No One Is Born Complete.

No one is born complete.

Traumerei Hodges considered this when he ran away.

No one is born complete.

And Trau considered this when he came back.

The moon, that round-faced slut lantern, was making her rounds at all the doors that night, and the regime lay in bloody, still-beating tatters at the feet of the people. It had only lasted a year, and the toppling had been a diminutive two weeks itself, and now no one knew what to do.

Just weeks ago, bombs had shaken the earth, new faults in the planet’s crust prying open at their bellicosity, awakening the glowing, viscid mantle. The house’s façade had been charred by the explosions, the water tasted like bodies, and even the rats hid. Trau had retreated to the soft, mysterious underside of his pillow, a fever raging in his body, counting minutes in his head in a traitorous summons back to the old days. Beneath the velvet curtains of his eyelids, a scene from television played in his head, townsfolk jettisoning their calendars and clocks and birth certificates into wondrous fires, the smoke carrying away all time and proof that these people ever came into the world.

From this day onward, the Leader had declared, timekeeping shall be done away with. We are putting ourselves in chains, grinding our own bones in the gears of timepieces, torturing ourselves with minutes and seconds. Burn your birth certificates. You create your own age now, and you may change this whenever you feel the need; documentation will not be necessary. Burn your clocks. No more fear of being late, no more undue stress over the question of punctuality. Burn your calendars. Days, months, years, what does it even matter? When did the sun and seasons stop being good enough? I will tell you when to work, when to celebrate, when to sleep, or dance, or fight. Only the lovers of timekeeping need concern themselves with them now, the rest of us need not any longer.

The coup, the takeover, all of it had been so sudden, no one had known what to think. Suddenly a man was in the White House setting fire to the congressional records, preaching radical love, claiming a former republic a totalitarian state united under unconditional universal love.

No one was born complete. In the kitchen on the chipped retro red plastic table stood a green knobby vase, like the shed skin of some great grassy porcelain insect. Within the vase stood peonies. They were beautiful, flakes, skirts of color sewn together at a button of dewy, curling pistils and stamens. The rhapsodic flowers had overlooked a morning-drowsy Trau as he teased his lip with the same spoonful of cereal but did not eat it. Within the boy had been a hole, expanding and contracting with the motions of his breathing. It was simple, unobtrusive and did not ask much, but it was insistent nonetheless.

Aime, the boy’s mother, understood, without either of them ever having to exchange a word. Understood that he would leave, understood the lacuna. From a distant place, people screamed. But within the house was the comptine of a cricket.

Alslam, the boy’s sister, was not so empathetic, and instead asked her brother if he’d forgotten how to feed himself, with she hoped, a wry enough tone. Als found herself too often caught up in how she might sound to others. After all, nobody in the world could hear your voice the way you heard it, something involving sound waves moving through bone and cartilage to your auditory center, versus moving through air to the ears of everyone else. This established a permanent segregation between oneself and the rest of the world, the tragedy, or blessing, of voice and sound wave behavior.

Trau reddened and dropped the spoon back into its chipped bowl, irritated at himself at being caught in a situation typical of only him. He leveled his gaze into his sister’s pretty vulpine face and proclaimed himself not hungry. Then he got up and left the room, specter-like, without another word.

That night he departed the house with nothing but the clothes on his body, escaped into the fire of revolution, the smoke of Gotterdammerung. Somewhere in some otherworldly television screen the clocks and calendars and birth papers were magically returning from the flames, condensing from smoke into the plasma of fire, and from fire, solid form, back into the hands of those who’d held them.

The enemies of the regime were raising hell, condemning love, shouting into the night their right for hatred and bitterness and bigotry. They lit fuses, prayed to an avenging god, and pitched into the beds of the people the seeds that would bloom into roses of conflagration. Trau walked along the streets and flinched when a bloody firework distantly burst, yet was reminded of the gypsy-skirt peonies in that ceramic husk. The world had both flowers of beauty and flowers of horror; they could end up right next to each other.

He slipped quietly along the wreckage and rubbish in the streets until he came to a whole block of the smoking skeletons of firebombed buildings. An extreme unction of blood thickened with ashes and plaster dust leaked out in a slow river onto the cracked asphalt; meeting the orange magma miles underneath. From the darkness, the ruins, someone whispered his name. Traumerei. “Dreaming.”

He gave a start, but stood rooted to the spot. One of the first things on the Leader’s agenda once he seized power was to reassign names. To combat xenophobia and encourage a harmonious society, everybody was named a foreign word for “love”, “peace”, “dream”, “harmony”, etc. Many railed against the fact that they’d been renamed “Alslam”, from “al-Slam”, the Arabic word for peace and also their dominant religion. But the Leader gave them a stiff ultimatum – accept the name, or disappear.

“Hello?” Trau called, his voice wilting as soon as it left his mouth. He was scared. The night was perfectly still, there was not even the rumble of far-off explosions. “Hello?” he entreated again, though this time it seemed as if he were talking to himself. From behind a cloud, the moon peeked her pearly half-face. Instantly, the deserted avenue was illuminated, bathed in an otherworldly sheen. Trau peered toward where the voice had issued, behind a sea anemone of metal tubing, arms angling cruelly toward heaven. He took a tentative step toward the pile. The moonlight mounted in its intensity, pouring silver onto the world. From the depths of the tubing, there was a twin glitter. The boy knelt to get a closer look at the thing.

Two filmy blue eyes, a nose, a mouth and cheekbones resolved themselves from the rubble, dusted with ash and powdered debris. A beautiful face. Trau gasped, hands flying to his mouth. Stumbling to his feet, he stepped backward and backward, but the features of the girl remained perfectly still. He turned and ran, unwinding distance between him and the face.

Love thy neighbor, or else. That was the paradigm of the Regime of Love. Hate groups were dismantled and put behind bars for life; hate speech and slurs were given a night in prison and mandatory education on the culture of the targeted group; all media was scoured for intolerant speech, which was promptly thrown out and the producers punished accordingly. People were encouraged to report prejudiced behavior to the neighborhood chapter of the Human Anti-Defamation League. If you can’t love unconditionally, you’re despicable, because there would be no world without love. You would never have been born, I would never have been born, human life would have been a microscopic blip on the face of the earth. Whites and blacks, rich and poor, intellectual and mentally disabled, Christian fundamentalists and gays, were forced to embrace and gaze into each other’s eyes, and learn about other’s lives and families.

Trau just couldn’t get the face out of his mind. It was a ghostly, ghastly face, but beautiful in its brutality. The most beautiful face he had ever seen…He wanted to brush the dirt from her fine features, wash her pale skin until it was luminous, close her eyes against seeing any more of the world’s ugly fury. He had slowed to a halting stroll by now, holding his forearms against his ribs. This was half from the pain in his side and half trying to catch in his hand the unnameable feeling that was taking hold of his insides. How strangely buoyant it was…He couldn’t keep his thoughts in a straight line. He wandered the dirtied streets in a diaphanous suspended reality. The hole within him was reduced to irrelevancy.

The next day Trau found himself right where he’d started, in the quaint little block that his house lived in, and returned home. The next week, the opposition brought in their tanks, the Leader was killed, and the Regime of Love was over. The next week Trau collapsed in bed, feverish, lightheaded, and plagued by a feeling of a precious thing lost. The end of an era, the end of a piece of his heart that would never unlatch from the beautiful silver thing he had seen, the girl that was even then falling back into incoherent atoms. Or being swept into an underground gutter.

Once he had passed, on the way home from school, a nondescript man with a rope around his neck, hanging from a stoplight. There was a sign around his neck that said, “Greg Borton. Hates women. Rips off minorities. Spat on the rainbow flag. Similar-minded individuals – watch your back.” Greg’s tongue, distended and livid blue, lolled from between the cracked worms of his lips. Some invisible physical force kept the man slowly spinning in one direction, then coming to a halt and unwinding in the opposite direction. Oncoming cars changed lanes to avoid the hanged man. One car rammed gladly into Greg’s ankles, letting his body slide up over the windshield and over the top of the car. He swung like an odious pendulum for a while afterward. Trau intermittently felt nauseous for weeks following what he had seen.

Not even a year and the system had begun to decay. A totalitarian state that preached absolute love had committed what could not be considered an act of love from any viewpoint.

All the final week of the dictatorship, Als lived in dread, her hands unable to stop shaking, humming songs to herself that sounded like the nervous whine of a mosquito to anyone else. She laid her cold hands on her brother’s hot forehead; no one was cured. Only after the moonlight girl’s features blurred over in Trau’s memory was he able to sit up in bed and smile hesitantly at his sister.

No one was born complete. A missing piece frays or burns or infects around the edges, whispers to unconsciousness, creeps to the brain, lashes out. Maybe at one person, maybe at a group for some unresolved childhood slight or scare. Maybe the whisper becomes a shout, telling him to burn hatred from the face of the earth.

No one could remain whole, either.

Als thought of the scar on her spine through which a cyst had left her, almost as old as she was, and never leaving her. Aime thought of the man she still loved, and would never be able to stop loving, even though he’d been gone long enough to never come back. He had told her the secret, the thing that all human beings have in common, and she had passed it on to her children. Trau thought of it often but right then he was thinking of his lightheadedness, how the fleet of balloons in his skull had begun to deflate. Everyday his brain inadvertently touched less and less on the exquisite corpse, but the feeling of incompleteness grew worse. The hole, amplified by loss, became an abyss.

The people thought of the empire, broken into unrecognizable pieces, and what would happen next. The provisional government now in place had not even issued a statement. Now that they had won, the enemies of love had diminished in their vehemence, gone back to their homes, too tired to crusade and questioning their ideals. Blood had lost its luster to them, fire hurt their eyes.

From the abyss, the dreamer's matrix of galaxies, blinked the beginning of the world. It was evening. Quiet. A soft breeze blew in from the open window. The brilliant peonies were now hung upside-down from the window latch, drying slowly. The green vase stood empty, a waiting skin, a shell in which one could hear the sea. Trau was eating cereal for dinner because he felt like it; he was on his third bowl. Now that he was better, his appetite was returning in threefolds. Als hummed a scale for once, to the top then down. She tried to remember the second note, clung on and explored the successively higher pitches, the pattern of major and minor notes. Aime was scrubbing the counter, but looking at the stars.

From the nostalgic, leaning depths of the house was the comptine of a cricket.