UnWholly

“I’m sorry. It’s not you I don’t like, it’s what they’re making you do. If you want to be my friend, try again when I’m not your assignment.”

“Okay, fair enough,” Jackie says. “But friends or not, I’m supposed to help you get with the program, whether you like it or not.”

An understanding reached, Jackie returns to her friends but keeps an eye on Miracolina as long as she’s in the room.

Timothy, the boy she was kidnapped with, is in the room as well, with a former tithe who was apparently assigned to him. The two talk like they’re already great friends. Clearly Timothy has “gotten with the program,” and since he was not too keen on being unwound anyway, all it took to deprogram him was a change of clothes.

“How could you be so . . . so shallow?” she says to him, when she catches him alone later in the day.

“If that’s what you want to call it,” he says, all smiles, like he’s just been given a new puppy. “But if it’s shallow to want a life, then heck, I’m a wading pool!”

Deprogramming! It’s enough to make her sick. She despises Timothy and wonders how anyone’s lifelong faith could be traded for corned beef and cabbage.

Jackie seeks her out later in the day—after Miracolina has determined that her “freedom” ends at a locked door, which keeps all the ex-tithes in a single wing of the mansion. “The rest is still uninhabitable,” Jackie tells her. “That’s why we’re only allowed in the north wing.”

Jackie explains that their days are spent in classes designed to help them to adjust.

“What happens to the kids who fail?” Miracolina asks with a smirk.

Jackie says nothing—just looks at her like it’s a concept she hasn’t considered.

•   •   •

Within a few days, Miracolina has all she can stand of the classes. The mornings begin with a long emotional group therapy where at least one person bursts into tears and is applauded by the others for doing so. Miracolina usually says nothing, because defending tithing is frowned on by the faculty.

“You have a right to your opinion,” they all say if she ever speaks out against their deprogramming. “But we’re hoping you will eventually see otherwise.” Which means she really doesn’t have a right to an opinion.

There’s a class in modern history—something few schools actually teach. It includes the Heartland War, the Unwind Accord, and everything surrounding them, right up to the current day. There are discussions about the splinter groups within many major religions that took upon themselves the act of human tithing, becoming socially sanctioned “tithing cults.”

“These weren’t grassroots movements,” the teacher tells them. “It began with wealthy families—executives and stockholders in major corporations—as a way of setting an example for the masses, because if even the rich approve of unwinding, then everyone should. The tithing cults were part of a calculated plan to root unwinding in the national psyche.”

Miracolina can’t keep herself from raising her hand. “Excuse me,” she tells the instructor, “but I’m Catholic and don’t belong to a tithing cult. So how do you account for me?”

She thought the teacher might say, You’re the exception that proves the rule, or something equally insipid, but she doesn’t. Instead she only says, “Hmm, that’s interesting. I bet Lev would love to talk to you about that.”

To Miracolina, that’s the worst threat the teacher could make, and she knows it. It keeps Miracolina quiet. Even so, her resistance to the resistance is well known in the mansion, and she is called in for an unwanted audience with the boy who didn’t detonate.

•   •   •

It happens on Monday morning. She’s pulled out of her intolerable therapy group and taken to a section of the mansion she hasn’t seen before—escorted by not one, but two resistance workers. Although she can’t be sure, she suspects at least one of them is armed. They take her to a plant-filled arboretum, all curved glass and sunshine, kept heated and restored to its former glory. In the center is a mahogany table and two chairs. He’s already there, sitting in one of the chairs, the boy at the center of this bizarre hero worship. She sits across from him and waits for him to speak first. Even before he speaks, she can tell he’s genuinely interested in her: the only square peg in the whole mansion who can’t be whittled round.

“So what’s up with you?” he says after studying her for a few moments. She’s offended by the informality of the question—as if her whole stance on everything occurring in this place is a matter of “something being up.” Well, today she’ll make it clear to him that her defiance is more than just attitude.

“Are you actually interested in me, clapper, or am I just the bug you can’t squash beneath your iron boot?”

He laughs at that. “Iron boot—that’s a good one.” He lifts his foot to show her the sole of his Nike. “I’ll admit there may be some stomped spiders between the treads, but that’s about it.”

“If you’re going to give me the third degree,” she tells him, “let’s get it over with. Best to withhold food or water; water is probably best. I’ll get thirsty before I get hungry.”

He shakes his head in disbelief. “Do you really think I’m like that? Why would you think that?”

“I was taken by force, and you’re keeping me here against my will,” she says, leaning across the table toward him. She considers spitting in his face, but decides to save that gesture as punctuation for a more appropriate moment. “Imprisonment is still imprisonment, no matter how many layers of cotton you wrap it in.” That makes him lean farther away, and she knows she’s pushed a button. She remembers seeing those pictures of him back when he was all over the news, wrapped in cotton and kept in a bombproof cell.

“I really don’t get you,” he says, a bit of anger in his voice this time. “We saved your life. You could at least be a little grateful.”

“You have robbed me, and everyone here, of their purpose. That’s not salvation, that’s damnation.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Now it’s her turn to get angry. “Yes, you’re sorry I feel that way, everyone’s sorry I feel that way. Are you going to keep this up until I don’t feel that way anymore?”

He stands up suddenly, pushing his chair back, and paces, fern leaves brushing his clothes. She knows she’s gotten to him. He seems like he’s about to storm out, but instead takes a deep breath and turns back to her.

“I know what you’re going through,” he says. “I was brainwashed by my family to actually want to be unwound—and not just by my family, but by my friends, my church, everyone I looked up to. The only voice who spoke sense was my brother Marcus, but I was too blind to hear him until the day I got kidnapped.”

“You mean see,” she says, putting a nice speed bump in his way.

“Huh?”

“Too blind to see him, too deaf to hear him. Get your senses straight. Or maybe you can’t, because you’re senseless.”

He smiles. “You’re good.”

“And anyway, I don’t need to hear your life story. I already know it. You got caught in a freeway pileup, and the Akron AWOL used you as a human shield—very noble. Then he turned you, like cheese gone bad.”

“He didn’t turn me. It was getting away from my tithing, and seeing unwinding for what it is. That’s what turned me.”

“Because being a murderer is better than being a tithe, isn’t that right, clapper?”

He sits back down again, calmer, and it frustrates her that he is becoming immune to her snipes.

“When you live a life without questions, you’re unprepared for the questions when they come,” he says. “You get angry and you totally lack the skills to deal with the anger. So yes, I became a clapper, but only because I was too i

There is an intensity about him now, and a moistness to his eyes. Miracolina can tell that he is sincere, and that this is not just a show for her. Maybe he’s even saying more than he meant to say. She begins to wonder if she has misjudged him, and then gets angry at herself for wondering such a thing.