Yet there are some needling issues, even aside from the case of Fan, such as the fact that the less durable, discretionary-type goods in the shops have become stretches to the typical budget, and are often nearly unaffordable. Even our own products have become much costlier, the price of a single five-hundred-gram perch equal to what two cost just five years ago. Or that the maximum stay period in the health clinics is effectively one work cycle (six days), no matter the condition or needs of the patient, as the family is now responsible for the fees past that time, fees that are well beyond most any B-Mor clan’s capacity to pay.
An example of this would be the recent experience of the Rivera-Deng family, who occupy not one but two row houses down near the B-Mor waste treatment plant. They are not an especially large family, but because they run a popular aboveground trinkets and bubble tea shop (the subterranean-level shops are almost without exception owned, if never operated, by Charter investors), they could afford to purchase the leasehold on the adjacent house when it became available. They are considered rich by B-Mor standards, though what else this wealth truly buys them is not at all apparent. Harvey Rivera-Deng might show up at a wake in his flecked suit jacket with a contrasting pocket square but we aren’t inclined to offer any notice, much less compliments. He stands stout and flashy in his finery but clutches the same plastic buffet plate as everybody else, jostling to get to the snow-pea shoots before they’re all gone. And this is how it should be. But when his wife, a portly, ever-smiling, sweetly damp-necked woman named Ruby, took seriously ill recently, eventually passing, the feeling we had can only be one of steady, drenching sorrow.
Ruby was not the most healthful person in B-Mor, a longtime diabetic who liked her sweet cakes and scallion fritters a bit too well, washing everything down with creamy bubble fruit teas. One afternoon she collapsed in the back of the shop; one of her kidneys had failed, which apparently led to a stroke that paralyzed one side of her body. She was rushed to the clinic but then suffered another stroke before being stabilized, which left her unable to speak. Otherwise her mind was intact, and Harvey and the rest of the Rivera-Deng clan told her not to worry, that they would take care of her at home, but everyone could see that she would need a dialysis machine to bolster her remaining, chronically weakened kidney, a machine that a physician’s assistant told her (when she queried him via a weak left-handed scribble of “$$?”) would cost an astronomical sum to purchase or else lease for an indefinite period.
No doubt you can imagine what happened next. Harvey made the necessary arrangements to transport Ruby home, machine and all, despite the absurdity of the finances; it would be like some counties peddler buying a Charter condo with only her pedi-bike rickshaw and its junky contents as collateral. There is no leaping of worlds in this world. Except for the rare case, the distance is too great. But of course, Harvey was only thinking about how much he loved his wife. He was only thinking about the details of her care. He set up their tiny bedroom to be hers alone, even rewiring (he was a facilities electrician before retirement) the bedside outlet to be on a circuit that would instantly feed off a generator if the main power cycled down in the middle of the night, as it often does. He requested a change of his children’s work shifts at the grow facility and water plant, so that they would stagger instead of align. He was even putting up for sale his and Ruby’s fancier shoes and clothes on a B-Mor weblist, even if few of us could ever afford them, when he got word from the clinic that Ruby had died during the night of multiple major organ failure. He was going to bring her home that day and instead had to view her sheeted body already rolled out to the corridor, the tented, plumped mound truly the saddest sight of his life. What had happened? They figured out that she herself shut down the dialysis machine for most of each day’s session, only switching it back on just before the nurse returned, ensuring her own doom.
And while self-sacrifice is a hallmark of life here in B-Mor, one of our original and most cherished mores, is there anyone who does not flinch whenever he or she hears of yet another act such as Ruby’s, which seem to grow more numerous each quarter, each year? In the old days, with our first generations, people would relieve their households all the time, but those were mostly the very old, ultrastubborn, salty pioneers who were too proud to become any kind of burden, their gestures as much prods to the community as discharges of their respective families.
Yet one looks around, and not just at the more flagrant cases. Visits to the health clinics were once unlimited, a yearly exam for every citizen an option as well, and in this way Charter people had very little on us, save that most of them go to private offices and see the same physicians each time. Our clinics are staffed by Charter doctors (if the youngest ones, often fresh out of residency), who rotate through monthly, but the nurses and physician’s assistants are constant and are B-Mor residents, and it’s these people who tender the real care. You could stop in and get your thumb stitched up (a regular occurrence for our indomitable fish filleters); you could pick up a bottle of pills for impotence or anxiety; you could get a quick session of chiropractic or acupunctural therapy, and for the most part people availed themselves of these things without abusing the privilege. In fact, we often reminded ourselves of our fortunate circumstance with the saying “Save some noodles for tomorrow’s lunch.”
Now there are so many new rules that make it all very complicated. The doors are still open twenty-four/seven but for life-threatening emergencies only; the rest of us with broken fingers or kidney stones have to wait it out until the next morning, an emergency-care doctor making the final determination. And when you do check in at the clinic, everything that has happened to you and that you’ve ever been prescribed or treated with pops up on the screen like always, but now some lines flash when a certain frequency is exceeded, and if you want that particular prescription or treatment, you’ll have to pay a fee beyond the usual token fee to receive it, an additional cost that is sometimes not so small.
When did this change? you ask, though of course nobody at the desk knows. It did change, and now is, these “reforms” from this point forward in force, and the result is that you may forgo that diagnostic X-ray, you might take only every other blood pressure pill if that’s tolerable, you will decide to amble another season on that arthritic hip in the hopes that it will somehow, someday, kindly warm. Really, every person we know has had to make such compromises, most not leading to horrific consequences, but the truth is you can’t help but wonder where this will lead, what new reforms will be instituted next year, or in ten, and to what extent the quality of life in B-Mor might someday come to resemble the conditions outside.
They say that with the economy stuck so long in the doldrums, even the Charter villages have had to institute certain cost-cutting measures, like no more free full-body scans each quarter for everyone over age thirty, though some of our more cynical citizens contend this is simply what the directorate and the Charters want us to believe. Even if this is true, what of it? How can it matter what goes on inside those gates? You might as well worry about the life cycle of the nearest star. A twinkling in the heavens, rightful but brief. We must remind ourselves of what the reality is within those lovely confines, that along with the neatly paved streets and the spotless schools and the fancy shops offering uncontaminated goods from all over the globe comes the fact that very little is guaranteed for a Charter person, if anything at all, and that one must continually work and invest and have enough money to sustain a Charter lifestyle or else leave.