assisted by a pulley and some rope.
He did not feel exactly like he’d scored,
but now he could observe; that gave him hope.
The first thing he observed once he was in:
A crumpled body through an open door.
His captor was still calling Engadin,
who probably could hear her call no more.
When she discovered this to be the case,
she closed the door behind her for a while.
When she came back, she had composed her face,
but he could tell that she had forced her smile.
“I know that I’m irrational to mourn.
It is more like your people than like mine,
but none of mine have recently been born.
There were but two of us left in the line.”
The boy informed her that such sentiment
was not a central theme as she implied,
but inexperience did not prevent
his feeling sorry that her loved one died.
“Yes, loved one—do you know what those words mean?”
She looked at him, intrigued by his remark.
“With your kind, sex is always so obscene.
There are no families inside that park.”
“I’ve read enough about that sort of thing
to know that what you feel is not so far
as you might think from how we sadly sing
when we have lost a part of who we are.”
Who we are: At first glance, this is inconsistent with the portrayal of the compound as devoid of almost all morality. Perhaps Merrimac is saying that collectivism, though strictly speaking irrational, is an intrinsic human attitude that doesn’t fade away when ethical support systems are removed. Also, this sets up the contrast between the compounders, who are just now starting to drop in numbers due to their lack of values, and their neighbors, who are already effectively extinct because individualism, which is their primary value, discourages rather than encourages procreation.
©2010 Louis A. Merrimac
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