Blueprints of the Afterlife

by Ryan Boudinot

I think Swan could tell I was bullshitting her but she continued. “Have you ever met a slave, Luke?” she asked. The question took me aback, coming from a black person. I stammered out a no. She said, “Really? You’ve never been to a mall? You’ve never watched shoppers with their carts piled with soda and microwavable food? You’ve never stayed in a hotel where a fifty-year-old Mexican mother of six scrubs your shit stains off the toilet bowl? You’ve never watched TV for five hours straight?” She went on to explain their theory, sort of a pseudo-Marxist vision of the gemeinschaft and the gessellschaft, the ruling class and the underclass, the proletariat and the elite, the haves and have-nots, the first world and the third. According to Swan, Mr. Kirkpatrick, whose name she refused to utter, had founded the academy as a method to ensure that those in power stayed in power, that those enslaved remained enslaved. The dropouts were the students who refused to go along with this philosophy and had instead allied themselves with the underclass, struggling for equality. Or maybe it was the other way around. It was all a little fuzzy. I asked her about Dirk Bickle. She said Bickle was one of Kirkpatrick’s agents, traveling the world in search of candidates to ensnare in the program.