The Gatekeeper

by Nuraliah Norasid

  They exited through the front door, opened hurriedly for them by the maid. The same maid ran out to open the main gates as Eedric opened the car door and folded himself inside. Once Adrianne was buckled in, he drove out of the lavish neighbourhood, taking speed bumps carelessly and honking at every man, woman and roc in his path. A few kilometres out, the car ran alongside a ground level CTT track where trains shot past them as blurred streaks of red and green, before they became tail-ends that diminished to nothing in the distance, leaving a vacuum in their wakes.

  Motherlands

  A glance at his watch face: 3.25 in the afternoon, on a Sunday and the final day of the Mist Sales. Of course, he thought with dripping sarcasm, the Covalence Mall was crowded. Most shops were short-staffed, which only meant a lot more freedom to help oneself to the items on the shelves and try them on. Adrianne was keen on bags (like she didn’t already have enough), and when she saw one she liked, she would hang it on a shoulder and, before looking in a mirror, ask him, “Is this nice?”

  Admittedly, Eedric had never understood women’s bags. They lacked functionality: too small, bloody useless tiny compartments, and the paradox of black hole bottoms. But he went, “Nice. It suits you.” A slogan good for clothes, shoes, bags, watches, jewellery, cosmetics, and even pets if they were meant to be ornamental. If words could manifest in thin air above him in a cartoon speech bubble, he would make a “Nice. It suits you” rubber stamp for it. And he would use it liberally. Chop chop chop.

  Adrianne was over it, eventually. They crossed the plaza on the ground floor and exited into the avenue where the heat was a blow after the frigid cold of the air-conditioning. Shopping malls with their office crown tops towered over congested windpipes of roads. Masses of people trundled along the pavements. Buses carried out their faithful commute, brave in the face of sales-grabbing weekend crowds.

  At 1.8 metres tall, Eedric stood above the crowd, looming over that sea of people like a god. In one hand he held Adrianne’s shopping bags and in the other, her hand, cold and limp.

  Leaning in so that she could hear him, he asked, “Where do you want to go next?”

  He meant of course, “Can we leave yet?” But Adrianne never got such things.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, shrugging.

  Normally, he would have said that he didn’t know either and insisted they go with her decision. The pressing crowd, the shop hopping that had frankly gone on for hours, the feeling that he was never needed for anything truly important: right then, he didn’t know which, but one of the above was agitating him, igniting that dreaded feeling of accelerated heartbeats and cold sweat on his brows.

  “Okay,” he told her, clenching her hand hard.

  He steered her around.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  He tilted his head down towards her, keeping his gaze forward.

  “Where are we going?” she repeated, louder and closer to his ear.

  “I’ll take you home,” he replied, walking faster.

  Adrianne’s resistance was weak and he pulled her on to match his speed.

  “So fast?”

  “It’s getting late.”

  “Late” was relative, but “late” was what it was starting to become right then. And not just because twilight was descending.

  There was not a single building in that stretch that did not have any kind of artificial glow, shine or glimmer in the growing dusk. Lights blinked in drops down the face of one building, a large electronic billboard advertised a facial product for fairer Human skin, and the outer walls of Covalence were a mockery of the bioluminescence found in the deep ocean trenches Eedric once had seen in a documentary on the nature channel. Every few metres along the street stood a mobile ice-cream vendor peddling wares from silver-boxed motorcycles under a large red-and-white umbrella.

  Eedric wondered how soon the day would come when these men from a fading past would be required to rent booths in neat, contained rows along the walkway. Manticura was, after all, big on the clean-up. So big, the Jankett Town shopping district bore not a single building from before the “Two-Half ” of more than forty years ago. There was a monument to that war, a looming stone obelisk carved with names, in the corner where the district turned into Krow City Capital, where all the embassies and government buildings were. No one gave a shit about the monument until Memorial Day, and that was when Manticureans would commemorate the war by taking pictures with it and tagging them with shit captions like, “In honourable memory of our soldiers!”

  The real war existed only in the memories of those who lived it: in Mama, who had her father and a brother taken from her, and waited six years for another to come home; in Father, whose memory of the war was locked on the day he had stood in the mangrove thickets of the Anuri’yun, watching Feleenese soldiers who’d served with him desert the 151 and retreat across the straits to Lower F’herak on the dawn of Manticura’s fall to the invading Esomiri forces forty-two years ago in 5074.

  But survivors did not live to reminisce. They lived, hoping that living would help them forget.

  Where there was no recollection, Eedric mused as he reached the road junction and joined a crowd of others waiting to cross, there was no forgetting. There were only the problems of the day, of myopic weeks and narrow months.

  Not ten paces from the junction on which Eedric stood, a young woman sat on the bottommost step of another mall, in front of the orange shop windows of luxury stores. Perhaps not even a young woman—a teenage girl. She sat with her legs apart, her tight top pulled over a pregnant belly. She had the coveted delicate features of the Feleenese: nose a dry, pink inverted triangle protruding a little above an equally small, tight mouth. Her fingers tapered into elegant claw-tipped ends that dangled a bottle of cola between her knees, and she was covered in fine ginger down.

  There were four others with her: another Feleenese, two Scereans and a shockingly thin Tuyun with scales resembling bark. The Scereans with their full snouts and horns of hard scale were intriguing enough, for pure-blooded Scereans were rare in the fifth millennium, but Eedric found his attention drawn back to the Feleenese girl. She sat a little apart from the group, enshrouded in her own thoughts and impervious to the raucous laughter of the boys. As if sensing him watching her, she turned her eyes to him and met his gaze. There hers remained, hateful and steely. He wondered which one of the boys she belonged to.

  Eedric felt a tug on his hand and moved with the surge of people, each one timed by the blinking green man on the other side.

  Adrianne kept her eyes firmly forward as she hissed at him to “Stop looking!”

  “What?”

  It was only when they were safely across the road that she turned to him and said, “Stop being so obvious.”

  He stared at her. She stared at the group instead. “You know, I believe everyone has a right to live their lives however they choose.” Eedric inclined his head mildly, brows already furrowing. Adrianne didn’t see as she went on, “But sometimes they just need to work harder. I mean, there are so many programmes out there to help but—”

  Eedric’s response was a sharp cut: “They?”

  Adrianne turned to him, as if surprised. She made a discreet head movement, gesturing towards the previous group; towards a young Feleenese couple, the mother pushing a pram slung over with a bag, the father walking beside her, empty-handed; towards an old Scerean man with a canvas bag reaching into the “cans” recycling bin; rolling her eyes along the planes of them before turning to him. “Yeah, you know…people—”

  People. It was what Adrianne always called them. “People” was what Adrianne, with her pretty face, her pretty friends with the pretty nails they shared between themselves called “people not like them”, but like his Mama.

  Mama passed away in his first year of junior college. On that day he had kept his head down in the doctor’s office, pumping his foot as if he wanted to drill a hole through the floor. He had not wanted to hear but heard enough to
know Mama could not be saved. Human-minora—“Minor Human”: Human in appearance, but with anir-tainted blood. Which anir, no one had a proper record of. Something extinct, Eedric would guess. Something happily obsolete.

  As a Human-minora, Mama was part of the “survivalist” subgroup, a layman’s term for an extremely rare genetic mutation that caused her to take on this horrific form when her survival called for it. As such, her body had responded to no medication, no chemical cocktail. No amount of specialist care could allay her of her ailments. From where he had sat, hearing the doctor pause every so often in search of the right words to say, Eedric couldn’t tell what the real tragedy was: there being no help for Mama’s illness or that she was, for all of her Human appearance, something other instead. Looking up at one point, he had seen the doctor glance his way, cautiously, almost knowingly.

  Right at that moment, Father had said, “Maybe it is for the best.”

  Both men had looked right at Eedric then, masks of sadness worn over what truly went on behind their eyes: mental tabulations of the medical costs for Father, and something unfathomable for the doctor. Eedric had sat, fists criminal and heavy on his thighs, dropping his eyes to fix them on the shiny floor.

  “You should go see her,” the doctor had told him gently. Before we pull the plug, was loud but unspoken. In his mind, he had raised his eyes to meet Father’s, loomed over the older man and said with barely controlled force, “Who made you the Divine? Who put you in charge of how and when a person is supposed to die? Mama lives until her time comes.”

  In reality, Eedric had only shaken his head, taken his bag and left the hospital that day. Without ever seeing Mama before she breathed her last.

  She had already been ill when he was in secondary school. Before her illness had taken hold of and wasted her, he would accompany her to her check-ups in his ugly light blue school uniform, holding her hand in the cab. He remembered sitting at the waiting area outside the doctor’s office, leg shaking, never really focusing on the homework he had brought with him. Mama had always preferred for him to stay at Father’s home to study. When he insisted on coming along, she had conceded but would not allow him to go with her into the consultation room or any of the treatment clinics.

  Mama had always come out smiling and was never forthcoming with the news. He had known things were not okay. But he’d never asked. He had not known how.

  He last saw her right after he’d completed his first month of junior college. That day he paused at the threshold to the private ward. As if acting upon an instinctive need to avert his eyes from the form on the bed, he took in the artwork on the blue walls, the flowers on the window sill, the personal bathroom with alternating patterned tiles and then the water dispenser with its red and blue taps. He breathed in the smell of medication and disinfectant, heard the sound of the machines before he focused on the bedridden figure as he moved further into the room.

  She did not look anything like the Mama he’d known all his life. No heart-shaped face with its impish smile, plump cheeks pushing up dark eyes into crescents. None of that thrill or that gleeful laugh, the sound of which reminded him of desserts thick with coconut milk. Mama used to have wavy hair she kept bobbed and parted so that most of it fell to one side of her face as if she was from an older era—a better era. In the final stage of her illness, she’d lost her luscious tresses, along with all of her indulgent weight.

  Her once black eyes were a new pale grey, her pupils constricted to a single point as if they were rejecting the room’s brightness. Uncharacteristically pale skin was drawn taut over her emaciated frame and each finger tapered long, ending in dark nails that looked like they had recently been sawn off. Earlier, the nurse had informed him, rather apologetically, that Mama had to be kept sedated because she had been damaging hospital equipment and attacking staff. The nurse had stood between him and the door, her hand gripping the handle as she peered up at him. He had not wanted to believe her, because the Mama he knew would rather be hurt to the point of breaking than hurt anybody else. But he had nodded anyway so that she would let him through.

  It was only when Mama turned her head towards him and weakly reached a hand out to him that he approached. Cautiously, he took the seat by her bed. External veins of clear tubes ran along the length of her thin arms which, like her legs, were clamped to the bed frame. He could smell the stench of urine and Eedric eyed Mama’s thin hospital gown, feeling a little angry and at the same time uncomfortable, wondering if the shackles were necessary.

  “I got you biscuits,” he began, doing his best to sound cheerful. To look at her. “I know this ward, so fancy and all, but they won’t have this.” He held up a tub of cashew nut biscuits.

  “Did not want you to see me like this,” she rasped.

  “Ma…” he tried. When he choked up and couldn’t say more, he took her hand, kissed the back of it the way he always did by way of greeting.

  She gripped his hand tight, so tight that blood seeped from the entry point of the needle beneath the clear plaster. “You don’t become until like this. Don’t become like me, adik. Don’t.” She always called him “adik”, even though he had no older siblings.

  “Ma, please, you need to rest to get better. Do you want the bed higher?”

  Mama shook her head and made some effort to calm her breathing.

  “This is what I look like, fighting it, trying to survive…” she said. “Maybe, this is how I will continue to look after I get better. So ugly already.”

  “Don’t say such nonsense, Ma,” he scolded, giving the hand he held a light shake. Cocking his head playfully to one side, he added, “You have a beautiful son, and you know what they say: Beautiful sons come from beautiful mothers, right?”

  Mama laughed, but that laugh quickly gave over to a bout of dry coughing. The coughing worried him and the sight of the clamps wrenched at his guts, but he braved a smile.

  “So sweet ah your mouth…” Mama managed finally. “You must be havoc with the ladies.”

  “No,” he protested.

  “As if I don’t know… How many love letters you get every day? Tell me, how many?”

  “Nobody writes love letters nowadays, Ma. Modern already!”

  He continued to playfully deflect her questions about admirers and girlfriends, feeling almost his Mama’s boy again, until the door opened and the doctor came in flanked by two male nurses.

  Seeing them, Mama whispered, “Go get those girls. Go!”

  The heart rate feedback on the monitor began to accelerate, beeping as if it was a time bomb clicking to its peak. Still, he held on, saying, “Are you feeling okay? They are here to give you your medication.”

  Mama shook her head again, the movement more a tremor at the pivot of a rigid neck. “Every…time…” he heard her say. She sucked in a breath, her body arching off the bed as her veins grew visible beneath pallid skin. She grimaced before her eyes sought his again. “Your father wanted a son. So much. So, I had you…because I thought…that I could keep him. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have put you through this.”

  The doctor was behind him and he could hear one of the nurses telling him that he had to leave. He ignored them. Mama looked as if she was about to burst out of herself, her pupils almost invisible dots in her pale, suddenly stricken eyes.

  “Mama, shh,” he whispered back, trying his best to sound reassuring. “We will talk later. After you get well.”

  “I was wrong. Adik, you are worth…” she struggled to speak and smile at him, “a thousand…of your father. And you remember that. Now, go!”

  The doctor was by then trying to get a needle into her, feeling along her arm. Eedric felt her let his hand go, so forcibly and the fingers so stiff he swore he heard the bones in them crack.

  “Boy, you really must leave,” one of the nurses said, practically hauling him out of the chair.

  Mama stared at him as he backed away towards the door. For a moment he thought he saw her eyes darken and crescent into Mama’s la
ughing eyes. It was as if he were a little kid again, carrying a square, dinosaur-brand backpack almost larger than himself, feeling morose as he waved from behind the school gate before morning assembly. Only back then, Mama had been smiling, so excitedly it was if she were the one attending school instead of him.

  The moment was soon gone when she let out a cry and her body tried to rise off the bed just as the doctor pierced her skin, and Eedric was bullied out of the room by the nurse.

  The bestiality of the cry had shocked him to a standstill just outside the closed door, and the last thing he remembered hearing was the doctor saying angrily, “Damn it! She broke the needle again!”

  Mama had fallen into a coma after that. Father married the woman who became Stepmother even before Mama was brain-dead enough for the grave and Eedric ceased to be anyone’s “adik”.

  Remembering, he knew he had failed Mama, not simply with his silence, but with the way he’d dashed away through the corridors and distanced himself after, wishing deep down inside for Mama, the Human, back, and the creature she’d become, dead.

  Adrianne… Adrianne wouldn’t understand. She was one of those types who got boxed into the SPADs, the Specials A-ducation Program—not a single non-Human within a five-kilometre radius and so special they couldn’t spell “education” right—and who thought virtuous honesty was saying things like she would not go to a particular cinema because it had an “anjing” (read: Cayanese) smell or that she tried not to buy from a stall if she saw a Scerean tending it because she was worried moulted scales would drop into her food.

  Now Adrianne was saying something to him, and yet again on that day, he found himself looking at her. Somewhere along the way, it’d stopped working for him. He didn’t hate her. He’d always thought “hate” was an easily recognisable feeling: that it made your chest heave, no different from impassioned love, which was in turn no different from the exhaustion after a good run. Yet, “hate” could well be silent, drawn guitar-string taut and stretched over a wasted land like a streak of sky. Falling out of affection for someone, while not necessarily caused by hate, had the same silence. That guilty, unhappy silence with which one looked down from the precipice at the end of the wasteland traverse.