Sandy, the nurse at the clinic, looked bored. She sat a desk, a half-done crossword puzzle and an open bag of potato chips in front of her. She smiled when she saw me. In the beginning I had seen the pity in her, the tenderness she tried not to make obvious. But that shifted to genuine affection when she learned that I was planning on raising the child myself, instead of dropping it one of the ubiquitous care homes, where most of the children stayed until they became too violent to be managed.

Sandy squirted some anti-bacterial gel on her hands and then led me to the exam room. As always, I was nervous at these visits. I carried small, like my mother had. I only really started to bulge now, in my fifth month. My grandmother had said my mother’s “half-moon pregnancy” was the cause of the wine stain, but even as I kid, I knew that wasn’t true. Still, I worried and it didn’t help that I was surrounded by women heavy with twins or triplets or more.

I sat down on the table and Sandy helped me lift my legs up. She rubbed gel across my stomach and then went over it with the ultrasound scanner. I watched the bow-shaped fetus twinkle on the screen and transform into different black and white views.

“Does everything look okay?” I asked, and Sandy knew that was a double question.

“Looks good. No sign of any abnormality, and no sign of anything cosmetic. Of course, we can’t always tell with that.”

She wiped the gel off my stomach and we chatted for a little while. She told me that ultrasound visits had continued to go down. Now that most people knew what the children were for there was less prenatal concern. Just before I left, she opened a drawer packed with pamphlets on breast-feeding and handed me one—a show of faith, since most kids born today didn’t want to suckle.

I drove by Lake Stoddard on my way to work. The kids had now set up an encampment at the lake and I saw a curl of smoke coming from the middle of the tents and makeshift shelters. When I arrived at the Department of Health and Safety Statistics, I saw Carol’s Range Rover with the hulking shape of Pastor Zeff sitting behind the wheel. I pulled up next to him and watched his big frame lumber out of the car and settle into the passenger seat next to me.

He put his hand on my stomach and I put my hand over his, feeling his sharp knuckles. In the midday sun, the lines around his eyes looked more like cracks and this reminded me of how little time we spend together outdoors.

“God came to me last night. Woke me up in the early morning and I’ve been awake since,” he said.

I knew that when God came to Pastor Zeff it was always with an order, a commandment that left little room for interpretation. Before I could ask what it was, he told me: “We have to announce this pregnancy far and wide. ‘Shout it across the land,’ God says.”

“Announce it? What? Why?”

“The people need to know,” he said.

“Why?” I asked again.

“They need to see my commitment to the Proliferation. That I’ll even go outside my marriage for it,” he said. “It’s all set up.”

“Set up?”

Then he explained that a major network—the one whose owner had been an early convert to Zeffism—would interview both of us tonight in their studio. I sat up and winced.

“Don’t worry,” Pastor Zeff said, and he tapped out the address of the studio on his phone, sent it to me, and told me to be there at 6. He brushed his hand over the stained side of my face and whispered “immune, immune, immune,” and then opened the car door. Just before he stepped out, he added “don’t want to jeopardize that now.” He reached in again, rubbed my stomach and flashed a wide grin, before heading back to his car.

I sat in the car for a long time after that, feeling dizzy and tasting the waves of acid as they rose from stomach. Finally, when I was sure I wouldn’t fall if I tried to stand, I walked to my office, avoiding eye contact with anyone I passed on the way. When I opened the door, the first thing I saw was the shredded sonogram images—the ones I had pinned to the corkboard over my desk—in a little pile on the floor. I spent the rest of the morning piecing them back together as much as I could. Then I taped them, along with the newest sonogram, to the outside of my office door so that Carol couldn’t miss them.

                                                                      * * *

The interviewer only asked me one question: “When is the happy day?” to which I quietly told him and the rest of the country my due date. Later that night a group of kids set fire to an old age home and Pastor Zeff said it was sign.

                                                                      * * *

I was eight months along and still working. I wanted Carol to see me waxing for as long as possible. One day, when I was sitting at my desk, looking over a dataset that showed that girls of the Proliferation were almost equal to boys in the commission of violent crime, I felt my stomach twist and break into pain like I had never known. I started to the bathroom, trying to walk while squeezing my legs together. I crawled through the door and lay on the cold tile floor, feeling like my insides were being filleted. I’m not sure how long I lay there until the pain started to come in pulses that, to my surprise, grew increasingly less intense until all I felt was exhaustion.

I still didn’t budge, except to reach out my arms to feel the cold of the floor on them. I wasn’t sure I could walk, so I just lay there stranded on a beach of stained white tiles. I was counting them, when I heard the door open and saw the low-heeled pumps that Carol always wore coming toward me. She was looking at her phone in her hand and when she saw me her face went quickly from surprise to satisfaction.

She came just outside of the orbit of my arm’s reach and from that angle she was a tall and straight as a knitting needle. Half of her calves were uncovered by her skirt and spider veins spiraled across them, like little galaxies. For a few seconds her eyes moved from me to her phone. She tapped a few times and scrolled down. Then she started reading, and I recognized immediately that these were the online comments from my interview with Pastor Zeff.

“The reason veils exist.”

“Is there a makeup artist in the house?”

“Ack! Cut your head off!”

“That poor kid. Imagine that being the first face you see.”

I closed my eyes tight and imagined Pastor Zeff’s voice telling me I was immune.

Carol entered a stall and locked the door. She kept reading and I heard her start to urinate.

“Criminally ugly.”

“I wouldn’t blame the kid if her kills her. With that face who wouldn’t be scared enough

to murder?”

I felt something warm and wet touch my cheek. I opened my eyes. Carol was peeing on the

floor and a yellow line traced an angular pattern of grout from the stall to me. I got up as fast as I could—which was still pretty slow—and steadied myself by holding on to the hand dryer. I wobbled to a stall, peeled off a length of toilet paper, and wiped my face.

“I’m sure in power outage she looks good.”

I made my way back to my office and locked the door, gulping breaths as I went. After I maneuvered into my desk chair, I cradled the bulge in my arms. Pastor Zeff had chosen me and there was nothing Carol or anyone else could do to change that. After a little while, I walked out to my car. I stayed in the parking lot staring at the building for a long time, as if I knew I would never be back. That night I dreamed of a time when I was twelve and a kid in my class threw his coat over my head and said “that’s better.” I saw his face—the constellation of pimples across his forehead and his chapped lips. I heard the laughter, and saw the quiet pity of a Jehovah’s Witness girl who sat a few rows away from me in class when I threw the coat to the floor.

The next day I went in for another ultrasound. This one had been quickly arranged by my doctor because of the episode at work. Pastor Zeff drove me and waited in the car. Sandy ushered me into the exam room with a stony face. She had seen the interview, it was obvious. Her manner toward me had changed so much that she almost looked like a different person. Even the way she rolled the scanner across my belly seemed different—quicker and with no commentary about the fetal preview.

I missed Sandy’s warmth and, trying to pry conversation I out of her, I said, “Probably the first singleton you’ve seen all day…”

“No, but the first I’ve seen who had such … er … purpose in the world,” she said.

This made me angry, but I held my tongue. My doctor had promised to call later with the results, but I wanted reassurance from Sandy before then, so I stayed quiet and stared at the image on the screen. When Sandy was done, she handed me a couple of paper towels to rub the gel off my stomach. It was only when she turned her back to wheel the machine into the corner that I asked if everything looked normal. When she said it did, I answer with “Praise Zeff.” Sandy’s shoulders tensed and she pretended that she was still busy with the machine so she didn’t have to turn around. I threw the paper towels on the exam table and left.

Pastor Zeff drove me home. When we reached Lake Stoddard, he slowed so we could take in the children’s encampment that had grown so much that it almost encircled the lake. A couple of girls who looked to be about thirteen were on the sidewalk. One held a stick in her hand with something on top of it. I leaned forward and squinted and that’s when I saw it was a cat’s head. Pastor Zeff saw it too and smiled. What sins could that cat have possible committed to be killed? I wondered and immediately tossed that thought away, like some bit of food that had rotted in the back of my fridge. We turned into the underground parking lot of my high rise and Pastor Zeff helped me out of the car. He even walked me all the way to the building’s elevator.

My doctor called later that day and reassured me that the ultrasound showed no abnormality. Still, he wanted me stay on bedrest for the rest of my pregnancy. He asked if I was aware of a popular meal delivery service, as if he knew that I had no one to cook for me.

My due date was still five weeks away and I passed the time mostly by watching TV and anticipating the next delivery from Pastor Zeff. He had sent a crib, a basinet, clothes, diapers—everything the baby needed. His visits became more frequent as I came closer to delivery. He sat at the edge of my bed, explaining his new conviction that the child would be the one to lead the righteous Proliferation in the final slaying and renewal of the world. I was carrying the final deliverer—that’s why there was only one of them. “One” he said and held up a finger. Pastor Zeff now smelled as is if he no longer bathed and his hair was greasy and long.

The kids were getting ever more violent. The few police officers left who weren’t Zeffite had given up trying to apprehend young perpetrators. I left the news on all the time now, even when I slept. A group of pre-teens broke into the home of couple of retired professors, tied them up, and gouged their eyes out. Twin sixteen-year-olds garroted a security guard with the drawstring of a sleeping bag.

When I felt the first contraction, I was watching a story on the midnight news about how four fifteen-year-olds had beaten a woman to death with metal baseball bats. One of them stripped her of her bloodied clothes and wore them for days afterward. The spasm started in my back and wrapped around me as I were being squeezed in an internal vice. I reached for the phone to call Pastor Zeff, but stopped myself before grasping it. The contractions grew so bad that I screamed into my blankets. I picked up the phone a few times, but something always kept me from punching the single, speed-dial button I had to him or calling an ambulance. Water flooded out of me and the contractions steadied to the point that I couldn’t count between them. My back felt like it was on fire. Then I felt her breaking through and I pushed after her. It was like trying to force a watermelon through a straw. This is impossible, I thought. I saw my body split down the middle and the halves run away in different directions. I pushed until I heard her cry.

The blood-marbled infant was no bigger than a shoe. I cradled her in my arms and cleaned her with the sheets. That’s when I saw it. The wine stain was almost identical to mine. It sprawled down half her face, like a purple hand. I rubbed her face again with the sheet and she shrieked. I bundled her up and tried to quiet her and myself.

I felt a mild pumping in my lower abdomen and the placenta slid out of me. It looked like roadkill and my stomach trembled a little when I saw it. I left the baby on the bed and went to kitchen for a scissors, hearing her scream the whole time. When I came back to the bedroom, the stain looked even darker to me. I snipped the umbilical cord with the scissors and put on a pair of pajama bottoms and old sweater. I picked up the baby and headed out to my car. It hurt to walk, but I still took the stairs for fear of running into someone in the elevator.

When I got to the car, I put the baby in the little well on the floor between the backseat and the back of the passenger seat. I slid into the driver’s seat and started the car. Even to press the gas lightly with my foot hurt. Driving slowly, I headed to Lake Stoddard and soon saw the jagged landscape of the encampment. I drove up as close as I could to it and left the car still running in the street. I scooped up the baby. Dawn was just starting to crack the sky open and everything was quiet, even the baby, who had fallen asleep. A set of three boys with white hair slept outside on pieces of cardboard. They heard me approach and sprang up. These kids woke up quickly, like dogs.

“What do you want, ugly?” one of them yelled.

The other kids began to rouse and soon a little crowd formed around them.

I handed the baby over to one of them, a girl whose eyes had a film over them, and then, before she could respond, I started to run, pain shooting up from between my legs to my neck. The kids chased after me. I could hear their numbers growing, as my body surrendered to the pain and exhaustion. My body refused, uncompromisingly and with little deliberation, until I was barely walking and the footfalls behind me grew as loud as a million banging hammers. I fell to the ground, and just then I felt something I had never felt before. I think it was freedom.

“Over fifty percent of women in the US now have hyper-ovulation, leading to a seventy-eight percent increase in the number of viable multiple—” The audience started clapping and hooting before I could even finish the sentence. They were led of course by Carol, who loved drowning me out and, I knew, was extra pleased because she could do it under the guise of celebration. I spread my arms out and pumped them up so the audience would get louder. I avoided looking at Carol, but I imagined her thin lips drawing tighter the way they did when she was angry. The chants of “Zeff, Zeff, Zeff” began, and soon both the room and my eardrums vibrated. Only then did I turn to Carol, who sat in the front row, with her impeccable pastor’s wife posture, and smile so broadly that my face felt like it might split in half. I held her gaze until she looked away, and then I scanned the audience. They were building toward the kind of ecstatic crescendo I’d seen at Pastor Zeff’s rallies, especially in the early days.

I looked up at the picture of Pastor Zeff hanging on the far wall. It was of him preaching, his mouth partly open, his face tilted to the left, and a shock of dark hair hanging just above his eyes. Around the photo was a slightly larger square of lighter paint that had yet to become as grimy as the rest of the wall. Before the Zeffite takeover, the picture of the Director of the Department of Health and Safety Statistics had hung there and the discoloration remained like a pathetic bid for remembrance. I stared at the picture until I wanted the audience to settle. Then I held up my hands, silently pleading for them to quiet, in the way that Pastor Zeff had taught me. “A crowd is like electricity,” he had said. “marvelous if you direct its flow; dangerous if you don’t.” Contrary to what our enemies said, Pastor Zeff was no hayseed. He had been an engineer before the Proliferation. I closed my eyes and slowly moved my hands up and down. Then I clasped them over my heart. Soon, there was a satisfied hush and I continued on.

I had written that opening sentence with an “X” before “percent” last year when I learned that I would be giving the next Proliferation Eve presentation, and even I hadn’t expected the number to be so high.

I went on. “Seventy-eight percent increase in the number of viable multiple births. Could we ask for a more auspicious sign for Proliferation Day?” I paused, letting the audience know I wanted a response this time. The clapping started up again, and I moved closer to the lectern, which held my laptop. When the clapping faded, I clicked over to the first slide, which showed graphs of multiple birth rates in aggregate, by state, by age, and by race.

“The news gets better,” I said, hesitating a few seconds to let the anticipation build. I brought up a slide that showed a bar graph comparing the rate of overall violent crimes committed by seven-to-ten year-olds last year with the current rate, which revealed an almost threefold increase. The latest had been just yesterday and I clicked over to the news website whose headline blared, “Eight-year-old stabs nurse in the eye with a pencil.” It was a clear trend, although the teenagers, of course, were still carrying out the bulk of the violence, and I flipped through some statistics about how fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds had now taken the lead in gun murders. I concluded the talk with “The data is clear. The children of the Proliferation are carrying out their mission with more zeal than ever—just as Pastor Zeff predicted.” That brought another wave of applause and as I left the podium I glanced over at where Carol had been and saw her empty seat.

My colleagues started to get up and break off into groups to chat. The whole atmosphere here had gotten so much more relaxed since the Zeffites took control. Before then there were set times for lunch and blocks and monitors on our computers that notified management if we had been away from a task for too long. I talked a little with Alex, a designer who had helped me put together the slides for the presentation. He stared into my right eye when he talked, a tactic I had seen before, especially with men who didn’t want to give offense.

I left the auditorium, and on my way back to my desk, I passed Carol’s office. She sat at her computer, Pastor Zeff’s large frame hovering over her, rubbing her shoulders. He smiled without looking at me, which I knew meant he had taken his pills. In my office, I listened to the conversation between Carol and him. For a man who had virtually remade the country with his booming preacher’s voice, Pastor Zeff was surprisingly soft-spoken in regular conversation, and I mostly heard Carol. She chattered about the details for the upcoming Proliferation Day celebration—the sound system had been delivered, the police had prepared for the unlikely event of protests, press passes had been distributed across the media. Finally, she said goodbye. I waited before heading down to the basement, counting down from 60 a few times before taking the long way to avoid Carol’s office.

The bronze door to the basement clanked a little when I opened it and the smell of old paper hit me immediately. I heard Pastor Zeff approaching. Pastor Zeff was a wall of a man, even at fifty-seven—thick, but without fat. He led me to an old desk that he had lain an Afghan over. Carol had crocheted this, but if the Pastor wasn’t troubled by that I wasn’t either. He lay me down on top of it and flipped up my skirt so that it was over my head. I wriggled out of my underwear. I heard him unbuckling his belt and unzipping his fly. When his pants hit the floor, I felt a little whoosh of air. and I arched my legs, making a valley for him to dive into. His ribs grazed my breasts when he crawled on top of me. I took his half-flaccid penis in my hand and turned it stiff within minutes. Pastor Zeff slipped easily into me and thrust back and forth, slowly at first and in sync with his breathing and then quickly until the gush of heaven took us both. I screamed through my skirt and Pastor Zeff moaned and dug his fingers into my arms. Then he collapsed on me, panting. After a few minutes he lifted himself up and he hovered over me, balancing on his knees and one hand. He pulled down my skirt and traced the Port-wine stain that covers half of my face and whispered, “immune.” He lay on me again, his weight like a blanket of bone that could shield me from anything.

Pastor Zeff snored softly, his head wedged in the curve between my jaw and shoulder. I heard footsteps coming down the stairs and I knew it was Carol. As Pastor Zeff’s wife of 35 years she knew just when to tell us that we weren’t fooling her. When Carol cleared the final step, she waited in silence for a few minutes outside the basement door. Pastor Zeff’s breathing grew deeper and I held him tighter to me. Carol went back up the stairs and shut the door loudly. I twisted my body to wake up Pastor Zeff. He got up slowly and pushed himself off the desk. He wiped the sweat from his face with the Afghan and held onto the desk with one hand as he eased his pants on one leg at a time. He grabbed my foot on the way out and shook it a little without looking at me.

I waited for a little while, curled up on the Afghan and using my arm for a pillow. I imagined Carol and Pastor Zeff getting in their old Range Rover and driving in silence to their home that was just past the rim of the city. Pastor Zeff serene and satisfied and Carol superfluous. When I went back upstairs, they were both gone. Most everyone else had left too and the office had that baleful feeling it always got when it wasn’t filled with people. Since the Zeffite era began, we had cut way back on the cleaning crew and stopped upgrading equipment. Most of the staff I’d begun with were gone too and the ones that remained had all been demoted so they now worked under me. Of course, they all resented me, but it would occur to no one to be anything other than quiet about it.

I closed my office door and flipped open a compact that I kept in my top drawer. My split face—the thing that Pastor Zeff said made me immune from the Proliferation children—stared back at me in the mirror. I’d be one of the few left when they were done and we’d enjoy a world purified of sin and pretense and evil and everything else that the children had been born to eradicate. The wine stain looked like someone had crushed a grape on my forehead and the juices trickled down to my chin. I clicked the compact closed and thought about how the Proliferation had taught me that everything could be turned upside down.

I decided to walk the three miles home. I always felt energized after sex with Pastor Zeff. Outside, I found one of the older Proliferation children leaning against the building, half-conscious and mumbling. These kids didn’t live long. Twenty-two or -three, tops. At 37, I must have looked ancient to him. I wanted to stop and say something comforting or give him money that he would scarcely have time to use, but then I remembered Pastor Zeff’s admonishment: “Let them be. Let them be and interfere not in the work of the Lord.”

When I reached Lake Stoddard, I saw the high-rise that I lived in appear on the horizon. I was squinting to see how many lights were lit up in the building when I felt something sharp hit the back of my head. Then I heard the laughter; the phlegmy croak of the Proliferation children. I started walking faster and felt them gathering behind me, their footfalls hard against the concrete that encircled the lake. “Did you forget to wash your face?” a girl yelled. “That thing looks like Texas. Are you from Texas?” a boy’s voice, broken by laughter, said that. I picked up my pace, glancing back only long enough to catch flashes of them. One wore no pants and mismatched shoes. Something hard bounced off the back of my leg and I began to run in long strides, picking up speed until I was almost to my apartment building and only heard the sound of my heaving breaths and the word “immune” chugging though my mind as if on a loop.

When I stepped into the lobby of my building, I ran my fingers through my hair and found something sticky. It was a jagged piece of peanut brittle that they had thrown at me first. My hand shook as I threw it into a wastepaper basket by the mailboxes. I took the stairs two at a time to my apartment, my heart jackhammering, and barely made the bathroom before throwing up. I gulped air and breathed in the comforting smell of Pastor Zeff that still stuck to me. Then I turned on the shower and let the room fill with steam before getting in. Under the water, without meaning to, I scrubbed the wine stain the way I had as a child and I believed I could wash it away. When I got out, I was exhausted and skipped dinner. I had long ago learned how to cauterize my memory so that the past only came back in the unruly domain of sleep the way it did that night.

I’m on the cold tile floor of my fifth grade classroom and encircled by kids, some hold my ankles, some hold my wrists, some just watch with a terrible eagerness on their pristine faces. Someone—a boy, with hair the color of apple sauce and a chubby face—straddles me and his corduroy pants chafe against my stomach. He holds a purple magic marker in one hand and with the heel of his other hand he turns my head so that the clear side of my face is as open as a blank canvas. Then he starts coloring it, rubbing the magic marker up and down my cheek. “Now you’re even,” he says as he leans back and laughs. Everyone joins him and it’s this saw-toothed laughter that breaks my sleep and keeps me up for the rest of the night.

                                                                      * * *

The Proliferation Day celebration had more security than I expected. Indecipherable chatter came from the police radios as I sat in the tent behind the stage and fencing that separated us from the crowd. Carol fluttered around trying to make herself look busy and needed by her husband. She checked mics, cleaned Pastor Zeff’s laptop screen, and issued orders to anyone who looked unoccupied. Pastor Zeff and I ran through the latest statistics, which I knew he had already memorized.

Even at this distance away I could smell the hormones coming from the crowd. Since hyper-ovulation had begun a crowd of women produced a singular smell, and as I breathed it in I guessed that probably half of the people waiting for Pastor Zeff to speak were women. When I stuck my head out of the tent to look at the crowd, I confirmed I was right. The front rows, before the crowd became so indistinct as to be sexless, were full of women and many of them had massive, multiple-crammed bellies.

Carol helped Pastor Zeff into his white cassock that was fringed with dried umbilical cords and a little flurry of dandruff drifted from his hair. She wiped it off, even though it wasn’t visible on the cassock. Pastor Zeff took the stage and the crowd hooted and screamed and clapped. I could hear the chant of “Zeff, Zeff, Zeff” gathering. Then Pastor Zeff said, “Let us begin with a prayer.”

Carol sat down next to me and closed her eyes as Pastor Zeff led the audience in a short prayer. When he began his speech, she opened them and smiled.

Friends, it has been four decades since we first detected the Proliferation. Forty years since women’s sacred wombs became more abundant than ever. Forty years since the children whom god, in his grace, sent to cleanse this foul earth, seeded themselves in the vessels of our women. On this Proliferation Day let us remember the divine mission of these children, whose retribution grows more fierce by the day. Let us also remember how we came together to stamp out the crimes of abortion and birth control and finally outlawed the selling of the condom—that devil’s sleeve. Our righteous plague children cull the wicked from the earth and it won’t be long before only we—the blessedly immune—will be left. Let us …

Carol turned to me and said, “Yes, it won’t be long and sometimes even the great Pastor can’t tell us who will be left.”

I felt the side of my face with the wine stain burn and I swallowed hard before I said, “But he could say who he’d like to be left with, no?”

Carol shifted in her seat and looked away.

Then, as if he were talking directly to me, Pastor Zeff said: “On the other side of this we will discover who God considers beautiful and there won’t be many of you, no matter your station in this life.”

After Pastor Zeff’s speech, it took a while for the audience to disburse and a few people who had insisted on meeting with him afterward had to be escorted out by security. Pastor Zeff made an excuse to stay behind with me and I’m pretty sure that it was that afternoon in the tent, with the chilly breath of fall prickling my wet skin, that I got pregnant.

More than 20,000 Palestinians have been slain in just over two months. One of them is writer and professor Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an airstrike by the Israeli military 6 December, along with his brother, his brother’s son, his sister and her three children.

Refaat shared countless narratives about the horrors of the Israeli occupation and system of apartheid, and he mentored so many Palestinian writers, including Yousef Aljamal, whose essay about Gaza appears in our forthcoming issue. Yousef describes his friend as ​“the giant of the Palestinian narrative coming out of Gaza.”

Refaat’s poem ​“If I Must Die” has been shared widely since he was killed. On social media, an impromptu effort translated it into dozens of languages: Spanish, Italian, Tamil, Urdu, Tagalog, Greek, Japanese, Yiddish and more. Here, we offer it in English and Arabic.

—Ari Bloomekatz

“فال بد أن تعيش أنت” / “If I Must Die” 

ترجمة سنان/ by Refaat Alareer

 أنطون  رفعت العرعير/ Translation by Sinan Antoon

إذا كان ال بد أن أموت
فال بد أن تعيش أنت 
لتروي حكايتي
لتبيع أشيائي
وتشتري قطعة قماش 
وخيوطا
(فلتكن بيضاء وبذيل طويل) 
كي يبصر طفل في مكان ما من ّغّزة 
وهو يح ّّدق في السماء 
منتظرًاً أباه الذي رحل فجأة 
دون أن يودع أحدًاً 
وال حتى لحمه 
أو ذاته
يبصر الطائرة الورقّية 
طائرتي الورقية التي صنعَتها أنت
تحّلق في الأعالي 
ويظ ّّن للحظة أن هناك مالكًاً 
يعيد الحب
إذا كان ال بد أن أموت 
فليأ ِِت موتي باألمل 
فليصبح حكاية


If I must die, 
you must live 
to tell my story 
to sell my things 
to buy a piece of cloth 
and some strings, 
(make it white with a long tail) 
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza 
while looking heaven in the eye 
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— 
and bid no one farewell 
not even to his flesh 
not even to himself— 
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above 
and thinks for a moment an angel is there 
bringing back love 
If I must die 
let it bring hope 
let it be a tale

I had a hell of a time finding the AR-15. The last one was made in 3075 and when I asked around some didn’t even know what a rifle was. Through an old military connection, I met a gun genealogist called Taddeo—part antiques dealer and part historian. I had pretty much dismissed him as another dead end and probably a crank. Then, one morning, just as I stepped out of the shower the doorbell rang and I heard feet scurry away down the porch steps. I quickly threw on a pair of pants and when I got to the door found a narrow white box left on the mat. I took it inside and opened it. The rifle was wrapped in tissue paper like one of those fancy fruit deliveries well-wishers sent to us at the military base. One box of ammunition sat near the stock and another near the muzzle and a scope nestled next to the barrel.

My fingers slightly trembling, I snapped a picture and sent it to Donna with the message, I guess it’s on now. She got back right away with, The Wrighthammer job? Can it be? ☺ Come in this afternoon? We settled on a time and I finished getting dressed.

I was about to pick up the rifle, just to feel its heft, when Ben called. His face rolled up on the screen when I answered.

“Guess who’s in business?” I said.

“My old military buddy, the sharpshooter?”

We both laughed, Ben more heartily than me. We’d only learned that word, “sharpshooter,” recently. With the long wait between being assigned to the Wrighthammer job and coming by the rifle I had had plenty of time to research the strange history and primitive mechanics of the gun.

“Arrived this morning,” I said and hovered my phone over the rifle.

Ben’s face came up on the screen. It took me a few seconds to realize that the look in his eyes was fear. In our military days, Ben was never scared. Of the two of us, he had always been the more adventurous, had even volunteered for field work in the colonies—something I stayed well clear of. But the Wrighthammer job put him off. The rifle put him off. He had tried to tell Donna to turn the client away—as if anyone told Donna anything, especially since she’d become a vice president at Terminease.

“Dangerous thing, John, be careful.”

“We can kill more with an M-Tab in 30 seconds than this clunker can in …” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence, but we both got the point.

“I’m not talking kill rates, man.”

“Then, what?”

Ben went silent.

“It’s too personal,” he said, finally. “It can … stir up … too much stuff. There’s a reason we’ve used M-Tabs for the last century.”

“Of course. Easier. Better control. No way we’d manage the colonies with these stupid things,” I said.

“It’s not just that. It’s the remove, the distance … It’s, you know, abstract what we do. We couldn’t do half of it up close. All I’ll say is when you’re done get rid of that thing. Give it back to Taddeo. Smash it up. Melt it down. Whatever.”

“Sure. I’ll make belt buckles out of it,” I said.

Ben laughed a little and then changed the subject.

After we hung up, I screwed the scope on the gun and took it out to the backyard. I was barefoot and the soil below me was still wet with dew. I pressed my feet into the soft ground and scanned the yard with a gun until I came to an elm tree. Through the scope I zoomed in on a robin sitting in the tree. I could see the rim of white around its eye and the knobs on the branch it perched on. I lowered the rifle. closed my eyes and imagined the closing animation I’d set on my M-Tab in my military days: a smiling ghost flying up every time a kill was finalized. Sometimes when I had killed groups of people the screen turned almost completely white, a blizzard of death. I looked down at the antique in my hands. Amazing to think that so much violence was done here in the home country with them. Getting rid of the guns and limiting devices like the M-Tab to the military and companies like Terminease had brought peace.

***

Donna kept a vase of flowers on the table in her office. I could gauge her mood by whether or not she pushed them aside when she talked to me. If she left them where they were it mean she was stressed or irritated. If she pushed them off to the side so they didn’t impede our view as we sat across from each other, I could expect her to be sunny. She shoved a bunch of yellow tulips to the rim of the table and smiled as she passed me the file.

I flipped open the cover and looked at the picture on the first page. Loose mahogany curls framed a chubby face. Astrid Wrighthammer was pretty—not really my type, but still, pretty. Her upper lip was made up of two perfect peaks and her nose was slightly turned up.  I smelled tulips, the soft rotten smell of stems that had been in water too long.

“Astrid Wrighthammer,” I said her name, “So, this is the one who wants to be shredded with an old-fashioned military rifle instead of an M-Tab?”

Donna asked, “Not who you were expecting?”

“I wasn’t sure what to expect. Not exactly a type.”

“Well, if this catches on we’ll see if she’s a type any more than the sad sacks who pay to be fried by remote control.”

“That has the benefit of painlessness.”

“I’ve never been convinced of that.” Donna said as she pinched off a shriveled petal “How can we know? But then I’ve never been a button man—or a Terminease client.”

“Compared to what an AR-15 can do, believe me it’s painless. I’ve seen whole families expire with barely a whimper,” I said.  I thought about some of exploded corpses I’d dug up in my research.

“Painless. Clean. Final,” Donna said repeating the Terminease tagline. “Even if we only got two out of three it’s still a bargain.”

Donna’s face turned serious in a way that made her look older. She was in her fifties and whether she looked old or young was now largely a matter of expression and lighting. With a smile on her face she could pass for ten years younger. “You know, John, the board is watching this case closely. They think it may be the beginning of a trend. Dr. B., one of the shrinks who signs off on client requests, says he’s seeing this need for the visceral.

“A hunger for blood and guts? “Ben won’t like this. He prefers his killing quiet.” I knew I was breaking a confidence. It had always been understood that what me and Ben talked about stayed between us.

“You’ve talked about this with Ben?”

“Yes, well, when I wasn’t sure it would ever happen,” I said.

Donna smiled knowingly. “Ben’s a good guy, but not exactly forward-looking.”

“Exactly,” I said, “Not forward looking—but a good guy.”

“A good guy,” Donna said with a nod and look of certainty.

I felt my loyalty slide from Ben and to Donna, and because of that I felt less like I was betraying Ben and more like I was fulfilling a duty to Donna.

“Anyway, Dr. B says he’s seeing it even in his non-suicidal patients.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to this. Why go through unnecessary pain? The whole point of Terminease was that if you wanted to pull your plug but didn’t have the guts and wanted it to be … well … painless, clean, and final, you called us.

Donna leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Good work on getting the rifle,” she said.

I looked down at the picture of Astrid again. I imagined her curls scattered over a sidewalk, bloodless and in delicate swirls.

Donna stood up and walked to her desk. “Well, study up. The deadline’s next week.”

When I got home I poured a cup of coffee so I could skip my afternoon nap. I wanted to dig into Astrid’s file immediately. I spread out the reports, the client narrative, the clinician statement, and all the other papers on my kitchen table. Unlike other client narratives, Astrid’s was written longhand in pen, something the Terminease intake specialist commented on in his report. “She demanded a written statement. Actually written, with a physical pen. Part of her nostalgia—for lack of a better term,” he had noted. Her loopy handwriting was in blue ink and she had included a sketch of the AR-15 midway down the first page. Around it she laid out her reasoning for wanting to be killed with this particular weapon.

When I was a kid I read about the M-Tab killings in the colonies. Soon after I took to blindfolding myself and banging around the house until I was bruised. I discovered pain then and everything else fell into place. They call the colonies the cemetery lands, but no one’s as dead as we are here. I grew to hate the idea of those M-tabs and their clean, silent killing. I want to crash into my death. And I admit it—it’s not just the death; it’s the few seconds of explosive life that I’ll feel when the bullet from the rifle rips through me that I want as much as death.

The deadline for the job was next Thursday. Sometime between now and then I would kill Astrid with the rifle. I poured over the details for the next hour. Astrid worked at an implant firm from 8 AM until 4 PM. She walked to and from work. Her apartment had windows facing East. She was 5 foot 4 and weighted 130 pounds.  She had studied botany before dropping out of college. On her back left calf she had a tattoo of a purple iris.

I put together my report for Donna. I named Tuesday the kill date for two reasons: 1. I liked my three-day weekends; and 2. I wanted to build in some time so if anything went wrong I could still make my deadline. It was, after all, my first actual gun kill. I would position myself on the roof of the building a few blocks from the plant and when she was walking to work I’d take her out. Terminease would take care of all of the unseen details, including making sure no one stopped me. The assistants for the day would all wear a necklace with three interlocking gold hearts.

I drank another cup of coffee and then I took up the rifle again. It didn’t feel as awkward this time. My shoulder curved more easily around its stock and I lifted and lowered its barrel with greater ease. I took it outside again and stood at the porch railing. I peered through the scope and panned around the yard until I found a squirrel sitting on a concrete base that once held a water fountain. I eased the gun down until the animal was squarely within the sight range and pulled the trigger. An explosion of red flashed before me.

The recoil jerked me back a little and I could feel my muscles jolting out of place. My ears rang and my heart slammed against my chest. I had the feeling that I was in the wake of something, something massive and world-altering—a feeling I’d never had with the M-Tab. My body settled quickly and I had a sensation of ease and order that was new to me. For the first time I had a sense of what drew the guys of old to the military. Unlike the M-Tab, the rifle was no mere tool, no quiet electronic slave. It was an equal. When I lowered the gun I had that feeling you get when you bite into a chili pepper or something pleasantly hot, except it was all throughout my body.

I got a garden trowel and a plastic bag and cleaned up the squirrel mess in the yard. I wouldn’t have thought you could feel both anticipation and satisfaction at one time, but that’s just the sense I had—as if I were starting and finishing something perfectly. When I checked my screen, I saw that Ben had called again. I didn’t call him back, and then I decided to switch off the phone altogether. Talking to him or anyone else could only bring me down.

In the days leading up to the Wrighthammer job Ben left me messages almost every day. They took on an increasingly frantic tone, and sometimes they got to me. “Do you really want to splatter a woman?” he’d asked in one. I told myself that this was a woman who wanted to be splattered and wasn’t that her right? But every time I planned to call Ben and remind him of this I’d back out. Sometimes, when I woke up too early, the first word to cross my mind was splatter, and as much as I tried, I couldn’t force myself back to sleep. I’d lay there for a while with my stomach getting knotty. Then I’d get up and practice with the rifle.

On those mornings I stalked around in the empty, dawn-stained back streets looking for prey, my ears stuffed with cotton. I shot a feral cat, a rabbit, and three more squirrels. My technique got progressively better. I told myself I was a natural. With the M-Tab I was just an order follower equipped with a machine that could remotely dispatch the troublesome and the troubled with ease. All it took was one finger. Unlike the gun, which required the whole body. Precision. Concentration. Training.

I was never really even sure how the M-Tab worked. Something about interrupting electrical impulses that kept the heart banging away. What did I know? They could have told me the M-Tab killed by marshaling an army of invisible fairies and I would have believed them. But a gun doesn’t lie. I had always thought of myself as a meek man. Malleable. Able to follow direction with a minimum of curiosity, much less resistance. No real conviction. But that had all been an illusion—one that the gun blasted away. The gun told the truth about who I was; the M-Tab lied.

The cat I killed was the girl who laughed at my advances when we toured an Eastern colony. I didn’t even really like her, but she sat alone in a bar popular with Button Men—a frumpy young woman who I didn’t think would do anything but melt when a soldier gave her some attention. The squirrels were the cousins who locked me in the basement one Halloween and only let me out the next morning when everyone else had dumped their costumes and I showed up to breakfast dressed like a peanut. I’d never thought of killing any of these people before, but the rifle made it seem like the most natural thing in the world.

On the night before Astrid’s termination I secured the safety on the rifle and placed it next to me in bed. In the past, I had lain next to women like this—my ex-wife for five years, for one—but they were lumpy and hairy. The gun was a sleek perfect line.

I didn’t eat anything the next morning. I shaved, brushed my teeth, ran a comb through my hair. Then I disassembled the rifle and put it in an old suitcase. As I was locking my door Ben called again and I hit “decline,” sending him on his way to leave another voicemail. It was only 6:30 in the morning, but it was already hot. I got in my car and turned on the air conditioning. The steering wheel was still too hot to touch. I flipped on the air conditioning, and as I was waiting for the car to cool down, Ben called. Again, I heard his voice in my head: Do you really want to splatter a woman? I hit decline and then squeezed the phone in my fist. I didn’t need Ben now. I wasn’t sure I’d ever need him again.

An hour later I arrived at the building across from Astrid’s work, a security guard who wore the gold heart necklace buzzed me in. She led me up to the roof without saying a word. I assembled the gun, click after satisfying click its parts married up. Then I crouched down. I followed a number of people walking down the street through the scope, telling myself all sorts of things to explain why I wouldn’t kill them.

When I sighted Astrid a couple of blocks away I kept the gun level and followed her as she made her way to the plant. Her hair was tied up in a knot on the top of her head and she bounced slightly as she walked.  She was confident and her confidence was all the approval I needed. For a moment I was angry at Ben and angry at myself for allowing his doubt to seep into me. But that didn’t last long. The work was too important. What did the reservations of a small man matter in the face of it? Silently, I thanked Astrid. She understood the gun long before me, and I owed her everything for it. I felt more alive than ever and now Astrid would too. I took a deep breath and tightened my stance until I felt the gun grow out of me. I trained the scope on the side of Astrid’s head, just where her hairline began, and pulled the trigger.   

The screaming from passersby startled me for a minute. A woman in a yellow coat bent down next to Astrid and then others followed until a small crowd was around her. They looked at each other and then started waving their hands wildly. Someone pulled his car to the curb and ran toward the crowd. A spray of blood stained the wall of the implant factory behind them. I wanted to stay and watch, but the security guard with the necklace tapped me on the shoulder and pointed for me to leave the building.

I knew Astrid wouldn’t be the last.

And she wasn’t. After her, there was a handyman leaving a building supply company with a bag of quick-drying cement that exploded with the shot and hardened some of the blood splatter. The second was a mother of six who, we later learned, believed that Astrid’s killing heralded the end of the world and had pulled the kids out of school. Then there was the guy who ran an aquarium who was carrying a tank of angelfish into his store when I blasted him from across the street. Dead fish and glass shards lay in the pool of blood alongside his unusually small body. Then there were others.

The calls from Ben stopped, but that didn’t mean he’d gone away. A few days after I got a purple iris tattooed on my inner forearm, I heard something in the kitchen as I as I was drifting off to sleep. When I stumbled in with the gun—I was never without it these days—I found Ben sitting at the table with an M-Tab in front of him. It was about half the size of a postcard, smaller than the one I’d used in both the military and Terminease.

“New model?” I said. I forced a smile and Ben looked up at me with a face so still it could have been carved from wood. He had gray half-moons under his eyes and his skin was waxy.

“I tried to—” Ben bit his upper lip. “—reason with you, warn you.”

“Like I’m still one of those sad, ex-military guys, who would be happy to press an M-Tab button for the rest of my life?”

Ben ran his finger along the edge of the M-Tab.

“Sad?” Ben said. “We were two guys doing a job. A well-paid job. One that provided a service.

“We still are. It’s just that you can’t understand the service I provide. Not while you’re still using that thing.” I nodded toward the M-Tab. In the sliver of a second that Ben looked down toward it I flipped the safety lever on the rifle.

“I’m clear about what my service is right now, John, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”

Ben looked up at me and after a second or two said, “You know, I tried to get Donna to tell me the address of the Astrid job. I was going to stop you. Not kill you, but stop you. But she couldn’t see the danger either. All she could talk about was new markets and how this time around the gun would only be put to good use and the board says this or that.”

Ben stroked the gray-flecked stubble on his chin. He was an old man now. Obsolete.

“I wanted to stop you then. Without it coming to this. Now there’s no choice,” Ben said.

Maybe not for you, I thought.

Ben tapped the M-Tab. It began its series of five vibrations before kill-initiation.

On the second beep, I put the muzzle of the gun under my chin and pulled the trigger for the last time.

Milton watched the bartender slowly pouring red wine into the biodegradable cup the way a starving person would eye a chef performing some kind of culinary origami. He had waited at the makeshift bar set up along the edge of the Havens University auditorium for an excruciating ten minutes, cursing himself the whole time for not having had a drink since lunch. Now he wanted to grab the cup away or better yet pull the bottle out of the bartender's skinny fingers, put it right to his mouth, and suck down the Pinot Noir, or the Merlot, or the Zinfandel or whatever post-revolutionary organic varietal it was. Instead, he drew deep breaths and felt his stomach puff out against his waistband with each inhale.

 “Here you go,” the bartender said as she handed him the wine.

He downed half the glass and said a polite “thank you.” No tip necessary. That was an old-world practice when waitstaff had to rely on the largesse of those they served, had to flirt with them and make them feel special just so they could pay the rent. No one struggled like this since the revolution. Milton couldn’t help thinking about this every time he was served.

The room was packed. Tonight Professor Mona Cranely, Milton's wife of nearly two decades, would defend the sacrifices, and the university community had turned out in force. On and off campus the cries to abolish the sacrifices had grown louder. Now, with the latest advancement due to prompt another one, the fight had gotten even more pitched. This morning Milton had heard someone on the radio describe the sacrifices as “ironic barbarities based on dubious history.” Of course, he thought, Mona should be the one to defend them.

Milton found a seat in a middle row that formed a direct path to the wine table. He could feel a tension in the crowd. No one seemed interested in talking. Instead of milling around, nibbling on canapés and gossiping, most just filled their plates and sat down.

He was glad of it. Like Mona, many of her colleagues had ascended up the ranks of academia while he had languished, and he hated how they were often extra nice to him to try to prove that they didn't notice or it didn't matter. At forty-five, Milton was still a junior scientist at the Havens University Neurogenetics Lab. That was a generous designation since he did no research anymore, and had unofficially demoted himself to a part-time employee. His teaching career had fizzled along with his scientific one. His wife's rise had been unstoppable, her career made up of steady bursts of achievement.

There were only a few seats left and Milton knew that if he got up for another glass of wine he would likely lose his. As he made his way to the bar he saw Stenmeyer, his wife's lover and the Neurogenetics Lab director, sitting in a front seat. Stenmeyer turned his head, which was perched on two chins, to talk to someone behind him. Even from his distance Milton could see how Stenmeyer's ham-colored face telegraphed that the latest advancement was his.

While he stood near the drink table, draining his second glass of wine Milton looked back to his seat, which was now occupied by the narrow body and open face of one of Mona's male students. He was almost finished when the provost emerged from backstage, stood at the lectern, and introduced Professor Mona Cranely. He reeled off some of her most notable accomplishments: author of twelve books, editor of The Deep Narrative Review, winner of the Theodore M. Brighton Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Then “without further ado” (and there was more ado to be had), he turned the lectern over to Mona, who was greeted with a gush of applause.  

Mona held up her hands and slowly mouthed thank you, thank you, thank you.

When the clapping finally died down, she began. 

Esteemed colleagues and friends, eighty years ago our Revolution vanquished misery, exploitation, and want. No longer do our stomachs or our spirits hunger. Our foremothers and fathers made sure that we had lives of bread and beauty. But they had to fight and suffer and die and then fight and suffer and die again. They fought the counterrevolution led by Charlotte without rest. I hardly need to give this audience a history lesson, but only when the Final Sweep reduced Charlotte and every last one of her followers to ash was our future born. We must never forget that, and today we are asked to forget—forget the triumph of our revolutionaries against Charlotte. Implored to forget by the forces who would have us abandon the sacrifices.

Today, we set fire to Charlotte's granddaughters and—yes—tomorrow, her great-granddaughters, to commemorate each success, each accomplishment, each step forward the revolution takes. In so doing we remember—not just in our minds, but in the way we must—in our bones —how our revolutionary forebears defeated Charlotte after years of painful and unremitting struggle. There are those who insist that when we set Joycelette aflame last year to mark the turn to renewable energy we committed murder, but I tell you that was no murder. It was the very ritual that we need to keep the revolution alive in our hearts and minds, to keep our tie to the past that makes our illustrious present and future possible.  

Mona banged the lectern with her plumb-sized fist when she made that last point. Pure Mona. Not afraid to show emotion. There was a time Milton admired this about her. They had met in an undergraduate philosophy class where Mona was known to deliver arguments that were gossamer-like in structure with an unapologetic ferocity.

“As you've all now heard, our Neurogenetics Lab has cured prion diseases …”

An explosion of clapping.

“Yes, Dr. Stenmeyer can you stand up please?” Mona put her hand over her eyes and turned her head to scan the audience, pretending she didn't know exactly where Stenmeyer sat.

Stenmeyer hoisted his large frame up and turned to the audience. Even now, Milton found it funny that his wife had taken up with a man who resembled a parade float. As the director of the organization who had made the breakthrough, Stenmeyer would randomly draw the Torchbearer—the one who would set alight one of Charlotte's granddaughters—using a computer program that ensured that everyone had equal opportunity for the honor. He would announce the lucky citizen in the next few days.

Milton still stood alone now at the drink table with his empty cup. The bartender was entranced by Mona. He wanted to ask her for another drink, but when he began to speak she touched her finger to her lips to tell him to be quiet. Milton noticed a half-full glass of wine on the table. White wine—it may just as well have been water—but he downed it anyway.

After waving to the audience a few times, Stenmeyer sat down and the audience grew silent with expectation of more talk from Mona.

“Now, with this latest achievement we will once again honor everything that made it possible by re-enacting the Final Sweep with one of Charlotte's granddaughters,” she said. “We will not be stopped by the new forces of Charlotte—and, make no mistake—that's who we’re taking on.”

Throughout the audience people started making the revolutionary salute. They joined their thumb and forefinger to make a circle and then touched it to their heads and then their hearts. The bartender included. Even if Milton didn't have a pint of vodka stashed in the glove compartment of the car he and Mona shared, he would want to leave. He had had enough.

The chill of the autumn air was a relief from the stuffiness of the auditorium. As he made his way to the underground garage, he saw, for the second time that night, the group of protestors who had gathered around the building. Their numbers had swelled since he had first arrived. Almost all of them had a sign around his or her neck: Amylotte, Sarahlotte, Calvinlotte. They were chanting “Charlotte is a lie/sacrifices must die.”

Campus security encircled them. They wore the revolutionary insignia on the shoulder of their uniforms: a thumb and forefinger joined together to make a circle with a brain and heart inside of it. Inert clubs and guns hung at their hips. They would stay that way. Milton wanted to tell the protestors that the guards wouldn't harm them tonight, that if they wanted to they could push farther than they were; hell, they could go all the way. Security had received orders to go easy that had begun with Mona. She didn't want anyone thinking her message needed the force of bloodshed.

Milton unlocked the passenger side door. His mind felt sour. He started drinking the vodka and soon he was asleep. He dreamed of the only sacrifice he'd witnessed, when he was child. He felt his mother's sweaty palm in his left hand and the smooth paper wrapper of the cotton candy in the other one. He saw the Torchbearer touch the lighter-fluid doused torch to the open fire pit that symbolized the Final Sweep and watched his grin widen at precisely the second that the flames transferred from the pit to the torch in his hand. He heard Zeldalotte's screams, which began even before she was torched. He saw the teeth on the floor. In the dream, his mother tossed a broom to him to sweep them away. Milton started to yell, and he felt someone shake him.

“It's alright. You're in the car. At Havens. In the parking lot,” Mona said.

Milton fell into a half-sleep. He heard Stenmeyer's voice saying “Such a shame … ”

“Maybe not for much longer, Sten,” Mona said.

Milton woke up uncharacteristically early the next morning. As he stirred in the living room recliner, he heard Mona pull back a kitchen chair and start tapping on her computer. Mona usually got in a couple of hours of work before officially starting her day at Havens. If he pretended to be asleep he soon would be and he could avoid talking to her at all. He knew this, but, still, he lowered himself down, slipped into the loafers he had once worn to work and that were now laced with holes and walked to the kitchen.

Mona didn't look up from her computer at first. When she did she motioned for Milton come over to the screen and then canted it a little back so he could read what was on it. A group calling itself “Lotte Liberation” had penned an open letter in response to Mona's talk. It made five demands:

1.     An immediate end to all sacrifices, beginning with the one slated for next week to celebrate the discovery of a cure for prion diseases;

2.     An honest and open acknowledgement of the lack of evidence for Charlotte's existence;

3.     A thorough investigation into how the original “descendants of Charlotte” were captured, what their real identities are, etc.

4.     A forthright explanation of what happens to male children born by the “descendants of Charlotte.”

5.     Immediate access to the House of Descendants by reporters and relevant experts.

 The letter was signed by a column of signatories, each with a “lotte” appended to their name. Milton scanned down and read:

Barbaralotte Allen

Deniselotte Casterford

Franceslotte Landes

Julialotte Stevenson

Kevinlotte Wexler

Mona clicked over to her inbox before Milton was finished scanning the names. “I'm not worried. It's not as if our side lacks for support,” she said and pointed to the list of e-mails she had received thanking her for her talk.

“Yeah our side will win again.”

Mona tightened her jaw.

“Can you even imagine supporting me, supporting your colleagues in anything anymore?”

“You've got all the support you need, Mona. Check your inbox again.” Milton said.

“You know, Milton, today could be a good day for you. After all it was some of your early work that—”

Milton flung open the liquor cabinet so hard that the door banged against the cabinet next to it. A fifth of scotch to the head would shut Mona up forever. He would never do this. Milton wasn't a violent man and when he imagined causing Mona's death it wasn't the act of killing he relished but the thought of never hearing her voice again. His fantasies were not vivid; they were airy and crammed with silence.

He poured the Scotch into a water glass.

Mona went to the counter and popped two slices of bread into the toaster.

“At least have something to eat with it,” she said as she packed up her computer and headed out.

Milton returned to the recliner, flipped on his computer that sat on a table next to it, and brought it to his lap. He slid on his glasses. He read, again, the press release the lab had issued. With gene splicing technology the team had developed a vaccine to protect against prion diseases. Mona was right. It was some of Milton's own work on prions that the other scientists had built on. Prions, the misfolded proteins that commandeered the nervous system, had fascinated Milton. They caused kuru and bovine spongiform encephalopathy—“mad cow disease” and its human equivalent: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—and those caused horrific symptoms: seizures, loss of balance, dementia, spontaneous laughing, sudden blindness and deafness.

Prions didn't reproduce. They targeted healthy proteins and then turned them like themselves, setting off a cascade of misfolding. Milton loved the challenge they posed. He would outthink them. He would use what Stenmeyer had called, when making the salary offer that would outbid every other lab, his “fecund scientific intuition” to neutralize them.

It was when he began to believe he was getting close that the sacrifices moved from some dim outpost of his mind and started to preoccupy him. He began, then, to treat himself as the problem to be neutralized. He held back the most auspicious data, encouraged his colleagues to pursue less promising projects. The drinking eventually took care of him being taken seriously as scientist.

He clicked over to the House of Descendants Web site. Photos of Charlotte's descendants flitted by in a slideshow. They were pretty and well groomed. They smiled. Except for the flames tattooed around their eyes, they could be any of the women Milton passed on the Havens campus.

Under each photo of the women was a second picture, this one of her flameliner, the man who had impregnated her to ensure that Charlotte's line continued. No woman was sacrificed until she gave birth at least once. How often Milton had thought of Stenmeyer or some other man as a “flameliner” to silently insult him. After a successful birth these guys were castrated and given all sorts of benefits—the best houses, weekly spa treatments, personal chefs. Milton didn't care about that. But the endless deference shown to them—these men who were chosen by lottery at birth and paired up with a woman when they were both young—that's what really got Milton. Most flameliners became fat and all shaved their heads and wore only white. Milton remembered his mother, who shrunk before no one, stepping aside when one waddled down the street toward them.

Milton gulped the final bit of Scotch left in his glass, and went into the kitchen to pour a second one. The bread Mona had put in the toaster was up and had grown cold and hard. He stuffed into the garbage disposal, flicked on the switch and listened as it was ground to dust.

Milton hadn't been to the lab in three days. No one would miss him. He had left the house only to buy alcohol and was spending his days in the kind of drunken sleep that was so thick and satisfying that it counted as experience. Mona had been busy, spending long days with Stenmeyer and others readying for the upcoming sacrifice. Sometimes he woke up briefly when heard her car pulling in the driveway at one or two in the morning.

He was surprised, then, to wake up from his afternoon sleep one day and find her at home. He wasn't sure if it was the clattering from the kitchen or the pungent smell of garlic and onions frying that roused him. Mona rarely cooked and Milton never did. He couldn't remember the last time they had sat down to a meal together.

Milton followed the smell to the kitchen and found Mona at the stove with a wooden spoon in hand. She looked up, smiled and rubbed her hands across the front of her apron.

“I'm making beef bourguignon. Remember how I talked the chef into teaching me how to make it when we we're in Paris?”

“Vaguely,” Milton said.

“Oh c'mon, don't you remember? I told him it was our honeymoon and if he didn't teach me the recipe how could I keep you happy?”

Mona giggled.

Milton did remember, but he had tried to forget because when it had happened he felt pride kick up in him that this woman was his. That had long since made him feel foolish, embarrassed even in front of himself for it.

She poured a glass of club soda, twisted a lemon slice into it, and handed it to Milton.

The chill of the glass in his hand dissolved away his remaining grogginess.

She scooped up a smidge of the onion and garlic with the wooden spoon and slid into Milton's mouth, while she held her other hand palm-up under his chin. Mona was wearing perfume. It was floral and sweet and, mixed with Mona's normal scent, there was something feral about it.

“Let's sit down,” she said to him. Milton sat down at the round kitchen table and expected Mona to sit across from him. Instead, she took the seat next to him, so that their shoulders almost touched.

“Milton, I have some news,” she began.

Milton's pulse quickened. News. His mind clicked through the possibilities and what they might mean to him. That she was preparing a celebration meant it couldn’t be anything he’d like. She wasn't, for example, leaving him for Stenmeyer or going on sabbatical in another country.

“As you know, Stenmeyer is going to announce the Torchbearer soon. He drew the name a couple of days ago. He's been holding off because, well, he—we—thought you should know first.”

What did it matter to Milton which flame-happy fellow citizen they chose to sacrifice an innocent women? Hadn't he made it clear with his years of refusal to attend the sacrifices that he wanted no part of them?

Mona placed her hand on Milton's and he felt a cold trickle down his spine.

She looked into his eyes and he though he saw hers mist over slightly.

“Milton, it's you. It's you, darling. You're the next torchbearer.”

Milton lifted his hand so hard that Mona's was flung off of it.

“What? Mona, what are you talking about?” he said.

“Stenmeyer drew you. Don't you see how this could be just what you need?”

“Stop the bullshit, Mona. Three-hundred million people and he just happened to choose someone at the lab Stenmeyer runs?”

“Why isn't that possible?” Mona said.

“Mona, enough. You think I don't know that you cooked this up with your boyfriend? Why? So you could give the invocation? Because it's convenient for you to have your husband do the … the fucking killing, now that you're the new face of the sacrifices? Forget it. You'll have to advance your career on your own. When has that ever been problem?”

“My boyfriend. You think Stenmeyer and I are—”

Milton laughed and then said, “Yes, Mona, I know. You can have your boyfriend.”

“Milton, that's absurd. Me and Stenmeyer? It's true we've been working together. I'll admit that, but there's nothing personal between me and that old man.”

Milton laughed again.

“Working together? What could you two collaborate on? Representations of neurogenentics in the novels of pre-partition India?”

Mona looked stunned. Her eyes were open so wide that her eyebrows almost touched the edge of her short bangs.

“You, Milton. You. We've been working to pull you out of your slump. To get you off the booze, to bring you back to your career. Don't you think Stenmeyer cares about losing the best young scientist he'd seen in his career?”

Milton could see the sincerity in Mona. She was telling him the truth. An affair he could handle—more than handle, but this conspiracy of altruism between the two was intolerable. That they thought he needed their help; that they thought he wanted to be like them. That cut through Milton, like a saw blade.

Mona's mouth moved, her lips changing shapes, but Milton couldn't make out the words. He felt like his chest was alternately shattering and convulsing and no matter how hard he gulped he couldn't take in air. Then he felt the linoleum on his back and saw the ceiling fan slowly spinning. Mona was still talking, but in a different cadence as if she were on the phone. Her words were still scrambled.

All he could hear clearly was the voice in his head saying Miltonlotte, Miltonlotte.