I Cheerfully Refuse

“The term, French for skeleton, was popularized a decade earlier when a dozen Michigan laborers seemed to vanish […] night shift, dirty weather, they stepped out for a smoke and never came back. Ordinary American citizens, filling six-year terms for bread and a bunk under the Employers Are Heroes Act.”

The Employers Are Heroes Act and the necessity for workers to escape highlights the dystopian society that surrounds Rainy in the novel. The employer-employee relationship is predatory, and working conditions are so poor that laborers, in large numbers, risk death to escape.

“I didn’t much credit the Mosquito, a humid little twelve-pager of raggy pulp and irregular publication. It styled itself a rebel paper, making much of the danger it posed to what Kellan would call the astronaut class.”

Rainy dislikes the Mosquito, a newspaper, finding its proposed activism empty and ineffective. The newspaper prides itself on challenging the astronaut class of society, exposing their crimes and abuses against workers. However, Rainy doesn’t see how their work helps anyone.

“When I returned he was still not himself. His words did not connect. He said he was a lab rat. He thought I might be the terrible Werryck in disguise and held his ruined hand away from me.”

When Kellan arrives, Rainy doesn’t know his story, and even as Kellan warms up to him, he learns of his past only in brief moments of delirium and terror brought on by Kellan’s nitrous oxide use. In this instance, Kellan demonstrates the extent of his trauma as a human test subject for medicine and his fear of Werryck.

“Five people had concluded in a Michigan backwater. Two more in northern Wisconsin. At a housing block in Chicago nineteen of all ages went in search of better. They turned on the radio, rented a bouncy castle for the kids. It was a veritable shindig.”

This report of deaths via Willow demonstrates the predominant attitude its users have toward it. It isn’t merely a quick and easy means to the end of life but rather a celebration to mark the transition to a better place.

“Look out the window, will you? At the clouds, ripped at the edges and moving fast. The sea like a shroud. The eaves bare of ravens, every bird flown.”

Throughout the novel, Lake Superior often operates as its own character, interchangeably playing the part of ally and villain while also often reflecting the events of Rainy’s story. In this case, as Rainy holds Lark’s body, the lake itself recognizes her passing, donning a gloomy and mournful appearance.

“It struck me Orpheus himself would not pass through that veil were he impaired and frousting about on the crooked limbs of nitrous.”

Much of Rainy’s character and adventure reflects the myth of Orpheus, and in this excerpt, Rainy references him directly, speaking of his grief and how he self-medicates with alcohol and nitrous. He recognizes, however, that not even the grief-stricken Orpheus would venture into Hades as impaired as Rainy is.

“Her bookshop, Bread, was a success, but dealing in adventurous verse and unapproved literature got it targeted as the merry purveyor of rebellion it unquestionably was.”

Lark’s love of books is rebellious in a dystopian time of diminishing literacy and rising conservatism. Her devotion to preserving literature, especially condemned books, earns her attention and hatred. At one point, a young man calling himself a “patriot” tries to blow up her shop.

“‘Oh, Rainy. Harboring a fugitive. Fleeing from authorities. Trading annulled currency. You’d be shocked how little of your life is legal. And yet I have the authority and will to absolve you. To vanish your indictments. Return to Icebridge, Rainy. Play music with your striving band. A small world is better than none.’”

When Werryck bargains with Rainy, he expresses his power by not only threatening Rainy’s freedom but promising to restore it to him. Werryck explains that Rainy’s existence in Icebridge largely lives outside the law and that Werryck has the authority to condemn him for it. Werryck has the power to leave Rainy alone and even to protect him.

“With no amplification I played only for chipmunks and bees and dangling spiders and eventually a clan of house sparrows who came squabbling and lit all over my shoulders and knees like I were a saint or a loaf of bread.”

This excerpt positions Rainy as Orpheus himself. Orpheus is known in mythology for his supernatural musical abilities, which include attracting animals to him and even controlling them. As Rainy plays, nature comes to him and listens, just as it does for Orpheus in myth.

“There used to be talk of beating it—remember this?—of beating cancer, funding the research, finding the cure. Not any longer. Not here. Maybe the astronauts were beating it like a dirty rug but who knew?”

The novel explores its dystopian world mostly through the state of employee-employer relationships and the widening wealth gap, but other impacts of the deterioration of society show in medicine. In the novel’s world, cancer treatments are nonexistent for the masses, and medical treatment in general takes a great step back from previous generations since many have no access to medication that was readily available to their parents.

“We imagine great storms building a wall of water, seen at a distance with its crest in the sky. But what I saw were rows of waves lining up in ranks each higher than the last and so near to one another they looked flattened as if glimpsed through a telescope.”

Rainy often personifies Lake Superior himself, mostly when he perceives that it turns against him. In this instant, as a storm sweeps through, he characterizes the waves not as plain walls of water but as similar to soldiers, with ill intent, on the offensive.

“On the way inside, he kissed his fingertips and brushed the cross as he passed. It was made of two automatic rifles welded at right angles and mounted on a wooden post so the crossmember was eye level to average sinners. The guns looked functional and the bandoliers were full of bullets.”

King Richard’s gun cross signifies the changing role of faith in this dystopian world. Though the novel seldom references religion, each time it does is connected to violence, whether from Werryck’s cynicism about the role of the Church or Brighton’s attack of its neighboring town on religious grounds. For King Richard, religion is important, but so is the ability to arm himself.

“Spooked as she was, that kite felt to me like hope, even a reward, maybe for delivering her from the hand of Richard, which I felt proud of at that moment, or maybe for giving an enormous corpse, that very morning, a more or less dignified burial.”

The kite is an interesting symbol in I Cheerfully Refuse because its flight not only reflects Sol’s lost childhood but also demonstrates Rainy’s need for hope. Sol has never heard of the kite, a common toy, and at first even thinks it’s a death angel, a vindictive creature of King Richard’s creation. Rainy, conversely, sees it as a sign that he’s on the right path, and it feeds his need to hold hope.

“He said Blinker and Brighton used to be like one city. People moved easily between them. Kids flirted and dove off the bridge with each other. Now the islanders hated their mainland neighbors.”

The description of the animosity between Blinker and Brighton helps explain one of the many ways in which societal relations break down. The differences depend primarily on issues of faith: Those in Brighton believe they’re righteous and see Blinker as full of heathens. This leads to frequent raids and even executions of the Blinker townspeople.

“It entered my mind that in addition to fleeing Richard, Sol was also hedging her bets. If he actually did catch us in his dawdly tugboat, she wanted to make sure all his money was gone.”

Sol often surprises Rainy, not only because of her lack of a childhood but also because of how this instills within her adult thinking. She wants to ensure that no matter what happens if King Richard finds them, they don’t have any of his money with them. She does this to give herself plausible deniability and possibly reduce the severity of an outburst.

“He said the crimes of these pagans were longstanding and known to all and included blasphemy and indecency and foul expression among too many others to list.”

Rainy and Sol watch the executions of several Blinker townspeople, listening to the charges the people of Brighton have brought against them. Brighton makes accusations based on religious faith and sees the people of Blinker as blasphemous, primarily because of their practice of painting the dead on buildings. To some, it may seem that they’re honoring their memory, but Brighton sees it as near witchcraft. It’s therefore ironic that the painter of the deceased escapes.

“It struck me that while the stories I recounted were hit-and-miss, Molly never failed to connect with Sol. When Molly fought, Sol wrung her hands. When Molly imagined her outlaw self, Sol trembled.”

Sol draws a few comparisons to Lark throughout I Cheerfully Refuse, and the primary one is her interest in Molly Thorn’s writing. As Rainy grows to know her better, he recognizes that Sol is as enthralled by narratives as Lark once was.

“She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman’s error. She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.”

In Molly Thorn’s I Cheerfully Refuse, she makes mention of a pastor she doesn’t agree with as a child. As her mother explains the situation to her, she learns that the church is a broken compass: It often leads people in the wrong direction. This sentiment is reflected in the Brighton-Blinker feud that leads to violence and death.

“I lay on the cot. Beneath it was a short stack of printed material: a 3D photo novel about foreigners come to topple our republic. A recruiting magazine full of soldiers in sunglasses doing calisthenics on a football field, one large exclamatory on each page: WOW! RIPPED! AGGRO! BEST!”

Though the novel never explicitly explores the governmental situation, it makes multiple suggestions that society is leaning toward conservativism. When Rainy peruses the reading material left in his cell, the main points support conservative, nationalist, and militaristic ideas.

“‘Of course. Revenge is nourishing. It is for me, anyway.’ He paused and continued. ‘Obviously once you’ve accepted terms of this kind, it’s self-enforcing. Once you choose, you’ve chosen.’”

When Werryck speaks of revenge, he references its all-consuming nature and the impossibility of straying from the path of revenge once it’s chosen. This foreshadows Rainy’s murder of Tom Skint, which happens in a moment, and Rainy has no memory of deciding to do so. It’s as if his body already knew it wanted to do that and didn’t wait for approval from his brain.

“Spectral and wavering, that’s how they looked. Heads-down skeletons climbing stairs in the rain is how they looked; shredded and soaked and past all hope is the way I would say they looked.”

The 12 squelettes represent the extent to which employers abuse laborers. Though their condition is due to their escape and time on the run, it illustrates how the astronauts and the people who work for them use people as resources with no care for their well-being. The astronauts use laborers for all they have and then discard them.

“Again, the deck was crowded. No one not locked up would miss it. There again were Tove and Marcel, there some manufactory priests, there a trio of lab techs mixing with kitchen staff.”

When the squelettes survive the night out on the water in the storm, they inspire a sense of hope on Posterity that transcends class and status. Everyone sees a new future and is in awe of the 12 squelettes’ resistance. No one wants to miss seeing them, and no one cares who they watch with.

“What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage.”

Rainy recognizes the desperation that the dystopian world around him instills in people. It can upend the fragile balance between support and community on one hand and poverty and isolation on the other, leading people to commit treacherous actions. He recognizes how survival and greed can lead people to evil situations.