Atlas Rises

It was December 2066. It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. I was 14 years old and my mother was driving me to my father’s house in rural Wisconsin, outside of Madison. There was no way I was going to spend the obligatory Gift Exchange and New Year’s holidays with him again. 

Last year instead of getting me presents, he smashed my guitar against the fireplace then put the mangled remains of it as well as the notebook where I kept my musical scribblings into the burning hearth. “That’s about as good a use as you’re going to get of those things, Abbey Zhang,” he had said. “No offspring of mine is going to waste his life composing songs about high school angst and pubescent hormonal fixations. You’re better off becoming a raiser of cage-free chickens, like your old man. There’s dignity in that profession. ‘Early to rise, to pluck from the dawn hens their golden-yolk prize,’ was your grandfather’s favorite refrain. It should become yours.”    

I couldn’t bear the thought of spending another two weeks on my dad's pasture chicken ranch, waking up before the light of day, feeding hens and harvesting their eggs, while the man who wanted to kill my adolescent musical dreams loomed over my shoulder. So, as I was sitting in the passenger seat of my mother’s car and as she drove at approximately fifty miles an hour on a two-lane highway in the waning hours of that cold, snowy day, I forcibly took hold of the steering wheel and turned it with all my might to her left. The hydrogen-fuel two-seater crossed the lane into opposing traffic and we crashed head-on into an older model electric vehicle, the kind that were still common when China had not yet occupied the country for peace-keeping purposes.

My relationship to mother wasn’t ideal either. Although she never complained about my music, she did complain about my friends and my conduct at school. She was a drinker, and sometimes the guys she’d bring over from her nights in the town’s bars would get rough with her. Some nights she’d become hysterical and ask what she had done to deserve such an ungrateful, troublesome son and such a miserable life, more generally. 

Although the Chinese were real law and order types, even they couldn’t control the kind of trouble that found a lonely woman who was also a single mother and given to drink. On more than one occasion, after a night at the drinking holes, she’d told me how I, Abbey James Zhang, wasn’t really her son, that I had been born of her loins, but that I wasn’t her flesh and blood. Even though I didn’t bear much of a resemblance to either of my parents, I didn’t know what she meant. I would only find out when my face finally began to take on the adult contours of Morris James, the grind music star clone whose genome I possessed.  

It was a freezing December, but I still got out of the car and started tossing money out onto the road. Money was only really used by people involved in the underground economies: low lives and recently arrived immigrants. The low lives used cash because they didn’t want to leave trails of digital currency linking them to suspect citizens known to sell drugs and outlawed weapons. Recently arrived immigrants who hadn’t received the government’s newly nationalized banking app also made use of the aging low-density polyethylene bills that had stopped being produced two decades ago, after the Chinese occupation. I had money because I used to help my high school buddy, Hank, peddle black market synthetic drugs like LSD, MDMA and ketamine. The Chinese had really cracked down on sales and use of illegal drugs, and I risked getting thrown into juvenile reeducation camp until my 18^th birthday for helping Hank, but I used the money to buy stuff at garage sales in the Latino barrios where some residents still didn’t possess means for electronic transfers. One of the things I had bought was the guitar my dad had smashed and burned.  

While I tossed plasticized bill after plasticized bill of the multi-hued hundred-dollar denomination currency, printed with the face of Barack Obama, onto the highway, I loudly shouted the lyrics of “Heathens” a song by one of my favorite millennial bands, 21 Pilots that had been covered by All, a band from the 2050s. It was one of the songs that hadn’t been banned by the Chinese who had imposed decency laws regulating cultural production.  All music that made explicit mention of sex, violence or drugs had gotten the governmental axe.  A concerned passerby driving a Great Wall hydrogen fuel coupe slowed to a crawl, rolled down his window, asked me what I was doing, and when I just kept on singing, he stopped and started picking up the old currency. Another passerby must’ve called the police, because not five minutes after I had caused the accident, a Madison Community Surveillance hydrogen hovercraft landed at the accident site.     

The Community Surveillance monitors found my mother unconscious in the driver's seat. Our airbags hadn't deployed and she had passed out upon impact with the steering wheel. I told the monitors that she was abused by a boyfriend and that if they looked for evidence of abuse on her body, they would find it. While the bystanders who had stopped to help looked on and reported what they had seen, I contemplated my options: either being taken to my father’s where I would be subjected to his sermonizing and paternal cruelties, or doing something rash to avoid transport to his torturous poultry-raising dominion. I made a lunge for one of the monitors. They quickly subdued me and after my mother had come to, she tearfully told the monitors that I wasn’t her son, that all they need to do was run a DNA scan to discover that the little demon didn’t belong to her. The monitors took me to a behavioral crisis unit for adolescents.

After I had been processed by the Madison Youth Behavioral Health Authority and given a DNA scan, I was shown to my room. There I met Dwindle, a lanky seventeen-year-old who told me he had been brought to the crisis unit after his parents had called the Community Surveillance Agency and told them that their son, who neither regularly took his meds for depression nor attended state-mandated therapy for anti-social personality disorder, had absconded. Dwindle was picked up by the monitors after being caught shoplifting in a gritty part of town. 

As we exchanged small talk typical of newly acquainted behaviorally-troubled teens, he told me that he’d been in and out of behavioral crisis wards since the age of twelve. Shortly after we had given each other a glimpse of our dysfunctional lives, Dwindle tossed a small bundle of pills, tightly wrapped in cellophane onto my bed.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Smell it,” he said.

The nugget-sized package smelled of feces.

“Smells like shit,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s because I keistered it when I was changing out of my street clothes and into the crisis unit uniform.” By “keistered,” which was pronounced like “key” and “stirred,” he meant he had surreptitiously hidden it in his anal cavity so that crisis unit staff wouldn’t confiscate the contraband. “It might smell like shit, but that right there is the shit that’s going to let me and you to get our kicks while we’re locked up in this hell-hole.”

The purple gelatinous pills didn’t look like any of the kind I had helped my high school black marketeer friend, Hank, peddle at high school and on street corners.

“It doesn’t look like Molly,” I said.

“Molly’s for idiots looking to experience love artificially,” said Dwindle. “We live in times when the likes of me and you are an endangered race.” He was referring to the fact that combined nuclear war in Europe and the epidemic spread of rapaxia, a virulent and extremely deadly disease that affected people of Northern European descent, had decimated light complected populations on the planet. No one was sure if rapaxia had evolved on its own or developed in a biological weapons lab. I was only partially white: my maternal grandfather was German and my paternal grandmother was Irish. Both my parents were half-Chinese, I wasn’t subject to rapaxia’s ravages, only people with red or blonde hair and blue or green eyes were, but I nevertheless harbored a fear that I could fall victim to its ethnocidal contagiousness.

“Love is for losers," declared Dwindle. "That substance you hold in your mortal hand is Moxy, and Moxy’s gonna change your life. It’s gonna make you want to kill something. It’s gonna make you see things, make you hear voices that’ll reveal the true meaning of your life. It’ll help you understand who the tormented soul that aches for meaning underneath your skin really is.”

Sure enough, seconds after we took the Moxy, I felt a surge of adrenalin that made me feel like I either wanted to fight or break something. Dwindle started howling and encouraged me to do the same. The loud racket we made seemed to quell the violent urgings the drug elicited, but Youth Behavioral Health staff intervened. Both Dwindle and I attacked the intervening psychiatric technicians. They found the remaining Moxy, put Dwindle on another unit and me in restraints in a side room. 

While fastened with rubberized straps to the side room’s metal-frame bed, the drug-induced adrenalin rush died out and the hallucinogenic effects kicked in. The buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead began to grow louder until they sounded like the deafening hum of a nuclear power station. The subdued hiss of the climate control vent on the ceiling began to sound like a titanic respiratory system inhaling then exhaling. On the mattress next to my head, a lone ant, on some programmed mission to benefit its colony, unsteadily climbed onto my arm. I found its genetically-coded determination comforting, and when I focused on it, the distorted cacophony of the lights and vent died down.

As I followed the ant with my Moxy-influenced eyes, it began morphing: first into a larger thumb-sized ant, then a rhinoceros beetle, a tweeting canary, a belching blue-bellied lizard, a roaring golden mouse, and on up evolutionary changes in the taxonomic chain of being until it became a chattering capuchin monkey, then a Jiu wӗihύ, a nine-tailed, white spirit fox that my maternal grandmother, Jing, had told me about when I was younger.  My grandmother’s name in Chinese meant “quiet,” which was quite ironic, since she was given to excessive chatting about topics that usually never captured my attention for more than a moment or two.

Grandma Jing’s talks of the nine-tailed fox provided a distracting alternative to the monologues she would often give about her Han, or pure-blood, genealogy, about the days of the Chinese peace-keeping force’s occupation, and the need for Chinese to conduct themselves like exemplary global citizens, reflective of our nation’s recently established manifest destiny. She was fond of telling me, “Abbey, you must stop frowning all the time. Bad moods are contagious,” words that now this nine-tailed fox repeated to me as it sat on my chest and gently rose and fell to my breath.

“Grandma?” I asked the fox.

“No, I’m not Jing, Mr. Abbey Dour—walker on the Abbey Road, seeker of the Abbey door—but, Jiu Wӗihύ, here to show you the true way-hu,” said the fox with a sharp-toothed smile, it’s nine tails flickering. 

“A Jiu wӗihύ, here to show me the true way-what?” I queried, feeling both confused and entertained by the hallucination that seemed straight out of Alice in Wonderland, a book my mother had read to me when I was in third grade.

“Way-hu, as in ‘path’ and ‘hu,’ meaning ‘to call,’ ‘to cry,’ ‘to shout,‘ and ‘to breathe out,’ in two of your grandparents’ native Mandarin, Mr. Abbey Zhang, Sir Abbey Tao. I’m here to say nĭ hăo and reveal your true name. I am the cry of your past, that is also the echo of your future.”

I knew nĭ hăo meant “hello” and that the Mandarin, “hu” translated into the English “to yell.” But the word had additional significance for me. My freshman year, after Hank had turned me onto the rock music his Wisconsin-born grandfather had listened to, I had turned him onto the Hu, a turn of the millennium Mongolian folk-metal band that still had a large following amongst Asians of many nationalities. Grandma Jing couldn’t stand when I would listen to the Hu. She called them, “bard-barian descendants of Genghis Khan,” and when she did I would reply with an “Amen,” and a “mother may, I?” before turning the volume of the Bluetooth speaker up even louder. 

I could hear the Hu’s version of Metallica’s twentieth century “Sad but True” blare from the intercom speaker in the isolation room, which I’m sure the nurse’s station wasn’t playing for the patients, but then the growly vocals started coming from the nine-tailed fox’s mouth. “I’m here to tell you to sing,” the fox said in Mongolian, which even though I couldn’t understand, I nevertheless understood due to the effects of the Moxy. “No matter what your father, the guitar smasher and burner, the dream killer, tells you, you’re no bringer of evil. You’re a derelict bringer of hope, you’re a singer.”

“How can I ever be singer? Most of the time I wish I didn’t even exist,” I said to the fox.

It put its snout against my nose, winked one eye, then the other, then opened both eyes wide. “Eight of my tails represent a time you will cheat death,” said the fox, and after saying this, it ate one of its fluffy tails. “You’ve already cheated death once, last summer when your mother took you to California and you dared the turbulent commotion of the Pacific Ocean despite the red flag warnings. You barely had the strength to swim back to shore. I will keep you safe until my tails run out. Until then, we must remain perfect strangers.”

I managed to ask the fox what my real name was. He answered, “My time here is up for now, but you’ll find out soon enough.” As I tried to get the fox to answer additional questions, it started to chew at my restraints. With a brilliant lightning flash that momentarily blinded me and a rumble of thunder that faded onto my sobering eardrums, the effects of the Moxy wore off, and my now-sober eyes could see that a tall psychiatric technician with a cleanly shaven head, full, graying beard, and blue eyes was unfastening the tethers that tied me to the bed. Behind him an attractive Asian woman with a white physician’s coat, a clip board, and a brass name tag that read “Dr. Bennet,” said “Abbey Zhang, there is someone important on a holophone who wants to meet you.” Holophones, that used hologram technology formerly confined to a few 20^th century science fiction films, had been introduced three decades ago and had made traditional teleconferencing obsolete. I had an unexpected, lumpy-throated hope the person projected by the holophone was going to be my father.

Dr. Bennet, who must’ve been married to a white man to have a name like that, walked me to her office, where the hologram of a dark-eyed, honey-skinned man with a pencil mustache sat with his legs crossed and the fingers of his hands clasped over his uppermost knee. “Hello youngster, my name is Charles,” said the man as he reached out an open hand for me to shake. I obliged and shook it, feeling the still unrefined plasma-hologram technology’s capacity for limited tactility. 

“Where are my parents?” I asked the Singh-o-gram.

“Your mother is recovering from the accident. The Community Surveillance monitors have deemed she is no longer fit to care for you. Your father demands I deliver you to his pasture chicken ranch. But those facts are neither here nor there. To be more exact about my name, it is Charles Ravi Singh,” said the hologram, “I’m an agent for a powerful media corporation, and I am also now your legal custodian.” The hologram took a corporate identification and electronic fund transfer card from his suit’s breast pocket and held it for me to see. I read his name on it as well as the name of 21^st Century American Entertainments, a firm that possessed the rights to many of the more popular films, music and books of the 20^th century. They also owned the copyrights to most celebrity clones. 

“You were given the name Abbey Zhang at birth, but that is not your true name. While your mother Alice birthed you, neither she nor your father, Lee, are genetically related to you. You are a genomic replica of the grind music star Morris James, and whether you like it or not, your genome, and therefore, your life and death, belong to the 21st Century American Entertainments corporation.”

The last James clone had committed suicide 49 days before my birthday. I was now fourteen, and although I know I didn’t bear much a resemblance to either of my parents, I didn’t think I bore much of a resemblance to James until the moment Singh mentioned I was the replicant of the grind star. As Charles Ravi Singh turned to speak to Dr. Bennet about my impending release, memories of my barely adolescent life flashed before my eyes, of my parents’ dysfunctional ways, of my only high school friend, Hank, and his pills, of my grandmother complaining about the Hu, of my foolhardy swim in Malibu Beach, of the white, nine-tailed Jiu wӗihύ, whose words had made me stop wishing for death. Before I once again started listening to the conversation between Dr. Bennet and my new legal guardian, I wondered about what my other seven brushes with death would look and feel like.