I chuckle. “I don’t know, my little salamander.”
“Salamander?” she says, laughing as she looks up at me.
“Yes.” I make a face and crawl my fingers up her arm. “Little Sally Salamander.”
Rose laughs, her eyes going wet. Then she starts to cough. I rub her back but she does not stop. She keeps coughing, coughing, her face turning red. A few of the Followers look at us, whispering to one another. Soon the Programmer comes over, handing Rose some water. She takes it and drinks. After a few sips she regains control of her breathing. The Programmer leans toward me. “RoseMother,” he says, “she is weak and so are you. I will take her from here.”
“No, please. I can manage.”
The Programmer sighs and walks away, toward the Mother Mother. From where he stands with his feet in the pool, the Apothecary watches, watches.
◄ ►
The next morning there are two Followers dead: KateMother and a two-year-old child, Rufus. Rufus had been sick since the day he was born, but KateMother’s death is a shock. We bury them and sprinkle mushrooms in their grave. The Composer leads us in a song and then we climb, climb. Rose does not laugh the whole day. She does not cough or urinate. She does not complain. She climbs, climbs, when she can, and the rest of the time I carry her. The Programmer watches Rose, and the Apothecary watches the Programmer. With every step the world gets warmer and wetter. So wet and so warm. But the cave seems brighter now, and there are fewer bats. We are eating blindfish and dried mushrooms for lunch when Rose asks me again. “Mother, what is it like, to be dry?”
I do not call her “Sally Salamander.” I look at the Apothecary and remember the feel of his chin hair on my neck. “It is like fire,” I say. “Fire that doesn’t burn.”
That night, the Apothecary comes to me as I sleep. He sneaks up behind, stroking my hair, whispering for me to stay quiet. He has brought two full rations of water, and one of the Mother Mother’s sweet sticks, for Rose.
“But it is not our turn,” I say. “The Programmer’s offering still swims inside me.”
The Apothecary puts a thumb on my lips. “No one will know. It’s harder to keep track here.” Beside us, Rose begins to stir. “I will leave before the rising hour.”
He moves closer and I wriggle around him, breathing the leathery hum of his flesh. I peel off my Mentholsuit and climb on top, keeping my head low, low. As always, our bodies come together amidst the flapping of bats. Rose wakes and looks at me and I motion for her to be quiet. The Apothecary, still inside me, smiles at Rose and hands her the sweet stick. He whispers, telling her that everything will be all right. Rose rolls over, turning her eyes away from us, and puts the sweet stick in her mouth.
◄ ►
I awake to grunts and shouts. The Father Fathers encircle me. Two of them grab my arms and the other reaches into a sack and begins to tie my wrists together. The Programmer is stooping over Rose, picking the sweet stick up from the earth. The Apothecary is on his knees behind the Father Fathers, his hands bound. The Mother Mother is watching, watching, rubbing her belly and squinting. She looks like she is in pain.
There is an abrupt trial, led by the Programmer. The Mother Mother is very quiet. She keeps sneaking furtive glances in my direction. The Grandmother grows heated, waving her arms in the air, but the Programmer keeps shaking his head. The Father Fathers nod solemnly and the Grandmother storms away.
The Programmer announces the final decision: the crime is Violation of the Glorious Rotating Monogamy Programme and the sentence is Reintegration. The pale Apprentice cries out, asking whether we can afford the sacrifice. “We are dying,” he pleads. “There are only nine Gestating Followers left. To reintegrate RoseMother is to contaminate our Lifewater at the source.”
The Programmer assures everyone that it will be all right. He says the Server has declared that we will survive as long as we abide the Glorious Rotating Monogamy Programme. The Followers grunt and nod. The Apothecary does not resist as the Programmer takes the First Aid Kit from his neck. He looks into the distance, his eyes poised, as when he hunts the blindfish.
The Father Fathers dig two holes in the earth, side by side. At least they are side by side. They lay us down in the holes and pick up their shovels. The Programmer looms behind them, with Rose at his side. He has his hand on her shoulder and I can see his index finger running back and forth along her collarbone. She is tense, tense, biting her soft little lip.
The first shovelful of dirt falls over me, thudding, thudding, on my chest. A few grains scatter across my face. I look at Rose. Her mouth is moving and there is fear in her eyes. I want to hold her in our little tent in the Mentholcove, listening to her breath as she settles into sleep. I want to see her feeding the salamanders, her eyes bright as the creatures curl their tails and flick their tongues. I want to listen to her laughing as she runs through the mushroom forest, looking over to make sure I am watching, her eyes sparking with love and glee.
Another shovelful hits me, this one falling across my thighs. For a moment, I think about calling out. I could accuse the Programmer of glowing like the cave insect. But who among us has not become like the cave insect?
My eyes fall on the Mother Mother and I imagine the Future that will emerge from her womb. I see it as a magnificent creature with red, red eyes and the wings of a bat. I see it taking flight across the sky above the Plains of Benevolence, hovering, hovering, among the things they call clouds. I see it trailing a mane of golden hair and laughing as it scoops Rose up and takes her in its arms. I see them laughing together, flying far into the North. They will find Technology. They will find Know-How. They will cross the Neverending Pipeline and ride together on the backs of the gigantic carnivorous moose. They will be glorious, glorious, and free, free.
I feel the Apothecary looking at me and I glance over and nod. I am not sure what my eyes say but I want them to say that everything is all right. We are here, together, in the damp, damp earth. Together, together. I look at Rose, but a clump of dirt falls across my eyes.
CITY NOISE
Morgan M. Page
Two cans of beans and an eggplant, a big one like you used to get at a supermarket before everything went for-real organic. Pretty good haul from a half hour with this client, and he was sweet, too. It’s enough to eat for a couple of days. And a Rolex – doesn’t work but looks like the day it was made. Sarah puts them into her satchel, stained and patched a hundred times over, different colour leathers, holding together all these years later.
She gets onto her bike; it’s dinged up pretty bad and starting to rust, practically ready for the scrap heap, and she heads away from the condo. The building’s mostly intact, has almost all of its windows, just a few missing here and there like knocked-out teeth. She heads up Bay Street, across Wellesley, and rides around Queen’s Park, not through it. It’s still daylight out, but the park’s not a good place any time of day. The long-since burned-out shell of parliament quietly looms over it in the south, and she’s always glad to get some distance between her bike and that wretched place.
When she gets in, past two sets of doors, five sets of locks, down the long dark hall in the basement filled with debris that hides the door to their little apartment from possible burglars, she finds Johnny on the floor again. Must’ve been another bad day. Sarah puts down her satchel near the door carefully, so she doesn’t mush the eggplant, and sits on the floor next to him.
“Hey, baby,” she says in her client voice. Stops herself, readjusts. Regular voice: “What’s going on? You okay?”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t make a sound. Doesn’t take a breath for a good long while, and then exhales slowly and says plainly, “It’s just loud again today.” Johnny sits up, and he’s got that look on his face that used to just break her heart. But you can only get your heart broke so much until you’re numb to it. “Maybe we should move to the country. Get away from all the city noise.”
“Yeah, maybe some day.” Sarah stands up then. Their little
daily drama, his dreams of fleeing the city. “But there’s no work out there. Not for me.”
◄ ►
It didn’t change too much for Sarah after The Crash. Sure, it was better before with the Internet and video games and her dates gave her cash she could spend however she wanted, but, when you already live on the fringe of society, it doesn’t make a big difference when society just stops functioning. So now she trades favours for canned food and “fresh” produce.
But, really, the only thing she misses. The thing that keeps her up at night. The thing that dominates her thoughts any time she passes a mirror. The only thing she can think about when she thinks about the future. Hormones. Now, she’s pretty lucky because before The Crash, Sarah got her bits nipped and tucked permanently, so it’s not like she has to worry about her damned body flooding her with testosterone each and every passing day. Not enough to make her hair fall out. But she misses the little blue estrogen pills that made her breasts perky and her skin so much softer.
Right when it was all going down, five years ago, her first thought: Get to a fucking pharmacy, bitch. The looting had already begun, but, luckily, no one was really on the lookout for estrogen pills. Each pharmacy was cleared out of every kind of pain medication, and most of the important antibiotics and medications, but without fail, there they’d be. Bottles of estrogen. Estrace the synthetic, and Premarin the natural made from pregnant mare urine. She briefly considered trying to raise a horse, but couldn’t quite put together how that would lead her to a wellspring of estrogen without, like, having to drink glasses of horse piss – and she knew enough about science to think that probably wouldn’t be terribly effective.
But those sources long since dried up. She’s not the only transsexual in town, and there are, of course, post-menopausal women and all the little drug dealers who think they can charge a ransom for any pill they find.
But without hormones her body betrays her, as it’s done her whole damn life. She’s tired all the time, and maybe someday her bones will become brittle and snap, or cancer might eat her up. And she’s got to keep her girlish figure for clients and sweet, broken Johnny, which is what brings her to Jetta’s loft near the Distillery.
Sarah parks her bike, locks it to a pipe, and goes up the three flights of dark stairs to Jetta’s. Outside the door, one of Jetta’s boyfriends, all muscle, shaved head, stands watch with a couple of candles going. He looks Sarah up and down, and she rolls her eyes because he’s seen her a dozen times before. When he moves aside, she slides the stupid-heavy metal door open.
Inside it’s all twinkling lights, candles and oil lamps everywhere because the sun’s starting to set. Racks of clothes line the apartment, and at the other end is a well-stocked kitchen with just about every stainless steel kitchen gadget you could imagine, and tiny Jetta back there chopping carrots.
“Mija!” she calls out, turning to see Sarah come in. “How are you, mami?”
“I’m good, honey. I’m good,” Sarah smiles. Sure, she’s Jetta’s client, but she always makes her feel like this is home.
“I’m making carrot tonight! A big carrot for all my boys!” Jetta finishes chopping and puts it aside. “You want to stay for soup?”
“No, I’m good. Really.” Because everything comes at a price and you only want to owe Jetta so much. “You got time to give me a little booster shot in my boy pockets?”
It takes her a few minutes to set up over by the medical exam table stolen from some hospital. First, Jetta sterilizes the needles. Now, Sarah is not stupid. She knows that you aren’t ever really going to get those needles sterile. But there isn’t much choice. Then Jetta goes off to another corner of her loft, opens a great big safe – another item lifted from elsewhere – and comes back with a plastic bottle. There’s a picture of a smiling woman and the most beautiful ass you’ve ever seen in the world, with the words “SILICONA – COLOMBIA” in a circle around the picture.
When Jetta’s ready, Sarah pulls down her skirt and her dirty tights, lies down on the exam table, and lets the woman do her work. Jetta pumps the silicone into her hips, five needles on each side. She leaves the needles in, each one atop a big round bubble of silicone, until she’s finished with both sides. Then she takes out the needles, says, “You know this gonna hurt,” and starts rubbing. Sure, the tearing flesh feeling of the silicone going in is bad, but it’s nothing compared to the rubbing Jetta calls her “special massage.” She pushes the silicone around, forms it into the perfect hips. She injects some more into Sarah’s boy pockets, the little dimples on the sides of each butt cheek that are supposedly a dead giveaway of ass masculinity.
Silicone is forever. Mostly. “You gonna lose some, maybe half by next week,” Jetta says, as she dabs superglue over the injection holes and covers them in Hello Kitty Band-Aids. The silicone absorbs a bit into the body, but most of it will stay. Hopefully.
All the girls have heard horror stories about silicone gone bad. The body can reject it, or it can move and disfigure you. But at least Jetta’s face is reassuring. Her cheeks are round, her lips are plump – all in a slightly unnerving but exquisitely beautiful way. She’s more than just a woman, she’s an artistic representation of femininity. Or one kind of femininity, anyway. She could be any age – 27, 43, 52 – it’s impossible to tell with such flawless skin. Clearly, she had work done before The Crash. Professional work. Maybe in Guadalajara, Bangkok, Rio. Quality work.
Sarah’s so sore, she tries not to cry as she leans over and reaches into her satchel, pulls out the Rolex. Jetta snaps it up and looks it over, gets a look on her face like Ursula in The Little Mermaid. “Mm, this is good. My boys love it. Next time you get something good, you come back here and we’ll top you up. Make those breasts of yours really pop!”
◄ ►
When she opens her eyes, slowly, sleepy, he’s not beside her. Runs a hand over the warm spot where her Johnny should be, and then she frowns and rolls over. Just a small shaft of clear moonlight coming in through the tiny grimy basement window, slicing through the dark room and hitting the edge of the bed. Her eyes adjust, and no Johnny. She catches the tension in her eyebrows as she’s squinting through the darkness, doesn’t need more lines, more reasons to get pumped. Relax.
Sarah gets out of bed, wobbles, rights herself, and makes her way carefully to the doorframe. One hand on the wall, she walks down the short hallway. First door, the bathroom. No Johnny. Farther down, she reaches the living room.
At first she can’t make out anything. Then a little whisper. She takes a step forward, so quiet, so careful, listens close for that little whisper. And there it is again. And then a little movement, enough that she can start to make out the edges of someone in the dark corner of the room. Her Johnny.
The only words she can make out, words spoken like terrible secrets, words meant to stay secret from her, are “I can’t.”
“Johnny.” Silence. Stillness. “Johnny, come back to bed, honey. Please.” Nothing for a few seconds.
He stands up and crosses the room, moonlight hitting just the lower parts of his legs as he sulks back over to her. “I’m sorry,” he says. Means it, too. Takes her hand and leads her to the bedroom. “It’s just so loud. It’s too loud in here, I couldn’t sleep.” Dead silence.
“I know, honey,” she says, climbing into bed. “But there’s nothing there. There’s no one there.” She almost catches herself, but it’s too late. The words have already fallen out of her mouth. He stops, won’t get into bed.
“You think I’m crazy?” Johnny says, the hurt thick in his voice. “I can hear them. I’m not crazy. Su Ling could hear them! You said you believed her.”
“Can we not have this fight? Can we not right now?”
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s just, you know, trauma. Like it was hard on everyone, when it all went down, and we all process it different, you know?”
“That’s just a nice way of saying crazy.”
“Johnn
y, I’m sorry.” She reaches out for his hand in the darkness, squeezes it. “You’re not crazy. I just don’t know what to believe.” She pulls his hand, gently, pulls him back to bed. Sarah puts her head down on his chest and runs her finger across the long, thin line of scar tissue under his pec. “I’m sorry. I love you.”
For a while, they lie there in silence, neither of them asleep and both know it. “We need to get out of here. It’s better in the country, like Su Ling always said. We need to get away from the city.”
◄ ►
It started about a year after The Crash. After everything stopped working, after the fighting, after the looting, after so much death. First, the rich fled the city. No use staying, they’d just be a target for gangs of thieves and looters. Sarah heard there were rich families holed up in farms way out in the middle of nowhere, up near Algonquin Park or somewhere like that.
With no government, no one came to collect the bodies. The remaining city folk started to bury them, mostly to make things hygienic. But there were too many, and digging’s a lot of work. People made huge pyres. Sure, it stank up the place with the scent of charred flesh for a while, but that was quickly overpowered by the rotting garbage smells. Life after The Crash was smelly. And that’s when Johnny, Su Ling and, Sarah was certain, many others began to hear it.
Johnny had been with her since before The Crash. They’d met at some sweaty queer dance party in the West End, around the time they’d both started transitioning. They’d stuck together as the whole damn world fell apart around them. He was strong and funny and sneaky then, a great looter early on. Until the pyres had burned away the last of the dead. They’d both seen friends and neighbours and so many legions of unknowns go up in flames.
He got a funny look on his face one day, looked around like someone had called his name. They were in an alley, had just looted a stockpile of canned food Johnny had found in the basement of some building. He thought they’d been caught, grabbed Sarah’s hand tight and ran.
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