Assignments

content/trigger warnings: discussions of death, grief, child trafficking, and adoption, written by someone who is not an adoptee

The plot was, indeed, very ridiculous.

It did not make Erica laugh or smile, but it did let her wander into a silly fictional world where people got caught in terrifyingly perilous situations and then escaped like it was nothing—a decent enough recipe for fleeting, escapist popcorn. Watching it, at first, had felt like a chore, as she tried to unstick her mind from the walls around her, and drag it into the silly fictional world with its nonsensical rules and neat resolutions. But eventually, finally, she gave in and got lost in it—peeled her anxiety down like it had been stuck up with tape, let it fall in slow motion like a loose leaf fluttering down and away from its tree.

The movie was at about the halfway point: the main character was trying to escape a safehouse swarmed by armed mercenaries, sent by her employers to catch and/or kill her, while talking to her employers over a wireless communicator as they dropped hints that the conspiracy she was uncovering was real—that her employers, whom she had, since birth, believed were her parents, did not birth/raise her, but had instead taken her from those who had birthed/raised her, a group of enigmatic celebrity historians that she had been tasked with capturing at the beginning of the film, setting the rest of the events of the movie in motion.

(Indeed, very ridiculous.)

But everyone, Erica thought, at some point wonders if they’re adopted, and that was what had drawn her into the film: the idea that relationships between individuals in a family can exemplify (or clarify) how history makes itself felt in every present action and dynamic—that the past wasn’t even past, as someone whose name she couldn’t remember had written in a book she’d long ago skimmed.

But the revelation dawning on the main character—that the historians had been telling the truth when, shortly after she'd captured them (at a Hollywood premiere, because, of course, the main character’s public-facing identity was that of a cherished A-list movie star), they had cryptically intimated she was their blood kin, fated to become their new leader—crept towards Erica with tendrils that threatened to brush away her own thoughts and aggressively reweave them until they were the size and shape of the main character in the film.

Erica had never asked her parents if she was adopted, and she’d never really felt the need to look into it (her birth certificate seemed authentic, she had her mother’s nose, her father’s eyes, etc.) but she was so different from them in so many ways—in every way that was not physical, she'd always felt—that she too, like many, felt called out to by the questions that haunt a diasporic world. Who am I, really? How easy would it have been for everyone to have lied to me about it? How little did I care, to not have tried harder to find out? How much do I even care now? And what would answers really change—about anything, if anything?

Erica knew it was grief talking. Mostly her parents', but also her own, a little, sure—it wasn’t like she'd known her grandparents well; her parents had kept them at arm’s length, which had only bothered her as a child (back when everyone called her Eric, back when they thought she was a boy) because classmates would come back from summer breaks to regale their friend group with stories of weird houses and stinky foods, stories set in faraway places with bizarre customs and new smells and funny-looking people, and she’d talk about summer camp or cruise liners and she couldn’t help, even at that age, feeling like her stories weren’t up to par. But as she’d aged, she’d understood that her parents’ relationships with their parents were far more complicated than she dared try to understand: that there was an unspeakable universe of pain there that, she wondered, might have been what drew her father to her mother, and the reverse (i.e., shared trauma, one of the most perilous bonds two people can forge).

Erica’s parents had grown up only children, and they had always felt like only children. Sometimes she wondered if she’d even been conceived on purpose. There'd always been something in their voices—something far more perceptible after the deaths of their parents—that told her they pitied her: that they were glad they were only children because it meant there were no other children like them, and that they regretted, at least a little, that they had ended up echoing the same (restrained) ambition of their parents, instead of downsizing their bloodline over a generation from one child to zero.

Erica loved her parents; her parents had done a fine job of raising her, she’d always felt, especially when compared to the parents of her peers, and that this didn’t necessarily make them good parents, but that it also didn’t mean they had been bad parents. Fine as opposed to perfect. Reserved; insular. Very internal. Very connected to each other but not much else. Not even her. They had never once complained about how often she spent her time away from them, how she'd rarely been home when she lived in their home and rarely was alone with them for longer than a meal and always pursued whatever she had been interested as passionately as she could even when that had taken time—so, so much time—away from them.

She had grown up feeling like an assignment, one lasting 18 years and that, afterwards, all there was for them to do was to die (and watch those around them do the same).

I have grown up

an assignment

(18 years, timed);

time's up, so

pencils down, now please just rest

in peace.

She had written the poem in college for an assignment about family, and rarely returned to the theme in her work since, though she recognized that that had been when her mind had first birthed the question of adoption—first as fear, then as fantasy—a fear, and then fantasy, that had vanished just as suddenly in a matter of months, around the time she’d started dating women.

In the movie, adoption for the main character was fear, not fantasy. After narrowly escaping the safehouse, she found refuge in what had once been a bustling movie theater, now hollowed out into living quarters for a few dozen people with nowhere else to go. Attempting to blend in as a drifter obviously failed; moments passed before she was recognized, and then moments more before she recognized the people recognizing her. The movie theater’s residents were mostly movie actors/actresses the main character had once reveled in seeing onscreen, the skillful way they'd controlled their bodies and emotions being part of why she had chosen—when given the choice by her parents/“parents”/employers at 16—her public-facing identity to be one of an actress. The actors/actresses explained the choice had not been a choice, as it had not been a choice for them, either: they too had been employed by her employers, raised by them as their children, and been told, just as she had, at 16, that they could give exactly half of themselves to any career of their choosing, and that—because of how their parents/“parents”/employers had taken them to movie after movie, weekend after weekend, and because these future actors/actresses had also reveled in seeing people skillfully control their bodies and emotions—they had, like her, chosen to live publicly as actors/actresses, until they'd aged out of A-list roles and their employers had discarded them as easily as the entertainment industry had. They'd been told that, were they ever to try to work again, they would be killed, and it was only then that the actors/actresses—each during different years, and under different circumstances, but always in the same way—had begun to suspect they had no idea where they really came from. They'd each felt that parents would not discard their children so easily, without remorse, as though their familial bond had been a simple financial transaction. And the main character shared her own story and their sympathetic reactions made her more sure than ever that the historians had been telling the truth.

The main character, through burning, infernal wails, vocalized her angst and anger about having captured and delivered so many targets to her employer as their agent (“their hunter, their wolf-dog,” the actress playing the main character whispered so bitterly the dialogue almost didn’t seem totally weird) without question. The truth obliterated everything she thought she knew about herself. Everything. Every act was suddenly poisoned. Every part of her wasn’t real.

After the ex-actors/ex-actresses finished comforting her, they told her their plan. They'd assembled a small army, and, later that evening, would be breaking into the city’s Hall of Records, in an attempt to, as they put it, “give everyone a clean slate,” by which they meant destroy the building, on a semi-suicide mission, and at this point, the plot of the movie had become so convoluted that Erica lowered the volume and opened the movie’s Wikipedia page (the movie kept playing in the bottom-left corner of her phone, picture-in-picture) to figure out who the hell had greenlit this movie and why.

Of course.

It was based on a video game.

And Erica read about the video game the movie was based on and found the plot was more or less the same, except with a few even more ridiculous missions/storylines, which had been (thankfully) cut from the film.

In the movie, the main character was agreeing to join the ex-actors and ex-actresses on their semi-suicide mission and then marching with their army towards the Hall of Records, their horde framed moodily by torrential rain from a nasty thunderstorm that—overwhelmingly melodramatically—included multiple lightning strikes landing near and around them, with not one of the tragic soldiers flinching even a little, so resolute in their mission they each seemed to be.

And the main character, too.

Erica considered turning the movie off at that point; there seemed, to her, to be power in that. She found it distasteful, of course, that the multibillion-dollar blockbuster was exploiting the trauma of adoption so grotesquely, centering a conventionally attractive light-skinned celebutante as though it were people who looked like her who had to navigate these questions in real life, and that, in order to make the conspiracy questionable but plausible, had made her parents/“parents”/employers a dark-skinned man and a light-skinned woman, and the cult of historians claiming her as their own a group of light-skinned, ethnically ambiguous characters played by a group of light-skinned, ethnically ambiguous actors/actresses, when the reality was that it was always lily-white parents/“parents” who felt most entitled to baskets of (light-skinned, ethnically ambiguous) children. Erica didn’t believe she was adopted so it wasn’t her struggle, per se, but she knew the movie was ridiculous in this way, too. She imagined the climax of the movie would be a confrontation between the main character’s parents/“parents”/employers and the cult of historians, and the main character would be forced to choose, and the decision would be torturous because it would involve accepting she'd been a victim of trafficking, and that she had almost delivered the people who had actually birthed/raised her to the people who had stolen/trafficked her.

It was just so fucking ridiculous. If Erica had been the main character, she would have left the narrative altogether and used her wealth to buy some really, really good therapy. (Maybe, like, some ketamine treatments, or something.)

But it was a movie and everything in movies gets resolved with violence and that was why Erica felt she was ready to turn the movie off.

Instead, she left the movie playing on her phone but turned her phone upside down and turned the volume down to the lowest possible setting without muting it altogether, and then turned herself upside down too, and quickly fell asleep.