The Test
José Esteves wakes up with all the psychosomatic symptoms that come with this sort of day. Sickness. Asthenia. Cold sweat. Sensing an anxiety attack, the semi-intelligent alarm clock distracts him with a brief summary of last night’s national news. Off the shores of Algarve, the maritime patrol torpedoed yet another freighter packed to the brim with African political refugees. No appeals for mercy were taken into consideration, not even when they offered, for toxicology and mutagenic virology experiments at the Câmara Pestana Institute, the two thousand children born during the journey. Refugee freighter down, and that’s final. Meanwhile, in the wilderness of Avenida da Liberdade, around three o’clock in the morning, a group of homeless people assaulted a van full of nocturnal Nipponese tourists and set about devouring them, half raw, taking advantage of the foul water in the lakes to cook some algae soup. When seized by one of the rare urban militias still in operation, the gerontologic group declared to whoever felt like listening: “They’re Chinks. They eat sushi. It’s disgusting, even their flesh tasted like fish…”
José Esteves contemplates himself in the shaving mirror, flops out his tongue where a few psychosomatic cankers have sprouted, swallows a couple of antihistamine pills, scratches his chest ulcers, opens the tap for a lean thread of putrid water, and runs the depilatory over his face before plastering all exposed body surfaces with protective UV block. Time and again, he wonders about the test he’d been preparing since yesterday. Are his questions suitable? Adjustable to the insuccess rate? He hasn’t got the faintest clue, and that frightens him. It’d have been better if he had told the students what all the questions were about, and stealthily handed them over the examination grid like some of his colleagues do, therefore protecting himself and the school’s insuccess rate. But since he had failed to do all that, he’s now in danger of undergoing an explicit assassination attempt on the way to school. It had already happened to poor Silva, and Leonor, and Tavares…
Solicitous, the radio tells him that the tectonic plate fault that splits the basement of Shopping Center Amoreiras in half has reached a five-metre amplitude. The whole Former Expo Zone is now permanently flooded. And they still haven’t repaired the lower roadway of the Ancien Régime Bridge (new name), through which a whole train fell down on a Neues NATO nuclear submarine five months earlier. Fortunately, the Tagus presents only low levels of radioactive contamination, authorities assure. Nothing to worry about. Nothing that would make mussel glow in the dark. The problem will be affording a new submarine, and because somebody has to pay for it, more cuts will be made in public service spending.
Outraged, José Esteves chokes on the wide range mouthwash. More cuts? Today, even?
It’s useless to protest. Like Pyrrhus, the teacher unions have piped down and folded their arms, having sold out to the Man. José’s honourable profession is one of risk. He has to live away from family all school year round, in a hidden apartment the State insists in not financing. For fear of student reprisals. All this means added expenses: rented room, secret phone number, defensive and offensive armament, travel passes, extended life insurance, and a few more small cumulative horrors.
Finished in the bathroom, follows the forced ingestion of bran gruel loaded with psychotropics and tranquillizers, and the whole daily dressing ritual.
First, he flattens the skin implants over his jugular which will notify the insurance companies in case of systemic fault outside his work area. Should that happen, not a dime will be paid. He then slips into a Kevlar armour reinforced with ceramic plates, capable of withstanding semi-automatic gunfire from five hundred metres. José Esteves wonders why he should care enough to suffer all the discomfort of a hyperthermia crisis. No one uses automatic firearms in cases like this anymore. In the dark corners of the teachers’ lounge there’s talk of rockets bought for a song from the Bosnians. Rockets with a reduced range of 150 metres, but still effective in eliminating teachers with maximum prejudice.
José Esteves puts on cervical protectors, shields his crotch with anti-offensive grenade codpieces, covers his head with helmet, his eyes with mirror shades, the ears with soundproof plugs. And then, when he’s finally dressed, comes a whole range of pedagogic weapons. A taser (legal and approved by the Institute for Juvenile Correction and Discipline.) A neuro-truncheon (not really recommended, but authorities usually turn a blind eye.) And a neurotoxin dart shooter with enough dysfunctional capacity for thirty hours of convulsions (illegal and anti-pedagogic, as it inhibits the potential for learning in students.) In the chest kit, next to the pocket for the register/files, is an indelible ink pen with titanium nib. Chained to his left wrist, the briefcase where he stores the test papers, protected by encoded lock.
He is finally prepared to leave the apartment. Carefully, he unlocks the door and peeks into the corridor where he can hear, in the distance, the usual screams of a family being beaten up by its children. Stuck to the window under the stairs, a rotten hologram of the Pope opens its arms to the world with a retarded smile. A cluster of condoms dissolved in acid smoulders still at the virtual feet of the defender of multiple progeny.
OK, no one in sight. Let’s go.
In the entrance hall shielded by double floodgates, José Esteves faces a couple of rows of homeless people still asleep, half-comatose, in the gap between the two metal plates. For fear that they might wake up at the wrong time and block the rails with an arm or a leg, the teacher quickly trots over them running, grinding a few fingers here, an elbow or a greasy skull there, as he struggles not to breathe in the fog of shit, vomit, muck and other bodily fluids that steam from the slumbering mass. “Fucking bourgeois!” snaps one of the homeless. “You damned fascists have always trod on the working class, but the day will come when…”
