Life Sentence (18 page)

We got to a wooden door with my name on it. The
building was old, so Will easily kicked in the door. He stepped
aside and let me be the first to enter the small office. There were
bookshelves along the wall to the right, a desk with a chair behind
it and two in front of it, and a window on the wall opposite the
door. On the wall to the left were some diplomas and a large print
of “The Death of Socrates.”

I was a little disappointed, as the decorations
didn’t seem too original, but I supposed it was harder for
philosophy professors to find pictures related to their work than,
say, art or literature professors. Besides, it took some of the
intimidation away from my unknown, previous self, so I was less
worried about living up to some especially august, original
thinker.

Everything was neat and intact. No one had touched
anything since the last time I had been in it, whenever that had
been. I glanced at the books as I walked around the desk. I would
look at them in a minute, but for right now, the desk was the more
urgent object of curiosity.

There was a computer screen and a keyboard on the
desk, and a pencil holder with pens and a letter opener in it, and
some piles of handwritten papers and photocopies. I saw the
handwritten papers had names written across the top. The last
papers of dozens of students, I supposed, and wondered for a moment
what had happened to all of them.

The most important things were the two framed
photographs. These were the sort of things I was both seeking and
about which I was apprehensive. Both photos seemed to be taken on
vacations, with one in some warm place where everyone was wearing
shorts, and the other in the winter, everyone bundled up in big,
puffy coats, with hats and gloves. In each, I stood with a woman
and two children, a boy and a girl. The woman was pretty,
especially as she didn’t have any parts missing or damaged, that I
could see. She was fairly slender and had short, blonde hair. I
automatically thought maybe that was a good thing, that at least I
still liked blondes, but immediately thought what a stupid thing to
have as the only connection to your past—what a trivial, useless,
grossly physical detail.

The children were small, perhaps eight and ten years
old, I guessed. Neither the woman nor the children summoned any
affection or remembrance, beyond the usual sadness that these
people were probably dead now.

But the whole scene filled me with sorrow and loss
that I couldn’t feel or remember anything. Even if I had done a
great many more evil things than I remembered, I could not
understand what I had done to deserve or cause this strange,
disconnected life I had. I wondered if other people felt the same
way, and that made it worse, as I realized that I had little way to
ask them or express my sympathy for them if they did. I again
remembered what crying was, and felt more cheated and alone that I
couldn’t even do that.

Lucy had come around the desk and stood next to me.
She looked at the pictures and ran her graceful fingers over them.
I set the one picture—the one of my family in the winter—back on
the desk. I turned the other one over in my hands and started
fumbling with the little clips on the back, trying to remove the
picture from the frame. Lucy helped me. She folded the picture
neatly twice and put it in the pocket of my shirt, closing the
pocket’s little flap over it. She pressed her tiny hand against me
there. Then her one good eye rested on mine, and she pointed to
herself and shook her head slowly and gave a very low, quiet moan.
I couldn’t tell exactly what was going through her mind, but I knew
she felt badly, threatened, unwanted, useless. I knew the feeling
quite well myself. I took her hand and put it back on my chest, on
the photo, above where my heart sat silent but full. I looked in
her eye. I didn’t know whether to shake my head to stop her from
thinking I didn’t want her anymore, or to nod to show that I did
want her, so I gave the little wheeze that we used to mean
generally good, kind, positive things.

“Of course he still likes you, Blue Eye,” Will
offered from across the desk. He’d picked up the winter photo and
was looking between it and us. “It’s hard when you remember people
you loved who are gone. It’s something the people around you now
can’t understand, but it doesn’t mean you don’t like them. I know.
It’s just something you have to feel by yourself. Do you remember
them now, Truman? Do you remember when these two pictures were
taken?”

I could only shake my head.

He set down the picture. “Well, that’s hard too, I
guess. I often wondered what that would be like, if I could just
forget the past. Meet all new people. Be off by myself with nothing
to remind me of the past. But of course I can’t. And it was hard,
thinking of all the bad things I’ve seen—my mom and all the other
people being killed, and all the other stuff. Maybe your way is
just different, but they’re both hard. I’m sorry if it made you
sad, seeing them, but maybe it’s nice to have their picture now, so
at least there’s some little connection with them.” He actually
reached out and patted Lucy on the shoulder, which I thought was
remarkably kind. “And don’t you worry. He’s yours now.” He looked
back at me and smiled. He was going to be playful again. “
If
you still want him, all Mr. Big Smarty Pants professor now, with
all his fancy books and diplomas. He won’t want to hang around with
us ‘regular’ people. What do they call that? Oh, yeah, ‘putting on
airs.’ That’ll be him from now on.” He made funny gestures as he
said this. Lucy looked back and forth between us and gave her
tortured little laugh, and I felt a tiny bit better.

The books on the shelves were almost all about
philosophy, though many had the word “ethics” in the title. None of
them looked familiar, exactly, but they all filled me with the same
excitement and enthusiasm and wonder as the trip to the library
had. I was picking out some to take with us when Will gave a little
chuckle. “Well, if we thought he was bad before, Blue Eye, now
he’ll really be impossible.” He held up a thin volume that had my
name on the cover. “Now he’s even an author.”

I took the book from Will. It was entitled
Virtue
Ethics and the Social Contract
. I liked it better than the
slogan I’d read in the college’s brochure, though I found it a
little daunting and cumbersome. At least I had some inkling of what
the terms meant. I read the back cover. Apparently, in the book I
outlined the specific implications that virtue ethics could hold
for social ethics, forming a better foundation for modern society
than the social contract model, and even forming a bridge or
rapprochement between neo-Aristotelianism and some deontological
thought. A professor from Oxford liked it, or so he was quoted on
the back. I stopped to wonder whether there was anything left in
England, or anywhere else, but then I went back to pondering what
in the world I had written. I concluded that I would need to do a
lot of other reading just to figure out what I had once
thought.

“Heady stuff, Truman,” Will said, putting my book
and a few others into a small pack he had brought. “I was wondering
if you’d written any books when we were in the library, but I
couldn’t figure out a way to look for them. There’s no card
catalogs because everything was online, and it would’ve taken days
to search the library on our own. So I’m glad you found it. An
ethical zombie? A virtuous zombie?” He looked at me and nodded.
“Yes, I suppose you are, Truman. I mean it.”

I supposed this was a compliment, so I tried to
smile, but just a little since I knew people didn’t like how it
looked.

On the long journey home, Will stopped at one of the
crossroads. On the road crossing ours, some of the grass and plants
were crushed in two long strips. I didn’t connect them to tire
tracks until I saw how Will examined them with a look of concern
and confusion.

“That’s funny,” he said. “When I was in town a few
days ago there was no talk about a foraging raid out this way.
Those things take time to plan and set up. They would’ve told me.
And there’d be more than one vehicle. This is just one. It’s a big
vehicle, like a big truck. Maybe someone just wanted a quick fill
up of fuel. But that doesn’t make sense. There isn’t a gate in the
fence on this road. The fence runs right across it. That’s
weird.”

In the distance, something roared like an engine. It
lasted only a second. Will stood and scanned the trees and fields.
He still looked concerned. “We’re close to the fence. It’s all
farms inside the fence around here. Could be people starting up a
tractor. But I don’t hear anything more.”

We listened a few seconds. Then there were three
short, loud sounds. As with the tire tracks, I didn’t make the
connection at first. I had been so focused on the tracks and the
sound of the engine that I thought maybe the sounds were from a
vehicle backfiring. I looked at Will.

“It could just be hunters,” he said, but I saw that
his look had gone from concerned to worried. “But they should know
not to hunt so near the farms. There are lots of kids out there
this time of year.”

I looked in the direction Will had been looking and
suddenly realized what we had heard: three gunshots.

With all the anticipation before and tragedy after
my vows, I was very glad to get away from the city. It was a
tradition that after school was done, the bigger children would
spend a few weeks out in the country, working on some of the farms.
The older people called it “summer camp,” and although there was a
lot of work involved, the farmers did always make it into a fun,
vacation-like atmosphere for us. We worked in the day, then stayed
up late at night, listening to stories of what the world had been
like, about cities in Europe and Asia that the older people had
visited, or places in the United States like the Grand Canyon,
Yellowstone, Las Vegas, or Disneyworld.

I always had the funniest notions during these
stories. Usually I’d have my typical sad thoughts of how all the
people were dead and gone and we were stuck here in our little
world and could never see those places again. Such places might as
well be on another planet if they were more than a few miles past
the fence.

Sometimes I’d think how the animals must like it.
Without people to bother and kill them, there must have been
thousands of buffalo and wolves roaming freely all over Yellowstone
and the Grand Canyon, alligators and tropical birds all over
Disneyworld, Gila monsters and coyotes all over the crumbling ruins
of the luxury hotels on the Vegas strip. It’s not a nice thought,
exactly, to think how it’s good in a way that there aren’t people
anymore, but it was always a fantasy that filled me with wonder
more than dread or loss.

We’d read books late at night, too. And sometimes,
when we worked really hard during the day, the grownups would treat
us to movies at night. They’d use fuel to fire up a generator and
we could watch an old movie on the television. The older people
would tell us how they used to watch television every day and how
there weren’t just tapes and DVDs, but new programs and movies that
constantly came to the television from all over the world through
an antenna or a cable. We would just look at them in disbelief.
When I was really little, it had seemed like they had lived in some
paradise of treasures and luxuries, being able to do something
every day that we were rarely allowed to do now. But by the time I
was twelve, it sounded more like some kind of strange excess and
waste, like an addiction. I couldn’t imagine watching television
every day. But I’m sure we do lots of things now that people from
the past wouldn’t be able to believe, things they’d find odd or
enviable or grotesque. And again I thought how hard it must be on
the people older than me, that they had lived to see both worlds,
and all the ugliness and senselessness and pain of each.

The old people told us that they used to drive for
hours, so they could go somewhere else to work. And they’d work
there all day, five or six days a week. Some would have two
different jobs. I figured that was why they watched so much
television, because they were so tired from all the work and
driving; it made me glad that we could just watch a movie once in a
while and have fun, and I definitely no longer envied them for
being able to watch television every day.

The older people even said that many people would be
at work so long and so far away that they’d pay someone to take
care of their children. I asked why their neighbors didn’t take
care of their kids, the way we did now, and they couldn’t exactly
explain it; they just said you couldn’t do that back then, that you
didn’t just ask other people to do things like that without paying
them. They said sometimes you could ask family members to do it,
but often they lived too far away, which also was hard for me to
fathom, even if I knew in the abstract how spread out people were
all across the country back then.

Even when we worked on the farms in the summer, we
didn’t work as much as they described. It just wasn’t necessary, to
work so many hours to get everything done. And it certainly made no
sense to live so far away from where you worked that you had to
spend hours a day driving, never mind all the fuel you’d be
wasting. I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t lived closer to
where they worked, or why someone would work and then give the
money to someone else to take care of their children so they could
work some more. They’d tried to explain that sometimes houses were
too expensive, or the schools were better somewhere else, or you
bought a house and then had to change jobs, and it all got too
confusing and complicated and just too far away from reality for me
to understand. It again made everything from before seem completely
alien, and even slightly ugly and absurd.