November 26th, 2015
6:28 p.m.
I can’t say for sure what the conversation went like, but knowing my mother, I’m sure she said something like, “Have you talked to your brother?”
To which my sister no doubt replied with her trademark impatience, “I called but he didn’t answer. He knew we were supposed to eat at six, right?”
“I told him five thirty actually,” Mom would have admitted, cringing playfully in only half feigned guilt. She had recognized my love/hate relationship with time for longer than I had. She’d seen the signs. She’d dragged me kicking and screaming to school, Amelia’s recitals, and the like. She’d made me brain food when I stayed up late to complete a project that I’d put off to the last minute. Accounting for my tardiness had become part of her parental calculus, and though she would never come out and say it, I felt at times that somewhere around my mid twenties her patience had begun to run thin.
“I think he’s caught on to that little trick by now,” my sister would later admit to having joked.
“Speak of the devil,” Mom said as I opened the door, cluing me in to the subject matter of their conversation. Entering the foyer I could not yet see those gathered, but I recognized their voices as an overlapping chorus of indistinct variations of “Hey, Grover!” erupted from the dining room. Amelia was there, along with her robot of a husband, Dan.
“Sorry I’m late,” I announced, removing my jacket and hanging it on the coat rack.
“That’s alright,” Mom said, walking out of the kitchen to greet me, “we started without you.” She smiled that smile—eyes gleaming through her thick prescription lenses—that always seemed to dissipate whatever considerable frustration had been weighing on me. It didn’t change the fact that I had gotten a ticket, that now I would be forced to cough up half a paycheck to fund the system that depended, ironically, on people breaking the rules it had instituted to keep its supercomputers humming. It didn’t soften my general disillusionment with the government and its absurdity, but it meant that for the next few hours I could return to the way life used to be, before I had bills to pay and people to disappoint. “Help yourself,” she invited me into the kitchen, where the turkey lay carved amid a spread that, for all its extensiveness, could only have been less fancy if the platters had been paper. “Plates and forks are on the table, bourbon’s in the turny-thingy.”
“I see you started that without me, too,” I commented, taking a detour to snag a small slice of turkey, as much to whet my appetite as to disguise my b-line for the lazy Susan. “Vocabulary’s slipping,” I joked, pouring myself an opening salvo. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t exactly like things were before. Obviously I didn’t drink when I was a carefree tyke, and of course there was that other glaring omission.
“Bite me,” Mom retorted without missing a beat—her standard defense when playfully called to the carpet.
As the new arrival, I was immediately elevated to the center of attention as my sister entered the kitchen to greet me. “Where you been, slowpoke? We tried calling.” She opened her arms and I put my drink on the counter to embrace her. Only a sip in and already I was getting sentimental.
“About that,” I grunted through the exertion of a heartfelt hug, “I would’ve answered, but you know how capes get skittish about movement.”
A barely audible scoff—a familiar voice—wafted in from the dining room, drawing my attention toward the door as Dan came in. No doubt he would soon regale me with some inanity about politics. Before he had the chance, though, Mom’s perpetual concern kicked in.
“You got pulled over?” she asked, her playful antagonism vanishing. “What for?
“Were you speeding?” Amelia practically accused, pulling away from the hug enough to cast an disapproving glare.
“Tag’s expired,” I announced triumphantly, as though flouting one regulation was more noble than ignoring another. Mom opened her mouth to speak, but I nipped it in the bud. “Zip it. I don’t need a lecture.”
Mom indicated with her eyes over her last sip of bourbon and Diet Coke. “It’s not me you should worry about,” she cautioned before heading for the lazy Susan for a refresh.
I followed her glance to the Amelia’s disapproving glare. Never had I been so thankful to see Dan approach. “Hey brother,” he greeted me with the over compensatory fervor I had come to expect of him. “Did you watch the debate last night?” There it was—the conversation whiplash that invariably led to politics. I remember when Amelia and he were first dating she assumed that we’d hit it off because of our shared interest in government. He, with his Masters in Political Science, and me dabbling at the time with grassroots activism, should have been fast friends by all accounts. What she didn’t realize then, what I had failed to properly articulate through years of overt disinterest, was that, while Dan relished the nuts and bolts of campaigning, I abhorred everything about modern government and longed for a return to a time when we didn’t look to brilliantly colored conclusive blasts to defend us or streaks in the sky to rescue us from ourselves.
“Didn’t catch it,” I uttered, trying to strike the proper balance between ambivalence and feigned interest. “Any fireworks?” I prodded minimally, hoping to God answer was no. I reacquired my drink and took a swig before moving to the table and beginning the arduous task of trying to fit two plates worth of sides onto one. Somehow no matter how piddly a portion I allotted myself, I always ran out of room somewhere between the corn and the candied yams, and I almost always forgot the rolls on my first pass.
“Just the usual posturing and platitudes” he lamented, following close on my heels as I rounded the corner into the dining room. “Butting heads and not much else”
“Honey, The Bullmoose was put out to pasture a century ago.” Amelia chimed following behind him. My eyes wanted to roll at the forced pun, but they were glued on the head of the table. We had never been a dining room kind of family. For the most part we took our meals in the living room, in front of the TV like any other red blooded Americans, but Thanksgiving was different. Once a year we would clear away the clutter—the partially read books we meant to finish, the bills we had every intention of paying, and the junk mail we hoped to sort through one day—and actually dine at the table that ostensibly existed for just that reason. On that rare occasion, Dad would assume the stereotypical paternal head of household position he likewise eschewed for the other three hundred and sixty-four days a year. He’d sit at the head of the table and carve the turkey. In the fifteen years since he’d been gone the seat had been empty. We still set the place for him the first couple of years, but eventually the morbidity of doing so outweighed the intended homage and we simply left a sacred void where once he had sat. This year, it seemed, my mother had decided to fill it.
“You know what I mean, Sweetie. Just mindless violence” Dan said, nearly bumping into me as I stopped dead in my tracks briefly at the site of the familiar face. Suddenly I realized why I’d recognized the voice that I’d heard harumph earlier. I had heard it my entire life, albeit sparingly. The man in my father’s place at the table was no stranger. That I could have handled with a little more grace than I mustered on this occasion.
“I invited Lamont,” Mom glossed over his presence as unceremoniously as she brushed past the log jam in the entryway to the dining room. A one time business partner of Dad’s, if one can call their occasional start-ups that failed to launch, “businesses,” Lamont had been a long-time family friend. Dad and he had met in college and bonded over the shared delusion that they could succeed without all that tedious education nonsense. They dropped out together, pooled their resources, and opened a private detective agency that folded along with their enthusiasm for a profession that turned out to be more philanderers and scam artists than mystery and murder. A few years before Dad died, they’d had a falling out, but I’d never found out why. Apparently whatever bad blood had lead to his absence had dried up, as there he sat, in my father’s house, in his chair, like he belonged there.
I recovered from my shock quickly enough to maintain my composure outwardly, but his intrusion did little to quiet the winds of frustration that had been whipping around my mind since my run in with the cape, skewing everything into a negative vortex. Mom taking a seat next to him stirred things up even further. “Why do you even watch these things if you’re so exasperated with the whole process?” I blurted back at Dan as I came to the unfortunate conclusion that the only unoccupied place setting was the other head of the table, putting me squarely across from the 800 lb gorilla in the room.
Dan settled back into his chair, seemingly ambivalent to the tension that lay heavy over the table, saying, “I know its a circus, but show me a government that’s not is all I’m saying. It’s not a perfect system, but we’re still the most free country on the planet, so something must be working.”
Lamont inhaled sharply as if to chime in but refrained for the moment.
“That’s debatable,” I muttered almost involuntarily, to which Mom pointed and nodded silently.
That apparently was enough to overcome Lamont’s hesitation. “You’d have what then? A return to parliaments and ministers?”
“Not exactly,” I hedged, weighing whether I should bother explaining my esoteric stance or just deflect. To my credit, I opted for the less confrontational. “I just don’t see the point in approbations when both contestants would be tyrants.”
“That’s a bit hyperbolic, isn’t it?” Amelia chastened.
“Not at all,” I defended. “Tell me how getting a ticket is any different than a king’s men shaking down travelers in the middle ages.”
“You broke the code. You were fined.” Amelia retorted matter-of-factly.
“Oh, please. Fine, my ass. It’s a tax. You know traffic regs are about revenue, not protection.”
“Children!” Mom addressed us sternly as the bickering teens we’d reverted back into. Even a few sheets to the wind she could bust out that stone cold look of disapproval that could sober a sailor on shore leave.
Dan ventured, “Registration helps Sanctioned investigate thefts, track down offenders—its an indispensable tool for code enforcement.” The concise textbook defense of the policy, with the obligatory visceral kicker. “Multiple ton vehicles can kill, and anything that can help track down reckless drivers and prevent vehicular manslaughter is worth the slight intrusion and minimal cost in my book.”
“A pencil can kill if wielded carelessly or maliciously. Why not register those so the investigation is easier?”
“Because more people are killed by reckless drivers than pencils,” Lamont correctly posited.
“Exactly,” I seized upon his point. “They’re killed by reckless drivers, not vehicles.”
“So you’re open to licensing, just not so much registration?” Dan extended cordially, trying to reconcile the extent of my apparently anarchistic leanings with the conventional wisdom of polite company.
“That’s a racket too,” I found myself saying with a reflexive shake of my head.
Mom threw in her two cents. “What’s wrong with proving someone can drive before you let them on the roads?”
“You know as well as I do that having a driver’s license doesn’t prove you can drive,” I fired back.
“What about serial offenders,” Amelia had locked and loaded. “Someone with multiple DUIs should be taken off the road.”
“Revoking a license doesn’t keep anyone off the road, at least not the people who pose the real problem,” I returned fire. “Anyone that doesn’t have enough sense to drive carefully out of sheer self-preservation isn’t going to care that they’re breaking the reg.”
“That’s why they hit you in the pocket book, because sadly that resonates more than self-preservation with some people,” Dan intoned. Insightful, I thought sardonically, for a machine.
“I’ve not been to a county commission meeting in a while,” I qualified, as though attendance at such mundane proceedings was commonplace, “but last time I went the books were in the red as usual. The county routinely operates at a loss, despite the regular influx of money from fines, registrations, court costs, what have you—which means that even the budgets they fall short of each month rely on the stream of punitive taxation from people doing exactly what it is Sanctioned exist to supposedly stop from happening. If people started obeying the regs tomorrow, the Sanctioned would be more broke than they already are.”
“I don’t think anyone at this table would argue with the need for fiscal constraint on the part of the Sanctioned,” Amelia reloaded, “but hamstringing beat capes who are just trying to do their job and serve and protect–”
“The only ones they serve and protect are themselves,” I came to rather bluntly.
Dan quickly swallowed his latest bite, nearly choking as he rushed to interject some civility. “Your turkey is always so flavorful, Denise. What brand is it?”
“Just the generic store brand at the Bargain Barn,” Mom quickly followed suit. Seeming to pick up on his intentions, she elaborated. “I usually spring for a Butterball, but they were astronomical. Everything was so expensive this year.”
Lamont leaned forward, in disbelief at what was hearing. “Capes put their lives on the line every day. Any traffic stop, even the mundane ones over a lapsed registration, could be the one that ends with a shootout for all they know.”
Dan took advantage of one of the few bites I’d actually take so far, rushing into the lull to try to rescue the last remnants of decorum from the fire. “I know! Locust is really doing a number on prices.”
“And they choose to put their lives on the line.” I ignored their efforts at cordiality. “By putting on the mask they expect that degree of danger. Your average citizen doesn’t step out into their day with a reasonable expectation that they could fail to make it home at night.”
“’Hands up, don’t shoot,’ is that it?” Lamont countered tersely. “Capes have as much a right to self-defense as anyone, and if they feel threatened—”
“I just think the person whose job it is to run headlong into every potential conflict should be the one with the short straw of the self-defense argument. If standard procedure is to err on the side preservation of life, it had damn well better be the innocent rather than the supposedly heroic. Where’s this great sacrifice if a cape can vaporize someone with impunity anytime he feels threatened?”
Lamont’s simmer was beginning to roll to a boil. Dan made one last vain attempt at diffusing the situation. “Organics especially. I’m spending a fortune on—”
“Why don’t you ask the anonymous widows and orphans, the people who really suffer when heroes die?!” Lamont prodded aggressively.
“—arugula,” Dan breathed out the last, defeated breath of his noble effort.
“God forbid a widow go unspoken for, huh?” I spat without thinking. I could hear the collective gasp from the others. I dared not look at Mom, but I could feel her disapproval dragging down my boastful shoulders and puffed out chest like an albatross around my neck. With that hanging over the table, I took a second to regroup. No sense in wasting the rest of the night fighting over every little provision of the reg that I disagreed with, I reasoned, when what I really want to say to him was ‘Get the fuck out of my Dad’s chair you fucking scavenger.’ Besides, both sides lose when you start treating people–actual broken families–as ammunition. I could no more prop my argument up on collateral damage that I contended was avoidable, than a modern municipality could hope to remain fiscally solvent in the face of a suddenly compliant citizenry.
“To diakriticracy!” I raised my glass in attempt to recapture the levity my rant had sucked from the room. It might as well have been a white flag. “May we honor the protectors who give their lives so we can remain free.” As the uneasy silence descended on the table, I finished my drink in one gulp, in hopes of slowing the maelstrom of frustration, disappointment, and futility.