Sandpaper Kiss

by Angel Wedge

  The creature – the girl, I had to remind myself occasionally to think about her as a person – seemed to have a kind of routine, which made more sense the more I thought about it. She knew how to survive here better than I did, and even if I had any suggestions there was no way I could convey them, so I followed her lead. We ended up moving in the morning and the evening, the cooler parts of the day. It wasn’t much difference in the intense humidity, it was like being broiled all day, but any respite from the temperature was better than nothing. I think she hunted at night, waking a few times while I slept, and then napped during the midday heat. She offered me some berries, and found fresh water to drink through the day. I noticed that she never ate the fruit though, and I wondered if she was strictly carnivorous. So many questions I couldn’t ask.

  “Kitty,” I whispered one day as she tended my injuries with her gentle sandpaper kiss. I’d taken to thinking of her like that, because she seemed kind of cat-like and it was also a name that could be used for a person. She licked my wound to keep it clean until it healed properly, and I was sure without her help it would have been infected long ago. It became a bonding experience, and after a few days of what felt like an effortless routine it seemed the easiest time to talk to her as well: “Kitty, can you understand what I’m saying?”

  I blushed even as I said it, unable to believe it had taken me so long to come up with the obvious question. She hadn’t spoken to me, had just made cat-like meowling sounds, but that didn’t mean anything. If she was intelligent enough to cook, then she was surely smart enough to understand language, if anyone had thought to teach her. Just because she hadn’t spoken yet, why would I assume she couldn’t?

  “Myaah,” she replied. It could be a cat’s meow, or a yawn, or just a sound of annoyance. Or it could be the kind of half-hearted ‘Yeah’ so beloved of incomprehensible teenagers. I knew it was a stretch, it really didn’t sound like a word, but I had a lot of optimism there. In a way, I was talking just to hear the sound of my own voice, to remind me I’m a person.

  “Was that a yes or a no?” I asked. I realised I was speaking in a sing-song voice, like you might talk to a child, or how some rich people seemed to talk to their pets. “Or can you not answer me?”

  A slight hiss led into another mewl. The sound seemed kind of structured, but maybe I was just grasping at straws. It certainly wasn’t speech, but was this some kind of tiger language? I realised I was stretching too far, and I should give over this silly fantasy. I probably wouldn’t even have thought of it, if she hadn’t been speaking in my fever dream. But then she made the same sound again, a hiss and a mewl and almost spitting at the end. Exactly the same. I wondered if that meant it really was some kind of language. And after the sounds, a strange little pantomime dance. She pawed at her throat, then put one hand up to lift back her top lip. Then she repeated the attempt at speech again.

  Anatomy. Her lips weren’t as flexible as mine, it looked like, fitting tightly around her teeth. Her mouth wasn’t the same shape, and I’d already seem that her tongue was quite different. I’d only briefly looked into phonetics, even as I studied so many languages, but I immediately realised that speech was dependant on more than just the brain.

  “You understand me,” I hazarded, “You know the words, but your vocal cords and lips are different. You can’t make the right sounds, is that it?”

  “Myaaaah!” she sounded happier, so I knew for sure now she understood what I was saying. “Myaah,” and a cheerful smile that lit up her eyes even though there was nothing I could recognise in the shape of her thin lips. Yes, I filed that sound away in my memory. It wasn’t much, but I knew a single word of her language now. Even if she couldn’t speak normally, if she could understand well enough then she was bound to create words with some kind of meaning. It was going to be tough to communicate like that, but learning to understand different people was what I did.

  “Have you got a name?” I asked, “Or should I keep on thinking of you as Kitty? I’m Mark,” I pointed at myself and repeated, realising a moment too late how condescending that would seem if she was as smart as I hoped, “Mark. What’s your name?” She shot me a withering glance, disappointed. I guess that means I was learning too, because now I could look past the oddity of inhuman eyes in a childlike face enough to read her emotions. If she was human, she would have been rolling her eyes at me right then, I’m sure.

  She grabbed the knife from my belt, and before I even had time to panic, jabbed the tip into the thick clay-mud at her feet. She lifted it up and scratched another line, and another. For a second I was afraid, then I realised she was writing. Of course, the shape of her lips wouldn’t be a hinderance there. After a few moments of intense concentration, she passed the knife back. Hilt first, more sensible than many Americans I’d had the misfortune of camping with over the years. I stood up, and turned to see the lines she’d cut into the earth:

  “Chinese?” I muttered, mostly to myself, “Really?” Kitty looked blank.

  “Uhh…” I struggled to remember a language I hadn’t used in two years, “Zhõngwén?” and she nodded. I closed my eyes, trying to imagine some multicultural group of mad scientists trying to decide what language to teach their great experiment. ‘Oh, let’s have her understand English but read and write in Chinese’, I couldn’t imagine that as anything other than a committee decision.

  I looked down at the words she’d written. “Strange dew… fork?” I translated hesitantly out, dredging the oldest parts of my memory like a man who’s discovered gold in a deposit of river mud. I couldn’t even be sure I’d understood the characters correctly, but if I had then there must be a meaning beyond the literal. “That means… I just don’t know. Is it a name? But how do I pronounce it?” That was one of the tough things in Chinese text, the same words could be pronounced completely differently in different regions. She looked up at me, gave a shrug that was worth a thousand ideographs but did nothing to clear up my confusion, and loped off into the trees.

  Chapter 20 — A Mother’s Love

  Understanding other people was always a problem. It was one of the things that had come between Lucy and Nurse Chǎ, too. But Lucy had been a bright child, and the nurse was also a good teacher. She wasn’t the kind to let a speech impediment spoil her young charge’s education.

  “Mā, mama, mammie, mamma!” Lucy grinned. Her pronunciation of all four words was a little indistinct, but if you were used to talking to her you could understand the sounds she was trying to make. It would be a lot harder for a stranger to understand her, but that was true of any child with a speech impediment.

  “Yes, Xiǎomāo!” Nurse Chǎ beamed in surprise, awestruck again by her favourite pupil’s aptitude for different languages, “I think that’s… hànyǔ, hélán yǔ, fēnlán yǔ, yīngyǔ, the tongues of all the men who work here? It’s very similar words for the same thing in so many places, I think. Maybe Mā is a word that comes straight from the heart, it means mother because it’s one of the first sounds a baby will be able to recognise. Something in the genetics of the brain. Well, listen to me! That’s the kind of thing that the scientists would be more likely to say, I must be talking with them too much.” Then she realised that Lucy wasn’t quite understanding what she was saying.

  “Yes, you’re right child,” she tried to express herself in a way she knew Lucy could understand, “Four languages, the word is almost the same. I think maybe it is a very important word!” But Lucy looked sad, and the nurse only then realised that her star pupil didn’t have a mother. To her, saying that the word was important would just remind her of what she had missed.

  “Can you be mā for me?” Lucy asked, and Nurse Chǎ nearly found herself crying again. It was the kind of innocent question a child would ask, and she knew she would have to say yes. They were interrupted, though, by a knock on the door. She went outside to find one of the managers there, Doctor Maxwell. She closed the door softly, leaving Lucy to amuse herself. The child had been vis
iting her regularly for weeks now, and knew how to amuse herself in Chǎ’s quarters. She never expected that the girl would be listening at the door, picking up part of a conversation she wasn’t equipped to understand or to deal with.

  “What is it? I’m teaching,” Chǎ spoke quickly, in English.

  “One of those children,” he shrugged dismissively, “You’re wasting your time. You should be with Lucretia in the infirmary, there needs to be a nurse with her at all times. They say there’s a chance she’ll regain consciousness, and we don’t want her to be all alone then.”

  “I can’t leave this child alone either. Nobody else cares about her, and she deserves an education. Did you know nobody even taught her to speak? She learned English by watching and listening to you people, and nobody ever tried to talk to her. That is monstrous.”

  “No. That ‘child’ is an experimental subject, she doesn’t need to speak. Maybe she’ll live, maybe she won’t, and it doesn’t matter. She has no life outside here. She has no purpose, no place in the world. Anything you teach that monster is just a waste of time. She isn’t the one you’re being paid to look after.”

  Mā Chǎ didn’t care. She knew a child in need, and she would continue to teach Lucy long after the scientists lost interest in her. She didn’t even care if they stopped paying her, because the health and happiness of the child was the most important thing to her. But Lucy had heard the way the people of the facility dismissed her life. She wasn’t important, she didn’t matter. It was a thought that would continue to haunt her for the rest of her life.

  But there was a bright side too. Just maybe, in Nurse Chǎ, she’d found the mother she never had, and someone who would help her find all the other things she was missing out on.

  * * *

  Days passed. A week, maybe two. A few hours of walking in the morning, and a few more in the evening. It quickly seemed like that was the only life I could remember. And when the path was less treacherous, when we weren’t short of breath from clambering over or hacking through dense foliage, we talked. It started slowly, but we both tried to understand each other. I learned. She’d picked up bits of language here and there, a kind of informal Esperanto made from listening to scientists, technicians, guards, and maintenance staff. There were at least four languages in use at Lucretia Falls, and nobody spoke all of them.

  Then she’d met a nurse called Chǎ, and discovered that her particular dialect of Chinese was so heavily tonal that as long as she could enunciate the different vowel sounds clearly, her difficulty with many consonants was a problem only in the same way an American kid with a lisp might have trouble being understood. While Kitty had a family – one of the scientists had called himself her father – she didn’t really have any maternal influence in her life. Nurse Chǎ had stepped into that role without a thought, caring for the almost-human child and teaching her language in a more structured environment.

  As she’d grown up, she decided she wanted to learn to read as well. She could easily have studied English, or some other common language, and more people would have been able to understand her. But she didn’t want that, she wanted a stronger bond to her family. Or maybe she just didn’t think about it in that way. Her father was speaking to her less and less often, and everyone else treated her as if she was a thing more than a person. Especially the one she called Dr Igor, who made her uncomfortable just by his presence and saw no problem with speaking about dissecting her even where he knew she could hear. I could only assume that was Barishkov. She said that he’d always wanted to be in charge here, and he’d had her caged like an animal as soon as he had the chance. The new scientists hadn’t even known she was a person, and she didn’t know how to tell them.

  That conversation stopped quickly. She was clearly upset that people didn’t see her as human, and there was no way I could apologise for my initial failure to understand her. It was a mistake I would only make once, at least. We talked more on other subjects. Most of the time, though, we spent learning to better understand each other. She refreshed my memory of the few Mandarin words I had once learned, and taught me as much as she could of the particular dialect that Chǎ had taught her. I also showed her the rudiments of American Sign Language, which proved very helpful because she knew most of the words even while she couldn’t say them aloud. Before long, she could start telling me some of her most emotional memories, things she’d never been able to say out loud before because everyone she knew was involved.

  By the time we saw light bursting through the canopy and I realised we were within striking distance of the highway, I was already starting to integrate Kitty’s memories into my mental narrative of what had happened here. She only had a few years of memories – maybe she was a lot younger than she acted, or maybe the process used on her had an adverse effect on memory – but every little detail could teach me something about the kind of place the complex had been before the marines came. What I’d been told before I arrived, the fragments from Lucretia’s diary, and a completely different point of view from an experimental subject. It all went together to weave such a complex narrative, I’d probably need weeks of study to understand it all.

  Chapter 21 — City in Turmoil

  When I’d left Sante Benedicté, even the highway had seemed like a rutted road to nowhere, only marginally more structured than the wild growth along the verges. But as I hauled myself up the embankment by pulling on a vine, it was an engineering marvel and a triumph of civilisation. We had survived the jungle, and once we got to the road it felt like we were almost safe.

  We turned towards the setting sun, and hiked along the road for some distance. I didn’t know if Kitty knew the way back to Sante Benedicté, but it wasn’t long before we saw a sign. My hip was healing now, but still pretty painful. When we could, she let me put an arm around her shoulders so that she could take some of my weight. But if we saw anyone else approaching down the road, she would have to scramble into the trees’ shade, and leave me to struggle on alone. A foreigner in this area would attract some suspicion, but I didn’t know what the people would think if they saw a young woman wearing only an animal skin kilt, and fur all over her body. I could only assume that their reaction would be hostile.

  A tractor passed just as we left the main road. The surface here wasn’t even packed gravel, but bare earth. The difference between the road and the surrounding ground was only in the lack of trees. Kitty, as ever, disappeared off the road as soon as she heard the engine in the distance. I moved over to the side of the road to let the vehicle pass, but he slowed down as he saw me limping along. The tractor itself was ancient, the kind of thing a European farmer might have been using thirty or forty years ago. In fact, there were still British license plates visible. I didn’t ask how it had got out here; these things happened. In little countries like this, all the detritus of the modern world seemed to collect, machines recycled and reused way beyond the lifespan their manufacturers would have intended.

  He was towing a trailer that seemed to be loaded high with timber and sacks of something, and he jerked a thumb towards it, shouted something I couldn’t quite make out over the engine noise. I guess he saw that I was hurt, and was offering a ride.

  “Pam’barra!” I shouted – Don’t trouble yourself. I couldn’t tell him why, but I wouldn’t leave Kitty this far from the city. He didn’t seem to get it, crashing the gears as he tried to back up the vehicle to somewhere I could jump on.

  “Bisse, pam’barra!” I called again – Thanks, but I’m fine. I hoped my understanding of the language here was good enough to come off as polite. He shook his head as he drove away, probably concluding that all foreigners must be insane. Kitty rejoined me pretty quickly,and we didn’t see anyone else for the remainder of the walk into town.

  When we came within sight of the city, I immediately knew something was wrong. The fences around the whole area had been to keep animals out, we were told. But now they were patrolled by armed men on both sides. I quickly led Ki
tty off the road and into the trees, hoping she’d take the hint to keep out of sight. She raised a hand under her chin, two fingers outstretched. ‘What’s wrong?’ I was immediately glad I’d shown her a little sign language, and also proud of how quickly she’d learned.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “There’s people there with weapons, it might be dangerous. They’ve never seen anybody like you, I’m not sure what they’d think. But they should be expecting me.” I didn’t want to speculate what might happen if the increase in guards was related to the coup that Marcos had been expecting. “I’ll go and check what’s going on, and see if I can organise an escape route. I think in a few days, being anywhere near that lab will be a very bad idea. I learned what’s going on, at least, and I need to let everyone know that Doctor Faulkner wasn’t the bad guy that the news networks want us to think.”

  I paused for a second. There was more I wanted to say, but I just didn’t know how. Could I just tell her that after just a week of depending on her for survival, I was nervous about leaving her behind? Should I say that I felt like I could trust her completely, that I felt closer to her than I ever had to anyone, despite the barriers of language and species? I didn’t even know what I wanted to say, but I knew that I didn’t want to be away from her once this story was told. I stammered nervously, and then the words tumbled out all at once: “You helped me so much, and I… I care about you, probably more than I should. I don’t want you to get hurt, so will you come with me? Back to my home, where you can be safe and not get locked in a cage again. I mean…” I didn’t know what I meant, but maybe she understood me better than I thought.