Category: lefty

Three hundred years ago.

The planet seems more or less fine. It’s got the typical pollutants. The population, according to disparate experts, is somehow both bursting at the seams and heading towards zero – and fast. Technology has reached unprecedented levels of efficiency, self-sustainability, and parody. No one uses even twenty five percent of the engine power offered by the average handheld. Everyone has one anyway.

When the first tremors begin hitting the coastline, people think it’ll blow ever, so they go down into their bunkers. Everyone has one of those too. When the waters breach the walls at the coast, alerts start going out, and everything happens quickly. Nobody knew this kind of tectonic activity was possible; this is one for the science books. But no one will write them, at least not in this country, because the only people who survive are the ones where the water doesn’t reach. Over five hundred miles inland. And there’s not that many of them. And they’re not the book-writing types. They won’t know for centuries whether people on other continents have survived the global quakes. Both oceans smother the nation because the fault lines run through the core of the planet, and they are shifting with cosmic results. The globe tilts on its axis. It wobbles in rhythmic response to the incident. Its new orientation alters its orbit. 

The northern hemisphere will now experience routine heat for all foreseeable millennia. 

The southern hemisphere is a frozen wasteland. 

Still, in the middle of the country, a collective emerges. Bands of derelict survivalists who have been planning for the end of the world since the beginning of time are finally – and indisputably – right. They don’t need anyone to cower in recognition either; the rest of the population is already so dead that they don’t even have a chance to take it back (the mockery, that is).

And saying, I told you so to a corpse is to literally have the last laugh. The survivalists are busting a gut.

Communities are forming with foundational principles that echo whatever there was near the end. And there are older principles that emerge too. They come from the forgotten forests and plains of the past. They come up out of the graves of the ancients. They glitter like atavistic gold in these new hands, fingers twirling. So, it means something now to talk about self-love alongside self-immolation, and they say the only way to be yourself is to burn. There are those that begin to talk about the application of random acts of justice and the experience of mercy as chance. They talk about the celebration of difference as commanded by the single perspective. The law. And submission to it. 

A new thing is coming. 

It is the priesthood. 

They talk about human dignity and human sacrifice, and they make all these opposite things sound like mirror images. They turn paradox into promise and break it. 

A handful seek truth in violence. The spark of rebellion. Blitz raids on what they’re calling Oratory Houses in the black of night while the High Priest whispers history, rewriting. The rebels start fires in the rafters. They send livestock through the doors. Anything to disrupt. And then they scatter leaflets through the streets and spray graffiti on the walls.

So, the priesthood retaliates. Roll call in the mornings in the center circle of every commune. Routine interrogations and psychological evaluations. Everything aimed at what they’re calling unification. The standard is set. It’s arbitrary and exact.

And it doesn’t take long for people to forget. 

In exchange for their forgetfulness they are given a semblance of freedom when the priesthood takes its religion underground and transforms Oratory Houses into communal relaxation spaces. Instead of sermons of subjugation the people go to receive rationed doses of squares. The music pulses with mind-numbing force. Between the squares and the endless rhythms, conversation becomes impossible, and though marketed as free time, the user experience at an Oratory House consists of scheduled, irresistible dopamine release, muting all questions. The obligatory ceremonies are over, relegated to holidays and festivals. The priesthood is quiet and though people don’t have to listen, they don’t get to think either, and it amounts to the same thing. The High Priest continues his whispers in the catacombs underneath. 

And everything is distilled in the simplicity, the ubiquity, of the wrong glove. 

All of the sociopathy of the priesthood goes into its design. Remnant technologies of the recent past are enough to perfect both form and function. Synthetic leather for durability. Rubber insulation. Once confined within a wrong glove, the right hand is neutralized through constant neural manipulation, an infant science applied with severe precision. The glove is fused to skin of the wrist, preventing removal. Of course, some try to cut through the material, but they only succeed in maiming themselves because the layer underneath the rubber insulation is triggered to ignite upon exposure to oxygen. Production is easy.

So is distribution. The priesthood, outfitted with overwhelming force, declares on the first day of the new year that bent is broken  – the first full year of the new world completed – and they give every person a wrong glove for their right hand.

“Put it on.”

Those who don’t are executed on the spot.

As are all of the lefthanded citizens of the community.

In the centuries to come, this single perspective is maintained. The law is clear. Children are observed until the age of ten, at which point the lefthanded children are eliminated (if, indeed, any still remain by this age) and the righthanded children are fitted for a wrong glove. It could have been the other way around, and it would have all played out the same. Right or left is not the point. Of course, humans are adaptable. People learn to use their left hands quickly – perhaps even more quickly because of the glove – but the damage is done. Every person experiences the reach of the priesthood. No one is exempt from their arbitrary justice.

No one is exempt from the fear.

The first phase of executions is brutal and public. The second phase is conducted in secret. It’s an experimental operation with a new technological step forward, developed by the priesthood: the black light. 

The third and final phase is initiated as soon as the people have begun to forget. It is the Ceremony of Home. The priesthood monitors all data collected from each individual’s wrong glove because the thing is, the neural manipulation cannot be maintained across a lifetime. It can’t even push past forty years. In other words, the gloves don’t last forever. Eventually, sensation returns. 

Eventually, everybody bends. 

And usually the priesthood knows before the sensations begin: they analyze the data, schedule a ceremony, and send the person home in the black light before they even notice a tickle in their rebel right hand. 

Usually. 

But sometimes the glove monitoring misses a signal. And then another. And another. 

Until, and nobody is really sure how it happens, within the hand an off-grid and unpredictable network of neural pathways lights up. The glove doesn’t notice. The priesthood doesn’t notice.

A rebel is unleashed.

There’s always at least one.

And one is all it takes. From there it’s simply dominoes and what we call momentum.

Lefty ran with the gun in his waistband and his shirt wrapped around his head to soak up the  ravenous sun. It was hungry today. It was hungry everyday. Before his birth – before even the generation of his grandfather – breathing had been a warm and muggy business. Lefty couldn’t remember the last cool breeze. He didn’t have a chance. It was all cooked way before his time. 

So, the home layer was thinning. That much was obvious.

What to do about it? Well, running was a good place to start. Even Jojo had considered it – momentarily. Lefty gave his mind over to the memories and tried to ignore his thumping, groaning pulse. 

A year or so ago:

Jojo went out early most mornings; Lefty didn’t always know where, but he understood why. Jojo needed what he called personal space. An discarded concept. Sure, everybody had a moment to themselves during break time. Allotted minutes. Structured and proportionate to each community member’s effeciency grade. Jojo wanted more. 

So, he snuck out of their shared room, out the window each morning before the sun could catch his shadow, and he had this tree. It was built out of the kind of bark that shreds as it hits the ground. It was the kind of climbing tree which allowed for moods: go this way when you’re feeling grumpy or go up that way when you need some adrenaline. Checkpoints in the branches for losers, loners, and lovers. And up at the top – that’s where Jojo was headed.

It was the end of the week. No one would be awake for another two or three hours. Jojo left through the window, and Lefty decided to follow.

The community couldn’t keep anything green unless it was inside. Grass, flowers, weeds – anything left outside couldn’t stand the heat. So, people pulled the plantworld indoors and set up shop in two competing venues: the amateur home and the professional greenhouse. In general, the greenhouses in the center of the community (there were three of them) housed plants native to the area. Experts in attendance. The idea was to keep the species alive until they could be reintegrated outside. As soon as possible. That was three hundred years ago. The plants kept in private homes were typically foreign species, delivered to collectors as seeds and grown for pleasure. 

The tree was the only one of its kind, that is to say, the only tree that anyone living had ever seen. And it was rooted in its own tower, tucked into the side of the mansion at the edge of town, kept in the artificial habitat curated by Jojo’s father. So, Jojo had the key.

It sunk into the lock without a sound. Lefty watched until Jojo had slipped all the way through the crack into the fake dawn inside, and then he hurried to catch the door before it closed. He stuck his gloved hand into the crack and leaned with his shoulder. The weight of the door was shocking – it was this immense faux wood layer of security, and Lefty immediately realized he couldn’t hold it. He would have been found with a crushed or severed gloved hand, crumpled at the door of his best friend’s father’s house sometime later that morning if Jojo hadn’t turned around and hit the lever.

“Are you kidding me?” Jojo wasn’t angry. He even laughed a little, and without surprise.

Lefty rubbed his wrist and shrugged. “Maybe I have big news?”

“Do you?” Jojo couldn’t keep a straight face. Lefty glared back. And then grinned.

But that was a year or so ago.

Lefty was running now from the memory as much as from any potential pursuit. They’d climbed the tree together that morning, Lefty learning the handholds Jojo knew by heart. Then, at the top, in those sparse and final branches: “Sometimes, Lefty, you know I think it might be nice to leave. Go find a place less…lethal.”

Maybe that was the beginning of the bending – for Lefty. And, for Jojo, the end?

The ground under Lefty’s feet suddenly dropped; he’d been seeing the tree and Jojo, and now he was falling, jerking his legs out to catch anything. It wasn’t a steep slope, but he stumbled for a second. Then, he found his footing and stopped. Good timing. He’d reached the Edge. A few scrapes and bruises and on his knees at a precipice, looking out into the fog that hovered over everything in sight. Lefty leaned back and sat in the dirt. He took a breath. He beat his gloved hand against his chest. Dust in clouds drifting away from him, meeting the haze everywhere out there. With the particles floating ahead of him and the sun setting behind, Lefty navigated the impenetrable ridges of the glove with his free hand; it was no use, and it never had been.

Letting his feet hang over the Edge, it almost looked like he could push off and stand on the grey below him.

Less lethal. Jojo said that.

Okay.

But it didn’t take long for him to change his mind. For half a year, he and Jojo met in the tree, in the dark freedom of a wakeless world. Then, one day the branches were there.

And Jojo wasn’t.

Lefty waited for an hour before he began to feel the first tremors in his right hand. And from there the weeks of scheming distilled into something new: it wasn’t just about the home layer anymore. If he was bending, then it was time to go.

He sat in the tree and let his feet drop into empty space. His hand began to pulse with new blood.

He sat on the Edge and took a breath. Then, he jumped.

On his back in the withering grass, Lefty watched the sun slam through the home layer. Thin to the point of vanishing. Everything.

And the chant was growing louder.

Sweat pushed into the fabric of Lefty’s tunic – for years already stained – and into the mesh confines of his wrong glove. He began to massage the glove’s imprisoned fingers with his other hand. Thumb at the base knuckle and rotate: eight tiny circles. Then, the thumb slides up the finger and clicks. Maybe it clicks again. Finish with ten depressions of the palm.

Now the drums.

And Lefty lay with his questions.

The creaking weight of them. It wasn’t easy to shift his mind from the presence. The present. And that’s really what a person needs. But distraction won’t be told. Distraction does what it wants.

So, Lefty lay in suffocation beneath this new presence: a sneaking suspicion that everything he’d been led to believe was a lie. And the questions. One question more than any other: why could he feel his right hand?

Only thirteen and he could feel the ache. Most people didn’t awaken to their right hand until they were scheduled to be sent home. Lefty looked back up at the sky, letting the sun do its incendiary magic. He closed his eyes.

Sensations in his right hand for months; and to Jojo, last night, a whisper, “I’m bending…”

It had seemed the only thing left to do. They already knew anyway.

And how did they know? This sort of thing developed secretly. Like a daydream behind the eyes. An unspoken word. Many didn’t even know until the black light lifted them home. Indeed, Lefty had barely known himself until he’d placed the cue ball.

It had been one of those nights. A handful of squares stolen from the dispensary, then the drift of unscheduled hours, and finally the rhythmic allure emanating from the center of Commune One – the Oratory House – promising tantalizing festivities, impossible to resist. So, Lefty had joined a game and with the crescendo of imitation ivory crackling throughout the hall, he’d felt his pulse rebel. Not worried, though. Not yet. The speeches never started until midnight anyway, and there would have been time to let the squares wear off beforehand. He wouldn’t have let words give him away.

He wouldn’t have the chance. In the end, it was his body that betrayed him, as it was and is and always will be, human bodies being fueled by opinion, the undiluted self. For Lefty, all of this expressed in the sudden decision of his right hand.

Of course, as soon as he’d lifted the cue ball in his wrong glove, everything had gone off the rails. The other guys, Jojo among them, had stared, then laughed, then stared again.

And Lefty hadn’t even noticed the weighted silence until the ball was settled on the felt of the table with the dexterous precision and sensitivity of the wholly bent.

And now the drum line crested the hill. Lefty turned his head, to rest his cheek against the scorched grass. He could see the green of the hill, and their masks rising above it into sky. Idols on a ridge, blurred to holiness by the heat. He didn’t try to lift his head; there was nothing to be done. He knew they would surround him, that others were already on the other side of the hill too. All sides.

Well.

Lefty elbowed his way into a sitting position, his legs stiff and meaningless. There would be no running. The circle around him was nearly complete. The chant entered its final lines, and then it was over, and the drums were the only sound for another breath, and then all was quiet.

The words of the chant coalesced in Lefty’s mind:

bent is broken,
bent is wrong,
bent was right way all along

He knew he should stand. He knew he should say something in his own defense. Others before him, the ones in the histories, had argued with words. It was through reading their language and their ideas in those early weeks that he’d finally begun to understand the ominous power of his right hand – the power and its ramifications. Now, no words would come.

Inch by inch, the circle compressed; the figures cloaked and masked in the violent white of home. Lefty sat like a fallen toy with his legs out in front him, his head bowed, and his hands resting palm up on the ground, until the shadows appeared from above, flickering along the length of his body. The shadows of arms and hands and fingers reaching for him.

And then the black light pulsing from the sky above, emanating from a new tear in the home layer. But it was more than a tear, of course. It was a doorway of sorts. It was Lefty’s goodbye. The black light dripped, sluggish and ravenous.

In the end, it was his body, again, that betrayed his better judgment; his treacherous hand sought justification. Wriggling in the wrong glove. Bent. Bent is broken, bent is wrong. He was bent. Whatever they did to him next, he deserved it.

Right?

And then before the black light dropped those final meters, the hand decided. Beneath the beckoning shadows of the High Priest’s greedy fingers, Lefty’s rebel hand reached out and took hold of the weapon, a gun – something he’d only ever read about. Still shackled by the wrong glove, his fingers couldn’t catch the trigger, but with a thrust into the stomach of the High Priest, Lefty now had their attention. The circle shuddered, and Lefty jammed the gun deeper into the folds of flesh and tunic, and the High Priest squealed.

“Use it not! A moment – ” the man cried, and Lefty certainly considered it, even as he twisted his hand below the grip and fired, thumb squeezing the trigger, the gun held like a glass aloft and the blood like wine, spilling down his right hand, arm, shoulder. First silence, then the howling of the company and staggered steps backwards. And no time to waste. The present disintegrating into distraction.

Decision reestablishing direction.

Because every broken second is the start of something new.

Lefty was standing and pushing through the circle which had grown three rows deep, leading with the gun in his right hand, jabbing at faces behind masks. He broke out and stumbled heavily to where the hill began its steepest descent, and he spun around, switching the gun into his left hand and aiming.

Behind him the black light had landed, and the last thing Lefty saw in turning was the body of the High Priest drifting up through the tunnel of darkness, a demented puppet rid of its strings. Most of the crowd crouched or kneeled with their hands over their heads, and some looked over their shoulders to watch the corpse rise home.

And some did neither, but stood instead, mute and gazing at him from behind their veils, and it was at these that Lefty fired a final time before turning to run.