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of events that had not yet occurred. Those were the years of corporate oligarchy, of videophonic telephones, meal tablets, and robot hearts. Years of silver foil and mass, private flight. We were observed, things were expected of us, a green pill was created to help us remember when to take a certain blue pill. We did all the important things and let the old and the sick work in The Factories. This was a time of sadly predictable oppression and digital surveillance. What was most vital about our lives was recorded and stored on a government database, which was looked upon with such utter detachment that we often forgot it was there. We were, above all, children, barely fit for the sort of lives we led.
    When we wanted meat, what we got was meat. When we wanted a morning constitutional, however, what we got was also meat. Meat, it appeared, was all there was left — great, heaping stacks of it, stored in icy towers at the center of the city, tended to by large men in white masks and rubber boots who wielded pitchforks and prods. We learned to shape the meat, to flavor it in such a way that we might not forget what it was like to taste an apple, say — to bite through the ruddy skin, which gave way to the sweet, tender center. We could achieve this effect with spiced, cured ham, stuffed into a tough intestinal sack. Chocolate was hard to eat for those of us who could remember the real thing. Children, though, loved to chew upon the hard, brittle cubes of browned beef that came wrapped delicately in gold foil. Cheese was meat. Juice was meat. Porksicles. Beefsicles. Baconsicles. This was the fulcrum from which our lives precariously swung.
    Chocolate milk was still milk, but the chocolate was made from hard, shaved splinters of seasoned loin. It had a sour, syrupy aftertaste — those of us who remembered called it simply “chilk” in an effort to preserve the dignity of the earlier, more substantial drink. But the children took in chilk whenever it was offered — how greedy they seemed, always clamoring like blind puppies to take the nozzle to their trembling, puckered lips.
    The meat made us look different. We got fat for a while — years, actually — but then the fat left us, so that what we were left with were baggy flaps of limp, oily skin, whole bolts of extra body. We gathered this loose flesh in long, flat clips at our shoulders, so that the worst among us appeared to have wings.
    The disappearance of a sustainable agriculture was a regrettable side effect of the Ministry of Air and Justice’s efforts, in the years of Fud, to color the air, to advertise the act of breathing with pale, pastel tints that bloomed upon exhalation. The air dispersed by the Fud Bellows did not color the air as promised but ascended, instead, into the pathetic, overwrought stratosphere, gathering there in hard, dark, permanent clouds. Few of us, though, were sufficiently interested in what went on above us to bother complaining — it seemed foolish to continue with the charade that the sky was anything more than wasted space, a vast area that could be put to much better use.
    Meanwhile, there was a man to whom I’d found myself married, and a child whom we’d drawn up between us not long afterward, like a bucket from a deep well. The three of us heaved away in a choked-up studio apartment on the humid side of the city, the side whereat the clouds hung so low as to scrape glacially past our windows, carving dull swaths across the panes, so that what light we did get was diffuse, splotchy. The clouds frightened the child, Philip; when they passed he’d crawl inside the big panda suit and huddle in the doorframe. The panda suit, we’d taught him — it was soft and warm, like a blanket, something to make him feel safe — but the doorframe seemed particularly anachronistic; something he’d picked up, impossibly, from an old Civil Defense manual. We were disturbed by this behavior and made every effort not to look at the child as he