Noah Cicero - Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products.

A total sense of dread and anxiety came over me. I did not want to look at Edward Choffin. I did not want to hear him. I did not want to go near that man.

I walked into his office.

In the 1950s he would have had a bottle of scotch in the room. He would have poured me a drink and we would have lit up cigarettes. But this was 2011 and there was no scotch and no cigarettes. There was a fat guy in his fifties and a young guy who wanted to keep his job.

I must have looked horrible. I was sweating and felt about ready to cry.

Choffin looked at me and said, “Today you witnessed something unusual. You probably have questions about it. But you aren’t allowed to ask any questions about it, so I will answer your questions, but you aren’t allowed to ask any. I know what you are allowed to ask and not allowed to ask, so I will answer the questions you are allowed to ask, as long as you don’t ask any questions.

“The government provides two main things to society. It provides the control of violence and it provides laws. How laws are made and if they make sense are not our concern at NEOTAP. NEOTAP’s concern is the control of violence, the control of people who break laws. I don’t care if the law makes sense or doesn’t make sense, I don’t even care what the laws are. What we must control at NEOTAP are the humans who break the law. To control humans is not easy. It’s not an easy job we have at NEOTAP. To fulfill your duties, to control humans, you must believe not only in the law, but in NEOTAP. I’m starting to think that you don’t believe in NEOTAP, Michael.”

I didn’t want to lose my job, so I said, “I have not lost faith. I was trying to understand NEOTAP better. It is obvious to me that in the context of modern America NEOTAP is the best possible outlet for criminals to be reformed. I would not under any circumstance prescribe alternative avenues for criminals to be reformed.”

“Good, then we are agreed. The law is not written but authority.”

“Yes, I completely agree.”

I walked out of the office. As I walked down the hall, I realized that he never explained where Armando went.

Monica’s dad said I needed to come over and help him rake leaves. Monica said it was very important to her dad that a family raked leaves together. She said her father believed that since the trees made the whole family happy by providing fruit and shade, it was a family’s responsibility to pick up the leaves together.

I parked in front of her house and her dad was standing in the yard. He came over and shook my hand and said, “You must be Michael.”

I shook his hand. His grasp was firmer than mine.

He told me his name was Milton.

Monica told me that her dad had worked at the same factory for twenty-two years making plastic parts for automobiles. He worked a forty hour shift five days a week. He had raised Monica alone. Monica hadn’t seen her mother in years and hardly ever mentioned her.

We went into the kitchen and Milton said, “Would you like some apple cider?”

“Okay.”

He poured two glasses of apple cider and said, “I believe in the seasons. In the fall I drink apple cider and eat pumpkin pie. In the winter I drink eggnog and hot chocolate, and I eat soup. In the spring I watch the rain and grow my seedlings. In the summer I eat hot dogs and drink fresh-squeezed lemonade and watch my garden grow.” He said it with a sense of pride, like he was in touch with the earth’s shakings and grumblings.

“Do you want to see my Malibu?”

I realized he was talking about cars and said, “Sounds good.”

We went into his garage and looked at his car. “This is a 1977 Malibu. When I got this car it was nothing but rust sitting in a junkyard. Now look at it. I take it down in the summer to the drag strip. Monica helped a lot in putting it together.”

I stared at the car. It was burgundy, and it had giant tires with chrome hubcaps. Milton got in the car and started it up. It made a horrible rumbling sound. He got out of the car and came over to me and said, “Sounds awesome, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“This thing is fast, oh my god.”

Monica came out all smiles, then we raked the lawn. Monica and Milton worked well together. They acted more like brother and sister than father and daughter.

After raking, we went inside and drank more apple cider. Milton said he was going to visit a friend for a few hours and we could have the house to ourselves.

Monica and I went to her bedroom to watch Netflix. We put on a Korean television show called Boys Over Flowers .

We began to kiss. The kisses were soft and sometimes I would kiss her cheek and sometimes she would kiss my closed eyes. We kept laughing the whole time. Monica took the remote and put the Korean drama on pause.

Slowly we started taking off each layer of clothing. First came shirts, then bra, then pants and underwear. It felt like years it took so long, but at the same time it felt like no time passed at all.

I ran my hands over her firm belly and groped her thighs. I kissed her thighs and belly. I ran my hands over her back and she ran her hands over mine. We smiled and said nothing. We were just two people having sex on a Thursday in America.

Both of us were inexperienced lovers. When I did a count, I think I’d had sex with a total of five people. Monica told me that she’d only had sex with three. Neither of us had ever been in a long-term relationship. We had both dated people for a year at most.

We lay there in bed afterwards and she turned the Korean drama back on.

I said, “I think you are wonderful.”

She smiled and said, “I wanted you to meet my father before we had sex.”

I laughed and said, “Why?”

“Because I wanted to know if he liked you. My father was here before you and he will be here after you.”

“If you ever meet my parents you will laugh. They are not like your father.”

“I don’t expect them to be.”

We finished watching the Korean drama. I cuddled her and we went to sleep.

I was to be trained in group counseling. To better understand what the residents had to live through on a day to day basis I had to attend several workshops. The first workshop was Drug Counseling with Larry the case manager. Larry had worked for NEOTAP for thirteen years and never got tired of it. He seemed like a really nice guy. Many of the employees who had been there for more than ten years seemed really nice. They didn’t have power complexes. I had heard through people who had worked there that several years ago Heidelberg was not in charge and things were different then.

Larry brought me into this office and sat me down. He said, “Now Michael, this drug counseling is very different, just four people are in it. They have been selected specifically because they are middle-class kids who went to college or are in college but can’t get their lives together. It seems that they don’t want college to end. They didn’t grow up in poverty, they weren’t abused when they were little, and they come from good families. We find that the middle-class kids and the poor kids don’t resort to drugs for the same reasons, so having them in the same group seems like more of a conflict than a solution.”

Larry brought me into a small room with windows where the group counseling took place. The three residents were already sitting there. I took a seat among them.

Larry sat down and said, “Okay, we are going to talk about how drugs make us feel today. I want you guys to be honest. No lies, just be honest. Okay, Tim, you go first.”

Tim said, “From the ages of twelve to the present I have done drugs regularly, with some breaks in between. I’ve done alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, acid, ecstasy, mushrooms, Xanax, Oxycontin, heroin, nitrous oxide, ketamine, ether, morphine, and crack cocaine. I think of drugs as a good thing. To me, they are part of a diet. There is nothing different about food, sleep, exercise, what kind of books and music you like, the people you spend time with, and drugs. I mean, some people have no personality and do drugs to replace having to have a personality. But I still like drugs. So I don’t know. It’s all part of the fun of trying to kill yourself slowly and make it look like you’re not trying, I guess. It’s just a way to spend time.”