by J. M. Clark
Then the job was over, and there were a few months of physical and mental recovery. And just like that, relations exercises started again. While she always had complications getting pregnant, Mary’s friend Joline had already given birth to five children, and she was only nineteen.
Something about the whole procreation ordeal seemed off to Mary, but she could never understand why. She knew that she wanted to see her children again. And while she did not own them, she had created them. It mattered to her.
After getting dressed, Mary walked over to Jacob’s side of the bed and kissed him on the cheek. She had no idea why she did that. But it felt good, it felt right, and sometimes that was enough of a reason.
Chapter Thirteen
Trevor
“I know that those particular morning enrichment sessions are hard on you, honey,” Trevor said. “Once we get some dinner in us, I’ll rub your legs in bed. We can talk about it. I know you enjoy that.” He walked over and grabbed a silver tray, which held a plate of food and a drink. He balanced the tray like one of those bears riding a unicycle, but he managed to clumsily make his way to the white couch and coffee table. He set the tray of food down.
“Thank you, dear.”
“You don’t need to thank me for anything. I love you.” Trevor smiled in Amy’s direction.
“I just…I just see it all the time. With all the years that have passed, wouldn’t you think that I would have healed by now? Sometimes I think that I have, then at other times I’m right back in those rooms. Watching them…you know?” Amy sat down on the couch, wiping a tear from her eye. She hadn’t ordered food that evening. Trevor didn’t approve of her not eating, but some days were bad days, and the stress of certain topics in morning enrichment would make her lose her appetite.
“Don’t get yourself all upset again, Amy. It’s hard, I know. The teachers have said that you are making progress in that area though. Hell, when we first got here, you wouldn’t even admit they were gone.” Trevor sat down next to his wife and placed a napkin over his lap. For a while, no one said anything. They waited.
“Do you ever wonder why, Trevor?”
Trevor didn’t look at her. He stared at the TV screen in front of them. It still read, “Please Wait.”
“Do I ever wonder about what, Amy?” But he knew what.
“Why wasn’t it us?” Amy looked him in the eye as a tear fell from hers.
Trevor didn’t respond right away. Amy had been fragile since that day. She was liable to fall off the mental wagon if he didn’t pick his words carefully when speaking about their two children.
Amy had come into the Palace weak and unable to walk on her own. She couldn’t think clearly or put together coherent sentences. The amount of pain she suffered that day was far too much for her to take. It was a miracle that she was even a shadow of her former self today. He thought that he had lost her totally. To hell with the Palace and everything else if he didn’t have her.
There were still times when he could hear Amy mumbling the names of their children in her sleep. She’d even mimic the motion of wiping their faces while she dreamed. Scared the hell out of Trevor, but he would just hold her tighter. Amy taking the death of their children so hard created a situation in which he didn’t get to properly mourn them.
He needed to be there for her and make sure that she could go on. Trevor’s time in the service in some ways prepared him for dealing with loss. Numerous friends had died in the war in Iraq. At first it was hard to deal with, but after a while, it all just began to mesh together, as harsh as that sounded. The same thing had happened with his children. That was hard to admit, but it was true.
Trevor didn’t get the chance to mourn them, and when he noticed this, he really didn’t care to. That fact still made him uneasy; he hoped that it was just a result of the things that he went through at war and not a part of his personality. What kind of man forgets about his children? he thought to himself.
Finally, Trevor said, “Maybe it was us.” Amy turned to look at him in confusion, but she didn’t speak. “Who’s better off between the living and the dead?” he continued. Trevor began smoothing out the napkin on his lap while speaking in a low tone.
“They are done with this life. The kids moved on with most of the rest of the world, meanwhile you and I are still straggling behind in this stupid building that we haven’t left in over twenty years. I’d say we got the short end of the stick. Try to change your perspective on what happened, Amy. That’s all I’m asking,” he said as he rubbed her leg.
Trevor turned to look at her, and their eyes met. She leaned in to give him a kiss and palmed the back of his head, just like their first kiss so long ago, back when they were just children with no children of their own. He’d been a young man in the service, and she’d been a young, beautiful stranger working at a retail shop in his town. Since the day he came walking into her store and laid eyes on her, she’d been the only woman for him.
The television screen flashed abruptly with the sound of a familiar voice. There was Sirus, sitting in his office at a big wooden desk, the golden globe of the planet right there in the middle. There was a plate of food in front of him. Looked like chicken, broccoli, and something else Trevor couldn’t quite make out. A red drink of some sort was on the right side of his food, and the utensils next to that. The office was dark, the only light illuminating Sirus’s face and the desk created by candlelight. The glow cast a dark shadow over his face.
“Hello everyone. We are lucky to have another day with each other to live, love, and prosper. Let us begin with the sacred words, for we are fortunate to be among the few who were chosen to start the world anew. The crimes of man have made it so that we are the chosen to right the world, and that’s not to be taken lightly, my family.”
Sirus flashed that big but unsettling smile into every Palace pod in every corner of the world. He was being broadcasted to millions, or maybe thousands; no one knew for sure.
Sirus lowered his head and closed his eyes. Trevor and Amy, along with every other soul watching the broadcast, followed his lead. “Thank you for breathing life into every man, woman, child, and lifeform that you have deemed fit to walk on your skin, drink of your bosom, and eat of your fruit. We are thankful, and we shall never take your gifts for granted, O Merciful Mother Earth. Amen.”
He lifted his head. Now that the words had been said, it was time for the meal to commence. “There is good news to share with everyone before we sup. Mr. Beneford has ascended to the next level and has joined the Greater Understanding Program. With the same work ethic and devotion to the new ways, you too could be promoted to this ascension. Hooray for him, and let that be a testament to how following the process gets you to where you want to be, and that’s back out into the world.”
Trevor and Amy exchanged a heavy look, but they didn’t discuss the news further. It was another difficult topic for them to tackle another day.
Sirus picked up his utensils, placed a napkin over his lap, and began to eat. This signaled to everyone watching that it is now okay to begin dining. Order would be important in the New World; proper traditions would see to that.
Chapter Fourteen
Dwight
He could remember it like it was yesterday. That Monday morning, Dwight had gone running to his parents’ room with the hope of getting some breakfast. They slept in late most mornings because neither of them had jobs. They would stay up all night, playing cards and drinking with another couple across the grass. Their home was in a trailer park in Indiana, and the trailer was owned by his grandmother, who let them live in it after she had moved to Florida with her sister.
Dwight’s mother was always using drugs and drinking; even a child could see that. When you were young though, it was neither here nor there as far as your parents’ mental or physical ailments. “Where’s the food, where’s the fun?” At his core, that was all Dwight was really concerned about as a child. He assumed this was why children had to constantly be told not
to walk away with strangers, even if they came waving candy from the big white van.
Dwight’s father would go out sometimes to do odd jobs with his brothers. Dwight was sure he did the same drugs as his mother, but he seemed to handle it much better than she did. They didn’t have much, but they did have each other, and as a child, Dwight didn’t really know how bad he had it. There had been nothing to compare it to.
On the morning when everything changed, Dwight had tiptoed to his parents’ bedroom door for the third time. He’d tried once around 9:00 a.m. and again about forty-five minutes after that. Sometimes they were slow to wake, so Dwight would check periodically with them to see who would get up and help tend to his childly needs first. He had banged on the door to wake them up. Even harder that third time. He was so hungry, and someone needed to make him a bowl of cereal. It was at least 11:00 a.m. at that point, but no one came to the door.
He banged even harder, turning his hand into a hammer to create a louder sound against the wooden door. Even kicked the bottom of it with his little foot.
Still, no one answered. Walking into the living room, he turned on the television and sat on the brown floral couch that had been gifted to them from a local church upon moving in. The channel was on the local news station. They were talking about people getting sick and how folks should try to make it to a hospital if they could. Adult topics that had no chance of keeping the attention of a ten-year-old boy in need of breakfast and a high-quality cartoon. Dwight sat on the floor with his legs crossed, filthy socks and all, channel-cruising for Sponge Bob episodes. He settled for Teen Titans.
That week, Dwight was serving a ten-day suspension for getting into a fight with a girl who’d been bullying him. A kid could only be ridiculed for having learning disabilities for so long before the snap occurred. He’d sat in the office with a sense of pride, knowing that he’d worked Olivia Jenner over for a good while before one of the hall monitors was able to pull him off her bleeding body.
After an episode, he thought that maybe his parents weren’t home. Sometimes they got up early to do stuff. While rare, it wasn’t unheard of. Dwight went back to his room to slide on some pajama pants and then proceeded to walk out on the front porch of the trailer. He could remember how beautiful the day was. Bright and sunny, leaves of autumn doing their jig all over the ground, but it was very quiet. His father’s 1998 Honda Civic was still parked on the side there—that meant they were still in the house.
He decided to look through their window from the outside. They didn’t have curtains, so he would be able to see them and knock on the glass. That would wake them up, if nothing else.
The window was wide open, and there they were, sprawled across the bed.
“Mom, open the door!” Dwight remembered screaming through the window. He had popped his little head through the window like the Whac-A-Mole game he played at Chuck E. Cheese’s whenever they went there for his cousin’s birthday parties.
Neither of them made a move. He thought they must have been tired. Mom was up sick last night, they probably didn’t sleep much, he had thought. A child couldn’t begin to fathom the unfathomable at such an early age. After screaming their names a few more times through the window, he decided to climb through and physically wake them. The second his feet landed on the stained brown carpet of their bedroom, the aroma had hit him like a car crash.
The human mind was like a magnificent computer. But it didn’t take much for a certain nasty virus to infiltrate the hard drive. Then boom, you are at your local Best Buy, spending the same amount you paid for the computer to get it fixed by Ian and the Geek Squad. Even then, it was never the same again.
The brain processed information much the same way. Dwight was certain that the day he climbed through his parents’ window was the same day his brain developed…a glitch. Even though it had all happened so long ago, to him it still felt like last week. The images, smells, and the fear were still so fresh in his memory that he could recall the scent of vomit and feces permeating the room. Sometimes he would randomly smell it, even today. Like it had followed him here.
At night when he lay in bed, he was always fighting sleep because he knew that sleep brought the nightmares that the teachers said should have stopped long ago. He was fighting sleep again tonight, lying naked under the sheets and wondering how they’d react if they found out he was still having those recurring dreams. Would they think that I was broken? The ever-present television watched him, watched them all while they slept. The Order maintained that there were no cameras in the pods, but everyone knew that wasn’t true. Nobody speaks on it, but we all know. Dwight turned over on his side and reached for his penis.
Dwight was given his own pod the day the Palace became home, and since that day, he’d lived alone. The small amount of nurturing and love he received from his mother seemed like tons compared to the rigid figure-it-out-yourself mentality of the Palace. That took a toll after a while. Maybe not for Palace-born children; they knew no difference, but he did, and the disappearance of that love isolated him from everyone.
Sure, he had plenty of food, social time, and clothing. Everyone was super nice, and he could have relations exercises with women. He never wanted to be with a woman in that way though; they didn’t turn him on. When it came time to perform, he could never keep his member erect long enough to do the deed, or he would ejaculate prematurely. Good thing the women here didn’t care about stuff like that.
Dwight began to jerk on his penis slowly, so as not to move the covers too much. The TV was watching. If the teachers, the Order, or Sirus caught you doing bad stuff like…pleasing yourself, you could get in trouble.
One thing that did rev Dwight’s engine was walking down to the fourth floor and watching them—the little people in the child center. He enjoyed spying on them from the survey area. Only the watchers had access to the kids until age ten. He could never understand why, throughout his time here, he enjoyed watching those kids.
He thought maybe it was because the trauma he suffered the day of the sickness; he was around that age when it all happened. He didn’t care enough to mention these feelings to the teachers. They would only judge him and tinker with his brain even more with the questions and counseling, but his hard drive had already been fragmented to no avail. The glitches were here to stay. No amount of talking could make him not become excited by what naturally excited him.
He didn’t really want to touch the children; that wasn’t even a possibility. He just liked watching them running, playing, smiling. This would always sexually excite him, and he made sure he wore heavy pants like jeans when he watched them. If the teachers or the higher-ups in the Order were to catch him doing this, he would be evaluated and possibly banished. It had been two decades though, and he’d perfected the ways to take his mental pictures when he went to the fourth floor. Times like this, lying in bed and trying to calm himself, were the times when he would go to those mental pictures.
Dwight sped up the tugging and pulling on himself, getting closer to an orgasm. But no, he wanted it to last longer, so he slowed down. Slower stroking motions ensued as he pictured male children running and jumping. The female brats didn’t excite him quite as much as the little boys did. Those were his favorites.
Dwight steadily began to speed up again. “Oh yes…yes,” he groaned under his breath, knowing the climax was just around the corner. He froze the visual picture of a young man in his head for masturbation fodder.
Just then, he came, hard enough to shake the bed. The whole damn room for all he knew. Dwight laid there, quivering like a solitary leaf on a tree outside of his parents’ trailer all those years ago—the last day he had on the outside as a normal child, in a normal world where everything made sense.
Spilling seed was looked down upon in the Palace. There shouldn’t be any selfishness involved in any sexual act. What Dwight did in bed every night was terrible. He knew this, but how did one change what couldn’t be changed? He was certain no amount of morn
ing enrichments could fix him. Telling someone they were doing something wrong would not, could not, stop the compulsion. There was no Norton AntiVirus for the human brain. We are what we are.
Dwight crawled out of bed and stood in the middle of the living room, nude. His right hand was clutched into a fist, trying to keep the semen from falling out. He couldn’t leave stains on the bed—the cleaning crew would notice and alert Teacher Thomas.
The moonlight from the southern window reflected off his skin. All was silent in the Palace. The buzzing of the television, which read “Please Wait,” was the only sound in the room. Dwight went into the bathroom and washed his hands. He stared at himself in the mirror and did not like what he saw, but that was nothing new. He would deal with it though. He had to because there was no other choice. Glitches and all.
Chapter Fifteen
Mary
“I’d like to begin by saying that we are all so excited with the progress you’ve been making. We know it’s been challenging to deal with certain emotions you may be experiencing as you age; that’s all to be expected. The most important thing is to make sure you bring those feelings to me or another teacher so that we have the opportunity to help you work through them. That’s why we’re here, after all.” Teacher Paul reached across the small wooden table and caressed Mary’s hand. “That’s why we’re all here.”
They were in a room where mental evaluations took place. This was where members would come to if they needed to speak with Teacher Paul. He would be there if you needed someone to lend you an ear. Selfishness, jealousy, hatred: these were very rare things in the Palace, as everyone owned the same possessions. A culture of independency and helpfulness were in place so that these emotions had little chance of being experienced.