Marko Kloos: Terms of Enlistment

“Well, well,” he says. “Come to say your good-byes, have you?”

“Mom sent me,” I say.

“Of course she did.”

We look at each other for a few heartbeats, and he turns around and walks back into the apartment.

“Well, come in, come in.”

I step into the hallway of his apartment, and close the door behind me. Dad walks over to the living room, where he drops onto the couch with a sigh. There’s an enormous collection of medical supplies on the table in front of him. He catches my glance and shrugs.

“Pointless, all of it. The hack at the clinic says I’ll be worm food in six months.”

I want to give him a snide reply, but somehow I can’t bring myself to do it. The room smells like sickness, and my father looks miserable. The cancer is eating him up from the inside, and he’ll die in this place, where the stairwells smell like piss. There’s nothing I can say or do that will make him feel worse than he does already, nothing that will make me feel any better.

When I was fourteen, I would have given anything for a chance to kill my Dad, take revenge for all the beatings and humiliations. Now he’s in front of me, weak enough that I wouldn’t even need the gun tucked into my waistband, and I have no hate left for him.

“I thought your mother was lying to me,” he says. “I didn’t think you’d pass. You and your books.”

“Yeah, maybe that had something to do with it,” I say. “They do need people with brains, too.”

“You’ll be pushing buttons somewhere. No way they’ll send you out to kill other people. You don’t have it in you.”

Why, because I never fought back when you used me as a punching bag?

His remark is the perfect excuse to hurl something back at him, but I realize that he’s trying to provoke me, and I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.

“We’ll see about that,” I say, and he flashes a faint smile. I look so much like him that it hurts. If I end up washing out, I’ll be back here in the PRC, and then I’ll end my life just like this someday, alone and afraid, confined to a few dozen square yards in the middle of a welfare city. PRC housing doesn’t stand empty for long when someone dies. They throw out your stuff, hose the place out with a chemical cleaner, reset the access code for the door, and hand the apartment over to a new welfare tenant the very same day.

“When are you shipping out?”

“Tomorrow evening,” I say. “I report to the processing station at eight.”

“Keep your nose clean. If you get arrested, they’ll fill your slot with someone on the waiting list.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I say. “When in doubt, I’ll just think of what you would do, and then do the opposite.”

Dad just rasps a chuckle. When we were still living under one roof, that kind of belligerence would have gotten me a beating, but the cancer has sapped the passion out of him.

“You’ve turned into a little shithead,” he says. “All full of yourself. I was just like that when I was your age, you know.”

“I’m nothing like you, Dad. Nothing like you.”

He watches, amused, as I turn to walk out of his apartment.

At the door, I turn around.

“Just go,” he says as I open my mouth to say good-bye. “I’ll see you again after you wash out.”

I look back at him, the man who contributed half of my genetic code. I tell myself that this is going to be the last time I see him—that I should say something that will make me feel like I have closure. Instead, I just turn around and walk away.

I step into the dingy hallway outside, and walk to the top of the staircase at the end. As I reach the stairs, I hear the door of my father’s apartment closing softly.

On the way home, I stop at the food station to pick up my weekly meals. They come in sealed, disposable trays, fourteen to a box. Every welfare recipient gets a box per week, twenty-eight thousand calories of Basic Nutritional Allowance.

The stuff in the BNA rations is made of processed protein, enhanced with nutrients and vitamins, and artificially flavored to make it palatable. They say it’s deliberately designed to taste merely tolerable because it discourages excessive consumption, but I think that no scientific process can make BNA rations a culinary delight. In the end, it still tastes like they used ground-up feet and assholes for the raw protein, which is probably not too far from the truth. One of my friends in school claimed that BNA rations are partially made of reconstituted human shit from the public water treatment plants, which is probably not too far from the truth, either. Public drinking water is recycled piss anyway, so it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to complete the circle.

The rain is still coming down steadily. At the tenement high rise next to ours, some guys are hanging out under the overhang by the entrance. They notice the box under my arm as I trot by, but none of them must like the idea of getting soaked to the bone for a few trays of badly flavored soy, because they all stay put.

As I walk up the stairs to the front door of our apartment building, I remember the gun on my hip.

There’s one more thing left to do this evening.

“How much ammo do you have for this thing?”

“Eight factory rounds, and twenty-seven home-rolled,” I say.

Eddie opens the cylinder and then spins it, something he has done three times already during our negotiation. It’s almost painful to see my gun in the hands of someone else. I know that I’ll never hold it again if the deal goes through.

“You’re tossing that in, of course,” he says.

“Of course. What am I going to do with the bullets without the gun?”

“Thirty-eight Specials are common on the street,” Eddie says. “You could sell the ammo to someone else.”

“I’m joining the service tomorrow. No time to go shopping around. Call it a package deal.”

“A package deal,” Eddie repeats. “Okay.”

He looks the gun over again, and nods to himself.

“Two commissary vouchers, and two ounces of Canada Dry. Last you for a week or more if you don’t run around and share.”

I shake my head.

“No go on the dope. If I test positive, they’ll kick me out. Four commissary vouchers.”

Eddie pinches his chin with thumb and forefinger in thought. I know he made up his mind on my offer the second it was on the table, but I let him go through the ritual anyway.

“Three vouchers, ten pills, regular meds, your pick of house stock.”

I pretend to think about it.

“Three vouchers, fifteen pills,” I say.

“Deal.”

Eddie holds out his hand. We shake on the transaction, and my revolver disappears underneath one of the many layers of Eddie’s clothing. We’re in a dirty alley between two residence towers. Eddie buys and sells almost anything of value—guns, drugs, vouchers for the food stores outside of the PRC, and fake ID cards that sometimes hold up to inspection.

“What kind of pills do you have?”

“Let’s see,” he says. “Pain killers, antibiotics, blood pressure stuff, uppers, a few downers.”

“How good are the pain killers?”

“Headaches and stuff, not ‘getting shot’ kind of pain.”

“Good enough,” I say. “Let me have those.”

Eddie reaches into his coat, gets out a tube of pills, and counts fifteen into my hand.

“These better be real,” I say as I tuck the pain meds into my pocket.

“Of course they are,” Eddie replies, mild offense in his voice. “I have a reputation, you know. People end up with fakes, they’ll never buy from me again.”

He reaches into one of his pockets again, and presents three commissary vouchers with a flourish, like a winning hand of cards.