A month before, just around the time when Uncle receded, all of us B-Mors had gone in to be evaluated for a certain marker for liver disease, but this time it was only certain people being summoned, the listing of their names by clan flashed on every screen in the settlement, hand and home, facility and mall. Of course, it was casually known who might be mixed, but to that point it had never been officially designated. It was a very small percentage, in any case, and we were young and wouldn’t have really cared about such things, but to our surprise there was one person in our extended clan on the list, and it was Auntie Virginia.
She was the last person you’d think was possessed of native blood. She married into our clan, yes, but she was very pale, paler, in fact, than most of us, who tend to be ruddy and darken quickly in the sun. She was on the short side, too, and spoke with a faint New China accent (like many older B-Mors did back then), and Uncle Kellen had known her since their first school days, her parents and siblings all derived from the originals, or at least appearing like they were. So what happened? Maybe the directorate has that information somewhere, the evidentiary gel lines. We shall never know. What we do know is that Uncle Kellen was hardly seen after that, at least for a while. In the mornings he skipped the household’s breakfast and went to the truck transport garage, maybe picking up something to eat on the way. He put in for overnight runs, which by nature were potentially dangerous, having to negotiate so much open counties land. And on free-days both he and Auntie Virginia rarely came down the stairs, and if they did, they scooted out as if they were late for a shift. Where did they go? Maybe to a back booth in a tea parlor, or to a big park, where they could walk about anonymously.
One day our cousins said our uncle and auntie didn’t come down to breakfast or even pass by, and when they were sent upstairs to make sure everything was all right, they found their door unlocked, their night table lamp left on. The tiny, low-ceilinged room was as tidy as always, the corners of the laced bedspread on their double bed tucked in smooth and tight. The only thing different was that their stand-up wardrobe was empty, the shelf cleared of toiletries and other personal items. At the garage they told us that Uncle Kellen had appeared at work that morning with his wife along, a practice that isn’t unheard of on especially long hauls, if not recommended for reasons of safety. But after their first stop they didn’t check in and there were no further pings from their locator. They were gone.
Each day for the next couple of weeks we awaited their return, we children deciding on our own to post a lookout at the end of the block even if we could only do so after school or on free-days (as if they would reappear only when we were ready). While we sat about at the corner benches gaming and watching vids, we traded opinions on why Uncle and Auntie had decided to leave. Sure, at a free-day gathering some members of the clan who drank too much beer maybe uttered some unkind words after Auntie Virginia was listed in that second call-up; maybe she was asked to excuse herself from a cousin’s wedding, not because of her presence per se but the needless commotion it might cause within the other clan; maybe there was something amiss at the mall, where no new policies were instituted but some shops displayed the list of names, bannering it below their daily promotions.
The truth, however, is that when you saw something like the listing, you began to look for it elsewhere, too. And after a while, when you didn’t see it, instead of not noticing or being relieved you might feel oddly unsettled, like something was off in your own belly, a pang of nausea that made you realize you were, in fact, a lot hungrier than you knew, which is why you were impatient with your spouse or friend, which is why you snapped at your child.
Was all this intended, somehow engineered? Again, there were no newly instituted B-Mor rules, restrictions, covenants. Not even the Recommendations of Practice that are periodically general-messaged, such as parking one’s scooter at a forty-five-degree angle to the curb (which are never, in fact, recommendations). Nobody was unduly demoted or fired. No one was dispatched. And a similar listing was never again posted.
It was only a relative handful of B-Mors who decided to leave, including Uncle Kellen and Auntie Virginia. After a few more weeks passed and we didn’t hear from them and knew we never would, one of our older cousins packed up his and his wife’s things and, without asking permission, moved upstairs to the vacant attic room. That was all it took. One phase had given way to another, the realm shifting without the least tremor. The new occupants stayed there until they had too many children to live in the tiny room, by which time Uncle Kellen and Auntie Virginia were just another faded memory.
These days we accept the various legacies of our corpus, from the time of the natives and originals right up to now, and live together in harmony as long as we don’t linger too much on those legacies, which we have all agreed to do. We don’t want trouble. Though looking back on it now, there were more tussles and even outright fights at school, when before there had been hardly any; or how certain cliques one had not really noticed in the lunchrooms and playgrounds and food courts seemed suddenly and sharply manifest; or how over the years as we grew up, certain, more mixed clans were more regularly pairing off, which is how someone like Reg can look like he does, the scantest fractions combining in that reversed, serendipitous math.
So, did the same math deliver Reg to be C-free? They tell us every destiny is ordered and yet this one, concerning our Reg and our Fan, seems intent on exhibiting properties as apparent and ungraspable as the smoke from a mystic’s joss stick. Where will the ribboning trail of this pair ultimately lead? How far and high can we rise?
This is the question girding all other questions.
Fan left B-Mor for love, but perhaps not for love alone. About the neighborhoods there is a steadily growing lore about their relationship, sundry anecdotes about the game parlors they frequented and the eateries they liked best and how, when the proprietor wasn’t looking, Reg might puckishly reach over the glass partition at the gelateria and poke a spoon into one of the tubs to get Fan a free taste. There is also talk of their more intimate moments, how they sat on a blanket in the cloistered lovers’ glade of the nearest park along with the other young couples sharing music through their earbuds and, of course, nuzzling and kissing. They were in the first blush of true romance and being sixteen and nineteen you would say it must be so that they were also sneaking off to the mini-inns. But they didn’t, amazing to say, which the mini-inn records show; people who knew them corroborate this, insisting that Fan and Reg were happy to show each other their affections in the park, in the café, on the periphery of busy clan gatherings. There was no way they could be alone together in their respective houses with so many relatives ever present, and thus by all accounts they were chaste.
It certainly seems they were content, and yet at some point the pair consummated their love. This must have been Fan’s initiation, for Reg was a young man who blessedly could not view his present station as anything but highly satisfactory. He was not in essence desirous. It should have been our expectation that Fan was the opposite, if not obviously so. She was the one who arranged their free-day itineraries, she was the packer of the drinks and snacks, she the one directionally leading their scooters, with Reg winged behind her like a potted young palm. And we won’t draw up some image of the two of them entwined the very night before he disappeared to illustrate the fact that Fan departed B-Mor in search of the father of her child.