The smaller of the two small men, seizing your arm above the elbow, says that an order has come down and that they must establish you, before 8:30 P.M., in a used-adult orphanage — upon penalty of demotion for them and unappealable eviction for you. If you don’t cooperate, they will ransack your cottage and throw you out on the street with your musty belongings.
Why now? you ask. Neither stooge manifests a glimmer of humanity. After all, you’ve been an orphan — as they insist on terming your condition — since you were a vigorous fifty-nine. They should show some respect.
The man holding your bicep smirks. That’s why they call it a Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage, he says. You get into one not because you’ve lost a parent. Your last living child has to die.
Jesus! blurts the other man. That goes against all our training.
You say nothing. You feel as if someone has opened a trap in your stomach and shoved in a package of wet cement. You sink to your knees, but not all the way because the smaller small man refuses to release your arm.
You feel you’ve just climbed twelve sets of stairs. Someone has injected stale helium into your head, inflating it to beach-ball size.
O God, you cry. O God, O God.
Even to yourself you sound like a scared puppy, not a woman. Your only living offspring, one of only two who bore your genes, has just died in the interminable War on Worldwide Wickedness, probably in a snowy province of R—.
Because Elise and her earlier-lost brother died childless years after Mick, your husband, passed away, you have passed from a state of natural, late-life orphanhood to the sad, wrong-way orphancy of the issue-shorn. Only someone similarly bereft can know your devastation.
Put your stuff in two plastic duffels, the cruel stooge says: Only two.
Please don’t make me leave my home, you beg of him. Just give me a knock-me-out so I can die.
Your lightheadedness persists: your dead daughter swims before your eyes like a lovely human swan, but the rock in your stomach keeps you from taking pleasure in her shock-generated image.
Against your will, you must say goodbye to Elise forever, as you once did to Mick and later to your darling son Brice.
Eventually, despite your protests, you cram clothing and toiletries into a duffel bag, and some file discs and image cubes into another. Then the cruel stooge and his only slightly kinder partner escort you out to the van for transport to Vinegar Peace.
Mr. Weevil, director of this Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage, looks maybe twenty-six, with slicked-back hair you’ve seen before on leading men in old motion pictures, but he greets you personally in the rotunda-like foyer, points you to a chair, and triggers a video introduction to the place. His head, projected on a colossal screen at gallery level, spiels in a monotone:
The death of your last surviving child (good riddance) in the War on Worldwide Wickedness makes you too valuable (unfit) to continue residing among the elder denizens (constipated old fools) of your life-help cottage (costly codger dump). So we’ve brought you here to shelter (ware house) you until our Creator calls you to an even more glorious transcendent residency above (blah-blah, blah-blah).
The talking head of Mr. Weevil — whose living self watches with you, his hands clasped above his coccyx — remarks that you can stroll inside the orphanage anywhere, but that you can never leave — on pain of solo confinement (for a first violation) or instant annihilation (for any later misstep).
The building has many mansions (rooms), viz., 1) Cold Room, 2) Arboretum, 3) Mail Room, 4) Guest Suite, 5) Chantry, 6) Sleep Bay, 7) Refectory, 8) Furnace Room, and 9) Melancholarium. Orphans will, and should, visit all nine rooms at some point, for every room will disclose its significance to its visitors, and these elucidations will charge any resident’s stay with meaning.
Don’t be alarmed, the director’s talking head concludes, if I haven’t mentioned a room you view as necessary. The existence of restrooms, closets, offices, kitchens, servant quarters, attics, basements, secret nooks, and so forth, goes without saying.
A young woman dressed like the men who snatched you from your lodgings takes your elbow — gently — and escorts you from the rotunda. And as Mr. Weevil’s body glides smoothly away, his face fades from the gallery-level screen.
Where are we going? you ask the woman.
She smiles as she might at an infant mouthing a milk bubble.
Where are the other residents? Will I have my own room?
That the director included a dormitory in his list of mansions suggests otherwise, but you have to ask. Still, you have begun to think you’re in a reeducation camp of some sort. Your stomach tightens even as you tighten your hold on the duffels, which now feel as heavy as old lead sash weights.
Miss, you plead. Why am I here? Where are we going?
She stops, stares you in the eye, and says, Oldsters who’ve lost children in the war often make trouble. Hush. It isn’t personal. We’re sheltering all orphaned adults in places like this, for everybody’s benefit. You’ll meet other orphans soon, but now Mr. Weevil’d like you to visit the refrigitorium.
What?
The Cold Room. Relax, Ms. K—. It’s nice. It’s a surprise, sort of.
It’s a surprise, all right, and no sort of about it. Your escort has abandoned you inside the Cold Room, which drones like a refrigerator but sparkles all about you as if you were its moving hub. Ice coats the walls in ripples and scales, each its own faintly glowing color.
Effigies of frozen liquid occupy shallow niches about the walls, and you soon find that three of these, interleaved with simulacra of unfamiliar persons, commemorate your dead: Mick, Brice, and Elise.
As if over a skin of crushed ping-pong balls, you totter gingerly to each beloved ice figure in turn.
Tears spontaneously flow, only to harden on the planes of your face. You clutch your gut and bend in agony before each image of loss. You sob into the chamber’s dull hum, stupidly hopeful that no one’s wired it for video or sound, and that your pain has no commiserating spies.
You’ve done this before. Must you indulge again? Have you no shame?
Over time your tears reliquefy, and the ice effigies glisten more wetly. The Cold Room has grown imperceptibly warmer. The ice on its walls stays solid, but the statues — by design or accident, but more likely the former — begin to shimmer and melt. Do they stand on hotplates or coil about intricate helices of invisible heating wires? Whatever the case, they dissolve. They go. And there’s no reversing the process.
So much water collects — from your tear ducts and the desolidifying statues — that puddles gather in the floor. Even the ceiling drips.
If you stay here out of a misbegotten desire to honor your treasured dead, you’ll wind up drenched, ill, and soul-sick.
Freezing, sweating, weeping, you back away. You must.
You have a slick card in hand: a floor diagram of the Vinegar Peace Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage. YOU ARE HERE, it asserts in a box next to the blueprint image of the Cold Room, BUT YOU COULD BE HERE.