Dystopyum (The D-ot Hexalogy Book 1) Read online

  He left her there, and went through the house and into the living room. He picked the dark blue NOV Temple love-deprogramming manual from the bookcase, had a seat on their old gray gendra-hide sofa, and started reviewing it. He looked for when and how to remove the straight jacket. He checked the FAQ’s and the flowcharts. Nothing. What about the medications — the sedatives that guy left with me? Nothing! “What is this bilgat crap? Just like every fucking trouble-shooting manual I have ever seen! They tell me everything except what I need to know!” he shouted in exasperation, and then ducked, realizing that he was not supposed to speak loudly. He then thought about the distance that she was from him, even though the bedroom door was open. She didn’t hear me. I’ve got to get her out of that straight jacket! How is she supposed to sleep with that thing on? Griswolt spent the next hour or so listening to the radio. He eventually got himself up, and walked back through the house to the bedroom. He peeked in.

  Martha had taken a seat in the chair near the right side of the bed. She still had the same alien look. Griswolt slowly walked in. Martha fell into another low-throated growl.

  Griswolt stopped.

  The growling stopped.

  Now what? he asked himself. I’ll talk, really nice and low, “Martha, sweetheart. Would you like me to take that jacket off of you?” Her facial expression changed. It became an expression of pain. Not necessarily good, but a change.

  She responded! He took a slow breath and offered, “Martha dear, if you stand up, I can take that thing off you.”

  Martha lowered her distant stare, and instead focused it on their beige and brown patterned carpet about six feet in front of her. Her face and scales looked very dry. She slowly and weakly stood up, keeping her eyes focused to the same point on the floor. She stood there for a moment, winced, and said, “Go slow!”

  She talked to me! “You’re going to be all right, dear,” Griswolt said with a smile. He slowly walked over to her, and Martha started growling lowly again.

  “Slower!” she hissed, starting to stoop in a guarded way. She was still staring far through that same point on the floor, but also intensely focused on the one coming closer to her.

  Griswolt stopped and waited for her growling to stop again. Then slowly, bending over so he would not look so large, Griswolt made his way across the room to her. Every time she started growling, he stopped and waited. In a few minutes, he eventually made it to her. Her breath was fetid. With time and patience, Martha allowed him to get behind her. She was shaking as if she were freezing to death. He slowly undid her bindings. She continued to growl — but nothing came of it. She smelled much worse with the jacket off.

  Griswolt’s mind was racing with questions about why she was in this state — they had to wait.

  “Do you want to take a shower?” he asked, but she just stood there. “Why don’t you lie down on the bed?” Griswolt suggested.

  Martha’s stare was interrupted as she glanced at the bed. A look of sadness passed for a moment. She did indeed make her way to the bed slowly, sat, and then laid down on it.

  Griswolt wanted to do more, but decided otherwise. “I should get out of here while she’s calm.” He went into the living room and prepared for sleep. He said to himself, “I’d better give her a sedative. I don’t want her walking around here tonight.”

  He went back to the kitchen to get the pills along with a glass of water, and then returned to the bedroom, entering slowly. Martha was lying there on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “Here Martha, will you take these? They’ll help you to sleep,” he said, as he gradually came to the bed.

  Surprisingly, Martha went along with it. As if in slow motion, she sat up, and took the pills. Then she lay back down.

  Griswolt breathed a sigh of relief, and went back to the living room. He got himself comfortable on the floor with a pillow and blanket, and fell into a light and uneasy, guarded night’s sleep.

  The next morning, Griswolt woke up and made one of Martha’s favorite breakfasts. It was a soft-boiled splint egg with toast. He was hoping the smell of it would rouse her. He bought fresh splint eggs the day before. Jan would be coming home tomorrow, and if the eggs got more than five days old, they would become increasingly bitter. Jan didn’t like that. When Griswolt was done cooking, he went to the bedroom to try to wake Martha. She was still deeply asleep.

  “I guess that sedative really worked — oh well, let her sleep,” he said, as he put her plate away for later. He went into the living room after breakfast, and started on the manual for a second time. “Hmmm. They say here that I shouldn’t try to touch her, even if she is talking, for at least three days. Some take three months! Wow. It says that some may never recover.” He stopped and thought about it. No, she’s going to be all right — most of them do turn out OK. He started thinking about the NOV. Griswolt was sure that this was the right way to go. To confront with the NOV leadership on this would be political suicide.

  “I really do think I’ll recommend a special class for fathers, rather than this lousy manual,” Griswolt said to himself. After climbing up through the ranks, he was an NOV policy maker now, a bureaucrat. It reminded him, “I’d better call the office.” Only the higher-level officials of the NOV were entrusted with electronic communication. It was wise to call in. He had to make his presence known. The bureaucracy making up the higher ranks of the NOV was very competitive, and others would try to take advantage of Griswolt’s absence from work. He went into the living room, picked up the heavy green phone and called his secretary, who connected him with others there. During the call, Griswolt discovered that the NOV was nationalizing a nearby mining conglomerate. After the phone call, he turned on the radio to hear the latest news about it. It was the main story of the day. The conglomerate had been threatening a strike because of the ever-increasing taxes imposed upon it by the NOV. The NOV had just “solved” their problem by eliminating all taxes on them. They did this by nationalizing the conglomerate. Now, instead of taxes, all the profits would go directly into the NOV’s treasury.

  “Wow! This could be a good opportunity for Martha,” Griswolt said to himself. Then he remembered, looked towards her room, and sighed. After his second time through the manual, Griswolt changed his reading material, and found himself going over the latest changes to the intraparty regulations of the NOV. I have no life, he thought to himself glumly as he read the dry, mercilessly detailed information. I’m reading government regulations in my living room. Who does this? He smiled to himself.

  Just then, he heard some movement. He looked up, and could hear Martha exiting the bedroom and heading down the hall to the bathroom. Griswolt sat up erectly — straining to hear, yet feeling like a weight had lifted. He focused his ears on anything he could identify. He heard water running. Slowly, he went over to the closed bathroom door. She’s getting in the shower — yes! Griswolt cheered in his mind’s ear. He then got control of himself, quietly turned, and went back to the living room. He sat down, and resumed his review of the regulation changes. She’s going to be OK. She is. It was a small thing, but at least it was some-thing. After a while, it occurred to Griswolt that Martha had been in the shower for quite a long time. He looked at his watch. He thought about going back and listening again.

  I should have checked my watch when she went in. Maybe it hasn’t really been that long. He looked towards the kitchen again, listening for sounds coming from the hallway on the other side. Going over these regulations sure makes time drag, he thought to himself. He had his right leg crossed over the other, with the report opened on his forty-five inch thigh, and realized how much he was waggling his foot, which was a lot. I’ll wait another fifteen minutes. Just then, he heard a crash. He was up like a shot, and ran to the bathroom. “The door’s locked,” he complained aloud, and then shouted through the door, “Martha, can you hear me? Are you all right?” The water was still running. He ran to the kitchen, grabbed a likely utensil, and ran back to the bathroom. He clumsily picked the bathroom doorknob open
, and was aghast at what he saw upon opening the door.

  Martha was half-conscious on the shower floor, trying to get up, but too weak. She was waving her arms in the air, as if trying to grab hold of something invisible in order to raise herself up. He ran to her and clutched an open hand as it was groping the air.

  She immediately pulled her hand back, curled up, and giving Griswolt a chilling look, screamed, “Don’t touch meeeeeeeeee!” She focused on him with a dagger-filled eye and threatened, “If you ever touch me again, I’ll kill you!” She attempted to exit the shower. Griswolt watched as she got up and staggered out into the bathroom proper, but was weak indeed. As she was turning to reach for a towel, Martha slipped, coming down on her hands and knees, and then falling to her side.

  Griswolt was shocked at what he saw from behind. His mouth dropped open. My God, what happened to you? His blood went to boiling. “What happened to you there?” he shouted. Everything between her legs was red and raw, with a slowly seeping bloody discharge.

  Martha looked up, and turned her head around towards him. She was still incoherent, and didn’t realize —

  Griswolt stormed out of the bathroom. “I’ll get to the bottom of this! Someone is going to pay!” he shouted as he lumbered down the hall to the telephone. He called in and asked for his secretary, Mari, and told her, “I want you to get the Office of Love-Deprogramming on the phone, and find out who was handling my wife over there!” Mari said she would check it out and get back to him.

  By the time Griswolt returned to the bathroom, Martha had regained her mobility, gotten up, and was now drying herself.

  Deciding to leave her be for now, Griswolt went back to the living room, putting the book of regulations on his leg once more. His foot was wiggling again as if it were its job. He could not focus. He looked up, and around at the comfortable room he was in. The NOV was the reason he had such a nice home and lifestyle. “I completely support the creed of the NOV,” he said to himself. Love is a dangerous idea — otherwise — they wouldn’t make such of a fuss about it. This has to happen, to keep an orderly and stable society.

  Since he was fighting some doubts about the wisdom of this requirement, Griswolt continued thinking along the lines of the NOV’s side of the debate. There were indeed important points about the serious negative effects of love on civic order. Because of love, citizens would repeatedly refuse to point out family members or others involved in any number of illegal activities — from outright violent crime to black markets, and to organizations like LERN.

  With any black market, there was also a “gray” market that blended with the official economy, which had always been somewhat dependent on the gray market. This problem was agreed by all to be unacceptable to law and order. However, upon the successful destruction of these black and gray markets decades ago, the economy had never fully recovered. It did not matter. The NOV finally had the law and order that they coveted so dearly, and the upper crust didn’t have it so bad.

  Look at what the superstition of love had done to law and order! Still, Griswolt had to keep pushing away the nagging thought that there had to be a better way. Especially now, he thought to himself. He could hear Martha in the bathroom, moving around. He got up, went to the bedroom, and picked out a nice thick leathercloth robe she loved. No, she’s probably still bleeding, he thought. Better, just go with some old comfortable clothes for now.

  With the infection rate the way it was, hospitals were a gamble on their own, and even Griswolt did not have the extra money for the safer hospital in town. He would not take Martha there unless he had to. He left the clothes hanging on the outside of the bathroom door and let Martha know they were there. He would give her the antibiotics later. The phone rang. Griswolt went to answer it, and it was his secretary calling back. She told him to check for a waiver among the document copies left with him.

  He put down the phone and looked in the kitchen. The waiver was there among them. Griswolt returned to the phone, and said, “I found it, thank you Mari,” and hung up. He sat down at the kitchen table to read the waiver. The heading read, “Waiver of Sexual Rights.” What the…? He read the verbiage below, and could not believe what he was reading. “I agree that I will not pass love-deprogramming school unless I submit to ‘Sexual Trauma Love Removal’. Without this extreme treatment, my torturer has predicted I will fail. Sexual Trauma Love Removal has a ninety-eight percent success rate…” Griswolt glanced at the bottom of the page and saw Martha’s signature. He had the wind taken out of him. Griswolt looked in the direction of the bathroom where Martha had been stirring, and then at the waiver again. This time, he slowly read his way through the list of sexually traumatic acts permitted. Griswolt let the document fall to the table, and put his face in his hands, energy sinking. “Oh Martha,” he said, lifting and shaking his head, “When I think of how lovely you were the last night before you —” He stopped, lost in thought, and gulped, “You were so radiant that night. You put on such a brave face.” He paused, swallowing again. Then Griswolt smiled, remembering, “And when you threw Hais out, that was perfect!” He started laughing, it was a strange laugh — one that he could not seem to stop. He kept laughing, until it became almost convulsive, and he couldn’t take a breath. Then the most unimaginable, terrible thing in the world happened — unbelievably, he could not stop what had started sprouting from his long dormant ducts, now rolling down his cheeks, and his uncontrollable laughter quickly spiraled into a repetition of choking, spastic sobs. As much as he tried, it would not stop.

  As Griswolt was caught in the chain of sympathetic reflexes with this outburst, Martha astoundingly burst in on him, grabbing a knife from the kitchen counter. As she lunged at him with the knife, she screamed, “No hope! No crying! No crying! No hope! I’ll kill you! No hope! No cryyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeing!” She cut him on his left arm as he dodged to his right.

  Reflexively, Griswolt quickly spun around to his left, and came back at her with his right fist. He punched her straight in the mouth, and with the shock, Martha dropped the knife.

  She repulsively spit out the blood from her split lip at him, and started laughing with gleaming, glaring eyes.

  He had to do something. Griswolt grabbed her and started shaking her, “Stop laughing or I’ll kick your ass!” That was stupid.

  She smiled evilly at him, going limp like a rag doll, “Go ahead!” She started singing, “I’ll kill you in your sleee — eeeeep! Ah hah hah hah hah!”

  This is going nowhere fast, he thought to himself, fixed on her crazy grinning face, absorbing her cackling laugh.

  Martha abruptly realized that she was being held. She screamed in terror, “Don’t touch me!” and pulled away from him with all her might.

  Griswolt was startled enough that she did indeed pull herself away from him. As soon as she was free, she looked at him, slightly bent over, pointing one finger up in the air, and said, “Don’t touch me,” now weakly jabbing the pointed finger into the air for emphasis. She then turned, and walked unsteadily back to the bedroom. It sounded like she was getting back into bed.

  Griswolt was standing there despondently. Now he was in shock. “My arm’s bleeding,” he said to himself as he only now really noticed it. He gave a sigh. I can’t really blame her — she’s just crazy. The cut wasn’t bad — his scales stopped most of it. “Good thing she cut down instead of up,” he muttered to himself. He got a bandage from the bathroom, and taped it on. He then went and peeked at Martha in the bedroom. She was lying on the bed again, on her back, eyes open. Better leave her be, he thought.

  As Griswolt went back to the living room, he wondered aloud, “Is it like this for everyone?” He had a seat again. He was thinking, I can’t remember anyone saying much at work about going through this.

  Whenever the subject came up around those who had been through it, the usual response was, “Oh, you don’t want to know, believe me,” like it was — like it was — like it was nothing much. Like it wasn’t worth talking about. Some just made
it into a “knowing joke”.

  Maybe I was wrong, Griswolt thought. Maybe they didn’t talk about it because it was too painful to think about. Now that makes more sense. He started talking aloud, “I need to bring it up at the next meeting. There must be a better way than this.” He then remembered Adap, the chief accountant of his division. Adap was another high-level NOV party member. Adap complained loudly about the love-deprogramming school when his wife committed suicide one week after arriving back home. That’s right, Adap was sent to an obscure post in the northwest after that. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll be more careful with my words when I deal with this. If I can get my supervisor to agree, we may be able to make recommendations for some change — or at least some civility. Griswolt sighed, and took another look at the manual. He flipped it open to a random page, and read:

  “If all else fails, give the mother time. She will become more normal with time.”

  Griswolt looked up, and thought about it. Yes, time. She’ll come around in time. He gave a half smirk, and said quietly, “If she doesn’t kill me first,” while shaking his head, and examining his bandage. He looked again, in the direction of the bedroom. I’ve got to do something. I just can’t wait. He got up and went into the bedroom.

  Martha was still lying in the same position, on her back, staring at the ceiling.

  Griswolt entered the bedroom slowly and as quietly as he could. As he approached her, she slowly curled up into a fetal position. As he motioned to the side of the bed he asked, “Can I sit down here?”

  No response.

  He slowly sat down next to her, but careful not to touch her. He looked at her broken face, and said, “I honor you and approve of you, and I deeply value you.”

  For a moment, Martha appeared to become lucid. She looked at him and said, “I need time.” When she then turned her head away, he started to reach for her, and without looking at him, she firmly said, “Don’t touch me, please.”