“The Reflexive Property”

by Brox Rosenfeld

I woke up. My mind opened like an eye, even though my eyes were closed. I found myself, for a brief moment, in a dark space, like a sphere filled with water, inside my head, but, of course, not inside my head. This place doesn’t exist. It is a delusion. But it is important to me, because it is the only place I can call my own.

It was just a silly dream,

I think, as I do every morning, shaking off the psychic wetness of the lagoon from which my foggy bobbing mind emerged.

I’m in the room… same room that I’m in every night. I’m right where I’m supposed to be.

And thus began the morning procedure. Breathe air. Open eyes. Stand up. Put on shoes. Ingest mouth-cleaning tonic. I walked two yards across the cold floor of the concrete cube I stood in.

Concrete. That means real.

I pressed on a mechanism that opened the door. The slab of concrete glided silently out of its socket, cut to fit perfectly. When it retracted fully, it made a thudding sound, as if announcing that now was the time to walk out. The shaft on the other side of the doorway was even more cramped than the cube. It was already filled with a dozen other bodies from the lower levels, who’d been woken up at exactly the right time for the lift to collect them first, and then move up to this level after a uniform interval. They all wore gray, as did I. I stepped into the lift, and made my way to the corner of an obvious gap inside the group of people, waiting to be filled. The lift was almost full. The air smelled like dust. As we went up the shaft, nobody talked, nobody moved. My inner voice was quiet too.

Good, I thought, or maybe felt, inside my stomach.

Complete content. The lift emerged, at the same time as many other lifts emerged around us. The ground fell from the ceiling to the floor as light seeped in through the wire mesh walls. Our congregation progressed down a little footpath to our station, waiting to be assigned to our posts for the day. I glanced around my peripheral vision, not moving my head or my eyes from the designated path. I really wanted to, but I could not. There was a statue of the mayor. There was a sign showing the amount of grain harvested so far this year. These were sights fit to behold. Everyone gave them a humble glance, some even muttered “blessed be our ruler”. I wanted to be like them, to say it. But I couldn’t make myself, not most days anyway. However, that was a good day. It must have been thanks to our ruler.

“Blessed be our ruler,” I said, very quietly.

Someone beside me gave an almost imperceptible nod in response. We paused at an intersection, all standing in formation. We stood by as a group of soldiers marched in front of us. We got to the intersection first, but we had to let them pass. I adjusted my position in the group slightly. One of the officers stepped out of line and gave us a formal salute, then continued walking. We waited until they were almost out of sight before crossing, as decided by the elders in our group. They walked in front of the group, they got onto the lift first every morning, they knew best. Our station was only a block away at this point. We passed through an alleyway, between two residential buildings. This is where the artisans lived, the closest to the city center. Many of the streets here were part of The Market. Government officials came by every morning to collect the products of the local artisans.

“...more of rank 30 or lower this week, and we’ll be forced to move you to…”

I overheard an officer talking to an artisan. I strained to hear it, and I strained not to hear it.

That has nothing to do with me.

The artisans were an odd bunch, from what I could tell. They lived by different rules than we did. I suppose their innovations were necessary for us to stay the prosperous land that we were. We reached our station, and each column of our group separated into different files. I was third in a line of six people headed to our department. We entered a gate that scanned each of our eyes. My turn.

“Authenticated, Citizen E-59872,” Announced the robotic voice of a security agent.

At surface level, this was a matter of orderliness, and I had nothing against that. But deep down, we all felt like our daily authentication gave us the signal to start seeing each other as individuals. Although it went against common sense, we had learned that cooperation within our unit actually increased efficiency. We had each other’s numbers memorized, of course, but we also had names for each other. Our manager stood and smiled at us as we entered and sat down on the metal benches in front of her. Behind her and behind us were thick concrete walls, separating us from the other units. To our left, the entrance gates and security booths, and to our right, the station interior. Our manager stood in front of us, waiting to give orders. She wore a bright red tunic, and her black hair, which we were not allowed to have, was tied up in a bun underneath her peaked cap.

“Attention, Engineers! District 8, Station D, Unit 103, has now commenced.”

An automatic typewriter recorded as she spoke. She began pacing back and forth in front of us.

“Assignment for the day: run maintenance on all designated turbines.”

I sat and listened as usual, fully aware of what needed to be done, which was a lot. It distracted me a bit, and I started to lose focus. With a second I snapped back to reality.

It’s no use imagining a day without turbines to fix.

“59872, will you now rise?”

“Y-yes sir!” I responded, astonished and caught by surprise.

“Today we honor you for your years of service and dedication. Your ranking will now be promoted to 89. Congratulations.”

I bowed deeply and sat back down. I knew it was all for the record, but it felt good to be promoted, and as our manager nodded at me, her smile seemed genuine. I loved my job.

“That concludes the briefing this morning. Break!”

The typewriter made a ‘ding’ sound as it finished printing, and the sheet it had been printing on slipped down into the machine with a ‘whoosh’. It was sent directly to our manager’s report file, where a higher manager would review it along with all the others at the end of the month, and write a report of his own, which would be sent up, etc. On our way to the turbines in sector C, Nemo walked up from behind me.

“Hey, Sum. You’ll never guess what happened to me yesterday.”

Nemo was short for ‘anemometer’, a device which he was exceptionally and intuitively gifted at calibrating.

“I was in the clinic after a routine examination. It was complete chaos. The exam was delayed by eight hours!”

“What was that all about?”

“They say something’s going around. I guess the doctors were busy with new patients.”

We reached the edge of the concourse and gazed out over the edge. Mystified river water wafted towards our faces, smelling of sewage. Each department in our station formed a semicircle around a massive pit dug into the side of The River of Life. There were stations like this all over the river, which drew in water from the river and filtered it. After the water went through our station, underground pipes took it back into the city, behind where we stood. After the filtration process, the waste from the river and from our city was deposited back into the river for the next station to clean. There was no fishing or boating on the river, and there was nowhere else to put the waste, so people just coped. But we were there to make this system work the best it could, and to ensure that no waste ever made it through to the prosperous people of our city. We were ready to descend into the pit, where we would have better access to the turbines.

“Well,” I said. “That’s certainly something to think about.”

Nemo stepped forward and started pulling a chain connected to a pulley system that hauled a lift up the ledge. A bamboo cage appeared over the edge, and we walked on, closing the door behind us. We strapped ourselves in and I started slowly pulling the lever that allowed us to descend. Nemo looked down at our feet, nothing below us but the roaring waters and the turbines. When we had reached about ten feet above the tops of the turbines, I released the lever. We grabbed our safety masks hanging from a hook in the cage, and donned them. We couldn’t really communicate while wearing them.

“You know what to do?”

I made a fist in the air to signal OK. We unstrapped ourselves and opened the door on the other side of the cage. We stepped out onto the metal walkway, a chain-link floor and skimpy railings suspended by cords over the turbines. We were getting soaked now, and the noise was deafening. We walked together to a platform further out into the pit, where our paths split. I went right. I got to the first control panel, and took out a key from my uniform pocket. I inserted the key and turned it, which lifted a panel over a red button. I pressed it with my gloved thumb and a satisfying ‘click’. The turbine below the walkway came to a halt and detached from the ground. It slowly raised up toward me on a large piston. Once it got to the height of the platform, it stopped rising. I took a good look at it. All things considered, it wasn't too bad. It needed a fin to be replaced, maybe two. I ran some spin tests, then collected some samples from the surface of the turbine, as well as from the capsules within the turbine that collected water from the river. I repeated more or less the same process with each of the other turbines in the sector. I met Nemo back at the lift. We took off our masks.

“The turbidity seemed a bit off today,” I suggested.

“Sum, I know you like to figure everything out for yourself,” Nemo recited.

“But we have lab technicians for a reason,” he pointed out.

“Yes, but today… I just feel like something’s wrong.”

“Don’t worry buddy,” he reassured me.

“I didn’t find anything odd. It’s probably just a fluke.”

We arrived back at the ledge. We walked back to the wall behind the benches and set our samples on the desktop. A machine allowed us to print out labels for our samples, and we inserted them into a chute that would deliver them to the lab for analysis. Two weeks later, I saw a victim for the first time.

Every male citizen from ages 16-36 had to remain active and physically fit for the military. A draft could have been called at any time, in peace times or not. People who joined the military were given vacation and extra food. I considered enlisting for years, and my field of expertise could have been put to good use. However, I was a coward. I didn’t want to leave my home. I was in compulsory training one morning and we were running through the city. Cold season was fast approaching, and we were wearing heavy fabric that chafed and choked. I could taste the sweat rolling down my lips. There were about fifty of us, packed so tightly together that I had to maintain the exact pace of the person in front of me. Suddenly, they stopped. The man behind me rammed into me and I almost fell over. A training officer to my right hit the man with the butt of his gun and reprimanded him. I didn’t need to make myself look away, because my attention was already captured by the mysterious cause of the stoppage. I peered over the other trainees catching their breath, and saw it. One of the trainees was lying motionless on the footpath, with one officer tending to him while trying to keep the crowd back, and another officer in a telephone booth across the street.

“Everyone, remain calm!”

“What happened?”

“Get back!”

I made my way to the front of the crowd. The man’s face was vacant and pale.

Did he collapse from exhaustion?

Then, the realization dawned on me. He wasn’t breathing. At that moment, everyone completely abandoned the false pretense of ignorance. The crowd around me came into focus all at once. They were saying things that I’d never dared think before, asking questions I’d buried deep within myself. We were genuinely confused, in a way we had never been before. We’d never seen death before, we’d never been taught about death. I was aware of the spread of diseases, and the potential danger that entailed. In my line of work, how could we not know? But I realized in the coming months that we only knew what the government wanted us to know. We didn’t know about the world, we were just useful specialists. The time period before Isolation was just a footnote in history classes. Our whole education was a lie!

How could they hide this from us? How did they hide this from us?

Some medics and reinforcements had arrived, but the crowd was only growing. People came out of their homes, out of markets, out of kitchens and underground tunnels. It seemed as though the entire city came alive with its usually silent workers. Soon, the shooting began. I ran. I ran, although I was tired from running… How many kilometers? It doesn’t matter. People were dying all around me now. They crawled on the ground, bleeding red pain, and screaming. Someone grabbed my ankle.

“Please! The bullets…”

I could not respond, I could not speak. I looked where his other arm should have been. I easily pried his hand from my leg and kept running, slow at first, in shock. More gunfire.

“Hey, you!”

A soldier stepped out of an alleyway as if in slow motion, gun barrel pointed at me, bayonet slick. He looked younger than me, fear in his eyes.

“No!” I screamed.

He hesitated for a moment and I kept running.

Where did that come from?

I felt like I had retreated into my head space. I was being forcefully held down, pushed deeper and deeper into the darkness. I was in my glass fish bowl, and it was being shattered. I was being shot at! I had never done anything wrong my whole life.

Why do I deserve this?

I ran and ran until my lungs burned, like I was really drowning. I had reached the city outskirts, where I’d rarely been. I’d certainly never been here before. I was so used to following lines and queues, I had no sense of direction. I slowed my pace to a jog, and eventually a walk. I was in the Countryside now: a mythical place that gave life to our nation’s people.

What could they be hiding here?

I walked past the plump pungent birds and large beasts with horns. I was almost attacked by a mongrel, but I threw a rock at it and it ran away, scared like the soldier boy.

What happened to all of those people? Did anyone survive?

I followed the road until it dusk, when I approached a building off to the side. It was made of wood with a triangular roof and spots of light. I walked up to the front door.

Damn it. I don’t have my identification in this uniform.

The door opened inward, which surprised me and I jumped back. Then I saw the gun barrel sticking out the opening.

Not again.

“Who are you?” asked a steely eye through the crack.

I regained my composure.

“I am Citizen E-59872.”

“What the hell? What’s your name, boy?”

I paused, astounded.

“I’m not sure I un–”

“Give me one reason not to shoot you dead and report an intruder to the authorities.”

I blurted out

“I can’t because I don’t know what ‘dead’ means.”

The eye softened.

“My days.”

The rifle retracted and the door receded further. A small man with gray hair held it open, letting out the smell of food, and looking at me with newfound pity.

“You just gonna stand there? Come in.”

I lived with the old couple and their son for the next few months. I learned a lot of things, like what “hell” and “shit” meant. As farmers, they were out dealing with the forces of life and death everyday, which gave them a very different perspective from everyone I knew in the city. But they didn’t even know what a magnet was.

“So you’re telling me that you use a piece of iron to glue things together? That doesn’t make any sense at all, does it, Ma?” debated Igor – Mel and Ivan’s son.

“Well, I don’t quite understand it yet,” replied Mel.

“Could you repeat it one more time, Sum?”

“All right. The thing you have to understand is that it’s a special piece of iron, one that’s been exposed to a magnetic field. And it only attracts other metal, or something else that can be temporarily polarized.”

“Oh yeah, that cleared things right up!” Igor snarked.

The whole room bursted into laughter, pounding their knives against the table. I was still healing from everything that led up to this moment. It felt good to laugh. Sometimes, I saw other farmers, like when we went to the butcher. Igor had me help in the field, in the garden, and with the animals. Mel had me help around the house. Ivan had me cut logs and then we’d build a fire and sit around it. It smelled differently depending on the wood we cut. Ivan told very funny stories for someone who usually seemed so serious. I felt like I was able to live lucidly, as though my facial expressions and movements were automatic and natural. I no longer felt like I was hyper-conscious of everywhere I looked and everything I said. It was a strange time. Sometimes it felt like I was sleepwalking. But it wasn’t a dull, dreamless sleep like before. It was nice. My little sphere of darkness was starting to shine. One night I was lying in bed. I shared a room that smelled like hay with Igor. I looked up at the bunk bed above me, where he lay.

“Igor?” I whispered.

“Yes?”

“Umm… I’ve been wondering… can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, I don’t mind. Not that that’s ever stopped you before,” he sighed out.

“Well, what happens after one dies?”

“Ah, good question. Usually, you get put into a wooden box called a coffin and buried in the dirt or thrown onto a fire.”

“Wow, a fire. But what happens after that?” I prodded.

“You burn up, obviously. You turn into ashes.”

“And get this,” he explained with a tone of amazement.

“Then we put you on the plants.”

“You’re going to do all of that to me?” I asked in bewilderment.

“No, well, maybe. It’s tradition to do so, I guess. But you’ll probably outlive all of us.”

“What, why?”

“Unlike you, I ain’t never seen no doc-tor. I’m already missing a few teeth, I’ve got back pains, constant infections, and a broken hand that healed wonky,” he described, flashing his hand for no one to see.

“Hmmm… maybe you should take a week off,” I suggested.

“No way in hell! A week? Are you crazy?”

“I can do everything that you would do,” I bargained.

“But you can’t do it as well,” he stated somberly.

I sat in silence, agreeing but not wanting to admit it. I guess there are some problems that can’t be solved. I felt like something was still missing.

“Igor, what really happens after you die?”

“I was hoping you’d drop it. The truth is, I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone does.”

“Oh.”

“Go to sleep.”

The next few days, we were in the field trying to work as hard as we could. I worked harder than ever before, mostly because I had gotten into better shape than the military training could have ever dreamed of. Igor worked harder too, as though he were in peak condition. We fed the cows supper and sat down in the shade. Ivan walked toward us from the barn.

“Are y’all done for the day?” he shouted.

“Almost,” said Igor.

He stood with his hands on his hips looking down at the ground.

“They’re having a Collection.”

This was a government policy in the country, I had learned. It instituted an inspection of all farms. They only gave a few days notice for all farms to stockpile enough produce to show the inspectors. If we didn’t have enough, our production was inefficient. If we had too much, we were hoarders. Either way, some of our property would be confiscated as punishment. There was no way to know exactly how much the inspectors were looking for, because their calculations varied each year. The key was to sell as much as possible and then start stockpiling, only eating the bare minimum. The problem was that the markets became inflated during this time, which made selling difficult. The gamble was that selling for incredibly cheap could hypothetically be balanced out by the reward for scoring perfectly on the inspection. This was the first one to happen since I’d been there.

“Okay,” said Igor, over layers of pain.

“I’ll do all the farm work. Sum will cook and clean.”

“Mel will take inventory and go to the markets. I’ll help with the farm,” said Ivan.

“No, Pa you have to rest,” Igor argued.

“Igor, you need to take care of yourself too. When you get to be my age, I don’t want you to be a walking corpse. When I die, I want you to be able to take care of yourself.”

“You’re not a walking corpse, Pa. You’ve already given us so much,” he pleaded, gesturing towards me.

I did not want to be a part of this, but I knew it was inevitable. They had saved me. Igor started sobbing, and his father embraced him.

“Look, son. This isn’t going to be easy for any of us, but we’ve got a helping hand. I’m not abandoning my family when they need me the most. Now let’s get to work.”

I walked into the kitchen one day (which was a part of every house here, I’d been told) to eat lunch. Mel was crying in a chair at the table. Ivan was standing above her.

“All of our animals have been stolen,” he stated grimly.

We talked about what to do. I felt so terrible for them. I wish there was something that I could have done. We’d all gone out to do different chores in our frenzy to stockpile for winter. I could have stayed and prevented this. Igor came back too, and became very upset. After standing with his head against the wall for some time, he turned around.

“Sum and I will leave today. We’ll find a better place to live. You can’t survive with us to feed. You can eat the food we’ve been storing. There should be enough by now to last you until the Collection.”

He looked at me.

“We have to catch the people who did this. They must have gone somewhere to trade them.”

After much discussion, Mel and Ivan tearedly decided to let us go.

“You have to promise me you’ll be back in a year, ” Mel said, hugging Igor goodbye.

“Good luck, boys,” wished Ivan.

And so we set off to check the local market.

They can’t have gotten far.

We asked around, and no one had bought or sold any animals today.

“What do we do next?” I asked.

“Inspectors are already making their way out from the city. The only place left to sell stolen animals would be…”

“Would be where?” I asked

He pointed to the woods at the end of the road leading away from the village.

“Across the border.”

I thought of leaving this place, and I felt free.