Sara Novic
I am an endangered species. According to the Official Record, there hasn’t been a deaf person born in forty years.
First, they CRISPRed out the low-hanging fruit: OTOF and Connexin26 and other known mutations deleted in the womb, or aborted besides. Off the record, there were those who slipped around those first guardrails of Greatness™ and were born or became deaf in other ways: the ultra-rare mutations, meningitis, ototoxic antibiotics. Eventually, they were all detected, too. First implanted, later injected with stem cell treatments, shot of pluripotence direct to the head. But the doctors never did figure out how to stop that particular miracle from fading, and eventually the upkeep got too expensive. So the deaf people—like the autists, the activists, the journalists, the queers—also went to the workcamps.
As for me, I got cochlear implants at around 8 months old, in one of the final Medicaid cohorts. By the time I was school-aged, government healthcare was gone and the kids who came after me got the open-source versions, subsidized with ads.
We all have the sporadic remote takeover now, but I reckon it would’ve made learning English harder, having to parse out what was your mom and what was background noise and what was a presser from the Potentate and what was a car sales ad; strangers’ voices zapped straight into your head from on high.
Nowadays, there are fewer commercials—all that’s left to hawk is end times gear and cash for gold and essential oils. That, and every once in a while a staticked sliver of propaganda materializes, as if seeping through my skullcap: Reminder to all Patriots, report to flag ceremony at 0800 hours Saturday. Use your ration card category to find your seating section. Blessed be the Potentate and peace be to all those upon whom he smiles.
I’m on the Outside because of my job in Hand Repair. According to the Official Record, there hasn’t been an artist in about forty years, either. Bot photography and AI-generated graphic design has been the standard for decades, and there isn’t much art made beyond that, not publicly. People don’t have the time, and the robots don’t have a reason. Still, even after they gobbled up every photo, painting, and blueprint, they never could get the hands right. Too many fingers, or not enough; bones splayed at grotesque angles. It became a tell—the Resistance would point out the errors to remind people that all the hateful images weren’t real, that humanity could still be good, and just, and five-fingered. Back when there was still a Resistance.
The agents turned up at sunrise, wearing masks and paramilitary-police uniform mashups like they’d gotten dressed in the dark at an Army Surplus store. This was at the tail end of the voluntary job era. Back when there were deaf kids (and schools), I’d been an art teacher. But by the time the feds showed up, that was all over with and I’d been working, like almost everyone I knew, in a factory.
I tried to wiggle out of it, wrote the agents a message on my iPad that said I was just on my way to work, a good and productive citizen.
But they wrote back only, you have a new job now before ushering me into their van. They kept the iPad, too.
Since then, I draw hands. Ten-hour shifts in an office that looks more like a shed, nights in a barrack populated with a mix of specialty civilians and National Guardsman. It’s a credit to them, actually, that they put two and two together and realized deaf artists raised with sign language would be useful in this way, would have spent so much time staring at hands, know the ins and outs of them. There’s another artist here, too—Elena. Also deaf, an expert on knuckles and wrist bones, and the way the light plays off fingernails.
Sometimes we fuck in the bathroom on our lunch break, Elena and I. Elena thinks they don’t have a camera in there, but I know they do, because once before she got here, I had a migraine and tried to hide in the stall to take off my implant and they came crashing in—it’s against the law to remove devices outside designated sleeping hours, lest you be inaccessible to ads or commands. As for the sex, I guess they like to watch, because they never stop us.
When we’re finished, we straighten out each other’s hair and uniforms. I bring one of her hands to my mouth and kiss the center of her palm. She makes the sign for “I love you” with the other and presses it into my chest. We don’t really know each other. We’re not supposed to communicate beyond image troubleshooting. Each time, it’s still the closest thing I’ve felt to happiness in years.
Back at the desk, I open my docket and begin repairs, removing extra phalanges from both the Potentate and Pope in a handshake I assume never happened; straightening the finger bones on a chain gang of detainees; correcting the thenar ratio on some politician whose name I can’t remember, or maybe never knew.
In the beginning, I considered sabotaging them, embedding microscopic writing in the crease of a wrist; some proof it had been altered. I don’t think about it much anymore. I’m not even sure there’s anyone left with the wherewithal or the tools to find it.
Instead, I change them all to Elena’s hands. Proportionally, of course. Same crooked nail on the left ring finger. Same faded scar on the pinky knuckle, a little freckle on the hypothenar. And same bold heart line arching broadly across the palm. Most of our subjects don’t deserve it, but it’s worth it for the few who do. Perhaps a secret message after all; we can still love. We are still here.
Sara Novic is the deaf queer author of the NYT Bestseller True Biz, Girl at War, and America is Immigrants. Her short fiction has been featured in BOMB, Guernica, TriQuarterly, Electric Literature, and the Baffler, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, and is an instructor of Deaf studies and creative writing. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.