by Bina Shah
Soon after that, my father told me he was going to fast-track me into the Perpetuation scheme. I would have to leave school early and become a Wife.
I begged and pleaded with him to reconsider, but he was obdurate. After my mother died, when I was twelve, my father, not rich enough to be assigned a Wife immediately, had applied nevertheless for a chance to bring in a Wife from the divided north. The women from the north were blue-eyed and fair-skinned, with blonde or red hair, different from our dark hair and olive skin. The Levantine Wars in the early twenty-first century had destroyed their countries, but not their beauty. My father was refused by the Bureau for reasons he never told me. He spent the next four years alone, but responsible for me. I assumed there was money to be made in fast-tracking a daughter: hefty Bureau rewards for providing a young woman to the Scheme at the peak of her health and beauty. Or perhaps his reward would be another Wife, an even trade.
I was burning to tell my father I wouldn’t be sold like a slave. But I kept my silence after I’d gotten over the initial shock. Something in me told me to go deep inside myself, to squeeze out every last bit of patience and cleverness that I had, and to rescue myself if my father was not going to help me.
I don’t believe in life after death; it wasn’t my mother’s voice guiding me from beyond the grave, no. I’ve said I’m not a Religious—the three religions that had merged into one still have their followers, but we regard them as eccentrics now that science has become our way of life. As long as the Religious don’t try to proselytize or influence Green City affairs in any way, they’re allowed to practice their strange rituals, believe in their god, a weak, watered-down version of what they’d had before. They’re too insignificant to be counted anyway.
Had I remained with my father, I would have been sent to the Girls’ Markaz, the large hostels outside Green City: a weird mix of finishing school, indoctrination camp, and fairy castle. Everything, or so we heard, is painted pink. After completing their secondary education, boys attend university, while girls go to the Markaz to learn how to become good Wives. The girls are given classes in Household Technology, Health, and Reproductive Sciences. Most girls are thrilled to begin the process of their elevation in society and barely pay attention to the classes, distracted by the idea of their impending first marriages. Others, like me, pretend enthusiasm while secretly feeling nothing but a sense of impending doom.
Two days before I was due to leave for the Markaz, I sent out a secret flag to the Panah across the Deep Web, using the code that Chicken had sent me. And with it, a desperate letter, addressed to whoever ran the Panah:
“My name is Sabine. I’m sixteen, almost seventeen. My mother killed herself when I was only twelve. She didn’t want to be married to anyone but my father. I don’t want to be married to anyone. I don’t want to be Wife to three or four or five men. I’m terrified. I know you don’t know me, but I’m begging you to help me. I will do whatever you tell me to do, if you can help me escape.”
I attached a picture of myself in my school uniform, and sent the message quickly, before I could change my mind.
Then I waited.
The whole time, I couldn’t sit down, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I paced in my room like someone gone mad, and kept checking and checking to see if there was a response. Each time it came up a blank: No Answer. No Answer. No Answer. It felt like a judgment upon me. What if the code had gone obsolete? What if Chicken had just made it all up? What if there was no Panah? I began to think that the waiting was a form of torture devised by the Bureau to drive us mad, a fitting punishment for just daring to think I could escape.
Sixteen hours later, a response chimed out from the Deep Web. I ran to my device and punched in the access code with shaky fingers. The message quickly unfurled itself: it told me where to go, when to go, how to get there.
I told my father I had to go to the Girls’ Markaz early for medical tests. I was about to name all the examinations—fertility checks, uterine and ovarian and breast cancer gene testing, was I sexually innocent or experienced (they could do virginity restoration procedures in half a day), but he didn’t want to hear any details; he just waved me away. In his view, he had already sorted out what to do with me: I was a problem solved, a folded shirt neatly put away in a drawer. But my father had a habit of leaving loose ends untied, stories incomplete, doors unlocked. It was this carelessness that allowed me to escape.
I was instructed by the Panah to take the Metro to the Corniche on Green Day, the yearly celebration of the date the Leaders signed the South West Treaty and created the alliance between Green City and the other territories. I would blend in with the heaving crowds until I got to the Corniche, and I should walk eastward for three kilometers. The setting sun would draw the crowds westward to watch the fireworks.
I would need currency sticks, jewelry, any valuables that I could bring with me in order to open certain gates that under normal circumstances remained closed, grease palms that prided themselves on staying dry. My father had never made me feel that what was his belonged to me. He had always made me feel obligated to him for earning money and supporting me with it. Never mind that the Bureau had rewarded him with all sorts of grants and benefits for raising a healthy girl. He kept all the money, spent the minimum on me, said he was saving “the rest” for “my future.”
Well, I thought, my future is now. And I’m taking what’s rightfully mine. I stole what I could from my father’s wallet, his jacket pockets. I even stole his gold watch, a present from his father.
I climbed onto the Metro, got off at the Corniche, turned east when all the others went west. They didn’t notice me, not even the Officers guarding the Corniche; everyone was too drunk with excitement and patriotism to keep close watch on a girl scurrying along like an insect. I walked and walked, shivering the whole way, feeling the currency and the watch in my pockets to give my nervous fingers something to do. I edged into the parking lot they’d told me to find, the one with the broken sign and the barrier stuck halfway open. A recent thunderstorm must have short-circuited the power, and they hadn’t got around to fixing it yet.
The black car was waiting for me in a corner.
I’d been told not to talk to anyone on my way to the Panah, but I couldn’t help myself. As I climbed into the back, I muttered nervously, “Are you … did they send you … am I doing this right?”
The automated driver responded in a nasal voice: “Wel-come. Please buckle your seat belt. Your safety is important to me.” So: a self-driving car—I’d never sat in one before—but I was disappointed that I wouldn’t have a real hand to hold on my journey into the underworld.
We drove north out of the city for an hour. I tried not to fall asleep, to watch every landmark, to even commit the stars to memory, but when the bright buzzing buildings gave way to silence and sand, I drifted away. Fear had worn me out. I woke up again only when we slowed down, and I saw gates sliding open to let us in a compound with a warehouse at the far end. I figured we must be somewhere on the edge of the Free Trade Zone, to the north of Green City.
When the car door opened automatically, I blurted out, “Where are we? What am I supposed to do now?”
Again, the driver didn’t answer me. The car was clearly preprogrammed; it just waited blankly until I got out; the door slid closed, and it smoothly drove away. Even before the gates shut I began to turn around frantically, looking for a sign, some lights, noise, anything to tell me I wasn’t alone. Tears welled in my eyes and my heart banged in my chest. Like a rabbit, I’d die of fear if someone didn’t—
“Hello, Sabine.”
The voice rang clearly across the compound. I whipped my head up to see where it was coming from. She was a distant shadow, but, as she walked toward me, she pushed her veil off her head and let me look at her. I wiped my tears with the back of my hand while my eyes raked over her face, as if its contours could slake my loneliness. She was older
than me, with high prominent cheekbones, a long nose, and a high forehead; that was all I could make out of her in the gloom.
Her voice was low, matter-of-fact. “So. Now that you’re here, what shall we do with you?”
I let out a sharp gasp. Was it all some horrible mistake? Was it all a trap to capture me and send me to the Agency? Was I under arrest already?
But then she gave me a wry smile, and then she stretched out her arms. I took one careful step to her, and then another. What made me leave Green City was the same thing that made her live in this forsaken place. What else, in the end, truly binds us together, besides the desire for each other to be free?
A few months after my eighteenth birthday, Lin said I was finally ready for an assignation. Over the last year, she’d schooled me in all the security protocols for arrivals and departures. She’d taught me the necessary etiquettes in apparel and hygiene—shower when you get to the Client’s house, never sleep the whole night in a Client’s bed, don’t allow him to take all his clothes off either—and admissible signs of affection: a hug was acceptable, a chaste kiss—lips closed—permissible on rare occasions; a real kiss very risky, and to be avoided.
But more than this, she’d taught me the reason we were able to play the game we did, and survive. Unlike Wives, whose presence in their lives is little more than a bureaucratic arrangement, women of the Panah remind the men of the mothers whose arms they sank into as infants; the sisters who nurtured them as they grew; the girlfriends and companions they sought to impress and please. Men’s physical appetites are huge, but their emotional appetites are without end. No regime can change that.
So instead of selling our bodies, we spend the night with certain men, special men, the most powerful of them, who remember the old days before the Gender Emergency. We give them an experience they themselves destroyed long ago: we let them soothe themselves to sleep in our presence. They want this more than anything else in the world, but we’re the only ones who can give it to them because there are so few of us left: free women, unattached to anyone else, our loyalties belonging to no one but the Panah. One Wife shared by four or five of them isn’t enough, can never be enough. Nor can prostitute bots, with crevices and grooves and hollows to be filled by them, fill the holes in their hearts in return.
We let them believe that possessing one woman, just for a short while, is still possible in Green City, even though that kind of life went extinct the moment the bombs went off in the Final War.
That first assignation, a few minutes before eleven o’clock in the evening, the feeling came over me that I was slowly leaving my body, that my consciousness was slipping out of its confines of flesh and bone.
Lin chose my clothes, a silken robe that she’d taken from her own closet and lent me for the night. She washed and dried my hair herself, and styled it into an easy tumble down my back. She lined my eyes with kohl and smudged it with the tip of her little finger.
“You’re there for companionship, not sex. Don’t trespass the limits and you’ll be fine,” Lin said, inspecting her handiwork, looking pleased with the results. I didn’t recognize myself when I looked at my face in the mirror.
“Companionship, not sex,” I muttered back. “No going near the limits.” But I still couldn’t believe that I’d be safe, that nothing would happen to me, despite all her reassurances. My legs shook, my stomach tightened, my throat grew a lump that refused to budge no matter how hard I swallowed. “How will he stop himself? I don’t think I can do this, Lin.”
“You can. Don’t be frightened. Remember, Sabine. No matter what they say, or how strongly they claim to control us, how weak they say we are, they still need us. Not our bodies, or our sex, but our love and care, our human warmth, our physical presence. These men won’t risk losing what you offer them.”
Lin placed the veil over my head and adjusted it like a frame around my face until everything pleased her. “You look like a painting,” she said. “Beautiful.” But I felt like a human sacrifice.
She rode with me to the Client’s house even though it was against Panah protocol. “Remember, we only survive because of the rules we’ve made, Sabine,” she said, holding my hand. “They suit us more than the Clients, and they don’t like it. But they have to obey them, or else we don’t go to them. Why do you think my Clients are all faithful customers? When they let us in their lives just once, they realize how they’ve been lied to as well. And they hate it. Calling us to them is their rebellion. Going to them is ours.”
Lin assured me that my first Client was known for his integrity, that he was an old patron and had behaved impeccably at every assignation. I still couldn’t shake the terror that he’d break the rules and rape me. And indeed, as he and I climbed into the bed, I spent the first hour with one foot on the floor, in case I needed to flee. But he was as Lin promised: courteous, gentlemanly, kind. He slept peacefully all night while I sat wide awake beside him, holding his hand. It was like being with a grandfather who’d had a wild youth but wanted to cap his life with a sedate, chaste courtship. When I left in the morning, he kissed me on the forehead and sent me back to the Panah.
A thousand nights later, now a consummate professional, it is fully I who regard myself in the mirror before leaving the Panah for a Client’s house. Sometimes I’m seized by sorrow at the position we’re all in, how fragile our inner safeguards against the betrayals that can happen to us in so many ways, internal and external. But as long as Lin’s waiting for me at the end of the night, I can live with the fault lines that run beneath my life.
From the Voice Notes of Ilona Serfati
I haven’t got much time; I’m an old woman now. The elegant kaftans I wear don’t hide my shrinking bones, my withering flesh. It’s been ages since I dyed my hair; I can’t remember the last time I cared whether it looked white or not. I hardly have any eyebrows left, although I paint them on every morning in a nod to my vanity, the only thing about me that’s still young. But I want Lin to stay innocent just a little while longer.
These new rules the Bureau just released today, they’d make me laugh if they weren’t so disturbing. Regulating the minutes a Wife spends with her Husband: How will they measure that? Will they have a man from the Agency in the bedroom, stopwatch in hand?
“With each new baby, a new hope for Green City and South West Asia.” Indeed. Do they think they can regulate us into multiplying? Well, of course they think that. Why else would they send around these ridiculous rules, thought up by the madmen in the Perpetuation Bureau? What human, man or woman, can obey them? More important, which woman can choose to disobey?
Has it really only been fifty years since the nuclear winter? I remember watching the news with my parents, the countries turning black on the satellite maps, from the remains of India and Pakistan westward over the former countries of Afghanistan, Iran—Tehran also hit in the small warhead strikes—and the Gulf Peninsula. Only fifty warheads had been detonated, fifty kilotons each, small in the schemes of military planners. Somehow they miscalculated their effects: five megatons of carbon were released into the air, and the black carbon rain killed millions in those unfortunate lands. Within days, people’s lungs collapsed—we saw them on the bulletins, turning blue and gasping for breath. Children of survivors had severely underdeveloped respiratory systems, and suffocated to death almost as soon as they were born. The atmosphere was choking them to death, in revenge for what they had done to it.
That’s why they constructed the bunkers, like this one, deep underneath the ground. I spent some time underground in a different one, near my childhood home, while we waited for the dust to settle, hoping the fallout wouldn’t come our way. It seemed like a game to me then, something concocted by my parents, like a holiday, or an adventure.
When we emerged like ants out of our subterranean sanctuaries, we learned that huge swathes of those blighted countries had become wastelands, poisoned by radiation, ozone loss, and t
oxic frost. Green City, Gwadar, Chabahar, Kolachi had been spared because our cities hugged the coastline, and our monsoon winds, stronger because of all the disturbance in the oceans after the blasts, blew the nuclear dust east and southward.
The remaining nuclear arsenals were dismantled and the bunkers demolished. In school we learned about new treaties formed, old boundaries between nation-states eliminated. The survivors aligned themselves not in federations, but in abbreviated trading corridors and economic zones, including the Sub-West Asia Region, of which they chose Green City to be the capital. I was hardly ten or twelve, but I still remember the celebrations, the fireworks exploding in the night as if all the stars had been set on fire. We went around waving flags all day, painting our faces the colors of the new territory’s quadricolor: black, red, indigo, and white.
What an achievement, to be the leaders of the new territory. We were told it was a great responsibility, but that we had been blessed, too. Surely we’d have some years of peace and tranquility now, to establish the new systems … Yet hardly months after the declaration, the conflicts of the east spread their tentacles all the way up into Green City, plunging us into chaos and uncertainty all the same, because of the Gender Emergency. Our Leaders took charge by taking drastic measures, establishing the Agency and then the Perpetuation Bureau in quick succession. From a blessed dominion we had turned into a police state, almost overnight.
Nobody dared disobey the new directives that kept Green City under control in the Emergency years. Obedience became a Green City hallmark by the time the Gender Emergency had come about. Already half a generation had been lost to war, terror, and disease; women were now the endangered species. The Perpetuation Bureau acted fast; before they knew what had happened, the remaining women in Green City found themselves put on an eerie pedestal to bring an entire nation back to life. At least that’s how it was presented to us; in reality, refusal to obey the new rules would result in an accusation of reluctance or revolt, a swift trial, and elimination. The Leaders did not mind sacrificing a few women in order to make the rest of us compliant.