The Games

the crowded beach.

A gentle offshore breeze tousled her short hair and cooled the little dots of perspiration as they welled up on her skin. Over the last few years the sun had pushed her complexion past golden and into a deep, warm brown. She liked it; darker skin was so much less forgiving of her scars. She wanted them to show.

She finally gave up on the novel she was holding and let it slip from her fingers and drop to the sand. The bookmark tumbled out of place, but she barely noticed. She’d already left the story behind. She’d never open the book again.

The truth was that she’d been having trouble maintaining interest in any book; it had been a long time since she’d been able to immerse herself wholly in a context of somebody else’s manufacture. So much in her had changed. She missed the escape of make-believe stories, but a person can’t always decide what parts of themselves they shed. It was the price of new skin. A new life.

She twirled the straw in her Coke and melting ice and took a long sip. Her eyes moved to the sound of splashing. “Samuel,” she called out.

The boy’s head snapped around. He was big for four years, already taller than the six-year-old cousin he was wrestling with in the waves. It seemed she was always buying pants for him because his legs were too long.

“Not so far out,” she called.

“Se faz favor, Mae,” he replied.

“No.”

Such a big boy. She watched him roughhousing in the surf. The sun shone off his wet skin. Since he’d started school, he’d taken to speaking Portuguese more and more often at home. The other children were influencing him. Sometimes this worried her. Other times it was a comfort. He was a smart boy, the teachers said. He could be anything he put his mind to. She wondered, And what would that be?

Vidonia saw her sister approaching across the waterline with her new boyfriend’s arm thrown over her shoulder. Paulo, she thought his name was. But it didn’t particularly matter; the names, like the boyfriends themselves, were interchangeable set pieces; they came and went like the cycles of the moon, and this one would be gone in a few weeks. They were always gone in a few weeks. He was short, dark, and muscular, with wavy hair combed straight back from his forehead in the newest style of the local connected men. He wore a white T-shirt with cutoff sleeves to show his arms. She knew he thought it made him look tough, that T-shirt, and she supposed it did. He looked like what he was; and that was something, at least. It was the ones who didn’t that scared her. The ones who looked nothing at all like what they were. And sometimes her sister’s boyfriends were that kind, too.

Paulo bent and scooped water into his hands. He flung it at Vidonia’s sister, who ran away, screaming and laughing. Paulo chased.

He was even attractive in his own way, Vidonia decided. Very much like her father, she suspected. Another local connected man from a generation ago.

She waved a greeting. They waved back, both of them smiling. In all their time apart, her sister had not changed a bit. She was still like their mother. The trick was not hating her for it. She needed. The men provided. Perhaps there was nothing so terrible in that. And she was raising her own son well. Vidonia clung to that. Motherhood was the remaining commonality that bound their lives back together.

The splashing came again, and she called out, “Samuel, I said not so deep.”

The boy turned and waded back toward the shallows, dragging his older cousin behind him like a knapsack. Samuel peeled the boy’s arms from around his shoulders and threw him into the swell of an oncoming wave. The boy was up in an instant, splashing and wrestling in a salty spray of foam.

Vidonia shook her head slowly, smiling. Boys will be boys. She knew she should keep him out of the water altogether, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He enjoyed the sea. Vidonia resigned herself to another trip to the doctor in a few days.

Samuel was prone to ear infections. She’d had tubes put in his ears last year, and that seemed to help, but water still played havoc with his internal piping. As she watched him, she was certain he understood the trade he was making today, a day at the beach for a night of pain.

It seemed lately that he’d decided to just live with the pain. You could get used to almost anything if you put your mind to it. Bad ears. Bad tubes. It would get better when he was older, or it wouldn’t.

She’d stayed in America long enough for him to be born. She wanted him to have that citizenship available to him. Later, he could do what he wanted with it. Parents give their children opportunities. What the children do with the opportunities is up to them.

But the United States wasn’t what it had been. It was hard to guess where Samuel’s future lay. So much changed after the Olympic debacle and the nuclear disaster. Millions died in the initial blast. Millions more in the civil unrest that followed. Parts of the southwestern United States went without electrical power for months. And for a long time after that, in some places, it was too expensive for many households to afford.

It seemed at the time there was more than enough blame to go around: the scientists, the government, the big companies that ran both. The infrastructure that had been built up over the last half-century collapsed like a house of cards when popular support crumbled beneath it. A radical shift advanced across the political landscape like a second nuclear wind, laying waste to the old guard and depositing a new. But then it was revealed that many of the new guard, those new, fresh faces, had the same old allegiances—and so that second wind had to keep blowing. And blowing. People wanted change. In colleges and universities across the country, civil unrest fomented, institutionalizing itself, becoming its own product. Radical influence grew, and the reactionaries did what they do best—and took things a step too far.

A special session of Congress was called, and the laws governing genetic engineering were changed almost overnight. Advancement didn’t grind to a halt, exactly, but it did slow to a reasonable crawl. Draconian licensing practices were also instituted for all research into artificial intelligence and VR computers.

Vidonia thought this last precaution was perhaps the most unnecessary. There would never be another Evan Chandler. There would never be another Pea.

The gladiator event, of course, was discontinued entirely and permanently. It would never again be a part of the Games. It now resided only in the history books, a sad and bloody chapter.

“Samuel, Rao, come in. It’s time to eat.”

Samuel ran, high-stepping through the waves just ahead of his cousin, and hopped across the hot sand to Vidonia’s blanket. The boys knocked sand loose from their feet.

“Not on the blanket,” Vidonia said.

They sat, and she pulled the sandwiches out of the cooler and handed one to each boy. They ate like starving men, and she knew better than to blame it on a day spent in the water; Samuel ate like a horse anytime, when given half a chance. But she could still count his ribs. Not so with Rao. He was squat and plump, and kept his bones well insulated from the world.

“Can we get back in after we eat?” Samuel asked. He’d already learned his chances were better when he asked for something in English.

“I’ve got a class to teach in an hour. Sorry, boys.”

They moaned in unison. But the sandwiches continued their disappearing acts.

Samuel made a face as he finished the last bite. He stuck his tongue out, spitting. “Sand in my teeth,” he explained. His sharp cheekbones and high-ridged nose gave him a fierce, angular appearance, but he was still handsome in the way of rough, healthy boys. She sometimes wondered how he might look in a dozen years. His face was a mixture of familiar features, combined into something new and his alone. The long body, though, that was a thing he’d inherited whole and complete.

Vidonia hadn’t listed a father on the birth certificate. She’d endured the looks of the nurses and checked the box for “unknown” paternity. It wasn’t such an uncommon thing. A lie easily perpetrated. The world wasn’t ready to hear that Silas Williams had a son. Perhaps it never would be. So much death was associated with that name now. Rightly or wrongly, in the public’s eyes that name carried a portion of the responsibility for what had happened. But she’d made sure that wasn’t a burden Samuel would have to carry.

And she’d also made sure that Samuel knew his father had been a good man, even if the boy didn’t know his real name. Even if he never knew it.

And she made sure the boy knew his mother loved him. In the end, she hoped that was enough.