by Bina Shah
I am Morpheus, Insomnia is my ever-faithful lover. Maybe we’re crazy, or we’re criminals, like wretched Nurya Salem. But we know exactly what we are doing, and at what cost to ourselves.
Lin always waits up for me, no matter how late it gets. When I return, I always go straight to her room, and we sit together, while she smokes an e-spliff. I love Lin’s room, the walls painted dark red, the old Moroccan carpets on the floor, her antique wooden chest, sides carved with a filigreed design, underneath the most intricate wall hanging. A brass lamp mirrors the same design, sending richly woven mosaics of light on her walls when, lighted, it turns and twists above our heads, throwing stars onto our bodies.
Her bed is made of the same wood as the chest and draped with a rich, rust-colored bedspread. Another brass lamp stands on a nightstand next to the bed, casting a warm glow in the room, and cushions with mirrored covers are scattered on the floor. They belonged to Lin’s aunt Ilona Serfati, who smuggled it all in when she, along with her best friend, Fairuza Dastani, founded the Panah. Those names are legend to all of us. We never get tired of hearing how the two of them came to this place, built it with their own hands, and kept it all a secret under the Agency’s nose. We see their brilliance in the artificial garden they built, the Charbagh, with its flowers, shrubs, hanging vines. Their vision illuminates the sophisticated lighting system they set up to mimic the days and seasons. Their rebellion thrills us, gives us courage when we don’t think we can make it through another night or stand to see another Client.
Ilona has been gone for twenty years, but her treasures make Lin’s room feel rich and warm. They remind Lin that she comes from somewhere, from someone. It’s a good thing she had Ilona to help her grow up. I know all too well what it feels like to be motherless, although I’m luckier than Lin. At least I had my mother for twelve years, though the line that truncates my life into before mother and after mother is as painful as a blade on my skin. I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up orphaned.
I’m the only one Lin lets inside her room. I’m glad. I’d be jealous of anyone else she’d allow into this inner sanctum. We all respect Lin, want to be in her favor, but I am the one chosen to be her confidante, for reasons that she’s never told me.
She rolls her eyes and half smiles when I lie down on her bed, covered in silicon, shining like a golden child. Lin has to perform miracles with both Clients and our benefactors in order to procure the gold. It’s smuggled from the mines of Gedrosia, a country rich in minerals and ore. They send it to her in small tins, hidden underneath other cosmetics, and she mixes it with silicon for us. Clients always complain that it leaves a shimmering residue in their beds, but they’re only half upset about it. My Clients are always fascinated with it, stroking their fingers against my shimmering skin. Some even say it’s an aphrodisiac, but I think they like that it’s real gold dust: we signal to them that we are even more precious than gold.
Lin knows the ins and outs of our bodies, our secret birthmarks and tattoos, the days of our cycle, how often we wash our hair. We’re racehorses she sends off into the night and takes us back into her safekeeping in the morning.
Every time Lin sees the dark circles under my eyes, she shakes her head. Sometimes she says she can smell insomnia coming off me in gray, depressing waves.
“Come on, Sabine, there’s always something you can try. They’re coming up with new drugs all the time.”
“No, Lin. Believe me, if there were a magic pill to cure me, I’d take it in a heartbeat. Nothing affects me, not even this,” I say, pointing at the spliff. It’s true: I’d like nothing better than to shut my eyes and drift away, surrender myself to unconsciousness even for a few short hours, with her watching over me. But there’s no cure for the insomnia, chemical or natural, temporary or permanent. I know Lin thinks I’m being foolish. But Lin’s a sound sleeper; she never understands that my mind can’t rest, that my thoughts chase each other like snakes swallowing their own tails, in a dark chemical wave. I often wonder about my father: I wonder if he misses me, if he wishes we could see each other again. Does he realize the cost of his greed to get me married quickly? Is he sorry? Am I sorry that I came here? You can go into your household as a reluctant bride—that’s only a minor infraction—but there’s no way to bow down to Green City when there’s rebellion in your heart. I had no choice, but five years on, I’m still not at peace with my decision. Maybe insomnia’s my punishment for my reluctance.
“Joseph always tries to get me drunk. He says it’ll make me sleep.”
“Aren’t you ever tempted?” Lin asks me. I know this is a test, so I feign ignorance.
“What? By the alcohol?”
“Of course,” says Lin. “What did you think I meant?”
“It’s against the rules …” I intone. “No intoxicants, no drugs, no alcohol.”
“Thank God for your unshakable integrity,” Lin says, with a straight face, looking at the e-spliff in her hand. “Imagine if I were having this conversation with Rupa.”
I smile. “Rupa’s only human. And so am I.” That’s as close as I can get to admitting to Lin that I have tasted the drink Joseph has offered me. “You’re so hard on her sometimes.”
“I have to be. She’s younger and she’s difficult.”
I have felt the sharp side of Rupa’s tongue as much as the others have here, but then I know things about her that the others don’t. So I feel sorry for her, and often defend her when Lin remarks drily on how Rupa’s being “difficult.” It’s not easy when you’ve come to the Panah from the outside. Lin doesn’t remember because she’s always called it home.
Whereas Rupa bridles at any decree, I actually like the rules Ilona and Fairuza made for us here all those years ago: not because they make me feel safe, but because they give me a space within which to contain myself. Otherwise I would dissolve, boundaryless, into the air surrounding me. I’ve always needed structure to push up against; it defines me and gives me shape. That’s probably the consequence of growing up in Green City: we’re told what to do, how to behave, even what to think, from the day we’re born. I’m not yet used to thinking for myself. The rules of the Panah provide a halfway house between the strictures of Green City and the complete freedom that exists in places I can’t even imagine.
From the Voice Notes of Ilona Serfati
Today, I kidnapped my own niece.
How ridiculous that sounds! But as the head of the Panah I can’t exactly walk into my cousin’s house any time I please. And it’s only been a few months since she died—this most recent wave of the Virus is particularly vicious; there have hardly been any survivors this time around. People are terrified; they jump if you so much as mention it. So I’ll have to save my outrage for another time.
My poor cousin, my precious Hanna. We lived together in one compound as children; I looked after her when she was a baby, I was a second mother to her. I got her ready for school, gave her a bath in the evening, made sure she ate well and that her uniform was clean and laundered for the next day. Such things count for nothing in Green City; the only loyalty a woman’s supposed to have is to her Husbands. The only reason we’re allowed to grieve her death is because it’s the loss of another precious woman from this corrupt society. The ones who die should consider themselves lucky to be done with it for good.
I am amused at my own ingenuity, I’ll admit. I dressed myself as a male social worker, with all the appropriate clothing, genetic switch chips and prostheses in place—obtained from the black market at great cost. When I got to Hanna’s house the windows and doors were already turned black to mark it as a house of mourning.
I don’t know which of Hanna’s Husbands opened the door to my insistent knocking. I said that I’d been sent there from the Bureau, and that Lin needed psychological testing to make sure the death of her mother hadn’t affected her physically or mentally. He stared at me as if I were an alien from space, announcing
my intention to conquer the entire planet. But he didn’t question me, preoccupied by his own loss.
By the time they realized that Lin was gone, it was too late. They don’t even know where to look for her.
In six months—let the dust settle—I’ll send a message to them that the Bureau has decided Lin needs to be placed with a family that has a Wife already, so that Lin has an appropriate female role model. She’s only seven, but they’ll have to accept the Bureau’s directives, like all good citizens of Green City. They won’t even think to investigate.
I wonder if they’ll miss her. None of them knows whose daughter she is, and three fathers aren’t much better than one, in my experience. Lin doesn’t ask for them, she only cries for her mother, and that too, only at night. I soothe her as best as I can, and tell her stories of what her mother was like when she was her age. Her previous life will eventually fade away, and that will be a great relief to all. I’ll mother her as I mothered her own mother; we women know how to do this without having to be taught.
She’ll grow up in the Panah, and she’ll take over when I die. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but I need a successor and I’m not getting any younger. And this way, young Lin will be spared from having to become anyone’s Wife. I owe her mother that much.
Sabine
The hour I’d turned up on Lin’s doorstep, tired, frightened, and penniless, was the hour my childhood ended. I’d fled my father’s house, terrified that he would call the Agency to chase after me and turn me in. By fleeing, my crime worsened from reluctance to rebellion. And it wasn’t unintentional: a girl couldn’t leave her father’s home and disappear in Green City without a great amount of forethought, manipulation, and deceit.
There were few of us girls left in my Green City neighborhood when I was small. Those of us who did exist—maybe ten or twelve, certainly not more than twenty—weren’t encouraged to befriend one another. They didn’t want us to talk, to question our roles in life, or dream of another life for ourselves. We would, at the very least, school each other in reluctance. Still, we looked up the Bureau records from the safety of our homes and found out all about each other—girls and women in Green City were required to have public profiles that men could peruse before applying for a Wife.
Sometimes we would catch each other’s eyes when we were out with our parents or guardians. We’d walk in the Galleria on hot days, browsing the shops teeming with luxurious clothes from Kolachi, tulipwood furniture made in Chabahar, precious jewelry from Gedrosia. On pleasant days we’d visit the large open-air rainforest parks to see the exotic sloths and porcupines, the rare whales and giant turtles that had been cloned back into existence. Or we’d go to the Corniche, aimlessly wandering amid the food stalls and fountains. We turned our eyes to the blue waters of the Gulf, we pretended to admire the crystalline kites soaring above it in the breeze, excited little boys controlling them with wireless remotes on the ground. We were really searching for each other. That spark of recognition as we stared into each other’s eyes, that furtive smile, the twitch of fingers to wave hello or goodbye, would signal that girl as a friend—and an ally.
We connected with each other in ways that our parents and the Agency didn’t know about. At least, that’s what we always told each other. We couldn’t use our parent-connected devices at home, couldn’t use the Network to find each other, so we resorted to things that had become almost obsolete: scrawled notes dropped in places only girls would search, inside jewelry boxes at certain stores, underneath a pile of dresses, tucked among a row of hairbrushes. The chances of our notes being found by others were low, because there were so few of us—but still, we tried.
We dealt in optimism. On those notes, we wouldn’t write messages, but we left codes for online TalkBots, automated computer-based messaging services, like mailboxes, that hold messages on a server that can’t be traced, messages that are automatically erased if left unresponded to for longer than a few minutes, messages we hoped other girls of our age would find and reply to. We sent messages in bottles to each other, even though we all lived on the same island.
“I live in Sur. I like chocolate and horror stories.”
“I have three brothers. I’m from Green City Central.”
“I live in a village in the Wahiba. My favorite color is lavender.”
“My mother died when I was a little girl.”
We didn’t tell each other our names. Instead, we used nicknames—flowers, like Rose, Jasmine, Honeysuckle; gems, like Ruby or Opal; birds, like Sparrow and Dove. We grew a little community that existed nowhere but in our own heads, arranging bits and bytes into patterns that relayed our thoughts, hopes, and dreams to each other.
We could have been punished for reluctance but it was an irresistible game to see how we could connect to each other, and how much we could get away with. How much freedom we could create for ourselves underneath the stifling, watchful eyes of our parents, and the future that awaited each one of us at the end of our girlhood.
It was one of these girls, unromantically named Chicken, who told me about the Panah. At first I laughed at her for spreading a silly rumor. With a name like Chicken, what else could it have been but the crazed invention of an overexcited girl? But she insisted that her father was a high-up official in the Agency; she’d somehow come across one of his classified bulletins mentioning rumors of an underground community where rebellious women existed outside the system, traitors to Green City and the largesse of its Leaders.
Ignoring my disbelief, Chicken soon told me even more details: that there were virtual tunnels on the Deep Web. The Agency tried to surveil them and shut them down, but they were architected to shift from one anonymous and undiscoverable server to another. With the right codes, Chicken said, she could not only reach out and make contact with those women, but she could tell them about herself and send them her profile, and they might select her to join them. If that happened, then a girl could escape her fate, and disappear like a cloud in the sky. Or a snowdrift that would simply melt away with the warming sun. One hour there, the next, gone. A strange feeling, to think of oneself as “disappeared.”
But then, wasn’t that just what had happened to all those girls and all those women in Green City who should have been alive, but weren’t? The missing girls, aborted out of existence, killed by the Virus, buried alive in marriages they didn’t want? I was one of the lucky ones who had survived the first two, but I didn’t know if I would survive the third.
“Would you ever do it?” I wrote Chicken, when she sent me what she said was the code for a tunnel access point.
“Maybe I would try, ” she wrote back.
“Wouldn’t you be afraid to get caught?”
“I would be more scared if I didn’t try.”
We knew that when we were women, we would be forced into marriage at least twice but more likely three and four times. Chicken herself was a product of one of those multiple marriages, and sadly had no idea—and was never told—which of her mother’s four Husbands was her father. She said all the fathers treated her well, spoiled her, and brought her gifts. But how her mother felt—we never spoke about that. Her silences on the subject said more than her words ever could.
It was a capital crime to hit or abuse a woman: women in Green City were precious resources, to be treasured and protected, looked after and provided for, in return for their bodies given to the cause of repopulation. The fertility drugs took their toll on the women’s health; women started giving birth to triplets and quadruplets because of the high doses, and the high-risk pregnancies wore them out quickly. So they were discouraged from taking up too much activity outside the house, in fresh air. Work was considered beneath them and domestics did a lot of the household chores.
The women I saw moving around the City were always accompanied by two or three of their Husbands. They were dressed well, and their husbands were attentive to them, bringing them prese
nts from the shops in the Galleria. No matter whether a woman was rich or poor, when she became a Wife her status rose, and the Green City government doubled the family allowance each time she gave birth. Her womb was the ticket from poverty straight into the comfort of the middle class for her as well as all her Husbands. And yet, those Wives I saw were bowed down, shrunken and meek, unmoved by the generosity of their Husbands and the state.
The times when I caught their eyes, I saw them fix me with steely looks of recognition, as if they were saying to me, I was once young and carefree like you. Treasure these days, girl, they don’t last.
When I got to the Panah, I was unused to the sight of women’s bodies not swollen and distorted by pregnancy. It seemed wrong, at first, as if something was missing. It took me months to realize that a woman’s stomach wasn’t always convex; that its default state was not always filled with another being.
Over the next several months Chicken sent me secret codes for flags that would let the Panah know I was looking for them. “I’m not interested,” I messaged her angrily more than once. “You use them!”
“You didn’t believe me. Now you have to. Go on, send them a message and see what happens. Then you’ll know I’m telling the truth. Or are you too scared?”
“It’s not a game, okay? If I get caught, you know what would happen to me.”
“You can’t get caught. The flags are randomly generated, they disappear every five minutes. Nobody can catch you if you don’t want to be found.”
“Why don’t you do it then if you’re so smart?”
“Maybe I will. Then we could go to the Panah together.”
I grew nervous then, and terminated the session. It was one thing to talk about it, but another to actually plot a disappearance and an escape. It was more than rebellion; it would be classified as revolt. I wanted no part of it.