The Music of Razors

by Cameron Rogers

  She was up to her armpits when the shovel went clank.

  Great, she thought. Another water main.

  She scraped the soft brown soil aside and found a flat surface, gleaming like quicksilver and elaborately crafted. She clapped a hand over her mouth and screamed. No one heard. Good.

  Dig dig dig.

  It was a box.

  A big. Stonking. Box.

  It was practically weightless, long and wide and thin as a briefcase. She looked around in the dimming daylight, saw no one on the street or in the lit windows of surrounding houses, and rested the box on the green, green grass.

  The box was engraved with intricate, craftful designs and curlicues. She ran her hands across the cool flat top and down the sides, the skin of her palms sliding easily across the glossy surface. It hummed faintly beneath her touch, tickling her hands, sending minuscule vibrations up her radius and ulna. It infused her, sympathetic vibrations sounding across her rib cage and up her neck like a tickle of faint electricity. Vibrations that reached her skull, touched her inner ear, and formed a word…

  Anxietoscope…

  Hope snatched her hands away. She could still feel the residual tingle in her fingers and bones. A word she’d never heard before still tingled in her ear.

  With great care she reached out with one finger and flipped open the lid.

  The box practically opened itself.

  Inside, on a bed of muslin, lay a small steel cup—a thimble—that would have fit perfectly over one fingertip; a thimble made from the same pure quicksilver metal as the case—with a single barb adorning its tip.

  Slowly it rose, resting on nothing, rotating lazily in the air.

  She slammed the lid down.

  Anxietoscope. The vibrations died in her ear. To be used in the…

  She quickly stuffed the box into her pack and slung it over one shoulder. Then she was out of the hole and headed for home, her father’s shovel in one hand, soil beneath her nails.

  ELEVEN

  BED

  THE CURTAINS WERE ALWAYS OPEN IN WALTER’S ROOM. His mother liked to give him as much stimulus as possible. When he’d first been admitted into hospital, all those years ago, a doctor had told his mother it was good for him. That was before they advised turning him off. Before his parents refused and refused and refused again to allow their son to just die while his body still breathed. Before the court case drew out over five years, in which time the hospital tried to get him out of their ward and off their list of annual expenditure. Before the court voted in favor of the hospital anyway. Before Walter’s parents ended up throwing all their money into keeping him at home. And before the money for that had run out.

  There had been times when he’d wished they’d just let him go, but it never happened. Even without the machines the body kept breathing. He didn’t know what would happen to him should the body die; he didn’t feel a part of it anymore. It was just something that was ruining his family’s life.

  The body was twenty-one years old. It had dirty-blond hair that his mother had cut the same way for as long as he’d had hair (which now looked absurd on the twisted shape he had become). She came in every morning to comb and part it, and allow her hand to linger on his sallow cheek. She would stroke his forehead and call him her beautiful boy. And then she would turn to the window and the street outside and do nothing but stand and breathe for long minutes. Sometimes the shaving got neglected. Like now. There were traces of coarse hair around the hollow cheeks and bony chin. To get a good look at the body Walter had to climb up onto whatever chair was nearby. There usually was one because his mother made a habit of reading in here, which was fortunate because he wouldn’t be able to move the chair by himself. He could touch it, feel the cool metal and sharp glass dust-like prickle of immovable fiber, but he wouldn’t be able to affect it in any way at all.

  He’d first seen the body during the final days of the court case, when the body was still on assisted breathing at the hospital. He’d tried unplugging himself a few times, but the snaking cords had been like girders in his tiny and useless hands—rigid and utterly static. Even the bedsheets refused to yield to his touch; he couldn’t so much as leave an indentation on the weave. Every substance and surface was hard as diamond, immovable as a mountain. He had overstayed his welcome in this world, and the world let him know it in no uncertain terms.

  It was easy to see why Hope had chosen her own brother as the face of her monster. He was the ugliest, most frightening thing in her life.

  Most of the time Walter watched from afar as his sister went about her life, while he kept an eye out for the doctor. Walter was no longer his sister’s monster, and the longer he delayed the inevitable moving-on, the weaker he became. Eventually the doctor would be able to just walk into Hope’s life and take her, and there wouldn’t be anything Walter could do to stop him.

  Entrusting her well-being to Suni had been the second-worst decision he had ever made, after taking Henry’s hand in the first place. It was all down to the Anxietoscope now.

  Now he stood on his mother’s reading chair, looking down at the face he was meant to have, and daydreamed about what he could have been.

  TWELVE

  THE SCHEME OF THINGS

  HOPE MOVED THROUGH CHATTERING CLOUDS OF HALF-FAMILIAR people, down hallways and across the quadrangle, headed for the library, a long purple scarf thrown around her neck against an unseasonable morning chill.

  The library didn’t open before school, so Hope usually found Suni camped out by its doors working on his art portfolio. He spent most of his lunch breaks and free periods inside doing the same thing.

  She rounded the corner to the library—litter blowing past her feet—and checked her Hello Kitty watch. Ten minutes until class and already she wanted to go home.

  More litter skated around her ankles. White, clean paper, unrumpled. One sheet contained a shaded pencil sketch of a clockwork cube, an ornate prison for the twisted body it contained. She’d seen it before. It was Suni’s. From around the corner she heard scattered laughter, and a voice saying:

  “Lucky I didn’t hit him any harder. Go straight over the balcony.”

  Hope grabbed a locker rack to brake herself as she rounded the corner—and found Suni with the small of his back against the balcony railing, arched out over a two-story drop to the courtyard, knuckles white on the rail, Kristian’s fist locked around his neck.

  Bright morning sunlight lit the place vivid saffron.

  “Let him go!” Hope’s voice cracked under pressure, snapped on go, became a shriek. The five or six people gathered around Kristian and Suni chuckled. A couple turned and walked away. Despite the fact that his head was held immobile, Suni’s eyes flicked to Hope. Though trapped and helpless, she realized, Suni wanted help even less than he wanted out. He could take the beating, he could take the shame, provided he could take it alone. There was no dignity in pity.

  Kristian looked over and with a last vindictive shove let Suni go. Suni’s eyes widened as he struggled to right himself, before doubling forward and flailing into the hallway. As Kristian turned to leave he reached into his shirt pocket and handed Suni’s glasses back.

  “There y’go, champ.” He turned his back on Suni and strolled over to where Hope stood shaking by the locker rack. “What’s the matter?”

  Her teeth were grinding, body vibrating from the inside in an uncomfortable chemical kind of way that made her wonder if her legs would collapse. “You prick.”

  Someone muttered “Whoa…” She noticed a couple of onlookers glance at each other.

  “Why? You want him back?” Kristian asked.

  “Apologize. Now.”

  Kristian seemed distracted by some point above Hope’s head, like he couldn’t look her in the eye after hearing that. He laughed once, like a cough, and walked away.

  And that was that. The little cloud of people dispersed—some glancing furtively back at her—and Suni bent to gather his scattered art. Students idled past
, giving her a wide berth but otherwise sensing nothing wrong with the scheme of things. Hope picked up the drawing of the clockwork cube from where it lay now, facedown on the hallway floor. She blew dust from it. It was a pretty thing.

  “It’s jjjj-juh-juh-just a sketch,” Suni said, taking it back, brushing it off with the experienced moves of a mother wiping grime from a child’s face. He placed it back among its siblings, inside his black folio. He feigned interest in something down the hall, unable to look Hope in the face. “Nnn-nice choice,” he mumbled.

  Hope pretended not to have heard. She swept her pink hair back with both hands, idly tugging her eyebrow ring, no idea what to say. She wanted to hug him, but knew that would only make it worse.

  Kristian and Suni had been friends, a long time ago. She didn’t understand why it had to be like this between them now. When she’d asked what caused the animosity Suni’s only reply had been, “It started over something small and got bigger. Doubt he even remembers what it was.”

  “So what happened here?” she asked.

  Suni shook his head, ordered himself and his satchel. His long black hair was a loose shamble half caught in the wreckage of a ponytail. He reached behind his head and shook loose the band that held it. “Nothing.” He pulled his hair back properly once more, tied it. With the hair out of the way Hope noticed one side of his face was beginning to redden where Kristian’s fist had landed. Over the railing and two floors down, a mass of students went about the usual—locking bikes, talking to friends, savoring the last clean moments of morning before the bell split the air and four walls spelled the rest of the day. “I can’t help it,” he said, meeting her eyes. Something unspoken and familiar lingered there. “You know how it ggg-guh-goes.”

  She did. It was perverse. Ever since they’d split up she and Suni had slowly become a support group for one’s separation from the other. It didn’t make any kind of sense, and only compounded Hope’s suspicion that she was doing something very, very wrong in the whole Kristian–Suni thing. “Yeah…,” she managed. “But I get over it.”

  He didn’t look away when he said, “And wuh-what happens when you get over things so often you nnn-never feel anything again?”

  Hope bit down on her well-worn mental bullet and thought of tigers. “Strong feelings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

  Hope made no mention of what she had uncovered beneath two feet of dirt the previous evening. It was a mystery, the most amazing thing she had ever found, something incredible to be fathomed and understood, and she wanted to be the one to do it. It was a giggly kid-on-Christmas-morning type of reaction, but it wouldn’t kill Suni to wait a day for something he didn’t even know existed. She’d check the whole thing out for herself, then blow his mind.

  She jogged home, got through the front door, and—like clockwork—her mother drawled, “Walter’ll need changing.” In the living room the TV was tuned to a fat-faced Chinese man chopping celery and smiling so hard you could hardly see his eyes. The stereo was on—a battered five-year-old thing with a faulty tape deck—tuned just loud enough to make understanding the chef impossible. Hope’s mother sat cross-legged on the floor with a big blue plastic tumbler in her hand, mostly full of tomato juice and ice and the usual. She didn’t look away from the set. She was singing again, in a cracked voice.

  You talk straightforward and squarely I see

  With a beer in your hand

  You were thrown down to me

  That blistering vowel you’d do anything to keep

  And knowing it’s you

  Silently screaming…

  Hope didn’t answer, never did, just went down the hall, ditched her bag, and got Walter over with.

  Her mother had trapped herself. After all this time she must know Walter was never going to wake up, but at the same time she couldn’t stop herself from looking after him. If she did, somehow, allow Walter’s body to cease breathing it would mean all the years, all the sacrifice, had been for nothing. She would have wasted her life. No house, no job, no money, no husband, no mind even. She was doomed to look after him until she, or Walter, died.

  Hope felt sorry for her, somewhere inside, but it was buried under a lifetime. Even she couldn’t dig that far down. She’d get out of here, once she graduated, and she’d make a life for herself. Then maybe she’d send some money home, make things easier around here. But until then it was business as usual and she could live with that. After all, it was all she had ever done.

  Hope did not have quite so much to do with Walter while her dad had been around. But once he was gone and Hope’s mother fell to pieces, almost everything to do with Walter landed on Hope’s shoulders—especially given that her dad’s absence was entirely Hope’s fault, in her mother’s opinion. Hope didn’t bother arguing the point. She didn’t have the energy for it anymore and it always devolved into mindless screaming and the dredging-up of the usual stuff, usually at the expense of things that made lots of noise when they broke. It became a subject broached only when her mother outlasted her juice, and stayed awake long enough and drunk enough to bring it all out again. Which was hardly ever nowadays. The booze and her medication usually combined to knock her out by seven, which was fine by Hope. It made life a hell of a lot easier.

  With Walter out of the way she showered quickly and rushed back to her room. The box was still where she’d left it on the top shelf of her closet. Still wrapped in her gray faux-fur jacket like some hairy, hibernating thing. She placed it on the bed and unwrapped it, wet pink hair hanging like vines in front of her eyes.

  Silver and shining, energy thrummed off the box with the effort of its waiting. Energy that hummed through her fingers and up her arm to vibrate the small parts of her ear and again form that word, a soft susurration in her head.

  Anxietoscope

  She lifted her fingers, the word still tickling the inside of her ear.

  This box just didn’t slot into the world that people, supposedly older and wiser than herself, insisted she was living in; it could not possibly exist in that world; and yet here it was.

  It made her wonder what else all those people might have been wrong about.

  Hope closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath through her nostrils. Time to find out.

  She spread her fingers and pressed them onto the cold metal surface. The humming voice began.

  Anxietoscope. To be used in the direct examination of a subject’s fears. Investigative procedures supplement the fright evaluation of a subject, which is made from subject history and behavioral observation. The Anxietoscope allows core fears to be localized with exactitude and removed for closer study in order that a terror or ecstatic manifestation may be customized for maximum effect. This is extremely useful when a given subject appears resistant to the incredible through lack of belief. The procedure is painless, and when such an examination is being undertaken it is essential that a Maker plan his approach in order to coincide with a period of subject unconsciousness. It must be realized that some investigations, particularly those involving the temporary extraction of core fears, carry an intrinsic risk that must be balanced against the value of the information that can be obtained from them. For this reason…

  Distantly, beneath the humming voice, Hope became aware of a pounding at the door. She couldn’t be sure how long it had been going on. An itch and tickle wormed inside her ear. She stuck a finger in each and wiggled them vigorously.

  The pounding continued. “Hope! Are you in there?”

  Her mother.

  “Why is this door locked?”

  “Just a second.”

  Hope wrapped the box in her coat and replaced it in the closet before opening the door. Her mother stood there in her blue jeans, eyes glassy, looking twice her age.

  “Why was the door locked?”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “What do you want, Mum?”

  Her mother’s eyes narrowed a little. “Dinner needs coo
king,” she said, stealing a glance over her daughter’s shoulder, suspicious of some new cover-up. “Your friend’s on the phone. Use the fish cakes.”

  THIRTEEN

  CANDLELIGHT

  HOPE’S MOTHER WASN’T SOLD ON SUNI. WHEN HOPE and Suni had first started seeing each other a little over a year ago, he had come home with Hope one afternoon and met her mother, uncomfortable the whole time. Hope had tried to dissuade him from ever coming over. All she could think about while he was there was how embarrassed she had been by the ripped covering on the sofa. Toward the end of the visit, when her mother pointed out it was getting dark, Suni had asked if he could see Walter. Hope’s mother had lost most of her friends when they’d moved, and anyone who knew Walter as a little boy didn’t come around anymore. Having a total stranger ask to see him was so unusual Hope had expected her mother to erupt. But after an unreadable moment, she’d acquiesced, and Hope had taken Suni upstairs.

  The body was where it always was. The nurse at the time, a young guy on an internship trying to earn extra cash, was pointlessly manipulating Walter’s legs. Hope didn’t know why her mother bothered with maintaining the physio at all. Walter had twisted out of shape from lack of use years ago, muscle contractures contorting his arms into a spastic, huddled tangle about his chest. She could tell the nurse knew it was pointless, doing it to get it done, get paid, and get out. Hope had wondered what he thought of it all: this girl and her crazy mother, this breathing corpse and the Japanese kid they’d just led into the room. Felt sorry for the kid, probably. It hardly surprised Hope that most of the nurses never lasted two months, and after a while her mother had to stop hiring them at all.

  The worst part of Walter was below the waist. More bone than skin, really. Legs that were practically vestigial, having been unused since he was four. And he’d been twenty then. They looked like they belonged on someone half his age—half his age and dead. It made her think of Auschwitz. The body was ghost-pale with hair to match; dark blue veins faint on his forehead and hands. He smelled like an old man, a dank body odor mixed with soap. The quiet, lingering scent of rubber and shit built up over the years.