The Ones Who Come Back to Omelas

 

The Ones Who Come Back to Omelas

 Asikea Ngansuril

This is the second part of an earlier story I published, which you can read here. 

I spent many months living by the seaside. I transferred jobs – still clerical work, though now in a department situated by the docks – in the hopes of never again having to see the Mausoleum of Prosperity. But no matter what I did to distract myself, I could not fight off the images that played in my mind: a bowl of cornmeal next to a pile of human faeces, skin stretched taught around swollen organs, the bones of a hundred children crammed in a tiny mass grave.

To tell you the truth – and perhaps you may feel the same – I never really enjoyed work. One day, when I could bear the images in my head no longer, I said to a co-worker, ‘Do you have fun here?’

I thought better of my words the moment I said them. It wasn’t normal to say such things. Perhaps I was just flustered; she was disarming, approachable – as if she were fashioned from the earth and the sea.

‘Why does that matter?’ Her intonation dropped on the penultimate syllable, like a tired parent talking to her child.

I liked her quite a lot, though her reaction now soured my estimation of her quite quickly. Thoroughly embarrassed, I moved to avoid an awkward situation.

‘Well, we all do things for some kind of reason. I came to work here because I like seeing the sea, for example,’ I said, trailing off a little.

‘I dunno,’ she said, ‘I mostly just work here because my dad does.’

The conversation shifted then to gossip and holidays, and for a time I was able to forget the wretched creature under the Mausoleum, the little bundle buried in the cemetery, the child carried away under the cover of dark. But as I walked home to my apartment, the sights, the sounds, and the smells all at once came back to me. At some point, I turned down an odd road, and after an hour or so I found myself back at Ssenrë’s grave.

It was Spring now; the seasons had turned since that Summer when the little bundle was buried here. The grave was unmarked – now impossible to find without prior knowledge of its whereabouts: that strange little patch of grass that bore no headstones. I walked the length and breadth of that section now, picturing a hundred malnourished children crammed under the earth there. I wondered then: is this city truly happy? Do we know what happiness feels like? Maybe, for most people, their happiness comes from the knowledge that, no matter what tragedy befell them, they would never suffer as the Child does. Or maybe we are afraid that, if we are to be honest about how our city works, we would have to accept that the sacrifice of the Child was never of any real benefit to anybody.

Hundreds of years ago, the people of Omelas did away with kings, priests; but they did not burn the banks and the stock exchanges. When the last King of Omelas was slain, the people sealed the first Child away in its tomb. The people of the day believed it was the end of history; all struggles were now over, and humanity could live out the rest of its days in infinite prosperity, under a republic of virtue. But how could a virtuous society allow an infant to suffer as Ssenrë did? Why is the pain of the Child necessary for our happiness? Why shouldn’t we, the citizens of this city numbering in the millions, work tirelessly to make the Child’s pain unnecessary?

There is something else about Omelas that I never told you. We all know about the Child – we are told, at some point in our lives, that it is there. We are told, also, that the Child must be there, otherwise our splendid city could never exist. Many – most, in fact – live their entire lives without ever seeing the Child. But among the few who do, there are some (a very small number) who leave. They walk away from the city. We are never told where these people go. Standing by that unmarked grave in the Spring, I understood then that I was about to find out. I looked first to the walls of the city – high, mighty, fashioned seemingly out of a single piece of stone. Then, I looked back at the Mausoleum. It was said to be a shining monument to the happiness of the city; except, for the past three seasons it appeared to me that the walls of the Mausoleum loomed over the city, like a spectre. I knew then what I must do.

The ones who walk away from Omelas only ever go – never do they take. At a brisk pace I walked back to my apartment, and pulled from under my bed a little brown box. In Omelas, we have no need of soldiers – instead, we have self-defence forces. We do not carry swords, not since the revolution all those years ago, but my father was quite fond of his history. I lifted the lid from the little brown box; inside was an old revolver. It was maintained well enough, and had been shot not long ago then by my late father, at a shooting competition which he’d lost (by a country mile) to a preteen.

Stowing the revolver in my jacket pocket, I strode now back towards the city centre. The Mausoleum was bathed in the light of the setting sun, and many of the people who worked inside had already walked back to their apartments. Security at the Mausoleum was relaxed – Omelas did not have terrorists or robbers for the militia-people to worry about – and so I waltzed inside unnoticed. Over the security gate I hopped, and then I felt my way around those corridors and flights of stairs through which I had once walked all those years ago.

I must now confess: I did not find my way to my quarry with ease. I had visited the Mausoleum only once, as an eight-year-old boy, and even though I had never forgotten what I saw that day, human memory has a habit of getting jumbled. As I rounded an unfamiliar corner, I found myself face-to-face with a security guard.

Likely disarmed by the strangeness of the situation, and not expecting any hostility, the man before me said simply, ‘Everything alright?’

Those were his last words as, acting on pure instinct, I pulled the trigger. I watched in silence as he sank to the ground – the gravity of what I had just done would not become apparent to me until days later – before stepping over his body and continuing through the labyrinth, certain now that I had seen these exact walls before.

I found the girl behind a door that I could scarcely forget – a nasty metal contraption which fit so snugly into its frame that no light could pass into the room behind it. She – the girl – recoiled from my touch as I scooped her up. This was no time now to try and convince a prisoner, resigned to her own confinement, to leave her cell.

The barrel of my gun stayed cold as I carried the princess away from her castle. I avoided further confrontation as best I could – I knew that the men who guarded that terrible place wouldn’t hesitate to shoot the Child as she lay in my arms. I listened for footsteps and waited, and before long I found myself back in the open air, now jogging towards the city walls, my sleeves wet with tears and mucus.

‘You’re safe now,’ I said, ‘You’re safe.’

The Child did not respond; perhaps she did not hear me, or perhaps she had no reason to trust an adult – even one who was carrying her away from imprisonment.

I found my way to the city walls, and stepped through the eastern gate. Looking back now, it’s strange how I never noticed nobody was following me. No militia-person took aim at me or the girl, and no passerby cried out for me to stop. I ran silently, my face dripping with sweat, until I could run no more. And then, I ran some more. I ran and I ran, until the city was far out of sight.

In Omelas we have no need of swords – but I did find a gun. I used what I found to shoot a man dead, and in so doing I saved the life of a girl who was born into punishment. In the river I bathed that Child, disinfecting her welts and sores, and there I named her Dahteal¹ – the beloved. I clothed her, and for weeks I nursed her back to nourishment.

The imprisonment of the Child under the Mausoleum of Prosperity is an industrial process; money is moved to make it happen. It was after coming to the city of Tirev that I realised this: by freeing Dahteal, I had saved a child from a slow, lonely death – yes – but, I had also condemned another to take her place. What people like you and I quickly come to understand is that there is nowhere for us to walk away to. Throughout my travels, I have stayed in other cities like Omelas. In every one of the hundreds of cities across the world, a child like Dahteal and Ssenrë is sitting in the dark, with nobody to call mother, father, sibling, friend.

And that brings us to where we are now. What are we to do, you and I? We know what must be done, but the two of us alone have no hope of achieving it. In a deterministic universe, every occurrence is downstream of a previous happening. That is not to say that everything happens for something. Rather: an unstoppable chain of events led to our meeting. That must mean something. We will make it mean something. I could not bear to keep on living in this world otherwise.

We can spend as much breath and ink as we like explaining and describing the evils of this world, but without conviction and a vision for a better tomorrow, change can never happen. So come with me. Come, with me and the others, back to Omelas.

1. /’dʌx.tʲəl/