2028, p.23
2028, page 23
She looked up from what she’d written and primly placed down her pen. “That ‘Second Child Amendment’ your father signed last week. Apparently, it slipped through without anyone knowing.”
“We aren’t ready to discuss that yet,” Montefiore said.
“Well, Commissar Montefiore,” Carmine challenged. “I think we are and should.”
“What?” Madelyn asked. “What is this ‘Second Child Amendment?’ Why haven’t I heard about it?”
“Dad didn’t think you needed to know, Madelyn,” Alexander whispered in confidence to his sister.
“Oh, really, Alex? And why was that?”
“Well, for one thing. It doesn’t involve you, because you’re not married.” His gaze turned accusing. “And you’re not likely to be having any kids.”
She answered his confidential dig with a sibling’s sneer.
“I’ll tell you what it says,” Carmine said.
“You don’t have to do that, Carmine,” Montefiore interjected.
“Yes, Commissar, I do. Three days ago, Premier Kenten signed into the record that, after her second child, a mother can opt to have a…pro-ce-dure.” She strung that word out to let it soak in.
“A procedure,” Madelyn said warily as she fleshed a glare at her bother. “What kind of…pro-ce-dure, Carmine?”
“It’ll be no more invasive then going to the dentist to get your teeth cleaned,” Montefiore assured.
“It’s only a little pinch, I’m told,” Alexander said.
Tim cringed. “Ugh. I hate getting my teeth cleaned.”
“Yeah. Okay, right,” Carmine dismissed them. “Apparently word had gotten out that parents were planning to stand up against having their third children taken away for the BlueShirt Brigade training. So. The regime has offered the mothers an option…”
Madelyn visibly stiffened over what she feared was coming.
“That option,” Carmine stated, “is voluntary sterilization.”
“What the FUCK, Randy?” Madelyn blasted at Montefiore. “What the God-damned fuck! Sterilization? What is this? Nazi Germany?”
“It’s only an option, Madelyn,” he excused. “It’s still a woman’s choice. And the BlueShirt Youth Brigade is at force now, so we’ll need fewer children.”
“A woman’s choice. Sure, Randy. She can either give up her kid or get sterilized to keep from having to do that,” Madelyn said.
“I know what,” Tim offered blithely. “The mother can choose an abortion of her third kid.”
“Abortion is against the law, and a sin, Tim,”Alexander reminded him.
“And this sterilization thing fucking isn’t?” Madelyn demanded.
“Well, Madelyn, it actually isn’t,” Alexander said dourly. “There is no mention of sterilization in the Bible.”
“But there is in Hitler’s playbook,” Carmine said.
“Whoa, there, woman!” Montefiore seethed threateningly as he rose from his seat in confrontation. “You have gone way too deep, there...way, way too deep! “
For the first, maybe second, maybe third time since her father declared himself Premier in 2022, she thought that maybe he should have been removed from office back in 2020. There might have still been time, then, to keep him from going too far like this. She’d seen the warning signs of gloat in him since his reality TV show days when his power started surging. But with this Second Child Amendment meted out at his pleasure through another fucking executive order, he’d gone further out than she might had imagined.
“Have I dug too deep, there, Commissar?” Carmine said. “No, sir. The Real-American people need to know about this, and I’ve decided to announce it in my show. Tonight.”
“You can’t do that, Carmine. Not before Premier Kenton does,” Montefiore warned.
“As head anchor, I can say whatever the hell I want in my show, if it’s the truth. Right Greg?”
“Well, yeah, but Carmine? There are limits—even to the truth” the old man of the airwaves cautioned.
“The hell with the truth!” Montefiore shot back at her. “This is for the benefit of the administration and, by extension, the Real-American people as a whole! You say anything about this on your fucking show, and I’ll have you bounced back to that the ditzy-blonde slot on The Morning Koffee Klotch.”
“That’s not your call, Randy,” Madelyn said.
“No, Madelyn.” Alexander countered. “It’s mine.” He looked at the inaccessible Carmine. “And I will do as the Commissar just said. So don’t report it, Carmine.” He grinned condescendingly at her, as if to convey: Who’s in the head chair, now, eh, Carmine? Hah! Touché! He took a satisfied, meaningful pull on his now-extinguished pipe.
“I’ll hold it until day after tomorrow, Alex, then we’ll talk,” Carmine said back to him. “By the way…” she reached down into a little “Dora the Explorer” book-pack her daughter had given her. “Did any of you know about this?” She held up a paperback book with a blue cover with a wide red stripe on its outer edge and a white star in the upper right-hand corner. Over this was emblazoned in gold: “The Neo-Publica Manifesto” and beneath that: “By Silvia Margoles.”
“Holy crap!” Alexander blathered.
“Where did you get that?” Montefiore asked.
“It’s an advance copy, delivered to my office first thing this morning. There’s some interesting stuff in here, as you can well imagine. Including the U.S. Constitution in full in the appendix.”
“That’s just God Damned illegal!” Montefiore shot back. “Who published that thing? We’ll shut them the fuck down.”
Carmine flipped to the Copyright page. “They’re out of Canada…let’s see…London, Ontario. It’s got a Canadian copyright. We can’t touch them.”
“Let me have that.”
“Sorry, Commissar, I can’t. It was sent to me. It’s network property.”
“Fuck that shit!” Montefiore said. “Let me have it!”
“No.”
“Actually, Randy, Carmine’s right. It was sent to her and belongs to the network,” Madelyn told him.
“Then I’ll take it, Carmine,” Alexander said. He reached out his hand for it. “As I am the network.”
“I won’t let you have this any more than I can’t let the Commissar have it, Alex. Reporter privilege. It was addressed to me. You can buy a copy once it comes out, though.”
“God Damnit, Carmine! All right you can break the Second Child Amendment thing on you news report. In three days. No. On Saturday when viewership is down. Now give me the God-damned book.”
“Okay, then. You all heard that.”
“Yeah, I’ll back you up, Carmine,” Madelyn said.
Carmine handed the Manifesto to him, then looked over at Madelyn. “You want one, too? They sent others, and you may want to look at it before you go cover the Neo Publica rally. You know, homework.”
“Homework. Absolutely. Thanks Carmine. I’ll drop by your office later today.” Madelyn replied
————————————————————————-
Sitting in the back of her father’s limo gave Madelyn a sense she was imprisoned in a rich, leather and oak, gold appointed padded cell. It smelled so new, yet so old; used, but not used, to accommodate Premier Kenton’s alleged germ-phobia. Even the germ-phobia had been just another one of his lies, as he sat across from his daughter with his ditzy, silver-tined haired bimbo of the week, dipping his fat fingers into a paper cup of McDonald’s fries without fear of picking up any germs.
Madelyn felt the presence her brother next to her, wearing his black suit and long overcoat and replicating the way their father dressed. Her deeper self had been held captive far too long by these two ignoramus men. They had systematically removed her from the inner sanctum of the family, especially since the Premier’s ex-wife, Alicia, had resorted to suicide four years earlier. Alicia had been her anchor, as her father and brother had now become her sinker.
For now, her prison was the Lincoln Tunnel traffic jam in her realized nightmare of helplessness. She had tunnel-phobia, anyway, and over the past fifteen minutes she had broken out in a sweat. Her breaths had shortened, and she was starting to feel suffocated. The dirty, porcelain-tiled walls seemed to be closing in on her. Opening the window would do no good this enclosure seething with carbon monoxide and the echoing cacophony of traffic noise.
She coughed lightly and called over her shoulder to the driver. “Lars, could you turn up the air-conditioning a little?”
“Yes’m,” he replied, and did.
“That new hotel should make lots of money, Dad,” Alexander said about the opening of the Kenton Plaza in Secaucus, where they’d just been.
“Yes,” replied the Swedish bimbo, with a single abrupt nod, which bounced the cute, silver-colored bob of her hair. The action appeared to add an exclamation point to the only English word she apparently knew.
“We can hope so, Alex,” Kenton replied wearily as he gazed out the window at the traffic. “My hotels always make money. You know that.” He absently popped another French fry into his mouth and made a protracted ceremony out of chewing on it.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Dad,” Madelyn said.
“What? Do what?” he said as he returned his attention to them and added another fry to the visible mush in his mouth.
“Those French fries and cheeseburgers. Maybe you should cut back on all that crap. When was the last time you had your cholesterol checked? And your blood pressure? Alex and I are worried about you.”
“Hey, Maddie,” Alexander said. “Dad loves his Big Macs, ya know?”
“Yes,” agreed Kenton’s Sweedish girlfriend. She then lifted a French fry from the cup.
“I’m fine, Maddie,” Kenton told her. “I’m healthy as a bull.”
“According to who? That doctor in Times Square?”
Kenton nodded. “He’s a perfect doctor.”
Maybe for him, Madelyn surmised. But that quack was far from perfect. He‘d probably gotten his medical degree from an ad on a matchbook cover. But no matter—he told the Premier whatever he’d wanted to hear. “Okay, Dad. Whatever.” She looked worriedly out the backseat window again as she fussed with her cellular phone. No stored messages from Sarah, her on-again-off-again partner. “What is the holdup here?” she asked frustratedly.
“Don’t know m’am,” Lars the driver said.
“One of my tanks,” Kenton blandly replied.
“Shit, Dad. There’s someone driving a tank through the Lincoln Tunnel?”
“Yeah,” Kenton chuckled. “Drove. Last Monday.”
She remembered the the tank-in-the-Lincoln-Tunnel snippet on a sidebar in Tuesday’s newscasts. She passed it off as just another stunt from one of the Regime’s rich supporters, and never thought to attribute such a circus act to the Regime, itself.
“He made a bet with the Soviet Premier that he could pass one of his new tanks through the tunnel on a drive from Jersey City to Port Authority in the city,” Alexander told his sister.
“So. Now a fucking tank is corking up the tunnel,” Madelyn said nervously.
“Not now,” Alexander muttered back at her. “Last Monday.”
“No, it isn’t, Maddie,” Kenton said. “It made it through to Port Authority. And now there’s still some roadwork going on in here from where the treads chopped up the pavement a little. Anyway, I won the bet.”
Maddie shook her head. “Jesus, Dad! A bet with the Soviet Premier? What did you win? Estonia?”
“Aw, come on Maddie. Stop picking on Dad...Yo, Lars!” Alexander called over his shoulder “Why don’t you flick on the siren and the lights? Maybe it’ll get us through here faster.”
Madelyn glanced around at how tightly they were trapped in. “We won’t get very far, you dunce. You know? At times, Alex you can be a real idiot.” ‘At times’ is too generous, she said to herself.
“No. Not Estonia,” Kenton told her. “Vlad tells me he has a special prize waiting for me when I get over to Helsinki next month.”
Madelyn supposed it would be another white-blonde headed woman in a tunic to act as her father’s slave for the week. “Well, that’s nice.” She looked nervously ahead, trying to will them passage through the clot of honking traffic.
“When is that, meeting, Dad?” Alexander said. “I’ll need to set up a reporter pool,”
“Yeah, but you’re not gonna record our meeting. It’s closed, totally closed, to everyone but the Premier and me.”
“I told Greg that. It’s just for the after-story, and your comments.”
Kenton chewed on another fry, and sipped his Coke. “It’s on the fifteenth. I think I’ll have a little announcement to make afterwords. Then I’ll make it a bigger one at my December rally in New Orleans.”
“Yes!”
“Maybe you two shouldn’t talk so openly about this,” Madelyn told her father, as she inclined her head toward his Swedish girlfriend. “You never know.”
“What?” Kenton said. “A spy? Oh, come on, Maddie.” He turned to his girlfriend. “Sveltva, dear, are you a Swedish spy?”
She nodded. “Yes!” she enthused.
“See?” Kenton replied. “Sveltva’s no spy. She can’t even speak English. Right, sweetie?”
“Yes!”
He offered up his cup of fries to her like a doggie-treat. “Here, dear. Have another one.”
Madelyn despised the way her father demeaned women so, especially since Alicia had died. But even she hadn’t been saved from his gross public innuendos and put-downs. He had a talent for diminishing anyone who posed was a threat to him. And women posed a threat. Alicia especially—until she couldn’t take any more, then killed herself. This surfaced that topic that had been brimming beneath the surface of her thinking for the last two days. “Dad. What is this ’Second Child Amendment’ you authorized?”
Alexander sighed out: Oh, Jesus, as Kenton glared across at her. He leveled the telling “Kenton Squint” at her. “How did you know about that, Madelyn?” he accused. “I wasn’t gonna announce that until next week.”
God. Madelyn thought. He’s gonna send me to my room without dinner. “Carmine Valenzia’s gonna cover it on her show on Saturday night.”
Kenton inattentively popped another french fry into the potato field he’d made in his mouth. “What the fuck, Alex!” he groused at his son. “Why are you gonna let her do that, son? Fire her! Tomorrow!” Kenton blathered. His voice then suddenly tightened, and he began coughing. Alex hopped across to his father as his face was turning red. He slapped him between the shoulders and the Premier regurgitated a blob into his napkin. He heaved a sigh, caught his breath, and cleared his throat. He then took up another fry.
“I want you to go see my doctor, Dad,” Madelyn said.
“Fuck that! I want to know why you are allowing that gypsy broad to preempt my policy announcement?” he barked at Alexander.
“Why announce it at all, Dad? Why even propose it?” Madelyn asked.
He thought about his answer. “Because I can, Maddie. And because I will.” He turned to his son: “And your reporter will not. End of story.”
“Yes!” The Swedish girlfriend nodded emphatically.
“Okay, Dad. She’s gone, okay?”
“Tomorrow,” Kenton pressed, then coughed twice.
“Yes, Dad. I promise.” The traffic finally started inching into a crawl.
“Ah,” Kenton said as he finished off the last two fries. “We’re on the move.” Another dry cough.
“Oh,” Alexander said as he reached into his satchel. “I meant to show you this.” He held up his copy of “The Neo-Publica Manifesto.”
Kenton squinted at it. “What is that?”
“It’s the manifesto written by to Neo-Publican people. They’re having a big rally next month. I guess they wanted this out in time for that.”
Kenton took the book and thumbed through it. “What’s it about? Is it good?”
Madelyn simpered. “Well, it’s not exactly a novel, Dad.”
“It’s about the old America. There’s even a copy of the U.S. Constitution in the back.”
“What the fuck?” Kenton sputtered. “That’s illegal!”
Madelyn wondered what “Illegal” even meant anymore.
“I’m gonna fucking shut that publisher down for doing this fucking book. Alex, I want you to publicly ban this book on our news-shows.”
“Yoo can’t shut down the publisher, Dad” Madelyn told him.
“Why the fuck not? This is Real-America, God-damnit! I can shut down anyone want! That’s the fucking business of doing business.” His face had blushed red again.
“Yes!”
“Oh, quiet, Sveltva,” he said. “Where is this god-damned publisher?”
“They’re out of Canada, Dad. We can’t shut them down.”
“We can, and we will. I don’t care if I have to invade those fuckin’ Canuks to do it.” Kenton sputtered on. “We’re gonna end that book. That fucking Constitution, again! Jesus!”
“Calm down, Dad,” Madelyn tried to reassure him. “You’re gonna choke again.” She gazed at the book cover and forgot about her tunnel claustrophobia. She’s been up well into the night reading the copy Carmine had given her.
She couldn’t put it down.
25
The Neo-Publica Rally
December 2
A
ileen’s breath steamed as she blew into her cupped hands. The hard, early December chill had hit Denver hard and the snow-faced Rockies loomed high in her view from her seat at Mile-High Field. The jagged mountains rising into the deep blue, pre-dusk western sky gave her heart that there was something greater than emotional idealism in the air. There was—seemingly for the first time—hope.
She looked down twenty or so nearly filled rows of seats to the football field. She saw Sylvia on a dais built on the fifty-yard line in the center of the field giving Piet and Hugh some instructions. She then went and sat back down in her chair as Hugh went to the podium to adjust the microphone, and Piet went off to the side to fetch something. He brought some auxiliary paperwork to her. She continued to study her keynotes as though trying to memorize them. How small she appeared; how large she loomed.
