-Ursula K. Le Guin
In modern times, writers of fiction take deep care conjuring the deserving protagonist, one who will stand and answer a grand call to action, champion a worthy cause, fight for the oppressed. Our favorite narratives have engorged us on these lofty ideals. It may therefore seem a relatable impulse to ‘walk away’ when one finds themselves in the untenable paradox such as the one presented by Le Guin.
But from the moment of reading, something with that premise has disagreed with me.
For me, Le Guin’s allegory evoked the image of a character that was the diametric opposite: not a warrior, prepared to crush by force the foundations of an unjust system, but that of a stunningly overwhelmed character (partially imagined from the unnamed soul who escorted the scapegoat of Yom Kippur to Azazel on behalf of the ancient Israelites). That ultimately led me to explore the notions of agency and freedom, but mostly, how the power of our choices can flip the script and always from truth springs liberation. “Escape from Omelas” was born out of the premise that if one finds themselves in an ‘Omelas’, where one can neither stay nor walk away, then they must find a way to somehow…transcend.
After all, we are defined by nothing, if not our choices.
People always ask if the ‘City of Joy’ was real. I suppose there will always be those reluctant to concede such a place could exist—the ones who need to question. Then there are others who want to believe, but simply cannot imagine what this place, this Garden of Eden with bullet trains and skyscrapers, must have been like.
I always answer with the same words: Yes. Omelas was real. As real as an eagle sailing across a mountain, or the brace of brine over the face of the water. It harnessed power, deeper than the roll of a kettledrum inside your chest or subdued as the sparkle of a caress on your skin.
Usually, they respond with the same, confused look you have right now.
Some go further to ask: if this so-called ‘United State of Euphoria’ was in fact real, why would anyone let something so rare, so exceptional, slip through their fingers? That is when I invite them to have a seat, exactly as you’re sitting, and I relate the story of how it unfolded, just as I’m telling you. Still, they never accept what happened.
They never truly believe.
#
It was the winter of my twenty-third year, when I set off to find the Monastery of the Highest Peak. I was told the path would be fraught, formidable, but that the monks, reclusive and hidden, left provisions along the way. Their sanctuaries, near-crumbling and perched high atop the bedrock, seemed to defy all commands to make the vertical drop below.
But my concern was not for my safety.
On the last spiral of snow-capped steps, chiseled from rock and railed with knotted pine, I collapsed. My toes, wrapped in wool and crammed in boots a half-size too small, had lost their sensation. I suppressed the urge to cough, afraid my lungs would crystallize and shatter in the thin air frost. Droplets of ice crusted my eyelids and I wondered: who would find my body if I just closed them until spring?
Sometimes Karma is exquisite.
On the brink of surrender, my eyes somehow resolved on the vista before me, its beauty forever etched in my mind like a woodcut painting. Ten of the Eighteen Peaks thrust themselves skyward through a sea of pearl and opal clouds, each an island swirled in mist. The sun, making its retreat, left trails of golden mandarin and ribbons of pale hibiscus above.
Like seeing a picture-postcard, stamped with a reminder why I came, I shook away the stupor, picked up my machete and continued to climb. I tried not to think of what I left behind. The sparkling city by the sea. My home.
After I fled the city environs, I met other wanderers outside those gilded gates. You could readily spot the ones who walked away. Either they roamed across the landscape sharing, with anyone who would listen, their memories of the child locked inside the Tower. Or, they remained silent, their far-off gazes honed on nothing appreciable. If they ever found whatever they thought they were looking for, it would be like staring into a mirror shattered.
It was overhearing one such exchange, in the back of a stale bar with cracked, leather stools that jabbed my empty pockets, that I first learned of the monastery. There was a Queen Mother, full of counsel so wise it was like salve for any soul so motivated, or so agonized, they reached the top.
Upon hearing it, I gathered whatever I could trade or borrow and set off toward the northernmost mountains. Passing through towns and fairs along the way, I heard the same story: rumors of the transformational journey to the monastery went back more than seventy years.
It was nightfall when I reached the top and entered the temple courtyard. Past the dim light of my torch, it appeared no one had lived there for some time. The dovecote and animal pens lay barren, not even droppings remained. The temple room had been overtaken: tree roots pushed through and engulfed the walls like the tentacles of some great squid. The place was near complete ruin.
I scoured room to room: the monk’s quarters, the dining hall, even the guest house…searching for some sign of life, a reason to hope. Turning down an empty corridor, I saw an open door. The light of a candle or a small lantern or a dying ember emitted a faint glow. Inside the room, an old woman lay stretched on a bed, as if lying on a pyre. Ghostly hands, sheathed in vellum-thin skin, rested upon an ivory spread like two, gray spiders. Her mouth stretched wide and silent, as if uncertain which breath would be the last.
I would have guessed she had already departed this realm if her voice hadn’t rattled out loud like a rusted accordion, “You come here from the ‘Spring of Gladness’?” Her ash-colored hand reached for a glass next to her bed. Once my heart began to beat again, I helped her sip.
Hearing one of the countless sobriquets used for my home, I answered, “Yes. Are you the one I’m seeking?”
“You and I are the only ones here, so that depends on what you seek.”
Kneeling beside her, I confided what haunted me since the day I deserted my post. My life as a Tower Guard had been respectable, predictable, until the morning the Constable approached me and told me the child locked in the tower would soon turn eighteen. A replacement would be selected, and I was ordered to take the older one into the wilderness, far outside the city gates, and leave them to die.
The silence was near suffocating then she finally spoke, “And? Where is the child?”
There was a palpable shift, my hands clasping and unclasping as if controlled by another, then I unloaded my burden, as much as it would give, “I didn’t know what to do. Outside the city walls, I felt caught in an undertow, like standing on wet sand when a wave crashes and recedes. My training as a guard never prepared me for something so… unequivocal, so I disobeyed the order. I left the child somewhere…safe. But I knew I could never go back and face the Constable. So I wandered, until I heard of the monastery.”
“I see. So what is it that brings you now?”
I looked around the room, empty save for a bed, the nightstand, and a bench in the corner. “At night, when I close my eyes, I have…visions. They haunt me relentlessly. I don’t understand the meaning and I can’t escape. I was told you have immense wisdom for anyone who desires it. How can I make it stop?”
“Ahh, yes. The dreams of those who walk away.” Her eyebrows lifted like startled caterpillars, “Didn’t you know? You come from the place I was born.”
Seeing my shock, she explained: “As a child, before the Days of the Trial, during a time of great scarcity and want, before the time we were chosen, the ‘City of Eternal Elation’ was like any other town. There were no festivals or festoons or flags to parade back then. Some believe these celebrations are meaningless, a vanity, but they’ve become so terribly crucial.
“I was no more than four or five when they came and asked my mother. There had been a randomized lottery and I was the first to be selected. I didn’t understand what it all meant, but my mother read the risks, understood the benefits, and she signed her consent.”
My stomach knotted and my hands began to shake. When the truth dawned, my entire world dimmed.
“First, came the Ones who wanted to help: bring me scraps of food, some leftover toy, anything to make me forget the constant loneliness, the ceaseless misery. But the Constable soon put a stop to those portholes of guilt. That was when they hired guards to prevent any further breaches to the Agreement.
“Next, came the Ones who wanted to persuade: I later learned from the monks how they presented such eloquent arguments to the Council, endless debates, one after another, as to how the Terms might be skirted. ‘This is an injustice,’ they argued. ‘Why must it be a child? They did nothing to merit such cruelty!’ Others suggested, ‘Why can’t the volunteer be an adult, a criminal, one who deserves it?’
“But each question went up like a burnt-offering on an altar. When the last of those arguments were exhausted, it inevitably led way to the Ones who wanted to fight: brandishing a sword for something requiring a scalpel. Anger can be useful, at times, but there’s such a fine line between it and bitterness. A brush fire unchecked never differentiates what it destroys. Every warrior grows weary, eventually burning themselves out.
“Finally, there were the Ones who walked away, like my Tower Guard, who also refused the order to leave a defenseless soul, alone and near death, in the wilderness. He brought me to the monastery instead, but it makes no difference in the end, you realize. Walking away. Nothing can change Omelas except for Omelasians.”
Before I could ask what this meant, the rasp of her voice nestled inside slowing breaths and she drifted. Peaceful rest had evaded me so long, my own eyes lost their will to keep vigil.
When they opened, soft morning light filtered through an empty room and I was curled like a kitten on the bench. The Queen Mother’s bed was untouched. There was no water glass or candle on the bedside stand. I retraced my steps out into the blinding snow. The monastery was as empty as I remembered the night before.
From the courtyard’s center I turned, or maybe it was the monastery that whirled around me. I watched and listened for anything to convince myself what I saw and heard and felt the night before was real. After all the weeks of hunger and gripping cold, all the dangers I surmounted hoping to be freed, I imagined voices, hidden somewhere between the trees, having a thorough laugh at my stupidity.
That was when a cold fury erupted from deep within. It began like a waterspout encroaching still waters, then swelled to a full-force cyclone. It ravaged everything in the dining hall: I threw chairs, upturned every table in my way. It laid waste to the kitchen where I flung whatever was unbolted, whatever came in my grasp, smashing glass and earthenware alike.
But that hadn’t begun to quell the rage.
I returned to the temple room, covered in bramble and steeped in cold. I slashed every root and every branch, until chips of wood and frost flew from my machete. My anger and tears did not subside until I reached something hard and impenetrable. When I cleared the last vegetation away, I discovered a stone triptych beneath.
On each panel was a story meticulously engraved: how a person, small and frail, was brought to the monastery from the city by the sea, how she was cared for and educated by the monks, and after she grew old and died, was buried beneath the temple’s vault.
How I didn’t succumb to exposure sitting on that stone floor, staring at that slab wall, is still a mystery, but a chastening crept over me like the vines over that temple, and I committed each detail to memory.
In time, I was forced to accept that everything had indeed, possibly perhaps, been mostly in my imagination, but I considered it all and salvaged one truth. Despite my instinct to do anything but, there was nothing left for me except, of course, to return home.
#
It’s by this time in the story, someone asks if I returned to the city to destroy it. Did I go back intending to cause its demise?
It’s then I explain. Citizens inside the ‘People’s Republic of Jubilation’ were like specters, walking in circles, blindfolded. The polity, a phantasm. Trying to dismantle that would be like grasping the wind: something perceivable, but forever out of reach.
When I returned, the skyrails still ran on schedule and the solar towers maintained their thrum. The metropolis and the masses continued their intimate dance. The entirety was as pleasant and placid as the day I left, except for me. When night came, if sleep befell me, the visions that chased me only intensified.
My dream world appeared no different from the real one, except whatever I couldn’t speak in words, I would taste, and whatever I tasted I could see. That which was bitter, bloomed like lotus blossoms in spring and that which was sweet, oozed a sick river of blood-red. What I could not write, I would hear and what I heard I would see. The patter of raindrops on glass glowed white, then electric blue. The laughter of children sprouted like green grass.
My dreams were not haunted by demons or many-armed creatures of the deep. My mind was filled with photisms, as if every waking sensation coalesced and misfired, evading all efforts to capture them.
So when the morning birds chirped and early shadows softened my bedroom walls, I arose to do what my subconscious wanted but could not. I painted.
As soon as one painting manifested, another followed and, as such, my small brownstone began to overflow. I rented a booth in the Farmers’ Market, where anyone who cared was free to mill and observe as I worked. Some even asked for a painting to keep. It wasn’t long before Tamnun, the Tower Constable, paid me a visit.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding, Harata?” he asked. “You’ve been gone a long time. I’d begun to worry something had happened to you.”
My cheeks warmed, but I held my words.
“I sent scouts out looking for you,” he browsed through my exhibit as he spoke. “You were nowhere to be found. I figured you, for some reason, had chosen to walk away, but now… you’re back.”
My eyes did not once leave the canvas I was painting.
“I must say, I was disappointed to hear you resigned from your post,” he sounded almost sincere. “I could always count on you to do as you were told.”
Something inside me recoiled, as if my organs had been ensnared in a tightening grip.
“I always hoped you would become Constable one day…” He picked up a painting and held it to the light, his voice growing stern at last, “What’s the meaning of all this, Harata?”
My exhibit was a collection of vignettes. I painted the city I knew as a child: clay rooftops and stucco walls, pergolas wreathed with grapevines and climbing ivy. Skiffs and trawlers moored in the harbor to the east, thoroughbreds grazing open fields to the west. It was a visual testament to the beauty and promise of a city I loved. But each painting featured, by default, the filthy, emaciated face of that child locked in the Tower.
At last I spoke, “I paint what I see. In my dreams.”
“Dreams in our ‘Land of Spanless Succor’ should be happy ones,” he said. “Why would you feature this wretched urchin, in the midst of our beautiful city?”
I tried to formulate a reply, while my hands, for a moment, forgot how to paint, “I suppose it underscores we’re all connected.”
At that, he sat on a client stool next to mine. Placing a fatherly hand on my shoulder, “What’s happening to you, Harata? Let me help you. If you would only make me understand…”
“You don’t need to understand, Tamnun.”
His hand dropped and his back stiffened like a reed. He stood up, nodding a few moments, as if in a private conversation with himself. Then, wishing me luck, he turned back toward the Tower.
#
I sometimes need to remind those who never experienced a utopia firsthand, that business transactions in the city were a non-commercial enterprise, goods and services were interchangeable in a free and open market. Happiness, however, was a controlled commodity: as non-fungible as rare rubies or fine diamonds. Sparks of joy were traded and sold in the tightly regulated market of public spectacle.
Stealing joy was a serious crime.
Three months after Tamnun’s visit, my sister Omri came to my home. Summertide was approaching and she looked uncomfortable sitting at my table surrounded by LED microchips and sketches. Outspoken since childhood, she wasted no tact on saying what was on her mind.
“You need to come off this bend you’re on, Harata.”
As much as our relationship had drifted since I returned, I didn’t expect such harsh words from her. Since our father died, before I could walk, and our mother succumbed to a rare illness when I was eight, Omri had been my only family. She had been my protector and had always filled that void until I left home to work for the Guard. “What do you mean?”
“Your paintings,” she picked up a sketch off the drafting table, holding it as if the paper was made from hemlock, “and this mural you’ve been so secretive about. It’s attracting the wrong kinds of questions. This is not just about you, Harata. Have you considered how it affects us? Your family?”
My sister, married and with two children of her own, sat beside me. She draped one hand around my shoulder while she squeezed my bicep with the other, “Do you remember when we were small, you thought you could go and gather meadow honey, all on your own? Don’t you remember when I warned you not to? But you forged ahead regardless and returned home swollen as a pumpkin on an autumn vine.”
I remembered those bee stings well. I went to gather wild honey for our mother, her favorite morning treat.
“Please, listen to me now, Harata. Stop whatever it is you’re doing, before you regret it.”
When my sister left, more memories of that day floated back to me. I was determined to return with my prize because, despite the pain, I wanted to bring my mother a small bit of happiness.
It was the last meal the three of us shared before she died.
#
The morning of the Summertide Festival arrived once again and the abrasive ring of metal clanging metal wrenched me from a restless slumber. What I once thought of as a celebration, now felt like a death march. Still, I wrestled on my dress robes to join the cortège as it snaked its way through city streets and thoroughfares. I stepped outside my brownstone just as a gaggle of denizens sauntered by, swaying to the beat of tambourines, oblivious to anything other than their self-satisfied joy-making.
Such a nonsensical instrument. The tambourine. Seriously, how much musical skill does it take to beat a goat’s hide?
I followed the hubbub all the way to the Meadow of Green Blossom, where any child under the age of eighteen could run butt-naked through clover. With unbridled exuberance, they flung mud cakes at each other, faces beaming. I tried not to think of the face locked in the Tower. Or the face of the one, barely younger than me, I shepherded outside the city gates. Or the sound of their bleating when I tried to leave.
It reminded me somewhat of my own unanswered calls for my mother, after she died. The questions I asked myself: Why did she leave? Why didn’t she take me with her?
O, Omelas! We should have never called you the ‘Crown Jewel of Happiness’ or named you an ‘Oasis of Perpetual Glee’. That was far too trite. We should have labeled you for what you were: freedom from guilt, abolishment of fear, the embracing of helplessness but, most of all…the utter abandonment of all responsibility.
Tamnun ascended the dais. Every year, the Tower Constable claimed the honor of kicking off the festivities. Before he could finish his grand elocution, I removed the handmade remote from my robe, the one I’d wired to unroll a giant screen behind him.
I expected an uproar, but there was only a strange quiet, punctuated by an occasional gasp. My two-story mural was entitled The First Child and it was painted as I remembered the triptych at the monastery, except my rendition was in living technicolor, the way it appeared in my dreams.
I did not flinch when Tamnun glared at me standing in the crowd. The only thing I regretted was the pained expression on Omri’s face. So when the Constable’s men yanked me and locked me in the Tower for subverting the public joy, it was not a shock.
#
In the ‘Municipality of Bliss,’ justice was a mirage. Law and order, a simulacrum. Usurping the city’s joy was a crime unheard of, but if it happened, it carried a life sentence. There were no witnesses or judges or juries. There was no need. In the interrogation room, there was only me and Tamnun, my Chief Inquisitor, face to face.
From the moment Tamnun sat across from me, I felt his powerful reach, but he smiled and offered me a chilled glass. “Don’t worry,” he said when I refused, “It’s just water. I know you don’t use drooz.
“I’ve already spoken with Omri,” he said, “and have a fairly good idea of what you’ve been going through since you returned from outside the city gates. I sympathize, I truly do. But I’ve already tried what I could to bring you back into the fold, pull you off whatever ledge you’re dangling from…
“And now, you try this stunt? This public embarrassment. Of the city? Of me?”
I stared at the glass between us. It could have been an entire sea.
“You know, Harata, I’m starting to sense a great deal of resentment from you, and I can’t help feeling it’s personal. What happened when you were outside these walls?”
“I did what you asked me. I left the child…”
“Where did you leave the child?”
I faltered for a moment under the stress of recall, “Beneath a tree, there was a stream—“
“That’s it? Did it try to follow you?”
“Nooo! They were much too weak for that. They cried for me not to leave.”
“Then what?”
“What does it matter?! Why do you care? The child is no longer your problem, isn’t that what you wanted?”
He took to rubbing his flecked goatee with slow, deliberate strokes, “It’s clear that during your time away, you visited the Monastery. It seems you’ve now returned planning to stage some upheaval to the balance of this city. But hear me clearly, Harata,” he leaned so close I could smell his ambrosia-like breath, “I will never let that happen.”
A sharp pain in the pit of my stomach forced its way past my throat, “Why did you choose me?” My question was the simplest of ones, my voice weak like a child’s compared to his, but I needed an answer. “Why not someone else? Why choose me for your dirty work?”
“My dirty work?” Tamnun laughed out loud. “You seem to be under the impression that you and I are somehow distinct. You think you can ride some high horse and free yourself of our harsh reality?” He stood up, walked over to the window, his eyes scanning past wind turbines and hyperloops. “From the time each of us peers into that room, Harata, our path is crystal clear. Our responsibility to the commonwealth defies individual distinction and overrides personal relationships: not friends, not family, not even our own children supersede that utility. Even your own sister understands the ultimate good is Joy.”
“And what is Joy?”
“You know, Harata,” his head rolled back and his eyes closed, as if remembering. His voice tinged with cloying sympathy, “I actually felt sorry for you, as a child, after your father walked away.”
For the first time, my eyes glared directly into his. “My father died,” I corrected him.
“No, son. Your father walked away, leaving your mother with a daughter and baby son to raise all on her own. And yes, drooz is a harmless drug, it can take away the edge for a while, but anything is toxic when taken in enough quantities. Haven’t you learned yet, Harata? There is no such thing as a ‘rare illness’ in the ‘City of Our Contentment.’”
Each of Tamnun’s revelations was intended to destroy, drill a hole where I was most vulnerable, dissolving my defenses into a watery sphere of distorted images. Closing in, he seemed all-powerful, “So how about you answer my questions, truthfully, now? The only thing I need to know from you is: What did you do?!” His fist pounded the table so hard, the glass of water splashed over the side. I swore it vibrated with the beating in my chest.
“Did you obey my orders, exactly as I gave them? Did you leave the child?” he asked. “Or, did you decide, on your own, to do something else? What was it? Hmm? A suffocation? A drowning?”
Something inside ruptured. I held my head in my hands. Tears dropped to the table.
“That is what I thought.” Tamnun headed for the door, leaving me dismembered, awash in my own guilt.
Before he left, his hand lingered on the doorknob. Without as much as turning to look at me he said, “I’ve always wondered what becomes of the ones who leave these city gates. Thanks to you, Harata, I finally know. You can never walk away. Not from this city. Not from me.
“We stay with you, wherever you go.”
#
Sitting behind iron bars in a cold, cement cell, bereft of comfort save a moth-ridden mattress and the rust-stained toilet, it was hard not to contemplate my current station. It wasn’t as if my punishment were undeserved, still I wondered endlessly about my choices.
The ones I chose. The ones that chose me.
In those moments between self-doubt and self-awareness, I would hear the new child in that wretched cuddy down the hall. His crying grew to sobs, and the sobs became babblings, unintelligible and in deep distress. Yet, despite the perceived differences between us, all the advantages bestowed upon me and all the derision heaped on him, the two of us found ourselves in the exact same place.
Nights passed, one by one, lying on that mattress with Tamnun’s words, perpetual and high fidelity, replaying in my mind. I never suspected what happened to my mother and father. Just another example of dissembling the Truth of Omelas, all in the pursuit of happiness. Or, for my mother at least, the similitude of it.
I remembered once, in the days after she died, I tried to leave the city. I reasoned her death meant she had chosen to walk away, and I had resolved to follow her. I left home that night, a small pack of favorite toys on my back. When I had reached the main gate, Tamnun stopped me. He didn’t scold, he didn’t lecture, he merely brought me back to Omri.
It was as if he sensed what I was thinking even then. What good is Joy for the ones who are left behind?
Mornings came, sun after sun. I was not allowed to paint, but the Constable eventually agreed to let me tend the Tower’s potager. There were times I tried to sneak the new child a fresh-picked berry or vegetable off the vine, but the Constable kept too close a watch for me to succeed. Each morning I hoped that searing sunlight would scorch my memories, purge the dreams and all their unanswered questions from my subconscious. I counted those redemptive suns until the days became months and the months became years.
After the thirteenth year, I stopped counting. In that timelessness, the guards occasionally brought news:
Omri had initiated an inquiry to the City Council on my behalf.
The City Council had scheduled a series of emergency meetings.
The Constable’s wife had walked away from Omelas.
I never held much interest in these jailhouse rumors. My only interest was word of Omri.
One day the Tower received a new ‘guest’ to take up residence in the cell opposite mine. Judging from his vernacular, he was not from the city and was being held for some minor infraction. My guess was that he would soon be released and escorted onto a train home, but the news he shared was entirely unexpected.
Efram was from Romayma, a port city on the sea farthest south of the peninsula, and he had come to hear a discourse on the main square…one organized by Omri. “Things are getting real out there, man. You have no idea what you started.”
“What I started?” At the time I didn’t remember any particular details of my mural, just the dreams that birthed it. “I started nothing. I’m here because I’m a murderer. I ended.”
“Yes, people still talk of your heinous act and the majority believe you’re an ass’ hoof who deserves to rot. But the mural? It’s been recorded and shown even in towns outside the city. The true details of what happened to the First Child? All the children that came after? Your sister Omri has convinced people to ask questions.”
It seemed strange in a way, but something about it all intrigued me, “What sort of questions?”
“They really kept you in the dark down here, didn’t they?” He unwrapped the lunch brought by the guard, a sandwich of fermented algae with tomatoes I had grown myself. Between bites, he answered, “First of all, people insisted on full disclosure of what exactly went on during the Days of the Trial.
“Folks were saying it was mighty strange the terms of this Agreement were nowhere for people to look at and read. Omri pushed for years demanding the people be allowed to see this contract for themselves.”
This was true. There had always been those on the Council familiar with the terms on which the city had been created, but the details were never widely disclosed. In the ‘Township of Glad Tidings’ everyone thought they knew the terms, just not explicitly.
“At first, the request didn’t go over so well with the Council. Then Omri threatened to lead a boycott of the Summertide Festival. That got the Constable’s attention. He went to the Record of Antiquities himself and retrieved the contract from the vault. For the first time, citizens were allowed to come and read the actual document your forefathers signed.”
I was fascinated by the thought, “Wait. Did you read it?”
“I sure as hell did. Everyone has.”
I waited patiently for Efram to finish his last bite. It was clear he loved two things: the smooth, umami tang of fermented algae and the mellow baritone of his own voice.
“What shocked people more than what was written, Harata, was the language structure. That said a whole lot.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Most cities have charters, letters of incorporation, constitutions…some document with high-falutin words and lofty ideals. But this thing? It had specific aims, measurable outcomes. It was a straightforward and binding contract, but it was written more like…,” he struggled to say it as if afraid to offend me, “like a research protocol.”
“Like…a what?” Across the space connecting his cell and mine, I was certain I misheard.
“How long you been here, man? I do not stutter. I’m telling you this thing had a list of scientific objectives, almost as if the entire city was a rodent in some lab. It was all laid out plain as day: what had to be done and why.”
I sat and listened in quiet disbelief as Efram explained the treatment (this was what the child was referred to as in the informed consent document), whether male or female, had to be less than the age of doli incapax. This was so it could not be held responsible for any wrong it had done in life. Once the child reached the age of accountability, it had to be switched with another.
Next, the child had to be native-born, in order to negate any pre-conception or ill judgment about outsiders. This would support the hypothesis that the subjects would degrade and ultimately despise even one of their own.
Third, subjects were not allowed to provide any comfort to the child. This was imposed in order to measure how easily the traits of human compassion and empathy could be eroded and dissolved.
Fourth, subjects could visit the child, but the child had to be locked away from society in order to allow the opportunity for subjects to forget what they saw or otherwise rationalize the gains they received from it.
Finally, this observational study was first and foremost designed to be perpetual and self-sustaining. In order to power all the material benefits the subjects would enjoy, an economy had to be created that was both separate and independent from the rest of the world.
“Economy?” I asked.
Efram replied, “Harata, the majority of places in this world, have something called ‘money.’ In this city, Joy is a currency—the festival, the processions, they’ve all been added to generate enough happiness to underwrite and staff the city an entire year. But not just any happiness, not the kind that comes from overcoming personal hardship or making a hard sacrifice for a greater gain. It requires the kind of joy that is free and overflowing for everyone to see. The whole caboodle: from the flower giveaways, to that kid playing the flute. That’s the currency the city needs to prosper.
“It seems your sketch-as-hell ancestors signed their consent binding all their descendants to the deal,” Efram added. “And as unbelievable as it all sounds, the consequences of breaking it are real. Two things will utterly destroy this city and everything inside it: diminishing the misery of that kid down the hall or decreasing the joy of the people outside.
“That’s the reason the Constable put you in here, my friend, not for some mercy killing that he, in fact, ordered. Omri was the one to call it out. The Constable was all worried that people who saw your paintings might begin to feel guilt.”
That night, after learning the true underpinnings of my home, the unsolved fragments of me had finally been stitched whole. My dreams became peaceful ones. I slept longer than I had in years.
#
The day the ‘Great Omelasian Experiment’ became no more, I awoke inside my cell with a fright. A half-eaten sandwich in his hand, Efram was standing over me, peering down, apparently for some time. More unsettling, he was grinning.
“How’d you get in here?”
“I walked in. How’d you think?”
“Where’s the guard?” I almost believed it was another vivid dream until a whiff of fermented algae pricked my nostrils.
“All I know, Harata, is: Not here.”
Skeptical, I hopped from my mattress and followed him into the hall. Every door was open, no guard manned the outer gate.
Right on cue, Efram ducked inside the storage room and began rooting through shelves of boxes. His personal items tucked under one arm, he turned toward me and said, “It was good meeting you, H. I truly mean that. I don’t pretend to understand what you did, but I do know you’re a decent man. Look me up if you’re ever down my way.”
With a surprising sense of loss, I shook his hand, and watched as his form diminished down the hall, past the courtyard and toward the train station. I, on the other hand, remained in suspended animation. Walking out seemed too simple. Was it a trap or was I simply afraid? Just as I was summoning the courage to follow his lead, I heard a much too familiar sound.
It was the child, almost a man actually, weeping. Or laughing. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. Despite the open door, he was huddled in the darkest, dampest, urine-stained corner of his room. Surely he would recognize my voice after all this time. I walked inside the cramped, light-forsaken room and reached out my hand. “Come,” I said, hoping he remembered faith and kindness enough to take it and follow me into the daylight.
My hand stayed in the air, rejected.
Of course it did. I wouldn’t have trusted me either.
I slumped with only the bare wall keeping me from sliding to the floor. I could have left him there for someone else to find. I could’ve left a note on the outer gate, ‘Throwaway human inside. Please call government services.’ I would have done my duty and been free to enjoy all the things I never dreamed but wanted. Of course, none of that hand-wringing helped me know what to do.
And this is what happens when you discover the paradox of walking away. When you learn it’s not always a destination you seek, but an answer. When you understand the difference between choice and the illusion of choice. It’s what happens when you walk away and realize the remedy lies not beyond the city walls, but in you.
I studied the cracks in the floor under the weight of those thoughts, then I went back to my cell.
The calmness that descended upon me in those next few hours was disrupted only by the intrusion of a strong, acrid odor and the sense of being intently watched. I lifted my head on which my arm rested and turned to see the child haunched low, near but not close. At some point he must have silently decided I was more interesting sprawled on a seedy mattress than standing over him like some false savior. I sat up and crossed my legs.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Naymm,” he replied.
“No. I mean, what do they call you?”
He seemed to focus before answering, “Tel’fohwn?”
I don’t remember how long I cried, whether it was minutes or hours, but when it was over, I stood up and we walked out of that cell.
Together.
Near the end of the hallway, a deep fear gripped me. I half-expected the world to slither to ruin before our eyes. Leaving the tower without a replacement child would surely break the pact. I guessed we’d have thirty seconds to run before a nearby volcano belched motes of lava, smiting us for wanton disobedience and turning us into pillars of ash, but the only thing that stopped us from crossing the last threshold was a question.
“Leaving us so soon, Harata?”
The Constable had leaned back from his desk in his office to catch a glimpse of our not so ceremonious departure. A small mound of paperwork was in front of him. “And what? No hug, no good-bye?” By then, the child had partially eclipsed himself behind me. “Oh, there’s no need to be frightened,” he told him. “You’re both free to go.”
“What of his replacement?” I asked, a bit belligerent. There was still a great deal of mistrust tinctured with residual trepidation, but the man sitting before me was not the same Constable of years ago, full of chuff demands and dictums. Time seemed to have weathered his belief in his own omnipotence, beaten it out of him, as it does all of us. Seeing that made me pity him all the more.
But something much more than that had changed.
“As of today, the city is officially defunct.” He looked at me and sighed, “Oh, please. Spare me your look of shock. This is almost entirely your fault—yours and your sister Omri. I’m just signing the documents needed to close out the Trial. The Tower will remain vacant from now on.” He took a small sip of clear, syrupy liquid, “They can turn the whole, damned thing into a coffeehouse for all I care…”
“I don’t understand,” I interrupted his spiel. “What about the Agreement?”
Tamnun stood and handed me the morning paper. The headline read: “The Omelas Myth is Over.” Splashed beneath was a picture of Omri, standing with a cadre of scholars and other astute minds with a penchant for legal contracts and economic theory. For years, they probed and tested the stipulations of the pact, concluding that after the age of eighteen, each one of the selected children could have lived the remainder of their lives within the city walls with a caretaker.
I looked at Tamnun, “There was never a need to send the child away? Then why?!”
“The Council deemed it best.”
“Best for whom?” My hands clenched to keep from lifting him by his shirt.
“For the bottom line, Harata, to maximize the Joie de Vivre. What is it you think this place is?”
By that time, I still didn’t know.
The article went on to say that while the terms could not be broken, the think tank hypothesized whether some terms and conditions could be re-interpreted instead. A quote from Omri herself read:
“While our forefathers never questioned the glaring paradox of gaining a moral good from an amoral sacrifice, we, their living inheritors, also never asked why the Constable and the Council insisted that the expression of that good must be so publicly displayed!”
I studied Tamnun for a moment, and the last of the puzzle pieces started to click. The economists concluded that the currency of the town was not just joy—but also the projection of it. Nowhere in the Agreement did it specifically define this as the pursuit of happiness.
Joy could also be the pursuit of justice.
So people tried expressing joy in less and less conspicuous ways: happiness evolved from the subjective measure of pleasure into an objective one of well-being. After all, it was the most logical of conclusions, that if there was enough good for the least of us, there was likely enough good for all.
So it was the citizens, who cherished their children and loved their home, that reclaimed the collective happiness from the city-controlled realm and brought it back to the private domain. They cultivated internal happiness from helping each other, not just flaunting it for the whole world to see.
So when the Summertide Festival returned that year, the city indeed celebrated a harvest of joy: more than enough to run the geothermal heaters and hydroelectric trams. But it wasn’t the kind that padded the city’s coffers or gave the Council such overreaching power.
“The city is bankrupt,” I said out loud, watching the Constable sign his forms. But it still didn’t explain what would happen when we stepped outside that door. I read the last snippet from Omri’s speech:
“After everything we’ve learned, this is what we know: we are more than a lab rat at the mercy of an unfathomable observer. We have the power to break the chains of our past, transcend the illusion of ‘now,’ and light a new path forward. It seems this attribute is a fundamental building block, the necessary cornerstone, of what it means to be free. In the truest sense, each one of us is a Child of Omelas, and with maturity comes the capacity to grapple with Truth. There is no greater victory. So, from now on, if there will be any utopia, we will build it. If there will be any good, we will earn it!
And to our children, we loudly say, no matter the price, we will never send another of you into that Tower. The null hypothesis has been rejected!”
Reading this, I thought I understood and I was incredibly proud of my sister. It dawned on me at that moment to ask about the child’s parents.
“Left over a decade ago,” Tamnun said. He dug through a stack of folders on a sideboard and handed me a personal file. “As far as no replacement, well, so far so good. He turns eighteen today.” He tilted toward the child, “Happy regards.”
To that, the child responded with a spit bubble.
Digesting it all for a moment, I asked, “So no one knows for sure what will happen when we walk out those doors?”
Tamnun put his hat and jacket on, “Not my problem anymore.” Taking a wheeled suitcase from the closet, he said, “But, if you don’t mind giving me a ten-minute head start?”
After he was gone, I bundled the child in a rolling office chair, making sure to shield his eyes, before taking him out: not toward the city gates, but toward my sister’s home.
Outside the tower, there were no streets littered with protest signs, no looted or burned out buildings along the avenue. A young couple passed us on the promenade. They were walking with a stroller, just as people had always done, but they radiated a serenity I had never witnessed before. This was the city I remembered from my paintings.
For a moment I looked at the sky. Angry clouds gathered, but they passed almost as quickly. When I looked back, the couple and the stroller were gone. I kept walking down streets, past the shops, through the main square.…they were all empty.
We passed a soccer field, normally brimming with activity and noise, but it was still and quiet. We went door to door, including my sister’s home. No one was seen, nothing was heard except, somewhere hidden between the trees, the sound of children laughing.
I sat on a curb, trying to process what happened, trying to weigh all the scenarios, how they could have played out differently. But Omri knew. The people knew.
And they chose.
#
Now, I recognize that look. It’s a familiar one. The look plus the wordless silence each time I come to the conclusion of this story—give the long-awaited ending—just so people can say, “Wait… what?!”
It’s perfectly understandable to be nonplussed by it. It’s OK to be irritated even. And it’s certainly your prerogative not to believe.
I have learned in the long and happy life I’ve built at this monastery, that some things take time to breathe. I’m not sure if any of us comprehend at first the shifting facets of a timeless question versus the invariable nature of its reply.
It’s like being trapped in a house of mirrors—distracted by the reflections instead of focusing on what they’re reflecting.
This was never about the child. It wasn’t even all that much about the place.
Society’s a chain that either binds or breaks, an intangible agreement between disparate souls: past, present and future. A thread so finely woven through our basic blueprints, it’s damned near Sisyphean to separate ourselves. We can’t rip the deal to shreds, lest we go back to something far, far worse. Nor can we simply walk away, not without spreading tiny, bastard versions wherever we go, not before the slightest headwind brings us straight back.
So we’re discomfited when we come face to face with the cracks and shadows that pervade it, challenging the moral rules we’re given as children—in our nursery school songs, our playground games and day school verses. Only so we can grow into the real world and face down all the distorted images it creates of ourselves, all while pretending: Oh no, that’s not us.
Some rationalize, then compartmentalize, ticking off boxes of good and evil until we find someone to delegitimize and dehumanize. Then we try to lock that reflection away, deep inside a Tower, hoping the light of day will never expose us for who we truly are.
Or, what we’ve chosen to be.
The child I took into the wilderness was a likeness I could not face. Better choices could’ve been made, better paths should’ve been taken, but it took thirteen years in a lightless room to see that. It’s been thirty more atop this monastery, and I still haven’t atoned. But the people of Omelas?
They broke free.
So now, Ido and I grow carrots and potatoes and onions in the greenhouse. I teach him songs and how to care for the bees in the apiary, and we wait for those who are broken enough and strong enough to make that climb and hear this story.
And what about the ‘City of Joy,’ you may ask? What truly became of the town that faded and drifted like letters falling from the page?
I heard Omelas is called something else now.
END
References
Le Guin, U. K. (1973). The ones who walk away from Omelas. In R.K. Silverberg (Ed.), New Dimensions III. (pp. 7-8). Nelson Doubleday. (Original work published 1973)
(1975). The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. United Kingdom: Harper & Row.
James, W. (1891). The moral philosopher and the moral life. International Journal of Ethics, 1(3), 330-354. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2375309
King, Martin Luther. (1965). How Long? Not Long. [Speech transcribed]. Voices of Democracy. https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-long-not-long-speech-text/.
Butler, O. E. (1993). Parable of the Sower (p.45). Four Walls Eight Windows.
