by Rachel Heng
Kaito stood up from the couch. “That’s not fair, Uju. You know I didn’t mean it that way.”
“What way did you mean it, then?”
Kaito was silent. He laced his fingers at his stomach, stared at his hands.
Uju exploded. “Why do you have to be like this? Have to thwart everything I try to do? You know it’s not just the windows. First the food, you’re never happy with the food—”
“How many times a week can you eat that damn sludge? It’s sludge! Tasteless, soulless sludge, not fit for human consumption—”
“Oh, so you’d rather your daughter eat animal meat, even after the latest dietary Directive—”
“Directives. Always with the Directives. I just want my daughter to have a normal life. Is that so hard? To live like a normal human being.”
“They’re Nutripaks, they’re optimized for normal human beings, I don’t see why you have to be so difficult about everything—”
“You never used to mind. You never used to be like this.”
“Oh? Well, you never used to be like this, either. I mean, look at you. Look at you! Lying around all day, filling your body with crap, never exercising, never sleeping. What are you trying to prove? Who are you trying to spite?”
Kaito paused. And then he spoke again, in a terrible, calm voice.
“It won’t bring him back.”
Uju was silent, her lips a thin, pale line.
Kaito went on, louder now. “It won’t make any difference. All this stuff. Sealing the windows, Nutripak diets, making Lea go to fucking AquaYoga every single day. You can make her the best damn lifer in the world and it won’t bring Samuel back, is all I’m saying.”
The heat in the room seemed to expand and fill up every last bit of space until none of them could breathe anymore. Lea could hear her father heaving for breath. There was a ringing in her ears, a lightness in her head. She added and subtracted in her head, differentiated and integrated, but still all she could think about was the number three, one less than four. She saw, now, that even three was not guaranteed, that one point of the triangle could easily pull apart, detach from the other two, escape forever.
EIGHT
Sometimes the silence pressed in on Anja so loudly that she was sure she’d gone deaf. So she started playing the violin again—scales, exercises, scraps of concertos from long ago. Anything to ward off the wall of silence, broken only by the mechanical clicks and whirrs of her mother’s body. Anja played for herself now.
She dug out an old, chipped metronome, sticky with dust. It still worked. She used it to keep time while playing, to lose track of it when falling asleep at night.
One morning she woke up to an icy draft flitting across her face. The streets were dusted with snow, glistening cleanly in the morning sun. That morning she played without the metronome for the first time. The notes came in a tumbling rush, like lazy acrobats whirling out of control. They seemed to have a mind of their own—yanking her fingers first this way, then the other way. They slipped and slurred and stumbled. Then Anja found herself playing a piece she thought she would never play again.
* * *
She remembered how at the audition, a tag on her dress, bought the day before on a mother-daughter shopping trip, was scratching the base of her neck. She remembered the way the serious, turtle-necked man’s voice had echoed as he asked whether she was ready to begin. Row upon row of plush maroon velvet sitting empty. No mother. The lump in her throat as she nodded yes. Shoes squeaking on the polished wooden stage as she shifted from one foot to the other, then lifted her bow. The familiar ache in her left shoulder, a conscious untightening.
It was the most beautifully she had ever played. Anja kept her eyes closed, at first to imagine her mother sitting there, but then forgetting to imagine, forgetting about her altogether. It was only when the final, trembling note had been wrung out of her violin that she realized she was holding her breath.
When Anja burst through the apartment door, she was so full of the news that she’d forgotten to find it odd her mother had never showed up. It was only then, just as she was about to tell her she’d made it—Juilliard, finally following in her mother’s footsteps—that she remembered.
Anja found her on the floor, dressed and made up, perfect except for a missing earring. That was the day her mother took to bed, her muscles no longer firm enough to hold herself up. She never left her bed again, so when the letters from Juilliard came, they were easy enough for Anja to hide.
* * *
It all came back now. As the music slipped out of her into the cold room, Anja found herself shaking, until she had to stop. An unfinished note hung high in the still air. It was then that the phone rang, as if it had been waiting for her to finish. Anja threw a blanket around her shoulders and stilled her hands. She picked up.
“Hello, Anja.”
Her mother’s heart clicked and whirred under the floral comforter.
“She’ll be there in ten minutes,” the voice on the phone said.
Her mother’s cheekbones, so white under the transparent flesh.
“Are you there? Anja?”
Anja’s mouth was dry. “I’m here.”
“Do you still want to do it? You know you don’t have to.”
Her mother’s windpipe, reinforced with a carbon fiber stronger than steel.
“Yes,” Anja said. “It was my idea. I want to do it.”
After she hung up, she put down her violin and picked up the camera.
* * *
Anja had told them she would do the second video herself. But when the knock came, when it was an actual person standing in her doorway, a woman with wheat-colored hair not unlike Anja’s own, she felt something inside her shift. Anja took in the woman’s round, soft face, the dewy cheeks as full and gently furred as peaches. She scrutinized the thin rims around her pupils, saw that they were raincloud gray. She observed the faint line running across the right half of the woman’s forehead, stopping abruptly in the middle, and wondered at all the things that must have led the woman to raise a single eyebrow. She wondered at all the things that must have led the woman to be standing there in front of her.
“Hello,” the woman said. “You must be Anja. They said you’d be expecting me.” When she broke the silence, the world seemed to get loud again, and suddenly all Anja could hear was the sound of her mother’s heart. Thud, thud, thud.
“I am,” Anja said, stepping out of the apartment, camera in hand. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Up on the roof, the woman marveled at the view as Anja set up the camera. The tripod legs were heavy and stiff, and she struggled to get the camera balanced just right. She focused on the task at hand, ignoring the woman’s attempts at small talk. Eventually the woman fell silent. It was only when Anja told her where to stand, so that she would appear in the middle of the camera frame, that she realized that she didn’t know her name.
As the woman moved herself into the right spot, she tucked her hair behind her ears with two hooked fingers. The girlishness of the gesture went straight to Anja’s heart. She forced herself to think of her mother, lying in her bed twenty floors beneath them, SmartBloodTM pumping determinedly through her veins.
But this was different, a voice inside her cried. Look at this woman! Look at her shiny hair that won’t stay behind her ears, look at her straight back, her strong legs, her bright, darting eyes. This woman was alive. This woman was nothing like Anja’s mother. This woman did not need to die.
“Ready?” the woman said. Her voice was different now. When she looked at Anja, her eyes were different too.
Anja nodded, and turned the camera on.
The woman started speaking. People might not know that the Club, she said, hadn’t always been an activist group. A long time ago, they were simply a collection of disillusioned lifers who’d decided they had had enough with the maintenance sessions, the HDL competitions, the self-denial. They organized forbidden performances of live music, trad m
eals of the worst, most artery-clogging kind, irresponsible orgies. They called themselves the Suicide Club mockingly, in jest.
But the Ministry got worried. In spite of all the new measures, population numbers were still falling. They couldn’t have people suddenly decide they no longer wanted to live forever. It would be disastrous, the end of American global dominance as they knew it. And that was when the smear campaign started.
“What to do with us, though?” the woman said, her hair whipping in the wind, her slight figure framed by the backdrop of the city, eighty floors down. “What to do with those they couldn’t punish with the usual penalty—by cutting our numbers, taking away our extension treatments?”
She picked up a bottle from the floor and began to drink. When she spoke again, the bottle was empty.
“Acceleration. Fast-tracked to the Third Wave, guinea pigs for immortality. Special replacements, even more indestructible than the last. Did you know the latest SmartBloodTM clots in less than a millisecond? DiamondSkinTM that will withstand not just the force of a car, as yours will, but a fall of eighty floors.”
The woman was backlit by the blazing sun, her eyes dark pools in the shadow of her face. She gestured behind her.
“I could jump off right now and they could put me back together again.”
The woman lit a match.
“They leave us no choice.” She brought the match to her face and breathed in, and the sun was no longer the only thing on fire.
NINE
The first session was held on a Sunday morning, in one of the Outer Boroughs. It was a part of the city Lea had never been to before. There the buildings were squat and bricked, caked with dust. Their windows were great hollow yawns, large and opaque.
As she passed the ancient brownstones, she glimpsed rooms cluttered with the shapes of furniture and their owners. She’d heard of these dwellings but never actually seen one; she knew how rooms were divided and subdivided, how people lived separated by curtains in lightless spaces. This was where most of the sub-100s lived. Where Samuel would have lived, if he had been born to different parents. Lea pushed this thought out of her mind.
The streets were eerily quiet, and an invisible cold crept under her coat into the spaces between her elbows, across the small of her back. She seemed to be walking forever, past brownstone after identical brownstone, until finally, there it was. Nothing to distinguish it from its shabby neighbors, it stood just as mute and mud-colored. Why would any clinic be here? Lea rang the bell, wincing at the loud buzz. A few seconds later, a voice of indeterminate gender came crackling through the speakerphone.
“Up the stairs, second room on the left.”
The door clicked open. Lea checked the address again, one last time, before stepping into the building. But the address was correct. This was it.
Inside, the carpet was mustard and balding. Lea climbed the creaking stairs on tiptoe, trying to touch as little as she possibly could. When she reached the top, a narrow hallway extended out in front of her. She stopped in front of the second door on the left. Forget the building, she told herself, straightening her coat and smoothing down her hair. This was it, her chance to set the record straight.
The Observers had been showing up at her office almost every day. It had gotten so bad that Jiang had asked her to work from home, which of course, she had refused to do. Flexihours and Remotework were the fastest ways to not get promoted. Observers or no Observers, she was going to stay in her office.
They didn’t really do anything, for the most part, but watch her. That was part of the feedback she wanted to give today, to the Tender who would no doubt be interested in her experience. Better to start with a tone of mild confusion—What, exactly, are they there to observe, again?—than to come across as a bitter, negative sort of person. It was important to show how ridiculous this all was, that a valuable member of society such as herself would even be here, undergoing unnecessary oxidative degeneration, in a place like this.
She looked around at the hallway. The dim lights overhead gave the walls a sickly yellow hue, the color of overripe squash. Or perhaps they actually were the color of squash. It was impossible to tell. Not a hint of natural light, for there were no windows. Lea took one deep, restorative breath, then knocked firmly on the door.
The man who opened it was as squat and squalid as the building itself. His face was a rounded square with sagging corners, two deep lines running from the base of his nose to the corners of his lips. The pores under his eyes were sunken and glistening, and he smelled faintly of processed food.
“Lea Kirino,” he said. “Yes. You’re late.”
Lea’s lip curled involuntarily, then uncurled just as quickly as she forced a smile and nodded to the man.
Lea looked around the room for the Tender who would be leading the group. Despite a small window set in the far wall, the room was no better lit than the hallway outside. Again there was that orange light overhead, which drained the faces sitting in a circle of any color they might otherwise have had. She counted six of them in total, slumped in plastic chairs.
The waiting room, presumably. More people here for treatment. They looked nothing alike, but they all wore the same expression, a strange mix of hope and anxiety. A quick glance around made her even more uncomfortable. Lea didn’t belong here. The starched poly-cotton blouse that woman was wearing, the red crack in one man’s lower lip, chewed to a pulp, the compulsive tapping of badly shod feet.
But then she brightened. That would make her case to the Tender clearer still. She wouldn’t even have to say a word.
Lea walked over to one of the two remaining chairs and sat down. She turned to the woman next to her, trying to ignore the open scrutiny from everyone else.
“Hello,” she said, extending a hand. “I’m Lea.”
The other woman looked up. “Anja.”
While the rest of the group tapped and twitched, the stray ends of their bodies betraying restlessness, Anja was completely still. She sat with impeccable posture, elbows tucked by her sides, shoulders relaxed, hips even.
“So how long do we have to wait?” Lea chirped, straightening her back, too. “And where’s the consultation room?”
Probably one of the doors out in the hallway, she imagined. It would be a room like Jessie’s, bright and clean, pamphlets neatly stacked.
Anja tilted her head. But before she could say anything, a large, oozing woman sitting across from her let out a snort.
“Consultation room,” she said. “Hah! What next, a paleo buffet?”
“That’s enough, Sofia.”
The man who’d greeted Lea at the door walked over to the circle. Hitching his faded pinstriped pants up, he sat down at the last empty chair.
“Welcome to the WeCovery Group, Lea. Now, since this is your first session, I’ll start with a quick intro. My name is George, and I used to be just like you,” he said with a practiced flourish.
Lea blinked, trying not to let the polite smile slip off her face. They could be observing her even now; it was important to appear calm, stable. So she nodded encouragingly at George, even though she sincerely doubted he had ever been anything like her.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, pushing his smudged glasses up his nose bridge. He leaned forward, looking at Lea over the tops of the frames.
“You’re thinking, This is a big mistake. Someone got it wrong. Misunderstanding. Am I right?” He exuded earnestness. Surely taking things so seriously had to be incredibly cortisol-generating.
“I just want you to remember—you’re in safe hands. We’re one of the most successful groups in the tristate area, something I have these troupers to thank for. Seven years and running.”
He waved one meaty hand at a peeling wall, bare except for a row of dusty wooden plaques, their scratched gold faces glinting dully.
Everyone was nodding, except for Anja. Why were they all humoring him? Lea glanced at her watch. Where was the Tender?
“All right,” he
said, slapping his hands together. Out of the corner of her eye, Lea saw Anja wince.
“Let’s get started. Little intro for our newest member, please. Sofia, you’re up.”
The woman who’d spoken earlier made an enginelike noise in her throat.
“Hi, I’m Sofia,” she said. “This week I tried to drown myself in the community pool. Not seriously, just a little, and definitely less than usual. There was an AquaYoga class like, three meters away. I knew they’d see me if anything really happened.”
“Good, Sofia, good. Controlled use. Leveraging others. Keep up the good work.” George slapped his thighs again. “Ambrose?”
The slumped figure next to Sofia unfurled. He looked like a shadow that had been separated from its owner.
“I, uh, I. Hi, hello,” he said, inclining one cheek toward Lea. “I tried to do them, George. I, uh, swear. They don’t work. Maybe they don’t work. On everyone? Maybe they don’t work for—”
“Ambrose. Hey, man. Hey.” George snapped his fingers.
Ambrose lifted his gaze. His eyes were two dark sparks.
George let out a long sigh. He leaned forward with his hands on his thighs, elbows splayed out. His fingernails, Lea noticed, were strangely well manicured. The gleaming squares unsettled her.
“Ambrose. You have to try, man. You know the program only works for those who try, right? You don’t want it all to go to waste, do you? Do you?”
Ambrose seemed to retreat even further into his chair at this. He shook his head.
“Good. Okay. I’m going to give you one more week. Do the exercises, lots of cruciferous vegetables, and no, I repeat, no carbs. Okay?”
As George turned to the next person, Lea tried to rationalize what was going on. Perhaps this was some kind of test. She surveyed the room for places where cameras could have been hidden. Or perhaps this was part of George’s treatment. Perhaps it helped him, the poor man, to feel as if he had some sense of purpose.
It was only when she noticed George taking notes in a tablet as he went around the group, his face puffy with self-importance, that Lea began to panic.