Educational Tapes

1.

This is installment one of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are not student 147B, you may now remove your headphones and raise your hand. Your educational professional will provide you with further assistance. If you are student 147B, cross your arms and lay your head on your desk. Close your eyes and smell the faint chemical residue of the disinfectant that the school janitor used to wipe your desk down this morning. Smell, also, the dirt and playground rock dust still clinging to your skin.

Know there is nothing here to harm you. Only your choices. Only yourself.

Every choice that you have made up to this point was your own: eating toast for breakfast, putting on a wrinkled green T-shirt, watching a bug twitch on your windowsill until it lay still.

When the mail arrived at exactly 8:30 a.m. yesterday, like it does every Sunday, you made a choice to get out of bed and go directly to the mailbox. You made a choice to open it, to extract the manila folder tucked inside, to turn it over and run your fingers across the seal, careful not to break it.

You stared for a few seconds too long at the governmental logo embossed on the front before a bird perched near you, a little closer than birds tend to perch, and tilted its head ever so precisely toward you.

It was your choice to then tuck the manila envelope under your arm, run back into your house, and shove the package far under your bed where it would be safe from the piercing gaze of birds.

Some decisions are more important than others. Like the decision to speak up or remain quiet when two adults are arguing, or to move your mouth in mimicry of words in a chant without actually speaking them aloud, or to only pull out the manila envelope late at night, when everyone is sleeping, so that you can be alone with it.

You carefully picked at the corners of the seal, then put it back down on the bed and walked away. You came back later, picked it up, measured its weight in your hand. You handled it like a thing that could bite you. And it could. But not on its own. The choices are your own.

Manila envelopes always contain choices.

Some will say there is no need to fear this choice, as long as you make the right one. But the right choice made for the wrong reasons is still the wrong choice. And fear will give you a healthy respect for the decision you’re going to make.

You do not need to worry, though, about making the choice now.

When you open the manila envelope with the governmental logo embossed on the front, you will be greeted with a thick stack of papers coated in fine print. It will look like a series of indecipherable symbols rather than a string of cohesive thoughts.

The papers are saturated with questions. Questions about you, your life, your childhood, your education, your likes and dislikes. Do not worry about these. These are for later. These you will fill out with the help of your parent, guardian, or an appointed educational professional.

The page that is important, the page that you are now worried about, is the final page. On this page, there is only a bit of fine print at the top, a box that says “I accept,” a box that says “I decline” and a line on which to write a shaky, reluctant signature.

In the manila envelope that I have sitting in front of me, there is something different. There is more paper with more fine print. Fine print with a very specific set of instructions on how to conduct an educational tape.

The paper tells me that the instructions are only a set of guidelines, a framework on which to build.

I have other manila envelopes. Manila envelopes on you, on your case, on the way you pinch tacks too tightly between your fingers and gaze too long into the distance.

I also have tapes. Bits of audio collected over the years. Bits of video. Notes on behavioral analysis.

But the envelope in front of me now, the general one with the homogenized guidelines, says to make a point about the positives of becoming a citizen, a point about the greater good.

You already know about the greater good. You know about food supply and nuclear families. You are aware that society is an intricate machine and that you are an important piece of it and that the purpose of the machine is greater than your individual purpose. You know what it means to contribute to the greater good.

But why should that matter to you? Why should it matter to any child that a monolithic entity wants to swallow you up in contribution of the greater good?

I have taken a black marker and blotted out entirely this small bit of advice. I’ve erased a small part of what was in the manila envelope. I have made a choice.

2.

This is installment two of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, cross your arms and lay your head on your desk. Close your eyes and think about the monolithic entity that wants to swallow your life whole in contribution to the greater good. Know that it does not seek to erase you, but to help you see yourself.

When you were six there was a book. A book that was passed around at lunch tables so that it ended up with grease spots on the pages and scratches on the cover. A book that was whispered about in hallways and argued about on the playground so that fights erupted and a small boy had his face shoved into the rocks.

There was something surrounding that book. Something you needed to know. You wanted to read it. You asked your parents if you could read it. But the book was not a book for children, was not a book that you should have known about.

That was the first time you stole. The last time too, unless you’ve gotten better at it, hidden it from prying eyes, stayed away from birds.

You took the book from its place in the library and slipped it into the small and secretive pocket of your backpack. It was a pocket that you never used and so, you assumed, one that others wouldn’t look into.

You could feel the book prickling there the rest of the day. It didn’t matter where you were in relation to it, the part of you that was closest to it always had a desperate tingling sensation. You wanted to pull it out of your backpack, feel its weight in your fingers. You didn’t.

You didn’t see it until later that night when you removed it carefully from your bag as you sat cross-legged on your bed. You ran your fingers over its cover, much in the same way that you ran your fingers over the cover of the manila envelope today, assuring yourself of the gravity of the situation.

The ocean does not exist. It’s imperative that you remember that the ocean does not exist. You doubted it once when you opened the finger-worn but still glossy pages of the book and read about endless shores and white sand, about deep undiscovered waters and the creatures that live there and beyond there. You went over and over the illustrated pictures and did your best with the words, though they were still only half-formed when you sounded them out as if you were speaking with rocks in your mouth. The book, itself, explained quite clearly that the ocean does not exist. That didn’t matter to you.

Every night you pulled out the book, ran your hand along its pages, fumbled with the words, closed it, shut your eyes tight in bed, trying to control yourself, and then pulled it out again.

It began to consume you.

The school soon noticed the book was missing and the witch hunts began. Searches, bribes, whispers on the playground, calls home to parents. It all seemed, to you, more significant than it was in reality.

The world was no longer safe for you. You drew into yourself, keeping the secret locked so deep away that you almost convinced yourself that you had not stolen the book. But at night you still drew it out. At night it was still yours.

You were isolated. There was no one you could talk with about the book, no one you could show its illustrated, glossy pages, no one who you could show yourself to.

As your guilt grew, so did your shame, and so did your isolation. It was only you and your secret.

It is maddening, to act in one way outwardly and be another person entirely in your own mind. Transgressions, even if they’re unintentional or uncontrollable, cling to you, set you apart, taint you. They will always isolate you.

This is why your choices are important. This is why you have reason to fear your choices.

You finally reached your breaking point. The book began to give your fingers a stinging sensation when you pulled it out at night. A burning in your throat. Shame.

You feared your confession but you feared worse isolation, so you tucked the book under your arm and walked to your parents’ room, your footsteps muffled by the carpet.

You rapped on their door, waited, felt your heart beat in your chest, your ears, your mouth, your face. You felt your resolve melt, then solidify again. You rapped on the door, this time harder.

Your father appeared there, and you wished to god it had been your mother, but in truth, a part of you knew you needed him. You extended the book to him and it took him a second of processing to understand. After the processing came the anger. After the anger came the hitting.

Blunt pressure, then stinging, then flashes of warmth, blunt pressure again. It hurt, but it also felt like relief. You deserved it. You knew you deserved it. All that time, you had been aching for the punishment. You wanted to pay the price and move on. That way the sins would no longer stick to you.

Some sins always stick to you.

He didn’t hit you for long, and when he finished, the dull throbbing of your skin and the tears streaming down your face felt like release. He knelt down, whispered forgiveness in your ear, and clung tight to you. You cried again, and this also felt like release.

He had rejected your sin, but he still loved you. This was acceptance. This was belonging. The warmth that spread through your chest when you finally realized that you were seen and known for who you were, the need to cling tighter to your father, to feel the comforting reassurance of his love wash over you.

This is why you will check the box marked “I accept” and write your name next to it.

3.

This is installment three of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, cross your arms and lay your head on your desk. Close your eyes and think of the stinging of your father’s hand against your cheek. Think of the release, of the acceptance, and, finally, of the warmth.

There is a book sitting in your backpack now. A book about the ocean. It is the same book stained by the hands of small children. It is stained, also, by your own, private memories. Holding it no longer feels enthralling. It is only a children’s book, like many others that you’ve read, now far below your reading level. Its only significance is that one, lonely time in your life.

Perhaps holding it brings back bad memories. Or, perhaps, it still fills you with some shadow of an idea.

I should be clear. There are only two options. Only “I accept” and “I decline.” There is no ocean.

Now that we have covered the personal reasons for choosing “I accept,” let’s take a look at some of the structures of our society and how you will operate within those structures, should you choose to mark the correct box.

Shortly after your entry into society is accepted you will be sent another manila envelope, this one much thinner. Inside, you will find a few sheets of thick government-issue cardstock marked with a date, time, and location. You will go to the location on the specified time and date and take a test. The lights in the testing room will be bright, a little blue, and flickering. This will make you feel as though you’ve done poorly on the test. That is a ridiculous thought. There is no way to do poorly on an aptitude test.

This test, along with the opinion of a panel of experts, and a detailed analysis of your previous performance in school, will be used to select a career for you.

Once a career has been selected, you will continue your schooling with a focus on this subject. Remember, for some careers you will have to move away when you are older. Most, however, don’t require that you move away. It is only very rarely that this happens. If it does happen, you have no need to be afraid, only slightly apprehensive.

It is likely, however, that you will stay. That you will continue to live and work in much the same way that you always have. You will continue spending time with your family, attending after-school activities, participating in community-bonding rituals. You will continue to live a happy life until you reach age twenty-one, finish your school, and are placed with a permanent partner in a permanent home with a permanent job.

Again, it is likely that you will not leave your current town. Again, if you leave your current town there is nothing to be afraid of. Only slightly apprehensive. Apprehensive in the way that one is apprehensive when a loved one says they will be home at a certain time but is running significantly late and the gaps of time are beginning to be filled with all of the horrible ways that they could have died, even though you know deep down that they’re okay, that they’ve always been okay in the past.

Of course, there is the off chance that this time they are not okay.

You will be okay. You will not be dissatisfied. You will not wake up at three in the morning with the residual feeling of a dream still clinging to you, making you feel as though you’re supposed to remember something that you can never quite put your finger on.

Once you are put in your situation it will remain permanent. You will live out your days in the comforting lull of routine unless you are uprooted due to special circumstances. It’s preferable to not be uprooted due to special circumstances.

This all might sound slightly terrifying. That’s okay. It should.

The natural human response to that which is slightly terrifying is autonomy, rebellion, and control. But a lack of willingness to relinquish control inevitably leads to mistakes, regret, failure, and a waste of human life. Do not be arrogant. Arrogance is what leads us to think that we should have control over our own lives, that we know best how to live them. It shows a lack of understanding of the greater forces in our world, the ones that have our best interest at heart, that operate out of a selfless care for our well-being, and that use advanced algorithms to determine what trajectory in life will make us the happiest and most useful members of society.

Even if you meet some amount of suffering in this life, you should know that in the end, it will be worth it.

In addition to helping you structure your life, entrance into society will grant you more rights than you are currently afforded. You will be an active participant of the community-bonding ceremonies, annual rituals, and after-school studies, rather than a passive bystander.

It will be difficult to mouth the words of a chant rather than saying them aloud when you are the one expected to lead the chant. This is something you should begin taking into consideration.

Weekly community-bonding rituals have a few important purposes. They act as a reminder that we are part of something larger than ourselves and also help us better live out our daily lives as community members. It is important that you begin actively participating in community-bonding rituals. I know that the rituals are often grotesque, but you should know that there’s a purpose for this and that the purpose is for the common good.

4.

This is installment four of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, cross your arms and lay your head on your desk. Imagine for a moment that you have a mother. You do, of course, have one. But yours is soft-spoken and flinching.

Imagine for a moment that you are not you. You are a hypothetical you, a you being used for this hypothetical illustration.

You have another, different mother. Her hands aren’t soft, but rough. Her cuticles are bitten and bloodied. Her eyes never focus. She never looks at you and when she does she is looking through you. She drinks, and you don’t yet understand that she does this not to hurt you but herself. She goes through life in a constant state of lethargy. She rejects her duties as a wife, mother, and civilian. She does not attend community-bonding rituals. Until one day, she does.

On that day, you look up momentarily from your dry wheat cereal and see that she’s put on a white shirt. Though the shirt is wrinkled, you think she looks beautiful. She notices you watching her and gives you a slight, wavering smile. This makes you happy. You go back to eating your cereal.

That morning you leave the house with your two parents, glad to feel the unfamiliar pressure of your mother’s hand in yours. Just like every Sunday, you walk. The suburb streets are speckled with other families, much like yours, also walking. As the streets merge toward the center of town, the people grow thicker, until you are pressed up against them and standing in the square in the middle of town.

They begin chanting. The chants mean nothing to you now. You are too young to understand but you say the words regardless, liking the way that they sound leaving your mouth and drifting up, mixing with the other voices. It has not yet occurred to you that you might not agree with the words you are saying. Your mother is also chanting. This makes you happy.

When the chanting is done your throat is almost sore from it and your father has to keep you gently held up against his side, or else you would be on the ground pouting and begging to leave.

You don’t listen to the droning words of the man in front of the crowd. He has nothing for you. Listening to him is boring. You wish you were home, outside in the backyard collecting bugs and pinching their tiny bodies between your fingers.

His words only mean something to you when your mother moves from her place beside you, hesitantly at first, as though she were just shifting her weight, and then more assuredly, leaving you, walking through the crowd, toward the man. You are suddenly very invested in the man and what he has been saying. What has he been saying?

You strain for it, but come up with nothing. All you can do is watch as she speaks to him in hushed tones. You feel nervous, but you don’t know why. Your mother’s hard face cracks. It has been a while since you’ve seen it do that. She sobs but you cannot hear it. You think that the man she is talking to also cannot hear it. It is too quiet, too closed up in her throat.

He puts a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, then he embraces her and holds her for a moment while she continues to sob. Suddenly you know why you are apprehensive. You remember what this means. He says something in a loud and booming voice, something about transgressions and atonement. Your face is burning and you cannot move. Someone throws the first stone.

There are not many loose stones in the cobblestone-paved city square, so people have brought their own. You watch as they fly through the air and meet their mark.

She stands for a while, unwavering. But she can’t stand for long. You stand and listen to the dull thumps of rock against her skin. You think you might be screaming but you cannot tell. Your father holds you and you listen until the thumps stop. The sound of your mother’s screams, the cheering of a crowd, the thumping of stones is replaced by indifferent silence.

One by one the people disperse until it’s only you and your father and your mother’s limp figure slumped against the cobblestone pavement. Her white shirt is bloodied, her dark hair matted against the sweat on her forehead, her breaths are coming in rasps. In spite of this, she is conscious. She gives you another slight, wavering smile. This time, you don’t smile back.

All you can feel is a numb, buzzing feeling in your face and in your chest. Your father scoops her into his arms and walks you both home.

You are convinced that everything around you is evil, but that is only because you do not understand. You do not understand that people have to be broken down at a fundamental level before they can be rebuilt into something new and better.

Your mother’s bones are not cracked, and she has no internal bleeding but for the large bruises that have spread across her skin like a disease. In the next few days, the healing process begins and you begin to understand.

As her body mends itself her mind, too, seems to shift. There’s a brightness, an alertness in her eyes. You think it might be panic but it slowly morphs into something else. Motivation. Determination. She smiles at you fully now, her eyes fixed right on you, usually. She only drifts occasionally. You only see her choke something down occasionally.

In the afternoons she is gone. Gone to a meeting, your father says. Something for people like your mother to go to after work. Something to keep the light in her eyes and the stones away from her flesh.

It works, for a time.

Pain is not innately bad. It can be used to mold and change us into better people. Refining a person is a painful and difficult process. You should, by no means, consider that process to be an evil one.

Active participation in community-bonding ceremonies, annual rituals, and after-school studies are imperative to your education and growth as a newly accepted citizen. If you want to be happy in these structures, it would be best for you to begin saying your chants aloud, carrying stones in your pockets, and not flinching when someone hands you a knife.

Taking these steps will ensure that you are more ready for entrance into society, that you do not have to keep rotting things stuffed inside you, like the hypothetical mother from today’s illustrative story.

It will also ensure that you do not wake up at 3:15 a.m. with something moving in your chest, something that feels alive and separate from you but only slightly. Something that can’t be cut out with knives or squelched by stones.

You will not get out of bed and pace the house until you find one tile in the kitchen to stand on and stare, unblinking, out the window. You will not hope that the feeling will go away, that it won’t grow again, and that you won’t end up like her.

If you say your chants aloud, you will not end up like her.

5.

This is installment five of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, cross your arms and lay your head on your desk. Close your eyes and feel the cool of your desk pressed against your cheek, hear the humming of the air conditioner and the distant shrieks of laughter from the children outside taking their recess break. Know that you are safe here. Know that not everywhere is safe.

Today we will discuss the second option that is tucked into the manila folder, which is tucked under your bed, away from prying eyes.

Inside this manila envelope there is a box that reads, “I decline.” Some wonder why the box “I decline” is included in the manila envelope. These nameless faceless people have argued that “I accept” should be the default option and that “I decline” should be obvious in the case that anyone should decline.

Children, they say, should be encouraged toward the most desirable option in any way possible. The people who propagate this idea, while well-intentioned, are severely misguided.

There is reason for the box which reads “I decline.” The importance of personal choice cannot be understated in instances such as these. No one can coerce you into making a decision regarding the trajectory of your life or else the choice has not been yours. The choice has not been genuine.

It is for this same reason that I must explain to you your inevitable future should you choose to check the box which reads “I decline.”

As you well know, those who live outside of the constructs of our society are forced into their only other option. That is, to live outside of those constructs. Alone, without guidance or protection.

It is an arrogant and foolish choice, a result of the idea that each individual has the capacity to control their own life. The cruel irony here is that each individual does have the capacity to control their own life, but the choice to cling selfishly to that autonomy results in unhappiness, lack of meaning, and, ultimately, death.

You already understand this on a rudimentary level. You understand that stealing a book from the library was your own, autonomous decision. You understand, also, that it resulted in your isolation. Keep this in mind when choosing between “I accept” and “I decline.”

As for the nuances of living outside of the structures of society, you have already experienced them on a rudimentary level. Though you may remember this trip—the extra sack lunch that you packed, the tightness with which your mother held you before you left for school—I can assure you that what you saw was not entirely reflective of the reality of this lifestyle. You were sheltered from the full reality because you were small and unable to understand. You are still small, but I hope, for your sake, you are able to understand.

When you got on the bus you clutched your two paper lunch sacks until your knuckles were white. The lunch sacks had to be paper, no plastics, no metals, nothing hard or heavy or with any other remotely sinister qualities. You didn’t know why you were pressing your fingers through the brown paper into the palms of your hand with such ferocity. But you understood something a little better than the children around you, the children who were already eating the dessert from both of their lunch sacks.

The bus stopped at the school and you were there for a few moments, sitting at your desk, still clutching the paper bags, listening to your teacher’s cheery and lilting voice, listening to things which should not have been said in such a cheery and lilting voice. There was a tightness in her smile that you may have imagined, but probably did not.

Then you were on the bus again and it was rainy and gray, which you, as a general rule, enjoyed. You did not so much enjoy it this time because this grayness wasn’t over rows of familiar houses or the school playground or the general store. This grayness was over endless stretches of emptiness and dead grass that went on, seemingly, in all directions. Until it did not. Until it turned into hills and rocks that you were sure had things hidden behind them.

The rocks then turned into trees, which turned into dense trees that blocked out the gray sky altogether. This, you liked even less.

The bus came to a stop. You stepped out and followed your teacher who was clutching a leather-bound book to her chest in much the same way that you were clutching your paper bags.

She led the class down a narrow dirt path, ducking occasionally for branches that hung low and threatened to scratch your face. This went on until you came to a clearing. In the clearing were makeshift homes and campfires and people who were unlike any people you had ever seen. Your teacher smiled her tight smile and cracked open her book. She began saying words that you had already heard iterated many times over, words that were meaningless background noise to what you were attempting to process.

People were hunched over themselves, their faces gaunt, their stomachs caved in, their ribs protruding.

You were meant to leave only one lunch sack. You left both. That was nice of you. It was also useless.

You couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t reach out and take what was being offered to them, why they wouldn’t pick it up when you set it on the ground in front of you. You couldn’t have known that when you left, they threw each paper sack into the fire because they could not accept the implications attached to it. You went home with a hollow stomach for nothing.

6.

Imagine for a moment that you are not on the giving end of the paper sack. That you are not you, but the hypothetical you from our purely hypothetical illustrations.

That after the stoning, your mother mends herself only briefly before she has to leave to a white, rectangular building where you cannot see her. Imagine that every time she comes back her eyes are glassier, her grip on everything less sure. Imagine that she does not come back at all.

You choose, for a while, to be bitter toward her and then toward them. The men who stand in city squares and speak with booming voices, the men in white jumpers who carry people off to white rectangular buildings, the men who hold you with soft but firm hands when you try to fight and claw your way out of them.

You don’t want to be around them anymore. Not without her. So you mark the box which reads “I decline” and leave it on the coffee table, hoping to send a message. Though the only message you send is that you were no better than her.

It is night when you leave the house and go walking just alongside the streets with their white, reflective glow and their slight buzzing that you can only hear at night.

You stay away from white rectangular buildings and town squares. You walk out until there are no buildings and town squares, only dead grass and then rocks and then trees and then denser trees. You walk until you can’t. And then you sit and sob and wait.

They find you eventually, just like you knew they would. The group that finds you is small and not unkind. You’re grateful for this much, at least.

They give you pieces of dehydrated meat and tea made from tree bark and hot water. You get a bed next to an elderly woman who sleeps with a knife under her pillow and teaches you curse words you didn’t know existed. She shows you how to hunt and take care of yourself and lets you watch when she uses burned pieces of wood to write out manifestos on pieces of scrap paper. Her conversation focuses mostly on the government.

The things she says get inside of you in a violent way. You begin to speak like her and she smiles at you until you show the first sign of wanting to put words into action.

The sting of her hand against your cheek doesn’t hurt so much as the shock of betrayal. She did this, she says, to protect you. You believe her.

After that, you keep to yourself about walking toward the ocean that doesn’t exist, or about walking back toward the place you called home with sharp objects in your hands.

You don’t voice these things aloud anymore. Instead, you focus on the immediate. The shortage of food and medical supplies, the poorly constructed homes, the sickness that spreads to someone new each day.

You build and think and sometimes write. And, for a time, you make things better. There is a terraced garden where you grow five different kinds of vegetables, an irrigation system, a waste-disposal system, homes that no longer fall apart, and a growing supply of food. There is a small window of time when you think you are happy.

It is worth noting that any semblance of happiness outside of the structures of society will always be superficial and fleeting. Happiness, here, is an illusion based upon temporary circumstance and with no eternal value. It is purely selfishness receiving what it desires. But keep in mind that a selfish nature will always result in more want, and is therefore insatiable.

It is when things begin to get better, when there are gardens and irrigation systems and community gatherings that don’t consist of stones and knives and condemnation, that the birds start to appear.

There are only a few at first. And then a few more. And then a multitude, from almost every angle, always.

You know what birds mean. You are not surprised when the birds are followed by men in white jumpers who come and drag you out of your home and hold guns to your head. You are not surprised when a man with a leather book and booming voice comes and speaks words that only sound faraway and scrambled filtered through the blood rushing in your ears.

Illustration by John Dale Javier

You are not surprised when they grab the old woman and push her to her knees and demand her to make a choice.

She makes the wrong choice by pulling out her knife. You don’t know how she planned to use it. On the men or on herself. Either way, she never gets the chance.

It is the first time you see anyone killed. It is too quiet. Too fast. A shot and a thump and a thin trickle of blood in the dirt. You think she deserved more than that.

After her, they ask each person to make a choice. We all have to make choices. We all receive a second chance.

They make the wrong choice.

You make the right choice, only you’ve made it too late. And that will cost you.

Please understand that those who seem like the victims in this hypothetical story are, in fact, the perpetrators. They had a choice and chose wrongly. Even then, they were given an opportunity to repent.

It was in their best interest to choose “I accept” and yet they brought suffering and death upon themselves under the prideful assumption that they could take control of their own lives. Do not make their mistake.

7.

This is installment seven of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, retrieve the tack from your desk drawer. If you are so intent upon pressing it into your thumb, do so now. Know that later you will regret seeking out pain, but do it if you must.

Now that we have discussed the two options available to you concerning your choice, and its consequences, we should also discuss the nonexistence of a third option. There are some who like to propose the possibility of a third option. Some illustrated children’s books that, at first glance, seem to propose the possibility of a third option. This, you will come to find, is absurd. There is no third choice. And those that seek it find only suffering and an untimely death.

It is understandable that you have returned the illustrated children’s book to its place under your bed. That you draw it out in much the same way that you did when you were a child, that you hold it up next to the manila envelope that you have still not opened as if you were weighing your options.

Do not weigh options that do not exist. There are only two options. “I accept” and “I decline.” There is no ocean.

There are people who believe in an ocean and choose to walk east, toward nothingness. You have seen them before. People who move alone or in packs through cities and towns or skirting around cities and towns. It is just as foolish to skirt around cities and towns as it is to walk into them and place undue trust in the people who live there.

You have seen firsthand how foolish it is to place trust in people who live in very neatly lined houses and attend community-bonding ceremonies on a regular basis. You have seen how foolish it is to place trust in nice, well-meaning people who sharpen the heels of toothbrushes and tuck them into their breast pockets.

You had not sharpened the heel of a toothbrush or broken a TV remote into plastic shards or confiscated a fork from the kitchen. But others had. And you watched.

You put down the piece of chalk that you had been using to coat the sidewalk in solid blue and watched as a group of people, people unlike any you had ever seen but for that one time in the woods, walked down the middle of the street. They huddled together, hands clasped in solidarity and fear, like a pack of animals pushing the strong out to the sides and keeping the small and weak protected.

They looked at the rows of houses and neat lawns and you and your blue chalk as though all were threats. They watched you and you watched them and their eyes begged you to be silent. You were silent. But not still.

You got up and ran inside to find your mother and she ran to find your father and he took a sharpened toothbrush out of his breast pocket as though he had been waiting.

He had been.

You should not have gone to the window to watch, but you did. You watched as he went out to them and used the sharp end of the toothbrush. How a few of them stood still and resigned, as though this had been what they were waiting for, as though they never hoped to get to the ocean, not really. Others were not so sedate. They tried to run. But it didn’t matter, because there were already other people in the streets, spilling out of their houses with broken flowerpot shards and heavy objects in hand. You watched, unable to pull yourself from the window until they all lay on the ground with various sharp objects protruding from their flesh. Your father came back inside and smiled at you, as though he had done you a favor.

Later, men in white jumpers came and hauled some of the people with sharp objects protruding from their flesh into ambulances to transport to rehabilitation facilities. Others, they shot in the head. You watched this too. You did not bother going back outside to finish coloring the sidewalk blue. The chalk was already tainted, mixed with red.

While these practices may seem cruel and remembering them may make you tighten your grip on your pencil and dig your teeth into the inside of your cheek, it is important to note that these people are dangerous. They present a threat not only to the health and well-being of community members like yourself, but also a threat to our way of life.

Keep in mind, also, that allowing them to die here spares them from a more gruesome death later and affords them the opportunity to repent and be taken to rehabilitation.

If you choose the option which does not exist and attempt to walk east, toward the ocean that doesn’t exist, this will be your fate. You will end up lying on a suburb street with a toothbrush protruding from your neck.

No one in their right state of mind walks toward the ocean that doesn’t exist.

No one gets up late at night and opens their window so that they can slip out without tripping any alarms. No one takes nonperishable food items and several days’ supply of bottled water and starts walking out of town, cutting through front lawns and avoiding streets and sidewalks that hum slightly but only at night.

Steer clear of the rehabilitation facilities and the sounds that come from them but only at night. Keep to darkened areas and away from any birds that you may come across. At the edge of town, toward the east, there will be dead grass and then rocks and then trees and then denser trees. Stay off the road. The roads take you only to other towns. Avoid other towns. Instead, follow the streams. When you get to the rocks there will be a stream that cuts through under the road. Follow the branch that leads east. If it takes you to a town, do not enter the town. Do not enter in the night or in the day. If you do enter a town, attempt to look as inconspicuous as possible. Ask no one for help. Trust no one to help you. The rivers do not lead to the ocean because the ocean does not exist. The rivers lead east. Despite what you have been told, there is no ocean in the east.

This is a hypothetical example of what someone who believes that there is an ocean in the east might say. Do not listen to such people.

Do not go east. Do not go east ever. Not yet.

8.

This is installment eight of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, think of the bird that you saw on the sidewalk yesterday at two in the afternoon. The bird that was half-dead, its neck bent at an unnatural angle, its chest rising and falling too rapidly, its movements panicked and sporadic. You thought killing the bird would be the merciful thing to do. But perhaps you were wrong. If you had let it live, it might have only suffered and died. It might also have suffered and lived and been stronger for it.

Remember, some suffering is necessary.

Now that we have covered the two options and the third option that is not an option, we will cover rehabilitation. While the word rehabilitation is often thrown around, there is a bit of confusion in regards to what it constitutes. And where there is confusion there is fear.

There is nothing to fear.

Rehabilitation is an integral part of our society. It has been put in place as a means to help community members live more happy, productive lives. It is for this reason that persons seeking reentrance into society after leaving it must undergo rehabilitation. It is also the reason why a few community members themselves must sometimes attend rehabilitation. It is for their own good, as well as the good of the community.

In order to dispel some of the confusion surrounding rehabilitation, today’s tape offers a look inside rehabilitation facilities and the treatment methods they use.

Keep in mind that some suffering is necessary. That it molds us into better people.

I’d like you to imagine that you are not you, but the purely hypothetical you we have been using in these purely hypothetical illustrations.

You are a government worker specializing in educational materials. You believe, as you should, that our society is ideal and that divergence from it is detrimental. Imagine also that you were once a little girl before you were a government worker specializing in educational materials. A girl whose mother often attended rehabilitation. A girl who marked “I decline” on the cardstock paper embossed with the governmental logo, who lived outside of the structures of society for a time, and who attended a rehabilitation facility.

After the rehabilitation facility, you were educated and placed in a job, a job as a government worker specializing in educational materials.

For a time, you were happy. You don’t remember the rehabilitation facility at all and you remember only partly the time that came before the rehabilitation facility. You do not notice the dull lull of routine, or that you are sharing a house with a man who you live with but do not know. You are only happy to be doing work that you find important.

The satisfaction of this is only occasionally interrupted by small bursts of doubt, feelings of unease that surface for no particular reason and that fill you with the panicked thought that you are just like her. That you will never be better than her. This happens mostly at night when the man who you live with but do not know is asleep beside you and the other thing that lives inside you and feels separate but inextricable from you surfaces, causing you to get up and pace the house and stare glassy-eyed out the windows.

These instances are rare and fleeting and do not cause you much alarm. You love the work you are doing. Important, meaningful work. And one day your work requires you to tour a rehabilitation facility. You are glad to go. There is only the faintest inkling in your mind that you do not want to go to the rehabilitation facility. But it is vague, flickering, and easy to push down.

When I tell you what you see in the rehabilitation facility, it is important to remain calm and to maintain the idea that there is nothing innately wrong with rehabilitation. Remember the stoning. Remember that people have to be broken down at a fundamental level before they can be built back up again.

The walls outside the rehabilitation facility are white. Stark white. And reflective. It is a monolith, nested between streets and houses and other symbols of normalcy. It is meant to stand out. It wants you to know that it is there. Looking at it pulls up that vague sense of unease. Pulls it up a little too much for you to push it down so easily. You push it down nonetheless.

Inside the rehabilitation facility, the walls are the same reflective white. Hallways without doors branch off into more hallways without doors that branch off into more hallways without doors. A man in a white jumpsuit leads you through these hallways. He is talking at you, and you smile politely, dismissively. He senses only the politeness and continues.

There is something about the rehabilitation facility that seems, to you, familiar, though you cannot quite put your finger on why. It is the same feeling of a vague memory resurfacing. A memory that feels like half dream, half reality, that is still forming, causing you to question the reliability of your own mind. There is no way that you remember the rehabilitation facility.

The man in the white jumpsuit puts a hand to one of the white walls and a door opens up. Inside is an unremarkable room with a few chairs arranged in a circle. The people seated in the circle are wearing gray cotton shirts and gray cotton pants. They look up at you with a familiar hollowness in their eyes, though a few smile.

A woman, who looks as though she is leading the group, who is not wearing a gray cotton shirt and gray cotton pants, says hello. She introduces herself and goes on to explain that she is facilitating a small group so that patients can share their experiences. This practice is a positive one for rehabilitation patients. They are able to sit in a circle and share, without judgment, their struggles and their inability to adhere to the constructs of society. They are able, also, to receive support and encouragement from their peers. They are able to know with a small amount of certainty that soon they will be able to leave rehabilitation.

There are other parts to the rehabilitation facility. There are many other treatments. You are privy to only a few of these. There are classes dedicated to knitting and needlework, though the needles are plastic and patients are closely monitored, a courtyard garden where patients meander and absently poke at the dirt with primitive-looking farm tools, classes on what constitutes a healthy marriage and familial relationships, sensory deprivation tanks where patients float for hours. There is also aversion therapy, shock therapy, high-pressure water hoses, medical procedures.

There are many other treatments that you are not privy to. But you can hear them, faintly. And while you are tempted to slip back into the comforting thought that it is just your mind playing tricks on you, that it is just a faint and flickering dream trying to resurface, you know that it is not. You know that you can hear them. You know that you remember.

You remember the aversion therapy and shock therapy and high-pressure water hoses and medical procedures. You know that you are not supposed to remember.

The vague unease that has been a part of you for so long—that has lived in the cavity of your ribcage and slept, only resurfacing occasionally at night, in the silence of your thoughts, in the cracks between everything else—is finally awake and, again, a full part of you, an old friend that you have neglected. It refuses to be neglected any longer.

You feel it rising in your throat and choking you. You struggle to push it back down in the way that you have so many times before. This time it will not go down.

As you watch a few patients work on an intricate paint-by-number of Vincent van Gogh’s sunflowers you feel the urge to scream or run or dig your nails into your skin. Instead, you stand very still and, as calmly as you can, turn to the man in the white jumper, thank him for his time, and ask to leave because you are not feeling so well.

When you return to your house you open the mailbox to find a manila envelope. You open it and find a questionnaire about your experience at the rehabilitation facility. You mark everything as satisfactory and in the blank space provided for additional comments, you specify that you had a good time and were especially impressed with the garden.

As you write this you remember faintly a garden that you once planted in a clearing in the dense woods far from your home. You remember an elderly woman who slept with a knife under her pillow. You remember a shot and a thump and a thin trickle of blood in the dirt. You begin to sob. There is a bird perched at your window.

9.

This is installment nine of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, think of a dream that you had a long time ago. A dream that felt pungent and real so that it stuck to you when you woke up and still comes to your mind occasionally, just to remind you of itself. Was it really a dream?

Doubt is easy to get under the skin. But once it is there, it’s difficult to get out. In handling doubt you should always be careful. Know that it can turn you on yourself quickly before you even realize what’s happening. It is for this reason that whenever you have doubts, you should doubt your doubts. Or, at the very least, push them very far below the surface of conscious consideration so that they do not pull you under.

It’s best, however, to cut doubt out entirely. Because doubt which you have ignored can resurface suddenly, and become all-consuming before you realize it’s resurfaced at all.

You have felt doubt bubble up inside and you have felt, too, the repercussions of letting it take hold of you. On the bus ride back from the dense part of the forest, when your stomach was hollow and you couldn’t get the gaunt and desperate faces out of your head. When the boys behind you were mocking and you turned and snapped at them and they looked back at you, shocked and silent, and you turned back in your seat, shocked and silent at your own words, and looked out the window in silence the rest of the way back to school. That is when the doubt began. That is when you should have snuffed it out. But you didn’t.

You went back to school and sat in the hard plastic chair and squirmed a little more than you normally squirmed, and stared out the window a little longer than you normally stared.

You listened to your teacher as she explained that there was a reason those people lived the way they did. That they refused to abide by the structures of society. That they deserved what they received and that they would only find suffering for it, in both life and death. You pressed your thumb against the tip of your pencil and watched as the skin turned white, but you didn’t dissent. Not yet.

The lessons went on that week, about the government, about its structures, about its goodness. You continued to press your thumb against your pencil. You continued to hold your tongue. Until once, only once, you raised your hand in the middle of class and asked your teacher about those who choose to stay within the fold of society, yet live in poverty.

Your teacher’s face twitched, as though she were irritated. As though you had asked this question not out of genuine concern or curiosity, but in an attempt to make her look like a fool in front of her class. The twitch of annoyance was gone as quickly as it had come. She smiled and took on her affected cheery voice as she explained that those people would receive their reward in full later. That there were limited resources, that some people were, by chance, placed in bad situations and had to suffer in life. But in death, they would receive their reward in full. And because of that, they had hope.

This answer only made something like anger twist in your gut. It only made the doubt grow stronger, though you were perhaps still unaware of it then.

Sometimes we do not recognize the doubt in ourselves until it is too late and we are too far gone. Sometimes we don’t recognize doubt until it’s already taken its toll and it’s too late for us to turn back.

It’s important not to forget the effects of doubt.

It is important not to forget what can happen when you—the hypothetical you—have just come home from a rehabilitation facility. When you remember things that you should not remember. When you allow your thoughts to fester, rather than going to an appointed psychologist to seek psychiatric help.

You do not notice the bird that is perched outside of your window. Nonetheless, it notices you. They notice you and take note of you. This is not the first time or the last time that birds will take notice of you. It is important from here on out that you also take notice of the birds.

It is at this point that things begin to lose their meaning to you. That the thing that lives inside of your chest, that feels as though it’s not a part of you, begins to feel as though it’s a part of you. It only used to squirm inside of you in the middle of the night or in the small fragments of time when there was too much room to think, or when something shocked it out of you. Now you feel it all the time, reaching into your chest and tightening, into your stomach and clinching, into your head and poisoning.

The things in your life that once held value start to lose their significance. The educational tapes and instructional videos and instructional sessions sound more and more like lies. Your deep-held beliefs sound foreign and strange coming out of your mouth. The thing that lives inside of your chest is moving beyond your chest. It is in other places. It is every other place.

The man who you live with but do not know becomes more of a stranger. You sometimes look at him, watch him, catch him in the middle of some mundane activity like scraping a spot of food off his shirt, or brushing his teeth, or pouring creamer into his coffee. He will catch you staring and smile a sweet, if a bit unsettled, smile and ask you what the matter is. Inside your head, there is a panicked screaming, an overwhelming sense of his strangeness to you, your lack of knowledge of the interworking of his mind, his hopes, his fears, what drives him. You have the urge to press your fingernails into his cheeks just so he will stop smiling that sugary-sweet fake smile. Instead, in these moments, you only smile back.

Nothing is the matter. Nothing at all. Nothing is the matter.

You do not doubt. That is what you tell yourself. You do not doubt. But you do.

You begin to feel more out of place in the place that you’re in. You are detached from the world around you. Even your skin feels wrong settled around you.

You think of the people in the rehabilitation facilities, the people living in the dense forests, the people who are members of society but not blessed by the protection of society. You think, for a fleeting moment, that this is all a lie, then press the thought down as soon as it has the chance to surface.

You cannot afford to lose your grip on your place in society. Not again. You cannot afford to live out in the woods and build from the ground up only to have it torn down all around you. You cannot go back to the rehabilitation facility where there is gardening, and knitting, and high-pressure water hoses. You cannot afford to go to the ocean.

The ocean, the lie of the ocean, fills your head more often than not. You remember when the woman who slept with a knife under her pillow told you not to walk any farther east than you already had. You remember the pull to walk farther east. Not only to walk away but to walk toward. Toward an ocean that does not exist.

It is important to remember, in spite of youth and folly and desperation, that the ocean does not exist. It does not matter how badly the thing that lives inside of your chest squirms. The ocean does not exist. Rehabilitation facilities and the dense part of the forest and people who lie in suburb streets with toothbrushes protruding from their necks do exist.

10.

This is installment ten of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B think about the last time you discovered that a parent or friend or someone you trusted lied to you. How did it feel? Did you still trust them?

It does not matter if you, the hypothetical you we have been discussing in these hypothetical illustrations, think you find the things that you built up around you are lies.

You find that the things built up around you are lies.

In only a few days what once seemed solid and firm and sure dissolves and is replaced with doubt. The things that you preach into a microphone, the things that end up on educational tapes become empty and meaningless. Still, you do not realize this for yourself. Not yet. You are pressing it down too far to realize that you are pressing it down.

It is not until one day when you come home from the job where you preach lies into a microphone to the man who you live with but do not know.

It is not until one day when you come home and stand at the window and stare until it is night and continue staring until you are staring at an old woman and a young girl walking down the street that you finally realize the all-encompassing nature of your doubt.

The girl is small. Only just old enough to have chosen “I accept” or “I decline.” It may be that she listened to one of your educational tapes. It may be that you know her. She has long blond hair but it is dirty and matted. Her clothes are also dirty and matted. She holds tight to the elderly woman’s hand. The girl does not look scared. The elderly woman is smarter than that.

She looks around her as though something was following her and could come upon them at any moment because something could, and something does.

They were not smart enough to stay off of the street that only hums at night. There are men in white jumpers. You think of a young girl who planted a garden and an elderly woman who slept with a knife under her pillow. You think of rehabilitation facilities and the dense part of the forest and a trickle of blood in the dirt. And you move.

You move to the fireplace and grab the poker, wrapping your hand tight around its hilt, sure of your decision.

The man who you live with but do not know is sitting on the couch. He looks up from his book, at you, into you, with such an understanding that for a moment you think maybe he is not such a stranger after all. But that doesn’t matter anymore. The decision is final. The doubt solidified. He doesn’t move to stop you. And you move to the door, to the streets that hum but only at night.

The man in the white jumper has a gun to the old woman’s head. He is asking her a question that you don’t hear through the blood rushing in your ears. He sees you and moves aside with a slight smirk, thinking that he knows what’s coming. He does not know what is coming.

You draw near him.

You bury the fireplace poker into the soft part of his temple, right beside his eye. It makes a muffled cracking sound that you feel reverberate in your hands and arms, that settles in your stomach.

You pull out the fireplace poker. If you were not gripping it so tightly, your arms would be shaking, your whole body would be shaking. But it is not.

The other man in a white jumper is too shocked to raise his gun. You take advantage of his surprise. You swing and catch him in the jaw. This does not kill him. It only hurts him very badly. You have to swing again. You will always regret those few seconds between the first and second swing.

The girl and the elderly woman stare at you in shock for a few moments. Then, the elderly woman takes the girl’s hand and they run. You watch them run until you cannot see them anymore.

That is when you loosen your grip on the fireplace poker. That is when you shake. That is when you retch and vomit onto the sidewalk next to the cracked skulls.

Before you open the door to go back into the house, you wipe your hands on your jeans, leaving dark burgundy streaks. When you walk in the man who you live with but do not know is gone. Sitting on the coffee table is a manila envelope.

Manila envelopes always contain choices.

11.

This is installment eleven of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, you should know that manila envelopes always contain choices. Your manila envelope contains a choice. The manila envelope that’s sitting under your bed, hidden, undisturbed except for when you choose to take it out and lay it across your bed and stare at it. Your manila envelope contains a choice.

Not your manila envelope but the hypothetical manila envelope that contains a hypothetical choice, from the entirely fictional story which is being used as an educational tool to help guide you in your decision of whether to choose “I accept” or “I decline.” Your manila envelope contains a choice.

You run your hands along its seal, much in the same way that you—the real you, not this hypothetical you—ran your hands along the seal of the manila envelope that you pulled out of your mailbox. You—the hypothetical you not the real you—run your hand along the seal, afraid to break it, afraid to stain it with the residual blood on your hand.

Instead of breaking it, you tuck it under your arm and bring it with you to the kitchen, where you find a spot and stare, glassy-eyed, out the window. Staring glassy-eyed out the window does not fix anything. You tuck your nail under the seal and break it, staining it burgundy. You remove the heavy government-issue cardstock paper from the manila envelope. You bloody these also. They are exactly what you expected and what you feared.

They are familiar papers. Papers that showed up for your mother often, for you once. They are an invitation to attend rehabilitation and a box to mark “I accept” or “I decline.”

You stare at them for a long time and, the longer you stare, the more the thing that lives in your chest becomes a solid and recognizable part of you. The longer you stare, the more you realize that doubt is no longer doubt. It is full-on disbelief.

You have felt something like it before but never like this. Never have you made a choice that is so irreversible. But the choice had already been made. It was made before you checked any boxes. It was made before you picked up the fireplace poker. It had always been inside of you, separate from you but inextricable. Only now, it seems irrevocable.

It is invigorating and horrible.

You drop the papers so they flutter onto the tile floor. You go to one of the kitchen drawers and pull a paring knife out and press it deep into the soft pad of your palm. These decisions have already been made for you. You are only acting on them now.

Once the white cylindrical object has been cut out of you, you drop it, and the knife, into the sink. You press your palm to your mouth so that you taste iron and the stinging in your hand subsides only slightly. You find a bandage to wrap the hand, hastily, poorly, and then you leave.

You leave the manila envelope and the choice inside it lying on the tile floor.

You get into your car and drive east, pressing the broken skin of your palm hard against the steering wheel, trying to get the pain to subside. The pain will not subside. Even when it scars over, the pain will not subside.

Slowly, as flat, dead grass turns into rocks and then into the forest and then into denser forest, your tears turn into anger and your anger into hatred. It starts somewhere in your chest, where the doubt used to live, and spreads, hot, up into your face.

You consider many of the things that you’ve been taught. That your desire for autonomy is selfishness and arrogance. That any choice made for yourself will be the wrong one. That the governmental structures have your best interest at heart. That they are there to protect you because they love you, because you are a part of something bigger. That choosing them will make you happy. That if you keep choosing them, even when it gets difficult, one day it will not be difficult. One day you will be at peace. If only you accept. If only you shove down the pieces of yourself that are trying to claw their way out. Even if it’s hard, one day you will receive your reward in full.

You feel like screaming. And you are alone, so you do.

You hate yourself. But that is not a new feeling. Once all the emotion settles, it is mostly comfortable numbness. Once it is settled, you are grateful.

Once it is settled, you’ve made it to the dense part of the woods. Luckily, you do not have to find your way by memory because your memory is foggy and unreliable. You have been privy to footage, though. And you know exactly where to park. Right next to what looks like a deer trail into the dense part of the forest. It’s not a deer trail, even if it started out that way, and you begin walking down it, having to duck branches that you once did not have to duck.

You don’t know, really, why you’ve come back. Maybe to prove that it is real, maybe because you hope to suck the last bit of memory out of it, maybe because some part of you hopes that you’ll walk into the clearing and everyone that you left behind will still be there.

When you walk into the clearing everyone you left behind is not there.

Whatever colonies came out of the surrounding cities, they’ve found a new place to live. A place that hasn’t been ravished.

You scavenge it. For leftover supplies, for leftover memories.

You don’t come upon many supplies or many memories, but what you do find you hold onto as best you can.

You remember the things that you planned to do when you were young and stupid. Before you made educational tapes and understood the systems in place to protect the systems in place.

You think, briefly, of turning around and going back as you realize what a stupid, stupid mistake you’ve made. You’ve stepped outside the realm of protection, you are vulnerable, weak.

But you have made your choice. And government workers do not go back. Not twice. And you do not go back to rehabilitation facilities. Not twice.

You get back in the car and drive until you cannot drive any longer. Until the sun comes up over the horizon. Until you reach a point beyond the dense part of the forest and hit crop fields that stretch for miles in every direction. Until you reach a place from which you have never seen footage from the birds. From here on out is the unknown. This only solidifies your decision.

You pull the car over and sleep.

When you wake it isn’t of your own accord. There is rapping on the window. After the rapping, there is smashing. This is what jolts you from whatever horrible dream you were having. You see broken glass and arms reaching for the door, then for you. They find you. Nails digging into your skin, wrapping firmly around you. You writhe and kick. They hold firm. You are being dragged from the car into the street. Then comes the pain of blunt objects and shards of glass.

It should be noted that illustrative stories are not always to be taken as examples of how to live. Sometimes, they are cautionary tales. Sometimes, they show us what happens if we take the wrong path. This is up for interpretation.

12.

This is installment twelve of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, think of the first time you saw someone’s body flattened against the concrete. Think of the anger and the resentment, the burning taste of bile in the back of your throat. You were sick. You hated community-bonding rituals. You hated them. But one day you will not hate. One day, you will press the knife in yourself. Because one day, you will understand.

Sometimes, if you get close enough to the bad parts of a thing, you cannot see the good of its whole. It is hard to see the good of the whole when a person you love lies twitching on the pavement in front of you, when someone you trusted’s hand comes down hard on the soft part of your neck where the spine meets the brain, when people lie on the pavement with toothbrushes protruding from their necks. It is hard to see the good of the whole when you see, also, the small amount of suffering. But you must try to see, not as you would see, but as another entity would see. One devoid of the bias of human emotion, one who is objective, one who knows and sees all with thousands of eyes. Who nothing is hidden from.

Imagine that you are not you, but one of the thousands of eyes. One of the thousands of eyes which see, from its perch, a small girl. The small girl is you and you are happy. But not for the purpose of this hypothetical illustration. For the purpose of this illustration, you are one of thousands of eyes. One of thousands of eyes watching the girl and judging her. Your judgment is not judgment in the usual connotation of the word. It is not malicious in nature. It does not see the girl or her family or her affection for her family and pass a negative judgment on her. Instead, the judgment is objective, detached. Objectivity innately comes from detachment. Your judgment on the girl is that her affection for the family is good, but that it must be kept in check. It must be tested, measured against her affection for other, greater goods. She does not realize that her love for her own family is a tool to test this allegiance to what constitutes the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

She does not realize that every child her age is tested in this way. She has been taught, from a young age, to stand before class and say certain pledges, to stand in city squares and recite chants, to sit in after-school programs and watch educational tapes about the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But then she goes home and reads to her parents and plays with them in the backyard and falls asleep in their arms. She loves them. Loves them dangerously.

You, one of thousands of eyes, watch on a foggy Saturday morning as the girl’s parents put on hooded robes that they only wear a few times a year for special occasions. Clothes that are marked with different symbols which hold different meanings, which give the girl’s parents a misguided sense of accomplishment. They dress the girl in robes of her own. Hers are unmarked but will not remain unmarked for long. Though the girl is confused, she is happy. Because they are with her. And she loves them.

You watch, and thousands of other eyes watch along with you, as the girl and her family and other families with other robed parents and other children filter into the streets and create a single, swarming mass that moves, as though alive, toward the edge of town, past the miles of dead grass, to the rocks. Large gray slabs of marble worn down by the elements and by other causes unrelated to the elements into smooth rounded hills. Rounded hills marked with dark russet spots that the girl does not pay attention to or understand.

It is here that she is faced with a choice between the greater good, the objective good, and her good, which is her family. Other children, also, are faced with this decision. The decision is not meant to be cruel, and neither is the outcome if they choose rightly.

The girl does not choose rightly. When a knife is pressed into her hand, she chooses to save what she loves, which is only natural. Only the human response. But she should know better. She should have been taught better by now, that the human response is not always the good response.

As a lesson in what the difference between the human response and the good response is, she must hurt what she wanted to protect.

You watch, one of thousands of eyes, as the girl tries to use the weight of her tiny body to break free and protect what she loves. But she is small and weak. We, also, are small and weak.

Other children also try to use the weight of their tiny bodies to break free. They also fail. They must also watch the thing that they love, the thing that they loved more than the greater good, suffer.

Some children, however, do not choose wrongly. They choose the good over what they loved and, in return, they did not have to see the thing they love hurt.

The lesson here is an important one but you, one of thousands of eyes, can see that it does not stick to the girl in the way that it should.

Other children become closer to their parents because they value them more deeply and form a better understanding of the fragility of those bonds. The girl does not. It sits with her in the wrong ways, makes her bitter and resentful, makes her press thumbtacks into her fingers and gaze out of windows a little too long. It makes her do things that a normal, well-adjusted child should not be doing.

The girl does not have thousands of eyes. She cannot see the greater good. But you do, you have thousands of eyes.

13.

This is installment thirteen of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, imagine that you are one of thousands of eyes.

With one of those thousands of eyes you see, many years after you saw the girl, a woman who leaves a manila envelope lying on her floor and presses the tip of a knife in the soft pad of her hand. Who drives out past the dead grass and the rocks and even past the dense part of the forest and sleeps in her car. You watch as the doors are ripped from her car and as she is pulled out of it and assaulted with blunt objects and shards of broken glass. You can see the panic etched on her face. The panic results not from fear of the unknown, but from fear of the known. Fear of knowing exactly what kind of situation she is in.

It is this fear that wanes, for a moment, into defeat. The woman’s body goes limp as she sinks into acceptance. Then a fork is jammed into her shoulder and the defeat is gone. She manages to grab hold of something, a piece of brick, though you do not see this with your one of thousands of eyes. She uses the piece of brick on the man who stabbed her with a fork. It takes a few attempts, but his skull eventually caves.

She runs, brick still in hand. You chase her, though she doesn’t see you, not yet. She runs through crop fields until she is far away from the people who attacked her. Far away from her car. Far away from civilization. She runs until she is lost.

She pauses for a brief moment to rest. Then, she grows still. She turns and looks right at you. She sees you. She sees you. You attempt to fly away. But it is too late and she is too good at throwing stones.

It meets its mark, and your eye goes dark. But it doesn’t matter. You have thousands of other eyes. The woman only has two, and she cannot see the greater good.

You, the hypothetical you, have just killed a bird with a stone. You have just blacked a single eye, one eye of thousands of eyes, and your vision is so limited that, to you, this feels like an accomplishment.

You pick up the bird and measure its weight in your hand. Then you throw it, as far as you can. The world is a better place with fewer eyes.

You look up to the sun in an attempt to find your bearings. But you don’t know whether it is morning or evening and so there is no way to tell which way is east. You wait a bit longer until the sun sets slightly in the sky and you know which way is east, so you walk east, through miles of dense crops which you think are something like corn but are not exactly corn. As your heart slows you begin to notice the place in your shoulder where a fork was pressed into the muscle and fat. It is bleeding profusely and the best you can do for it is to press a hand firmly against it in attempts to stop the blood flow. But the blood runs freely, seeping through your shirt and between your fingers, slick and warm and reeking of iron.

You stumble on, thirsty, tired, bleeding. Hoping that you do not collapse and die and rot in a field. Hoping that you do not end up like her.

You do not collapse in a field. Instead, you stumble out of a field and onto a lawn, where the grass is a yellowish fading green. There is a small, dilapidated house in the distance. Beyond the home are more homes. Beyond the home is a neighborhood. You know that you have made a mistake, but at this point, it doesn’t matter. There is nowhere else to go, your head is light and throbbing, your stomach clenching. You lay down on the yellowish fading green grass and close your eyes.

Remember your family. Remember the good of your family that was given to you. Remember watching that good taken away. Remember watching the woman press a knife into the soft palm of her hand. Remember watching her being dragged from her car, the fork plunged into her shoulder. Know that the bad parts of a thing are only parts. See, with thousands of eyes, the good of the whole.

14.

This is installment fourteen of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, think of all the things that have caused your throat to close up and your fists to clench and your teeth to dig into the soft skin inside your cheek until you taste blood.

When you wake you think, at first, that you are in your own home, in your own bed, engulfed by your own sheets, sleeping next to the man you live with but do not know. You forget, temporarily, about all that has happened to you: the rehabilitation facility, the dull cracking of skulls, the fork in your shoulder. Then the ache of your body returns to you and, with it, the memories and the hatred and the disappointment that comes with not being dead.

The answer walks in through your bedroom door. She is an older woman with graying hair that isn’t quite yet gray. She comes and sits on the edge of your bed. You look at her, confused. Because you know her. But you scarcely have the courage to articulate how.

The woman puts two fingers to her lips and then presses them to your forehead. Then, you are sure you’re dead.

The woman is your mother, and your mother is dead.

She smiles at you, softly, sweetly, as though she is expecting you to smile back. But you don’t, because you can’t.

Your mind goes back to the woman and her children. You wish you would cry, because then maybe the horrible mixture of emotions throbbing inside of you would leave. But you can’t cry. And you can’t smile. You can only stare.

The woman, your mother, seems to understand this. She doesn’t press you. Instead, she leaves. She comes in and out over the course of several days. Sitting on the side of your bed, putting her fingers to your forehead. She leaves trays of food, and takes out trays of uneaten food, and administers medicines that you only take begrudgingly.

You stay in bed. Not because you are weak, though you are, but because you can’t think of any reason to get up.

Until, one day, you see a bird at your window. The bird is not looking at you with one of thousands of eyes. It is looking away from you, its eyes a haziness of ignorance. Before you know, fully, what you are doing, you go to the window to look at it. It perches there only a moment longer, sees you, and flies away. You have no choice then but to look out the window. There are rolling hills covered in dead grass and a dark, almost black, lake. There are no roads, no cities, and no other birds for as far as you can see. You want to know where you are.

So you ask. You go to the kitchen that smells faintly of almond cookies. The scent is familiar, unsettling. You ask the woman with graying hair where you are. The only reply she offers is that you are somewhere no one can harm you. “Nothing here can harm you,” she says.

You ask her why she is there. Why she never came home to you and why her breath is no longer laced with the smell of alcohol.

Her answer is “rehabilitation facilities.”

This is not an answer that you want to hear. This is not an answer that makes sense. Because the people who enter rehabilitation facilities and never come back are never seen again. There are no rumors, no houses in the hills, and no escape. But your mother stands in front of you in a house in the hills, escaped and, seemingly, happy, in the same way that the woman you loved was happy.

You ask her why you are there and she answers that you are there for a second chance, to make a choice. Manila envelopes always contain choices.

That is when you see the manila envelope lying on the kitchen counter.

That is when you turn and leave.

You walk out the front door. Past a garden that looks familiar in a way that makes your stomach knot uncomfortably. You walk away from the house in an unknown direction. Hoping that you can keep walking.

You reach a fence that is tall and shocks you when you touch it. You begin to walk the perimeter of the fence, throwing dead leaves at it and listening to the crackle of electricity as they catch there, hoping you’ll find a chink, hoping you can leave. You do not. You walk along the edge of the fence for miles.

Night begins to fall as you come back to the place you started. Your next thought is to walk into the electric fence and hold tight to it until you feel tingling and then numbness and then nothing at all or to walk into the lake and let your lungs fill with water. But some part of you knows that neither option will result in death, only waking up in another strange bed to ache and hate the world.

So you walk back, past the lake and past the garden and into the house that is dark but for a light on in the living room, and empty but for your ghost of a mother. She sits on the couch, cross-stitching with bright red thread.

She looks up from her work. Up, at you, and asks if you’re ready to talk. You sit in a chair beside her and tell her that you wish you were dead. She knows this already. Knows because she felt it.

In a moment of weakness, you tell her everything, because her eyes are sympathetic and motherly and familiar in their faraway-ness. They look almost how they looked when you were a girl. They look almost how your eyes look now.

You talk about hate. Things that you have seen with two eyes, without the perspective of thousands of eyes.

She nods and says that choices have to be made but not now, not today. And she holds you in a way that feels familiar but better than familiar because her arms were not so strong or so sure before.

She whispers apologies in your ear, though you don’t know what she’s apologizing for.

As time drags on, you begin to understand. You understand that some people do leave rehabilitation facilities but do not reenter society. You understand that you have been brought there because you could be one of those people. You could stay in the little house with your mother. All you have to do is open the manila envelope and make a choice. All you have to do is choose “I accept.”

The back of your throat tastes acidic when you think about this, so you try to swallow it down, push it away.

Instead, you spend your days digging carrots out of the soil in the garden and baking almond cookies, and cross-stitching things in red thread and relearning, yet again, what it means to be happy. Some days, your mother performs rituals.

She goes out into the middle of the dead grass and chants from a black book aloud to no one. Or she traps small animals and opens up their throats against a rock. Or she gets on her knees and claps her hands together and whispers fervently under her breath. On those days, you stand far away and watch.

You begin to forget about the ocean that does not exist. You begin to get the feeling that you could be happy there with your mother.

This frightens you.

Your mother talks, occasionally, about the good of society. About the greatest good for the greatest number of people. When she does this, the hatred comes out of you. You raise your voice, you throw things. She lets you do these things until you are spent of them. Until you grow tired of raising your voice, and throwing things, and instead you sit and listen.

Everything evil is for a reason. We do not see with thousands of eyes. We see partially. Subjectively. Every evil intentionally inflicted has a reason, for the greater good. There is a plan, greater than all of us.

You ask why you were allowed to live and receive a second chance when you should have died.

Your mother replies that she does not know, but there was a reason.

You ask her to justify all the evil in the world.

She justifies it with all of the good. With all of the families that stay whole, and the people who find meaning, and the satisfaction that the general population finds with life.

You ask her about the people whose stomachs are empty and who live in rotting houses.

She answers that they are, statistically, the happiest out of the whole population.

You ask her about people who chose to stay within the fold of society but are sent to rehabilitation facilities.

She answers that people like her are never abandoned.

You ask if her beliefs are founded in truth.

She answers that her beliefs are founded in what’s good.

She chooses this lie because the lie gives her a reason.

You realize that you, too, can find a reason.

You will have to return first to the man that you live with but do not know, then to the rehabilitation facilities, to cut out any unclean part of yourself.

But then you can return home to your mother and your garden and the smell of almond cookies. You can write educational tapes from the small cabin and you can forget that you ever wanted to walk toward the ocean that doesn’t exist. You can be happy.

So that is what you do.

You reach for the manila envelope on the table. You open it and run your hands carefully across the government-issue cardstock paper. You flip to the final page and you mark “I accept” and write your name in a shaky, reluctant signature.

15.

This is installment fifteen of the government-issue educational tape for student 147B. If you are student 147B, know that every choice you have made up to this point has been your own. A choice cannot be made for you. A reason cannot be found for you.

Your manila envelope contains a choice. Attempt to make the right choice.

Do not walk east toward the ocean that does not exist.

No one in their right state of mind walks toward the ocean that doesn’t exist. No one takes a kitchen knife and presses it into the soft pad of their left palm until they extract a white sphere. No one gets up late at night and opens their window so that they can slip out without tripping any alarms. No one takes nonperishable food items and several days’ supply of bottled water and starts walking out of town, cutting through front lawns and avoiding streets and sidewalks that hum slightly but only at night.

Steer clear of the rehabilitation facilities and the sounds that come from them but only at night. Keep to darkened areas and away from any birds that you may come across. At the edge of town, toward the east, there will be dead grass and then rocks and then trees and then denser trees. Stay off the road. The roads take you only to other towns. Avoid other towns. Instead, follow the streams. When you get to the rocks there will be a stream that cuts through under the road. Follow the branch that leads east.

If you follow the branch of the river that leads to the east you will come to crops and farmlands that will morph, slowly, into hills. Hills with dark, almost black, lakes. Hills surrounded by electric fences. Do not go near the hills. Do not trust the people who live in the hills.

Continue to follow the river until you reach the sand of the beach and the electric fence that will prevent you from walking on the sand of the beach. Do not be fooled by the blue ribbon of water that lies beyond the electrified fence. The ocean does not exist.

Follow this electric fence south until you come to a rocky cliff. Sleep at the base of this cliff until the right person finds you and shows you the rest of the way.

The rest of the way will not include going to the ocean that does not exist. It will not include boarding a boat and sailing for several days out to a remote island that is beyond the jurisdiction of your current society.

This option does not exist because the ocean does not exist.

This is the end of the government-issue educational tapes for student 147B. If you are student 147B it is now time for you to either mark “I accept” or “I decline” in your government-issue manila envelope.

Remember, there is nothing here to harm you. Only your choices. Only yourself.