HUMAN’S RESOURCE FILE

Name: “THE GENERAL”

Current Location: SURFACE

At nine years old, the General, given name irrelevant, grew the largest sugar beet the Minnesota State Fair had ever seen. He got a purple ribbon and his photo in the newspaper, beet hoisted above his head with both hands like the severed head of an enemy clansman.

Saint Anthony’s Home for Boys wouldn’t let him keep the ribbon. The head priest, Father Michael, hung it in the sparse trophy case on display behind the school’s front windows. They said it would inspire envy in the other boys, and they were right. In a place where nobody had anything, envy was as verdant as the home’s hearty crops. An older kid tried to uproot the General’s prized beet before it was ready, but he couldn’t get his grubby fingers deep enough to pull it out. When the General saw the evidence the next day, he started sneaking back out to the fields at night—risking a beating or, worse, the loss of the ability to enter the fair in the first place—to watch the vegetable. As he lay on his stomach between the rows of crops, a weaponless sniper, he would dig a nail into the beet’s skin until it pierced the meat, and then he would put his nail in his mouth. There has never been a better taste. There is no candy in the world like that dirty, stolen sweetness.

The night after he won, the General picked the trophy case lock. Even at nine, he welcomed envy.

That’s when the fights first began.

In the beginning, it was just the boys themselves. But if there is one thing boys don’t know, it is noise control. Soon, their jeers and the sound of young bone against harder young bone became too much to ignore, and Father Michael came looking. Technically, they were fighting for the General’s ribbon. But Father Michael knew, the minute he walked into that musty basement thick with the pubescent smells of sweat and blood and the kind of double-edged terror-thrill that comes from a lack of safety net, that the ribbon itself had nothing to do with it. They were fighting because no one had ever loved them, or because once someone had but then they stopped, by choice or fate or finale. They were fighting because if they didn’t—if they went to bed that night without a swollen lip or a cut over their eye and had to get up again the next day to till someone else’s fields for free, for nothing but the gift of another day over—their bodies would hold none of their own stories. And since they already had no one to claim them, no one who could look at them, dead or alive, and say, Yes, him, he is mine, they had to, at such an early age, become their own, and the only way they knew how to do so was by marring themselves into recognition. To make a history on their skin.

When he stepped into that basement and saw the General with his teeth up to the gums in the calf of another boy, Father Michael recognized all of this—their need and their pain and their thirst for glory, and also what only an adult with no qualms about making a living off the backs of children could recognize: the siren’s call of unadulterated profit.

That was when the real fights began.

Four years later, when the General had decided to run away, he picked the lock to Father Michael’s office, to steal a cashbox the boys whispered about, with a key kept taped to the underside of a drawer. To the General’s utter delight, when he opened the box, underneath crumpled bills he found his purple ribbon. He took the whole thing, key and all. The money ran out quickly, and for a long time that box and its purple ribbon were the only things he owned. The only reminders—unlike the scars he had earned but Father Michael had been paid for—that he was, in fact, his own person.

And when he was thirteen, it was that ribbon that got him work at the Farm.

At the Farm, the General didn’t have to wait to live. He contributed every day, and, in return, he was a part of something real. He attended class, learning about the Bible in a radically different way than at Saint Anthony’s. Instead of the phantasmal, anemic God whose son got hard from blows to both cheeks, at the Farm, he learned about the red-blooded God, the one with fury and grip. The God who practiced envy, who encouraged possessiveness over one’s own belongings as long as all knew that ultimately everything was actually his.

It was in these classes that he learned about the Almighty War. The battle between Heaven and Hell that had been raging for so much longer than humans could comprehend. The priests at Saint Anthony’s made it sound like the events that took place in Heaven and Hell were so long ago, they seemed almost mythical. Not the places themselves—those were real and thriving. But their battles, their threats and their victories. Their losses. According to the priests, Heaven and Hell were relics of the past. Heaven and Hell were done with their war, their moment in the historical sun. They were backdrops now. But at the Farm, the General learned that the war was ever raging, and constantly in need of more forces. It was here that he also learned about the water. The river Lethe, as the texts called it. The river in Hell that would wipe a person’s memory. A tricky battle tactic, like all of Hell’s tactics. So even if the Farm sent soldiers from the surface to fight from within on behalf of Heaven, a Trojan horse approach, they would arrive in Hell and instantly forget their purpose, falling into lockstep with the other side.

The Farm was a paradise, but paradise always comes at a price. The strongest of God’s warriors, those chosen by the Holy Father or by battle, or because of size or circumstance, had to make it to the Almighty War, and they couldn’t be tempted into complacency by the trickery of Hell. They had to learn how to be strong, to resist the water and keep their wits—their decency—about them, so they could be called back to Heaven once they had fought and won.

The General was the strongest the Farm had seen yet. He could tend to a breech calf with the same calm certainty as he could to a fellow soldier’s jammed weapon under fire. From the moment he was found undernourished and exhausted at the Farm’s gate, purple ribbon pinned to his lapel, tattered and almost white from the sun, he had worked and believed so hard that he quickly became one of the Holy Father’s favorites.

That was, until the General got the first—and only—girl he ever loved pregnant.

Elsie was a year younger than him, and she kept her long fair hair in a single plait down her back. It took him two years to gather the courage to speak to her, as the boys and girls were not encouraged to engage at their age. But he always knew where in the room she was—he could feel her pulse as if it gave off waves of sound tuned just for him.

They hid it for as long as they could, but when her bump—six months large and Elsie beyond all reasonable excuses—was discovered by another girl in her bunk, Elsie was dragged into the Farm’s center by her hair. The General was at the armory at the time; he had risen through the ranks from farmer to soldier to head boy of the Holy Father’s militia. It was his job to keep the guns cleaned and the ammo accounted for. To always be prepared.

By the time he climbed the hill and saw the crowd, Elsie was barely breathing. The blows to her stomach were nothing compared to the blows to her face, as if the premarital pregnancy—since it didn’t spring from the Holy Father—wasn’t as insulting to God as her face, which invited such a possibility. Lying in the dirt, she looked like a peach neglected on the tree, the kind that gets so swollen with ripeness, it is bruised by a strong breeze. The kind that bursts open and rots into the ground before anyone ever knows it’s ready to be eaten.

Once the General had made it back to the armory, shouldered a rifle, and run back up the hill, shoving his way through the raging crowd, he found Elsie still on the ground, the Holy Father holding to her cheek the thick metal cross he wore around his neck. It took the General a second to distinguish the red of the metal from the red of her blood, but once recognized, they seemed such obviously different colors. The first was a lit-from-within red, molten red, the kind of screaming red that can come only from deep, intimate contact with fire. The Holy Father pressed the neon cross to her cheek until the smell of burning flesh hit the crowd, even as Elsie had stopped moving entirely. The General had seen the Holy Father brand people before—or, rather, he had seen the aftermath. He preached that the scars were necessary for God to know whom to save once the Almighty War had been won: the scars were needed to prove who had known to forgo the water and had infiltrated Hell with honest hearts, as opposed to the usual sinful, thirsty masses. But never before had the General smelled it. The gummy char, mingled with the smell of hay and the faint wind-whipped whiff of Elsie’s white-blond hair, made the General sick with rage. He clocked the Holy Father with the butt of his rifle, picked up the fifteen-year-old mother of his child in one arm, hoisted her over his shoulder, and walked out, knowing that when the gate slammed shut behind them, it was to stay that way, permanently.

He didn’t know if Elsie would make it through the night, let alone the next three months of her pregnancy, or the unforeseeable future of their lives. But somehow, as they camped in the desert and stole provisions from gas stations that spotted the sparse and sun-blinded land, her face healed, save the branding scar, and that second heartbeat inside her beat on. At night, as they dined on beef jerky and pop, the General would press his ear against her belly and listen, tuning out the put-put-put of the cactus pygmy owls and ceaseless squeak-squeak-squeak of killdeers, trying to find that distinctly human thump, thump, thump. It wasn’t until his daughter (although he had no way of knowing she was a daughter at the time) kicked him in the face that he knew their baby had survived.

He wasn’t prepared for how relieved he would feel. It wasn’t until then, his cheek burning with the tiny pressure of her foot, his heart soaring out of his throat and into the New Mexican desert, that he knew he wanted this child, and not only because, beyond that purple ribbon, she was the only thing in the world that was really his.

He just simply wanted her.

Elsie lasted until the girl turned three.

They had been surviving on the road, the General taking seasonal farming jobs and Elsie tending to the child. All in all, it wasn’t as bad a life as he had lived before, and he even managed to believe what they shared could be considered happiness. It was certainly happy enough for him. But one day he came back to their motel room to find the child alone, the TV on, and a note tucked into the Bible.

Elsie was going home.

He knew that they wouldn’t let her back into the Farm. He knew that, on some level, she must’ve known it too. Maybe she was ready to go fight in the Almighty War. She already wore the brand. Or maybe she preferred nothing to being with him. With them.

In that moment, he did what he always did when he felt the edge of panic, that loose-rock decline into the unknown. He went for the cashbox, the key where he always kept it around his neck. He was eager to hold the ribbon, to pull its tattered length through his fingers. But then his daughter reached up her hands for him, even though he had never been the one to hold her, and he stopped. She had his eyes, and as he lifted her up and into him, the key pressed into his chest and he realized that he was the father now. He could create purpose out of nothing; he could give them both—and anyone else who wanted it—something for which to live, or otherwise die.

At that point, the General hadn’t entirely stopped believing in the Almighty War, but he wasn’t the same fervent boy he had been when he first arrived at the Farm either. Now it seemed to him to be more of a convenient tale, like a fable or national anthem: something that served a worthy purpose, even as a lie. It was a whip without the bite, death-march shackles without any chains. It was the excuse people needed to give up their freedom, to submit. Which, in turn, meant they could get what they truly always wanted: to be cared for. To be a part of something. To be loved. For if he had learned anything in his short life, it was this: when expertly combined, the threat of that which is outside and the promise of being on the inside yielded a special kind of complacency in the weak, which provided a special kind of symbiotic power for those doing the talking. And thanks to the fathers in his life, he knew exactly how to direct that balance of power to his own most profitable benefit.

Of course, he resented Elsie for leaving him alone with this breathing black hole of need, whose arms reached for him the minute he entered the otherwise empty room, even when he had never before held her. But she had his eyes, and as he lifted her up and into him, the motel key that hung from his neck pressing into his chest, he thought he could be his own Holy Father, and hers too. He could create purpose out of nothing. Starting with that purple ribbon, he had been doing it his whole life.

He fished the cashbox key out from the warmth between them—a skeletal thing with an ornamental bow—and decided it would do just fine.

After all, the brand itself has nothing to do with its power to bind.