“‘Listen, sweetie,’ Dad had said, ‘this isn’t your fault. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be separated from you,’”—you feel yourself smirk, noting the passive voice—“‘but I heard that song, and it’s in my head, and I know it’s changing my Pattern. It’s making me something new. Not just new atoms, but a new Pattern. I’m not the man I used to be.’
“As he said this, he unbuttoned the cuff of his right sleeve with his free hand. His right hand held the pistol, and his finger never left the trigger. He pulled up his sleeve, revealing a scatter-plot row of weeping boils that had sprouted up his forearm. Nestled in each boil was a small, wide eye. There were five of these eyes, bright as a baby’s. Each looked like his eyes, like mine, but each tracked independently, like five separate eyes in five separate darling baby faces. As I watched, they blinked in series, like a shiver of gooseflesh.”
The children do not react to this, and that’s good; their Resilience is all they’ll have, soon enough.
“My father said: ‘I’m scared about what happens next.’ He was crying then with his own eyes, his forearm eyes still looking around like fascinated toddlers. ‘I used to get anxious,’ he told me. ‘It was this constant feeling, like something awful was always just about to happen. Now the feeling has changed. I feel like something awful has already happened. And it’s me. I don’t want to do this, but the song… I thought it was Mick Jones singing “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” but now I realize it’s Sid Vicious covering Sinatra’s “My Way.” I can take a hint.’
“And then he put the gun in his mouth. And then he pulled it out with a grimace, and instead placed the barrel beneath the shelf of his chin. And he pulled the trigger twice. That impressed me. It still does: he’d done the job fine with the first bullet—the proof got all over his grandfather’s axe—but he so badly wanted to make sure the job was done right and final that he had the presence of will to keep pulling, even though he was already dead. That’s something. That was my dad, in a nutshelclass="underline" he really did the job right and full.”
You take a breath, and you finish:
“My father committed suicide because he’d listened to the Bad Song on the radio—back before anyone even knew anything like the Event could happen—and the song had started to change him. He was insufficiently resilient and adaptive. This is a problem for adults: he could not cope with What Has Happened. To his mind, when your Pattern is gone, you’re gone: the head and handle aren’t just not the old head and handle; they aren’t heads or handles at all. He could not accept this, and so he was Rejected.”
You pause, and then say:
“I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place.”
“You can’t,” Vanessa Z. gasps. Denial.
You ask if there’s a rule that you can’t. The children clearly don’t know. But you do, and there is not. No one ever conceived of the possibility that an adult might try to leave the “safety” of a federal continuity-of-operations shelter. No one older than fifteen is known to have survived outside any shelter, and everyone knows it.
“Bitch,” Bennie mutters under his breath, his eyes accusatory coals. Anger.
The other shelters ceased communicating weeks ago—their computer networks don’t even “reply to pings,” whatever that means. You don’t imagine this is because they’ve somehow found a way to eliminate Rejection.
“Who will help us work through our issues, Dr. Mikkelson?” Vanessa L. asks, slyly.
Bargaining.
You tell them that Dr. Bowersox is an excellent clinician, because she is. They will all be ready to leave sooner or later, you explain. They all have the capacity to be Resilient, Functional, and Adaptive. They are young, and it is still their world. They just need to trust in the therapeutic protocol and in themselves.
You do not say that we—the adults “protecting” you—won’t survive here. Small children are never Rejected; they can accept What Has Happened. These older children can process their grief and likely avoid Rejection, too. But what are the rest of us, the “responsible adults,” doing? Living like moles, breeding more children in order to steadily traumatize them in the sunless continuity of operations bunkers, only to someday send them out the Waiting Room Door, where they’ll sink or swim on their own—and all the while cutting our own rations further and further. What’s the point of that? What the hell are we clinging to?
You realize you are Bargaining with yourself, and you smile.
“I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place,” you repeat. “I’ll see you all tomorrow.”
The final rule is that when you leave the Children’s Sharing Place, you must leave through the Waiting Room.
As soon as the session begins, you stand. “I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place,” you repeat.
The group is silent. They do not Bargain because they are now in Depression.
But you’re past all that, and so you leave.
The Waiting Room Door snicks shut behind you, and you are finally in the Waiting Room, where the potted plant nods in the corner like the quiet old woman whispering, “Hush.”
The Waiting Room is small but not stuffy.
You wait. Nothing happens. And so you leave through the EXIT.
There is a shock of clear light and a distant dinging. The heavy EXIT door thunks shut behind you. Your eyes clear, and you discover that the door exits directly into a large parking lot: cracked, oil-stained asphalt full of weeds, a few cars parked indiscriminately around the blacktop. One car has its driver’s side door hanging open. That’s the source of the ding: the keys have been forgotten in the ignition.
Something bothers you about that dinging, but you can’t focus on what that might be.
You turn to look at the building that you came out of, and see that it’s a low-slung strip of little cinderblock office units skirted with ragged hedges, situated on the outskirts of a giant parking lot, which surrounds a distant shopping mall. There are more cars at the mall, but the parking is no more orderly. You’d originally been brought (note the passive voice) to a different building elsewhere in this office park, a warehouse with a loading dock. This was back when we thought we could hide long enough for What Has Happened to blow over. Back then the big concern was keeping the kids “developmentally on track” while they lived in the shelter, “so they’d be ready to kickstart the global economy.” The soldiers who brought you had spoken of critical infrastructure protection and continuity of operations planning. “The children are our future,” one had told you earnestly as she helped you down out of the truck, “our most precious natural resource.”
You had agreed, but you were still in Denial. Everyone was. Well, everyone older than fifteen.
You are absolutely terrified, standing out in the open in the parking lot.
But the day is beautiful—especially after so many months spent in tunnels and bunkers and shelters and conference rooms and gymnasia. It is sunny and clear, the breeze fresh and clean. It smells of hot tar and the tall sweetgrass left to grow undisturbed in the fields beyond the parking lot. There is no distant drone of traffic. There are no airplanes in the sky, nor the contrails that show their passing. Birds flit and swoop in enormous flocks.