Last chapter, Charlotte voiced her desire to explore the world outside her dome city. She’s been told the world outside is full of pain and destruction – yet, surely there must be something more.
She misses star gazing, but due to her mother’s job, they’re unable to leave the city. In this chapter, Charlotte asks Miriam why they moved to the dome city, and how Miriam got her job working for the notorious Vanderarc Industries.
CHARLOTTE: Much like our city, my mom’s life’s work was first denied, and then destroyed. This was the beginning of the end.
CHARLOTTE: There are some awful monsters on this Earth, and most of them wear cuff links and corporate smiles with too-white teeth. My mom is – was – unfortunate enough to be employed by one of them. We didn’t know they were monsters until later, of course.
CHARLOTTE: 10 years ago, she met Anthony Vanderarc in a conference room on the 102nd floor of the MICC headquarters; MICC, is, of course, the Minnesota Innovation City council. I interviewed my mom about that day.
MIRIAM: I remember staring at the floor ‘cause I was too nervous to look up. It was really dark. Apparently, the Anthony likes to work in completely dark rooms, it makes him more productive or something; but his face was why I kept looking down. He was bathed in shadows, except for his eyes, which were lit up by this thin strip of sunlight from the window. It was terrifying. Like an animal’s eyes at night.
MIRIAM: The board of men, maybe two women, sat in a circle around me; it felt like I was on trial, though I was there willingly. Or maybe – a better metaphor is a meeting of the knights at the round table. And I was being initiated.
CHARLOTTE: Knights are usually noble, though.
MIRIAM: They all seemed to have impeccable posture as they read my – uh – modest proposal. One of them tried to speak to me.
COUNCIL-MEMBER: Ms. Foxtrot –
OTHER COUNCIL MEMBER: Shh.
MIRIAM: But the others hadn’t finished reading. The silence was like – it felt like there was a muzzle over the room. I couldn’t even breathe, which was bad. I’d been thinking about what I wanted to say to the board for a long, long time. This was my dream.
CHARLOTTE: As a girl, my mom would plan her dream wedding. She had a cherry red three-ringed binder, decorated with embossed flower stickers. Printed out in black and white were photos of slim, blonde models wearing tulle gowns and mermaid dresses, an ivory silk slit down the side, gaping necklines dripping with diamonds. The models would smile at her, with pearls for teeth, and she’d smile back, pretending she was one of them.
MIRIAM: Before I realized how they get infested with ants, I wanted my wedding to be decorated with peonies.
CHARLOTTE: I’ve never seen peonies in real life, but in the pictures, they’re beautiful. The petals as soft as a baby’s pink cheeks. What was not in my mom’s well-thought plans was, well, me, a baby, coming before the wedding.
MIRIAM: It was all planned out. I thought I would marry in spring, on a rocky beach in northern Duluth, and I already knew how much the venue would cost. The bridesmaids and groomsmen would dress in pastels, the colors of the sunrise at dawn. My future partner, well, that was an afterthought.
MIRIAM: I just knew I wanted to be a bride, showered in flower petals and made up to look beautiful for just one day in my life. The center of attention. My special day. I was a little – narcissistic, back then. . . I learned better.
CHARLOTTE: I would never call her a narcissist, for the record. She was idealistic, romantic, and hopeful. But a child never factored into her plans. Certainly not two children.
CHARLOTTE: As a young adult, she bought new book binders. College had her tearing out loose-leaf papers and gulping down bullet points like pills, until, ironically, she forgot one pill. She still makes scrapbooks, dream boards and bucket lists, but now, my mom has binders full of corpses instead of flowers.
CHARLOTTE: Her magnum opus had been meticulously mapped out and time-lined, each step premeditated years before she approached the MICC board for funding.
CHARLOTTE: She was good at making things seem simple, easy and painless, even if it was the culmination of years of belaboring and embitterment. That’s the sort of person she was, so hardworking and hopeful even while staring at an info-graphic full of facts about dead children.
CHARLOTTE: I was kept in the dark about a lot of the details of my mom’s project.
MIRIAM: You saw the pictures once as a kid, and it gave you nightmares for days. And when you don’t sleep, I don’t sleep. I hated seeing you cry. Hearing you cry was awful, too, good god, you could scream. When I think about it, something hurts, a bit, inside. No one wants to see their baby cry.
CHARLOTTE: All I know is that my mom was interested, primarily, in sudden infant death syndrome, and she wanted to create an app, a monitoring system of sorts, to prevent it in the future. It was connected somehow to a mattress that could sense your baby’s movements, roll them over before they could suffocate. So you can sleep without worrying.
CHARLOTTE: I know I had a twin brother, Romeo, who died in his sleep. She sets out a plate for him at dinner, and she stares at his empty chair, and I know she’s imagining a ghost that looks like me, but not.
MIRIAM: The first time I approached the board, I was young, grieving, just barely holding onto to a cusp of an idea. Of course, I was denied. I was told, gently, to come back when I could speak without crying.
CHARLOTTE: The second time, she was confident, she was older. I was older, too, maybe six at the time. This was our big opportunity.
MIRIAM: It was. . . listen. You don’t get it. I was a single mom, ostracized from my family, um, living paycheck to paycheck in a shitty bungalow in a shitty town. Back then, MIC was like – it was like Make a Wish but for good ideas. I guess Shark Tank is a better analogy.
MIRIAM: Point is, if I got approval from the board, we could move to the dome city. Be given a nice apartment, consistent paychecks, we were a walk away from a library in any cardinal direction. There were parks, playgrounds, amazing food, the best tutors. It was the hotbed of innovation, ‘the Microcosm of the future,’ like how Anthony Vanderarc called it. I told myself, if I got Vanderarc’s backing, we’d be set for life.
MIRIAM: Anthony looked at my binder with the intensity and awareness of a man who knows that with one word, he could change lives, and so he took great care to speak with intention. There was also… a delicate way that he turned the pages. Like he was handling something precious. I don’t know. It made me feel important. Valuable. So goddamn lucky, to even have the chance.
CHARLOTTE: Anthony, despite being the youngest of MICC’s board, was the most powerful, my mom’s only lifeline in a sea of clammering competition and amazing ideas that she worried she could never hold a candle to. She was desperate.
MIRIAM: I remember when Antony looked up from the papers. There was a – I can only describe it as a smirk, on his lips, something that I learned, after working with him for years, was typically a precursor to Anthony saying something profound. He told me;
ANTHONY: So. You want to save lives?
MOM: And I said ‘yes, please.’