The Allergy Tax

Below is my entry in the BLOCK-CHAINS | A Conspiracy Writing Contest IV sponsored by @v4vapid. It's not too late to enter, so make sure you check it out!

“No thanks,” I tell the waitress, “I'm black toast intolerant.” She doesn't laugh.

The plate scrapes the formica table as I push the burnt bread toward her. She apologizes, more to my grandmother than to me. Smoothing her pink apron, she promises new toast.

My grandmother smiles, then watches the waitress disappear behind the swinging door. “You shouldn't joke about that, Gary.” She leans over the table, moves the salt to make a place for her elbow. “My friend Alice just got that diagnosis and she's already been charged.”

“Charged?” They're arresting people now?

“On her August taxes. Lactose intolerance, that's a heavy fine.” My grandmother sits back, pressing her lips flat.

Personally, I don't think this allergy tax is a good use for the blockchain, but it's no use telling her that. She watches the televised president with clasped hands and worshipping eyes. He seems to have personally promised my grandmother that the blockchain will solve every problem in her life.

“They almost gave her the wrong antidote!” My grandmother tells me. “But her blockchain,” my grandmother holds up her wrist to show me her digital bracelet, “it beeped twice when they scanned it.”

“Twice, grandma?”

“To let the nurse know it was the wrong medication.”

I nod, looking around the care home cafeteria. It’s styled like a 1950s diner with vinyl booths, shiny as a little girl's patent leather shoes. A checked tile floor, buffed bright. Pink and black. Swirled formica and curvy ketchup bottles made of thick glass. Each time a black accent catches my eye, the pink interrupts, an organic pink that seems to ease this place and its glaring black gloss.

No wonder my grandmother likes it here.

Marla, the waitress, wears a beehive of ginger hair, but her brown roots betray her. Now she’s back, smoothing her pink apron and clinking the buttered, tawny toast down on the loud formica.

“Anything else?” She’s chewing bubble gum, a walking cliché.

My grandmother smiles at Marla’s apron and saws a serrated knife over her dried-up little pork chop.

Each table has a curved indentation so a wheelchair can be rolled up and docked comfortably. The juke box by the window blinks in bright colorful silence, but the booth has its own speaker and Elvis Presley softly emanates through its metal pores. The overall effect, gaudy thought it is, soothes me and I dunk the new toast into my egg yolk.

“Breakfast for dinner,” my grandmother laughs. “You'd be surprised how many people order that here.”

Forks clang and clink on old, white dinner plates. I watch her blue-veined fingers clasp the handle of her coffee cup. How can she swallow so much black, steaming coffee at eight o'clock at night? She’ll be asleep within an hour. Marla is whisking her brown-rimmed coffee pot from this table to that, trafficking caffeine to each desperate set of old eyeballs. The other coffee pot, with the orange rim, she never even picks up.

A painting hangs behind my grandmother's head, one of those formless, 80s pastel swirling streaks of pink. Pearl frame, ugly as hell, but the color keeps catching me. The waitress comes back with a paper cup of my grandmother's pills.

“Here you go, sweetie.”

I look up at Marla. “Got any for me?” She doesn't laugh.

My grandmother's curled fingers suddenly straighten. She drops her cup, slamming her hand on the formica. Her digital bracelet is blinking. I’m blinking, too. Her hand knocks over a ketchup bottle and I see fear, a scared animal in her bulging eyes. She's looking past me, struggling for breath. Gasping, choking, clawing at her own throat with her hand. My own breathing stops, and I'm gasping, too, looking up and around for help.

Already in Marla's hand, a syringe. Steady fingers, she's set down her brown-rimmed coffee pot and presses the needle into my grandmother's shoulder, the only muscle left on her frail, heaving body. “You'll be right as rain in three and a half minutes, Miss Clara.” She smoothes my grandmother's hair and lifts her now relaxing arm, scanning the digital bracelet conformed tightly to her wrist. It beeps. “The bracelet has already recorded the antidote from your grandmother's bloodstream. This is just my witness confirmation. Once the video tape is reviewed,” she looks toward a tiny lens I hadn't noticed there, in the booth's speaker, “two more confirms will be logged on her medical blockchain. Then it'll stop blinking.”

As my grandmother's breathing slows, so does my own. Marla re-deposits the spent syringe into a pocket of her apron. She rights the ketchup bottle and moves on with her coffee pot as if nothing happened. I begin to hear sounds again. The speaker in our booth is releasing a hiss, then the warbles of a Frank Sinatra song.

Grandmother's bracelet has stopped blinking.

“Wait, miss?” I call after the waitress. She's pouring coffee at another table, and she smiles. For the first time, I see her teeth. But by the time she reaches our table again, the smile has closed. “Miss, did you say, antidote? As in poison?”

“That’s just what we call it. Your grandmother had an allergic reaction. The antidote is a type of antihistamine, is all. All the nurses on the floor carry it.”

“This is pretty common, huh?”

“This particular allergy has really taken off.”

“And she'll be charged?”

“It's already on her tax statement,” she fills my grandmother’s coffee cup. “For October.”

“But wait,” I press on her arm before she can leave again. “What is she allergic to?”

“Probably the pork.” She disappears back through the swinging door. My grandmother is sitting quiet and small across the table from me. So small.

“You're okay now?” I ask her. She’s fully composed herself and smiles meekly with her eyes over the rim of her raised coffee cup. She seems embarrassed, mostly. Hates a fuss. I push my hash browns around my plate with my fork. She clears her throat a few times and returns to sawing her pork chop with a serrated knife.

Outside, dusk is falling, damping all the colors into dull evening tones. I watch out the window as a grey bank of clouds drizzles residue onto the sidewalk. A pale sun sinks behind the flat roof of the grocery.

And then, a woman is approaching our booth, artificially lit from above with a fluorescent-bulbed brass fixture. My grandmother lifts her hand in a weak hello.

“I saw your injection, Clara.” The woman is breathless, giving my grandmother’s hand a knowing squeeze. She sits down, raising an empty coffee cup to catch the attention of a waitress, then faces my grandmother with concerned eyebrows. “Are you okay, dear?”

“I'm fine.” My grandmother is smiling. “The pork chops are excellent. Did you have one?”

“I don't touch the pork here, Clara. You know that. I've warned you.”

My grandmother returns to her peas and tells me that Bess thinks the pork here is bad.

“It's laced,” Bess interrupts, digging for something in her purse. She pulls out a worn bit of newspaper and unfolds it on the formica. “It's how they get you.”

“How they get you?” I know better than to ask, but her pause was begging for a reaction.

Bess presses her glasses higher up her nose, scanning the article for just the facts she wants. “Here,” pointing midway through, “the processing plant in Atlanta. They lace the meat with a chemical. It’s an antibiotic for the pigs, so they don’t get sick. But the reaction rate is very high. Close to 80 percent of our residents here are allergic to it.”

I'm chewing my toast and dipping it in the now-cold yolk of my sunny-side-ups. My grandmother is mm-hmming at everything Bess says, not hearing a word. Perry Como sings a Hawaiian song and the diner is a framed moment in time, a Normal Rockwell picture in muted, fleshy pinks and yellows. My toast, perfectly browned, has a pleasing crunch and I taste the salted butter that melted into it 20 minutes ago. “Well.” I interrupt myself to lick the tasty salt from my lips. “How much is this antidote? Is it expensive?”

“Oh, the antidote is free.” Bess folds up her article.

My grandmother nods. “All the drugs in the care home are free, honey. That's one of the blockchain benefits.”

Bess frowns at my grandmother and looks to me. She suddenly looks desperate, like a little girl accused of fibbing. A youth and clarity fill her eyes before she blinks them away. “They charge you for the allergy, not the drugs.”

Another waitress, this one named Mary, fills her cup. Mary's apron is that lovely shade of pink, and she's carrying a pot with an orange rim. Bess waits until the pour's gurgle is complete and the waitress had walked away. “That's how they get you,” she tells me. “You pay, whether you take the pill or not.”

Bess takes off her glasses and her face softens in a moment. She settles back into the booth and takes a slow, pleasant breath. I watch the muscles in her neck lengthen a bit.

My grandmother touches her hand. “Bess knows what's going on. She keeps us on our toes.”

Buddy Holly sings refrains of Peggy Sue and Bess changes the subject, telling my grandmother about a dog that belongs to her daughter. I lean back, imagining that I could probably find out what this antibiotic was they were injecting into those Atlanta pigs. I could look into it, find out if the same company is producing the antidote. I might just look into it, if I get some time. And there's that color, again, a lighter shade of pink, an apron walking past, filling our coffee cups, removing our plates. An apron in that color that makes all things seem somehow less important.

“Well,” I slap both hands on my knees, “I'll just pay our check and we'll be off.”

“The food is covered,” Marla says, “even for guests.”

My grandmother nods, pleased in this truth. “It's the–”

“The blockchain, yes, I know.” And she's right. My own digital bracelet isn't blinking. Nothing owing, we're free to go, not even a tip is expected here.

I walk my grandmother back to her suite of rooms and shut the door. The television happily chatters to her as I retreat down the hallway toward the side door and the parking lot. My car waits for me in the second row and I run my hand over its hood. The paint is new, flesh pink, a soothing color that blends my car in with practically every other car on the road.

The miles home are quiet, my stomach sated and my hands heavy on the steering wheel. The lights of town, twinkles receding in my rear-view mirror as fields of soybeans stretch before me, illumined by the moon. A barn, a stop sign, and the asphalt leading home brightens before my headlights.

My grandmother will be asleep by now, maybe still in her chair by the television. The news is comforting to her: the president, his speeches, the optimism that she swallows down like a forkful of peas. I smile, thinking of her dim understanding of her own digital bracelet. Always referring to that blockchain, the blockchain; she thinks there's only one. Probably housed in Washington.

On this old road, I drive toward my own farm. No pigs there, just chickens, a few goats. My wife will be waiting, probably watching the same spot of news that my grandmother is sleeping through. Twenty miles to go, and I notice, in my throat, an itch. It's tightening, my tongue thick and my chest lifts, sucking oxygen. On my wrist, my digital bracelet is blinking.

I grip the steering wheel, breathing hard, and in my mouth, a faint, worrying aftertaste of bacon.