Beautiful Machine

by PW Cooper

  The man looks at you. “For god's sake!” he bellows, “Can't you see she's been injured?” Then he blinks, realizing that you are not the porter, not an attendant, and he frowns, shakes his head. Turns away.

  The girl is staring at you, her cries choked in her throat. She cocks her head, and her eyes widen with fear. “Oh Daddy!” she says, all in a panic, “where did she come from! She's one of them, isn't she!”

  The boy snarls, fierce through his tears. “Get out! Get out you!” His chubby face is red and wet. He seems squeezed into his clothing.

  The woman looks at you, her eyes fluttering. The blood pours down her face. She sees you and she shudders, clutching to her husband.

  You back away, overwhelmed by the force of their fear and anger, their hate. Why do they hate you? What have you done? You trip on the doorframe and fall into the hallway. The children are shouting at you, calling you names, their faces screwed up like those of snarling dogs.

  And then there are hands, unseen hands, grabbing at you from behind, dragging you, clawing you, pulling you back. You twist and writhe and squirm. You see a black gloved hand swinging down and a swath of dark red cloth and then nothing.

  They have you.

  * * *

  You are aware of your eyes. Opening and closing. Opening and closing. Closed. You are aware of your eyes.

  Hands on your shoulders, rough hands digging into your flesh, forcing you upright. A hand striking your face, slap across the cheek. A hand grasping your chin and jaw. A voice: “Look at me, girl. Look at me now.”

  You are back in the rail-yard. The black train – the familiar train, the miserable repulsive so-familiar train – is there on the track, smoke billowing from its stacks. The sun is high. The ornate silver train is gone. You wonder if all that was nothing more than a dream, an image lodged in your mind and spat out into the world. Did any of it happen? Are you still sleeping?

  Your clothing is gone, it has been replaced with an ill-fitting drab brown outfit. The collar is too tight and the waist too loose. You can feel fleas biting at your skin, parasites crawling all over you. The clothing smells faintly of death, distant now but once very close. You think that you have been given the clothing of a dead girl. The clothes which she wore when she died, you think. You want to tear them off.

  You look up.

  Harsh eyes, cool blue. Sharp bones beneath the skin, high cheekbones and hooked nose. He holds you so tight in his grip. It is the same man, the man who questioned you at the boarding school, the man who took you away and put you on the train, who chased you through the darkness beneath the station. The Captain. There is no warmth in his blue eyes – as blue, you think, as ice.

  “Can you hear me, girl?” his fingers pinch at your skin.

  You nod your head.

  “You've been very naughty, haven't you? Well, never mind that. It's in your nature, I understand. Never mind past transgressions. All that matters is what happens now. I am Captain Brighten. Tell me your name.”

  You are not sure which name to use. Your own name? Ahlem? Sally? What name will best serve you now?

  Captain Brighten takes your indecision for silence, and he nods. “You have no name anymore. You do not deserve one. No more than a dog, any of the lower species. There are those who would name you. They do not understand, I think, the power of the thing, the responsibility. I am Jack. Jack Brighten. Now we are going back aboard the train. Do you understand?”

  You nod, because you do not know what else to do. His grip on you is so tight that you can hardly move. He stands up. He seems satisfied. There are more soldiers in red standing all around you, a half a dozen of them at least. They are at ease in the smoggy rail-yard. They recline, their guns held ready and their postures relaxed. Trains pull and puff across the way, whistles shrieking. There are more soldiers on the little platform further along the track where the great loading arm stands ready and poised. They stand there looking over the edge of the platform. There is a swarm of dogs just out of sight below them, nothing but snapping jaws and thrashing tails.

  “Look there,” Captain Brighten orders. He points to the great arm. “Do you see that? There at the end of the scaffold?”

  A formless silhouette against the sky. A heavy teardrop swaying like rotten fruit about to break free and fall heavy and sweet and bursting to the earth.

  “Rudolph Harris. Collaboration with an enemy of the state. Death by hanging. The woman did not deserve to die alongside a soldier, even one such as him.”

  A horrible knotting in your stomach. A sick fear.

  The dogs are convulsing madly. Their savoring jaws gleam red and flickering white. They tear. They devour. You scan the sky for another swaying body and do not find one.

  The hook-nosed man puts his hand on your shoulder. The way your father used to hold your shoulder to keep you from getting separated in a crowd, to keep from ever losing you. Now this man is doing the same. He holds you as though he owns you. You want to kill him. You feel as though he is mocking your father.

  You wonder if things can ever go back to the way they were. Surely it is not possible to break a thing so far that it cannot be fixed?

  The Captain turns his bloodless smile on you. “Come with me,” he says. “We must get aboard.”

  “Where are you taking us?” you ask.

  He ignores you. Pushes you towards the train. Rather than wait for you to climb aboard he lifts you and places you on the train. His strong hands clasping you beneath the arms. Again you are reminded of your father and you feel sick. When you find your father at the end of the line will you still love him? Will he love you? Can he feel this betrayal where he is? It's not my fault, Papa! Where are you, Papa?

  The coal-black train. The strange pipes running along the ceiling. The empty vents like mouths. There are bars on the windows now, hastily and crudely welded there. Familiar faces: The two old men. The poet. Jamil with the broken teeth. The man with the heavy beard. The old man Tamir. And many new faces. You are sure they are new faces. Yes, they must be, previously empty seats are now filled. There is hardly any room left on the train. Everybody is looking at you. There are still no other children among them. Where are all the children?

  Tamir looks at you and his composure breaks. His face sinks down into his hands and he weeps. You want to ask him why he is crying, but you already know why. Asima is nowhere to be seen. You search, desperate, sure that she is simply hiding behind somebody, that her face is turned towards the window. You cannot find her. The woman did not deserve to die alongside a soldier. The slavering mouths of the dogs.

  Captain Brighten forces you down the aisle, placing you in one of the few remaining seats. You can see more soldiers in red stepping onto the train. They look at you and there is nothing in their faces but that blank hatred.

  The train starts to move when they are all aboard, rumbling to life like an immense reptile.

  The Captain stands at the head of the car. He is speaking, addressing the passengers of the train car. You find your attention sliding away.

  The train moves slowly through the rail-yard, slowly past the hanging body of Rudolph Harris, swaying in a weak breeze. Face turned purple, hands twitching with the last impulses of extinguished life. The dogs beneath the platform are writhing like a nest of rats over their meal. You cannot see what is beneath them. Shreds of cloth, shards of bone, the red meat of torn flesh. You cannot be sure.

  Captain Brighten has finished his speech. He meets the eyes of each person in turn, holding them locked in his steel gaze until their will breaks and they cast their gaze to the floor. When he has done this he turns on his heel.

  The city groans around you. Soon enough, you leave it behind.

  * * *

  This city of the future. This city will soon fall to ruin. Smoking towers belch fire to the sky. Cripples limp in the streets with shell-shocked faces and thoughts tattered. Soldiers march to forgotten orders, officers call for reinforcements that will not come, for men who no longe
r draw breath. Women screaming in the road, children trampled at their feet. All lined up in the shadow of the corpse fires. All is decay. All is destruction. This future bleeding closer every day.

  * * *

  Everyone is silent around you as the train leaves the city. There is a sense, a feeling in the air, that they are all passing from something beyond sight or measurement. They are all leaving behind a part of themselves with nothing to take its place. Knowledge ebbs to uncertainty. They seem resigned to this life.

  You sit beside the poet. She tells you that her name is Nazmiya. You do not offer your own name and she does not ask for it. Her shawl is wrapped around her head. You can see the faint pencil marks of her lines written there, the poem wreathed about her skull like a halo.

  She sits quietly and looks out at the smoking fields, crops burned to prevent them falling into the enemy's hands. Her head is rocking against the window. Her skull goes tap tap tap on the glass. Her eyes stare, unfocused and distant into the unfurling smoke as it slips past unremarked and unrecognized to dissipate high over the world. Her fingers play at the seat, at the armrest, at the window-frame, at the crude new bars. Her mouth moves, shaping unspoken words. The words of her poem, perhaps, formed but not as yet given breath.

  Beyond the city a gray-green world. Trees the color of old iron, foliated fingers bristling with dull leaf. Water moves in slow streams over steely rock. A hard wind blows snow down from the mountaintops to melt away on the burning planes like beads of rain.

  Captain Brighten is waiting in the next train car. His men are always here, always watching. They patrol up and down between the rows of seats. Anybody who speaks is violently silenced. Food is given twice a day: when the sun comes up and again when it goes down. It is the same food, but there seems to be less of it and it feels somehow even less filling. Hunger is powerful. After these few days you can already see faces turning gaunt and thin, bones pressing against skin, plump bodies slowly reduced. The body eats itself.

  An elderly couple sits across the aisle. They do not speak or move but sit as though dead. You think of the pictures you saw of mummies, ancient emperors entombed; those timeless people so assured of their own godhood, silently judging from beyond death. You have always been afraid of the mummy's curse, of the idea that there are foul spirits in the world eager for blood. Something crawling down your spine.

  There are two men sitting ahead of you. A stern man with a thick beard and another, a slim soft-featured man who whistles aimless tunes under his breath whenever the guards are too far away to hear him. They whisper to each other in secret conference. You overhear bits and snatches, but you do not understand. They are talking about roads, forests and hills. They are talking about landmarks and topography and major routs of troop movement. They are talking about supplies which they do not have, about how much food and water they will need. For how many people? I don't know yet. We can't expect to get everybody out. Perhaps if we overpower the guards. How? You lost your chance there, should have done it when there were just two of them. It wasn't the right time, we were too far from the border, we'd never have made it. We're getting further from the border everyday. But further from the cities, they won't find us out in the country, not if there are just a few of us. Well then, how do you decide who comes and who stays? I don't know.

  They speak in staccato bursts, little flurries of hissing conversation snatched between the turns of the guard's patrol.

  You feel their eyes turned back towards you. Like the eyes of the old men before them, glimpsed flashing though the gap in the seats.

  They turn back to each other and the slim one speaks. “My God, what about the girl?”

  “What about her?”

  Far quieter, so quiet it is scarcely spoken. You are sure that he is trying to hide the words from you, but you can see them on the movement of his lips. “She'd never make it.”

  The bearded man: “She's stronger than she looks. She already got away once. Bad luck it was so near the train station.”

  “Her? She can't be more than thirteen years old!”

  “Something like that.”

  “How did she get out?”

  The bearded man licks his lips. His mouth opens. He does not speak. He makes a small sound. A terrible defeated sound. He shakes his head.

  “My God, what-”

  “Do not ask!” the bearded man hisses. He sighs. He pulls at his beard. “If only I... and not the old woman. I would have killed them both... If only I had...”

  The thin man smiles. “Ah, my friend, you forget: had you run off together then, you would never have met me, and think how impoverished your life would be in my absence.”

  The bearded man laughs softly.

  The thin man twists in his seat. He looks at the poet and he smiles. His white teeth flicker. “And you?” he asks, raising his voice a little, “Will you tell me your name, or am I going to have to guess?”

  She blushes. You wonder what's wrong with her; she seems flustered. “Nazmiya,” she says, and juts out her chin.

  The man laughs. “They call me Raheel. God only knows why.”

  “What else would they call you?”

  He shrugs. “Oh all sorts of things, some of them less than suitable for such young ears.” He looks at you. “And what about you, girl, will you tell me your name?”

  You shake your head. What's he doing? Does he want you all to die? Is he trying to get you killed? You shrink down in your seat and hope that the guards don't notice you.

  Raheel looks at the woman. “Is this your daughter?”

  She shakes her head. “I don't know who she is. She won't tell me her name.”

  Raheel looks back at you. “Why the big secret, girl? Come, I'm Raheel, this is Nazmiya, my somber friend here is Daniyal.”

  The bearded man turns. “Leave the girl alone, Raheel.” He looks at you. “Are you well, child?”

  You nod. Why won't they be quiet? “Thank you,” you say, hoping that it will satisfy them.

  Raheel turns his attention back to the poet. “How'd they catch you then?”

  Her brow furrows. “What do you mean?”

  “Where did they snatch you from? I went into hiding as soon as I heard what was happening. My cousin was going to smuggle me out of the country in a turnip boat, if you can believe that.”

  “A turnip boat?”

  “Some kind of vegetable, anyway. He's the farmer. I did papers.”

  “What does that mean? You were a...?”

  Daniyal leans close. “He was a forger.”

  Raheel looks offended. “Please, my friend. You wound me.”

  Nazmiya's eyebrow arches. “You're a criminal?”

  “We're all criminals here on this train, don't you remember?”

  “But you're a real criminal.”

  He gives a chiding click of his teeth and shakes his head. “Who's to say? The people who make the laws say that we are less than they. Do we just accept this? Roll over and die? That's where the rule of law will get you. What I do... I only try and survive. Law is of no use to people like us.”

  “People like us? Do not think that we are alike.” Nazmiya pulls self-consciously at her shawl. “I never did anything wrong. I should not be here.”

  Raheel laughs, but his laughter is laced with iron. “You think that I deserve this? Where is your humanity, Nazmiya? You think I deserve to be on this train?”

  Daniyal cuts in before the poet can reply. “Of course she doesn't. Don't start bickering. We have to work together. We are all of us in the same boat now.”

  “Would that we were. I'd welcome you all aboard my cousin's turnip boat if I could. We'd sail together out to the ocean, eh?” He laughs.

  “What happened?” Nazmiya asks.

  “Hm?”

  “Why aren't you on your turnip boat?”

  “My cousin turned me in.”

  “You're joking!”

  “Unfortunately not. I don't really blame him, though. Poor bastard probably t
hought they'd reward him if he named names. Too bad mine was the only one he had. They might have actually let him go if he'd had more to give them.”

  “What did they do with him?”

  “They shot him.”

  “I'm sorry...”

  “Not half as sorry as I was when the red soldiers came crawling aboard. If I'd know they were going catch me anyway I never would have hidden in the turnips. I can still smell the damn things.”

  “And they brought you here?”

  He shrugs. “That's the whole story, I'm afraid. Are you coming with us when we leave, or would you prefer to suffer under the law?”

  Nazmiya blinks.

  He laughs. “Do you really think that we're just going to sit here and wait to die? My friend and I are going to get us off this train, don't you worry. You're much too beautiful to leave behind for the jackals.”

  She blushes again. “If you say so.”

  “I do.” He crosses his legs. They all fall silent and watch the guard stalk past. The silence in his wake has a miserable force to it, an unbearable weight. As soon as the coast is clear Raheel look again to the poet. “Alright then, I'm waiting.”

  “For?”

  “Your story. How did you come to be here with the rest of the criminals?”

  She looks away and does not answer.

  The world is blurred outside the window, like it is all melting away before your eyes, turning to nothing and dribbling down the windowpane. Soon there will be nothing left but the train and those aboard. The world is shrinking around you.

  “I'll tell you some other time,” Nazmiya says.

  Raheel grins. “That's a promise to which I will hold you.”

  The silence returns. There are others speaking, a murmur of frightened voices which sinks into the groaning sound of the train and vanishes beneath, like a swimmer slipping below the surface of a stormy sea, never to be seen again.