Christina Dalcher - VOX

The boys exchange worried looks, the kind of worry that comes from knowing what occurs if the counter surpasses those three digits. One, zero, zero. This is when I say my last Monday word. To my daughter. The whispered “Goodnight” has barely escaped when Patrick’s eyes meet mine, pleading.

I scoop her up and carry her off to bed. She’s heavier now, almost too much girl to be hoisted up, and I need both arms.

Sonia smiles at me when I tuck her under the sheets. As usual, there’s no bedtime story, no exploring Dora, no Pooh and Piglet, no Peter Rabbit and his misadventures in Mr. McGregor’s lettuce patch. It’s frightening what she’s grown to accept as normal.

I hum her to sleep with a song about mockingbirds and billy goats, the verses still and quiet pictures in my mind’s eye.

Patrick watches from the door. His shoulders, once broad and strong, slump in a downward-facing V; his forehead is creased in matching lines. Everything about him seems to be pointing down.

TWO

In my bedroom, as on all other nights, I wrap myself in a quilt of invisible words, pretending to read, allowing my eyes to dance over imagined pages of Shakespeare. If I’m feeling fancy, my preferred text might be Dante in his original, static Italian. So little of Dante’s language has changed through the centuries, but tonight I find myself slogging through a forgotten lexicon. I wonder how the Italian women might fare with the new ways if our domestic efforts ever go international.

Perhaps they’ll talk more with their hands.

But the chances of our sickness moving overseas are slim. Before television became a federalized monopoly, before the counters went on our wrists, I saw newscasts. Al Jazeera, the BBC, Italy’s three RAI networks, and others used to occasionally broadcast talk shows. Patrick, Steven, and I watched them after the kids were in bed.

“Do we have to?” Steven groaned. He was slouched in his usual chair, one hand in a bowl of popcorn, the other texting on his phone.

I turned up the volume. “No. We don’t have to. But we can.” Who knew how much longer that would be true? Patrick was already talking about the cable privileges, how they were hanging on a frayed thread. “Not everyone gets this, Steven.” What I didn’t say was, Enjoy it while you can .

Except there wasn’t much to enjoy.

Every single show was the same. One after another, they laughed at us. Al Jazeera called us “the New Extremism.” I might have smiled if I hadn’t seen the truth in it. Britain’s political pundits shook their heads as if to say, Oh, those daffy Yanks. What are they doing now? The Italian experts, introduced by underdressed and overly made-up sexpots, shouted and pointed and laughed.

They laughed at us. They told us we needed to relax before we ended up wearing kerchiefs and long, shapeless skirts. On one of the Italian channels, a bawdy skit showed two men dressed as Puritans engaging in sodomy. Was this really how they saw the United States?

I don’t know. I haven’t been back since before Sonia was born, and there’s no chance of going now.

Our passports went before our words did.

I should clarify: some of our passports went.

I found this out through the most mundane of circumstances. In December, I realized Steven’s and the twins’ passports had expired, and I went online to download three renewal applications. Sonia, who’d never had any documentation other than her birth certificate and a booklet of vaccination records, needed a different form.

The boys’ renewals were easy, the same as Patrick’s and mine had always been. When I clicked the new-passport-application link, it took me to a page I hadn’t seen before, a single-line questionnaire: Is the applicant male or female?

I glanced over at Sonia, playing with a set of colored blocks on the carpet in my makeshift home office, and checked the box marked female.

“Red!” she yelped, looking up at the screen.

“Yes, honey,” I said. “Red. Very good. Or?”

“Scarlet!”

“Even better.”

Without prompting, she went on. “Crimson! Cherry!”

“You got it, baby. Keep up the good work,” I said, patting her and tossing another set of blocks onto the carpet. “Try the blue ones now.”

Back at my computer, I realized Sonia was right the first time. The screen was just red. Red as fucking blood.

Please contact us at the number below. Alternatively, you can send us an e-mail at applications.state.gov. Thank you!

I tried the number a dozen times before resorting to e-mail, and then I waited a dozen days before receiving a response. Or a sort of response. A week and a half later, the message in my in-box instructed me to visit my local passport application center.

“Help you, ma’am?” the clerk said when I showed up with Sonia’s birth certificate.

“You can if you do passport applications.” I shoved the paperwork through the slot in the plexiglass screen.

The clerk, who looked all of nineteen, snatched it up and told me to wait. “Oh,” he said, scurrying back to the window, “I’ll need your passport for a minute. Just to make a copy.”

Sonia’s passport would take a few weeks, I was told. What I was not told was that my passport had been invalidated.

I found that out much later. And Sonia never got her passport.

At the beginning, a few people managed to get out. Some crossed the border into Canada; others left on boats for Cuba, Mexico, the islands. It didn’t take long for the authorities to set up checkpoints, and the wall separating Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas from Mexico itself had already been built, so the egress stopped fairly quickly.

“We can’t have our citizens, our families, our mothers and fathers, fleeing,” the president said in one of his early addresses.

I still think we could have made it if it had been only Patrick and me. But with four kids, one who didn’t know enough not to bounce in her car seat and chirp “Canada!” to the border guards—no way.

So I’m not feeling fancy tonight, not after thinking about how easily they kept us prisoners in our own country, not after Patrick took me in his arms and told me to try not to dwell on what used to be.

Used to.

Here’s what used to be: We used to stay up late talking. We used to linger in bed on weekend mornings, putting off chores and reading the Sunday paper. We used to have cocktail parties and dinner parties and summer barbecues when the weather turned. We used to play games—first, spades and bridge; later, when the boys were old enough to tell a six from a five, war and go fish.

As for me, on my own, I used to have girlfriends. “Hen parties,” Patrick called my nights out with the girls, but I know he didn’t mean it unkindly. It was just one of those things guys said. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

We used to have book clubs and coffee chats; we debated politics in wine bars, later in basements—our version of reading Lolita in Tehran. Patrick never seemed to mind my weekly escapes, although he’d joke about us sometimes, before there wasn’t anything left to joke about. We were, in his words, the voices that couldn’t be hushed.

Well. So much for the infallibility of Patrick.

THREE

When it started, before any of us could see what the future held, there was one woman in particular, one of the louder sorts. Her name was Jackie Juarez.

I don’t want to think of Jackie, but all of a sudden, it’s a year and a half ago, not long after the inauguration, and I’m sitting in the den with the kids, hushing their laughter so Sonia doesn’t wake up.

The woman on the television is hysterical, Steven points out when he returns to the den with three bowls of ice cream.