“Don’t say that!” Kate insisted, leaning across the table for emphasis.
The candle flame was mirrored in her green eyes. It would have been romantic except for the strange urgency burning in them as well. She looked around with quick, almost bird-like movements of her small, red-haired head. Content that none of our fellow diners were listening in on our conversation, she fixed her gaze back on me.
We were at our favorite riverside restaurant. We had a table on the deck overlooking the Riverwalk. It was a beautiful spring night. We just finished our entrees and were waiting for dessert. It was the moment for which I had spent the whole day working up my courage.
“I love you, Kate,” I told her. My phone, which was always set on silent mode, vibrated at my hip just then. I ignored it.
She was supposed to tell me that she loved me too. I would then drop to my knee, pull the small, velvet box from my jacket pocket, open it to display the ring and ask her to marry me. I knew there was a chance she would reject my proposal, but I didn’t expect to be cut off before I actually proposed.
Taken aback by her reaction, I just stared at her for a painful moment before protesting, “But I do love you, Kate.”
My phone buzzed again.
“Will you stop saying that, Tony!?!” Her words were half whispered, half hissed.
“Stop saying what, Kate?”
She mouthed the word silently. “Love.”
“Why can’t I say I love…?”
Buzz.
Despite myself, I shot an irritated scowl at the phone at my hip. For the thousandth time, I was tempted to rip the thin rectangle of plastic and circuitry off my belt and toss it in the river. Cell phones not only served as our medium of mandatory identification, but they were necessary for nearly everything from shopping to unlocking the door to one’s home. Judging by the amount of time their heads spent bowed before phone screens, most people seemed not to mind their dependence on the machines. I did. And the latest versions, which were made without Off buttons, were particularly annoying.
I looked up again to find Kate regarding me through a narrow-eyed glare. “Have you been under a rock all day?”
“No,” I said, my voice lowered to match her whispering. “I went biking through the hills and then slept until it was time to get ready for dinner.”
“Don’t you check your messages?”
“I checked to see if there were any from you.”
“Didn’t you see the latest mandate from the Bureau of Sensitivity?”
“Yeah, I noticed there was a message from them,” I said. “I just haven’t read it yet.”
Kate sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Well, if you had taken five minutes to read the update you would know that…” She paused to look around again, her glance stopping briefly on the nearest acoustic scanner. There were scanners and cameras bolted behind the faux gas light fixtures suspended over the river walk. “You would know that the word l. o. v. e. has been dropped.”
I finally understood. My phone was not buzzing with incoming messages but with prompts from the Bureau of Sensitivity.
It was their latest means of helping to purge the language of words and terms they deemed offensive. The Bureau would continue to prod me every time I used the newly banned word. Ignoring their prompts would eventually freeze my phone until I finally read the mandate and clicked on the ‘I comply’ button. Afterwards I would be fined a hundred credits every time I used the illicit word.
The great language purge began in the last century with the seemingly innocent desire to censure racist and sexist epithets from everyday speech. It soon became a mania. Before long the mania became a movement filled with ever-swelling ranks of offended individuals and marginalized groups, each with their own lists of words, phrases, and even whole ideas they wished to see banned. The Bureau of Sensitivity was created to adjudicate the various demands. Like all bureaucracies, its scope and influence grew over the years. And as its power became near absolute, the Bureau’s decrees became ever more absurd.
You could never say that out loud, of course. Criticism of the B of S was one of the first things outlawed.
Like millions of others, I found it easier to let it happen than to challenge the trend. A word dropped here, a phrase banned there; it all seemed so innocuous at first. The consigning of one idea after another to banned speech was only disconcerting if you allowed yourself to think about it at any great length. So of course you tried not to, busying yourself instead with as many of the myriad, noisy diversions life in the new and improved safe cities of the new and improved Enlightenment offered up in lieu of quiet contemplation.
If you did think about it long and deep enough to worry yourself, you bit your tongue rather than voiced your concern over the narrowing options of socially acceptable opinions. Everyone knew too well that thinking such thoughts out loud would earn one the damning designation of, bigot. The ostracism that came with the label could cost you your job, benefits, friends and eventually your very freedom until you recanted and returned to the fold of ‘right thinking folk.’
If you were like me you kept your head down and your thoughts to yourself until…
“Why do they want us to drop the word love?” I asked.
Buzz.
“If you had read the update, you would know.”
Kate and I had been seeing each other for a little over a year now. Unlike everyone else I knew, Kate wasn’t averse to an occasional weekend camping trip in the mountains or a day trip biking through the hills. She was no small find in an increasingly insulated society where people preferred to explore virtual worlds rather than the real one. Three generations after the use of fossil fuel was deemed to be a bad idea, travelling outside our cities, even the limited amount we did, required much more effort than the average citizen was willing to expend. I considered myself lucky to have found someone willing to join me on my jaunts, someone willing to trade the city’s beeps, blips and dings for the songs of birds and the rustle of wind-strummed trees.
I loved Kate for it. But Kate could be exasperating. I could never convince her to completely ignore her phone during our trips. She always kept one eye on the post stream, closely following what her friends and the world at large was saying, thinking, and doing, eating, drinking, liking and sharing ad nausea.
“Why love?” I asked again.
Buzz.
“The gist of it is,” she said, uncrossing her arms. “Not everyone is fortunate enough to have someone to um…”
“Love,” I said.
Buzz.
Kate shot me a pointed look. I shrugged. “I haven’t read the update yet so I can still say it.”
“Your phone is vibrating, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m having dinner with you, not my phone.”
“Fine,” she conceded. “Anyway, the word has been deemed to be hurtful to people who don’t have someone… someone like that in their lives.”
“Someone to love, you mean?” I said it loud enough for the couples in the neighboring tables to hear me. Judging by the looks they gave me, they had read the update. My phone buzzed with a prolonged burst of vibration. It was the last warning the Bureau would give me before it overrode my phone’s silent mode.
“Yes, it’s insensitive to remind them of what they don’t have.”
“This is ridiculous, Kate.”
“What is?”
“Dropping love.”
Ring!
“Dropping any word, really,” I said. “It’s stupid.”
Ring! Ring!
The word ‘stupid’ was dropped years ago. I don’t remember exactly why. I’m guessing it was deemed insensitive to stupid people. My bank account, I knew, just took a hundred credit hit.
I plucked my phone from its sheath, pried off the back and removed its battery. Kate looked at me as if I were dismembering a kitten. She grabbed her own phone off the table and drew it to the safety of her lap.
“In a few minutes they’ll figure out you’re with me Tony, and then they’ll call my phone.”
“Until then listen to me, please,” I said, getting down on my right knee. I fished the velvet box out of my jacket pocket and showed her the ring. “I love you, Kate. I want you to marry me.”
Kate cupped a hand over her open mouth and alternated her wide-eyed stare between the ring and me before speaking. “We can’t get married, Tony.”
“Don’t you love me, Kate?”
“It’s a bad idea,” she answered.
“Marriage?”
“Well yes,” she said. “The update mentioned that the Bureau is going to review the concept of marriage next year. They’re going to determine whether it’s still viable for the modern world.”
“What?”
“Most experts think they will rule against marriage and even against monogamy,” Kate continued. “It seems most people feel that such hoarding of um… affection, such exclusivity is, well… anti-social and, you know, insensitive to the relationship-challenged.”
“This is crazy, Kate!”
“No, it’s not, Tony,” she said, her voice rising defensively. “It makes perfect sense when you consider the words we dropped last year.”
I guessed that Kate was referring to the words, adultery, fornication and other, related ideas. They were purged from the language for being judgmental and thus offensive to the promiscuous.
“So what now?” I asked. “Do we go around hooking up with anyone and everyone?”
“It would make for a more open and inclusive society, don’t you think?”
Kate’s phone rang. It spared us the indignity of my hurling some long-banished words at her. She looked at the screen and then at me. “It’s for you.”
Rising to my feet, I took the phone from Kate. The call was from the Bureau of Sensitivity. I must have burned through two thousand credits telling the agent on the line what I thought of him, the Bureau and their sensitive, open and inclusive world. I ended the call by dismembering the phone.
Kate gasped and immediately set about reassembling it.
Our fellow diners stared at me, their faces frozen in shock. Our waiter, I noticed, stood a few paces off, slack-jawed and transfixed with our bread puddings held aloft on a tray. He recovered quickly and placed the desserts on the table.
After a nervous clearing of his throat he asked, “Will there be anything else?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Separate checks.”
“Tony!” Kate shouted.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “They haven’t dropped those words from the language, have they?”
Kate answered me with a mute and open mouth. I turned to the waiter. “Well, have they?”
“No sir, not that I’m aware.”
“Then separate checks, please.”
Appetite lost, I followed the waiter without looking back at Kate. I reassembled my phone at the register and used it to pay my bill. I then took it apart again. The cashier looked on with wary eyes and a painfully polite smile.
“I should’ve done this years ago,” I told her.
The older woman’s reply was a muted and nervous giggle from the back of her throat.
“Good night,” I said and left.
I would leave the city in the morning, take what I could carry by bike and backpack. I’d leave the rest, being sure to drop the cell phone components in the toilet on the way out. I didn’t know where I would go exactly. There were rumors of people beyond the hills and over the mountains who lived unplugged lives in the wild, lives completely off the grid. If I found such people, and if they would have me, then I would settle down with them. If they didn’t exist, I knew that I was condemning myself to a hermit’s life, a life of solitude.
I shrugged at the prospect.
In a world without love, I thought, one might as well live alone.
The End
Carlos Carrasco 