Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

  The text drank me in silence. I stared at the text and then back out into the hallway, afraid. What would the keepers think of a student that silenced their history? I tied my robe closed and ran from the niche, back to the main archives. My whole body trembled. I expected one of the overseers to find me, to say the keepers had seen what I’d done and would purge me.

  Yet no one came for me. The other students continued to ignore me. The overseers still let me explore the archives alone.

  I became addicted.

  At the end of each class I went back to the far corners of the archives. I buried myself in texts. I silenced them. They choked on me. Silence the texts, silence the keepers, silence the world. I was an ugly empty text, but I had power over all of them.

  I do not know how many texts I took pleasure in this way. Always I returned to my favorite, and told it to tell me its story in a different way, but it could not tell a story that was not true. So I spilled myself into it, altering the text as I knew I should not - could not. There was no one to stop me.

  Until.

  I withdrew and licked the mouth of the text, and heard:

  “What are you doing?”

  The voice was not the text’s.

  I fell back onto my robe and kicked away from the text. One of the other students stood in the corridor, staring at me with large, dark eyes.

  “I’m…” I said, putting my arms through the sleeves of my robe with limbs that felt clumsy. “I’m touching the texts.”

  “You’re defiling them,” she said. “You’re silencing them. That’s obscene.”

  “No,” I said, and knotted my robe closed. I managed to stand on wobbly legs. “I was just –”

  “I watched you,” she said. “You’re that strange body, that violent body, the one they brought in from the compounds. Anish.”

  She was older than I was, nearly an archivist already. I had seen her before, assisting in the cleaning of texts.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why are you touching the body texts?”

  “Because all of you are so ugly.”

  She laughed. When she laughed she threw back her head, and a snarl of dark black hair came loose from her twisted braid of hair. It curled down along the side of her face, touched the empty, appalling smoothness of her cheek.

  “One doesn’t touch the body of another,” she said. “One only touches texts. Haven’t you been taught that?” She knitted her dark brows so they formed one line above her eyes. “Do you think you understand them better, because you’ve spilled yourself into them?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “They why do you do it?” she said. She stepped up into the niche. She approached the flat, featureless end of the text.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve never done it?”

  “You really are a dumb body, aren’t you?” She unknotted her robe, held it open. Her body was not straight and flat like mine, and she had no external male organs. She looked to me like most of the partial texts I fucked at the compounds; those texts I thought had been altered. She taught me the pronouns I use now.

  “They cut you?” I said.

  She retied the robe. “No. I was born this way, in the birthing centers.”

  “Then you won’t understand,” I said.

  “Show me how you touch them,” she said. I recognized a desire there, in her eyes, her voice, as if she held up a mirror to my own. No other empty text had ever approached and spoken to me.

  I reached for her hand.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  We knelt over the body of the text.

  “Here,” I said, and moved my fingers up to the wire around the head. “Feel how cold the wire is. Imagine the way it feels, to have your flesh try to grow around it.”

  She touched the wires with hesitant fingers. I saw that her hands trembled. Did she have the same desire I had? The same fear and anticipation?

  I moved my palms down across the jagged welts, traced them with my fingers. “They won’t hurt you,” I said.

  She, too, ran her fingers along the tattoos, down across the throat, the shoulders, the chest. “I’m not afraid,” she said.

  But she was afraid of them. I knew it even then.

  “Do they feel anything?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’re not allowed to ask, and I don’t like them to talk.”

  I traced a line of tattoos that brought my fingertips to hers. Our fingers touched. She looked at our hands there, joined atop the text.

  She withdrew her fingers from mine. “I told you not to touch me,” she said. She stood up to walk away.

  “Wait!” I said. “What are you called?”

  “I don’t tell dumb bodies such things,” she said. She jumped out of the niche and into the hallway.

  I did not see her for many days afterward. The overseers had deemed my independent study complete, and they lumped me back into a student group, this time a group watching the dictation sessions. The art of dictation was the most difficult an archivist had to learn. I had already accompanied the archivists on feeding and cleaning sessions, but it was the dictation that most interested me. Here I could perfect bodies with my own hands.

  Sometimes I snuck away from a feeding session early and wandered the lonely corridors, passed row upon row of texts. Sometimes I came to corridors that had been barred off with a thick steel gate. These were the libraries that had already been purged. I had watched the archivists unhook the bodies from the tubing that bound them to the floors of their niches. The archivists carted the bodies out on long wheeled trolleys. Piles of bodies. When I asked why they had to get rid of them I was always given the same answer.

  “The keepers are dying. We must conserve only the most important truth.”

  But who decided what the most important truth was?

  So I walked down the long halls, passing those texts the keepers still retained, and I searched for the student I’d touched over the text. I often dreamed of her. In those days my dreams of her were pleasant ones – out bodies entwined, my mouth on her skin. The dreams sickened me at first. She was ugly, incomplete. What kind of a body had I become?

  Yet my desire for her was so great that I did not eat or sleep or visit the texts for three days while I looked for her. When I found her she was just outside one of the barred corridors, following a train of archivists carting out obsolete texts.

  “Anish,” she said.

  “What are you called?” I said.

  We stared at one another.

  I wanted her name, as if knowing that, I could own her and begin to fill her emptiness.

  “Help me with the cleaning of the texts,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She told my overseer that she wished to work with me, and my overseer agreed without hesitation.

  She strode quickly back down to the archival corridors, so fast on her long legs that I had to struggle to keep up. She did not go down the long individual history corridor where most of the other students clustered. Instead, she took me back to the Unmaking Hall where those exquisite texts of the end of human freedom were still held.

  She stepped up into one of the empty niches. She gazed around at the clean floor, the bare walls. “We took this one out today,” she said.

  I climbed up beside her. “Did you burn it?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “They aren’t going to recopy it?” I said.

  “No. This corridor must be cleaned out by the end of the year. The keeper who oversaw its maintenance is dead.”

  “Dead? What about its own history?”

  “It’s already written on one of the bodies in the individual history corridor. It will survive in that, at least.” She gazed out into the hall, and I saw her look turn inward. “I want you to touch me, Anish, here, where the text would be.”

  I shivered.

  She untied the knot of her robe, let the gray material fall open. “I want you to touch m
e the way you touch the texts.”

  She stepped directly in front of me. She reached out and unknotted my robe. She was so close I felt the heat of her body; her breath on my skin. I gazed at the flesh of her, the smooth, brown, hideously unmarred flesh. She was uglier than I was.

  She placed her palm on my chest. I was trembling.

  “I won’t hurt you,” she said.

  “I know that,” I said.

  She pushed off her robe, and it piled around her ankles.

  I wrapped my arms around her. She pulled our bodies together. For the first time since my arrival in the archives, I found myself pressed against a body that not only responded to mine, but wanted me there against it. This was all I had dreamed of doing during the terrible loneliness of those nights when I wrapped my empty arms around myself, trying to fill them.

  We ended up on the floor that had until that day been housed by a body text, rubbing our bodies together against the same floor it had been displayed upon.

  I tried to fuck every part of her, to join with her as I had the texts, but she pushed me away from her mouth and thighs and forced me down onto my chest, against the hard, slick floor. She pressed her whole body down onto mine, wrapped her strong hands around my throat.

  “I own all the bodies here, Anish. Even you,” she said.

  “Let me fuck you,” I said, and my breath condensed against the shiny floor.

  She laughed at me, released me.

  I struggled up and tried to grab her the way I’d often been grabbed in the compounds, grabbed and entered. But she cried out in pain when I gripped her. She pushed me away with a strength I did not expect.

  “You hurt me!” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and wondered how I had hurt her. This is what we had done in the compounds, all of us. The pain and fear and pleasure all went together.

  “Don’t ever hurt me again,” she said. “If you hurt me again I’ll burn you, Anish, just like the texts.”

  “I won’t hurt you,” I said. I would have promised her anything to be able to touch her.

  She hit me then, across the mouth. I gasped at the shock of it, but I desired her as I desired the beautiful bodies of my youth. She brought pain and pleasure and fear.

  “Touch me, but never hurt me,” she said. “Understand that, dumb body?”

  “What are you called?”

  She turned away from me, jumped down out of the niche, and gazed back up at me with her big, dark eyes.

  “I am Chiva,” she said, “and I am to be the librarian. Your body, all of these bodies, are mine, to do with as I please. Don’t forget that, Anish. We touch only when I want to. You understand that, dumb body?”

  Chiva wanted only unaltered bodies, those ugly texts like me. She liked me best, she said, because I desired the texts, and she found that so revolting that I became desirable to her, she said. We spent our days entwined among texts, and I reveled in the feel of her body against mine. For me, it was enough. My loneliness had ended, and the archives were no longer so cold and empty to me. Chiva told the overseers she was instructing me, and most of the time they did not argue with her. I learned that there were not enough overseers to look after us anymore, and the few that remained were happy to pass my training on to Chiva, even though she had no direct link to a keeper. She was as free as an empty text could be.

  Sometimes she and I simply sat in observance of texts and listened to them narrate their histories. We lay in one another’s arms as the bodies told us a truth that would no longer exist by the year’s end. Chiva often wanted me to help her when the archivists purged another text, but I refused.

  “We just have to unhook them and put them on the cart,” she said, but I left her to it and ran off down the winding corridors to find a quiet space. I did not like to watch them take the texts away.

  I remember once when we lay across the body she had first seen me spill myself into. We both curled up next to it, told it to narrate, but did not listen. Instead, we spoke together in our soft lover’s voices, heads bent forward, bodies touching.

  “We have to burn them down until they’re just ash,” she said.

  “Why do you have to talk of it?” I said. Sometimes I thought she took delight in the burning of the texts.

  “You know what we do with the ash, when we burned it all down? We used to gather it up in big containers, and they shipped it down to the synthetics factories along the coast, and you know what they did with it?”

  “Threw it into the sea?” I said.

  She laughed. “No. They condensed it all down, mixed it with chemicals and wood char and made synthetic logs for the living compounds around the factories.”

  “Synthetic logs?” I said.

  “Yes. I heard stories, not truth, of course, just stories, that the workers out there, the keepers would let them set the logs on fire, and they would dance around them. These naked, empty texts. They would just dance!”

  I remembered the dancers. The orange flames leaping high in the air. I remembered how proud we all were of watching that flame, that one bit of making we were able to perform while the keepers owned our bodies. The smell of the black dust, the way it coated our bodies.

  “Don’t talk about burning things anymore,” I said.

  Our days were not to last, of course. Contentment never does, does it? But then, would we remember it as content if it was not prefaced and ended in darkness?

  “I watched you always, Anish,” my keeper told me the day it died. “I watched you and wanted to be you, and when I could not be you, I wanted to unmake you. What we cannot have, we must destroy. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”

  My overseer approached me one morning after Chiva and I had fought. Chiva said that my silencing of the texts was a form of rebellion, of subversion. She said my body was not mine but hers, to direct as she pleased. I was nothing, she said, just a dumb body, an empty text.

  My overseer waited outside my door.

  “Come with me, Anish,” he said.

  I did not ask where we were going. Perhaps a part of me already expected this.

  The overseer brought me to the center of the labyrinthine archives. I knew I would not be able to find my way back unaided. He palmed open a door and stepped into a domed room. At the center of the room stood a large hexagonal structure. The air was much cooler and drier than in the archives. The overseer walked up to the structure, pressed his hand against it, and a section of the wall opened to admit us. We stepped in.

  We stood inside a perfect hexagon. Lining the walls were row upon row of square gray panels, each no bigger than my palm. All of them had one small light on the lower left hand side. There must have been thousands of them, all up and down the walls, all around me. They stretched upwards some twenty feet above me. Soft light illuminated the room from panels on the ceiling, panels much like the ones in the archives; only the light these ones emitted was less white, more orange. On these thousands and thousands of squares, all of the small indicator lights were dark; all but the ones on one solid bank of squares on my right, a collection of perhaps a dozen yellow lights. I walked over to them.

  “Is this all?” I said.

  My overseer nodded. He went up to the wall, selected a square situated at the far left corner of the roughly circular pattern of lights, and pressed the panel. It clicked open.

  I stared inside.

  And was disappointed. All I saw was a long tube of wire connected to the shiny black shell of the interior. The overseer unwound the wire, asked me to come closer.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Adjusting you,” he said. “Your communication hardware was fitted in the birthing centers, but never used. This keeper wants to be linked to you. I have to attune your hardware to its settings. Be still. It will not hurt.”

  It hurt.

  I tried to pull away from my overseer, but he held me tight. The tubing in my ear sent a wave of pain shooting through my ear canal and behind my eyes, and I
heard a terrible hissing sound that filled my head.

  When my overseer released me, I fell onto floor. I held my head in my hands and gasped.

  “So this is Anish.”

  My overseer had not spoken. I looked up at him, at the tubing he held, and glanced up at the casing of the keeper’s square.

  “Yes, that’s mine,” the voice said. Did the voice have a gender? I do not know. It simply existed. I call my keeper he because my overseer was male. When I think of my keeper I think of the body of the overseer -- his broad shoulders, broad face, narrow nose.

  “What do you want with me?” I asked.

  Laughter. The laughter of keepers is not a laughter you ever want to hear. It echoes in your head, over and again until it feels that your head has been broken.

  “You are so silly, Anish. Such a lovely body, but full of silliness! Don’t you know, haven’t you guessed? Why would I bring an archivist here?”

  “You’re dying. You want me to write your history.”

  “Ah. You see. I knew all along you were not a dumb body. I would not have chosen you otherwise.”

  “But I’m not an archivist yet.”

  “More intelligence. Perception. Such quickness. Why aren’t all bodies so? Ah, yes, because my esteemed brethren found them troublesome.”

  “I can’t help you,” I said. “I don’t know how to do proper dictation.”

  “I have been watching you, Anish. I’ve seen the way you touch the texts. You have a reverence for our truth, don’t you?”

  Did I? I wondered if the keeper could read my thoughts, or if I had to say them out loud. I kept saying them out loud. “It will be good to record your -”

  “Do you want to know the body I’ve chosen for you to dictate upon?” the keeper said.

  My head ached. I already knew.

  “I prefer the more educated bodies,” my keeper said. “Best find one that comprehends truth and history, one that appears dull and animalian because it is concealing its thoughts from me, not blank and dull because it is empty. I experience too much emptiness in my own kind now. Too much death. You see us dying, do you not, Anish? But that will not save you from me. The absence of the future does not negate the past.”

  “Please,” I said. “Choose another text. She’s a good archivist, and she’ll be a better librarian, when she’s finished learning.” If I unmade Chiva she would never be able to touch me again.