Sex and Death

by Sarah Hall

  What seems like a long time passes and Sally doesn’t return to the control centre. I can’t find her on the screens so I get two teas from the snack area, load one up with sugar, then head off to look for her. I check her bunk, to see if she’s gone back to bed, but she’s not there. I finally find her sitting on a bench by the glass viewing screen, staring sadly at the work area. I give her the tea, which has gone cold. She doesn’t seem to mind.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I say.

  She doesn’t reply for a while, but then makes a visible effort to perk herself up and points down to the laboratories below.

  ‘I’m giving the robots names. Listen,’ she says, ‘that one is John, and the one over there that’s listing slightly is Don. And the fellow in the corner is Ron. Which one do you think we should elect leader?’

  I start to point to Don, mostly out of sympathy.

  ‘Think about it,’ she says. I lower my hand. I try to furrow my brow the way she does.

  I think about it for a long time, until it comes to me.

  ‘We should elect Ron,’ I say.

  I glance at her, and for a moment it looks like there’s a smile playing around her lips, but she hides it quickly behind the edge of her cup so that I can’t tell any more.

  ‘Attaboy,’ she says, quietly.

  *

  Some time early the next morning I’m reminded how small the bunks are, and that they are in fact only big enough for one person, when Sally climbs into bed with me.

  ‘Budge up,’ she says. ‘It’s you or the robots.’

  I shuffle as far as I can to one side, but it’s still a tight fit keeping us both under the blanket, and we’re pressed pretty closely together. Her skin holds a faint sweet smell of perfume and sweat. When I work up a bit of courage I move my hand so it’s resting on her bare arm. I marvel at the heat.

  ‘You’re really warm,’ I say.

  But Sally, unusually, doesn’t seem to be in the mood for conversation. She squirms around, and I’m worried she’s going to push me out of the bed, so that I’ll have to go and sleep somewhere else. As I try to keep my place in the bunk I grab hold of something soft and warm, and I realise that a lot of her squirming was so that she could take off her pyjamas. At this point it occurs to me that she should probably still be on her shift, and I’m about to mention it when she leans over to nuzzle her forehead against the side of mine, and then sticks her tongue inside my ear. After that I get so distracted I forget to bring it up.

  *

  When I get up for my shift the next day Sally is sleeping in her own bunk. I stand beside her for a while, wondering if I should say something, but she stays unhelpfully asleep, and eventually I have to go to start my shift.

  Beyond saying hi, Sally ignores me for the next two days. In the morning when she finishes her shift she goes straight to her own bunk. I stay in my blankets for longer than I usually do, hopeful, but all that happens is that my shift starts without me and I begin to feel guilty about it. In her bunk, Sally snores, convincingly.

  Every time I see her in the day and go to talk to her she gives me a grin as though she’s pleased to see me, and then walks away before I get to her. The first time it happens I follow her, thinking that maybe she’s heading back to the bunks, but she just makes a big loop around the control centre and ends up right back where she’d been. As I trot in after her she is already sitting at her monitor looking somehow pleased with herself and I don’t know what to say.

  On the afternoon of the second day, I’m at my desk flicking through the monitors when I see Sally standing in one of the drone-patrolled corridors near the laboratories, waving patiently at the camera, waiting for me to see her. I’m a little surprised to see her there, as that corridor is usually locked, and I thought she was still in bed. I focus the camera on her and zoom in a bit, and she sees the lens move and stops waving. Then she turns her back to me and slowly, carefully, starts to undress.

  She’s down to her underwear when a hazmat-suit-clad robot whirs up behind her and pauses, detecting something in its path. Sally turns around and mouths an exaggerated ‘oh’ to the camera, putting her little finger to her lips. She starts to step out of its way, but at the last minute just bends forward to pick up her clothes, so that the drone gently bumps into her. She slips out of the rest of the clothes, and leans backwards against the robot’s yellow rubber suit, moving her hips against it, closing her eyes and reaching back behind her with one arm. Then she glances at the camera again, gives it a wild and frankly terrifying grin, turns round to face the machine and starts to climb it.

  The drone just stands there and takes it. I don’t think it’s been programmed for this. I have some sympathy. My hands hover over the keyboard, not knowing whether to switch to a different monitor. After a while I take them away. I watch for quite a while. When Sally walks into the control room later, smirking, I don’t know where to look.

  *

  For a couple of days after that everything is all right and we have a good time. We bring our sandwiches from the snack area and eat them together while watching the screens, scattering crumbs over the surfaces. Sally takes her turn making the tea, and remembers not to put too much sugar into mine. When we take our pills I make her laugh by cramming as many as I can into my mouth and then trying to talk to her, pretending to be unaware that my mouth’s full. When things are quiet, we squeeze together in one bunk and watch old movies on the VCR.

  ‘Sally?’ I say one evening, when we’re curled up in blankets. We’re naked and sleepy, a single, glowing heat. Our skins are pressed so closely together I’m no longer sure what is me and what is her. Outside there’s a storm blowing, black and wild. The heather is whipping in the wind, and the wind is howling at the windows.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What do you mean, do?’

  ‘To get sent here, I mean.’

  ‘I did the usual thing. I applied.’

  My mind bends in a way it wasn’t designed for. ‘People apply?’ I say.

  ‘Sure,’ she says. After a few seconds she looks back at me with that frown on her face and says: ‘Wait. What did you do?’

  *

  ‘That’s all wrong,’ she says, shaking her head firmly. ‘They can’t do that.’

  I shrug.

  ‘It’s bonded labour,’ she says. ‘That’s practically slavery.’

  ‘It’s kind of my own fault,’ I say.

  ‘It’s completely out of order.’

  ‘It’s not, really. You don’t have to be so critical.’

  ‘Oh, I’m supercritical,’ she says, quickly. ‘You have to be.’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘Why?’

  ‘You need supercriticality,’ she says, extra slowly, ‘to achieve fission.’

  I gape at her. Her forehead crinkles.

  ‘Did you, like, study any science at all?’ she asks.

  ‘It wasn’t my best subject,’ I say, defensively.

  *

  When I wake the next morning, something feels wrong. I lie in my bunk for a while, hoping that Sally will come in to wake me and everything will be okay, but Sally doesn’t come. The unease coalesces as I doze, almost forming into nightmare, but just as I’m on its threshold something pulls me away, and I lie with my eyes open, feeling terrible. Eventually I become aware of a distant beeping sound. I’m not sure how long it’s been sounding. I get up, get dressed and trace the beeping to the control room. There’s a message from Barbara on my computer, marked urgent. The beeping stops when I click on it.

  Good morning, Todd, it says. I hope you’re enjoying the good weather. Please reacquaint yourself with the contents of the manual ‘In Case of Nuclear Excursion’.

  I think about this for a moment. I remember the manual. Barbara pointed it out when I started work here, though I never read it, just put it away in a drawer somewhere. I always assumed it was a prop. I always thought it was a joke related to the holidays I don’t take.

  The
manual is where I left it. It begins: In case of critical excursion, do not under any circumstances attempt to leave the facility. Ensure all bulkheads are firmly closed, then proceed to your station. What the manual omits to mention is how I’m supposed to know if there has been a critical excursion. Presumably something will light up on the control panel, but it would be nice to be clear. I go to check, but there are no new lights, and I decide that reading the manual is probably just a precautionary measure. The first thing to do is to find Sally.

  I look everywhere twice before I’m sure that Sally has locked herself in the reactor again. The thought of it makes me uncomfortable, and oddly sad, and that sensation runs in circles around my chest until I realise that I’m starting to panic. It’s the exact same feeling I used to get when I had all that debt and I’d wake in a sweat with something twisting inside of me. I count back the days since Sally arrived, and get to twenty-nine. It seems an appallingly low number. How did everything go so wrong so quickly?

  I make some tea to calm myself down. I drink it while it’s still hot and it burns my tongue, but the warmth feels good in my throat. Then I fiddle with a panel in one of the cupboards until it comes off in my hand. From a hook behind it I take the emergency key, and then I head over to the reactor chamber, my heart listing slightly in my chest.

  The reactor chamber is empty. It’s round and white and bright, with no sign of Sally. There’s just the white-tiled interior, interrupted only by a single black tile in the centre of the floor. I go over to take a look.

  The single black tile turns out to be a white tile that has been removed and placed neatly on the tile next to it. The black tile is an opening in the floor. Just below the rim is the top of a ladder. A breeze, slight and sleepily warm, breathes from it. My foot nudges against something on the ground and I bend down to find, neatly camouflaged, an empty white mug. It’s cold to the touch. I look behind me, back to the door. I look at the mug. Then I take a few deep breaths and I lean over and look down the hole.

  *

  My trainers ring softly on the metal ladder, then pad down onto an invisible floor. It’s dark at the bottom, the black filtered by a faint red glow. It takes my eyes a while to adjust, and when they do I can just about make out that I’m standing in a small alcove, with the ladder behind me and the outline of a door on the wall in front of me. My foot nudges against something again, and on the floor I find Sally’s basketball trainers, the laces pulled loose, their cloth tongues lolling. Beside them, in a neat row, are her Geiger counter, a torch, and what turns out to be a small, cloth-wrapped case with tools inside. I don’t recognise the tools, but it seems plausible that they might just be the kind – slender, pointy and precise – that would fit inside locks.

  I stand and look at the door, which avoids my gaze. I run my hands along it at the level where the handle should be, but the surface is smooth. I give it a push, but the door continues to ignore me, and I stop pushing.

  After a while I realise that the red light warming the area is coming from a small LED in the ceiling. I look up at it and try to make out if it belongs to a camera. If it does, it wouldn’t be one of mine, or else I’d recognise the place I was standing in. My brain eventually remembers I have Sally’s torch, and with it I can see that there is indeed a concealed lens there. I stare at it a moment, stupidly, and it stares back. It doesn’t blink. I wonder if the light is good enough for whoever is watching to see through my eyes, and along the nerves into my core. Deep inside, my heart is beginning a slow decay.

  I look away. I look back. Then I give the camera a wave and a thumbs-up, collect up Sally’s things and climb back out. I put everything away as tidily as I can in her locker, though I still need to lean against the door to get it shut. I avoid looking at the other lockers. There are a lot of them, it’s true, but if we carry on at this rate we’re going to need some more.

  Back in the control room I begin to write an incident report to send to Barbara. I don’t feel very good about it, and have to stop three times to make myself some tea, but eventually I get it done. Then I file a final work evaluation on Sally, giving her the highest marks I can. The numbers may get queried by Personnel, but I’m a bit past that point. After that I don’t feel very well at all, and have to lie down for a while.

  When I get back to my desk the chat box is blinking in the corner of my screen. Barbara is waiting for me to log in.

  Hi, Todd. Sorry Sally didn’t work out. I know you were getting on well.

  That’s okay.

  Well, we feel bad about it. Like we let you down a bit, recruitmentwise.

  That’s okay.

  You’ll be all right on your own again for a while?

  I’ll be all right.

  Chin up, she types. The weather should be picking up soon.

  Barbara logs off, and I close the chat box. There’s a warning light flashing on the control panel. Something has got stuck on the barbed wire again, and I’ll have to check to see if it’s a sheep, or a protester, and then find out if someone’s free to go and cut them loose.

  BRUNHILDA IN LOVE

  Taiye Selasi

  Halfway through the spa detox Brunhilda takes a lover.

  This comes as a shock to all of us, including Brunhilda herself.

  To state the plainly obvious: Brunhilda is not attractive. Realistically (if not statistically) speaking, few Brunhildas are. The name is too heavy, too thick in the waist. A sign of things to come. The things that came were: childhood teasing, weak-willed parents, excellent grades, a pitying husband, an underage mistress, a quick and expected divorce. On the bright side the weak-willed will often excel in the dullest of corporate contexts and Brunhilda’s parents willed her all they’d saved before they died.

  Quiet people. Suburban Germans. Thrifty, self-denying. Every time they saved some cash they bought a small apartment. One in Florence, two in Shoreditch, four in former East Berlin, together worth the kind of sum that lightens psychic loads. Even without the life insurance payout she’d have quit her job and booked the three-month detox at Espace Henri Chenot. But Brunhilda’s parents, bless their hearts, died instantly in Munich when a tower crane collapsed: a painless, profitable way to go.

  Hundreds injured, two struck dead.

  Apology accepted.

  In life they’d left her to fend for herself. In death they made amends.

  At forty Brunhilda is single, childless, rich and overweight. For five and a half of their six years of marriage, Dirk was chubby too. Then, at his company’s annual retreat, he met a personal trainer. Heiko is this trainer’s name. A veritable Adonis. Sprayed gold skin and dyed gold hair and gleaming muscles carved from marble, born and raised in Elmau, smelling still of fresh-chopped wood. That year, due to a global recession, the corporate retreat was not on Kos but rather at the luxe hotel, ten minutes from Dirk’s office, where Heiko taught a morning dance-cum-fitness class called ‘Rise and Shake!’ adapted from his disco days to suit his clientele. Who’s to say why Heiko took an instant shine to shaken Dirk and offered him free access to the hotel gym on weekdays? Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, faithfully, Dirk lifted weights, returning home aglow with joy, a gleaming suckling pig.

  Brunhilda thought, and delighted to think, that Dirk was in the closet; that her rapidly shrinking husband had become his trainer’s lover. It aroused her intensely to picture this, Dirk’s pale and fleshy buttocks offered up like heaping mounds of clotted cream on fork-split scones. She’d always preferred (and still prefers) gay male porn to other genres. She particularly likes the nomenclature: Bear, Twink, Daddy, Verbal, Dominant. Such meticulous categorisation. As if, devoting his life to research, a taxonomist had classified all sexual fantasies, pinning them down like butterflies.

  ‘Verbal Daddy’ is Brunhilda’s favourite. In truth, she doesn’t know why. She never felt anything close to lust either for or from her actual father, a kind but physically distant man who rarely hugged or kissed her. The only time she ever felt his fingers on her b
ody was the time he placed her sixteenth birthday gift around her neck.

  ‘Almost . . .’ he’d murmured, standing behind her struggling to do the necklace up. (Her father always murmured, as if shamed by making noise.) Her mother was waiting in front of them beaming and holding a camera, obscuring her face, while recently blown-out candles wept their wax tears on the cake. As Brunhilda had no friends at school apart from one young teacher, Mr Engel, who taught classics and wore tweed suits every day, the party was small: just the dinner at home for her and her parents and Fido their cat. She’d invited Mr Engel but, surprisingly, he’d declined.

  Like her, Mr Engel had no friends. His colleagues found him awkward. Nervously huddled and painfully shy; it pained them to engage him. Brunhilda often ate lunch in his classroom, the two of them chewing and reading in silence. She liked the soft sound of their turning their pages, waves lapping shore or else breeze stroking leaves. ‘But a male teacher’s attending a female student’s sweet sixteen’, he’d said, ‘might raise some awkward questions.’ Brunhilda said she understood. There was the awkward question of why said student had no better options than said teacher: skinny, fidgety, a sad old man at thirty years old. (When, years later, she learned that Mr Engel, a raging paedophile, had been sent to prison she wasn’t stunned but palpably offended. On all those sunless afternoons he’d never paused to lower Ovid, lift his gaze and leer from where he sat, across the room. She had, and often, glancing up to see if he was glancing too. No. Just nibbling crackers, snowing crumbs on his tweed coat.)

  Bittersweet sixteen. Fido sleeping. Mother beaming. Candles weeping. A gift of atypic extravagance from her penny-pinching parents. Brunhilda opened the velvet box and shyly drew the necklace up: a white gold chain from which hung, catching light, a diamond heart. Her mother wanted a Polaroid. Her father could not close the clasp. Brunhilda touched her chin to her chest as if to give him room. Between curtains of hair she closed her eyes and prayed that he would fumble on, that the magical tingling at the back of her neck would carry on for hours. He succeeded in seconds then reached around to nudge the pendant into place, his fingertips brushing the broad expanse above her heavy breasts. ‘Alles gut,’ he murmured as he drew his fumbling fingers back.