Over the Edge
by Pat Wakeley
This story begins with a man. See the man.
His name is Hank. He’s an ordinary guy, married, in his thirties. He wears chinos and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Sexy guy. His wife is from Costa Rica and beautiful in a sultry, Latin way. She has a high forehead and pouty lips. She wears bright silk shirts and lots of gold chains. Her name is Rita.
They have no children. At least not yet. Rita would like to have a baby, and she’s been cleared for it by the Regional Commission on Parental Aptitude. Hank wants children, too, but he hasn’t been cleared, and that’s the catch. If only... Well, Rita does try. She coaches him all the time.
“Will you for godsake lay off that crap!” he snarls at her one otherwise beautiful morning. Birds sing outside their window, and sun splashes across their breakfast table. The scent of coffee hangs in the air.
“I’m only trying to help,” she says. “If you could only just relax and let it happen.”
“How can I relax when you’re on at me all the time? You make me feel so damn self-conscious!”
“You don’t need to use swear words! I realize you’re only trying to express your feelings, but those words create an unpleasant atmosphere in the home.”
Enough! Hank slaps the Times-News down on the table, shoves his chair back, and slams out of the house. A man can’t think his own thoughts anymore. He admits that Rita’s a good and faithful wife, but sometimes she sounds like a damned schoolteacher.
He slogs across the back yard, still muddy from the spring thaw, skirts Rita’s forsythia where the buds are showing a flirtatious yellow, and heads for his studio.
Children. What could be more natural? Like other men, Hank believes he hungers to pass on his genes and values to the next generation. But that’s not a simple matter.
The real difficulty, of course, isn’t Rita’s nagging but the Regional Commission’s lockhold on fecundity. A robin can scarcely lay an egg without a permit. He kicks a stone out of his way, then grabs his foot because the stone was heavier than he expected. There he is, hopping on one leg, a comical sight, but he is really in despair over what he must do to get his permit.
To put it simply, he and Rita must convince the government that they would be good parents. To do that, each must produce an “authentic” work of art that truly reflects their inner vision. Then the psychologists judge whether that inner vision is compatible with parenthood.
This is nothing new, of course. Huge posters on billboards and brick walls have promoted the system for years.
- Every child a wanted child
- Do your child a favor – get authorized.
- Rebuild the race through planned parenthood.
Not that anyone has a choice. If you have a baby without permission, they take it away and destroy it. For the parts, they say, for the stem cells. Hank shudders.
He pushes open the studio door and enters his familiar workspace. Tables, easel, canvases — a chaotic mess, but not to Hank. Sometimes he feels as if his studio is the only place where everything is in order, where he can think clearly.
But not today. All he can think about is the Permission. It looms with a capital P.
There’s no doubt, of course, that he can produce a good piece of art. Even Rita, whose talents lie elsewhere, has produced an acceptable tapestry on her loom. And Hank is a professional artist. His role in the new world is to paint portraits of community leaders, murals for public buildings, nostalgic landscapes for countless walls above countless fireplaces. “The painter of energy,” they call him, because all his paintings vibrate with a special effect no one else can match.
But Hank has grown weary of reproducing the scintillating effect everyone likes so much. He is tired of being a mere craftsman. He has new ideas that have nothing to do with political reality or with his need to earn a living. Ideas he is afraid to express. They certainly would not result in a good baby-picture.
He turns toward the two-foot piece of cedar log he’s been working on. Originally he had a grand vision, carving this piece of once-living wood into a totemic figure, perhaps an amalgam of Freud and Martin Luther King, Jr., two of his heroes, though he doesn’t know much about them.
Freud, he believes, was the man who helped you understand yourself. King was the man who showed you how to reach out to others. Together they will form a sane and balanced symbol of humanity at its best, the physical features of the two men combined in one, a graceful figure with a high forehead and a hand outstretched. All it needs is a final polishing, but today he looks at his work with loathing.
It is too mawkishly sweet, too damned nice. Hank picks it up, feels the heft and weight of it in his arms, and hurls it against the tiled floor. The outstretched hand breaks off.
The truth is that Hank hates the bureaucracy. If he does something beautiful for the baby application, they’ll analyze it and discover he’s not being true to his inner vision. But if he expresses the rage that smolders in his heart, they’ll tell him he’s not fit to be a parent.
Here’s how it works: When you submit your work to the Regional Commission, they send it on to your psychiatrist. The psychiatrist — and everyone goes to one from age eleven onward — can tell at a glance whether your work reveals the artistic integrity and creativity necessary for parenthood. Whether your work is imitative or genuine. Then, even more humiliating, they hook you up to a polygraph and ask questions about your artwork and your inner thoughts. Hank isn’t too sure how they grade the answers, but he knows the process is humiliating.
He remembers the day, three months before, when he went to the Commission office to fill out forms, to begin his parent project. Past him filed the men and women who had just taken the polygraph test. Two were sobbing. All of them looked pale and shrunken.
Even thinking about it makes Hank’s stomach knot up. He wishes he hadn’t had that second piece of toast at breakfast.
* * *
The whole problem started seventy-five years before when the Bombs rained down, blasting cities on every continent, all within a single hour because of interlocking domino defense systems. On that same day, the World Council on Progressive Religion was in the midst of its triennial conference inside the well-equipped caves of Snow Mountain. Deep inside, shielded from radioactivity.
After the Bombs, the delegates stayed hidden for an entire year until it was safe to come out. When they emerged, they found only remnants of humanity, living in caves and holes like animals. Fewer than a million souls, scattered across the scarred planet.
But the Survivors, as they called themselves, brought with them a Plan out of the caves for recreating the world they had now inherited. They didn’t stop to think that those who were lucky enough to dodge the Bombs, healthy enough to withstand radiation sickness, and tough enough to overcome the loss of family and resources had strength beyond imagining.
No, what the Survivors saw was subhuman bipeds living in holes. They saw opportunity, a world ripe for mission.
And the remnants were grateful at first for whatever help they could get. They were tired, and they had lost all the mills and factories that made things, and the libraries that stored knowledge. They had lost computers, radio and TV, telephones and mail delivery. With these, they had lost a sense of community. They liked having someone come along who knew how to disinfect the soil, find safe and fertile seeds, tap into aquifers that held pure water. Someone, anyone, who knew how to organize the production of goods and services, connect them with their fellow man, and restore a broader vision of life.
So the Survivors found it easy to take charge. They were, after all, highly educated and well-meaning people, and they dressed up their Plan in the trappings of religious humanism. According to them – and they included natural leaders who could inspire thousands, visionaries who could articulate the people’s dreams of prosperity, teachers who could teach the new religion, and marketers who could sell it — according to them, humanity had unlimited potential.
The holy community took the place of an outmoded anthropomorphic deity. Above all, the human race must develop to the full its innate creativity, both through education and through continuance of the most creative gene lines.
Over the years, the Plan led to progress. Libraries and technological databases were recovered. Cities were rebuilt. People lived in neighborhoods, read newspapers, held jobs, raised families. Government leaders spoke of the power of community and extolled human capacity. Little children were taught the twin virtues of justice and compassion. At church on Sunday, preachers intoned, “May the strength and love of this holy community be with you in the coming week.” Or “May the creative spirit of the universe blossom in your heart wherever you may go.”
They meant it, too. Not only did the Plan’s leaders exalt creativity as the most noble of human qualities, but they measured it. And enforced it.
* * *
Hank, in his studio, sits in a shabby red director’s chair and stares out the window. He doesn’t feel like working.
One of his strengths – or weaknesses, depending on your perspective – is that he has the skill to implement whatever he envisions. Master of all media, he paints in oils, tempera, acrylics, watercolor. He is adept in ceramics, metalwork, basketry, woodworking. He reaches for whatever tool, whatever medium, is appropriate for transforming imagination into reality.
Mostly, though, he uses his tremendous talent to give people what they want. A memorial to the millions killed by the Bombs. Murals for the new city hall in Alton, Illinois, which has become a great metropolis now that the upper Mississippi is free of radioactivity. A twenty-fifth wedding anniversary portrait for his parents. Oh, he can give people what they want. All too easily.
His professors at art school warned him about this. “You have the ability to implement whatever you imagine, but your virtuosity can get you into trouble. Keep in mind the integrity of your art, be true to your inner vision — which is in a sense the vision we all have of a world filled with peace, order, and plenty. A world in which the Bombs can never rain again.”
He had bought into that message when he was younger. But now he loathes the orderly pans of tomatoes in the hydroponic farms, the neat rows of apples trees in the orchards, the carefully bred milk cows with their regulated offspring. He has painted all of them.
As he sits there, staring out the window and hating the government, a solution flashes into his mind. And he laughs. He will paint, all right.
He sets a new canvas on his easel and begins a landscape. As it develops, we see cornfields bright with tassels, a town beside a meandering river, a neat woodlot where men are cutting trees. But this idyllic landscape is invaded by angry red slashes coming in from the right: the furious red eye of a boar in the bushes, the red throat of a Venus flytrap. The far right margin dissolves into a smear of roiling colors. He grins as he applies the paint. He knows the psychiatrists won’t like it, these hints of violence and Dionysian disorder. But they will be beguiled by the perfect order, the sheer Apollonian beauty of the rest of the painting.
* * *
It comes to pass as Hank expects. The critics acknowledge the anger in his painting, and in Hank, but they believe this is only an aberration, a small part of Hank’s emotional domain. They like the honesty, as they see it, which led him to include a bit of violence and disorder in his picture.
But so much of the picture is beautiful, the reflection of his noble soul. They are mistaken, of course, for all of his soul hates the system that regulates him. But the painting fools them, and they grant the long-sought permission to have a baby with Rita.
The irony is that while his baby-picture amazes and thrills the bureaucrats, it frightens his wife. Rita is not fooled. She knows from the way he acts at the breakfast table, from his cranky refusal to eat her cooking, and now from the painting itself that his soul is consumed by anger. She wants to have babies but no longer wants to have them with Hank. She leaves him.
Hank, to his surprise, feels relieved. Babies are all right, but the real force driving him, he now realizes, had been a desire to please Rita. With her out of the scene, he revels in his freedom and begins a series of huge, violent canvases.
His original baby-painting, acknowledged by the critics to be a masterpiece, is hung in a museum. He is after all a great artist.
There it is seen by a young couple, newly married and thinking about parenthood. Let’s call them Josh and Jill. Josh is a journalist, Jill a schoolteacher. They study the painting, note the ugly red slashes and the Venus flytrap. That night Josh turns to this wife and says, “I wonder what he meant by that? It’s a beautiful picture, but there’s something disturbing about it.”
“Shush, my love, go to sleep,” she responds.
“No,” he insists. “There’s something about it. I need to think more...” and he falls asleep. In a dream, he flies over the idyllic landscape with its green fields, neat fences, cows up to their knees in pretty ponds. He flies over the town with its domed churches where people worship the sacred community, worship themselves. Over the woods with their graceful birches and sturdy oaks. Out into the wilderness beyond the Venus flytrap and the snout of the wild boar hiding in the bushes, beyond the edge of Hank’s painting. Out into a cold and stony wilderness where mountains loom and dragons fly against an azure sky.
In the morning all he remembers is an uneasiness, a sense of something important left undone. Something to do with that painting.
He telephones Hank – it’s easy to call anyone, anywhere, because the communications satellites have never stopped functioning. Hank is pleased. This is the first time anyone other than critics and bureaucrats have said anything about the painting. He is curious to know more about the young man’s reaction, so he invites Josh and Jill to visit his studio.
The meeting goes well. They talk for hours, speculating about the wilderness beyond the edge of Hank’s painting. Hank shows them his angry new paintings. They do not entirely understand them, but they are excited by them. A spirit of wild inquiry takes hold in all of them.
By word of mouth, they make their interests known to others who sense that there must be more to life than an orderly and powerful community. Slowly a secret movement gathers force.
Boundless possibilities excite them, but where should they focus their restless minds? The physical planet is known and subdued, and they lack the resources to explore the stars. So, in their urgent need to discover more, they turn inward, to the realms of the unconscious, to scrutiny of dreams, to experiments with hypnotism, to political and philosophical speculation. All forbidden. All secret. They know they are planting the seeds of subversion, so they put nothing in writing, transmit nothing electronically. They speak to each other in the middle of empty fields, never more than two or three at a time.
What do they do, awed as they are by the richness of unfettered minds? Our hero, Hank, takes grim satisfaction in the knowledge that his art, which the bureaucrats see as useful, is ultimately subversive. He continues to paint scary pictures, and he begins to include disturbing elements in his murals. Josh hints at alternative viewpoints in his newspaper articles. Jill, the teacher, begins to praise children who display individual initiative.
Then comes the day when Josh and Jill make a momentous announcement. They are going to have a baby. They did not get permission for it, and they intend to keep it. In fact, they will go underground, if necessary, to keep their child. Into the wilderness. Hank stares at them in amazement. This is the ultimate rebellion, he realizes, to create a child without the blessing of the state. It’s a commitment that will affect the rest of their lives.
The next day, Hank finds himself noticing Alice, a young woman in their movement. She’s a psychologist with long blond hair and intelligent green eyes. Her work involves helping unhappy teenagers adjust to the requirements of the state. Now, with youngsters of a certain turn of mind, she suggests creative outlets for their frustrations. This is subversive. Who knows what fruit their efforts may bear?
Hank asks Alice out for coffee. One thing leads to another, as it often does, and they fall in love. The last we see of him, Hank is busy pruning the forsythia and chatting with Alice. He’s asking her to come live with him and be his love, possibly the mother of his children. Planned, wanted, but unauthorized children. That would mean heading out into the wilderness, babies in tow.
Alice says yes.
Copyright © 2008 by Pat Wakeley
