The Mending

They gave us the menders for free, and that should have been the first warning. Nobody hands the poor anything for free unless they have already found a way to take back something larger.

I am writing this down for you while I still remember being the woman who was afraid. By the time you can read it, fear may be a foreign country to you, and I don't want you believing your mother was brave. I wasn't. I was tired. Tired is what makes a person say yes.

The clinic was a shuttered laundromat on Halsted, the dryers still bolted to the wall behind the folding tables where the nurses drew our blood. A boy no older than nineteen pressed the injector to my arm and told me the menders would find the cancer in my liver and eat it, cell by cell, and then dissolve into harmless sugar once the work was done. He had the bright, rehearsed face of someone reading a script he had not written.

For three weeks I felt nothing but well. Do you understand how strange that is to a body like mine? I had been sick so long that health felt like trespassing. I climbed the four flights to our apartment without stopping. I tasted food again. I laughed, and the laugh did not turn into coughing.

Then the changes began that were not in the pamphlet.

My eyes stopped stinging in the yellow air that hangs over the lake now, the air they warn us to stay indoors from. When the water came out of the tap brown and reeking, my skin drank it and did not blister. A cut on my hand closed while I watched, the way a mouth closes. And I understood, standing at the sink with the brown water running over my healed palm, that the menders had not dissolved. They had finished the cancer and gone looking for other work, and in a world as poisoned as ours there is always other work.

I went back to the laundromat. It was empty — the dryers, the tables, the boy, all gone, as if the clinic had been a stage struck after a single night's performance. Someone had taped a phone number to the door. I called it for a week before a woman answered, and she did not sound like a script. She sounded like me.

Come to the water, she said. The old steel works south of the city. Come and see what we are.

There were perhaps two hundred of us that first night, standing among the rusted bones of the mill where our grandfathers had forged the rails that stitched the country together, back before the country decided it no longer needed them. We had all been given the menders for free. We had all been the kind of people a city can lose without writing it down. And every one of us was changing.

Nadia — the woman from the phone — had been a chemistry teacher before the schools closed. She had done the thing the rest of us had no training to do: she had put her own blood under a microscope and watched. The menders were not dissolving because they had never been meant to, she said. They were meant to adapt us. Somewhere a very intelligent group of people had done the arithmetic on the century ahead — the heat, the drought, the yellow air — and concluded that it would be cheaper to change the poor than to clean the world we had been left to live in. Cheaper to make us able to drink the poison than to take the poison out of the water.

They expected gratitude, I think. Or they expected nothing at all, the way you expect nothing from a field you have sown. They did not expect us to find one another.

I will not pretend it was simple. Some of us wanted to march on the men who had done this and make them answer for it. Some wanted to hide, to pass, to keep the old bodies as long as the mirror would allow the lie. And some of us — I was one, for a while — wanted only to be who we had been, to have the tumor back and the fear back if it meant our own faces looking out at us in the morning. There is a grief in becoming, even when what you become is stronger. No one warns you about that. You lose the person you would have died as.

But here is what they miscalculated, whoever they were. They gave us all the same blood. They meant it for a leash — the same machines, the same maker, simple to switch off if we ever became a problem. Instead it made us kin. When I bled and Nadia bled, the same small things swam in both of us, learning the same lessons from the same poisoned world and teaching them back and forth between us like gossip passed over a fence. We healed faster near one another. We began, Nadia thinks, to share what each body had learned. A woman who had survived the lakewater passed her surviving to a man who had never touched it. Without meaning to, we were becoming a single long memory that no one owned.

That is what you will be born into. Not a family in the old way — though your father is a good man and has stood by me through all of it — but into that longer body: the two hundred that are already four thousand, the four thousand that will be more by the time you read this. You will drink what would have killed me at your age and taste nothing wrong in it. You will never know the country of fear I am writing to you from.

I am setting this down because I want one thing to survive the mending, one thing they cannot rewrite: the memory of choosing. They did not ask us. That is the wound beneath all the healing, and I need you to carry it — because a people who forget they were changed against their will are only waiting to be changed again.

So when they come — and they will come, with their bright rehearsed faces and their free gifts — you will already know the shape of it. You will look at what they are holding out to you, and you will ask the question I was too tired to ask.

Not: will this heal me.

But: who profits from what I am becoming — and did they think to ask me first.

Then you will decide, the way I never got to. And whatever you choose, choose it awake.

— Your mother, Odessa