by Jerry
“Tired from what?” Melissa shifted to make room for Helen on the bench. The cafeteria was cavernous in its emptiness. The timer above the cafeteria door reminded her that she had fifteen minutes before her shift.
Helen waved her food implement in the air before attacking her bars with gusto. “All of this. Everything. The department. The bodies. Watching everyone’s lives projected on the wall.”
Melissa shrugged. “It’s a job. I’m good at it. I fail to see what else I should be thinking about.”
“But that’s the problem,” said Helen. “Don’t you remember what life was like planetside?”
“You mean the constant threat of typhoons or drought? Or the sense that food was going to run out the next day? Or that we had no idea where to get water or medicine or anything remotely necessary for patients at a hospital? No thanks.”
Helen rolled her eyes. “Well, you’re a barrel of sunshine.”
“I’m being realistic. We’ve been here, what, almost two decades now? It’s a better job than anything I could get back home, even if I’ve migrated to the American Union or Canada.”
“Is a job all you ever think about?”
Melissa placed her pad down. “What’s bothering you, Helen?”
The other woman pursed her lips. “Rommel emailed. He wants me to come home and take care of the grandkids.”
“You’re still on contract.”
She shrugged. “I can finish it at the local hospital. They don’t have a DNR system set up so maybe I can go back to actual pathology.”
“So what are you talking to me for? It seems like you’ve already figured things out.”
Helen reached out across the table and laid a cool, soft hand over Melissa’s. “I wanted to see if you wanted to come with me. You look tired and burned-out, Mellie. Maybe going back home will make you feel better.”
She shook her head. “This is my home now, Helen. There’s nothing for me planetside.”
“But what about—“
“There’s nobody, Helen.”
Helen chewed the last of her bars and then stood up to bring her tray back to the dispensers. “Well, if you change your mind, I’ll be here for a few more days to file my transfer docs.”
Melissa forced her lips to lift into a smile. “I’ll be fine. Thanks for the offer.”
Later, at her desk, while completing the last few docs from the previous shift, Melissa thought about her colleague. They were cordial, but Melissa wasn’t interested in being friends. She wasn’t even sure how Helen ran the other half of the day; that wasn’t part of Melissa’s job.
She glanced over at Helen’s cube, with the projections of her children and grandchildren. Rommel occupied a large space on the wall, his sun-brown face breaking into a wide-toothed smile. There were some people in Dentistry who would kill for those teeth. She glanced back at her own cube, at the blinking blue light on her console that signalled the arrival of a body, and sighed as she suited up for work.
Gloves, face mask, blue-hued uniform: Melissa slipped them on like a second skin as she quietly waited for the nurses to bring in the body for prep. Two nurses, both male, rolled in the body and lifted it from one gurney to a metal slab, nodded to her in acknowledgement, and then left the room. Melissa yanked the bright halogen exam light toward her as she examined the body.
Male, late fifties, slightly abnormal swelling around the midsection—stomach cancer, perhaps? While they may have largely eradicated the mutation in younger citizens, the elders, particularly the first generation transplanted from the Philippines to this colony, weren’t so receptive to the gene therapy introduced by the Hospice oncologists. Melissa glanced at the ID that accompanied the body. Manuel Co. The name sounded familiar, but then again, she assumed that men of a certain age were part of the same ship she had taken to the colony.
The work was tedious, but familiar. The flesh parted easily, allowing her ways to read the body like delicate pages from an old book, like the ones made from paper, which she saw only behind glass in museums. She wondered if the material would feel this way against her touch: supple and slick. She read his childhood sicknesses and minor irritations, gall bladder removed, liver slightly discoloured (Alcohol? Medication?), heart still thick with roped muscle and veins that bound it in place. Melissa excavated the body in silence, her only music being the scraping of blade against skin, skin against bone.
The eyes were cloudy, the irises faded to a soft brown. She plucked them, flower-like, from the sockets, and immersed them in the conducting liquid. Flicking the machine’s switches, she listened to the familiar whirr-grrrr sound of the neuro-visual conductors as they extracted the images from the pale white globes suspended in the ether. As she waited for the machine to begin projecting the images on the wall opposite her, she began the methodical task of distributing the body’s organs into their specific containers and organizing them for delivery. Once the body was empty, she began suturing the remaining skin back into place.
Her stitches were clean and narrow, neat lines punctuating the flesh of the dead. Her mother used to be a seamstress, after all, and taught her well.
The small furnace at the back of the lab was sealed shut, and only Melissa and Helen had the key codes, which changed every twenty-four hours. Once Mr. Co’s body was ready for disposal, she slipped off her gloves and initiated the sequence to activate the furnace. The clean energy resulting from the dead body was enough to power many of Natural Resources’ machines, including the neuro-visual conductors. Melissa figured there was some kind of poetry in that, but she was never fond of literature in the first place.
As she slipped the body into the caverns of the furnace, she wondered for a moment how it would feel to slip through that hole as well, to crawl down into the bowels of the planet and stay there, ensconced in darkness and warmth.
At the edge of her hearing, she knew that the machine had finally extracted the necessary images and were now splicing them together into a narrative. Melissa never quite understood how the technology identified cohesion, but she was nonetheless pleased that she was not that necessary to the process of making the DNR video. All she had to do was make sure that everything worked perfectly.
She saw the image projected on the wall. The hairs on her neck rose.
On the screen, playing in a loop, was a clear image of a young woman, bronze-skinned and dark-haired, wearing a sun-coloured dress and smiling at Manuel, her hand extended away from the frame as though she was inviting him into her world. The sky was a brilliant, blinding blue. She had never seen that kind of blue on Mars.
Melissa stared at herself: when she was a mother, when she was a wife.
She was one of the first responders on the scene. The Great Tremors weren’t so great then: rumblings of the earth, an unsteady floor, a rolling sea. But as the numbers on the Richter scale began to climb, cities began to fall. Manila was one of the worst places hit by the earthquakes, the sudden shifting beneath the swollen city. Tenements, forgotten or ignored by the city government and allowed to stand on unstable foundations, collapsed immediately, burying hundreds of the city’s poorest people beneath wood, concrete, and debris.
Mellie worked for three days, taking only minutes-long breaks in between. Slight and small, she was constantly wedging herself between slabs of wobbly wood or rusty steel, attempting to rescue another human being. Survivors emerged, bloody and bruised, their skin dusted with dirt, tears running down their faces as they saw the sky. Rickety ambulances whined and screamed down the main thoroughfares of the city. The entire thoroughfare of Epifanio de Los Santos Avenue, the longest road that ran across the city, was closed off to traffic, land, and air. Lanes were quickly cleared to bring the injured to the nearest government hospitals.
Of course, once the dust had settled, Mellie had a day to get herself together before reporting back to duty at the St. Michael and Mary Hospital, which was already running out of room for all the patients. The newsfeeds said that there were thousands, tens of tho
usands, dead or missing. Her husband, Manuel, had also taken a day off, and he was at home, waiting for her.
He wrapped her in his arms and said that everything was okay as she took great, heaving gulps, allowing the tremors of her own body to pass through her. When Benny, who had just turned ten, arrived home from school, he gave her a great, big hug. He told her that he was going to be an engineer when he grew up so he could build great houses for people that wouldn’t fall on them when there was an earthquake. Mellie held him tight, so tight.
When she returned to work, she asked for a transfer: back to Davao City, where she had grown up. She was sure the buildings there were safer—everyone said that there were no earthquakes in Davao City, and she believed them. She heard about the earthquake ordinances, the way the city was organized to respond quickly and calmly to any emergency. She knew her family would be safe there.
Of course, she was mistaken.
Benny was eleven when it started: the rashes, the redness that spread over his skin like a wildfire. He had come back from a camping trip with his classmates and complained of insects and feeling feverish the whole time. She tried everything: cooling baths, calamine, anti-inflammatory ointments and creams that his skin absorbed but barely relieved him of the pain. He cried, his nails raking over his body like slash marks. After a week, he could barely move, his skin in a constant state of swelling and thickening and swelling once more.
“We need to take him to the hospital,” Manuel had said. But she didn’t want her son to see what she did at work, to frighten him. She thought it was chicken pox. Seven to twelve days—she knew her literature. He had all his vaccines. He was going to be fine.
But after thirteen days, Benny was in such a constant state of pain that his hands and feet had to be restrained so that he wouldn’t hurt himself. His sheets were already streaked with blood, where he had been scratching himself so deep that he had peeled off his skin. Mellie took one look at her son, wrapped him in a thick blanket to protect him from the world outside, and took him to her workplace. In and out. It would be a quick trip, not even a day.
But she was wrong.
The infection had burrowed beneath her son’s skin like parasites. He constantly burned from the inside. Immuno-compromised, his charts read as Mellie swept through the screens, searching for a sign to help her son. Unknown causes. Doctors rotated his meds, ran test after test. Manuel sat patiently beside their son while Mellie could barely stand to be in the same room anymore. All her knowledge flew out the window. She wanted to scream, fight, punch through wall to save Benny’s life.
She slipped out of his room while he slept, morphine dripping from an old-fashioned IV line. The hospital had a small garden between buildings, filled with synthetic plants that resembled her favourites from childhood: small star-shaped santan blooms, nodding gumamelas in yellow and pink ruffles, small round cacti that threaded across the meandering path connecting the two buildings.
Mellie sat at the solitary bench in the middle of the garden and stared up at the sky. The seat was a desolate grey, the hue of all those dilapidated houses that collapsed during the earthquake over a year ago. More earthquakes were happening, more disasters rising from the earth and the ocean like monsters. Why worry about other nations when your own country is out to get you? Davao was the last stable bastion. The government had relocated the spaceship programs down south, just outside Mintal. The government had reclaimed the flat expanse of agricultural lands at the foot of Mount Apo, where it could build the first of great Bakunawa ships that would take them to space. After all, they were one of the last NATO-ASEAN countries to leave, and at the rate they were going, even Laos would be heading to the Moon before they could even lift-off.
She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. Her heart paused between one beat and the next. It weighed her down, anchored to her chest like a stone. She looked at the sky, her neck aching from tilting backwards, watching the grey light fade. Stars came out. And in that moment, she knew that she needed to be out there, following that pinprick of light, rather than being here, bound to the ground.
When she returned to the hospital room, Manuel had fallen asleep on the uncomfortable chair next to their son’s bed. Benny’s breathing was calm, controlled. He was wrapped in white cloth and bandages, where he had scratched so hard that the skin had broken and refused to heal.
He was broken. Mellie could see that now.
Slowly, she reached down for Benny’s files, hooked to the foot of his bed, and swiped across the screen to access his vitals. At the bottom of the page was a consent form. Without thinking, Mellie quickly double-tapped the screen to confirm that her son was a DNR.
He died two days later.
When he was wheeled into the lab, covered with a sheet, her supervisor looked at Mellie and asked her if she was capable of doing the job. DNRs in children were rare, and there was a lot of value in their parts. In response, Mellie asked if she could do the initial incision.
The technology to record the last imprint within the visual cortex did not exist at the time. And so the eyes were also sent out, unrecorded, to help another doctor, another patient.
She came home early that night. The weight in her heart could no longer be tethered to her body. It crashed, littering her soul with the debris of loving her son. When he was born, she had disconnected his body to hers, and now she had cut him apart. Now, some other child will have a piece of his heart, will have the muscles and bone and blood taken from her child. They will still live. But Benny, Benny, Benny was dead.
She was on the couch, flipping through the channels when Manuel arrived. There were dark circles under his eyes. “When can we bring him home?” he asked.
“The hospital already took care of it. He was infectious.” There was a mechanical lilt to her voice she couldn’t suppress. “He needed to be processed fast.”
“Well yes, but surely we could have a small funeral, at the very least, before they take care of him.” Manuel sat down beside her and held her hand. He felt warm and pulsing and alive. She couldn’t help but be reminded of Benny in the curve of his lips, the sound of his voice. “Mellie, talk to me.”
She took a deep breath, felt around her mind for the words that she wanted to say to her husband. Something about loss. Something about pain. Something about knowing that she could no longer stand to be near anything that reminded her of her son.
Including Manuel.
Especially Manuel.
But her lips remained shut. And so they stayed there, through the night, until Manuel had fallen asleep on the couch. Mellie crept to their bedroom, packed her things one more time, and left everything else behind.
The medical space program was for volunteers only. Mellie signed up as soon as her son died. The hospital was willing to help her; they received funding every time they were able to put a doctor on a spaceship. They even tweaked her application to show her suitability for spaceflight.
It was only after training—sixteen months to train for space travel, and another ten months for terraforming and colonization—that Mellie was able to send a short message to Manuel to ask for an annulment. The government had requested it. They knew how hard it was to be up there and yet to be anchored down here as well. She needed to be weightless. He never replied, but the digital documents arrived at the office the next day, signed and sealed and ready to be filed into the cloud servers.
And then she got on the ship and never ever once looked back.
Until now.
She remembered that day, remembered where they were: the beach, just before Benny was born. A romantic getaway, just the two of them. Everything was clear: the sky, the sea, Manuel. This was years before the ground had swallowed up the Philippines, before the Great Tremors rendered the archipelago into broken, distant islands in hours. She did not have to watch the livefeeds from the newsdrones to know that she could not return to Davao City, that she had no home to return to. She refused to look at the lists of the dead. She knew her husband had di
ed, and she was the one who had killed him.
Melissa stared at the eyes in the container and at the video playing on the wall. He may have changed his last name but certainly not his memory. Guilt tugged at her chest, where she knew her heart was still beating, faintly, for this man.
A ring from the comm stationed at her cube startled her from her thoughts. “Dr. Remedios?” came a voice from the nurses’ station. “The family of Mr. Co is here, waiting for the DNR recording.”
She paused, and stepped toward the recording equipment, at the looping memory of herself. She came to Mars with nothing to remember him by. Beyond the borders of the memory, she could almost see his hand, the faint outline of his arms. His body. His eyes.
“Please tell them that the files are corrupted and that we have been unable to retrieve his memories. We will be compensating them, of course, for this unfortunate incident.” She kept her voice clear, steady.
But for now, the lie was just between her and a dead body. “Alright,” said the nurse on duty. The comm clicked off, and for good measure, Melissa removed the wire that connected it to the central communications system. Then she cupped the eyes and placed them in a transport container. Finally, she withdrew the recording chip from the machine and tucked it into her pocket, where it jostled with her ID.
Manuel Co, she thought, a finger stroking the smooth cylindrical container holding his eyes. Mine. All mine.
I MET A TRAVELLER IN AN ANTIQUE LAND
Connie Willis
The terrible thing about Manhattan is that all the streets look alike. And I can hear New Yorkers screaming bloody murder already, asking indignantly, “How can you say that? The Village and the Upper West Side look nothing alike, and how could you possibly confuse SoHo with Midtown?” and bleating about Carnegie Hall and Penn Station and the Met, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the streets. Especially the cross streets, though what I’m talking about applies to long stretches of Broadway and the avenues, too.