The Gatekeeper

by Nuraliah Norasid

  He stepped away, both embarrassed and horrified. Ria gave him only a quick glance before turning to smile at Suri. With astonishment, he listened to Ria explain her situation to Suri, with vulnerability, even kindness, in the old-fashioned cadence of her voice. Suri was a Human in the employ of a Human household; he couldn’t guess at any reason why Suri might feel any solidarity with Ria. They spoke a common tongue but were not of a common land. Yet Ria was convincing enough that Suri nodded at the end of it. Perhaps Suri held no love for Father or Stepmother, who ruled her rather strictly. No love for him either, who had done nothing to stop the punishments he knew were meted out to her over the slightest mistake. Who in his own way—in not washing his plates after he was done eating, in complaining when his shirts were ironed wrong, in never washing his own car—was only perpetuating the injustices she experienced day after day.

  “Sir went out with Ma’am to party,” Suri told him when she finally turned away from Ria.

  “That’s good,” Eedric said. Feeling relieved in spite of what passed before. He added, “Please don’t let anyone know. And”—he took a fifty from his wallet and pressed it into her hand—“something for your help.”

  He could feel Ria looking at him, but he wasted little time in bundling her up the stairs to his bedroom on the third floor.

  “Is that how you surface people always work?” Ria said quietly when they were in the room, door safely locked behind him. “Buy off anyone, any place?”

  “It will keep her quiet.”

  Maybe the indiscretion would come back to bite him in the ass someday, but the way he saw it then, the transaction was merely him bringing someone along if he was to go down with the SS Medusa.

  “She seems a frightened little thing,” Ria went on to say, her gaze distant.

  Eedric checked to see that the windows were still shut fast, the way he always left them. After a quick glance out to the dimly-lit road below and across the way to the neighbour’s dark balcony, he drew the curtains tighter and clamped them together with a metal clip from his table for good measure. “Father is strict about work discipline. Suri’s predecessor got sent home before her contract ended and…well, Suri doesn’t want to end up the same way,” he explained, turning back to check that the air-conditioning was on.

  Ria stood stiffly in the middle of the room, arms folded, shoulders hunched and head retracted into the hood as far as she could manage, as if afraid to disturb the objects on display in the suddenly tight layout of the room. She was scanning the room. It compelled him to start cleaning: he moved the morning’s rejected pile of clothes from the bed to the chair, and then realising that Ria might want to sit on the chair, subsequently shoved the pile into the wardrobe.

  Between tidying up magazine stacks, old seminar notes and portfolios, he turned to see her still standing in the same spot, perfectly inert now that she was done assessing her surroundings.

  “You can sit down, you know,” he informed her.

  “Sit?”

  “Yeah, sit,” he replied, motioning vaguely. “I don’t know how long you are going to be here and you don’t want to stand around all day, right?”

  He expected her to come back at him with a quip about standing stones or a messy room, if not actually sit somewhere. Instead, in a quiet voice filled with apprehension, she asked, “Who is your father anyway?”

  Eedric straightened up slowly from where he was half-kneeling and half-squatting on the floor, collating loose photograph prints meant for his updated portfolio.

  “Nothing I haven’t told you before,” he replied. “He’s in the chain store business and a part of the Star Malls group. Not much of a family man. He hates my mother and is the reason she died in the first place…”

  “Beyond that?” she cut in, gaze flicking from the corner she had been frowning at to him. “He knows people. Important people. You told me once. I remember.” Ria spoke with growing disquiet, perhaps even a rising anger. She was holding herself away from him, winding the strings of her person tight, closing up and sealing all entry points. Her stare was unnerving, as it could sometimes be, but it was what she said after that broke him: “Why did you bring me here?”

  He regarded her, mouth working to find words.

  The portfolio hit the side of his desk at which he’d flung it. “What now? What are you trying to say?” he demanded, going up to her. He made to take hold of her but, something, either the memory of his exchange with Suri earlier, or the fear that she would flinch at his touch, stayed him.

  She spoke fast: “How is it all nothing but coincidence? You took me away on the day the police raided Nelroote. You never left, and I thought it was because… I thought you were different, because you never changed, because being what you are, being someone like me, meant something to you. Because I meant something you! And to think, you were only biding your time; to think, that in half a century I have managed to keep the likes of you away, only to lose everything now!”

  He had been moving away from her, to check the windows again, but the accusation made him turn back. And he did take hold of her. He wanted to shake her but he didn’t. His grip wasn’t even tight. She could have stepped out of it, could have moved away. Instead, she turned her face as if he was something repulsive.

  “Ria, look at me,” he said, and then once more, shouting, “look at me!”

  She kept her gaze away, her snakes rising to start a flurry, the spreading of their hoods synced with a chorus of warning hisses.

  “You don’t trust me, do you?” he demanded. “You don’t. No one does!”

  “I don’t even trust myself,” she told him.

  He threw his hands up, practically tossing her away from him. “Does it always have to be like this? The mistakes of another time brought up over and over? I know I keep saying this but look at me. Look. At. Me, please.” He gestured towards himself, fingertips stabbing his chest repeatedly, and so hard he could have pierced skin.

  “I may not be good enough. For Father, for your sister. For you! But I am here, Ria. And I am not a stone statue.”

  She looked and he saw that she could see him there. It was strange, but he felt that in that moment, she was seeing him with perfect clarity for the first time since they met. Parts of her begin to unravel. He saw her shoulders droop.

  “What will we do now?” she asked quietly, afraid.

  Even at a time like that, “we” was a sweet word coming from her. She was everything he couldn’t explain and yet nothing he needed to explain. She was a dangerous thing to possess and an equally dangerous thing to let free. There was no medusa outside of captivity because authorities would rather have one than be rid of one. A medusa—two medusas—must be worth something to someone. And in that moment, he wanted to do right by her, whatever it meant. It was with certainty that he told her:

  “We sit it out as long as we can. And if my father or anyone else ever finds out, if there is even the slightest indication that they have an idea, we will clean out the drawers, pawn all the jewellery we can get hold of and jump cheap hotels. We will live off convenient store food, maybe even get drunk on cheap beer every night. We keep doing that until we either get caught or reach the end of the road, where we know we’re fucked anyway.”

  Ria lifted an eyebrow, smiling. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “It is what it is. Only, I make it sound classy.”

  She laughed, in spite of things. He came close and she dropped her forehead onto his chest.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  He shrugged and closed his arms around her. “I know.”

  They stood like that for a while, the silence that reigned around them possessing the quality of a foggy lull right after a battle. In time, he started to say, “Back in the chamber…you—”

  He stopped when he felt her arms tremble and her hands grabbed fistfuls of his T-shirt. Guilt welled up in him anew, and he was prepared to drop it entirely when he heard her say, forehead pressed to his ch
est as if she wanted to lose the words to the floor below: “She was always the perfect one.”

  “Ria, that’s not—”

  “She’s beautiful and she’s strong. She was the one with the plans. The one we all looked to, still look to. So many years ago, all I ever wanted was for her to look at me. To acknowledge me. To see me. Sometimes I wanted to be just like her. Most times, I wanted to be better, smarter… I wanted to know more; to be more. And when I was better, and when I was more, I would be more dangerous. And when she finally did look at me… We were already so deep in. No light at the end of the tunnel. A part of her had died and I was the one to kill it.”

  He could not help but consider her with frustrated pain. Bleeding welts that never healed, scars and a life of self-isolation; recalling them all made him angry.

  “I know now is not the right time to say this, but you need to let all that shit go,” he told her finally.

  For a time, she remained quiet. He said no more. He thought that she didn’t need to hear any more of the inconsequential things he was likely to say anyway. Then, she lifted her face to him.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but it is time to try.”

  He wanted to let her go. It was in a strange turn of opposite intentions that he only pulled her closer, so that her body was flush against his. She did not try to disengage herself. Her thigh was pressed up into his crotch. A twitch and then a movement in reaction to that, and he knew he was going to get hard. He cursed himself for it; for reacting like a hormone-driven boy in the midst of such a crisis.

  Never mind, never mind, he thought. His mouth met hers with violence, in a kiss of one who was both desperate and unthinking. His head reeled from the clash of teeth, but he gathered enough of his senses, or rather lost enough of them, to press on with his affections—hands dropping from shoulders to bum, cupping it and lifting her up a little, pressing her hips to his. She was fleshier than he’d thought, heavier and more solid. There was a hint of the coffee they’d drunk some two hours or so before, on her lips and on her tongue; a hint of her usual talcum powder smell, mixed in with the cologne that still clung to his hoodie—scents of him and scents of her.

  Take her, take her, take her.

  He couldn’t have picked the worst of times and he knew she was vulnerable and confused but that was the only mantra drumming through his clouding mind, in this room, this space of his that discomfited her so. He wanted to burn and burn and burn her out so there was no barrier left between them.

  His face was buried in flesh. “Fuck your sister. Fuck Nelroote. Fuck this whole entire place,” he murmured. His teeth bit skin. “It’s just you now. Just you.”

  He noticed how the skirt of her dress had ridden up her thighs and how one of his hands was gripping on to her flesh, clawing into it; noticed how his left leg had started to cramp. She was so impossibly soft. Her snakes moved around her face in their own coital dance, wriggling and coiling, one body with the next until they nearly resembled braids. He knew then that the precious window would soon pass; that in seconds, she was going to be in control again in her ghostly but overpowering manner.

  A car passed, its headlights a pale glow through the curtains that grew and diminished as it went, and then the neighbourhood outside was dark and silent—dark and silent and ignorant again.

  He reached out to relieve her of the hoodie, dropping it in a shapeless pile on the floor. He mustered the courage to finally weave his fingers into her hair at the back of her head, working blind between the loosening strands of serpent bodies to get to where the snakes met scalp. With a gentle tug forward, he pressed his lips to her face, near the hairline, ignoring her whisper of “Eedric, no,” and whispering instead reminders of “I am here” and “It’s okay”.

  Her breath came out shaking. Out there in the world, she would be considered hideous by people that wanted long porcelain faces and luscious locks; fat by a generation of small waists, flat stomachs and thigh gaps. Once, that kind of beauty was what he had desired, strove for it in the women he preferred and pursued; fed it with his prestige and occupation. But in that moment with her, he was blind to all of it and nothing but lucid to everything that was her.

  On his unmade bed, she was so warm that he could not help but let out a pained moan. She laid back, unmoving as he touched her—from breasts to the folds in the furred region between her legs. She responded to him, but he couldn’t tell if her grimaces were those of pleasure or hurt. He ought to pause, to check in: if it was all right so soon after a tragedy. But he was so far gone, he couldn’t stop. The act itself—a painful barrier to break for her—had to be quiet, bodies kept close, taking breaths in shallow gasps muffled against each other. She was quiet. And tight. He finished in a few thrusts. Somewhere in the middle, she’d pulled his chain off—mangled and broken the clasp. The pendant lay cupped in her hand, a fake military dog tag of dull silver that he’d got a long time ago from a shop specialising in street wear. He’d had it engraved with his name and a number that meant nothing, not his phone number or birth date. Just the first combination of six numbers he could think of—156713, was it? He couldn’t remember. It had come to be a tribute, a monument to an age of swaggering youth. It meant something different now, something in the way she grasped it as he rolled off her, and the way she stared up unblinkingly at his bedroom ceiling even after he’d returned from washing up.

  Blaze

  Eedric surveyed the spread on the table, wondering what he could take up to Ria after the meal. He chanced to meet Suri’s eyes as she crossed behind Father at the head of the table to get to the kitchen. He nodded and tried to smile, but Suri’s wary and dazed expression caused the smile to falter. He cast only the briefest of glances up at the ceiling, imagining Ria sitting two floors up in the corner of his room, wedged between wardrobe and wall. She would not so much as twitch when she was left like that—not move a leg or adjust her sitting position. He loathed the idea of leaving her alone and would rather be in his room pretending to game with the volume turned up real loud than be away from her. But it was her wish that he join his family for a meal that day.

  “Nice to finally see you come out of your room, Jonathan,” Stepmother said as she reached for the serving bowl of sautéed vegetables. Leaning over, she added with a smile, “Must be that new game, right? I can hear you playing it.”

  Eedric continued drowning his rice in gravy. He tried to remember what he could have been playing that she’d heard. Must be one of the shooters, he thought, or a gameplay montage on replay at full volume. Stepmother would be none the wiser. He was known to be a noisy gamer, raging when things didn’t go his way, which was often. He was also known for locking himself in when a game was particularly hard or engrossing; forgoing showers and a change of underwear, eating bread slices right out of the plastic bag.

  Eedric came to the depressing realisation of how deep in isolation a person could live even in a house shared with others. He saw clearly now how it had always been this way, how his days were spent in a home that resembled one from pictures—with a lazy ceiling fan, sterile walls and paintings of fruit bowls—but his room was an untouchable sanctuary of relics needing both dusting and a good wash. The family meals were actually pretty few and far between because it was rare that everyone was home at the same time. Even Stepmother would often stay over with her parents when Father was out of town for long periods. He didn’t know if he dreaded family meals more because they obligated him to spend time with people he didn’t much care for, or because the meals were unfamiliar events to him.

  Ria simply didn’t exist to Stepmother and Father. She was outside of their plans, their social planes of existences, just as her people were outside of the country’s. In another space, another world, she was his inexplicable truth—a warm body against his every waking hour. They lay curled, she a crescent moon against the dark space of him. Sometimes he partook and she indulged him in silence. But it was enough for him to simply lay back, his head cradled in the circle o
f her arms. He must have missed countless castings and classes. He screened all of his calls and only took the ones from Miz, though he told his friend nothing of the woman sitting by his window, or how he sometimes traced the filter end of his cigarettes over the contours of her, imagining that the smoke spirals were her ghosts leaving through a chimney. How he sometimes sat on the toilet watching her stand with her face inclined to the warm deluge of the shower. Sometimes he wished for her sister back, just so he could see her smile again.

  “Yes,” he replied slowly—carefully—“still at that new game.”

  He continued to drench his rice, so that the white became brown.

  Stepmother shook her head, amused and, like all of her generation, not understanding the media and technology that ruled her stepson’s life.

  “You know,” she continued, as always perfectly conversational and positive, “I have not seen Adrianne in a while.”

  Eedric stopped. Then carefully replaced the ladle in the bowl.

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s all right.”

  Actually, Eedric didn’t know. Last time he was in contact, it was to pick up the box of his things from her house, and it had been her maid he met at the front door. She had handed him the box filled with his T-shirts, a hoodie he thought he had lost, electronic cables and a bunch of other mushy crap he had given her. The maid had lowered her head and clasped her hand by her apron before saying, “I am sorry things not happy any more, sir.” Eedric had only shaken his head and told her to take care. He had never felt freer.

  “Busy, I think,” he felt compelled to add.

  He saw concern flit across Stepmother’s countenance but Father cut in with a sudden remark, “First Feleenese minister—and a drug raid on the same page.”