THE LAST MAN: Part Seventeen

“I remember the exact moment,” she begins again. Her name is Desiree, a name which somehow seems appropriate. We are sitting at the table, both completely drained by our laughter. A steady rain drives churning black smoke from the Reclamation Center down into the city where it lingers like a dirty fog. Heavy gray clods descend along the coast in tattered sheets. Oily black soot bleeding upon the window distorts that world into monotone abstracts. She pauses, weighing those first words, her eyes flitting anxiously to Sentinel.

“I was a Mandate Clerk for Reclamation Services. It is hardly more than a computer lottery, really. Not much to there, but my department’s task was to notify section twenty-one for the occasional non-compliance, coordinate with the Channels for labor replacement, and to reassign living assignments…”

As Desiree continues my thoughts are flooded by the terrible images from the Reclamation Center.

…it was all terribly precise and efficient. I thought nothing as Associates in my work section received their Mandates. They would simply finish out their day and that was it. One day my Mandate would come. I never, never questioned,” she looks at me deeply pained. “Like questioning the motion of the earth around the moon, or the sum of four plus four.” She shrugs, fiddling with her fingers. “Then one morning getting out of bed my legs became tangled in the sheet and I tripped. My head struck the corner of the table, right here.”

She parts the hair covering her forehead. Perhaps two inches above the left eye a poorly healed scab covers a ragged gash.

Sentinel surely alerted Section Twenty-one?” I say.

“Hmm, I laid in a pool of my own blood for two days. Seems sentinel only really worries over subversive or dangerous thoughts. The languishing emptiness of the unconscious Associate is of much less concern.”

“But your position at Reclamation Services?”

She glares at Sentinel a moment, as if tempting it with her obvious disdain. “A secret of the Corporation, birthrates are hardly uniform. From time to time Reclamation creates overages and shortages in the system. Actual reclamation progresses at a constant unchangeable rate. It functions at maximum capacity. That rate never rises and never falls. I believe that the reclamation center is the most efficient link in the system.”

Desiree obviously has no idea. “I have seen it firsthand.”

“The Reclamation Center?” she asks, surprised. “You have been there?”

“Nothing you should concern yourself with,” I say with a knowing glance to Sentinel.

She stands and goes to the window, looking out across the dull and rain-swept city. “When I awoke everything had changed. Everything was so terribly confusing. I tried to control these feelings, but they were just too much. Worst of all, I had the sudden sense of being entirely alone in the world. I broke down at work one day. Within forty-eight hours I received my Mandate. Two days later I was reassigned and brought here.”

I recall the words of Frederick Douglas. In them I find common cause with my new roommate, as well as ample ammunition for court on Monday, “…we were one; and as much so by our tempers and dispositions, as by the mutual hardships to which we were necessarily subjected by our condition as slaves.”