A person can only become a person through other persons.
—A Zulu saying
On Monday morning, I find myself sitting nervously in a meeting room, waiting to see who the Living Lost will send to me. I’m relieved when only two women appear. One is thin and nervous looking, the other is stout and serene. Both have skin the colour of chocolate. The stout one smiles broadly as she speaks. “Blake, child, it’s such a pleasure to meet you. I’m Cadence Nkomo. This is Mimi Beaumardi.” Her voice is low and musical. She makes no move toward me, but I feel as if I’ve been hugged. They seat themselves across the table.
I hardly know where to begin, but that doesn’t matter. Cadence has everything under control. “We were so happy to see you on The Solar Flare, honey. So much of what you said was just what we’ve been wanting to say. But we’ve been going around in circles for so long, trying to decide how to tell our stories, if we should tell our stories, not knowing how people might react. Isn’t that right, Mimi?”
“So it is,” Mimi says.
“It took so long for us to all find one another, people of like minds, who want to put the sadness of the past behind them and just forgive. Not forget, just forgive one another and start to work together. Then you come along, just a slip of a child. And now, we have the courage to speak out. All because of you.” She sits back in her chair and beams at me. Mimi smiles too.
“I’m nothing special,” I start to say.
“Don’t you say that. Don’t you ever say that, child,” Cadence says.
I change the subject to move the conversation away from me. “How did the Living Lost start?”
“Mimi and I were neighbours,” Cadence says.
“Cadence was the one with the idea,” Mimi adds quickly. Cadence smiles her broad, ready smile. “That’s right. During the Recovery, when the Dark Times were ending and knowledge was being restored, my great-grandfather came here from South Africa. He was a bio-technician, and he brought knowledge people here so desperately needed. But he didn’t just bring his knowledge. He brought his wisdom, too. In my homeland, there’s something called ubuntu. That’s the foundation we used to build the Living Lost. That’s our cornerstone.”
I lean forward. “What is ubuntu?”
“In Africa, they say, ‘A person can only become a person through other persons.’ In this society, you would say, ‘You can’t respect others until you respect yourself.’ But, if a person has ubuntu, she would say, ‘I can’t respect myself if I don’t respect others.’ Because we are all part of humanity. Do you see? If you offer disrespect to others, you diminish yourself. If you hate another, it’s like hating yourself. A person with ubuntu is able to accept others and knows that we all belong together.”
“I didn’t know about ubuntu until Cadence taught me,” Mimi says. “I have seen great sorrow in my life. Bad things were done. I didn’t know how to find peace.”
“And now you do?” I ask.
Mimi nods. “Should I tell her my story?” she asks, and Cadence agrees.
“Before the technocaust, Cadence and I were neighbours. We lived side by side. But I did not love this woman. She had a bigger house than I did. She wore nicer clothes. Her children did better in school. I pretended to be nice, but her happiness ate holes in my heart. My husband felt the same. He worked hard, in construction. He never seemed to get anywhere. Cadence’s husband, he worked in genetic modification. He had a good job and he made more money.
“When the technocaust came, we thought, now, these people who are always happy, they will know some grief. As soon as the government restricted technology, my husband went to Internal Security and reported Cadence’s husband. The military came and took him away.”
“I had to take my children and leave,” Cadence says calmly.
“And I had to stay and live with what we’d done,” Mimi says. “Other neighbours came and looted her house, they took everything away. I learned the hard way, you can’t make your happiness out of someone else’s grief. Every time I passed that empty house, I had to look away. My husband joined a gang that went door to door with lists they downloaded from Internal Protection, rounding up wanted people. He thought this would earn him a job in the government. But later, the military came and took him away, too.”
“What happened?” I ask, and Cadence answers.
“After the most violent part of the technocaust, the Protectors decided to cover their tracks. They took people like Grant Beaumardi and put them in forced labour camps in the industrial zones, so they couldn’t talk about how the government had encouraged them.”
“We got him back after the Uprising,” Mimi says, “and he was a shell of the man I married. By then, Cadence had come back to her house. I couldn’t speak to her, I was so ashamed. But when Grant came home, she showed up at my door to help me. I was too embarrassed to tell her my story, but I needed her help so badly. Finally, one day, I found the courage to tell her the truth, and she forgave me.”
I stare at Cadence. “How could you do that?”
“When I came back to my house, ‘Some of my neighbours brought me things they’d stolen from us after we fled. ‘We kept this for you,’ they said, and I accepted that. It was then that I remembered what I’d been taught about ubuntu. I realized, if I was going to live among these people, I had to forgive them or I’d be asking hate to take a place at my table, to sleep in my bed. I couldn’t do that to my children. I wanted them to grow up without hate. So I started to reflect on the spirit of ubuntu, and then I began to teach it to others.”
“And that was how we started our meetings, and we grew into the Living Lost,” Mimi says.
“We’ve been wanting to tell everyone this is what has to happen now, but we were afraid to speak,” Cadence says. “Then I saw you on The Solar Flare, and you just opened up your soul. I looked inside, and I saw ubuntu there. I know you can show us the way to make things right.”
This is ridiculous. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Cadence must see that she’s upsetting me because she stands. “We’ve taken up enough of Blake’s time today, Mimi. We should leave her be. Besides, we have that meeting with Dr. Siegel soon.” I’m afraid to ask them what that’s about.
Mimi and Cadence hug me warmly as they leave. I hug them back, but I can’t shake the feeling they are just plain crazy.
“You come and meet everyone when you’re ready, Blake,” Cadence says. “We meet every Thursday night at my house. Here’s the address.” She hands me a card. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
“I don’t know if I can,” I start to say, but the disappointment in their eyes is more than I can bear. “Maybe someday,” I add, so they leave the room smiling.
After Mimi and Cadence go, I’m overwhelmed by a tangle of emotions and ideas. I can’t deal with this now. I struggle to clear my mind as I go find the other aides.
They are not busy in the media rooms, as I’d expected. Instead, everyone is sitting in the conference room, looking gloomy. What do they have to feel gloomy about? Are crazy women making demands of them? I check myself before I speak. It isn’t fair to blame them for my problems.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, trying to sound as if I mean it. “We’re not getting anywhere,” Kayko says. “I thought this hologram would tell us so much.”
“It did,” I say.
“It did, but now it doesn’t. We haven’t learned a thing since last Thursday.”
“But I have.” They all look at me in surprise. I tell them about Prospero and Dido, about Cadence and Mimi.
“You learned all that?” Astral says when I finish. “We’ve got to start talking to these people.”
But Kayko shakes her head. “We can’t. That’s what the victim statements are for. If we talk to people before the Council does, it would be like putting ourselves before them.”
“When will they start?” I ask.
“Another week or so, not long,” Kayko replies.
“We’re talking about things that happened fifteen years ago,” Griffin says. “We can wait another week. In the meantime, we should pull together our report for the Justice Council.”
“Griffin’s right,” Kayko says. “We can start by writing summaries of everything we’ve learned. No more than ten pages. Then we’ll share what we’ve got and try to produce a coherent report.”
Everyone agrees. So, without warning, we begin a new phase of work, dividing into our own offices.
The suite I share with Erica is full of people now. I hide myself away in a corner office. My only relief is lunch with the other aides. This is isolating work. It leaves space for thoughts to creep in. Thoughts about my father. Even if he has no access to the media in prison, he must know I’m alive by now. Why hasn’t he asked to see me? What kind of monster wouldn’t want to see his own child? These thoughts feed on one another, building, until I’m furious by the end of every day. At night, I lie under the skymaker, the wheel of anger turning so furiously inside me I can hardly think. When I finally sleep, my father is always lurking in my dreams, no matter what else is going on, somewhere in the background with his back to me. I wake up exhausted.
By Thursday, my distress is apparent. “You look terrible,” Erica says at breakfast. “Maybe you should take a few days off.”
“No!” I cry so forcefully, she drops her knife. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. It’s just that going to work is the only thing that holds me together right now.” I stop and take a breath. “I didn’t mean that. It sounds too dramatic.”
“Maybe it’s not too dramatic. You’ve been pushing yourself so hard, Blake. I wish I could think of a way to make things easier for you.”
I sigh. “I know what I’ve got to do,” I say. “The Living Lost are meeting tonight. I should go.”
In the morning, meeting with the Living Lost seems bearable, but by the end of the day, I would rather crawl under a rock than meet those people. How can I face their compassion and forgiveness when I find nothing remotely like that in myself? But Hanif has ordered a car and driver for me, so I let the momentum of his arrangements carry me forward.
Cadence’s home is north, in a part of the city I’ve never seen before, very different from the quiet old neighbourhood beside High Park. Most of the houses are new, high-tech but cheaply made. Many have stores on the bottom storey. People line the streets, standing in groups talking while children play around them. The house we stop at is more sturdy than others, but it still bears scars that must come from the technocaust.
Cadence herself opens the door. “I’ knew you’d come,” she says quietly. Her voice is filled with such warmth and dignity that my misgivings abate.
Cadence seats me beside her in a room that holds maybe fifteen people. It’s comfortable, but the furnishings have seen better days. The meeting isn’t what I’d expected, though. I’m braced to hear story after story about the technocaust, but the Living Lost turns out to be more than a simple support group. After introductions, they get down to work quickly.
“Everything set for the Saturday night patrol?” Mimi asks. “Who’s collecting the blankets?” A burly-looking man raises his hand. “Good, Ray. Make sure they give you extra, it’s getting cold out there now. What about the food?”
“I got that covered,” an older woman says. “Soup or chili?”
“Both, if you can get those big kettles from the Happy Mouth again. That worked really well last week.”
Mimi nods. “We’ll see what we can do. We should think about buying our own at some point.”
I lean over to Cadence. “What are you planning?”
She whispers her reply. “We take food and blankets and some basic medical supplies down to those debtors at Union Station every Saturday night.”
“What about protection?” Mimi is asking now. “Lolinda, can we rely on that big son of yours?”
“As long as he’s finished by midnight, he says that’s fine,” a woman replies.
I remember the crowd that gathered around Spyker and me the day I found out about my father, and I shudder involuntarily. “That’s dangerous,” I whisper to Cadence.
She nods. “It can be. We don’t take any chances, though.”
I feel comfortable with these people. They remind me of Prospero and of the weavers at home, trying to deal with the problems around them. But I don’t offer to help. The memory of that trip to Union Station is just too painful.
When they finish making arrangements for the Saturday night patrol, Cadence introduces me to everyone. I’m afraid she’s going to ask me to speak about my past, but instead she says, “Everyone here is really interested in what happened in Terra Nova, Blake. Why don’t you explain how you managed to get elections so quickly?”
I’m happy to talk about Terra Nova. These people listen intently and ask intelligent questions. By the time the evening’s over, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in days. People start to leave. Every one of them shakes my hand or pats me, as if I’m some kind of talisman, some kind of lucky charm. But I like them and what they’re doing so much, it doesn’t bother me.
I know the driver is waiting, but I don’t want to go yet. This house is such a welcoming place, if I didn’t know what had happened here, I’d never suspect. Somehow, Cadence has put her life back together. I wish I understood how.
“I’ll help you gather up the dishes,” I offer.
When the plates and cups are collected, Cadence turns to me. “Child, something’s troubling you. What is it?”
I don’t realize what I’m going to say until it’s out. “I want to know why my father doesn’t want to see me.”
Cadence pats my arm. “Let’s sit down and talk,” she says. We sit at her small kitchen table. “What makes you think your father doesn’t want to see you?” she asks.
I explain about my micro-dot and the information from Code Tracking. “He’s been notified by now. He knows I’m alive, and he hasn’t asked to see me,” I finish. “Why?”
“I don’t know your father, so it’s hard for me to guess,” she says. “But what would you do in his place? Would you want to see your child?”
A snort escapes from me. “If I’d done everything he has, I wouldn’t imagine I’d be worthy to talk to my child.” This stops me. “Oh.”
Cadence smiles. “Maybe you just answered your own question.”
I sit in silence for a moment, taking this in. It makes sense. “So what do I do?” I ask at last.
“If you want to talk to him, I’d say you have to make the first move.”
“But what if we’re wrong? What if he really is a monster and he isn’t interested in me at all?”
“Do you know anything about your mother?”
This question surprises me. “Quite a bit. I even have a voice recording she made for me before we started to run.”
“Does she seem like the kind of woman who would have married a monster?”
“No,” I say. “But people change. He changed. He must have.”
“If you have reason to believe there was good in his heart once, I think you’ll find it’s there still,” Cadence says.
“What if I’m wrong?” My voice is small and miserable.
“If you’re wrong, you have to hold your head up high and walk away. There’s lots of people in this world ready to love you, child. You’re a special person.” She says the word “special” in a way that almost makes it possible for me to believe her this time.