The Twenty Percent

Pollyanna Polcheck’s life had given her cause to think about her name. What glint of the eye, what waggle of the tightened first, what early wailing, had compelled her parents to name her Pollyanna? She could only conjecture, but she was nothing of the sort. It conjured images of a happy, smiling child, where Polcheck, as she would come to be known, was inscrutable, wild, and gifted with a genius that rendered her under stimulated as a child, and therefore, unhappy and unsmiling – the antithesis of a Pollyanna.

Barbara Weston on the other hand, was a Barbie through and through. Her parents named her Barbara after her mother’s mother who had been so named after her own mother’s mother. Someone in her generation was bound to get the name, and it turned out that from the moment she was born, she did look ‘somewhat’ like a Barbara. She wondered about that ‘somewhat’. How could they settle for somewhat in matters of being? Your name is your marker, the only thing, for a long time, you can truly call your own. Your ears prick up when you hear it called, whispered, or screeched. You learn to carve it out in chicken scratchings with an unsteady hand. You first fail to enunciate the words, but over time your tongue remembers where to go. You spend your whole life trying to determine what that name, that first marker called you to be, and then when you find out, you may rail against it, you may complain, but a Barbara will be a Barbara. Your fate is sealed. But this is the story of how Barbara Weston’s fate was interrupted.

Everyone in Ginju Verte knew that post didn’t come at any time past 12pm. If you didn’t get any by then, you didn’t have any. The postal office workers had unionised and had long since negotiated a comfortable deal for themselves, with mail sorting being reserved for the afternoon hours, and deliveries only in the morning. “It wasn’t like that in my time”, Romain would grumble on a normal day. Everyone said Ginju Verte was falling apart, the new postal system just one of the horsemen of the apocalypse.

But that morning was just silence, as Barbie and Romain both pottered around, each within two metres of the door, but each straining to pretend they were not eyeing it. Barbie looked at the time – 12:05. Not a chance. She gripped onto the sponge and squeezed until her wedding ring got caught in the rough material and the water fell in staccato droplets into the sink. She prized the ring off.

This was it. Romain turned and looked her in the eye, for the first time that day, not counting when their daughter, Rachel, whined, and he had asked Barbie to “just give her the toy so she’ll shut up”. Not counting that, he looked at her for the first time that day.

“What are you thinking?” he said, his voice, his countenance, softening.

“Well, what do you think? I didn’t get one. That’s all there is to it.”

Silence.

“it’s not up to me you know.”

“I know you keep saying”

“Yeah, but I just need you to understand. It’s not up to me”.

She let out the gust of air that had gathered up in her insides, filling up every part of her and threatening to explode. “Ro. I know. I know you tried. This is what we have to do.”

Silence.

“I’m glad you…understand.”

20%. The number had been stuck in Barbie’s mind ever since Polcheck first explained the experiment a year prior. “We’ll offer a select group of men with specific skills the opportunity to travel to the new world. But they can only take 20% of the women in Ginju Verte with them. How will they decide who to take?” She could barely get the words out, she was elated, giddy, the way she had been in the early days of her various experimentations with human lives. She continued, “we’ll arrange the men by profession, taking enough of them, and asking them to choose the best of the others, those who will offer the most to their new society. Wouldn’t it be amazing to see what they do with all that power?”

Barbie bit into a fingernail that had already been chewed down to its limits. She saw where this was going. At university Polcheck was known the campus over and beyond, going only by her last name, standing toe to toe and head-to-head with the men. Barbie and Polcheck were inseparable, believing everything was better in twos: arriving to parties together, often dating the same types of people, and they shared a passion for behavioural science - they only differed in their methods, as a tendency to defy the general rules of ethics were Polcheck’s Achilles heel. She would eventually be expelled. Barbie happily gave up on science for life as a housewife, while Polcheck continued to satisfy her thirst to understand the human being, her main interest being the effect of power on decision-making.

“How would you like it if Romain was part of the experiment?”

Barbie wasn’t sure at first.

Polcheck pressed.

“Look, I know Romain would choose well. It’s not even an issue, he’s one of the good ones. It would just be great to have this kind of proximity to one of my subjects.”

Polcheck was one of many who thought Ginju Verte was falling apart. She had been front line picketing the local post-office when they unionised. She didn’t believe in the individual – she had planted her stake on one side of the party line. She had risen through the ranks in the scientific bureau over the years, despite her lack of credentials. She had soared through sheer intellect and her unwillingness to shy away from the gorier parts of what it meant to lead a nation. Polcheck didn’t care for what was popular. She cared about what worked. Polcheck was convinced, above all, that this new world would work.

“- and leave everyone else behind? I’m not sure…”

“You don’t have to be. There’s nothing left here for us Barbie. Not for us, not for anyone.”

Barbie didn’t share the same penchant for complex human experimentation. She didn’t know its parameters. She didn’t understand the new world. But she understood opportunity. She understood a better life. Ginju Verte was falling apart, everyone said so. She said yes.

Polcheck was elated.

“Romain will pick you! It’s a non-issue. You’ll see. Everything is amazing over there. Better. Ginju Verte is falling to pieces you know.”

She knew it, her friends always told her – Romain was one of the good ones.

Then Barbie started seeing hearts everywhere. She had noticed Eliza McPhale wearing one around her neck, twirling the heart-shape around her finger as they waited at the school gates. Their family paediatrician, who she had visited on account of Rachel’s persistent cough, had one. She saw it as she drove past Jupiter Hill, the woman on her daily 8 am run had one bouncing up and down on her chest, glistening in the sunlight, taunting her. She imagined the happy day when the post arrived and they received their packages, securely despatched of course, how the women opened it up, what they understood of its meaning. She wondered what they had that she didn’t.

“So?” Polcheck asked eagerly, her eyebrows twitching in anticipation. “Did you get it?”

Barbie settled down, nestling a cup of tea in her hands.

“Did you get a necklace?” she asked impatiently, her bouncing leg shaking the table.

“Nope. Nothing.”

Polcheck shook her head. “Oh, Barbie. I’m sorry.”

“Yes. Well. That’s how it goes doesn’t it. All he said was it wasn’t up to him, and he hopes I understand.”

Polcheck reached over and grabbed Barbie by the hand, almost spilling her tea, “you know that’s not true. It was all up to him. He knew the parameters.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s not like that makes it easier.”

She imagined them arriving to the new world, their places intact, their lives secured for the next one thousand millennia, while life down below halted, slowly at first so you may not notice, but then all at once, like water rushing down an unplugged drain.

What made them one of the twenty percent? She clutched the empty space on her own neck, feeling for security where there was none. There was nothing, but it meant everything.

Everyone said Ginju Verte was falling apart. Polcheck said it, Romain said it, and it was said so often that Barbie would struggle to wrestle the truth of her thoughts away from the truth of theirs. All of it would cease to matter, and Ginju Verte would cease to be, and all that was left was a miserable ball of grey where lives had once been lived, where Romain and Barbie had set up their lives, and so too had her mother, and her mother, and her mother before. When anyone walked past, they would never notice the dilapidated house, the front lawn, traces where the Weston family had once lived. They might never notice the package covered in dust, securely despatched at 12: 10pm many years prior, protected by time. It contained a heart-shaped locket with Barbie’s name engraved into it, etching her into posterity, securing a fate in a new world she would never meet.