No one, Quig included, could have predicted how quickly things would change. Initially the cats got sick, and then the dogs, followed by the hobby livestock, but then a small percentage of the human population became infected, which wouldn’t have been so catastrophic had not nearly all of those unfortunate people died. The affected villages were immediately locked down, Charter epidemiologists flown in from around the world to determine what was causing the sickness (expressed in a catastrophic hemorrhagic fever) and how it had crossed multiple species barriers; while they were working, all pets and animals in the affected villages were ordered destroyed, whether sick or not, including, as has been noted, the fish in home aquariums. Families who tried to hide and save their pets were made examples of and banished to the open counties; soon enough every last animal was tendered. Naturally, panic spread around the Association (we B-Mors heard nothing about it until much later) and it wasn’t long before every Charter village in the country and many abroad decreed the same, banning all animals indefinitely.
Which then became forever.
So what happens to someone when his livelihood disappears literally overnight? It’s not the same as losing one’s job and having trouble finding another like it. The entire reason is gone, like the old-time writers who at some point found that very few people, if any, actually practiced reading anymore. But at least those writers had time, the change happening over many decades, until readers became rare enough that they were believed to be nearly extinct, like some twitchy, sensitive creatures who lingered in the twilight brush. But for Quig, it was as swift as awaking one morning to see that every appointment for a procedure or examination to come was gone, the entire calendar voided. He and his wife had some savings, plus partial equity in their condo, but his veterinary group had borrowed heavily to finance recent expansions of their staff and the call-van fleet and major office renovations. With no income and huge debts, Quig’s family had to sell their condo and move into the rental dorms normally reserved for service people, the nannies and landscapers and teachers and security/emergency workers et cetera who could never afford to own Charter real estate but wanted for obvious reasons to live inside the village. The idea was for Quig and his wife to take on whatever work could sustain them until he could figure out another sufficiently profitable line of business, and so they did, she cleaning office suites at night and he in charge of linens and towels at a health club. They borrowed money from friends for Trish’s school and music lesson fees. He applied to all of the industrial livestock corporations but got nowhere, as there was a taint upon not only veterinarians but also breeders and pet store owners, as if they had somehow allowed or even caused the outbreak.
Pix of Quig before and after the animal ban show a profound change in his appearance. Look at the man he was, reading poolside or picnicking with his wife and daughter in a park, sporting a tidy beard and moustache, the prosperous fullness to his neck and jowls like that of any respectable midlife Charter professional who knows he’s belted in and secure, and then at his drawn, clean-shaven twin (the facial hair removed along with anything else that might appear remotely sinister, down to the kitten silhouette stickers on their car), whose newly yielding posture (lowered shoulders, a forward pitch of the chin) also contained an ever-tightening coil of disillusion, this reserve of bitterness and anger that might never spring outward but was steadily grinding its way into his psyche, forever hollowing out shadowy pockets in him that he himself was unaware of. Look at his attractive but weary-faced wife, Glynnis, who could no longer afford to have her hair colored or her crow’s-feet smoothed, time catching up and passing her by right before your eyes. And yet there she is at the boutique with their gleaming, unsullied Trish being fitted with a new carmine gown and matching shoes for the coming pageant, her thumbs-up salute to the camera betraying nothing of the bellowing wonder of how any of it would be paid for. Look, at last, at the former call-van Quig converted himself, stripping the Mobile Vet lettering from the sides and refitting it as a delivery truck for a new linens business he was about to start, the blooming of his hope reflected in the shine of the freshly dressed tires, Trish and Glynnis crammed at the wheel behind him and mugging for the camera, this family for whom he would do anything, no matter how humble or retrograde, accepting whatever destiny his needed to be.
But the descent is the harshest journey, and for Charters especially.
The linens service was doing all right, but a former veterinary client who was a restaurateur was the source of most of the billings, and Quig couldn’t yet afford to go less than part-time at the health club. Glynnis took a position there, too, in the women’s locker room, and it was here that she reconnected with some members she knew from before the ban, girlfriends who commiserated with her plight. Glynnis would never accept charity and in fact none was offered, but they wondered if her husband had leftover stocks of the anesthetics they used on the pets. He did, in abundance, as there was no market anymore for them, and to her surprise her friends offered to buy the drugs at an extraordinary price.
There are illegal drugs in the Charters, of course, but they are extremely difficult to get, given the security measures, and it dawned on users that after the animal ban that certain tranquilizers might be more readily available. So it went for Glynnis, one tiny vial at a time tucked inside a rolled hand towel and placed where the cash had been left for her in the locker. Word spread and soon she was selling a dozen vials a week, and as the supply dwindled, she charged double and triple, which didn’t deter the Charter women from telling their friends. Glynnis didn’t tell her husband about what she was doing until one day he found stacks of money in the storage locker where they kept the veterinary supplies. He was furious at her — the huge risks she was taking, given the penalties for drug dealing! — but she was just as angry with him; the linens business clearly wasn’t growing and meanwhile their standard of living was steadily falling. They couldn’t see their friends much anymore, because seeing them required spending a surprising amount of money on drinks and meals and activities, something neither of them had ever paid attention to before. They had traded in their sleek silent-running sedan for a clattery old electric wagon that partly ran on diesel, a kind that mostly counties people drove. And of course, they lived in a small two-bedroom flat instead of the airy, light-filled duplex with two balconies overlooking the village reservoir. How did he think they were still eating out once a month at places like the Tomato Grove? How was Trish able to go on the weeklong school trip to Paris with her French class, and take cooking and oil painting classes? Where did he imagine the money was coming from? It surely wasn’t put on credit, as theirs had been cut off by the banks, they would find out, the day before the ban. Glynnis wasn’t ever a spoiled Charter wife, but once things changed, it seemed she just gripped tighter to whatever semblances of their former life they could manage. Up to that time, Quig was perhaps the dreamiest in the family, the one who passionately but unassumingly went about his work with animals while Glynnis and Trish were in perpetual motion with the packed agenda of a full Charter life, his former partners the ones who arranged the marketing and expansion of the veterinary business and liked to be taken out for golfing and wine-themed dinners by their suppliers. Quig always chose to stay home with his family, and if he traveled, it was in one of the call-vans for work, when he never bothered to explore the shops and facilities of other Charter villages but instead called home to say he would be back in time to go out for dinner.