You did a tour overseas, during the Great War of 2018. You won’t talk about your time in the military, but sometimes you have nightmares when you scream about killing. Again, you won’t talk about it so I don’t know more.
You say, “That was the before life. Let’s live in the now life.”
And since you are generally happy when you are awake and are such a good husband, I don’t push it with the questions about the past and the night terrors.
But back to the story of how we met. You were brought into an outdoor labor camp, and you refused to work or talk, even when they withheld food and water and finally tortured you, almost to death.
When they decided that you were expendable and that it had been a mistake to bring you in alive, you were saved by a request from the heartland for test subjects and shipped to a government testing facility. I just so happened to be an administrative operator back then, and you were assigned to me.
I was a scientist working on a drug that made it easier for adults to conform to the new enclosed world. The idea was to rid the planet of rebellious people and to make sure we curbed the human tendency to disagree and argue, which has led us to nuclear war and all that followed.
Mother Earth was angry with us, and so we had to “teach ourselves to be better children,” which was the tagline the new North American Land Collective government preached.
At first you wouldn’t speak to me either. I had you in a padded cell and I would talk to you via speakers. But you just sat in the corner with your head between your knees, getting skinnier and skinnier.
At night we’d gas you, and then my aides would give you shots full of vitamins, nutrients, and the experimental chemicals.
I don’t remember why I decided to read to you, but we started with Shakespeare—Hamlet—which was damn lucky for us. Made me believe in fate again, if you’ll allow me to be mystical.
I read, saying, “Act I. Scene I. Elsinore. A platform before the Castle. Francisco at his post. Enter to him Bernardo. Who’s there?”
That’s when you lifted your head and said, “Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.”
I was shocked. You hadn’t spoken once and here you were reciting the next line in Hamlet. It was like I found the key to your mouth. So I read on, saying, “Long live the king!”
“Bernardo?” you said.
“He,” I replied.
“You come most carefully upon your hour,” you said, and then we traded lines from Hamlet all day long.
A few times I tried to break and ask you questions, but you would only say, “More words! Words, words, words!”
And for a week or so we played this game—putting on the play, just the two of us through speakers.
You were so passionate about it, such a good actor, actually—reciting Hamlet’s soliloquies with such zeal and conviction that I began to think you were perhaps once a budding movie star.
Eventually, I broke protocol and entered the padded cell so that we might read the play together in person. That’s how taken I was with your ability to breathe life into Shakespeare’s lines.
We acted out Hamlet for weeks, and the drugs we gave you started to work—you lost the wild look in your eyes and eventually began to speak to me like a regular human being. Only you weren’t regular at all—you were full of magic.
I remember the first thing you said too, when you finally broke character. You said, “Can I take you to dinner sometime?”
It was a ridiculous thing to say, since you were locked up.
But I laughed, and you smiled.
You began to tell me the story of your life, and I broke protocol again by telling you mine.
I began to take you out into the world—partly to show my superiors how I had tamed the wild man with my science, reclaimed his mind for the good of society, but mostly because I was in love with you.
As you will learn, my father was a high-ranking military man during the Great War and many of the North American Land Collective leaders owe him favors. It wasn’t really all that hard to get both of us transferred to Outpost 37 under his command.
Once the paperwork was complete, after I had finished my drug study and vitamin Z was introduced successfully into the controlled population, we were flown by helicopter to Outpost 37.
My father threw open his arms and said, “Welcome home.”
You and Dad took to each other right away, and he presided over our wedding a few weeks later when we discovered that I was pregnant.
That’s right, Leonard. You’ll be hearing from our daughter next. You love S even more than you love me, and I don’t mind that one bit, because I love you both to death.
You are a fantastic dad.
Fantastic!
And I know that your childhood wasn’t all that great—that you felt a lot of pain, and that you are in a lot of pain right now. But maybe you have to go through all that so you’ll learn just how important having a happy childhood can be, so you will provide one for our daughter.
I wish I could send you a video or a picture of you and S playing in the water with Horatio the dolphin. If you could see that, you’d know that all of the pain you have to endure to get here, where you are happy in the future, is most definitely worth it.
Even though she’s getting too old to be sleeping with us, she still falls asleep with her head on your chest every night. You kiss the top of her hair before you man the lighthouse with Dad and me.
We send out the beam for twenty minutes, and then conserve energy for twenty minutes, repeating the forty-minute cycle all night long. Three or so minutes before we switch the light back on, after our eyes have just begun to adjust to the dark, you and I always go out onto the observation deck to search for shooting stars. There are a lot these days and we’ve been keeping track of who spots the most. This year I’m beating you 934 to 812. We’re hoping to get to 1,000 each before the year ends, and it’s looking good.
And we kiss every time we spot a shooting star too.
So we’ve kissed 1,746 times on the observation deck this year alone, and many more times have we kissed elsewhere.
I like that you are so affectionate with me. You always say you’re making up for lost time and that you wished we could have met earlier in life, so that we would have been able to spend more time together.
It’s a good life, Leonard.
Hold on.
The future is better.
We have so much sex!
Your daughter is beautiful.
And my dad becomes a dad to you too—just like you always wanted.
Just hold on, okay?
Please.
Love,
Don’t-You-Dare-Call-Me-Ophelia,
A
FOURTEEN
My friend Baback is of Iranian descent, but when I first met him, he used to tell everyone he was Persian, because most American teenagers don’t know that Iran used to be Persia, and most American teens have watched enough news to hate Iran.
Back when he was a freshman, if you gave Baback some wrinkles and a salt-and-pepper beard he’d look exactly like the current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which could cause him problems, especially during patriotic times like 9/11 anniversaries, and whenever Ahmadinejad made anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American comments, which was all the time.
At the very least you would have thought that Baback definitely could be related to Ahmadinejad, that’s how much he used to look like the Iranian president.
I met Baback during freshmen orientation, right after he came to America and ended up in our school. For a year I saw him around the halls looking tiny and terrified, dressed in really formal clothes—like if you gave him a tie, he’d be a prep school kid in a uniform. He had a backpack that was bigger than him, and he was always carrying this violin case—like everywhere he went. He wouldn’t leave it in a locker, except during gym class, when he was forced to—I know because we had gym together as sophomores.