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Lunacy
Contents:
Midpoint
Connect with S.A. Barton
By S.A. Barton
Copyright 2015 S.A. Barton
You get a feel for when someone has passed over the edge of sanity. Detecting mental distress is an art and not a science, despite what the ghosts of Dr. Freud and his successors would say, and despite what professors and insurance adjusters would have you believe. Our mayor would certainly agree with my point of view, which is why I'm his right-hand man in the mental-health arena. He trusts me. He trusts me with all our lives.
Technician Kwok, I thought (and I later would tell Mayor Ma), was over that mental edge, appearances to the contrary. Like most of us, Kwok suffered through his required time in menial, habitat-supporting tasks. He seemed to me to suffer more than most, drawing in upon himself, retreating behind a shell as he worked. He had few friends, none close, and no family in the city according to his citizen file. It was no help to him that he was in a difficult social position in Sibling City. The northern side of the city shared his ethnic origin, Chinese—half from Hong Kong alone, the origin of his family. The southern side shared his national origin—American, mostly from the United States, to which his parents emigrated before his birth. He was too American to be accepted among the Chinese and too Chinese to be accepted among the Americans, an ironic state for two ancestral camps constrained to close quarters, adopting more of each others' culture year by year. The people of Sister City grew closer, but few would accept someone who was already living in the cultural space between the two.
The living space Kwok had applied for and eventually obtained reflected the dichotomy; he lived on the border, suspended between his two halves. While many sharing his position gravitated to one group or the other, or became mobile between the two communities, Kwok straddled the fence, rebuffed from both sides, refusing to court either, encapsulating himself. Humans are social animals; isolation deranges us. Kwok was making himself a society of one, an ultimately untenable state. His predicament was an easy one for me to see; in some ways, I share it. A person of high position like myself has few friends; Mayor Ma is the only one I can truly talk to. And the Mayor has little time for small talk. Yes, I could see Kwok's isolation growing, could understand the danger coming.
After thoroughly studying his files and using the high clearance Mayor Ma afforded me to watch him through the ubiquitous public surveillance net, I secretly arranged an encounter with Technician Kwok on his home turf. In a confined community dominated by two cultural traditions both known for their aversion to mental health care, I find it most productive to take temporary jobs alongside those I must study, to get as close as possible to them without revealing my psychiatric profession. We are an enclosed community, a self-contained ecosystem maintained at great cost of labor and attention. A single person could, theoretically, doom us all. I must constantly be alert; I cannot afford to rest. Mayor Ma trusts me with all our lives.
Though small compared to the metropolises of Earth, Sibling City still numbers a quarter million souls. My job is difficult, but many jobs vital to our survival are difficult; Kwok's position was, if lower than mine, still unenviable. The day I assumed my temporary position in studying Technician Kwok, I found myself beside him, both of us up to our plastic-suited elbows in the fermented waste of our quarter-million citizens as it motored by via conveyor belt, on its way to be pressed into pellets for agricultural use. It's an unpopular job for obvious reasons, and there are never more than the bare minimum staff on hand to handle the workload.
One reason: “Fermented waste” is a mild term, the kind of technical locution that disguises the ugliest realities. Our work enclosure was dense with the smell of rotting human shit. The density of it drove the odor, somehow, through the machine-sealed triple layered gaskets of our helmets like a paste, a putty, a clay that slithered moistly through the hoses that fed us canned air. It carried an intangible weight that caked our noses, sinuses, mouths, and throats with a rich fertile stickiness as if we had been inseminated with feces.
Kwok's face and body trembled with involuntary tics as he worked. In part, I ascribed them to the bombardment of filth we suffered; that he suffered daily, week after week after month after year. But tics can also signal deeper troubles, the burgeoning of mental illness down deep under a professional veneer. My right eye flickered with a flurry of blinks as I watched him. His left arm, whenever free, jerked involuntarily, lifting halfway to his face, over and over. I watched the corners of his mouth twitch back toward his ears through is transparent faceplate as he worked; he didn't seem to notice it. His arm jerked, his mouth twitched. I longed to wipe at the tears the blinking of my right eye brought forth, but the helmet was in the way and my filthy hand skittered off the glass of my helmet, smearing it. Such a filthy job. Yes, Kwok was credibly ill. The mayor would believe me.
“Do you use wintergreen oil?” I asked him the second day we worked together. I had worked with a mortician before, when I was young and still on earth; they used wintergreen under their noses against the smell of death.
He turned his head slowly as if it were on stiff bearings, stared, blinked twice, deliberately, with a long second between the blinks. Then one corner of his mouth quirked up, twice quickly. Another tic, my clinician's mind said, cataloging.
“No,” he said seriously. “There is no wintergreen with us on the moon. It has been left behind.” His shoulders rose and fell as he sighed inside his environment suit. I don't know how he managed to sigh; the reek bound my chest tight as if I'd dived into deep, deep water, the pressure constricting my ribs. Kwok turned back to the conveyor, turning sludge with his hands, picking out long stringy fibers that might clog the pelleting apparatus. Vegetable kitchen waste mixed with the sewage.
“Left behind?” I asked. “That's an interesting way to say it. Why do you put it like that?” I added; my turn of phrase was one of my counselors' tools, a bland conversational hook cunningly designed to draw out further comment. It failed. Kwok ignored me, continued running his gloved hands through the parade of shit, teasing out unwanted debris from the moist brown curds. I could see his mouth tic, tic, tic through his helmet and my eye blinked, blinked, blinked in response. His hands wrung the long fibers as they pulled them out, as if breaking a neck, then knotted them and threw them into a bin to be pulverized. I tried speaking to him again a couple of times and he only grunted, immersed in his shit job, attentive, devoted.
After the workday was over I went to the Mayor and presented my evidence of Kwok's potential mental illness, of the danger that he might present to Sister City if left untreated. I asked for a passkey to Kwok's private compartment, a single room like many others including my own; until we were able to dig deeper into the moon and open more chambers, that's all there was space for: one room per adult.
“You think you can help Kwok? If he is a danger, it may be better to arrest him and compel treatment. Remove him from a sensitive area where an outburst could do irreparable damage,” Mayor Ma Huang said as he printed the passkey. In such a small and precarious environment, things were informal at the top. He and I were friends, and old enough friends to remember how it had been on Earth, in the last days, during the Crash. Enormous intertwined bureaucracies, ponderously falling, helpless, Gullivers with their feet inextricably bound by a million Lilliputian social and environmental entropies. Perhaps, if what we made on the moon thrived, we'd replicate the whole thing on a larger scale, perhaps spread out through the entire solar system. Even then, if that were t
o come to pass, an autotangled bureaucratic web would not be so grave and final a circumstance as the situation on Earth. Strangled by rising seas, accumulated pollutants, runaway greenhouse effect, raging warlordism deadlier than any Gothic horde that ever razed Rome: the Earth-human was almost certainly doomed to extinction.
We, however, might survive. If we could weather the last vestiges of claustrophobic madness we had imported with us. The moonborn like Kwok, the oldest now turning thirty, had no such claustrophobia. The tight warrens of the Moon were as natural to them as a burrow to a bunny.
I envied them their calm strangeness.
Envy is corrosive. Nearly as corrosive as endless claustrophobia, a black ghost haunting my every dream, my every waking step. A buried terror glaring back at me from every eye that met mine.
“I think Kwok can be saved, if I act quickly. It would be counterproductive to simply confine him. Such an act would likely make him feel persecuted, worsen his condition. Better for me to approach him alone, to be proactive rather than simply reactive,” I said.
“Proactive, yes. Update me in a few days,” Ma Huang said, handing me the passkey to Kwok's only refuge. I took the key and looked down to pocket it, right eye suddenly twitching while the mayor could not see. Twitch. Twitch. Twitch.
“Of course, Mayor Ma,” I said, and I kept my bitter smile hidden under a bow. Bent, the faint odor of shit wafted up from my clothes: more claustrophobia. One more unavoidable reminder of ugly reality, ugly job clinging to my person, dogging me. It was in my skin like maggots; I scratched one hand with the other as I left, as if I could dig them free.
Kwok's room was empty when I reached it, as I expected. We older crowd spent more time in our quarters, reading, watching vids. We socialized at work. The youngsters were opposite, working quietly apart, then heading out to socialize in the larger common areas afterwards. Even loners like Kwok would rather sit and nurse a cup of tea and a plate of noodles alone in a crowd than alone in their cubicles. Their homes weren't much more than places to keep a bed. They invited nobody there, unless it was for sex, in private, known only to two.
It was an odd way to live. Strange. Antisocial.
Unnatural.
And I was tired of it, tired of watching Sister City's people warp and distort into an unnatural society, a society of embodied mental illness. Tired to death.
Kwok's job was in life support, maintaining the vats of algae and hydroponic gardens that supply us with oxygen and food, and recycle fouled water into something drinkable, sorting shit for recycling. Life support is normally a closed space to non-technicians like me. Even my temporary job sorting shit, even with my rank and clearance, had not gained me access to spaces beyond the shit-sorting line. But Kwok's clearance as a life support technician would grant that access.
His work access card allows access to the heart of the life support apparatus. And it's a delicate operation. One man really could destroy it all. Even an inexpert man.
We should have stayed on Earth to ride out the crisis. Bet it all on one roll of the dice. This warren in the Lunar dirt is not a place for humans to live. It has bred us into something... wrong. The young are all coming out wrong.
I'll tell Kwok all about it. As soon as he gets home. And I'll take his work access card off his body when I'm done.
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