by Hodge, Brian
“You haven’t come out here, before?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Your kind don’t come this far out, and I’m trying to be your kind. Besides, I’m used to finding what I need on my own. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know about places like these.”
“What kind of place is this?”
“It’s where runaways come. Where your Security lets them live.”
“The missing man came out here first.”
“He didn’t want to adapt.”
Marican questioned the women she’d pointed out, and other merchants, some specializing in family albums, diaries, and other personal history relics from people who hadn’t survived the Turning. He didn’t bother feigning interest in searching for a piece of his past, or buying a false history for himself. Sellers weathered him by shaking their heads and staring at the ground. He moved on quickly, barely containing the panic over their close proximity.
Oria found those who’d talk to her. With a few, she laughed and played quick finger games, and exchanged hushed and giggling whispers. The years dropped away from her face. A yearning to hold her crushed his heart. Deeper interests in her stirred.
“Come on,” Oria said, grabbing hold of his arm in a tight grip. “I think I’ve got a lead for you.”
She dragged him into a gulley hidden behind a subtle rise in the debris field. They descended into an open trench, the remains of a stair and tunnel, and emerged into a canyon warren of shops, most carved into walls of rock or debris. Track segments, iron fencing, stretches of tiling had been exposed and incorporated into new structures. The old train station, Marican thought. There’d been a mall. Now a squatter town, a carnival trick mirror reflection of the real city above it.
Or the seed of something else, growing.
Abstract symbols he didn’t recognize covered the walls, as well as variations on graphic symbols remembered from computer screens, traffic signs, corporate icons and commercial brand names. Complex constructions blocked passageways, but no one interfered with their inexplicable presence. What songs filled the air sounded more like chants, repetitive and rhythmic, as if celebrating breath and the triumph of a heart still beating. Someone tapped out a too familiar series of clicks. Children ran through the passages, playing a game of chase and flight with intense ferocity. They clustered in groups of five and six.
Marican slowed, leaned against a thick stall post laden with thick necklaces strung with detritus: doll heads, small containers and crumpled packages, coins, miniature ornaments, brick and stone fragments, small plumbing and electrical parts. He took deep breaths, overwhelmed by the crowding, the noise of life. He looked to the sky, braced for terrible thunder. His hand slipped, the necklaces rattled, cold metal brushed his hand. He jerked his arm away, flailed, choked on a scream.
People turned to him, looked away quickly. He didn’t understand why the infestation hadn’t provoked repercussions. He looked to cracks and dark corners.
A boy in rags, blond hair knotted and eyes bloodshot, pushed a rusted metal box into his chest. When Marican tried to slip past, the boy opened the box, revealing a set of shiny medical instruments mounted in velvet holders. He wasn’t sure if the boy was selling him the instruments or pleading for surgery. The stench of earth, feces and petroleum rose in waves that seemed to make the air around his body ripple.
He gently pushed the boy aside. Vendors on either side of the passage called out to each other. A drum began talking.
Oria appeared, rattled teeth in her cupped hand in front of his face.
“What is this place?” he asked, pulling his head back.
“It’s where your man did his business. See? This is his currency.” She broke into a grin. Her cheeks flushed.
He looked away. Sliding, rhythmic motion drew his attention to a nook above the stalls, close to ground level. Pebbles tumbled, dust blew out like smoke. Shadowed limbs writhed, jerked. He could almost hear a dry, scrapping sound. No one paid attention to the activity.
A frigid ball of ice filled his gut, burning, draining strength from his legs. He held on the post, too weak to run.
A break in the clouds allowed the long, golden light of an autumnal sunset to slide under the grey expanse of sky and paint the landscape above them in colors that warmed the eye. The rays brushed the nook’s depths, illuminating a man and a woman, naked, entwined, desperately clinging to each other in the rhythm of their passion. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d made love, or seen the act of sex performed.
“Naja,” he whispered, through a roaring in his ears.
Oria came close, followed his gaze. “Ah,” she said, turning to him. “There are other free spaces up there.” She put an arm around his. A small smile spread from her lips to her eyes. She smelled of something sharp but sweet, a fragrance from this new world.
A sound like a bus engine gunning shot through him, deepened, thundered. The ground shook. People around him cried out. More dust rose, this time in a plume, from the city’s outskirts, as if something invisible had crashed.
Marican fell to the ground, his limbs shaking uncontrollably. People gathered, and he tried to push them away, but his body refused as a greater fear raced through him body, squeezing, pulling, twisting, until his heart felt ready to burst, his body about to fly apart. The booming gathered into a sustained roar, became piercing, like a jet engine whine, racing higher, drawing him into the heart of a whirling annihilation, as bodies closed in on him, hands holding on, fingers digging for a tighter grip against his dancing spasms.
“They’ll come, they’ll come,” he cried out over the sustained booming rolling through him.
“Not for us,” Oria said in his ear.
“The thunder,” he screamed.
But she told him, “There’s no thunder. That’s just the Turning, in your head. But that was long ago.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but words fell out in a jumble. He fought for control of his body, then just a limb, a finger, a joint. But something else flowed through him, stripping all thought and emotion except fear, moving him in ways suitable for another form, a different environment. He laughed in convulsive bursts, tears streaming from his eyes. Exhausted, his muscles drawing strength from somewhere he couldn’t name, he surrendered to the dance and waited, alone with his terror, for the invisible partner leading him through the steps to appear.
“Where do you live?” Oria asked, her voice booming like a relentless cannonade. Later in the barrage, she said, “Don’t worry.” And soon afterwards he was lifted, carried up into the air and the mottled grey sky, as if in a dream or a terrible memory.
In the sky he flew in the grip of something vast and unyielding, as helpless as prey carried off to a nest of hungry mouths. He screamed, forever, breath flowing like blood, in pulsing beats connecting body to mind to feeling to everything that beyond that was not him. The scream was the last of him, all that was left, a dream, the music of his fear, the bond that joined him to all that he danced to and with.
He woke, the scream still in his ears, his throat raw, his body aching but still.
The cracked and peeling ceiling above him was familiar. The bed, a comfort formed to the curves of his body. He was home.
Floor boards creaked. Fabric rustled. A small fire crackled in the stove. He focused his eyes, expecting to see the long, curving arc of an antenna probing a pile of laundry.
By the dresser, Oria was holding the framed picture of his family. Light poured through breaks in the clouds and the open shutters, but the day seemed younger than he last remembered.
“What—” he started, his voice dying to a croak in his burning throat.
She took a deep breath but didn’t look up. “A wall collapsed, and you had a fit. Never seen anything like it. Very impressive. Your laugh scared off the kids, but the screams made the older people quiet. Brought back bad memories, I guess. I managed to get you back to your place. Mine—well, I thought yours would be nicer, and more
private. I was right.”
Marican’s arm jerked, a response to a phantom blow. “How?”
“I asked the scavengers to help.”
“Orphan gang.” He scanned the room, but the shadows were shallow and empty.
“No. Runaways working for merchants.”
“How—” he said, but the words and questions wouldn’t come together.
“Passed out your description. Someone supplying this neighborhood’s khli vendors remembered you. People from the market carried you home. Three stories up after a long haul was a lot to ask. Had to pay them off with some of your things. There was a bundle of clean clothes by your door. The nice mirror. Some took pellets from your stash. Hope you don’t mind.”
He mumbled something even he didn’t understand. Stopped. She’d started crying, gently, like a new spring leaking from a wall of stone, while tracing the picture frame’s edge with her finger.
“I’ve seen this one before,” she said.
“What—”
“The frame. The picture.”
An artic chill howled through the hollow of his bones.
“Mother and daughters. It made my think of my…of Mom. I was trying to remember if I had a brother, or a sister. My Dad, I kind of see him. The shape of him. I can feel his hand on my shoulder. But I can’t remember his face. I can’t remember any of their faces.” She took a deep breath, put the frame down. “It must have been in the stores when the Turning came.”
He wanted to erase everything she’d said. He wanted her gone, missing, like a case never to be solved. No one cared about orphans.
Don’t let her talk, anymore.
He braced for the fear to take him, to sweep him away from her words, the sound of her voice, this moment, and into the blind embrace of emptiness. But thunder didn’t roll. Muscles remained locked in fatigue.
“Do they remind you of your wife and kids?” she asked. She wiped her face with a towel.
“No,” he said, but couldn’t finish what he’d meant to say, that the picture was real, it wasn’t what she though it was, an anonymous image, a random fragment from another age, empty of meaning. He needed to tell her that he’d had a family, once, just like her. They’d had names. Naja. Cara. Camille. He could see their smiles. Hear their laughter. His hands were still warm from holding them all in his arms. They couldn’t be names on the tags to empty folders.
He’d lost everything in the Turning.
He reached for the certainty of truth, became lost between dream and memory. He searched the empty places in his heart for traces of his past, found only screams. Oria’s grief, the reality of her physical presence in his apartment, the sight and smell of her, her voice, the story of her survival, and the hints of her past, all made him feel insubstantial. He could have been a ghost haunting his own dreams. Or worse, a figure in her imaginary museum, given life by her need to connect with the past.
Who was he supposed to be, if he hadn’t lost a family? What was he, after all the years in the ruins, at the Ministry, in the service of bringing humanity back from the brink of extinction, if he’d never been anyone real? If he’d never loved, or had let what came consume everything he’d ever been?
“Sorry,” she said. “I guess I should have given this away and saved your pants.”
“How—” he started, the sentence almost slipping through before becoming entangled in too many others. He didn’t want her to tell him anything, yet he choked on questions he wanted to ask.
“How long? Just since yesterday. I sent word to the Ministry that you’d taken ill during an investigation, and that I was taking care of you. Guess that’s why they didn’t send someone to check on you. Unless, they don’t have anyone left to do that, with you out. Do you want some tea? It’s the only thing you have here to eat or drink.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. By the time she sat by the bed in the apartment’s only chair and put glasses of tea on the bed’s side table, he’d managed to sit up despite the sensation of spinning as he fell through a vast expanse where the lights and sounds of life were distant, unreachable.
Fighting through nausea, he clutched at the threads of his life. All he could find was the moment, but that was enough for him to find a focus to speak, to exist, to be more than a ghost.
“What…are you doing here?” he asked.
She sipped the tea as steam rose into her face. “Taking care of you,” she said, with a hint of impatience.
“Why?”
“You’d rather I’d left you in the market to get picked over by strangers?”
“Security would have protected me.”
“They weren’t there. Where I come from, we don’t have Security. We have each other, and everything else that’s waiting to find us alone.”
He stared at her with the expression he used when requesting Security to clear out the body he needed to close a case. He was finding firm ground: the woman, a part of his investigation, in his territory. “You shouldn’t be here.”
She watched him closely over the rim of the glass as she took another sip. “You’ve never let anyone up here, have you.”
“No.”
“I like that it’s safe,” she said, looking into the living room.
He didn’t like the way she took in the dead television, the shelves filled with books and recordings, statues and other ornaments, pictures of places he’d never been to, things he’d never owned.
“But living like this hurts,” she continued. “It’s all this…dead stuff around you.”
“It’s real,” he snapped, hearing an accusation that he was not real, not alive.
Alive. In a new day. There was a reality he could get a grip on. “I need khli.”
She scowled, put the glass down. “That stink last night. How can you eat it? Do you even know what it is?”
“It keeps the monsters away.”
“No. It makes them think you’re one of them.” She picked up his glass, brought it to his mouth.
“What do you want?” he asked her, putting his hand up. “Do you want me to drink your tea? Do you want me to tell you to leave, again? Go back to work? Would you like me to report you to your Bureau Chief? Or to Security?”
She put the tea back down on the side table, kissed his cheek. She sat on the bed, held his hands in hers, put her head down on his chest, her face turned away. The weight, the solidity of her body, comforted him. Strands of her hair slipped through his shirt to tickle his chest. She rose and fell to the rhythm of his breathing; her own breath warmed his belly. “Her name was Naja. You called for her.”
Relief poured through him, sudden and fast, leaving cold fear. “I don’t think she ever was,” he said, from the safety of her embrace.
Her shoulders shook. She gasped, as if weeping. When he put a hand against her back to push her off the bed, he found he couldn’t move her, and then he discovered his eyes were burning as tears flowed from them.
He slid down and held her. She was real. She existed, and by talking to him, being with him, she made him real, as well. Maybe he did the same for her. He didn’t know, or care.
Holding each other was enough for a long while, and when it wasn’t, they kissed, slowly, tasting each other as if trying to savor someone else in their arms. Her clothes fell away. Again, he was hard. Her body pressed against his. He moved as if in a dream, surprised to be giving and receiving what he’d never imagined either of them wanting from one another. They danced to their sudden passion in the practiced rhythm of old lovers, but it seemed to him that they were only passing through each other on their way to what they really needed, to the parts that were missing from their own lives.
They cried out as they rolled, made the bed rock, the floor creak and groan. Soaked sheets clung to him, cold and clammy, after they finished. His body trembled, but gently, as if a spent wave washed through his body as it rushed back to the sea. He felt more alive than any other moment he could ever remember. And yet, he missed something, perhaps the memory of Na
ja in his arms, Cara asking why, Camille humming a tune she’d caught in the cacophony of a morning’s bird calls. In Oria’s wake, the past felt real, again. So did he.
She fell asleep next to him in the small bed. He lit the bedside candle, closed his eyes, trying to hang on to what they’d done, to his memories of his family. But as he slipped closer to his dreams, he found hunger for the intimacy of a good questioning, a firm interrogation.
When he woke again, night had fallen. Oria still slept. The apartment was silent. No one knocked, the antenna was not probing the room’s empty center. By candle light, he examined her skin, and then his, to make sure nothing moved in their flesh. When he was satisfied, he went back to sleep.
In the museum of his dreams, the walls were bare, the halls empty. He wandered, calling out the names of all the people he’d ever known. Not even echoes replied.
The talking drums woke him up. Changes in the Ministry, they announced. An Orphanage burned down. Someone died. A baby was born.
The stench of khli made him nauseous.
He put a hand out, touched cool bedding. Oria. She was gone.
He sat up. The apartment was empty.
And then he realized he hadn’t answered the neighbor’s knocking last night, or watched the antenna search the apartment. He’d missed another day of work. And he hadn’t come closer to discovering the missing man’s fate.
Other things had happened. A nervous flutter passed through his stomach. “Naja,” he said, though he didn’t know why.
A woman’s voice rose from the street, singing harsh words to a cheerful tune. He didn’t recognize the language, but the voice soothed him. The singing passed below his window. Before he could get up to catch a glimpse of the performer, the voice passed into the building.
The song grew louder, accompanied by the heavy stomp of boots, until it swelled just outside the doorway. Marican was too tired to try escaping through the hole where the floor had been behind the bathroom door. He was ready to surrender to whatever came through.
Oria walked in singing and carrying two bundles.