by Johnny Bananas

They took up their glasses and bongs and sniffed at them.  The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every passing of the lips.  It had become the element they lived in, the green new air they breathed.  With it they awoke in their brave new world – the new life, death and resurrection.  It was smoke or drink that lay them dull into bed at night and pulled them out of it in the morning.  When they awoke they never felt truly awake unless they found the way to do the work.  The work meant facing the contradictions on their way to their role in Utopia.  The drink and smoke was necessary to suppressing the memory of the time before the Great Purge.   

The purge was beyond horrific and the faces of those who survived could not hide what they had seen and allowed. Working for the Ministry of Truth Miro could remove the evidence from the pages online but not from his mind.  Some things cannot be disappeared down the memory hole.  The unthinkable cruelty, they were told, was necessary to achieve equity and ultimately Utopia.  One had to face it with the same dispassion necessary for an abortion.  These weren’t humans the way the world needed them to be.  That had not evolved to understand inclusion nor diversity as they were meant to be understood.  They hadn’t summoned the necessary fear of pandemics and climate change to become sacrificial and show solidarity.  Their freedom was a license to kill and so they must be killed if humanity was to live.  Embracing this contradiction was difficult but not impossible if one’s conscience could be numbed. 

Occasionally, usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays after confirming the deposit of his UBI check, he reported to the unkempt office in the Ministry of Truth on the corner of Champlain St. and Maple to do a little work.  At least, it was the work necessary to collect the check.  Karen and he were among the several members of the subcommittee of a subcommittee dealing with the minor difficulties that arose from the compilation of the Seventh Edition of the Newspeak Vermonter.  Emma and Joan made a show of arriving early by standing in pledge of allegiance to the Diversity Flag just as Miro would walk in, careful to declare the anthem loud enough to activate the telescreen.  Though it had not been disappeared down the memory hole, and no longer allowed in common use, he recalled this was once derided as virtue signaling.  Though it could not be called that any more the practice was common, necessary even to keep one’s standing in the party.  Miro would always join in loudly as if by his volume he could hide his secret disdain for his role in the charade.  He reminded himself this was progress. 

They were tasked with producing an Interim Report which was an exercise in political cleansing.  Their job was to keep the image of the town above the reproach of the State.  A stabbing or shooting was to be declared a “domestic disturbance” and the victims were often dismissed as having been the descendents of a deplorable.  The glaring homeless encampments were always under development by the Department of Homeland Safety.  The once bustling marketplace (he recalls was renamed from Church Street to Utopia Boulevard) now mostly boarded up store fronts was to be in a state of perpetual renovation, citizens were to be redirected to the cities E-commerce Suite.  Karen, Emma and Joan had formed into a type of clique whenever the topic was the market at which point Miro, who was technically the committee chair, would offer weak resistance to their input.  Women, whatever that was, were speaking which meant he needed to listen.  This too was progress.

As they quarreled over semantics Miro could hear the soft melody of Holiday music in the distance.  His mind drifted back to a time when he sat at a table with his siblings playing Monopoly with the scent of cinnamon and pine needles caressing the air.  The tired voices of the women on the committee arguing were replaced by those of his siblings as they harangued each other about playing for property and money, two evils he remembered from his youth.  His mother would bring them hot cocoa and cookies so fresh they felt like sweet tufts of air streaming into his gullet.  Outside the window pane collected snowflakes that framed the dimly lit street of his childhood.  His father sat quietly in the next room reading from a book he remembers burning en masse during the Great Purge.  Behind him was the tree under which lie boxes wrapped neatly in the colored paper no longer available with bows now on the list of non-essentials that can only be found on the Dark Web and for a cost too great to justify with one’s UBI.  He remembers the joy they all shared the next morning as they opened their gifts, his brother’s new baseball mitt and his sister’s new sequined shoes.  He pushed the picture out of his mind.  It was a false memory. They troubled him occasionally, which only mattered if he couldn’t defeat them for what they were – false.  Some things had happened while others had not. 

He made his way over to the Whiskey Room where he could play trivia with the locals.  Trivia was an effective way of re-learning things the party had approved.  It was much more enjoyable to do this in community as a show of solidarity.  On the large telescreens situated around the room the professional teams were playing the sports of the day – poker, video gaming and some type of martial combat.  Banners ran along the top and bottom with reports of the day’s newsworthy events.  The pandemic had mutated into a new virus.  The death toll was in the millions.  The patrons would brag about the latest booster shot they’d volunteered to take.  The war in the Mid-west was nearing its final stage.  The Allies had been dealing strategic blows to the rebels and terrorists from the Brotherhood of Saints.  Footage of the bodies of terrorists elicited cheers from inside the room, while outside pedestrians could be seen stopping to gaze at the heroic bombing from Allied drones.  Barely discernable over the din from within the room he could hear Wolf Pulitzer announce – “Operation Abomination – terrorist cell captured – vital infrastructure – restoring Democracy – AI is winning”.  

His chest began to pound slowly at first as his fist tightened around his glass.  Outside he could see the old silhouettes of a city he once knew but now despised.  She was a Queen who had oppressed many and needed to be dethroned.  In the distance he could see the University’s Ministry of Love where he learned to let go of his old ways of knowing.  Where he had struggled off his privilege and patrician ways of living and purged his soul from wrong-think.  The whiteness that blanketed the trees outside was innocent unlike his which had accursed him since the day he was born.  He was back in his college whiteness studies class confessing everything, implicating everybody.  Walking down the green with the armed Antifa guard at his back his longhoped-for bullet was entering his brain.  He gazed out at the enormous facades of concrete and graffiti with the all encompassing slogans he fought to embrace: Black Lives Matter, Diversity Is Our Strength, Trans Rights Are Human Rights! Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was needed to envisage his lips. It was the thin smile of acceptable tolerance.  Oh cruel misunderstanding!  Oh stubborn, selfish desire to think freely!  

Two icy cold tears trickled down his ruddy cheeks.  It was all right, everything was all right.  The struggle was finished.  He had won the victory over himself.  He loved Big Burlington.  

Johnny Bananas is the nom de plume of a fake news reporter living in Vermont. Nothing he reports ever actually happened. This is satire, folks.