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At the time, the museum did not pay much attention to the manuscript, as it seemed to them to be a highly implausible personal memoir that held no cultural or historical significance–at least none that could be verified. Its author made bold claims but did not provide sufficient details to corroborate them. It wasn’t until a staff member by chance learned about the body found with the manuscript that the museum began to take the work seriously.
But—and I suspect that this isn’t something people like to admit; I’ve seen a lot of people who lived through that time not admitting this—it didn’t feel like an apocalypse. It just felt like life.
I was born into war, and I grew up in something much, much worse.
The idea of an apocalypse is a comfort, because it makes death seem like something we can all experience together, in a single moment, a colorful firework burst. But mostly death is something you keep to yourself. In reality, the apocalypse is most likely to be you, alone in a room with the flu.
Sometimes you get to the point where surviving takes so much work that you begin to ask yourself if it’s worth it. Or you would, if you had the energy. I’m not talking about depression, really, though I suppose there are similarities.
“It’s in times of strife that our true goodness can shine through,” you’re probably thinking. I’ve heard people say that. Countless times I’ve heard that said by youngsters who have never seen so much as a backyard brawl. By idiots.
You do the best you can, and the only morality you have to cling to is the knowledge that you didn’t choose to be there.
A set of powerful men, who never even knew you existed, put you there. And why? For power? For a bit more land they’d likely never even walk over?
Belief in an apocalypse is the belief that a greater power, a predetermined fate, has been set in motion. Once you believe that the end of the world has begun, you are complicit in its destruction.
When she found homes that housed human remains, Naija wouldn’t allow anyone else to handle the bodies—she would do that herself. She would wrap them carefully in whatever blankets we could spare, bundle them into a wheelbarrow, if she could find one, and take them away. I asked her about what she did with them, but she never told me. All she would say is “They are human beings,” giving me a strange look, as if I was wrong even to ask the question.
When I picture myself in prison I picture—well, myself. My adult self. Why didn’t I realize how young I was? Why didn’t I realize I was a child?
IT WAS COMFORTING TO KNOW that we all shared similar paths in life. Families dead. Opportunities vanished. And nowhere else to turn. This was, of course, nearly universal to all survivors of the Reckoning, but it felt good to talk about it. To share. To be heard and acknowledged. No matter how much worse someone else’s story was from my own—Nora, the granddaughter of American slaves, for example—there was always a gesture of shared sorrow, of empathy.
“If we could only break down the idea of tribes altogether,” Nora would add. “Or convince the world’s people that they are all part of the same one anyway.” At this point Willem would laugh and scoff. “Yes, exactly. All we need is to tell people there are no borders between us, that we’re all one.” It was baffling to watch. I’d never seen people talk like this, disagreeing but not arguing.
While some in the group seemed to approach these debates as purely academic, as theories and studies, Nora was a true believer. An idealist. Hopeful. She would talk about what she called a “new society,” with no nations, no flags, no armies.
Utopian ideals weren’t just bandied about over dinner and around lectures—under Nora’s direction, they were translated into lists of objectives and tasks. It wasn’t until much later that I would recognize these lists for what they were: manifestos. The first drafts of an insurgent constitution.
My contribution to this effort was the Watercolor Quiet, but though I was developing my own practice in exciting new directions, it still rarely connected with others as anything more useful than a relaxation exercise. I was appreciated, certainly, but never fully understood.
It is hard to stop yourself from developing affection for people, even when all your past experiences have taught you how dangerous it is.
I was beginning to wonder if, rather than just dampening traumatic emotional memories, I could reorganize them. Detach them completely from the earlier pains of war and smoke and disease.
I began to wonder how each parent had reacted to each individual trial of the past decades. What impatience, frustration, anger, helplessness their children had witnessed in them, in the people who were supposed to be their unassailable protectors. Every time they watched their parents fail, I believed, their feeling of security in the world and their place in it was eroded. On top of this, every faulty impulse, every bad habit, every prejudice their parents carried, the children would inherit.
And stories, like damselflies, populate and spread in the right conditions. In the humid haze following a storm, eggs hatch below the water, and soon thousands of exotic insects color the dense air like floating jewels. They are beautiful, with bright bodies, kaleidoscopic eyes, and wings like stained-glass windows, so we appreciate them. We allow them space in our ecosystem, because they stimulate the surface of our imaginations. We accept them because, unlike wasps or ants or bottleflies, they cause no harm.
Nora knew that truth is a tree. It is sturdy and strong, but only after it has fully matured and weathered the brutal critique of nature. She had no weapons against brittle, determined ignorance.
The writer of this manuscript seems to believe, or to be trying to make us believe, that the current structure of our world was put in place simply by those loud enough to demand it. That the rules we follow were invented by opportunists. If she were right in this, it would follow that the society we live in is little more than a global cult.
I am haunted as I write this. Surrounded by people I spent the best part of my life trying to forget. Would it have been easier if I’d kept them with me? A little bit of pain every day instead of the flood all at once now—now, when I need focus more than I need regret?
I wanted to free people entirely from the trauma they had suffered, but it seemed to me that all I had done was open a door to a garden. They could not stop themselves from venturing back into misery from time to time.
Clearly it was not enough to remove someone’s emotional connection to their memories. Repackaging trauma was not enough. Unopened boxes demand opening. But what if I could remove painful memories entirely?
I had developed a methodology for separating people from their trauma, for allowing them to live more peaceful lives, and I thought I would be able to keep control of it. It was mine, after all. Who would be able to use it but me? But it escaped my control and ran rampant. It spread and spread, iterated many times, and each iteration was one step further from where it started.
I am not saying that the Society is wrong to use my technique as it does, necessarily—after all, we have created a peaceful world. But if I had known the lengths to which it would be taken, I believe I would have kept it to myself and found another way to help those children.
It is one of the universe’s deepest and cruelest jokes that it takes a lifetime to learn the lessons you need in order to live.
There would be no more parents. There would be no more families. All that was to be severed. It was not until 1960 that all children were required to be state-raised.5 But in my final, tarnished years at Gateway, we were charged with removing all knowledge of parents, siblings, and secondary family from the orphans.
Then he lunged at me. For a moment I thought he was about to attack me, and I stood up from my chair, but he did not attack. He hugged me. He held tightly to my waist and sobbed. “Please don’t,” he wailed. “I like talking to you.” I held my arms up like wings, trying to understand what was happening. Embracing children in the program was not conducive to their progress. It was a form of parental love. In certain sessions, we deconstructed forms of touch, such as hugs and kisses on the cheek or forehead. But these took place in a controlled, heavily monitored environment, and they were meant to
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didn’t fully understand. I knew that Edgar was dead. Whether by human or animal or his own doing, it didn’t matter. What mattered is that he suffered, and I failed him. What mattered is that I was considered responsible for his death. What mattered is that I could not stay and fight against the IID—an opaque agency whose reach I could not even begin to imagine. I did not want to go to prison. I wanted even less to go through months or years of interrogations and trials.
The value of this manuscript lies chiefly in that it is a rare depiction of a life lived during the greatest social upheaval the world has ever known. It is also valuable for the insight it provides into the mental state of a person who had an undeniable impact on the world as it operates today.
I KNEW I LOVED TERESA MOYO THE MOMENT I SAW HER, AND THE first thing I did was spit on her.
Again she was dressed intimidatingly well: a blouse in a warm mustard yellow that brought out the deep, dark shine of her skin. Again I marveled at her, how her close-cropped hair brought out her cheekbones, how her black eyes sparkled.
We got married on a cold, gray, damp day, and everything was beautiful. I didn’t need sunbeams because I had her. I didn’t need blue skies or sweet summer breezes, because the depths of winter felt like spring.
As the New Society was protecting the lives and minds of children, was it dismissing the needs of adults? The Society was raising competent, confident youth, who would give back to this world in extraordinary ways. They would be raised without the burden of families, without the cultural conservatism and selfish sheltering of parents. Without the privilege of generational wealth and connections, without the struggles of inherited poverty. These children would be the first truly equal generation.
We would lose the innate joy of raising a child, seeing them grow and develop, replicating our gestures and habits, improving upon our failings. It is a powerful loss, and the treatment program Teresa had enlisted in was supposed to help ease that.
“I really loved being pregnant.” “What did you love about it?” She looked down for a moment, shook her head slightly. “I don’t think I can explain it. It’s just—it’s something bigger than words, you know? Bigger than ordinary life.” She paused again for a while. “At first it’s just the sense of anticipation. Potential, you know? Then slowly it becomes about how it’s changing you. Your own body adapting and readying itself. It’s intoxicating. Like there’s something more running through your veins than just blood. “And eventually you can feel this new person, this new life. It moves and kicks
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“I know how it works, Miriam. I just liked the name. In my mind, he’s Moses. In his mind, wherever he is, he can be whatever they call him. I don’t care. He’s always going to be my Moses.”
My research with people who had been through the repopulation program was ready for its second stage: I was ready to begin putting participants through the Watercolor Quiet—restructured and targeted to their specific needs—to help them let go of the children they had carried but could not raise.
I was presented with options, and I made decisions, and sometimes I asked questions in order to make better decisions but sometimes I did not, and that was a choice too. So here we are. The last moment. The last time I could have prevented everything. The last time I could have given myself a different legacy. But how do you prevent something you can’t predict? Or maybe I should have predicted it. Maybe that’s my real crime. I didn’t see the future—I chose not to ask the questions that would have allowed me to see the future, and I have to live with the consequences. Not for much longer, but
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She was sitting cross-legged on the footpath outside the hospital she’d given birth in. She was very still. I pulled over, got out of the car, and sat beside her. “Teresa?” I said. She turned to look at me, her face blank. “I wanted to remember. I wanted to remember them,” she said. “Do you think if I could touch them, I would remember what they look like?”
Based on the timeline of the events and the situations the author outlines earlier in this manuscript, Dr. Haverstock seems the most likely candidate, but it seems wildly unlikely that she had any part in what is related here. Dr. Haverstock died before the manuscript was discovered, so we cannot ask her. Even if we could, we would be loath to suggest that she committed the crimes Dr. Gregory accuses her of. To accuse anyone, let alone a person of such standing, of the murder of a child is in itself a shocking claim, absent concrete evidence.
I had wondered whether, if we began to administer some of the therapy via a recording that they could follow on their own, wherever they were most comfortable, they would be more able to complete the program.
“I don’t know. Everyone just calls it ‘below.’ I’ve heard that if you keep failing, you get taken below,” she said. “And what happens to the people who get sent below?” “No one talks about it,” she said. “One day they’re asked to report to the south wing, bringing only their cassette player. When they come back, they’re not really back.” “How do you mean?” “They’re normal, but not. They’re happy, but they don’t say much, and they definitely don’t talk about what happened below. And usually they’re discharged—or, I don’t know, sent someplace else—a day or two after that.”
I wish I could see Rosemary’s face as she is brought low by my work. She thought she was too far ahead of me; she thought she could stop me. She was sure of it. And I haven’t come out the winner—I’m dying alone in a dusty room under someone else’s name—but she hasn’t either and I want to see the knowledge of that on her face.
Now that you have read it, we request that you either return this copy to us, burn it, or take responsibility for its safekeeping yourself. The one thing that must be avoided at all costs is the widespread distribution of this manuscript.
