The Work: a story

Paper. Finally, clean paper. Or at least, the back of it is clean. The front is…well, if you’re reading this, you can flip it over and see. I managed to steal this from the hallway between my cell and the bathroom. I doubt anyone will miss it; there are hundreds of them, posted haphazardly all over that hallway, the building – everywhere, I wouldn’t be surprised to know.
Haphazardly. I like that word. I wonder why no one uses it. You see the word “hazard” everywhere, mostly on these obnoxious posters: “Copy is safe. Creation is hazard. Please report all instances of creation and spontaneity to the Department.”
The Department. Not the Department of Normalcy. Not the Department of Equality. Not even the Department of Copy. Just the Department. Everyone knows what they mean, anyway.
Obnoxious. There’s another good word. He taught me that word, “obnoxious.” Used it to describe the posters before I ever did. He-
 This is rubbish. Wasting paper recording every thought that runs through my head – I’m going insane, aren’t I? Well, what should they expect, putting me in a blank, empty cell with nothing to do all day but mull things over in my brain until it explodes… Out of all the ways I could die, I never considered boredom. Now there’s a thought…I apologize, reader. If there is a reader. They may burn this, you know. Like they did so much else. Maybe you’re the one tasked to burn it. Maybe this paper is crinkling and curling and blackening as you read. If so, please, if you read nothing else on this page, read this: CREATION IS LIFE. DO NOT TRUST THE DEPARTMENT. And if, by some lucky chance, this paper is not in imminent danger of becoming ash, perhaps you would be so kind as to make sure it stays that way. Hide it, if you must. Protect it, if you can. And read it, if you please. Because this is my story.

 I first met Adam out on the streets near my apartment block. He wasn’t hard to notice - a messy mop of red easily stands out among the masses of neat, black haircuts. The Department, at that time (was it only seventeen years ago?), had already begun encouraging parents to genetically tailor their babies to “desired” specifications. Even if they hadn’t, the parents would have, anyway, to “protect” their children from social ridicule. You were stared at if you were too different.
 I had been born almost perfect - straight, thin, black hair; smooth, unmarked, pale skin; average height, average weight, average build. The only things that hadn’t worked out as planned were my eyes. To my parents’ horror and the doctor’s shame, the eye color gene had failed to switch on properly, and I was born with green-grey eyes, instead of brown. The government issued my family free colored contact lenses as compensation, but by the time I was old enough to wear them, the damage had already been done. The other kids were already calling me “Green Girl,” instead of my government-issued name, Mary (parent-given names insinuated that parents had created their children, and were thus quickly outlawed early on). “ “Green Girl”…not a clever nickname, but then again, I cannot blame them. They weren’t brought up to be clever - cleverness was a sign of creation. And that was bad. It hadn’t been outlawed at the time, but it was still bad.
Adam was indeed very bad. His hair - bright red and curly - screamed of badness. All the instructors were afraid of him. He would stand in front of the equality class and, instead of reading out our assigned essays on about the wonders of equality, would illuminate the vast history of inequality and the struggle for equal rights. He brought to life the Civil War, the Holocaust, and the suffragists - things that the teachers had never taught and sometimes things that they themselves had never heard of. And he never read these from his document processor - not that our document processors held anything other than the pre-written, pre-approved essays that we were told to read aloud each week. He simply spoke out of his own head. None of us knew how to do that. None of us knew how to produce a single non-conversational sentence from our own heads without long, arduous thought, never mind entire lectures on history. We weren’t taught history at school - at least, not the kind that Adam knew. The school’s job wasn’t to teach new things - it was to instruct us in old ways. We only knew as much history as we needed to know, to reinforce our beliefs in Copy. And Adam was most definitely not Copy.
All the other students - and the teachers - would watch him with fascination and fear. Make no mistake, no one interrupted him whenever he was talking, but no one talked back, either. Teachers never spoke of him, not even to complain to higher-ups – perhaps they were afraid that this would be seen as their fault. Or perhaps, like me, some secret part of them was not repulsed like the rest, but fascinated. Maybe having non-Copy eyes made you sympathize more with other non-Copys - when one is fourteen years old, one will make odd connections.
Either way, one evening, when I saw him in the empty street outside my home intently studying stray rocks, I worked up the courage to step outside and ask, “What are you doing?”
He looked up at me, and then glanced up and down the street before whispering, “Looking for something to write with.” His voice echoed harshly in the empty street, bouncing off the poster-covered alleyways.
“To what with?” I asked, stepping closer and lowering my voice. Whatever it was he had been doing, it was definitely non-Copy.
“To write with.” He continued to pick up rocks for examination, as if I didn’t exist.
“What is ‘write’? You mean, to turn to the right with, or what?”
He finally turned his eyes on me, with a look of irritation. “Keep your voice down, will you?”
“I will, I will.” I was directly in front of him now; I bent to pick up a rock, and asked, “So what is this ‘write’?”
He looked into my eyes questioningly, guardedly. Always my eyes. They were what everyone stared at. But he was looking into them, not at them. It was something altogether new – and uncomfortable.
 Without warning, he dropped his rocks and grabbed my face with both hands. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked me, in the most intense fourteen-year-old voice I had ever heard.
“Well...yes, I suppose so.”
“Because if you tell, I’m doomed. My whole family is doomed. Perhaps the whole town will be doomed. And you’ll be doomed - they’ll lock us all up in a place where we’ll never be allowed anything to do or make or be, and all we’ll do is sit there and rot and die. You understand?”
I tried nodding, but he held my head too tightly for that. So I whispered, “Yes.”
That first evening was the beginning of my lessons in creation. He had me help him find rocks - there was a specific kind he had been looking for, one that left dark traces on anything they were rubbed against. After we had gathered a handful of these, we took them back to his house, and he introduced me to his parents - both of whom looked very non-Copy, too. They seemed surprised to see me. And they were even more surprised when he asked them if I could learn to write. They looked at each other, and then at me, then at Adam, and then back at each other. Adam’s father asked him, “Adam, may I have a talk with you about this in the other room?” They walked out silently and closed the door behind them. His mother stayed behind and talked to me. I can’t remember what exactly we talked about, but looking back, I think it was some kind of test. And I passed.
The first few months were sheer bliss - Adam taught me to write the letters I had read all my life without knowing where they came from, and words that I had never read, words like “radiant,” “imaginative,” and “leapfrog.” Beautiful words that rolled off your tongue like water, and tasted sweeter than fresh air. He taught me to string the letters into words, and words into sentences. And he taught me to form those sentences to express my thoughts and feelings, as he did so easily. He even gave me a notebook in which to write them down - a small booklet he had made from ripped-up posters and a piece of string. And soon, we were writing stories - first biographical, describing our lives, and parables, and eventually, epic adventures in which the two of us battled the demons and dragons of the school, Copy, the Department, whatever we felt like.
We found an abandoned housing facility on the quiet side of town, papered up the broken windows, and made it our hideout - our “home for stories,” he called it - filling it with stacks and stacks of torn posters, napkins, boxes, anything we could scrawl on. We even wrote on the walls. And always, always, there was a steadily growing pile of rocks that we collected to write with. Adam called them pencils, for some reason – I thought the name was silly. And one day, when we were both fifteen, I found, tacked to a part of my corner of the room, a shred of paper which read, “I love you.” I stared at it for a long, long time before taking it down and putting it into the folds of my notebook.
I never learned what that word, “love,” meant...and I didn’t want to ask. I knew, from the way it had been written, from the care with which the scrap had been ripped into a neat rectangle, from the way Adam smiled at me that day, that it was something sacred.
Our group, which had started out as just the two of us, grew into five, and then twelve. Most of them were children and teenagers, like us, but a few of them were older. Caleb, for example, was a twenty-seven-year old man with long, braided hair and a penchant for sketching. When he was seventeen, he had overheard his teachers discussing putting him in the Institution, so he ran away from home and eventually found us. We, after a heated debate, had agreed to offer him temporary asylum – a spare mattress in the corner of our hideout. When we returned the next morning, he had filled the corner – and the entire length of an adjacent wall – with a swirling, eye-defying mural. Needless to say, we decided to keep him.
Caleb was the only one who lived in the house, although any one of us would gladly have taken that position as well. We all knew that doing so would raise suspicion, so none of us said anything about it, beyond a longing glance back into the room before we left each night. We never missed a chance to be there – straight after school, we would arrive secretively in twos and threes, set our things down, and get to work. Some of us were artists, others writers, and still others were performers. We had been cautious about the amount of noise we made at first, but as time went on, we allowed ourselves more and more volume in our speech and song and laughter.
And, maybe, that’s what got us caught.
I remember it was late afternoon. I was sitting in my corner, writing some frivolous what-if stories. Well, I had always considered them frivolous, but Adam liked what-ifs. He said they gave hope. Anyway, I was writing. Adam was across the room, doing the same. Caleb was beginning yet another mural on the wall behind me; he had already finished covering the majority of the house’s other walls with sketches. Some of the other kids - Preston, May, and John – were in a huddle in the middle of the floor, working on some project together, and giggling. In another room, I could hear someone reading out loud, in clear, ringing tones. But beyond that, it was quiet.
Suddenly, Caleb stiffened. “Someone’s coming.” A quick glance out the crack in the door confirmed his words: a group of men, striding purposefully towards our haven. They were carrying things in their hands – but I didn’t wait to find out what.
“Everyone out the back door, now!”
The room became a scuffle of shouts, cries, and papers. Somewhere, I could hear Adam’s voice, yelling, “Don’t take anything with you, just go!” Loose scraps of paper and posters were fluttering about like frightened birds, disturbed by the rushing and shoving and pushing.
And then I was outside, ushering people out the back door, pushing them out, in some cases. “Go, go, go!” I counted their receding backs. Eight, nine, ten, and Adam standing beside me. That left one. “Who’s still in there?”
And suddenly, amidst the noise and the chaos, I heard the long, thin scratching sound of a pencil against plaster. Adam and I turned as one and ran to the window looking into the main room, scrabbling at the paper we had used to board the empty hole up against the wind. Caleb was inside, standing alone amongst the scattered pages in the abandoned room. He had a pencil in his hand, and was making long, sweeping curves on the wall perpendicular to the window.
“Caleb! Get out of there now!” Adam yelled harshly.
He turned to look at us briefly, his eyes sad. And then he returned to his drawing.
“Caleb! Please! We’ll find somewhere else, I promise!” I pleaded.
His voice was quiet, resigned. “I’m done running.”
We weren’t given a chance to respond – a loud gunshot cut through the silence. I heard a loud ringing in my ears as I stumbled and fell backwards, but I didn’t feel any pain. Then I turned my head and realized why. Adam lay next to me, a dark mass spreading across his chest. He touched it slowly, and his fingers came away red, as red as his hair. All I could do was stare at him, as he stared at me. His lips moved, trying to form words, but all I could hear was a slow exhalation, followed by a low, guttural sound.
And I realized he was no longer staring at me.
I couldn’t move, not for the longest time. Everything was numb, and my mind drew nothing but a blank. Time slowed. It was only instinct that caused me to jump at the touch of a hand on my shoulder. I don’t remember if that touch was friendly or not, whether it was the soft brush of commiseration, or the harsh grip of arrest. I only remember running – to somewhere, anywhere, I didn’t care.
I hadn’t run more than twelve steps when I fell to my knees, all the air knocked out of my lungs by a fist to the stomach. I was dragged to my feet, and then dragged some more back to where I had been before. I didn’t look at Adam’s body.
And then a man was in front of me, asking questions about the house, the papers, the people. I didn’t speak – just kept shaking my head, more out of numbness than defiance. The man seemed to give up after a while, and then knelt down to examine Adam’s body. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it; he cursed, kicked the body, and then stood up again. He looked at me for a reaction. I gave him none.
And then someone came up to him, asking if they should enter the house. My eyes sluggishly wandered to the hole we had ripped in the paper window. There was movement inside – Caleb, still at his work, no doubt. I could hear the insistent scratching, loud in my ears. I wondered what he was doing. Why couldn’t they hear him, too?
And then the man was asking me something again, only this time, he looked as though he cared less about the answer. I shook my head again. And then he said something to the man next to him. The man nodded.
And then I heard a wooshing sound, like the wind through an abandoned building. And then the roof of the house went up in flames.
Time suddenly returned to normal (or was it too fast), and suddenly I was tearing myself from their grip, crying, screaming, fighting, and running all at the same time trying to stop the building from burning, trying to stop the stories from burning, trying to stop Caleb from burning, burning my hands and my arms as I fruitlessly beat against the fiery walls that refused to let me in but I didn’t care, I was going to get in, I needed to save our stories, our pictures, our lives, save Caleb –
The fire had eaten up the paper in the windows; like butterflies made of flame, they fluttered around me as I walked slowly to the window frame. Inside, Caleb was still drawing, his back to me, the corner of his sleeve starting to catch fire – no longer in huge sweeps, but just filling in the details, details I could not see for the tears. His final mural was surrounded by a living, breathing frame of reds and yellows, which cast a flickering light on his work. The work…
As I stared, he finished the last line, and turned to see me. And there, framed by his work, framed by the flames, framed by the window, framed by the house, framed by my eyes…he smiled.
And then a giant piece of the ceiling caved in, and I was pulled away. I dimly recall being put in a car, driven somewhere, and being put into a cell. And I remember sitting down and not doing anything for a long time, with nothing but that final image in front me. That final work.
The picture was of Freedom.