License to Do That (opening)

1

“Guess what happened while we were away,” Dylan said to Rev. They were in her screened porch, Rev sunk lengthwise into her couch staring out at the sparkling lake, Dylan stretched out on a lounge chair staring at his open laptop.

They’d just come back from their infamous ‘blasphemy tour’, ostensibly a series of speaking engagements at American Bible Colleges, sponsored by the Atheist Alliance Consortium, to talk about their recent adventure in court. They’d been charged with blasphemy when they’d added “‘Blessed are they that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stone.’ — Psalms 137:9” to a billboard just outside Algonquin Park. A Right-to-Life billboard.

A great number of things, Rev thought, would have happened while they were away. An infinite number of things, if Dylan was including events that had occurred in alternate universes. If she took into account his interests, that would narrow it down. But not by much. Ah. The laptop. If he was reading the news, then, given the news producers’ interests, that would narrow it down to just half a dozen things. Politics, business, sports, cars, houses, and travel. Well, one thing, really. Money.

“Are you rea—”

“You’re just supposed to say ‘What?’” Dylan said.

She thought about that for a moment. “Why?”

He groaned, grinned, then sighed. Bloody hell, but he was going to miss her. He was a professional housesitter, and so didn’t really have a home of his own, but since their serendipitous meeting about a year ago, some twenty years after they’d gone through teachers’ college together—at the end of which they had both been voted most likely to be brilliant teachers and, simultaneously, least likely to be hired—he’d been spending half his time at her cabin on a lake in a forest, near Sudbury. He had a housesit scheduled in Argentina for two weeks hence, but, he thought now, maybe he’d cancel it and just stay here. Stay home, he happily amended.

“Okay, where?” Rev had decided to narrow it down.

“What?”

They stared at each other.

“Have some Froot Loops,” he said and held the box out to her.

“There’s no pizza left?”

“Someone ate it all.”

“Hm.”

He returned to his laptop, and she returned to the sun-glittering lake. She had missed it dearly while they were away and now couldn’t get enough of it.

“So,” Dylan tried again, “have you read the news recently?”

“No,” she replied. Then added, “Not since the early 90s.”

He looked up from his laptop in disbelief, stared at her expectantly, and was not disappointed.

“It’s always the same old shit,” she explained. “About which I can do nothing, since I am the epitome of powerlessness. So what’s the point? Stupidity doesn’t entertain me.”

Dylan snorted.

“Which means, by the way,” she continued, ignoring the snort, “that I depend on you to tell me when some Nero’s gone nuclear. Or some yahoo gets the blueprints for the reactors mixed up and installs the earthquake supports backwards. Again. So I can go up to the loft.”

“That’s not going to stop you from getting irradiated.”

“No, but it’s where I keep my suicide kit.”

He considered that information for a moment.

“Why the loft?” he finally asked.

“I figure, generally speaking, if I’m that depressed, I’m too depressed to climb the stairs. So it’s a—”

“Got it. Good idea.”

And then another moment.

“And what’s in your suicide kit?”

“A bottle of Jack Daniels, a razor blade, and lots and lots of Nyquil. And a pen and some paper.”

He nodded. “To write what, exactly?”

“Oh, you know, last words about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Or maybe just our epitaph.”

“Which would be?”

She thought about that for a bit. “‘I told you we were sick.’”

He laughed. “Indeed.”

“And yet,” he said then, pointing at his laptop, “guess what happened—”

She glared at him. Sort of.

“Canada passed the Parent Licence Act,” he said quickly.

She slowly turned her gaze from the lake to him. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. The NDP voted for it because it would piss off the Go-forth-and-multiply Conservatives, and the Conservatives voted for it because it would piss off the You-can’t-touch-our-civil-liberties NDP.”

He passed his laptop to her so she could skim the article.

“Wow,” she said when she was done.

“And,” he continued, happily, “That Magazine wants me to do an article about it.”

“What magazine?”

“That Magazine. Remember? There’s this magazine called—we’ve been over this before. Haven’t we?”

“Oh yeah. Cool!”

She turned her gaze back to the lake.

“You should call up Hugh LaFollette,” she said after a few moments, “if he’s still alive. He published a paper on the idea back in the 80s. And Jack Westman wrote a book about it. You could cover the legal implications, the moral implications, you could interview parents, Family Services, the Church…” She was off and running. As he knew she would be.

Dylan was typing away. A moment later, he hit ‘Send’ and a note arrived in Argentina.

2

They worked for a bit. Rev was a test development freelancer, writing logical reasoning questions that went on the LSAT. What else does one do with degrees in Philosophy, Literature, and Education? And Dylan started gathering background for his new assignment. He was a freelancer as well and typically wrote travel articles, which fit well with his housesitting and his degrees in History and Education, but occasionally, more often since reconnecting with Rev, he wrote pieces with a little more substance. Such as this one.

After a while, they decided to go into town to rectify the pizza deficiency.

On the way, Dylan summarized his findings for Rev.

“So, you have to be eighteen.”

“That makes sense,” Rev said as she drove her pine-tar-spattered car along the dirt road that lead from their driveway to the main road. “You’ve got to be eighteen to drive. Surely parenting requires the same level of maturity.”

“More, I’d say,” Dylan replied. “Maybe driving has greater potential for physical injury, but—”

“But getting in a car accident doesn’t mean you’ll end up with maggots in your diaper.”

Dylan looked over at her. “Not usually, no.”

“But,” she backed up a bit, “we’re assuming a correlation between age and maturity.”

“Good point,” he pulled out a little pad of paper and a pen and made a note to himself.

“According to Covell and Howe,” he recalled, “professors of psychology and political science, respectively, and both directors of a children’s rights center in Cape Breton, people should demonstrate the ability to be responsible for their own lives before being allowed to assume responsibility for a child’s life.”

“But, again, that’s assuming a correlation,” she turned from the dirt road onto the main road. “If that was the rationale for the age thing. Being a certain age doesn’t mean you’ve taken responsibility for your own life.”

“True.” Dylan thought for a moment. “What would?”

“Having moved out of your parents’ house? And lived on your own for a year? I heard a guy in the hardware store once whining about how now that his wife had left, he’d had to figure out how to cook his own dinner once he got home. Poor baby.”

“No surprise as to why his wife left.”

“And yet the woman at the register was so sympathetic. She actually cooed.”

“Whereas you…”

“Oh I was sympathetic too.”

Dylan thought this highly unlikely.

“I agreed that figuring out how to turn on an oven could be tricky for a man of forty.”

They passed the graveyard of a gravel pit. It had been in full operation twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, for eight months while the highway had been four-laned. Rev couldn’t stand the noise, which, due to the acoustic corridor formed by the long lake, reached her cabin despite being miles away, and she’d had to move for the duration. At her own expense, of course. Neither the township nor any Ministry she called was willing to intervene. The pit owner had a right to run his business as he saw fit.

“Okay, what else?” she asked.

“No drug addictions.”

“And what are they counting as drugs?”

“Gotta get that list,” he made another note to himself.

“No mental illness,” he continued. “Gotta get that list.”

“I wonder if they’ll consider religious belief a mental illness.”

“They could consider atheism a mental illness.”

“Who’s ‘they’, that’s the question. Get that list.”

“No mental retardation,” Dylan resumed.

“That’s going to upset the disability lobby.”

“Yeah, I should interview someone about that.” Another note to self.

“Ask them if they’d hire the special person down the street to build their house. Unsupervised.”

“Hm.”

“What else?” she asked.

“You have to have a minimum income, 20% above the poverty level.”

“Well, it does take money to raise a kid. Food, clothing, music lessons. Or something. But we don’t want it so only the rich can have kids.” She noticed in passing that the only remaining independent gas station in the area had finally, inevitably, gone out of business.

“Well, 20% above poverty level doesn’t exactly make you rich,” Dylan replied.

“True. Though if you’re living at poverty level, an extra 20% can make you feel rich,” she remembered back a couple decades. There was a time she was scrubbing toilets at the hockey camp for minimum wage, despite the three degrees in her back pocket.

“Would we rather have kids fully funded by the state?” he wondered aloud. “They could have made it like in China. People who agree to have only one child get priority access to housing, health subsidies, and pensions, and the kid gets priority access to nurseries, schools, and employment. People who have more than one child have to pay an ‘excess child’ levy, which is, I believe, quite steep. I think it’s a ten percent deduction from their total income, until the child reaches sixteen. In addition to having to pay for all the medical and educational expenses for the additional kid. Benefits like that would be a real incentive to get licensed. I wonder why—”

“Because it would’ve been an incentive to have a kid just for the money?”

“But if the money wasn’t paid directly to the parents—and it wouldn’t be, in the case of access to housing and schools—”

“I think I prefer the minimum income thing. Why should I pay for someone else’s kids?” Rev asked. “They had ’em, they should pay for ’em. Do they pay for my choices? When I decide to take a trip—”

“Well, they pay for some of your choices. If you’d broken your leg when you fell off what’s-her-name’s Harley—”

“Yeah, but—”

“And we already do. Pay for other people’s kids. We pay for their education, to a point. And their broken legs. And—”

“Yeah, and I’ve never really been happy about that,” she said. “It’s like the biochem cube thought experiment.”

Dylan glanced over with raised eyebrows.

“Suppose John Smith makes biochem cubes,” Rev recalled the experiment. “Biological-chemical cubes of something or other about one metre by one metre. With an input for the resources required for sustenance, and an output for the unusable processed resources.

“Why does John Smith make biochem cubes? Good question. Truth be told, they’re unlikely to make the world a better place. And he doesn’t sell them.

“So. Should we make allowances for John Smith? Should we give him a bigger salary? A break on his income tax? After all, he has, let’s say, ten biochem cubes to support. If they are to stay alive, he has to provide. He needs a bigger house. More electricity. More food.

“Should we encourage his ‘hobby’? Or should we censure it? Because once his biochem cubes become ambulatory, the rest of us have to go around them in one way or another. And when we’re both dead, his ecological footprint will have been ten times mine. Or yours. More, if the biochem cubes he made are self-replicating.”

“Well, when you put it that way,” Dylan said after a moment.

“Though you know,” Rev thought aloud, “if only qualified people will be able to have kids, there may be fewer broken legs. Or what have you. And I don’t mind paying for the pure accidents. It’s paying for the consequences of other people’s stupidity, or thoughtlessness, that I mind. And I guess I can generalize that to the kids themselves. I mind less paying for a cherished, wanted child than for the result of some drunken or otherwise mindless fuck.”

“To put it delicately.”

She grinned.

“What else?”

“You have to take a course on child development,” he said.

“Good. Is it a long course?”

“Don’t know the details. Yet.”

He made a note.

“No prior convictions for child abuse. Which will upset the child abuse lobby.”

She glanced over quickly to see if he was serious. “There’s a child abuse lobby?”

“People have rights!” he parodied.

“There has to be a minimum of two partner-parents,” he continued, “and since this is Canada, there are no specifications as to sex, sexual preference, or skin color of said partner-parents.”

”Cool.”

“But,” he summarized, “all that applies only to those who want to raise the child.”

“What do you—ah. Right. Of course.” Then, several moments later, when she’d fully caught up, “Wow.”

“Wow, indeed,” Dylan agreed.

“Mandatory testing?”

He nodded.

“Mandatory engineering?”

He nodded again.

“Wow. That used to be illegal in Canada. Now it’s mandatory?” Then a few seconds later, “That’s opening a can of worms.”

“And yet—”

“And yet, like the other, it doesn’t have to. Are they insisting on genetic enhancement or just…whatever it’s called when you correct genes. Like for, what, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s—” She paused for a moment, thinking. “What disease would you want to be named after you?”

3

When they walked into the pizza place, they saw a new guy back in the kitchen area. He lumbered out to the counter, a perfect picture of boredom and fatigue, then reached for a pen and the pad of pre-printed order forms. He waited.

“One with green olives and pineapple, one with black olives and mushrooms…”

“One with onions and peppers,” Dylan said, then turned to Rev, “and one Veggie Special?”

“Sounds good.”

The man ticked off various boxes.

“All large,” Rev anticipated his question, “and all undercooked a bit.”

Driving into town for just one pizza would be environmentally irresponsible, so she ordered several each trip, then froze them, heating up one slice at a time in her toaster oven. Four large would be a month’s supply. In theory.

The man re-entered the order into the computer system.

“And a bottle of Pepsi,” Dylan added.

“Yeah, make that two,” Rev said.

They waited a few moments.

“That’ll be $103.76,” the man said. Rev handed over her credit card.

“So,” she said to the guy as he processed the payment, “what do you think about the new parent licence thing?”

“What?”

“The new law that says you have to get a licence before you become a parent. He’s writing an article on it,” she nodded to Dylan.

“I think it’s stupid,” the man said.

Dylan nodded. “I’ll be sure to put that in my article.”

• • •

They stepped outside with half an hour to kill.

“While we wait, shall we check out the word on the street? What I have so far is—”

“An unrepresentative sample?”

“Maybe. Hopefully. Probably not.”

“Okay, sure,” Rev said. They looked to the right. They looked to the left.

“Okay, maybe the word in the mall?” Dylan suggested.

Rev hated malls. They were everything she—hated. “Another day. The park?”

“Yeah, but the ice cream place first.”

So they walked down the empty street to the ice cream place. It was a seasonal establishment and had just recently re-opened. Soon the summer people would stream in every weekend with their loud and large self-importance, but today they had the place to themselves. Dylan considered the possibilities, walking along the freezer with its selection of ice cream in brown cardboard barrels, then looking up to study the sign that listed extras. He asked for Strawberry Cupcake with green sprinkles. Rev asked for Triple Chocolate, then wandered to the adjoining fudge counter.

“Pity it’s not cheesecake,” Dylan said what was clearly on her mind.

“Yeah. Even so…a piece of the Egg Nog fudge too, please,” she said to the youngish woman behind the counter who was busy scooping their choices.

“So what do you think about the new parent licence thing?” Rev asked her she handed their cones to them. “He’s doing an article about it.”

“I think it’s about time,” she replied, slicing off a piece of Egg Nog fudge, then wrapping it. “I’ve got a little girl, just turned eight, and I swear I spend half my time undoing the influence of other people’s kids. Do you know how difficult it is to refuse your own kid when everyone else’s kid has it or is doing it?”

“I never thought of it that way,” Dylan said, taking a lick of his Strawberry Cupcake. “Thanks for your comment.”

She scowled as she rang up their order. “I just know she’s going to want to give blow-jobs when she’s ten.”

• • •

They paid for their cones and the fudge, then crossed the street and entered a small park. Once they had walked around the perimeter, they sat on a bench, idly watching some kids on the brightly-coloured playground equipment.

Suddenly Dylan got up, tossing his cone, and rushed to the monkey bars to rescue a purple-faced upside-down toddler.

“Hey, get away from my kid!” A large woman, followed by an even larger man, stomped toward Dylan from one of the other benches.

“I was just helping—”

“He didn’t need any help!” the woman shouted.

“Actually, he did,” Dylan said. “At that age, there’s no way he’d’ve been able to pull himself back up. In a moment, he would’ve fallen off.”

“Then he would’ve learned an important lesson!” the man grunted. “Not to climb up there in the first place.”

“A moot lesson for a paraplegic and/or vegetable,” Rev commented, having joined the circus.

“Are you calling my kid a vegetable?”

“If he’d fallen, on his head, which he would’ve have, given—” Dylan decided to withhold the physics lesson, “that’s exactly what he would’ve become.”

“But you probably wouldn’t’ve noticed much difference,” Rev assured the couple.

There was a moment of dead air.

“Are you saying I’m a bad mother?” the woman challenged Rev.

“Duh.” She licked her Triple Chocolate.

“But I love my kids!”

“Oh please,” Rev responded, “the word means so many things, it’s useless. Whatever, your love is obviously insufficient.”

“But I’d do anything for them!” she insisted.

“Except take Child Care 101,” Dylan said dryly as they returned to their table.

“You know,” Rev commented, as she offered Dylan a lick from her cone, “one article isn’t going to be enough.”

“Not even close,” he agreed.

(free download of complete novel at jassrichards.com)