Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

  The keeper started laughing again.

  “Chiva?” he said. “You are such a silly body, Anish! You thought I wanted Chiva? Oh no, oh no.” Laughter, laughter, my head throbbing. “Haven’t you guessed, Anish? I want you to unmake yourself.”

  The world the keepers created had been falling apart throughout my life, but I had not noticed it. I did not think forward, only back. That was the nature of my existence. Now, though, none of my days were spent in causal silent observance, sprawling lazily in the present while listening to the truth of the past. Now I was told stories, stories I knew could not be truth, stories I could not silence.

  The stories my keeper told me did not match what all the texts narrated and illustrated.

  “Exiled us?” my keeper said. “Oh, pity no, that’s the old religious pull, you understand? The persecuted few? Your people consumed it well the first few centuries. Oh, no, we went out on our own, thought we were wonderfully special, thought we could leave our dead bodies behind and live in the synthetic ones forever. Ha! All fools. The last of the synthetic bodies gave out half a millennia after we crashed here. All gone. No more bodies. At least we had enough time to indoctrinate and implant you.”

  The voice in my head had made me nervous. I could not halt his stream of stories. I could not ask him to be quiet, so I stole quietly back to my little room and lay down. I avoided Chiva. My head always hurt.

  “When will the sessions begin?” I asked.

  “Oh, soon enough, little Anish,” he said. A long pause. Then, “Let us see Chiva.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I could make you.”

  “I thought you were here to unmake me.”

  “Ah! I thought we’d bred the cleverness out of you. Perhaps another day, then.”

  But in the morning my overseer waited for me again.

  “It’s time for the sessions to begin,” he said.

  I tried to protest, but my keeper grumbled, “Oh, it’s not me, Anish. It’s those ancient fools back there, spouting off about mortality. They’re so old they’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a body that’s yours. Well then, since it’s already scheduled…”

  My overseer let me into the dictation room. He shut the door. I gazed at the apparatus on the walls – the needles, lasers, the skin grafting equipment, the row upon row of shiny surgical tools, glass containers of narcotics.

  “I can’t do this alone,” I said.

  “Oh, I think you can,” my keeper said. “I’ll not ruin you so terribly as the others. I’d like you to function as I would, if I had such a delightful young body. Now sit on that stool and listen. You’re not just here to tell my stories. The truth, as you call it, the stories I liked best, were the ones I had when I owned my own body. You’ve never seen mountains, have you? Lakes? River stones?”

  I had never heard the terms before.

  “I’m going to have your body illustrate the real truth about our kind,” my keeper said, “I want you to be a literal text. Not one of those useless globs. I want you to be able to walk and spit and fuck. After all, what is the purpose of a body but to exert one’s power over another?”

  I wondered if he spoke of my power or his own.

  I spent our first three sessions learning to draw symbols. My keeper was able to direct me through the motions; he had a limited power over my body - enough so he could assist when I misplaced a stroke of the stylus.

  Each night, he asked after Chiva.

  “Don’t you miss her terribly?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, and thought, but you do enough talking for all of us.

  The fourth session, I began to write. I can think of no other body but mine when I remember this session, this memory of writing. The way the precise tool inscribed my already numbed flesh in a long series of puckered marks that reddened or blackened as I pressed the button that allowed the ink to flow into the wounds.

  Afterward, I always closed my eyes. When I closed my eyes I heard the words of the woman who called herself my mother. I felt her clutch at me with her claws. “You are already our history, yes?”

  No, I thought. I am nothing. I am an empty canvas being filled. I won’t be ugly any more.

  By the fifth session the markings covered my throat and shoulders. This will not be so terrible, I thought, watching the curious red tattooed welts forming on my flesh.

  I do not remember how long my keeper and I spent in the dictation room.

  One morning I awoke in my own room and my door remained locked until well past midmorning. Another overseer arrived to unlock the door.

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  “His keeper died,” the overseer said. And nothing more.

  With the death of that keeper came yet another purging of the texts. Piles of bodies were carted out through the corridors. I watched them with a dizzy sense of horror.

  After that, I slept in the dictation room.

  Finally , the day came when I stepped out of our dictation session, the one that I know now was our last, and Chiva stood in wait for me. When she saw me, her eyes widened.

  “It’s true,” she said.

  “It must be,” I said.

  “You don’t look like you,” she said.

  The markings now covered my torso all the way down my right leg and up to the thigh on my left, but I had only seen the black and red marks section by section, reflected back at me from a small round magnification mirror that let me apply the tattoos with accuracy.

  “It isn’t so terrible,” I said, but as I watched her eyes move over me I felt a stab of fear. “I’m still the same,” I said. “I’m not going to be in one of those niches. I’m not -”

  “You’re just another used text,” Chiva said. “You’ve lost your history and given it to a keeper. You’re just another dead keeper’s writing.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “You don’t know anything about it. I’m beautiful.”

  “You’re so stupid, Anish. Have you looked at yourself? You said you were your mother’s text, our text. You’re just another one of theirs now. Go look at yourself,” she said. She turned and walked away from me, trailing after a trolley piled up with bodies.

  I heard my keeper’s laughter.

  “What did you do?” I said. I walked back into the dictation room, pushed the small mirror back into the wall, opened up the panel where the full-length mirror was. I had been too afraid to look, before.

  The body that stared back at me was never mine. I had always known it was not mine. I belonged to the keepers from birth, but it was my mother’s body I spilled from, my mother’s history I had always been. But no longer.

  “What did you make me write?” I said. “What do these symbols mean?” Another question I had not asked during dictation, a question I feared the answer to. They were unlike any marks on the other texts.

  “Words,” my keeper said. “Not pictures of things, but symbols representing the sounds of the actual spoken words, words so old I thought I’d forgotten how to form them.”

  “What do they say?”

  My keeper was silent.

  “What do they say?”

  “They negate all truth,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I wrote words that told an untrue history. One different from all those others.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not? Are you a fool? There is no truth, Anish. Only stories. Only things we wished had happened. Words unmade the skin that formed so smooth and perfect in your mother’s body. And now we will finish negating the existence of the texts and the existence of all your bodies. We will finish unmaking history.”

  “You can’t tell lies on a body,” I said. “You can’t –”

  “And what does Chiva’s empty body attest to, Anish? What truth does she tell? She is empty and free and when the last of us dies she’ll burn you along with the rest of them, to be free of you.”

  “Shut up!” I said, and I slammed the mirror panel shut
and ran out of the dictation room. I saw again the vision of my burning kin. “You can’t negate their bodies!” I said, and I ran down through the corridors, my keeper’s laughter ringing in my head.

  Other students and archivists stared at me as I passed. I ran and ran, looking for the Hall of Unmaking. I knew the route so well, that place where Chiva and I had touched truth. Down this corridor, left here, another left, and –

  A steel gate blocked my path. I stopped. I stared at it.

  “She likes to kill them, you know,” my keeper said. “She likes to kill them because she’s afraid of them.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You think that word saves you? It changes nothing. You think I can say no and go back to being an organic body? You think I can say, `no’ and cease to be a swimming mass of synthetic fluid and artificial synapses?” my keeper said. “That word cannot unmake what I became. You want truth, Anish? We envy your bodies. Your beautiful smooth bodies. We covet them. We have built not an archive but a shrine, not a world of absolute truth but a world that records the stories we wish were ours. We use flesh to fantasize about that which we can never be. You bodies are so stupid. You lie about this place talking of how ugly you are, running around in this artificial labyrinth of our making, your unmaking. You have not seen the sun in years now, Anish. You lounge about here and squander your lives, and when we’re dead you’ll still lie about here as your bodies waste away. You’ll exist only to preserve the history of our death.”

  “You’re lying,” I said. I pressed my palms to the cold steel of the gate. “These are just stories.”

  “But now I’ve had you write them on your body, little Anish. Now they’re truth, aren’t they?”

  I turned away from the gate and began to run again through the halls. How long had we spent in dictation? How much had things changed? I saw more gates. Corridors ended abruptly. Those corridors still open had empty niches. What had happened to all the texts?

  “How many keepers are left?” I said. My legs hurt. My throat was raw. “How many have died?”

  “There are five of us left. We die in groups, you know. Just as we were made,” my keeper said.

  I stopped and stood still in the hall, breathing deep, gazing at the monstrous construction that enclosed us all. When the keepers died, would we be trapped in here? Trapped inside this hollow casing to die as the keepers died?

  No. Where did Chiva take the texts to be burned? Not inside. There had to be a way out. I remembered the way it felt to dance in the dust. I remembered sun on my skin. How had I forgotten it?

  I found Chiva with three archivists and another trolley heaped up with bodies. When she saw me she looked away, but I grabbed her by the shoulder. The other archivists stared at us. I did not care.

  “When you burn them, where do you take them?”

  “What?”

  “Where do you burn them?”

  “Outside, of course,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? You never wanted to talk about it before. You ignored –”

  “Show me,” I said.

  “We’re going there now.”

  We ascended through a long narrow hall, entered a cylindrical lift, and stepped out onto ground covered in grayish ash.

  I looked up and saw a blue sky striated in white clouds. The sun was so bright it hurt my eyes, and for a moment I was blinded. I looked back down to the yard. It was a broad, circular pit. Surrounded by a wall fifty feet high.

  I felt dizzy. I collapsed into the grayish dust.

  The archivists piled up the bodies, wet them down with reddish fluid, opened up a bin of flares by the doorway. The texts burned without making a sound. I watched the bodies flame, bubble, melt and char.

  The archivists did not even wait for this batch of bodies to finish burning before they took the trolley back to the lift.

  “Chiva?” they called, but Chiva stood in front of me. The bodies belched smoke behind her.

  The lift closed.

  “What’s wrong, Anish?” Chiva said.

  I pressed my hands against my face, covered my eyes. “I’m unmade,” I said. “There is no truth.”

  She knelt beside me. “Don’t you know?” she said. “There never was any truth. We’re just like these burned things.”

  I reached out to her, tried to hold her body against mine. I had missed her so much. Having her close meant I was not alone, trapped within these walls with a dying keeper.

  I held her by the wrist. My grip was firm.

  She stared at me. She stared down at my hand on her wrist. “Anish?”

  I pulled her robe loose, pushed it off. She fell back, grabbed at the robe, smacked me across the face. “Don’t touch me. You’re a violent body!”

  I grabbed her by the shoulders, pressed her down into the gray ash. The dust puffed up around her, fell across her skin. She tried to get up. I held her. I put a hand to her throat, just as she had done to me, so long ago. She was strong, but I had put myself on top of her. I pressed my body down upon her, pushed my robe out of the way, bit her smooth flesh. Pleasure and fear and pain, they were all the same to me - inseparable.

  I had wanted so long to be within her, to feel again as I did in the pens, my body slick with sweat and dust, surrounded in moist flesh.

  I forced myself inside her. She screamed at me.

  Someone was laughing in my head, laughing, laughing.

  I wanted to spill into her, and more. I wanted her to tell me truth. I wanted to unmake her as I had been unmade, to write on her as I had been written upon. I could not tell my keeper no when he told me to write his lies. I would not allow her to be empty anymore, empty and free as I once was.

  Her body was tight, all her muscles clenched, and her cries filled my head even more than my keeper’s laughter. My sweat smeared her flesh. Dust and sweat, and the sun overhead.

  I thought of the dancers, of our fire, of the texts I fucked, the texts the keepers burned while I did nothing. I did nothing but watch, nothing but witness a truth no one would ever record. I wanted to silence Chiva as I had been silenced. But Chiva was not like me.

  I released everything into her body: all the anger, the loneliness, the pain, the pleasure, the fear, the unmaking. I cried out because for one moment, I too felt empty. And beautiful.

  An empty text. Belonging to no one.

  Then Chiva punched me in the throat, pulled away, and kneed me in the groin. I screamed at her and fell over. She balled up her fists and struck my face, pummeled my head. I curled up into a ball in the dust and tried to shield myself against her. Then the beating stopped. I heard her walk away from me.

  I looked up. I saw her walking awkwardly to the bin of flares. She took one out and stumbled back toward me. I saw the wetness on her face, the raised bite marks on the flesh of her throat, her breasts. Along the inside of her thigh, there, a long dribble of reddish fluid oozed downward; blood and semen, and her own body’s wetness.

  Now she would burn me.

  I lay huddled in the dust, watching her approach.

  She stood over me, the flare in her hand. She had only to ignite it.

  “You love them, don’t you?” she said.

  I did not know what she meant. “Chiva, I—”

  “You think you can control the world by hurting me? I hate you. But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You can’t do the rest. They unmade you. They ruined you, but you can’t hurt them can you? You think you unmade me? You don’t know anything about unmaking. I’ll show you how to unmake the world.”

  She did not put on her robe. She went back to the bin, collected more flares. I stared at her.

  “What’s she doing?” my keeper asked, very softly.

  I had almost forgotten him, this thing I could not silence.

  Chiva walked to the lift with a heap of flares in her arms. The lift closed.

  And I knew what she was going to do.

  I ran to the lift. I descended back into the archives.

  I could already sm
ell the burning bodies. A part of me hoped I was only still smelling the burning flesh from the yard. But then I saw the smoke. I heard the archivists screaming. I stared to run. I passed niches where the bodies inside were already afire. I watched the history of Chiva’s destruction of the past.

  And then I saw her, heading back toward me, smoke billowing in her wake, her arms empty.

  “I need more flares,” she said, and she strode past me on her long legs, and her eyes were dark, her face grim.

  “Chiva, please…” I did not dare touch her.

  She walked away from me. The archivists ran madly through the corridors. I saw some of them huddled up by the niches, weeping.

  “Do something,” I told my keeper.

  “What? This is your creation, Anish, not mine.”

  I could do nothing. The keepers were dying. The past was burning.

  I could do nothing but help Chiva with its destruction.

  I went back out to the burning yard. Chiva was there, piling flares into her robe. She glanced up at me. Her face was dark, expressionless. She tossed me a flare. I took three more and a container of flammable fluid.

  We descended together.

  We burned the world.

  My mother was dead. Her history undone. The bodies were lies. My body was a lie. The world was a lie. I had hurt the one thing I knew to be real, to be true.

  We parted in the individual history corridor. I began to search for something else. She continued to burn.

  “Why are you looking for us?” my keeper said.

  “Because it was always you and your kind I wanted to silence. Just as you silenced my kin.”

  “We’ll die soon enough. Let us die.”

  “You didn’t let us die,” I said. “You used us. Destroyed us. Unmade us.”

  “No, Anish. You did that yourself.”

  I found the door. How I found it, I do not know, not to this day. I had walked so long and so far that I could no longer smell the smoke or hear the screaming. I pressed my hand against the door, tried to open it. It did not open.