by J. P. Smythe
So I look away from him, trying to not make eye contact. That’s when I see her in the corridor, being escorted by guards. They’re leading her down toward Gibson’s office. She’s shackled, her hands tied. Her metal hand doesn’t stop twitching the whole time. She’s been tearing at herself, I can tell—scratch marks down her face, across her scalp. She looks sickly, eyes red, mouth drooping. She looks at me. And she knows me, I can tell. Something in our eyes reflects.
On the road, I’m working with a different partner, but Jonah is here as well. I see him on the tarmac working; the shape of him is so familiar to me. I feel calm—only for a second, but I carry that feeling, try to clutch it to my gut. We’re laying pavement today, putting down the new tarmac. There are guns that blow out foam that we use to fill in the holes we made before. It expands and hardens in seconds to fasten the road back together. After it’s sprayed by one person, the other needs to flatten it straight away, dragging a long stick along the line of the road. And that’s it. Repeat that, hundreds of times. I’m the one with the gun. I spray, and Jonah waves at me. When we take a break, he runs over and asks me how I am, even though we’re not partnered. Nice questions. Nothing about the tests. Just concern, and I can tell he wants to say more, but he doesn’t.
I tell him that I’m fine. I want to say so much more but I’m not sure what, so we keep talking, keep asking and answering. When the break is over, my partner asks him if he wants to swap. Jonah doesn’t hesitate to say yes.
As soon as we’re together, we move down the road a little to work on our own section. On his knees, smoothing out sections of the road, he talks again, but more softly this time. At first it’s hard to hear him through the mask, so I move closer to him.
“I’ve missed you,” he says.
I tell him that I have missed him, too. That I don’t understand why. That I don’t even actually know him.
He says, “I’ve wondered if we knew each other before. Haven’t you wondered?”
I tell him that I don’t know what happened before. We’ve been told it’s not important.
“But maybe this is the truth,” he says. “They say the truth is in front of us. And you’re in front of me.” He stops working and looks up at me, wiping the outside of his faceplate so that I can see his eyes. “It’s as if I remember you. I don’t remember much, but sometimes I read something—a book from the library—and it’s familiar, like I’ve known it before. And that’s how I feel when we talk. Familiar. Don’t you remember anything like that?”
I tell him that I remember something from when I was a child. A voice, a woman.
“Your mother?”
I think so, I say.
“Well, maybe more will come,” he says. “Or maybe it stays in the past, faded out. Maybe everything now is about moving forward.” He doesn’t say that he might see me in that moving, but it’s implied. He looks away but I keep staring in case he looks back.
On our way back to the facility, I put the masks back into their box. It’s our duty to make sure that they’re charged and ready for the next day. If they’re not, we won’t have enough air and it’ll be our fault if something goes wrong. That’s one of the things we’re taught—personal responsibility.
I walk down the hall of the center—past the room where they induct people, the showers, the dining halls, past Gibson’s office. The door is shut, which means he’s in conversation with somebody. The corridor continues on to the wing where our rooms are, past the maintenance rooms, the filters for the air conditioner, the electricity generator—we run our own, off the grid of the mainline, too far from the city to tap into theirs—and the laundry.
I want to see where they were taking Polly.
There’s a room at the end of the corridor sealed with a solid door, heavier than the ones on our rooms. There’s no window panel to see through. I try to push it. It’s locked. I can hear noise from inside, though—murmurs. Polly muttering something, I think. I wonder if she’s in trouble, whether she needs my help.
Something feels right about how I’m standing—how I creep backward until I’m flush with the wall opposite the door and then turn my body so that my shoulder is aimed at the wood, ready for impact. I’ve done this before. I can feel the pain in my shoulder already, like an echo from before—an echo of what I’ll feel when I’ve done this again. I put my foot on the wall, ready to kick off as much of a run at the door as possible, and—
“No,” she says. I can see her, then—the light of her body, her face, at the crack underneath the door. “No.” I kneel down and look at her, at the tiniest corner of her eye that I can see. “Why are you here?”
I ask her if she’s okay.
“They’re making me sleep.”
Making you?
“Something from the holes in the walls. Makes me sleep, I think. Why do they want me to forget? What did I do before?”
I don’t know.
“Why can’t they let me remember? I don’t even care how bad it was. I want to know.”
Me too. She tells me that I should go, that I can’t help her, that she’ll be out soon and she’ll find me when she is. I agree to leave. I put my finger under the door and she does the same. Our fingertips touch. Even that feels familiar, as though I’ve felt her skin before, somehow. Somewhere.
In the minute before I sleep, I look at the vent in my room. This is what Polly was talking about. I don’t want Gibson or the guards to see me doing it, so I have to be careful. I don’t know how they’re watching us. Must be something in the walls, in the ceiling. The light, maybe. So I have to hide what I’m up to. I begin by exercising, pushing against the walls, bending my legs, cracking my arms behind my head. Moving as I do it.
Soon I’m close enough to the vent to see that the air coming from it, for a brief moment, is tainted—as pale a smoke as any I’ve ever seen. Like the steam that sometimes rose from the depths of somewhere I was before I was here—I have a memory of it turning to wisps before it reached the higher floors. Or the mist that came off the top of a stream that I know I once saw—where the water beat itself against its own surface briefly, churning, spraying itself upward.
And then I know I’m too close to it. Tiredness comes like a fist to the face and I’m falling, falling down, wondering if I will die. I hit the ground in my room, which shakes me a little. Awake just enough, I crawl to the bed—wanting to wake up there, knowing that will look more natural. On my way I take a pen from my table, and once in bed I hide myself under the cover. On my forearm I write gas from the vents in case whatever happens while I’m asleep means that I could forget what I’ve found. I don’t want to forget it. I can’t.
I see the note on my arm when I go to the showers, ready for the water from the faucet to clean every bit of dirt off me, ready to be put back all over again once I get out there onto the roads. I see it and don’t even have to read it. Something clicks inside me, the note nudging a brick through the wall in my memory that was blocking it off, allowing the events of the night before to rush back to me.
It must have been a pretty weak wall.
I scrub my arm first to get the ink off, watching the water that comes off my skin blacken with it. Agatha used to say that water was purifying, that it had the effect of making you feel cleaner than you actually were, that that cleanliness was a lie worth telling yourself if it helped you sleep better at night.
I remember that, but I don’t know where it came from. I can’t even remember who Agatha was—only that she was, and we lived somewhere very, very different. I know that they are making us sleep, but not for our health; it’s to change our memories, to enable them to rebuild us. Who we are here is not who we are. And they—Gibson, whoever else runs this place—are taking our selves away from us.
I wash my hair, my face. I remember something about my hair. It used to be short because of lice, because of stuff in their bites that could make you sick. That’s why it was short. Why is it longer now? Was that my choice? When I’m clean, I stand undern
eath the dryer and let it completely buffet my body—pushing my skin, my flesh—forcing the droplets of water off it until I’m totally dry. Get dressed, go to the canteen. Take a seat and sit with people who I know or don’t know, talk about the day. I stay quiet, I eat my food, and I look around. No sign of Jonah. I want to ask him about what he remembers, tell him what happened last night. I want to understand why he’s so familiar to me. We could have grown up together—and I understand now that we wouldn’t know. We look different so I know that we’re not related: our skin color, our hair, everything about us. But we know each other.
Maybe Jonah isn’t his name. Chan, my name—maybe that doesn’t come from who I was before here, either.
Tom comes in. He’s stitched up, healed, and cleaned. He looks like he lost weight, or maybe he’s just sagging from the recovery. He raises his hand to wave to the table, like we’re all waiting for him, all anticipating his return. There’s applause, I don’t see where it starts; then I spy Gibson in the corridor, clapping, grinning. Tom takes a little bow and he winces, something from his injury still stinging. I’m sure I’ve never met him before this time, but I don’t know how I’m so positive of that. There’s something, a niggling feeling, that his presence in my life is new. Doesn’t matter. I feel bad that he was stabbed. I feel bad that Polly is in solitary. Both acts make me feel the same, but one should be worse, I’m sure.
“Tom has made excellent progress.” Gibson steps into the room, half-shouting this to us. “But he won’t be on rotation for a few weeks, okay? So go easy on him. Let him know how pleased you are that he’s back with us. Somebody, give him your seat, would you?” He watches and waits to see who steps away from the table first.
I do. I stand up and I push my chair back, and I smile the biggest smile that I can manage. Gibson nods at me. I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do, because he was injured and he should have a seat. But also because I want Gibson to see that I’m on his side, that I’m making progress.
And he does. He comes to me, he puts his hand on my shoulder, and he says in a quiet voice, “That was very kind of you, Chan.”
I don’t say a word in reply.
Out on the road and I’m working with strangers. Different partners on a different stretch of tarmac. We’re back to digging up the path, and my partner—a smaller boy called Graham who can’t handle picking up the debris and can barely hack up the road to the extent that it needs to be done to actually feel like we’re making any progress—keeps moaning, whining that he’s hot, that he feels sick in his suit. That he can’t breathe properly. He’s trying to take breaths that are too big. I tell him that, tell him that if he breathes softly and gently he won’t feel nearly as bad. The masks purify the air, make it cooler for us. It’s not like breathing normal air; it’s concentrated. You need to relax into it. If he does that it will help him to keep working. That’s what we’re here for. He hasn’t been at this facility for long—less time than me and this is only his first day on the roads; he’s not prepared for what it takes.
It’s only when he starts to cry that I realize a solution to a problem that I had barely begun trying to solve. I need to not fall asleep at night—it seems like that’s when we forget. The gas makes me fall asleep, makes me forget. But with one of the masks on, I won’t be affected by it.
“I want to go back,” Graham sobs. “I’m going to be sick.” And then he is, all over the suit he’s wearing, all over the road. It fizzes as it hits the blistering tarmac, cooking, evaporating away. I tell him that I’ll escort him back and he nods, pleased. He wears his re-breather until we get back to town and then I tell him to take it off—that I’ll clean it and put it back for him. I do, but for the benefit of anybody watching, it looks as though I’m putting back mine. I’m not. Mine stays inside my suit all day, and after I change it’s hidden away underneath my clothes. Then when I have a chance to go back to my room, I drop onto the bed like I’m exhausted and slide it out and under the covers, slipping it beneath my mattress, ready for when it’s time for bed.
I go to bed the way I always do: on my side, bundled up under the covers. But then I slip my hand between the wall and the mattress, lift it just enough to pull out the re-breather, then slide it back to myself, all under the covers. I put it on my mouth, head hidden from whoever might be watching, and breathe. I hear the sound of the vents, the hiss of oncoming sleep, and I stay awake. I checked the volume of air on the mask earlier, so I know there’s four hours’ worth, but I take light breaths, shallow breaths. I stay awake for an hour or two because I don’t want to make any noise or alarm anybody. I want them to think I’m asleep like the rest of them.
Eventually I feel tired—not fake tired, forced on me—just tired.
When I sleep, I dream. I don’t remember the dream when I wake up—the mask empty but still on my face, the covers pulled up and over my head—and I don’t remember my dream when I get dressed, when I shower, when I eat my breakfast. I don’t remember it when I head back outside to the road, returning the re-breather to be charged, taking a new one. I don’t remember it as I work all day, pulling up chunks of the road, work that feels as though it’s designed to exhaust you. I try to breathe through the re-breather as little as possible, taking in real air instead—as warm and stale as it is—to make sure I’ve got enough air in the re-breather to get me through most of the night. I don’t remember it at dinner or when I’m reading or getting ready for bed, or looking for Jonah, but somehow failing to find him, feeling a hole, a desire to see him. Through all that, I don’t remember my dream.
But then I’m lying in bed under the covers with the mask on my face, listening to the slow, soft hiss of air that’s designed to send me to sleep and make me forget myself; finally, I remember my dream.
A woman with hair knotted and long down her back, her face damaged from time and years of fighting, of surviving; her lip destroyed and rebuilt, a scar like a plait of muscle and healed tissue; her strong arms holding me as she tells me that I will be all right, as I watch the dead remains of my mother burning at my feet.
I wake up and it’s dark. I don’t remember waking up in the dark before. Here, we go to sleep when the sun’s setting and wake when it’s rising. I’ve never woken in the dark.
Except I have. Just not in this place. I remember opening my eyes into a different sort of darkness and hearing voices, the sounds of others in the distance, the noises of everything I knew shattering and breaking. There’s a voice here now as well, and for a moment I think that they’ve found me out, discovered my mask, that I’ll be joining Polly in solitary. I’ll be forced back into sleeping, into forgetting.
But it’s not that. It’s Gaia’s voice in my head. Like when she asks us questions in the morning, but less gentle—more driven, more forceful. There’s something different in her tone. “Everything begins anew,” she says. “There is no war, only peace. There is no imprisonment, only freedom. There is no cruelty, only kindness.” Words, over and over, repeated in cycles, and then new phrases dropped in. “There is no conflict, only resolution.” Ways to behave, things that I’ve heard Gibson repeat, tell us himself. “There are no lies, only truth.” There’s a tranquility to Gaia’s words. Then it stops—a pause, as if she’s taking a breath.
Her voice is replaced by a screeching, a noise that’s utterly inhuman. It whines its way into my skull as though it’s a part of me—somehow inside me, coming from me and everything around me. I cover my ears but that does no good. I try not to make a sound, not to scream, because I don’t want them to know I can hear it. I wonder if this happens every night, if we just sleep through it. I don’t know what it’s doing to us, what it’s supposed to be doing. My eyes water and my skin itches; I scratch at my head. I can feel my nails digging into the skin, making trenches, pain the only thing to block out the noise.
And then it’s gone. Gaia’s voice comes back, a soothing balm, a relief. “There is no pain, only resignation,” it says. I breathe deeply into the mask. I d
on’t sleep for the rest of the night. I keep my eyes open until she stops telling me what I should feel and think, who I should be; until I see light and hear birdsong and Gaia casually asks me, as if the night never happened, how I slept.
As I’m walking to breakfast, I see Jonah. He straightens his back when he sees me, opens his eyes wide.
“Chan,” he says. He takes my hands. His palms are warm against mine. I didn’t know how cold my skin was until now. “I tried to find you. They’ve taken me off roads duty—they said it’s for the best.” He pulls me closer so that our heads—our faces—are nearly touching. “I think they’re keeping us apart, and I don’t know why.”
I say that it’s his imagination. I want him to calm down, to feel better. I’m not sure he’s wrong, but I can’t tell him that. I don’t know how he’ll react.
“They put me on comms—said it’ll be good to get me out on the antennas; it might get me a job working the walls when we get put in a city.”
The walls. I can suddenly picture them. I’ve seen them. I know how tall they are and how imposing, how they curve over as they climb to the sky as though they’re cradling the city they enclose like fingers, cupping people into a palm. He keeps talking, telling me about what his new work involves—the wires, the panels. His job is to pull them back, to understand where they run, what makes the radio signals work. He talks about how when it’s all fixed, Pine City will have an easier time sending messages to and from the larger cities.
“I’m not even sure what they know about us up here,” he says. “There are satellites in the sky above us, above the planet, but they’re not connected to us here at the moment. We’re isolated.”
I think about the satellites, drifting somewhere above the clouds. Something clicks. It’s like a light coming on through the fog in my mind. “I asked if they ever send us to the city with people from here, and Gibson said that they try not to—that individuality is easier if you’ve got no baggage. But I want to be sent with you. Is that strange? But I feel like I know—”