The noise of these voices and bag rummagers becomes muffled. The air in the train is getting bad. As the atmosphere closes in on him, X. feels groggy, shiftless, and unable to focus his eyes on the words on the page. He dabs at his chest several times with the butt end of his pen before he can manage to get it into his shirt pocket, and finally allows himself to sink backward in his seat . . .
A squeal of brakes startles him — the train is different. No, it is the same, but his seat is different. He now occupies the seat in which the strangely obscured sleeping man had been. His mouth is pasty and dry, his body stiff, complaining in every joint, and this, and his inability to recognize anyone on the train, contributes to the presentiment of alarm that gathers in the still-dim corners of his waking mind. Through the window, he can see the lights of the next station appear against the tunnel walls ahead. A longing for the open air and sky comes over him; he thinks of the walk he took a night or two ago, gazing up at Jupiter, calm and tremendous. The first winds of autumn were tossing in the trees, so unlike the lifeless stillness of summer. The autumn winds, lightly fragrant like a woman’s hair, always bring him a special awakening feeling, even though they were harbingers of death. October was the month of his birth, and it sometimes felt as if the autumn season recognized him as one of its own creations. Now, if he were to get up and make his way to the surface, he might see Jupiter again, as if no time at all had elapsed since he’d seen it last.
He glances warily at his watch, expecting it to be shockingly late. For a time, he labors to understand its face, how it could now be five minutes earlier than it was the last time he’d looked at the time. The perennial night of the tunnels has fooled him; it’s almost twelve hours later.
The next station appears on the far side of the car. Through the other window, the one closer to him, he watches in silent consternation as the panel slides toward him. The train has gone full circle. How many times? The people standing on the platform look weary, heads hanging down over their books. They board the train with clumsy, enervated movements, and one man goes to stand somewhat before him. This man is neither familiar nor unfamiliar; it’s difficult to say what he looks like, so changeable are his features from one moment to the next, but he is gazing out the window, and his eyes are riveted on the panel.
X. rubs his face, and puts his clothes in order, although they seem entirely crisp and fresh, better than expected. Another stop. A seat empties, and the man who looked at the panel sits in it. Is it the same seat X. sat in? It does seem to be roughly in the same part of the train, but whether or not it is the very same one is not for his memory to say. The man makes a note in a notebook and claps it shut efficiently. Then he raises his eyes to the young woman sitting opposite him. She is dressed with a great deal of deference to the magazines, but for all her obvious vanity she has the face of a villainous fairy.
“I wasn’t writing about you,” the man says to her with a smile. His manner is abrupt, and she stiffens and lowers her eyes without responding. At the next stop, she leaves the train.
The man has noticed X.; despite himself, he has been watching him too closely to pretend otherwise now. Without a word, he rises and sits beside X. His face is familiar; he is sprucely dressed, and X. notices he has an irregularly-shaped ring of dull metal on the ring finger of his left hand. Now that he is closer, if anything he is more difficult to see clearly than before; when there was some distance between them, X. could see him entire, if indistinctly. Up close, X. can see only such details as his posture reveals, and his posture is always shifting slightly, even if he conveys more of an impression of stillness than of restlessness.
“Are you awake?” he asks, only barely turning his head toward X.
“Mostly,” X. replies, rubbing his forehead and the bridge of his nose. “I must have slept so long.”
“Falling asleep is dangerous,” the man says. “What you have may be taken from you.”
X. checks his pockets. “Nothing missing, I think.”
A faint smile crosses the man’s lips, or so it seems to X., who can only see some of his face at a time. “That’s more attributable to sloth or cowardice than goodwill,” he says. “Although perhaps sloth and cowardice are not the best words to describe the city dweller’s lack of spirit.”
He speaks in a dry, brisk way, with an indulgent coolness that only makes the things he says seem that much more matter-of-fact.
“The modern city exists only to be destroyed,” he says flatly. “The frenetic activity you see around you every moment of the day and night is not creative, but purely destructive. Here, human beings are worked to death and leave nothing behind them but that which will ruin the generation to come. This city, like all others now, exists only insofar as it is collapsing, and all its activities are dimensions of its collapse. This work they do is their own destruction, sustaining itself.
“The modern city exists only to be destroyed.”
With a small whisk of his hand, he gestures to the people seated around them, and goes on, keeping his voice low. Quietly as he speaks, X. still has no difficulty hearing every word distinctly through the roar of the train.
“These people all dream of its final, catastrophic destruction, only pretending to dread it, perhaps trying to convince themselves that it is dread, and not yearning, that the vision of a final catastrophe elicits in them. This is not real defiance. It is not the vision of the end of the city that matters, but the vision of what is to come after. That is everything, and these people do not look that far. Have you?”
X. turns his head, not toward the man, but toward the window, at the black underground world out there, which could be hurtling by at fantastic speed, or sitting motionless, surrounding a train that rocks and bellows in place like a bull caught in a pen.
Now X. looks into the face of the man beside him.
“I see,” the man says quietly. “Take me there.”
The village seems freshly abandoned, in good repair, though dark. Walking down its modest main street and glancing about himself, X. sees nothing but its buildings. The land beyond is hidden, and even the sky above is only a shadow, without a single star, or even a cloud, unless perhaps the entire sky is covered by one single uniform cloud, very high and utterly opaque. The darkness does have a cloudlike feltiness, and a murky quality that clear, windswept nights never have. All the same, the air in the streets is intoxicatingly fresh, cool and invigorating. The effect it has on his companion only goes to show that this impression is more than imagination. From a nearly somnolent trudging, the man’s step grows lighter and more dancer-like pace by pace. His carriage is more erect, and his eyes more bright. The village, what’s more, is answering his liveliness with lights and by some other, subtler effects X. can only just dimly take note of, but which do make it clear that activity of some kind, some happy bustling, is stirring in the houses.
Lights dart out their flashes across the reviving village. Shadows lean and pivot against the ground, but the beautiful darkness of the night is not dispelled by these lights, which have no glare. It seems instead as if the night has flung open its windows here and there among the outlines of the buildings. There are no figures to be seen, but the hum of activity, still not quite audible or at least so quiet that it doesn’t disturb the pleasing silence of the night, is growing. He looks at his companion, who has unlaced his arm from his and is looking around himself in a transport of happiness, rubbing his hands together, then opening his arms in an invitation to embrace him, directed not at X., but at the town.
“It is all the work of machines,” he says.
“What, all this?” X. asks, waving at the village buildings.
He turns, smiling broadly, and nods.
Disappointment sweeps through X..
“I had thought there were people here, greeting us,” X. says sadly.
“No!” he replies, his gaiety still increasing. “Only machines.”
“It seems . . . inappropriate somehow. These quaint, rustic buildings.
That they should just be masks for some impersonal machinery.”
“You would expect that in a city, wouldn’t you?” he asks, still gaily.
“Well, yes! The modern city is nothing but machines.”
“The modern city . . .”
He says this in a tone that suggests more to come, but adds nothing. When he does speak again, it’s as if he were making a rejoinder to someone in another conversation, and now his voice has a bitter, recriminating tone, even if it has lost none of its gladness. It’s the embittered tone of one who can accuse another from a position of unquestioned innocence.
“Modern cities . . . cruel cities . . . cities of weakness, cities without ritual.”
“Yes,” X. says, eagerly. He wants to hear more.
“When you dream,” the man says, suddenly addressing X. directly, “you dream of the city of reason and ceremoniousness.”
“Of liberty and rest,” X. says.
“Of order, uncoerced and spontaneous as a dance.”
“Ordered with the precision of an improvisation.”
“You can hear the singing of those machines which mankind slanders as being alien and inimical to it, and to nature itself, when it is by human hands that the innocent particles of nature are transformed into machines, and set to work by the application of natural principles. Machines are made in the human image. Man does not imitate them!”
A weird light plays around his features as he says this. While he never ceases to look human and natural, at the same time there is a temptation to see his face as a hollow glass mask with luminous gases inside. As that luminescence grows, more lights come on all over the town, and X. begins to realize they are connected.
“You are . . .” X. says, and stops, unable to manacle together the words he needs.
“I am,” he says, nodding, evidently guessing X.’s thought. “Do you think this is something?” he asks, with the air of someone who is about to unfurl something more astonishing.
The other can only nod.
He tugs at his tie, undoing it, and pulls it from his collar. Then, twisting his hand around as if he were working a dial, he undoes his collar button, and begins to undress, begins to laugh, as the black void of the sky above the village behind him explodes in countless lighted windows soaring up tall towers whose tops are impossibly high. Laughing, stripping off his clothes, with a lurid brilliance that steadily grows more intense about his face and eyes, his image begins to dance before X., and, with a crash, dazzling rays of light burst out from behind X. X. turns to see yet more towers, and on all sides — this is not a village, but a city of colossi, wafers of night pressed between headless dragon spires whose flanks are scaled with terrible, illuminated windows. His vision seems to drop away down the endless, canyon-like streets to the massive buildings beyond, as they burst alight one by one, and still further and further. An intense, silent vibration suffuses the air and the ground at his feet, as his companion, whose mind is these buildings, these lights and this power, continues to strip himself.
A jolt pulls him at once entirely out of his dream, and the man is there by his side, clapping him on the shoulder and telling him it’s time to get off the train. Blearily, X. rises and follows him, his legs moving in what feel like convulsive jerks, shot through with cold, glassy pains like darts of ice.
They are in the same station, the same station as ever, but the doors open on the wrong side of the train. Together, they stand on the narrow ledge opposite the platform. The train leaves with a dull roar, and people spill from the stairways, refilling the platform, streaming endlessly into the station, lining up along the tracks, bent wearily over fluttering white books. The man leads X. to the panel, which is only a step or two away. With his finger, he scrapes a thick layer of encrusted dirt from the wall, tracing the outlines of a rectangular panel. With some knocking, he clears the dirt from a recessed handle, and draws the panel open with a sharp tug, revealing what looks like a clockwork mechanism within the wall. With a glance at X., he pulls the irregular ring from his finger. Now X. sees clearly that it’s a gear, which the man fits neatly into the mechanism. The machinery spins, and the panel glides up into the wall without a sound.
The man crosses to the other side of the panel and gestures to X., bowing a little and inviting him, without a word, to crawl inside. From this angle, facing him again, he can make out something of the man’s features a little better than he has up until now. The singular light shining from the platform throws them into an altered relief, and seems to shadow that vague, interior luster that had leant so much variation to their composition. The man is not himself, nor is he another. The idea crosses X.’s mind even as he crouches to enter the wall through the open panel, and the ambivalent alarm that it brings in tow competes with an intense curiosity.
The aperture is a bit like a closet, lit only faintly by the glow from the platform. It is an upright tomb in the wall, and it was empty until X. climbed inside it. With sudden fear, X. turns to face the man, as best he can, but of course he can only see the feet, and that with effort. They recross in front of the aperture as he stoops awkwardly in the narrow chamber to look, and he hears a soft tinkle of metal. That is the sound, he knows, of the gear being removed from the machinery, and replaced on the ring finger of the left hand. The panel . . .
The panel drops steadily into place, to seal him in total darkness, inside the wall.
As the panel begins to descend, neither slowly nor rapidly, in a flash he inventories all that he has within reach and determines which of these things — his head — is the hardest. Already stooped, he thrusts his head violently forward just in time. The panel settles its weight across his temples. The thickness of the panel extends above his eyes like a canopy, but he is still able to see the tracks, the station, and the people on the platform, the trains as they come and go, as long as the lights remain lit. The panel rests on his head as stably as if it was part of his skeleton, but bones also fall off each other, and everything moves in time, including the trains, which are far heavier than the panel. So the darkness is not quite complete, because there is, certainly dampened and partially blocked by his head, also a bar of light.
Perhaps there will come a time when X., standing on the platform, will see the train pull in behind him as he is reflected in the glass windows of the kiosk there. The reflection is just bright enough to make it seem as though there are two trains in the station, although one is spectral and dim, like his own reflection. The doors of both trains will open. It may be that he will turn and board one, and his reflection will turn and board another, and it may be that these respective reflections will eventually arrive in unfamiliar and necessarily unforeseen destinations.
SLOW COLD CHICK
Nalo Hopkinson
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican science fiction and fantasy writer and editor who lives in the United States. Her novels (Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon's Arms), and short stories such as those in her collection Skin Folk, often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling.
They'd cut off the phone. Blaise slammed the receiver back into its cradle. “Oonuh couldn't wait just a little more?” she asked resentfully of the silent instrument. “1 get paid Friday, you know.” Now she couldn't ask her mother to put milk or water in the cornbread. Chuh. Blaise flounced into the kitchen and scowled at the mixing bowl on the counter.
Mummy used milk, she was almost sure of it. Blaise poured milk and oil, remembering her mother's homemade cornbread, yellow-warm smelling, hot from the oven, with butter melting more yellow into it. Yes, Mummy used milk.
And eggs. And Blaise didn't have any. “Damn.” It was almost a week until payday. She made a sucking sound of irritation. Frustration burned deep in her chest.
A movement through her kitchen window caught her eye. From her main-floor apartment, Blaise could easily see the Venus-built lady in the next-door garden. The Venus-built lady's cottage always gave
the appearance of having just popped into existence, unexpected and anachronistic as Doctor Who's call box.
Chocolate-dark limbs peeking out of her plush white dressing gown, the Venus-built lady waded indolently through rioting ivy, swollen red roses, nasturtiums that pursed into succulent lips. Blaise had often thought to ask the beautiful woman what her name was. But to meet the eyes of someone so self-possessed, much less speak to her . . .
Branches laden, an otaheite tree bobbed tumescent maroon fruit, so low that the lady could have plucked them with her mouth. Blaise's mother sometimes sent her otaheite apples from Jamaica, but how did the tropical tree flourish in this northern climate?
As ever, the Venus-built lady's gingered brown hair flung itself in crinkled dreadknots down her back, tangled as lovers' fingers. Blaise had chemically straightened all the kinks out of her own hair.
The Venus-built lady was laying a circle of conch shells around a bed of bleeding hearts. She reached out to caress the plants' pink flowers. At her touch, they shivered delicately. Blaise looked down at her own dull brown hands. The Venus-built lady's skin had the glow of full-fat chocolate.
The woman bent and straightened, bent and straightened, leaving a pouting conch shell behind her each time, until pink echoed pink in a circle around the bleeding hearts. Blaise thought of the shells singing as the wind blew past their lips.
The lady turned away from the flower bed and swayed amply up her garden path. As her foot touched the first step of the cottage, a fat, velvet-petaled rose leaned beseechingly towards her. She tugged the rose from its stem and ate it. Then she opened her gingerbread door and sashayed inside.
Weird. Blaise imagined a spineless green grub squirming voluptuously in the heart of the overblown rose. And an avid mouth descending towards it. She shuddered. I don't want to eat the worm.
It had gotten hot in the apartment. The fridge burped. Distractedly, Blaise went to it and opened it.
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