No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven)

by Randall Farmer

  Gail stalked out of her tent, a week-old newspaper over her head to keep the rain off, willing the juice flow to remain stable and keep everyone’s juice count at least close to normal. Just as she was about to get to the Ebener’s back porch, her mother slammed through the side door of the farmhouse, in tears. Gail ran through muddy puddles to catch up to her mother before her father did.

  What had her father done this time? Whatever had happened, he and her mother seemed anxious to leave.

  “Get out of my way,” her father said. He elbowed past Gail, led her mother to his car, and helped her inside.

  Her father’s angry red face stifled Gail’s first question, and she waited until he was on the other side of the car before asking “What’s going on?” to her mother. Her parents had stayed all weekend on their first visit to the farm, but it was only a little after lunchtime this Saturday. Gail was already hungry for dinner.

  “It’s all your fault,” her mother said, sniffing and wiping away tears.

  “For what?”

  “Telling us to get lost!” her father said.

  Good for them. She wondered what her parents had been thinking, trying to come down and run the household on the weekends. They actually tried to give orders to her people for what they should do during the week. She wondered how long her household would stand for such interference. She had made it clear she wouldn’t defend them to her household, nor would she defend her household to her parents. Well, they had made their decision.

  “If you’d taken control of these people like you should have, and done what I told you, this wouldn’t have happened,” her father said. “Instead, you’re letting them run you around.”

  “What happened?” Gail said. “What did they say to you?”

  “Did you tell them to do this, Gail?” her mother said.

  “Nonsense,” her father said. “They don’t care what Gail thinks. That’s clear, especially with their talk about money. They’re just a bunch of filthy uppity Transforms.”

  Gail winced. Her parents got anal about anything to do with money. “Money?” she said. How much money?

  “I mean,” her father said, “asking if we could contribute to cover our weekend trips! The nerve! We’re your parents, the parents of their Focus! Where’s their respect!”

  Gail’s mother went on at length about how respecting your parents was the most important of the Ten Commandments, while Gail bit her tongue and tried to keep from laughing out loud.

  “…bunch of filthy uppity Transforms…” her father said, his voice trailing off into a mutter. He climbed inside the car and slammed the car door.

  She hadn’t been prepared for her parents to do the stalk and walk over what, for them, was little more than pocket change. They were pissed simply because the household had suggested they cover their own room and board when visiting. Such a tiny thing, but the household had to enforce such tiny things – money was tight. The household had been working on an agreement where everyone in the household would contribute a goodly fraction of their life’s savings to the household’s bank account. Gail had been afraid they would hit her parents up for some of their not-inconsiderable life savings, some of which was in Gail’s name, money Gail had never counted on seeing anyway because her parents tended to go ballistic whenever the issue of her joint inheritance came up. She expected any serious money talk would cause problems.

  Behind Gail, the quiet household came alive with laughter and derisive cat calls to her parents. Her people had caught her giggly mood over her father’s tantrum, as she moved juice to make everyone happy. Unlike her, though, they weren’t biting their tongues.

  Her father’s red face turned ashen gray as he started up his car and turned on the wipers. “We’re done supporting you, Gail,” her father said. “We agreed to support you through college. Nothing more. Well, it’s clear you’re out on your own now, and never going to complete that degree of yours. We should make you repay the money we sunk into your college education. Like the Morris’s did with Katie when she eloped with that damned hippie of hers. You’ve thrown it all away. You’ll probably even need to get a job. Without a degree, you might even need to get your hands dirty in a real job. Certainly that Van person is never going to be able to support you properly. We’ll talk about this later.” He put the car in reverse, backed out of the driveway and splashed muddy water on Gail’s legs, turned the car, and sped off.

  The laughter behind her stopped. She, and everyone else, had been counting on her getting something from her parents. Her parents’ contribution had been part of the budget. Not that she or they had seen a penny from her parents. Her father even refused to pay the Transform clinic co-pays the government Transform support program required.

  “Liars,” Gail said. The whole thing had been a set up. Her parents had been acting provocative and looking for an excuse to walk, not willing to support her at all.

  It was as if becoming a Focus had somehow given her the ability to read people’s thoughts; her people’s emotions were an open book, at times even those of non-Transforms, like her parents just now. Surely not. Such abilities weren’t even mentioned in the pamphlets. The stress of the situation must be leading her into unnatural caution and paranoia.

  Gail sank to the cold wet ground and put her head in her hands, her black depression returning.

  (10)

  “What’s this?” Gail said. Van had books strewn out over their tent cots. History books, his specialty. Books old enough to smell old. They all had two or more ripped up pieces of newspaper in them, marking places.

  “Reading material for you,” Van said. He sat on an impromptu chair – a 2 by 8 over two sets of stacked cinder blocks – with legal pads on each knee. He would glance at the writing covering the one on his right knee, close his eyes, pause, and then write a sentence on the legal pad on his left knee. He had adjusted to tent living much better than Gail had predicted.

  “You shouldn’t have.” Gail sat on the bed and closed her eyes. Each day she grew hungrier, despite the extra food she got at dinner. Each day the ache of low juice got worse. Her head throbbed, and she snapped at everyone who came near.

  Van interrupted his dissertation rewrite, stood with a stoop, and sat himself down beside her. He kept his legal pads on his knees. “Take a look at this one,” he said, plopping a fat book titled something about the history of New York State, volume such and such. He opened it to one of his bookmarks.

  Gail looked, frowned, looked again and started reading. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Coitus reservatus? Mystical communion through sex, here, in the United States?” Everyone knew the United States was founded by and run by Protestant Puritan prudes who would prefer they didn’t need to engage in sex to procreate.

  “Owen’s Oneida group, the Perfectionists, was one of the more successful utopian or communitarian groups,” Van said. He got a twinkle in his eye, his ‘I’ve got one on you’ twinkle. “They lasted over two decades before they dropped the funky sex and group marriage requirements.”

  Well, she did have to set her heart on Van; with him came a landslide of history, both Colonial and pre-20th Century American. She flipped through all the books, at what Van bookmarked, and sighed. “You’re thinking these have relevance to Focus households, don’t you?”

  Van nodded, chewing on his pencil, keeping one eye on her, the other on his editing. He took the pencil out of his mouth, crossed out a word on the legal pad on his left knee, and wrote in another. “Yes. They all failed, save for the Community of True Inspiration.”

  Gail gave Van a puzzled look. He picked up a book on something with ‘Second Great Awakening’ in its title, opened it to one of his bookmarks, and handed it over to Gail.

  She skimmed the page and wrinkled her nose. “The Amana Society? As in refrigerators?” Gail said. Surely not.

  “Which they make, to this very day,” Van said. “As with many of these groups, they were pioneers of primitive gender equality.” Uh, pioneers... Of gender e
quality? Here? “The religious groups all lasted longer than the secular utopians, though the Owensites, whose original colony of New Harmony, Indiana, lasted only two years, reorganized in Great Britain in a more practical manner, invented the concept of socialism, and went on to form the British Labor Party. They probably had the greatest long-term influence on English-speaking society of any of the utopians. I can’t say…”

  “You think the Focuses are going to need to have religious households to last?” Gail’s stomach knotted at the idea.

  Van shrugged. “I think this all depends on what the Focuses bring to the table. From your description, and a few things I’ve read in the newspapers about Focus Adkins, the best way to describe her is Goddess-Queen, or Demigoddess-Queen. I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing Focuses as religious cult leaders.”

  “You’re not making me feel better, you know.”

  Van shrugged again. “Read about these groups. Learn from what they did wrong. The utopian strain of thought is part of all of us Americans, despite what our parents and schools taught us.”

  “Hippie communes.”

  “Exactly. Our generation isn’t unique, or even particularly revolutionary.”

  “The older Transforms won’t like any such things.” As they didn’t, in Gail’s household.

  “I don’t have a clue what’s the correct path for you or this household, or any other Focus’s households,” Van said. “I’m not a Transform, and all thoughts of legal equality aside, Transforms are different than run-of-the-mill humans. However, I don’t think this household’s current method of leadership is going to last long.”

  As in: I’m going to have to pull their nuts out of the fire eventually, Gail thought, and take control of things, whether I want to or not. Headache forgotten, she started to read.

  ---

  Gail closed the last of Van’s books, what she thought of, with a grin, as his ‘assigned reading’. Useful and interesting. She wanted more, but Van was at U of M. She stood and stretched, eying the farmhouse and the field around her, dry and dusty and tent-strewn.

  She could be back by dinner if she left now. She smiled, kicked a few stray clods of dirt off her once-white now-dirt-brown tennis shoes, and headed up to the Ebener house. With the job problem her people suffered because of anti-Transform prejudice, her household had turned the front of the Ebener house into a parking lot, still filled with cars late in the morning. She should be able to borrow one for a day trip.

  “Hey, Ed,” she said, after she entered the Ebener house, looked around, and found someone who owned one of the cars currently out front. “I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “Sure, Gail,” he said. “What’s up?” Ed Zarzemski was an older man, currently unemployed, a former Port Huron dock supervisor. He ran his hands through his short salt-and-pepper hair and stood.

  “I’d like to borrow your car for a few hours,” she said. “I’ll be back by dinner. Promise. I’m going over to U of M.”

  Ed opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and hummed. “Uh, I think I need to run this by Bart.”

  Gail frowned. Two weeks ago, Bart, the spouse of one of her new Transforms, Isabella, had taken over running the household from Kurt and Ed. Kurt and Ed had been setting things up like a commune, mostly to keep Gail’s father from taking over and running things from a distance. They succeeded in their task, driving away Gail’s family and saving Gail from being stuck as an adult child, forever under her parents’ control. Unfortunately, without Gail’s father as a target, Kurt and Ed hadn’t been able to keep the household leadership. Too many of the older members of her household disliked even the smallest hint they might be living in a commune.

  After Bart took over, the frequent household meetings, which used to be a chaos of group decision-making, became less frequent, but more organized and efficient. Unfortunately, the now-weekly meetings no longer made decisions. Bart and his cronies made the decisions now. Last week’s weekly meeting had turned into a forum to vent grievances, bring up problems, assign jobs, and for Bart and his crew to announce decisions. Gail hadn’t been there, as usual, fearing her very presence would overly influence any decisions being made. According to Van, her people spent quite a bit of time sniping about her.

  Gail wasn’t happy with Bart or his crew. None of her former friends, none of the Transforms, no women and no one under thirty were members of Bart’s clique. The rest of the household seemed to be happy with the change, though, so she couldn’t object. So far.

  Bart, though, turned out to be at work. The fact he had found a way to keep his construction job gave him a lot of power. His number three, Buddy Attendale, was around, though. He worked an afternoon shift at a Red Wrench garage. Buddy was a short stocky man, in his early forties, with close cropped red hair and a tight squint.

  “Hey, Buddy, can I have a moment of your time?” Ed said, buttonholing Buddy in the kitchen. Buddy gave Ed a sneer. Because Ed had sided with the younger people in their desires to run the place like a commune, he had lost his standing in the household, at least from Bart’s perspective. Buddy shared Bart’s opinion.

  “Shoot,” Buddy said.

  “Gail would like to borrow my car and head in to Ann Arbor for the afternoon,” Ed said. “I just wanted…”

  “We’ve talked about this,” Buddy said. “The answer is no.”

  “No?” Gail said, surprised and angry. Moans echoed throughout the house, from the Transforms. Gail had clipped everyone in range. She fought her temper, and put the juice back. In her mind, her Transforms’ juice trembled like jello, threatening to fall, at any instant, back into her juice buffer. “I would…” She didn’t get a third word out before the juice slipped its leash again and came back to her with an inaudible thud.

  “You see,” Buddy said, oblivious to Gail’s havoc, “we’ve looked at the household finances, and we need to be smart about our time and money. When the Focus goes out, she goes out with a bodyguard crew.” Hey, I’m right here, Gail thought, as she struggled for control of the juice. Talk to me! How dare these people confine her like this! “We can’t afford any personal trips for the Focus.”

  “I’ll go with her,” Ed said. He smiled, or at least attempted to smile. His face looked like he was eating some raw liver some dictator somewhere hand-fed him. “I would appreciate this, Buddy, a favor…”

  “No,” Buddy said. He turned away from both Ed and Gail, but not before letting an expression of triumph cross his face. Gail flashed for a moment on an interpretation she had read in one of Van’s books: authoritarians prefer tough economic times, because tough times give them more levers to control the people they consider necessary to control. She hadn’t agreed with the historian author when she first read the passage; common sense said, at least to her, that bad economic times risked rebellion, which all authoritarians feared. Watching Buddy and his emotional reaction brought Gail an epiphany – rebellion wasn’t bad to authoritarians, instead, rebellion gave them a good excuse to bully those they thought needing bullying.

  Today, I’m the bullying target, she decided.

  “I’m sorry, Gail,” Ed said, taking her gently by the elbow and leading her away from Buddy. Gail wanted to scream, and argue, and fight, but every time she relaxed her control over the juice, even to think about what to say, she shorted every Transform in range.

  She nodded and let Ed lead her out of the farmhouse. She stalked back to her tent, lay down on her cot, clenched all her muscles tight and fumed. Her eyes stayed dry, but her stomach ached, almost ulcer-like. She wanted to do something. Anything.

  Her household of equals slipped down a nasty slope toward authoritarianism. She needed to take action, protest, rebel, something…but for the life of her, she didn’t know what.

  (11)

  “They’re late,” Gail said. She and Van waited for his parents to show up, stuck sitting on a couple of folding lawn chairs for far too long. Only the woven pleated plastic seating straps were long gone, which mean
t, as always, sitting on boards, in this case ratty plywood warped from being outdoors in the wet for too long. The ground would have been more comfortable, but she was the Focus, and she needed to maintain some appearances.

  Van shrugged. The reason they sat out here near the end of the driveway, under the part-shady crabapple tree, was to wave down his parents. Otherwise, they would drive right on by. “Only a half hour. If they showed up now, this would be early for them.”

  Nobody in the household stayed with them to wait, the last, Melanie, wandering off ten minutes earlier, an expression of mute despair on her face. The older household members still didn’t know what to make of Van, and his scattered monosyllables about his family’s impending visit hadn’t helped. Or his cryptic comments about his family. Gail let Van take the lead on this, not wanting to interject by accident any of her not-necessarily-politic opinions into the situation.

  Betha Ebener tiptoed down the driveway toward them, radiating nervousness. “Uh, Gail, ma’am?”

  From Betha she got a ma’am. Gail didn’t understand why. “Yes?”

  “Your boyfriend’s parents just called.” Boyfriend. Parents. To Gail, the Schubers were already her in-laws; in her mind she was as married to Van as she would ever be. Try explaining this to anyone over thirty, though… She thoroughly understood Melanie’s warranted despair. “They took the Stony Creek exit and followed the signs to the town.”

  Van winced in half-expected exasperation. “Damn. Let me.” He ran off in his long loping strides, back to the Ebener house, leaving Gail alone. Van had told his parents, at least five times, they wanted Stony Creek Road west, not Willis Road, going east to the town of Stony Creek. Betha followed Van.

  This game of musical chairs went about as well as Gail expected. Van’s family drove her crazy.