Dorothy Tse
Translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce
Head Start
It is a place where you cannot advance to adulthood without a ‘head start’. As a result, a scar extending from the forehead to the back of the head, rather than age, has become the primary means of distinguishing an adult from a child.
Even several decades ago, there was no one left in the highly commercialized city-state of Region C able to undertake the lengthy process of gestating and then rearing children. A birth rate of almost zero has pushed the city to become the world’s largest market for imported babies. Every year, infants from all over the world are delivered to Region C for inspection, and a small minority are retained by local government authorities. After receiving a “head start,” these chosen few are entered into the state education system and raised into ‘people’. The remaining infants are either marketed as pets or sold on to other regions.
When Shellman first arrived back here from Region C, most of his face was hidden behind a long curtain of hair. A customs officer ordered him to brush it aside as he passed through the immigration inspection channel, only to gasp in alarm when he complied. Many consider the Region C forehead scar to be sacred (Region C is, after all, the most prosperous of the city states), but the grey, centipede-like thing crawling up Shellman’s forehead so shocked the officer that he forgot to inspect Shellman’s enormous leather case; he simply watched as Shellman let his hair fall back into place and stepped expressionlessly through the checkpoint.
During the economic depression of the ’50s, our city exported quite a number of babies to Region C, and Shellman was among them. He was already three years old at the time and therefore did not comply with the region’s child import regulations, but his parents made some adjustments to his birth certificate and brought him to the child traffickers along with his fifteen-month-old little brother; he was small and scrawny enough to be convincing, and they allowed him through. But he and his little brother were destined for different things, as Shellman was one of the lucky few selected for a head start. After extensive testing, he was taken into a brightly lit room. He could not have known it at the time, but the stark lighting was to allow the officiants a clearer view of the folds and twists of his brain. Under the effect of a particular medicine, harmful tissue turned a dark, bruise-like magenta, and could then be excised.
There have always been rumors about the head start operation. It is said that children who undergo the procedure lose all memory of their earlier years, along with all childish characteristics, meaning that a two-year-old might be- come capable of sitting in a classroom for an entire day without ever losing concentration. Many believe this to be the secret behind the success of Region C’s extremely cost-efficient education system. However, despite the rigorous head start selection process, not every child is able to survive with such a brutally depleted brain. Nobody knows how many children die on Region C operating tables every year, nor how many go on to perish as a result of their surgeries.
Shellman, of course, did not die. After stepping down from the operating table, he merely felt an intense pain in his head. A little later, he looked at himself in the mirror and, aside from the scar, saw no discernible change to his face—no matter whether he attempted to pull faces or laugh uproariously, it no longer displayed any change at all.
After three years of schooling and two years of professional work, Shellman was eight years old and had been trained into an upstanding Region C-er. As a successful accountant, he had quickly repaid his tuition fee debts to the government and found himself an apartment in a high-class residential area, where he enjoyed a relatively prosperous life. His mood remained perfectly serene until he became old enough to experience lust, at which point great waves arose inside his body. Like other Region C-ers before him, he conscientiously reported to the hospital for a vasectomy and then embarked on a relatively moderate sex life. Region C has no laws pertaining to marriages, because Region C-ers are too fiercely independent to require them. From time to time, as though arranging to have dinner, they might agree to have sexual relations with a nearby friend, but there has never been any such thing as excessive desire or emotion; no one has ever jeopardized the stability of Region C society on account of needless passions or emotional entanglements.
Not long before Shellman’s return to our city, a woman moved to his neighborhood.
“Come over and see my new pets,” she said, after they had known each other a little while.
Shellman had never had a pet and felt no particular emotion towards the woman’s pair of beautiful gray schnauzers. He stroked them politely. What did spark his interest was a sobbing noise coming from inside the woman’s utility room. Through the half-opened door, Shellman saw a child, surely not yet ten years old, lying on the floor completely naked, tied up like a dog with a chain attached to a hoop around its neck. The other end of the chain was securely em- bedded in the wall, and its length was such that the child’s arm could not quite reach a dish of mushy food placed on the floor nearby. At the sight of Shellman, the child stopped sobbing and launched into full-throttle shrieks.
It was not an especially unusual scene. As far as Region C-ers are concerned, there’s no real difference between a child without a head start and a wild animal. Shellman had seen children in cages at pet shops, and was familiar with their incomprehensible modes of behaviour.
“It’s called Beach Ball Number One. Because when I first brought it home, it was as fat as a beach ball. But it’s starting to get old now, it doesn’t make cute faces and wriggle around anymore, so I’m planning to sell it.”
“Beach Ball Number One,” Shellman repeated, not once suspecting that the creature before him was his very own brother. He gazed calmly at snotty-nosed Beach Ball Number One and suddenly, seemingly without reason, Beach Ball grinned and began trying vainly to crawl towards him.
“Sell it to me,” Shellman said to the woman, a few days later.
Nobody knew where this sudden interest in pet-raising had come from. But from that day on, Shellman’s neighbors would sometimes see him in the evenings, taking Beach Ball Number One to the park. And when Beach Ball Number One paused his crawl to look up at Shellman, passersby discovered that, if you looked closely enough, their two faces were remarkably alike. Shellman was oblivious to their astonished expressions. At night time, he unclipped the metal hoop around Beach Ball Number One’s neck and let it sleep on his chest. Since Beach Ball had come into his life, Shellman’s dreams had become increasingly vivid: they were always set in the same city, a place nothing like Region C, and as Shellman walked the streets of this city he found that he couldn’t stop shrieking, or eating food that had been dropped on the ground, or doing any of the other il- logical things that Beach Ball Number One liked to do. One day, Shellman woke up and ordered an extra-large pet case, planning to take Beach Ball Number One on a trip to this strange place he kept seeing in his dreams. As he did so, he felt a surge of excitement unlike any he had ever felt before—only not a single flicker was detectable on his blank, stiff face.