Matching

17 degrees Fahrenheit is pretty darn cold

Who in their right mind would willingly spend

every day in a room so cold?

Well, me. I don't know if I am in my right mind, but, I was chosen. Besides, I'm broke and it's a paycheck -$20,000– which should have been someone else’s, and I need it. There was no way that I could have matched this income. It came to me the way that many things have: I found the request page on the train, on my nightly trip to the dorms from the labs. Someone I’d never seen left it behind. I saw the bottom line, stuffed it in my jacket, carried it with me for over a week, before I finally submitted my name for matching. And, I rode the train each night the long way, every single night, hoping not to see them.

Without my parents, I have had to make due with only myself. Each time I have thought I could make a friend, something matched for them, and I was left hoping again.

Now, I just wait a little longer for the train, so I can ride the long route, pretending to be a part of others’ lives.

Since I lost my parents in The Terrors, I’ve had to take care of myself. They, the government people who came to tell me about my parents, let me finish school. Half a degree in BioGenetics is no good for anyone. Makes the school look like a failure, picking a failure; and since the school is run by said government people… Besides, my parents prepaid the degree program. Mom and I always talked about working together. “I'll pay your way, then we'll work side by side!”

17 days after I entered the advanced colleges, my third year before matching, that's when The Terrors began. The BioTechGen Program was sequestered away from the main college, but there were many of us, perhaps 100 budding scientists pursuing our post graduate degrees through the program. We spent most of our time together, in classes, labs, our dorm. We weren’t allowed to room with the other- cademics, so there was no expanding our horizons. No Poe, Chaucer, Bradbury, King; our poets and authors were Einstein, DNA, DuPont. We didn’t learn tohe philosophies of Nietzsche, Plato, or Aquinas- instead we learned our DeGrasse-Tyson, Hawking, relativity, continuum and regression. We could not be bothered with plebeian thought and they couldn’t be trusted to hear what we knew, what we were realizing every day. They’d just turn it in to a SciFi novel or YouTube show.

I wonder if that was the beginnings of Genetic Matching -the career I have devoted so much to— if so, we didn’t notice it. We simply didn’t look elsewhere for our futures; we befriended and loved within the people in our circle. As the circles tightened, we forgot the lost friends from our childhoods in the wilder world, and we loved among fewer people.

Then, The Terrors began. We called it that, when the government people took the name from the French, Les Terreurs. Because of the name, I thought for a long time that they began in France; otherwise we would have taken it from the language of the original country, right? Only lately have I come to realize that there are no known cases of Les Terreurs in France or the French Provinces. At least not like ours.

Sounds scary, no? The Terrors weren't like YouTubeHorror. We wouldn’t have known if they were any way, because such films were outlawed in the second millennial decade, after the disease first started. That’s when the Great Distrust began. How could King have known that a flu virus would decimate us? He had to have been talking with someone from our branch of study…or the government. I think it was when my mom was in school, or had just finished with her lower levels- “high school” she called it. Mom said that things were normal before that. Whatever “normal” is.

Dad, an administrator from State Business and Mom, from State Bio were of the last people to be acquainted across the boundaries of a campus. Until their time, the students mingled all over campuses and all over the world. But that was before. Now, we don’t even see the others. Gates and borders block our views across the expanse of knowledge, protecting us from those who would take one word from someone in “real academia” and turn it into a $20,000 paycheck. We get matched to our paths, and to our people. And we stick together from there on out.

Now: Bio and Business or Linguistic Studies, or even History; they just do not mix; not since all of that began. The Terrors began small, and as we were all sitting in our lower levels classes, we hadn't heard of them yet. We knew only that Kevin Jeffries and Collette Sansucre had been caught making something that wasn't on the curriculum. They didn’t “match our Magnet” was all we were told when they left suddenly. They were such an unlikely couple. He was a physics channel and she was in chemistry, as different as they could be and still be on the same Magnet School campus. There was once a third to them, but their friend was long gone by the time they’d been reassigned; the teachers called them musketeers, like in the children's story.

The third was a girl, Sheila, and she was an amazing artist. Sheila Mason could draw the insides of a car without even looking at it. That girl knew what it should look like. Once, she drew the insides of a person. Johnson (our facilitator) sent Sheila away for awhile. Such things were not for her to think of- only Physicians and mothers were allowed to learn those things.

It was at least two months before Sheila returned to our classes. She mumbled something about a family emergency. But when she said it, we could tell: this wasn't the Sheila we remembered, but we let it go, even though she had quit drawing. After a month or so, she started talking more freely about her experience while she was gone. No details about “it” but lots of innuendos about what it meant. New tests had determined that she would be best matched working for a medical degree and that her desires bordered on the artistic. “I think plastic surgery would be best for me. They said I could construct an actress out of the homeliest of girls. Maybe I should start with you, Jeffries!”

After awhile, Sheila started talking about Phillip. He was a student in MedGen School, and opposite of everything she had ever liked in a guy. She preferred dark hair, Phillip is blonde. Tall guys were her passion before, Phillip was barely as tall as she -5’8”— but he was all she could talk about.

They got permission to Match-up the next year, when he got his first degree and moved to his Residency at Hopkins-Tyson. She went, of course, taking a MidLevel degree, but we never heard if she did any work. We did get an announcement that they were increasing the next year. They increased another time, before I moved on and lost touch. The children were of course on PreMed track as they began their schooling. But she sent a picture once, drawn by the first child. It looked an awful like Sheila’s older drawings of machines. Jeffries and Sansucre, the other two “musketeers” were gone in a matter of months.

Later that year, I was accepted at Carnegie for my post-grad. I haven’t heard from anyone else since. In all fairness, it’s on me. I was so wrapped up in my new world: keeping up, getting ahead, then the first inklings of what The Terrors had brought.

Now, I’m here, two weeks in to this, my TempMatch assignment. Freezing. For $20K. Next month, I’ll have to figure out how to pay the bills again. This job is limited, intentionally. Too long here, and the health effects are… irreversible. While the temperature staves off some of the Influenza COVIDs, it cannot keep away all of them, nor the “colds” COVIDs and pneumonia, and other diseases that have adapted. Nearly half of the 20K goes to the insurance company supplying my vaccines and the antidotes supplies held for me, just in case. I am susceptible to it all, since I have been working so long in BioGen.

The rest pays for rent… barely. My stipend from State BioGenTech pays for my supplies and most of my food. If I want to go out, I am at the mercy of my nonexistent friends and locals. They say that like me, because I don’t sound like the “Robotos” as they call them. I sound “real” they say. I think I just sound like me. I really just want to sound like Mom. I miss her voice. I miss her certainty that this is my Match for life.

She would know what to do next. She would have figured the next step out long ago. I’m just so busy, keeping up at school and working in labs like this. She would have found: a) a better way to get $20,000 and b) better ways to spend it. But, she didn’t make it through The Terrors. And me? I am trying to.

I am trying to make the best use of my time, and my money. When I leave the lab, I take the later train. It’s cheaper. It makes stops at the other campuses, before coming back around to my dorms. I stop along the way, to eat in the local pubs. Watching (always at a distance) the other-match academics, as they laugh and play. Occasionally, one of them leaves behind something. Maybe a scarf, a book. Once, someone left an umbrella. I still have it. I grab their remnants, just to have something in my hand, as I move alone, to the next place, taking time away from the night. Just me, just trying not to be so alone. But I can’t be anything but. I know too much. And I never really know if I may have something that others might pick up after I leave. The fear of making someone sick is the hardest part of my job, my studies.

As I ride the train, I look at these things that they think nothing of leaving behind. I wonder how much they must have, to so casually commune with others, and to leave these items behind. Things I may never have the money to buy, especially if I cannot complete my Dissertation. Once, a guy left behind a letter. I read it, over and over. In it was a poem. The guy was around my age, handsome, and a Lit. I would never get to know him, though we went to the same places. Rode the same train. We were matched to separate paths.

Someone named Seamus had written the poem, the letter said. I love the line I can remember: “Strange, it is a huge nothing we fear” and the words “Death of Naturalist, Heaney” were scrawled near the line, in a different color, a different hand had written it. I carry that letter still, even though it is no longer legible. I copied over the words, and I read it, remembering that when Mom and Dad had gone to work, they told me they were OK, allergies. It was “nothing to worry about” and they’d “be fine.”

But they weren’t fine. They weren’t OK. They weren’t coming home. And I would be alone forever, forging ahead on Mom’s dream, in Dad’s world. Trying to figure out how to get $20,000 more, to buy myself another month, another chance to write the one thing that would get me out of this pit of worry, and into the life my parents made me for.