“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.
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