This Census-Taker

by China Miéville

  “You take apart all the buildings,” I said. “Take out all the bricks and push them down and set fire to them.”

  “Bricks don’t burn.”

  “Hot enough like in the sun they do. Right in the sun. You make them ashes.” Bats, I saw bats again, but these ones I imagined in the bricks’ ashes were as big as houses and not flying but walking in their horrid way on the tips of their wings and their claws, and the ash was baked solid so none of it gusted up at their touch. That was where they might live, the bats. Batland between the town and the hill, the country!

  “Or…or pull all the rest down instead,” I said. “The middle of the town.”

  “Undome the domes?” she said.

  There was only one dome in the bridgetown. Maybe there were more in the coastal city and that was what she spoke of.

  Do it there too, then. Take the domes down and unwind the railways until the city was all gone. It wouldn’t have to be a bad mess, you wouldn’t have to explode the buildings in the center; you could take away one brick, then the next, then the next. The grass would come back then. And the ring of ruin beyond would change again, change back, that very bit already gone into decay would unwind its decline. That’s how we could help. In a few months that would be the city, a circle of revived tower blocks around a huge field of weeds.

  “That’s enough,” said my mother sharply.

  I blinked and came back to myself on the dark slope, realized I’d been speaking, was quiet all the way home.

  —

  When Samma’s group didn’t come for me, I would accompany my mother through the town at no pace, hesitating under shops’ sun-bleached awnings, acquiring pieces without any logic I could discern. Sometimes, to my anguish, she’d enter fenced-off middens, heaps of junk and rubbish at the corners of streets, and pick through them. She wasn’t the only person to do so, but it wore on me as if she were.

  There were higher and steeper roads where some houses were changed on the inside, rooms and floors removed, even, so the shell of what had been a cottage was now a church of some low faith, or a showcase for huge industrial goods. It was on the door of one such that my mother knocked one day, to be let in by a harried young woman in a filthy apron chewing flavored bark. She let us into a dim acrid corridor raucous with throaty sounds. The windows were blackwashed and there was a low wire mesh in each doorway. Every room had been cleared of furniture and thronged with fowl, gathered by age and sex, tiny chicks chirruping pitifully in what had been a bedroom, larger birds jostling in the kitchen. I coughed in air dense with the dust of feathers. I heard the geese upstairs.

  The woman spat toward an under-stairs cubby and two cockerels lurched over to investigate.

  “Come on then,” she said. Then she said something in another language, but my mother immediately shook her head, and the woman went back to our own. “What do you want?”

  My mother bought eggs and a bird for eating. The young woman wrung its neck.

  We went to a small stinking house on the run-down valley-side street. Its door was unlocked; my mother pointed for me to stay outside but when I heard her ascend the stairs I followed her inside, into a different reek from that of the chickens.

  The house was a dump. People would enter to leave their trash and pick through that of others. Drifts of rubbish received me coldly, layers of moldering remains, grudging hosts silent but for the tiny shifts of rot. I held my breath and picked through to the window, to join spectating flies and the drifts of their dead in staring out into the gap.

  There were eyes on me too, from within a mound of refuse. The sight of them made me gulp a mouthful of that awful smell.

  Glass circles in a hinge-jawed wooden head, nestled in the garbage. Years of decay had eroded its rudimentary features and drawn it an intricate and terrible new mildew face, from which I ran.

  On a vivid day as summer hurried in I came down the path from the garbage hole and I saw my father walking up toward me.

  I stopped. Sometimes if you stand very still and close your eyes you see rocks behind your eyelids. Or you realize aghast that the shapes of things are other than you’d understood.

  “I didn’t go in,” I said. “You didn’t say I couldn’t go to the cave just not in. I only went to the edge.”

  I rarely disobeyed my parents. When either of them discovered me in any transgression I would shake, or I would freeze as still as a wax boy. If my father thought I’d been bad he might make me stand outside, was all, even in the rain. My mother might look at me and mutter with dislike and maybe knock with her knuckles across the back of my hand as if at a door: the painless sanction filled me with shame. Still, when it came time for punishment I’d always be paralyzed as if they would kill me. I didn’t move as my father approached, and I could hear only the wind around my face.

  He didn’t even furrow his brow. He didn’t glance at me. I watched how he trudged, not tired. I looked at the hand in which he’d carried the broken dog that last time and I saw that what was in it now, what I’d thought a sack of trash, was a lolling mountain bird.

  The hill was always busy with these flightless scavengers we called scunners. A scunnerbird is tough and stringy but there’s much worse eating. Shoot one, you have two or three days of stew. My father had no gun. Scunners are skittish and fast despite their fatness and I couldn’t think how my father had enticed this one to him. I knew that, by whatever means he’d killed it, it was not to eat. I wanted to cry; I stood still.

  He had it by the neck. Its brown body was bigger than a baby’s. Its shovel head lolled and its nasty hook beak twitched open and closed to snap faintly with each of my father’s steps. The bird’s broad feet dangled on the ground and bounced on stones as if it were trying to claw itself incompetently to a stop.

  My father passed me. He looked briefly at me as you might at a stump or a broken machine or anything that’s specific only in that it’s in your way, to walk around it as my father did me.

  I knew he was taking the dead bird to the rubbish hole, that he’d throw it up so it would curve as it had to and descend; I knew that day my father was feeding only the darkness.

  —

  The boy went to the low-down part of the attic where he drew, and drew a lizard in a bottle between the stems of the wallpaper’s design. He came back the next day and, beside it, he drew a cat in another bottle and a fox in a third. He drew a fish in a bottle, a crow in a bottle, a mountain lion in a big bottle. He’d never seen a mountain lion but he heard them sometimes and knew he was to be afraid of them. He imagined that deep throaty growl contained by glass and the thought fascinated him. He drew corks tight in the bottles’ necks.

  He cramped his drawings together to keep them a secret, and he saw that without intending it he’d drawn his bottles as if neatly lined up in some strange cupboard. So he drew a shelf beneath them, and while daylight reached them and cast across them the shadow of his own drawing hand, he put down the lines of a house around the bottles, to contain them, and he drew another house to either side. He could have filled the whole of the room, covered every wall of it in the smudged lines of rendered streets, that they could be filled in turn with women and men and children in the same lines as their city, some like small women wearing masks, some people squat as if they lived underwater. Someone there would be the keeper of those bottles.

  He wanted his pictures to be secret so he kept that city and itemized all its citizens in his head.

  I looked out. My mother was digging, and she came into view as she bent to extract unwanted roots. The wind pulled her clothes and tugged scraps of paper from her pocket. She balled something up in her fist and put it into the ground and covered it carefully and very gently with soil.

  Soon I’d be too big to do as I liked to, to hunker and perch in the little window’s alcove. I swung my knees up and braced them with my back curved and my head down, so I was bundled up on the sill as if the house itself held me like a baby. I sat like that on the ledge because I still could. />
  From there I’d look out and down across the edge of the garden and the incline of our hill, the rough up and down of the tree line, the sky. Sometimes people called it a hill, sometimes a mountain. It moved unceasingly. Branches spread, trees twisted behind trees in all the wind. Even the stone moved.

  I sat up then because I thought I saw a new green, outlines of tough vegetation, neither needles nor fibrous leaves but spines on bunched and distinct knotty skin, misplaced amid the gray and those dusty greens I knew, swaying, pushing purposefully above the hillside growth at the edge of my sight as if deliberately positioned to be glimpsed against a sky the color of the hill rocks. A quickly moving visitation.

  What I saw was gone almost instantly into some dip in the uneven ground.

  I came out of the window and ran down the attic stairs and out and up the footpath. I ran as fast as I could to the copse at which I’d been staring. I pushed straight into its empty center to stand alone amid clustering midges. I listened for a long quiet moment, and wondered whether the gap I saw ahead of me was where the bushes and low trees had been pushed apart by someone big, or whether they were even still vibrating from that passage. The shale there didn’t show marks well but there were scuffs between the roots, and I decided they were great footprints. And did the ground shake? As if someone had turned and was retracing their steps toward me?

  Then the wind got up very suddenly and hard enough to make me gasp, so it was all I could hear, and all the undergrowth was moving. Nothing came back but those gusts. Turning, I saw two large unfamiliar flowers in the dust, bright petals right for a stronger sun, broken off in a clutch of spines.

  I took them and returned. I re-entered the house. Hesitantly calling for my mother, I ascended the stairs, to stop, abruptly silent, by her empty room. I pushed the door, as I was not allowed to, opened it onto her things. Her bed was unmade. The few books with which she did not teach me to read were on her chair. Drawers and clothes and small pieces of trash were laid neatly on the shelf of a window that looked onto the hill from an angle that was new to me.

  I could smell her. I wanted to stay and look at everything but I was afraid of her finding me there, and I wanted to know what it was that had passed.

  My mother finished patting earth down as I approached her with my hands behind my back and she straightened and put something back in her pocket and waited.

  “I saw something,” I said. “A tree was walking.”

  She didn’t speak for a while. She stood as tall as she could and looked past me toward where I had been. Not knowing why, I kept the flowers I had picked up in my closed hand.

  “Maybe you only thought you saw something,” she said, and paused. I was fascinated by her hesitation, the uncharacteristic way her mouth opened and closed more than once before she continued. “Maybe,” she said, it sounded as if to herself as much as to me, “it was someone from your father’s city.”

  She watched the horizon, her brows low.

  “Come to see him?” I said.

  She looked at me and though her attention brought with it an anxiety as it often did I could see she was not appraising me but a situation. She contemplated saying more, craned her neck again. At last she shook her head.

  “You only thought you saw something,” she said. Her calm had relief in it and disappointment, so I too was both sorry and glad that no one was coming, to provoke her into finishing whatever she had started to tell. My mother bent again and returned to her task and I knew she wouldn’t say anything more.

  When she went in I planted the petals and their thorns where she’d been digging.

  Two other times as I played in the dustblown slopes I saw my father heading to the dump-hole with the body of something he’d beaten to death. Both times I stayed very still to watch him. Sometimes in my mind when I think back to that he has my mother’s face, or he wears a face that I can’t bring clear, that goes between his and hers. But I’m sure it was my father. Once he had a small rockrabbit; once an animal so ruined I couldn’t identify it.

  Months passed between those times. If he did for other things, he did it when I didn’t see him.

  I had never seen my father kill a person, which I’m sure is what I saw, before the time I ran, but I think that was at least the third he had.

  A young man came to our house. He was tall and fervent and young and well dressed, one of the richer of the downhillers, I supposed. He was in a terrible temper when I opened the door.

  “Where’s the key-maker?” he said, jabbing his fingers at me. “Come on, where’s the fucking key-maker?”

  My father came and banished me so I sat outside on the cold ground below his window and tried to listen to what passed between them. It was on its way to summer again and the earth around the house was garish with weeds, though the blooms I’d found and planted never grew.

  I could hear the client telling my father his needs. He spoke in such a low quick voice I couldn’t make much out. My father seemed to be trying to calm him. It didn’t work and his own voice began to grow louder.

  “Make the fucking key,” the young man said. That I heard.

  My father made a brief response.

  “You want a silver flower?” the young man said. “Want me to give you a flower, councilman? Oh, I need it all! I need it all!”

  There was nothing for some minutes then a grating sound and a regular methodical thudding began. I was still, hunched there, too afraid to rise, hearing the beat, feeling percussions through the house.

  I don’t know what name I’d give to the feeling I had—it was mostly fear, of course, but it had in it something of certainty too, the excitement of being not surprised, seeing myself there as if I was my own watcher, of discerning ineluctability.

  The rhythm went on. I was blinking and quaking and I looked up into a sky now warm and heavy with clouds, and I saw my mother knelt with her skirt rucked to her knees, her feet parted in runnels of earth between growing marrows. Scabs of dirt dropped from her hands.

  I looked at her and she up at me and we listened.

  When my mother gave a sort of shudder and held out her hand I found out I was crying. She didn’t sweep me up or whisper to me but she rose and stumbled urgently toward me through the ankle-traps of her vegetables and reached for me and I came to her with my own arms wide and she took both my hands in one of hers and walk-dragged me as fast as she could out of sight of the house, out of earshot of the impacts.

  “Now,” she muttered. “This way.” She kept making little noises. “You, wait,” she said, seemingly to herself. “Quickly now.”

  She took me down the slope. We slid through the hill dust to a place only minutes away where I’d not been before, a fact that seemed impossible, but even quivering as I was I looked very carefully and really I don’t think I’d ever seen that configuration of trunks and branches, that crack in the huge rock slab below us out of which burst an explosion of whiskered creepers.

  A rock and forest animal, something quick and furred, bundled past close enough to show teeth. My mother leaned back on a tree. She still held my hands at the end of her stiff arm, so I could go no further from nor get any closer to her.

  “It’s like in the water,” I said finally. I pointed.

  She looked along my finger and back at me.

  “Like in the tank,” I said.

  I was pointing at those reaching vines hooked and angled like insect legs or like the limbs of sea animals.

  After a moment she said, “Oh yes. The starfish. Yes, I suppose it is a bit.”

  I shook my hands free. I climbed the ledges onto the rock to sit so my head was at the same level as hers.

  “The water in that tank was salty,” she said. “Like the sea is. You remember I told you what the sea is?”

  She’d never told me. It had been in a book she’d shown me, though. I nodded. I was shy to look at her.

  “There are fish under the sea bigger than our house,” she said. She narrowed her eyes into the wind. �
�There might be starfish that big,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  “Are there people?” I said.

  “I can’t say. There are people on the other side of the sea, so maybe there are under it too.” She rubbed her hands together and whispered into them, “Imagine what they must be like. Imagine.”

  “What’s a silver flower?” I said. “What’s it for?”

  “It isn’t for anything,” she said. “You want a silver flower, do you?” She said it nastily but saw me wrap my arms around myself and sighed and in a quieter voice said, “It’s something you give someone for running away.”

  I climbed down and reached into the breach out of which those vines boiled and pulled out a tiny speckled egg. Within the crack a shadowed nest remained, and still within that were the remains of other shells, broken from within. The one I’d taken was dead and whole.

  “When will we go back?” I said.

  “In two hours,” my mother said.

  I climbed down the steep side of the rock. It took me several attempts, but I held those rooted creepers and clambered down. I looked up at last from a shelf of moss and my mother was leaning over and watching me. She smiled at me and waved.

  When the clouds got darker I put down the egg and came back up and we climbed the footpaths and returned to the house. As we approached I started to cry again and did so more when we saw the door was open, but my father stayed in his workroom, and he stayed quiet. My mother put me to bed and he didn’t emerge.

  —

  Perhaps half a year after that, my mother came running up the stairs where I explored the great blank space of the upper floor. She half-led half-pushed me out of the house, took me on another of those quick purposeful walks in directions that I’d never before taken.

  That time I didn’t see my father. I didn’t find him particularly subdued or melancholy when we returned. But I suspect from my mother’s rush that this was another occasion when he killed a person.