The Cessation
by Ginny Hogan
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
I redoubled my efforts to understand what had prompted the Cessation. I work best when my hands are busy. Usually, eating does the trick, but I found an extra bottle of Tilex on my kitchen counter. Jacques must have left it, surely an indication that he wanted me to clean up after him. The lazy string of pee.
I took a whiff of the product, just to make sure it was still fresh. It was. It smelled familiar. Like... someone I loved. I started scrubbing down the counter. And after hours of scrubbing, I felt good. Productivity is delightful, when done carefully.
The next morning, a glaring piece of evidence found me:
BREAKING: THE COMMITTEE RECOMMENDS HOUSEHOLDS STOP CLEANING THEIR HOMES; CLEANLINESS MAY RESULT IN CONTINUED BODILY EXCRETIONS
I wanted to know if Jacques had heard the news. We rarely spoke, but seeing Tuzzy made me miss controlling another human. That’s what it means to be a mother.
I popped my head into the basement and yelled for him. No response. I yelled again. No response.
And then, I did something I’d never, ever, ever done. Something I never thought I’d do. Something I certainly never wanted to do, but perhaps my isolation from others had made me unusually friendly. I tip-toed downstairs. I entered Jacques’ room. I flicked the light on. And... oh, did I wish I hadn’t.
Jacques’ room was absolutely filthy. Well, in vibe. Because he’s a dirty, disgusting boy. Truthfully, the room was absolutely spotless, and that startled me almost as much. What was he doing in here all day that he needed it so clean?
What most horrified me about Jacques’ room is that he wasn’t in it. He never left the house. Where could he possibly have gone? What trouble could he have gotten himself into? Instead, he’d left in his bed the body of a dead man who bore a slight resemblance to him — or, at least — what I remembered him to look like. It had been so long. Did he have a cousin?
Disgusting — he expected me to clean up this mess? And if he were going to kill people, did he have to do it in the house? I would have to have a talk with that child.
* * *
“The economy is booming,” Dr. Rash announced one afternoon. “So you’re all very welcome, and we will be doubling taxes to fund more Committee work, as it’s clearly to everyone’s benefit.”
My personal economics, on the other hand, were faring less rosily. I’d taken a job at a call center to pay the bills. It was frustrating, having an adult son dependent on me, especially one whose whereabouts were unknown. Also, I was dependent on me, which I found rude. Other women just didn’t have to deal with this.
Each day felt exactly like the last, but worse. Life only continues going downhill. If each day truly feels like the last, you’re lucky. You’d get to be a baby forever, and you’d always have someone paying for your food.
I didn’t like answering the phones, so instead, I spent the hours staring at my co-workers. And boy, were they a sorry sight. Candace — the savage to my right — was tapping her foot ferociously, a habit that had only increased in intensity since I’d joined. Maureen — the savage to my left — was biting her nails. Actually, at this point, she was just biting her skin. It was bright red and peeling. Hadn’t she heard of moisturizer? Both looked exhausted beyond repair. It seemed like I was the only one able to still hold her head up, which was a bummer for the company, since I was also the only one unwilling to do her job.
As irritating as I found all these women and their stupid “issues,” they triggered in me a recollection. Their odd behaviors were a bit — just a bit — like someone else I’d met three years ago. A woman who had no idea what was wrong, who came to me with patchy red skin and an incessant twitch. After months of tests, we figured out the problem was in her bladder. And we were able to treat my sweet Tuzzy, for a time.
I wanted to ask my call center co-workers about the roots of their physical issues, but just as I was about to, a news item caught my eye:
BREAKING: THEORIZING ABOUT THE CESSATION NOW A FEDERAL OFFENSE.
I mean, I didn’t want to ask them that badly.
* * *
In the following months, a tension imposed itself upon us. No one dared speak of it publicly or even admit to noticing it, but we all felt it. Or at least I did, and I assume other people felt like me, because the way I feel is right.
We didn’t have adequate explanations. And while I wasn’t a doctor anymore, I couldn’t help but notice that the world seemed to be falling ill. Every time I drove past my old hospital, there were lines out the door. It had become harder and harder to get an appointment at a hospital, as 70% of doctors had been fired in the past year, not just me. It was messed up. If I absolutely had to get fired, I at least wanted to feel special and unique about it.
And yet, and yet. No one else was answering our questions. The Committee had taken ownership of all newspapers. Social media sites had been uniformly discontinued, which did not provide the boon to our mental health that social scientists always claimed it would. Cellphones were disconnected at random. I even saw a man ask a woman out in sky-writing because there was no other way to reach her. She carved her answer into the sand at low-tide. “No thanks.” A wave washed her rejection away.
I had a hypothesis, or really more of an image. Water had slowly been dripping into a sealed container. At first, it was just a tiny amount. Over time, the container was completely filled. Then, all of a sudden, a tiny crack appeared. Did water drip out that crack? Maybe it would have, many years ago. At this point, though, the weight of the existing water broke the whole container, and the water rushed forth in a tidal wave. And we were left soaking wet.
Whatever we’d been letting into our bodies had been building for years, I suspected. But we’d been able to resist the effects; the container was still sealed. And then, the dam broke. Wait... maybe a dam was a better analogy all along. Either way, now we were all wet. Or, well, the exact opposite. Okay, I’m a scientist, not a poet.
The effects of environmental carnage are too disastrous to understand. Even if I never knew why the dam broke, I could still attempt to fix it. I had an idea. If I was right, I could save Tuzzy. I could redeem myself for letting her down as a patient. And if I redeemed myself for that, then maybe, just maybe, I could redeem myself for other people I’d let down. People I was supposed to care for. People I’d written off just a bit too soon.
So I did what scientists do: I bought a lot of rats. To test my theory on them. And I went to bed.
The next day, my rats were gone. There was a blue van parked outside my house, although as I drew my curtain open, it sped away.
* * *
A week later, I turned on the television to the only station still available: The Committee Broadcast Network. Dr. Rash was mid-sentence. He coughed. “From this day forward, to ensure our national leaders are best-equipped with the scientific changes the next century shall bring, we will be dissolving the Executive and Legislative branches of the government.”
There was a long pause.
“What about the Judicial branch?” one reporter asked.
“That’s like judges, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” the reporter wheezed.
“They’re... uh... they’re with us, too.”
The camera scanned the reporters in the crowd and, no, it couldn’t be a coincidence: the reporters were uniformly twitching. Twitches twitches, everywhere. Where did it come from, and when would it end?
The next day, the front page of the New York Times:
BREAKING: EYE TWITCHES PROVEN HARMLESS, DOCTORS AFFIRM.
For months, I’d been hung up on how sudden the Cessation was. Evolutionary change just didn’t happen like that, I told myself, because it never had in the past. But we weren’t living in the past, we were living very much in the present. And who’s to say — when we damaged the Earth in one fell swoop in our unceasing acquisition of resources — that we couldn’t damage our bodies instantaneously, too.
Something had shifted tectonically. We really don’t know what’s going to happen when we poke and prod and drill and drill and drill our planet. It might just give way. Maybe it had.
And Tuzzy... Tuzzy had just experienced it first. She was a hydraulic engineer. She fracked. She was closer to the elements. Her bladder shutting down... it was a warning. If only I weren’t such a fool.
But then, I found Liquid X. Or at least, some angel at my hospital brought it to me. I don’t know what it was, but someone must, or why else would the Committee have told us to stop cleaning our homes? But who? And now that I had a firm recommendation, how could I disseminate the message?
I lifted up a takeout menu. Under the Thai menu, I found a note.
Mother — if you’re reading this, they got me. I spent too many hours online and uncovered the truth. All mainstream message boards were shut down immediately, but I was already plugged into the dark web, and I was able to find information. That’s why I’ve been cleaning the counters so obsessively — it looks like if you’re near a product cleaned with Liquid X, you get the benefits. I knew you wouldn’t believe me, so I couldn’t ask you to drink it.
The Committee knows the only solution to the Cessation is Liquid X. They know it’s in short supply. We know, on the message boards, too. We have a finite amount of it — they want to kill everyone off to keep it for themselves. But they know we’ve found out — activists have been injecting it into the Clorox supply, to save anyone who cleans their home with it.
The Committee is suppressing dissent. Everyone who disagrees with them is getting thrown in jail, which is futile, since we’ll all be dead soon, anyway.
The reservoir in Gutman Park contains Liquid X. I just discovered this, before I was taken. Feed it to the sick, and feed it to them in droves. We need more of it. To get this message out, post it on cesslies.co.uk. People are scared to listen. You have to be firm. Tell them you’re a doctor. Use your authority. You’re our last hope. And then, link up with Dr. P on cesslies.com. He’s working on a way to produce Liquid X. It’s our last hope.
But Mother, you must be careful. Anyone who knows the truth is at risk, and they’re already onto you. I love you, and I’m sorry.
I gasped. The dead body downstairs — that wasn’t a Jacques lookalike. It was Jacques. And I missed it, because how many years since I had looked my sweet boy in the eyes!?
Jacques — my sweet, sweet Jacques — they’d taken him! But he was no fool — he’d left the answers for me. Wide-open. He’d helped me. I thought all his time on the interwebs was nothing but a pathetic waste — a dissipated life. But no — people on the Internet knew things. It was us real-life denizens who were the fools. For the first time in his whole life, my boy had helped me. I sobbed with pride.
I pulled open the website he’d guided me to. I knew I had to act quickly; it could be banned within a matter of minutes. As I did, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Roy. I thought it must be some sort of fluke, my phone hadn’t worked in months. But no, right there on screen:
She died *sad face emoji*
I nearly crumpled. My story might have ended here. She was my reason for persisting. But then I remembered: she didn’t die in vain. She was a harbinger of what was to come. Her mysterious bladder issues weren’t so mysterious to me, after all. She was simply the first victim of the Cessation. Without her, I would never have put the pieces together. Without her, or without Jacques. My two guardian angels.
Just as I was to post my conclusion online, I glanced out the window. A man stepped out of a bright blue car. I’d grown so lightheaded, I couldn’t process the threat he’d posed. He aimed a gun at me. I knew enough to know I didn’t want him to shoot. I clicked out of the tab. Never to log back in again.
Copyright © 2021 by Ginny Hogan
