And Now I Yearn

Gillian Murray Kendall

And Now I Yearn

They took Nimrod away at dawn. They always take at least one from below the subsistence line, although I'd never heard of a garbage picker going to the Genius Project. Central must be making a point about inclusion; perhaps there wasn’t actual unrest—that wouldn’t be tolerated—but murmurings, calls of unfairness, a few Genius Project posters with graffiti on them, those things made Central nervous. I stood still at the entrance to the landfill as Nimrod walked away. He looked back once. I’m sure of it. He walked between two members of the Genius Project Guard. They kept their distance, as if he smelled bad. He probably did.

I had known Nimrod for four years, in a place where life expectancy was so low that it would have shamed Central to publish it. So they didn’t. I had been twelve when we met. 

So young. Twelve.

I hadn’t even gotten my period yet.

He was three years older. I came from a family of garbage pickers who had all died of the various sicknesses that circulated among those who worked the dump. Nimrod had once had a family with a claim to one of the shacks on the edge of town, but they were finally caught up in a spiral of poverty. They sold Nimrod, but he talked back, and when his owners got tired of punishing him, they sent him here, to be an indentured garbage picker. The first day he started garbage picking, we came face to face over a heap of offal, which, raked away, revealed a stash of phone books.

Paper.

Nimrod and I looked at each other. We had maybe a minute before someone noticed we had found something interesting and then crowded me out to share the treasure with Nimrod. Nimrod, new at the job and young himself, might not have much of a chance either.

But Nimrod pushed me away and scooped up the phone books. Gron noticed us and was making his way over, but Nimrod was fast. He got to the head checker, Lane, before I had fully recovered from his shoving me down. Lane took the books and weighed them.

“You’re the new one,” Lane said to Nimrod. “Good find.”

“It’s Saskia’s, too,” Nimrod said. “We each get half.”

Lane stared at him with a look of distaste. “She’s young for you, isn’t she?” he asked. “Not even really a woman.”

I had caught up with Nimrod by this time.

“Half of that’s mine,” I said.

“That’s what he said,” said Lane. “All right. Half and half. But leave her alone, Nimrod.”

I couldn’t believe that Nimrod had shared the chits for the phone books. Or that Gron hadn’t taken them from us. Luck. Then I thought that maybe it wasn’t luck. I waited, terrified that Nimrod would come to me that night.

He did.

“Go away,” I said, but my voice came out a small hoarse croak.

“Look what I found,” he said. He put down a pack of cards on the table.

I didn’t understand anything. “Those are valuable,” I said.

“Not very,” he said. “Four cards are missing. And I’ll ‘find’ them tomorrow. I thought you might like to play.”

And we did play, almost until dawn, when we would have to go back to the landfill. He lost every time. I finally looked up at him, surprised.

“Aren’t you counting the cards? You’d do better.”

“’Counting the cards’?”

I explained.

“I don’t think I can do that,” he said.

After that, we stuck together. We shared our finds. He didn’t try to lie with me. I wouldn’t have liked that, even though I liked Nimrod. Virginity was another thing to save up for a time when pickings were bad. Besides, I still felt like a kid back then. Gron seemed to like that I was young, but he left me alone after I bit him. The day after I told Nimrod about Gron, they both came to the landfill with bruises on their faces. 

The year I turned fifteen, things changed. We had the bitterest winter I could remember. Twice, pickers had not shown up for their shifts. They had died in the night. That was the winter that Nimrod and I started sleeping together for extra warmth.

I was the one who reached out for him. I pulled him to me and kissed him, an unpracticed kiss. I knew he slept with others, and it had never bothered me until now.

“Are you sure, Saskia?” he asked.

“I’m sure.”

He kissed my breasts and stroked me until I was gasping. When he entered me, he gave a soft moan. I cried out.

I couldn’t bear to say it, but he said it first.

“I love you, Saskia.

And, because of me, the guards from the Genius Project came and took him away. I had lost much and many, but nothing came close to this loss.

All because I was good at Math. All because I could count cards.

They took him away, and I would never see him again. The poor who were given a token chance to become part of the Genius Project never came back, although sometimes their bodies were found in garbage dumps and landfills. It was a foolish wish to imagine becoming part of the Genius Project. After Nimrod was taken, my nightmare was that I would be picking through broken dolls and diapers and the occasional dead horse, and I would uncover him, almost all eaten away.

I relived the past. 

Nimrod loved it that I was smart. He loved to watch at the end of each week, when I made the tallies for the pickings.

“Can you always do the Math?” he asked me once.

“Always,” I said. And it was true. 

I could always do the Math. He’d seen me do it for four years.

People lived and died by these numbers.

Each week, Lane would put me on a stool as the ration card points and the recycle weights were called out to me.  I would juggle the figures in my head, apply a few formulas I had invented to make it easy, and give out the total.

They trusted me absolutely.

Old Silas had sometimes had someone check my work by figuring out the numbers longhand, but this was time consuming, and, not infrequently, I had to point out the checker’s errors.  They didn’t know the logarithms I had created to make it all so easy.

It was said that people high up in Central, as well as those in the Genius Project, had calculators—even computers.  We did not.  The only calculator we ever found in the dump didn’t work, and, anyway, it had to be forwarded to Central immediately. Anyway, we didn’t need calculators. That’s what I was for.

Lane, who had been in charge for two years, always waited for me by the big board where the crucial rationing numbers were posted.  My co-workers were at their places in the semicircle.

“Let’s get started,” said Lane.

“Stand up, Saskia,” said Nimrod.  “We can’t see you.”

They were all taller than I was.

Lane went alphabetically, so Seth Atkinson was first.  Lane read out the hours Seth had worked and the weights and varieties of his pickings—the type and quality of the metals; the state of preservation of the paper; the color of the glass.  There were also rogue objects that needed particularly careful evaluation.

Fine rubber from balloons.  A jar of blue paint.  The pelt of a tortoiseshell cat.  A pristine Chatty Kathy doll still in its original box.  A partially shattered coral necklace.

This week Seth had found a roll of plastic sheeting (valuable) and a sandal made of rotten leather (of no value at all).  He had also found several intact bottles and two aluminum hubcaps, along with the usual collection of detritus. 

I paused briefly.  They loved the drama.

“42,” I said.

Applause broke out, and some of the other whistled.

“Genius!” shouted Nimrod, but the others hushed him; “Genius” wasn’t a word to bandy about.

Everyone was pleased that Seth had done well this week.  He had been going through a dry spell, and the plastic had been a good find. 

We continued with the calculations.  Not all of the ration card numbers were so good.  Roger, who wasn’t present, had been in a decline for a while, and I thought he had, perhaps, been ill for a while and was trying to work on top of it.  Perhaps the grave that opens at our birth was almost deep enough for him.

Then it was my rationing card that was up for calculation.

I only needed to do the numbers once, but I did them twice anyway.  Then I spoke out:

“Saskia Cress. Fifty.”

It had been a good week, and no one, except maybe Gron, now looking sick and old, begrudged me.  

Nimrod looked delighted.  But Nimrod was always generous; I had come to expect it from him.

The workers from the Genius Project came at the end of that week. They passed out the same sheet of paper to everyone.

“If you do well on this, we’ll take you to the Project,” the shorter one said. “If you do well, you’ll get a reward. If you pass three more tests, we’ll take you through a course to see where you might fit in the Genius Project. People have spread slander about this process, but you can get a great deal of money if you do well.”

Nimrod and I glanced at each other. “A way out,” he murmured. I shook my head at him. No.

That night he came to me.

“Do you know how little money we need to leave this place?” he asked.

“We can’t leave this place, Nimrod,” I said. “We signed the contract. We’re here for twenty years.”

“We’re not going to live that long,” said Nimrod. “We’re not. No one does.”

“The test for the Genius Project is just something to keep people quiet,” I said. “They’re not going to give us money. They will kill us.”

But Nimrod got up and walked away, clutching his sheet of paper. The next day, he didn’t work next to me the way he usually did. He wasn’t there to see my good find: a pencil.

“Trouble in paradise?” asked Gron. He’d developed a nasty cough and had trouble getting the words out.

“You should sleep in part-day tomorrow,” I said. “You don’t sound good.”

He hacked some more. “Can’t afford it,” he said.

Nimrod joined me later, and he seemed fine, but he was late coming to bed with me that night. I didn’t want to go to bed without him. I sat on the bed and smoothed out the paper the Genius Project people had left. I took out the nubbin of pencil that I hadn’t turned in.

My guess was that the problems on the paper were meant to be hard. Maybe they really were going to give out some chits—or even some money—if the answer were right. I knew, however, that I was a fool to think that way. Because maybe they would just kill the winner. Business as usual. 

As I waited for Nimrod, I finished the sheet. It was sort of fun, really. 

He didn’t come, and finally I fell asleep.

The next morning, Nimrod was waiting for me at the dump. He gave me an extra pair of latex gloves that he’d taken from the box, and he’d cleaned the picking rod that I used to turn over garbage. We didn’t talk about our disagreement.

A week later, Gron died.

Most people said goodbye; we put him in the body pit and sprinkled lime over him. Even I said goodbye. He was just another person with no hope for a different future.

Nimrod took my hand as we walked away. “We have to leave,” he said.

“Nimrod—”

“Saskia,” he said. “We will both die here.”

“I would give my life for you,” I said.

He looked at me sadly. “That’s not how it works.”

The next day the Genius Project guards from Central came back, with no warning. They were wearing jackets with the Genius Project logo on them. And they took Nimrod. I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. Just that quick glance over his shoulder—did he even see me? He must have seen me. I couldn’t bear it. Why would the Genius Project take him? He couldn’t even count cards.

And then it came full blown into my head. The genius test. Where had I put it? Relieved, I found it quickly, wedged against the bed. I had crumpled it up, and now I opened it out.

It was blank.

What a fool. What a fool I was. I had been so caught up in stopping Nimrod from doing something dangerous, in attempting to run away, that I had never particularly noticed when he took my genius test and left his behind.

He would not pass the next test, of that I was sure. Would the Genius Project really give him money and send him back?

No.

I barely remembered my mother’s face, and I had always felt ambiguous about it, probably just about the way she had felt about me. I was another mouth now taking food from the family. And then they were all gone. I don’t remember caring. I remember trying to protect myself and to get food and clean water. And then I had signed the papers that indentured me to the landfill. I thought I had done something clever.

How long ago that was.

It’s been a year now since they took Nimrod away.

I had never loved anyone the way I loved Nimrod. I never will. He had changed me. He changed me into someone who could feel. He changed me into someone who could hope. He changed me into someone who would forever yearn.