I Track Down Freaks

I TRACK DOWN FREAKS

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Chapter 1.

One of the mutant children was spared by its child﷓mother, who was at the time of its birth living in Venice, California, in the region known as "the canals." She knew she was supposed to bring it to the hospital, where it would be painlessly killed, but she did not obey the law.
She was thirteen years old when her child was born. She was named Katherine Casey. She had run away from her home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a boy who had been in a small band whose origin was in that city and whose dispersal was in Los Angeles. The boy walked out barefoot over the stone bridges of the Venice canals every morning, looking for a job in the body of Los Angeles, shuffling slowly away and home, his yellow hair nodding back and forth around his face. Then he was beaten by three drunken thieves in Santa Monica in the beach parking lot when he came out of the bus where a friend of his was living, who turned on the headlights, which even then did not encompass the place where they were beating him. He died several days later, weakly smiling, making no effort to speak. His parents came to take his body. Katherine did not inform them of the coming birth. She spent two weeks alone in her room.
The room was an attic. She looked out the window over a peaceful canal, where ducks were sitting on the water and chickens walked in the yards of her neighbors. She had always been a good reader, and she read piles of used books and magazines that were given to her by the boy and girl who lived on the lower floor of her house. The walls of the room were painted a restful color, and she had the knack of making her surroundings comfortable, although she had no money. This restfulness, reading and solitude, and the effect of the community where she lived, where musical instruments could be heard day and night, all made it possible for her to develop from the tragic, unlucky elements of her life, a sense of herself that was independent and strong. She brought herself to a state of moral scrupulousness without any conceivable use to her at the time, but which was soon to come into play, as she was faced with a situation requiring a difficult choice. The boy and girl from below began to dote on her, took pride in the thing that the world had left over, began to brag about the white flower, and although they were older than she, came upstairs nightly to hear her examine the questions that occurred to her, which seemed somehow to illuminate their lives for them.
As the birth of the child approached, Katherine obtained medical books and pamphlets of advice wherever she could, and studied them. She then sought to examine herself internally, closing her eyes and calling forth images from her body, especially her womb, and willing them to fulfill the ideal of the medical drawings upon which she meditated.
The child was born as she knew it would be ﷓ a male cylopean. The girl from downstairs, dressed in a white waitress' dress, with a paper cap pinned in her hair, pulled him from Katherine and gave out a short scream. Katherine's eyes were comfortable on the face of the infant and she loved him instantly. His face was in other respects similar to others of the human race, except for the ears, which were lower and longer than the ears of other infants. She poured her attention into the eye, which was like a long blue fish above the center of the nose. The pupil was actually the result of the overlaying of the pupils of two eyes not completely separated from one another, the hemispheres of the brain to which each was attached not having sufficiently distinguished themselves from one another. Katherine was amazed to see the piercing quality of the eye, shining up and searching the area.

The people of the neighborhood soon knew of the child. Dust﷓covered trucks gathered in the yellow dirt before the house. Men, women and children stood in the low haze like a field of wheat around the house, as the ashes and pollen of the sky settled upon their hair and skins. Finally, the boy from the lower floor came to the front steps and without looking at the crowd, but only staring at the sheet of white paper he held in his hands, he read, "On this day our own Katherine Casey, of this place, has given birth to a prodigious child, whose name shall be Raphael. It is the mother's wish that no one give news of Raphael's birth, or of the form of Raphael, because she is afraid of the state authorities."
He turned the stooping shoulders and bloated belly of his malnourishment up the stairs. Some people followed him to the papered attic room, and were momentarily blinded by one or another of the strokes of sunlight originating in the wood's knots and broken corners of the room. The mother and child were in a corner, below a blanketed window. Beside the bed was a wooden crate covered with a piece of white lace. Although they had expected their eyes would immediately seek out the infant, they could not remove their gazes from the mother, who was so thin and pale she was almost transparent.
Everyone who passed during the first day and night did claim to admire Raphael, but they were not telling the truth. Some had nightmares that would not leave them for the rest of their lives. Even after Raphael was older, and could be seen playing in the area with the other children, with his melancholic mouth and the searchlight beam of his eye, and they knew and did like him, still the memory of the first seeing was terrible...

In Katherine's time, as in our time, it is near to starvation that stands anyone who is forced to depend on the State for his food. Unlucky is the unlucky one, because the State, through all its programs, funds and loans, will not sustain him and will tend to reinforce his fate rather than to help him forestall it. A few bills and coins were shoved across the counter every month for those such as Katherine and her neighbors. Such a few that the old woman who stood on the Government's side of the counter, a short woman, who stood on a platform of wood in order to see the line, when she saw the face of Katherine, so lethargic and complete suddenly materalized before the counter, reached into her own pocketbook, that she kept on a lower shelf, took out five dollars and pushed it with the rest to the young girl.
Now, in order to continue to receive even her small monthly amount, and to have added to it the sum required to feed and clothe her new son, it was necessary for Katherine to inform the State of Raphael's birth. But she could not let the State know he was a mutant. She wanted Raphael to live as long as possible.
She knew she was wrong. The law was clear concerning the mutant births. They must be handed over to qualified members of the medical profession, who would see to it that they were disposed of in a safe, humane manner. She would not be blamed for the birth, if she simply obeyed the law. At first, when the monstrous births had begun, a few years ago, the mothers and fathers were thought to be the parties at fault. Articles were written suggesting that the drug-taking, unmarried sex, and slothful lives of the poor were the causes of the mutations. Of course, the parents of such children became afraid to bring them to the hospitals, fearing the shame of association. Therefore, new causes were suggested, one after the other, each cooked up in the public relations departments of the National Institutes of Health. Terrorists were blamed for poisoning the already undrinkable water of the cities. Witches and satanists were blamed. Chance, then Heaven, then China, then television (it was thought that the viewing of disgusting sex and violence throughout the day might somehow drip the forces of monstrousness from the eyes down into the wombs of TV-watching women), then various types of food were all in their turn blamed for the plague of freakish births in America.

In fact, the cause was not with the women, nor with their husbands, nor was it even with their Government, but rather with the ones who came before them, their forefathers, those victorious generations who left behind them many records of their existence and victories, and evidences of their thinking very highly of themselves, tbe many arts bearing forth their lighted images, but had also, by their harder, more technical doings, (and largely unknown to themselves, truth to be told) left behind them the unhappy causes of monstrous births, by evil actions taken during a war in Asia.
There, in the sea, in the air, coursing through the mouths and flesh of animals, adding to the weight and cell walls of the stiff capillaries of the growing plants eaten by men, or by the animals eaten in turn my men, America had used the chemical denuder of trees called Agent Orange, cacodylic acid 2,4,﷓5,T﷓, which contains the impurity 2,3,7,8﷓tetrachloro﷓dibenzo﷓p﷓dioxin.
This chemical was sprayed down with generous abandon by a nation so long fruitful with the blessings of argiculture that it did not think to modify its actions through a memory of any economical contingency when it came to matters of the land, but spread the cacodylic acid over three quarters of the farmland of Viet Nam, and poured it into the rivers, the result there being monstrous examples among all the species of that place: crooked trees, grasses, fishes, rice, water buffalo, and so on and on. There were children there whose tear ducts were placed in their throats in such a way that when they first cried they were strangled, there were cyclopses, there were twoheaded children, and children who did not fully separate from the formless home of all matter; and all were seen, or heard of, by an expedition that went from Harvard University, led by the scientist Matthew Meselson, and made its report in Nature Magazine, but it was too late, and so it happened that after not too many years, that poison came on the tides, back to the place of its past manufacture, and the monsters America had caused to be born in Asia soon had brothers and sisters in America itself.

Then, laws were passed, whose object was the early detection and killing of the freaks.
These laws were generally considered to be just, and were for the most part obeyed. The birth of children became tied to public policies and controls. The Institutions and Agencies that had it as their job to cover the land with words, made no mention of the cacodylic acid, for it was felt this knowledge might cause embarrassment in certain inviolable crypts. All well and good -- but as a result of the withholding of the true cause of the monstrous births, there were many theories, legends and prophecies that sprang up, carried forth by crackpots and men claiming an education they did not possess, and believed by the poor. And, as it has been whenever monsters seem to be advancing numerically over a place, the foremost thought soon became that the Government would fall, that the world would change hands...
It then happened that, despite the law, there came to be women who did not take themselves to hospitals, but gave birth at home, and if the children were freaks, did not bring them to the hospitals, but hid them, in order to preserve their lives.
Of those in the first noticeable wave of monstrous births, most did not survive past the first year or two. Some died of diseases unknown to those around them, some from more commonplace illnesses which they had no chemical ability to combat, some by the action of the Government, which had made the decision to strike forcefully against the new freaks. The freaks were becoming objects of veneration for the poor; around the core of their love for the freaks, they leaned all their hopes, for they were superstitious, believing in signs, studying events from a religious standpoint, as opposed to a historical one, and therefore believing that the cause of things follows its effects in time.
The Government, seeing the people in a mood of rebellion, launched an attack against the symbols of the rebellion, the freaks, no matter how innocent the freaks may have been (none of them was over 2 years old when the program was approved) of themselves harboring rebellious thoughts. Innocence often suffers for the hopes of the guilty, and against the lives of a few freakish births ﷓ the kind that until recently all right-thinking parents had prayed against ﷓ how could you measure the peaceful continuance of American society? Therefore, assassins were chosen and trained to kill the freaks and those who protected them, for it was illegal to have one and not to have turned it over to the Government...

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