Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  I truly cannot understand Sabine’s reluctance to be in Joseph’s company. He is thoughtful, kind, and never holds back on treating the woman with him to all the fine things in his life: the best food, silk sheets, and most of all, the best wine. Instead of treating me like a child in a woman’s body, he confides in me as an adult would confide in another adult, tells me about the difficulties and stresses of his job, his troubles with other supervisors at the Bureau, the late nights he spends attending receptions and dinners for visiting dignitaries. And I in turn give him advice, like offering Sabine his best wine so that she will soften toward him.

  When he asks me what I do when I am not with him, I am reluctant to tell him about my mundane days in the Panah—the boredom, the quibbles and the pettiness of the other girls. That we spend so much time together underground, it gets on our nerves and we take it out on each other. Silly fights erupting over who has eaten whose special food, or who has used up all the hot water for a bath. And everyone trying to curry Lin’s favor, so that she will send them outside on more assignations. When else do we get the chance to be above ground, in the company of such sophisticated men?

  I get on well with Diyah, for the most part. She and I play cards in my room, an old-fashioned game that Ma taught me, which she’d learned from her mother. I’d once described it to Diyah and a few days later she presented me with a pack of playing cards that she’d made with her own hands, cutting out paper and drawing pictures and writing numbers on all fifty-two of them. I nearly cried when she gave them to me. We spent many peaceful evenings laughing together and playing cards, just the two of us. She’d often beat me, but she was too good-natured to crow or gloat.

  Diyah can tell the future, too, or so she says, from the leaves in a teacup.

  “Show me, show me!” I beg her. “Tell me what you can see for me.” I grab her hands and kiss them over and over again. “Please, Diyah, sweet Diyah, pretty Diyah...”

  “Not now.” She laughs, pulling her hands away. “I can only do it when I’m in the mood.”

  “That’s what Joseph says,” I tell her with a straight face. “But he’s never in the mood.” I wink at Diyah and she glances back at me with an odd look in her eyes.

  “Rupa...”

  “Don’t worry.” I look down at my cards so that Diyah can’t see my face. “I’m safer with Joseph than I would be with my own family.”

  Sabine

  It’s the third night in this month that Joseph’s called me. Usually he isn’t so greedy, but lately he can’t seem to get enough of me. I enter his apartment, take off my veil, drop it on the chair near the door. The last few visits, I’ve been bringing my flask of Lin’s tea with me, sipping it on the way here instead of saving it for the ride home. I know it’s just a habit, but it’s been helping me to feel more relaxed when I come to see Joseph. I must remember to ask Lin to make more for me when I get back to the Panah.

  He locks the door, then greets me with his usual kiss on the cheek, and an embrace that lasts a little longer than it should. I pull back but let my hips press against his. Even with a Client I don’t like, there’s a protocol to be observed, a dance with steps that need to be followed in the correct order to end up in just the right place.

  I do make fun of Joseph with Lin, but it isn’t unpleasant being with him. Living in the Panah among women provides one kind of safety, but spending time with a man who’ll risk his own stature and life to have you in his home is a different feeling altogether. Gratifying. Satisfying. Pleasurable in a perverse way. The leaders set the tone of morality for the rest of the citizens; they call their city Green, but the only color they’ve chosen for its women is white, a purity that only exists on paper. In truth, the color of Green City women is red: red for the blood that they bleed every month when they’ve failed in their duty to add another child to their tallies; red for the blood on which those precious fetuses are fed and nurtured for nine months; red for the blood that’s spilled when they’re born.

  Whenever I go to see Joseph, he prepares a gourmet meal for me that I’m usually reluctant to eat. He tries to feed me a bite of this or a morsel of that. He sees himself as a bon vivant; feeding me well is just another way of impressing himself. I take a few sips from his wine glass when he offers, but I usually refuse my own.

  Tonight, he insists on pouring out a glass of something fizzy for me. “Sabine, you have to try this. It’s black champagne, from Venezuela. In South America.”

  “I know where Venezuela is,” I say and he laughs at my bristly response. I take the glass from him, secretly admiring the way the crystal is cut into so many flawless facets, each one reflecting a small rainbow of light from the chandelier overhead.

  Joseph watches my face carefully, to see if I’m annoyed. Men like Joseph don’t like uncertainty; it makes them act in strange ways. Maybe treating a young woman as if she is a pupil eager to be schooled in the ways of the world is merely second nature to him. A kind of chivalry that appeals to his vanity.

  I take one delicate sip from the glass. The beauty of the liquid just barely touches my tongue before exploding into full flavor.

  I put down the glass quickly. “What is this?”

  The lines around his eyes crease into starbursts as he smiles. “I told you. Black champagne. It has minerals extracted from volcanic rock that are infused into the soil the grapes are grown in. The grapes take on the color and the sheen of the minerals; that’s why it has that oily look. See?”

  He holds up his own glass to the light and I see it then; the black giving way to a mercury silver that changes tone as he tilts his wrist this way and that. Then he laughs softly, the sound grating against my ears.

  “What?”

  “I know you didn’t actually drink it.”

  “I did!”

  The lines deepen around his eyes, and for a moment he is no longer an urbane, powerful sophisticate, but almost like a simple fisherman, face weathered by sea and sun. “Your face. You look like an innocent little girl. No, no, Sabine. Don’t take it the wrong way. It’s lovely. I haven’t seen anyone look like that in a long time.”

  Joseph’s use of the word innocent makes me cringe. Maybe he means naïve, or unworldly, or even foolish. I would call it cautious. But maybe I should be less uptight. Why shouldn’t I enjoy a glass of rare champagne, poured out for me in an expensive goblet by a man as sophisticated as Joseph?

  He dresses immaculately, beautifully, for our nights together: a jacket and tie, which he later exchanges for a silken dressing gown and a pair of silk pajamas. After dinner, he likes to put on old music, smoke cigars, drink brandy while I watch him fuss with the bottles and the music player. He doesn’t need me to talk to him; he just wants me to admire him being masculine and masterful. These most powerful men, Lin tells us, have hard lives, difficult decisions to make, and without women in their lives they grow bitter, old, and dissatisfied with themselves and their place in Green City’s upper echelons. “Even a man who’s achieved everything, fulfilled every ambition, won’t really be happy feel truly at ease with himself without a woman.”

  I take another sip and glance back at Joseph, realizing that he can be surprisingly kind when he isn’t trying to put his hands in places they don’t belong. I know he’s fond of me, with an affection that borders on possessiveness, something that Lin observes might be adoration but not necessarily love. Sometimes his attentions are lustful, at others, avuncular. We talk together and he takes comfort from my presence. Maybe this is enough for him. Maybe he’s too tired to want more.

  Joseph’s own Wife died from the Virus, but because he was older, they didn’t give him a new Wife: they save that privilege for the younger men, the ones who can father healthy children. That’s why most of our Clients are the older men of Green City, like Joseph.

  I don’t like the idea of being the sandpaper to smooth a man’s rough edges, but it’s better than being an enti
re nation’s incubator.

  When the smoldering end of his cigar fades out, and the last song winds down to its stuttering conclusion, Joseph moves around the room, turning out lights and putting away his shoes, his brandy snifter, his books and files. This sudden burst of activity calms his nerves, I can tell. All his worldliness, his knowledge about politics and history and fine wines can’t disguise his fear that he might be rejected by a young woman because he’s growing older and less virile by the year.

  As I watch him shift around the room in a semblance of busy-ness, I stretch my arms and legs. The room is conditioned to a comfortable temperature, and a pleasant scent of smoky incense rises in the air. My anger from the last time I was here, when Joseph almost ruined my morning departure protocol, has faded with time. I pick up the wine glass and drain it, and smile at him brightly. “See? All gone.”

  “Very good,” murmurs Joseph. The tension between us breathes, expanding and contracting. Our eyes lock, and something flickers in the light, making his gray irises look full, like clouds filled with heavy rain. My head is already feeling distant from my body: the drink’s having an effect, faster than I’d imagined. I feel a tightening somewhere between my stomach and my thighs, and I have to tense the muscles of my hips to keep myself from sinking down.

  I stare at Joseph with new eyes: he’s a little blurry and I have to strain to focus. I’m not like Rupa, always imagining that a Client’s falling in love with me. But all of a sudden it’s as if nerves and channels that I didn’t even know existed in me are starting to open and bloom. I can sense his heat, his need. He looks back at me with eyes shaped like question marks, curious and all-seeing. My mouth opens and I breathe hard, then lick my lips because they’ve become so dry.

  Finally, I break Joseph’s gaze, walk to the window and look out at the skyline, all perpendicular lines: the sharp ruler-straightness of roads and horizon, crossed by the vertical of dozens of skyscrapers arranged in groups as if pushed together by a giant toddler putting all his toys into order, reaching up to the clouds. Cold, stark shapes are silhouetted against the sky: rooftops shaped like triangles, like diamonds, thousands of lights twinkling from the windows, blotting out the stars. An architectural rainbow: the indigo of the ground and buildings, the violet of the deepening night, greens and blues of darkened glass, then the oranges and reds of illuminated signs, and atop the light, a fading yellow canopy reflecting cumulus and desert dust.

  Here and there it looks as if a rooftop is melting, then falling. The lights are turning into stars, erasing the barriers between construction and creation. I have to blink hard to keep it all straight, and I’m annoyed at myself for getting tipsy so quickly. I’m such a naïf, in more ways than one.

  I glance down at my hands; they’ve grown so pale from lack of sunlight. My fingers look lonely; they long for companionship. Once I traveled everywhere with my parents, holding their hands as they guided me in and out of buildings whose names I hadn’t needed to know. Now I spend my life in this indoor existence, going from the Panah to one rich man’s bed after another.

  My head has too much noise in it, I buzz like high-tension wires with all the words and sentences that built up during the day. In the Panah, we pass the days by talking; at night, my Clients talk to me. So many words, words, words. I want to run out screaming with my hands pressed to my ears with the strain of never-ending chatter. Utter silence, just for one hour—I want that more than currency or clothes or carats.

  Joseph is making impatient sounds now, somewhere halfway between a groan and a growl. I turn around again to see him opening the door to his bedroom. He turns down the covers to the bed, a new, sleek, chrome and platinum offering. It glints under the low lights of the bedroom.

  He works methodically to make the bed comfortable, to his liking, and then he arranges himself on it and pats the space next to him, a wolf inviting me to lie down beside him. I pad across the heated floor, my nose filled with the scent of cologne and leather and brandy. Dizzy, I’m glad to be able to lie down. The whole world is slowly wheeling around me.

  I look up at Joseph, who’s gazing down caringly at me. I begin to panic. There’s a thickening in my chest and throat. I need to stand up. I need to...

  “Sabine? Sabine?”

  I blink. Joseph is staring at me from the bed. “Why are you just standing there like that? Come here. Are you all right?”

  Who is this man with his arms stretched out toward me? Why am I standing in a room with chilled air and a heated floor? And why am I shaking?

  “Lie down,” says Joseph. “It’s all right.” He wraps his arms around me but his embrace is gentle, the way a father would cradle a daughter, protective and warm. My heart is still galloping. I close my eyes and breathe out slowly.

  “There, there,” he whispers. “You’re all right. You’re safe with me.”

  “I’m fine, Joseph,” I say, making my voice bright.

  “Ssshh, ssshh.” Joseph enjoys playing the role of my protector.

  I give up the struggle. Joseph feels my limbs unlock, and he grows even more tender towards me. His kisses on my forehead are gentle, the timbre of his voice deepens. There is a courtliness to his embrace, as if he’s rediscovered his own nobility in my weakness.

  I wonder if Joseph ever wants to know what goes on in my mind, or if he is only concerned with how I make him feel.

  I rest my head on Joseph’s shoulder. I’ve always fantasized about being able to sleep easily, a butterfly floating into the air, wings fluttering in gentle currents. Instead, I’m taking a run to the edge of a canyon and leaping high into the air, to hurtle down towards a great blackness where nothing exists, and nothing can ever grow.

  From the Voice Notes of

  Ilona Sarfati

  The Charbagh is my favorite part of the Panah. It’s best at night, when the others are out with their Clients, and the garden goes into nighttime illumination mode. I like to sit on a bench at the far side of the garden with a cup of tea warming my hands.

  Fairuza’s a brilliant biochemist. She’s used all her skills to nurture this garden, divided into four quarters, lined by waterways, a small fountain bubbling in its center. Its murmurations delight us, the quiet whispering of the grasses and plants, the bushes and pygmy trees releasing natural, not synthesized, oxygen. Panels on the ceilings absorb and process it into soft artificial sunlight that lights up the garden year-round. If there’s a god, may he bless Fairuza’s Persian ancestors for coming up with the idea of a garden meant to recreate paradise on earth. It gives us some measure of beauty in our underground colony. When I was in school, I learned about ants, the workers, sexless drones marching in and out serving a glossy and beautiful queen. Here, Fairuza and I are the queens but we toil for a purpose totally at odds with the way nature works.

  Fairuza found the old map in the Geoscience archives and together we discovered this bunker. We had a small window of opportunity to come here, before they widened the restrictions on international movement to include domestic territories as well. We both chose the name Panah, a Persian word that means “sanctuary.” Our refuge is made of reinforced concrete and radioactive-proof metals. It keeps us hidden from the men and their scanners above ground. And with luck we’ll be able to go on living here for generations to come.

  Gifted as she was, Fairuza could do nothing about the Virus, which morphed from a rare strain of HPV into a fast-spreading cervical cancer epidemic. Men could be carriers, but it was women who were felled, quickly and inclusively. Most died within four to six months of catching it. This is the reason the Perpetuation Bureau stresses fidelity within marriage; a woman’s protected from the Virus when sexually restricted to her legal spouses, who are always tested before a marriage is allowed to take place in Green City.

  While the Officials tried to put a stop to the men roaming the city in packs, assaulting and gang-raping any woman they could find, in those chaotic days
of Restoration and the new rule, we worked day and night to refurbish our rooms here. We faked our own deaths, gave up all our belongings, cut off ties with our families. We even burned our clothes to destroy any remnants of our DNA that could be used against us. A hard thing to do in your mid-twenties, but we had to.

  I was a communication specialist for the government of Green City; I was good with words. So naturally I wrote the first message to the handpicked Officials we invited to be our first Clients:

  “We represent a commodity no longer available in Green City. It’s not just economics; it’s also science, of a sort: the alchemy that takes place between a man and woman, far more compelling than any drug for its powers to soothe, heal, rejuvenate a spirit broken by the stresses and strains of the day.”

  At first we went out on assignations ourselves only with most high-powered Officials: Agency high-ups, Perpetuation Bureau managers, generals in the army. We chose our Clients carefully: men placed highly enough to protect us and keep our activities hidden from the Agency or the Bureau.

  In the early days, we looked for how outwardly loyal the would-be Client was to Green City. If a man ranked high enough in the hierarchy of Agents, Officials, and Leaders, yet engaged in behavior that contravened Green City’s strict codes—keeping a woman all to himself, for his own pleasure, instead of sacrificing his desires for the greater good of the society and its reconstruction—his involvement with the Panah would be classed as rebellion. Only the ones who expressed doubts in the new order, who wrote of missing the old days, suited our needs and passed our test.

  Soon we had enough business to consider expanding the Panah, with caution. We couldn’t take just any woman to join us. She had to be double- and triple-recommended by our own contacts. Any assets she could bring to the Panah were a bonus—liquefied property, good contacts, and, above all, an unswerving commitment to our secrecy. The vetting methods were rigid because one weak link would bring us all down. The Perpetuation Bureau would easily sacrifice a few errant women to teach the rest a lesson. Green City would use our deaths to illustrate the futility of revolt.