The Fate of Mice (8 page)

My father’s never left them. He’s still living there, living then. Living in the old world, which has just been infiltrated by terrorists.

To the prisoners of Oldworld Manor:

We are from Outside. You don’t know what we’re talking about. The people who put you here don’t want you believe that there’s an Outside. They don’t think you’re strong enough to handle that information.

We disagree. We think you are strong enough. We want to free you. We want to give you genuine choices.

Most of you were big readers before the Change. (What Change, you ask? We’re getting to that. Be patient.) You read everything because you were so passionately devoted to truth: even unpopular truth, the truths people tried to suppress, and even truths that contradicted your own worldviews. You read voraciously; you read everything. And so some of you may remember reading an obscure scientific article about two populations of animals, one on an island and one on the mainland. We ourselves have forgotten where this article appeared or what kind of animals they were: some sort of small mammal, we think. (Those of us who read it are very old now, as old as you are, and our memories aren’t what they used to be.) Whatever its species, this was an animal that couldn’t get back and forth easily between the two places. The two colonies were completely separate biologically, even though they were the same species. They had no communication with each other.

And then one day, both colonies suddenly started displaying a new tool-using behavior: using rocks to break clams open, maybe, something like that. The biologists studying the two colonies hadn’t seen one animal in either place learn how to do this and teach it to the others. One day, all the animals in both places woke up and displayed the new behavior. They’d made a simultaneous evolutionary leap.

That’s what happened to us twenty years ago. To people. This is the truth your jailors have been keeping from you, because they don’t think you’re strong enough to handle it.

For as long as there had been people at all, some of us had been haranguing the others to be kind, to be compassionate, to share resources instead of fighting over them: to cooperate, instead of competing. Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill. Don’t cheat. But people did all those things anyway, and there were wars and plagues and tyrannies and general rottenness, and the people who wanted to play nicely with others kept being told that they were hopeless idealists who had their heads in the sand, because nature was really red in tooth and claw and nice guys finished last. And so forth and so on. You remember that. You know what we’re talking about.

But it’s different for your grandchildren, for all the people who weren’t alive before the Change, or who were too young to remember what it was like back then. We oldsters can’t make them believe that people could really be that stupid and wasteful and destructive, because looking back at it now, none of that behavior makes any sense. It had always been in our best interests to cooperate and share, but before the Change, most of us weren’t able to understand that. We just didn’t get it.

And then, one day twenty years ago—March 24, 2029—we all woke up and got it, just like the two animal colonies who’d suddenly learned how to use rocks to break open clams. We all woke up wanting to be nice to each other. We all woke up grief-stricken over the lack of universal health care, over poverty and world hunger, global warming and irreversible climate change, warfare and injustice. We all woke up wanting to work together to fix those things. We all woke up with compassion and common sense. We’d all made a simultaneous evolutionary leap.

Except for a few of us, who hadn’t or couldn’t, who couldn’t accept the new world. Like all of you, who’ve been locked into an elaborate insane asylum by people who really believe they have your best interests at heart.

We think they’re wrong. We think you’re strong enough to handle the truth, and we think it’s our job to tell you the truth. That’s why we’ve gone to a great deal of time, trouble, and expense to make sure that you’re reading this. We’re the Truth Terrorists.

We’re thirty miles from Oldworld Manor. My stomach’s one huge knot. “You know,” Jenny says, “your father would probably be a Truth Terrorist himself, if he’d been able to adjust.”

That’s occurred to me, too. Before the Change, Dad was a journalist, specializing in politics and foreign affairs. He spent my childhood railing against fraud, corruption, and government conspiracies to cover up everything from the real effects of food additives to the real cost of whatever war we were fighting at the moment. He spent hours on the Internet tracking down cover-ups, and he wrote scathing stories about them that usually either didn’t get printed or were simply dismissed as the ravings of a liberal lunatic. He marched and demonstrated and protested and wrote letters and signed petitions and got arrested a couple of times, and he was very likely being watched by the FBI, and once he wound up on an airline no-fly list, although it turned out that was a mistake and they’d really been targeting somebody else with the same name who’d gone to the Middle East a few times.

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t really out to get you,” he always said darkly. He said that a lot. Coming from anyone else, it would have been a joke, but my father meant it. He used to apologize to me for having brought me into such a horrible world. He meant that, too. He’d call me into his dusty, paper-strewn study and make me sit down in front of his monitor so he could show me whatever latest government scandal he’d uncovered that no one else was paying attention to, and he’d rant and rave about the stupidity of the general public and the cowardice of the liberal media, and then—sobbing, his head in his hands—he’d beg my forgiveness for having conceived me in a moment of blind lust. “It’s the only time we didn’t use birth control, Nate, I swear to God, we were always so careful because we could tell even then that everything was going to hell in a handbasket, and how could we subject a child to that? But, well, we were a little drunk, and it was spring, and—”

“Dad,” I always told him, “Dad, it’s okay. I’m glad you conceived me. Really. Thank you for conceiving me. I’m glad I’m alive. I like being alive. You don’t need to apologize. And there are some good things in the world too, Dad, really.” And he’d always ask me what they were, and I’d have to come up with a list. “Ice cream and sunrises and, um, brave journalists and—and books! Books are really cool, Dad, come on, you like them too, even though you spend so much time on the computer, I know you do.”

And he’d sigh and shake his head, and start crying again. “But so few people read anymore! Books are going the way of the record album!”

“The what?”

“The record album! Records! An obsolete form of media you’ve never seen or heard! You’re so young, Nate. So young. I was idealistic once, too. You’ll learn better.”

My mother finally couldn’t take it anymore; when I was thirteen, in 2015, she told my father that she was moving out and taking me with her. I had to listen to her ranting, too. “I can’t believe the things he tells you! Nate, you have no idea how desperately I wanted you! I told your father I was on the pill, even though I wasn’t, and he kept using condoms
anyway
, not to mention all the lectures he gave me about evil pharmaceutical companies and the health hazards of oral contraception. I had to get him drunk to make him forget the condom that one time. It took everything I had before that to keep him from getting a vasectomy: I talked him out of that idea only by telling him that if we survived a nuclear war or biological catastrophe, we might have to help repopulate the planet. And then when I got pregnant, he wanted me to get an abortion! And I told him that he’d spent his entire conscious existence campaigning for a woman’s right to choose, and I was choosing to have this child, dammit, and if he didn’t want the baby he could just leave!”

“But he didn’t,” I always told her. “He didn’t leave. So he must have really wanted me, somewhere deep down.”

“Oh, honey, he adores you. He adores kids. That’s why he was so determined not to have any, because he couldn’t stand the idea of what they’d have to go through. But I told him that I was choosing to have the baby, and that he could choose to be its father or not, and of course then he was hooked. He hated negligent parents, and he never would have been able to live with himself if he thought he was a deadbeat dad.”

Once I asked Mom why she’d married him in the first place. She sighed and shook her head and said, “Oh, Nate, it was the old story. I thought I could change him. I thought our love would make him happy; I thought that if I pointed out the bright side of things, he’d start to see them too; I thought he just had a chemical imbalance that medication could fix, except that he refused to go on the meds because they were really carcinogens produced by evil pharmaceutical companies. At one point I went to my doctor and got a prescription for Prozac for myself, and put it in your father’s coffee every morning. I’m not proud of that, but that’s how desperate I got.”

“Wow. What happened?”

“Nothing. Not a blessed thing. I couldn’t see any difference, except that he had a lot more trouble reaching climax, and that made him curse whatever the government was adding to the water, so I stopped giving him the Prozac, and then that side effect wore off and he said the government must have started adding Viagra to the water to counter the effects of the other chemicals. And of course he found some crackpot site on the net that reported that very thing, and good luck talking him out of it once anybody else had come up with the same idea. That’s when he started triple-filtering the bottled water we bought.” She shook her head and said, “Nate, please promise me something. Promise me that you’ll never marry anyone you want to change. Don’t marry any woman you don’t love just the way she is.”

“I promise,” I said, and I kept my promise. I’ve always loved Jenny just the way she is, and she loves me too, and we love Sam and Julie. Every day I tell my kids how much I love them, how much their mother and I wanted them, how ecstatic we were when they were born. Sam’s twenty-three now—he was born three years before the Change—and Julie’s eighteen. They’re great kids. They roll their eyes whenever I tell them how much I love them, the same way I rolled my eyes when I was their age and Dad gave me the same old, tired speeches. I guess some things never change, no matter how much the world does.

Things didn’t change that much after the divorce; Dad still stayed close to us, because he didn’t want to be a negligent father. Mom and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment, and Dad moved into a little studio with a loft bed for him and a foldout couch for me when I came to visit. I think he was happier after the divorce, because he could spend more time online with his conspiracy-theorist friends, and his entire house could be dusty and paper-strewn. Looking back on it now, I actually think that was the best time of his life, those fourteen years before the Change, because for all his terror and despair and bitterness, he was doing what he was best at: hunting for cover-ups, and finding them. He dutifully gave me money and sent checks to Mom—although as a banker, she made a lot more than he did—because he didn’t want to be a deadbeat dad. He saw himself as a kind of knight or saint or prophet: one of a small band of clear-sighted freethinkers who knew the truth about a world that insisted on ignoring them. It was his way of being a hero.

Of course he had a terrible time when Mom got cancer, one of the fast-moving kinds that wouldn’t slow down for anything the doctors threw at it. We all had a terrible time. Dad had never really stopped loving Mom, and I wept in Jenny’s arms every night, and every morning we took Sam, who was just a baby then, to the hospice to visit Mom. I’m so glad she got to see Sam before she died, so glad she knew she had a grandchild. I wish she’d gotten to meet Julie, who looks just like her.

Dad wanted to visit too, but Mom wouldn’t let him: she said he was too depressing. So every day after we saw Mom, Jenny would take Sam home and I’d go to my father’s tiny apartment, and he’d weep and rail about Mom’s illness.

“It’s the damn Prozac she took all those years ago. I bet she never told you she was on Prozac. She never wanted to admit how depressing the world was, never wanted to look at what was really happening, but it got to her anyway, Nate, I know it did: she was too smart not to see the truth. So she got depressed and had to go on Prozac, and look at where she is now! You won’t get me anywhere near that stuff, and I’m healthy as a horse.”

“Dad,” I said. It hurt to talk. “I don’t think it’s the Prozac. Millions of people have taken Prozac. They don’t get cancer any more often than anyone else does.”

“They will. Just wait. Just wait and see.”

“Dad. You know, sometimes when you wait and see, good things actually happen. Like when I met Jenny, or when Sam was born.”

He patted my hand. “You’re in denial, Nate. I understand. It’s where you need to be to cope with what’s happening to your mother. I love you, Nate, you and Jenny and Sam. Make sure you only give Sam certified organic baby food.”

“We love you too, Dad. And we’re taking good care of Sam, don’t worry.”

I wish Mom had let Dad visit, even though I understand why she didn’t. I know she thought about him, more and more towards the end. Her last words were about him. “Nate,” she said, her voice a thready whisper, “take care of your father. I keep hoping that someday he’ll be happy before he dies.”

I couldn’t see through my tears. “I will, Mom. Have you been happy, Mom? I love you, Mom.” But she didn’t answer; she couldn’t. She took a last breath and died.

At the funeral, the minister said a bunch of stuff about how she was in a better world now, how we were all going to a better world. My father couldn’t take it: he got up and left in the middle of the service. But it turns out that Mom missed the better world and that Dad got to see it, because it arrived two years later, on March 24, 2029.