Brave New Worlds Part 33

Independence Day.

by Sarah Langan.

Sarah Langan is a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. She is the author the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and Audrey's Door. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Lightspeed, Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies The Living Dead 2, Darkness on the Edge and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father's Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet.

If you listen closely to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," you'll hear real pain beneath the slick guitar solos. The song is a lament for an America where ordinary people mattered and their vote made a difference in the direction of the nation. It was a song written in response to the Vietnam War, and the squawking nationalism that swept the U. S. after the Bicentennial.

But it's the Tricentennial that our next story examines. Polluted and terrorized, somehow America is just as frantically patriotic as it was when the Boss wrote his cla.s.sic song-and the feeling is twice as empty. Langan says of her piece: "I was working on an homage to Springsteen. I couldn't decide on a particular song, and decided instead on what I thought was the essence of Springsteen; standing up, and fighting for what you believe in a screwed-up world. "

The waiting room is shiny and bright, but the people inside it are dirty. Trina tries not to stare but she can't help herself; she can tell just by looking that a few are addicts trying to score a fix. One lady's wearing a black garbage bag instead of clothes.

Trina waits her turn with her dad, Ramesh. He won't be seeing the doctor today. He's never seen the doctor. He says he's not sick, but he's lying. He coughs all the time, and in the mornings she's seen him spit blood and phlegm into the bathroom sink. Last month, the Committee for Ethical Media installed a television camera in their kitchen because he submitted an unapproved audio to the news opera "Environmental Health. " Instead of running it under a pseudonym like he'd wanted, the editors called the cops. Now the whole family is under house surveillance. Anybody who wants can flip to channel 9. 53256 can see her lard-congealed breakfast table, and the weird foam curlers her mother keeps forgetting to take out of her hair in the morning. Her whole eighth grade cla.s.s knows that Ramesh's pet name for her is Giggles, and that they can't afford fresh milk. Only one-day soured from the bodega on 78th Street. It's humiliating, and so is he.

While they wait, he puts his hand on the back of her neck and squeezes the skin surrounding her port like he's trying to pull it out. He doesn't understand, even though eighteen Patriot Day channels repeat it day-in and day-out: You can't stop progress!

Trina rubs her bruised cheek and glares at Ramesh. He sighs and lets go of her port. It's a victory, but it doesn't make her happy; it only stirs the p.i.s.s and vinegar stew in her stomach.

She's carrying the list in the pocket of her spandex jeans. Each visit, her dad makes her write down her complaints before they leave the house, and then goes over them with her. He tells her that he wants to be sure she says the right things so she doesn't get in trouble. But the truth is, he doesn't give c.r.a.p about her. He's just protecting his own sorry a.s.s.

He got drunk last night at dinner. Her mom, Drea, accidentally took too many vitamins and nodded off at the table. Trina pretended she was a duck, and let it roll off her back. Quack, fricking quack. At least dinner was ready. Peanut b.u.t.ter and Fluff: the ambrosia of champions. But after a few drinks, Ramesh got The look. He started talking through his teeth like a growling dog: "they're pushing me out. Looking over my shoulders all the time. Even the janitors. Cameras everywhere. A man can't work like that. "

He rubbed his temples while he talked like his thoughts were hurting him, and Trina tried to be sympathetic, but she'd heard this song before. Every time he got drunk, it was the same. Meanwhile, cameras were recording his every word, and where would they live if he got fired? Worse, what if that blood in the sink turned out to be cancer, and in a week or a month from now, he was dead?

In the corner, the television was set to "Entertainment this Second!" Drea pretended to be interested in what Ramesh was saying, but she was looking past him, at the show.

"Those f.u.c.kers are killing my work!" Ramesh shouted while banging his fist against the table like a gavel. Everything jumped-even his stinking vodka bottle. The salt shaker rolled into her lap. She was scared to call attention to herself by putting it back, so in her lap it stayed. Her little friend, salty. She and salty, against the world.

She hated salty, all of a sudden, because his sides were all greasy with thumbprint sc.u.m. She hated her dad, for ruining dinner. She hated their c.r.a.ppy apartment, and the kids at school who called her pink lung. Mostly, she hated the way Ramesh shouted, because Drea was so out of it, Drea had checked out months ago. It was Trina he was yelling at. I can't fix your problems. I'm thirteen years old, remember? she wanted to say.

But she didn't. It would be too hard to explain. The salt spilled like bad luck, and she let the shaker drop from her lap. It rolled under the table. "f.u.c.k you, you f.u.c.king no good drunk," she grumbled under her breath, only the words got away from her. They rushed from her chest, and then burst into a holler that practically echoed inside the kitchen. She spun at her mother, to make sure it wasn't Drea who'd spoken. But Drea's earpods were inserted. On the television, beauty queens in bathing suits wrestled in a pool of mud for the t.i.tle of "hottest b.i.t.c.h. "

Had she really just said f.u.c.k you To her own father? She was already blushing from shame when she felt the blow. It came while her head was turned. Her dad, a dirty fighter. Another reason to hate him. At least it was his open palm and not his fist that tore across her face and knocked her out of her chair.

She lay stunned on the floor. From the table, Drea shook her head, "Don't fight, babies. It's beneath you," she said, but she might have been talking to the mud-slingers.

Trina's face broke like gla.s.s. Her lips pulled wide, ready to explode into the worst crying jag of her life, so she squeezed her fists so tight her fingernails pierced her skin, and tried to stay calm. Ramesh was kneeling next to her. His long limbs wobbled drunkenly until he gave up kneeling, and sat down. She flinched as he ran the plastic Smirnov bottle along her swelling cheek. It was so cold it got stuck and pulled her skin. "Let me see. Hold still," he told her.

"You're a terrorist," she sobbed. "that's why they want to get you fired. A dirty Indian terrorist," she said, even though she was half Indian, too.

"Shh," he said. "I'm sorry. That was unforgivable. I'll never do it again. " He was still holding the bottle against her skin. He smelled like mice and formaldehyde, and though he wasn't supposed to, he'd worn his white lab coat home from the office. It made him feel important, because he could tell people he was a doctor, too.

Trina tried to stop crying, but she couldn't. She pushed the bottle away and hid her face between her knees. It was dark in there, and she wanted to come out and let him hold her, but she hated him so much.

"I'm so sorry," Ramesh crooned. His long limbs didn't quite fit under the table, so he was hunched like a man in a dollhouse. The air was warmer, because they were both breathing fast in a small s.p.a.ce.

"I mean it, I'm reporting you," she blubbered. He didn't answer that. Probably too shocked. It was the meanest thing she could think to say. Then she got up and locked herself in her room. She didn't come out until morning, when it was time to go to the doctor.

Now, a nurse holding a Styrofoam clipboard calls her name: "Trina?" She's wearing neon orange short-shorts and a belly ring. All the smart nurses dress in tight clothes. That way they get better tips. "Trina Narayan?" she asks again.

Her dad nods at her very slowly, like he's trying to impart one last tacit bit of advice. He thinks he's a genius or something, but if he'd taken a real job with the Defense Department when the last war started instead of staying in the toxicology lab at New York University, they'd be rich. Instead, his funding got cut, so they had to move from their pretty house in Westchester to a two-bedroom stink-hole with wall-to-wall s.h.a.g carpet in Jackson Heights, Queens. Now she goes to a school where kids ignite cherry bombs in homeroom, and her only friend is semi-r.e.t.a.r.ded, which is better than the rest of the kids, who are completely r.e.t.a.r.ded.

She touches her bruised cheek for courage. It still stings. "Don't tell," Ramesh mouths so that only she can see. He's so scared that his eyes are bulging. A bug-eyed coward. He's not a real man, her father.

She smiles in a way that is not meant to rea.s.sure. Her lips are closed, tight and angry, and she silently tells him her answer. The blood drains from his face as she walks away.

The examining room is empty. A bright light shines from the corner and she squints. Most people her age only require one visit, then tune-ups every ten years. You're not allowed treatment more than once a month or you become a vegetable. Still, some people invent false ident.i.ties and sneak. They wind up wandering the streets and begging for food because they can't remember their names, or where they live.

Problem is, the treatment never works on her. Every time the doctor cuts out the bad stuff, it grows back like a tumor. Her dad tells her it'll right itself on its own, but he doesn't know s.h.i.t. First sign the bad stuff is back, Trina doesn't gather moss. She calls the doctor. The best part is, no matter how much paperwork Ramesh fills out to cancel her appointments, he never gets it done in time. It's fun to watch him run around, like a wind-up toy, when she knows that no matter how hard he works, he'll never get anywhere.

The examining room is pink and round like a womb. She's wearing a short-sleeved jumper so she won't have to undress. The needles are plastic, which makes them cheaper, but not as sharp. She has to shove the small one really hard to get it into a vein. Blood squirts. She puts the second needle inside the port in the back of her neck and twists its metal ring until it locks into place. Some people do it standing, but she likes to lie on the cool metal table. Makes the whole thing floaty, like a dream.

The doctor is a five-foot wide metal box in the curved corner of the room. It's attached to the needles, and her, by worn plastic tubes that over time have turned pink from other peoples' blood.

The doctor has a Cyclops-like eye in the center of his face. It lights up white, and then red. The needle jabs through her neck and into her skull. Her skull is especially big, so she had to get her port adjusted at a shop in the mall. The sales lady broke off a piece of her skull and replaced it with hinged plastic that she has to swipe with rubbing alcohol every night so it doesn't get infected.

The light flicks from red to green. The machine starts to purr. She holds her breath. This is her fourth time with the doctor, and it is always this moment that feels most wrong. The needles have warmed to the temperature of her blood, but they are still foreign objects; they don't belong inside her skin. Neither does this port that has left her gray matter vulnerable. There are people, mostly the old and young, who experience drip. Their spinal fluid leaks, and they become paralyzed. She wants to rip out the port. She wants to pull out the needles and break them. She wants her booze-hound daddy. Mostly, she wants to run.

But then the doctor doles his medicine. It travels, colder than her blood, but tingly. First her elbow, then her shoulder, her back, and finally, all the places that are just beginning to get tender. It feels like the boys she wishes would touch her. Like laughing so hard her stomach hurt back in Westchester, when life was easy and she was Giggles. Like her mother's embrace. Like love. It feels just like love.

Begin, a recorded female voice announces over the loudspeaker. Its mechanical quality rea.s.sures her. This is too intimate for human witnesses. Too special. Oh, how she loves the doctor.

She pulls the wad of paper from her spandex jeans and starts: "I'm afraid for Lulu. " She always begins with this one, but so far every time they excise it, the worry grows back. ". . . In school they say that early cultures believed in this thing called a soul. It scares me. I don't know why. Like we've all got these ghosts that live inside us. Like I'm haunted by my own ghost. "

Continue, the voice tells her. Its soft voice travels through the tubes so that her port vibrates.

"The actors in the movies-it doesn't make any sense that they look so different from the people I know. They're so pale and thin-they never have mechanical lungs. . . I hate the way I look. I wish I could cut myself into little pieces. I wish I was pretty. . . "

The tube in her arm is getting backflow. Red blood mixes with morphine, pink and pretty like all girls should be. Except she's brown and pudgy.

"I got so mad last week I bit my hand. You can still see the teeth-marks. They're smaller than you'd think. Looks like baby teeth, so I told everyone at school it was a neighbor's little kid. Well, actually, n.o.body asked. But if they did, that's what I'd tell them. "

She looks at her list. The rest are the items that her father invented: You don't like sour milk; You want to devote your life to your country. You're so excited about Patriot Day that you can't sleep. Then he added, like it was an afterthought, but she knew it wasn't: You want to be popular but you don't fit in. You don't understand that you're special. Your worries are a gift. She'd felt her face flush when he said that, because suddenly the gig was up, and they both knew that n.o.body at PS 30 thought she was cool.

She decides she'll say the honest one. Maybe it'll stop being true, once she says it. Maybe the doctor is magic. "I'm not pop-" she starts, and then stops, because if she says the words, her father will be right. Because that smack had been so unexpected, and undeserved. Because every day for as long as she can remember, things have been worse than the day before, which is how she knows that last night wasn't a fluke. He might be sorry for it, but next time he gets drunk, he'll hit her again.

The morphine has wound all over her, like amniotic fluid. It feels so good, and safe. The doctor will know what to do. She crinkles the paper into a ball, and for the first time, tells the doctor what's on her mind. "I'm so sad. . . . My mom doesn't take pills because she wants to be happy. She just wants to be numb. I'd take pills if they made me numb, but they don't. "

She sniffles, and bites her lip hard until she's sure she won't cry. She'd like the doctor to take everything this time. She'd like to be so empty that she doesn't remember how to breathe.

The machine starts clicking and humming. She gets nervous. Was she wrong to say that pills don't work?

Continue, the voice tells her.

The thing she really wants to say sits on her tongue like a sliver of reconst.i.tuted nectarine. She bites down, and lets its juice run down her chin. This is not her problem. She is not accountable. He has done this to her. Her father. The doctor, too.

"I hate my father. He drinks. He hit me last night. " She notices, dully, that her voice now echoes. I'm being recorded, she thinks, and then: Good. Now he'll really get in trouble.

"He makes us wear air filters in our chests, even though the EPA says we don't need them. He fills the apartment with them, too. He says he's working on safe cigarettes at the lab, but really he's testing metal dust on mice again. He says it's the debris from the bombs that's killing us. All those falling buildings. He's going to move us to Canada because they're granting amnesty-I heard him talking. He wants to get out before the mandatory ports go into effect. "

As she talks, the drug warms her. She's almost sleeping. Sweet, thick dreams. She will be sick from this for days. But for now it is so good. Continue, the voice says, but she doesn't have anything else to say.

"That's all. "

Continue.

She tries to make something up, but her thoughts scatter. She licks them like gossamer spider's webs, but can't collect them into coherent strands. They bundle and knot in all the wrong ways. "I have no soul to haunt me," she says, because it rea.s.sures her to think this.

Then the pull. This is her least, and most, favorite part. She closes her eyes, and starts floating. Warmth radiates from the port in her neck. She doesn't feel it. There are no nerves up there. Just pulp and grey matter. Heat in tiny lasers breaks the synapses, until all those bad thoughts disappear. Memories fade, and are gone. First Lulu, then school, then the pills, then her father, then her soul. She can't remember them anymore.

When the stream ends, she nods off. In her dream a little person lives inside of her, and that person is so angry she's eating her own fingers until all that is left is a pair of opposable thumbs. She holds them up, b.l.o.o.d.y and ragged as the coast of a beach.

The table jiggles as it rescinds. She falls to the floor. The needle in her arm tears her skin on its way out. Blood squirts. The needle in her port, still attached, yanks her head back. "Cripes on a cross!" she mumbles, then with an eye half-open, looks at her watch: 11:15. She's been sleeping for two hours. A personal best. She twists the tube from her port, and starts out just as the sprinklers and ammonia pour from the ceiling, to clean the room for another patient.

Except for the headache that longs for more morphine, she's as light as air when she opens the door to the waiting room. The world is like a flat desert, and she sees nothing for miles. Wings, sparkly and slender as silk threads, are attached to her back; they'll fly her away.

In the waiting room, her father is sitting next to the woman wearing the garbage bag. The woman is really fat, so maybe it's a contractor bag. You could roll her, Trina thinks, and then she giggles. The doctor has made her so happy!

Her dad stands to greet her. He's tall, dark, and skinny. Long, long ago, her mother used to call him beanpole: My funny beanpole, I could grow c.u.mquats off your arms. My funny beanpole, bend down a few stories, and give me a kiss. Two years ago, the apartment got so hot that he filled the tub with ice water, and they all took turns snorkeling for rubber duckies in their bathing suits.

He's frowning like he's worried, and suddenly her stomach turns. Something is wrong. What could it be? She knows, even though she can't remember. She did something bad.

Her temples throb. She cradles her head like she's wounded, because she wants him to know that she's hurting. There's a bruise on her cheek, but she doesn't know how she got it. "Daddy," she says, and she doesn't know why, but she's crying.

It smells like metal out; another explosion in midtown. They walk with their shirtsleeves over their noses to the car. His legs scrunch in the seat, and he has to bend into the steering wheel.

She thinks maybe he's going to hit her, which is stupid, because he's never once hit her in her life. But he only raises his hand to make sure her sleeve stays over her nose. He holds it there, so she doesn't have to talk for a long while. He takes care of her, which, come to think of it, he's always done. After a long while, he takes his hand away, so she raises her own hand to keep her shirt in place. Out the window, ashes fall like rain. If you think of them as black dandelion wishes, they're almost pretty.

She was mad at him, she realizes, so she told the doctor something very bad. Now he's is in trouble. To keep from sobbing, she puts the heel of her hand in her mouth and bites down. "I'm sorry. I told," she whispers through a mouthful of bone.

He closes his eyes for just a second. "Remember me," he says.

In her mind, a bomb explodes where she sits. Its fire swallows her, and her father, and the car, and the doctor, and her apartment in Queens, and her city, and her country, and the whole world. All ashes, falling down.

He's not yet gone, but already she remembers something as if she is reminiscing at his funeral: before the war, her dad never drank.

"Where do they go?" Trina asks her best friend Lulu the next day at lunch. They're on line in the school cafeteria. She can't remember what she said to the doctor, except it feels queasy, like spoilt milk. It feels gnawing, like missing fingers.

"Where does what go?" Lulu asks. She's got a voice like Darth Vader because her mechanical lung needs a tune-up. When Trina's feeling left out, she takes tiny breaths like hiccoughs until she feels loopy, because Lulu says that having a mechanical lung is like being high on nitrous all the time.

"Where do our thoughts go after we visit the doctor?" Trina asks. In her mind, doctors across the country collect the worries into a giant vat. They're extracted one at a time by the people in charge, who best know what to do with them. Why should the whole world worry, when you can give the job to a select few?

"That's stupid!" Lulu giggles. " there are no problems! that's why we go to the doctor. To get adjusted. It's a throwback from early evolution. Our species worries even when nothing is wrong. " It's a line from a commercial for the doctor that Lulu's quoting but Trina knows better than to argue, so instead she shrugs.

Lulu scoops up a ladleful of lard-fried iceberg lettuce onto her Styrofoam tray. She used to be one of the pretty girls, but over the last few years, she's gotten fat and dim-witted. Trina caught her on the way down.

Trina bypa.s.ses the lettuce for a vitamin-fortified fluff sandwich, and they sit in the back of the cafeteria by themselves because, except for each other, they don't have any friends.

There are about twenty television screens all set to the same program, "Brick Jensen's Health Challenge. " they hang from hooks in the ceiling and descend to eye level at the middle of every table. Lulu is fascinated. Brick Jensen, also known as Mr. Fit, is explaining that five minutes of exercise each day is enough to keep in shape, so long as you do it correctly. You can squeeze your b.u.t.t while standing, for example, and do three sets of mechanical lung lunges. For perfect arms, you hold your backpack over your head.

The show is interrupted by Mr. Mulrooney, the school princ.i.p.al. He's got a tiny black moustache, so everybody calls him Hitler. The moustache is pencil thin, though. So maybe it's Gay Hitler. Eccentric Hitler. Hitler Lite.

"Two days until Patriot Day!" he announces; a small man trapped inside twenty small screens. It'll be July 4, 2076. The 300th anniversary of the Great Emanc.i.p.ation. "Remember to wear your school colors," Hitler Lite adds.

"If they weren't maroon and orange, maybe," Lulu mumbles. Her wilted lettuce looks like green p.o.o.p, but she keeps eating it, like she's punishing herself for getting ugly.

"If everybody wears maroon and orange I'll go blind," Trina adds. "Seriously. It's a health concern. I'll get dizzy and puke and go blind, not necessarily in that order. " Lulu is wheezing, so Trina punches her backpack until the battery starts humming. She's done this enough times that it no longer requires acknowledgment. They're best friends, and that's what friends are for.

"For those of you without ports, remember to bring your insurance cards. " Hitler says. "And if you've got private insurance. . . . Well," he smiles tightly, "n.o.body here has private insurance. "

Patriot Day is the same day that the law goes into effect, and everybody who can't afford a private doctor has to get a port. She used to be really happy about that. What progress: adjustments for the ma.s.ses! Better yet, poppies for the ma.s.ses! But that means her dad will have to get a port and she knows he doesn't want one. Her stomach feels hollowed out again. Like somebody scooped away her insides with a metal frozen yogurt spoon. She thinks about the Cyclops eye, the list she crinkled into a ball instead of reading. And the morphine. She thinks about that, too, because she misses it already.

Hitler makes a final announcement. He's the third princ.i.p.al in two years. They keep getting fired for embezzlement. The last guy partnered with Milk of Magnesia, so everybody got free laxatives after lunch. The bathrooms stank, but at least the school colors were blue. She liked that a lot better than Hitler's pick: who wants free Tang? Everybody knows that trip to the moon was a hoax.

"Ozone levels are too high. No after school sports today," Hitler says before signing off.

"Bees knees, s.h.i.t up a tree!" Trina moans. Unless it's video games, sports are for lesbians and stupid people. Everybody knows that. It's the running joke on the show everybody's watching lately: "Will Brick Jensen Get Laid?!?!" People keep remaking it with their own video cameras, and posting it on their personal television channels. It's the joke that won't die. It's pulling its decaying corpse down the hall with its thumbs. Still, she loves Track, and the weather's only been nice enough once this season.

Because of her natural lungs, Trina is really good at running. She even laps the boys. It's showing off, but she can't help it. She loves to run. When you go fast and long enough, it's like being high, only better. It's like living, only good.

Most people in this neighborhood get the operation by the time they hit grade school. Stores all over the mall take out your bronchi, and replace them with plastic tubes. That way you never cough when the bombed buildings fall. But so far, Trina doesn't need the surgery. Thanks to her dad and the time she spent in Westchester, her lungs are clean. Even if it makes you popular, fake lungs look like a bad idea. Sure, you won't get cancer, but what happens when they rot? Still, she's an outcast at this school. When she volunteers in cla.s.s, she doesn't pant like the rest of them if she says more than a sentence. She doesn't need to shoot insulin in the girls' room, either. Sometimes she brings a needle anyway, and fills it with salt.w.a.ter.

"Sports are for lesbians and stupid people," Lulu wheezes.

Trina frowns. It's coming back to her, the stuff that got excised. She wishes it would go away. She wishes she was like everybody else, and nothing ever bothered her, but instead she's crazy like her dad. Ignoring Lulu's comment, she asks, "Do you think the doctor helps people? that it's good to forget?"

Lulu shrugs. "I wouldn't know. I don't have any problems. " then she adds, "I'm feeling much better than yesterday. "

Trina sighs. Lulu always says she's feeling better, but she coughs more and more. It's not just the battery that's low. The tubes are clogged with pus.

The gnawing inside her hurts like a morphine headache. In her mind, a girl is chewing her hands into rags. "Maybe it's all a lie," Trina says. "And we can't figure it out because the doctor makes us stupid. "

Lulu's jaw drops. She looks around, because they both know that Trina said a very bad thing. Something so bad that if Lulu reported it, the Committee for Ethical Media would take her away to a re-education center, where the kids get stuck cleaning rubble and bodies.

They look at each other for a while, and finally Lulu smiles like a phony. "You pink lung!" she teases. Only, she's not kidding, and for the first time in the three years that they've been best friends, Trina is on the outside, looking in.

The door is open to the apartment when she gets home, which is new. "Where's dad?" she asks.

Drea is watching three different programs on the television while instant chatting with her friend next door. Trina wishes she'd inherited Drea's white skin and blue eyes, but no dice. She's brown like a terrorist instead.

In big letters in the corner of the screen Trina sees: "Sports are for thesbians and flaccid people!" "Brick Jenson gets me wet!" "Sour milk=de-lite-FULL. " On a side bar are all the quips she wrote, but doesn't plan to send because, unless she dumbs it down, n.o.body ever knows what she's talking about: "These ashes are our loon's call; mad and maudlin. " "Remember, my love, it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. " "the womb grows like a widening gyre, and even our best suckle its poison. "

Drea was a poet-in-residence at NYU when she met Ramesh at a faculty dinner. As his pick-up line, he told her that the written word was dead. Even then, he compulsively p.i.s.sed people off. Trina's the same way. She never intends to offend anybody; stuff just bursts out of her mouth. Half the time, she doesn't even realize she's thinking it.

But instead of getting mad, Drea agreed. "Yeah, books are dead," she said. "So what does that make me for writing poems? Better yet, what does that make you?"