Выбрать главу

And it cannot matter that outwardly nothing has yet changed. Maybe we don’t even expect things to. Maybe we know that next year it will be deemed that 0.75 percent is the allowed fraction. We may not soon be heeded, but at least we can feel the long-held rumbles, now open-throated, our lungs warmed and aching with this special use that we know may be poignant only to us. There was so little of this voicing before, and now that there is much more, we see it takes as many forms as there are people, though some don’t easily align. There are instances of overexuberance, when someone is so stimulated by this unfettered exhibition that he loses all perspective and control. Take the case of one B-Mor fellow, who, after receiving what he felt was poor care at the health clinic, set up a camera in the staff restroom and took vids of the nurses and PAs, posting them for all, and going further by captioning each with the names and house addresses of these supposedly rotten individuals, who are of course our brethren. While we well know that our clinics are not the finest centers, and that the staffs can often seem indifferent to their charges, there is no excusing this fellow for trying to expose and humiliate them, something we have all darkly considered (not by using surreptitious vids, of course) but would never dream of enacting. And yet this B-Mor did, taking on the mantle of witness, prosecutor, judge, and jury, and executing in an instant the full bore of his malice that was unleashed, in great part, by this new and wide enthrallment.

The feeling he was free.

We will bear his blight, and others, trying to understand them as what naturally attends any plenitude, the rise of certain kinds of pests. But what gives us pause is what also may be happening to the rest of us, who have not gone to any extremes and never will and yet are differently engaged, not ultimately self-celebrating and self-aggrandizing like our health center muckraker but oriented in a way we haven’t quite been before. Are our thoughts angling as much toward ourselves as to our household or clan? Have we become as primary as the collective rest? Such indication may be in what we have begun to hear and see of the concern for Reg. B-Mor remains focused and worried about his whereabouts and welfare; there are growing calls for official information; there was even a lie-in at one of the main intersections of the settlement, in which a thoroughly organized group of younger people spelled out his name on the asphalt with their bodies, causing a jam that took some hours to undo, an inconvenience for sure but one we abided.

There are other Reg notations that don’t at first blush appear out of the ordinary. Newer tags, hand done, that only slightly revise what we’ve seen before, such as:

FREE ME, REG.

I MISS REG.

And amazingly, REG ME, which must have inspired the now popular eponymous song, whose lyrics, quirkily charming as they may be, are remarkable mostly in how much they reveal the fascination the singer has with herself. She goes on and on, and by song’s end, we can’t help but think only of her sitting at the mall café, her tea getting cold, waiting for a boy who might never come. We end up losing Reg all the more. Hey, that’s the point, some say, though it doesn’t feel in the least convincing on that score. And although the majority of us are still fixed on Reg’s happy images about the walls and streets, on the shapely simplicity of his name, on the hope that he will return to us unchanged and whole, it seems some of us have already skipped a few beats forward with no wearing effects at all.

What stands besides is that there has been nothing of Reg. Nothing at all, if you don’t count the wild rumors, which have him simultaneously manning a handscreen accessories kiosk in D-Troy, and gravely injured while attempting to escape from wherever the directorate was detaining him, and currently living among us after being cosmetically and mentally altered, which set off a brief period in which younger men of his build and height were regularly corralled by people absolutely sure it was he. Perhaps you find yourself trailing a gangly figure at the park, the kid jogging with a friend, a ball cap on his head, tufts of curly hair poking out the sides. You actually run alongside for fifty meters or so, eavesdropping on their breathy dialogue in the hope of gleaning some telltale remark or tendency that can’t be surgically erased — the way the bridge of his nose lightly twitches as he laughs, how he makes a tiny throaty rumbling urr if you startle him when he’s on his ladder — and while there is no definitive display, you can’t help but see him locked away behind that boy’s pale face and greenish yellow-flecked eyes, and reach for his pointy elbow. The boy sees this and swerves, sneering as though he’s seen a diseased cur, and then he and his friend bolt down a diverging path, giddily cracking up as if they know they just barely got away.

Which makes us think all the more that if we stop looking he’ll never emerge. It’s in the tilting and thrashing that we wangle our luck. Otherwise, as a wise man once said, we’ll be bound in shallows and in miseries. For the truth is that we can’t help but envision what may well come; for what happens when there are no more songs and postings about Reg or Fan, when all there is remaining are weather-faded portraits and scribbles on the walls? Will we look upon these as our originals did when they tried to make out the ghostly hatch of the old-fashioned firm names and advertisements for things like tooth powder on the sides of the derelict buildings and idly marvel at what times those must have been? Will we have forgotten how impassioned we became, along with the details of the cause?

Or will this capacity be a part of us now, inform from this point forward how we view these long runway-straight streets, these heartening low-shouldered homes, and our modest and well-meaning brethren, who have worked assiduously all these years in the grow houses and tanks and treatment ponds, hardly ever looking up? “B-Mor being B-Mor” is how the saying goes, but whenever someone repeats that now, there’s a rankling in the belly that makes you want to grab the person by the ears and bark, No more!

In fact, this became a refrain during the West B-Mor playground rally regarding the new promotion standard and led to a proposal of a general strike to protest it. Whether a work stoppage will really occur remains to be seen, as it would be a most serious turn, for it’s something that’s never happened in our history, not even when the directorate shut down two very busy health clinics for budgetary reasons or raised the minimum occupancy number for the older row houses after a second boomlet in our population.