The Fate of Mice (9 page)

It took a while after the Change for everyone to figure out what was going on, and then we weren’t able to fix everything. A lot of the damage was irreversible: the global warming that’s wiped out huge portions of coastline on every continent, the HIV that decimated Africa even when all the pharmaceutical companies distributed drug cocktails for free, the species extinctions, beautiful animals no one will ever see again. So it’s not like the Change made us all happy, because it sent a lot of people, the ones who’d never wanted to face those issues before, into tremendous pain and grief. They could no longer hide from what they’d done, from what we’d all done, and how it made them feel. A lot of people spent a lot of time in agony, because we’d done so much harm we couldn’t undo. The suicide rate went way up for a while, before it disappeared almost completely.

The Change made all of us see everything more clearly: the way all of you always had. You are our spiritual forbears. You were the original Truth Terrorists, the ones who burned through all deceptions. That’s why we’re trying to free you now from the lie in which you’ve been imprisoned.

We couldn’t fix everything. Things aren’t perfect now. All any of us could do was promise to be better, to share and cooperate and be compassionate, to try our very best not to break things the way they’d been broken before. We kept that promise. We don’t need police now, and poverty and hunger have been almost wiped out, along with suicide, and there aren’t any more wars. But we still grieve for all those animals, and for all the people who died who didn’t have to.

It took us a while to believe that the Change was real, even though the difference was so dramatic everywhere. When the papers are suddenly full of stories about incredible acts of philanthropy and ceasefires and cooperation between people and political parties who were previously at each other’s throats, and when that’s happening all over the world, and when it’s all in the service of helping people who need help: well, let’s just say that we all knew right away that something staggering was going on. There are still people who obsess about exactly how it happened, probably because they’re afraid that if things changed so quickly, they could change back that quickly, too. Nobody really knows what the mechanism was; the spontaneous evolutionary leap theory is the one most of us have settled on, but religious people ascribe the Change to grace or miracle, to God rather than science, and there are people who think it was interference by kindly aliens, or even some side effect of a benevolent virus released into the atmosphere by saintly scientists. There are still plenty of conspiracy theorists around, but now they come up with stories about elaborate networks of justice and mercy and goodwill. And that just makes everyone else laugh. We
know
the people around us are plotting to perform acts of lovingkindness. That’s been going on for twenty years now. It’s not news. It’s not anything anyone needs to keep a secret.

Except that some people
have
been keeping it a secret. From you, the original Truth Terrorists.

If we don’t understand why most of us changed, we also don’t understand why a few of us didn’t. There were still a few criminals after the Change, although they’ve all been locked up in vastly improved prisons, prisons with excellent food and golf courses and maid service. (An improved prison is still a prison. We are doing this to free you because you’re also in a prison, and you did nothing wrong to deserve to be there.) And there were still some people who weren’t quite criminals but still didn’t want to share or cooperate, who stayed selfish and greedy. They’re harder to deal with than the actual criminals: mostly they just wind up being profoundly lonely, which is maybe how those people always wound up anyway.

And there were still some people who persisted in looking for the downside of everything, the dark side, the hidden agenda. Like all of you. The people who’ve put you here think that means you can’t handle the truth. We, the Truth Terrorists, think we owe you the truth, as long as we present it in a form you recognize, in a shape that’s familiar enough to be safe.

Ten miles away. I think I’m getting an ulcer, sitting here in the car. “Remember the early days?” Jenny asks wistfully. “When we thought he’d finally be happy?”

My stomach spasms. “When I thought Mom would finally get her wish. Of course I remember.”

“Oh, God, Nate. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I tell her. “Do you think I don’t think about that all the time? Do you think I haven’t thought about it every day since Dad lost it? It’s not like you’re bringing up something I could forget.”

Jenny and I had always thought Dad would be happy after the Change. This was the world he’d always wanted, wasn’t it? We didn’t realize right away how bad it was for him: everybody was disoriented and trying to readjust, and we were all dealing with huge social changes. Of course we saw that he wasn’t increasingly happy and excited like nearly everybody else, and at first we just chalked it up to old habits dying hard. But he spent more time online than ever, and he called me more often, too, and he sounded more panicky every time he called. “Nate! Nate! Everybody seems to
believe
that Congress is really talking about dismantling the military so it can increase the education budget!”

“Well, sure, Dad. That’s because they really
are
talking about it. I saw it on the news.”

“Nate! Surely you can’t believe that they’d do that! Why would they do that, Nate?”

“Because educating kids makes a lot more sense than killing people, and nobody wants to fight anymore.”

I heard my father sputtering on the other end of the line. “Come on, Nate, nobody really thinks that way! Especially not in
Congress!”

The day that bill actually went through—and obviously it took a while, because a lot of details had to be worked out—Dad called me in tears. His conspiracy-theorist friends believed the demilitarization was happening, too. He couldn’t find anyone to agree with him that it all must be a giant hoax. “Nate, oh God, the world must be ending! What’s wrong with everybody? Nate, I’m dizzy, I can’t breathe, Nate - ”

I hadn’t heard him in such bad shape since Mom died. I was afraid he was having a heart attack. I called 911, and then Jenny and I put Sam in the car seat and rushed to the hospital, and sat with Dad in the
ER
for six hours while the doctors ran a bunch of tests. They finally decided that his heart was fine, that he was just having a panic attack.

Being in the hospital just made his panic worse, though, because so many things didn’t make sense to him. Nobody asked him for an insurance card or proof that he could pay, because the healthcare system had already been reformed—that was one of the earliest things that got fixed after the Change, since so many people had been worrying about it for so long anyway—and the doctor and nurses spent a really long time with him, just sitting at his bedside and chatting, because they didn’t have to treat gunshots or knife wounds anymore, plus there were fewer car accidents because we were all driving more carefully. Of course the emergency room still could have been busy with heart attacks and strokes and diabetes and cancer, but I guess it was a slow night, and most people were having less trouble with chronic conditions too, because of lower stress levels.

Anyway, the doctor was really friendly and sociable, and it sent poor Dad into another tizzy. “Nate!” he hissed at me when the doctor had gone to check on some tests, “is he a real doctor? He can’t be a real doctor! Real doctors don’t sit and chat like this! That only happens on
TV!”

“I think he’s a real doctor, Dad.”

“Why aren’t there more patients here? Nobody’s screaming! There’s always screaming in emergency rooms! Is this a real emergency room, Nate?”

“It’s real, Dad. It’s all real, really.”

He’d started to cry in great gulping sobs, and I started to panic a bit too; I left Jenny to sit with Dad and went outside to find the doctor. He was sitting reading some printouts at the nursing station, where a bunch of nurses were playing poker because they had so little work to do. “Your father’s having a panic attack,” he told me kindly. “We’ll send him home with some Ativan; it’s an anti-anxiety drug. Does he have a history of psychiatric problems?”

“Not diagnosed ones, no.” Jenny and I had talked before about whether he was paranoid schizophrenic, but he didn’t hear voices, and he’d always had proof for his theories, even if other people ignored it or interpreted it differently. He always made sense, even if his take on things was a little extreme. But when I said that, the doctor’s eyebrows went up.

“Undiagnosed ones, then? What do you think’s going on?”

“Um, well … he’s having trouble adjusting to the Change. It doesn’t seem to have affected him, and he doesn’t believe in it. He thinks it’s a hoax of some sort.” And I told the doctor about my father, and he listened and nodded and looked very compassionate. The nurses had looked up from their poker game, and were listening and nodding and looking compassionate too.

When I was done, the doctor sighed and said, “We’ve seen a few cases of this. People who hate the Change because it violates their belief system or invalidates what they spent their whole lives doing, before. Some cops are having a lot of trouble.”

“Because they don’t have jobs anymore,” I said. “Sure. But my father’s not a cop.”

“You said he was an investigative journalist? There’s not much left to investigate. And it goes even deeper than employment issues, or might: I’m not a psychiatrist and can’t make an actual diagnosis, but we’ve seen a condition called ‘conflict addiction.’ There are people who spent their whole lives before the Change opposing things, protesting things, defining other people as enemies. And now they don’t have anything to oppose or protest, and the people they thought were their enemies are acting like friends, and they can’t deal with it.”

“But this is the world he’s always wanted,” I said. “If you’d asked my father, before the Change, how he thought things should work, he’d have described exactly what’s happening now.”

The doctor nodded. “Right. It’s the world he said he always wanted, but now that he has it, he doesn’t know how to live in it. Because all of his modes of functioning involve protest and opposition. He has to learn an entirely new way of thinking and living. That’s going to be hard work, and I have to warn you, not everyone can do it. Listen, I’ll send him home with the Ativan, and I’ll give you the name of a psychiatrist who specializes in this. If anyone can help him, Dr. Hurley can.”

“He won’t take the Ativan. He thinks pharmaceutical companies are trying to poison everybody.”

“Well, I’m not surprised, after what you told me. If he won’t take the Ativan, warm milk and a hot bath may help him relax.”

So Jenny and I took Dad home, and he refused to take the Ativan, and we gave him warm milk and a hot bath, and I sat with him until he fell asleep. I told him over and over that he was all right, that his heart was fine, that Jenny and Sam and I loved him. And he held my hand and told me that he was feeling much better, and that he knew we loved him, and that he loved us, too.

Now I wish we’d brought him back to our house. I wish we’d kept more of an eye on him. I don’t know why we didn’t think to do that. If we’d brought him back to our house, maybe we could have kept him from watching the news the next morning, or at least shielded him from it. Not that it ultimately would have helped, I guess; something else would have gotten to him, eventually. But the next morning, the top news was that the major pharmaceutical companies had made a group announcement that they’d been guilty of unethical practices for years, that they’d been buying off doctors and tampering with clinical trials and withholding information from consumers, and that they were going to mend their ways and also offer financial compensation and free supplies of better drugs to patients who contacted them.

“Oh my God,” Jenny said, as we sat at the kitchen table watching the
TV
. “You’d better call your dad, Nate.”

“He’ll be overjoyed,” I said. “He’s been saying all that for years; everybody’s known it for years, anyway. He’ll feel vindicated because they’ve finally admitted it. Won’t he?”

“After what happened yesterday? I doubt it. Nate, call him.”

I called. There was no answer. “Maybe he’s in the shower,” I said. “Maybe he went out to pick up some groceries.”

“Maybe he’s slit his wrists,” Jenny said. “We have to go over there. Unless you want to call 911 first.”

“Jenny, you’re overreacting.”

“I hope so.” She picked up Sam, who was halfway through his breakfast banana. “Nate, let’s go.”

We went. There was no answer when we knocked on my father’s door. “Maybe he took the Ativan and he’s sleeping,” I said.

“Sure. Use your key, Nate. We need to get in there.”

I used my key. We found my father curled in a fetal position on the floor in front of the television. He was still in his pajamas and bathrobe. He didn’t respond when we talked to him, touched him, waved our hands in front of his face. He was breathing, but he barely blinked. His eyes were fixed in a glassy stare, and a thin trickle of drool dripped from his mouth onto the rug. Jenny called 911 while I sat with Dad, begging him to talk to me. Sam sat next to me and sang his favorite song, “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Dad loved to hear Sam sing that song, and he always sang along, but today nothing happened.

So we wound up back at the hospital, where Dad had still more tests, all of which said that he was fine, physically. The emergency room was still eerily quiet, and at the nurses’ station, the day shift was deep into a game of Scrabble. A group of paramedics played frisbee in the hallway. “I’m worried about you guys,” I told the nurses; I’d wandered over to watch the game while Dad was having an
MRI
. “Are you going to lose your jobs? You need more sick people than this to keep your jobs, don’t you?”

They all looked up at me and smiled, and I wondered if they’d been hitting the Ativan. “It’s okay,” one of them said. “There will always be sick people, even if there aren’t a lot right now. You know, the flu. Allergies. People falling off ladders.”