“killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme…”
“Belinda wasn’t really ready,” Tilly says. “I am very ready. I’m gone.”
The shy boy next to Tilly—his name is Marcus, and he is new—speaks just to Tilly: “We could…”
Tilly stops and turns to him. He is knotting his fingers, twisting them against each other, digging painfully into his skin, but his voice is level and clear, if quiet. “We could… try that thing that you wanted to try, but that I was nervous about.” He chews his lip, looks up at the room, then locks on to Tilly. “We could do that. We could do whatever you want if you stay.”
His eyes are wide and desperate and lost. Tilly’s mouth twitches, but she shakes her head without speaking.
Tilly leaves. The Waiting Room door latches shut. You all hear the sigh and thunk of the heavy EXIT door. Then silence.
Silence is presumed to be indicative of Acceptance (note the passive voice).
The group is dour with Tilly gone. This is odd, because Tilly hadn’t been a ray of sunshine. She was usually morose and often irritable. Once, in the midst of an especially spirited session, Bennie had shouted at Tilly: “The only thing you like is stirring shit up and making everyone as miserable as you!”
Albert had called a Time Out and then, in his plodding voice, had taken Bennie to task: “That’s not fair to Tilly,” he’d said. “She doesn’t like stirring shit up and making people feel bad. She doesn’t like anything.”
Everyone had laughed, including Tilly. Then Vanessa Z. had begun to cry and had kept doing so for five minutes and thirty-eight seconds before simply saying, “My brother is dead. He was nine, but he was Rejected anyway because of how Auntie died. My brother is not nine anymore, because he’s dead.” Her spirits had steadily improved since then, but she has yet to ask to leave.
No one seems to have much to say during the session following Tilly’s exit, and so you say:
“My father had his grandfather’s axe. The axe was old and it hung in our garage. It had been used a lot : The handle was dry and splintered and cracked, and the head was pretty rusty, except for the working edge, which Dad dressed before and after each use. My dad and his dad were both the youngest from big families, so I’d presumed my great-grandfather’s axe was very old. Maybe a century? Maybe so. I always thought that was neat: A five-year-old smartphone was practically junk, but a hundred-year-old axe was as good as ever.
“Then one day Dad mentioned how often his dad had worn through axe handles—Dad grew up out in the country, and winter was harsh back then—and I realized that the handle on his grandfather’s axe wasn’t a handle my great-grandfather had ever even seen. On a hunch, I asked how long the head would last. ‘Oh,’ Dad had said, ‘I dunno. Generations. It’s hard steel. I only replaced this one once, when I first got the axe after Dad passed. The handle had dried and shrunk, hanging unused in his shed for so long, and the first time I hauled back to split some stove wood, the head went whanging off into the brush. Never found it.’”
You have never spoken to any of the children about your life before the bunker and the Sharing Place. None of them have ever asked. They are politely attentive now. You know they’ll start to lose focus soon.
“So, my father’s grandfather’s axe had neither the head nor handle of his grandfather’s axe. His grandfather had never seen or touched a single atom of that axe. I asked my dad how the heck the axe was his grandfather’s axe, and he gave me sort of a weird look. ‘Because it is.’ I explained about the atoms, about how the axe only has two parts, and both had been replaced, and so it wasn’t the same thing anymore. Dad was a physics professor. He’d worked at Oak Ridge Atomic Research Center, and he replied: ‘You know that thing people say, about your body having all new cells every seven years? That’s basically poppycock: Some cells are replaced very quickly, like the lining of your stomach, which is shed weekly. Others very rarely are replaced, like neurons. But atoms are swapped in and out constantly by your metabolic processes; from one year to the next almost every single atom in your body will be replaced. Since birth you’ve been a whole new girl over again more than two dozen times—but you’re still my little girl. If I’d saved all the hair from your haircuts growing up—the very atoms that had been you—and introduced it as ‘my daughter, the famous child psychologist,’ people would think I was nuts. The material is just dead stuff. If you’re going to be like that, then we’re all stars, because that’s where all our atoms started out. What counts isn’t the material, it’s the pattern. You aren’t your skin or hair or clothes or diplomas or New York Times bestseller; you are the pattern in your cells that causes those cells to keep gobbling up atoms and organizing them to be you.’
“That sticks in my head, because my dad died in his garage, and some of his blood and stuff splattered on that axe and handle. This was after the government realized that the Event had already started, when the National Guard was dynamiting radio stations so people couldn’t accidentally hear the Bad Song, but before people got really careful and started snipping the speakers out of their electronics. This was before the first deaf person ‘heard’ the Bad Song in the rhythmic buzz of a cellphone set on ‘vibrate,’ and long before people started smashing anything with a speaker in it.”
This was likewise long before the Advent, but you don’t mention the Advent, because the children don’t know about the Advent—don’t even know the word; they came to the shelter before the Advent—but also because you don’t really know anything concrete about the Advent: All you really know is that something has arrived. And, in stark contrast to everything you learned from your dad’s favorite movies, it isn’t going anywhere.
“This was before regular people got careful, but already the police wouldn’t answer the phone or use radio dispatch. You had to text them. So I texted them, staring at the blood spattered on the axe handle so I wouldn’t have to stare at Dad.”
You are no longer worried about the children getting impatient with your story. This is what they’ve been hungry to hear about, the things the “responsible adults” don’t talk about—as though it’s the children who need to be sheltered.
“When I’d come by after work, Dad hadn’t been expecting me. He was in the garage. He had the spigot on, running a trickle across the concrete to the floor drain. He’d do that when he was dressing out a deer in the fall, so the concrete would be easy to rinse off when he was done. But this was the early spring, not deer season. And there was no deer. He was standing over the drain, holding his pistol. A revolver.
“‘Oh,’ he said when I walked into the garage, ‘Jeez, Janey; you scared me. I didn’t think you were coming by.’
“I’d texted him, but he hadn’t noticed—he was ahead of the curve, and had already snipped out his cellphone’s speaker and vibrating motor.
“‘Listen,’ he said—and even then, so soon after we knew there’d been the Event, that word was already starting to get scary: Listen. Because what if someone had heard the Bad Song, just a little, and was about to hum it to you? The way you do when you have a jingle in your head and you say, ‘Hey, listen to this; what’s this stupid tune I’ve got stuck in my head?’ And then you hum a few bars.