by Bina Shah
Lin wondered if Sabine really wanted to give up her sleepless nights. She wore her insomnia like penitence; guilt over her mother’s suicide lingered like poison in her blood. Lin still remembered the impassioned plea that Sabine had sent, years before, her fear and terror at being trapped in a system that had made her mother kill herself. Sabine’s teenaged face in the photo, beautiful but painfully thin, the school uniform barely hiding the comeliness of her adolescent body, evoked a ferocious pang in Lin’s heart. She, who had never known her own mother, felt as though she were looking at her own ghost. She’d decided instantly to take in the motherless girl.
Sabine’s sorrow should have faded away over the years she’d spent in the Panah, and that hadn’t happened. You wouldn’t survive if you couldn’t accept where you were, if you kept clinging to the past like a life jacket. You had to somehow override the memories, otherwise they’d seep into your dreams and torture you in your sleep.
Maybe the drug would even help Sabine to overcome the remnants of her sorrowful past. “What harm could it possibly do?” Lin said to herself, out loud.
“Please buckle your seatbelt. Your safety is important to me,” replied the car.
Lin chuckled, then closed her eyes and let Green City shrink away as the Panah loomed larger and larger. The night lost its immediacy, becoming the memory of an oasis she had once visited in the middle of a long journey. She even let go of her fear of the future: her power over it did not lie in her hands; there was only the quickly fading near past and the approaching present, time running on the wheels of the car gliding beneath her through Green City’s quickening streets.
The car approached the abandoned warehouse. Reuben ensured that its location never appeared on any of the Green City maps—by what kind of technology, she didn’t know. Lin waited until the car had driven away and counted sixty seconds after the warehouse door slid shut behind her. Then she went to the old-fashioned elevator and put her thumb onto the button. A slight vibration informed her that her thumbprint had been accepted. The door slid open, revealing a long black well. The elevator car had been torn out of the shaft long ago; only a small steel pipe snaked along its back wall. It was to this that Lin clung and let herself down, inch by slow inch. Her feet found the small indentations that had been etched into the wall with painstaking deliberation by Fairuza Dastani. The escape shaft had served thirty years of Panah women. There had been other entrances, once upon a time, but they’d been blocked up to prevent infiltration or defection. This shaft was the only remaining way into and out of the Panah.
At the bottom of the shaft, in near-total darkness, she let go of the pipe and dropped the last two feet down to the ground, her veil billowing around her like a parachute. Only after she’d pressed her eyes into the iris scanner and the door opened to let her in did she dare remove the veil, roll it into a ball, and stuff it into her pocket.
Everyone else was asleep, or about to return from their assignations. Soon it would be time for Sabine’s pickup. Lin padded to the kitchen to prepare the mixture of cardamom, honey, turmeric, fennel, black pepper, and cloves. She opened the vial Reuben had given her and slipped one tiny pill into the tea, then stirred it well. She’d send the flask out with the pickup car, then go to her room and wait until Sabine came home. They might share an e-spliff before going to bed, giggling like schoolgirls over silly things, sweet relief from the heaviness of their existence.
She walked along the hallway, but miscalculated a step, stumbled and dropped the flask. As she bent down to retrieve it, her fingers touched another scrap of something on the floor. She picked up the flask and the other object, holding it up in the dim light. A memory slip, small enough to hide under your fingernail. She didn’t use them much, but maybe it was one that had gone astray.
She took it back to her room and placed it under the infrared, throwing its pages onto the display in magnification. She started at a random page in the middle. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the words written by hand instead of typed text. She drew back in surprise, then bent in again for a closer look. If books were antiques, then handwriting was downright obsolete—voice-to-device and even thought-to-device had replaced pens and pencils long ago. But someone had filled the memory slip with pages and pages of painstaking notes in this cramped and urgent script. First, a list:
THE DANGERS
Virus
Pregnancy (how would we deal with childbirth if …
something went wrong?)
No doctors (dying is better than being discovered)
Agency will punish us for Revolt
Then, beneath it:
I know Lin’s got a secret. Maybe she’s got a man but she doesn’t want the rest of us to have one because she’s jealous of us for being younger, prettier.
None of the others are brave enough to defy her, but I did, and now I know. And I’m glad. He was so good to me. So kind and gentle. And when it was over, he kept touching my nose pin and telling me how beautiful it made me look. Like a Gedrosian princess.
As the fragments started to create an unwelcome picture, Lin had to hold on to the table to steady herself. She skipped ahead a few pages, steeled herself to read again:
Lin hates my nose pin. She thinks it makes me look cheap, like a prostitute. She makes me take it off outside the Panah, but I put it back on when I’m with a Client. Just because I can.
The erratic words, the jerky sentences almost hissed off the page. Lin was stunned by the repetition of her name, written darker and underlined to emphasize the writer’s resentment. She read the passages over and over again, until the tightening in her chest subsided into a dull, constricting ache, making it hard to breathe.
There was only one woman in the Panah who wore a nose pin. And Lin, who had never been afraid of her, now found herself stunned at what she had discovered.
Rupa
Ma told me once that there are two types of envy. The first is when someone has something that you want, and you wish you could have it, too. The second is when they have something you want, and you wish they didn’t have it. But there is a third type of envy, a black feeling in your heart when you have something, and you actively work to take it away from anyone else who might get it. That’s the kind of envy Lin has for us. She makes sure the happiness she knows is something we can never have, because she keeps it from us deliberately.
The others exist in a perpetual state of gratitude towards Lin for saving us from the fate of being Wives. They’ve swallowed all the restrictions and the secrecy without question. The rules have become a part of their bodies, clinging as leeches do to their flesh.
What if I had wanted to live on the outside, like a normal woman? What if I wanted to be a Wife, to bear a Husband a child? My choice was robbed from me. Once I set foot inside the Panah, I became a criminal. I could never go back. They are not my rules. I never made them, I never agreed to them. I never got to say what I wanted.
The Panah holds hardly half a dozen of us, and there are as many as forty or fifty Clients who want us, so we often end up on assignations with the same men. Of course Sabine is Joseph’s favorite, but when she isn’t available, he asks for me instead.
I know how to be grateful when I go to Joseph’s house and enjoy his generosity. Sabine is wrong about Joseph; where she sees a tiresome, greedy man, I see a man I can admire, strong and confident, powerful and accomplished. He’s good to me, as he would be to anyone who understands and respects his place in the world. His wealth and power are secondary to his character, which Sabine isn’t wise enough to see.
I truly cannot understand Sabine’s reluctance to be in Joseph’s company. He is thoughtful, kind, and never holds back on treating the woman with him to all the fine things in his life: the best food, silk sheets, and most of all, the best wine. Instead of treating me like a child in a woman’s body, he confides in me as an adult would confide in another adult, tells me about
the difficulties and stresses of his job, his troubles with other supervisors at the Bureau, the late nights he spends attending receptions and dinners for visiting dignitaries. And I in turn give him advice, like offering Sabine his best wine so that she will soften toward him.
When he asks me what I do when I am not with him, I am reluctant to tell him about my mundane days in the Panah—the boredom, the quibbles and the pettiness of the other girls. That we spend so much time together underground, it gets on our nerves and we take it out on each other. Silly fights erupting over who has eaten whose special food, or who has used up all the hot water for a bath. And everyone trying to curry Lin’s favor, so that she will send them outside on more assignations. When else do we get the chance to be above ground, in the company of such sophisticated men?
I get on well with Diyah, for the most part. She and I play cards in my room, an old-fashioned game that Ma taught me, which she’d learned from her mother. I’d once described it to Diyah and a few days later she presented me with a pack of playing cards that she’d made with her own hands, cutting out paper and drawing pictures and writing numbers on all fifty-two of them. I nearly cried when she gave them to me. We spent many peaceful evenings laughing together and playing cards, just the two of us. She’d often beat me, but she was too good-natured to crow or gloat.
Diyah can tell the future, too, or so she says, from the leaves in a teacup.
“Show me, show me!” I beg her. “Tell me what you can see for me.” I grab her hands and kiss them over and over again. “Please, Diyah, sweet Diyah, pretty Diyah …”
“Not now.” She laughs, pulling her hands away. “I can only do it when I’m in the mood.”
“That’s what Joseph says,” I tell her with a straight face. “But he’s never in the mood.” I wink at Diyah and she glances back at me with an odd look in her eyes.
“Rupa …”
“Don’t worry.” I look down at my cards so that Diyah can’t see my face. “I’m safer with Joseph than I would be with my own family.”
Sabine
It’s the third night in this month that Joseph’s called me. Usually he isn’t so greedy, but lately he can’t seem to get enough of me. I enter his apartment, take off my veil, drop it on the chair near the door. The last few visits, I’ve been bringing my flask of Lin’s tea with me, sipping it on the way here instead of saving it for the ride home. I know it’s just a habit, but it’s been helping me to feel more relaxed when I come to see Joseph. I must remember to ask Lin to make more for me when I get back to the Panah.
He locks the door, then greets me with his usual kiss on the cheek, and an embrace that lasts a little longer than it should. I pull back but let my hips press against his. Even with a Client I don’t like, there’s a protocol to be observed, a dance with steps that need to be followed in the correct order to end up in just the right place.
I do make fun of Joseph with Lin, but it isn’t unpleasant being with him. Living in the Panah among women provides one kind of safety, but spending time with a man who’ll risk his own stature and life to have you in his home is a different feeling altogether. Gratifying. Satisfying. Pleasurable in a perverse way. The leaders set the tone of morality for the rest of the citizens; they call their city Green, but the only color they’ve chosen for its women is white, a purity that only exists on paper. In truth, the color of Green City women is red: red for the blood that they bleed every month when they’ve failed in their duty to add another child to their tallies; red for the blood on which those precious fetuses are fed and nurtured for nine months; red for the blood that’s spilled when they’re born.
Whenever I go to see Joseph, he prepares a gourmet meal for me that I’m usually reluctant to eat. He tries to feed me a bite of this or a morsel of that. He sees himself as a bon vivant; feeding me well is just another way of impressing himself. I take a few sips from his wine glass when he offers, but I usually refuse my own.
Tonight, he insists on pouring out a glass of something fizzy for me. “Sabine, you have to try this. It’s black champagne, from Venezuela. In South America.”
“I know where Venezuela is,” I say and he laughs at my bristly response. I take the glass from him, secretly admiring the way the crystal is cut into so many flawless facets, each one reflecting a small rainbow of light from the chandelier overhead.
Joseph watches my face carefully, to see if I’m annoyed. Men like Joseph don’t like uncertainty; it makes them act in strange ways. Maybe treating a young woman as if she is a pupil eager to be schooled in the ways of the world is merely second nature to him. A kind of chivalry that appeals to his vanity.
I take one delicate sip from the glass. The beauty of the liquid just barely touches my tongue before exploding into full flavor.
I put down the glass quickly. “What is this?”
The lines around his eyes crease into starbursts as he smiles. “I told you. Black champagne. It has minerals extracted from volcanic rock that are infused into the soil the grapes are grown in. The grapes take on the color and the sheen of the minerals; that’s why it has that oily look. See?”
He holds up his own glass to the light and I see it then; the black giving way to a mercury silver that changes tone as he tilts his wrist this way and that. Then he laughs softly, the sound grating against my ears.
“What?”
“I know you didn’t actually drink it.”
“I did!”
The lines deepen around his eyes, and for a moment he is no longer an urbane, powerful sophisticate, but almost like a simple fisherman, face weathered by sea and sun. “Your face. You look like an innocent little girl. No, no, Sabine. Don’t take it the wrong way. It’s lovely. I haven’t seen anyone look like that in a long time.”
Joseph’s use of the word innocent makes me cringe. Maybe he means naïve, or unworldly, or even foolish. I would call it cautious. But maybe I should be less uptight. Why shouldn’t I enjoy a glass of rare champagne, poured out for me in an expensive goblet by a man as sophisticated as Joseph?
He dresses immaculately, beautifully, for our nights together: a jacket and tie, which he later exchanges for a silken dressing gown and a pair of silk pajamas. After dinner, he likes to put on old music, smoke cigars, drink brandy while I watch him fuss with the bottles and the music player. He doesn’t need me to talk to him; he just wants me to admire him being masculine and masterful. These most powerful men, Lin tells us, have hard lives, difficult decisions to make, and without women in their lives, they grow bitter, old, and dissatisfied with themselves and their place in Green City’s upper echelons. “Even a man who’s achieved everything, fulfilled every ambition, won’t really be happy, feel truly at ease with himself without a woman.”
I take another sip and glance back at Joseph, realizing that he can be surprisingly kind when he isn’t trying to put his hands in places they don’t belong. I know he’s fond of me, with an affection that borders on possessiveness, something that Lin observes might be adoration but not necessarily love. Sometimes his attentions are lustful, at others, avuncular. We talk together and he takes comfort from my presence. Maybe this is enough for him. Maybe he’s too tired to want more.
Joseph’s own Wife died from the Virus, but because he was older, they didn’t give him a new Wife: they save that privilege for the younger men, the ones who can father healthy children. That’s why most of our Clients are the older men of Green City, like Joseph.
I don’t like the idea of being the sandpaper to smooth a man’s rough edges, but it’s better than being an entire nation’s incubator.
When the smoldering end of his cigar fades out, and the last song winds down to its stuttering conclusion, Joseph moves around the room, turning out lights and putting away his shoes, his brandy snifter, his books and files. This sudden burst of activity calms his nerves, I can tell. All his worldliness, his knowledge about politics and history and fine wine
s can’t disguise his fear that he might be rejected by a young woman because he’s growing older and less virile by the year.
As I watch him shift around the room in a semblance of busy-ness, I stretch my arms and legs. The room is conditioned to a comfortable temperature, and a pleasant scent of smoky incense rises in the air. My anger from the last time I was here, when Joseph almost ruined my morning departure protocol, has faded with time. I pick up the wine glass and drain it, and smile at him brightly. “See? All gone.”
“Very good,” murmurs Joseph. The tension between us breathes, expanding and contracting. Our eyes lock, and something flickers in the light, making his gray irises look full, like clouds filled with heavy rain. My head is already feeling distant from my body: the drink’s having an effect, faster than I’d imagined. I feel a tightening somewhere between my stomach and my thighs, and I have to tense the muscles of my hips to keep myself from sinking down.
I stare at Joseph with new eyes: he’s a little blurry and I have to strain to focus. I’m not like Rupa, always imagining that a Client’s falling in love with me. But all of a sudden it’s as if nerves and channels that I didn’t even know existed in me are starting to open and bloom. I can sense his heat, his need. He looks back at me with eyes shaped like question marks, curious and all-seeing. My mouth opens and I breathe hard, then lick my lips because they’ve become so dry.
Finally, I break Joseph’s gaze, walk to the window, and look out at the skyline, all perpendicular lines: the sharp ruler-straightness of roads and horizon, crossed by the verticals of dozens of skyscrapers arranged in groups as if pushed together by a giant toddler putting all his toys into order, reaching up to the clouds. Cold, stark shapes are silhouetted against the sky: rooftops shaped like triangles, like diamonds, thousands of lights twinkling from the windows, blotting out the stars. An architectural rainbow: the indigo of the ground and buildings, the violet of the deepening night, greens and blues of darkened glass, then the oranges and reds of illuminated signs, and atop the light, a fading yellow canopy reflecting cumulus and desert dust.