The harsh, impatient buzzing of the building’s alarm awoke Dr. Seacombe from his deep slumber. His dream had been the same one he had had every night for the last half a dozen years. As he hauled himself out of his bed and set about the morning ritual of getting ready for work he allowed himself these few precious moments to reflect upon the Dream. It was an alluring alloy of fragments of memory and futile hope; the belief that by some means, despite the seemingly unconquerable power of the state of Obamanation there was a way to return to the past. To the time before the Black Man had been elected, to the time before the Health Care Reform Bill had been passed.
They said there were fugitives still living somewhere in the Deep South, bands of outlaws who draped themselves in Stars and Stripes and openly spoke of the truth of Obama’s birth-place. But who was this ‘they’ who said such things about the ‘Glenners’? Overheard snatches of conversation in the libraries and on the buses. Seacombe guessed they were tools of the state, tasked with luring secret non-believers like him in to conspiracies with wild tales of disobedience so that they might be identified and eliminated. He did not believe in the ‘Glenners’ Named for a man who had spoken out and was the first to die in the public executions after the show trials.
It was too good to be true. Living under the perpetual rule of Obama had taught him to be wary of seeming good news.
As he propped his shaving mirror on the bedside table the grim sight in its reflection of his accommodation unit still caused him to shudder. He would always remember the view from his shaving mirror at home. Funny how little things like that remained.
Even if they got to him with the mind control serum he believed the memory of that image would not budge from his subconscious.
He closed his eyes and once again he saw the pale blue wall paper and a few red roses in a crystal vase stood atop the bathroom window sill. He thought of his wife’s admiring smile as he made a show of preening before that mirror, he once again heard the sound of his children’s laughter in the next room as he lathered shaving cream in his hands. Such a scene of domestication was unthinkable now. Every wall that did not have a picture of Obama was regulation white or left bare. Wallpaper had been banned as had vases and flowers in houses. Capitalist frivolities, they had no place in the communist utopia of Obamanation. Not for the common-folk at any rate. There were different rules for the party elites, everyone knew but no one dared say yet another thing that was unspoken because of fear.
He was grateful that his walls were now white at least; his accommodation unit was on the forty-second floor of Block 5, Kennedy St. It had once been ‘Wall-St.’ His own cousin, who had worked briefly as a health-insurance policy salesman had had his office in this very room. He had been executed here as a potential enemy of the state and Seacombe forcibly moved in shortly after when the offices were commandeered for living space. For months he had woken up to the sight of the blood stains.
He often wondered whether the decision to relocate him to the place of his cousin’s death had been a deliberate sick joke on the part of the bureaucrats or one of the many strange coincidences that arose when every aspect of human lives were arranged at national level.
He glanced at the clock to check the time: 7.47a.m, he needed to be in work no later than 9.00a.m. He dared not be late and risk drawing attention to himself.
There was time enough to get dressed and smuggle some breakfast from the communal canteen for Oma, before walking his ‘daughter’ to school on his way to the local hospital where he worked.
His ‘daughter’s’ attendance at school was a temporary arrangement of course, the state now only educated white children in the basics of the propaganda, to ensure obedience and in the jobs which the blacks would not deign to do. She was destined to be sent away in two years time and though he was kind enough toward her he made sure not to foster an emotional attachment. She was not his biologically of course. He had not escaped the forced sterilizations of white people despite his connections. She had been given to him to look after by an administrator at the hospital in a misguided attempt to assuage the loneliness he felt at the loss of his own children once they had reached the age at which they were sent to the forced labour camps. The excellent medical care he could provide meant that he had made many friends amongst the hospital staff and the local party-workers. He did not know the true origins of his new ‘daughter’, it was probable that she was the product of some renegade white heterosexual couple, the female’s pregnancy somehow surviving the purges of the white-unborns. A small selection of the white babies uncovered by the state in recent years was allowed to live. The desire to exterminate the white race had given way to a desire for a small managed population for forced labour, medical experimentation and organ harvesting. In order that their number be kept down homosexual marriage had been made compulsory for most white-men, Seacombe counted himself fortunate that he worked days whilst his new husband, an agreeable enough man who also missed his wife and kids and struggled to hide the fact, worked nights. The two rarely met and were cordial enough when they did.
Working in the hospital meant that Seacombe was privy to far more information than most whites, he knew the fate that awaited his new daughter would not be a good one if the system got her when she reached 8 years of age, the age at which the white-kids were sent to the work camps or, if they were unlucky enough, to the laboratories.
He did not allow himself to become attached to the girl. Instead he desperately sought a means to sell her on the illicit-slave market as a menial worker in Canada or France. It would be her only realistic chance of surviving beyond her early teens.
This ‘daughter’ he had at least some hope of protecting if he could get her out of Obamantion. It was not unheard of for young people to breach the security of the borders and escape. He did not think these tales were myths, it was the one piece of hope he allowed himself to cling on to.
Oma was another matter entirely. The border guards would not be bribed to let an old lady through, the punishment for doing so was too severe. Obama’s hatred of old-people had infiltrated every layer of the state.
Seacombe walked down to the work canteen and queued for his rations. As a ‘good’ white, his specialist medical knowledge made him useful for the black elite, he was allowed two thirds of a black man’s rations, a good deal more than was supplied to the majority of whites living in the accommodation units. He doubted whether the inhabitants of the camps ate any more than was needed to survive. Every time he thought of them he found his stomach would shrink and his appetite vanished. He ate only for the sake of keeping himself alive and healthy to protect Oma and his new ‘daughter’. He carried the tray up to his room and tasted the fare. Cold mashed potato, some boiled cabbage, also cold and his weekly helping of beef. A slim, greasy patty. He divided the meal, such as it was, in half, putting one half on to a book which he utilised as serving plate.
Then he tip-toed back down the stairs and along a corridor to an apparently unoccupied room, as he unlocked the door he was careful to make sure no one was observing him, silently he slipped inside. Dust sheets covered the furniture and a stifling mustiness filled the air, he walked to a far corner and rolled aside the threadbare carpet to reveal the floorboards beneath. Gingerly he gripped one board and prized it up. Then another, and then another. He had become expert at this task and now it took him only a few minutes. In the gloom below he saw the almost luminescent sheen of his grandmother’s white hair , she was already awake, her piercing, cobalt blue, German eyes meeting his with the same expression of thankfulness which they wore every morning when he could bring her food. She smiled broadly at him.
‘Ach, my dear, you have given me too much.’ She protested.
He shook his head ‘Reggie gave me his rations because he’s ill.’ He lied.
He was determined that his Oma, his German-grandmother, the mother of his mother, should live and so every meal was this ritual of persuasion. His own parents had died when he was a two and his Oma had raised him by herself. His affection for her had not diminished since his early child-hood but had rather grown stronger.
Obediently she scraped the food from the plate and ate. When she had finished she perused the pages of the book with genuine interest. There was very little to keep her mind occupied in her small hiding hole.
‘Little red riding hood.’ The book’s cover showed a smiling black-girl in a red hood. ‘She was white you know, when I was a girl.’ She told him, as if she would not be believed.
‘Yes I know Oma, I remember.’
‘And she was bringing cakes for her grandmother, not communally baked-bread for the local party-worker.’
‘There’s no grandmas in the books now Oma. It’s not allowed, you know that.’
She sighed heavily. No grandmas. Well that was one way at least that the blacks and the whites had met an equal fate. Although she supposed that the black grand parents were allowed to die in a more humane way.
‘It is my fault.’ She told him again, as she had done hundreds of times before.
‘I voted for him. I believed in him’
‘Hush now Oma.’ He replied sternly. He did not want to hear her guilty self-remonstrations. What was done could not now be undone.
‘Can you really believe I am the last Grandmother and a great-grandmother also!’ She remarked more to herself than to him. She pronounced these two facts as if they were of equal significance.
‘You are the last grandmother and the last great-grandmother as far as we know. But maybe there is another somewhere, maybe we are not the only ones with secrets Oma.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘No dear, I feel sure I am the last. I did not believe about the death-panels, I thought they were being irrational, paranoid. Foolish, foolish! And now my friends, all of them, they are gone.’
‘Not all of them Oma, Mabel is still alive. Her daughter is infertile; she’s never had any grandkids. ’
‘Ah, a blessing in disguise I suppose.’ Sighed Oma.
The 2-gen rule had been introduced in the year 2033, one of the few compromises made by the state. Now instead of being automatically extinguished at 75 for whites and 85 for blacks the elderly were allowed to live so long as there was only two immediate generations in their family. A pregnancy heralded a forced choice. An abortion in one of the dismal state clinics or sending one’s parents to be killed. No one was spared by the death panels. Not even the Family of the senior party members. They were run personally by Obama himself, one of the few apparatuses of state that he continued to oversee day to day, no one dared to show any sign of questioning the party line, not even his closest comrades.
When the search for grandmothers had begun in his building Seacombe had taken a fresh cadaver of an old lady back from the hospital morgue and had placed it in his grandmother’s bed, he had hid his Oma in this hiding hole and she remained there ever since. It was too dangerous to risk moving her.
She had always been a leftist, but he forgave her that, she was never a communist and had a healthy, now irresistibly illicit distaste for authority. But her now faint childhood memories of East-Germany had left her with an unshakable belief in the power of the state to be good and useful.
Her own father had worked in a hospital and had managed to provide good care for his patients despite the irksome interference of the state. He had even been allowed to take on private patients a few years after the Berlin wall had fallen. The extra money he had earned from them had allowed for a comfortable retirement. She was aware of the excesses of state power that had existed then of course, she had read the history books and heard the testimonies. But her own childhood had not been touched by this side of the East-German state. Unlike Obamanation it had been possible to live a fairly normal life so long as one conformed.
‘It did not have to be like this.’ She would tell him.
‘If Obama had not gone mad….’
He still regarded her socialist views as a peculiar eccentricity that was harmless in her, though he knew that she and millions like her had voted in Obama.
Oh, the changes had begun innocuously enough, as he was graduating medical school the election campaign whirred on in the background, though he was too busy with his studies to pay much attention. He had not discussed politics with his fellow students, most of whom were a good deal younger than him and his wife had been absorbed in her own work and the kids. ‘He’s a Socialist.’ People had said. ’He’s a militant Muslim.’ Now such statements seemed like wishful thinking. Sharia law would be far preferable to the arbitrary cruelty of Obamanation. Even those from the Deep-South agreed with that. At the least the Muslims would have allowed religion, it was rumoured that the Islamic rulers of France even allowed a few Christian churches to remain open.
Seacombe had paid scant attention in the first few years, his family’s affluence meant that his work was primarily an intellectual pursuit and if he was allowed to practice medicine and carry out research he had not cared much whether it was for the state or a private company.
But when the socialised medicine had begun to take effect he had been shocked at how suddenly his world had changed. The medicines were rationed of course and his wages slashed, but he kept faith. The republicans would get back in power, the bill would be repealed. It was not until the first death-panel broadcasts on PBS, which everyone had been made to watch, that he realised the full meaning of the legacy of the election of Obama and the Health Care Reform Bill.
He kissed his grandmother’s forehead.
‘I’m going to work now Oma. Don’t make any noise.’ And he hauled himself out of her hiding hole and carefully replaced the floor boards and the carpet.
He returned to the canteen where he found his ‘daughter’ finishing her own breakfast. ‘Let’s go’ he told her and they headed for the main doors.
It was a short walk to the school and a little further to the hospital. A massive, grey building atop a hill that dominated the sky-line, like all buildings posters of Obama and hammer and sickle flags provided the only colour.
What choice did he have? If he refused to comply they would investigate and find his Oma, they would exterminate his new ‘daughter’ and his real-family if by some miracle they were still alive.
He gritted his teeth and entered the building to begin another day working for the socialised Obamacare.
Footnote:
'Glenner' is a local slang-term here (Bristol UK) for a mentally ill person, named after the former Glenside hopsital. Thought that worth explaining since I doubt many on Dailykos would be aware of the term.