Within a week the riot was forgotten. By official decree the looters were forgiven and the insurance companies were ordered to pay for all damages to the stores. There was no danger of the insurance companies going out of business, since a new law had made bankruptcy illegal. No new businesses were allowed to form, and no old businesses were allowed to dissolve. These were the orders of the Committee.
Franklin Delware was eleven years old. His mother was thirty-three. He was a quiet boy, with light brown hair and light brown eyes. His face was neither pretty nor ugly, and seemed to have distinguishing features about it all. It was a face in transition, from that of child to that of an adult. It was hard to tell whether he would be an attractive adult or not. For the moment, it seemed as if it could go either way. In his favor were his perfect teeth.
Franklin was not a smart child, in fact he was rather stupid. This, and his lack of friends to give him something to do besides studying led to his having exceptional grades. In that mental prison known as public education, intelligence can lead only to failure. In a system that champions and breeds mediocrity, the stupid child is king. Franklin had never received a grade below an A. His mother loved him, for this, and other reasons, but mostly for this.
Franklin liked to study. He would spend hours in his room reading and copying pages of textbooks, memorizing names and numbers, compiling lists, and summarizing all that the textbooks had revealed.
Yet, in a strange way, he was not entirely proud of his success at school. In fact he was somewhat embarrassed by it. The other kids seemed resentful of him.
“I’m no different than you,” he would tell them. They would believe him, but this did not seem to matter, he was still resented. He got good grades, he was not well liked, and he had few, if any friends. Franklin was lonely, miserable, and terribly unhappy.
There was an older boy in his class who he idolized. The idol’s name was Karl Reichtler.
Franklin’s father was out of work. His hip had been crushed during the riot and he could no longer do his job. His father had taken this twist of fate well, he had sunk to a level of bitterness, but not despair. He took out his anger and his boredom by beating his wife. He never touched Franklin. He did not particularly like the boy. He had wanted an athlete, instead he had gotten this skinny, studious, dim-witted bookworm who, had he continued working, would probably someday have been his boss.
The Delwares lived in a part of the city known as the war zone. It was the industrial part of the city. This area housed factories and warehouses, and the depressing and soot covered dwellings of the workers who sweated all day working in front of the machines in the factories, or lifting boxes in the warehouses, or driving the seemingly endless supply of trucks that drifted up and down the streets, connecting this city with the rest of the country, somewhere out there, beyond the river, beyond the horizon, beyond the thoughts or the cares of those whose existence knew nothing except the factory where they worked, and the machine that greeted them every morning, exactly as they had left it the night before.
Strangely, when the revolution had come, some twenty years ago, this neighborhood had been the site of the longest and bravest resistance. That is why it was known as the war zone, unofficially of course.
If the revolution were held today, none of these workers would have resisted. Most of the courageous fighters of that forgotten era were dead or drunk, or worse.
There was no cemetery to mark the graves of these heroes. Indeed they were not heroes, but villains. The Committee represented Progress, the Future, Equality. These men and woman had resisted and had been destroyed. Silently, thousand, millions more had appeared to take their place. Eagerly, fighting one another for a place in this new society, even as they cursed every day of their miserable and petty lives and spit upon the machines that had enslaved them, and that often seemed more alive than the men and women who ran them.
This was the war zone, and this was where Franklin Delware had spent his entire life, in a grimy, dilapidated apartment building with a thousand other families in a thousand other apartments exactly like his own. The four windows of their apartment looked out at four enormous smoke stacks, rising up out of sight. This was Franklin Delware’s world, he knew no other.
There was only one word that could describe this existence, the word was dreary. And indeed, everything about Franklin was dreary, from his monotonous report cards to his meaningless textbooks, from his expressionless face to his mindless depression. Franklin, not knowing that he could be any other way, had become exactly like his world.
And yet, now, amidst all this, he had suddenly found hope. There was a name to this hope and face to this hope, a face that promised a better life, a life that had meaning, a life where he could live, a life where he could actually exist, and be a part of something magnificent, something far greater than his own insignificant life.
The name and the face belonged to one person. They belonged to Karl Reichtler.
Amidst all this endless gloom, beyond the curtain of clouds that surrounded his world, there was a ray of light breaking through, a light that illuminated something he did not dare speak about, a future.
This boy who never had a goal, who never wanted anything in life beyond the immediate satisfaction of the basic requirements of survival, this being who always did exactly as he was told, now had a purpose to achieve, a goal to work towards. He would join the gang of Karl Reichtler, and nothing, nothing else would matter.
Franklin’s mother, Regina Delware, was a seamstress. They lived in a f our room apartment. One room was Franklin’s bedroom, another was his father’s. The third was both a kitchen and a dining room, and the fourth was a living room, and a bedroom. Franklin’s mother and father did not sleep together, and had not done so, for eleven years. They had only wanted one child.
Regina ran her business form the dining room and it was piled high with clothes that needed mending and tailoring. She worked all day and most of the night, and somehow managed to support the family from her income. She had the exceptional talent of silence. She rarely talked to her customers and so gave them nothing to complain about. She spent most of her time mending uniforms for the men and women who worked in the factories and in the warehouses. She had become somewhat of an expert in replacing missing buttons and had an enormous supply of them which she kept in jars on an old piano that was pushed against the wall. No one had seen the keys of this piano for at least ten years. Franklin did not know it was a piano at all. As far as he could remember it had always been covered by his mother’s work, like everything else in the dining room. There was something odd about this piano, covered up and forgotten, like a life that once existed, but had been buried beneath the drudgery of an endless struggle that led nowhere.
Usually, they ate their meals in the living room, sitting on the cold wood floor, listening to the radio shows that helped to pass the time.
Regina did not mind being beaten by her husband. That is to say she did not mind that it was her husband doing the beating. It was not that the beatings were not painful, often she could not walk correctly for days afterwards, but she never once cried or complained. She did not believe that a person had any control over their actions, and so she accepted her husband’s behavior with the same quiet acquiescence with which she accepted her own life. Regina believed in fate, and she knew that someday she would find a better life.
One night, soon after her husbands accident, Regina was beaten rather severely.
Earlier in the day, the landlady had come around, and, it being already the fifth day of the month, demanded the rent. The Delware’s were a month behind, the result of having to spend the last month’s rent on hospital bills. Though Mr. Delware was not killed the night of the riot, it still took a considerable amount of effort to restore him to even to a pitiful semblance of his former self. The Delware’s were nearly bankrupt.
Officially, the landlady could not evict the Delwares, but, there were stories of people who had their apartments reassigned to new tenants. In addition, it was rumored that this landlady had a friend on the Committee. If they lost this apartment, the Delware’s were finished. It was virtually impossible to find an apartment to live in, if you did not already have one.
By falling one month behind, the Delware’s had put themselves in a dangerous situation. Now, the future they had mortgaged had come to reclaim the past they had not quite been able to salvage.
“I’ll be back tonight for the rent, both months,” the landlady said in her peculiar voice that seemed one octave higher than any human voice should be.
“There ought to be a law against that voice,” Regina’s husband had remarked to her one day, before the accident.
Regina remained silent and continued working. In a few hours her husband would be home and she would tell him, he could figure something out, she was sure of that. Perhaps he had succeeded in getting a check from the Disabilities Office and was on his way home with it right now. They had gotten themselves out of worse problems before.
And so the day continued, like any other, the sun arcing high over the earth, casting a insipid hazy glare on this city at the edge of the world, this city of death and gloom and destitution.
When at last night came, it was a welcome relief. With darkness comes fear, with fear comes a hope of escape. In the day there was no hope and no life. At night there was a feverish, desperate longing, an irrational hope that tomorrow life would be different, that somehow, while the city slept, the future that was promised everyday by the Committee would arrive.
When Franklin’s father came home, he was partially drunk. Yet, it was hard to tell if his staggering was caused by the damage to his hip from the accident, or the damage to his brain from the alcohol that, since the accident, was his only true friend.
When Regina told him of the landlady, he pulled out a roll of money and threw it on the table.
“There it is bitch, there’s my broken hip.”
Mr. Delware sat down on the couch and stared at the floor, unable to focus on anything but the unassuming green expanse of the carpet.
When he finally looked up, Regina was standing in front of him, smiling. She had counted the money. If rationed carefully, and combined with the money she made as a seamstress, this money could last them several years.
Then, in a sudden movement, as if he had regained his strength, Mr. Delware stood up, and in a sweeping motion ripped the white dress that was a uniform off the body of this woman he called a wife. She was wearing a black bra that had lost its shape and a black slip that went down to her knees.
The movement was so sudden, so skillfully executed, that it appeared as if these two had rehearsed this before, and it made no sound. It was so sudden that the smile did not leave Regina’s face. It was so unexpected that Franklin looked up from the textbook he was reading in the corner and looked dimly at his half naked mother.
Mr. Franklin was staring at his wife’s breasts. He wore an expression on his face that Regina had not seen in eleven years.
And then, with both his fists, he jerked forward and punched both her breasts as hard as he could. Regina fell backwards, falling over the coffee table that was littered with sewing needles and a pair of suit pants that she had just finished sewing, for one of the few clients who had any reason to wear a suit.
As if in slow motion, the roll of money flew into the air, and Mr. Franklin caught it as it hung suspended before him. For a moment, he stood, with the money in his hand, unmoving, silent, with nothing but a blank expression on his face. His eyes were open, but he did no blink. A small dark stain on Regina’s bra began to grow larger as she convulsed on the floor, unable to breathe.
Mr. Franklin unrolled the roll of money, and, one by one, began tearing the bills in half. He threw the torn pieces into the air and watched them float for a moment and then fall softly to the ground. When he had torn up about half of the money he fell back on the couch, laughing hysterically, burying his face in his hand.
Franklin turned away and buried his attention in his textbook. He did no even realized that he had passed the pages that were assigned and was reading next week’s assignment. Never in his life had he read ahead; what would have been the point?
When he looked up a half an hour later, the situation had not changed much, except that now his mother, still dressed in only a black bra and a slip, was crawling around on the floor, taping the torn pieces of money back together. Every few minutes Mr. Delware would get up, and, still laughing, kick his wife in the stomach, or behind the legs, or in the crotch, or in her breasts again, or her face. She would collapse for a moment, and then continue collecting the money and taping it back together, as if nothing unusual had happened, and, indeed, in the life of this woman, nothing unusual had happened.
Franklin Delware closed his book and put it down next to the window that was perpetually fogged over, obscuring their brilliant view of the four enormous smokestacks.
He stood up, went into the dining room and put on his coat, a short grey jacket that was rather ugly and not very warm, turned, went towards the door, opened it, stepped into the hallway, and closed the door on the two parents that this eleven year old boy with brown hair would never see again.
Mr. Delware watched his son leave, and then, still laughing, kicked his wife in the mouth and cracked three teeth right down to the root.