There was a time — not as long ago as one would like to think — when people of Reg’s appearance would have been talked about openly, right in their faces, as if they didn’t have eyes or ears. Maybe there would be a young mother and her not-purely-from-the-originals kids strolling through the park, and the mere sight of them might elicit a comment by some busybody auntie to her friend, They can still breathe through such flat little noses! or Even the winter sun makes them darker, or And such an attractive woman! Such talk didn’t much disrupt the atmosphere of whatever park, or mall, or facility lunchroom, and though not applauded or admired, it was certainly, like some extra measure of mugginess on an otherwise pleasant day, not found to be intolerable.
When we were much younger, and as yet unaware of certain aspects of B-Mor, there was an uncle of ours who lived in one of the clan row houses on the block. His name was Kellen Yip. He and his wife, Virginia, didn’t have a family of their own — they wanted children but were unable to reproduce — and for a while he often played with us on free-day or after his shift in our street contests of tag and soccer. Uncle Kellen was our favorite among those uncles and aunts (really they were second and third older cousins) who treated us fondly enough but saw us mostly as a pack of pesky sweaty-heads to be fed and duly shushed off. He was a slight man, perhaps no more than fifty-five kilos fully dressed, but he was fast and athletic, and to view him now is to realize how adept he was at gearing himself down to our skill level. He could coax the ball from foot to knee to shoulder like it was a circus animal, and if we showed mettle and were aggressive and quick enough, he’d leave the ball vulnerable so we could win it. What a feeling that was! What a surge of elation and pride and maybe, too, an arrogance tinged with that slightest instinctual contempt for the defeated, at least until he mussed our hair and trumpeted our names as we streaked away.
Afterward he would sit on the stoop with us and “talk story” about olden times while Auntie Virginia poured cups of iced tea to go with the boiled peanuts she’d bring out in a white plastic bowl. Through the muted crackling of the dampened shells, he’d describe how things were for the originals, who were, of course, before his time but whom he’d heard about from his great-grandparents. His stories weren’t exactly the ones you studied in school or watched vids of at the historical museum, the oft-documented stuff about how by dint of their collective will and the discipline of their leaders in keeping everyone focused on the job the originals transformed the desperate nothingness about them.
Uncle Kellen was a truck driver who transported fresh B-Mor goods to Charter villages and from those collected any unsold produce plus second-hand clothing and furniture and other discards to sellers out in the counties. He would take a big gulp of his cold drink and wipe his brow with the back of his hand and you could see the droplets of perspiration sparkling in his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, just like one of us but old, and he might begin by asking one of us an ordinary question about B-Mor history such as who was the first original to open a private business, to which we eager-to-please students would shout the answer (Wu Gangshur!), and then what he sold (kitchen and bathroom plumbing supplies!), but then he would remind us that there were, in fact, numerous existing businesses when the originals arrived, businesses run by the smattering of natives who had stayed on, whose deeds and leases to their properties were unilaterally voided and reassigned to the (then nascent) directorate.
But there was no real population to speak of anyway, one of the more stridently confident of us might have said. Those shops were failing!
You should know, he answered, eyebrows rising, that they were failing for a very long time.
We asked what he meant by this, and Uncle Kellen explained that while it was true that the existing city was an impoverished husk of a society, with just enough inhabitants to fill the schools and ride the buses and, indeed, shop in the stores, there were schools and buses and small businesses, there was a police force on patrol, with a governmental body overseeing it all (if not terribly well); and that this society, barely clinging to life, was still stubbornly doing so, and might have improved itself if given the opportunity our originals had to retool and create a B-Mor of their own. Where most of them ended up instead were the open counties.
Not all of the native citizens left after the arrival of the originals, Uncle Kellen told us. Living around the old hospital complex was a sizable population who had refused a relocation scheme that would send them out to an abandoned university campus in the western part of the state. An attempt was made to evict them by force, but after dozens of people including children were killed in an apartment building that somehow caught fire during the operation, it was decided to let them remain, though no more public utilities would be provided to them.
The Parkies! we sneered, which is how they were identified in our history class materials, owing to their subsequent annexation of a large city park. For nearly a generation they were entrenched in their flawed Eden. There was a brief but memorable study unit on the period, with close-up footage of the initial protests and ensuing riots and eventually a sprouted tent city. The Parkies contended that because there were no jobs, and they’d been cut off from city services, that they needed the land for growing food and collecting firewood and drilling water wells, though the historical record shows that by the end of their occupation all the trees were felled and the ponds had become craters of muck and the plots were either misused or neglected and were producing nothing. They’d even tried farming shrimp but had the wrong equipment and token assistance from the authorities, and they only succeeded in fouling their water.
Now it is a typical park again, very popular on fair-weather free-days.
But do you realize how difficult it is to grow fruits and vegetables outside? Uncle Kellen said to us. We forget about how ideally engineered our grow facilities are. No pests or bad weather. Uncontaminated, nutrient-rich media. And all of you now trained from an early age in the techniques of maximized production. It is only natural for you to believe that we have achieved mastery.
And you believe we haven’t, Uncle?
He snorted, snacking on his peanuts, being quiet in the way he often was, not quite responding to our questions, clearly not for lack of views but because he wanted us to formulate our own opinions rather than automatically inscribe ourselves with his, which we would have done, immediately, happily.
That’s not what’s important, he said.
All these years later we’re still not certain what he meant. Perhaps this is why we remember him so well. You can be affected by a person because of something particular they said or did but sometimes it is how a person was, a manner of being, that gets most deeply absorbed, and prompts you to revisit certain periods of your life with an enhanced perspective, flowing forward right up to now.
A couple of free-days afterward, we knocked on his bedroom door on the top floor (row-house attic rooms are always the smallest, and thus go to couples) and Auntie Virginia answered and told us he was away driving, a rare instance for Uncle Kellen on a free-day; sometimes there were shortages or maybe a big occasion when a village required an emergency shipment of goods, and someone had to go. Like most everybody else, Uncle Kellen was a hard worker and devoted to whatever might benefit B-Mor, so it was no surprise that he volunteered. The next time she said he had a chest cold and was napping, which seemed like bad luck, but when on the following free-day we noticed Auntie Virginia making a cup of tea in the kitchen and we bounded upstairs to their door knocking and calling to no answer, despite sounds of movement within, we had to wonder if we had somehow disappointed or offended him. We accused one another of being rude to Uncle, of haughtiness and overfamiliarity, of accidentally kicking him too often in the shins, and would probably have gone on berating ourselves had the directorate not posted a message for certain citizens to report to the central clinic for testing.