avant god

Welcome, welcome. Come in. I know what you want…

You are lucky to find me here, still alive after all these years. I rarely get visitors anymore. Come closer, sit down. I don’t bite.

Let's see, my last visitor stopped by two years ago, a young girl I recall. Lovely. She stayed for lunch; I've never seen her since... She said I was a real, live monster. She was writing a term paper or something, I think...

Did you know I was on the cover of Rolling Jones magazine six times? Mother Stoned twice. Look at me now, The Beast. It's unfair--I never killed anyone, certainly not the President. Rape? Incest? Cannibalism even...

Have a cookie, I made then myself. The cover of Rolling Jones... and look at me now! I can whistle through my cheeks!

I was young once, handsome even. Look at me, I'm no monster, I spin no webs. I only tell the truth these days. It's all I have left. This "depravity" of mine is a cruel mask, the last, most permanent illusion in a long line of masquerades I have been forced to play. You know me from the press, the fan magazines, the art reviews, history. And how am I remembered? The son of darkness.

There is nothing visible left of the real Maynard Ix inside. Even dogs run away from me. I was just a country boy at first. All I ever wanted was the truth. They took everything away from me, everything but the truth, and now no one cares. History has made up its mind. But you, you came here to visit me, you remember. Thank you.

Yes, I can tell you what really happened--why the President was really assassinated. I can tell you the truth, but the truth will not leave you unharmed. To see the light you need to see the darkness, there can be no light without darkness--they need one another.

Listen.

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My first memory in life is of the day I left Red Hook, when I was ten. I remember my father that morning, looking down on him from my window as he stooped, scraping dirt in the front yard, wearing his gray shirt and brown pants, moving painfully slow, as if half dead under the Westphalian dawn. He lived farming, worked farming, ate farming, slept farming, dreamt farming, fingers furiously grubbing in the dirt, stooped back awash with sweat, hammering, hauling, plowing, sowing, husbanding and butchering as if our lives depended on it. He lived in the fields with his beloved grazers. I watched him from my bedroom window, moving about down there before dawn, stooping among his bleating children, sprinkling meal for their finger lips. The grazers never looked up from dust around his feet as he flicked fodder, gray hair, flapping ears, brown creased neck, never once did they glance up to see from whom their manna fell. He never expected them to. He never looked up at me.

My parents were dedicated farmers, their convictions ironclad. They thought with farmer mentalities, living off the land, managing their offspring and their animals with the same pragmatic necessity, not because they were farmers; they were survivors. I was their boy, the secret miracle of barren Westphalia, drawing in the dirt, dreaming up playmates, making toys with grazer skeletons under the Red Hook sun. Father feared the skeletons. He never told me why, but I knew. They were the bleached monuments to his fate, bleak suggestion of our prospects.

That was forty-two years ago, here in Red Hook. Yes, I was actually born here in the AZ. The only human ever born in this low, flat, hostile land stretching golden in its nakedness of scrub brush and thistle. They blamed the industrialists and the conservatives for this waste, then exiled them here to live in it. Nothing larger than rabbits and snakes are stupid enough to live out here,other than us and our sheep. This is our prison, picked for us for its barrenness, to ensure the Sentence of Sterility. All sterile but my father and mother.

I rose in the cool dim of my room and dressed quickly. I had to be down and fed by first light so I could feed the chickens. There would be food for me only if I worked. When I came down to feed, I expected the kitchen to be empty; as soon as I could feed myself, I ate alone. That morning I came down to a mild surprise. Mother sat waiting for me at the table. She hadn't eaten with me in years. She pulled out a chair for me to sit next to her; I came over reluctantly. I was afraid, for she made my favorite breakfast, axolotl offal omelet, with bacon and coffee. Touching my face, resting her hand on my thigh, stroking my neck, all the while her face pale and devoid of expression, she watched me eat in silence. All that touching made it hard to eat. She said sad things; I remember little behind the pale blankness of her face uttering distant, murky sounds, the faint murmuring of the dead. She said one thing that stayed with me. I lifted a piece of bacon to my mouth, and she said it.

“Bright eyes. Watch out for the Big Kahoona.”

“What's a Big Kahoona?”

She smiled. “He's everywhere.” For most of my life I didn't remember anything else about my mother other than this: the corners of her mouth always drooped, and when she smiled she exposed wide, yellow teeth. “Go find your dad.”

He was easy to find. I came running around the corner of the house. When I saw him, he stood, turning his face towards me. The dry air tossed his gray hair across his blank forehead, casting shadows across his vacant face, smooth and featureless.

“Daddy, tell me a story,” I called, running down the embankment, arms outstretched. He wiped the dust from his hands, crouching to one knee. I ran up and climbed on. He looked down, his wide ears spread out side to side along his head, his face bare and blank as a gelding's backside.

“A story! Sure,” he said, his voice sad and slow, rumbling from the gray blankness of his face. “How about 'The Spider and the Fly.'“ My favorite little story. He lifted me in his arms and carried me over to the hog trough, adjusting me to hear. I looked deep into his blankness, his deep voice coming deeper from a great nothingness all over the front of his head.

He looked up from his story, off to the East. A noise was coming. I heard it too, low and rude. “Go get your ma,” he said, standing slowly, letting me drop to the ground. And just as he stood, a long yellow truck pulled up in front of the house. I ran around to the kitchen and found mother, looking out at the yellow truck.

I was surprised. This was the first time I ever saw a long yellow truck like that, or any car, for that matter. Mother wasn't surprised. She stood still in the doorway, watching, and when I came up she let me stand behind her. I peeked around her through the door as a tall man in black stepped from the cab, clipboard in hand. He stood in the front yard, not coming to the front door, waiting to be noticed. We were all perched there, on the edge of a great difference.

Mother finally pushed me back into the house and stepped into the morning heat. The man in black raised his clipboard and pronounced my name. Maynard Ix. I was shocked. Who in the universe would know me? I was just a little nobody, a baby fly. Mother stood there for a very long time, staring at the man. He stood there staring at her. Finally, she turned to me. “Go pack some clothes in your satchel, boy. You're going to the Public Trust.” I turned and went to my room. I knew that tone; there was no argument.

When I came back down, father was there with the man. They were speaking angrily, nearly whispering. Father never got angry. They saw I was there and father turned. I saw him then, for the last time. His head sat crooked on his leathery neck, ears sticking way out, hair sandy and gray, his face a slab of tanned meat, not even wrinkled or creased. He got down on his knee and took me by the shoulders. His hands smelled like feet. All the noises that came out of his blankness were garbled, meaningless. I couldn't take my eyes off the slab where his face used to be. His breath was bitter, fecal, but I couldn't see where it was coming from. It was just a smell he had. Then, he said the last thing he would say to me for nearly thirty years.

“Maynard. If you fail, the world will not care.”

“What?”

“Why doesn't matter, boy. Remember, pause long enough to understand the things you believe.”

Before I could respond, the man in black reached around him and took me by the arm, pulling me away, as if being too close to my father would burn or scar me. He shoved me up in the long truck. I ran down to the end, to a window overlooking my father as the man in black talked to him.

“Somehow we missed you, Ix,” he said. “We'll get you fixed right away. This won't happen again.”

My father said something, mean and low, and the man in black struck him, right across the head. My father fell to the ground, then dragged himself tiredly back up. “Jackass!” the man in black shouted. “You're a nothing now. Powerless. We should have killed you when we had the chance.”

He climbed into the truck, pulling the door shut. The truck lurched forward. I sat in the last seat, looking back at the farm. The truck kicked up a whirl of dust that consumed my parents, standing there watching, growing smaller and smaller. Just before they disappeared, I saw mother wander back into the house, wiping her hands on her dress. My father raised his hand, never moving from that spot. And so I was off to my first day in grade school.

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The truck bounced across the Western Province for days until it finally rattled into the lush, green Capital, New Gaia. Once we entered Fornicalia, the truck started to fill with other kids. As we approached the Capital, we all clamored to the windows to watch the city creep by. It was the first time I saw the city that would be my home. The monuments were victorious, huge, gleaming white. They were nothing like my little piles of grazer bones. They had wonderful names to them, which the FA bellowed out to us from his driver's seat. Names like: The Silurian Monument! A great, domed obelisk covered with fur. The Cretaceous Arch! A graceful stone archway looming over the street. The Ordovician Plaza! A long, crowded boulevard stretching for miles, lined with rows of statues of great armored insects. The Jurassic Park! A zoo. As we turned on to a large street, the largest I ever saw, crammed full of people and cars and stores and noise, there was an explosion. The truck shook, slamming to a stop.

“Don't cry,” the driver bellowed. We cried more. I looked back down the street; about a half block away a huge plume of smoke billowed out from a store front. I remember bodies, crumpled in bloody heaps. But they could have been groceries, or bags of new clothes dropped by lucrative shoppers in the panic.

“Don't cry,” the driver shouted. “It's just a gas leak, or something. They happen all the time.” We turned off the boulevard and wound our way through the city. Finally, the truck turned into a gate in a high wall. Looming above us with its high towers, barred windows and steep roofs, was the Public Trust.

This was the beginning of my Developmental Stage.

As they herded us from the truck into the reception hall, the tall man pointed to each of us and blurted out a number. To me he said, “007348986.” A tall, ugly woman with a scowl, her hair pulled so tight on her head her eyebrows reached her ears, demanded my name.

“Maynard Ix,” I barked at her. She scowled even more nastily and jotted the number in the book. One by one we stood in line and a nurse all dressed in red took us by the arm, wiped away the dirt with cool alcohol and jabbed a vein to draw blood. The tall woman at the door was named Mrs. Rocinante, our Trustee. She said something about modesty being counter-productive, making a little speech about asking before touching. She told us there were no differences between the sexes, other than those set in place by the sexism, bigotry and hatred of Serve prejudice prevalent before the Civil War. She glared at me the whole time.

They stripped us, herding us all together into the shower, boys and girls alike. That was the first time I ever saw another human naked. Everyone does everything together in the Trust. And when we filed out of the steamy showers, dripping and frightened, a wall of gray watching children were standing there, all in a row in their crisp, gray uniforms.

The Public Trust. Anonymity is Equality!

So we filed naked past the long line of our peers, boys and girls, men and women I thought then. Remember how it felt? For me it was catastrophic. It was my first time away from my parents, away from the farm. I had never been around anybody but my parents, but there I was in the full public view of my peers. I tried to cover myself, acting as if I wasn't there, stumbling clumped along with the other nakeds. I was lucky enough to be standing behind a large girl, nearly obscured behind her broad, pimpled rump, glad of it as we rushed to the end of the line to get our uniforms. The whole experience, up until that point, had an eerie, surrealistic feel. But the situation snapped into sharp relief.

My flabby rump shield suddenly stepped aside, revealing me to the full scrutiny of the children. Three of them stood there, gawking at me like wolves. That was the first time I saw the three of them. They were at the end of the line, down by the uniform stacks. They were my age, I guessed. The first was a bright, pink fat girl, her head unusually small, compared to the rest of her body. Next to her was a small black girl standing perfectly still, her eyes darting across the bodies of those passing in front of her. She seemed like a statue, all her hair shaved from her shinny black head. The last one was tall, gangly, her long arms folded across her chest, one hand raised in front of her mouth as she slowly caressed her lips. Her skin was a strange whitish hue like I had never saw before. I stared at her, taken by the oddity of her eyes, large and placid, scanning the boys and girls in front of her. Her huge green eyes were so strange to me I giggled at her. I didn't mean it. I was just so scared. She noticed me. Everyone noticed me. I had come to a complete stop, standing there naked giggling at a funny looking girl as the line passed behind me. The tall gangly one stepped away from the others, striding right over to me. I tried to move, but the pale girl grabbed my arm.

“What are you laughing at?” she demanded.

I couldn't speak. I was terrified.

“I said, what are you laughing at, you freak?” This time she shook me, my arms dangling to my sides as I nearly fainted from fear. She looked at me slowly, as if memorizing me. She looked down for what seemed an eternity. I was so scared, I didn't even realize what she was staring at until she looked up with the most grotesque smile I had ever seen and sneered, “I wouldn't laugh if I were you, shorty.”

“Where'd you get those eyes, shorty?” The other girls began to laugh. It was a shrill, evil sounding noise echoing all around the showers. Now it wasn't just these three girls laughing, everyone laughed, uniforms and beginners alike. I was ready to die. And then it happened. I felt the warm rasp of a robe being wrapped around my shoulders and the tug of someone pulling me away from all those eyes, steering me away, down a short, dark hall into the cool relief of un-being. And just as I glimpsed her beautiful face, she shoved me into a closet.

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Standing there in the dark, I listened to my savior out there, yelling at the others. Her visage danced in my mind, a tall brunette, the most beautiful girl I ever saw. I didn't notice her at first, buried deep in the humiliation of my full exposure. I heard their voices, the olive one, the black one and the fat one shrieking, all their voices blending into a mass of echoes. All I could make out was one voice rising above the others, shouting over and over, “It's not fair! It's not fair!” I laughed. What did fair have to do with this? Standing there in the darkness I realized my universe did not stop at the farm, revolving on the end of my short nose. There were others out there, and those others had full disclosure of my being. That was my first lesson at the Trust. Everybody was nobody, and the Trust knew all.

I wrapped the robe around me tighter and looked around the closet. Once my eyes adjusted I saw it wasn't really a closet at all. It was actually a little room, with a table and pictures on the wall. I inched closer to the table and saw things all over it, papers and blocks and Crayons. There was one block on the front of the table, and I could feel words cut into it, so I looked close and read them. Livia Gates, it read, Resident Assistant. I noticed a chair back by the door, so I sat down. It wasn't long before the door swung open and a row of hanging lights snapped on over head. That was the first time I really saw her, Livia Gates, my first friend.

Livia Gates had the most beautiful blue eyes I ever saw. She seemed glad to see me sitting there behind the door. She took me by the hand and led me over to her table, telling me to sit there, across from her. Such blue eyes! She went around the table, her hair fine and long and brown, sweeping to the middle of her back. She pulled out papers and began to write on them with her thin, petite hands that moved gracefully across her desk, cradling a pen in her thin fingers that she pushed and stroked across the page. Her skin was dark, like my mother's, but it was as clear as cool water.

“Wow! I never saw a set of peepers like those before,” she smiled. “You must be a real lady killer back where you're from.”

I blushed. “I got them from my parents. Blue from my mom and brown from my dad.”
“Your dad?” She smiled, lifting up my file. “Maynard Ix? What kind of name is Maynard Ix?” She laughed at me, but not like the others, not cruel and vicious. Her laughter sounded like music. “I like your eyes,” she said. “How about I call you Peepers?” I smiled. Whatever she wanted was fine with me. She could call me stinkweed. “I hate to do this on your first day, Peepers, but we're going to fill out an Incident Report. I'm not too good at this because I just started, but I think we can work it out.”

“What's an Incident Report?”

She looked at me again with those eyes and said something that I still hear in my dreams. “Virginia Anteranté will never forget you.” The name loomed over me like a threat. Virginia Anteranté.

“Who is she?”

“She's the leader, the one you embarrassed. I'm filling out an Incident Report so she knows this little scene won't go unnoticed by the proctors. That way you won't disappear one night.”

Virginia Anteranté. That was the tall one who called me shorty.

“Who are those girls?”

“I call them, The Triad. That means three. The fat one is Peggy Armandeki. The black one is Esther Ghen. They're this year's bullies, the Queens of Domicile 17. They strut around here like they own the place.”

“Where did they come from?”

“Nowhere in particular. There's groups of them at every level in the Trust. Every year a new bunch of bullies floats to the top when the previous bullies graduate. You made some nasty enemies your first day.”

“Are you a bully?”

Livia laughed. I loved the sound of her laughter, like cool rain. “No. I'm just a Freshman RA.”

“RA?”

“The inmates around here help run the asylum.” It was all just riddles to me.

“What's asylum?”

“The Public Trust imitates the egalitarian world we live in, so the Citizens assist the Administration. Until the proctors assign you a grade, you're low man on the totem pole, Peepers. You could be a first grader, but you're old enough to be a fourth grader.”

“What's egalitarian,” I asked.

She just laughed again. It seemed she always laughed. “You don't know very much. Where are you from, the AZ?”

“I don't know where that is.”

“The Abortive Zone?” she said, shaking her head. “You don't know a thing, do you? Oh well, you'll find out soon enough. Right now we need to get you a bunk assignment.”

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This would be the first of over 2100 nights I would sleep at the Trust. I remember a glimpse here and a snatch there, but time has obscured them all but that first night. Livia and I stayed in her office talking about her stay there. She told me about her first day, when she was six, how they paraded her naked down through the showers. I would have given anything to be there that day. But I was only four years old then. She told me about her small size attracting the bullies who lived there then, boys who had since gone off into their lives in public service. She got up and left the room, and sitting there alone I realized I loved her. It was a violent, intense feeling of belonging and desire. I didn't understand it. As soon as she returned the feeling became controllable, bearable, so I decided it would be best for me to stay with her always. She handed me a small uniform, a gray innocuous thing. I turned away from her and slipped it on under her robe. It fit.

She took me by the shoulder and led me out, back into the hugeness of Domicile 17. I didn't want to go back. I had seen too much newness in one day; I couldn't take any more in. But I had to. She dropped me off into the indoctrination routine and hurried off to explain all the commotion I had caused to her supervisor. I watched her move off through the crowd, her long hair swinging back and forth.

I found my rump shield among the new recruits and stood next to her, melting behind her size as best I could. An old woman was there now, in charge, a Trustee. She barely noticed me as she stood up there talking to the beginners. She said something about playing fair, about exposing the competitive as bad and sharing among your Trust family. My family was a million miles away. These people, these boys and girls, fat, tall, skinny, short, black, white, red, yellow, brown, they were all my family now?

We were herded down a corridor into a long room lined with beds. The Trustee explained that we all lived communally, in something she called the Combs. Home Sweet Comb, a sign read over the door. We followed en mass behind the towering woman as she walked down the aisle of beds. She stopped every few feet and read off a name. That kid would stand there, alone, watching as the mass moved off. She read all the names until I was the last one following her. She started to walk away, faster than she walked before, not even looking down at me. I thought she had forgotten me, so I reached out and touched her. Bad.

The towering woman turned on her heel, stooped and swung her hand at my head. All I saw was a huge flash of light and I was on the floor. She bent over me, her face red and hateful.

“Don't you ever touch anyone without their consent.” Her voice trembled inside her neck. “That's rape. Understand?” I nodded my head. She stood tall again, looking down on me hatefully. “Just stay quiet and follow me, Ix. You've been assigned to a different Comb. It's just as well. You're too different to be with these kids, anyway.” I was shocked. How was I different? She looked at her list and smirked. “You're in with seventh graders. Like your father, I see you've wasted no time manipulating the system.”

“The system?”

She didn't answer, turning and striding off like a commando. I climbed to my feet and followed as best I could. We crossed the hall and entered another long room lined with beds. She walked down the long line, reading the name plates as she went, finally stopping at one bed. I looked around the woman at the plate. Gates, it read. My heart leapt. She turned and pointed to the bunk next to Livia's, then gave me a nasty, sour look. “It's not fair that you get special treatment.” She turned and strode off in her ugly, black rubber shoes.

This was my bed. My very own bed! I jumped on it, glancing over at Livia's bed every few seconds to make sure it was really hers. It was. I looked under my bed and found a chest with my name on it. I pulled it out and flipped it open. Birthday! The chest was filled with trinkets: tooth brushes, hair brushes, pajamas, combs, snacks, Radioactive Man comics, books of math and other subjects. Those I just dropped on the floor and kicked back under the bed. I was so overjoyed by the chest I didn't even notice when the seventh graders started coming in. All of a sudden I was surrounded. I looked up at them, a circle of chests and arms and faces, stone faces. Words were bubbling inside those faces. Baby. Wimp. Namby-pamby. I climbed to my bunk, pulled my legs to my chest, hiding behind Radioactive Man. Some of the faces drifted off, but they were replaced by other faces. All of them glaring, sizing me up. I felt more naked than before, more vulnerable. These kids, these new adults had absolute power over me. They could reach down and crush me with one nasty word. I was a freakish tumor so perverse I drew all of their stony attention. Was this special treatment?

They came in. The Triad. Virginia and Peggy and Esther. The seventh graders moved out of their way as they pushed through. When they came to my bunk, they stood there three across, one by one looking down at my name on the plate.

“What are you doing here?” Esther hissed.

“You're only a fourth grader,” Peggy barked. “Worse than that, you should be a first grader, in with the babies.” Virginia just glared at me.

“The Trustee just put me here,” I squeaked. “I didn't ask to be here.”

“Right next to Gates,” Esther said, like I didn't even talk. “He must be her new pet boy-toy.”

Virginia moved so fast I barely saw her coming. She grabbed my hair and pulled me back down on the bed, her other hand unclasping my belt. “Want to see something funny?” she laughed. I shut my eyes. I didn't want to see this again. I missed what happened next. My whole body jerked, as if I was shaken and dropped by a bush dingo. When I opened my eyes, all I could see were their backs; all I could hear was their screaming.

“Kill her! Kill her!”

I stood on my bunk and looked over the crowd. In the center of all that screaming was a swirl of hair and swinging fists. But I recognized her. It was Livia. She had done it again, shown up just in time. I didn't know how to feel, standing there letting a girl fight my battle. I hate to admit it, but it was exciting.

Just as they were really getting into it, biting and clawing and screaming, the other kids started whispering “Trustee! Trustee!” and taking off to their various bunks. Livia and Virginia separated, nearly leaping to their cots just as the door at the end of the row opened and the towering woman stepped into the room. All the sevens were sitting neatly on the sides of their beds and there I was, standing on the end of my bed bouncing up and down like a monkey.

The towering woman came down the row and stood at the foot of my bed, staring at me, a smirk on her face like she knew everything. She knew every secret in the world. She was the Trustee. She reached out and pushed me gently on the chest, and I fell back on my bed.

“Jumping on the bed: ten demerits.” She looked over at Virginia, then at Livia, then back at me, smiling more broadly as she walked around the side of my bed. She looked down at my chest, opened with its contents strewn about. “Unkempt belongings: ten demerits. Untidy clothing: ten demerits. Damaging community property: twenty demerits.” I didn't know what she was talking about, but demerits poured out of her like blood. “Disruptive behavior: thirty demerits. Unfairly playing while others work: fifty demerits.” As she spoke, Livia wrote all these things down. Finally, when the Trustee was done, she turned to Livia and said, “Tell me, Resident Assistant, what's the total?”

“One hundred seventy, sir” she said, miserably. My heart fell. They were bad things.
The Trustee smiled and turned. “Not a bad first day, Mr. Ix. Keep this up and you'll wind up spending all your time in the kitchen or the laundry, or maybe even back in the AZ.” When she said that, all the faces turned at me. They were different this time. They were fearful, disgusted, angry, but none of them were like they were before, none of them were superior. “But perhaps that would be best,” she said, nearing the exit. “Perhaps that would be equitable to the rest of us.” She left.

No one came near me now. I didn't know what the Trustee had done, but somehow suddenly the sevens all treated me differently. Even the Triad. All the faces began to look away, began to glance at me only when I wasn't looking. Even Livia changed.

She was hurt. She had a small cut on her neck from Virginia's nails. How the Trustee didn't see they were fighting was beyond me. If I got all those demerits for being a slob, I couldn't imagine how many she could have given Livia for fighting. For an hour Livia wouldn't look at me. Every time I tried to get her attention she looked away. After a while, Livia finally came over and sat next to me. She was very sad.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

I was shocked. “For what? I like this comb.”

She laughed and put her hand on my knee. It was like an electric shock went through me. “Do yourself a favor, call them the tombs. You won't stand out as a dork.”

“What's a dork?”

“Forget it. I was just sorry I got you all those demerits.”

“What are they?”

She shook her head, like I was the stupidest person she ever met. “You get them when you fail.”

Fail? How could I fail with Livia? She rescued me. “What do you mean, fail?”

“I didn't know you came from the AZ, and now everyone knows.”

“So? What's the big deal with the Western Province? Don't they like farmers here?”
She looked at me in disbelief, then her eyes warmed. “The AZ is where they send murderers and traitors to die.”

The words fell on me like slabs of stone. Murderers. Traitors. Die.

“You're the only kid I've ever seen come from the AZ,” she said. “I thought they sterilized people there. You should be non-viable. It's like you're a ghost.” She looked at me for a long time, as if she were waiting for me to tell her something. But I had nothing to tell her. I didn't know what non-viable was, but I knew what a ghost was.

Livia finally got up and left, wandering out of the Tomb. I was alone again. No one looked at me. It was as if I suddenly died. I heard my father's words, the words of a traitor, a murderer, speaking to a ghost. “If you fail, the world won't care.” My father was wrong. The world did care about failures; it cared enough to punish them. But it was nothing my father and mother did or said that proved to me he was wrong. It was my very being, and theirs. They were failures, and they lived in Red Hook, the AZ. They were traitors, to me. They betrayed me because they never told me I was non-viable, that I never should have been born, that my non-viability made me a non-person, a ghost. I was a failure by birth, and I got 170 demerits for it. I was a failure and Livia feared me. From that point on I was a ghost. A non-viable person. A loser the world cared enough about to cast out. No matter what anyone said to me, I knew what they really cared about. Fear. They just called it something else.

I stayed on my bunk. No one talked to me. I talked to no one. They finally turned out the lights and I climbed under the covers, glad the day was over. Livia didn't come back. I lay in bed for an hour, staring up at the darkened fixtures. What did it mean to be a ghost? What did it mean to be the son of a murderer? They never saw anyone come from the AZ before. The Abortive Zone. What would happen to a ghost? I began to cry. The tears were hot, bitter. I buried my face in the pillow, hiding the sound of it. I don't know how long I was like that, but I would have stayed that way all night if not for the hand that pulled me back.

Livia rolled me over, rubbed my chest, wiped my eyes. She took me from bed and led me down the row, past the sleeping sevens, past the Triad sleeping side-by-side. I thought I heard the rustle of sheets as we passed, but when I turned they were all still, breathing deeply. Livia took me to her office again and sat me in the chair. She sat at her desk, turning on the little light and taking fig cookies from her desk drawer.

“I got these from the storeroom,” she whispered. “Don't tell, or I'll get 500 demerits.”

We sat in the small circle of light for a few minutes, eating cookies. I felt better. She shared a secret with me. Even though I was the son of murderers and traitors, she trusted me. That made me feel better. After a while, she leaned over her desk and called me silently with her finger. I leaned close, but she beckoned again, whispering, “Closer, Peepers. Come closer. I have a story. Listen.

“I was born thirteen years ago in the slums of New Gaia. They don't call them the slums around here. They call them the State Housing Entitlements. SHE. My brother was five years older than me. I was one when they took him away, so I never knew him. We must have really needed the money, because mom was pregnant the whole time I knew her.”

“Why?”

She looked at me strangely, shaking her head. “The harvest? Ever head of it?”

“No.”

“ZPC? Zero-Population Codes. Like they say in Civics class, 'What kind of world would we live in if there were no restraint on our animal urges to procreate?'“

“Procreate?”

“Hello. Sex.”

I blushed.

“I guess they never worry about that out in the AZ. They say everyone is sterile there.” She looked at me and shrugged. “You must be a miracle. Never mind. You'll find out soon enough. Anyway, my father took the money from the harvests and bought drugs with it. Did your father, you know... get drunk and… you know…”

I didn't know what to tell her. My father never drank. But he never really talked to me very much. He was too busy with the animals. He never told me he was a murderer, that he was sterile and I never should have been born. “My father drank and beat me,” I agreed. “All he ever did was drink and hit and...”

Livia smiled and nodded. She was starting to act like she did earlier that day, and I was glad. “I thought so. They say life in the AZ is unbearable. It had to be like SHE. If it wasn't for the Big Kahoona, I'd be dead by now.”

“The who?”

“The Fed. You'll find out in sociology.” She spoke in wonderful, musical riddles. Livia leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Did your father rape you? And your mother, too?”

I hesitated. What did rape mean? The Trustee said that word too. I assumed it was like drunk, or something people did when they drank too much, so I said, “Yes, he raped me, and my mother too.”

“Mine did too. He raped my mother and me over and over again,” she said matter-of-factly. “The FAs here have been helping me recover my memories and cope with them. Fatherhood is a disease, and that's why the Trust is good for us. It gets us away from the mistakes of evolution.”

“Evolution?”

She looked at me like I had an arm growing out of my chest. “You’re as dumb as a stump, aren’t you? “

“Sure.” Why not?

Smiling, Livia stood up behind her desk and came around to me. My heart nearly stopped beating when she crouched down and squeezed me in her arms. No one ever squeezed me in her arms like that. It was good.

“I told you we'd be good friends,” she said. “You better get some sleep, Peepers. Testing starts next week, and you'll be busy working off those demerits first.” I went to sleep that night safe in the thought that Livia was near me.

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A demerit is worth an hour of unpaid labor. An hour of labor is an eternity to a ten-year-old, and I had one hundred seventy eternities to work off. The Trustee put me to work early the next morning. All the other beginners were allowed time to settle in to their new surroundings, but my settling was labor. And as I worked in the kitchen during all my free time, over fifteen hours a day, washing pots, scrubbing filthy rubber mats, scooping grease from fryers, cleaning endlessly, working off my demerits, I replayed that late conversation with Livia in my mind, over and over again, memorizing every word. I had more than just a friend in her; I had a companion. She came to the kitchens in her free time and helped me work.

Something else happened in those first few days at the Trust. I became known. Even though we were all just the same, as they told me over and over, I still got the reputation of being the son of treacherous murderers out in the AZ. I was something of an oddity, since no one was ever born out there before. Perhaps that was the real reason the Trustee was so cruel? Even the Triad left me alone. Suddenly everyone left me alone, and as long as I did my work, no one cared about me. I felt wretched, outcast, alien; I wanted to hide. But I noticed no one else had two differently colored eyes, and no matter where I went or how invisible I tried to be, it was impossible for me to go unnoticed.

What I first thought was a disability became an advantage. People feared me, so I came and went as I pleased. And I learned new words that week: ghoul, phantom, demon, fiend, monster, freak, aberration. Phantom was my favorite. The sevens started to say things behind my back that I eventually heard, that I sucked blood and ate human flesh, that I wasn't really human and that I was made from animal DNA, whatever that was. And every night I came off work I stood under the scalding showers, wonderfully alone in my nakedness. No one dared bother me when I was naked. Then I staggered off to my bunk to sleep near her. It was a good time, a safe time. As new as my surroundings were, things were still relatively the same in my head, except for all my new names. All that changed after my first week, once they began testing.

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One morning the Trustee came to me and took me from the kitchen. She told me it was time for the SET, the Standardized Evaluation Test. She led me down a long hall into a huge room. Hundreds of faces were there already. I was last. They all looked at me when the door opened, already taking the test. The Trustee led me to a chair in the back and handed me a thick book with a paper seal on it. She glared down at me. “Read,” she ordered. So I read. It was a bunch of gobbledygook. I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. Out in the AZ we didn't even have pencils and paper. My mother taught me to read by drawing in the dirt with her finger. I sat crossed legged and she squat there and we drew. This is a G. This is an N. This is an A. This is a T. GNAT. We had lots of gnats. I learned to read about gnats and rabbits and snakes. But I never filled in little circles. All the kids around me were filling in little circles. I looked at the paper they gave me. It was covered with little circles, rows and rows of little circles with a pencil on a paper.

If I squinted my eyes and shook my head, they became like little pink rivers falling down my desk. I decided to fill them in, but not the way everyone else was doing it. That seemed dull. I would make a picture. I looked over at the paper of the girl next to me. She was only making one dot on each line. So was the boy on the other side. That was the rule. One dot a line. It would make it more difficult, but I could manage. I stared at the paper a long time, deciding what to draw. Most of the morning I sat there, staring. I decided the best thing to draw would be a snake, since it lived in a line. I could draw a snake and even make its skin design, all without using more than one dot a line. So I started.

After I decided what to draw, it was easy. I made a sidewinder, my favorite snake out in the AZ. They always jerked and wobbled, but they went fast when the sun was high and the sand was hot! I finished my dots before everyone else. At first I wanted to get up and leave, but there were Trustees at every door, standing there grim faced and arms crossed. I didn't know what to do. I decided to sit and wait until someone else finished, and then do what they did. To kill time, I read through the book. It had crazy questions about numbers and people and animals. I circled all the animals. I circled all the people. I circled all the numbers. I connected all the circles. Even scooping hot grease was more fun than this. Finally, a girl down near the front got up and walked down to the table in the front of the room. She left her paper and book there and walked out, stopping at the door to look back at the rest of us, smiling like she was going to bust. I got up and walked down to the front as well. But the Trustees didn't smile at me, like they did to the girl. They just watched me, like I was a gnat. I put my paper and book on top of the girl's and went to the door. I turned and smiled at all of them, all those faces staring up at me. I was faster than all of them. I was better. The Trustee made me go back to the kitchen.

When I got in bed that night, Livia was still awake. She rolled over as soon as I was under the covers and whispered, “I heard you were second done in the SETs. That's great.”

“It was easy!”

“I finished with a 1404 when I took them. How do you think you did?”

“I finished all of them.” With time to spare. As I lay there, extremely self-confident and proud, I was beginning to figure out this crazy world. It was all in using the letters and numbers: AZ, FA, RA, SET, SHE, ZPC, 170, 1404, 007348986. All I had to do was remember to use all these numbers and letters, like they were some kind of secret code to getting along.

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Another week passed in the kitchen. By the second Friday, I had worked off 150 demerits. I only had twenty to go. That evening, after I took my solitary shower and went to bed, long after all the other citizens had fallen asleep, the Trustee came to get me. It was late, but the Trustees never sleep. In my pajamas I followed her down the hall, through a door and into a little room. When we were inside, the room jerked and my stomach felt like I would throw up. The room was sinking, slowly dropping. I wanted to scream, but the Trustee was perfectly calm, standing there with her arms behind her back, staring down at me with that stone gray face of hers. I stood with my arms behind my back as well, trying to stand still and not reach for the railing that stretched all the way around the little room. Phantoms do not scream. The room jerked to a stop and the door slid open again. I followed her down another hall. We came to a door where she commanded me to wait, going inside and shutting it in my face. The sign on the door read Superintendent. It was a bigger word than Trustee, so I was a little nervous.

After a while, I got tired. I lay down by the door and fell asleep. When I woke up, a tall man in black stood over me with the Trustee. At first I thought it was the one who hit my father, but it wasn't. All the men at the Trust were tall and dark. “Just like a little dog,” he said. “He always does this,” the Trustee said. “Just lies down and goes to sleep wherever he wants. Just like a little animal.” I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Just as I was about to tell them I never did this before, they both reached down, lifted me by the armpits and took me into the office. They sat me in a seat in the corner and went over to the desk. I could hear them talking, even though they never looked at me. They said things I didn't understand. “I've never seen such a low score,” she said. “At least his parents have been properly sterilized this time, so this won't happen again.” She sighed, turning to look at me. “If we'd only found out in time, we could have taken proper measures. He should never have been born.” “But he was, and he's already been assigned a Social Security Number. That was my fault. We can't just get rid of him now.” The man sighed and sat down, looking at me over the desk, his face sad and angry all at once.

“Moderately Retarded. I never thought I would see that label again. It sounds so ominous. What will we do with him?” “He's been working in the kitchen for the last two weeks.” “Away from the normal children?” “Yes.” “Good.” The woman smiled. “I noticed he was different from the beginning. Just look at his eyes. Pure mutant. They're fascinating.” She came over and touched my face. Her hands were as cold as a dead grazer's nose. “One can only guess the extent of damage to his genetic material. Thankfully I assigned him Kitchen Detail until we could assess the situation.” “Brilliant, as usual,” the man said. He looked at a paper and shook his head. “But look at this score in the SET. Nearly perfect. We may have an idiot savant on our hands.” “I doubt it,” she sneered. “It was probably dumb luck.” “Um, strange,” the man said. “According to his blood analysis, genetic disposition is for an above average IQ. Apparently, life in the AZ is too strenuous for the proper development of children.”

The woman sighed and looked down at me. Her voice seemed to be filled with pity, and yet her eyes were filled with hatred. “That's just one of the reasons none of them are allowed to be born there. But it's no surprise he was born without our knowledge. His father was sentenced to life there for just this type of deviant, antisocial behavior. There's your real genetic disposition.”

“He should have just been killed when they shipped him out there, like the rest of them were.” The dark man sighed. “Oh well, what's done is done. We'll just have to isolate the boy here at the Trust and curb any type of deviant behavior as soon as it's in evidence.”

The Trustee looked at me in a way that made me feel uneasy. “Too bad he's defective. He's such a handsome boy. I'll keep an eye on him.”

The dark man smirked and wrote something on a paper. “I'm sure you will. For the time being, his file should be kept inoperative...”

They talked a long time, probably about what they were going to do with me. They used so many words I never heard before, words like genetic scan, prenatal anomalies, amniotic contamination and deviant developmental nurturation. There was one that they said over and over, retarded. So I had more new names. Retarded and Idiot Savant. I liked Phantom better.

I fell asleep in the chair while they talked. No one knows how I got back to my bed that night. I just woke up in the dark under my covers. I could hear Livia breathing right near by and I knew I was home.

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The next morning I got up and went to the kitchen, as I usually did. I went to sign in so the hours I worked could be converted into demerits and be taken away from my total. I only had twenty to go, and that was two short days of work. I looked and looked, but my name was not on the demerit sheet. The bald, fat cook who always sweat so much watched me look for my name and laughed. I turned to him, happy to be taken from the list so I could maybe go play. I thought this was a reward for being retarded, that they weren't making me finish my demerits. The cook took me down a little hall and showed me something I will never forget. We walked up to a square machine, with a clock on it, took down a card from a row of hundreds of cards and handed it to me. Maynard Ix, it read. 007-34-8986. I looked up at him, confused. He smiled and took the card back, reaching over and sticking it inside the machine. It made a hollow ping noise and he pulled it out, handing it to me. 07:06, it read, in pink ink. So many numbers!

“You have a new job, retard” the sweaty cook said. “Welcome to the machine.”

He took me back to the dishwasher and left me there. The machine? It was the same machine I always worked. I was confused and decided to let it all pass. These people in the Trust confused me continuously. They must be turning my last twenty hours into twenty demerits in another way, I thought. I worked all day, and just as I was going to eat dinner, so I could come back and work into the night, the sweaty cook came over and took me by the arm again. We went back to the box clock and he found my card. This time he let me stick it in, and the machine pinged again. 17:05, it read. I looked up at the man and shook my head.

“Does this mean I only have less than three demerits left?”

“You really are retarded,” he laughed, shaking his head in amazement. “From now on, you'll get paid for the hours you work. Ten hours equals thirty dollars.”

Thirty dollars! Thirty Dollars! I stood there looking at my card, absolutely amazed that this could be happening to me. I only had to work ten hours and they actually gave me money. Thirty dollars was more money than my father ever had! Were they doing this for me all because I was retarded? Suddenly, the word wasn't so ominous. Suddenly, the word had power. It had more power than phantom had. I wanted to write it on the top of my card, right after my name. “Ix, Maynard. Retard.” I had a new power now. Even the cook looked at me different, in amazement now that he knew I was retarded. And I was being paid money, real money. I bet Livia wasn't even paid real money, not this much, anyway. Maybe if I wrote Idiot Savant on the top I would make even more money? It was two words, longer than retard. I was so excited I asked the cook for my money right away. He laughed again.

“They pay you every two weeks, retard. In two weeks you should have a big check. Three hundred dollars.”

I fell into the wall. Three hundred dollars. In just two weeks?

“Well, not exactly. They'll take out for your room and board. There are no free rides in the Fed.”

Room and board? Let them take out for room and board, whatever they were. Three hundred dollars was more money than my father ever had. I could afford room and board. I ran back to the showers and cleaned up, rushing off to look for Livia. I was so excited, I didn't know what to think. I ran from tomb to tomb looking for her, and every tomb I went into stopped what it was doing just to look at me. I was a somebody. I had money and they didn't. I was a retard and it gave me power.

I found Livia in the library, reading for a report she had to give in a class. I climbed into the seat next to hers and sat there, waiting for her to notice me too. She didn't look up. She sat there reading for a long time until I reached over and touched her. She looked up then, her face pink, her eyes red. She was crying. I asked her why she was so sad, but she couldn't say. She just sat there, shaking her head, looking away. People were looking at us, but people looking wasn't so great now.

“What's the matter, Livia?”

“Shhh,” someone hissed.

“I heard what they did to you,” she whispered. “I'm so sorry.”

“They gave me money.”

“Shhh,” someone hissed again. I never could whisper very good.

“You don't understand, Peepers. They gave you a job. That's why we all go to the Public Trust, to find out what job we'll get after school. They gave you one without even going to school. Now they'll never let you learn.”

“But I learn every day. I work in school, so I am in school.”

“Shhh,” someone hissed, and this time I looked up. Across the room, sitting in chairs that faced us, were the Triad. Virginia hissed again, so I threw her the finger, just like FA did to my father when the bus drove away. She didn't like it.

“Peepers,” Livia said. “You're only ten years old, and they gave you a job. That's your job. That test you took was an aptitude test. A placement test. The whole school is talking about you being...” She lowered her voice even lower, “retarded.”

“I know. Isn't it great?”

“Do you know what retarded is?”

I shook my head.

“It means you're stupid. It means you'll never get smart. They say your IQ is only 79.”

“What's IQ?'

“The average is 100. Mine is 131. Virginia's is 143. 79 makes you retarded.”

“Idiot Savant,” I said, not believing she meant that I was stupid. What was IQ, anyway? Just two more letters followed by some stupid numbers. There were too many numbers. “My number is not 79! My number is 007348986. That's bigger than any body's number.”

She shook her head. “That's your Social Security Number.” She shook her head some more. “I know you're not stupid, Peepers. What did you do in the test?”

“I did my best. I did what my mother taught me. What I like to do in the AZ.”

“Forget your parents and the AZ! All they did was hurt you. Whatever they taught you has ruined your life. You're in the Trust now, so you have to live like we live here.”

I looked up, across the room. The Triad sat there, staring hatefully at us. One was dark and bloated with venom, one was black and hungry as a spider, one was lean and watching, chewing at her fingers. Their eyes weren't impressed with me, with my money. They only hated me. Suddenly I remembered all the eyes I saw that day. They were all like these eyes, cruel and empty. All the faces I saw that day weren't following me in awe, they were despising me because I was stupid. Retarded was a bad word. Murderer was a bad word. Westphalia was a bad word. Failure was a bad word. I was a stupid retarded son of a murderer from Westphalia, and no one cared about me.

I got up and wandered toward the door. I could feel the six eyes of the Triad follow me as I drifted past them, their six legs waiting to creep after me, their six arms waiting to snatch at me, to tear and rip at me. Let them.

I walked back to my bed alone, half expecting the Triad to attack me without Livia's protection. I didn't care. I was tired, overwhelmed by all these new words and numbers. When I got to the tomb I collapsed on my bed, dead tired, in an agony of rejection, missing my parents and their silent stability. I hardly noticed when the Trustee came to the end of my bed.

“What do you think you're doing, Ix,” she barked. “It's against the rules to sleep before everyone else. It's not fair for you to be here.”

“I just want to be alone,” I told her. I expected her to attack me, but something incredible happened. She smiled.

“Boy,” she said. “This is your lucky day.” She reached down to the name plaque and removed it from the bed, holding it up for me to read. “Can you read this?” Of course I could, but I didn't. She thought I was slow at reading, so she never made me do it. I thought that was fair, since I had to wash so much. I just looked up at her, the best confused, bewildered look of an idiot savant I could muster. She smiled bigger.

“It says, 'Iglesia, M.' Is that your name, idiot boy?”

This time I really was bewildered. “Where's my name? This is my bed.”

“It's the Trust's bed.” She reached down and pulled me onto the floor. Without another word, she dragged me down the row of beds out into the hall. I was thankful it was dinner time; all the other citizens were gone, not there to see me dragged off like a rabbit to the wire. Without all those prying eyes, I took the liberty of fighting back. She dragged me kicking and screaming all the way down to the kitchen. I didn't want to go back to the kitchen, but she dragged me through it, all the way back to the dry goods storeroom. There, against the back wall, among bags of flour and sugar and pastas, stood a cot. She dropped me there at the foot of the bed.

“I know you can read that,” she said, pointing.

I did read it. A little piece of paper glued to the end of the cot read 'Ix, M.' I sat there, dumbfounded. She expected me to sleep down here? To work and eat and sleep down here? They expected me to live down here? Alone? I stood slowly, turned slowly, took three slow steps toward the Trustee and stopped.

“I want to go to school.”

“School? You?” She scoffed. “Do you think it's fair to slow down the class, holding up the education of all the normal students with your stupidity? You don't need school, Maynard Ix. We're giving you this job.”

“I don't want to wash dishes. I don't want to live in the kitchen. I want to go to school and get a real job someday.”

She laughed again, this time spitefully. “A real job? This is as real a job as you'll ever see. What would you like to be, hum? A lawyer? A doctor? Maybe even the Big Kahoona himself?” She laughed again, walking toward me, waving a long crooked finger in my face. I shriveled before her, she was so tall. “Who do you think will hire you? Who would hire an idiot boy when there are so many bright Citizens graduating from the Public Trust every year? This is the only real job you will ever be able to hold, Maynard.” It was the only time she ever said my name like that, like I was a real person you could call by just their first name. “Do you know what the SET told us about you? You're special. No one in the world has an IQ as low as yours. We don't allow the burden of low IQs in the world anymore. That makes you a freak. There is no place for you out there in the real world, so we're going to take care of you here. You are a ward of the Fed now. You'll always have a job as long as we're here to take care of you, so what have you to be so resentful about?”

“I want a good job,” I told her. “I want to be back with the others.”

“So that's it. You want to be with Livia?”

“No!” She caught me. “I just want to play with my friends. I don't want to be hidden away down here, like an animal.”

“What friends?” She turned and started to leave the room. “Look around you. These cans and bags, these are your little friends. Them and me.” She stopped at the door, looking back as she closed me in. “You'll learn to love your job. Giving you meaningful labor and a place in society is the most fair and judicial thing we can possibly give you. It's what everyone else acquires upon graduation, so stop whining. At least you won't have to endure the frustration of constant vocational rejection.” She pulled the door shut and I threw myself at it, kicking and screaming. It was locked, of course. I battered that door until my wrists ached, my back ached and my head pounded and spun. I screamed myself hoarse at their fairness, but it was for nothing. I realized, lying there on the cold concrete, that they had me beat, in terms of getting out of that room. Thanks to that damned test, I was set for life. I would never get out of that kitchen. But I had something they didn't know about. Climbing into my cot that first night, I decided I would keep on playing stupid, but I would keep my eyes open. Even if they didn't want me to, I was going to steal me an education.

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Young hands heal quickly; old hands scar.

I learned that over the next two years in the clanging, sweaty, chaotic solitude of the kitchen. There, among the shouting, hurrying, swearing wait-staff forever too slow for the liking of the outraged, red-faced, foul-mouthed cooks expediting their never-ending line of food, forever behind the demand, I was truly, for first time in my life, alone. They assigned me a post as one of the dishwashers, permanently. According to the Fed, I was a problem taken care of, whiling away the rest of my days happily hauling hot dishware from the steamy machine to their temporary, between-meal home on the shelves. That's what I did, all the while talking to myself. I was my only friend, since no one spoke to me. I was an oddity. The closest thing to human contact I knew was stares and whispers about the idiot-boy who somehow survived birth out in the AZ and glared stupidly with those evil eyes. When I lived in the AZ, my best friends were rats and rabbits, cats and coons, dogs and birds and fish, and of course, my parents. I never noticed there were no children to play with. But in the kitchen, surrounded by noisy, nasty, excited, hateful people, I saw how alone I was.

My new friends were dishes and silverware, pots and pans, tongs and knives and cleavers. For the first twelve months, standing alone in front of the dishwasher, talking and singing and laughing to myself, I occupied my vacant mind with violence. The games I played with my new friends were suddenly bloody. I wanted everyone to die. I imagined dozens of brutalities carried out on the two Trustees who sentenced me here. Beheading, raping, disemboweling, crucifixion, such barbarisms from a ten-year-old boy! All that jabbing and thrusting, muttering and babbling as I worked away, lost in my own world, made my reputation as a lunatic grow and grow. And it made the time pass. My anger was bottomless. After a twelve hour work day, I would return to my cell and brood, sitting on my cot, staring at the towering shelves of food across from me. I took three cans of beans, the gallon size, down from the fourth shelf and lined them up across the end of my cot. Harry, Joe and Shirley, my own Triad. I tossed them around the room like medicine balls, rolling around and wrestling with them to help burn off the rage.

I missed my parents; I missed their warm, unthreatening company and easy manners. I missed rolling around in the dirt with my dad. I missed seeing real, honest, outside on the ground dirt! I missed my mom's cooking, three-eyed possum pie and raccoon kidney cobbler. I missed seeing the stars way out there in the milky way, the quiet nights sitting out under the glowing AZ sky, crickets chirping, fire-flies winking...

My only human contact was with my superior, Mrs. Rocinante, the tall Trustee woman who came in at the end of every Friday to check on my “progress,” standing a few yards away, watching me work, convinced I was happy with my useful labor. Busy hands make happy hearts. And after I had finished the last of my work she would march me down to the showers to inspect me, turning and lifting, poking and prodding, searching for any evidence that I had fraternized with the Citizens of the Public Trust. I didn't mind it so much. Sometimes I was embarrassed, like when she tried new tests on me, experiments, but even they became familiar after a while. It was all part of checking my progress.

Progress, the implication of rising, of becoming more than a dishwasher, gave me hope. She gave me hope, the Trustee, in touching and hurting, hope that I could somehow earn my way out of there. When I saw her, every Friday night, I knew an outside reality was still there, somewhere. The Trustee and the things she did to me were my link to the outside. To Livia. To my mom and dad. Our relationship grew, became symbiotic. She came down to domineer over me, the mentally deficient monster-son of the evil murderer, trapped in her judicious web, assuring my abnormality could not spread to anyone but her. And I stood there, scrubbing pots, waiting for the shower, outwardly bitter, but inside I rejoiced that she still came, that she would come next week, every week, re-assuring me that I still mattered. Maybe someday I would be a part of that world of progress she represented. It was true; there was hope in her perverse fairness.

Like clockwork, after she left every Friday night I found myself steeped in profound sadness. The seven days until her next short visit, my next affirmation, seemed like an eternity. The fear of her forgetting me hung around my neck. But she always came back, after every Friday night dinner, and soon my affirmation simply became part of the larger routine.

Then there was my other human contact. The bald, fat cook's name was Otto, a kitchen god, my first taste of petty tyranny. He never even bothered to ask my name, simply calling me Retard. He sweat. When the kitchen was really humming, he stood bathed in torrents of bodily fluids, replenishing himself with beer he drank from a quart jar with “Otto” scrawled on it in black ink. “How do they expect me to run a kitchen with retards like you!” he bellowed at the side of my head. He never laid a hand on me. I at least had the right not to be beaten. “They just want me to fall behind so they can fire me!” I pitied him. I could never be fired. Stability was my power, for which he hated me more than anyone. I was his dishwasher for life, and that was fair. When he finally finished venting, I returned to my flatware, letting his body slide down, an impaled puppet resting in a pool of black blood, waiting for the end of my shift.

I always left two or more hours after everyone else, sagging back to my cot, lying there alone, waiting for the dinner prep. Staring up at the asbestos ceiling, I met again with Livia. She wore a strapless summer dress, like the one my mother wore in the picture above her dressing table back in the AZ. Livia's long hair was tied back with flowers.

“I miss you, Peepers,” she said. “I miss you sleeping near me.” She lay down on my cot, in my arms. I missed her too. “When you get out of here, we can get away, go back to Red Hook, hide with your parents.” She touched my face. “You work so hard down here, Peepers. I worry about you all the time.” Then why didn't she come to get me out of the kitchen? “I tried, but they stopped me. They took away my RA status and made me work the laundry, to keep us apart.”

I dozed off, dreaming of Livia lying with me under covers of fine white linen. Livia is singing a song with my mother's voice:

I awoke to the dinner tone calling me back to work, its mellow hum sounding just like Livia's and mom's voices.

The rest of my week passed as it always did. Meaningful labor. The first year of the Public Trust was like this, and I began to understand the essence of my world. It was all a matter of survival, lasting the day under Otto's withering words, sleeping, lasting the week until I was affirmed in the showers. Otto and his kitchen were trying to destroy me, and I wanted to survive.

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It was a Friday when Otto began to scream, waving his arms over his head, bellowing like a gutted mule. The staff stepped thankfully aside as he boomed in my direction. I didn't listen to his braying. I stopped listening months ago. I was too busy expecting the Trustee to walk in and save me, giving Otto something to fear in his tiny, paranoid mind. Otto was having a nasty rant. If I listened to the words, I would have died. After a mind-numbed eternity, he finally stalked off, leaving me there more stunned by the Trustee's absence than by his raging. I turned back to my work. The night dragged on. No Trustee. I finished the last of the clean-up and dragged myself off to shower and bed, alone. Lying there in the cool, dark silence it finally hit me; she had grown bored, abandoned me, left me to die a slow, acidic kitchen death, withering under Otto's hateful words.

I remembered my father's foul breath. The world will not care. I will die, here in this kitchen. I sat up in my cot and looked around the storeroom. It was full of food, dead things in cans and sacks. I needed people. Livia. She could help me. The Trustee didn't really care; she sucked the life out of me. I had to get back in touch with the real world, with Livia; she could help my progress.

I stopped myself from hoping too much. We had to be careful. What would they do to Livia if they knew we were communicating? What if it was bad? I couldn't take the chance of getting her in trouble, of getting her sentenced to some laundry or kitchen somewhere. But I couldn't just die here. I had to make contact. I settled back on my cot, resolving to live. The problem was living so they wouldn't know I was alive.

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The next morning I went to work the same as I always did, but this time I had a mission. I spent more time near the door to the mess, trying to find Livia's assigned seat. Every time I brought a tray of flatware to the front, I cracked the door and scanned the crowd. After three trips, I found her. Table 143, seat 11. But how could I get a message to her? What would it say? Standing in the doorway I waved to her, but she didn't notice. I waved again. The people around her noticed, but she was staring at one of the waiters. Sitting just beyond Livia, I saw Virginia Anteranté, ears wide and red. She smiled at me. I sank back into the kitchen.

Days passed. Friday came again; again the Trustee didn't come. I was dead meat. With new resolve I worked on sending a message to Livia, thinking and thinking of how to get her attention without attracting attention. I stared up at the wall of dry goods, rows and rows of boxed food, when I saw the yellow box, the red letters reading, Fig Chewies. I smiled, instantly formulating a plan.

When the servers brought out the food they usually staggered the trays, so no one table was served earlier than another; no special treatment that way, even though everybody got their food cold. During a lull in the serving, I would slip into the staging area and place a Fig Chewy on the plate 11. I moved into the wings and watched, wanting to see the look on her face, washed and shinning beautifully among all her friends. It was meat loaf night. Every other night was meat loaf night. A short, little old man served. They rotated the servers, so no associations could form between employees and the students. Livia was served first. She looked down at her plate for a long while, then looked up scanning the other plates on the table. She had the only Fig Chewy. She looked over at the next table, scanning the plates. No Fig Chewies. The Triad sat at the next table, watching, always watching. Livia noticed Virginia, then scanned the crowd more tactfully, looking for me. Her eyes stopped on a group of waiters by the kitchen doors. Blushing, Livia snatched the cookie from her plate.

I went back to my station, overjoyed. I made contact. I was not lost in the void of steamy hatred. I washed that night with renewed vigor, finishing my work and cleaning up a half hour early. Otto grumbled as he inspected my station, finally letting me out at eleven, my usual time. I ran back to my cot not knowing what to expected, a little note maybe? There was nothing. She hadn't tried. No matter. It was precarious what we were trying to do. She could get demerits, or worse. I could get... Who knew what could happen to me? At that point, I didn't much care.

I waited a whole week for some kind of response from Livia. Nothing. I tried again, repeating the whole daring cookie scheme. A younger waiter was serving them, and when she saw her plate, Livia looked up at him, smiling as I had never seen her smile before. It did something to me, made me feel rather funny. Instead of hiding the cookie like she did before, she slowly lifted it to her mouth, brushing it against her full lips, taking a little bite, all the while staring at the young waiter. I was dumbfounded. Did she think it was a gift from him? The other girls at the table watched Livia and the waiter, turning to laugh at me. I was indignant, and just as I was about to slip back behind the curtains, I noticed Virginia staring at me, grinning ear to big ear, looking back and forth from flirtation to indignation. Not only had I failed, but I failed in front of her.

I moved back down into the bowels of the kitchen, brooding angrily as I washed dishes, all the while waiting for that waiter to come in. He was old, at least twenty, or more. Who did he think he was hitting on my Livia? We were just kids. He had a mustache and dark tanned skin, thin and tall, long arms like an ape that moved with their own intelligence, muscles all over him. I could never hurt him. He was too big. When that waiter finally came in with all his waiter buddies, clearing the tables, I took my time getting the dishes to bring down to the washer. I waited and listened to them talk. They didn't notice me. They never noticed me; to them I was just a little psychotic-idiot-boy-dish-washing-machine.

“That little girl has your number, Alex,” one leered to Mr. Mustache. “I thought she was going to jump you out on the table.”

They laughed.

“She's a nasty little whore,” Mr. Mustache sneered. I was stunned. Was he only pretending to like her? “Did you see the way she was eating her meat-loaf tonight, licking her knife and fork? Ouch.”

“What's her name?”

“Lidia. I think I may be paying her a little visit before long.”

“Be careful. Remember what happened last time...”

They moved back out into the dinning room. Last time? Had he been seeing her? This guy needed killing. My plan had backfired in a horrible way.

I was the last one to finish cleaning that night. Otto made one of the waiters wait, the guy listening to Mr. Mustache's bragging, the careful one. I decided to take a chance and say something.

“Pretty busy night, huh?” It was a stupid, pointless comment; every night was busy. He turned and looked at me like I was a talking dog.

“Shut up and clean, retard!”

“Sure.” I wiped and thought. This wouldn't be easy. He hated me. They all hated me. Then it hit me. Advantage is most easily gained over the simple. It was something my father told me once. If I wanted to get in with this guy, I had to seem to have something he wanted. I did. And when he thought he got what he wanted, I could get what I wanted.

“Don't know what's taking me so long,” I said. “Lidia will be angry when I show up so late.”
The waiter looked down on me, surprised something from my universe could exist in tandem with his. “Lidia?”

“My cousin.”

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The rest is history. I met Mr. Mustache that night. His real name was Alexander Guérilla. His careful friend's name was Charles Monke. He brought me out of the Trust that night over to the brownstone building just off campus where they lived. Most of the kitchen and housekeeping staff lived just off campus in shabby, ugly little buildings. I was the only staffer who lived in the kitchen. Mr. Mustache liked that. It was his way in.

Mr. Mustache gave me a glass of wine when he found out I was Lidia's cousin. I corrected her name. They asked about my eyes. I told them my parents lived near one of the destroyed reactors in the AZ. They believed it. Sitting there in his apartment, I learned a lot about Mr. Mustache. He was a stud, and his hobby was bedding down the little coed Citizens. He considered himself their teacher, their mentor. And I was able to confirm something else about Mr. Mustache, as well. His relationship with Livia was further along than I thought.

As my head began to grow thick and muddled, he told me about meeting Livia down by the pool, heavy petting and how she was in love with him. I said I thought that was great. We drank more wine. He told me Livia was a good kisser, that someday she would be a well-built woman. He knew that from tickling her. And they were almost caught down there in the bushes. He lay there listening to Livia explain to her Trustee that she was collecting specimens for a science project, nightcrawlers. He thought that was hysterical. I laughed too. What was I going to do? He wanted me to get him inside so they wouldn't have to take chances getting caught outside. I decided that night that I would someday kill Mr. Mustache. The last thing I remember was telling him I hadn't had a chance to talk to her recently and to give Livia a message from me tomorrow at lunch, “Hi from cousin Maynard.” They all laughed at my name.

The next thing I knew I was lying in the street, a light rain falling on my face. I was too drunk to walk, slumped against a wall, watching the street spin and heave; I began vomiting. It was lucky I was sitting down, because when the building at the end of the street exploded the hail of mortar and glass would have cut me to shreds if it hit me full on. As it was, my hair was full of dirt and glass and blood, my hands were covered with vomit and dirt and spit; blood ran down my face from the gash in my hair line. I dragged myself to the Trust and banged at the gate. Trustee Rocinante came out and helped me in, angrily demanding an explanation.

“Gas,” I said. They hosed me down and stitched me up, and when the Trustee locked me into my store room. She looked down derisively on me moaning on my cot.
“I'm sorry,” I said.

“It's about what we expect of you,” she said.

She shut off the lights and locked the door.

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The next several weeks were a living hell. Mr. Mustache gave her the message, and she sent one to me. “Hello cousin,” he said. Mr. Mustache brought the first few messages back and forth between us. What an idiot. In that way I arranged to meet with her, during an early evening break. It was the first time we would speak in nearly two years.

We met down in the park by the library, at a bench in a grove of trees that hardly anyone ever went into. She entered the grove slowly, looking around carefully, then stepping, looking. She was so graceful, so beautiful; I didn't want to talk to her. I was a hunter looking out from my hiding spot, watching a gazelle step from the brush to drink from the still pool. I just wanted to sit there in the bushes and watch her.

“Cousin,” she whispered.

Suddenly I was a dishwasher, stinking of grease and Otto's hatred. I stepped timidly from the bushes. She pounced on me, asking for a message from Mr. Mustache.

“No. But I'm fine.”

She smiled, patting my shoulder. “I'm sorry, Peepers. How are you?”

I told her about the kitchen, about Otto and the Trustee, about working all day and never talking to anyone, about sleeping alone and making friends with no one. She listened patiently, her eyes blank. I wanted to tell her Mr. Mustache was a pig, that he was using her and he called her names, but I couldn't. She was in love. I couldn't hurt her. I couldn't be the one to crush her. I wanted him to hurt her. I wanted him to push her to me, just as I had pushed her to him. I would heal her, and she would love me. I had to wait.

“Livia, can you help me learn.”

She was surprised, then smiled. “Of course I can help you learn.” She patted my leg, then pulled her hand away. I was damp with soapy water and grime.

“You were right, I don't want to live in a kitchen. It's not fair.”

She smiled sadly and nodded. “Of course not,” she said. “If I can have your word.” Words. It's always a matter of words. “I'll help you if you help us.”

I agreed.

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That February Livia and I began our education together. I began leaving doors unlocked at night. I got hold of my first reader. I left windows unlatched. I started writing out grammar exercises. I distracted the Trustee by drinking. I learned. I learned all kinds of interesting things about the depravity of the Whitemale race; I read the entire Constitution of The Democratic Oligarchy of America; I learned about my self and my world. Livia learned about kissing and heavy petting.

We both learned about biology.

She brought me her Health Class book, Your Body, filled with words I never heard before: Syphilis. Gonorrhea. Clymidea. Herpes. And the pictures! There was a picture of a dead lady someone cut in half, with all her innard parts with little signs on them, like a road map of her guts. And I could see her sex parts, too. They had signs on them. I read about sex. “An equitable gene pool is varied!” “Beautiful pairs aren't fair!” On and on it went about genetics, the little parts that make a baby boy or a girl, smart or average. Even though everyone had genetics, they were really the business of the Government. The book read, “Until Humanity sustains an acceptable level of reproductive accountability, it is the responsibility of Government to efficiently manage human genetic development.”

The whole end part of the Health book was filled with Medical Law. I found the word in the back that the Trustees said about my parents.

The book was filled with all kinds of stuff like that. I decided medicine was not for me. There are no idiots in Medical School.

Livia saw Mr. Mustache once a week, so I only saw her books once a week. After two months, she and Mr. Mustache started seeing each other every other day, and for longer times. I started asking what they were doing so long, so she brought me her philosophy books.

They were a complete mystery to me. One book, called The Revisionist Self, was about the continuing act of self-reinvention. It was confusing and stupid. I remember only one passage. “The reinvented self is most negatively affected by Truth in terms of the internalized holistic conception of the relationship of self-to-other, not only regarding real self-need, as understood in the physical carnality of presence, but as it exists in terms of synthetic self-need, understood as the psychology of desire. In this context, Truth is the least meaningful of the Self-Esteem Constructs, and should be dismissed as the most harmful.” Philosophy was not for me.
I turned thirteen. Livia turned sixteen. Mr. Mustache grew older.

Her visits with him grew longer and longer. Maybe it just seemed longer because I didn't enjoy learning as much as I thought I would. We were walking back from Mr. Mustache's apartment one night, slowly. She liked to walk slowly, so she could tell me about every inch of her visit.
“Livia?” She looked down at me as if waking up, raising her eye brows. “Do you enjoy learning?”

“It depends of the subject,” she said, drifting off again. I took her hand.

“What subjects do you like?”

She sighed, squeezing my hand and swinging it lightly in the air. “I love Romance.”

When we got to the Trust, I went in first, leaving the gate slightly ajar, waiting for Livia to slip in. She disappeared in the dark immediately. I went back to my room alone. A funny thing happened. There was a Fig Chewy on my pillow. I smiled, thinking it a “thank you” from Livia.

Stupid me.

As Summer approached, our little outings began to drift farther and farther from the Trust. Livia became restless, pensive. She went days without talking, then suddenly pulled me aside and told me embarrassing things about Mr. Mustache and her, that he had the hardest, flattest stomach she had ever seen, that he was built like a man. I felt little, like a child.

About that time I discovered History. Understanding History changed my life. I learned that history was about war. My country wasn't always so peaceful, so orderly and egalitarian. (Egalitarian meant a secure job in the kitchen.) It wasn't until 14,654,912 people died, thirty years ago in the American Civil War, “The War of Left and Right,” Brown and Gray, that we got our current constitution, the one with Equanimity. 14,654,912 dead people. And Livia told me more and more about Mr. Mustache. Over the weekend they lay in each other's arms all night, but he didn't take her. I didn't understand. I set my mind on death; I studied war.

14,654,912 dead in the Civil War, an abstract number to me, just like 007348986. It had no meaning. I wanted to see 14,654,912 people, so, on a day Livia wasn't sneaking around with Mr. Mustache and his hard flat stomach, she sneaked out with me for a trip into New Gaia. All she did, sitting there on the bus, was stare dreamily off at the passing buildings, talking endlessly about Mr. Mustache. There was something she wanted to tell me, but she couldn't. I kept my mind off her blathering by trying to visualize 14,654,912 dead people. It wasn't very hard. The population of New Gaia was 12,300,000. That was close enough; I just imagined the people I saw, men, women and children, all dressed up in either brown or gray. Livia walked around all day talking about Mr. Mustache, so I put mustaches on everyone. Once I was completely surrounded by thousands and thousands of legions of brown and gray people with mustaches, I killed them all. On the way home from the city she told me how much she loved his hard body, his flat stomach. Something wonderful but scary happened with Mr. Mustache. She wasn't going to tell me, but she had to tell someone or she'd die. I needed bigger, deadlier wars.

In the First World War, only seventy-five years ago, there were 23,567,198 deaths. She told me she dreamed about him. I imagined the Second World War, only fifty years ago; 57,301,351 people died. The numbers were higher because someone invented the concept of “Total War,” making people targets. Livia rattled on and on about him, thanking me for listening because I was her little cousin, her little buddy, I understood and no one else could listen back in the Tombs and if anyone even found out, especially the Triad, she would be demoted from RA and never see Alex again. I understood. People were expendable. No one knows how many people were not accounted for in the First World War. No one cared. I looked at her, my face blank and numb. Something happened between she and Alex, she needed to tell someone. All together 95,523,461 expendable people died the last seventy-five years. That night, when they were naked together in his bed, they did something. The grand total was 1,273,646 deaths a year, averaged over seventy-five years. She gave him something she could only give once, and now she was different. But they only actually fought for eleven years, all together between the three wars, so the real average was more like 8,683,951 a year in wartime. Something in her was wrong, and she couldn't talk to her Trust Health Practitioner because she wasn't supposed to date Trust employees. There was blood. The streets were awash with blood. Two out of three people in New Gaia died for every wartime year. She cried into her hands. I smiled.

The bus came up the narrow drive to the Trust. I never wanted to leave someone so badly in my life. Even my dish washer was better than this. I stood as the bus approached the Trust, patting her on the shoulder. I would get off first, so we weren't seen together. She would ride the extra hundred yards and get off at the gate. Livia stopped crying, smiled and wiped her face as she stood behind me. I noticed Mr. Mustache was waiting for her at my stop. We got off together. She got in his little car. She didn't even say good bye. They drove off. I watched after them, but decided I would wait for her. As long as it would take.

Livia was my first true love; true love is a slow death.

I cried that night, lying there alone. I dreamed of holding Livia close to me, easing the pain brought on by the ape. She wept quietly. I stroked her hair, holding her head close to my naked chest.

I love you, I whisper. I will be your lover forever.

I'll never hurt you, she sighs. Not in a million years.

We kiss. She laughs at me, not with contempt, but the silly, meaningless laughter of lovers. It is a furtive romance, but we don't care, holding each other tightly, touching without pain open mouths and eyes shut tight, and, and... we don't care. I fall asleep, smiling.

Over the next week I decided to find out what exactly were the odds of starting my relationship with Livia, besides waiting for Mr. Mustache to go away. I asked Livia for her Health book. This time I knew things that I wanted to look up, things that mattered to me. Love was strange, biological, unpredictable, exhilarating. I liked it, but I immediately flipped to the legal section. It was less embarrassing. There was a section on Marriage Bylaws. I looked there.

The reason Livia was so terrified of getting caught and losing her RA status, and why the ape was so sneaky, all had to do with her SEC, Sex Education Class. Having their tryst wasn't so bad, but whom they were having it with was. The Trust encouraged all the students to experiment sexually with whomever they wanted, as long as they were other students and provided that all parties involved signed a Consensual Contract, or CC, as part of their General Health Education Program. To get a grade for the course, they had to keep a P&P log, Partners and Practices, handed in once a semester for review and grading by the Trust Health Practitioner, or THP. The students could engage in everything from abortion to prostitution to polygamy, as long as all parties involved were students who signed CCs and kept P&Ps chronicling all their partners. Since it was every Citizen's right to do with their bodies whatever they desired, (it being their inherent property), the Trust tried to teach the students responsible sexual practices in a controlled, contaminant free environment. Sexually Transmitted Diseases, or STDs, were rampant in society outside the Trust, third on the list of Causes of Premature Death, or CPDs. The THPs were going to great lengths to teach the kids to P&P responsibly and stay away from outsiders until they understood the full essence of their sexuality. That was why they didn't allow students, wards of the Fed, to have free sex with anyone they wanted, like the Citizens out in the real world did. All of this stemmed from legal precedents set by interpretations of the American Constitution's third amendment, allowing the people to freely assemble. The chapter on these regulations ended with, “Your Cooperative takes great safeguards for your safe sex education, but we can do nothing if these safeguards are not followed responsibly by the students.” I had a little trouble figuring it all out, but it goes like this: the THPs of the SECs let the PTCs et. al. execute their CC in a P&P so no one got a STD, high on the CPD.

The good news was that Mr. Mustache was an outsider, like me, and breaking up their relationship was as easy as snitching. The bad news was that I was an outsider too, even though I was as trapped inside the Trust as Livia, but still I had to do something. I made a decision. I would wait a little less passively for the end of Livia's relationship with her ape.

A year passed.

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I read books. Things stayed the same, with two minor exceptions. Livia suddenly stopped telling me all the little details of her tryst. The second thing was that I acquired an admirer.

When they carted me into the Trust, I thought I was this short, pip-squeak of a little nobody. But when I turned fourteen my hormones kicked in. All that hot work must have done something. As I grew taller and taller, Otto's tirades became less and less intimidating. When he blew up, I just looked down on him and smiled, and his ranting and raging became more like fussing and grumbling. He began leaving me alone, choosing instead to pick on the new students working off their new student demerits.

My sudden growth spurt did not go unnoticed. Over the year of waiting for Livia to grow tired of Mr. Mustache, or for him to grow tired of her, the number of Fig Chewies left on my pillow greatly increased. It started as an occasional thing, but soon I expected to find them rather regularly. And no matter how hard I tried to find out who was leaving them, I never could. I thought they were from Livia, and tried to thank her for them. All she said was, “What cookie?”

I began to think it was someone else. She was tall and dark, a loner among the other students too jealous of her good looks to be nice to her. Then, one day, sitting alone in the cafeteria, she noticed a certain tall young man in the same situation as herself. A dishwasher... On and on I dreamt, making the nights less lonely. It was all very exciting. And then there was the note.

I came in after a particularly hectic Friday night, greasy and smelling of filth, and found a note under the expected cookie. I stopped in my tracks and stared at it. This was the note I had been waiting for, communication from my secret loner. I sat lightly on the bed, taking up the note. It was on pink paper, with little kittens all around the border. The handwriting looked like mine, very square and methodical.

“Dear Maynard,” it read. “I hope you have enjoyed my little treats. I have been watching you. I think about you all the time. Meet me at the little park with the bench by the library, Saturday, 11 PM.” It was unsigned.

I sat in the dark, staring at the last line. It terrified me. Did I want to meet this admirer? What if she was not my lonely Amazon? What if she was a troll? No. Never. Why would a troll go to all the trouble of doing this? I decided I would meet her at the park.

The next day passed so slowly I thought I would go insane. I saw Livia around noontime, and the urge to tell her about my meeting that night was almost too much to bear. I was going to have a secret tryst, too.

After the dinner shift, I took a shower, put on clean clothes and slipped out the loading bay to my first date. I was excited, hurrying over to the library, slipping from one darkened hedge to another. When I finally reached the grove, I hesitated. From where I stood I could see the bench, and beyond, the little stand of shrubs. It had to be Livia. Who else would pick the exact same place to meet? I stepped into the grove, looking around. Nothing. I moved over to the bench and sat down, keeping my eye on the entrance. After about a minute I heard a rustle from behind, from the stand of shrubs. I turned, smiling widely and caught a sight of her. She stepped out of the bushes and moved across the dimness deliberately, tall, thin, her hair long and black, but not full and shinning, as I expected. Her face was pale and long, on which sat a pair of round glasses that hooked back over large, reddened ears. It was Virginia Anteranté.

I jumped up from the bench and nearly ran, but she reached out and grabbed my arm, pulling me back down onto the seat.

“Don't go,” she said, more pleading than commanding. She sank her fingers into my shoulder, fastening me to the bench. “Not until I say what I came here to say.” I looked down at her hand, long and thin, her knuckles white and angular.

“Okay.” I had no choice.

“I've been watching you, Maynard, watching for months. I know what you're doing.”

“What am I doing?”

“You're pimping Livia to that waiter.”

A wave of rage and hatred swept over me. I tore myself from her grip and spun around, stopping myself from spitting on her. “What are you talking about? I never even see Livia.”

She laughed, the sound of it like grinding sand in the dark. “Don't be stupid, Maynard. I know everything. I know about the trips to the city. The late night rendezvous through windows you leave unlatched. The meetings in the apartment. You're caught.”

“What do you want?” I blurted.

She smiled, kind of strolling around the bench and coming right up to me. She put both arms around my neck and looked me right in the eye. “I want a piece of the action.” She kissed me. I shut my eyes. Virginia tasted like beets, rather hot and sweet, but like vegetables. She forced her tongue into my mouth. I nearly retched. What was I going to do? She could get us all in trouble. She could get us all thrown out. I was caught. She tore my shirt, and as we fell into the wet grass, as Virginia climbed on top of me, I looked up into the dark sky, up at the moon far overhead.

“I love you, Maynard Ix,” she panted, pausing as if she wanted me to say something too. It was a full moon up there in the sky, but not really. “I love you,” she said again, “and in time, you will love me too.”

If you stared, I mean really concentrated, you could see that the moon was not all there. “Sure,” I heard my voice say, looking up past Virginia. “I can do that.”

When I got back to my cot and undressed, I found bruises all over my body. I even found bruises shaped like fingers on my shoulder. A pet name for Virginia sprang to mind: Knuckles.

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From then on I ignored the letters from Knuckles as best I could, only going to her when she threatened to blow the whistle on Livia. I never saw the light of day for fear of running into the Triad, of seeing Knuckles gloat over me like I was her property. The odd thing was, she thought we were having a relationship. She'd lie next to me, digging her elbow into my chest, calling me “dear” and “sweetheart.” I imagined this was what it was like for Livia and her ape. The whole thing repulsed me. I began to hide, living in the kitchen, living for my work, feeling the slow, strangling grip of isolation tightening around my throat; it wasn't good.

I worked harder and longer than anyone else in the kitchen, coming in at six in the morning and leaving at eleven that night. A strange thing happened. I began moving up.

It appeared my position was not for life after all. After months of seventeen hour work days, the salad chef allowed me to help prepare salads. Imagine my excitement! They were kicking me up stairs, giving me the responsibility of handling the students' food. I was overjoyed. The produce cooler was cool, the vegetables were green and orange and red and white, dripping with cool water that ran down to my elbows when I sprayed and tore and chopped and arranged, and all the while I was working, away from my “lover.” It was heaven. I remembered what the Trustee said. Everything evolves towards equality in this the most equal of all possible worlds.

They split my shifts, giving me more and more responsibilities. Soon, I no longer even worked on the dishwasher. I trained the new recruits how to wash, how to spray and not get all wet, loading and unloading in one easy movement. I got my first taste of power. It was good. But there were more important benefits to being kicked upstairs. I could get back in touch with Livia.

Just about this time, now that I was part of the outer kitchen staff, I tried passing sly, witty comments to Mr. Mustache, as if I were one of the boys. In a sense I was. I was involved in a relationship just as dangerous and illicit as his. More dangerous. But he acted as if I was not there. I tried chumming with Chip, making cracks about the female students, but he wouldn't even speak to me. When I caught Livia's eye, nodded or waved secretly, she looked away. I was dumbfounded. What had I done? After helping them get together, arranging their meetings and protecting them with this new horrible sacrifice with Knuckles, did they think they could get away with not even acknowledging my existence?

One night, after clean-up, I sidled up next to Mr. Mustache and said, “How are things going, Alex?” He grunted. “Great. They've been going well with me, too. I've been seeing this little number for about a month now. How about you and Livia doubling in the city with us next weekend?”

He looked at me like I was the most disgusting pile of crazy filth he ever laid eyes on, shook his head and muttered, “Right.” I smiled. That would get back to Livia. She would hear that I was involved with someone. She would see that my life didn't revolve around her. I looked up and saw Knuckles staring at me from across the cafeteria. I slipped back into the kitchen.

Weeks passed, and I soon realized Livia and the ape no longer needed me. I had somehow ignored the subtle changes in the minutia of our relationship. I lingered longer and longer at the salad bar, listening for anything that could help me get back in good graces with Livia, but I was suddenly treated as if I had the plague. The ape was getting tired of me hanging around. Suddenly I wasn't this cute little idiot boy who never posed a threat. I was a witness.

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When Knuckles and I had been “dating” for close to a year, something strange happened. It was the middle of the hot summer, and the students loved to go out to the pools and take swims in the humid night air under the protective glare of the Trustees stationed by the gates. The staff loved to come out and watch from their various concealed places. The laundry had their spot along the perimeter; the driving pool had their spot along the wall by the driveway; the kitchen had ours by the tennis courts. I was hiding under a bush near the chain link fence. Down below, the students splashed and danced around in the soft yellow lights. From where I was, I could see The Triad together down there, safely sitting in a corner, commenting on all the stupidity surrounding them. Livia was with several of her friends, sitting on blankets at the side of the pool, flirting with some boys who splashed and made idiots of themselves in front of the girls. It was a ritual. As I sat enjoying their fun I was nearly stepped on by two pairs of drunken waiters' legs. I recognized their voices immediately; it was Chip and Mr. Mustache. I pulled my legs into the bush and disappeared.

“You should go down there and just take her,” Chip said.

“Nah. She'll graduate soon. I can wait.”

“Why? You've been waiting for years.”

“I can wait. It won't be much longer now.”

“Just look at her down there. Doesn't it bother you what she's doing with those boys?”

“She's just playing with their heads.”

Chip crouched heavily against the fence, looking up at the ape, shaking his head. They still wore their uniforms from dinner. “She's playing with more than their heads. She's treating you like a clown. What's happening to you? You never used to care about these little bimbos.”

The ape's legs moved over towards Chip, looming over him. Chip curled his legs against his chest, looking up afraid at the ape.

“I'm sorry, Alex,” he said, shutting his eyes. The ape stepped back, turning towards the pool.
“I don't know either,” he said. “It's not like me. I know that. But there's something about Livia. She's different from the others. Older. Maybe she's the one.”

Chip's face paled, his jaw dropping. “You want to marry her?” My jaw dropped. Chip climbed to his feet, staggering over to the ape. “She's only seventeen. You're only twenty-two. What are you thinking?”

“I don't know. I don't know.” His feet turned, pointing at Chip's. “We're thinking of eloping, as soon as she graduates.”

“What?!”

“Well, mostly I'm thinking of it. She wants to stay and finish her placement exams. She wants to be a Public Servant. I want her to live with me.”

“Why? You already have a nice set up. You're in and out of here all the time, and if you get locked out, the idiot-boy can get you back in. Why change all that? What is it? Do you actually love her?”

“No,” he said irritably. “I just don't like this system anymore. It's too dangerous. I'm tired of hearing every time we get together how the whole world of punishment and defeat hangs over her head and how dangerous I am for her to be with. She's so terrified of getting caught that there's nothing fun about being together anymore. Besides, do you know what it's like to have to depend on a retard for your love life?” They both laughed.

“So dump her.”

The ape moaned. “I can't dump her. We've been doing this for too long. I want to get out.” They began to walk away. Just as they receded down the hill, the ape turned and looked back in my direction. I knew he couldn't see me, but he seemed to look me right in the eye, under my bush. “It's about time Maynard the gibbering idiot-boy was cut out of the picture all together.”

They disappeared down the hill, leaving me alone under my shrub. Laying there in the dark, I watched Livia down there among all her potential suitors, laughing childishly, pushing them into the pool, batting her eyes and flirting, all the while planning to run away with him. In a little while, I would never see her again. And Mr. Mustache was going to get rid of me, as well. I don't know what came over me. I wanted them to die, I wanted them to get caught, her to get demoted and I wanted him to get fired and thrown out of the Trust; and I could do it, too. As long as I moved first.

The Triad stood together and moved across the pool area, stopping by Livia and her friends to sneer down at them. Over by the gate, Mr. Mustache and Chip stood drunkenly looking in. The Trustees noticed the waiters and came over, shooing them along. They wouldn't leave. I climbed out from under my shrub and looked down at Livia. I didn't want to hurt her, no matter what she planned for me. I loved Livia. I needed her. I couldn't let her go, no matter what. And she would need me, someday. I just had to survive until then, and get rid of Mr. Mustache and Knuckles and the Trustees and this whole mess. Knuckles said something to Livia and they both looked over at the Trustees, now raising their voices at the waiters. To the Trustees, the waiters were a lingering menace.

I had an idea.

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It wasn't very hard to initiate my idea. Getting rid of Mr. Mustache was almost too easy. The first thing I did was let my “relationship” with Knuckles get hotter and heavier. I returned her advances, and she responded in kind. The more I responded, the deeper I drew her in. Every time we met, I made a big deal about it being a secret meeting and that no one could ever find out because if they did all that would happen to her was a few demerits and some time quarantined from the student population, but for me it would mean losing my job and being thrown out of the Trust. I guess there was some truth to what I said, since sleeping with the coeds was a dismissal offense. But I had no idea what would really happen to me, since my job was for life. The important thing was that the threat was there, to Knuckles.

I began sleeping with Knuckles; our relationship blossomed rather quickly. We sneaked off regularly to any of a dozen little hiding spots around campus, staring into each other's eyes, kissing a lot, sharing our dreams. I made up some good stuff.

“Maynard,” she said, lying next to me one night under the bleachers by the soccer field. “What do you want to be when you get out of here?”

I never thought of getting out. I shook my head. “I don't know.”

“What did you want to be when you were a kid?”

I remembered the AZ, playing among the skeletons. “A builder. Maybe an architect. I don't know.” It was stupid to wonder. The Fed already gave me a job. It didn't matter. I looked off to the parking lot lights and sighed. It worked like a charm. Knuckles climbed on my chest, digging her elbows into me, like she usually did, both her hairy legs wrapped around both of mine, looking dolefully into my eyes.

“Maynard, what's the matter? You've been distant and moody all night.”

I sighed. “It's nothing. I can handle it.”

“I'm sure you can handle it,” she fussed. “But I may be able to help.”

We went back and forth like this for a while, until I hit her with the secret weapon.
“No, this is a guy thing.” Knuckles slapped me playfully, but with anger. That was the magic word. She hated the idea of guy things. “Okay, okay. I'll tell you. It's Alex Guerrilla. I think he wants to kill me.”

Virginia grunted. “How do you know?”

“He said things that were pretty threatening.”

“Like what?”

“He called my idiot-boy. Retard.”

“Everyone calls you that, except me.”

“He started shoving me around. One night he and Chip were pretty drunk and waiting for me out by the dumpsters, so I left the trash in the hall until morning. I got written up for that, as well.”

“Maybe they're just fooling around?”

I sighed. “No. He likes to fool around with the coeds. If he was smart, he would be more concerned about getting caught with Livia than looking for trouble with me.”

“Umm,” she said, staring at my ear. She wasn't following. I decided to up the ante.

“I've been considering putting in for a transfer, before he gets the chance to kill me. They're always looking for a few good dishwashers out there in the world.” She jumped, looking down on me with real fear in her eyes.

“You can't leave. I won't let you.”

“We don't have much choice. He's six or eight years older than me, and bigger. It looks like it's going to be either him or me.”

She rolled off me, looking vacantly up at the shrubbery. Her profile was so flat, so without definition, I could have rested a book evenly on her face. Finally she smiled and rolled back on top. “Him or you?”

I looked up at her, confused. “What do you mean?”

“I have an idea. Instead of writing all the stuff I've been making up about Esther and me in my P&P log, over the next couple weeks I'll write down all of our exploits, but change his name for yours.”

“Yes,” I said, curiously. Inside I was overjoyed.

“I can start making a big deal about him in front of Peggy and Esther.” Her voice was rising in excitement, so I put my hand on her shoulder, shushing her. “They're already suspicious of me as it is. I can confide in them that I've been sleeping with an employee. They'll believe anything I tell them.”

“But what if someone he's been with comes out in his defense?”

She balked. “Who would be stupid enough to do that? He's just a waiter.”

“You never know.”

“Well, we can fix that. As the ultimate evidence, I can give you a pair of my panties and you can slip them into his locker in the kitchen. Then, once everything is in place, I can go to the THP with complaints of a strange rash or something. That's all it would take. Simple. Our problem is solved.” She smiled widely, her ears growing pink with excitement. I lay there under her, beaming. It was all so simple.

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Things moved rather quickly after that. I spiced up Knuckles' entries; she was rather lacking in imagination and I had too much. We had the details to no less than twenty meetings fleshed out in her journal in less than a week. The whole time I grew more and more anxious. Knuckles thought I was afraid of Mr. Mustache, but I was growing more and more concerned that he would beat me to the punch and run away with Livia before I could get him thrown out of the Trust.

One Thursday Knuckles asked to be excused from class because of some unexplainable pains, and went down to the Health Education Office for a check-up. Somehow she made herself pretty sick, and the HEO became concerned, seizing her P&P logs for the past several months. What happened next was a whirlwind. The Trust Administrators pulled Mr. Mustache from the floor and held him in their offices until he consented to allow them to search his lockers and apartment. He consented, having nothing to hide. And he didn't. Except for a pair of flowered panties with the initials VA scrawled in them. He put up a struggle, but it was no use. It seems there were witnesses, the girl's best friends, who swore she was in his company all the time for over three weeks. They even knew of details of their relationship (which they learned from reading Knuckle's log). Livia was brought in to the whole mess, since Knuckles was one of Livia's residents and this had all happened right under her nose. I understand she sat right next to Knuckles while the whole mess unraveled, for support of the violated minor. I can only imagine the look on her face as she heard all the evidence set against her ape while pretending to aid and comfort Virginia Anteranté, an enemy and apparent co-lover of Alexander Guérilla, waiter paramour.

While all the waiters at one point or another had trysts with the coeds, hardly any of them ever got caught. That was against their code. And when one was, it was bad for the culprit. So, with all the evidence in against Mr. Mustache, the Administrators decided to make an example of him.

He was dismissed. But they didn't stop there. He was turned over to the local magistrates for rape, Knuckles being a ward of the State who had not consented to his violation in writing, in which case he would be tried as a child molester. I heard through the grapevine that, if he was found guilty of child molestation, he would have to do jail time, lose all his chances at social advancement, be identified to the local authorities as a molester, subject his eventual two children to the Fed for evaluation six times a year (voluntary sterilization is required of repeat offenders), and spend the next several years in deep psychoanalysis. They took Mr. Mustache out of the Trust in hand-cuffs, swearing his head off all the way to the wagon that Livia and Knuckles had framed him. If he only knew.

Scandal rocked the Trust status quo. For Knuckles, things didn't go so badly. The commotion lasted for several days, and she was even something of a hero, since no one had been caught fraternizing with the staff in several graduating classes. She was rather swept up in her new found celebrity status, as older students suddenly became attracted to her and underclass-people stepped aside for her in the hall. It was all well and good for me, since I needed time to see how Livia was recovering from her Mr. Mustachectomy. I watched her at lunch from the kitchen wings, sitting at her table, staring blankly into space while her friends gossiped all around her about the latest news of Mr. Mustache's unfolding psychoanalysis. Every so often she would look over her shoulder at Knuckles, then shake her head and stare back into space. She was baffled, completely alone in her misery. She needed a friend right now; she needed me.

As chance would have it, she was staring in my direction. I waved frantically to get her attention. After about five minutes, she blinked at me. I held up three fingers and pretended to read a book, 3 o'clock at the library park. She nodded, then drifted off into space. That was the best I could do. I turned to walk back into the kitchen and slammed right into Chip. My blood ran cold.

“Three what?” he said.

“Three what?” I looked up at him, my face as completely blank as I could make it. Chip just looked out at Livia, then scowled as he moved away.

After my shift, I went to the library and waited. Livia showed up a little late, but I was surprised she showed at all. I came over from my shrub pulling her to the bench.

“Are you all right?” I asked, worried about her pale complexion and vacant eyes.

“I can't believe it, Maynard. I can't believe it.” I said nothing. She looked at me, inquisitive and angry. “Tell me the truth, Maynard. You work in the kitchen. Did he really have Virginia Anteranté?” She asked the question with revulsion. I was a little insulted, but I hid it well.

“As far as I know, yes.”

She grabbed my arms, her nails digging into the meat. “Why! Why didn't you tell me?”

“I didn't want to hurt you--”

“Were there others? Did he do this the whole time we were together?”

To be honest, I didn't know. “Yes.”

“How many?” She shook me hard. I pulled away, angry that she was taking this all out on me.

“I don't know. They all hated me. All I ever heard was rumors.”

“How many?”

“Dozens.”

She let me go and stared off again, her eyes glazing over. I didn't know what to do. She was taking this so badly.

“What's the matter, Livia?”

She turned and looked at me vacantly. “I'm going to have his baby. We were going to elope... We were going to run away and live together.”

We sat in silence for a long time. Finally, she stood and moved off back to the Tombs, leaving me there to mull it all over. I have no idea how long I sat there, or what I thought about. I got back to the kitchen at about four fifteen. Everything about the place was different. I didn't even notice the waiters gathered by the rear entrance, huddled talking in low tones. I pushed through the din and stood by my station, waiting for the dinner rush. I was in such a state I hardly even noticed when the paper was shoved in my hands. He had to shake me to even get a response. I looked at it. A girl lay on a bed, naked and oily, her hair sweaty, clinging to her head as she held what looked like a wrinkled cigarette smoking between her teeth. She looked drunk. But there was something else about her face behind the smoke, the way she held her head. Then I realized what it was about her that seemed so familiar. It was Livia. And I recognized the room. She was lying back on Mr. Mustache's bed. I looked at the person who handed me the picture. Chip stood there smiling like a hyena.

“I thought you might want to use this for your future advertising to pimp your cousin, retard,” he said coldly. “I've been passing out pictures from Alex's private collection all day. Several of the boys seem interest--”

I took a bottle of vinegar from the salad rack and hit him so hard in the face I think his feet left the ground. He landed somewhere on the other side of the kitchen, knocking over a huge stack of dishes that crashed to the floor. I hit him again as he was trying to get up. He didn't. He fell back onto the dishes, unconscious. I watched his face glaze over in red; the bottle cut the right side of his face so deeply it looked like he had another mouth. I stood there, watching him bleed, happy, pleased. Otto hit me so hard I think I fell right there on top of Chip. I don't know. The next thing I remember was waking up in the infirmary, tied down to a bed.

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What happened next I only heard through the grapevine. They doped me up pretty good. Apparently Otto told them that my tiny, little mind had snapped, that I had wildly attacked everyone on the kitchen staff. I would have killed them all if he hadn't wrestled me into submission. They were keeping me under observation, since they weren't sure if it was safe to reinsert someone of my limited mental capacities and deficient genetic makeup back into society after so violent an episode.

I really wanted to know what happened out there, how many pictures of Livia were floating around, if she had seen them, but I was placed in a psychiatric ward, in the communal wing for faculty and staff. The place was nearly deserted, except for this tall, gangly art teacher a few beds down who was taking a little vacation for her depression. She was really old, maybe twenty years older than me. Her skin was gaunt and hung around her eyes so they drooped sadly most of the time. All she did was stare at me. I tried and tried to find out what was happening, but no one would talk to me. I asked if anyone heard anything about what was happening in the Guérilla case, or anything about a student named Livia Gates, but they just ignored me, hurrying away as if I had the plague. Days passed. Just when I thought I would lose my mind, it happened.

One night, really late, I felt this hand shaking me out of sleep. I opened my eyes and found myself nose to nose with the art teacher.

“Hello, Maynard Ix,” she said.

I nodded.

“You really messed up that waiter. He won't be around for a while. Forty stitches in the face. Broken jaw. It was bestial.”

“I don't care.”

“I bet you don't.” She crept noiselessly around the end of my bed, her arms and legs moving in perfect silent rhythm, her pale face never turning away as it floated on her turning body. “Tell me, Maynard Ix, are you really as stupid as they say you are?”

I nodded.

“I'll bet you are.”

I didn't say anything to her. I just lay there, strapped down, looking at her as if she could slit me open and suck me dry.

“You want to know what's happening?” she whispered.

“Yes,” I said. She covered my mouth with her hand, looked around, then leaned close. “This morning, Livia Gates took an overdose of drugs because some nude pictures of her are floating around the Trust.” She couldn't have hurt me more if she jabbed me with a poisoned dagger. I wanted to scream, but the art teacher held my mouth tighter. “I have the whole collection. Would you like to see them?” I shook my head. “You are a friend of theirs? No? Of hers?” I nodded. She smiled. Letting go my mouth, she hissed a shush at me past her bony finger and leaned back on the bed next to mine in one falling movement.

“How did you get pictures of Livia?” I whispered.

The art teacher laughed. “Everyone has a set by now.”

“Where is she? Is she all right”

“Livia? She's not in the Trust any more.”

“Where is she?”

The art teacher shook her head. “It was a cry for help, but no one heard it,” she hissed.

“Livia died.”

avant god

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Justice: Serial Monster Sentenced

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

I: Cereal Logic

Who am I...