Chains

At the appointed time I find Stacey sitting on her bed staring at the wall. I tell her it's time, and she follows me quietly to the car, smiling falsely for a second to prove she's not scared. As much to herself as to me. I can see right through her eyes, to the fear behind them, her trust and love for me, the things she dares not speak. I am the high priest leading the virgin to the altar with the stainless steel tool in my hand.

A sacrifice - and that's ironic too, thinking of the financial angle. I haven't told her the price and I won't complain as my parents did; they were never chained and they had no right to talk to me about sacrifices.

When we get to the corner I catch a flash of - something - is it a father's telepathy? She wants me to swing the wheel the other way, away from the white room and the man with the foreign name and letters after it. To the desert, beyond the reach of any human eye. And what would we do there, beyond the chains? But there are other chains that hold tighter than glass-filled epoxy bonding agent. Chains. I am impotent, as much a prisoner as she. I turn to the town.

The car picks up speed and we pass the Catholic school, girls in plaid skirts on the sidewalk. Smoking cigarettes, talking and gesturing. I can't hear their words but I don't need to. Pure in theory only. One smiles. I catch a flash of her chains as we speed by.

When I was their age I knew a girl with a smile like that, and of course I knew chains as well, only too well. Big steel shackles, tough wire, the heavy technology of my time. Pain. My body bent and stretched by the chains, molded to a more functional shape, in theory. Transcending the failure of evolution.

The current generation have the benefits of materials science: sleeker, thinner, more elastic. Everything is more scientific today. I remember the man with the foreign name and letters after it showing me the diagrams, the computer-aided drafting output. Vectors. Cutaway views. Chains. My daughter is not a person, not even piece of meat: a machine to be reconfigured.

But that girl I knew when I was young, with the brilliant smile. The Inquisition torturers knew that physical pain is nothing, the body can adjust to it, can even learn to enjoy it. They found other means of torture. In my first day of school with my new chains. Adjusting to that terrible itching ache.

She looked at me. I smiled; and her gaze slid past me to the boy on my right. What's the interest rate on a smile? How many perfect smiles, later, would it take to balance that moment? A hundred? A million? Will it ever be made up? She got hers the next summer. Steel scaffolding around the back of her head. She didn't smile so much then, but I wasn't able to take comfort in that.

I saw a brochure in the white room, not about this generation but the next one. Less stainless steel, more ceramic. Too expensive, of course. What's the interest rate? Does it matter anyway? A chain is still a chain no matter how well camouflaged, and I've no doubt they will feel the same as my crude steel bands. The jokes and the names will be the same.

There must be more to it than a smile. I think of the white room, and the woman - what was she called? The technician. A nice, clean word. A young woman, but never pure, never chained herself, oh no. Cotton and stainless steel and antiseptic, or was it leather, cast iron, and blood?

It's all about dominance and submission. I imagine her in a black harness smiling at my little Stacey. Heating the needles, adjusting the rack, administering the only form of bondage and discipline we still permit our children. Does she enjoy her work and can I blame her?

I think of Stacey's fear surfacing only to be held in silence (more chains), her juvenile nipples hardening against the technician's touch, her heart beating at its chains as the ache begins, her little mouth. Don't go there, and we hear of the young lovers, painfully chained to each other, one more reason to abstain. Think about the stereotype - imagine a girl in chains and what do you see?

Metonymy. At the ends of our chains, we squirm, substituting other words, relatives of the ideas we cannot grasp. What did the man, another man with letters after his name, say in my class at school? "The container, for the thing contained; the effect, for the cause." Ponytails, bubblegum, plaid skirts, but don't go there. Chains.

We reach the parking lot and I send Stacey in alone. I cannot face the white room and the technician and the man with the foreign name, letters after it. The row of stainless steel tools, the cotton and antiseptic. The blood, leather, and cast iron. Chains. I will not see them take away her control in a way the angry demonstraters would never think of imagining. When Stacey cannot control her own body, why talk about the rights of "wimmin"?

There are schools where men with foreign names and letters after their names draw out the tiniest chains of life in air displacement micropipettes. I have seen the stringy-haired girls with chains of beads and their clueless lovers chanting in the mob on the quadrangle, and I have heard their arguments, the rhetoric against tampering with Mother Nature.

But I have borne chains of my own, and I cannot condemn the men toiling in their dungeon laboratories. Yes, there is little humanity in the culture tubes, but to give ourselves bodies that work unmodified, to end the need for chains, if there ever was a need, no, I cannot condemn. Let them break the chains. Break all the chains.