'Gezzer in! Gezzer in! ' Harris announced ceremoniously, once we had all entered the

cave.

'What is he saying?' I asked Nin, again.

'He's saying “get yourselves in” really quickly,' she calmly replied back; I could see

the clear look of entertainment on her face, which is still a better substitute for

impatience considering my fusillade of questions.

Jeter Kit took out a thick fat book from his backpack and pressed it on top of the

wooden stump he was previously sitting on, releasing a perfume of claustrophobic

dust into the dark air.

'Read your great, great uncle's book, it's ... great,' he said to Nin with a crescent like,

perfectly symmetrical smile.

I peered over the cover to get a glimpse of what he was talking about after motioning

my flashlight towards it, 'Ulysses by James Joyce ... you're his niece?'

'Indeed, so,' she flirtatiously affirmed.

'James Joyce will undoubtedly be smiling from beyond the grave right now,' Harris

joined in with his rather husky voice - seems to be hit with puberty the earliest - 'and

to think we'd soon be there if our parents found out. '

I must have twitched my nose and opened my mouth for a fraction of a second,

because Nin propped up in front of me and said in a tone of enflamed optimism, 'I'll

explain to you what we're talking about! '

Moving a little backwards, my raised eyebrows were the perfect 'proceed on'

indication, and proceed on she did.

'There's a certain order that we must adhere to at all times, or else there will be chaos

in the perfect system the eliteratti created, 'she went towards the wooden stump and

picked up the book, 'for instance, Jeter can't go around wasting his time reading

literature because that is not his domain – it’s mine. So it makes no sense for him to

leave his perfectly good economical investment books or whatever his line of work

has him read and do something other than that.’

‘It’s practically blasphemy,’ Harris interjected again. ‘Abu hates it when I talk of

how dreary all medicine lessons are. See here, he says, we weren’t born to look like

this without good reason – and with that being said, no, we do not have any right to

step out of this biological status quo.’

‘That leaves me stressed out since I genuinely love poetry and fictitious philosophy

in literature or anything remotely abstract. But my brother?’ Jeter pulled his tree

stump in the middle of Nin, Harris and myself. The rest of us were sitting on rocks

and the cave was suddenly lit up with glowing jubilees in lanterns.

‘My brother took over our father’s surveillance business – the only surveillance

business of its kind in Silverns,’ he continued, ‘it keeps tabs on everyone’s activities

and their adherence to the rules. Bitterly ironic, how they both couldn’t keep me

adhering to their pathetic system.’

‘I mean you can’t change what’s inside…no matter what you look like,’ Nin added

softly.

Indeed you can’t. Don’t I know it! My father was born looking like a clown. He had

fluffy orange hair, bleached skin with upside down triangles under his eyes, a circular

tomato for a nose and oversized red lips. His skin consisted of turquoise flannel and

white frills with yellow buttons trailing all the way down from neck to bottom. But

the thing is, the man didn’t know a single joke to save his gosh darned cute look or

failing career. The man aspired to be and become more than anything in the world: a

lawyer. He campaigned relentlessly among the weaker factions of the miscellaneous.

He took paroles by the law judiciary just so he could learn and understand the basic

rules of Silverns. Sadly, instead of making people laugh, he was laughed at for failing

to crack a decent punch line and straying into a more socially ambiguous position,

instead. And society is ruthless. A clown near high profile eliteratti headquarters was

akin to an unsightly beggar that was a constant reminder of all that ugly, the rich tried

so hard to conceal, or rather, ignore and forget.

My father knew more than anything that this sort of discrimination could not

possibly be it. How could one feel so wrong in one’s own skin? Luckily, he found

some respite when he met mother. She looked quite strange to him with normal olive

coloured arms and a face that had shades of pomegranate in the cheeks, eyes that

sparkled intelligence and clothes that were different; a polka dotted long skirt with a

purple top. He wasn’t sure which profession it alluded to, so he assumed she was a

method actor – definitely one of the miscellaneous, one of ‘his’ people.

They fell in love. It was the first time someone had helped him laugh and see the

funny side in all the imperfections of life. Physiologically he had no idea she carried

an aversion or deviance from the genesis that engulfed Silverns of looking like the

way you are meant to spend the rest of your life earning a livelihood in or even a

name. My mother used to call my father Spud instead of being known as simply

“Clown T” (he was assigned an alphabet to show he was the twentieth person born

looking like a clown in the town). I don’t exactly know what Spud means, maybe she

just found it endearing.

Unfortunately, my mother died when I was very young. Sometimes, in moments of

solitude I do tend to reflect on life and how my circumstances would have been, had

she been alive. She and I, two of a kind. Surely, there might have been some kind of

ease in all the difficulties we had to overcome. Because of what I remember, she was

definitely the stronger spirit in the household, who helped father find happiness in a

world that consistently saw him as an unnecessary, useless and ungrateful misfit.

‘Nonconformity the disease’ is a slogan that has never quite lost any of its severity

along the transition of centuries in our existence.

Ironically, Darwin was wrong – the fittest and possibly most fearless of us – my

mother, left the earliest. I always hope mother bequeathed her fire and zesty spirit to

me, so that there may be more binding our unique bond than just the special our

‘types’ received at birth; an odd red circle with several ringlets inside, it was a symbol

that heightened our individualism and our kind because only those born without a

profession were branded with it. My mother and I.

Life wanted to bring father and myself to the forefront… inculcate within us that the

struggle to live and not just survive, must never be lost, even if our greatest strengths

and comforts get snatched away from us.

I promised myself that I would help my father achieve his dream. Since no career

particularly influenced me or had any degree of interest, there was no other goal. If

through all the madness that surrounded us I could achieve even a remotely

significant identity for myself, then life would be meaningful. In this town, which is

really another type of world, you only truly thrive when you come first in your

profession, but let’s face it, only if you were born an alpha. And alphas are only born

looking like the core eliteratti professions. That is why they are also born with the

licence to make the secondary creatures’ lives horrific because it is the entire chain of

being ideal once again.

A simple technique of implementing this is to do well in what you’re born with and

sticking to that. It would simply be your misfortune if you got stuck in the wrong

‘body’ as my unfortunate father did and my new friend Jeter seemed to be. There was

no room for silver in Silverns Town. Since the eliteratti generated the most revenue

they were naturally deemed golden. The miscellaneous, whilst still possessing

purpose were always the second best. Every child born was told they had to aspire to

be like the eliteratti – golden. The very fact that you were not born to look like the

eliteratti meant your entire life would be spent aspiring and admiring…from afar.

The whole deal with this fictional world is the quintessential example of man’s ideal

utopia turning to dung. As the golden quartet brought along with them different pieces

of their culture that they thought could be fused into a mutant colony, it certainly went

bizarre but in ways man knows best.

So are we really what we look like?