A World Without

My earliest memory is one of my Great-grandmother sitting across the dining room table from my mother. It was a few days from my birthday, and the mornings were already turning hot and sticky, telling us that April had arrived in Texas. My Great-grandmother was speaking quietly, as though it was important to her that I didn’t hear what it was that she was saying. She was telling my mother that parenthood is hard. How all we are is sacrifice and that a life with one of us was going to be a life filled with telling herself that she was not going being able to do the things that you want to do or go the places that you want to go and telling her that the way things now were better for everyone, including me.

I know that I don’t have anything to compare it to, just a few vague memories and feelings that I can’t seem to tether to any real experiences, but I have my doubts that this is better. I remember that I had a soft bed, with a full, fluffy pillow and so many blankets that I would have to remove a few of them because it would be too stuffy for me to sleep if I didn’t. My bed now is hard, and the blanket that I have, which is the same blanket that I’ve had for five years now, doesn’t so much keep me warm as it keeps me from getting any colder than I was when I covered myself with it.

The food is alright, though after ten or eleven years of eating artificially sweetened oatmeal for breakfast and stewed beef roast over instant potatoes one tends to get a little bored. Complaining doesn’t do much good, either. Complaining about the oats or asking too many times for a new blanket was an effective way to get yourself reassigned.

We’re reminded often that we’re the lucky ones, and since we don’t know what the alternative is we choose to believe it. From the time that we get here, which is either at the beginning of puberty or right after our eleventh birthday party, we notice that boys come and go often. We are advised not to make too many friends you never can tell who is gonna make it and who isn’t. “Making it” means that we advanced through the E’s and T’s and we get to live here in the “pool” and contribute.

“E’s and T’s” stands for education and trial. They try to teach us first, because evidently it is easier to instruct a younger child than it is a teenager. Because teenagers can physically endure more than a child, they save the trials for when we are older. I imagine that there is also a greater chance of a teenager would put up a greater resistance to what comes. One day a car comes to our house, and we kiss our mother’s goodbye, and the car delivers us to a place called “The Center.”

For several years after that “the Authority” fills our time with class after class after test after class. It’s tough to determine time once we get to the center, as there aren’t any watches or calendars. We mostly rely on the sun and the moon and the temperature and the trees and the word of someone else to give us a sense of when and where we are in the universe. We try not to think about it.

These first few years are hard, not just for the kids who were just brought in by the Authority, but for the ones that have been there for a while, because we know what’s coming and there’s nothing that we can do to stop it or change it. I think that’s part of the test, to see if we can endure what all the boys before us were able to endure. We all have to listen to the cries of young boys missing their mothers, begging anyone who’ll listen to just let them see her one more time. They plead and bargain and offer to do whatever they have to just for the chance to hold their mother’s hands one more time, and the Authority makes the same deal with all of them.

They are told that if they if they are good, if they do what they are told and they study hard and make the Center proud and they don’t make any trouble for the Authority they will be able to feel the warmth of their mother’s arms again. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve never been able to decide which was worse, the crying and the wailing of a boy’s heart breaking from wanting his mother or the crying and wailing of a boy’s heart broken by the realization that it was a lie, he’ll never see her again.

Not every boy made it through their education, but fewer made it through the trials. As I said before, the education was mostly just classes and tests, and our teachers did their best to try to make it fun. Most of us took to it easy enough, but we would get in trouble if we weren’t attentive or if we shifted around in our seats too much or if we asked the same questions too many times. If you did those things or you didn’t get high enough marks on too many of your exams you ran the risk of being “assigned”, Which was the word that they used when the Authority removed one of us from the class and sent to them do something else. None of us knew where they went or what the something else was, but our instructors made it sound like a punishment.

The Trials was when the Authority assigned the most boys. The Trials was just their fancy way of saying never ending physical and psychological punishment. We got up with the sun and as long as the sun was up we were yelled at, pushed, forced to do one exercise after another, until when the sun set we had to choose which was more important, eating or sleeping. Day after day the Authority stripped of any dignity or responsibility. Our only job was to do what we were told. They said that it was because it was known that the key to a strong mind was a strong body, and that the trials were as important as our education, because a strong mind without a strong body was worth nothing, but a strong mind and body combined with an inability to follow directions was worth less than nothing.

It went on like that for what felt like a lifetime. Most of us began the trials as scrawny children, but there we grew to become hulking, bearded men. The beards were discouraged, but it was the only form of individuality that we were allowed, so those of us that could grow them would. It didn’t occur to us until we were older that, because this was an act of rebellion that was allowed, it wasn’t really rebellion at all.

We wouldn’t find out what day or year it was until one afternoon, when an Authority member would come to where we were exercising and tell us to shower and meet them in the “Administration office”. The Administration office was the only part of the Center that we hadn’t been in since we had arrived. It had its own button on the elevator, and when the door opened you were greeted with a blast of cool, lavender scented air and a room that seemed to be decorated to make you feel both comfortable and comforted, two things that none of us had felt since we had arrived. Seated on a sofa facing an empty chair in the middle of the room were three older women. They gave us and piece of chocolate cake and a warm Coke and told that it was our twentieth birthday, and it was time to celebrate or new opportunity. Then they sat back and explained what the opportunity.

Many years ago, long before anyone that was alive today had been born, there was a war that nearly eradicated Mankind, and more specifically, the males of the species.

It was determined by those that were left that the men, who had always been more inclined towards aggression and a general inability towards being reasonable, should not be as involved in politics as they had been in the past. Soon after that it was decided that they shouldn’t be involved at all. The guilt that men felt over what had happened, combined with a few opportunistic women that felt that this was the opportunity they had been waiting for, the chance to wrestle power away from men once and for all, pushed for the creation of a society free from the influence of men.

Scientists worked for years after that trying to find a way to continue the species without the “contribution” of men, but they failed at every turn, so they turned towards creating a way for us to be able to help the species continue to exist without being able to do any harm to it. That was us.

It had been known for centuries that the strongest, smartest parents made for the smartest and strongest children, so the scientists devised a system to weed out the dumb and weak among us, because even though they hated to admit it, they needed strong, smart men to help make strong, smart women.

After the cake, the Coke, and the conversation, that the Authority members gave us our “opportunity.” They placed a beautifully wrapped box on the desk, and they told us that we could choose to take the present and our place in this society, or we could be assigned. I chose the box.

In it was a key and a golden, heart-shaped locket. The key was to our new quarters, a private room in a facility nearby, with a bed and a desk and all the books we could want and even a television with videogames so that we would have a way to work out our “aggressive nature.” The locket was so that we would have a place to keep the pictures of those that we “contributed” to. It didn’t take long for us to notice that they only gave us pictures of the girls.

As time passed and you start to make friends and notice men in the library and in the cafeteria and in the yards, you’ll see the older men studying the pictures in their lockets and then studying the other men. It wasn’t hard to figure out what they were doing. They were looking at the pictures of their daughters and then trying to see if any of the other, younger men shared similar features or looked enough like them and the girls in the picture to be their sons.

It was dangerous to do this, though, because spending too much time with another man, being too “friendly”, was the quickest way to get assigned, so if you thought that you had found your son the best thing that you could do was stay as far away from them as possible. Most of us tried not to let our feelings towards the possibility of having a son overwhelm us and strived to find peace, some sense of comfort, in the little girls that they gave us to hold near our hearts.

I often stay up at night, enveloped in the silence of my room, and think. I don’t think of my mother, though, because I’ve found that to be too painful. Instead, I think of my great-grandmother. I wish that I had the chance to sit down with her at that table and talk to her, if only for a minute, so that I can tell her that she was right.

Parenthood is hard.