A Different Alchemy (7 page)

“You aren’t worried?” she asked.

“Everything always works out for the best.”

Instead of speaking, she scooted closer to him and put her head against his shoulder. When he put his arm around her, she didn’t shake or whimper, but thirty years of being married let him know she was crying.

“When I was a little girl I used to think I’d live in the country and take care of horses all day. I’d get up early in the morning, have coffee with my dad, and then the rest of the day I’d be outside combing horses, feeding them, riding them, talking to them. When we first got married I, well, I guess I didn’t have an exact course in mind for how things might go, but I was still happy. Now I sit at home and take care of Galen all day.”

That wasn’t true and they both knew it: Galen didn’t need much attention, he barely needed anything at all really. All he needed was a re-filled nutrient bag each day. And an occasional cleaning. Everything else they did—talking to him, giving him companionship, even simple things like brushing his teeth and shaving him—they did just so they could feel like Galen was more a part of their lives than he actually was. Those things offered a window to what it was like to have a regular child, nothing more.

“Every night,” she continued, “I get up after you’ve gone to sleep. I sit at the window and watch which neighbor will leave next.”

That wasn’t true either, unless, in his old age, he was becoming a sound sleeper. When they were first married he would wake up every time she so much as shifted her weight. On a couple of different occasions he had woken up to find her briefly look out the window on her way to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. Had those actually been times she was staring out the window for hours, only to act like it was in passing once he stirred?

They were surrounded by silence. There was no chance Galen would interrupt them, no chance that a nightmare would wake him up or that he would sneak out of bed to listen to their argument.

It was Katherine who finally said, “What if something happens to you? I’d have to take care of Galen by myself. What if we take him with us on the trip to Washington and something happens then?”

“Don’t say ‘if we take him.’ We’re taking him. Don’t talk like that.” He never raised his voice or said nasty things to her, but her simple choice of words, intentional or not, made him want to yell at her so the few neighbors left on their street could hear that his son was never to be taken for granted, was to be given every consideration that any father would give his son. “Everything will be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry so much.”

“What if we get to Washington and they don’t have enough empty houses?”

“People are leaving Washington to go further south just the same way people here are already going to there. It’s not just us moving on. Look at how many new faces we see each day. And they never arrive to a lack of vacant homes. Hell, they have twenty houses to choose from in this neighborhood alone. There will be plenty of empty places for us to pick from.”

They stayed on the sofa in the same position, in silence, until she was asleep. He wanted to say, “The three of us are going to grow old together. You’re going to get mad at me because I’m going to be a cranky eighty-year old man who constantly farts and asks you to repeat yourself.” He didn’t want to wake her, though, so he said nothing.

She woke a moment later, mumbling about a quick dream in which they had a normal child.

“Who wants a kid who can talk back or break curfew or thinks they know everything just because they’re young?”

“Don’t say things like that,” she said. They stared at each other, both trying to remember the younger version of the person next to them, the person they had fallen in love with so long ago. “I love our son, but don’t say we’re lucky to have a Block. Don’t say that.”

And just like that, they were dangerously close to the one argument they could never resolve. She had been three months pregnant the first time she told him they shouldn’t have tried having a baby.

“But you wanted one,” he had said. And then, before she could say anything: “We both did.”

“You said we should do this, not me.”

They had both wanted kids at one point. It was just that Katherine didn’t want to try once the Blocks appeared. Jeffrey still had.

As a young man he had been dumb enough to say things like, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if we would have tried having a kid earlier. We should have tried right after getting married, instead of waiting.”

The numbers backed him up: the first Blocks weren’t identified until Jeffrey and Katherine had been married for five years. But once they had appeared, they outnumbered the regular children three years later, before being the only children born within six years of their first appearance.

She had only agreed to have a child because Jeffrey told her everything would work out for the best. She didn’t have to agree to try to have a child, but she wanted to make him happy. He didn’t think about all the times she said they should wait until a Block cure was found or all the times he said there was still a small chance of them having a normal baby (this was four years after the Great De-evolution had started). The longer they waited, he would tell her, the more they were pushing their luck.

He cringed these days as he replayed those old arguments. One time he had told her, flat out, that having a Block son was her fault because she was the one who had wanted to wait. As if watching a horror movie, an immature version of himself had tried to make himself feel better by making her feel worse.

“You’re right,” she had said, her tone letting him know something nasty was going to follow. “Lord knows we were ready to be parents straight out of high school, right? And it made perfect sense to get pregnant before you went off to basic training, right?” She looked at him with narrowed eyes the way a beautiful red fox would just before chasing down a rabbit and ripping its throat apart. She yelled into his face: “Everything would have been just fine if I would have listened to the oh-so-wise lord of the house. Grow up, Jeff.” When he didn’t say anything she growled and added, “This was a mistake.”

She didn’t say which part she was referring to that was a mistake, and he didn’t ask because there were too many answers he wouldn’t like.

“You’re the one who wanted a son so badly,” she said. “Now you have your precious son and he’s not going to be able to talk to you or do anything with you. He’s going to sit in bed all day, or in his wheelchair. So there you go.”

“Don’t talk about my son—our son—like that.”

In all their years of marriage, that had been the only time he got so mad at her that he packed a bag and stayed somewhere else for a while. That “somewhere else” ended up being the living room sofa because he couldn’t bring himself to actually open the front door and drive away, not even for one night. It might not have been so bad if the sofa had folded out. The joke was on him: he still remembered the conversation with Katherine years earlier when they were shopping for new furniture and she suggested they buy a sofa that folded out in case they had guests over. He had said it wouldn’t be necessary.

Two days later they had made up and he was sleeping in the same bed again.

Before Galen was born, they had talked about their hopes for their child. Of course they had both wanted the baby to be normal, the difference was that Katherine had never failed to let it be known how crushed she would be if it wasn’t regular, while Jeffrey always made sure to say he would love any child he was given. Katherine had wanted someone she could see off to the school bus each morning, a child who cleared the table after dinner, someone who would eventually fall in love and let Katherine become a grandmother.

While Katherine’s belly got bigger and bigger, the ratio of regular babies diminished, replaced by Block babies. The chances their son would come out crying also diminished. As the ninth month approached, Blocks made up ninety-five percent of newborns. Katherine was constantly throwing up then. Things she said made Jeffrey think she was making herself sick from obsessing about the possibility of a near comatose baby growing inside her. To her, it might as well be a still-born child growing in her womb all those months. He would lie in bed and hold her as she begged for the baby to kick just once, just one time. Through it all, Jeffrey told her everything would be fine. Things always worked out for the best.

During check-ups, they had refused to let the doctor tell them the fate of their child; they wanted to be surprised when Galen was born. They knew it was going to be a boy, that much of the surprise was OK if it was ruined ahead of time, but they both agreed they didn’t want to know whether Galen would be born a Block until they actually laid eyes on him.

His birth should have brought tears of joy and yells of celebration, but Katherine burst out crying when the baby refused to make a sound. She held it in her arms like a doll.

“Stop that,” Jeffrey had snapped. He didn’t care that her parents were staring at him. He never settled on whether or not they had been staring in shock at a man who would yell at his wife right after giving birth, or in admiration at a father who would protect his son from insult. Or maybe they were simply staring at a Block baby for the first time, amazed at how close it was to a real baby, yet completely silent, completely still.

“I knew we shouldn’t have risked it,” she had said when they got home from the hospital. The single sentence had been enough. She might as well have said, “Why did you force me to get pregnant against my will? I didn’t want any of this and now look what happened. I hope you’re happy with your mute and motionless son. We should name him Burden.”

He thought back to the hospital’s nursery and how he hadn’t even realized what it was at first because there were no crying babies. The room contained eight children, all of whom had been born within the past week. None of them were begging to be picked up. None of them were crying to be fed. It was an amazing thing to see. It was more like a room full of Hollywood props than it was a real room with real, breathing newborns. And they would be that way for the rest of their lives.

He had tip-toed up the aisle, knowing all the while that being quiet wasn’t necessary, until he spotted a sticker with his son’s name scribbled on it. The baby’s stillness, its perfect calm and quiet, made Jeffrey instantly protective. Maybe he would have been anyway, but seeing how defenseless his little boy was turned him into a lion. Something about the child not being able to call out if it needed help made him want to be there more than if the child was wailing for milk. He cried then, not because his son would never talk or move or do anything a normal son would do, but because the life his finger tips were touching—yes, there was a beating heart and blood flowing through those veins—was his very own son. His son.

All he said was, “You’re my boy. I’ll always protect you.”

That night, as Jeffrey held Galen in his arms, he had told the child, “You’re the lucky one. You won’t have to go through the misery of being around mean kids or having your heart broken by a girl. You’ll never have to sit at a job you don’t like just so you can support your family.”

It was the first of many times over the years that he would say the same thing as he watched Galen grow from an infant, to a teenager, and then to a young adult, all the while sitting still and not uttering a single sound.

When Jeffrey had a bad day at work he went to Galen’s room and said, “You’re so lucky you’ll never have to put up with bosses that don’t know anything.” When he got home late he said, “You’re so lucky you’ll never have to sit in rush-hour traffic.” When the politicians still couldn’t agree on anything, even as the human population started decreasing for the first time in history, he told Galen, “You’re so lucky you don’t have these bastards speaking on your behalf. If it was up to them, no one would ever make a decision.” There was always a reason to tell Galen that he was the lucky one in the family.

Just saying the words, giving his fears and his ambitions credence, helped. Maybe if Katherine sat down with Galen more often and had the same kind of talks she wouldn’t be so negative. Or maybe when she spoke to Galen, she would focus on the things that bothered her each day. Maybe talking to a Block was like talking to a reflection of yourself and whatever you had to offer to the world was what you got back.

But instead of talking to Galen when she had the chance, she remained quiet. The times she did sit in a room with him and Jeffrey happened to be walking past the doorway, he saw her staring at the boy’s face or out the window. She was always thinking about something, always remembering a thought from the past or lost in daydreams.

Years later, after many iterations of the argument, she had asked Jeffrey why he spent so much time sitting on the porch talking to Galen, as though talking to his son was a waste of time that could be better spent cleaning dishes or working on the yard, something that would make their lives easier, or at least something with a measurable benefit.

He had turned to her and answered her question with his own: “Why don’t you spend more time talking to him?” A variation of the same Galen argument started up again that time too.

“Our words fall on deaf ears.” She gave a dry laugh at her black humor.

“God damn it, don’t make fun of our son like that.”

There was a ground swell of resentment in those years, as the very last normal babies were being born, against parents who insisted on trying to have a child anyway. It bothered Jeffrey when neighbors or co-workers would later ask round-about questions to find out when Galen was born, as though he and Katherine got what they deserved because they waited as late as they had. It didn’t bother him that other people wanted a reason to feel superior to him; it bothered him because Katherine would sometimes accept the guilt they wanted to place on her as she lied about Galen’s age. She would say Galen was a couple of years older than he actually had been so that when the other couples did the math in their heads, there was no blame to pass on, only sympathy.