Salvation
By Sarah Cavar
It could have been a vat of Mountain Dew.
Sugar dressed in blue as raspberries.
It could have been red like party barrels of childhood fluid in bulbous plastic jars, seemingly available at every birthday party or family reunion a young Patrick had ever attended. Always hosted by the same aunt, these get-togethers would inevitably end in someone’s diarrhea. When he was six, after watching Cousin Hanna dive naked into the pool, he asked his brother Mark where her pee-pee was. Mark looked him up and down and up again, and finally, pointedly, at his groin. And then he laughed and laughed, said girls don’t have those, you have pussies, doncha know that?
At the time, he had nodded tepidly to the rhythm of Mark’s laughter, imagining a toothy cat hidden inside Cousin Hanna’s groin. He considered the space between his own legs, pasting wonder round the inside of his skull. The other boys all drank red juice as if cats in crotches were of no concern. When a soaking-wet Hanna emerged from the pool demanding lemonade, Auntie Mallory fixed her a tall glass, perhaps for fear of the cat inside her one-piece.
*
Patrick, having never tasted the blue from this roiling vat, speculated it a reckless-sweet. Blue whispers of cure clung like corn syrup, so thick and close he could hardly breathe.
Each day he loved one stainless-steel scoop from the pot to his arm, liquid warm but never burning. Gobs of Mountain Dew blue (this nickname brought him peace in times of bafflement) affixed themselves to predetermined points on his wrist, arm, elbow, bicep, and finally, fingers, trickling toward center of his palm. Once covered, he would bring his Mountain Dew arm—this Mad, simulated glove—up to the mirror, watching light dance on its surface.
For a period, he would leave the Dew glove on, arm extended Frankenstein-style. Upon hearing kitchen sounds below his feet, he would hold his arm above the vat, letting the now-glowing blue drip back toward its host, taking with it several innocuous moles.
Patrick’s wife, Nadine, a poor cook with excellent taste in microwavables, made breakfast at the same time every day, loud noises calling Patrick from his daily blue. Today’s breakfast smelled a shared favorite: bagel-crusted pastries stuffed with strawberry cream cheese.
“Only normal cream cheese today, sorry,” Nadine told Patrick, looking even sorrier for herself. She shook a pile of sugar crystals onto a cup-less tea saucer, pressed her already-bitten breakfast to it, and, biting it once more, brought a hand to her mouth.
Half-listening to her toothache groans, Patrick heard himself suggesting a dentist’s appointment, because what has it been, five years? He could quarter-hear her indignant reply: didn’t he remember, the local guy wouldn’t stop calling her the wrong name, even though it’s been Nadine since the first year of her Master’s program?
“Right, right, I’m sorry. I should have—” he shook his head, checked the time, stood. “I'm going out to pick Lee up from the Center, okay? See how he’s doing. Maybe get some lunch.”
Nadine licked tiny granules of sugar off her manicured hand, nails pale pink but for two white, gem-studded ring fingers. She’d had the Naildazzle pack for years, rationing the things like toothpaste ever since trade with China ceased.
“No lunch,” she said. “I haven’t gone out there in—fuck, I don’t know. But you’re getting too comfortable. It’s getting worse for us out there. I’ve seen the news. You never know when you’re going to be, well…” She drew one manicured hand across her throat, slicing, and let her tongue dangle to the side of her mouth. She had re-pierced it, he noticed, remembering the mysterious pot of boiled water and emergency sewing kit left on the counter the previous night.
“It’ll be okay. Lee needs it,” Patrick said. “You know I take precautions.”
Nadine said nothing before retreating to her office.
Now alone, Patrick ran through his checklist. A small pistol in his pants pocket. Another in the opposite pocket. Spare money secured in a hidden pocket on his briefs. A vest, not bulletproof but thick-enough, beneath a loose t-shirt, above a pair of rolled-up vintage Levi’s. A black N-95 over his nose and mouth. Sensible sneakers, tied on the front porch in a futile effort to keep the inside-floor pristine. He and Nadine avoided formal goodbyes.
The skinny row houses surrounding his own came in a variety of cheerful colors. If he squinted, avoided his periphery, he could make in his mind some genre of paradise: just he, his wife, the rainbow of houses, kids—maybe a dog and picket fence, too, he thought. Yet if he widened his gaze and squinted through his home’s topmost visible window, he could, from his tiny yard, see the blue living—no, existing—rent-free in his study. Bubbling, occasionally steaming, it crowned his house. An oblivious Nadine ate second-breakfast one story below: one yellowish Hawaiian roll (a black-market import from the recently independent archipelago) topped with a shining smear of margarine.
Patrick turned from his home and walked toward the gates, fishing for his identification. A new resident monitored the gates: Angie, barely eighteen, with blonde highlights fading from their curly brown hair.
“Pat, right?”
“It’s kinda more Patrick now.” He stopped himself before he could apologize.
Angie nodded, biting the nail on their forefinger.
“So I’m supposed to ask you… where you’re going and if you’re bringing anything dangerous and if you could tell me if that ‘anything' is your, uh, slime pool thing. Also, it’s still Angie. For me.”
Slime pool thing. Word travelled fast. Patrick grimaced. “Picking up my son. Two guns for protection. Nothing blue. And I’ll be bringing back Lee—the son—and leftovers, maybe groceries.” No mention of lunch.
“When?”
Patrick squeezed his eyes shut, opened them. “Are you old enough to be doing any of this, Angie?”
“Filling a need,” Angie said. “Sorta like you, I think.” Patrick scowled at them as he walked through the now-unlocked gates.
*
The Desert Strip was long-deserted. It had been made so not by neither choice nor coercion, but simple brute force. Residents lived in dense, chaotic squalor, sand-strewn wind piercing every orifice, fumes clouding their uncovered eyes and ears. Clothes of any color gradually faded, bleached by filth and sand and sun. Buildings towered, crouched, felt as though they closed further on pedestrians with every passing moment.
Patrick, head down, moved quickly, thankful he had chosen not to shave his thin fuzzy attempt at a mustache—if his features betrayed him, on top of his tender, cloistered appearance, he would have to use the guns he promised himself he would never touch. Walk, walk, walk, he thought. Head downturned, he was bearded by shadow, raising his head only to nod to the fruit seller whose salvaged wares he’d purchase on return.
Lee’s Center was located at the far end of the Desert Strip, surrounded by armed guards, and adorned with tinted windows. It was specifically designed for children like him, whose bodies sent pens across specialists’ clipboards. He had never seen one up close, but imagined them faceless, mere flapping coats with gloating hands attached.
At the Center’s entrance, a woman at least six inches taller than Patrick greeted him at the door. She smiled down at him as if sucking on an orange slice.
“That time again,” she said. “M—Mister Edwards.” A dyed-blonde, her nametag read “Regina.”
“Ms…um, Regina, I’m here to collect my child for the weekend. Lee Edwards, twelve years old. Born September seventeenth, 20—”
“And his student number?” Regina interrupted. Before he could answer, she gestured Patrick inside the building and toward her closet-sized office.
“Is there another Lee Edwards here?” Patrick asked. The office was bare but for a long, narrow desk and two unoccupied chairs.
“No. If there were, we would also ask for his-or-her student number,” she said, crossing her arms.
Patrick peered through her office door’s inside window, watching children file into the hall in parallel, sex-segregated lines.
“The number, Patrick?” Regina said his name as if it were a curse.
When he gave the number, Regina made a great show of searching her paper records. She ignored the one piece of tech in the room, a dusty, translucent modem whose still-glowing power button belied its age.
“Come with me,” Regina said.
She called Lee by his number over the institutional intercom. He arrived expressionless, holding a backpack by its top strap, with Center-buzzed hair a moment from baldness. Only twelve, Lee had reached puberty early. His pink, pockmarked face reached eye-level with Patrick’s.
Regina spoke as if she did not see Lee. “As I remind all parents at this stage, the signing-over takes place twice per year. Anticipate communication from NADA in the coming months.” Patrick felt Lee, now leaning gently beside him, stiffen. He stiffened in kind.
“I'm leaving now,” said Patrick, forcing his voice as low as it could go. He reached for Lee’s backpack and slung it over one shoulder, taking Lee’s hand.
“Expect communication…Mr. Edwards. Sir.” He heard her lips curl from behind him. He curled his fingernails inward, stopping only when he remembered it was his son’s palm he held.
*
“They've been preparing us,” Lee said, several minutes into their walk home. The market had grown louder; Patrick dodged several shoppers to retrieve his fruits.
“Dad, they’ve been preparing us,” Lee said more loudly. Patrick silently dropped several coins in the fruit seller’s hand. Finally, he turned to Lee.
“Preparing you.”
“For the…” Lee looked down, paused mid-stride. He kicked a rock with his foot. Patrick gritted his teeth, pulling Lee gently to the next booth, grabbing a loaf of preserved bread, a vacuum-sealed jar of peanut butter mixed with synthberry jam, a mixture of roughly one-third strawberry, one-third-blueberry, one-sixth cranberry, and one-sixth unknown naturalberry flavors.
“For the—for when I go away for good,” Lee said. “And I hate that bread.”
“You're not going away. Eat the spread and fruit alone, then.”
Lee gestured toward his right arm, roughly half the length and width of the left. His right sleeve was tied with a piece of twine at the small jut of an elbow where the arm ended.
“As long as I’m…as I’m like this, they’re gonna take me.” As they neared the end of the long market road, Patrick purchased two bottles of potable water.
“And once they see I’m going to fix it, they’ll have to let you stay.”
Patrick and Lee stood at the foot of the long, hilly road into their neighborhood. Its iron gates shone against the sun. They walked until burnt-brown grass gave way to green, continued walking until they found an unclaimed tree. Sitting beneath its skinny shade, Patrick prepared their meal, taking two utensil bundles from his pockets.
Lee plunged a plastic spoon into the peanut butter and jam jar. He reached into the bag of fruits, extracted a pear, and placed it on his thigh. He topped the unbitten thing with spread before biting. Dregs rolled down his chin and onto his shirt.
Patrick opened the bread loaf but got no further. He squinted further up the hill, swearing that, in the distance, he could see the blue, hear its call, feel its peaking praying prying aura, so thick he could spread it with his knife. There, in my house, my salvation. He shivered. When he finally turned back to Lee, partway through his second pear, he saw blue like an aura around his head. Patrick finally tore into the heel of the loaf with his teeth, letting spit-covered crumbs fall into his lap. This boy—this funny, jam-covered, profoundly good boy—to be disappeared in a few short months. This boy a thing to be hidden.
From birth, Lee had borne the stigmata of conspicuous absence, inherited from Patrick and Nadine like some archaic curse. Nearly two decades prior, in a then-progressive move to protect cross-sexers (CS) from the threat of domestic terrorism, the president (a member of the Centrist Party, whose policies “satisfied the sane and angered extremists on both sides”) had proposed a compromise between the American right-wing and the CS community. The former would, naturally, be permitted their First Amendment right to assemble and speak freely as they wished. They could conduct physical assaults (Second Amendment) if the offending weapons were deployed from their Free-Expression Zones, which lined the base of the hills upon which segregated CS towns, known as Exclusion Zones, were built. As for the CS, Patrick and Nadine included, legal sex-change guaranteed admission to a Zone, so long as they did not stray beyond its gates. Within these walls, they found each other.
Early in Patrick and Nadine’s courtship, it became legal for heterosexually-married CS in good social standing to biologically reproduce. Such reproduction, aided by fertility drugs of dubious origin, was lauded as the pride of a technologically-advanced nation-state. At nineteen and twenty, respectively, Patrick and Nadine received their marriage license, marked by two small symbols: one to signify theirs as a CS relationship, and the other signifying their approval to reproduce.
Nadine was not the first mother to give birth successfully after a uterine transplant and vaginal reconstruction. Still, when Patrick, after hours pacing the length of Nadine’s hospital bed as she sweated and grumbled, watched a head emerge from her vagina, he felt a keen sense of glory. Glory to be living in an age in which his childhood nightmare, Nadine’s childhood dream, could be fulfilled. How glorious that Nadine’s womb was a material reality; how glorious afore-troublesome bodies could produce new life from nothing, even amid these difficult times.
The glory did not end upon their child’s first cry. It did not end the first, second, or sixtieth time the baby shat on one or both of them. It didn’t even end when Lee, hardly five, called himself a boy, and Nadine wept of every feeling, infuriated at her relief that her child did not take after his mother.
Years of happiness and heartbreak passed. But as little Lee grew, he also shrank, and Patrick saw with horror what the fertility drugs had done: an entire generation of children was born destined to be cri–– no, Patrick shook that damn despicable, thingifying word from his head. This was the word the state used when all the CS parents asked where are their bodies going? Limbs shrunk as if deflating. Some appendages fell off entirely. Most bafflingly, the process was not physically painful—in fact, it was senseless. A child might return home from a day at the park with eight fingers and nine toes, unsure of how they ended up that way.
The “wasting disease” was initially blamed on CS bodies. Soon after, research emerged tracing the wasting disease to the fertility drugs, whose side effects had long gone unreported.
To monitor the situation, the state established Centers for Wasted Adolescents, all deemed undue burdens to their “medically-compromised" CS parents. It was predicted that all of the wasters’ limbs would crumble by middle age, requiring them become full-time patients, wards of the state. The transition from child to ward began at ten. At eighteen, each child would become property of NADA, the National Association of Disabled Adults. Former CS parents would thus be childless once more. In the meantime, the cri—no, Patrick thought, not the cruel word—as the disabled children aged, stayed for ever-lengthening periods at the Center to prepare for eventual parental nullification. This was the social contract between the CS and the government. Freedom.
When Lee was young, Patrick had, perhaps stupidly, committed to curing the disease, to saving the children from patienthood. Every day he tended the blue like a second son. Both spoke in the language of hope.
As the sunset-sky ripened, Patrick and Lee packed up their makeshift picnic. They walked, Lee holding his sugar-bloated stomach, toward the Zone’s gates. Several church-clothed and seemingly-unarmed families lined the surrounding Free-Expression Zones. Upon seeing Patrick and Lee, several went into venomous ecstasies, abomination and curse dropping from their lips like flakes of dead skin. Lee and Patrick passed, studiously impassive.
*
The house appeared empty when they arrived home, Nadine no doubt still parked in her desk chair. She worked full-time from home, monitoring comments for social media giant FriendsConnect. These comments, she maintained, vindicated her decision never to leave the Zone’s gates. Patrick called her name into the quiet house as he extracted the guns from his person and placed them inside a locked chest.
“I'm gonna go watch my show,” Lee said, kicking off his shoes before jogging, apparently recovered from his bloated stomach, up the stairs. Patrick allowed his son several moments’ distance. When he heard the sound of a bedroom door closing, followed by the indulgent chattering of serialized space colonists, Patrick returned to the blue.
He stirred twice before beginning the day’s skinless tests. He removed a potted succulent and a small paper notebook from a nearby shelf. He placed the succulent, whose arms grew in strange and unpredictable angles, some long enough to hang to the floor below and others too short to see amid their counterparts, on a high table beside the fluid. He grabbed an arm of middling-length and dipped it gently into the whirling substance. Both sizzled upon meeting, Patrick wrote on a newly-named-and-dated page.
After thirty seconds, he lifted the arm from the blue, noting its changed color (now not green, but teal, with an unmistakably golden sheen) and increased length. Once eight inches, the arm was now nearly ten. Hand shaking, Patrick wrote, 20% increase—success? Hastily turning full stop into question mark. He jotted the names of recent additives before closing the notebook and dropping to his knees. He prayed to “please,” his imaginary god, chanting its name until his kneecaps ached.
Once, Nadine had found him like this, kneeling and pleasing. She had looked at him with excruciating pity, pulling half a Hershey’s from her pocket. Patrick had loudly refused this precious contraband, batting the waxy mess of a bar to the floor and grinding it beneath his heel. He left the Zone that night for a walk he hoped to be suicide. At daybreak, he returned disappointed. Nadine, clad only in her bathrobe, said, “go to bed,” before turning to her office, slamming the door behind her.
He had gone to bed, but not before praying Please, he implored, let the boy be safe. Please, don’t take him before he’s had a chance. Please, don’t let her find me like this. Please, let her love me without grotesque pity. Please —Please—Please don’t let us be our own ruin.
Patrick stood in the now-dark room. He numbered and dated the test in his notebook before realizing he had already done so.
*
Lee continued to grow relentlessly. He seemed to have shot up inches in mere days, though these days were in fact were months, passing with frightening celerity. A tiny, unfortunate mustache sprouted on Lee’s upper-lip. Patrick and Nadine quietly discussed which of them should suggest he shave it.
“He’ll think I’m biased,” Nadine said, picking at her nails. Now violet, they were already chipping. “He’ll think I’m biased, but really, it just looks…pubescent. By which, of course, I mean embarrassing.” She giggled, as did Patrick.
“I’ll talk to him sometime. Show him the razor. He’s a smart kid.” They shared another smile, this time strained. It was here that the two entered into their now-nightly game of charades: speaking nothings to each other, keeping their son underneath: Lee, and that vat of blue, which was in some ways also Lee, or the promise of a future with Lee in it.
As his thirteenth birthday neared, Lee grew increasingly reticent as to his activities the Center. Patrick struggled not to pry, instead observing his son’s frequent glances toward the mirror, the way he’d shift to see and then conceal his shrinking side. Patrick and Nadine had decided early on to assure their son that he was whole, that no missing limb or appendage correlated to a loss of selfhood. But what else was there to think when one’s body guaranteed their alienation, removal from the only family they had ever known? What else, when a three-limbed body was always wasted, identifiable only by lack?
Late at night, amid the blue-lit vines, Patrick made tricks with language. What if my son was not missing an arm, but everybody else had an extra? He knew, of course, that flesh often grew worlds apart from the mind’s desires. He had spent half his life beneath his body’s yoke. Yet, his struggles felt arbitrary, unimportant, and at any rate completely distinct from the forces demanding his son be stolen. His blue salvation, too, felt wrongheaded in the face the state itself had created.
*
When months grew few enough to become weeks, Lee began to bring home voluntary renunciation papers on his weekend visits home. Patrick prepared a final growing salve to test on his skin. He meticulously recorded every activity, including near-constant visits with the blue: Wake 7a. Check B. Jog 30min, push-ups x50. Egg-sub + fauxmato on toast w/ 1cup oj 1cup imit. coffee. Check B. Shower 10min warm water+shampoo+soap. Check B.
One day he left his office to find Nadine, smiling sadly, in the hall. “He shaved. Like you showed him. Hair on the sink…” She took a breath. Words rushed. “My son. My child. My only child. Becoming a man. I hardly know him. He was inside me nine months and his hair is in my sink and soon he’ll be—” She didn’t say gone. She didn’t say forever. But Patrick felt the words nestle deep inside his belly, felt that uncanny sense that he was falling somewhere dark and cold and could not get out. Nadine bowed her head to his shoulder. Patrick pressed his head to Nadine’s heart until her shirt was soaked.
*
The two-week mark was like a shot of adrenaline straight into Patrick’s heart. He woke up early the morning of Two Weeks ’Til (as read the glowing reminder on his phone) already haunted. At dawn, he launched himself out of bed and into his office and told himself, today. Today, his son would come home again, this time bearing the final documents sealing renunciation of custody. The two-week goodbye period would begin. After fourteen days, he’d drop Lee off for good, receiving in return a paper certificate to place above his son’s now-empty bed.
This morning, the Dew-colored blue foamed lightly, emitting gentle smoke. Patrick pointed his index finger directly into the stream and felt neither pain nor heat. Slowly, he traced his finger downward until he felt its warmth. He tried to recall the taste of Blue Raspberry, but could only imagine the vague stickiness of liquid on his chin and hands, the way it dripped onto his summer dress.
Back in their bedroom, he knew, Nadine still slept, snoring as heavily as the moment he’d risen. The violent sunrise to which he’d woken had since turned daylight-blue. Patrick saw echoes of his substance in the window, whose slantwise mirror reflected his office back to him beneath the scene outside. He pressed his fingers to the Plexiglas, pretending—just for a moment—that he was nothing but a character in somebody’s feature film. A man in an unfortunate story about a future he, as a child, could never have imagined. As a teenager, he had pretended to live in a cautionary tale about unremarkable bodies, which quickly turned to weapons in improper hands. He recalled believing that Nature herself had played a cruel trick on him, mixing up mid-bequeathment. There was nothing wrong with him. Yet, he was wrong, so wrong, so brimming with a rotten wrongness that it nearly killed him.
Now he knew it was not Nature, nor any anthropomorphized Force, that wrote the story of himself. If anything, it was the documents that did it: his birth, his sex, his wife, his son, and the subsequent voluntary sterilization procedure, required in order to secure a home in the CS town, mere days after Lee was born, all intentional and codified. Soon, Lee’s absence would also be a document. Lee himself would turn to paper. The body he lived in would become a student number. “Lee,” as such, would vanish in the filing of papers.
Patrick, in a long and frozen moment, stared at the vat. Shaking, he placed a single drop of Dew upon a small arm of the succulent. He placed another on his own left arm.
Nothing.
Heart fluttering, he took a larger scoop from the vat and spread it gently first over the plant’s arm and then his own. At first, nothing still. Then the foaming began, and Patrick watched his arm pulsate and then grow, bubbling like a science fair. He heard himself shouting as he began to shake the bubbles from himself. Foam spilled to the floor, hitting his pants and to his bare feet. His toes began to bulge and foam as well.
Patrick felt no pain at first. The blue only tingled, but its effects were outrageous: his arm had by now tripled in size, hissing and straining like an overblown balloon against his now-tiny elbow and wrist. His toes crowded like teeth, each tip a near-sensuous red. His muscles now radiated pain. Below him, the blue foam had begun to sink into the floor, eroding it board by board. He knew the room itself would soon collapse, and sprinted to the bedroom, calling for Nadine.
From the living room, she replied, “Downstairs!”
“Leave the house!” Patrick shouted. He descended the stairs just as the second floor of his home crumbled, hearing the long-armed plant’s pot smash in his wake. His left arm was now free of foam, seething sausage-pink in color, leaking fluid as his skin stretched and tore. From the foot of the stairs he made for the front rooms and then the door, leaving behind him a trail of blood. He swung the door open just as it began to crumble from its frame, and saw Nadine, barefoot and bug-eyed, watching from the neighbors’ yard. Behind him, the house gagged, heaved, vomited blue sludge. Neon rivulets bolted across the lawn.
As Patrick gained distance from the rubble, he noticed the open windows of the nearby houses. Small groups of children, newly home from the Center for the weekend, gazed at him in awe and anger. Every blue-touched grass-blade rose as if by magic, bulging as his arm and crowding as his toes, this time into a forest of teal.
Patrick watched the little blue vessels run from his lawn into the roads, pooling fitfully in the concrete’s indentations. Nothing grew here. Puddles stilled. His arm, still aching but now no longer growing, flapped beside him. Children continued to stream from nearby houses and into the blue-laden street. Meanwhile, at the Center, Lee remained. Alone.
Behind his thoughts, Patrick heard Nadine’s voice. “No, don’t — stop — !” He followed first her pointed finger and then her sprinting body toward a child, no older than eleven, several yards from where he stood. The child, who hunched barefoot and shirtless on the pavement, had one arm and a bowl-cut. They reached to the blue puddle at their feet.
The child seemed oblivious to Patrick’s shouts and Nadine’s nearing footfalls. Their parents were nowhere in sight. They collected a small amount of the blue solution on their fingertips and slowly, gracefully, applied it to the slim stump on their opposite side. Once more, the blue buzzed.
Patrick could not but lose himself in it.
Sarah Cavar (they/them) is a PhD student, writer, and critically Mad transgender-about-town, and serves as Managing Editor at Stone of Madness Press. They wrote A Hole Walked In (Sword & Kettle Press, 2021), The Dream Journals (giallo lit, 2021), and Out of Mind & Into Body (Ethel Press, forthcoming 2022), among other things. Find Cavar at www.cavar.club and @cavarsarah on Twitter.