Invisible things, p.7
Invisible Things, page 7
Stage 4: Depression
After three months, the initial welcoming period for new arrivals came to an end, and every member of the Delany crew was being encouraged to find gainful employment to avoid the streets.
“What happens if you don’t get a job?” Nalini asked that commercial fisherman from Nantucket as they paused at the mailbox.
“Nothing good, lady,” he laughed. “You’ll end up living in the Cavern with the skid-row basket cases, I guess. Or just start losing it, like your former lab partner.”
For a stretch, Nalini stopped seeing Dwayne walking or talking on the streets of New Roanoke at all. When she checked in on him at his apartment, he greeted her at his door with a grunt and the musk of a man who’d denounced and rejected personal grooming.
“Dude, you reek,” Nalini told Dwayne, and was surprised to see this seemed to be news to the man, cocooned as he was in his melancholy.
For her part, Nalini didn’t experience Depression as an individual stage but, rather, as the fibrous connective tissue that held all the other stages together. There was a night, however, when her despair reached a crescendo. Ahmed was out for Thursday-night drinks with the Bobs at the Blarney Stone; she stayed home alone. No distractions from the crushing enormity of their predicament, feeling the full weight of the emotional burden, Nalini thought about doing something about it. Something bad. Something permanent—something so wrong she wouldn’t even name it inside her head. In that moment, this act seemed like a rational response to her reality. An act of power, even. Of defiance. Even though it was the worst form of self-destruction. That Nalini should do as those nineteenth-century West African slaves bound and bound for the New World did: jump overboard rather than endure captivity. It was a rational choice, she felt at the time. The primary reason Nalini did not act on this impulse for self-destruction was the knowledge that her own African ancestors were specifically the ones who didn’t jump overboard. Her ancestors were the ones who made it to the other side of the bloody triangle of the Atlantic slave trade by enduring, and kept that up for centuries. If they hadn’t been, she wouldn’t be here, or anywhere. The other suicide deterrent: Nalini refused to be the first of the Delany crew to do so. She would not give Bob the satisfaction. Hell, no.
Although Nalini could also acknowledge that Bob likely wouldn’t care one way or the other, this was a strong motivator.
Stage 5: Acceptance
There was nothing the former crew could do to change their situation besides choosing to stop wasting energy trying to change everything. New Roanoke was fine, just another small city, but on a moon. That’s it. Whatever had taken them there hadn’t hurt them, and maybe never would. If it was hell, it was a hell with a Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen and three Massage Envys. How it all got here, how it was being sustained: not urgent questions next to ones like How do we make the most of our new lives in this place?
I will make it up to Josey, Nalini vowed. With the bounty of my research. At this juncture, Nalini reached a stage where she was both sure she would be rescued and certain she was stuck for the rest of her life. She had become Schrödinger’s Cat. If she was doomed to stay, she decided she would become a middle-school teacher, to work with children as penance for not being there for Josey—the seventh-grade Josey of her mind, the last version of her sister she had connected with. That was fine—there was always a shortage of middle-school teachers in the STEM fields. This plan calmed Nalini for a week before she remembered that she also disliked kids, especially the middle-school ones. Are you babies? Are you teenagers? Make up your minds. But even that was fine; penance is supposed to be painful.
Ahmed Bakhash was one of the most adaptive individuals Nalini had ever known, and if she hadn’t gotten engaged to him four months after landing, she would have considered him an excellent research topic. They hadn’t even been on New Roanoke a month before Ahmed started exploring the job market. Nalini watched him devising a list of possible jobs, deciding which to pursue based on how well his existing skills would translate, and which offered the best long-term earning potential. For, as seemingly identical as this land was to their own, there were some significant differences, the complete absence of any aeronautical presence in the dome being one of them. There were no planes, let alone space shuttles. There was no research science, or need for it, because all the real innovation came from out of town, passed on from Earth like hand-me-downs. New Roanoke was a state of replication, not innovation. So Ahmed decided that—absent any demand for astronautical engineers—a career in broadcast technology was the key to providing him with a lifestyle that would make being kidnapped on an alien planet more palatable. His existing skill set went far beyond the requirements of the job, so, in lieu of a résumé, Ahmed constructed a broadcast-tower signal booster, about the size of a trash can, and presented it to the Roanokan Broadcasting Company’s executive-level management. This display secured him a senior engineering management position; always an overachiever, outpacing others in mental acuity and work ethic, Ahmed now had an even greater advantage. Like a city slicker in comparison to his country cousin, Ahmed was up on the latest fashions, technology-wise, while his New Roanokan peers lagged five, sometimes ten years behind. In a matter of months, he’d progressed all the way to Vice President of Communications, acquiring a local financial advisor as well.
Ahmed’s corporate audition was arranged by Bob Seaford himself: Bob managed to get that politically connected, that fast. Through the lens of her professional discipline, it was fascinating for Nalini to watch Bob work, a joy radically tempered by her intense dislike of him personally. In the first days of their group citizenship training, Bob repeatedly requested an audience with “whoever’s in charge,” exasperating several daily instructors until one finally acquiesced to his demands just to get him to shut up. All the Bobs quietly cheered this on when they heard, assuming Bob was asserting power and agency on behalf of their larger collective. The first person in charge Bob targeted was the night-shift manager at the New Roanokan Collected Welcome Center, a petty bureaucrat seemingly selected by Bob because he was the easiest to blindside.
“Okay, that’s it—I’ve heard enough. Let me speak to whoever you report to. Get them in here. Now.” The flustered night-shift manager brought in a slightly older-looking administrator, then fled the room. Focusing on the new guy, who seemed half awake and visibly off guard, Bob immediately repeated his routine: “Who is your direct superior? Names, I want names.” And then, to his boss, Bob buckshot variations of “What the hell is all this about?” and “No bullshit, someone tell us what is really going on,” on repeat. Until whoever was harangued relented and got his boss. Over and over for the course of a week this went, Bob’s performance of entitlement too flawless for anyone even to think of questioning it. At first, Nalini took this to be a pointless symbolic act, yet another one of Bob’s hollow dominance displays meant to excite his acolytes. After all, these were the same questions they’d all been asking the staff since they landed. But for Bob the question was only a tactic, a runway to his grander performance.
Witnessing his slow-motion infiltration of the indigenous leadership, Nalini soon realized that she’d underappreciated what a rare and skilled Machiavellian operator Bob Seaford truly was. The local society had no natural defenses against his opportunistic maneuvering. Their ruling class was soft from lack of obstacles or resistance. The first-generation abductees of New Roanoke were people plucked from quiet, comparatively unremarkable lives—folks who could go missing without the world coming to a halt. Amid this subset of Earthlings, Bob was an anomaly: an overachieving and cunning predator. Like any ecosystem invaded by an alien carnivore, New Roanokan society had developed no natural defenses against being devoured.
Bob’s grilling of the senior manager of the New Roanokan Collected Welcome Center was conducted in such a forceful and annoying manner that said manager kicked his queries up to his superior as a way of exiting from Bob’s overbearing orbit.
Next up was the Founders Party Communications Deputy II Brett Cole. None of the Delany crew had ever heard of him, of course, but the local admins said his name aloud with a measure of gravitas that implied they should. Apparently, Communications Deputy II Cole was someone who’d “taken a break from his senior party schedule to honor us with their presence,” their intake counselor offered, his eyes flicking to Bob for a hint that this was finally enough. It was, apparently, because Bob’s demeanor immediately switched upon the Communications Deputy II’s arrival.
By then, Nalini was more aware of the Founders Party’s position in this society. Not only was it the ruling party; their brief history lesson revealed that it had been for a generation. On its surface, posters of smiles and strength and national pride, which Nalini associated with the deniable malignance of soft-core fascism. An emphasis on tradition and “New Roanokan values,” which she took as a polite way to advocate for a nativist power structure in a world where foreigners were plopped down on a regular basis. On honoring God, as a way for a party of humans to claim divine rights. The conservative sect closely linked with the party, “Church of the Collected”? That was just creepy; Nalini didn’t need to know anything but the name to get it. But, considering all that, when the Communications Deputy II showed up, Nalini was surprised to see that individually he came off like a total sweetheart.
This doughboy of a man (Nalini imagined this is what an adult-sized baby would look like in a suit) seemed to be under the assumption that the crew of the Delany, having just arrived from Earth, were as impressed by his presence as was the rest of the Welcome Center’s staff. Cole soon proved to be a numbing orator, overly formal and prone to silences between thoughts, and the words that came out of his mouth were just gilded versions of the same nonanswers they’d be fed daily. What was truly different about the occasion was how Bob responded to them.
After some effusive praise that stopped just short of perceptible insincerity, Bob switched seamlessly into a more conspiratorial tone. “Chief, I’m not from here—obviously. But I can see a man of substance when he’s standing before me. You coming down here, to talk to us? That’s character. Brett Cole. I’m never going to forget that name.” Bob walked over to the man and slapped him on the back. Cole startled at the gesture, but an earnest grin flashed across his face, as if he’d waited his entire life for such an audience response. Bob had his hand on the other’s shoulder when he leaned in and added, “Just want you to know, if I can return the favor in any way, I’d love the opportunity. My goal is to show just how much a new arrival can do in this great society you got going on here. I’m trying to be like you when I grow up.”
Communications Deputy II Brett Cole beamed. And with that perfect balance of fraternal and obsequious, Bob began burrowing himself into the fiber of the primary power structure, the Founders Party. Using his weakness, as a newly arrived outsider in a nativist stronghold, as his greatest asset. Offering himself as a symbol of the recently collected, a prominent token willing to play ball if it kept him on the roster.
Nalini watch all this unfold and was humbled by the brilliance of Bob’s machinations. The efficiency and skill with which he injected himself into the local society revealed an expertise honed over decades. Clearly, it had been with a similar method that Bob managed to secure the backing of his high-roller oil-and-gas buddies to get on the Delany in the first place. It wasn’t long after his charming of the party man that Bob had his first party job himself. The title of this Nalini didn’t bother learning, because the role of the job was too clear for her to bother. Bob offered his service as a token immigrant in a fiercely nativist party, historically a highly lucrative position.
Within months, Bob had left the lower-income neighborhood surrounding the New Roanokan Collected Welcome Center altogether. It was less than a year later that Nalini first heard the rumors about Bob’s new McMansion on the other end of town. Perfect for dinner parties, apparently. At least according to Ahmed and those Bobs who’d been invited.
In contrast to the overachieving assimilation strategies of Ahmed and Bob, there was Dwayne. Before dawn, when Ahmed first rose to shower, Nalini—always a light sleeper—rose as well, usually to make tea and plan the day as she waited for the “sun” to rise in the artificial sky. It was at the window that she would sit and watch Dwayne, speed-walking in the dark. Some mornings, in circles around their block. Zip, zip, zip. Other times, it was just off into one direction and then gone, down the street and out of sight for the day. Or days. Nalini hoped he was going somewhere specific, somewhere he’d found to get away from it all. His pace, the way he swung his arms, it looked…wacky. Nalini liked to think of it that way, wacky, because she was afraid of categorizing it more clinically, hoping that, instead, there was a logical reason she was missing. Maybe he was just exercising—it made sense that Dwayne, a rabid vegan and disciplined practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, would get into extreme walking after being stuck for so long on the Delany. All this was guesswork, because, despite the basic stipend given to him, Dwayne had no phone, and either his doorbell was broken or he simply wasn’t answering. After putting it off for longer than she was proud of, one morning Nalini rose in the dark and dressed before Ahmed so she could catch Dwayne the moment he came out for his daily wander.
“Yo, lady” was how Dwayne greeted her on the street, and an unexpected shudder of relief made Nalini aware that she’d assumed that he was mad at her for some grave yet unknown offense. Despite the walking, without the meticulously balanced dietary regime of the Delany, Dwayne had already managed to gain enough weight to inflate his cheeks and thicken his neck—slight, but something someone who’d spent months staring at him would notice.
“So what’s going on, chief?” Nalini tried to keep pace with him, because he was already launching into his strut and on his way. He knew what she was talking about, and didn’t bother with the game of denying it.
“I’m still looking for a way to get out of here,” he admitted.
Nalini walked alongside him silently in the time it would have taken to say the obvious: We’ve been through this, we can’t get back to our ship, they have no ships, and even if we tried to build a ship we lack the technical, financial, and industrial means to make that a reality.
“I’m walking the length of the bubble in spirals now,” he continued, his voice intensifying as he went. “Just to see what’s here. What’s really here, and not just what they say is here—not just take their word for it. I refuse to renounce my freedom based on the assessments of total strangers. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but some of these people are really weird. Walking around smiling, empty-eyed. Who does that? It’s creepy. They look like nonplayer characters in a shitty game. I think that’s what happens to you if you just give up.”
“Lot of people here are dealing with the trauma of being here. Likely, even the ones born here—generational trauma, possibly. It’s not a game.”
“No. It’s a terrarium.”
“Sure, okay.” She shrugged. When Nalini saw Dwayne’s slight blanch, Nalini realized how dismissive this sounded, so she added, “I’m just tired of thinking about it, to be honest.”
“I can’t think of a damn thing else. I keep thinking: bearded dragons.”
There was a vast stretch between how obvious this connection was to Dwayne and how little sense it made to Nalini, and it made her worry about it more.
“I never told you the bearded-dragon story?”
“No. Tell me your bearded-dragon story.”
He kept walking, staring down as he talked. “When I was a kid, my pop refused to let me get a pair of bearded dragons. You know, little lizards, about a foot and a half long. He hated them, hated the smell of them in the pet store, thought they cost too much, said our apartment was too small. He wanted to adopt me a puppy, and then that became a whole thing, a stand-in for the larger conflict between my identity and the fact that he was a closeted homophobe. But, eventually, he gave in, for two reasons. One: to encourage my interest in science. And two: to get me to stop begging for bearded dragons.” Dwayne’s pace slowed a bit as he looked up at her, but he never stopped moving, pushing forward.
“We’re all going through versions of the same thing, Dwayne. Come talk to me. If Ahmed’s an issue—which is ridiculous, but whatever—I can come to your place.”
“The thing about bearded dragons is that you can’t just feed them dog food. No dry, bulk buys. They need to eat crickets. Live crickets. So it’s like you’re buying hundreds of pets to feed one pet. Every day. So what does that mean? That means you’re at the pet store once or twice a week. That means, no matter how careful you are, crickets get everywhere; random appliances start chirping, because somehow the crickets got inside. It was a nightmare. My dad was totally right, it was a horrible idea, even if he came to that conclusion for the wrong reasons. But I refused to admit it, and kept them until I left for college, because fuck that guy.”
“We’re not bearded dragons.”
“No, we’re not. We’re the crickets.”
* * *
—
The next time Nalini heard Dwayne deliver the bearded-dragon/crickets analogy, it was a year later, and he was standing on a milk crate at the Speaker’s Corner of Grand Circle Square Park again. It was one of several theories he floated during the span of twenty minutes in which Nalini watched him. Now others were watching him, too. Not just walking by, but standing attentively to take his words in. Nalini stood at a distance as he railed passionately about things that were never going to change unless everyone present changed them. Dwayne was vague on specifics, but it was still bold: Even publicly acknowledging that New Roanoke was not actually the promised land was an antisocial act of rebellion. The crowd grew for a while, too, until, eventually, there were dozens listening. And they stayed until Dwayne segued to his theories on the importance of discussing the “invisible things” issue. It was the first time Nalini had heard it discussed in the open. At the mention of “invisible things,” the crowd cleared out almost instantly. No one wanted to talk or hear about that.
