“He wasn’t gonna get us more ice cream. It was a bad time to ask,” she said.
Larry just shrugged.
“Why did you hide in that truck? It makes us look bad. Like we planned to get her alone and hurt her,” she said, and part of her question was curiosity, but mostly she asked because she wanted to jolt him awake. Hurt him into it, like she was hurting, so she wouldn’t be so alone with these feelings in this house.
“I was scared to leave the park without you. But Shelly didn’t want me there.” He was shaking still, and now that he was under his sheets, he’d wormed his hands down his pants.
“Gross,” she said. “You’re so weird and gross. The whole block’s talking about us. They’re gonna take Daddy away, and it’s all your fault!”
Excerpt from Rhea Schroeder’s dissertation, seized from her home office on August 2, 2027
Consider the panopticon. When Foucault, the father of semiotics, originally imagined it, he’d intended the guard to stand center, watching a periphery of prisoners. The tool was effective for surveillance because none knew when they were being watched, but they knew that it would happen eventually. They couldn’t escape it. And so they behaved their best. But we can all agree that Foucault was drunk on his own ideas, responding not to real-world social surveillance, but to his own personal scars from having been raised by totalitarian parents.
Modern culture is an inverse panopticon. Not a drunk father, but a vigilant mother. The masses elect a single person to the hot seat for their five minutes of fame. We, the periphery, are the judges and jury. Because we’re separated （like prisoners, we can’t connect to each other through these impossible walls）， we’ve no option but to connect via the sacrificial lamb we’ve placed dead center. Even when we privately dispute the censure or praise we heap upon them, publicly, we echo popular sentiment.
To avoid loneliness, we become a single, unthinking mass.
And yet, the mother and father both reveal their very limited ability to connect. The proverbial child cannot attach. We participate in this mass identity, but it does not serve us. Our language is reduced to a series of agreed-upon signs reflecting not nuance, but binaries: like/dislike; good/bad; yes/no. We are even more lonely for the failure of it…
118 Maple Street
Wednesday, July 28
Night. Far past time to sleep. A knock came. Rhea Schroeder did not say, Come in.
“Are you there?” Fritz called through the old, thin wood. All this time in America, and he still had an accent.
Rhea was in her office, unmarked papers heaped in piles. She turned the volume down on The Black Hole, playing off an old VCR in the corner. The one from college, that she’d brought with her to every place she’d ever lived.
“Rhea?” Rhee-a, he said, had always said, making that first syllable especially long. But he so rarely spoke her name that it shocked her.
The room was dark, lit only by the TV light. He wasn’t often home, and when he was here, he never came to this place. She fiddled with Shelly’s Pain Box, which she’d been trying to pick with an unbent paper clip for hours on her lap. So late in the day, her fingers had lost their dexterity.
She crossed the room. Put her hand on the door, turned the lock inside the handle, so he couldn’t get in. She felt panicked, though she couldn’t explain why. Would he care that she’d gone through two bottles of wine tonight? Was this about the brick? Or Shelly? She didn’t want to talk to him about those things. He had no business offering an opinion, knocking on her secret place.
She could see the shadow of his feet beneath the sill of the door. He ran his hand, skin on wood, so specific and so similar to the sound of night rain. “Yes. I understand,” he said at last. “I’ll leave you.” And then footsteps; his thick leather loafers, walking away.
In the dark, she returned to her chair, her lockbox, to her Black Hole. The paper clip caught, then lost the catch. On-screen, it was at the part in the movie where the good guys discover that the captain of the spaceship has lobotomized his own crew and turned them into slaves. They’re not robots after all. She wished her dad were here to watch with her. Imagined him in the chair beside her. Willed it.
She’d been having fun that day at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, the café all the smart kids frequented. Close enough to graduate-student age that she could have passed for one.
All nine of them had been talking about the panopticon when this second-year PhD, Aileen Bloom, had started babbling about Bertrand Russell. There’s a troublemaker in every class. They can’t abide authority figures, or they care so much about the subject matter that they self-destruct, or they simply have bad personalities. Aileen Bloom was all three.