Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 7

Bradley woke up weeping. Marsha rolled sleepily beside him, murmuring something that might have been 'What's wrong?'

'I dreamt—' he began, and stopped short. He struggled to find words for the experience. There was the dream, and there was the associated memory that confronted him in the few seconds after waking.

He lay back with his eyes shut, still half-immersed in the dream. It was a vast, luminous vision with his whole life stretched out before him like a landscape on a snowy winter evening. It all occurred inside the glass snow globe, but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was diffused with pale light. Each drifting snowflake was one of Bradley's memories. The dream snow was disturbed—indeed, in some sense stirred up by—a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the documentary he wrote about in his diary, trying to shelter her child from bullets, before the drone blew them to pieces.

'You know,' he said, 'until this moment I was sure I'd murdered my mother?'

'Why'd you murder her?' Marsha said, almost asleep.

'I didn't murder her. Not physically.'

In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of her. Upon waking, the cluster of memories surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been less than eight years old, possibly ten, when it had happened.

His father had vanished, how much earlier he could not remember. He remembered clearly the uneasy circumstances of the time: periodical panics about pandemics and lockdowns, piles of rubble everywhere from category 6 hurricanes, unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs in shirts all the same color waving new flags, enormous queues outside the supermarkets, intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance. Above all, he recalled how there was never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys scrounging through dumpsters and piles of trash, picking out apple cores, moldy bread, sometimes even scraps of rotting meat from which they carefully scraped off maggots; and also in waiting for the passing of trucks which traveled over a certain route carrying pig feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of soybean meal.

When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She became completely spiritless, all fight gone. It was obvious even to Bradley she was waiting for something. She did everything for them: cooked, washed, doom-scrolled, made the bed, swept the floor—always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, almost zombie-like. Her large shapely body just settled naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit unmoving on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face wretched with thinness. Very occasionally she would take Bradley in her arms and hug him for a long time without a word. He understood, in spite of his youthful selfishness, this was somehow connected with a never-mentioned thing about to happen.

He remembered the basement room where they lived, a damp, muggy room prone to flooding. In his memory, it was half filled by a large bed with a green bedspread. There was a portable electric ring on the dresser, and a shelf for food, and on the hall outside there was a stained ceramic sink, common to several rooms. He remembered his mother's statuesque body bending over the electric ring to stir something in a saucepan. Above all he remembered the continuous hunger, and their fierce battles at meal-times. He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over, why was there not more food. He would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed), or he would attempt a sniveling tone in his efforts to get more than his share. His mother resisted this. She would not take it for granted that he, 'the boy', should have the biggest portion; but however much she admonished him he always demanded more. At every meal she would beg him to not be selfish and to remember his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped stirring, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands, he would grab from his sister's plate. He knew he was starving them, but he could not help it; he even felt he had a right to do it. The gnawing hunger in his belly was his justification. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering from their wretched store of food.