The Gatekeeper

by Nuraliah Norasid

  He dropped her hand. His first thought was to move, keep his long-legged pace all the way to his car, then drive off to the quayside for a drink and a live soccer telecast. Threads of obligation and guilt bound him to her and he couldn’t, wouldn’t, just leave. Mama thought he was a better man than his father ever was. Between his violent outbursts and his affair, Father had never told Mama when it no longer worked. Perhaps he had been too cowardly, too frightened to say that it was because she was a mutant, a social outcast, like that pregnant Feleenese girl.

  Father was, after all, a very proper man.

  Eedric looked back at Adrianne.

  So was he.

  She was standing in the same spot, clutching at her arm as if she’d hurt it. Her long hair hung about her downward tilted head. So he knew something he’d said had upset her.

  “Come,” he urged her softly but firmly, taking her hand as he made to move. She resisted. He threw his eyes upwards and clenched his jaw. “You know,” he began, “your purse is in my car. So want to or not, you won’t be able to get home without me.”

  She started to walk, her arms crossed, hands gripping her elbows, refusing to hold the one he offered. From the tight, rigid way she held herself, he knew that she was going to keep her face averted until he apologised. And he knew that by the time he got to the car, he would have.

  Blood History

  The phone buzzed in his hand while he was scrolling through a daily laughs site. Eedric saw that it was Miz, replying to a text he’d sent an hour ago about meeting up. The response, a terse, “Ah k. Same place,” drew the first crack of a smile from Eedric.

  Adrianne stirred in the bed beside him. He set his phone silently on the nightstand, all the while glancing over his shoulder at her. Her bare back was to him. She took nearly all of the covers and claimed further territory with her hair. Eedric felt phantom strands of it in his mouth. It was futility itself to try and remove them.

  He wondered why he’d even ended up fucking her last night.

  Yesterday’s ride home after the impromptu shopping trip had been painstakingly slow. Adrianne had kept asking him if everything was okay, if there was something on his mind, or something he would like to talk to her about, if something was going on with work or family. Basically, the questions she always asked, after every fight, every minor disagreement, every show of “attitude problem” on his part.

  Cars had been lined up nose to tail and a voice over the radio told him what he already knew about the state of traffic on the expressway. A billboard had blinked “Heavy traffic”. In the midst of the congestion, the chasm in the car had been an ocean wide. He’d opened his mouth to say something, but snapped it closed again.

  Finally, he had tapped the sides of the steering wheel and said, “Nope, nothing.”

  Adrianne had stared ahead at the saturation of vehicles, drawing her lips in a tight line before blurting out, “You know, if you don’t communicate, how am I supposed to know what to do?”

  Eedric had chosen to remain silent and tried to concentrate on the radio. He’d felt the urge to tune in to the oldies Mama used to listen to, but his hands never moved from the steering wheel. He’d felt the burn of Adrianne’s eyes, but did not return her gaze. He’d stared at the road instead, working up every coping mechanism he knew to keep his heart rate steady: deep breaths; feeling the seat beneath him, its leathery solidity, the way it cupped his bottom; and saying over and over in his mind, “I’m here. I’m fucking here.” Fool! Though it hadn’t all worked out so great because he still punched down on the horn to blast it.

  None too soon, he’d managed to inch out of the jam and turn into the neighbourhood of semi-detached houses where Adrianne lived. The day had gone dark by then and the narrow road running between the rows of houses was not well-lit. Most houses already had their porch lights on. A roc’s muffled bark could be heard as he’d reached her house. Adrianne had not moved from of his car; Eedric didn’t turn his head.

  “I don’t know you any more,” Adrianne had remarked quietly.

  That had drawn him to face her and before he could stop himself: “You knew me?”

  Her expression had been one of hurt and shock at first before she demanded, “So what is this? Why are you being like this? Why are you suddenly acting as if—” She’d paused, lined eyes growing teary. “Is this what it is?” Another pause, then sharply, voice a decibel higher: “Who is she, Eedric?”

  He’d stared at her, frowning open-mouthed. “What? There is no one!”

  “I know you have been talking to her—my friend from my risk management class.”

  “Which one?”

  From the way Adrianne had looked, he’d known he shouldn’t have said that.

  “See?” he’d pointed out. “I don’t even know who the hell’s in your class. So why the hell would I be talking to them?”

  “Then what is it? Why are you being so distant?”

  That was as much of the argument that he could remember. What had followed was the usual charade of him apologising for “everything”—for “everything” encompassed all that was wrong with his boyfriending. She had resisted as always, holding fort just long enough before opening the doors to end the siege. To let the making up happen. Then, because she had always enjoyed make-up sex, the fucking—the motions of it blind from repetition.

  In bed, Eedric cast another glance at Adrianne before slipping one foot carefully over the side, and then the other. Aided by the bit of light that managed to illuminate the room through the semi translucent pink curtains, he found his various articles of clothing: His jeans were hung precisely over the back of her chair. His socks were paired and folded on the table, right beside the blinged-up laptop computer. He found his shirt on a hanger in her walk-in closet. His shoes were in there too, on the bottom row of her shoe cupboard, heels touching and the toes angled away from each other.

  As he dressed, he thought—not for the first time—how he had never once heard Adrianne’s maid come in to clean the room in the early hours of the day. The maid was a major-blooded South Ceras Scerean; a slight protrusion of nose and jaw, to give the impression of a snout, and she also had a red frill going from the top of her head down the back of her neck, instead of cleft and knobs. Mouth small, eyes huge and always glazed. Her movements were fast and, as he’d come to know, deathly quiet.

  He had his socks on and shoes in hand when he considered Adrianne again, recalling the routine sex with what he could only describe as a profound sense of regret.

  He was weighing the repercussions of simply leaving without letting her know, when Adrianne roused.

  She lifted her body a little off the bed and turned to look at his side of it. Finding it empty, she turned full on her back. The cover slipped a little down her body, exposing her breasts.

  “Sorry, Miz wanted to meet,” Eedric explained before she could ask.

  Then there it was: the slight furrowing of shapely brows. Sometimes he had to remember that she didn’t get along with Miz.

  “I have class later at eleven,” Adrianne replied. “I thought you would give me a ride.”

  Eleven was the time he was hoping he could meet Miz. It was already about ten. He was badly in need of a shower.

  “If you have to meet your friend,” Adrianne continued after a beat, “it’s okay. I can go myself.”

  AdrianneSpeak translation: Warning! It’s not.

  “No,” Eedric assured her quickly. “It’s okay.”—EedricSpeak: It’s not—“I have time to drive you over first.” He didn’t.

  Adrianne settled back into bed, not in the centre of it as if she was going to sleep, but on her side of it. She kept her eyes on him, smiled a little.

  “You wash up and get ready. I’ll see you downstairs,” he told her. And then he left, letting the door slam a little behind him.

  He met the assassin-footed maid partway down the stairs. He nodded a greeting to her, not meeting her eyes, and kept on walking. Adrianne’s mother was doing workouts
to a video in the recreation room. There should have been a law against mothers in yoga pants. The woman was doing the backward dog, ass and hint of camel toe pointed to the hallway. He had to stare.

  She must have sensed him there because she turned. “Is my princess still sleeping upstairs?” she asked.

  “No, getting ready,” he replied and then excused himself saying he had to check on the car.

  Walking out, he reached into his back pocket out of a force of forgotten habit. He didn’t find his cigarettes, and only belatedly remembered that he’d given up smoking a long time ago.

  Miz’s latest romance must not have worked out if the Feleenese was smoking like a fiend again. Miz’s eyes were also shamelessly resting on womanly bums in barely-there shorts passing outside the small café in the Krow City business district. Eedric watched Miz with amusement, in between letting his own eyes wander. He had known Miz a long time, admired him in fact, for simply being the sort of guy who would help you out of any kind of shit, and then ask you for a light by way of payment.

  They’d gone through secondary school and junior college together, and were posted to the same camp in national service, where Miz had had it hard. Heck, somehow Miz managed to have it hard everywhere he went. Miz was always the right man for the job, in places people thought wrong for him: too Feleenese to be treated with equality by the Humans, and too Human in his ways and beliefs for the Feleenese to remember him as a brother.

  Initial posting into national service vocations was based on merit and Miz had been an exceptional student back in junior college: soccer team captain and chess club competitive team member with more than 30 per cent of extra community service hours. Not a student counsellor though. His smoking habit made sure he couldn’t make it into that. Or get nominated for the valedictorian scholarship. He had excellent eyesight and reflexes—Feleenese gifts—and as a boy he had dreamt of one day making it into the armed forces sniper division. Turned out, being able to shoot straighter than Humans in basic training only earned him a badge and a little extra pocket money every month. No one escaped Camp Genealogy: that was what they had both concluded when they were prowling together in the haunted parts of the camp’s perimeters. They were “with distinction” certificate holders with some of the best scores in Physical and Marksman, but where they ended up, they were nothing more than bullet fodder alongside the grade-average Humans.

  Eedric could write up long complaints, tell anyone who would listen that, “Hey! I am oppressed too! Because my mama’s minora blood runs in me. Because I went through test after test prior to entering service and none of the doctors would show the reports to me. They said I was fine and that there was nothing to be particularly concerned about.” But whatever was written in those reports had made sure he got a shitty posting. It made sure that he had to undergo a psychometric test at the end of every month and be prescribed medication—for “hormonal stability”, “stress regulators” to help with “blood control”, to “suppress adrenaline over-production”— which he never took beyond a month of their renewed prescriptions because they always made him feel like shit.

  But he was still not a Feleenese in a camp full of Humans who thought he was some kind of punching bag, a novelty cap they could wear for street cred. He was not the one who got stripped and drenched before being locked in a room with the air-conditioning on at full-blast by a whole lot of them who thought such initiation rites were funny, even manly.

  Still, he had to hand it to Miz. Where any man would have died of hypothermia—and one guy had died—Miz had marched back without a hint of a shiver. Eedric remembered what it had been like at the bunks when Miz came back, the way no one had said a word as Miz dried himself off and then got dressed just in time for morning PT.

  Most Humans tolerated Miz in the camp; sometimes just barely. A few had asked, “Why put him with us?” There were other camps that had a lot of his kind, probably set up just for them too. Eedric supposed the “Feleenese Retreat” of 5074 didn’t engender much trust for the kind.

  The official books skipped the part of history where the Feleenese had laid down mines in the swamps, drawn enemy forces into them with their retreat, and for the next four years worked out of rebel camps to try and liberate western Manticura from the occupiers.

  “They lost more men to their guerrilla operations than the Humans did to open warfare. Capture, torture and execution were in store for them when they were found. And you know what’s more? While the pig-fleshed signed the country over to the enemy, Tuyuns continued to fight in the jungles throughout the occupation period. That is loyalty to the country, my friends!”—His old secondary school history teacher used to call the students “friends”, sometimes “comrades”. Eedric frankly didn’t know what to make of it, but he had always liked that teacher even if the latter had obvious biases. He was always so animated that not ten minutes into the class, his famous blue-and-white chequered handkerchief would be out and applied to his red, glistening face. The school had replaced him halfway through the year with someone whose dogma constituted model answers and supposedly infallible textbook facts. Eedric couldn’t even remember who it was, so he must have been sleeping at his desk through the rest of that semester.

  Miz tapped the end of his cigarette against the rim of the ashtray on the table. His coffee was still untouched, the foam still a mushroom cloud above the rim. Eedric was already halfway through his.

  “How’s work?” Eedric asked.

  Miz nodded, but said nothing. Smoke curled upwards and Miz contemplated some distant vision in its tendrils. Eedric leaned back in his chair and waited.

  Finally, Miz was done. Stubbing out his cigarette, he asked, “So you and Adrianne?”

  Eedric turned away from the particularly pretty girl watching them from behind the counter in the café.

  “Eh, same old.”

  Miz nodded again, even more slowly this time.

  The stretch of the quayside street was quiet. Eedric stared at the stretch of canal across from them, at the tourist boats cruising down its length. What was there to see, he wondered. Concrete, stone, the same walking mass-produced statues everywhere.

  “I don’t know, man,” Eedric added after a while, eyes fixed on a distant boat. “I don’t feel anything any more.”

  Miz half shrugged, half nodded. “It’s tough, but if you have to end it, you have to end it.” The Feleenese leaned forward, took a drink of his coffee, then settled himself back. Eedric could smell the smoke on him.

  “It’s just—” Eedric tried. “How? And going back into the dating game is a hassle.”

  Miz conceded. No words, as was usual.

  “But there’s just no…depth. No engagement. She’s just…” Eedric struggled to find a word. Turning to look Miz squarely, he said with an ironic smile, “She is probably the first right thing I’d ever done.”

  Miz chuckled. “Does she know?”

  Eedric shook his head. He fingered Miz’s box of cigarettes. Miz eyed him idly.

  “I thought you quit?” Miz remarked.

  He had. Adrianne didn’t like him smoking.

  But right then, fuck Adrianne. He knew he already had. He pulled one out for himself and raised his brows at Miz. The other man waved his hand as a “take it” gesture. Eedric lit up using Miz’s lighter and took a long, gratuitous drag.

  “What are you doing after this?” asked Miz.

  Eedric shrugged and let the buzz and haze of the nicotine envelop him as he took a few more drags. They spent the next twenty minutes or so like that, for after Eedric finished his cigarette, Miz started on another. At the end of it, Miz said, “Have to go soon.” Jerking a chin in the general direction of Eedric’s body, he added, “How’re things?”

  “Some days okay. Some days bad.” Eedric stubbed out his cigarette.

  “No sudden changes?”

  Eedric shook his head. “So far so good. Off to work?” He meant Miz’s shift at the biomedical laboratory where he worked as a research assi
stant. The head researcher Miz was working under didn’t start work till after two.

  Miz gave a nod as he stood. “You?”

  “I’m going for a walk. Give myself something to do… Really don’t feel like going home, man.”

  Miz chuckled and stretched out a fist, which Eedric bumped genially.

  Forest Trek

  Eedric found himself in the open-air car park near the visitors centre of the Ne’rut Rainforest Reserve, hands gripping the steering wheel of his car even though he’d already been there for a good twenty minutes. There was no reason for him to be there, no reason to refill the spaces of his childhood memory bank.

  Or perhaps every reason to, he thought as he finally switched off the ignition. He stepped out from the enclosed air-conditioned space, into the dense and humid warmth of the vast outside. He had his shades on, but still had to squint when he looked up at the quarry from which the reserve got its name.

  The ravaged face of earthy orange-red tinged in grey rose above a lake, which had formed when rainwater and surface run-off filled the gaping hole blasted out by dynamite. It used to be a site for granite quarrying before mining phased out as Manticura plunged into industry about a decade or two before the war. The rock structure, some people said, was older than all of that, though no one could say exactly how old.

  While few trees could gain a foothold on the bare rock face, more crowned the top of the quarry, seaming effortlessly into the surrounding jungle. The largest of Manticura’s remaining pockets of rainforest, the nature reserve flanked an entire stretch of expressway and two housing estates. There had been plans once to take down a part of the massive quarry—the only major natural landmark the country had, really—to make way for an expressway expansion. Some people had protested. Others had just thought it was an inevitability and never broke out of their routine. Somehow, however, other sectors of the government had shot down the idea and declared the site a protected area. Strictly off-limits. No discussions were opened after that; no press releases, no newspaper or blog articles; no news, as if the matter had dropped out of existence completely. It was a silence so complete, no one else made a sound after that, not even the loudest, most questioning of the country’s dissident voices.