Marko Kloos: Terms of Enlistment

“Appreciate the business,” he says as I take the vouchers.

“I’ll see you around, Eddie,” I say, and know without a doubt that I won’t.

Mom looks up from her Network show when I walk back into the apartment.

“How was it?”

“Pointless,” I say.

I walk over to the living room table and drop the handful of pills onto it. Mom eyes the meds, and raises an eyebrow.

“Nothing illegal,” I say. “Just some pain meds. I figured you could use ‘em, with your toothaches.”

She leans forward and scoops up the pills.

“Where did you get those, Andrew?”

“I traded some stuff.”

I pull the commissary vouchers out of my pocket and place them on the table in front of Mom. She leans forward to inspect them, and claps her hands together in front of her mouth.

“Andrew ! How did you get those?”

“I traded some stuff, Mom,” I repeat.

She picks up the vouchers carefully, as if they are made of brittle paper. Each of those vouchers entitles the bearer to a hundred new dollars in goods at a food store outside of the PRC. The government issues vouchers every month, and they hand them out from the safety of a concrete booth near the Public Transit Station on a lottery basis.

“Use ‘em, or trade for something,” I say. “Just don’t let anyone cheat you out of those.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Mom says as she stacks up the vouchers and slips them into a pocket. “It’s been a year and a half since we got a voucher. I’m dying for some bread and cheese.”

I was fully prepared to feed my mother some nonsense about the stuff I traded for those vouchers, but she’s so excited that she doesn’t bother to dig any further.

“Good night,” I say, and walk over to the door of my room. Mom smiles at me, and turns her attention back to the plasma panel on the wall, where some inane Network show is running on low volume.

“Andrew?” she says as I am at the door. I turn around, and she smiles at me, the first one I’ve seen on her face in days.

“I’ll try and go over to the food store in the morning. Maybe we can have a decent lunch before you go.”

“That would be nice, Mom.”

I spend my final night in PRC Boston-7 reading the last fifty pages of Moby Dick. Tomorrow, I will have to leave the book reader behind. I’ve read the novel a dozen times or more, but I don’t want to leave it unfinished now, forever bookmarked at the spot where the Pequod slips beneath the waves.

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan…

“Don’t do it”, the woman says.

I am an obvious target for the protesters that have gathered in front of the military processing station. I’m carrying a ratty travel bag, and I’ve saved the military the cost of a haircut by shaving the hair on my head down to an eighth of an inch.

“Excuse me?” I ask.

The woman has a kind face and long hair that is starting to go gray in places. There’s a whole gaggle of people protesting out in front of the station, holding up signs and chanting anti-military slogans. They stay well away from the doors of the station, where two soldiers in battle armor stand guard and check induction letters. The soldiers carry sidearms and electric crowd control sticks, and while they’re not dignifying the protest with so much as a glance, none of the protesters ever come within twenty feet of the yellow line that separates the public sidewalk from the processing station.

“Don’t do it,” she repeats. “They don’t care about you. They just want a warm body. You’ll die out there.”

“Everyone dies,” I say. That particular piece of wisdom sounds pompous even to my own ears. I’m twenty-one, she looks to be past sixty, and she probably knows much more about the subject of life and death than I do.

“Not at your age,” the woman says. “They’re going to dangle that carrot in front of you, and all you’ll get out of it is a flag-draped coffin. Don’t do it. Nothing’s worth your life.”

“I signed up already.”

“You know that you can back out at any time, right? You could walk away right now, and they couldn’t do anything about it.”

Right then, I know that she’s never been within ten miles of a welfare tenement. Walk away, and go back to that place?

“I don’t want to, ma’am. I made my choice.”

She looks at me with sad eyes, and I feel just a little bit of shame when she smiles at me.

“Think about it,” she says. “Don’t throw your life away for a bank account.”

She reaches out and gently puts her hand on my shoulder.

A heartbeat later, the elderly lady is on the ground, and the two soldiers from the entrance are kneeling on top of her. I never even saw them move away from their posts. She yells out in surprise and pain. Her comrades stop their chanting to shout in protest, but the soldiers don’t even acknowledge their presence.

“Physically interfering with access to an in-processing station is a Class D felony,” one of the soldiers says as he pulls out a set of flexible cuffs. They pry the woman off the dirty asphalt and haul her to her feet. One of them leads her inside, while the other soldier takes up position by the entrance again. The soldier leading the woman roughly by the arm is probably twice her mass in his bulky battle armor, and she looks very fragile next to him. She looks over her shoulder to flash that sad smile at me again, and I look away.

“The building is made of concrete and steel,” the sergeant says. “It’s extremely solid. You don’t need to hold it up with your shoulder.”

The guy next to me moves away from the wall against which he had been leaning, and gives the sergeant a smirk. She has already moved on, as if there is no point in wasting further time on the exchange.

We’re standing in line in a hallway at the reception building. There’s a folding table set up at the end of the hallway, and someone else is scanning the ID cards of the new recruits. The queue moves slowly. When I finally reach the head of the line, most of the evening is gone. I got here an hour before the eight o’clock deadline for reporting in, and now it’s close to ten.

The sergeant behind the folding table holds out his hand for my ID card and the induction letter, and I hand them over.

“ Grayson, Andrew ,” he says to the soldier next to him, who searches through an old-fashioned printout and then makes a check mark next to my name.

The sergeant takes my ID and sticks it into the card reader on his desk. Then he pulls my ID card out of the reader and flips it into a bucket beside the table, where it joins a pile of other IDs. The printer on his computer terminal hums, and spits out an unspectacular-looking slip of paper, which he hands to me.

“That’s your assignment slip. Don’t lose it. Out that door, and find the gate listed on your slip. Report to the gate sergeant, and he’ll get you onto the right shuttle. Next .”

The shuttle to my Basic Training station is filled to the last seat. The cushions are worn, the belts of the harnesses are frayed, and the carpet on the center aisle is a loose collection of fibers that have long lost any semblance of coherence or pattern. It seems they use the oldest equipment they could find, as if they want to avoid spending a dollar more than necessary on the new recruits.

The shuttle’s engines send vibrations through the hull, and a few minutes later, we lift off into the dirty evening sky. Some of the new recruits strain their necks to see out of the scuffed windows, but I don’t bother. Even if you could make anything out, you’d only see precisely the kind of stuff everyone’s itching to leave: identical-looking high rises, all clumped together in a sprawling mass of concrete that bears some resemblance to an oversized gerbil maze, except that it smells five times worse and isn’t half as clean.