“I asked the school about him,” my mother said, the tiny blades slicing cleanly. “He’s failing all but one of his subjects, and was suspended last year for carrying a weapon.”
It had been a knife. If I had been allowed to speak, I would have told her that it had been self defense and stupidity.
Instead, she said, “Truthfully, I think I should have someone start picking you up again.”
I wanted to shout at her, but she calmly picked up another carrot and I left, wordless.
It is not surprising, then, that I defied her without confrontation. I did it by not returning home the day of the screening. Instead, I went directly to Gregory’s house, and then to the city where the Focus meeting was being held. Rain stained the footpaths and buildings, and left an odd sheen on the cars that sat on the sides of the streets. These were different to the gasoline run vehicles that had been in Jersey years before. They were new and with rounded, sleek frames over electric powered engines.
Focus was in a studio apartment in a refurbished factory. The cage door of the lift opened smoothly when Gregory and I arrived to reveal ten people sitting on lounges and beanbags in a room painted dark blue. Mostly, they were white and male, but there were two Asian girls, both slim and wearing thick black glasses and who looked identically cold and distant to me. That coldness touched with frosted fingers on my opinion of everyone in the room and I felt out of place. The fact that they were at least four to five years older than me did not help. This feeling persisted until one of the white men—in designer jeans and a home-made red t-shirt with a picture of a yellow clown holding hand grenades—told me that he was Gregory’s brother and that everyone within the loft attended Engelman.
“Everyone gets lost in the images,” Gregory’s brother, Dan, said. He sat next to me after introducing himself, attempting, I thought at the time, to set me at ease. That was why I allowed his hand to touch gently on my leg as he talked. “We’re fed things we want through them, fed clothes, holidays, stories and images, all of them marked by their glamour and beauty. Then, when we see these big splashes of violence, it’s this harsh, other world, as removed from us as if it were on Mars itself. But often the violence and anger is never explained, never given context, never shown how it is influenced by our world. There is no focus.”
The feed he showed, however, did not reveal much more than what the mainstream media had. Of the two differences, the first was the Alrea infected men and women working to rebuild a house that had been damaged in a flood. They were thin, the virus eating away at their flesh in its trademark symptom, but otherwise, no one looked sick, and the Diseased men and women looked happy. The second difference in the video was that Baker Thomas’ face was not obscured, and that he, unlike the others with Alrea, looked healthy and well and very, very black. When I was asked what I thought after the interview was shown, I said it was interesting; mostly, however, I thought it empty, and that Dan and his friends were playing at being revolutionary in the same way that children play at being soldiers and pilots.
I did not realize how much of my life would be connected to him, nor did it occur to me to give Thomas Baker any more than the cursory thought I reserved for the entirety of the world’s madmen. I was far more interested in the fact that Gregory sat next to me; that he held my hand lightly; and later, as he walked me down the street to my mother’s house, we kissed. We stood in the street for half an hour, holding each other, talking in whispers and kissing until I finally told him that I did not want to go back home. A week later, I didn’t.
It was not surprising that my relationship with Gregory did not last long, but it was surprising that within nine months I was living in Dan’s studio apartment.
It was my mother’s death that began our relationship, and its unhealthy catalyst was apt for the nature of my love with him. I was told of her death by my uncle, who called a month after I had left. Grief lent it a roughness that I did not know: “She took a lot of pills.” We had not spoken since I had stabbed him. “Do you—do you have any idea what you did to her? What you tore from her?” Unable to endure my following silence, he slammed the phone down.
I pushed both Gregory and his parents away to deal with my immediate grief—I yelled and screamed wordlessly and cried—and so it was Dan who found me two days later, in the backyard of my mother’s house. I had not moved back in, but I needed to be alone, and had nowhere else to go after storming out of Gregory’s. I was, however, unable to enter my mother’s for any long period of time—I could see her, in my mind, curled up in pain and surrounded by vomit in the living room—so I had set up a small, faded red tent on the overgrown lawn. I slept in it surrounded by the wild, unkempt mix of purples and blues and greens of the garden my mother had taken so much pride in.
When Dan came to the house, he let himself into the backyard, and sat with me, made bad jokes when I had nothing to say, and gave me beer. Later, I slept with him.
The sex was clumsy and I cried after, but not because of Gregory. I cried because I was drunk, because I was confused, and because I was sorry.
“I had a class with your mother the first semester I was at Engelman,” Dan said, after I had finished crying. He had touched me, once, when the tears began, but after I shrugged him off he did not do so again. He sat naked and cross legged against the back of the tent, a cigarette paper in one hand while his second, his right, mixed tobacco and marijuana into it. “She was the first teacher I had there and she was so different to any other teacher I’d ever had. She challenged everything that I did. If I wrote an essay one way, she asked me why I didn’t do it another. If I wrote it differently, she asked me why I changed. When I told her that it was because she told me too, she asked me if I’d eat rat poison if she asked me to.”
“Was it her 20
th
Century Literature course?”
“Yeah.”
“She loved that course.”
“Yeah.” Dan’s hand touched my shoulder, held out the newly rolled smoke. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were Ms. Butler’s daughter earlier.”
The drugs were not new, but the reason I used them was. I told myself that I did not want to dull my feelings to the point that there was nothing to be felt over my mother’s death, but I failed at that, and my relationship with Dan became part of my usage. He became a way to dull the pain and after six months in his blue painted studio the drugs became a tool he could use against me. In hindsight, I realize that I trusted him too much, that you and I allowed him too much control, that we gave him too much of ourselves because we wanted not to be responsible for anything. Of course, it was not all negative, and the abuse was tempered, I argued, by the fact that he was my best friend, my love, and one of the few people that did not criticize me every time we met.
“You’ve become so thin.”
I waved my hand dismissively at Gregory when he said that.
“It’s true.” We were in a bookstore, and he was squatted down at the bottom of the shelves, rows of black and white spines pointed out to him. “I can almost see the light through you. When was the last time you ate?”
I left him there, but he called later. “I am not in need of saving,” I said angrily after I had picked up the phone. I had let it ring out six times before I snatched it off the table. “If you need to save someone, go to Africa. You could build pipes for fresh water. You could take them food. If you don’t like that, go to France and save the people who are homeless. Alrea has destroyed their infrastructure. If you don’t like Paris, go to New Orleans, Texas or even Mexico. The same thing is happening there and the people who are stuck inside need your help. The government has abandoned them. They’re not going to be given relocation papers. They will never have a life outside what they have. You’ve seen the army jeeps and soldiers in the city just like I have. It’s a different world! The borders are closed! Anyone born in a Diseased state will never be educated! Never watch international feeds! Never eat well—”
“Why are you shouting?” Dan’s voice. The metal gate was pushed up as he entered the studio, recently painted a sombre grey, a reflection of his mood when he looked out in the world, or so he said. “You’re going to have the neighbours complaining again.”
“I’m sorry.”
I disconnected the call.
“My brother?” He was wearing black pants and a grey shirt, his hair neat and cut and dyed a light blond; he worked as a psychologist now. “You know it upsets you when you talk to him.”
“I’m sorry.”
His hand touched my arm. “Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it to yourself.”
His grip was not tight, but it could be. It had been. The last time it was he was holding me down as I begged him for meth. He had not bought any for two weeks as a form of punishment. I didn’t have the money, as the last time I had bought my own after he had cut me off resulted in a furious search through the apartment for pipes and lighters and any debit or credit card that he could find. I had never replaced the last in a mix of apathy and a desire not to upset him, though it wasn’t uncommon for him to accuse me of some wrong doing. These things were often small, such as not cooking his food correctly, or being distant during a conversation with his friends in Focus, which was easy, given that I found them shallow and boring. But Dan had an image of what a woman should be like, and that was to be socially engaging and attractive, an object that allowed other men to envy him. In private, I was to be polite and obedient. When I was not these things, he withheld drugs and occasionally hurt me. It often ended with me begging for his forgiveness, more often than not in sexual forms. In the two years we had been together, I found myself involved in acts I would now find degrading. For Dan and my meth and heroin, however, I was submissive, and I allowed him to hurt me, to control me though it did not excite me at all. It excited him, however, and he had taken to finding increasingly minor reasons to punish me.
The final time, however, was different. It was three months after I had spoken to Gregory on the phone and we were at a party. Having smoked before, I was relaxed, easy going, and I flirted with one of Dan’s friends. It was nothing worth reacting over, and indeed, nothing he had reacted to before. Dan, however, exploded when we returned home, and demanded that I make it up to him. Rather than allow him to place the bonds around my arms and legs, I fought back, hitting him, and arguing. It was the first time I had done that and I still do not know what had changed in me to do so. There was simply a switch inside me, and his jealousy, his shouting, the way he wrapped his hands tightly around my wrists and threw me, finally flipped it. The following day I packed a bag after he went to work. It was an overnight bag, black, ordinary, and much too small to start a new life on. Yet, with a hungry, gnawing sensation in my stomach, I threw clothes into that bag and with what little money I could find in the loft, bought a bus ticket.
My ticket was to Jerome, Arizona, but the details were unimportant. I moved from foot to foot as I fed notes into the ticket machine, unable to keep still in the cold morning, and only interested in the first bus that I could get onto.
After thirty minutes of fidgeting, the bus arrived in a long, dull silver streak covered in dust and marked with bullet on the back half. The black metal shields had been lowered from the windows, however, to hide the last, and I should have taken this as a warning, but the implications were lost on me. I wanted only to walk down the street, find a dealer, and a quiet spot to smoke. But then that was no different to my daily life—over the last year I had barely acknowledged the rise of the military in cities, the number of Diseased within the country, and the new laws that had been put into place to detain anyone who looked suspicious. The most I could have told anyone about the state of the world was that the news feeds had increased their dramatic music and now used a lot of red and orange to describe the control of borders, neither of which you needed while you were finding that calm spot within yourself on the beanbag.
For the first few hours of the trip, the lack of that serenity played havoc with me. I found a seat near the toilet, the choice dictated by a sudden rush of paranoia concerning the return of my period. It would take another three weeks for any visible sign of that, but I was not prepared, and spent the first fifteen minutes trying to come up with ways to solve the issue while staring at the green vacant letters on the latch.
Outside, the city slid past the bullet proof glass in a grey collection of buildings inter spaced with khaki military green, yellow barriers, and billboards.
It was at the state checkpoint that I was first questioned.
I had slept, finally, huddled beneath my light coat, and it was the voice of the driver—a deep, base voice with an Indian accent—that woke me. He was telling us to provide identification, and tickets, and to warn us that we might be questioned and removed from the bus if the military thought it necessary. The words were a jumble inside my head as I blinked away the red light of the station from my eyes, my sleeping angle having put me right in direct line of it and the jeep making its way towards us. Two people, one female, one male, the latter with a dog, stepped from it.
I almost stood up in panic. I had to remind myself that I didn’t have anything in my bag, not even a pipe, and that the dog wouldn’t be interested in me. It didn’t help. When the pressure seal on the door lifted in a hiss and the two soldiers walked in, I dug my fingers into the seat and willed myself not to move. Both soldiers were white. The woman was the older of the two, stocky and solid, and when she removed her helmet, she revealed short, grey hair, and faded blue eyes. The younger, who was almost twice her height, was heavily freckled, and looked as if he had been made by pieces of twigs, to a point that they even coloured his eyes. He held the German Shepard on a tight leash as it sniffed and moved around the bus, oblivious of the people watching it.