Father strokes my cheek. “Like porcelain,” he mutters, “even now.” His own skin is pocked with great gaping holes that suck up airborne grit. On Mondays, he sees a facialist to have his pores eliminated. On Fridays, it’s a colonic to purge his bowels. And every day at eleven, he sits in the sauna expunging toxins.
I suppose this is my genetic future—I am staring at myself in forty years—but that thought doesn’t subside the feeling of repulsion, which I am certain he senses, as close to me as he is. He swears he has heightened perception, the ability to read people, to make judgments others cannot, a certain connection to the Higher Truth.
I can hear the protesters chanting outside our walls, over a quarter-mile of ocean. It was a dramatic political maneuver, transplanting the Capitol from the forested heart of our river country to its very fringe, beyond. It sent a message—we will leave you all behind, you provokers and usurpers, we will let you rot, watching from our manmade island, built on dredged up seafloor silt and the toil of thousands, connected to the mainland by a single span of bridge.
They have tried to blow up the bridge, to show us they don’t need us, to separate us entirely, but all they’ve managed is to knock holes into the guardrail. Now, when we venture over to the mainland, we can see all too clearly the water, hundreds of feet below.
I sit very still in the chair, Father’s palm on my cheek, the straight razor at my neck.
*
My brother died just months before I was born. They named me for him, but everyone calls me Two. When I was seven, they took me to his gravestone and told me I was the anointed successor, the Soul running through One too quickly, his body too weak to contain it, entering me. I am strong. Say what you will about me, but my body is well formed from fencing and combat training. I have not let myself go sallow and soft like Eldest Sister, or thin as a water-starved vine and just as miserable, like Second Sister. They are both older and secretly resentful of my natural ascent, though they pretend deference when Father is around.
Mother never gave me her breast. Still grieving One’s loss, she stayed in bed, behind blackout curtains, deep in a drug-induced sleep. So Father found me Wet Nurse, who gave me her breast until I was four. Even now, I can recall the taste, warm and buttery sweet, the way I’d warm my hands inside the folds of her dress. Father sent her away when it was time. It was a painful separation; I’d bang my head on the wall, wail—that’s what Eldest Sister says anyway. I remember only the feeling, like a valve had been left running in my chest, like it would never shut off.
I didn’t see her again until I was twenty-six, already a husband, a father of two lovely and loathsome boys, spoiled and petulant and totally ruined. I was taking a tour of the hospital’s sad pediatric wing with blinking halogen lights and too many children, seven, eight to a room, staring out at me with those big ghoulish eyes. I recognized her immediately despite her nurse’s uniform, her smart little white shoes, the fans of wrinkles that had begun to form at her eyes. She had taken a position at the hospital after her husband died defending Father from a fourth coup attempt. Along with the hundreds others who perished that day, he was given a hero’s burial in the sprawling cemetery on the mainland. And the bodies of the faithless, the usurping serpents, were pulled to pieces and driven across the bridge, dumped in two great mounds at its mouth.
I had remembered her beautiful, but the effect was more potent in person, the valve in my chest spouting. Grief lent her a certain regal quality, a sad fragile appeal. I told Father I wanted to take her as my second. Though Doctor said she still bled, Father insisted she was beyond childbearing years and forbade the union.
So I visited her at night. At first she refused me, blocking the door, begging me to leave. Then, in Father’s stern voice, I reminded her who I was, and she let me pass, staring at the scuffed tile floors of their cramped apartment as she told her children, her mother, to go back to bed.
It was not rape. How could it be? I am the successor, the Anointed One, the Soul running strong through me. I never felt it stronger than when I was pressed against her, held tight to her breast.
My wife put on a good show while performing her marital duties, yelping and scratching my back—it was expected, my entertainment her primary responsibility—but I got the impression she did not like me. I would hear her singing to the children from down the hall, but when she saw me standing in the doorway, she’d stiffen, go silent. I tried to get her to warm to me, to ask her questions about her childhood in the temple-studded plains, her love of horses, but she seemed to view that kind of conversation as beyond her job description. I don’t blame her. Our union was arranged, her father the provoker, the warring lord, selling her off to keep his land, Father accepting the treaty to fortify his control of the wild plains. She never forgave me for this transaction, and it never seemed to occur to her that I hadn’t had a choice either.
When my sisters were of age, they were married off to men who threatened Father’s position. Eldest Sister developed a bad habit of overeating and always being right, and her husband, a powerful man in the northern forests, sent her back to us after less than a year, threatening to break his treaty with Father if she ever returned. Second Sister’s husband was once a radical revolutionary with powerful ideas, steadfastly against Father’s iron rule until he was captured and tortured, brought to our side. Now he keeps his own room on the far end of the Presidential Palace and works long into the night for the Labor Board. At night, Second Sister drinks and cries, and no one mentions anymore that they cannot have children.
Unfortunately, Father does not have enough children to marry off to provokers and usurpers, as evidenced by the first attempt on my life. Presidential Taster turned purple, his eyes bleeding out, his ears, floundering on the floor. We pushed back from our plates, fled the dining hall, sequestered in our quarters until the culprit was found, pulled apart, dropped at the end of the bridge.
All my life I have been the anointed successor while everyone around me has had to struggle for ascent. It is not fair. I am not pretending otherwise. But one thing’s for certain: I’ve no more freedom than any of them.
I went nightly to Wet Nurse. She did not cry, not until the seventh visit, when Eldest Sister told on me, and I watched from the car as the men dragged her toward the van in only a nightgown, feet bare, hair loose and wild. She sobbed, searching the street frantically, finding me with her eyes. The valve in my chest burst as she cried out for help, calling my name. I could hardly utter the words, “Drive on, Driver.”
*
I would not see her again for another twelve years. By then she was nearly unrecognizable. She’d lost many teeth. Her face was lined and hollowed out with hunger. Her breasts had drooped. She was stooped and limping in one of our Agricultural Career Training Centers, an unfortunate necessity in our autarkic economic system. I’d gone to survey the conditions, the healthiest of laborers separated from the sickly and put to work for the rolling cameras. It was one of my responsibilities, to ensure prison camps appeared up to international standards, keeping the UN at bay.
Father told me it would pass. “For now, we must present our best selves,” he counseled, “we cannot give them any reason to challenge our leadership.”
He is getting old, and soon it will be my time to ascend. When Grandfather fled to the heavens, Father felt the Soul traveling down his throat, twining his heart, pumping harder, finally alive.
Seeing her didn’t affect me the way it should have. I was not repulsed, I was not sad, I was not angry with Father. Happy—I was happy, though I could tell she wasn’t.
I tried to speak to her, but she dropped to her knees to avoid my gaze. Taking hold of her chin, I raised her up, cupped her face, turning it this way, that.
“You are coming home with me.”
“No, no,” she murmured, “I cannot.”
“Do not say no to me,” I hissed. If anyone heard, she would be killed on the spot.
First Guard counseled me to reconsider with as much deference as he could muster. It was a challenge to find the words. “Perhaps, consider for a moment how—how your father—I mean the President—might react,” he stammered.
When it appeared she could not stand, I ordered the guards to help her to the car, even as the cameras rolled.
*
She sat as far from me on the car’s bench as possible, pressing herself against the door. I tried to engage her in conversation, but she appeared distant, as if she had gone somewhere in her head. I told her I was sorry for what had happened to her, that I intended to marry her, that Father could not stop me this time. He was weak and I was strong. She would see the best doctors. They would fix her up. I would make certain of it. Finally, as we crossed over the bridge, she looked at me. Her eyes were the same burnt brown I remembered. I was struck then by how much I loved her. I did not notice her hand on the door’s latch, not until we passed the broken guardrail and she shouldered the door open, toppled out of the car. I did not see her hit the water, but the protesters outside our walls did.
*
Father lathers my chin. He has never shaved me before. I feel the blade run clean and close, up my neck, over the uneven terrain of my Adam’s apple. My boys are of age now, the Soul could pass into one of them, I realize, razor to neck—he does not need me.
Her name has not come out yet, but it will, and when it does, they will build legend around her. Already, they are calling her Martyr; they are saying I drove her to jump or worse, I pushed her. I don’t care about that, just her, the only warmth I’ve ever known. It is hard work, the hardest, keeping the tears back, but if I cry, he will cut me, just slice me open, let my soul slip out, into someone else.
I think of that last look she gave me, almost a smile, cheeks like withered apples, the same look she’d given me when I was four and she’d held me in her arms, whispered, “Oh Two. You are a sweet boy. My good boy. You will make this a great nation.” Then she was in the wind.
Katie M. Flynn‘s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Bellingham Review, Carve, Flyway, Monkeybicycle, Paper Darts, and elsewhere. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice and was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s 2015 “Family Matters” contest. She hold an MFA from the University of San Francisco and lives and writes in San Francisco still. You can follow her on Twitter: @other_katie.
