A Miniature Cage September 2027, Chicago Early for autumn, yet a few trees had already turned color, surprising the old brick-and-mortar neighborhood with splendid, if unwelcome, harbingers of winter. It seemed too soon for summer to be over, too warm for daylight hours to shorten. But there could be no mistake about the signs. One especially extravagant hard maple paraded in front of August Helm's apartment on Fifty-Eighth Street, its red-orange flora shamelessly monopolizing the window view from his second-floor kitchen. On sunlit mornings, broad avenues of light slanted in from the horizon, and the glowing leaves resembled the innermost chamber in desire's furnace. Five blocks away, August Helm worked at a biochemical laboratory in the University of Chicago, the same facility he'd been in for four years--almost as long as he'd lived in the Hyde Park apartment. Along with the fifteen other members of the research team, he experimented with adaptive immunization engineering--studies primarily designed by Dr. Peter Grafton and funded through grants from privately owned pharm-conglomerates and the National Institute of Health. It was a relatively unremarkable time in August's life. He was thirty years old, an inch shy of six feet, and he weighed roughly 150 pounds; his daily routine had a nearly predictable rhythm, and his health remained excellent. He enjoyed cycling whenever he could carve out the time, and on one day rode his Swedish-made bicycle eighty-six miles--a personal record; yet the high odometer reading had less to do with his own ambitions, and more to do with the man and woman he was riding with. Both were older than August, well respected within the scientific community for their grant writing, and wore their fitness like merit badges. Though August generally went out of his way to avoid overt physical competition of all kinds, on that day it seemed important to keep up with them. Two weeks later, when he was asked to ride with them again, he begged off. Most of the stumbling blocks along August's career path had been overcome, and he anticipated a decade of working in temporarily funded labs before seeking salaried employment with an established pharmacological or biomedical company. Currently, his monthly school debt repayments were being waived, yet his income never quite stretched far enough to cover all his expenses--like a twin sheet fitted over a full-size bed. And he accepted this as normal. Nearly everyone he knew under the age of forty lived beyond paychecks, settling old obligations by incurring new ones. Due to a steady trickle of people and businesses from the East Coast, where retreating shorelines seemed increasingly inhospitable, and an even steadier stream of immigration from the drought-plagued Southwest, the costs of living in Chicago had risen. August's parents had been calling and texting a lot lately, urging him to come home for a visit. His mother had become unusually strident, and recently threatened to take a bus to Chicago by herself if August's father continued to refuse to drive into the city because of the traffic. She complained that if August stayed away from home much longer, they might become strangers to each other. But August kept putting them off. The tiny village of Words, Wisconsin, where his parents continued to live in the same house August had grown up in, had come to seem to him like a foreign land, nearly irrelevant to the life he'd become accustomed to. Whenever he considered returning home, other activities and schedules always seemed more pressing. He could never find the time. This dismissive attitude toward the place of his childhood would have seemed quite unfathomable to August seven or eight years earlier, when the urge to flee back to the benign familiarity of home had tormented him unmercifully. For months after leaving Wisconsin, his heart had nearly broken from dislocation. And he'd often dreamt--even during daylight hours--of returning home, coming upon his mother pulling weeds in her garden or reading in her favorite chair, and his father working on gasoline and diesel engines until after dark, smelling of perspiration and oil. Any remembered scenes from home, it seemed, could be effectively mythologized by his loneliness into visions of domestic rapture. But since then, the unfamiliar had become familiar, and like many other young people who are selected by test scores, sorted by application forms, separated by scholarships, and relocated out of voiceless rural backwaters into urban centers of higher education and technical training, new activities and thoughts gradually consumed him, and for several years now, he seldom thought about his origins. First, there had been the dormitories, cafeterias, offices, and classrooms to contend with, and many of those mammoth buildings had exuded a grand respectability of age and old-world craftsmanship, with polished granite floors, thick, beveled glass, and hand-carved woodwork. All of them seemed formidable, bursting with people from every corner of the world--many of whom looked and sounded very important. Growing up in a lower working-class family in an extended rural community of other families of similar circumstances had not prepared him for the diversity he discovered at the university. On that first day, in front of the dorms, arriving students had pulled suitcases and boxes out of vehicles that August had never seen before excepting in magazines and movies; but he also saw saw people who looked like they hadn't changed clothes, slept, eaten, showered or entertained a benign thought in many days. Everywhere he looked something challenging looked back. August's assigned roommate--an ultrapolite young black man from Pondicherry--spoke in a distinct British accent. He called himself Ishmael, though the name listed on the student registration form clearly read Eugene, and he wore a bright white turban carefully wrapped around his head. His baritone voice conveyed infinite self-confidence, and even his normal mode of speaking gave the impression of making announcements. His smile seemed friendly and upbeat, and at first reminded August of blinking his headlights at the driver of an oncoming car, only to learn his low beams had already been engaged. When they met, Ishmael assumed the responsibility of explaining to August that Pondicherry--where he was from--lay along the southeastern coast of India; and until 1954, Pondicherry had been a providence of France, previously founded as a trading colony by the French East India Company as early as 1674. Ishmael's family had at one time been spice merchants, or, as Ishmael explained with a short, friendly laugh followed by a blinding smile, "One of Europe's many flavor vendors." Before August could say where he was from, Ishmael explained that during the previous week he had made inquiries with the registration office and had already learned that his new roommate was a native of Words, a small, unincorporated town in the heart of Wisconsin's renowned yet sparsely populated Driftless Area. Ishmael went on to summarize how the unusually hilly topography of the region around August's home had many briskly flowing streams, and because the rocky geography prohibited most large-scale tilling, planting and harvesting techniques, dairy farming grew to prominence during the twentieth century, and the Driftless Area became known for cheese. The industry flourished, with local creameries existing around every hillock. August interrupted to point out that due to several decades of ruinous government agricultural policies, the number of dairy farms had decreased, and the numbler of independent cheese makers in Driftless hills had dwindled. "Not all of them," announced Ishmael, handing August a Ziploc bag containing eight ounces of cheese curds, made in a small cheese factory a short distance from August's home. "I spoke with the head dairyman," said Ishmael. "He seemed like a good chap--well acquainted with your parents. And he assured me the curds would still squeak when you bite into them. I thought you might fancy a familiar taste as we adjust to our new surroundings." "That was extremely thoughtful of you," said August. He accepted the plastic bag and offered a curd to Ishmael. "Sorry, mate, I'm afraid I'm blinkered--lactose intolerant." "That's too bad," said August. "Here, I have something for you." He handed Ishmael a small, carefully wrapped box. Inside was a tiny wire cage, large enough to perhaps enclose a single marble, with a little door that opened and shut. Ishmael stared at August. "My mother borrowed a neighbor's jewelry-making kit," August explained, somewhat sheepishly. "She wanted you to have it. I told her it was a remarkably eccentric gift, but, well, she wanted you to have it." "A miniature cage?" "Like I said, there was no talking her out of it. When she learned you were from Pondicherry, she got excited because a long time ago a yogi named Aurobindo Ghose once founded an ashram there, and, well, he was apparently quite prolific during a certain period of his life, and Mom had read a raft of his books." "The ashram is still there," said Ishmael. "It's a major tourist attraction." "My mother says," August continued, "that while jailed as a political prisoner, Aurobindo heard a voice in the night saying that India would gain her independence without him, freeing him to devote the rest of his life to spiritual pursuits. My mother wanted to show--" "I get it, mate. Your mum made me a freedom charm." "Then you're not offended?" "To the contrary, it's a grand gift and I will treasure this jeweled cage, though it should probably be noted that Sri Aurobindo attributed the divine voice he heard in the underground prison to a visitation from Swami Vivekananda, and his interest in yoga began at that time. And if you don't mind me asking, what are you hoping to major in, August?" "Cell science, and you?" "Criminal justice." Getting along with people, August discovered, required real concentration. He needed to consistently interrogate the first impressions he formed of new people--to banish unwarranted generalizations and associations that prejudged strangers before he acquired enough experience to make more useful assessments of character--and to do this while learning to navigate the sprawling campus, disengage his rural reflexes that assumed every honking horn and loud voice was intentionally aimed at him, enroll in the required classes, acquire the textbooks without paying extortionate prices, meet with his advisors, fill out financial forms, and assume his work-study obligations. For months and months, he succeeded in resisting the urge to return home. Since about the age of five, he'd nurtured a healthy fear of failure, and he tried to recruit this fear to work in his behalf. Still, the new acquaintances he formed remained relatively superficial compared to his friends from childhood, partly because of the profound psychological forces released by early social interactions outside the nuclear family, and partly due to the insular nature of the rural community itself. Nevertheless, he met a few students he genuinely liked, and a few with peculiarities that he could sympathize and even identify with, like working to discover errors in a study guide's optional problem sets and reporting them, unsolicited, to the publishers. He also met someone who--like himself--had memorized the periodic table in the eighth grade. And once, when he was asked to retake an essay section of a structural biochemistry exam because of his illegibly small handwriting, he found himself completing the makeup work beside three other students. After two years, he moved out of the dormitory and into a rented room in an old house shared with four other undergraduates. And by the time he received his Bachelor of Science he had lived in three different apartment buildings with a variety of other renters, always looking for better, quieter domestic arrangements. After receiving a Master of Science, August was accepted into a doctorate program in structural biochemistry--the study of chemical processes inside living organisms. The advisory council overseeing his thesis and student teaching also rotated him through several laboratories needing short-term research assistants. Somewhere in the meanwhile, August lost his connection to his hometown. And though he saw his parents at major holidays and other times, over the years his visits home grew shorter and less frequent; perhaps more importantly, the character of his visits slowly changed from resuscitating to obligatory. Sure, he went home, but he no longer felt he belonged there. Everything rural seemed in slow motion. Weeding in the garden with his mother, searching for a subject they could relax inside; at the shop with his father, passing wrenches, screwdrivers, and needle-nosed pliers back and forth as his they repaired a piece of broken machinery; eating cold sandwiches pulled from a dented lunch box; neighbors dropping in and out, delivering malfunctioning lawnmowers and chain saws, greeting August with brief eye contact, quick smiles, commenting on the weather while buying a soda from the machine, exchanging a few words with his father, returning home . . . all August could do was remember an earlier version of himself, a younger edition that was currently, well, gone. And when he attempted to look up his old friends, he couldn't find them. His visits invariably came at the wrong times--when JW was away at a marketing convention, or with Lester in Vietnam, or wasn't answering her messages. Once, at Christmas, August almost linked up with Ivan, but at the last minute Ivan texted that an ice storm had stranded him and his grandfather at the lake where they'd gone fishing. August could no longer sync; he'd become unmoored from his childhood and couldn't find the place where he used to drop anchor. And the distress this brought to him added another argument in favor of his dislocation. He felt more at home in Chicago. This was especially true after completing his doctorate and beginning a long-term commitment to the research lab under Dr. Grafton. Along with predictable working schedules, he could finally afford an apartment of his own, a better bicycle, and to periodically eat in his favorite diners and restaurants. He purchased a couple dress shirts--not pulled from a bargain bin--and experienced a measure of independence, or at least semi-independence. And perhaps of greater significance, the wider civilization that he had joined had assigned him a token of its acceptance--someone with whom he imagined eventually making a family. Excerpted from Painting the Walls: A Novel by David Rhodes All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
