The New Voices of Science Fiction

IN THE SHARING PLACE ^{DAVID ERIK NELSON}

CHILDREN ARE brought to the Sharing Place because a loved one has died.

You must always use the present perfect tense and passive voice: “A loved one has died.” Not “A loved one is dead,” and never “this killed a loved one” or “a loved one was killed by that” or even “a loved one died because of the other thing.”

The actual circumstances of the death are inconsequential. They have nothing to do with why children are brought (note the passive voice) to the Sharing Place, nor when they will leave the Sharing Place.

Children are brought to the Sharing Place because a loved one has died and, despite being young, they may very well still suffer Rejection if they fail to process this grief.

And just about the only thing we can do for our children now is help them avoid Rejection.

There are three rules at the Children’s Sharing Place. The first is that a child may leave at any time, provided they attest that they are ready to leave on two separate occasions.

The boy with the long hair that hangs over his eyes does not speak for his first two sessions in group. On the third session the first thing he says is that he is ready to leave.

He shouldn’t even be here, he explains. His father isn’t dead, he insists.

“Augie,” you say, “your father has died.”

Augie does not speak again for the remainder of the session.

The next day, he repeats that he is ready to leave.

You say nothing, because that is the therapeutic protocol. This protocol demands impartiality and discipline: A child who has self-selected to leave will not progress further if forced to stay in the Sharing Place. Worse yet, a non-progressing child could derail the others’ progress.

You remain silent, but the other children attempt to talk sense into him. They Bargain. This is appropriate.

They tell Augie he can’t go, because he just got there, because he hasn’t resolved any of his issues, because he hasn’t Said It yet, hasn’t even started to Say It. They say that if he goes into the Waiting Room now, he’s definitely going to get Rejected. They say that he can go but doesn’t have to: he can still just go back to the dorms and then have dinner and then go to bed and then get up and then go to class and then return to their next session. He doesn’t have to leave, even if he said he wants to leave. Fifty-seven minutes pass this way.

“Our time is almost up for today,” you say.

Augie stands without a word and opens the Waiting Room Door. Beyond the Waiting Room Door is a small waiting room—just a pair of upholstered yellow chairs and a side table with a fan of three magazines. The top magazine is Ranger Rick. You have never been in the waiting room, and so do not know what the other two magazines may be. There is also a potted plant. There must be a draft, because the potted plant nods rhythmically, like the quiet old lady knitting in the rocking chair in Goodnight Moon.

And, of course, there is the other door, the EXIT. The word “EXIT” glows above it in red. It probably isn’t even three long strides from the Waiting Room Door to the EXIT.

Augie steps through the Waiting Room Door and gingerly shuts it behind him. The door latch clicks, then there is the faint sigh of the EXIT door, followed by a big and sudden sound, like an alligator roaring and rolling in a swamp. And then silence.

“Our time is up for today,” you begin to say, but just after you say “time,” Augie’s scream interrupts you. It is a truly agonized scream, loud and long and ragged. It doesn’t end, so much as fade. There is whimpering and crying for a long time after. But this whimpering is quiet, and the other children in the Sharing Place understand your words this time. They file out the main door, back to the dorms and mess hall and everything else down here in their sheltered world.

The second rule is that a child must eventually, in their own words, explain how their loved one(s) died. They must Say It. There are many levels to Saying It. It may start with:

“My father has died.” And from there progress:

“My father is dead because of a gun.”

“My father fired the bullet that killed him.”

“My father committed suicide.”

“My father committed suicide, because something went wrong in his brain.”

“My father committed suicide, because something went wrong in his brain after the Event.”

“My father heard the Bad Song.”

“My father committed suicide after the Event, because he heard the Bad Song and listened.”

And so on.

It is not abnormal for children to become extremely emotional as they attempt to Say It in various ways. Do not let this alarm you. It is a natural stage of grief, and it will pass. Children have a natural tendency toward Resilience. If a child is consistently extremely emotional during their own or another’s act of grief, they may need to book Open Time in the Laughing Place or the Volcano Room. Open Time can be recommended (note the passive voice) in the “OTHER COMMENTS” section of the Incident Report.

Three days after Augie has gone through the EXIT, Tilly stands and Says It, succinctly and dispassionately. You tell her that she’s done a good job, and that you are proud of her. Other children do likewise. The shy boy next to her flashes her a quick smile, then looks away. He holds up his fist, and she bumps it. She smiles, relieved.

The boy begins to speak—perhaps to Say It himself, perhaps to say something else—and Tilly interrupts him without apology.

“I’m ready to leave,” she says.

This is her second time attesting. Her first was fourteen weeks earlier. It was the first thing she said, two minutes into her first session. Almost none of the children present today were at that session. Almost all of those children have Said It and gone, or just gone (as was the case with Augie). To these children, Tilly is as much a staple of their sessions as the chairs and canned fruit and well-worn fidget toys.

You say nothing.

Tilly stands.

The shy boy next to Tilly is clearly distressed, but he does not speak.

Do not attempt to dissuade Tilly. Do not Bargain with her. The children can—and should—Bargain with Tilly. It is part of their grief, and it is appropriate.

“You don’t have to go just ’cause you said it,” a tall girl, Marianna, says. “You can still stay. At least another day.”

“Marianna’s right,” another girl, Vanessa L., adds. “The Waiting Room will be there tomorrow, and next week, and forever.” Barring natural disaster, this is correct: The Waiting Room will likely be there forever. But that doesn’t mean one can wait forever: Food stores aren’t dire yet, but they are dwindling. There is plenty of water, though. Our well is deep. It would not be inappropriate for you to correct Vanessa L., but you let her statement stand unchallenged.

Vanessa Z., who sits next to Vanessa L., is nodding. “Announcing it is just saying that you’re gonna go. Like with Shane. He said it and Said It, but didn’t go for another six weeks.”

“It’s all bullshit anyway,” Bennie adds. He is small and young, but angry as an old cop. “Don’t do their crap their way. Keep coming to sessions with us.”

“You should at least stay until we’ve finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Jay Chen yips. He’s an excitable boy. “There’s only, like, one-third of the last season left. It won’t even be a week.”

Tilly shrugs. From prior sessions you know that she is a huge Buffy fan. But for many children their demeanor changes once they’ve Said It, and Tilly is one of those: Relieved of the weight of the things they haven’t been saying, they expand back to their normal size—like a sponge that’s had a cinderblock lifted off it—and in doing so draw into themselves. It’s natural. It is part of their process.

“Augie went.” This is Albert, with his chipmunk cheeks and glum Eeyore voice. “That didn’t go great.”

“Augie wasn’t ready,” Tilly says. “I’m ready.”

“Belinda said she was ready.” Belinda had been in the group for a month. She had Said It—and wept while doing so—and then over the next few sessions brightened, gaining strength and equilibrium, helping the other children talk their way forward in their grief. She’d announced her intention to leave, reaffirmed it the next week, and left that same day. Her nail polish had been a perfect robin’s egg blue that day, glossy and flawless. The door had snicked shut behind her, and the scream that had followed had been long and high and ended with a string of babbled begging that had finally devolved into two words repeated so quickly that they’d sounded like the chugging of a ragged, dying lawnmower:

“killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme…”

“Belinda wasn’t really ready,” Tilly says. “I am very ready. I’m gone.”

The shy boy next to Tilly—his name is Marcus, and he is new—speaks just to Tilly: “We could…”

Tilly stops and turns to him. He is knotting his fingers, twisting them against each other, digging painfully into his skin, but his voice is level and clear, if quiet. “We could… try that thing that you wanted to try, but that I was nervous about.” He chews his lip, looks up at the room, then locks on to Tilly. “We could do that. We could do whatever you want if you stay.”

His eyes are wide and desperate and lost. Tilly’s mouth twitches, but she shakes her head without speaking.

Tilly leaves. The Waiting Room door latches shut. You all hear the sigh and thunk of the heavy EXIT door. Then silence.

Silence is presumed to be indicative of Acceptance (note the passive voice).

The group is dour with Tilly gone. This is odd, because Tilly hadn’t been a ray of sunshine. She was usually morose and often irritable. Once, in the midst of an especially spirited session, Bennie had shouted at Tilly: “The only thing you like is stirring shit up and making everyone as miserable as you!”

Albert had called a Time Out and then, in his plodding voice, had taken Bennie to task: “That’s not fair to Tilly,” he’d said. “She doesn’t like stirring shit up and making people feel bad. She doesn’t like anything.”

Everyone had laughed, including Tilly. Then Vanessa Z. had begun to cry and had kept doing so for five minutes and thirty-eight seconds before simply saying, “My brother is dead. He was nine, but he was Rejected anyway because of how Auntie died. My brother is not nine anymore, because he’s dead.” Her spirits had steadily improved since then, but she has yet to ask to leave.

No one seems to have much to say during the session following Tilly’s exit, and so you say:

“My father had his grandfather’s axe. The axe was old and it hung in our garage. It had been used a lot : The handle was dry and splintered and cracked, and the head was pretty rusty, except for the working edge, which Dad dressed before and after each use. My dad and his dad were both the youngest from big families, so I’d presumed my great-grandfather’s axe was very old. Maybe a century? Maybe so. I always thought that was neat: A five-year-old smartphone was practically junk, but a hundred-year-old axe was as good as ever.

“Then one day Dad mentioned how often his dad had worn through axe handles—Dad grew up out in the country, and winter was harsh back then—and I realized that the handle on his grandfather’s axe wasn’t a handle my great-grandfather had ever even seen. On a hunch, I asked how long the head would last. ‘Oh,’ Dad had said, ‘I dunno. Generations. It’s hard steel. I only replaced this one once, when I first got the axe after Dad passed. The handle had dried and shrunk, hanging unused in his shed for so long, and the first time I hauled back to split some stove wood, the head went whanging off into the brush. Never found it.’”

You have never spoken to any of the children about your life before the bunker and the Sharing Place. None of them have ever asked. They are politely attentive now. You know they’ll start to lose focus soon.

“So, my father’s grandfather’s axe had neither the head nor handle of his grandfather’s axe. His grandfather had never seen or touched a single atom of that axe. I asked my dad how the heck the axe was his grandfather’s axe, and he gave me sort of a weird look. ‘Because it is.’ I explained about the atoms, about how the axe only has two parts, and both had been replaced, and so it wasn’t the same thing anymore. Dad was a physics professor. He’d worked at Oak Ridge Atomic Research Center, and he replied: ‘You know that thing people say, about your body having all new cells every seven years? That’s basically poppycock: Some cells are replaced very quickly, like the lining of your stomach, which is shed weekly. Others very rarely are replaced, like neurons. But atoms are swapped in and out constantly by your metabolic processes; from one year to the next almost every single atom in your body will be replaced. Since birth you’ve been a whole new girl over again more than two dozen times—but you’re still my little girl. If I’d saved all the hair from your haircuts growing up—the very atoms that had been you—and introduced it as ‘my daughter, the famous child psychologist,’ people would think I was nuts. The material is just dead stuff. If you’re going to be like that, then we’re all stars, because that’s where all our atoms started out. What counts isn’t the material, it’s the pattern. You aren’t your skin or hair or clothes or diplomas or New York Times bestseller; you are the pattern in your cells that causes those cells to keep gobbling up atoms and organizing them to be you.’

“That sticks in my head, because my dad died in his garage, and some of his blood and stuff splattered on that axe and handle. This was after the government realized that the Event had already started, when the National Guard was dynamiting radio stations so people couldn’t accidentally hear the Bad Song, but before people got really careful and started snipping the speakers out of their electronics. This was before the first deaf person ‘heard’ the Bad Song in the rhythmic buzz of a cellphone set on ‘vibrate,’ and long before people started smashing anything with a speaker in it.”

This was likewise long before the Advent, but you don’t mention the Advent, because the children don’t know about the Advent—don’t even know the word; they came to the shelter before the Advent—but also because you don’t really know anything concrete about the Advent: All you really know is that something has arrived. And, in stark contrast to everything you learned from your dad’s favorite movies, it isn’t going anywhere.

“This was before regular people got careful, but already the police wouldn’t answer the phone or use radio dispatch. You had to text them. So I texted them, staring at the blood spattered on the axe handle so I wouldn’t have to stare at Dad.”

You are no longer worried about the children getting impatient with your story. This is what they’ve been hungry to hear about, the things the “responsible adults” don’t talk about—as though it’s the children who need to be sheltered.

“When I’d come by after work, Dad hadn’t been expecting me. He was in the garage. He had the spigot on, running a trickle across the concrete to the floor drain. He’d do that when he was dressing out a deer in the fall, so the concrete would be easy to rinse off when he was done. But this was the early spring, not deer season. And there was no deer. He was standing over the drain, holding his pistol. A revolver.

“‘Oh,’ he said when I walked into the garage, ‘Jeez, Janey; you scared me. I didn’t think you were coming by.’

“I’d texted him, but he hadn’t noticed—he was ahead of the curve, and had already snipped out his cellphone’s speaker and vibrating motor.

“‘Listen,’ he said—and even then, so soon after we knew there’d been the Event, that word was already starting to get scary: Listen. Because what if someone had heard the Bad Song, just a little, and was about to hum it to you? The way you do when you have a jingle in your head and you say, ‘Hey, listen to this; what’s this stupid tune I’ve got stuck in my head?’ And then you hum a few bars.

“‘Listen, sweetie,’ Dad had said, ‘this isn’t your fault. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be separated from you,’”—you feel yourself smirk, noting the passive voice—“‘but I heard that song, and it’s in my head, and I know it’s changing my Pattern. It’s making me something new. Not just new atoms, but a new Pattern. I’m not the man I used to be.’

“As he said this, he unbuttoned the cuff of his right sleeve with his free hand. His right hand held the pistol, and his finger never left the trigger. He pulled up his sleeve, revealing a scatter-plot row of weeping boils that had sprouted up his forearm. Nestled in each boil was a small, wide eye. There were five of these eyes, bright as a baby’s. Each looked like his eyes, like mine, but each tracked independently, like five separate eyes in five separate darling baby faces. As I watched, they blinked in series, like a shiver of gooseflesh.”

The children do not react to this, and that’s good; their Resilience is all they’ll have, soon enough.

“My father said: ‘I’m scared about what happens next.’ He was crying then with his own eyes, his forearm eyes still looking around like fascinated toddlers. ‘I used to get anxious,’ he told me. ‘It was this constant feeling, like something awful was always just about to happen. Now the feeling has changed. I feel like something awful has already happened. And it’s me. I don’t want to do this, but the song… I thought it was Mick Jones singing “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” but now I realize it’s Sid Vicious covering Sinatra’s “My Way.” I can take a hint.’

“And then he put the gun in his mouth. And then he pulled it out with a grimace, and instead placed the barrel beneath the shelf of his chin. And he pulled the trigger twice. That impressed me. It still does: he’d done the job fine with the first bullet—the proof got all over his grandfather’s axe—but he so badly wanted to make sure the job was done right and final that he had the presence of will to keep pulling, even though he was already dead. That’s something. That was my dad, in a nutshell: he really did the job right and full.”

You take a breath, and you finish:

“My father committed suicide because he’d listened to the Bad Song on the radio—back before anyone even knew anything like the Event could happen—and the song had started to change him. He was insufficiently resilient and adaptive. This is a problem for adults: he could not cope with What Has Happened. To his mind, when your Pattern is gone, you’re gone: the head and handle aren’t just not the old head and handle; they aren’t heads or handles at all. He could not accept this, and so he was Rejected.”

You pause, and then say:

“I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place.”

“You can’t,” Vanessa Z. gasps. Denial.

You ask if there’s a rule that you can’t. The children clearly don’t know. But you do, and there is not. No one ever conceived of the possibility that an adult might try to leave the “safety” of a federal continuity-of-operations shelter. No one older than fifteen is known to have survived outside any shelter, and everyone knows it.

“Bitch,” Bennie mutters under his breath, his eyes accusatory coals. Anger.

The other shelters ceased communicating weeks ago—their computer networks don’t even “reply to pings,” whatever that means. You don’t imagine this is because they’ve somehow found a way to eliminate Rejection.

“Who will help us work through our issues, Dr. Mikkelson?” Vanessa L. asks, slyly.

Bargaining.

You tell them that Dr. Bowersox is an excellent clinician, because she is. They will all be ready to leave sooner or later, you explain. They all have the capacity to be Resilient, Functional, and Adaptive. They are young, and it is still their world. They just need to trust in the therapeutic protocol and in themselves.

You do not say that we—the adults “protecting” you—won’t survive here. Small children are never Rejected; they can accept What Has Happened. These older children can process their grief and likely avoid Rejection, too. But what are the rest of us, the “responsible adults,” doing? Living like moles, breeding more children in order to steadily traumatize them in the sunless continuity of operations bunkers, only to someday send them out the Waiting Room Door, where they’ll sink or swim on their own—and all the while cutting our own rations further and further. What’s the point of that? What the hell are we clinging to?

You realize you are Bargaining with yourself, and you smile.

“I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place,” you repeat. “I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

The final rule is that when you leave the Children’s Sharing Place, you must leave through the Waiting Room.

As soon as the session begins, you stand. “I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place,” you repeat.

The group is silent. They do not Bargain because they are now in Depression.

But you’re past all that, and so you leave.

The Waiting Room Door snicks shut behind you, and you are finally in the Waiting Room, where the potted plant nods in the corner like the quiet old woman whispering, “Hush.”

The Waiting Room is small but not stuffy.

You wait. Nothing happens. And so you leave through the EXIT.

There is a shock of clear light and a distant dinging. The heavy EXIT door thunks shut behind you. Your eyes clear, and you discover that the door exits directly into a large parking lot: cracked, oil-stained asphalt full of weeds, a few cars parked indiscriminately around the blacktop. One car has its driver’s side door hanging open. That’s the source of the ding: the keys have been forgotten in the ignition.

Something bothers you about that dinging, but you can’t focus on what that might be.

You turn to look at the building that you came out of, and see that it’s a low-slung strip of little cinderblock office units skirted with ragged hedges, situated on the outskirts of a giant parking lot, which surrounds a distant shopping mall. There are more cars at the mall, but the parking is no more orderly. You’d originally been brought (note the passive voice) to a different building elsewhere in this office park, a warehouse with a loading dock. This was back when we thought we could hide long enough for What Has Happened to blow over. Back then the big concern was keeping the kids “developmentally on track” while they lived in the shelter, “so they’d be ready to kickstart the global economy.” The soldiers who brought you had spoken of critical infrastructure protection and continuity of operations planning. “The children are our future,” one had told you earnestly as she helped you down out of the truck, “our most precious natural resource.”

You had agreed, but you were still in Denial. Everyone was. Well, everyone older than fifteen.

You are absolutely terrified, standing out in the open in the parking lot.

But the day is beautiful—especially after so many months spent in tunnels and bunkers and shelters and conference rooms and gymnasia. It is sunny and clear, the breeze fresh and clean. It smells of hot tar and the tall sweetgrass left to grow undisturbed in the fields beyond the parking lot. There is no distant drone of traffic. There are no airplanes in the sky, nor the contrails that show their passing. Birds flit and swoop in enormous flocks.

You look down and see a child’s fingernail—a perfect ellipse of robin’s egg blue—crusted into the center of one of the “oil stains” that is not an oil stain. A scream gathers in your throat and you look away.

Tilly climbs out of the dinging car and stretches languidly, like a cat. She has a big, daffy grin.

“Oh, hey, Dr. Mikkelson!” she says. “How are you? Long time, no see.”

You tell her you’re scared. A coyote pads out of the tall grass at the edge of the parking lot. You startle and draw back, stepping toward the safety of the EXIT. Now you’re more than scared. You are terrified, bordering on petrified.

Two more coyotes come, trotting silently into the parking lot. You scurry back to the building and find that there is no knob on the exterior of the EXIT.

“It’s okay,” Tilly says, smile sparkling. She’s hardly herself at all. “It’s all good,” she says. “It’s all good from now on.” She isn’t herself at all.

The coyotes are mellow as old collies, their tongues lolling like friendly pups. One lazily laps Tilly’s hand as it trots past. The lolling tongue is not a tongue; it is a tentacle, the suckers cupping wide, curious eyes, some hazel, others blue.

High in the sky there is something beyond the clouds. At first you think it’s the Moon. But it’s too big, too close, too pink. You note that there are several of these not-moons, pale red, with wavering edges. One rotates slowly, like a curious bird, revealing an enormous three-lobed eye that blinks like a baby’s nursing mouth, pursing and relaxing.

Your heart pounds and pounds in your chest, sending shocked vibrations down your limbs, as if you are uselessly hammering a concrete floor with a hard steel axe.

“Dr. Mikkelson,” Tilly says, “it’s all good; just Listen.”

Tilly is quiet, beaming at you with her daffy smile. You listen to the car dinging, and it doesn’t sound quite right. It’s a little ragged and uneven—but more importantly: it’s been months since you were taken down into the bunker. That car’s battery must be entirely dead by now.

You abruptly remember something Dad showed you once. You’d been washing up after dinner, and had asked him why your guitar amp picked up AM when you had it cranked up with the cable plugged in, but no guitar. He explained that it was because AM transmission was powerful and simple and could infiltrate the amp—and since the amp would amplify any analog signal, it amplified that just the same as your guitar. The place he’d lived in college was near an AM station, he explained, and his toaster would pick up the broadcast on some nights. The appliance’s whisker-thin heating elements vibrated with the power of the AM transmission, singing in tinny harmony. Even unpowered items—unplugged stereos, radiators, people’s dental fillings—have been known to pick up high-output AM.

“AM’s powerful stuff,” he’d said, drying a plate. “If you’ve got the wattage, you can make just about anything sing your song.”

You imagine that this is precisely what the things up in the sky are doing, bathing us in their electromagnetic transmissions, suffusing our highly wired, intricately interconnected world with their perplexing, invasive song. And what is a song, if not a Pattern of signal and silence? God knows that a song can get “stuck in your head”—tricking your brain into reproducing it, over and over, the same as a virus tricks a cell into reproducing it until the cell bursts with those li’l hijackers. Was it so beyond imagining that there might be a song that was so catchy, it didn’t just seduce your brain into reproducing its Pattern, but also into fundamentally changing yours?

Tilly nods encouragingly, still smiling. There’s something odd about her eyes, her eyelids. They’re slitted—you assume because of the brightness of the day—but the corners of her slitted eyes curl up into smiles exactly matching her smile.

Her smile widens, as does the smiling of her eyes.

The car’s dinging isn’t dinging; it’s the Bad Song. It vibrates all through you, at first in harmony with the vibrant clangor of your heart, and then drowning it out. For a moment it is absolutely intolerable, a feeling like your guts being used to dangle you over an infinite and airless abyss, and you absolutely understand why your father put the gun in his mouth.

And then that feeling, whatever it might be called, releases, like a cramp loosening, and you hear the Song for what it is.

Tilly nods, and the coyotes nod, and the birds swirl, and the Eye of Heaven even seems to nod—although how could it be nodding at you? How could the Distant Traveler care at all about something so infinitesimal as you or Tilly or this parking lot or even this country or our species—except to care absolutely and without exception, as It cares about all things here, living on the newest addition to Its glorious collection of Worlds.

Peace and plenty is in the Song. Clean longevity is in the Song. In the Song we’ll be free of strife and free of disease and our slightly battered world will mend and go on and on and on.

The Song isn’t Bad; it’s actually pretty Good. It’s a Good Song, and you smile. You can feel that soon you’ll be smiling all over, in every pore. You’ll be something new, all seeing and all loving, omniscient and omnipresent. Coyotes lick your fingertips, and you taste their tongues on your skin as you taste your skin through their tongues, watching through the eyes that stipple the birds’ skin like morning dew.

The Song tells you that the Song Rejects no one, but some fail to Accept the Good Song and the One True Resonating Harmony that comes with it, here in the Vast Collection.

This is the true Sharing Place, you realize, and you share in it as it shares in you.