Manna
A young man cuts through the crowds of The Times Square Bazaar, his pace is urgent, but controlled to avoid suspicion. He expertly dodges the floating hologram pop-up ads targeting the pedestrians. He chooses to travel through the crowds for protection from the surveillance advertisements, sticking close behind to briefly hijack their identities. He shadows the unsuspecting tourists, drafting like a race car, gracefully upgrading to faster dance partners, anticipating their abrupt stops to watch the glowing projections promising the latest health and beauty improvements.
Despite his best efforts, a sensor will occasionally get a lucky read on his biosignature, activating a customized glowing window that greets him with, “Jorge Washington! Have you been checked for lung bugs? Act now and you could be the first diagnosis in your area!”
The identification photo displayed in the corner of the floating screen is for an older, more rugged version of the boy. The picture is his father’s, as is the weathered leather satchel slung across his chest, in stark contrast to the bright white uniform worn by every citizen.
Young Jorge didn't just take on the family name, he took on the family identity. He knows how hard his father fought to feed his family food, real food, like their ancestors. Food that gave them strength and mental clarity, food that made them grow taller and run faster than the other kids. The people in their outer borough neighborhood were not dependant on the vitamin fortified food that claims to help maintain proper health, but never seems to benefit the perpetually sick population.
Your state designated doctor will tell you that we are all born sick. We have our own unique combination of diseases, allergies, intolerances, and resistances, also known as Original Sickness. Everyone was in need of fixing right out of the womb, everyone a lifelong customer, dependant on the ouroboros of designer foods and drugs to treat, but never cure, their prescribed ailments, with new ones being invented everyday.
Tragic was the new rich, as long as you were already rich. Chronic diseases and the severity of the necessary treatments determined a person’s status in the sympathetic hierarchy. Your illness was your identity. The daily plight of an individual became their story, with their routine hardships competing for pity.
The fashionably sick championed the most frail. The most tragic were the most popular, as long as their burden wasn’t anything dirty or gross like being a homeless garbage burner. Your personal, customized, life-threatening diagnosis needed to contain enough important sounding medical language to prove that your pampered life was in more danger than that of your neighbors. An exotic disease paired with a sob story could become a career. The goal was to collect a large following, an audience for your suffering, with the hope that your story would eventually land you a pharmaceutical sponsorship.
Jorge’s father had left his family an even greater gift: an undocumented death. His ghost identity granted his family the freedom to move through the city under the guise of an unremarkable citizen, taking all his prescribed medications, but truly dying of nothing more than a lifetime of hard work.
The best part of Jorge’s day started with the smell of burning garbage. Jorge breaks from the sea of consumers and heads down a ramp below the streets. A roaring air curtain separates the minty perfume of the sanitized city air from the dense, smokey soup of the industrial zone. Most visitors’ delicate nostrils burn, throats constrict, gagging uncontrollably, gasping for oxygen as if they had been thrown into the vacuum of space.
Jorge had made the trip enough to no longer fear the acrid air, but to even look forward to it. The true stench of death and decay made him feel alive, and hidden within the swirling ashes he could detect the sweet aroma of his destination.
Cooking had been deemed a waste of energy, and marketed as a mysterious, difficult, and potentially unsafe procedure that should only be executed by experts. Rehydration and low watt microwaves were the only legal cooking methods allowed in the massive high rises. Any use of gas or flame indoors was banned under the fire code to avoid potentially endangering thousands of inhabitants crammed into the buildings.
Jorge took a twisting route through the alleys between the factories and incinerators. He had to always assume he was being followed.
Introducing unapproved raw ingredients into the food chain, anything that had not been processed in a federally regulated facility, was considered an act of terrorism, an attempt to poison the people, and overthrow the government as the one safe source of nutrients for its dependant population.
Jorge winds his way to the employee entrance to Incineration Facility #10. His father’s city worker credentials automatically unlocks the door as he approaches, he walks past the security guard with a nod, and continues down to the garbage fields. Bulldozers push piles of trash into huge fire pits at the base of towering smoke stacks that claim to project the pollution into space, but the public is unable to see the sky anymore, so no one truly knew where it went.
Walking to the far side of the massive building, in the shadow of the last smoke stack was an ember of a light coming from a small room. Inside was a crude oven tended by a man and two women. Jorge enters without saying a word, he and the younger of the two women greet each other with a glance and a polite smile. He removes two large cans from the satchel he had been clutching so tightly through the crowds. He opens the cans to reveal freshly ground flour from wheat grown and milled by Jorge’s family.
In return she hands him four round loaves of still warm bread: three for his neighborhood, and the fourth to divide up as payment to make it back through the city.
Her hand brushes over his as she transfers the loaves into his arms, she smiles, avoiding his eye contact, and quickly brushes a small amount of flour off his wrist. They both look over at the man and woman by the oven but their backs are turned.
Jorge looks away to hide his embarrassment, and carefully arranges the loaves in his bag, gently crunching the crispy exterior and releasing their intoxicating aroma.
Their time together was over. He desperately wished he was able to talk to her about anything beyond their routine transaction, but this is the way it had to be done, quickly and efficiently, just like his father had done for years.
They have been doing this since their youth, only ever exchanging pleasantries, but forming a strong bond of trust, a reliable smile, the promise of something better, and the one thing they both looked forward to each day.
Jorge knows that he is not the only messenger she interacts with on a daily basis, but he knew they shared the same feelings, maybe one day when the next generation takes over, maybe then.
He steps one foot out the door, visualizing his return trip, cautious never to retrace the same path.
But today, something was different, he was scared, more scared than when he almost got caught last week, more scared than when his father got sick, more scared than his first day as a runner.
Today he was scared because he knew he could no longer wait, he couldn't wait for things to improve, he couldn't wait a generation to be with her.
With all the courage the young man can muster, he touches his fingers to his lips, and with a puff of flour, blows her a kiss.
THE END
