Metro

by Stephen Romano

  This is the first time our boy ever understands that. The first time he ever sees what a birthday cake looks like, and presents too. It’s a small party, attended only by himself and the man with the white hair. It takes place in a tiny room deep inside a place that seems like it goes on forever. He has no idea where he really is. All he knows for sure is that they had to ride on an airplane to get here, then they put a blindfold over his eyes and stuck him in a van and drove for a while, and then they were walking him through open air and the smell of leaves and grass and flowers from a garden were all over him for a few minutes, and then the blindfold came off in the tiny room.

  The tiny room is where our boy will spend the next three years of his life.

  He will have a birthday cake each November 12.

  On the day of his arrival, which is also his birthday now, the man with the white hair gives him a small leather book with one hundred blank unlined pages in it and tells him he must learn to write in that book. Says he will teach our boy what writing is, how language works. His other present is another book, but this one already has words in it, and words are an almost-alien thing to our boy—but only at first.

  Soon, he understands that the book with words in it is a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In just three months, he understands everything written in that book. The man with the white hair teaches him personally. He doesn’t let our boy watch Sesame Street or read funny books with big alphabet letters or cartoon drawings designed to trick young minds—those were at the institution, which never taught him a damn thing beyond his ABCs. No, the man with the white hair says. Your education must be classical. You must be armored by ideas, not Muppets. You have to understand the sophistication and elegance of language and the condition of humanity. And your body must be strong, but not too strong. When you learn all there is to know about what we do here, when your mind is honed and brilliant, when your hands are skilled and filled with muscle memory, you will still remember this moment, and you will look back on what you were with a bitter chill. You will be reminded of how fortunate you were to be chosen by us. There are only hundreds like you in rooms just this one—all of them learning to read, learning to understand, learning from us.

  The man with the white hair looks deep into him.

  “You are one of us now,” he says.

  Be proud.

  Be brave.

  Be brilliant.

  • • •

  The routine for the next three years consists of one hour’s exercise in the morning—walking around an indoor track, calisthenics, and light weight training—breakfast in a big room with four other children his age, with whom he is not allowed to speak, and then five hours of classical education, personally taught by the man with the white hair. No lunch during the day. They don’t believe in a midday meal here. Just a breakfast of cereal, fruit salad, toast and jam, milk and juice, and then a big dinner full of meat and potatoes—all at the end of the day, after learning is done.

  His progress fits his profile.

  He learns very fast.

  He learns to write his feelings.

  He fills the empty leather book with his own handwriting and is given a new one. On his next birthday, he gets a stack of new books, which are really old books, all by classical authors. He is shown the life and conquests of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. The man with the white hair says that these men are the architects of modern civilization—the stone killers and ruthless warriors who showed the world how easy it is to convince the masses that you are God. The man with the white hair tells him that Alexander the Great was the first leader in world history to have a brutally effective secret police force, and what a brutally effective secret police force actually does. He tells our boy about guerrilla warfare, about straight terror tactics—shock and awe, they call it now. Back then, it was purity evolving into mass-hypnosis, evolving into politics. Today, it’s complex economics evolving into mass destruction evolving into the genocidal extinction of the human race. He tells our boy that the only way to stop the end of the world is to understand our past and learn from it. And never believe a damn word they tell you up front. Straight perception is not good enough. You must know what lies beneath.

  Deception is key.

  People wait to be ruled.

  The world needs champions like us.

  Eventually, his training will be honed to include a comprehensive perspective on the contemporary arts—pop-culture things like movies and comic books. It is the early 1980s when they tell him this. Disco is no longer king and video is about to kill the radio star. It’s an exciting new time, fuelled by revolutions in media. Even at eight years old, he understands what all that means. Because the man with the white hair teaches him about the Coming Thing and the Face of the Future. He tells him about computers that talk to each other over telephones. He tells him about telephones that will fit in the palm of your hand. He tells him about George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola and Duran Duran. He says that the face of the new world changes every day, and you must know every trick, every new wave, every trend that will redefine humanity.

  Our boy is told by the man with the white hair that he is very lucky to have been placed inside the States and not overseas—because the new technological inventions and the cultures and subcultures and sub-sub-subcultures that come with them will be the most exciting here in America.

  No bullshit, kid.

  They know that Bill Gates and Ted Turner and the white-collar business pirates who’ve taken over Wall Street are just years away from revolutionizing/sabotaging the future. They know that Carter and Reagan and Bush are just figureheads for a financial and political system that sponsors such revolutions—and, in fact, scalps the best results of all this shit to the highest bidders, all over the world. They teach our boy what a figurehead is, and they begin to tell him about the structures that operate under all that. He learns about government and law. He learns about the true value of money—which is just paper backed up by nothing but blind obedience and faith. Like religion. These are the biggest open-view scams ever pulled on anyone in the history of the world.

  And these are still just base lessons. He doesn’t have to know everything, not just yet. Most important is language and classical education.

  Our boy will be a writer—that’s what the man with the white hair tells him.

  Soon, our boy’s head is filled with the philosophies and worldviews of Shakespeare and the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe—he knows that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent qualities of the human race, that it all comes down to weakness and terror, romanticized concepts flying in the face of social contracts that are never quite honored. He’s even started to understand how many lies are told to the average American citizen on a daily basis, how these lessons are perverted, subverted, and even mocked by people who know not what they do. Not to mention all those world leaders who live to force every damn man, woman, and child to their knees and keep them in the dark. Our boy begins to feel the weight of his own humanity as it forms in jagged, terrible layers, his soul swimming jaded at nine years old.

  And . . .

  Finally . . .

  Our boy looks at the man with the white hair and asks him what his name is, asks him where he came from, asks if they are destined to move through life together as father and son. And the man with the white hair says he must never ask at all where either of them came from. He must only do as he is told.

  He must do.

  “That is how we operate. That is how we control things. You are one hand that will never know what the other hand is doing. You must have unquestioning faith in the machine that you are a part of. And I am not your father. You have no father. You are better than a child with a mom and a dad. You are a man now, strong with wisdom and ready to be born again, and again, and again.”

  Our boy looks right into the eyes of the man with white hair, and this man’s words
are absolute.

  Final.

  After that, our boy never sees the man with the white hair again.

  Something terrible happens then, deep inside our boy.

  Something like the world bottoming out.

  Something like your father going away forever and never coming back, without even a word good-bye or a handshake for the road.

  • • •

  At first, our boy isn’t even aware that his heart is broken. That is, until they change everything. They put another blindfold over his eyes and take him out of the place that was his home. Then they give him a new home. He goes to sleep this time and wakes up there.

  And there she is.

  His new teacher.

  She is a beautiful woman in a black suit and buzzed black hair and hard jaw and large assets, stabbing the ground in stiletto heels that click to the center of the earth. His new room is bigger, with a desk and chair and a bed and a television set. The woman says he has a TV now, so he can begin the next phase of what she suddenly calls his training. They never called it that before. She sits him down on his bed and sits across from him in the chair and explains that the man with the white hair is gone forever. And that it was time for that man to leave because our boy loved him—they can tell this about our boy, you see, because they can tell everything—and love is dangerous in this world, she says.

  Her voice is dark and beautiful.

  Elegant and deep.

  “Love is an illusion,” she says.

  And she lets the words settle over the room for a long, long time before she explains what she means. The words are deep and gorgeous.

  Beautiful beyond anything he’s ever known before.

  “Love is something that people like us must turn away from. You are still too young to understand. But you must develop patterns early in life that will condition you to the work you will do as an adult—and you must do it before your sleeping manhood awakens. That will be in just a few years, if we’ve predicted the trajectory of your development correctly. And we always do.”

  Our boy knows what all those words mean because he is classically educated. He’s even been prepared for his manhood and all those awakenings she’s talking about. He was prepared by the man with the white hair, whose name he never even knew, and whose face he will never forget. She tells him not to love that man. She tells him not to love her.

  “It will be hard not to love me,” she says. “That will be the next lesson we teach you—alongside the other lessons. About the changing world, about the technologies that rule us. About the endemic industries and social cliques that define humanity.”

  Then she pauses, and the light in the room hits her in just the right way.

  Making her some kind of wise spirit.

  A goddess who knows all.

  “Endemics is what we do here,” she says. “We adapt to the world and we watch what happens in it, day by day. We prepare our people for what happens. We send them out to live there. One day, you will be out there. But you will not go lightly. You will go with all speed and ammunition. You will be brilliant and wise, armored against anything they can throw at you. And you will know, all the while you are there in that world, that you are the master of it. That you work for a greater good, a bigger picture, a plan that holds it all together. You are the very builder of the human race and the world at large.”

  Closer now, her voice, her beauty.

  Complete truth, right there before him.

  “So don’t be fooled by attachments. Do not love your teachers. Do not feel as others in the world feel, because to feel is to be one of them, and you are not one of them.”

  You are the master of them.

  “I will test you endlessly. I will try to reach you and break you. It will be hard, but you will learn. You will become stone. A master of deception and betrayal. You will be able to work any equation with ease, slip through the noose of humanity and come out the other side with their secrets. You will even be trained to kill, but that’s for later. When you are all grown up.”

  All grown up to become the master of the world.

  And so it goes.

  • • •

  Under the watchful eye of the beautiful woman in the black suit—a woman whom he does indeed fall in love with, secretly at first, then passionately and openly—he learns the trick of his masters. Learns that you can turn those feelings off and replace them with something else. Learns that loneliness is not really loneliness, if your mind is full to breaking with the right kind of knowledge. That love is not really love, if you stand away from it.

  And there is more to learn about.

  The cultures that break their waves on the dazzled face of the new America in the mid-1980s are radical and colorful, unlike anything that’s come before, overhyped, hair-sprayed and full of shit, flashy and flaky and shimmering in gaudy imperfection, like half-formed illusions masking the most significant changes that modern civilization has ever experienced—and those changes all come just beneath the surface of popular culture, all tied to advancements in technology and entertainment. You can almost see it moving in the faces of Madonna and Michael Jackson, heightened perceptions diluted by the flash of MTV. The merciless steel hammer of the Terminator comes down at home and abroad. We go to war and nobody even notices. We sell off our own stockpile of antiquated military hardware to our enemies and the media reports that we are buying back hostages. But that’s all just what’s on the surface. What’s really happening is the rise of a dynasty so huge and the mutation of a bloated, half-destroyed superpower so completely overworked and drunk on its own juice that the mob operators and ghost agencies are put into a sort of overdrive, just to check the spread of the cancers.

  They explain to him that the oil crisis of 1979 was an elaborate hoax.

  They tell him the Reagan assassination attempt of 1981 was staged.

  They just laugh when he asks about JFK and say What do YOU think, kid?

  They show him evidence that the last twelve presidents were appointed, not elected, tell him the twenty-second amendment was ratified in 1951 to keep guys like FDR from running the world for too long—because they saw all of this coming and wanted to stop it from happening. They tell him that our involvement in Korea, South Vietnam, and all the other military actions that still run today on a business-as-usual basis are little more than public smokescreens for a covert series of very important black-ops missions, and it’s usually all about securing our future through natural resources and a lot of incredibly advanced technology, all of it held hostage by people without an idea in hell that they are poisoning the lifeblood of civilization. They tell him that the shadow organizations that currently control the US government are planning a twenty-year series of dangerous social experiments and controlled media-hyped happenings—that’s what they call things like Operation Desert Storm, which are on the drawing boards even now, more than fifteen years before they will blow up in public.

  It will be a brave new world.

  People must know they are protected from it.

  People must know their place.

  And so must you.

  • • •

  Our boy is eleven years old when his manhood finally breaks over him—one year earlier than they predicted it would. He burns for his brilliant busty teacher, and she says it’s time for him to become a man. But not by her. She is only an ideal, only a conditioned response, only a lie told to him by his own subconscious—one that must be debunked.

  He is brought to a room filled with teenage ladies, perfumed and pretty, half-naked in lingerie, and his teacher smiles at him, saying that he can have his pick of the litter. He is lost in a sea of eager flesh and desire that overwhelms every sense in his body.

  “And now do you understand? Your love for me is only this. Only a response that we can condition. When you are taught to be a man by the ladies you
choose, I will become nothing but a dull memory.”

  His teacher says all this to him, and she’s almost right.

  But he does remember her even after that day, which is the last time he sees her—the same way he will never forget the man with the white hair. They were his mother and father. He will never forget them, though his next teachers tell him to forget, try to drive the memories from him, bend him over and break his ass hard.

  • • •

  These new guys are tough bastards, and almost kill him dead.

  They train him to be like a robot over the next four years. They put him through martial-arts training that feels like rocks beating against his flesh and bones. They teach him endurance and relentless drive on refrigerated target ranges and deep-sea simulators. They strap iron bars across his back and tell him to run, run, run. They break his bones and replace them with implants, so he literally is part robot when they are done with him.

  The worst experience is what they do his hands.

  The master sergeants and martial-arts instructors—he can’t remember their names or faces because there are so many, always on constant rotation, always with some new torture—tell him in seven different voices that he must be able to act in any situation, defeat any enemy, escape from any cage. The first thing the enemy will try when they want you to be helpless is immobilization. They’ll inject you with drugs, hammer you senseless, cuff your hands behind your back, and shoot you in the head if they can. This is unacceptable. You must be tactically ready. You must know twenty ways to kill that man. You have to do it without hesitation. You need the tools. And even with every bit of secret knowledge we can fill you with, handcuffs will always be a problem. There are too many types of handcuffs. Skill alone will not save you. So they knock our boy out with heavy dope and put him in a room with a brilliant high-tech surgeon, who breaks apart his fingers and reworks the bones, replacing joints with plastic ball sockets. A year later, when the healing is done, and our boy is nineteen, he is able to fold both thumbs across the palms of his hands in such an inhuman configuration that Spider-Man himself would be amazed. The idea is to compress your fingers into a space narrower than your wrist, so you slip right through the iron or the plastic or the cheap aluminum that binds you—and it works like a charm.