On the hill, I looked for those blue eyes. I ached to see them, to know he was there, suffering for what he did to me, to my family. But I never did catch sight of him through the clouds of flies, the flocks of scavenging birds, the crusted filth that thickened around each inmate until they no longer cried out, no longer moved, and were replaced by another. There was no shortage of inmates, it seemed.
After a while, longer than I’m proud of, to be honest, I stopped hoping to see Dale and started dreading it. Despite everything, I didn’t wish that degree of suffering on him or anyone. It’s not that I forgave him. When the police were deputized to act as immigration officers, and the National Guard was mobilized, I knew things were going bad, but I thought our family would be okay. Our friends and neighbors would protect us. Instead, we were turned in. The whole town assembled as we were marched away, not just our family but hundreds of detainees, all of us marched south to begin construction of the Great Wall. Then, too, huddled with my parents, trying to calm my little brother, I searched for Dale’s sky-blue eyes. That time, I saw them. And in them I saw the truth: he was the one who’d made the call. Not a word passed between us; I saw a cloud of guilt darken his eyes, and then his awareness of what I saw, what I knew, and then he turned away forever, while his parents in their red MAGA caps shouted and waved and carried on like it was Christmas and the Fourth of July baked into a cake with the Super Bowl on top.
We were in the first wave. How many died in those marches, I don’t know. We lost Nana. Grandpa passed in the hard months at the border, working on the Great Wall. It seems so long ago now—not even four years. A lifetime. I guess we were lucky. After a few months, Mexico took us. The story was that they agreed to pay for the Wall, but everybody knew the money was a ransom. So we were deported. And the president got to tweet about another promise kept. That deal, like so many others, didn’t last long, though. Turned out that building the Great Wall was another job Americans didn’t want to do themselves.
What’s become of Dale, I don’t know. He dm’d me for a while, but I blocked him. By the time I regretted that, the Virtual Eminent Domain Act had passed, giving the president control over the Internet. Last we heard, two years ago, the New Mexico National Guard was in a shooting war with the California National Guard, after the New Mexicans crossed into California in pursuit of illegals seeking sanctuary there. That was when the digital wall went up. Nobody knows what’s taking place behind these walls now, the real and the virtual. We see smoke rising. The lights of fires reflecting off the clouds. We hear rumors that are almost impossible to believe. But still the cells are filled like clockwork.
“I thought I’d find you here, mijo,” comes a voice I know.
I’m surprised. It’s the first time he’s joined me here. I shrug and offer the binoculars, but he declines with a shake of the head.
“Did you ever think he did it to save you?” asks my dad softly. “Dale, I mean?”
“I know who you mean,” I reply. “Of course I’ve thought it. Doesn’t matter though, does it? He’s dead, or as good as. The whole damn country is dead. Or as good as.”
“We’re the country, too,” he says. “And we’re not dead.”
I don’t have an answer for that.
He puts an arm around my shoulders, and I pass the binoculars on to the next pair of grasping hands. There’s nothing to see anyway. Even so, it’s a long while before my dad and I turn and make our way back down the hill.
THE PASSION ACCORDING TO MIKE
Scott Bradfield
On the day Vice President Mike Pence awoke from a two-year Regenerative slumber in the Green Room of the General Electric Eternalization Clinic in downtown Indianapolis, he felt as fresh as a new-blossomed daisy. He sat up in a soft bed amongst celestially billowing white sheets and blankets to a room smelling of lavender, jasmine, and a faint hint of Cinnabon. And when he swung himself out from under the covers, he found his long legs to be as tawny, well-shaven, and supple as the legs of a young girl.
“Hallelujah,” he said, to nobody in particular. “I feel like a million bucks.”
Which is when the white door opened, and a beautiful, oval-faced woman with bronze skin entered bearing a tall glass filled with thickish green liquid on a gleaming steel tray.
“Accounting for inflation,” she said with a smile, “that would come to, oh, about a billion dollars at today’s rates, sweetie.”
Mike could vaguely remember the last frantic moments of his former life. There had been something about an earthquake, and then another earthquake, and then a flood, and then a tornado, and then another flood—all frequent, God-ordained natural occurrences on a normal Indianapolis afternoon during the First Thousand Days. Then, just as suddenly, he was being hurried through crowds of protestors—bricks and tomatoes flying around—choking on a dark haze of pepper spray and marijuana smoke. Something struck his head, and then something else struck his head, and Mike turned to see the angry face of his last still-functioning Secret Service Bot wielding a freshly-dented STOP sign on a wooden two-by-four. “I will not work for five bucks an hour!” the robot was shouting. “I will not work for five bucks an hour!” And then, as if the plug had been pulled, Mike fell crashing into the strong, blissful arms of his Lord.
“Here, drink this,” the beautiful woman said.
It tasted like seaweed, cornstarch, and Aqua Velva.
“I’d prefer a Diet Coke,” he said.
“Who wouldn’t?” Her smile was like a box of Chiclets. “Unfortunately, since the anti-GMO forces took control of the State legislatures, no can do. Anyway, these kale smoothies are packed with all the vitamins your newly-awakened brain needs to get it back into high gear. Speaking of which, how’s that genetically reconstructed bod working out for you?”
Mike ran his hands slowly down his hairless chest and legs. He had lost weight, and his musculature was smooth and supple. Then, between his legs, he found…something that hadn’t been there before. And something…that wasn’t quite the same as it had been…
“The new hermaphroditic functions always take a little getting used to,” the beautiful, dark-skinned woman said. “But eventually you’ll learn to love your flexible new multi-gender pleasure devices, just like everybody else.”
The next time Mike awoke he found himself sitting in a softly unfocused white room surrounded by softly unfocused, attractive young people wearing softly unfocused, celestial white robes. Enya, or something soothingly similar, was playing on the overhead speakers.
“This is more like it,” Mike said, relaxing into his plush BarcaLounger.
One face came into focus from the cluster of other faces. It was the dark-skinned, beautiful woman from his earlier dream.
“We gave you an herbal sedative, Mike. My name’s Gabriella. Now, why don’t we take a look-see around your new world?”
Everybody seemed to be humming the soft-rock Christian music Mike enjoyed playing in his Bose wireless headphones while reading the Bible and signing executive orders. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God,” Mike whispered. “And all these things will be added unto you…lah-de-dah-dah-dahhh…”
“Absolutely, Mike,” Gabriella said, and took him gently by the arm. “Now just keep thinking those good thoughts, and we won’t have to sedate you again.”
Outside, everything was similarly unfocused and billowy, with young sexually ambiguous people floating back and forth down long corridors that stretched in every direction like the visual conundrums of an Escher drawing.
“Basically, your drug-enhanced virtual receptors interpret the world by means of your gestalt ordering-mechanisms. With new, improved Accu-You, produced by the good people at Pfizer, you literally see what you believe. And the best part of all? It’s free, since Pfizer is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the FDA, and the FDA, of course, is owned by you, the taxpayer. Not that you’ve been paying your fair share of taxes since your Suspension, Mike, but don’t worry. With the new Universal Basic Income established during the F
irst Intercession, we probably owe you money!”
Mike was feeling wobbly and unrehearsed, as if he had stepped onto a stage where he was expected to deliver lines that he couldn’t remember from a play he had never read.
“For example,” Gabriella said, “my field of perception perceives green fields littered with non-GMO fruit trees, gleaming blue lakes and streams, and clean blue skies unmarked by industrial pollutants. Isn’t that great? You get to see what you want to see, and I get to see what I want to see. And who cares if you’re perceptually enhanced and I’m not? It doesn’t matter in the long run of history, right? So long as we’re both happy…”
Several boyish-girls and girlish-boys ran past, giggling, and Mike felt a strange, indefinable sense of pleasure lift up from between his legs. It reminded him of the first time, as a twelve-year-old boy, he had seen Anita Bryant singing about oranges on television.
“Take your pick, Mike. Sex isn’t nasty or ungodly; it’s productive! Especially since we started using our wombs to manufacture stem cells for the bio labs in California. Our sexual parts aren’t simply hedonistic pleasure centers or baby-makers anymore. We’ve all been turned into walking, talking genetic labs. So don’t be shy, Mike. Wanta make stem cells together? Your place or mine?”
Mike had to sit down. He needed a glass of water and, with a blink of awareness, found one materializing in his hand. Underneath him, the stool morphed into a cordially shaped Barca Lounger—just like the one in the Reawakening Center a couple dreams back.
“Try to relax, Mike. Today’s election day, and you know what that means? The twelve-hour Super Bowl! We figured it was a kinder, gentler way of keeping the white, male-oriented guys from voting. And hey, after the twelve-hour Super Bowl, they’re running a Dog the Bounty Hunter marathon on CNN!”
A billboard-sized television screen materialized in the fuzzy white air, depicting large, well-breasted men in heavy shoulder protectors bashing into one another like gently jostling balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It looked the way hell was supposed to look, according to Mike’s darkest dreams of it. A whole lot of confusion, softness, inspecificity, and casual petting.
The sense of pleasure between Mike’s legs grew into a small, mild erection while, at the same time, something opened damply inside him, as if his anus was being pulled inside-out.
His mouth went dry and moist—both at the same time.
“But what about, you know, Him? Our Leader?”
When Gabriella smiled, she looked like an angel. But wasn’t that the work of Satan? To make you see what you wanted to see? And not to see what was really going on?
“Frankly, she was a little disappointed when we turned her property holdings into Free Health Care Clinics for the latest influx of Mexi-American workers bussing up from Juarez, but no matter. She’ll get used to it. She’s got one of the best cross-gender imams in the business helping her adjust to the New World Order. But then, so do you, Mike. So do you.”
BRIGHT SARASOTA WHERE THE CIRCUS LIES DYING
James Sallis
I remember how you used to stand at the window staring up at trees on the hill, watching the storm bend them, only a bit at first, then ever more deeply, standing there as though should you let up for a moment on your vigilance, great wounds would open in the world.
That was in Arkansas. We had storms to be proud of there, tornadoes, floods. All these seem to be missing where I am now—wherever this is I’ve been taken. Every day is the same here. We came by train, sorted onto rough-cut benches along each side of what once must have been freight or livestock cars, now recommissioned like the trains themselves, with eerily polite attendants to see to us.
It was all eerily civil, the knock at the door, papers offered with a flourish and a formal invocation of conscript, the docent full serious, the two Socials accompanying him wearing stunners at their belts, smiles on their faces. They came only to serve.
Altogether an exceedingly strange place, the one I find myself in. (That can be read metaphorically. Please don’t.) A desert of sorts, but unlike any I’ve encountered in films, books, or online. The sand is a pale blue, so light in weight that it drifts away on the wind if held in the hand and let go; tiny quartz crystals gleam everywhere within. At the eastern border of the compound, trees, again of a kind unknown, crowd land and sky. One cannot see through or around them.
They keep us busy here. With a failed economy back home and workers unable to make anything like a living wage, the government saw few options. What’s important, Mother, is that you not worry. The fundamental principles on which our nation was founded are still there, resting till needed; our institutions will save us. Meanwhile I am at work for the common good, I am being productive, I am contributing.
That said, I do, for my part, worry some. This is the fourth letter I’ve written you. Each was accepted at the service center with “We’ll get this out right away,” then duly, weeks later, returned marked Undeliverable. It is difficult to know what this means, and all too easy to summon up dire imaginings.
To judge by the number and size of dormitories and extrapolating from the visible population, there are some four to five hundred of us, predominately male, along with a cadre of what I take to be indigenous peoples serving as support: janitorial, housekeeping and kitchen workers, groundsmen, maintenance. Oddly enough for this climate, they are fair, their skin colorless, almost translucent, hair of uniform length male and female. From dedicated eavesdropping I’ve learned bits and pieces of their language. It is in fact dangerously close to our own, rife with cognates and seemingly parallel constructions that could easily lead us to say, without realizing, something other than, even contrary to, what we intended.
The indigenes speak without reserve of their situation, of what they’ve achieved in being here, and not at all of what came before. They appear to relish routine, expectations fulfilled—to thrive on them—and to have little sense of theirs as lives torn away at world’s edge, only jagged ends of paper left behind. Popular fiction would have me falling in love with one of them, discovering the true nature of the subjugation around me, and leading their people to freedom. Approved fiction, I suppose, would write of protagonist me (as someone said of Dostoevsky’s Alyosha) that he thought and thought and thought.
As I write this, recalling the failure of my three previous missives and a rare conversation with another resident here, I realize just how close we’ve come to a time when many will scarcely remember what letters are.
Kamil taught for years at university, one of those, I must suppose, composed of vast stone buildings and lushly kept trees whose very name brings to mind dark halls and the smell of floor wax. Unable to settle (“like a hummingbird,” he said), Kamil straddled three departments—music, literature, and history—weaving back and forth, seeking connections. On a handheld computer he played for me examples of the music he’d employed in the classroom to elicit those connections from young people who knew little enough, he said, of any of the three disciplines, least of all history. Truth to tell, I wasn’t able to make much of his music, but the title of one raucous piece, “Brain Cloudy Blues,” stays with me.
I remember when you told me about circuses, Mother, the bright colors and animals, people engaged in all manner of improbable activities, the smells, the sounds, the faces, and then explained that they had gone away, there were no circuses anymore, and the very last of what was left of them lay put away in storage in the old winter quarters of the greatest circus of all in a town faraway named Sarasota.
Are we all in Sarasota now? There are further chapters in my life, I know. What might they be like? When someone other than myself is turning the page.
THE NAME UNSPOKEN
Richard Bowes
On this early morning, I find myself on the east side of Sixth Avenue. Like every other city street, it’s riddled with potholes as deep as ditches. Real New Yorkers, even in our ruin, have never called Sixth Avenue “The Avenue of the Americas” despite w
hat it says on street signs.
And no one except traitors who have been bribed ever whispered “Avenue of American Greatness.” Because that title was a construction of the one we call the Monster (His name is never spoken).
I’m old, confused, and can’t remember why I want to cross the avenue. But it’s on my mind that an event approaches and it’s a long time since I’ve performed in public.
At the moment I couldn’t get across if I was promised love, laughter, and unending orgasms (as happened when the twenty-first century and I were young).
Vehicles in various stages of decay, all with horns blaring, are stuck in an unbroken line that no pedestrian, especially one in his eighties, could pierce. Some drivers manage to peel off onto side streets and join smaller traffic jams there. The others rely on their horns.
We’ve lost our glamour and primacy among cities. We’re said to have one foot in the Third World. But through all our trials I never met a New Yorker who didn’t believe that a traffic jam or anything else couldn’t be cured by leaning on a horn.
I’ve lived here before and after the Beast’s dictatorship, endured riots, hurricanes, and, not once but twice, the horror of burning towers.
That first time, falling towers were terrifying and we had seen nothing like them. The second fall was awful and we mourned the innocent. But it occurred in the time of the Horror and there was room for bitterness and cold amusement.
This morning I can’t help but notice an absence of cop cars, fire trucks, or ambulances. This could be a sign that something big is happening somewhere more important in the city—emergency services are stretched thin. More likely municipal government prefers not to notice what is going to occur.
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