by Irene Gallo
“Please take care of yourself,” the man tells me, on the way out. “If you don’t, the world will just eat you up.” And he lifts the caterpillar in salute.
I leave work early. I desperately don’t want to go home, where the maggots will be puddled in the plastic up on my ceiling, writhing, eyeless, bulging, probably eating each other.
Mary walks me out. “You going to take any time off? See anybody?”
“I just saw Jacob and Elise yesterday.”
“How was that?”
“A really bad decision.” I shake my head and that, too, is a bad decision. “How’s the migraine?”
“I’m okay. I’ll live.” It strikes me that when Mary says that, I believe it—and maybe she sees me frown, follows my thoughts, because she asks, “What about Nico? Are you still seeing him?”
“Yeah. Sort of.”
“And?” Her impish well-did-you? grin.
“I’m worried about him.” And furious, too, but if I said that I’d have to explain, and then Mary would be concerned about me, and I’d feel guilty because surely Mary has real problems, bigger problems than mine. “He’s really depressed.”
“Oh. That’s all you need. Look—” She stops me just short of the doors. “Dominga, you’re a great partner. I hope I didn’t step on your toes today. But I really want you to get some room, okay? Do something for yourself.”
I give her a long, long hug, and I forget about the maggots, just for the length of it.
There’s a skywriter above the hospital, buzzing around in sharp curves. The sky’s clean and blue and infinite, dizzyingly deep. Evening sun glints on the plane so it looks like a sliver poking up through God’s skin.
I watch it draw signs in falling red vapor and when the wind shears them apart I think of the Lighthouse, where the circle of tables was ruptured by the passage of an illusory force.
I want to act. I want to help. I want to ease someone’s pain. I don’t want to do something for myself, because—
You’re only burnt out once you stop wanting to help.
I call Nico. “Hey,” he says. “Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
“Want to get a drink?” I say, and then, my throat raw, my tongue acid, a hangover trick, words squirming out of me with wet expanding pressure, “I learned something you should know. A place to go, if you need help. If that’s what you want. If the world really is too much.”
Sometimes you say a thing and then you realize it’s true.
He laughs. “I can’t believe you’re making fun of me about that. You’re such an asshole. Do you want to go to Kosmos?”
* * *
“So,” Nico says, “are we dating?”
Kosmos used to be a warehouse. Now the ceiling is an electric star field, a map of alien constellations. We sit together directly beneath a pair of twin red stars.
“Oh,” I say, startled. “I was worried. After yesterday, I mean, I just…” Was furious, was hurt, didn’t know why: because you were having fun, because I wasn’t, because I thought you needed help, because you pretended you didn’t. One of those. All of them.
Maybe he doesn’t like what he sees in my eyes. He gets up. “Be right back.” The house music samples someone talking about the expansion of the universe. Nico touches my shoulder on the way to the bathroom and I watch him recede, savoring the fading charge of his hand, thinking about space carrying us apart, and how safe that would be.
I have a choice to offer him. Maybe we’ll leave together.
Nico comes back with drinks—wine, of all things, as if we’re celebrating. “I thought that game was charmingly optimistic, you know.”
“Jacob’s game?” He’s been tagging me in Facebook pictures of the stupid thing. I should block Jacob, so it’d stop hurting, which is why I don’t.
“Right. I was reading about it.”
The wine’s dry and sweet. It tastes like tomorrow’s hangover, like coming awake on a strange couch under a ceiling with no maggots. I take three swallows. “I thought it was about unknowable gods and the futility of all human life.”
“Sure.” That stupid cocky grin of his hits hard because I know what’s behind it. “But in the game there’s something out there, something bigger than us. Which—I mean, compared to what we’ve got, at least it’s interesting.” He points to the electric universe above us, all its empty, dazzling artifice. “How’s work?”
“I’m taking a break. Don’t worry about it.” I have a plan here, a purpose. I am an agent, although which meaning of that word fits I don’t know. “Why’d you really dump Yelena?”
“I told you.” He resorts to the wine, to buy himself a moment. “Really, I was honest. I thought she could do a lot better than me. I wanted her to be happy.”
“But what about you? She made you happy.”
“Yeah, yeah, she did. But I don’t want to be the kind of person who—” He stops here and takes another slow drink. “I don’t want to be someone like Jacob.”
“Jacob’s very happy,” I say, which is his point, of course.
“And look how he left you.”
“What if I thought you made me happy?” Somewhere, somehow, Mary’s cheering me on: that gets me through the sentence. “Would this be a date? Or are we both too … tired?”
Tired of doing hurt, and tired of taking it. Tired of the great cartographic project. Isn’t it a little like cartography? Meeting lovely people, mapping them, racing to find their hurts before they can find yours—getting use from them, squeezing them dry, and then striking first, unilaterally and with awful effect, because the alternative is waiting for them to do the same to you. These are the rules, you didn’t make them, they’re not your fault. So you might as well play to win.
Nico looks at me with dark, guarded eyes. I would bet my life here, at last, that he’s wearing one of his good jackets.
“Dominga,” he says, and makes a little motion like he’s going to take my hand, but can’t quite commit, “Dominga, I’m sorry, but … God, I must sound like such an asshole, but I meant what I said. I’m done hurting people.”
And I know exactly what he’s saying. I remember it, I feel it—it’s like when you get drunk with a guy and everything’s just magical, you feel connected, you feel okay. But you know, even then, even in that moment, that tomorrow you will regret this: that the hole you opened up to him will admit the cold, or the knife. There will be a text from him, or the absence of a text, or—worse, much worse—the sight of him with someone new, months later, after the breakup, the sight of him doing that secret thing he does to say, I’m thinking of you, except it’s not secret any more, and it’s not you he’s thinking of now.
And you just want to be done. You want a warmer world.
So here it is: my purpose, my plan. “Nico, what if I could give you a way out?”
He sets down his wine glass and turns it by the stem. It makes a faint, high shriek against the blackened steel tabletop, and he winces, and says, “What do you mean?”
“Just imagine a hypothetical. Imagine you’re right about everything—the universe is a hard place. To live you have to risk a lot of hurt.” You’re going to wonder how I came up with the rest of this, and all I can offer is fatigue, terror, maggots in my air vents, the memory of broken skulls on sidewalks: a kind of stress psychosis. Or the other explanation, of course. “Imagine that our last chance to be really good is revoked at the instant of our conception.”
He follows along with good humor and a kind of adorable narcissism that I’m so engaged with his cosmic bullshit and (under it all) an awakening sense that something’s off, askew. “Okay…”
The twin red suns multiply our shadows around us. I drift a little ways above myself on the wine, and it makes it easier to go on, to imagine or transmit this: “What if something out there knew a secret—”
A secret! Such a secret, a secret you might hear in the wind that passes between the libraries of jade teeth that wait in an empty city burnt stark by a high blue st
ar that never leaves the zenith, a secret that tumbles down on you like a fall of maggots from a white place behind everything, where a pale immensity circles on the silent wind.
”What if there were a way out? Like a phone number you could call, a person you could talk to, kind of a hotline, and you’d say, oh, I’m a smart, depressed, compassionate person, I’m tired of the great lie that it’s possible to do more good than harm, I’m tired of my Twitter feed telling me the world’s basically a car full of kindergartners crumpling up in a trash compactor. I don’t want to be complicit any more. I want out. Not suicide, no, that’d just hurt people. I want something better. And they’d say, sure, man, we have your mercy here, we can do that. We can make it so you never were.”
He looks at me with an expression of the most terrible unguarded longing. He tries to cover it up, he tries to go flirty or sarcastic, but he can’t.
I take my phone out, my embarrassing old flip phone, and put it on the table between us. I don’t have to use the contacts to remember. The number keys make soft chiming noises as I type the secret in.
“So,” I say, “my question is: who goes first?”
Something deep beneath me exalts, as if this is what it wants: and I cannot say if that thing is separate from me.
He reaches for the phone. “Not you, I hope,” he says, with a really brave play-smile: he knows this is all a game, an exercise of imagination. He knows it’s real. “The world needs people like you, Dominga. So what am I going to get? Is it a sex line?”
“If you go first,” I say, “do you think that’d change the world enough that I wouldn’t want to go second?”
I have this stupid compassion in me, and it cries out for the hurts of others. Nico’s face, just then—God, have you ever known this kind of beauty? This desperate, awful hope that the answer was yes, that he might, by his absence, save me?
His finger hovers a little way above the call button.
“I think you’d have to go first,” he says. He puts his head back, all the way back, as if to blow smoke: but I think he’s looking up at the facsimile stars. “That’d be important.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he says, all husky nonchalance, “if you weren’t here, I would absolutely go; whereas if I weren’t here, I don’t know if you’d go. And if this method were real, this, uh, operation of mercy, then the universe is lost, the whole operation’s fucked, and it’s vital that you get out.”
His finger keeps station a perilous few millimeters from the call. I watch this space breathlessly. “Tell me why,” I say, to keep him talking, and then I realize: oh, Nico, you’d think this out, wouldn’t you? You’d consider the new rules. You’d understand the design. And I’m afraid that what he’ll say will be right—
He lays it out there: “Well, who’d use it?”
“Good people,” I say. That’s how burnout operates. You burn out because you care. “Compassionate people.”
“That’s right.” He gets a little melancholy here, a little singsong, in a way that feels like the rhythm of my stranger thoughts. I wonder if he’s had an uncanny couple days too, and whether I’ll ever get a chance to ask him. “The universe sucks, man, but it sucks a lot more if you care, if you feel the hurt around you. So if there were a way out—a certain kind of people would use it, right? And those people would go extinct.”
Oh. Right.
There might have been a billion good people, ten billion, a hundred, before us: and one by one they chose to go, to be unmade, a trickle at first, just the kindest, the ones most given to shoulder their neighbors’ burdens and ask nothing in exchange—but the world would get harder for the loss of each of them, and there’d be more reason then, more hurt to go around, so the rattle would become an avalanche.
And we’d be left. The dregs. Little selfish people and their children.
The stars above change, the false constellations reconfiguring. Nico sighs up at them. “You think that’s why the sky’s empty?”
“Of—aliens, you mean?” What a curious brain.
“Yeah. They were too good. They ran into bad people, bad situations, and they didn’t want to compromise themselves. So they opted out.”
“Maybe someone’s hunting good people.” If this thing were real, well, wouldn’t it be a perfect weapon, a perfect instrument in something’s special plan? Bait and trap all at once.
“Maybe. One way or another—well, we should go, right?” He comes back from the cosmic distance. His finger hasn’t moved. He grins his stupid cocky camouflage grin because the alternative is ghoulish and he says, “I think I make a pretty compelling case.”
Everything cold and always getting colder because the warmth puts itself out.
“Maybe.” Maybe. He’s very clever. “But I’m not going first.”
Nico puts his finger down (and I feel the cold, up out of my bones, sharp in my heart) but he’s just pinning the corner of the phone so he can spin it around. “Jacob definitely wouldn’t make the call,” he says, teasing, a really harsh kind of tease, but it’s about me, about how I hurt, which feels good.
“Neither would Mary,” I say, which is, all in all, my counterargument, my stanchion, my sole refuge. If something’s out to conquer us, well, the conquest isn’t done. Something good remains. Mary’s still here. She hasn’t gone yet—whether you take all this as a thought experiment or not.
“Who’s Mary?” He raises a skeptical eyebrow: you have friends?
“Stick around,” I say, “and I’ll tell you.”
Right then I get one more glimpse past the armor: he’s frustrated, he’s glad, he’s all knotted up, because I won’t go first, and whatever going first means, he doesn’t want to leave me to go second. He wouldn’t have to care anymore, of course. But he still cares. That’s how compassion works.
If I had a purpose here, well, I suppose it’s done.
“You’re taking a break from work?” He closes the phone and pushes it back to me. “What’s up with that? Can I help?”
When I go to take the phone he makes a little gesture, like he wants to take my hand, and I make a little gesture like I want him to—and between the two of us, well, we manage.
* * *
I still have the number, of course. Maybe you worry that it works. Maybe you’re afraid I’ll use it, or that Nico will, when things go bad. Things do so often go bad.
You won’t know if I use it, of course, because then I’ll never have told you this story, and you’ll never have read it. But that’s a comfort, isn’t it? That’s enough.
The story’s still here. We go on.
SETH DICKINSON’S short fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others. He is an instructor at the Alpha Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Workshop for Young Writers, winner of the 2011 Dell Magazines Award, and a lapsed student of social neuroscience. The author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant and The Monster Baru Cormorant, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Language of Knives
Haralambi Markov
A strong-willed daughter is guided by her unloved parent in the death rituals and customs of how to respect the remains of her favorite parent. This is how you love the dead. This is the language of knives. Edited by Ann VanderMeer.
A long, silent day awaits you and your daughter as you prepare to cut your husband’s body. You remove organs from flesh, flesh from bones, bones from tendons—all ingredients for the cake you’re making, the heavy price of admission for an afterlife you pay your gods; a proper send-off for the greatest of all warriors to walk the lands.
The Baking Chamber feels small with two people inside, even though you’ve spent a month with your daughter as part of her apprenticeship. You feel irritated at having to share this moment, but this is a big day for your daughter. You steal a glance at her. See how imposing she looks in her ramie garments the color of a blood moon, how well the leather apron made from changeling hide sits on her.
You work in silence, as the ritual demands, and your breath hisses as you both twist off the aquamarine top of the purification vat. Your husband floats to the top of the thick translucent waters, peaceful and tender. You hold your breath, aching to lean over and kiss him one more time—but that is forbidden. His body is now sacred, and you are not. You’ve seen him sleep, his powerful chest rising and falling, his breath a harbinger of summer storms. The purification bath makes it easy to pull him up and slide him onto the table, where the budding dawn seeping from the skylight above illuminates his transmogrification, his ascent. His skin has taken a rich pomegranate hue. His hair is a stark mountaintop white.
You raise your head to study your daughter’s reaction at seeing her father since his wake. You study her face, suspicious of any muscle that might twitch and break the fine mask made of fermented butcher broom berries and dried water mint grown in marshes where men have drowned. It’s a paste worn out of respect and a protection from those you serve. You scrutinize her eyes for tears, her hair and eyebrows waxed slick for any sign of dishevelment.
The purity of the body matters most. A single tear can sour the offering. A single hair can spoil the soul being presented to the gods … what a refined palate they have. But your daughter wears a stone face. Her eyes are opaque; her body is poised as if this is the easiest thing in the world to do. The ceramic knife you’ve shaped and baked yourself sits like a natural extension of her arm.
You remember what it took you to bake your own mother into a cake. No matter how many times you performed the ritual under her guidance, nothing prepared you for the moment when you saw her body on the table. Perhaps you can teach your daughter to love your art. Perhaps she belongs by your side as a Cake Maker, even though you pride yourself on not needing any help. Perhaps she hasn’t agreed to this apprenticeship only out of grief. Perhaps, perhaps …
Your heart prickles at seeing her this accomplished, after a single lunar cycle. A part of you, a part you take no pride in, wants her to struggle through her examination, struggle to the point where her eyes beg you to help her. You would like to forgive her for her incapability, the way you did back when she was a child. You want her to need you—the way she needed your husband for so many years.