She stopped sleeping. She locked herself in the laboratory, and at night I could hear the whirring of machinery: computer fans and bone saws. She did not speak to me, but her eyes were bloodshot, and even in repose her fingers scratched and picked at one another because she could not bear to sit still.
She built a robot with my face and tasked it with the domestic chores. She said nothing to me, but one day I came home to find my bed made and the dishes washed, and a girl with my old brown eyes staring at me across the kitchen table.
I pretended not to notice.
For Caesar she worked harder than ever. She worked on weapons, on bombs and spores. She no longer admired him. He too had failed her. He was weak in private—easily ruffled. She was too clever for him. She explained her formulas to him and he did not understand them; he only nodded—like an owl, she said—and sent her on her way.
Rome was not enough for her. She had come to hate it. She hated the obsequious waiters and the motorcycle oil that pooled up between the cobblestones. She hated the marketplace sounds: the squawking of chickens, the hawking of squid.
“They don’t realize how much better I could do,” she said. She had stopped speaking to me; instead, she had taken up the habit of addressing the robot to whom she had given my eyes, inevitably in my overhearing. “You understand that, don’t you? I could give them something worthwhile.”
Nothing was worthwhile. She stood at our window and pressed her palms against the glass; at times she muttered curses at the passersby below. They did not understand her; nobody could understand her. Did they not know that the medicine in their drinking water, the fortifications in their joints, the serenity of their sleep—all this they owed to her?
I watched her from the doorway, tapping my feet upon the threshold, and relished her unhappiness. I was one of them, after all, with my still-beating heart, my left arm still fashioned of flesh. Like them I had the power to disappoint her.
One night she came into my room, woke me two hours before dawn to tell me she had discovered it—that through which all things would be purified. She had molted, melted, melded; she had alchemized and vaporized and at last she held in a ball no bigger than a thimble the secret to the beginning and the end, the proof of her greatness, the seal of her wisdom, the stamp of herself.
She would not let me sleep. She flung open the curtains; she stomped dust from the carpets; she dragged me into her laboratory and there, humming with joy, she revealed to me a small and spinning black sphere, the size of my rosary beads.
“You see?” she said. “I’ve done it. I’ll show them, now.”
“What does it do?”
Her laughter echoed from machine to machine. “Everything.” It realigned asymmetries; it gathered viscera into geometrical shapes. It took cells and rearranged them in her image. It could cure congenital deformities, she said, from the inside out.
“Is it safe?”
“What do you take me for?”
She told Caesar she wanted to test it. She asked for five hundred men. The response came swiftly, on printed letterhead. It was too dangerous, he said. Perhaps she would be content with rats?
All night long she raged, throwing beakers and jars against the wall. The maid with my face scuttled behind her, sweeping up the mess.
“You see how they’ve treated me?” she said. “They’ve made me a laughingstock—and it’s because of you! You think they don’t see you walking out alone, by yourself? You think they don’t wonder what kind of influence I am, letting you go out among the plebs? You think it’s not your fault?”
I had no answer for her.
She grabbed me by the shoulders, fixed her gaze on mine.
My eyes were made of electric sparks, and they gave nothing away.
The next morning my mother took me on our customary walk to the Capitoline, to see where her name had been inscribed upon the wall.
“It’s a wonder they’ve got the balls to leave it up,” she said, “if this is how they’re going to treat us.” She took my hand. “Come. We’ll go to the Forum. We’ll have a picnic.”
We sat once more on the pillars; she spread cheese on bread—a rarity, now; she almost never ate food. Together we turned our faces to the sun. She pressed my cheek against her breast and ran her fingers through my hair. The crimson light of the dusk had settled upon her cheeks, and in that light she was beautiful. I leaned against her; her body was warm on mine, and I do not know if I have ever loved her more.
“It’s only that I wanted to give you the world,” she whispered to me. “It’s only that I love you, and that nobody else really can.”
She began to hum—quietly at first, and then loudly enough for passersby to stop and stare—hum until every panel and every wire and every metal bolt within me began to vibrate with the beauty of it.
Fa la ninna, fa la nanna
nella braccia della mamma
Fa la ninna bel bambin
nella braccia della mamma
It was only when she stopped singing that I realized what she was about to do.
There was a flash, and then there was no more world.
III.
We can never go back. From time to time I don the necessary helmet and walk alone along the ramparts of the old city.
The men at the border press their foreheads to the floor. They retreat into their elevators and then I walk alone past the Colosseum, past the legless statues, the bones of stray cats. Now all seven hills are dust and shadows, and so alone I go to Pompey’s Theatre, to the stultifying emptiness of the Hippodrome where even the eagles are dead, and alone I venture into hollowed-out tramcars; the upturned Pantheon; the parks on the Janiculum, where the vines reach all the way to the river, which has not flowed for twenty years.
I walk until nightfall, and there is no sound but my footsteps, which is like no natural sound and which sickens me still. I go alone to what’s left of the basilica, to pray, and when my knees fall to the earth the clang echoes in my ears and it is the only sound left in the world.
Sometimes, briefly, I forget, and I think that I am home.
There is a caesura between all that was and all that is, between the city I loved and the city that I know now, between my mother’s city and my own.
My left arm is gone now; it was the only part of me that could not withstand the blast. I screamed from the gurney for them to let it be: it was withered and misshapen; it was all that was left of her. But in those days nobody knew what was happening, or how long the effects would last, and there was a fear the spores might spread. They cut off the arm and burned it; two hours later they placed Rome under quarantine.
Caesar died instantly. In the wild and wrecked months that followed, in those frantic and fevered weeks of dead burying and barricading ourselves indoors, we went on without him. Those of us who survived were those with false arms, false legs, false eyes, bearing, all of us, my mother’s seal.
If the others suspected what she had done, we never spoke of it. To condemn her was to condemn her works; we could not afford to lose her genius now.
I was her keeper, in the end. I was the one with keys to her laboratory; I was the one who knew what she had built, who knew how it all worked. I was the one who taught the others how to secure buildings, far from the seven hills, how to keep the spores out.
I was the one without flesh, and so I was the one who could walk in the old city, unharmed. They sent me to count the dead, to take names and photographs, to remember them. I was the one who reported to them that my mother had died with the rest. I lied.
Her face is withered; her skin is green. She rasps when she speaks, and it is only because I know her so well that I am able to understand her. She lives on the Capitoline, in an empty tramcar, waited upon by the sightless servant who bears my face. She inhales poisoned air and engineers her own temporary remedies. I bring her pills, in as many different flavors as I can invent, and she insists that I am lying to her.
“That’s not how it happened at al
l,” she says. “There was nothing wrong with it. I checked it—twenty times. I made no mistakes.” Her story changes. Sometimes she insists that it was Caesar’s conspiracy, that he altered the formula behind her back, that he was jealous of her power. Sometimes she insists that I must have tampered with it in the laboratory, that I must have turned a dial too far in the wrong direction and forgotten about it, and so this is why the world has been destroyed. Sometimes, the worst times, she tells me that we are better off now, that this is only a temporary setback, a necessary ellipsis between the world in which I was born and the world she knows that I deserve.
She asks me about the laboratory, about my research. Sometimes, when I reach an impasse in my experiments, she is the one who tells me what to do next. She slips me formulas, chiseled into slate, and reminds me to polish her inscription at the gates. I carry the weight of her on my back when I go.
“You’re alive,” she says. “And that’s what matters. You’re alive, and they know us now. By our works, they will know us, and you will lead them into tomorrow.”
They made me Caesar. I never told her. It was the only way I could think of to punish her.
Last night I told the Senate that I have found the cure, that I have made perfect my mother’s research. I told them I have engineered a device that will destroy all the spores and purify the air once more.
There is only one problem, I said. We will have to destroy it first. We can’t risk a cell, a speck, a single gangrenous dot remaining. We will atomize the ruins, the colonnades, the vines; we will level the seven hills, and then—when everything is ash—we can rebuild.
They murmured “hail,” and licensed me to do as I see fit.
Tomorrow, I will put my seal on the decree, and then men in gas masks will tear down the ramparts of my childhood places; tomorrow I will erase my mother’s footprints and the sound of her voice from the face of the earth, and in the smoke of the earth I will bury her. I will walk out into the world she has left for me, and then with two sticks and a match I will build her up again.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Tara Isabella Burton
Art copyright © 2016 by Ashley Mackenzie
The Destroyer Page 2