Chapter One

President Martha St. Tala:

Exercising one’s will over one’s own mind is not automatic, and so you are all fortunate to have been born into a society which teaches you this skill from childhood. Remember, if there is anything you do not wish to have in your experience, practice your ability to overlook the reality of it now, and soon it will leave your reality. And you will hardly notice its departure or remember that it ever was there.

Gaylen’s wife didn’t look at him as she passed through their small bedroom. Her tone exasperated, she said, “Sierra wants you to read to her,” and she disappeared into the closet.

On the mandatory, government-installed wallscreen just a few feet away, the Brandenburg Concerto by Bach accompanied them, with a garden of bluebonnets, goldenrods, and daisies in tidy rows. It was a Beauty Moment approved by the Bureau of Entertainment.

Instead of going to Sierra’s room, Gaylen got up and followed Serena to the closet. She had just pulled off her skirt and top, revealing her silky, white underthings. She tossed her clothing into the hamper beside her. Gaylen caught sight of the two of them in the mirror fastened to the wall. Both tall, slender, and dark-skinned, they made a striking couple. He had taken pleasure in the sight many times. Now, he noticed that his face looked worried, and he changed it back to a pleasant expression.

Meanwhile, Serena slipped into a nightgown, which slid invitingly along her smooth body. She flipped an errant shoulder strap into place, then glared at him. Her eyes flashed. “What do you want?”

He took a step back, his hands up. She glared at him, unmoving, until he had moved out of her sight.

A couple of months ago, she would have reached for him, given him a lingering, teasing kiss, then playfully slapped away his roaming hands. He would have left the bedroom pleasantly tantalized. Instead, he stepped into the tiny kitchen to eat a snack-size candy bar, then another, then a third, while he watched the too-loud wallscreen above the sink.

Gaylen didn’t know why his wife had changed. She hadn’t said, and it wasn’t permissible to ask.

The Beauty Moment with its cultivated flowers faded into blackout. The evening’s Good News report began, and the announcer cheerfully related that worker productivity had increased five percent over this same period last year.

Gaylen went into Sierra’s room feeling somewhat fortified by the candy bars. As he went, he told himself, I am happily married. I am surrounded by love. Everything in my life is perfect.

Sierra half-reclined in bed with her handscreen in her lap. She stared absently at the wallscreen on the wall at the foot of her bed, which filled most of the room. The children’s channel showed a cartoon with a little puppy—a yellow Labrador retriever with big, floppy ears—who turned around in circles in his flannel bed, then settled down to go to sleep.

Sierra lit up when she saw Gaylen. “Daddy!”

He smiled and snuggled into bed with her. “Let’s get this book taken care of, shall we?” He kissed her on the forehead and picked up the handscreen to resume the book, which was reassuringly marked APPROVED FOR ALL AGES by the Bureau of Entertainment.

With his mind half on the story, he worried about his marriage. Yesterday, he’d added an evening session of positive affirmations to complement the half-hour morning sessions he’d been doing for a month, but there were no results yet. He reminded himself that he wasn’t supposed to worry about results. They would come in time.

Sierra usually fell asleep as he read. Not tonight. Her little eyes closed a dozen times, but she kept shaking it off, and she was clinging to him. After he read the book once, she demanded another reading of it, then another. Finally, twenty minutes past her usual bedtime, she announced, “I’m always going to think about you smiling, Daddy.”

He paused, trying to parse out the meaning and intent of her words. Finally, he settled for, “Thank you, sweetie.”

She was quiet and still for a moment, and he thought maybe she had gone to sleep. Then she said, with an emphatic jerk of her shoulders, “I’m going to think about us always together, OK, Daddy?”

That comment, especially coupled with the previous one, struck fear into him. “What do you mean?”

She paused for a while. “Nothing,” she said. But it came out in her “I’m in trouble and I’m telling a fib” tone of voice.

He decided that he needed to talk to Serena. He knew he was supposed to ignore anything that seemed negative, so as not to give it power and attract more of the same into his life, but it would be impossible to ignore this.

“You go ahead and think about the good things, Sierra. I will, too.” He gave her a kiss on the forehead. “And everything will be OK,” he added, hoping he sounded convincing.

Her little body relaxed, and she fell asleep immediately. He stayed with her for a few more minutes, watching the rise and fall of her chest and the little sleep twitches of her body. Apprehension built up inside him until it became unbearable. Carefully, he stood up and tucked Sierra into her bed. Then he went into his and Serena’s bedroom.

Serena lay in bed and read something on her handscreen. She didn’t look up when he entered. On the wallscreen, a comedian told innocuous jokes about family life. Gaylen slid into bed, his face blank but his mouth dry. He tried to ignore the wallscreen while he thought of and discarded a dozen inadequate openings.

Finally, he said, “Serena, are you… thinking positively… about our relationship?”

She scowled. “I’m thinking positively about my life.”

“But about us? Are you thinking positively about us? Like you’re supposed to?” He knew he sounded plaintive, but it was true. They were both supposed to think positively. How was he supposed to think positively for the both of them?

“I’m not supposed to. You know you’re not supposed to get your heart set on any one person. People come and go, Gaylen. All that matters is being happy.”

“So let’s be happy. I am. I’m happy.” He knew he sounded defensive.

She threw the magazine down onto her lap. “Fine. Me, too.”

They glared at each other.

Serena shook her head once. “Look, I’ve decided I’m leaving. I’m not renewing our marriage contract this time. Sierra and I are moving out. I’m ready for something different.” She picked her handscreen back up.

He found himself on his feet, facing her, breathless. His throat constricted. “No, no, no—don’t take Sierra. Don’t take her.”

“She’s my child.”

“She’s mine, too.”

“Well, she can’t live with us both, Gaylen!”

“Yes, she can—just stay here! Just don’t go!”

“Stop it, Gaylen.” She sat up fully and swung her legs out from under the blankets. “You aren’t doing this right. Just think about the future and having someone else in your life. OK?”

“I don’t want anyone else. I just want you. And Sierra. I love Sierra!”

“Stop it this minute. Let it go!” Her tone brooked no further argument.

Gaylen walked out of the room, her glare on his back. He went into the living room and sat on the edge of the sofa, his head in his hands. Serena didn’t follow him. The sound of laughter did follow him, though, via the wallscreen in here. He stared at it uncomprehendingly. The comedian had finished a long joke and now waited out the laugh.

Breathe. She’s not gone yet. You can still fix this. Think differently, Gaylen, think differently.

He went to the kitchen and got a glass of water with shaking hands and gulped it down. The cool water felt good, and he turned on the tap again to splash some on his face.

Your thinking is wrong. You’re the one doing this to yourself. Just fix it.

I can do this. I can do it.

He settled onto the sofa and imagined Serena telling him that she had decided to stay. Over and over he saw it. By the time he went to bed, she had shut off the light.

All the next week, he brought home the most perfect bouquets of flowers for Serena every day, which she accepted with brief thanks and placed around the apartment. He complimented her at least three times a day, which she also accepted cordially. He spent forty-five minutes each morning and evening in meditation about his happy family. He prevented himself from entertaining any thoughts of Serena or Sierra being gone.

By mid-afternoon every day, he had a tension headache. He woke up several times every night, and each time he did, he recited affirmations with all his heart and soul while he watched Serena’s peaceful, sleeping face.

And yet he came home on Thursday—a warm, sunny day—to find the apartment full of half-packed cardboard boxes. Serena sat on Sierra’s bed and sorted through her clothing while she sang children’s songs for her daughter.

Gaylen went straight to the bedroom and closed the door and sat on the bed. For three hours, he thought, as hard as he could, variations on I have a happy marriage. My wife loves and appreciates me. My family is joyful. My home is full of love. His head ached and his body was rigid with tension by the time he fell asleep. But when he woke up in the morning, he found that Serena had slept in Sierra’s room.

Before he went to work that day, Gaylen stopped at the wallscreen in the tiny kitchen and pulled up a digital copy of their marriage contract. It ran out on June 30th of each year—only one week away. To renew, they would just sign on the next year’s line, and if they didn’t sign, the marriage would expire.

He touched a button to pin it to the wallscreen so that it would remain visible. It read simply,

Gaylen Thomas Andrews

and

Serena Anne Tate

Are joined this day in love and joy.

For as long as love and joy shall

last, they shall forsake all others

and give one another their

unconditional happiness.

Love and joy are still here, he thought forcefully.

With determination in the set of his jaw, he signed the renewal line with his fingertip. Then he left the contract pinned so that Serena would see it. With all his hope, he left it there. He said nothing to Serena directly. Their earlier argument had reminded him of what President Martha taught—discussing problems only made them more concrete and attracted more of the same. All problems had to be ignored.

That night, after a long day of positive visualizations, he came home and looked into the kitchen with optimism, looking at the contract visible on the wallscreen.

The other signature line was empty.

The next day, it was the same.

And the next.

Serena continued to pack her possessions, and Sierra’s.

Gaylen’s optimism waxed and waned. He fought himself and he fought despair. And every day, he visualized more intently. On the final day, he put off what work he could so that he could sit at his desk in quiet visualization for most of the day. He knew he could not bring himself to go home until just past midnight, when Serena’s decision would be final. After work, he went alone to a movie theatre and watched back-to-back romantic comedies, trying to summon the right wavelength of emotion and thought to align himself with what he wanted.

On the subway ride home, however, despair found its way into his heart. His wife and child were nearly finished packing. The flowers he had bought Serena had wilted and she had thrown them away. There had been no sign of a crack in Serena’s inscrutable exterior. All his efforts were coming to nothing.

He admitted to himself that Serena was correct: he knew perfectly well that he had no right to insist on one specific person. Doing so violated the free will of others. He was supposed to ask for the kind of family and the kind of person he wanted and then let the universe find him suitable people—people who wanted the same things he did. And since Serena had already said she wanted to take Sierra, he had no right to argue with that, either.

But he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He loved them too much. Especially Sierra—Serena had changed so much that he could hardly summon up his old adoration of her, but Sierra was his little girl.

Just after midnight, he arrived home with his head full of all the positive thoughts he could summon, but with trembling hands.

He walked into the kitchen and looked at the wallscreen only to find the contract ignored, silent and inert on the screen, a thing of disappointment and betrayal.

The next morning, the three of them stood at the door of Gaylen’s apartment, Serena’s and Sierra’s suitcases around them in the hallway. Sierra clung to Gaylen, her face nestled into his chest.

Gaylen felt like his heart was physically breaking, coming apart into pieces, as he forced himself to pull Sierra away from him. He could not say goodbye. He would have broken down if he had tried. He struggled to stay composed, but Sierra saw his face, and she burst into tears. She threw herself against his chest and wailed.

Her mother knelt down with them. “Say, ‘Only happy feelings,’ Sierra,” she commanded.

Gaylen took a breath and said, “Stop it now, Sierra.”

The little girl tried valiantly to stop her tears. “I don’t wanna go away from you, Daddy!”

Gaylen’s eyes filled. “There’s better things to come, honey,” he said, trying with all his heart to mean it. “You’ll be better off where you’re going. ‘Nothing bad ever really happens, unless you think it’s bad.’ Remember?”

“This is bad,” Sierra cried, and she threw her arms around Gaylen’s neck and clung to him as if for dear life.

He had always loved how she’d clung to him, from the first moments her tiny little limbs had been capable of it, when she was mere months old. It had always made him feel invulnerable somehow when she had held onto him like this. And this was the last time he would ever feel this way.

Serena had always been better at this than Gaylen. “Now stop it, Sierra. This minute!” She gently loosened her daughter’s grasp and pulled her away from her father. “Do you want to make us have bad feelings, too? Do you want all of us to attract bad things into our lives because of you?”

“No…” Sierra wailed.

“Then stop it. Smile for your daddy and tell him how good everything is going to be for everyone. Tell him how happy we are all going to be.”

Sierra struggled hard for a long moment and managed a smile through her tears. “Everything will be good, Daddy.”

“Yes,” Gaylen said authoritatively. “Yes, it will. Now go on and have fun with your mom!” He tried again to smile for her, and he succeeded this time.

Serena picked up their suitcases and the two of them walked down the corridor toward the skyrise’s elevators. Sierra looked back twice, crying again. Gaylen forced himself to smile encouragingly each time. My life is rich and good, he repeated to himself as he watched them walk away. My life is complete just as it is, lacking nothing.

When they were gone, Gaylen turned and went into his apartment and closed the door behind him. He would never see or hear from them again. Sierra would have a new daddy in a few weeks or months, whenever Serena chose someone. And no one would permit Sierra to speak of her old daddy from this moment forward. He was in the past. He was over. And that was as it should be. Serena and Sierra didn’t want the same things he did anymore. He couldn’t do anything about that. He had been wrong—selfish—to even try.

As for himself, Gaylen would soon be assigned new roommates, unless he picked some of his own accord. Everyone knew that good company was important.

Gaylen hesitated in his living room. The digital frame on the wall over the faux fireplace held their family photos. He took it down and deleted every picture that included Sierra or Serena.

Tears blurring his vision, he went to the stereo and deleted all the children’s songs they’d downloaded for Sierra, and then all the music Serena had contributed to their collection.

A plastic black-haired doll lay on the floor behind the sofa. Sierra had accidentally left it behind. He got an empty trash bag from the kitchen, shook it open, and threw the doll into it. He carried the trash bag with him as he moved through the house and looked for anything else that had to go.

I am so lucky, he told himself. My life is rich and good. I have everything I want and need in this moment.

In a bathroom cabinet, he found some of Sierra’s hair ties. He added them to the trash bag. He also found some of Serena’s old makeup she’d tossed into the bathroom trash. He emptied that trash bag into the one he carried.

He looked at himself in the mirror. He felt detached from the man he saw there, with his bloodshot eyes.

He went into their bedroom and came to a stop as he looked around. Serena had decorated the entire room. He would have to replace everything. She’d loved picking everything out. He’d walked hand-in-hand with her through the furniture store, not caring one bit what she chose but just loving the way her eyes glowed.

He dug an old blanket out of a chest and took it to the sofa in the living room. He would sleep there until he had a chance to buy new furniture. Numbly, he went into the bedroom closet. Serena had accidentally left some of her fabric-covered, perfume-scented clothes hangers. And all the little blocks of cedar wood tucked into the drawers—she’d done that. She’d organized his underwear and socks into little dividers, too. He stopped, defeated. Was there anything about the way he lived that she hadn’t impacted somehow? How was he going to go back?

He went to Sierra’s room with the faint hope that it would be easier. The room was empty, but there were stickers of cartoon characters all over the wall. He dropped to his knees and started scraping them off with his thumbnail while he tried not to think anything at all. Then he noticed the wall itself: the mural they’d painted while Serena was pregnant—a colorful, carefully cultivated garden of flowers reaching up to a blue sky and a big yellow sun. He would have to repaint.

The enormity of the task—of removing these people from his life as if they had never been there—crushed him. He slumped on the floor, his eyes unfocused, as he remembered family movie nights and walks in the park, shopping for clothes for Sierra, cooking together. Six years they had shared. Six years of family. He could not pretend they had never touched his life.

Slowly, his hands came up over his face, and he began to sob.

Late one night several weeks later, Gaylen pushed the “Request Assistance” button on the wallscreen opposite his bed.

The evening’s good news report vanished and a live feed came through, of an older man of Chinese descent, with the standard short haircut of all New American men. “Gaylen Andrews?” he asked.

Gaylen nodded, surprised that they would know his name.

“Our records show”—the man glanced at something on his screen—”you haven’t requested assistance since you were eight. You were… it says, ‘Playing a prank on sister. Was informed as to the serious nature of the Assistance Response Team.’ Correct?”

Gaylen nodded again, remembering with some embarrassment.

“How can we help you?” the other man asked, his tone disinterested.

“My wife left me. And she took my little daughter with her. A little over a month ago. I’ve done everything I’m supposed to. I’m trying to focus on the future and not think about it, but the thoughts just keep coming back. What do I try next? I—”

“Have you removed all signs?”

“Yes…” Gaylen said, but he remembered the one photo of Sierra he had kept on his handscreen.

“All signs?”

Gaylen hesitated. “It’s really necessary?”

“It’s the only way to move on,” the responder said, his tone distracted, and he glanced at something off-screen.

Gaylen took a deep breath, resistant. What if he forgot what she looked like? Of course, he was supposed to forget.

Finally, he got his handscreen from the bedside table and pulled up the picture. He looked at her soft brown eyes, her braided pigtails, her beautiful brown skin. He struggled to keep his face composed. “I miss her,” he said in vigorous protest.

The responder didn’t comment.

Gaylen looked at the photo for long seconds while the responder waited. Finally, Gaylen took a deep breath and pressed the “Delete” icon and “Yes.” In a flicker of the screen, the photo was gone. A jolt of pain lanced straight down into the pit of his stomach and demanded that he undo it, but it was too late.

He turned back to the wallscreen.

The responder said, “You’re only making it worse by dwelling on it. It is your responsibility as a citizen of New America to let this go. Stop thinking about it.”

“How?” Gaylen asked, his voice ragged. “I’m already trying. I’ve been trying. It’s not working.”

“That’s the wrong thinking,” the responder said in a monotone, as if it were a memorized script. “You can do whatever you think you can. Change your thinking and your life will follow. Here are your assignments.” Gaylen saw the man’s shoulders move and heard the clacking of his keyboard while his eyes focused elsewhere on his screen. A moment later, the wallscreen changed to white italic text on a background of drawings of blue daisies. It read:

I can let this go. I am happy and at peace and grateful for everything I have. I distract myself every day with something fun and enjoyable. I am going on a date with someone new every night until I have a new partner who makes me just as happy as the old one did.

“Repeat these statements twenty times daily,” the responder’s voice prescribed.

“What about Sierra?” Gaylen asked.

“What about her?” the voice of the responder said.

“Am I supposed to just replace her, too?” Gaylen demanded, his voice rising.

The screen flipped back to the view of the responder, who recited, “This assignment addresses all aspects of the situation. Trust the assignment and complete it diligently. It is your duty as a citizen. All of your resistance only prolongs your pain. Stop resisting what is.”

Gaylen felt as if he were adrift on an ocean, with no land to be seen anywhere. He had not known what help to expect from the ART, but this wasn’t it. He already knew all of this.

“Isn’t there anything… else?” he asked.

“This is everything you need as long as you complete it properly,” the responder said. “If you don’t change your mind, nothing else will change. Take responsibility for your experience.”

The wallscreen went dark, and then it showed the assignment again. This time, a large “20” appeared beneath it. A warm programmed female voice said, “Let’s complete your assignment! How great it is that you will be able to feel better so easily! Read this along with me, won’t you?” Then she began to read the text aloud. “I can let this go. I am happy and at peace and grateful for everything I have…”

Gaylen stared disbelievingly at the text that was supposed to help him.

After a few seconds, the automated voice interrupted herself. “Come on, now, you have to play along!” she said, teasing. “This is your assignment and it is your duty as a citizen of New America to participate fully! Let’s try this again!” She started over on the reading. “I can let this go. I am happy and at peace—”

Gaylen sank onto his bed and covered his eyes. “No… no, no, no.”

“That’s not a helpful attitude!” the voice said. She sounded as if she were scolding a small child. “Come on, chin up! We don’t want to bring back the Assistance Response Team, now, do we?”

“No,” Gaylen muttered under his breath. “No, we definitely do not.” He took a deep breath and began reading along with the text, with a voice full of resentment.

Within a few seconds, the voice interrupted them again. “Now, that’s not the right attitude, is it? Let’s try it again, but this time, let’s really try hard to mean it! You have to say it like it’s already true. Try to feel it all the way down deep, in your bones. Let’s go again!” And she started over.

Gaylen wanted to shatter the wallscreen.

Three or four tries later, he figured out how to fake a cheerful tone well enough to satisfy the program and was allowed to finish the twenty readings. By then, it was three o’clock in the morning. At least the effort exhausted him enough that he was able to go to sleep.

Thirty-eight days later—it was September now—the wallscreen still interrupted Gaylen every night at bedtime to read through the assignment. The words seemed to mock him even more than before. The voice replayed in his head throughout the day, though he begged it to go away. Sometimes he even hit his temple with his hand as if it would knock the words out of his mind—and then looked around nervously to see whether anyone had noticed.

As he forced himself to choke down a sandwich for dinner that particular night, dread of the readings brought tension that built in his chest until it hurt to breathe. After dinner, he ate five of the mini candy bars, as had become habit now that he didn’t have Serena around to scold him. The dose of sugar only turned his tension into a more frenetic energy. It was so unreasonable to be forced to do this useless exercise every night.

He paced and watched the living room wallscreen and stared at the clock in the upper right-hand corner and waited for the readings. Gradually, he came to feel that he would commit some kind of violence upon himself or the world—although he could not imagine what—if he had to do this again. He went into his room after he brushed his teeth, and he changed into pajamas, all without processing anything he was doing. Tension rose and fell within him like ocean waves as he convinced himself just to get through the readings quickly, and then convinced himself that he could not bear to do them at all.

The moment he turned off the light, the wallscreen dimmed, and then the painfully familiar white italic text on the blue daisy background appeared. He screamed at the wallscreen before the voice could start. “No! I will not do this anymore!”

“That’s not a helpful attitude!” the voice said, somehow both cheerful and scolding at the same time. “Come on, chin—”

“Shut up!” Gaylen yelled. “Shut the hell up!”

“We don’t want to bring back the Assistance Response Team, now, do we?”

An unnamable and grim force driving him, Gaylen grabbed a water glass from the bedside table and threw it at the wallscreen, but missed. Next went the lamp; the cord ripped out of the socket halfway through, interrupting its arc toward the wall. Then he grabbed both pillows, one in each hand, poised to throw them.

The wallscreen clicked over to a younger white man. “Can I help you?” he asked.

Gaylen froze.

“I see you’re on day thirty-eight,” the responder said. “Surely you’re feeling better by now?”

“No,” Gaylen said. He still clutched the pillows. The grim force that had been driving him was gone as if it had never been. A lightness was in him now, hoping for some other solution. “Can you do something else? I can’t do this anymore. I’m saying these stupid sentences over and over again and it isn’t helping. I need something else.”

The responder pursed his lips as if to speak, and then he shook his head. “Sorry. This is it.”

Gaylen dropped the pillows, his arms going limp. “But you’re supposed to have help for us—we just have to push the button. This is what we’re supposed to do.”

“Do your assignments. This is all I have for you right now.” The man’s voice was curt.

The wallscreen clicked back to the readings. The vacuous wallscreen voice started reciting again. “‘I can let this go. I am happy and at peace and grateful for everything I have. I distract myself every day with something fun and enjoyable. I am going on a date—’”

Gaylen fell to his knees and dropped his head into his hands.

“Come on, chin up! We don’t want to bring back the Assistance Response Team, now, do we?”

Gaylen broke down sobbing.

The screen clicked over again. It was the same responder. He glared at Gaylen and spoke in a hushed shout. “Stop it—you’re making me look bad. You do not want to get their attention right now, I promise you!” And then the screen clicked over again.

Gaylen froze. Get whose attention?

Adrenaline rushed through his body and made him tremble. How could this be happening? The only source of help his society offered had threatened him. And they were watching him.

He got up and staggered to the bathroom. The readings showed up here, too, on the small wallscreen opposite the bathtub. He had never paid any particular attention to that wallscreen before. Now he couldn’t believe it.

The voice was repeating, “We don’t want to bring back the Assistance Response Team, now, do we?” It didn’t seem to realize that the Assistance Response Team had dismissed him.

He wanted to cover up the wallscreen, but they’d notice that, too.

Gaylen staggered outside, onto the tiny balcony of his apartment. He inhaled the clean September air, just starting to cool off after the hot summer. He cast about for something to tell himself, some way to calm himself down, but he had nothing to turn to.

Then he noticed that, on the outside of the skyrise opposite his, a giant wallscreen covered several stories. He stared at it. Surely not.

Suddenly, he could hardly breathe.

Gaylen went back to his bedroom, eased under the covers, and used all of his remaining energy to go through the readings with perfect intonation. The voice was delighted with him. When they finished, it asked, “Are you ready for sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow is Tuesday, September 19. Tomorrow will be refreshingly cool in the morning and pleasantly warm in the afternoon. Would you like to wake up at eight o’clock in the morning again?”

“Yes.”

“You will sleep well and wake up even happier.”

Sure. Of course I will. He turned onto his side.

The wallscreen, and the rest of the room with it, went dark. He could still hear its electronic hum—it never truly turned off—and he was certain that they still watched him.

Keeping his movements small and casual, he pulled up the sheets and blankets and arranged them so that he could not be seen from the wallscreen. He allowed his neutral expression to dissolve, then, and his face contorted.

Why wouldn’t they help him? Why were they watching him if they wouldn’t help him?

He couldn’t think of any answers that made sense. In the end, though, it all came down to him. He was the cause of all the trouble.

What is wrong with me? Why can’t I just be happy like everyone else?

A few weeks later, on Thursday morning, October 5, Gaylen sat in a meeting at work. He and the rest of the data entry team for the marketing department of the Bureau of Entertainment listened to their boss talk about new software.

Without Gaylen even realizing it, his mind turned to the dark places he could no longer stay out of for any length of time.

Tommy Hiyashi’s cheerful report on the software faded away until Gaylen heard nothing but his own inner voice screaming at him, “What is wrong with you? Why can’t you be normal? Be normal! Be normal! Be normal!”

He returned to awareness and his eyes refocused, because the outside world had grown so quiet. The five coworkers seated around the table all stared at him. He realized then that he had crushed his paper cup and spilled the lukewarm coffee all over his hand and his arm and the table. Heat flooded his cheeks.

Tommy met his eyes; Gaylen saw a flash of concern. Then Tommy laughed and said, as cheerful and gregarious as ever, “Gaylen, you’ve had way too much coffee, haven’t you? Go on, wash up—we’ll clean up in here. Our meeting’s almost over, anyway.”

Gaylen could only nod and excuse himself. He hurried to the nearest restroom, his eyes downcast as if that would shield him from the eyes of others along the way. All the wallscreens in the hallways and in the restroom played an effervescent animated song-and-dance routine, and the catchy tune followed him as he walked. He locked the restroom door with trembling hands. He washed the coffee off his sleeve and hand while cartoon figures cavorted on the wallscreen at the corner of his vision.

He turned to grab paper towels and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He looked drawn, haggard, creases starting to show on his forehead—far from the ideal of a happy, healthy New American. For a moment, he couldn’t turn away from his own empty eyes. He ran the tap again and dashed cold water on his face.

As he gripped the sides of the sink, water dripping down his cheeks, he stared himself down. “You’ve got to stop this, Gaylen,” he whispered to himself, his tone fervent. “You’ve got to.”

Then something inside him broke. His face contorted and sobs burst from him. Tears ran down his face. He found himself on the floor, and he clutched at the wall as if it could keep him together. Moments passed while he watched himself having hysterics, as if he floated outside of his own body, unable to control it.

Then the wallscreen clicked. A black woman with her graying hair in a bun looked at him disapprovingly.

He was shocked out of his tears and back into himself. He stared at her, eyes wide, as tears dried on his face. He had forgotten that they were watching him all the time. It only made sense that they would be watching him here, too.

“Gaylen Andrews,” the woman said in a commanding voice. “You have been working with the ART for almost two months, yes?”

“Yes,” he said. He still clutched the wall.

“You are not completing your assignments satisfactorily. Stand up.”

Gaylen stared at her.

“Stand up,” the woman commanded.

He stood up slowly.

“Straighten up. Now smile. Repeat after me, ‘Everything in my life is just as it should be.’”

Gaylen obeyed. His grief subsided into his core, like an animal that ran away, abandoned. It left emptiness behind.

“‘I am happy and at peace’… ‘I am grateful for my life’… ‘I think only positive thoughts.”

Gaylen repeated the statements in the pleasant, optimistic tone of voice he knew the ART required, but he felt dead inside.

The responder glanced at something on her screen. “Our records show you have not yet taken advantage of Love Today.” That was the government-supplied matchmaking software, available on heart-studded kiosks all around town. “You must go on three dates per week. You will appreciate and enjoy the wonderful romantic options available to you. Understood?”

“Understood,” Gaylen said with some approximation of a smile on his face.

The screen switched back over to the cartoon.

He kept up his blandly pleasant expression while he smoothed out his suit and washed his face and hands again and went back out into the office. He glanced around. The smiling faces around him seemed oblivious to all he was suffering.

As he returned to his desk, he noticed the wallscreens on every single wall and every ten feet along the hallways. He sat down at his desk and looked at the wallscreen to the right of him, which watched him in profile. It occurred to him then that he was never alone, that he didn’t have a moment of privacy.

I’m trapped. I’m trapped and alone in a nightmare that no one can wake me from.