Jars
Milten Jones brought the bourbon jigger to his lips. Shooting it down, he poured another one. Like the first, he quickly drank the jigger. The warmth spread out over his empty stomach. This marked his fifth shot. He thought of another, but didn’t want to slur or stagger. No, then they’d question his parenting. Too early for the media to start that shit, he thought. His focusing eyes starred blankly ahead. A black sheet of glass segregated him from the driver some ten feet forward. The limo he rode in bounced stoically forward.
They
rounded the corner of Second to Reily. His
Milten got out of the limo a few blocks down from the townhouse. The driver popped the trunk without getting out of the car. Milten took his gear from the back, and draped his overalls over his shoulder. He threw the driver’s garbage bag back into the trunk, noticeably leaving the muddy side exposed to the carpet. He smiled slightly to himself, and shut the trunk. With a short wave to the driver, Milten ducked into an alley and jogged down into a door jam. The photographers following him slowed, peered down the alley, and drove presumably to turn around. Milten ran quickly down the street, hung a right, and entered the back alley of his parents’ fixer-upper.
In the basement, he hung his overalls and toolbelt on an old hook in the door frame. He shrugged off his clothing, stripping down to his work boxers. Milten took a long, actualizing look at himself. “Twenty-seven,” he said aloud. “Twenty-fucking-seven.” He shivered. The temperature outside was around twenty degrees; inside, it was around sixty. He saw his frame, the semblance of an upper chest hidden behind the occasional rounds at fast-food. The wasted money hung loose upon his muscular frame. He flexed his arms to watch the muscle and fat swing gently. Cliché lines ran through his head questioning his existence. He suppressed them as being self-doubts. After all, his body was authentic. He didn’t diet. He didn’t work out. He lived, that was all.
His mind returned to his body sometime around the shampooing of his hair. His mind had been lost to the sniper’s death in 28 Weeks Later. The man’s eyes, he thought with fingers scrubbing rust from his hair, were too uncanny. Like some egocentric connection, he felt amalgamated into the obviously fictional image. Still, he wondered if he read too much into it. Somewhere in the unconscious, he found the scene locked tightly away.. At the time, he had wrestled it away as being a cathartic attack on his social inactivity. He supported the American conflicts. For some reason, he felt he always would. Yet, while standing naked in the shower, he felt guilty for that unspoken support… As if recoiling, he ushered the thought into that abyss we call subconsciousness. He had no time for social conflicts and personal guilt. He had his share of them already.
Milten dried his body with a make shift towel he had borrowed from his mother. Standing in the frigid townhouse, he pulled on a pair of semi-damp boxers and a paint-stained hoody. He looked at the time: 5:50 PM. In less then an hour, the car would arrive to take him to the clinic. “Christ,” he swore aloud. The protestors would be there. He hadn’t forgotten them from the last time. Last time, he thought, not even since the first time. They had been outside the courthouse everyday of the trial. The first few weeks had been the worse. They had finally stopped throwing things at him by the end. At least until the young woman took a shot at him last month. He found himself looking in the mirror as the scene crept quietly onto him. With a blink, he suppressed all but her hazel eyes, the same that shone with rancorous light as the .32 crept up to the limo window. Two shoots passed through the glass before the driver got him out of the line of fire. “Guilt,” he said aloud. “I have my fucking share.”
The driver pulled quickly onto the shoulder. Milten silently opened the back door and stepped inside. He sat a closed red rose onto the seat next to him. The driver already had his instructions so all Milten had to do was wait. A muffled cover of “The House of the Rising Sun” played in the backseat. He closed his eyes. The drums in the back of his head roared. He shouldn’t have done the shots before leaving, but the thought of the masses blazing eyes made him frightened. Would they follow him home? Milten thought of bringing the twelve-gauge home tomorrow. Just in case…just in case those hazel eyes come back…
He fell into a welcomed but unexpected apathetic sleep. In his unfortunate dreams, he found himself in the courtroom again. It was the day of the decision. She stood next to her lawyer, some old man that would sell the Morningstar as a cure for cancer. Behind her, Jason rested his smooth hand on her shoulder. Milten felt that same jealous indignation boiling his eyes. Milten glanced to his left. His adjudicator was a land shark if they’ve ever existed. It was his mother’s money which chummed the beast on his behalf. Milten rarely spoke to him. He had no respect for social lampreys. His disgust was interrupted by the gavel’s audible authority.
The judge laced his fingers in a practiced pose. “The recent weeks have been unnecessarily rushed, an unfortunate mandate by the nature of Ms. Perish’s situation. Still, it is not in the best interest of the legal world to be ruled by the natural conundrum leveled at it. No, not in any way. It is my understanding that Mr. Jones must insist for the sake of his child. Be that as it may, Justice is a beast best slipped slowly on her leash, and with a practiced, patient hand. This sentencing, and its ramifications, may show how uncertain and begrudging was the hand that released it….”
“Mr. Jones.” A voice startled him. “Mr. Jones?”
“Yes, Driver?”
“Mr. Jones, five minutes to the icks clinic.” Milten let his eyes focus. The limo rushed down Route 81 towards a medical and industrial complex. Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” played softly over the speakers. Milten held his fevered eyes tight together, listening to the sympathetic singing. He let the subtle sound shift over his psyche. He would need it later.
When he opened his eyes, the clinic appeared before him. A large billboard was attached to its façade: “Now offering ICSS procedures!” Milten shivered. As of 4:30 this afternoon, Milten was the third parent to benefit from Intermediate Caesarean Surrogate Surgery, colloquially titled icks. A relatively new procedure, it allowed the removal of a fetus from the womb to gestate within an artificial incubator. To the vulgar, the incubators are called jars.
Milten readied himself. He picked up the closed rose and ran his callused hand over his hair. In the distance, beneath the canopy, he could see the protestors’ silent screams. Like feral wolves, they rushed the approaching limo. The driver slowed the car to prevent any injures. In his head, Milten urged him to depress the throttle, perhaps rid the Leviathan of several of its monsters. Instead, the police awaiting his arrival forced the ravenous masses away from his door. Several hectic seconds passed as the police force arrested and sublimated the protestors.
An officer with Kevlar chest protection opened his door. He could hear the profanations and threats as the masses pressed against the civil servants. “Go immediately into the clinic.” Some screamed for blood. He leaned quickly into the limo, “Don’t fucking stop and keep your fucking mouth shut.” The officer pulled away from the door. Milten took an obstinate step out of the door. He saw them: Men, women, children. He saw their clothes, their signs, the rage in their eyes, the spit on their mouths. He could smell the hatred as it rose like mustard gas above their heads.
A man wearing a pink ribbon on his suit coat held a sign saying “ICKS IS SLAVERY” screamed, “You mother fucker! Let them cut your guts open. FASCIST!” The fascist chant was old, he thought. Milten saw a fourteen-year-old girl waving her middle finger over the shoulder of a black police officer. He watched an older woman, her expensive London Fog coat swaying on her swelling chest, “Chauvinist! MYSOGNIST! Let them cut you open! Let them cut you open! ICKS! ICKS rhymes with Misogynist!” her chant swelled into the crescendo of the masses. Their mouths all singing the awful tune of a majority agreed upon social injustice. The steel barricades rocked with the chorus of suppressed violence.
“Jones, what the fuck! Go!” The policeman pushed him forward. The masses swelled. He felt fingers reaching for his arms. “FASCIST!” He kept his eyes locked forward. He didn’t know if he’d cry or kill, but the blood was in his neck and he felt like exploding. The officer was over him, a shield over both their heads. Someone took it as a target and threw an egg. It shattered on the policeman’s shoulder. “Baby killers! Fascists!” Someone threw something hard, which snuck through and hit Milten in the upper shoulder. He turned to scream, but the officer ushered him violently into the clinic.
As they entered the room, several officers blocked the door, weapons exposed. A nervous but pacified doctor awaited his approach. Milten extended a shaking hand. “This is the worst since the gunshot.”
“This too will pass,” the doctor cracked a nervous smile, enjoying his ironic quotation. “Are you ready to see your child?”
“I’d like to see the mother first.” He raised the still intact rose. The doctor’s practiced smile quivered. “I’m not going to do anything. I just want to give her this rose.
“As your doctor-“
“You’re not my goddamn doctor. You’re hers. Now take me to her.” He was tired of the bullshit surrounding this spectacle. Worse, whatever had hit in him the shoulder had injured him. The wound throbbed under his already quivering mind. “Please, doctor. I will leave if she grows upset.”
“Come with me. She is sleeping.”
The doctor led him down a long sterile corridor. Near its end, he was led into a small room with drawn white curtains. A soft music played over the scene. He could not make out the sound, but it sounded fiftiesish. The doctor timidly drew back the curtains.
“Harper,” he said. She rose her eyes. He could see the weight of her eyes, and how the twinkle had twilighted for him. “Harper.” He knew she wished upon him the pain of all this circus: the trials, the procedures, and how, no matter the outcome, it had ruined both theirs and the child’s lives. He did not wish it on her. God knew he wanted to hold her still. From the look on her face, he knew that embrace would be only felt upon the blade’s point. “Harper,” he said again, “I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes, the small beads of pain-laced tears dripped violently down her enflamed cheeks. In their brief contact, he knew the tears were burning from the hatred she felt for him. He gently set the rose at her docile feet, ignorant of the metaphoric gesture, and turned his back on her. His name would forever bear a demonic legacy with her. He was the vile world manifested in her mind. With every footstep which took him away, he knew it was but a million too short to spare her the space she needed. He would not grant her the tears he felt inside. Let Jason sponge up the damage he had caused. As for Milten, she was but a shade of his and his child’s torture. No, he thought. How could he grant that wrong, that sin, to his child. He would not speak of it to the baby. If the child learned of his fault or the social/legal trial which ensued, it would be from her mouth, not his.
The doctor materialized in front of him. “You’ll want to follow me. She’s waiting.” Milten stopped.
“She?” The doctor nodded.
“A baby girl.” Milten could not think of the smile on the doctor’s face as being anything but the recognition of its ironic paradox. For every social action, there is a new and direct reaction. At least, his narrative, he thought, seemed to allude to that fact.
“Let me see her.”
The doctor led him to a small room outside the corridor, far away from Harper Perish’s room. Walking into the sterile room, a row of dead incubators lay powerless. At the very far end, in the first incubator, rested a small fetus, her eyes tightly shut. In that brief instance of recognition, Milten saw the infernal torment worth every ounce of pain. The social, judicial, and personal bullshit had sought to choke him, all the nonsensical entropy had pressed his soul near death, and those rancorous hazel eyes could not tarnish the briefest, most natural recognition of true purpose. In his ears, he heard the scratching of the doctor’s prattle trying to explain to him the medical procedure, the new additions to the room, and the importance of the operation, but Milten saw only the beauty of authentic artifice. The amalgamation of ethereal and corporeal, the stages of godhood as seen only by the godhead, was now manifested for the human. So, Milten thought, this is Christ in early stages. Here lies Milten Jones’s eternity! In his delusional, romanticizing head, he vowed to be a good father, to raise his child to be the glorious genius she would be. He ignored that engrained knowledge that she was destined to be a social object, a docile and malleable form in the great abstract god’s hands. He refused to acknowledge that he, by granting her life, had paved the way for a new, and different, oppressive world. In that actualizing moment, Milten Jones saw the future.