The Weight-Bearers

It was the sound of an altercation that pulled me from unconsciousness that morning. The words were incomprehensible at first and distorted by the temporary grogginess that had clouded me upon waking.

‘You can’t take that!’

‘Step aside, mam.’

‘I said you can’t take that!’

‘Someone remove her please!’

It was the sound of shoving bodies, of weight colliding with walls, of tumbling furniture and violent protest. I rolled over and looked at the time on my alarm clock. It was just before six in the morning. The television was murmuring with the morning news.

‘And later today, Prog Fac leader Octavius Hunt is expected to hold a press conference regarding yesterday’s Promenade at Blackwater Bridge. We already know that -’

I switched the television off. When I pushed through my front door and peered down the hallway, it was as I had expected. An outfit of Enforcers, none of whom I recognised, were raiding one of the homes several doors down from me. Two of them stood guard out front forcibly restraining a woman in her forties who was fighting to get inside. Within the room, I could hear the continued commotion; the shattering of glass, the clattering of objects upon the floor, the heavy boot treads of unseen Enforcers. After several failed attempts to get inside her home, the woman’s knees buckled. She crumpled to the floor, sobbing in her hands, and it was only then that the Enforcers eased their grip on her.

A rough hand pulled at my shoulder and turned me about so that my gaze was torn from the woman. It was another Enforcer who had seized me. He was clad in the standard dark uniform and wearing a full helmet with a black visor and a baton hovering at his waist. ‘Do you know this woman?’ he demanded, indicating to the weeping woman on the floor.

I turned back and regarded her for a moment longer. Her gaze was distant through the doorway of her apartment and as the sounds of destruction continued within it, her arms crept up along her body as if to cradle herself. Her face was wet and had lost all expression. One of her hands had dragged up the hem of her cardigan where the pocket would have been, gripping something and turning it over absently.

‘No,’ I said finally. ‘No sir, I can’t say I do.’

-

When the Enforcers left, I approached the doorway and looked into the apartment. The woman was in the middle of the floor, trembling from a lingering sob. Everything imaginable was upended around her. The room was stripped of anything that could have been considered a belonging. Broken photo frames with missing photos lay about her and dusty display shelves were rife with clean impressions where ornaments had previously been displayed. Overturned jewellery boxes were in abundance with nothing inside of them. The only things that remained within the apartment at all were the items that possessed no character: furniture, appliances, dishes, but even these had been demolished in the ransacking. As other residents started to emerge from their rooms, they passed by the apartment entrance without hesitating. Some of them went by without a second glance. Others shot her narrowed and disapproving glares. The weeping woman took no notice of them.

When she had calmed her crying, I stepped inside the apartment and closed the door behind me. It was only when a shard of glass cracked beneath my boot that the woman inclined her head in my direction. Despite my presence, it seemed she had resigned herself to whatever intentions I had come to exact. Patiently, I sat down beside her, and for a moment I said nothing. She sniffled but was otherwise silent. She was sitting on her legs, her frame hunched, and her wet eyes looked distantly out the window.

‘What was their name?’ I asked.

Something in her gaze flickered. She blinked the tears down her cheeks, dashed them with the back of her hand, and looked upon the mess on the floor as if seeing it for the first time. Confusion contracted her brows, and her right hand, which was still gripping the pocket of her cardigan against her thigh, twitched slightly. ‘Eli,’ she said finally. ‘His name was Eli.’

He could have been a child, a lover, a brother. With the apartment so utterly stripped, there were no obvious clues with which to consider his relevance to her.

‘They’re going to come back,’ I said. ‘If there’s something you don’t want them to find...’ I trailed off then, but the implication compelled her to face me. Her brows came closer together. ‘I know a place,’ I concluded.

It was an underground merchant that I had taken her to beneath an antique shop in The Hollows. A network of lanterns illuminated the large cavern he currently occupied, and as we moved further into the light, the layout of a shop came into clearer view. It was a space filled with objects which had been made illegal by the Prog Fac many years prior: weathered copies of books that were long ago redacted by the bureau; dusty music albums and vinyl records from artists I had never heard of and imagined must have written about notions held in disrepute; posters and memorabilia associated with celebrities that had committed self-murder and thus rendered non-existent. Beyond these, there was also a litany of furniture and other belongings which had belonged, at one point or another, to erased self-murderers. When I brought the woman (whose name I had since learned was Audrey) into the store, she surveyed the contents of the shop closely. The merchant was a lanky bearded man with glasses. Henry. He greeted me with a nod behind the counter. When finally we approached him, I introduced them, after which I turned to Audrey and nodded encouragingly.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘You can show him.’

From within the pocket of her cardigan, Audrey revealed the last remnant of Eli. It was nothing so obvious as a photograph. If it were, there would have been no sense in saving it. There was no circumstance in which a photograph of an erased self-murderer could have survived. Rather, it was a heart-shaped locket. It was of a bronze constitution and hung from a thin bronze chain. She offered it tentatively to Henry, who adjusted his glasses and received the locket patiently. Upon inspecting it, he clicked it open. What he saw inside of it, if anything at all, was impossible for me to determine. His expression was hard and immovable as stone and it gave nothing away. After a moment, he clicked the locket shut and looked upon the woman tenderly. To his credit, he did not ask any questions, either of Audrey or myself. Eventually, he exhaled and smiled sadly, a gesture of finality, and he carefully wrapped the locket in the thin chain from which it extended and deposited it into a nearby satchel before tucking it away beneath the counter. Beside me, Audrey took in a sharp breath.

‘When you’re ready to return,’ was all Henry said, sliding a bill across the counter toward her. I nodded to him appreciatively, and when Audrey accepted the bill, I guided her back upstairs.

This had always been Henry’s business; laundering artefacts that were otherwise due for redaction or destruction by virtue of being associated with a self-murderer the Prog Fac was due to erase. It was this very prospect of laundering the locket that had convinced Audrey to relinquish her only remaining belonging of the lost Eli.

‘Just remember to come back when you’ve relocated,’ I instructed Audrey. She nodded mutely. Upon exiting the store, she offered me one last smile, and I took comfort in the fact that at least some measure of her spirits had been marginally restored. On her way out the door, I caught it by the side of its frame and made her turn back to me. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said, ‘but don’t let them take him from you.’

She wept then. In the doorway of the antique store, she wept. It was only several moments later when she regained her composure, but she allowed herself the few moments that had been forbidden to her in the world outside; the world of the Prog Fac. Before stepping through the door again, she turned to me one last time. ‘What’s your name?’ she requested.

For a moment, I averted my gaze and shook my head. It seemed irrelevant who I was. It should not have mattered one iota in the wake of her grief. As I looked at her though, I felt the same thing I had felt when looking upon the others. I could not find the strength to deny her. ‘Atlas,’ I conceded. ‘My name is Atlas.’

‘Atlas,’ she repeated. It brought the slightest of smiles to her wet lips. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

And then she was gone.

When I returned to Henry at the counter, it was with a weight in my chest that had been growing over the past several months.

‘There’s a stirring in the wind out there, boy,’ he said, his tone grave. ‘People know there’s a storm coming. That’s half a dozen of them you’ve brought to me in as many weeks.’

My response was little more than a heavy exhalation.

‘Maybe these will cheer you up,’ he added.

From beneath the counter, Henry withdrew a stack of books that, with significant heft, he dropped onto the surface in front of me. Whatever covers they previously had were gone, as was the case with most illicit books Henry had found for me. In their places were leather cloths, goatskins, or repurposed canvas. I took the first book, opened it to the title page, and read Vice and Virtue by Erhart Greer. The second book was The Age of Proselytes by Anonymous. As I looked through each of them, Henry’s hand disappeared below the counter only to reappear moments later with a handful of book sleeves, all of which were of Prog Fac-approved literature such as their annual treatise Triumph Through Tenacity.

Despite myself, I laughed. ‘You’re right, Henry, old friend. That did cheer me up.’

Collecting the books and claiming the sleeves that Henry had offered to me in one hand, I emptied my wallet onto the counter with my other. It amounted to little more than several notes and a handful of coins that waterfalled onto the surface.

‘Keep the change,’ I said, pulling the stack of books into my arms.

Henry laughed heartily. ‘Good one.’

As I moved away from the counter, however, he called out one last time. ‘You don’t ever question whether or not you’re doing the right thing by them?’ he asked, making me pause. ‘As barbaric as they seem, the Prog Fac only want to dissuade self-murder. It’s not unreasonable.’

‘That’s not that part I have a problem with, Henry,’ I said, inclining my head back in his direction. ‘It’s the way they punish sympathy. The way they punish grief. The way they punish pain. People like Eli who think there's no other way out, and the people left behind, like Audrey - theirs is a weight that’s too heavy to bear. The Prog Fac only compounds it. The weight-bearers have to be heard, they have to be supported. Not punished. Not erased.’

‘The weight-bearers,’ Henry repeated.

‘There’s no way forward in the world the Prog Fac is building.’

He was silent for a long moment then. Finally, he exhaled. ‘Just be careful.’

Whether his warning had been in regard to practice or principle, I could not be entirely certain. Likely, it was both. As far as I was concerned, however, I didn’t have the choice not to be.