by Lavie Tidhar
Yeah, I want to learn to speak what the aliens speak. I want to translate for them. ’Cause it’s the smart thing to do. Leonardo looks at me and disapproves. Leonardo is a fool.
* * *
When we eat in the big hall, Leonardo always wants to sit next to Fabiola and Mario. I don’t like them. They’re always whispering and complaining about the aliens. I know they also whisper about me.
Leonardo says they’re nice people, but they’re not. Mario called me chola one time (’cause I have the tattoo on my arm) and another time bitch (’cause he’s a scared dickless shit). If I was back in the ravine I could slice the smug smile off his face with a glass bottle. I’m here so I can’t do squat. The aliens don’t like us fighting.
Today they were sitting together and whispering again. I put on my headphones and listened to my music until they were done. Then we came back to the room and Leonardo was all weird. Something they said must upset him but he wouldn’t tell me what.
Fine. It’s not like it matters.
* * *
Sometimes I like Leonardo. Like, when he explains big words to me like “hyperbole” and “paradoxical.” He doesn’t explain like he’s smug and that’s good because I don’t like people making fun of me. They make fun of me, Fabiola and Mario. I got funny music in my player, they say. I tell them to eat shit.
Leonardo just lays out it real clear and he knows I get it. He ain’t gotta explain ten times before I understand. I’m real good at languages and I remember words. He looks a bit surprised when I can remember some stuff, real quick, but I tell him I’ve always been a quick learner.
He says I could’ve done well in school, if I finished. He asks me if I’d wanted to study anything.
What would I’ve studied, I ask him. All the women ’round were maids or picked garbage. My dad was a scavenger, I was one too. Sort glass from wood, sort paper from plastic, while aggressive flies buzz ’round your face and stray dogs wag their tails.
I told him my biggest dream was to go to California.
He asked me why I wanted to move so far away.
I told him I meant the restaurant with the buffet.
And he smiled and I felt stupid for telling him that.
* * *
I didn’t understand Leonardo’s books when we first started sharing a room. It seemed so stupid to hang on to those. They were not even fun books, but the textbooks he’d been carrying in his backpack when he was hauled off by the aliens. But now I guess I kinda see the point. The books are like the music to me. They click in your head like a big puzzle piece and make you whole.
Leonardo doesn’t like my music, but he’s sat down next to me, on the bed, and we’ve listened to the same song. For kicks. To starve off the boredom because you can’t study the alien language all day long and there are those patches in the day that must be filled.
This feels normal. I’ve never done normal. It’s… kinda fun.
* * *
Leonardo told me the aliens conduct experiments and we are like mice. I told him that’s as idiotic as the people who say aliens eat people, ’cause they don’t. He says they’re parasitical and some of them are going to live inside us. I ask him how something as big as the aliens (’cause they’re real tall, real pale) can live inside you. But he says they can.
He watched too many cartoons when he was a kid. I now have access to some of the alien databanks and there, and in our conversations, it’s pretty obvious it’s not like that. We’re too coarse, too violent, too stupid and they are going to help us. I suppose some people would prefer to think they’ll cook us for supper. That would be easier to understand. This… well, it’s harder to stomach.
Not that I can’t stomach it. Alien cops, space cops, whatever you wanna call it… they ain’t so different from regular cops. You just gotta talk the right way, act the right way, think the right way, bribe here and there, and we’re all friends. We’re a nice, happy family.
It’s kinda funny that Leonardo doesn’t get it. Seems simple to me.
* * *
Leonardo’s been nicer and quieter lately. That’s good. When he’s nervous, he makes me nervous. Pisses me off. He’s all mellow today, laying on the bed and reading his books. He even asks me how the language is going and I tell him it’s real good. I’m going to be a translator. Maybe one day I’ll be a section supervisor.
He nods and stares at me. He asks me if I miss my family. I miss my sisters. I don’t miss my parents. He asks me “what if they’re dead.” I tell him if my parents are dead, they got what was coming for them. My sisters… they didn’t do nothing, but bad stuff happens to good people. Happens all the time and good people bite a bullet just ’cause it’s the way it is.
He tells me he misses his parents. He had a girlfriend. He doesn’t know where she is now. I tell him not to think about it. It’ll twist you inside.
He says I’m brave.
I laugh at that.
* * *
There’s no windows in our room (the cell, Leonardo says), but there’s windows in the dining hall. While Leonardo, Fabiola and Mario whisper, I splay my fingers against the glass and look at the sky. The jellyfish ships swim in the sky, so pretty against the sinking sun.
I want to be on them ships. I want to be onboard. I hope, I hope I make it.
* * *
Leonardo gets scared sometimes, at nights. He dreams they’re coming for him again, taking him from his school, taking everyone. I lay down next to him and I pat his head. Yeah, it’s done, I say. Yeah, it’s over.
He wants to know what I did when they came for me. I shrug. I tell him there were raids all the time where I lived. At first I thought it was just cops. Then I saw it wasn’t cops and frankly, it didn’t matter.
He wants to know what I dream about. I tell him I don’t dream much.
He looks all sad and plants a kiss on my cheek. I let him. I didn’t let the other boys, but I let him.
* * *
Leonardo thinks we can escape. He’s talked about it with Mario and Fabiola. I tell him there’s no way and he insists on it. Resistance. Fight. Blah, blah. I put my headphones on and listen to my music. He comes over, all plaintive, and puts a hand on my knee. Don’t I want to go with him?
I like it here.
Yeah, but he’s springing out of here one way or another with Mario and Fabiola.
What’s the catch, I wanna know.
Catch is I’ve got access to the main terminal. Catch is he needs some info. Catch is this smells like being used. I roll over and stare at the wall.
I get him the info anyway.
* * *
I know he’s going to betray me but it still stings when it happens. He does spring out, but just with Fabiola and Mario. They don’t bother taking me with them.
It’s okay because they’re caught two days later and brought back. I see them being dragged across the patio in chains. Leonardo’s got a wild look in his eyes. He catches sight of me, standing with my alien advisor by a window. He yells. He asks me to convince them that they’ve made a mistake. Mercy. Intercede.
My advisor glances down at me. I know how to say this, of course. But sticking up for a runaway won’t look good. I know it’ll go in my file. I won’t be able to fly in one of the pretty ships. Maybe they’ll even say I was an accomplice (and I was, it would be true) and punish me too.
There’s one of them ships going by, iridescent (Leonardo taught me that word). It blocks the sun like a great whale, the shifts and slips away.
Sometimes there are no words, in any language, to construct the proper sentence. I remain quiet as he’s dragged away.
I’m brave? I don’t know. It’s called surviving.
I turn on the music player.
Old Domes
J.Y. Yang
Friday, midnight. A young woman pants in the field in front of the Old Supreme Court, doubled over, as though she has run a long way. She is covered in blood, and in her right hand glints a weapon.
Her name
is Jing-Li, and she is a cullmaster of buildings. Of embodiments of brick and stone, locations expressed in forms that humans can deal with, difficult to perceive and even worse to understand. But she does not need understanding to do her job.
The job is in two halves. Two old buildings—pre-WWII colonial edicts, ancient by Singapore’s standards—are being repurposed for conservation, their insides ripped out and both buildings combined to become an art museum. The first to go: the City Hall, the senior building that was once the seat of Parliament, whose blood is now making its way down the woman’s arms in rivulets. (It is not real blood, and it will fade as soon as the shock of the deed has worn away.) That leaves her with the old Supreme Court on the right.
The old Supreme Court building: Child of the Great Depression, completed in 1939, constructed on the grave of the Grand Hotel de l’Europe, its predecessor in the sequence of colonial buildings that had stood there. Once it lorded over cricket players and rickshaw-pulling men with its massive dome and Ionian columns. It witnessed the Japanese troops marching in, and posed a dramatic backdrop to the first National Day Parade after Singapore’s Independence. These days it sits empty, dwarfed by the skyline fleshed by glass and with bones of steel.
Its time has come as well. That is why the cullmaster is here.
* * *
Jing-Li entered the old Supreme Court building by a side door, trying to ignore the wet on her hands. It was red, like real blood, and it triggered in her all the associations of fear and revulsion that mortal death entailed. She had not expected it: not the blood, not the soft thud of a body on masonry, not the shallow breaths drawing away to nothing.
None of her teachers had mentioned the hunt would feel like murdering a real person.
The City Hall had reminded Jing-Li of her grandfather, maybe that was why. Hair combed back, starched pressed shirt, glasses precisely set. Perhaps it was a figment of childhood, the archetype of the dutiful public servant instantly associated with a man who had died when she was ten and existed mostly through stories falling from her parents’ lips. If he had looked like someone else, maybe she might have felt less uncomfortable swinging the blade.
Who was she kidding?
She gripped her consecrated sword tightly, a cheap plastic thing bought at a sports store, usually sold to seniors taking recreational tai-chi. The air here tasted dusty. Jing-Li’s footsteps echoed through a warren of corridors until she entered the main entrance chamber, where the ceiling yawned open far above her head and moonlight poured in from the windows on the second floor. She took a deep breath and thought she smelled London.
London: the place where Jing-Li had gained her culling certification in her undergraduate years, taking a twisty bus route to a poorly-ventilated basement where she’d sit taking notes with a handful of other groundskeepers, young and old. She had been the only non-European there.
In her course application she had written cheerfully about the transient nature of Singapore’s geography, where buildings ten years old were considered aged. Surely a local, internationally-certified cullmaster would be invaluable.
After all, this was Singapore, where lacking anything else the land itself became the currency in which the nation was defined. A living corpus carved and recarved, hollowed by tunnels and multibasement carparks, its borders fed with the leftover rock and silicate. It was a young land, supple and stretchy, where the maps a year old were outdated, their lines dancing a seismographic tango. Guardians here lived and died in droves.
Except that this was Jing-Li’s first hunt since she’d returned home a year ago, law degree in hand. It turned out that guardians here went away as easily as their physical selves did, connections weak as water. Young locations lacked staying power, and older ones were strangely compliant in fading away. This job, then, existed only because it was unique.
Jing-Li looked at her hands: the blood of the City Hall building was gone.
The old Supreme Court was waiting upstairs, she knew. She tried to muffle her footsteps on the curved staircase as much as possible, as though she could sneak up on it by surprise, like a sleeping animal. It was quiet here, even by the standards of deserted buildings, something stately about the way the air rested amongst the shapes of the masonry. She was very, very cautious.
“I’m here,” he said, the moment her foot touched the stones of the second floor. He was waiting against one of the balustrades that overlooked the first floor, arms folded much as she remembered from their first meeting. She was a child then, waiting for her father, and she had tugged on her mother’s sleeve to ask her about the “funny man in the hat”. Later she would seek out pictures of white men in Victorian garb to point out to her mother. Her first building guardian. Her mother had thought her imaginary friends cute.
The Supreme Court of today would have fit in perfectly in posher parts of the Central Business District. “You updated your look,” Jing-Li said.
His shrug seemed particularly dismissive. “In keeping with the times, you know.”
“The times have caught up to you. Do you know why I’m here?”
“You must think I’m an idiot.” He uncrossed his arms and stood straight. “I felt the other guy go too, the sorry bugger.”
“It can’t be helped,” Jing-Li said. They were nearly toe-to-toe now. Was he ever this tall and thin and white? “If it’s any consolation, you will be remembered.”
If there’s any consolation, she thought to herself, it’s that after this I’ll be done with the job. The sword felt heavy in her hands, as if it were actually made of metal. She raised it in the direction of the guardian, brought it downwards—
The guardian vanished a split second before contact, and she found herself swinging through empty air.
“Oh, kitten, it’s not that easy,” the Supreme Court said from behind her, and when she turned around he was sitting on the banister of the curved staircase with a Cheshire cat smile. Chest constricting, she lunged forward again, but like a clever insect he eluded her. When she regained her balance she found him back against his balustrade perch.
She took one step in his direction, and he froze her with a wag of his finger. “Ah-ah.” She did not move, scared of spooking him, scared that he would vanish once again.
“Look,” she said, as sincerely as she could through the heaviness in her chest, “I don’t like it either, but it has to be done. That’s the rules.”
He leaned vertical, hands slung easily in his pockets. “I don’t intend to give up this position. After all, the other chap is gone. Somebody needs to man this station. I’ve decided that it’s going to be me.”
The guardian Jing-Li remembered was a stern one, back ram-rod straight, features imposing: a presence that filled the room and commanded absolute attention. Perhaps that was when he still functioned as the nation’s highest court. “Sorry, but that can’t happen,” she said. “We’ve done the measurements and both existing guardians need to go. Another one will arise for the new art museum.” Not to mention that his proposal would be incredibly unfair to the former City Hall, who had seemed a much better candidate for representing the art museum if they had to pick one.
“Ah, but I put no stock in the calculations of your groundskeepers’ council. They use their own metrics, which are useless. There’s no correspondence with a global standard.”
The global standards had been scrapped a decade ago, exactly because they mapped poorly across the globe. These days different towns, different regions, different countries used self-calibrated standards, whatever worked best for them.
Jing-Li felt like pointing this out, but she did not. Somehow, she knew it would be like shouting at walls. Perhaps it was.
“You’re out of luck,” the City Hall said. “I intend to stay.” She looked at him, standing resolute in his place, solid as one of the columns that made up the building’s facade, and could not argue. He had beautifully blue eyes, movie-star eyes, which crinkled at the edges before he disappeared. “Don’t think of summoning
me,” his disembodied voice said, by way of parting. “It won’t work.”
Jing-Li didn’t try. It took her several minutes after she exited the building before she realized she was shaking.
* * *
Monday, midday. The young woman, neat and dressed in what is generally accepted to be common office wear, trails a large group of people following a guide leading the way through the City Hall and former Supreme Court buildings. The group consists of civil servants who volunteered to help in the open house taking place in a month’s time, and are dressed accordingly. Run by the staff of the museum that has taken over administration of the two buildings, the open house will, for the first and the last time, allow the public into spaces previously reserved for the highest offices in the country. License to gawk and to touch, before the diggers and bulldozers move in to do their reconstructive surgery. Some of the group take notes as the guide points out key features and historical nuggets: this will be crucial information in a few weeks’ time when they too will become guides, this time to an adoring public eager to soak up the storied narratives contained within the buildings.
The young woman does not take notes. She merely follows, unnoticed.
The guide, with a knowing smile, leads the group away from the prescribed tour route, up to the roof where the iconic dome sits. The group loses flock coherence, running to various edges to take photographs, taking on the appearance of guppies in a tank. A large number of them gather at the front edge of the building, the only one not obscured by towering modern-day buildings. Eager hands point outwards, gesturing over the expanse of the Padang that lies, treeless and manicured, in front of former Supreme Court. It’s the first time any of them have seen it from this angle, and, artificial as it is they find it a wonder.