by Bogi Takács
Despite knowing the terms and conditions of his altered genotype and phenotype, since his (fraught) first breath outside the egg Talpo’s human memories still expected an easing, a longed-for regulation of the lungs, a breath that would finally catch and clear. He now saw (with the wisdom of forty-seven minutes of living) the wheezing horror of its lack, or the fragile efforts of his heart to pound, as like the waves he used to watch crash on the grim human pollution of Saliko City beach (memories not his own, but Kvora’s, that black water quietly transmuted in memory’s lazy eye into the dirty milk of the marshwater around him) as inevitable/historical events caused by forces that dwarfed in scale and scope the observer consciousness. Following along, never directing. Kvora had theorized this was how paniskoi saw the world, and made him in their image, or as close to their image as a human brain (and mind, or minds, if Talpo wanted to count himself a separate entity from Kvora, a distinction they had not had time to discuss in the haste of war) could achieve.
(This dissociation, she warned herself/him before he was even born, would be a brutal adjustment: the cessation of self-identifying as an agent. She had told herself this as firmly as she knew how, internalized it before they put her under for the procedure, prepared herself to wake up twice: once in terror and relief; once with purpose and in abandonment.)
It wasn’t clear if paniskoi even knew they were at war. It was not known if they meant to commit acts of war or agricultural engineering. Ends had merely revealed intentions irrelevant. It wasn’t clear if paniskoi understood intentions, either.
Kvora’s plan (she said let’s give it a go I won’t make anybody volunteer I’ll do it myself and meant it, because Talpo as Kvora remembered meaning it, and there was no way to tell at this range if that intent had included substrates of lies of second-order intent, or lies of fact, or lies of the unconscious variety for which blame could not be reasonably applied. There had been no ethics committee, no approval from Saliko City’s Fourth Junta, nothing but expenditure of accumulated credibility and frontline assumptions about language) depended on Talpo’s participation in his predestination, which he would have cared less about if only he could breathe easy. Blame came easier with the nearness of panic (and the risk of aborting himself in two feet of marshwater). The mission: find the paniskoi diplomat/farmer/soil-quality-assurance engineer/erosion control measure in this marsh and figure out how to say “we surrender” in paniskoi. Or “you surrender or else.” Kvora didn’t care what the message was, if this impossible communication could be initiated at all. There were other plans, contingencies, gambits, a choice of meanings to commit to that Talpo could no longer grasp, rapidly decaying into unintelligibility. Intentions have a short half-life and were instantly obsoleted in any case, by the undiscovered realities of what Talpo could or not articulate in paniskoi when the time came. (You’re in the army now, my son.)
The damp air in every raw breath tasted like milk gone bad, which Talpo had never tasted but Kvora had once when she was young on her homeworld (hometown childhood home warm red tiles river-smoothed stones, bad milk sick and slick on the tongue), long before the colonial navy bought her and brought her to Saliko City under the Third Junta. Promotion, honours, lives and territories gained and lost.
Straight lines from A to B. Don’t drink the bad milk because it will make you sick. Tiny unhappy cilia, an epithelium in revolt, formalised as the construct of disgust.
Overhead the bilious yellow overstory thick with alien xanthophylls and casting sunset at high noon. A jaundiced underworld with no void in it, all filled and entangled with leaf, branch and root. Talpo clambered under and through (not to worry about scrapes and scratches, about infections and immunodeficiencies, since in any case always already too late given his predestination), splashing whenever distant explosions (not so distant) rippled the water around him. He kept his lips closed tight. Don’t drink the bad milk.
These foggy Kvora-memories from before his birth felt like a trick. Like Kvora had somehow betrayed him by not properly conceiving him as a separate person with his own history but only as a version of herself, a ragged continuation of her story, a brief subplot. Her genotype and her consciousness, her choices, her will: Talpo the product of her voluntarity, participant but not agent, behind the curve of will (of course this was quite sane from Kvora’s theorised paniskoi point-of-view), and Kvora not his twin nor mother, but still a ghost-twin, a mother-dream. Call it his risk, his life, not hers but her voice in his head (don’t drink the bad milk, but in the ghost of Talpo’s memory, Kvora drank the bad milk anyway this time, tilted her head back and kept swallowing spilling and splashing down her chin) directing the choices made over an hour ago, in another life.
He smelled strange to himself, alkaline and dying.
The clearing in the marsh-tangle was formed in the interface between great mater roots from which much of the tangle radiated. Talpo had arrived here by simply following the pattern of the roots, with no consciousness of doing so. Talpo knew which way Kvora would have seen it (a straight and intended line from birth to this predestination, a clearing in which a planned meeting could be had) but not which way he saw it himself. Intention and simulation lay all before him like the tangled roots themselves, a structure grown mysteriously with its roots in alien milk.
The paniskoi smelled like nothing Talpo had an analogue for. When its emergences stellated, indicating awareness/airflow adjustment, he heard himself speak, and listened.
The Pigeon Summer
• Brit Mandelo •
J. kicked the door shut and deposited hir armload of grocery bags on the floor. From the squat bedside table, one of the three pieces of actual furniture included in the price of rent, the rattling buzz of hir phone filled the room—a petite cacophony, but grating. And then it stopped. For a moment, one hand on the countertop and the other hanging limp, J. stood frozen in the silence. The shop below the apartment had closed in the afternoon. The building, though aged, did not obligingly ping and moan and settle. In the space of held breath the weight of quiet was suffocating, until the gentle burble of a bird’s call broke the tableau. J. twitched like a horse shaking off flies and moved to the window, chewed fingertips on the warm glass, to peer out. On the ledge between gutter and wall there was a nest—tufts of fluff and prickly twigs. A pigeon rustled in it, one eye turned to the window, and cooed again.
“Some company, I guess,” si murmured and turned to lean a hip against the frame, surveying hir domain: a trash bag full of clothes listing sideways in front of a shallow closet at the foot of the compact, hard bed, a laptop on the dining table, and a battered carryon case with handle still raised pushed up against the side of the kitchen counter. Si nudged open the drawer of the bedside table—inside, a slim black smartphone and a stack of twenty dollar bills not much bigger—and closed it again, then shut hir eyes and sagged against the thick old wall.
As the sun crept down, taking with it the bird’s soft continual communication, J. paced across the creaking hollows of the uneven floorboards from fridge to bed and back, counting steps against the quiet. Si lost count at sixty-seven and collapsed onto the mattress, breathing careful and slow through hir nose. The sheets still smelled like long nights of sweat and restlessness. Si hadn’t washed them before bundling them up and stuffing them in the trash bag. The streetlights below illuminated the cracks in the ceiling plaster; si rolled onto hir side and reached out, fingers resting on the drawer handle.
It slid open with a whispery squeak. Si picked up the phone and thumbed it on, swiping past the missed calls and texts, found the gallery and opened it. C.’s smile—C.’s arm around hir shoulders—C.’s shock of brunette hair wild and caught in a private wind. A wolfish sound ground its way from between hir teeth, breaking into a choke-breathed moan and the wrenching gasps that followed. J. cried ugly, cried alone, cried hot-skinned and lying on top of unwashed sheets in a shithole apartment downtown. The hard edges of the phone cut into hir palm.
Then came a crackle of
plastic and a thud from across the room, followed by the sound of something rolling across the floorboards. J. lifted hir head, swallowing hard. A can of condensed soup bumped to a stop at a split board. The side of the plastic sack had been pulled down as if a curious hand had tugged it to peek at the contents. Skin tingling with a mixture of horror-movie curiosity and raw pain, J. staggered from the bed and circled the shopping bags, seeing no way for the culprit to have tipped itself open.
C. had used to watch marathons of Haunted Hotels in the fall. They’d done it together. It had become a joke, but the sort that maintained a sincere and childish hope: that it could happen. It would be almost too much for that mutual shred of belief to come to fruition, now, too late. Still si waited, lips pressed into a thin line, for the brush of a cold hand or the whisper of a voice—some sort of theatrical confirmation—and nothing. The air felt like air; the room, empty. Finally si unzipped the carryon and snagged a notebook from the assorted junk inside, opened it to write:
Dear ghost,
I would know if you were C., and you’re not. I guess you’re my roommate now.
I’m writing because I don’t want to hear the sound of my own voice.
Hope you don’t mind.
J.
Si left the note on the table and stripped out of hir jeans and shirt, crawling beneath the covers and burying hir face in the pillow. Eighteen for two days—days like wrack-strewn islands—and already writing notes to imaginary ghosts. It made hir feel close to C., for a moment. Hir hand found the phone again, cradling it to hir chest: a fragile slip of circuits and plastic, a box of memories.
The vertiginous sensation of waking under an unfamiliar ceiling with the sun at the wrong angle to the eyes: J. swallowed it down with a dry mouth and cracking lips. The second morning was not precisely easier than the first, only less of a surprise. The body-hot phone dug into hir hipbone where it had slipped in the night. Si fumbled for it with loose hands and placed it on the bedside table, then sat up and swung bare feet down onto the sun-warmed boards. Before leaving behind hir bedroom and books and self, si often woke without remembering that it had happened, as if hir mind had shunted that knowledge off to the side in self-defense. But then as si would reach out drowsy to text C. good morning, synapses would fire quick and merciless—his fingers white and cold in the coffin molded around the striped hat he’d loved, the discreet agony of messages sent and not ever answered. Comparatively, waking already gutted and dizzy was preferable to being wounded fresh each time.
Going through the motions—clothes, bathroom while avoiding hir reflection in the mirror, a bowl of cereal—took barely twenty minutes. After, J. sat slouched at the table, hands in hir lap. The notebook sat open by hir empty bowl, its scrawled note stranger still in the daytime. There was no clock in the apartment. Time passed; the room grew warmer as the sun filled it more and more aggressively.
J. stood, walked back to the bed, and lay down. Si wrapped one arm around the pillow and hugged it to hir stomach. As if in an attempt to distract hir, the phone buzzed for attention on the nightstand. Si did not move.
Time passed.
“Fuck’s sake,” J. croaked as the phone went off for the sixth time in a row, buzzing incessantly. Si sat up, ignoring the twinge in hir lower back from so long spent lying on the unyielding mattress. The screen read, Mom. Si waited until the call stopped, picked up the phone, and toggled it to silent. These two days were probably the most hir mother had tried to talk to hir in years.
What am I doing, si thought.
Nerveless fingers scrolled through a handful of unread texts from people whose desperation could not touch hir. Si had nothing for them—no answers, no apologies—any more than si had for hirself. The thought of opening one, of facing the blinking cursor and a blank box into which si had to compress some sort of rational answer, was unfathomable.
But what am I doing—
On the table, the notebook wasn’t open. Si dropped the phone onto the bed and crossed the room, thinking blankly of shut windows and still air, of a notebook that could close itself in a locked room.
The page with the note was the same. No spectral hand had scribed a response. All the same, J. sat down hard at the table and took up hir pen once more, flipping to the next blank page. The cheap, crisp paper wrinkled gently under the pressure of hir palm holding the notebook open. Si waited, poised to begin but unable to find the thread, the explanation, for what had put hir in the cramped studio downtown with a silenced phone and no one in the world to whom si felt accountable.
Dear ghost,
I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know who you are, or what you’re sticking around for. I won’t know your name. That’s kind of a relief: I don’t have to know you. I am unconnected to you, and you are unconnected to me. Just some disembodied something hanging around, maybe trying to figure me out. Good luck.
There are some things I do know though:
(1) I’ve paid two months’ rent here
(2) I don’t have a job and I don’t have much money left
(3) My best friend is dead
(4) I don’t know how I’m supposed to be
(5) Above all I am seriously fucked
J.
The aching in hir eyes recalled a three-day hangover, bruised and tingling. Si blinked, stared up at the ceiling until the dampness and burning passed, and took another look at the note. I don’t know how I’m supposed to be—and next to that, si scribbled in addendum, without C. Below the signature, si continued: it was us against the world right. The aching spread in a shiver across hir skin from eye sockets to sinuses and out. Si shoved the chair back and stood, swallowing down bile and tears. The chasm inside hirself—a trench home to some devouring leviathan, waiting for the right moment to surface and consume—was like a physical wound, the kind it was best not to look at. A cut down to bone: the shock doesn’t set in until you see the striations in your tissue and muscle and fat. So don’t look.
The setting sun hollowed out the room, highlighted the bare lack of personalizing detail. Si wandered to the window while hir pulse pounded in ears and tongue. The pigeon wasn’t in its nest; there were two eggs, pale and speckled as if with flecks of ash. Si watched, waiting, devoting hir energy to the complex task of breathing. Finally the pigeon returned and landed on the ledge with a few clumsy flaps, then hopped up into its nest. It settled in, fluffed up, blinked, all small bones and dynamic reality chugging along the tracks of its life. The pigeon didn’t know how easy it had things. After standing until hir knees ached, J. dragged the chair to the window and sat instead, watching the pigeon watch the world. On the street below, the river-flow of people moved and moved, colorful and drab by turns, all alive and vital. J. rested hir head on the glass, gently, feelings its warmth.
Dear ghost, si wrote later in the dark, seeing by the yellow reflected glow of streetlights.
The question isn’t necessarily if I want to live.
It’s whether or not I can.
The next morning, there were chicks.
Their naked miniature bodies had appeared suddenly—eggs during the night, birds come noon. J. wondered with a dull ache in hir gut if it was all right that the adult had left them so bare and alone, freshly extant in the world. Si took up hir post in the chair by the window to keep an eye on them. They didn’t move much, huddled together, only a little twitch here and there. The stillness was agitating in and of itself, long moments of dread where those barely-birds seemed too motionless.
When the pigeon finally returned, si breathed out what felt like hours of tension. It cuddled into the nest with the chicks, hiding them from view. Released from vigil, J. paced to the fridge, bed and back. After seven circuits, si flipped open the notebook on the table and wrote:
Dear ghost,
There’s a line about the terrible boredom of pain that seems really appropriate right now. I wonder how you deal with being dead. I guess I’m your pigeon—something to watch that’s still moving.
You’re probably not real; this is a device, me giving myself therapy badly.
But if you are, we’re both in limbo. Not so unconnected after all, I guess.
——
You know, we got into college together. Same program. We had a future.
Seems like a different world. Not real.
J. spread hir hand over the words, pressing them down. Si had been so ready; they both had been, full of strategies and tactics. The world an oyster, a peach, a sun-hot raspberry from the bushes behind C.’s parents’ house—and now husk, pit, bitter. No plans. Instead, the dedicated free fall of a life with the bottom torn out.
Goddamn I am so melodramatic
There was a thin-fingered handprint in the steam on the bathroom mirror. Towel in one hand and wiping water out of hir eyes with the other, J. attempted to correlate the odds that si was hallucinating against the odds that the ghost was real and—judging from the print—petite. Or, it had been left in body oils by some previous tenant and never wiped down. That seemed as improbable as the phantom; tiny and old or not, the apartment had been clean when si moved in.
“Are you going to communicate with me now?” si murmured, voice rough from disuse and echoing strangely in the closet-sized room.