So here I sit with it again, Form 7⍺. It is printed on cheap paper with low-quality ink that smudges under my fingers. The option they judge least bad for me has been scored through, unavailable, while the four other options remain. Since the last time I faced this choice, they’ve updated the logo for whatever committee it is that processes these things. I sit with the cracked rubber stamp and the grimy pad of red ink. When I press the stamp into the ink and then onto the form, it will read “REQUESTED.” So, which punishment should I request this time?
The last time I had to complete Form 7⍺ was a decade ago. It was my first time, and I was a different person. Two days before, I’d arrived to visit my sister, who lives on a different island from me, separated from mine by the lush, teeming forest. I crossed at night. There was me, nine other travelers, and a guide. The crossing was legal. The guide was state-approved and carried her Form 5⍴, which bore the stamp of the relevant committees. The timing was optimum, four hours after sundown, when all but two of the forest’s species were asleep, and our footsteps would disturb the ecosystem minimally. The problem was me. I was illegal.
The islands were established fifty years ago. Three are residential clearings, each a thousand acres, where we live our day-to-day lives. Three are correctional clearings, only ten acres each, where we undertake any necessary punishments. Six islands in a sea of forest that totals six billion acres.
The original authorities determined that each citizen may cross from their home island to one of the other residential islands and back again at most once per year. Even this was a compromise with those who had argued there should be no crossings at any time and for any reason. We must impinge no further on the forest, they said. It must remain inviolate. But that view did not prevail. It transpires there are limits to our ecological purity. Instead, between any two islands, ten people may cross with a guide each night.
That night, I was one of the ten. The problem was that I’d already crossed that year, only two months before, in fact. That time, like this time, it was to see my sister.
She’s six years older than I am, and ever since I can remember, she’s been the sun in my life. Every story from my childhood has her at its center: something funny she said, some game she invented, something perfect she did.
I always knew she carried a burden. Every four or five years, sometimes for months on end, a shadow would fall over her. The light would go from her eyes, the cadence from her voice, and there would be a flatness to everything she did. Part of me dreaded those months, but another part that I hated in myself welcomed them. She’d spend more time at home, more time with me, and I’d read to her late into the night.
Our mother said they’d have called it depression when she was young, but now that word means only a dip in the ground, a hollow in the earth. Our mother said they’d have given her medicine for her depression in the old world. But it wasn’t talked of now—these sicknesses that show up in your mind rather than your body. We were supposed to have left them behind when we moved to the islands. They were born of a cosmic unease, they said, an unconscious, ever-present guilt about how we’d been treating the land and its creatures. They assured us this would lift when we started to live ecologically within our means, when we made our peace with the earth. But of course, it didn’t. And now we had no way to talk about what my sister suffered and no way to get her any help.
Her latest bout had started as the dry season began in June. I’d sensed it approaching during our phone calls and in her letters. As soon as I was certain, I requested leave from work, telling them my sister had tripped and fallen and broken both wrists and needed help at home. They granted me two weeks, and I made the crossing the next night, my first crossing that year, all perfectly legal.
