from Spiral Gardens
They gathered the latest batch of children on a Stunday. They were only going to be gone for as long as would be required for the completion of their training, which itself remained dependent on the prep each family unit had pre-authenticated on their own. The Coalition for the Reclamation of Our State would not make any exceptions, including illness, slowness, or other biological distraction. Guidelines were sacred and could not be bent for any meant to live within our reach. The benefit would far outweigh the uncertain pangs of missing they might feel amidst the would-be fortunate inconvenience of being instructed how to serve. All we had to lose was our own fate, the mass of minds combined to whisper, in a language passed on between us only by blood, and therefore not a kind of wisdom that could be anything but suffered, seen to play out through decisions made by unseen others, out of sync with how life actually felt, because by now you weren’t supposed to have to really feel it.
Most parents did not come to see their children off beyond the glass that framed their home. It had been imminently encouraged that to dote on the event might inspire in an offspring a demeanor non-correlative for their best work, thereby lengthening the probable timeline of return. Thus, it would be regarded as egocentric to be seen weeping, clinging, carrying on. Those who wished to offer solidarity to eligible offspring could best do so by simply letting go, and allowing the gyre of their young loved one’s burgeoning maturation to keep turning, as one would have liked one’s parent to have done for them, given such a chance as this next generation had before them. Would you not? How could you sleep at night realizing that you’d only gotten in the way of what would and must be done, in order for each, in their own way, to begin the process of learning to Contribute?
Thus, it had only been another common Harvest. No one had anything to say—not even the children, in their blue jackets, standing side by side to form an ever-silent line along the demarcated locations for their retrieval, left alone for once to watch the spirals of smoke rise over the horizon of the world beyond the district’s lambent border Barrier, forever tinted with its proctored and unconscious ghost-color-coding to foreswear would-be approachees, on both sides—not that anyone had ever tried to leave, you understand, but only ever those who wanted in. There was only exactly enough space for how many of us there already were in here, the dictate reminded, even including the children who’d today been shipped off to earn their rights. Those bodies would be back, without a question, to reclaim what was already always theirs. It remained our duty to look after their belongings only in absentia, for as long as we could remember how it felt to want to, then to have to; then…
Everybody had their turn. Any adult within the district, besides those who had been too old already at the onset of Redefinition, had to serve by rank and file. They had emerged from the aspects of their training fully enabled to not have to remember any more than would be necessary to explain the pattern repeating with their own kind. There was no time it’d not been like this, each remembered, beyond the banks of clouds that filled their heads, a kind of mnemonic mode of open memory mimicking the Barrier itself, as if the structure’s coordinates could span not only physical dimensions, but those even more readily impregnable partitions available in any mind. So much to be thankful for, and so many ways to show it, all of which, by definition, came with a price: the price of living.
The seamstress did the bulk of her state-work while others slept. There were no longer official hours during which to frame an evening or a morning, given how the district’s ambient technology no longer required a dependence on sun’s light. Only the repeating programming times, marked by reminders sent directly to the software in one’s heart, could be counted on as certain, a firm dial; but to be honest, even thinking there might be a need for centralized time as such was long outdated, a sudden victim of its own craft. Anyone might feel the need to sleep at any time; and often would, without a warning or an impulse palpable even to them; therefore, the days remained so full and fast with the unconscious that even the false daylight felt like dark. No matter what forms of medication or conditioning she’d been provided as a younger person, the seamstress had not been able to shut herself completely off: an attribute that would have flagged her for removal of another sort—for further testing—had she not learned to play along. She’d simply close her eyes and bow her head down, for the cameras, for as long as she could stand, using the time inside her mind, at best, to map out patterns and procedures for her next quilt, and at worst, to worry what else about her or the world around her might go wrong. Eventually, she’d nod off for long enough to have the energy to rise again and carry on, having never tipped her hand that she’d spent so much extra, unchecked time in her own mind.
Most of the time the seamstress—her name before had been Ray-Beth—assumed she was not alone in such distinctions; that for every several others who seemed to sleep as if in some direct competition with the dead, there was at least another somewhat like her, forced through ultimate goodwill to keep up appearances, to be fine. Though other days, like this most recent day of culling, she wondered if it were more likely she was totally, and inherently, alone, in a much larger and deeper way than one was supposed to always feel and thrive through, by legal definition. She could not, for instance, remember having ever witnessed the kind of local violence that might require such heavily enforced and unquestioned participation with the ongoing training of their youth. She felt embarrassed, in a way, to even say so only now that she had become one of those who had continued to allow it so directly, at a cost from her own individual pockets, not just as a negligible fraction of the whole. She knew that it was inherently the commitment of their partition’s governing forces to overseeing what other forces might complicate the simple picture of their existence, if left unchecked. It was because they continued to offer up their service without question that allowed the feeling of a lack of need for such protection to manifest the tragic question of why we must still imagine acts of struggle, and against whom. The latter aspect, in particular, had a good answer, she’d been assured, though it was part of the program that to never name it, nor give it definition, assisted in the ongoing guarantee it would never again appear to stake its claim. The enemy could seek to claim the ground inside us, they instructed, though only so far as we allowed. The less we remained able to name it, to imagine, the less access it had to sink its claws in, tear us up.
For the most part, that trend in logic had always been enough. People seemed enabled now with a sense of distance between them and even those whose air they most often shared; an automatic conditioning that enabled the safe and steady progress of all society. The seamstress had always thought herself, too, capable of relinquishing her claims, both biological and semantic, on wanting her own child’s time kept close and soft—she was a patriot at heart, she felt, despite the unclear meaning of toward what or whom such a sensation in the present aspect of the district’s definition should be applied. Though when the time had come to let her only daughter off, hardly three clicks after the same birthday that marked her eligible to be retrieved, she’d found herself unable to turn her mind fully away. Suddenly each breath came in only shallow, like flat fabric, making her strain to gasp to stay awake—this before she’d even risen, drunk in bed on the susurrating unnatural light lurching and lashing out through the SeeScreen onto her every aspect of a mind. She found it difficult to even crick her neck or feel a finger, within such thrall as what came on into her through the State programming’s rapid-pulse light; even harder to stop shaking when she realized she’d already missed her daughter being escorted out through the front door, assisted by robovolunteers dolled up to look like humans too. They’d left behind only a single silver metal peony, which she was supposed to plant and care for in the same way she would have liked to for the only child she’d ever called her own. Suddenly her face was soaked; her skin sticky, clammy; a clog of acid in her chest and down her limbs, making every inch seem so compressed and full of noise she might never remember how to blink, much less to scream; only the churning, raking feeling there inside her holding steady, like an illicit cargo no one but she would ever bear.
Within the apparition of an hour, however, the seamstress had already found her mind reconsumed with living work. All pre-fashioned modulation of undesirable sensations had found its way within her to return to neutral, dissolve away, replacing in her person any area of harbored grief with a desperate desire to Contribute. At any time, her backorder log, under the contract provided to her by her pit bosses, could be described as the work of six or seven of her at the least. Each order for new federal garments that she filled would be automatically replaced with two more just the same, a condition said to be a boon for an adjunct worker such as herself—and yet there was no condition to any cognition that wasn’t pressed upon by the onslaught of those pursuits. Any dream she had for working on the quilts and gowns that filled her back life—as all unwarranted acts of mere imagination must be termed—stood no chance against the numbing scoot of the displacement of duress her labor saved. She had to eat, so she could not think. Even the square-shaped live/work-office cube she called her home might fall upon her at any time, were she to allow her fantasies to run their course unchecked and out of time. The real work was meant, of course, to cover up her other feelings; most of all those she’d not been meant to feed a credence in the first place, such as right now. She already could not remember why she felt what she had felt, leaving only the shuddering memory of recent alteration to course her body’s structure with its indecipherable fog of cold. It still hurt, mind you—even the programming and pre-medication could not cure that—yet still, removing its meaning made it somehow more democratic, able to be pushed past as her mind became shelled over with employment. It was not until she’d already messed up several orders—today more of the same dark garments that she failed to realize that the children, once removed, were made to wear—that the seamstress realized that the day as it had been before was already over, its coded culture curving out to pangs of some verboten desperation, just the same as it’d begun.
What else could still exist here but ourselves? the seamstress sometimes wondered, as her mind wandered slumped in her bed at the dead end of another day. It appeared at first to be the kind of thought one would be called into order for having wondered, or for having been able to still. And yet, in seeking out an answer, science told us, peace could be returned in having realized there really must be nothing else. The district had not been merely lucky to have survived the silver fires that wiped all else beyond the Barrier, a product of our ancestors’ steadfast dedication to survival, to overcoming what had for so many other nation-states been an unavoidable demise. Even now, many generations later, enough that no one could remember any of the facts not written down, the silver smoke still rolled in at all hours over the lip of the Barrier, as if to remind those held within it both what they had and what they should be thankful they did not have. That alone held all the rest of us in check. How could we desire to place limits on the same power that had already saved us once before? What would we be now had we not trusted those in power to make the right decisions just in time, especially now that time itself was no longer of the essence? But, see, already we were asking quite too much. One interminable question always begat another, requiring instead then the preference for a condition where one no longer meant to wonder what was nowhere being said. Much simpler, instead, to stay above what stood obscure; to only ask after what we already knew had a clear answer, one we could handle, by again forgetting, same as we had been by our God.
The seamstress spent the bulk of her active free time’s allocation before next clock-in exploring Spiral Gardens on her own. Customarily, it had been a pleasure she and her daughter shared, though she could already no longer remember how that felt—only how now the ornately sculptured path seemed slimmer than it last had; how the branching forks of what lay ahead at any corner no longer felt familiar enough to lead her forward on the same old circuit that had always dropped her back out at the exit nearest her home. Instead, she’d had to walk back around the archive, along its perimeter—so much wider from on the inside than the out—cutting back in at any of the innumerable unmarked exits the attraction provided, which was both its calling and its curse. You were not supposed to enter Spiral Gardens without a companion, which is why their fields were always empty. Experienced alone, though, the programming of the fauna seemed to have a much more complicated mode of branding: its impressions appeared to burn itself onto one’s eyes, creating trails and points of gather that made the world around it surge and then decline; like the rhythm of a sea transposed onto ambient material, in such a way it meant to want to drag you in. Many had gone lost starving, blissed into mythos, even side-by-side with a loved one or close friend. Some were said to never actually come back from Spiral Gardens, a children’s rumor, when there were children still around to spread it, who remember what the Gardens even were, or who felt assured enough to want to enter federally conducted space without a Credit Slip, summoning you forward to the courts. By now, most saw any public structure as a ghost town, the kind sane people never even imagined going into; though for the seamstress and her daughter, as she recalled it, the Gardens felt more like home than their own home—a place, at least, comprised equally of history and mystery, and more beautifully emphatic than doing legal drugs, which by now came solely from the SeeScreens, for instance, or from what patches to local software might be applied during one’s sleep.
No matter what anybody said, the seamstress knew she loved the way the Gardens’ colors came together and revised themselves before her eyes, like plangent sentences in the mesmerizing books she must have read when she was young—exactly the kind of memory she’d have given anything to be able to carry on beyond the Gardens’ reach. Otherwise, she could not remember reading them, nor having been allowed to, except while lost. She wouldn’t mind becoming combined in unbound memories with them forever, she imagined, without a map or any key; in other words, to let the Gardens have their way. At least then she wouldn’t need to worry so much about what she did and did not remember, and who was keeping tabs, and when soon again the name of even the present day might change with her inside it, against her life, as it likely had for each other of those both young and old gone missing as for forever—whatever that meant.
Blake Butler's most recent books are Molly, UXA.GOV, and Void Corporation. His website is blakebutler.org and he blogs at Dividual (blakebutler.substack.com).