Lucia's Masks (3 page)

What is the role of the wealthy in the new regime?

The members of the Plutocracy are our exemplars. The Plutocracy’s leading lights will be celebrated on the sky-screens. All citizens are encouraged to study and learn from the minutiae of their lives. The Plutocracy’s glory is our glory. A prime function of the sky-screens is to cast that glory as widely as possible.

What is the main achievement of the EYE to date?

The EYE’s main achievement to date is the founding of a regime that ensures our safety and security. We have removed the sting of anxiety that formerly plagued all citizens. As a result of the EYE’s vigilance and consolidated communications, we have defeated, and will continue to defeat, all terrorist incursions on our soil or in our waters or airspace. Citizens are now bound in one body, resilient and indestructible. We must all be firm of purpose. We will brook no undermining of our goals, from within or without.

What are the chief virtues of the EYE?

The chief virtues of the EYE are pragmatism, prescience, and inerrancy.

These opaque and rancid words we recited on command, some of us with the prodding help of Mr. Rod. Soon enough, they were to taste of blood and burnt flesh.

In the second half of the EYE-Year 1, the junta erected a ten-foot-high electric fence around the City. In the official nomenclature of the regime, this was the Safety Perimeter. In popular parlance, it became the “agony fence,” because of the third-degree burns it inflicted on those reckless enough to try to cut their way out. An official decree went out forbidding the utterance of the phrase “agony fence.” To use this heretical vulgarism was a treasonable offence.

EYE-Year 1 also saw the introduction of the “assimilation factories.” Mrs. McPhilmey was one of the first inductees. When she came out she was unrecognizable, the light drained from her eyes. Her mouth hung open, like a fish. Under the terms of her release, she was made to wear a sign identifying her as “factory-complete” and to sit each day on a wooden chair outside our building. This was so that everyone who passed by might see the changes the assimilation factories wrought. Mrs. McPhilmey did not so much sit upon her chair, as hang upon it, like a rag doll that has been too many times through the wash.

In EYE-Year 2, the junta initiated its crackdown on all “frivolous pursuits.” Held up for particular censure were written works of all kinds that focused on persons and places entirely fabricated. These were “time-wasters encouraging degenerate and immoral thoughts.” The most heinous, in the EYE’s assessment, were books that manipulated readers into shedding tears for “entities, whether human or animal, that had never actually existed.” The shedding of tears, whether on behalf of flesh-and-blood or fabricated beings, impeded the regime’s advance, as did every act of so-called comfort and kindness. If we all stopped to wipe away someone else’s tears, or pick up those fallen by the wayside, how could we forge ahead as one body?

Because there were no resources available to sift through the mass of written material in the City, all books, with the exception of technical manuals and official documents, were to be yielded up for incineration.

In EYE-Year 5, the junta closed the public schools. Mama, who then lost her job as a teacher of mathematics, found work as a cleaner. Papa had already resigned from what had once been the Culture and Heritage Department to become a garbage collector.

In EYE-Year 11, officials shut down the workshop of Miss Spencer, the potter to whom I was apprenticed. In her shop we made clay pots for the preserves produced in the Agricultural Zone. Miss Spencer’s crime was to give some of us instruction after work on sculpting the human face and form.

In EYE-Year 12, Sophia volunteered for work in the Agricultural Zone, seduced by the recruitment videos’ innocent images of young people beaming over their honest labour. She was enraptured by the scenes of teenage girls, dressed in floral cotton gowns and crisp matching headscarves, who scythed the wheat with a sublime grace, moving through the golden field in sweet concert, singing as they went. Mama, Papa, and I waved her off on a bus packed with young men and women with shining eyes and hair. We heard from her sporadically. She was happy, she said, most especially working in the herb gardens, where the scent of basil reminded her of Mama. We rejoiced at the miracle of her release from the City’s bondage.

In EYE-Year 13, Papa learned by chance the true name of our Zone. It was not the “Prime Zone,” as the EYE had taught us, but the “Zone of Human Fodder.” Papa was enlightened by one of the drivers responsible for trucking the bodies of the daily dead to depots outside the Safety Perimeter. Many of the deceased were Chrysalis State people, who expired quietly each day beneath the sky-screens.

Papa’s face was contorted as he slammed his fist into the palm of his other hand.

“Do you understand, Fiammetta? It is not a metaphor. They use everything: eyes, skin, hair, internal organs, genetic material. When specimens are too poor to harvest, they rend them for fertilizer or for fuel.

“Human fodder,” he repeated. And then he cried and Mama held him and told him to hush.

I retreated to my room to wrestle with the horror he had revealed. The dreadful thing was that I had sensed this all along. Papa had only spoken aloud the evil we all intuited beneath the obscurantist rhetoric of the EYE. They degraded us, even in death.

That night Mama took special pains with our family’s ritual.

In EYE-Year 14, the junta introduced minuscule surveillance cameras that resembled buzzing insects. I began to notice how one of these sinister devices would zoom in on my face whenever I was forced to defend myself in some nasty street encounter with a hardened thug or a young gang member. If you tried to brush the thing away, you got a jolt-like sting, sharper than a hornet’s.

“They are scrutinizing us for the Survivalists’ spark,” Mama conjectured, when I described the insect-cameras’ fixation. “They want to capture what it is that keeps us going.”

Then she laughed, which I found puzzling. “It is the one thing they cannot cut out of us and sell,” she said. She smiled then in a way that was soft and warm and yet secret to herself. I had not seen such an expression on her face for many years.

In EYE-Year 19, I lost my parents in one of the epidemics that periodically swept through the Survivalist population. I was the last of my family left in the City.

In EYE-Year 20, the vandals violate my sanctuary and smash my wheel. I am twenty-seven, a year older than the poet when he died. If it is death toward which I will be walking today, I know that is preferable to staying. Without my wheel, I have nothing left here to keep me human.

I donned my thickest rubber gloves and gathered up the stinking bedclothes and thrust them in a garbage bag, which I sealed tightly and took outside to the huge metal waste container that serves the entire apartment building. I cleared up the pieces of my broken wheel as best I could, weeping all the while. Then I gathered only those clothes I would need, as well as the poet’s life mask, a ball of clay, a washcloth, a bar of soap, a toothbrush and paste, salt, a box of matches, sun block, a bottle of water, and some dried fruit. At the last minute I remembered to tuck a little bag of pepper in my front hip pocket. I might need to brew some in hot water if I suffered from bad menstrual cramp. It was an old remedy of my mother’s and a simple way for me to take something of her with me.

I was exhilarated to be leaving at last. I pictured myself as a pilgrim dedicated to the search for virtuous truth and beauty. If my feet faltered, if I grew afraid, I would think of Keats’s brief, radiant life and take courage.

Just as I was finally ready to leave, I began to worry that in my haste and distress I might have forgotten to secure the lid of the waste container properly. I did not want anyone unnecessarily exposed to the stink of my fouled sheets, which the plastic bag did little to conceal. So I went back, on the last errand of my City life. And of course I found that all the bolts were securely set. I had closed the lid as automatically as I always did. As I bent down to pick up my backpack, I heard the scrape and scratch of claws on brick. Something was crouching behind the garbage container. I caught a whiff of it then, a stench that belonged to stagnant water and sewers. The thing began to chant. Its voice rasped cruelly, like the sound of splintered glass rubbing on glass.

“Beriberi,” it sang. “Dengue fever. Dropsy. Cholera. Typhoid. Common syphilis. Lupus. Come to me, little ones, and taste my wares.”

Suddenly the waste container started to tilt toward me. I spun round and ran out into the street before the thing was able to extricate itself from the narrow space between the container and the wall. Its nasty song played over and over in my head as I sped off. “Boils. Buboes. The pox.” My legs felt rubbery — as if the taunting singer had indeed managed to inject me with an immediately enfeebling virus. Then my instincts took over and I began to run again, as fast and powerfully as ever. Within minutes I would be in the thick of the crowds in the city centre, weaving my way through the sprawled sky-screen addicts. Whatever it was, the being with the macabre chant would not follow me there.

Was the creature behind the waste container a Rat-Man? More than anything else in our cursed world, I have always feared an encounter with this hybrid abomination. Some of my co-workers scoffed at the idea they even existed. But I heard stories about the Rat-Men everywhere in the City and each fresh telling left me chilled to the bone and briefly paralyzed.

I have a horror of rats: of their ruthlessness and bloodlust and slimy coats. Surely these pitiless plague carriers are the most hateful of all living things? I try to reason with myself that none of the EYE’s scientists would be so wicked or insane as to clone a human male and a rat. But when I think of the Chemical Head Children, or the sadistic young roller-blade gangs or the countless vacant faces upturned to the sky-screens, the Rat-Men seem far from improbable. Hadn’t Papa said the EYE took genetic material from the “human fodder” they collected? What was to stop them splicing together the genes of a man and a rat? Such an evil seemed to me in keeping with the monstrous character of the regime. Perhaps the EYE bred such aberrant hybrids for export, or to engage in perverse gladiatorial combat for the amusement of the Plutocracy.

According to the rumours, the Rat-Men specialize in spreading infections that cause maximum damage and pain. They want their victims’ agony protracted. The disease takes hold the second they plunge a virus-laden syringe into your arm or sink their teeth into your throat, leaving deep puncture wounds into which they then decant a vial of infected blood. The thought of the Rat-Men is unbearable to me. I do not want to believe they are real. Yet I cannot help myself. More than anything else I dread the kind of lengthy, gruesome death they are said to inflict.

I watched my own parents die of the plague. It was the fourth major epidemic that year — Zeta 4 the EYE called it. From loudspeakers on every street, the EYE broadcast the usual warnings and paltry advice. Wash your hands thoroughly. Wear a gauze mask and cotton gloves when you go outside. At all costs, avoid contact with the sputum of coughers or the rheumy-eyed.

Until Zeta 4, our family had been lucky, protected perhaps by the genes of those sturdy peasant ancestors my father liked to boast of. He would laugh when he declared we were part soil; that the ancient dirt of Tuscany had made us what we were.

It was my mother who fell ill first. Each moment of that terrible day is scored as deep in me as a ploughshare cutting into earth. Mama was behaving strangely. She kept brushing her hands in front of her face and around her head. She let her knife fall from the cutting board where she was chopping garlic for the puttanesca. She began to pace back and forth in our narrow kitchen, beating at her chest and hips with her closed fists.

I felt wretchedly afraid and helpless, seeing her in this weird agitated state. I had no idea what was wrong or what to do. Papa was not due home for many hours. This was his week for the late shift.

I stood stupefied as Mama paced under some relentless compulsion, her hands flailing at the air.

“Mama? What is it? What are you doing?” I feared she had gone mad, broken finally by the changes in our lives. She had always been so strong for us through all the bad things that had happened: Papa resigning his job when the EYE made the department where he worked a propaganda ministry; and Mama losing hers when the regime closed the public schools. Children should be home-schooled, the EYE said. There was simply no money for any but the most essential services. Every penny had to be invested in keeping us safe from the terrorists of all stripes intent on destroying our economy.

“We must believe better times will come again,” Mama always told us, even when she saw her former students running wild-eyed in packs through the streets, brandishing purloined kitchen knives. “Have the barbarians not been at our throats before? Did we not survive?”

She had developed a ritual she hoped would save us from despair. She would have me and Sophia and my father sit with her at the kitchen table; then she would bring out the treasure trove of picture postcards that had belonged to my great-aunts Giulietta, Fontina, Nidia, and Claudia, the most ancient of our blood relations. These were women who had held fast to the tradition of black clothing once their men were dead, and who never ventured out-of-doors without their long, fringed shawls and head scarves.