Election
Note: This story contains some language that may not suitable for younger readers.
When I was in college my mother used to tell me at least five times a year that I should become a Bible preacher.
"Why?" I'd ask, even though after the first couple of times I knew pretty much what she was going to say.
Mom'd say that when I got to talking I could persuade a pig to get up out of the mud, butcher itself, and hop in the frying pan. “That's why you should do it,” she'd say.
I'd smile. (Because she was right, of course. I was very persuasive. With girls. With teachers. With her.) Then I'd look at my Mom. I'd really lock her down eye-to-eye. I'd shake my head and give her a firm no.
"You see, dear Mother, I can't do that because Jesus himself wasn't interested in being a persuasive speaker. Think about the time he was arrested in the garden. Peter went crazy and chopped off that guy's ear. And what did Jesus do?"
The question was rhetorical. Mom knew this about as well as she knew the story about Jesus, so she just gave me a little grunt. I kept right on going.
"You remember what the Lord did. Jesus said, 'Stop that crap! And he reached out, stroked the guy's head with a lover's hand, and then – whoosh – the ear popped back on like it'd never been gone in the first place. After all that went down, Jesus just told everyone within earshot that those who live by the sword will die by the sword.
"Now, Momma – and you know this better than I do – Jesus didn't say those words like he was trying to convince anybody to buy what he was sellin'. Not at all. Christ just announced it like it was a fact, a simple slice of cold, hard reality."
"Uh-huh," she'd say.
"Mom, it's sorta like my phone telling me that the sun's going to set at 6:03pm tonight. Phone's not worried about me being persuaded. It's just telling me what's real. No more and no less. The phone leaves it for me to decide if what's real is good news, bad news, or no news at all. Same with Jesus. He just told life to people. He didn't try to slick and smooth people into signing up for his spun version of it.
"Momma, that's just not me. Not at all. Never will be. I like to persuade. I like to massage things and make things come out a certain way. You know that."
She’d shake her head, rub her nose across her sleeve, and say back to me, "So, son, if you ain't goin' to be a preacher, then what are you goin' to do?"
"Mom, I'm going to use the gifts God has given me for the good of the community. And while I'm at it I'm going to make a little money for myself. I'm going to become an Election Official."
Then Mom would say a near silent "shiiit" and go back to her cooking.
But that's what I did. I got the education, made the grades, and laid the connections. And, when the dust settled, I was an honest-to-God, fully-credential, and optimally-invested Election Official.
I've been doing it for ten years now, and I wouldn't trade a second of it for anything. It's been a blessing. Mom might still not like it, but the money I send her she seems to like just fine.
Dad would probably like what I do and be proud of me, if he were still alive, but he's been dead a long time now. He died of a syn-bovine fungus outbreak when I was in seventh grade. Dad loved his beef, even when the only kind available to someone of his limited means was the fully synthetic form.
Dad made cars. In fact, before we gave the work completely over to the Shinies, Dad was among the last of us to put a few parts of a car together with human hands. Mom tells me Daddy just loved the work, so he never would do the smart thing and take the company's early retirement buy-out.
Then the day came when the "buy" was gone and all that was left was the "out”.
Dad's ass was kicked to the curb. Six months later Dad's ass got sick from the fungus. Three weeks after that Dad's ass was parked on his death bed. From that bed he looked at me through blood-streaked, half-blind eyes and told me the last thing he had to say to anyone this side of glory.
I remember it so clearly. I'd just gotten home from school. Mom had got me out early because she knew Dad's time was short. I can still feel – not just in my mind, but also in my body – the pull of the backpack straps on my shoulders while I focused my eyes and ears and heart on Dad. His body was unmoving, lying still before me, while he was slipping away from me at the same time, a wave retreating from the sand back into the sea.
Dad said, "Jonathan, I love you, and so I choose in this moment to treat you not like a boy, but like a man. I choose before God to speak to you man-to-man."
Dad paused for a moment to collect his energy and breathe deeply a few times. In the space of that pause, I remember noticing how measured and peaceful his voice sounded. He even sounded a bit elegant, formal.
The moment's cathedral silence was broken by a massive, wet fart forcing itself from his conquered, shredded bowels. (This was the fungal infection’s trademark symptom.) I took a step back as an irrational fear of the fungus gripped me. Dad shook his head once very hard, as if trying to clear it, and then he finished his thought.
"Jonathan, retirement is wasted on the old. So, Jon, pretend you're retired now. Go, do what you love, and fuck the rest."
He closed his eyes. I overcame my fears, approached him, and kissed him on the forehead. He smiled. Four minutes later he was dead.
Yeah, Mom might not be too happy with me becoming an Election Official, but Dad would be pretty psyched about it simply because I love what I do. I love my country; I love Democracy; and I love the chance to serve both.
And that's definitely the case this morning. After I get out of the shower, I inspect the questionable mole on the back of my shoulder and deem it nothing to worry about. Then I do a naked, little happy dance in front of the bathroom mirror. I watch my rump wiggle in the fog, and I can't wait to get on the Net and get to work.
The Party has assigned me to my city's mayoral campaign. It's the second best placement I've ever managed to secure for myself.
My best gig so far came my way a couple of years ago when a friend-of-a-friend got me in on the race for the Governor's office. (The friend-of-a-friend owed me. You see, I used my persuasive gifts to his benefit. I talked my sister into going out with him.)
Anyway, my sister decided my friend was all wrong for her, but I got the right politician elected into the Governor's Mansion, and I just raked in the cash. My Vote Commissions were off the charts. Just Fuck-off Fantastic. After the election, I even got to meet the new Governor. It was awesome. On Inauguration Day he had a big lunch at the Mansion for the twelve highest grossing Election Officials – me and eleven others.
(Twelve? Mom would have liked that. Just like Jesus and his disciples.)
At the ceremony the Governor thanked us for our service to Democracy. Then he allowed each of us to fill our right hand with the sweaty meat of his right hand and into each of our left hands he placed a key to a new Ford.
We even got to choose the model. (I chose a tricked-out pick-up truck – full electric infinity motor, zero to sixty in three-point-five seconds, alterna-leather seats, enough power to tow a Rocky Mountain, real time global satellite smartNet link, the whole package).
The experience was amazing, a true highlight of my life. Overwhelming. I had to bite my cheek to the point of blood to keep myself from dropping a tear.
God's Honest Truth: that day was probably number three in my life after my wedding and the birth of my daughter. And nothing'll top it until someday when I finally get in on a Presidential Election. Besides, I made enough money from my Vote Commissions on that one gubernatorial race to buy my house – this house – outright.
I love this house almost as much as I love my job. It's a 150-year-old old bungalow not far from the city center. The house is cavernous, far more than the three of us need. It just sprawls in every direction. My daughter has a bedroom, a play room, an art room, and a closet room (if that's even a thing).
And there are these original hardwood floors everywhere, even in all seven of the bedrooms. Cherry wood beams crisscross the ceilings of both the living and dining rooms. When I sit and sip coffee on the couch, I feel like I'm visiting an old-timey ski lodge.
Sitting on the couch in my lodge, I get to stare at my favorite feature in the whole house. I have this beautiful coal-burning fireplace with an even more kick-ass fireplace grate thing covering it. The grate's in the shape of this massive peacock with shining black glass eyes and green and blue glass of different hues and tones bringing its tail to life.
The best thing about my fireplace cover is that it’s 100% old and original. It isn't that molded, pre-aged, plasti-fab crap you see in most current home restoration renos. I hate that cheap, fakey trash imported from the labor camps in Texas. (And to think Texas used to be one of our states. Good God, have mercy.)
But my fireplace cover is original, real, and truly old. It's classic. I adore the fireplace with its antique cover, even though the whole set-up is utterly useless. I mean, who the hell burns coal anymore – especially in their house, of all places?
Or, I should say the fireplace and its grate were useless. They aren't useless now. I won in the end. I created a solution. I triumphed. I found a way to make the fireplace cover not only beautiful, but also useful for me, for here and now. For today.
(There used to be a term for that, for taking high tech stuff and merging it with the antique. What was it? Do you remember? What was it? Uh... Steampunk, I think. Yeah, Steampunk.)
So, anyway, when I was thinking about where I wanted to set up my office, I decided not to put it in some back bedroom, but right here in the living room with my steampunked fireplace. I had my Holopro unit installed in the fireplace behind the peacock grate cover.
I flip on the Holopro and a blue-tinted light shoots out of my repurposed peacock and fills the center of the living room. The light carves a series of full-color disembodied human heads into the air, a collection of twelve detailed busts I can walk all the way around and study.
Beside each face are Net links to that particular person's pertinent stats: name, address, social media connects, annual income, voting history, ethnic heritage percentages, essential family and medical history, potentially useful (read: embarrassing) Net search findings, etc. With a few simple commands I can usually get way deeper into the rabbit hole and find out where my potential voter has been eating lately and what videos they've been streaming. In short, it's everything I need to do my job.
So that's what I do during the morning hours. I work on those people. I use my God-given-Mother-disapproved gifts of persuasion. Depending on each target's identity stats, I figure out how many votes my candidate might be able to earn from each of them, and I rank them accordingly.
To the ones at the shittier end of the list I send half-hearted social media blasts and text messages designed to make them feel important, even though they are not, and they know this. To soften the blow, I spend some of the Commissioner's Advance the Party paid me. I send them a little credit at their favorite restaurant, bar, or sex casino.
As I get closer to the top of my list, I change things up more and more. I send my targets football tickets that almost no one can ever get nowadays since expansion caps and stadium seat reductions became fashionable in the League.
For numbers three and four on my list, I make some pleasantly surprising and fully free travel arrangements. For my top two, I do all this and more. I buy and have delivered to their homes in Zone Alpha a few cars currently only on limited-release prototype status. These are vehicles that won't be widely available – even to them – for two more years.
It's a lot of hard work. It always is. But, it's an above-average day for my candidate, and so, most importantly, it's an above average day for my city and for me. By the end of the morning my candidate has received 2,587,616 votes from my 12 targets. Not too shabby.
Still – complete disclosure here – I'm a little worn out by the end of it. So, I flip off the Holopro a little early, the lights within my peacock go dark, the disembodied heads of the rich evaporate, and I head down to my unfinished basement.
My wife and I call the basement "Our Dungeon of Love" because it's all dirt, mustiness, and drear. You'd have to be a sick perv to do any loving down here, hence the joke. But the basement is where my election shrine is, and when I close up shop for the day, I always go down there to pay my respects.
I know that sounds weird, but while I'm walking down the stairs I'll explain.
I love being a part of the history of things. I love being a part of a world moving forward without losing touch with its past. That is, deep-down, what I love most about my house. It had a life before me. Now I have it, and I will use my gifts to improve it. Then, when the time comes, I'll hand it on so the next generation can play their part and do the same.
My basement election shrine is about all of this too, but it's even more important – more perfect – because it's not about a building, a house; it's about us, our Nation; it’s about Democracy.
Something like a hundred years ago someone added a garage to the basement. For some reason that I can't guess and am too lazy to research, the contractors lined the ceiling of the narrow, drippy garage with newspapers. A couple pages actually still exist. The yellow words and images printed on them stare down at me still faintly readable, and one of them has become my shrine.
It's a large picture on page eight. The woman who dominates the picture stands in a run-down office, but she is dressed formally. She looks like she should be at a funeral or a wedding. Her outfit is topped with a wild and glamourous flowered hat. The picture is black and white, and I wish it were in color because I'd like to know what colors the flowers are.
She is very dark-skinned, her lips full, her nose strong. The caption says her first name is Rose. I wonder if she wears roses on her hat as a play off her name.
The caption also says Rose had tried to register to vote eleven times before she finally succeeded. I know enough history to know that her skin color is what makes her failures so numerous and her final success so newsworthy. As an Election Official, every time I’m down here her struggle pushes me to the brink of tears, even more powerfully than the Governor’s Inauguration Party did a few years ago. And, as a modern citizen, Rose’s need to struggle in the first place strikes me as so very stupid.
This picture is my shrine because when I come down here after work and gaze up at Rose, I pray. More specifically, I give thanks. I give thanks that – despite our flaws – we live in an age that has taken her struggle seriously and has been wise enough to learn from our predecessors' sins.
I give thanks we finally decided that no matter what you look like, or where you're from, or what faith you embrace – for every one of us one dollar equals one vote. There are no longer tricky registrations that can spit you out because you're black or poor or gay or some idiot government clerk hates you or whatever. Your dollars are your votes, and you are free to vote until your heart is content.
The front door opens and then slams shut above me, and the antique oak floor emits a squeak as small feet move across it. My daughter is home from school, and her arrival shakes me free of my reverie.
I decide to do something special, something Zaria and I haven't done in quite a while. I take the steps back up from the basement two at a time. I scare my daughter as I bust through the door into the kitchen. I hug her fiercely, and then I pile her into my car.
Ten minutes later we're at an entry checkpoint gate into Zone Alpha. The guard lowers his weapon and asks me to turn my face toward him. After I do, he scans my eyes with his Identipen. Next he offers me a tablet on which I place my right palm. The guard then performs the same routine with Zaria.
The retina scan and the palm scan are redundant. They are both ways of figuring out who we are. To do his job, to do his part for the Democracy, the scans give the guard access to the same exhaustive social and economic information on me that I access on others to do my job.
And that's a.o.k. with me. I don't blame the people of Zone Alpha for being thorough and wary. These are strained, violent days we live in, and so you can't be too careful, especially if the lesser-haves are trying to drag you down by any means necessary.
After just a moment, the guard speaks to me. "Mr. Edwards, welcome to Zone Alpha. It's good to have you and your daughter Zaria come and visit us again. The records show you haven't visited us for thirteen months and seven days, so it is indeed nice to see you again. Your current Citizen Status allows you and your daughter to remain in the Zone for 106 minutes. I hope you enjoy your time.
"However, as you know, Mr. Edwards, I am required to inform you that you will be fined severely for each minute you remain in the Zone beyond your legal allotment. Further, if you remain within the Zone sixty minutes beyond your legal allotment, a warrant will immediately be issued for your arrest, your vehicle's power supply will be shut down remotely, you will be apprehended by the authorities, and you will be punished immediately to the fullest extent of the law. Further, your daughter Zaria will also be punished extensively – in a way that is fitting for her age, of course."
What the guard is saying is nothing personal. It's just standard legal boiler plate. Even Zaria knows this. I've heard it all plenty of times, and the guard has said it to Downzoners like me thousands of times, if he's said it once. So, I smile at him, and he does the same at me.
I assume Zaria is smiling to, but I don't check. It's poor etiquette to take your eyes off the guard during these exchanges. A colleague of mine once did just that and for his negligence he received an electric shock from the guard who, understandably, felt disrespected.
"Have a good visit," the guard says as he waves us through the gate.
To call it a gate is strange because it doesn't resemble any gate I've ever owned or seen – except for in Zone Alpha, of course. There is nothing that swings in and out on hinges. There is no door. The gate appears to consist of magic, or whatever you call the temporary evaporation of steel.
One moment there is an unbroken metal wall 30 feet high that stretches in either direction as far as I can see.
It glows silver and impregnable in the late afternoon sun. The next moment the section of the wall directly in front of our car vanishes. In response, Zaria sucks air in sharply, audibly. She's always done this. The wall's ability to awe never grows old – for either of us. But as an adult I'm better than she is at hiding my wonder.
We drive through the gap. As soon as we do, Zaria spins around in her seat so she can look out the back window. She knows what's coming. When we get ten yards inside the wall, "the gate" reappears. The wall is once again whole, as if it had never been otherwise.
Once the trick is over, Zaria spins around to face front so she can see the houses awaiting us around the bend up ahead. We drive on slowly in a silence electrified with anticipation. Just before we reach the curve up ahead, we notice two little girls sitting at a table by the side of the road. They look about Zaria's age.
The sign beside the girls say they're selling lemonade, and the glistening glass pitchers of yellow fluid on the table suggest the sign speaks the truth. The girls spot us and suddenly explode into grins and waving hands and hoots designed to get us to stop, spend, and drink.
"Dad, can we stop? It'll be just for a minute or two."
I consider it, but time is slipping away. 106 minutes is a lot, but we have much to see. I tell Zaria no; she shrugs. We wave and smile at the girls hoping to blunt the force of the fact that our car isn't slowing down.
Their waving hands pause in midair as the realization strikes them, and then their fingers fold until all that's left to wave our way are four middle fingers. As we disappear around the turn, even though our windows are closed, we hear shrill, girl-child voices scream something our direction about poor, cheap, Downzoners.
And then we are gone.
Our discomfort evaporates like Zone Alpha’s magic gate once we see the first houses. As our car crawls down the street, Zaria and I gaze. We are as silent and amazed as we were when we last drove this street over a year ago.
Finally, one of us speaks. It's Zaria. She asks, "Daddy, why are the houses floating?"
I'm a bit surprised by the question because she knows the answer. We've been over this before. Every school age kid knows the basic answer I'm about to give her yet again.
"Zaria, it's the Aldousium. The bottoms of the homes are coated with a six-inch skin of the synthetic mineral Aldousium. When the homeowner activates the house’s elevation system, electricity passes through the mineral, and that catalyzes an interaction between the Aldousium and the Earth. They repel each other. The homeowner can control the height from inside the house via remote control. But there are strict government laws about how high you can go. Aldousium is the most valuable commodity on earth. Besides water and air, of course. Just a teaspoon of it is causing our car to float above the road right now."
"Yeah, Dad, I know all that. We've talked all that to death. That's not what I meant this time. I didn't mean ‘Why?’ like ‘How?’. I meant ‘Why?’ like ‘Why bother?’.
Then it makes sense to me. She’s using the same words to ask a new question. So I think for a moment, and then I say what comes most naturally to me, “Because they can, Zaria. Because they can."
We say nothing else to one another for a long time as we drive along and bask in the wonders arrayed around us. In the grip of that shared silence I know we are dreaming together. For a few moments we dream together about what can be. And about what we could become.
"Why?" I'd ask, even though after the first couple of times I knew pretty much what she was going to say.
Mom'd say that when I got to talking I could persuade a pig to get up out of the mud, butcher itself, and hop in the frying pan. “That's why you should do it,” she'd say.
I'd smile. (Because she was right, of course. I was very persuasive. With girls. With teachers. With her.) Then I'd look at my Mom. I'd really lock her down eye-to-eye. I'd shake my head and give her a firm no.
"You see, dear Mother, I can't do that because Jesus himself wasn't interested in being a persuasive speaker. Think about the time he was arrested in the garden. Peter went crazy and chopped off that guy's ear. And what did Jesus do?"
The question was rhetorical. Mom knew this about as well as she knew the story about Jesus, so she just gave me a little grunt. I kept right on going.
"You remember what the Lord did. Jesus said, 'Stop that crap! And he reached out, stroked the guy's head with a lover's hand, and then – whoosh – the ear popped back on like it'd never been gone in the first place. After all that went down, Jesus just told everyone within earshot that those who live by the sword will die by the sword.
"Now, Momma – and you know this better than I do – Jesus didn't say those words like he was trying to convince anybody to buy what he was sellin'. Not at all. Christ just announced it like it was a fact, a simple slice of cold, hard reality."
"Uh-huh," she'd say.
"Mom, it's sorta like my phone telling me that the sun's going to set at 6:03pm tonight. Phone's not worried about me being persuaded. It's just telling me what's real. No more and no less. The phone leaves it for me to decide if what's real is good news, bad news, or no news at all. Same with Jesus. He just told life to people. He didn't try to slick and smooth people into signing up for his spun version of it.
"Momma, that's just not me. Not at all. Never will be. I like to persuade. I like to massage things and make things come out a certain way. You know that."
She’d shake her head, rub her nose across her sleeve, and say back to me, "So, son, if you ain't goin' to be a preacher, then what are you goin' to do?"
"Mom, I'm going to use the gifts God has given me for the good of the community. And while I'm at it I'm going to make a little money for myself. I'm going to become an Election Official."
Then Mom would say a near silent "shiiit" and go back to her cooking.
But that's what I did. I got the education, made the grades, and laid the connections. And, when the dust settled, I was an honest-to-God, fully-credential, and optimally-invested Election Official.
I've been doing it for ten years now, and I wouldn't trade a second of it for anything. It's been a blessing. Mom might still not like it, but the money I send her she seems to like just fine.
Dad would probably like what I do and be proud of me, if he were still alive, but he's been dead a long time now. He died of a syn-bovine fungus outbreak when I was in seventh grade. Dad loved his beef, even when the only kind available to someone of his limited means was the fully synthetic form.
Dad made cars. In fact, before we gave the work completely over to the Shinies, Dad was among the last of us to put a few parts of a car together with human hands. Mom tells me Daddy just loved the work, so he never would do the smart thing and take the company's early retirement buy-out.
Then the day came when the "buy" was gone and all that was left was the "out”.
Dad's ass was kicked to the curb. Six months later Dad's ass got sick from the fungus. Three weeks after that Dad's ass was parked on his death bed. From that bed he looked at me through blood-streaked, half-blind eyes and told me the last thing he had to say to anyone this side of glory.
I remember it so clearly. I'd just gotten home from school. Mom had got me out early because she knew Dad's time was short. I can still feel – not just in my mind, but also in my body – the pull of the backpack straps on my shoulders while I focused my eyes and ears and heart on Dad. His body was unmoving, lying still before me, while he was slipping away from me at the same time, a wave retreating from the sand back into the sea.
Dad said, "Jonathan, I love you, and so I choose in this moment to treat you not like a boy, but like a man. I choose before God to speak to you man-to-man."
Dad paused for a moment to collect his energy and breathe deeply a few times. In the space of that pause, I remember noticing how measured and peaceful his voice sounded. He even sounded a bit elegant, formal.
The moment's cathedral silence was broken by a massive, wet fart forcing itself from his conquered, shredded bowels. (This was the fungal infection’s trademark symptom.) I took a step back as an irrational fear of the fungus gripped me. Dad shook his head once very hard, as if trying to clear it, and then he finished his thought.
"Jonathan, retirement is wasted on the old. So, Jon, pretend you're retired now. Go, do what you love, and fuck the rest."
He closed his eyes. I overcame my fears, approached him, and kissed him on the forehead. He smiled. Four minutes later he was dead.
Yeah, Mom might not be too happy with me becoming an Election Official, but Dad would be pretty psyched about it simply because I love what I do. I love my country; I love Democracy; and I love the chance to serve both.
And that's definitely the case this morning. After I get out of the shower, I inspect the questionable mole on the back of my shoulder and deem it nothing to worry about. Then I do a naked, little happy dance in front of the bathroom mirror. I watch my rump wiggle in the fog, and I can't wait to get on the Net and get to work.
The Party has assigned me to my city's mayoral campaign. It's the second best placement I've ever managed to secure for myself.
My best gig so far came my way a couple of years ago when a friend-of-a-friend got me in on the race for the Governor's office. (The friend-of-a-friend owed me. You see, I used my persuasive gifts to his benefit. I talked my sister into going out with him.)
Anyway, my sister decided my friend was all wrong for her, but I got the right politician elected into the Governor's Mansion, and I just raked in the cash. My Vote Commissions were off the charts. Just Fuck-off Fantastic. After the election, I even got to meet the new Governor. It was awesome. On Inauguration Day he had a big lunch at the Mansion for the twelve highest grossing Election Officials – me and eleven others.
(Twelve? Mom would have liked that. Just like Jesus and his disciples.)
At the ceremony the Governor thanked us for our service to Democracy. Then he allowed each of us to fill our right hand with the sweaty meat of his right hand and into each of our left hands he placed a key to a new Ford.
We even got to choose the model. (I chose a tricked-out pick-up truck – full electric infinity motor, zero to sixty in three-point-five seconds, alterna-leather seats, enough power to tow a Rocky Mountain, real time global satellite smartNet link, the whole package).
The experience was amazing, a true highlight of my life. Overwhelming. I had to bite my cheek to the point of blood to keep myself from dropping a tear.
God's Honest Truth: that day was probably number three in my life after my wedding and the birth of my daughter. And nothing'll top it until someday when I finally get in on a Presidential Election. Besides, I made enough money from my Vote Commissions on that one gubernatorial race to buy my house – this house – outright.
I love this house almost as much as I love my job. It's a 150-year-old old bungalow not far from the city center. The house is cavernous, far more than the three of us need. It just sprawls in every direction. My daughter has a bedroom, a play room, an art room, and a closet room (if that's even a thing).
And there are these original hardwood floors everywhere, even in all seven of the bedrooms. Cherry wood beams crisscross the ceilings of both the living and dining rooms. When I sit and sip coffee on the couch, I feel like I'm visiting an old-timey ski lodge.
Sitting on the couch in my lodge, I get to stare at my favorite feature in the whole house. I have this beautiful coal-burning fireplace with an even more kick-ass fireplace grate thing covering it. The grate's in the shape of this massive peacock with shining black glass eyes and green and blue glass of different hues and tones bringing its tail to life.
The best thing about my fireplace cover is that it’s 100% old and original. It isn't that molded, pre-aged, plasti-fab crap you see in most current home restoration renos. I hate that cheap, fakey trash imported from the labor camps in Texas. (And to think Texas used to be one of our states. Good God, have mercy.)
But my fireplace cover is original, real, and truly old. It's classic. I adore the fireplace with its antique cover, even though the whole set-up is utterly useless. I mean, who the hell burns coal anymore – especially in their house, of all places?
Or, I should say the fireplace and its grate were useless. They aren't useless now. I won in the end. I created a solution. I triumphed. I found a way to make the fireplace cover not only beautiful, but also useful for me, for here and now. For today.
(There used to be a term for that, for taking high tech stuff and merging it with the antique. What was it? Do you remember? What was it? Uh... Steampunk, I think. Yeah, Steampunk.)
So, anyway, when I was thinking about where I wanted to set up my office, I decided not to put it in some back bedroom, but right here in the living room with my steampunked fireplace. I had my Holopro unit installed in the fireplace behind the peacock grate cover.
I flip on the Holopro and a blue-tinted light shoots out of my repurposed peacock and fills the center of the living room. The light carves a series of full-color disembodied human heads into the air, a collection of twelve detailed busts I can walk all the way around and study.
Beside each face are Net links to that particular person's pertinent stats: name, address, social media connects, annual income, voting history, ethnic heritage percentages, essential family and medical history, potentially useful (read: embarrassing) Net search findings, etc. With a few simple commands I can usually get way deeper into the rabbit hole and find out where my potential voter has been eating lately and what videos they've been streaming. In short, it's everything I need to do my job.
So that's what I do during the morning hours. I work on those people. I use my God-given-Mother-disapproved gifts of persuasion. Depending on each target's identity stats, I figure out how many votes my candidate might be able to earn from each of them, and I rank them accordingly.
To the ones at the shittier end of the list I send half-hearted social media blasts and text messages designed to make them feel important, even though they are not, and they know this. To soften the blow, I spend some of the Commissioner's Advance the Party paid me. I send them a little credit at their favorite restaurant, bar, or sex casino.
As I get closer to the top of my list, I change things up more and more. I send my targets football tickets that almost no one can ever get nowadays since expansion caps and stadium seat reductions became fashionable in the League.
For numbers three and four on my list, I make some pleasantly surprising and fully free travel arrangements. For my top two, I do all this and more. I buy and have delivered to their homes in Zone Alpha a few cars currently only on limited-release prototype status. These are vehicles that won't be widely available – even to them – for two more years.
It's a lot of hard work. It always is. But, it's an above-average day for my candidate, and so, most importantly, it's an above average day for my city and for me. By the end of the morning my candidate has received 2,587,616 votes from my 12 targets. Not too shabby.
Still – complete disclosure here – I'm a little worn out by the end of it. So, I flip off the Holopro a little early, the lights within my peacock go dark, the disembodied heads of the rich evaporate, and I head down to my unfinished basement.
My wife and I call the basement "Our Dungeon of Love" because it's all dirt, mustiness, and drear. You'd have to be a sick perv to do any loving down here, hence the joke. But the basement is where my election shrine is, and when I close up shop for the day, I always go down there to pay my respects.
I know that sounds weird, but while I'm walking down the stairs I'll explain.
I love being a part of the history of things. I love being a part of a world moving forward without losing touch with its past. That is, deep-down, what I love most about my house. It had a life before me. Now I have it, and I will use my gifts to improve it. Then, when the time comes, I'll hand it on so the next generation can play their part and do the same.
My basement election shrine is about all of this too, but it's even more important – more perfect – because it's not about a building, a house; it's about us, our Nation; it’s about Democracy.
Something like a hundred years ago someone added a garage to the basement. For some reason that I can't guess and am too lazy to research, the contractors lined the ceiling of the narrow, drippy garage with newspapers. A couple pages actually still exist. The yellow words and images printed on them stare down at me still faintly readable, and one of them has become my shrine.
It's a large picture on page eight. The woman who dominates the picture stands in a run-down office, but she is dressed formally. She looks like she should be at a funeral or a wedding. Her outfit is topped with a wild and glamourous flowered hat. The picture is black and white, and I wish it were in color because I'd like to know what colors the flowers are.
She is very dark-skinned, her lips full, her nose strong. The caption says her first name is Rose. I wonder if she wears roses on her hat as a play off her name.
The caption also says Rose had tried to register to vote eleven times before she finally succeeded. I know enough history to know that her skin color is what makes her failures so numerous and her final success so newsworthy. As an Election Official, every time I’m down here her struggle pushes me to the brink of tears, even more powerfully than the Governor’s Inauguration Party did a few years ago. And, as a modern citizen, Rose’s need to struggle in the first place strikes me as so very stupid.
This picture is my shrine because when I come down here after work and gaze up at Rose, I pray. More specifically, I give thanks. I give thanks that – despite our flaws – we live in an age that has taken her struggle seriously and has been wise enough to learn from our predecessors' sins.
I give thanks we finally decided that no matter what you look like, or where you're from, or what faith you embrace – for every one of us one dollar equals one vote. There are no longer tricky registrations that can spit you out because you're black or poor or gay or some idiot government clerk hates you or whatever. Your dollars are your votes, and you are free to vote until your heart is content.
The front door opens and then slams shut above me, and the antique oak floor emits a squeak as small feet move across it. My daughter is home from school, and her arrival shakes me free of my reverie.
I decide to do something special, something Zaria and I haven't done in quite a while. I take the steps back up from the basement two at a time. I scare my daughter as I bust through the door into the kitchen. I hug her fiercely, and then I pile her into my car.
Ten minutes later we're at an entry checkpoint gate into Zone Alpha. The guard lowers his weapon and asks me to turn my face toward him. After I do, he scans my eyes with his Identipen. Next he offers me a tablet on which I place my right palm. The guard then performs the same routine with Zaria.
The retina scan and the palm scan are redundant. They are both ways of figuring out who we are. To do his job, to do his part for the Democracy, the scans give the guard access to the same exhaustive social and economic information on me that I access on others to do my job.
And that's a.o.k. with me. I don't blame the people of Zone Alpha for being thorough and wary. These are strained, violent days we live in, and so you can't be too careful, especially if the lesser-haves are trying to drag you down by any means necessary.
After just a moment, the guard speaks to me. "Mr. Edwards, welcome to Zone Alpha. It's good to have you and your daughter Zaria come and visit us again. The records show you haven't visited us for thirteen months and seven days, so it is indeed nice to see you again. Your current Citizen Status allows you and your daughter to remain in the Zone for 106 minutes. I hope you enjoy your time.
"However, as you know, Mr. Edwards, I am required to inform you that you will be fined severely for each minute you remain in the Zone beyond your legal allotment. Further, if you remain within the Zone sixty minutes beyond your legal allotment, a warrant will immediately be issued for your arrest, your vehicle's power supply will be shut down remotely, you will be apprehended by the authorities, and you will be punished immediately to the fullest extent of the law. Further, your daughter Zaria will also be punished extensively – in a way that is fitting for her age, of course."
What the guard is saying is nothing personal. It's just standard legal boiler plate. Even Zaria knows this. I've heard it all plenty of times, and the guard has said it to Downzoners like me thousands of times, if he's said it once. So, I smile at him, and he does the same at me.
I assume Zaria is smiling to, but I don't check. It's poor etiquette to take your eyes off the guard during these exchanges. A colleague of mine once did just that and for his negligence he received an electric shock from the guard who, understandably, felt disrespected.
"Have a good visit," the guard says as he waves us through the gate.
To call it a gate is strange because it doesn't resemble any gate I've ever owned or seen – except for in Zone Alpha, of course. There is nothing that swings in and out on hinges. There is no door. The gate appears to consist of magic, or whatever you call the temporary evaporation of steel.
One moment there is an unbroken metal wall 30 feet high that stretches in either direction as far as I can see.
It glows silver and impregnable in the late afternoon sun. The next moment the section of the wall directly in front of our car vanishes. In response, Zaria sucks air in sharply, audibly. She's always done this. The wall's ability to awe never grows old – for either of us. But as an adult I'm better than she is at hiding my wonder.
We drive through the gap. As soon as we do, Zaria spins around in her seat so she can look out the back window. She knows what's coming. When we get ten yards inside the wall, "the gate" reappears. The wall is once again whole, as if it had never been otherwise.
Once the trick is over, Zaria spins around to face front so she can see the houses awaiting us around the bend up ahead. We drive on slowly in a silence electrified with anticipation. Just before we reach the curve up ahead, we notice two little girls sitting at a table by the side of the road. They look about Zaria's age.
The sign beside the girls say they're selling lemonade, and the glistening glass pitchers of yellow fluid on the table suggest the sign speaks the truth. The girls spot us and suddenly explode into grins and waving hands and hoots designed to get us to stop, spend, and drink.
"Dad, can we stop? It'll be just for a minute or two."
I consider it, but time is slipping away. 106 minutes is a lot, but we have much to see. I tell Zaria no; she shrugs. We wave and smile at the girls hoping to blunt the force of the fact that our car isn't slowing down.
Their waving hands pause in midair as the realization strikes them, and then their fingers fold until all that's left to wave our way are four middle fingers. As we disappear around the turn, even though our windows are closed, we hear shrill, girl-child voices scream something our direction about poor, cheap, Downzoners.
And then we are gone.
Our discomfort evaporates like Zone Alpha’s magic gate once we see the first houses. As our car crawls down the street, Zaria and I gaze. We are as silent and amazed as we were when we last drove this street over a year ago.
Finally, one of us speaks. It's Zaria. She asks, "Daddy, why are the houses floating?"
I'm a bit surprised by the question because she knows the answer. We've been over this before. Every school age kid knows the basic answer I'm about to give her yet again.
"Zaria, it's the Aldousium. The bottoms of the homes are coated with a six-inch skin of the synthetic mineral Aldousium. When the homeowner activates the house’s elevation system, electricity passes through the mineral, and that catalyzes an interaction between the Aldousium and the Earth. They repel each other. The homeowner can control the height from inside the house via remote control. But there are strict government laws about how high you can go. Aldousium is the most valuable commodity on earth. Besides water and air, of course. Just a teaspoon of it is causing our car to float above the road right now."
"Yeah, Dad, I know all that. We've talked all that to death. That's not what I meant this time. I didn't mean ‘Why?’ like ‘How?’. I meant ‘Why?’ like ‘Why bother?’.
Then it makes sense to me. She’s using the same words to ask a new question. So I think for a moment, and then I say what comes most naturally to me, “Because they can, Zaria. Because they can."
We say nothing else to one another for a long time as we drive along and bask in the wonders arrayed around us. In the grip of that shared silence I know we are dreaming together. For a few moments we dream together about what can be. And about what we could become.