by Rich Horton
It was an investment owned by an Emirati family who was hardly ever there. She and the other staff had the place much to themselves most of the year. They planted and watered, trimmed and pruned. They polished floors, painted eaves, and washed windows. She took walks in the morning and watched the seagulls, the hydrogen-driven freighters sliding past, large as buildings, the pleasure boats with sails so white they blinded you in the sun.
She had no family except a brother she had never met. Her parents had died before she knew them. She had been raised in an orphanage, surrounded by institutionally kind people in tidy, well-ironed uniforms with tidy, well-ironed emotions. She was quiet, a reader, rarely leaving the estate, putting most of her money away in the bank, cooking for herself. Her name was Feride, which means “the only one.” She thought, on some days, that it really meant “the lonely one.”
She had worked at the yali for seven years when, digging in the earth one day, she scratched her hand on a thorn. The wound bled, but she washed it under a tap in her little staff cottage, and thought no more of it. The next morning she felt dizzy, unsteady. She had a temperature. Her muscles ached as if she had run a marathon.
When the head gardener arrived, Feride was wrapped in a wool blanket on the couch. He told her to take a few days off. Later that day, he saw her through the window of her cottage, slumped on the floor. She didn’t respond to his hammering on the window frame. He kicked the door in and called an ambulance.
• • •
It is three months later. In the intensive care unit Feride’s hair, the color of India ink, makes her face look even paler than it is. She is paralyzed and on a ventilator, with plastic tubes running into her mouth, nose, neck, wrist, forearm, and bladder, wires running to her chest to record her heartbeat, a plastic clip running red light through the skin of her earlobe to read the oxygen levels of her blood. They have taped her eyes shut to protect her corneas—two x’s of tape over her eyelids that make her look like a cartoon corpse. She is an anemone of wires and tubing, adrift in the greenish, undersea light of the night ward, surrounded by a reef of drip-stands gravitating antibiotics, plasma, transfusions, heart-strengthening drugs into a system opened rudely up to a world she always sought to close herself off from.
The staphylococcus bacteria had multiplied quickly in her bloodstream, its toxins turning the ordered harmony of her body into cacophony. Her blood ceased to regulate its clotting: scarlet flowers hemorrhaged on her limbs, as if in dark imitation of the rose she had grasped too clumsily. Elsewhere, her bloodstream clotted off supplies of oxygen to vital organs. Bacterial growths blighted her fingers and toes black. As the infection spread to her organs, the hemoglobin in her blood metabolized to bilirubin, yellowing and stiffening her skin with jaundice, as if she were being turned to wax from the inside. Her thin figure is waterlogged with fluid leaking from the failed seals of her arteries and veins. Her features are blurred, as if the wax she is being turned into is losing form, becoming a puddle.
And indeed, her skin feels like wax when Fahri lays his hand against the side of her cheek. She is like something discarded, emptied of all she had once been.
In the cafomat Fahri drinks his nightly coffee, watching the dawn over the port. A freighter is being unloaded. The enormous, skeletal cranes, silent behind the window’s glass, rotate their hooked limbs as they shift the containers down to the spidery, tracked roustabots who delicately nudge them into place onto the waiting truck bases. It has rained. The surface of everything is clean and reflective. The loaded trucks, cyclopean and featureless as a child’s building block fitted with wheels, are mirrored darkly in the surface of the pavement as they roll away with their loads. Their green lights pool and slide on the pavement beneath them, smeared emeralds. In the control tower above the port it is possible there is a human being, but likely there is nobody at all. Near the cafomat’s coffee dispenser, the puck-shaped floor polisher shivers in spirals.
Melek, the night doctor on the ward, slides into the chair across from him. “How is your sister?”
“About the same.”
“I looked at her charts on my rounds earlier. No worse than yesterday. We shouldn’t get our hopes up, but that’s good news of a sort, right?”
“It is.” Fahri looks at her—Melek, in her scrubs the color of a faded key-lime pie. Mischief always in her lively eyebrows, a chipped front tooth, one eye slightly larger, and greener, than the other. She glances at the time in her thumbnail, gives the cuticle a double-tap to start a timer. They had met the first night Fahri came in to see his sister. Melek had sat across from him the same way, nearly three months ago now, when they first met. Her interest in him had been as obvious to him then as it was now: over the first cup of coffee they shared she’d said: “I like you—but I don’t have time to date anyone. Not for more than five minutes at a time.”
Fahri had smiled his genuine, but tired (always tired) smile. “Five minutes is about all I can spare as well.”
“Perfect. Then we’ll just have to do this in five-minute increments.”
And so they had, for nearly a quarter of a year now: building a relationship out of the tiniest nanoblocks, in increments of time anyone could afford.
“Okay: five-minute date starts now.” Elbows on the table, she rests her jaw on the backs of her hands, flutters her off-kilter eyes at Fahri like something out of the film archives, mocking romance and infatuation. “So let me tell you what I did today.”
As tired as Fahri is, as aching as he is, as eager as he is for a few hours of sleep, natural or induced, he does listen. Because everyone can afford five minutes: this is right. And everyone deserves five minutes, at a minimum, from a fellow human being. It should not be too much to ask. The cafomat, otherwise empty, warms with her conversation. She speaks, and he listens. She has an inner light as easy to see as a lamp behind a gauze curtain. She has a warmth he could warm his hands to. And they are, he and Melek, of the same world. Contractors, gleaners on the edge of the protectorate, making a living. Even after all these five-minute dates, he cannot tell how he feels for her, beyond this.
Now her face changes, mid-sentence. She is looking at him, startled. Then he feels it—a warm line along the side of his face, two drops of dark grape across the table, like thick red wine.
“You are bleeding.”
He puts a hand to his head, but she grabs his wrist. “Come with me.”
In the all-white examination room she tilts his chin up to her with an authoritative, gloved hand. Her other hand, thumb at the tragus of his ear, searches in his umber hair for the wound.
“Look up at me. Blink twice to permit me to read your vitals.”
He does so. Melek looks up and to the right a moment, reading. She doesn’t have implants: she prefers contacts. He remembers her saying, that first night they met: “I don’t like knives. Even in the hand of an autosurgeon. Even if I don’t see them.”
“But you are a doctor,” he’d said.
“I mean that I don’t like knives when their business ends are directed at me.”
“Vitals look okay.” Melek’s fingers find the wound. “Okay, everything is all right. Here it is. Just a nick. Two centimeters.”
She cleans the wound with a cotton swab. He concentrates on the carbonated sting of the solution. He tries to push the image of himself tackling the skip from behind out of his mind. Them toppling to the pavement. But he didn’t hit his head. So from where? He’s holding the skip down while he struggles, trying to get the inhibitor on him. The skip had reached a hand up, tried to grasp his hair. He must have cut him then. A key of some kind? A fingernail? He doesn’t even know, but the skip cut him. A small cut, it must have bled a little into his hair and then closed itself. Later, the cut must have opened up again on its own.
Melek pinches the edges of the wound together, runs the warmth of the liquid skin applicator over the wound, wipes the excess blood and disinfectant from his hair and face with a cotton ball.
“I must have hit
my head on the edge of the faucet in the bathroom, washing my face in the sink.”
“Didn’t you feel it?”
“No, I must not have. Too tired.”
“You need to sleep more.”
“No,” Fahri says. “I need to work more. I’m a contractor. My sister’s care won’t pay for itself.”
Melek is stripping off the gloves. “You are a prince, Fahri. She must have been a good sister to you.”
“Perhaps she might have been,” Fahri says, standing up. “But I never got the chance to find out. We never met one another. But she is all I have in the world. What do I owe you?”
“No charge,” Melek says. “You owe me a bit more caution with yourself. I don’t want to have my five-minute dates with someone else.”
Nothing is free. Melek will be paying for the gloves, the swab, the auto-registered use of the applicator, the disinfectant—even the cotton ball. But Fahri can’t afford to turn down the gift. Shame heats his cheeks.
On the way out of the hospital, he takes one more look at Feride’s waxen, sleeping face, blurred by disease. A death mask? Or only a suspension? Then he blinks three times into the paydesk’s eye, and glances up and to the right to see the turquoise numbers of his bank account spiraling down to no more than a metaphorical handful of Protectorate lira. The familiar feeling of dread washes over him. Enough left for what? Three meals, an energy tab or two, the rent on his cell for one more day. They used to call it “hand to mouth.” Now it’s “from one blink to another.”
• • •
The tekray dopples southwest, the Marble Sea on the left, glaucous and undulating in the blue-shifted early light. To the right, the hives of cell towers beyond the southern boundaries of the Protectorate tessellate past, a few windows already lit up. Fahri glimpses a line at an immigration center, hopefuls rubbing their hands against the morning cold. The Protectorate announced a new citizenship lottery, with the promise of benefits—pensions, insurance, minimums, safety nets—dangled in front of a few thousand more hopefuls. It’s a cold morning with a freezing salt wind off the sea. Spring keeps advancing and retreating. Under a bridge of the abandoned motorway, he checks in with Mahir.
Mahir’s office is a cage of rusted steel and dirty glass in an ancient garage that once serviced gasoline-powered cars. Now its bays are empty: all that is left are tools, spare parts, rags, hydraulic lifts smeared with the oily filth of internal combustion. There are pegs on the walls with belts and hoses dangling from them, ancient, battered license plates intended to be read with the naked eye, unidentifiable machines, battered bumpers leaned against the wall. Mahir’s office, secure as the shell of a hermit crab, used to be for the cashier of this place. Inside, Mahir drifts in a cloud of vapor, his face like some terrible fish, chewing on the soggy fiber applicator of an electric cigar.
“Can you handle three? Think you have it in you?”
Three! Fahri could get a week ahead on payments. In his mind, the paid-up days spin out, seemingly endless, like a luxury without limit. “Of course I can.”
The feeling fades when he sees Tarik leaning against the concrete of a bridge support outside the garage. The concrete is bleeding rust through its cracks. Tarik’s coated teeth have the green patina of a copper roof—the latest vogue. Coordinates, compass points, and facial patterns cascade backward down the lenses of his fashionably out of date horn-rim Parker Philips overlay glasses in amaranthine, like something out of a Kurdish cult VR.
“Riddle me this,” he lisps through his statuary bicuspids. “What has four legs in the morning, sleeps while running on two legs all day long, and ceases to exist at midnight?”
Fahri shrugs.
“The answer,” Tarik says, taking his glasses off and wiping them with a microfiber cloth, “Is you, if you don’t blink me 40K usage fee by 11:30.”
“I get it,” Fahri says. “Very funny.”
“I’ll meet you at the hospital. Don’t make me chase you down to some late-night döner stand like yesterday: it grates.” Tarik pushes the glasses up the bridge of his nose, glares at Fahri through a cataract of magenta data and a reverse image of Fahri’s own head, ghost-translucent, monochrome, rotating trapped in Tarik’s lenses, overlaid with skin texture analysis triangulations like a phrenology bust.
“Plus a thousand for the ding. Be more careful with our toys.”
The first two skips are easy: Fahri finds the first one in the lobby of the Intercon, ensconced in a chair-pod built to look like the nest of some enormous bird, licking salt off the rim of a margarita. The skip just shrugs and puts one floppy hand out for the inhibitor.
The second one leads him up through the autocheckpoints of the Protectorate and out its north side on the Tekray, then arcing over to the Antalyan side of the strait. He catches up with her in Kiliçli on a branch-line platform, completely seized up: she’s been in a fugue state for days, and is collapsed on a bench, jerking like a puppet when he locks the inhibitor on her wrist. A mercy: she’s trapped in this malfunctioning body without escape. Sparrows hop around Fahri’s feet, confused into thinking he is going to feed them.
Giving in to the sparrows, he buys a simit from a vendor and sits down on the bench. He tears tiny pieces off the ring of sesame-spangled bread for the fierce, fat little birds. They battle one another for position and twist their little heads, regarding him with one glistening sable eye and then the other, always eager for more.
He takes a few bites of the simit ring. Time is a luxury. He’s at least paid up for the next four days, and it seems like he has forever ahead of him. He’s registered the two skips, and in the upper right of his vision the turquoise balance of his account has grown. A five-minute date, he thinks. I’m having a five-minute date with myself. But Melek’s face arises in his mind: he feels the gentle pressure of her thumb on the tragus of his ear as her fingers move through his hair, looking for the wound. He closes his eyes and concentrates on the feeling, brings out all the nuance he can squeeze from this moment, until he can almost feel the ridges of her thumbprint through the surgical gloves, like the most minutely grooved corduroy.
He notices, then, that one of the sparrows has an artificial foot. Its brown dinosaur leg is grafted to a construct of delicate carbon fiber struts and miniature talons of hardened glass. The foot flexes and grasps just like its other foot of flesh and blood. Who would take the time? This little piece of loving kindness, like a gap torn in the net of injustice. The tiny cyborg pokes one of its comrades in the butt, startling the other bird into dropping its bread, then seizes the prize and flies off, triumphant, with a hunk of simit half the size of its head clasped in its beak.
The collector van pulls up to the station. The tech is in field gray coveralls and a company garrison cap. Bored, tired, probably on a double shift. Fahri can see him watching a ’cast in the corner of his eye: the privacy shield still allows a slight blur through it, a darker cloud behind clouds.
“She’s locked up,” Fahri tells the tech. “The neuromodulators in the blank’s reticular activating system aren’t firing properly. Wherever her original is, she can’t transmigrate back.”
The tech shines a penlight into her eyes, pointlessly.
“She wasn’t on the run: she was wandering. She’s in a fugue state. You’re going to need a shop reset.”
“Oh, do your own fucking job, contract whore,” the tech says. But there’s no anger in his voice—only exhaustion. “I don’t need to be lectured on Keiser’s Law by some exurban temp.” Moving to feel the woman’s pulse, he never bothers to look at Fahri.
The other tech arrives, practically a twin to the first in exhaustion and apathy, leading a stretcher on a tether. Fahri walks onto the Tekray train headed back to the European side of the strait. So much, he thinks, for loving kindness. This, he thinks, is why Feride avoided speaking to people as much as she could. But they’ll get this person, trapped in their malfunctioning blank, back to the shop and reset its reticular activating system. And somewhere, wherever they a
re, this person will wake. To what? No matter: to something. To whatever and whoever there is for them to go back to.
Back on the Tekray, he gets a call from Mahir. “Fair warning,” Mahir says into his ear. “This last one for the day is a heavy blank. Custom. Big—you can’t miss him. But you’d better sneak up on him and clap that inhibitor on him before he sees you. I don’t want to lose my best tracer.”
“Very kind of you to look out for me.”
“No, just practical.”
The skipped blank is big. A mountain of a man. Somebody’s fetish: all roiling muscle straining against his clothing, black beard practically up to his eye sockets, hands like the paws of a bear. Fahri catches up to him on the ferry to Fener. The blank eats a quick dinner at a family café and then wanders a while, looking into the blandest of shop windows while the sun goes down and lays, for a few minutes, a net of claret, ruby, persimmon, and salmon clouds on top of the city. He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry, isn’t looking around to see if he’s being followed. Just strolling along. The muezzins call the faithful to the Maghrib prayer. The man raises his head, listening to their songs winding into one another, a small smile almost lost in the forest of his beard. He walks past street vendors folding their wares away, past knots of locals in doorways discussing the day as they and their ancestors have for centuries.
In the rusting, cast-iron cave of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church of St. Stephen, they are alone. As the man raises his arm to light a candle to the Virgin, Fahri makes his move. But although he is fast, the man is faster. He must have known Fahri was there. He claps a giant hand on Fahri’s wrist and squeezes. Fahri’s tendons go limp, and the inhibitor clatters to the floor. With a swift step, the man is behind Fahri, has swept his legs out from under him and wrapped a thick arm around his neck. His other forearm pushes on the back of Fahri’s head, urging him further into the chokehold. The candles before the church icons dance, shudder, and streak as the world darkens. The man slides to a sitting position, holding Fahri against his massive chest, and as Fahri slides into an indigo space full of stars and the ringing of blood in his ears, he hears the man say, “Shh. Don’t struggle. It doesn’t hurt. You just go to sleep.” And he seems to be holding Fahri firmly, but with a tenderness. In a fairy tale there is a bear who clutches an orphaned human child to its chest and takes it to the forest. Takes it to a den to protect it against the winter.