The night terrified me. I heard nothing through the thick walls. No bodies lay next to me. No flesh. I wanted skin pressed against mine, arms wrapped around me. I missed sighs and snores and the sound of mumbled conversations. I missed the feel of another’s breath on my skin. I ached to be near the beautiful bodies of my youth.
When the overseers opened my cell each morning I eagerly followed the other students to the archives. A little group of seven of us stood in observance of a text, listening to the body tell the story of those events written upon its body. The archivists said this was not called storytelling—storytelling could be untrue, could be lies. Bodies narrated. Bodies told only truth.
The only bodies the overseers allowed us to touch were the texts. I remember the first real text I touched, the exquisitely complete form that I did not recognize as a body. I learned in that moment just how partial the texts at the compounds had been; how plain, how lacking.
Our little cluster of students stood in the text’s allotted area of residence, a niche in one long wall in the Era of Exile corridor. Tubes embedded in the skin, connected to the floor, regulated the body’s excretions. It received its food in a similar manner, twice a day, administered by the archivists.
The body existed solely as an organic text capable of narration. It bore no discernible face, only a slit for a mouth, and across the rest of the flat flesh where a face should have been rose fist-sized circular growths. Its hands were soldered to its knees. The skin stretched off the arms in one smooth flap, like wings. A length of silver wire wound around the throat, and the flesh had begun to grow over it.
I stood transfixed. The body spun my favorite tale of past truth in a pleasant, articulate voice that flowed smoothly from the slit of its mouth: the story of the keepers’ voyage in exile.
I fell in love with its body.
I heard thousands of other texts in my years at the archives. I heard how the keepers found our world, a lonely planet seeded long ago by human beings who had forgotten what they were. The keepers’ sailing ship burned down from the sky, and our kind went to them. The keepers freed themselves of their casings. They selected those bodies that they would communicate with and fitted them with inorganic devices that allowed the keepers to direct them.
“You were simply our curiosities in the beginning,” my own keeper later told me at one of our dictation sessions, one of the last it held with me. “We took such delight with you and your kind. You had bodies that we did not, and we used you to enact that which we could not. Ah, Anish, our preoccupation with your kind was so much more delightful then. So base it was, our delight and your perversion.”
Often I lay awake at night and closed my eyes, remembering those bodies that once surrounded mine. I ran my hands along my own flesh, across my throat, down my smooth chest, flat stomach, the insides of my thighs. I thought of another’s body pressed against mine, so close I felt their breath. I often pushed myself up against the cold wall and lay there with my arms wrapped around myself, longing for the morning. I did not weep anymore. I found warmth and closeness with my own body, my mother’s text.
And during the day, I had the archives.
I frequented the niches I knew the others had no interest in. I stood in front of those texts illustrating the unmaking of the bodies who ruled the world before the keepers came. No one wanted to view these texts; these twisted, angry figures that wept blood and cried out for a freedom their flesh still remembered. Many of the archivists wanted to burn them. I knew that as more keepers began to die, more texts would be purged, and these would be the first destroyed. So I spent my days with them. I wanted to remember them.
One day I found the body text of the keepers’ emergence from their sailing ship, and their linking with the first bodies. I stepped up into the niche containing the text.
“Don’t narrate,” I told it. “I just want to touch you.” But the body could not be silent. None of them could. It existed to narrate.
As the open scream of its mouth moved to form words, I ran my gaze across its form. The body lay flat on the floor, both arms raised up as if to shield itself from harm. From the torso downward, the body seemed to liquefy and spill across the floor. A section of the scalp and skull were missing on one side so you could see the shiny little chip embedded into the soft tissue. The eyes were always open.
My hands trembled. I knelt beside the body and traced the jagged, blue tattoos on its flesh with my fingers.
I wondered if it could feel pleasure, or anything at all. Anger? Loneliness? Or did the keepers order the archivists to deaden that too, as they deadened the body’s flesh?
“So sad,” I said. I moved my fingers down the torso, to the mass of featureless flesh. I stared at the wide, glassy eyes, brown as dust.
A gorgeous text.
I pulled my hands off the body and fumbled at the knot on my robe. I struggled out of the robe. I wanted to join my flesh to the body’s, to become one text, the altered and the empty.
Only the mouth was open to me, wide and wet and full of teeth. My body shook with fear and anticipation. I wanted to silence the text.
Could I stop the words? Stop history?
The words stopped. History stopped.
I stared at the text and then back out into the hallway, afraid. What would the keepers think of a student that tried to silence their history? I tied my robe closed and ran from the niche, back to the main archives. My whole body trembled. I expected one of the overseers to find me, to say the keepers had seen what I’d done and would purge me.
Yet no one came for me. The other students continued to ignore me. The overseers still let me explore the archives alone.
So I went back to the texts. And I became addicted.
At the end of each class I went back to the far corners of the archives. I buried myself in texts. I silenced them. Silence the texts, silence the keepers, silence the world. I was an ugly empty text, but I had power over all of them, and their words, their truth.
I do not know how many texts I took pleasure in this way. Always I returned to my favorite, and told it to tell me its story in a different way, but it could not tell a story that was not true. It made me angry, so I did what I could to it. I tried to unmake it. There was no one to stop me.
Until.
I licked the mouth of the text, and heard:
“What are you doing?”
The voice was not the text’s.
I fell back onto my robe and kicked away from the text.
One of the other students stood in the corridor, staring at me with large, dark eyes.
“I’m . . .” I said, putting my arms through the sleeves of my robe with limbs that felt clumsy, “I’m touching the texts.”
“You’re defiling them,” she said. “You’re silencing them. That’s obscene.”
“No,” I said, and knotted my robe closed. I managed to stand on wobbly legs. “I was just—”
“I watched you,” she said. “You’re that strange body, that violent body, the one they brought in from the compounds. Anish.”
She was older than I was, nearly an archivist already. I had seen her before, assisting in the cleaning of texts.
“Yes,” I said.
“Why are you touching the body texts?”
“Because all of you are so ugly.”
She laughed. When she laughed she threw back her head, and a snarl of dark black hair came loose from her twisted braid of hair. It curled down along the side of her face, touched the empty, appalling smoothness of her cheek.
“One doesn’t touch the body of another,” she said. “One only touches texts. Haven’t you been taught that?” She knitted her dark brows so they formed one line above her eyes. “Do you think you understand them better, because you’ve silenced them?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“They why do you do it?” she said. She stepped up into the niche. She approached the flat, featureless end of the text.
“I don’t know,” I sai
d. “You’ve never done it?”
She shook her head.
“Then you won’t understand,” I said.
“Show me how you touch them,” she said. I recognized a desire there, in her eyes, her voice, as if she held up a mirror to my own. No other empty text had ever approached and spoken to me.
I reached for her hand.
“Don’t touch me,” she said. “Just them.”
We knelt over the body of the text.
“Here,” I said, and moved my fingers up to the wire around the head. “Feel how cold the wire is. Imagine the way it feels, to have your flesh try to grow around it.”
She touched the wires. I saw that her hands trembled. Did she have the same desire I had? The same fear and anticipation?
I moved my palms down across the jagged welts, traced them with my fingers. “They won’t hurt you,” I said.
She, too, ran her fingers along the tattoos, down across the throat, the shoulders, the chest. “I’m not afraid,” she said.
But she was afraid of them. I already knew it, even then.
“Do they feel anything?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re not allowed to ask, and I don’t like them to talk.”
I traced a line of tattoos that brought my fingertips to hers. She looked at our hands there, joined atop the text.
She withdrew her fingers from mine. “I told you not to touch me,” she said. She stood up to walk away.
“Wait!” I said. “What are you called?”
“I don’t tell dumb bodies such things,” she said. She jumped from the niche and into the hallway.
I did not see her for many days afterward. The overseers had deemed my independent study complete, and they lumped me back into a student group watching the dictation sessions. The art of dictation was the most difficult an archivist had to learn. I had already accompanied the archivists on feeding and cleaning sessions, but it was the dictation that most interested me. Here I could perfect bodies with my own hands.
Sometimes I snuck away from a dictation session early and wandered the lonely corridors, passed row upon row of texts. Sometimes I came to corridors that had been barred with a thick, steel gate. These were the libraries that had already been purged. I had watched the archivists unhook the bodies from the tubing that bound them to the floors of their niches. The archivists carted the bodies out on long, wheeled trolleys. Piles of bodies. When I asked why they had to get rid of them I was always given the same answer:
“The keepers are dying. We must conserve only the most important truth.”
But who decided what the most important truth was?
So I walked down the long halls, passing those texts the keepers still retained, and I searched for the student I’d touched over the text. I often dreamed of her. In those days my dreams of her were pleasant ones—our bodies entwined, my mouth on her skin. The dreams sickened me at first. She was ugly, incomplete. What kind of a body had I become?
Yet my desire for her was so great that I did not eat or sleep or visit the texts for three days while I looked for her. When I found her she was just outside one of the barred corridors, following a train of archivists carting out obsolete texts.
“Anish,” she said.
“What are you called?” I said.
We stared at one another.
I wanted her name, as if knowing that, I could own her and begin to fill her emptiness.
“Help me with the cleaning of the texts,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
She told my overseer that she wished to work with me, and my overseer agreed without hesitation.
She strode quickly back down to the archival corridors, so fast on her long legs that I had to struggle to keep up. She did not go down the long individual history corridor where most of the other students clustered. Instead, she took me back to the Unmaking Hall, where those exquisite texts of the end of human freedom were still held.
She stepped into one of the empty niches. She gazed around at the clean floor, the bare walls. “We took this one out today,” she said.
I climbed up beside her. “Did you burn it?” I asked.
She nodded.
“They aren’t going to recopy it?” I said.
“No. This corridor must be cleaned out by the end of the year. The keeper who oversaw its maintenance is dead.”
“Dead? What about its own history?”
“It’s already written on one of the bodies in the individual history corridor. It will survive in that, at least.” She gazed into the hall, and I saw her look turn inward. “I want you to touch me, Anish, here, where the text would be.”
I shivered.
She untied the knot of her robe, let the gray material fall open. “I want you to touch me the way you touch the texts.”
She stepped directly in front of me. She reached out and unknotted my robe. She was so close I felt the heat of her body; her breath on my skin. I gazed at the flesh of her, the smooth, brown, hideously unmarred flesh. She was uglier than I was.
She placed her palm on my chest. I was trembling.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said.
“I know that,” I said.
She pushed off her robe, and it piled around her ankles.
I wrapped my arms around her. She pulled our bodies together. For the first time since my arrival in the archives, I found myself pressed against a body that not only responded to mine, but wanted me there against it. This was all I had dreamed of doing during the terrible loneliness of those nights when I wrapped my empty arms around myself, trying to fill them.
We ended up on the floor that had until that day been housed by a body text, rubbing our bodies together against the same floor it had been displayed upon.
I tried to fuck every part of her, to join with her as I had the texts, but she pushed me away from her mouth and thighs and forced me down onto my chest, against the hard, slick floor. She pressed her whole body down onto mine, wrapped her strong hands around my throat.
“I own all the bodies here, Anish. Even you,” she said. She laughed at me, released me.
I struggled up and tried to grab her the way I’d often been grabbed in the compounds. But she cried out in pain when I gripped her. She pushed me away with a strength I did not expect.
“You hurt me!” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and wondered how I had hurt her. This was what we had done in the compounds, all of us. The pain and fear and pleasure all went together.
“Don’t ever hurt me again,” she said. “If you hurt me again I’ll burn you, Anish, just like the texts.”
“I won’t hurt you,” I said. I would have promised her anything to be able to touch her.
She hit me then, across the mouth. I gasped at the shock of it, but I desired her as I desired the beautiful bodies of my youth. She brought pain and pleasure and fear.
“Touch me, but never hurt me,” she said. “Understand that, dumb body?”
“What are you called?”
She turned away from me, jumped out of the niche, and gazed back up at me with her big, dark eyes.
“I am Chiva,” she said, “and I am to be the librarian. Your body, all of these bodies, are mine, to do with as I please. You understand that, dumb body?”
Chiva wanted only unaltered bodies, ugly texts like me. She liked me best, she said, because I desired the texts, and she found that so revolting that I became desirable to her. We spent our days entwined among texts, and I reveled in the feel of her body against mine. For me, it was enough. My loneliness had ended, and the archives were no longer so cold and empty to me. Chiva told the overseers she was instructing me, and most of the time they did not argue with her. I learned that there were not enough overseers to look after us anymore, and the few that remained were happy to pass my training on to Chiva, even though she had no direct link to a keeper. She was as free as an empty text could be.
Sometimes she and I simply sat in observance of te
xts and listened to them narrate their histories. We lay in one another’s arms as the bodies told us a truth that would no longer exist by the year’s end. Chiva often wanted me to help her when the archivists purged another text, but I refused.
“We just have to unhook them and put them on the cart,” she said, but I left her to it and ran off down the winding corridors to find a quiet space. I did not like to watch them take the texts away.
I remember once when we lay across the body she had first seen me with. We both curled up next to it, told it to narrate, but did not listen. Instead, we spoke together in our soft lover’s voices, heads bent forward, bodies touching, rubbing against one another.
“We burn them down until they’re just ash,” she said, “when we remove them from here.”
“Why do you have to talk of it?” I said. Sometimes I thought she took delight in the burning of the texts.
“You know what we used to do with the ash, when we burned it all down? We gathered it up in big containers, and they shipped it down to the synthetics factories along the coast, and you know what they did with it?”
“Threw it into the sea?” I said.
She laughed. “No. They condensed it all down, mixed it with chemicals and wood char and made synthetic logs for the living compounds around the factories.”
“Synthetic logs?” I said.
“Yes. I heard stories, not truth, of course, just stories, that the workers out there, the keepers would let them set the logs on fire, and they would dance around them. These naked, empty texts. They would just dance!”
I remembered the dancers. The orange flames leaping high in the air. I remembered how proud we all were of watching that flame, that one bit of making we were able to perform while the keepers owned our bodies. The smell of the black dust, the way it coated our bodies.
“Don’t talk about burning things anymore,” I said.
Our days were not to last, of course. Contentment never does, does it? But then, would we remember it as contentment if it was not bracketed with darkness?
“I watched you always, Anish,” my keeper told me the day it died. “I watched you and wanted to be you, and when I could not be you, I wanted to unmake you. What we cannot have, we must destroy. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”
Meet Me in the Future Page 27