Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

She had fallen for him before she’d even hired him to work on her yard once a week. It was textbook head-over-heels, biochemical attraction. Infatuation that kept her wired at night as she tried to fall asleep, and barged into her mind first thing upon waking. Henry eclipsed her brain; he made her stupid, craven, in a permanent state of yearning. She cringed at the cliché of it: she was a lonely secretary (Yale educated!) and he was her gardener .

Six months later, he’d brought her here, to this blank space in the desert.

Why didn’t she hate him? For a time, she had. For a time, her hatred for him had burned white-hot. But she also understood. He was just a man, doing his job. Carrying out his assignments to investigate any private citizen this employer deemed a potential “threat” to the U.S. government. He’d been just a boy when they recruited him, so naive and vulnerable, so desperate to escape his barren, violent life on the high plains of Montana.

He’d told her all about his life.

In a way, she loved him. The romantic fixation had long subsided, replaced by something deeper. She’d forgiven him. She couldn’t help herself.

For a time, Irene had considered cooperating. Considered walking into the stucco administrative building near the Great Wall, which ran the perimeter of the whole area, and making an appointment to meet with Borlav or Winger, or any of the other thick-necked oafs on the Inner Panel, the group in charge of the Colony. She imagined sitting across a table from one of them and saying finally, Okay. Yes. I’ll cooperate. Just tell me what I need to do.

But what sort of life would she have if she did?

It would be like life on a stage, scripted and directed by the Inner Panel. Her choices would be dictated by them. Her mouth would belong to them. They would be watching and listening, verifying she uttered not a word pertaining to her own history. They would repackage the story of her pregnancy and disappearance with elaborate, specific details—her “revision.” An entire division of the Colony staff was devoted to inventing this content. Irene would be forced to rehearse her revision until she knew it so well that she almost believed it herself. Until she could deliver it seamlessly to the people who had once loved her, who had been bewildered and devastated when she disappeared.

Yes, if she mastered her revision, she would be free to leave the Colony. But what sort of freedom would it be? She’d still have to live by their rules. They would still be monitoring, listening, watching.

Worst of all, if she returned to the outside world, she would not be allowed to contact her daughter.

So what was the point?

She let her window to cooperate expire. After a time, the Inner Panel deemed her resident status “permanent.”

She’d gone permanent, a rare choice. At any given time, there might be as many as five hundred Imports in the Colony—there for any number of reasons, the vast majority unrelated to AG—but most of them eventually revised and departed. Whatever they’d done to earn a classification of “threatening” to the government, they were usually happy to undo it in order to earn back their freedom. Only Irene and a few other stubborn souls remained, month after month, year after year.

She didn’t regret her decision to be permanent. It seemed the best of her bad options, at least for now. At least until Henry Duarte returned to the Colony—and he always did—and she could speak to him about her other plan. He’d promised, when he’d brought her here, all those years ago, that he would help her. Somehow she believed him. Somehow she still considered him her friend—her only friend, really, unless you counted Johanna the nurse—even though Henry had deceived her before. But that had been his job, back when he cared about his job.

He cared less now. Irene could tell. But he still cared about her , a great deal. It was an unspoken truth, an energy she felt between them like an electric current, not exactly sexual but not devoid of sex, either.

It was that feeling that made her believe Henry would help her get what she wanted.

Irene continued to sit on the porch and rock as the oncoming night bruised over the setting sun. She’d observed this sky for so many nights that she could now recognize the altered configurations of stars each evening, the shifting phases of the moon. She thought frequently of an Elizabeth Bishop poem she’d studied at Yale: He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky / proving the sky quite useless for protection.

Yes, it was quite useless.

She reached for her juice on the small table beside her chair, and the simple extension of her body was difficult. The stiffness of age was a particular cruelty. She didn’t mind the wrinkles so much, or the inches lost in height, or the color of her hair—in fact, she’d come to love its downy white—but not being able to move as she once had was terrible. Once she had lived so fully in her body, taken such pleasure in its abilities, in how it would respond when she pushed it. Of course, she’d also been harshly critical of it, but she hadn’t known any better.

Now she knew better.

She went to her bedroom, changed into her nightgown, brushed her teeth at the sink. Johanna always offered to help with these tasks, but Irene refused. They took her a long time to complete, yes, but what was the rush? There was an intimacy in revealing her body to herself, a renewed fascination every time. The loose and creased flesh, the hump at the top of her shoulders, her downward breasts that lay almost flat against her chest. Her body had always been so generous, so cooperative, that she felt she deserved to witness what she’d done to it. This sagging, dying husk.

No one wanted to acknowledge the nudity of the elderly. Anyone would shield their eyes from the sight of her.

Except that Irene was not elderly.

She was just unlucky.

Of the forty-eight documented cases of accelerated gestation, only three of the mothers—one in sixteen, insofar as Henry knew (and Henry, as a senior agent at the Agency, which ran the Colony, knew a great deal)—had ended up this way. As for the children, well, it was hard to know. They had not been rigorously tracked, despite the Agency’s mandate that all obstetricians report the delivery of an AG baby.

Perhaps her daughter was okay. As healthy and normal as she’d seemed at two weeks.

Perhaps she was not.

She’d probably never know. She’d trained her mind to veer away from the topic each time it began an approach.

But according to Henry, most of the other mothers—Irene’s peers—still looked their age.

Which, in Irene’s case, was forty-two.

VivversOC: anyone there?

Xavey: YRU awake?

VivversOC: YRU?

Xavey: its not thaaat late in Denver. Ur in Boston now right? At that girlz school?

VivversOC: women’s college, yeah can’t sleep. do u ever wonder why AG isn’t more of a thing?

Xavey: a thing??

VivversOC: like why it’s not more famous, more research etc?

Xavey: there was already a lot, it didn’t go anywhere

VivversOC: can I ask you a personal question?

Xavey: fire away

VivversOC: how did ur mom die?

Xavey: car axydent. I wasn’t even 1y/o

Xavey: hello???

VivversOC: shit I’m sorry I sort of froze, I’m sorry to bring up yr mom