elopement

all are one and one are all

It was a January morning much like any other at Fairmont Elementary School. In the administrative hub, the monitoring wall was a grid of cold, emerald lights. Fourteen green dots pulsed in synchronicity with the school’s mechanical heartbeat. Among the three hundred and twenty-eight students, there were fourteen elopement threats. Constantly monitored. Dot six had stopped moving though. When this was first noticed by the technician who monitored the wall, Janet Miller thought it was just a glitch. She even tapped the monitor screen. “Six is stagnant in classroom four,” she muttered.

“Six is having problems adjusting to his clone status… have to put him on the shelf… please don’t put me on the shelf…”

When the lunch bell rang at eleven-thirty, like a hammer striking an anvil, It echoed through the halls. The other dots began to migrate toward the classroom exits. Dot six remained at its desk in room four. A digital ghost mocking the system. Classroom four’s teacher was a woman whose face was a mask of pharmaceutical indifference. When she looked at the empty desk that six’s digital tracker rested on, the panic didn’t start as a human emotion. It started as a systemic failure. She grabbed her walkie talkie and informed Miller.

“Code yellow!” Miller exclaimed into her headset, her voice cracking. “We have a runner! Six is offline! Repeat, six has eloped!” The school transformed. The doors’ locks engaged. Staff scrambled, their sensible shoes scurrying on terrazzo. They weren’t worried about six. They were terrified of the liability, the breach in the grand design of order. They checked the boiler room, storage rooms, change rooms and the bathrooms. They called out on their walkie talkies to others who were scanning the schoolyard perimeter from outside. The air in the school grew thick with the smell of ozone, panic and sour sweat.

Dillinger Harkins, meanwhile, had already been tasting the cold outside for a while now. To a ten-year-old mind wired for patterns and sensory intensity, the city beyond the school’s fence wasn’t just a place. It was a screaming, bleeding organism. It was a lively landscape of pavement, concrete, brick and humanity hidden behind a veil of January freeze. He walked past an alleyway where the brick walls seemed to seep a sorrowy ooze of better days gone by. He saw a man huddled in a doorway, his face a ruin of open sores.

The man clutched a cardboard cup as if it were a holy relic. He looked at Dillinger with pleading eyes that were nothing more than milky cataracts. “You got any spare change, kid?” the man croaked, his breath a cloud of rot. Dillinger didn’t answer him, he looked away and kept on walking. He stepped around a scattering of discarded needles that looked like the bleached bones of tiny, translucent fish. He walked past another man slumped over on a stoop with a needle stuck in his arm.

He continued on down the sidewalk well into the viscera of the city. Beside him a street that felt like a long, decaying throat. The sensory input was a physical assault. The evident horror of the mundane turned monstrous. He saw the seemingly lost looking souls in the methadone line. A row of shivering specters outside a pharmacy with barred windows. They stood in the wintry slush, their skin the color of curdled milk. One woman was weeping silently, her hands tucked into her armpits, her body shaking with the other clones. Shivering in rhythmic tremor.

“All day long we hear her crying so loud… I just wanna be myself… I just wanna be myself… be myself,,, be myself…”

A few feet away, johns circled in their cars like sharks in a stagnant pool. One car slowed beside Dillinger, the passenger side window rolled down with a mechanical groan. Inside sat a man whose face was a jigsaw of shadows. “You lost, little boy?” the man asked, his voice like sandpaper on silk. Dillinger saw the man’s hand, its long, yellowed fingernails tapping on the steering wheel. He felt an instinctual horror that was supernatural, a suffocating weight of human depravity. His heart hammered in his chest, he bolted. His grey school uniform a blur against the soot stained snow.

He briskly paced past a tent city in the parking lot of an abandoned bingo hall. Its residents had built a cathedral of trash. He saw a woman sitting on the front steps of a derelict building smoking a cigarette. She looked up at him, their eyes met. Hers were wide and wild, she shrieked a string of gibberish. It sounded to him like the school’s compliance frequency played backwards. Forty minutes. To the school, it was an eternity of lost data. Of adrenaline fueled lingering accountability. To Dillinger, it was a tour through the circles of a decaying, modern Babylon.

A Police officer finally intercepted him near a collapsing tenement building. He pulled up quietly. The Cop who stepped out of the car didn’t look like a saviour. He looked like a janitor assigned to clean up a spill. He calmly called out to Dillinger and when he was close enough got a hold of him by the scruff of his grey sweater, his grip like an iron claw. He wouldn’t be running away from him.

“I’m all alone, so are we all… we’re all clones, all are one and one are all… all are one and one are all…”

“Got the student,” the officer barked into his shoulder mic. “I’m bringing him back to the school.” He sat Dillinger in the back seat of his cruiser and fastened the seatbelt over him. The back of the car smelled of bleach and vomit. Dillinger looked out the windows watching the ‘unfortunate ones’ disappear into the January air. He felt a strange, hollow grief. Even the horrors of the street were more real than the suffocating oneness of Fairmont.

When he was marched back through the school’s front doors, the atmosphere was one of suppressed violence. The staff looked at him not with relief, but with a simmering, bureaucratic hatred. He had made them look human, vulnerable to error. The Principal met him in the foyer. He didn’t check Dillinger for injuries. He walked him into his office and sat him down on a chair. ‘We cannot have the clones wandering the city streets’ he thought to himself. ‘It causes... friction’.

“We don’t need your kind… the other ones… ugly ones… stupid boys… wrong ones…”

Then came the blazing aftermath. The explosion of a mama bear’s rage. Stephanie Harkins didn’t come to the school with tears in her eyes. She came with them full of fire. She stood in the front office, her face a stark contrast to the bland institutionalized surroundings. She was the ‘other one’s’, the ‘stupid boy’s’, mother, who refused to be a clone. “Forty minutes!” she bellowed, her voice echoing off the sterile tiled walls.

“Forty minutes my son was out there! Do you know what’s on those streets? Do you know what kind of filth is out there? He’s ten! He’s autistic! He’s not a ‘number‘ on your goddamn board!” The secretary hardly looked up from her computer screen. “The safety protocol was followed once the breach was identified, Mrs. Harkins. The police were notified within the allotted window.”

“The window?!” Stephanie slammed her hand on the plexiglass partition. “He was walking past crack whores while you were staring at a dot on a monitor that wasn’t even him! You didn’t even call me! You called the police first? I am his contact! I heard it from my husband. I am his contact, not him!” Her chest heaved as she inhaled before unleashing more pent-up fury. “You treat these kids like cattle! Like you want them to be, so you don’t have to feel anything when you lose one!”

When she left the school with Dillinger she contacted the local newspaper. Most read about her story a few days later in the online edition. A story which read like a tale of a school that functioned like a low security prison. But the school board’s response was a chilling piece in itself. They didn’t apologize. They didn’t even acknowledge her name. They issued a statement to the press that read like a manual for a computer terminal.

“Fairmont Elementary maintains a one hundred percent recovery rate for elopement incidents. The student in question was retrieved without permanent structural damage. We are currently upgrading the tracking hardware to prevent future manual detachment by units. Student individuality is secondary to student containment.”

That night after dinner, and after a thorough bath. While his school uniform agitated in a washing machine, Dillinger sat in his room, as his mother drilled him about what it had been like for him downtown that day. He closed his eyes and saw the man with the needle in his arm. The man in the car. The woman on the step with the cigarette. The assorted collection of other characters he had observed. He couldn’t tell her what she wanted to hear. He drifted off, humming a song to himself softly.

He opened his eyes and looked out his bedroom window. He was safe, he was snug, it was snowing. He was glad to be there. School wasn’t just a building to him. It was a ghost that lived in his nervous system. There was a spot between his shoulder blades. He didn’t know it yet, but that was where the ‘new’ tracker would be installed onto his school uniform the next day. Undetectable to him. To the school system, he wasn’t a boy anymore. He was inventory. And somewhere in the bowels of the city, the ‘unfortunate ones’ were waiting for him to come back and join them.

“All are one and one are all… all are one and one are all…”

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(this story featured lyrics from the song ‘Clones (we’re all)’ by Alice Cooper)