1984: Big brothers America

The first time I touched 1984 it was already dead. It was a soft book from our school library, the pages thin and translucent like tissue. The spine was brittle, cracked open like a gunshot wound that refused to heal. Mildew, sweat, and some kind of greasy film stained the pages, human residue seeping into the grain of the paper. My teacher slid it across my desk with just a touch of her fingertips before they were withdrawn like icicles in the sun. No preamble. No explanation. Just another assignment to be read and digested and regurgitated and forgotten.

The classroom was lit too brightly. The floor smelled of disinfectant, bleach hiding the sour breath of a hundred students caged in there since breakfast. Fluorescent lights buzzed like flies in a butcher’s shop. My classmates thumbed through the book without reading, the edges of the paper catching on their fingerprints like it was something to be broken.

I devoured it in one sitting. The paper cut my fingers raw, thin veins of blood peeling along the edges of pages. The words were not written—they infected me, buried themselves under my skin, took root. I could smell the stale air in those rooms: recycled and dry and biting, oxygen leeched out until your lungs had to labor for every breath. I could hear the old sweat on the stones, human residue polished into the concrete by people who could not leave. The State Orwell described did not want to keep its citizens alive. It wanted them to not die too soon to be of use.

I could feel the electricity in the room as I stood in front of the class to deliver my presentation. My hands trembled, but my voice did not. I said 1984 was not a novel—it was prophecy. It was a slow-motion asphyxiation. I said truth could be fragile, snapped without sound. I said tyranny did not come with marching bands and jackboots in the night. It came in other ways. Patient. Inconspicuous. Until one day you awoke and found its taste in your mouth.

They laughed.

Not loud. Not cruel. Worse. The empty, dismissive laughter of people who believe the blade will never cut their skin. My teacher did not interject. The bell rang. My words slithered along the floor, crushed under their feet like gravel.

It was more than ten years ago.

The year is 2025 now, and 1984 is no longer prophecy. It is a primer. It is a set of blueprints pored over until the pages were slick with the grease of men who read and reread and took notes in the margins. The man with the red tie and the bloated lips and the powdered flesh and eyes like slugs dragged from the toilet is back. The rallies are carnivorous, the air inside them thick and hot, the breath of sweat and spit and zeal. His voice is meat rotting at the edges. He preaches in wounds. He promises atrocity like it is grace, and they cheer.

Animals. Infestation. Wolves in the henhouse. Feral. Packs. Rabid. Disease-ridden. Children in cages like rats, each corner of their worlds defined by barbed wire and fluorescence. Blankets with eyes too wide to take in the starkness of it, crinkling as they shift to echo the dull, staccato thump of their own hearts, to throw back their terror at themselves like a funhouse mirror. Refugees are called vermin. Immigrants, infestation. Negroes and Hispanics are lynched in broad daylight, the blood of them seeping into the asphalt while their murderers stand over the bodies with bloody smiles for the cameras. Homosexuality is legislated away with the scalpel of a surgeon who does not recognize the humanity of the flesh he cleaves.

Science is disemboweled on television for audiences to watch, the organs laid out on the table for inspection before the husk is left to twitch in the street. Climate research defunded. Data manipulated until scrubbing the numbers might make the ocean less hot. Words like “climate change” and “gender” excised from reports like doomed convicts. Doctors are threatened for refusing to sign death warrants on patients the State has other plans for. Progress is uprooted by the very soil it grew from, so much dirt and blood still clinging to it.

They adore him.

They are no longer individuals, they are a mob. A body. Pulsing and sweating and stinking. They tattoo his name on their flesh. They scream until their throats bleed. They will watch him degrade the disabled, attack the press, vow to purge the country—and they scream until their throats are raw. Their love is not love. It is hunger. Hunger leaves no bodies behind.

I protest anyway. My lungs smart from chanting. My hands bleed from holding the cardboard signs we’ve fashioned until the plastic dissolves in the rain, the words seeping from them like open wounds. I sign petitions into oblivions. The police are there waiting for us, trapped in black armor, their batons twitching like dog tails, their helmets distorting us back at them like amoebas. They want us to scatter. They want the camera to capture the bodies as they fall.

In D.C., the tear gas had come low, almost invisible, skimming past ankles like it was hooves. It was a beast, low and slow. It pawed at mouths, pinning us down with claws of flame. People coughed until their bodies convulsed. Some screamed wordlessly, clawing at their own faces. My lungs seized. My eyes ran. A stranger shoved a lemon wedge into my hand and told me to bite. The acid cleared my mouth of the taste of blood from my broken lip, a temporary reprieve before the burn settled in and took root, deeper than my skin, burrowing through to the bone.

That night, I opened 1984 back up. I avoided the slogans hollowed into the fabric of hats, of tote bags and t-shirts and stickers. I read the passages where love is removed surgically, where language is amputated until pain has no name. I read the chapters where history is stripped from the bone, dressed in lies. I read the lines where the State kills you, feeds you your own devotion as if it were ambrosia. I read until the whites of my eyes burned, until the words beat in my skull like a second heartbeat.

I think about leaving every day. I think of flight the way an animal thinks of chewing off its own leg to escape the snare. I wake up at 2 in the morning and research visas in the blue light of a laptop. Skilled worker. Student. Refugee. Investor. Every door bolted. Every lock guarded by someone who has already decided you do not deserve the key.

I do not believe in salvation anymore.

America does not want saving. America wants adoration. It wants you to kneel, to offer your throat. It wants you to kiss the boot stamping your face and thank it for not having spared you.

The rallies get larger. The chants are slick with saliva. The list of enemies grows until it becomes the very air you breathe. At the border, mounted officers charge immigrants like ranchers stampeding a herd, reins whipping like