never seemed an old man to any of us. He was brazen and vigorous. Honorable. And when he had decided that something needed doing, it was quick to be done. Even though he strongly disagreed with our decision to institute the Coupling Program and abolish the institution of family, he recognized that this course of action had been approved by the majority, and so he moved forward along with us.
“With our minds made up and our ideology down on paper, the General flipped the switch. In 2015, on the fourth of April, the Revolution began.
A bit over five years later, in 2021, the Coupling Program went online in the regions we controlled, which were already surprisingly substantial. To show his own commitment to the program he had created, Eli insisted on being the first to enroll… the first to part ways with his own infant child for the benefit of the nation. And he encouraged all of us in the council to do the same.”
“I remember this part. ‘The Coupling Program was sanctified through the sacrifice of the Twenty-Five’,” Gabriel recited.
“Is that the way we phrased it in those books you’ve read? Ha! We really churched it up, didn’t we? How horridly ironic!”
“It was a smart move,” Gabriel offered. “Politically, I mean. A strong show of solidarity with the common man.”
“Well, it’s bullshit, Gabriel. I hope you are learning to identify bullshit when you hear it. Those books are filled with it. Ah… the advantages of writing your own history. They don’t mention those of us that refused. They don’t mention the handful of homosexuals amongst us who refused to act against their own being,” he raised his eyebrows to Gabriel, and Gabriel could feel the heat radiating in his face again.
“They don’t mention the few post-menopausal women in the council. They don’t mention that I could not… I absolutely would not force my own wife to go through with it. Not that I was ever able to force Laureen to go through with much of anything. She was quite a girl, my Laureen.”
They were silent for a time while Lamar dwelled within the escaped moments of a bygone life.
“If memory serves me, there were eight others who agreed to go along with Eli on this, just one of whom was female. She opted to leave the council the following year. What was her name again? It was all so long
ago.” Lamar rubbed at his brow with his thumb and index finger. “What was her name? She was broken. We all saw it. I thought I would remember her for the rest of my days. She haunted me for years, and now I can’t even see her face. Damn it! What was her name?!”
Lamar continued massaging his forehead.
“Fuck it!” he snapped, bringing his hand back down onto his knee. “I’m off on a tangent anyhow. I was telling you about Eli. You see, Cecil’s story is tied to Eli’s. Cecil was Eli’s replacement.
“He began as Eli’s assistant at the age of forty, which the rest of us found to be a bit comical. How the hell can you train a forty-year-old to be anything but what he already is? Well, Eli found a way, I guess. Eight years later, Cecil was sitting in that chair instead of him, and it seemed as though he had been born in that council room.
“Almost at once, he was recommending new people… vast groups of people… for Reassignment and Relocation. Up to this point, it had been a short list… basically, only violent criminals and those who promoted the use of violent resistance to the policies of our government. But that list exploded. Thieves. Dissenters. Anyone who stood in the way of our vision, the fine lines of which were quickly beginning to blur.
“Eventually, that list came to include increasingly mundane offenses, and increasingly benign perpetrators. People who took too many sick days. People who were consistently unable to manage their food credits for the year. People who wrote essays which might have been deemed vaguely critical of the Coupling Program…”
He stared into Gabriel’s eyes.
“So R’n’R is punishment, pure and simple? And I was that close?”
Lamar nodded without breaking eye contact.
“So where are they sent? The desert somewhere?”
“You still don’t see it. Maybe you just don’t want to. They are all sent to the same place we all go, Gabriel. They just get there…”
“A little sooner than the rest of us.” Gabriel finished the sentence quietly, bringing his eyes down to the floor at his feet and staring through it.
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