Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (20 page)

What could keep a person going like that, I would never know, but then again, my life was going to end.  It was already coming to a close.  He had no such hope.  But what was I rambling about?  Should have been the other way around, shouldn’t it?  Heck, I didn’t know anymore.  I thought then that I had better get some sleep.  Ezra would be up bright and early and we had more things to go over.  

“
B
ut Miss Lori?”

“Yes, child?  What is it?”  I knew my little breakfast lecture was about to tumble down a very deep rabbit hole as it often did when I tried to make anything even close to a simple assertion.

“What
specifically
happens to the people who go against cycle?”

“Well, many things.  Sometimes a disease or a car accident, in a series of events so far removed from beginning to end, we can only trace a tiny portion of it.  And sometimes, it seems, by all accounts, people just
poof
and vanish.”

Ezra took a big bite from his pancakes and chomped on them in thought.  “Who gives it to them?”

“Gives what?”

“The disease.”

“Well, no one.”

I could tell Ezra was getting tired of being told about these inexplicable happenings.  He wanted something substantial, something he could chomp on.  “Then how come only the people who want to change things get diseases?”

“Other people get diseases too.”

“Has anyone ever
seen
a person disappear?”

“Ezra, there is only one sentiner for every three-hundred
thousand
souls in Gothica.  It’s not realistic for them to record everything that happens every day in every life.  And besides, the sentiners mostly agree that the strangest happenings in this city can only happen when you find yourself looking away from ‘em.  In fact, there are probably aspects of reality that even
we
take for granted, ones that run in currents much deeper than the murky surface the sentiner’s see.”

“It just sounds too easy.”

“
That
sounds too easy!  Explain this to me you little sesame seed, you.”

“It sounds too easy that you can’t change things.  You’re not even supposed to think about it.  If I was the king of Gothica, this is the story I would want everyone to believe.”

“Ezra, for four thousand years, the Sentiners tried to find the government doing something about dissidents.  Cynthecorp never had to.  They never even got the chance because the system of cycles they set up did it for them.  You might do well to remain skeptical about some things, but this is just a fact.”

“They used to tell us errand boys stories about the flooded areas.  They weren’t true… but the stories kept us from going there.”

Oh, sometimes that child made my blood boil.  But I remained good.  I said very calmly, “Maybe it’s time you started reading some sentiner files.”

“
M
iss Lori said I should talk to you about cycle,” I heard Ezra say to Miquel by virtue of my ear being pressed to the door.

“I assume you have questions then,” Miquel replied.

Silence.  Maybe
a nod or a frown like he did.

“What kinds, son?”

That word,
son
, sunk into me deep and I pulled back from the door.  Was that fair?  Was it ok for him to just bandy about a word so strong especially with the gender implication?  Ezra must have had something to think about it.  I pushed my ear back to the door again.

“Think of it this way,” Miquel said.
  “When you get sick with a cold, it is because a virus has gotten into your body.  It’s so miniscule compared to you that you can’t see it.  But your body still knows it’s there.  Other tiny parts of your body recognize the threat and fight back against it.  Your nose gets runny and your throat tickles, but that’s not something either your nose or your throat decided to do.  It’s all part of a big system – an immune system.  That is cyclic backlash.  It is the body of Gothica made up of all these tiny parts which, for the sake of the city, fight any perceived threats.”

Ezra mumbled something I couldn’t make out, something about the evil of cycle. 
Child,
I wanted to interrupt,
it isn’t evil.  It’s just the way of the world.  The only evil is in what we do.
 

“Well some viruses and diseases trick your body.  Different types of can
cer for instance, or AIDS.  AIDS actually turns your immune system against you, till you essentially kill yourself from the inside.”

Miquel!  He’s a baby!  He does
n’t need to know about that!  Least of all in
those
words!  Now he’s gonna wanna get into the evil of suffering.  Oh hush Lori!  Wait, what did he say?

“That is a big question, son.”

That word again.  This time I keep my ear pressed, staring at the edge of the door frame before me.

“
But it does seem to be the implication,” Miquel said to something I missed.

Then
something about Ezra asking if evil creates more evil.

Miquel shifted in his chair.  He was biggun and tough on old furniture. 
“It does pretty much rules out the possibility of a benevolent god.”

And then…
Don’t mumble, child.  How am I supposed to hear what you’re saying?

“Well that’s only if inaction is as culpable as action,” Miquel replied.

I’ll be damned if the little muffin wasn’t quoting me. 
There’s only evil in what we do,
I think I heard him say.

“That may be.  Perhaps you could talk to Miss Lori about that, she’s fond of saying the opposite as I’m sure you know.”

The opposite?

“Maybe she’d get us some tea, even.”

I looked to the side table next to the door at the tray of tea and croissants.  The melted butter had congealed in the ramekin.

I knocked on the door, opened it
an inch and picked up the tray with a jingle of porcelain.  I entered tush first and then set the tray down on the table between them.

“What are you to on about then?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Ezra quickly but softly.

“Oh, c
ome now, you can tell Mama Lori,” I said with a smile.  “Imparting some wisdom on this Young Turk, are we?”  I said to Ezra, nodding towards Miquel.

But Ezra shook his head, no.

“Well that’s fine, keep your secrets–”

“Evil is in what we
don’t
do.”

My belly quivered and I felt a burp surface.  I took a deep breath through a tight chest and nodded trying to seem unaffected.  “Well, carry on.”  I stepped out and stood with my back to the door.  I didn’t need to cry; just to compose myself.  What was I so upset about?  I
was would need a little more starch in my breeches if I was going to raise this defiant little one.  Why did his words affect me so?  I put my hand to my mouth and smelled the tea on my fingers and immediately after, wondered if that smell would become forever tainted with the feeling of disappointing my child. 

“
M
iss Lori?”

“Yes child?”

“Miquel sounds like he’s read one of the books you said no one but us has.”

“Oh?  Which one is that?”

“The one by Marx.”

“Oh child, careful saying those names out loud.  I told you those were books that came to us from long before the Anatheas’, or the Sentiners, or Gothica itself.  Those are very delicate things I let you read.  No one else can know about them, you hear?”

“So then why do some of Miquel’s reports have things from… that book?”

“Well child, when you start to counsel the sentiners, you get to know them very well, to hear about the things they leave out of their reports.  And so you sometimes steer them in certain directions, help them come to conclusions that they should rightly have come to on their own, if it weren’t for the crazy world we live in. 

“Of course some of that stuff, about half of…
that book
is rubbish and so you leave those parts out.  But some parts are thoughts so profound you can’t keep them to yourself.”

“But how is that different from sharing our knowledge with anyone?”

“Heavens; if you don’t ask the best head scratchers.  Let me see, now.  Well for starters, all the information in all these books?  It isn’t really in them at all.  It’s actually up there in the collective consciousness.  That’s how the catalogue system works.  We’re asking the consciousness a question, and it gives us an answer, usually something we already know but need to be reminded of.  And sometimes we find things we didn’t already know.  Forgotten things.  What we do when we
share
it with the sentiners is plant a seed in their noggins, and then they ask the consciousness themselves in their own way, usually not nearly as efficient as our bookstore mind you, but over time they get their answer. 

“
The point is, it’s they that pluck the idea out of the sky.  We just have to make sure only ever to steer sentiners towards things they can handle.  Do you understand?  Miquel would never act on the revolutionary ideas, but it helps him to formulate ideas about the fetishization of commodities and the commodification of capital.”

“How will I know what to steer them towards?”

“Oh that just comes with time and experience.  Never you mind it now.”

T
ime passed quickly and it seemed, at the time, that I was finally starting to get through to Ezra.  I knew in my heart that he hadn’t come to accept certain things I told him, but he had stopped questioning them.  No denying it, we lived in a bubble.  So there was nowhere else for him to turn for truth.  It was the only way he would come to accept things, and I did my darndest to present a strong case. 

But, like the best laid plans of mothers and pug dogs, it started to crumble when that cursed affliction gripped my child.  Puberty.  I curse the name.  The delicacy Ezra had in his gestures and words seemed like any child’s might when he was still a muffin, but as his
voice began to change and his body began to grow long and slender, shedding the baby weight I had packed onto him, there was little to hide his femininity.  Oh, and damn the world for making it thought such a thing ought to be hid!  It shouldn’t take an immortal lifetime for people to come to see we’re all different, and that that’s okay. 

I
should have known better than to let him watch television, especially GTV, but he convinced me – begged me – that it was part of his research and a way to understand a culture he would never be part of.  But like any adolescent, he couldn’t figure out the difference between the presentation and the truth (or lies) behind it.  The masks and the faces were one in the same for him.  I couldn’t imagine trying to live up to the reality show or sitcom as he felt he needed to.  How fabricated, how overly dramatized, how pathetic!  But of course, it was too easy to blame the television.  Instead, I suddenly found myself outraged at those damn middle class parents.  Spines made of jelly, the lot of them!

One day while washing dishes at the window I heard a woman on the sidewalk tell her son not to hit his younger brother.  She said, “If you do that one more time…” And by this point the boy was old enough to know this routine.  So, looking defiantly up at her, the boy hauled off and walloped his little brother.  “What did I say?” she asked him, little more than perturbed.  “If you do that one more time...”  And to the world’s shock and horror, lo and behold, the little brat did it again.  “Hey, mister,” she said more sternly.  “If you do that one more time…”

Well this went on two more times before I shouted angrily out the window.  “You’ll do what?  Repeat yourself?”  I hadn’t meant to say that at all – just to think it.  And what’s more, I had thrown my hands down into the soapy water and splashed bubbles across my indignant grimace.  Before the woman could look around and see me, I ducked down on the kitchen floor, mortified.  Pumpkin ducked down too and we couldn’t help but giggle.

It wasn’t the woman, it was what she represented, the children she raised.  An entire middle class convinced it was royalty.  The kind of child to bully but be dumbstruck as the bullied.  They grew up into someone who couldn’t be bothered to pull over for an ambulance to get by.  And consequences?  Heavens, they couldn’t make hide no hair of it.  It was like watching a grown person stand shocked at the presence of gravity time and time again!  Not to mention their unshakable sense of entitlement.  Gothica: “
me first!”
should have been the city’s slogan.  I would get so worked up.  It had never bothered me before, but now Ezra thought that these little brats were the ones he needed to emulate.  It was the swan imitating the slug.  And not only did the slug just think the world of itself, but convinced the swan of its shortcomings!  Ooh it just wrung my towel!

As much as he was sheltered from the conforming forces of middle and high school, its dripping tentacles still wormed their way into his mind through that damned TV.  No wonder he caught the self-loathing fever, what with all that dung spewing out of it.  I unplugged the cursed thing early on, but the damage had already been done.