These Lifeless Things

by Premee Mohamed

  We’ve moved flats, quietly and without comment. Now we are in some airy, Art Deco monstrosity, room after room of soothing curves, no angles, plush rugs, and (importantly) intact doors. We boarded up the windows that first afternoon. Remember a world where we liked to have large panes of glass at ground level? Shudder to remember. We are far, far from our old neighbourhood, and even though I returned and gave everyone our new address, I fret about my lost neighbours, my lost people. I feel very far away from them, not a half-hour walk. (If only we could use bicycles! But that was a useful lesson to learn, too.)

  At night, we climb to the roof and survey the darkened city with binoculars. V. often bores of this and turns his on the sky, which of course is terrible with binoculars and makes him motion sick.

  Look, he said last night, startled, scrambling to his feet, and I rushed to his side, but saw nothing where he pointed.

  You’re not being pulled again, are you, I complained.

  No! I just... I think I saw the ISS pass, he said, and his face crumpled in the moonlight, all exaggerated pain in silver and black. I took his flashlight from him quickly before he collapsed to the roof and sat motionless, head in hands.

  Oh my God, I said. Oh, God.

  Silence fell as we stared up at the sky again, in vain; clouds had begun to gather, softly covering the stars, a chunk of bright moon, till everything was snowed under its diffuse powdery light.

  I never thought of that, I never looked up. But the astronauts up there, had they gotten a visit from Them as well? Was the whole space station dead, mad, vomiting strange languages? A slow starvation, or a swift death by thirst?

  I’m so sorry, I wanted to tell them, that no one will come get you. I’m so sorry. We do remember you.

  Far below us, snorting and pacing, the statues prowled the streets. Their feet were like nails on chalkboard. Come up here and say that, I wanted to yell.

  I wish we had proper siege equipment for this siege, V. muttered. Pour a big cauldron of boiling oil on them.

  Drop a rock on them, K. said.

  Yes, I said. Like in the books.

  HOW WOULD I catch Darian in the act?

  I’m not even going to talk to the others. Winnie would try to talk me out of it (and succeed). Victor would stay neutral. But I am adamant, quietly, that the story that Eva is telling is worth sharing with the world, and its veracity can only be questioned by reasonable persons. That’s all. That’s all I want to say. That’s all I want to prove. And Darian, I am sure, just as adamantly, does not want me to prove that.

  What a ridiculous thought. We’re all focusing on our own research here.

  Victor says the deer appear quite normal. “Even their droppings,” he says.

  “I’m not helping you collect deer shit, Victor.”

  And now I find I’m missing files. What the hell? I’ve talked to the other three and they say nothing’s out of the ordinary at their stations. “Mice,” Victor said uncertainly. “Check the back for droppings. Or ants.”

  I tried to meet Darian’s eye, but he held his gaze steadily till I dropped mine. “You probably just mis-filed them,” he said brusquely. “It happens.”

  I don’t want him to talk down to me, I want him to admit that he’s been tampering with my research. There isn’t much missing—just photos and a scan of the one badge that I found in the dirt by the hospital, and the inscription on the back, because it occurred to me that most of the badges I’ve read about don’t have an inscription. It’s not in any of the Cyrillic languages; I have the scanner trying to parse what it says. So there’s still some files. But not the high-quality original. I’m ticked off.

  What I want, really, is to catch him in the act. But what act? He’s rarely even near the pod during the day, and at night we’re all there.

  Maybe I’m just being paranoid.

  After all, he’d say, you don’t have any evidence. And if he looked (gulp) he’d find, probably, traces that I’ve been in his files, too. But he wouldn’t give them to me if I asked. And I didn’t delete anything.

  I would not want to tell V. or Eva, by the way, that the ISS crashed about five years after the end of the Setback. No survivors, of course, but no way of determining whether there were remains on board either. Only scraps were recovered from the ocean. Maybe they were spared, there. Maybe they weren’t.

  October 3

  The bloody agents go around stealing guns, emptying the city. Cleansing the city of ammunition till we are toothless. Oh, how I hate Them for that, hate Them. We are reduced to cavemen, to fighting with fists and nails and teeth and clubs, as if we had not even invented the spear. What are They so afraid of? And They are cracking down even more on gatherings; the number grows smaller and smaller, till we can meet and speak only in our handfuls. Any speck of light, any wisp of smoke, any betrayal of habitation is enough for Them to rush in and search.

  The old women say this is like the old days, and I nod, because I too read the history books, and they tell me: No, no Eva. This is not like the books. This is what the books cannot truly tell you. The invasion of privacy, the rush of the warm air into the icy night.

  They are looking for rebellion and sedition, and in other places, other times, the mere act of looking used to create it; but it cannot do so here. They stamp it out, and then if even the wind stirs the remains, They stamp again. You’ve seen what They did to that first revolution, and I think, yes, I did see, I wish I could forget. We’re no good at this revolution thing now, I think. Ours was erased, actually obliterated, so that not even teeth remained.

  What they needed was a cadre of old women, which are still in no short supply in this place; in fact after M. disappeared I began to notice how some people simply soldiered on. The world of old women had not ended; only ours had. They had lived under one dictator and then another and another, and when the system collapsed and strangers came to their houses to tell them they were free, their answers were “Hah!” Universal disdain. Now, strangers come to their houses to ask them if they would like a few cans of sardines, and their answer is “Hah!”

  I think of the first days, eating next to that old woman, how she had honed her own knife to a razor’s edge and taken apart someone’s leg as smoothly and quickly as if she’d been doing it all her life, like deboning a chicken, so that for a moment we others around the fire glanced at one another: Had she been doing it all her life? Good Lord, the police never find most serial killers, do they.

  But she had something we didn’t: transferable skills. The rest of us lost ours in the unconquered years.

  The city shifts, rumbles at night. We leap out of sleep in fits and starts, whimpering like babies startled awake. Sometimes, when we do so, K. is not there. I tell myself: It means nothing. It’s better than thinking that it means everything. That it’s proof of something. I haven’t told the others; I’m not sure they’ve noticed.

  A. tells me, nervously, that he’s heard that They’ve taken one of the old war bunkers near the river as Their new headquarters. That you can see Them sometimes, shapeless and tall as mountains, flickering in and out of it, leaving behind Their stench and the soil writhing with Their leavings. The bunker was some kind of tourist attraction (for the dozen tourists we used to get every summer) but still structurally functional, still solid, still good. Three-foot walls of solid rebar concrete. You’d have to drop a bomb square on it to make a dent. We joke about this city and its flimsy new buildings, but a lot of the older stuff is like that—swoops and blocks of concrete, whole riverbeds of moulded aggregate. You never appreciate the stuff while you’re baking in a bus station made of it, and yet it never rots, warps, weeps like wood; it doesn’t flake or chip like brick; a thrown stone won’t shatter it like glass, but bounce back. We bitch about it, journalists come here and photograph it to mock in coffee-table books, but dammit, it’s useful. You can tell from all the hits this city’s taken. What falls. What stands.

  If you were gathering children from a dead city’s dead parents, wo
uld you put them behind concrete? Or something else?

  October 8

  Our people never threw out much, we hoarded and buried for later, proud of our full pantries, we knew the word ‘cache’ and laughed when the magpies and squirrels did it. Is that what They are doing with the children? Are They storing them for... for something I cannot think of? Or are They waiting till they grow up and become suitable for use as agents?

  The not knowing hurts me, a long unending throb. It is still all I can think of and I am making myself sick with it.

  One good thing today: V. brought food for dinner at the old flat, not a full community dinner, though there would have been enough: just me, P., K., A., B., and T1 and T2, whom I have noticed are absolutely impossible to kill, and also impossible to get behind; we have a game now, which I am sure they participate in as fully as V. and I, where we try to get behind them, but they always have their backs to a wall.

  The food, anyway. A plateful of bleeding, dark red meat. P. and I looked at each other. We looked at K., who showed no surprise. T1 and T2 snickered.

  Oh, come on, said T2, and dug her skinny elbow into V.’s side. I thought we agreed we would stop doing that.

  It’s not what you think! V. said.

  Yes, it’s one thing to eat the already dead, said T1 serenely, and another to get, you know. Fresh provisions. Shame on you, young man.

  It’s not that! V. huffed. It’s venison!

  We all laughed. And I really mean that. Laughed and laughed as if he had told one of those long obscene jokes. And cooked the meat on spits in the fireplace like cavemen, and burned our fingers while we gorged ourselves, absolutely gorged, till our stomachs were distended. With nothing on it, not even salt, it tasted like... the meal you might be given in Heaven, you swoop in on your cloud and they hand you your wings and a plate of steak and potatoes, charred and rare like this, it tasted like pepper and rosemary, brown butter, fried garlic, it tasted like dreams. When the only true seasoning, looked at in the cruel light of daylight, was cooked blood from a fresh corpse.

  (Update later: it was a deer! V. stubbornly showed me the hooves and the startled head, still dripping. They wandered into the park, he said. Three of them. A tree snatched at them and they bolted right into me, and I stabbed one of them. Then I had to chase it down. Thought it would taste gamey. I laughed, As if any of us would notice whether it did, you ridiculous creature. He had a smear of blood under his eye. Funny, I said, pointing at it, it suits you, Nimrod the noble hunter, and he said, Then I’ll keep it there. We agreed not to eat the brain, even though it was probably full of valuable minerals and vitamins and suchlike. Mad Deer Disease, I said.)

  “THERE SHOULD BE a cache or an armoury somewhere in the city,” I tell him. “The agents were confiscating weapons, but I bet they weren’t destroying them.”

  “Could be,” Darian says.

  “Did... have you found anything like that?”

  “Nope.”

  I almost say, pleadingly, ‘Are you sure?’ and then I realize that that’s what he wants me to do: plead. For his help. He’s a bully, but is he anything more than that? I need to find out.

  The city shifts gently, rumbles at night, just as Eva said. We’re used to earthquakes back home, but here they seem more unsettling. And it doesn’t help with the nightmares, either. There are new cracks forming in the buildings from all the seismic activity. Darian’s instruments can tell the difference between these and the ones formed by bombs, statues, looters, and time, which I admit seems a bit like magic to me, which I guess makes him a wizard. But I’d never give him the satisfaction of admitting it.

  The pull, the pull from the stars. What does that mean?

  God, maybe I really should be doing qual instead of quant. Maybe then I would have some answers.

  October 11

  K. told us he’s “got a lead.”

  Oh, really, said V.

  The old seminary on the south side of the city, he said. Do you know it?

  I knew it; V. did not, clearly, but as he had been born and raised here I could see that he would be damned if he admitted it. It had been abandoned after the war, when the priests were rounded up and marched off, and then it had become some government administration building for a while, and then it was declared structurally unsound in the ’nineties and closed off. The city was supposed to rebuild it or prop it up or something, but there always seemed to be something else to do with the money. A practical, modestly adorned concrete building of three or four storeys, sagging dangerously in the middle.

  I met K’s eyes and drew myself up. Who told you this? I said. What did they see?

  An old woman I met, he said. Near the riverfront. She was doing laundry, and fell in, and I pulled her away from those tentacle-things that grow up between the rushes, and we talked. I didn’t tell her I was looking for missing children.

  No? I said.

  He said, No. I told her I was looking for places the sentinels and the statues came in and out of a lot. All day. All night. And she said, oh, like an anthill, the opening of an anthill. The old seminary.

  Let’s go then, I said. Let’s look.

  V. said, No, it’s too close to night. We’ll have to go tomorrow. All of us. Together.

  Of course, said K.

  Under some pretext, he wandered off, humming to himself; V. and I narrowed our eyes at him as he left.

  He’s got a nice voice, said V. after a minute. You’d believe someone who told you things with a voice like that.

  Oh, you noticed that too, I said. I noticed that he knows this city, but he doesn’t love it.

  No? said V.

  I waved an arm at the plaza around us, the thick old buildings tottering but still proud, the church with its breathlessly bent steeple, the bell hanging over the edge like a perched bird, the whole square barely recognizable now, as if it fell from a great height. The gray concrete, the colour of the gray sky, loomed over us like the clouds, angular, the edges soft with impact, chunks littering the ground snowlike at the base of every foundation. You don’t have to love a place just because you’ve lived here a long time, I said. I mean, look at you. You’ve lived here less time than me.

  How do you know that? he said.

  I’m much older than you, I said patiently.

  Not much, he said. I bet.

  How much do you bet?

  A billion American dollars, he said blithely. No, don’t give me that look; I know where I can lay my hands on it. I could be the richest man in the country in half an hour. The continent.

  It’s true, I said.

  Money doesn’t mean much now. It didn’t even mean much when we had the proper markets still going. It was just food for food.

  And I was thinking of Chornobyl, hundreds of kilometers away but in a sense very near, near enough to touch, as if its breath were on the back of my neck; They were there too, I knew. It was even a site of curiosity for Them if not gladness, it was a place They congregated, a place whose poison They might even enjoy; I felt certain, somehow, stabbingly sure, that they had broken the Sarcophagus, taken the Elephant’s Foot into the obscenities of Their mouths. I wondered what V. knew about it. Just what they taught in the history books. But he had been born years after that happened, and I had been born before. It was different.

  It’s not different, he said, months before when I brought it up. Both people born before and after it happened carry the mark in their bones. Because the fallout got everywhere. It’s like a signature. No, a tattoo.

  No, that’s not true, I said. It was only for people who were born before.

  No, it’s everyone, he insisted. The only difference is degree.

  I’m doubtful that that can be true, but what do I know about bones? At any rate, I can’t go to the library and take out a book about it, not right now. Maybe in the winter, if we’re still alive. Isn’t it funny that that was virtually the only thing the world knew about us, when they thought of us at all, and it took the Invasion for the entire wor
ld to start thinking about the same thing all at once. Solidarity at last, I thought, and I laughed drily by myself in the dark.

  October 15

  Happy birthday to me! If I’ve been reckoning the days right, I suppose. I think I am the only person in the city who still adheres to some kind of calendar and it’s probably not even accurate by this point.

  We set off across the city this morning, just as we said, to investigate the seminary. Everything soft, silent, waiting. As if holding its breath. I scanned the ground as we walked, hoping to find... what? I don’t know. Something obvious and clear that no one could miss. A dropped shoe smaller than my palm. A superhero sticker.

  And ahead of us—a shock, an expected shock, our stomachs telling us first that the ground was moving, and only then seeing it erupt, spitting cobbles into the houses near us, a humped thing slavering and gnashing at us, its tongue covered in our good black soil. I say this now, as if I had stood and coolly analyzed its appearance, but in fact we spun and ran so fast that we got no more than a glimpse. It was big, like a bull, but it was fast once it dug itself out of the street, and the street itself shivered under our running feet, and we fell to hands and knees and kept going.

  Of course it was a trap. When we had staggered and sprinted and crawled about fifteen blocks the thing ceased its pursuit, and we had no strength except to crawl into a doorway and count our fingers and toes and teeth. You did this, I almost said to K. You brought us into this. And yourself, to make it look credible. But we were all so shattered and ragged that I resolved to do it in private, and then did not.