Double Tears
Chapter 128
“Where were you when the nukes fell?”
—Mackenzi Noel, The Time of Fire: Book One
20 NOVEMBER 2020
I guess it’s a go to live stream our concert. This is a first. I mean, we’re being paid to perform at an event! Everyplace else we’ve performed has either been as part of the ‘learning experience’ or ‘for exposure’ or ‘for tips.’ This is a paying gig. Sophie said she negotiated a payment of $200 for each of us. Not bad.
On top of that, John came into our Advanced Photography class and announced a new class project. We’re learning live video. A lot of our class has been watching classic video productions from the ’90s. Apparently, that was when MTV and VH1 rose in popularity with music videos. The concept has waned in the past decade or so. But yesterday, he showed us a few clips of live broadcasts instead of recorded. We watched something as plain as the daily news show and then an awards show. Then we got a tour of video mixing equipment. He plans to use three cameras and a mixing board during our performance with all students doing the work. Cool! We’re going to live stream the performance!
In order to make it all work, Cindy and I have to not only rehearse our music, but we have to perform it in front of the class so they can discuss angles, cuts, and shots. Well, that eats into the rest of our so-called free time.
The only thing is, I need some free time. Em is coming home today. She’s taking a week’s vacation to be here for her twentieth birthday and Thanksgiving. And I’m stuck in school for two more days next week before our break starts.
I need to get home.
Beca was as antsy as I was at lunch Friday. Her little butt kept bouncing on the seat at our table so much that she was shaking the food we were eating.
“Okay, so when does she get in?” I asked. “Is she going to leave after work tonight or wait until morning?”
“She’ll call after work and let me know,” Beca said. “It depends on whether she managed to get packed and how the weather looks. She said Chicago is expecting snow this weekend.” Yeah. Joan was also coming home for the Thanksgiving vacation. Our whole pod would be together again.
“I hope she gets out tonight, then,” I said, giving our littlest girlfriend a squeeze. “It’s going to be a busy weekend.”
“I know you are excited to have Emily home and I’m excited to have Joan, but let’s not forget about our other girlfriends,” Beca sighed. “We’ll have to share them.”
“You have that right,” Rachel said. “I can’t even begin to decide whose lips I want to taste first. We are still all headed to Donna’s tomorrow, right?”
“That’s kind of becoming the default location,” Desi said. “Not that I object, but we all need to be doing more around her house. And how are we handling food for Thanksgiving? I know Donna is excited to have all the pod and our families together, but it must be like fifty people. How are we paying for that?”
“We took the food budget out of our Patreon earnings,” I said. “Livy, Donna, and Nanette went out shopping last weekend to get the big things, like the turkeys. They have to thaw. Donna said we all have to help bake pies this weekend.”
“It doesn’t seem fair that the cost of our holiday should come out of your earnings,” Brittany said. “How are the rest of us contributing?”
“We’re high school juniors and seniors,” Beca said. “And one cute little sophomore.” She reached over and pinched Cindy’s reddening cheek. We’d gotten past the point of really considering her age as that much younger than the rest of us except when we could make a joke about it. “The pod parents’ group has been meeting once a month to discuss their children. Granted, Sophie, Nanette, and Donna don’t have parents in that group, but they are also represented. Mom said one of the key topics of conversation has been how the parents contribute to the support of minors within the pod. Since they all have individual responsibility for us, it’s not like they feel a need to bankroll the whole pod. But when special things come up like travel and gatherings, they created a fund to help contribute. It isn’t huge. We can’t tap into it and all take off for Paris for the weekend, but it makes up the parental contribution to our allowances.”
“That could be hard on some parents,” I said. “We aren’t all from affluent families.” I looked meaningfully at Beca and she just shrugged.
“From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs,” she sighed.
“Ah. Our budding communist,” Rachel said. “But you know, that’s something we should all take to heart. We’re a kind of family—our pod. The essence of a family is that they combine as a unit for mutual affection, protection, and provision. A family doesn’t depend on the children to put food on the table but they provide food for the children. I think the heart of being a family is communist.”
“The thing is, we also depend on each other to be honest about our needs and ability,” I said. “Even in families there’s sometimes a hierarchy of equality. The father is still likely to say, ‘My house, my rules.’ There’s a fine line between providing and dominating.” I could speak from experience on that. V1 had used that very line when dealing with my children. How idiotic of me not to recognize that our home belonged to the family and I’d set it up so that the family was a guest in my home. No wonder my children felt alienated.
By the time I got home after Cindy and I rehearsed Friday, Em was already in the kitchen helping Mom put dinner on the table. That didn’t stop her from squealing and rushing to hug me when I walked in. I needed a minute of just holding her in my arms in order to let the problems and pressures I’d been feeling dissipate into the air.
“A whole nine days off!” she said. “I don’t want to drive anything. You have to cart me around to all my social… you know… flitting around. You are my designated chauffeur.”
“That’s fine with me. You’ll just have to make sure you do all your flitting when I’m not in school or rehearsing.”
“Or on a date or having family time or doing chores. You know you still have responsibilities here at home, young man,” Mom lectured.
“Have I been neglecting things, Mom?” I said. I was really concerned. It seemed I was so busy at the moment that I hardly saw my family. “I didn’t mean to. I forget sometimes that I have responsibilities beyond school and music and the pod.”
“We understand that, Jakey,” Mom said. “Those are all very important and primary responsibilities. But sometimes, your little sister would like to spend time with you and we do like it when you are here for dinner with the family.”
“I’ll try to do better, Mom. Where is the little monster?”
“I’m not a monster, J. I’m right here. You haven’t looked past Em the whole time you’ve been home.” I leaned down to give Pey a hug and realized I didn’t have to lean as far as I used to. She had to be nearly as tall as Beca now.
“And where have you been looking, my favorite little monster?” I asked as I tickled her.
“At Em.” Somehow, she managed five syllables out of those two words. All three of us started giggling. Dad came into the kitchen and just put a hand on my shoulder. We all headed for the table.
“I run grain south and cotton north,” Em said as we ate and caught up. “It is one boring trip after another, day after day. And these are terminal to terminal trips. I’m not making deliveries to bases. I drop a trailer at a terminal, drive the tractor to another terminal, pick up another trailer and drive to another terminal. At least I have a decent scheduler and dispatcher. I leave Monday morning and get back Friday night. I spend four nights a week in the berth in the tractor. I’m on target to drive 150,000 miles this year.”
“That’s brutal,” I said.
“Since nearly all my driving is on the main corridor, the speed is eighty, so it’s not quite as long a day as it could be.”
“Eighty?” Dad said. “Last time I was through there it was seventy.”
“Infrastructure improvements,” Em said. “The road surface is so much better now, it’s safe to have a higher speed limit.”
“Why are the roads better?” Pey asked innocently.
“Hmm. You’re in fifth grade now, right? You should be learning about the Romans in history. The Romans were great road builders. Some Roman roads are still in use today as superhighways. You know how they did it?”
“No.”
“The same way the Egyptians built the Pyramids and the Chinese built the great wall. Slave labor. With a million slaves you can build almost anything. I bet with a million slaves you could build a space shuttle in a week.”
“Yeah, but would you want to fly in it?” I asked.
“You could have taken the management track option,” Dad said. Honestly, Dad? I didn’t think he was serious. He’d worked twenty years on an assembly line.
“And then I’d be the dispatcher telling other slaves where to go and when to be there,” Em said. “There’s another lesson for you, Pey. All the slave drivers who cracked the whips to get the roads built were just other slaves with a different job.”
“We get such different viewpoints on the service,” I said. “Aside from not being here where she wants to be, Joan’s doing exactly what she wanted to do for a career.”
“If I’d known what you know about manipulating the test, I might be in a different place right now. For the vast majority, though, the test shows an aptitude for repetitive labor and doesn’t show actual interest. When they presented it, logistics sounded interesting. The reality is it’s just a repetitive task that would be better done by a machine, or a Mexican immigrant.”
The family played a couple of games and watched TV Friday evening. Em had me cuddled up on one side and Pey on the other as we watched the latest Marvel Comics hero defeat all comers. There were days when I wished there really were heroes like that in the world. But then, I suppose, they’d just want to control everyone’s life like everyone else with a little power did. Heroes today were corporate executives and senators—sometimes one and the same—who made the decisions that lives depended on.
I had to admit my V3 world was somewhat better at moderating the excesses of my V1 world. Corporate executives earned substantially more than the peons who actually did the work, of course, but executive earnings were capped at a percentage of what their employees made. In order for an exec to earn more, he had to increase the level of compensation for his employees. It made sense. V1 had never met or heard of an executive who earned the massive salaries they were paid.
Em and I had a lovely and loving reunion in bed. It had only been a month since she was back for my birthday but it seemed like forever. And the next break we’d be able to get together during would be the first of April. We took our time making love and reassuring each other of how we felt. On the bright side, we were both counting down the thirty-three weeks she had left in the National Service.
“It’s less time than it takes to get pregnant and deliver a baby,” we quipped.
Sometime in the middle of the night, while we were sleeping, Pey crawled into bed with us and went to sleep cradled in Em’s arms.
The pod celebrated Em’s birthday on Sunday. Under guise of entertaining everyone, Cindy and I did our entire two half-hour sets. We were still debating whether to use music during our performance. We were getting pretty good with the memorization but an hour of music at once was a lot. Even though school would be out, Mr. LeBlanc had slated the entire morning Wednesday to work with us. I really didn’t want to be lectured about not paying attention to the score. We could get away with a little more on the Piazzolla music but we’d decided to refresh our performance of Cantos Desiertos since the only video we had of it was what I’d put on my channel the weekend after Cindy’s recital a year ago. Wow! So much had happened in that time.
The family celebrated Em’s birthday Monday evening after I finished rehearsal. I was pretty much blowing off homework this week and figured I’d start making it up after Thanksgiving. There just wasn’t enough time. My big sister was now twenty years old. The big surprise of the night was when Francie showed up with little William Jay.
“I decided to take the week off and give the grandparents a taste of their baby,” Francie laughed. “Many of the parents are off this week and taking their kids away for the holiday so it’s easier to get time off on a holiday than it is in normal times.”
“You sound like you’ve adapted pretty well to your service,” Em said. “I’m so happy you got to stay with your baby.”
“As my grandmother says, ‘It was more luck than sense.’ William came along over a month before my eighteenth birthday. I was obsessed with him and he was seven weeks old when I took my NSAT. All I could think of was caring for him. It seems that came across in the test and I came out with a strong nurturing aptitude I didn’t even know I had.”
“Isn’t that common with all the moms who go into service?” I asked.
“No! You’d be amazed at the number of girls who went out and got pregnant because they thought it would get them deferred from National Service. When they found out differently, they totally lost interest in their babies. We have a creche full of single parent orphans—essentially babies that have been abandoned by their mothers and may not even have a record of the father. The mandatory birth control is just beginning to put a dent in the number of teen pregnancies. In two or three years, we should see it drop off completely. But there are a lot of moms out there who don’t have any nurturing aptitude at all,” Francie said.
We sat around having cake and ice cream and just laughing about our experiences this fall. I got to thinking about what Francie had said and related it to what we were learning from Ray. As he said, ‘A lot of aptitude is attitude.’ We were trying to manipulate our test results with the same technique Francie had used accidentally.
“When can we join the pod?” Pey asked out of the blue.
“What?” I said. “Who join what pod?”
“Me. And Richard and Donnie and Barb and Lisa and Joyce,” she said. “Your pod.”
“Um… Why would you want to join our pod, pumpkin?” I asked. The oldest of the kids she’d just mentioned, Lisa, was just thirteen. Pey and Donnie were ten. Lisa, Barb, and Richard were somewhere between that.
“Pey,” Em said softly, “you just took J by surprise. He’s not being critical of you. There’s, what, six of you? And you’re all getting along great, right?”
“Yeah. Since summer when we all did swimming lessons together, we’ve been doing almost everything together. Lisa will be in high school next year and she’s really scared. Donnie and I feel the same way about going to middle school. We want big brothers and big sisters to watch out for us,” Pey said. I grabbed my little sister and picked her up on my lap.
“Geez! You’re almost too big to pick up anymore,” I said as we plopped down on the sofa. “Before we talk about joining a pod, though, there is one thing you should know for sure. Brittany and Livy and Rachel and Em and I will always watch out for you, no matter what pod you are or aren’t in. And because they are our girlfriends, Donna, Nanette, Sophie, Desi, Beca, and Joan will always watch out for you, too. That doesn’t require membership in anything. You’re our family and we will always be there for you.”
“Really? I love you, J. I love you, Em. I just get worried.”
“What J said is the absolute truth,” Em agreed. “We love you and won’t ever let go. You are our family.”
“Maybe we could have our own pod then and just be your brothers and sisters.”
“Let’s see what happens,” I suggested.
We had nearly every square inch of Donna’s family room, dining room, and breakfast nook covered in tables and chairs. We’d finally gone out to a party rental store over the weekend and rented enough tables, seating, dishes, and flatware to serve the thirty-two people who came to dinner. We decided to expedite things by serving buffet style so people could just go through the line and get whatever they wanted whenever. The parents brought wine but only Sophie, Donna, and Nanette in the pod joined in. A couple of the other parents didn’t drink, either.
The meal was fantastic. Turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, gravy, cranberries, huge salads, deviled eggs, creamed green beans, Jell-O salad, olives, pickles, carrots and celery, pumpkin pie, mincemeat pie, apple pie, cherry pie, ice cream, coffee, tea, and I probably forgot something. We were all full and lethargic.
The kids, whom we subtly started calling ‘pod2,’ went to the game room in the basement. We got the table cleared and the dads all put away the folding tables and chairs, then settled in to watch the Lions and Vikings play football in the first game of the afternoon. That put about twenty of us in the kitchen putting away food and washing dishes and laughing. Several moms sat at the breakfast table with glasses of sherry gossiping. I was happy to see Cindy’s younger brother, Luke, join the kids in the basement and her older brother, Keith, joined the pod in cleaning up. Well, why wouldn’t he want to hang with eleven of the cutest girls he’d ever seen? And Nanette took it upon herself to be personally in charge of teasing him unmercifully. He was a pretty good sport about it.
“Kids. Moms,” Dad said from the doorway. We all looked up. “You should come and see this. The president is on TV.”
We all dropped what we were doing and headed into the family room where our dickhead president had interrupted the football game and was trying to complete a sentence. I wondered if the woman I’d never heard of before who was just elected president would be any better or if gross incompetence was simply a prequalification for becoming president.
I won’t go through the painful transcription. The sum was pretty direct. Border tensions with ‘our southern neighbor’ had escalated. I didn’t understand why no one in news or politics would ever just say ‘Mexico.’ It’s not like we had any other southern neighbors. Anyway, Mexico had closed its borders. WTF? Mexico was keeping people out or keeping people in? Turns out, both. No US citizen was being allowed across the border. Those who arrived by plane or ship were not allowed to debark. US citizens in the country were being rounded up and processed out. Only verified Mexican citizens were allowed into Mexico through any border crossing between the countries. Foreign nationals had to be vetted by a US Border Patrol before they were allowed out of Mexico through any border crossing because once past the turnstile into America there was no way to return.
The real twister, though, came last in the president’s address.
“I have declared a state of national emergency,” he said. “This means that all US military and National Service personnel are required to return to their base at once. All leaves and vacations have been cancelled. All military and corps personnel are required to report to their supervisors or commanders by 0000 hours Saturday November 28, 2020 to await orders. We understand this creates a hardship for some and invoke Article 7 of the National Services Act. Your families, your neighbors, and in fact your country are depending on you to return to duty at once. God bless you.” And with that he left the press room without taking questions.
I turned and looked at my two stunned girlfriends, Em and Joan. Everyone else was looking at them as well. My pod was in action before the parents and had them surrounded in hugs.
“What on earth do they want with an agriculture products driver in a national emergency?” Rachel cried as she held Em between us.
“For all I know they need bales of cotton to reinforce bunkers,” Em sighed.
“You can’t be serious.”
“We all learned that during arms training,” Joan said. “A cotton bale will stop a fifty-caliber bullet with standard load in twenty-seven inches. The same load and bullet will pass directly through a round hay bale.”
“Unbelievable. What do they need computer graphics for?” Beca said. “You shouldn’t have to report.”
“Equality under the law. If one is called, all are called,” Joan said. “When you see the next presidential speech and there are graphics showing where action is and clever animations with things like, ‘National Emergency, Operation Southern Cross’ or whatever the hell they name it, that will come from my department. All that mapping we did in the cafeteria is exactly the kind of animations I do for websites for the government.”
Everyone, including the parents, had a few choice swear words.
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