“Destroy the city with me,” he says. “Destroy the city, and we’ll be free. We’ll still be strong. But we can go wherever we want.”
She presses her body to the machine, fitting her limbs among its protuberances, laying her cheek against its thrumming heart.
“I can never remember your name,” she confesses. “I put your picture on the wall, and I still can’t remember.”
“We loved each other,” he says.
“I can’t remember that either.” She steps away. “I have to stop you.”
“You don’t have to do it for me,” he says. “Do it for yourself. See London and New York. Just think about it.”
She tells him she won’t, but she does. The notion itches, scratches, burrows.
Haven’t I done enough for you? she asks the city. Its fear grows more urgent with every hour; her dreams are filled with glowing liquid and a heartbeat that shudders with promise.
She gets the number of the man she saw interviewed. He agrees to meet. By the time he gets there, he’s forgotten why he’s come, but he answers her questions. He doesn’t regret it. She asks him what made him do it.
“I was lonely,” he says. Then he shakes his head. “That’s not it. Honestly, I couldn’t stand seeing that everyone I loved got along fine without me.”
She tells him about the machine. He asks what she’s going to do.
“I could give him the cure,” she suggests, but he shakes his head again. It’s not a syringe of blue liquid you can jam in his thigh; it’s months of drugs and radiation. She looks at his skin, paper-thin, his color like a day-old bruise. She wonders how much life he’s traded to have any life at all.
“The thing is,” she tells him, though he’s lost track of her now, doesn’t register her voice, “the thing is, if I stop him, I’ve got to kill him. Or else I’ve got to stay here forever. Because he won’t go for the cure, and he won’t stop trying.”
She stares at her hands, her fingers gnarled from fractures that have healed over wrong.
“I’ve never killed anyone before.”
He laughs at something on his phone. She leaves him with the bill and walks down a street that stretches from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine.
It is not, in the end, a beautiful city. It has no real soul to it; it is forgettable, indistinct. It clings to her, infests her, gives little in return. No one on this street knows her name.
He joins her. They walk the city, stand at the edge, where the pain sets its teeth gently against their throats.
“It’s ready,” he tells her. He takes her hand. “Cass. Destroy the city with me tonight. Destroy the city, and be free.”
She almost remembers him. In a way, it makes it easier, or else nearly impossible, when she turns to him, kisses him, hands on either side of his face. When she wrenches her hands to the side. When she feels his neck break.
It’s not enough to kill him. There is no magical serum to make him weak, no stone from the orbit of a distant sun, no incantation. There’s only brute strength and the crack of bones. Too much damage to heal.
When it’s done, she goes to the church steeple. The city thanks her with a sunrise more brilliant and more beautiful than any she’s ever seen, flooding light over men and women who are alive because of what she’s done. Because of the blood drying to grime in the creases of her hands.
Not one of them knows her name. Not one of them knows about the machine still under their feet, waiting for a switch to be flipped.
The city shows her something new. Six hundred miles away, someone’s matching her streets to the map on their bones, praying for an end to the ache. It’s a promise, a gift. The city’s consolation prize. You won’t be alone.
She leans back. Wonders what part she’ll play when they get here. Maybe they’ll work together. She’ll get a sidekick, and they’ll get a mentor who knows every brick and shadow. They’ll get each other. They won’t have to be alone.
Except she was never alone, and she was. He was always here, and it wasn’t enough.
Except that she hasn’t taken apart the machine. She should have headed straight there. Scattered its pieces, destroyed its blueprints. She hasn’t. She’s finding that she likes the option. The switch she could flip and opt out of this whole dance.
Except that she knows, if she’s willing to admit it, that someday—not soon, but someday—she’d smile. She’d hold out her hand. And she’d say, Destroy the city with me tonight.
She could fight it—for a while. But she’s got one death to her name now. Another would be easy. Another hundred wouldn’t be hard. Her disease is advanced; she has trouble remembering herself these days, but she remembers enough to know that isn’t the way she wants to be.
She smokes his cigarettes until the sun comes up. The city calls to her to reconsider, but she’s made her choice. She walks to the clinic, blood still caked beneath her nails.
There’s no paperwork to fill out; they move too quickly, the only way to ensure the treatment actually gets started before the disease wins out.
The needle slides into her arm. No blue liquid; it’s clear, and it slithers into her blood like poison, hot and acidic. Her bones begin to ache, and the city grieves.
In another city, far away, a woman runs her fingers over the letters carved in her kitchen table. CASS, they say, and she begins to remember.
Further still, six hundred miles and more, someone buys a bus ticket. They step on board, searching for the streets etched on their bones.
Kathleen Kayembe
You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych
from Nightmare Magazine
Isobelle: The Whispers of Dogs
Uncle says there’s a pit bull in Mbuyi’s old room, but he’s lying, and his eyes are scared. Dogs aren’t pets in Congo, they’re for guarding—it’s why Dad never got us one, and how I first knew Uncle had no pet dog. I tried to learn what he was hiding, but the more I asked questions, the worse his lies got, until I finally asked if I could just see the dog, and Uncle snapped. His fear and frustration exploded into an angry lecture about respecting my elders; and how I’m too much like spoiled American kids; and that I’d better be careful—no self-respecting man wants a woman who badgers him with questions, and that’s true no matter what country you’re from.
I bore the tirade in silence, which my American friends didn’t understand. Dad and Uncle were close friends in Kinshasa; although he’s not blood, he’s family, and his lectures carry near-parental weight. His French and sociology lectures at UMass are far more pleasing, of course, but to hear Uncle at his best, watch him gather folklore. Once he’s turned in spring grades, he travels the country collecting stories of other people from Congo, living off of grants for the eventual book these stories will become, and on the hospitality of those he interviews. Uncle records oral histories, conducting interview after interview and transcribing them.
Uncle loves stories about The Way Things Were—my favorites—but he loves stories of the old religions and witchcraft more. Those are the stories my grandparents never told their children except through actions and naming, and superstitious talk in outdoor markets with other adults about rain and harvest and what evil magic can be done to you if you don’t properly dispose of your hair when it is cut and a witch gets hold of it.
Those are the stories Uncle is really seeking. They’re what made him lean forward in his seat, dark eyes narrowing and hands stilling over the scuffed cherry wood of our kitchen table. He didn’t look down at his list of questions the entire time Dad and Aunt Ntshila talked about their strange dreams the week before my grandmother died. He listened—really listened—when they told him their mother had asked them to gather all of her children and bring them back home. When Dad said sometimes he feels her spirit with him, Uncle even seemed to understand.
I watched Uncle as avidly as he watched them.
And then I watched him lie about the dog shut in the upstairs bedroom. I watched his fear when I stood on the sta
irwell to move my suitcase from his path. I watched his panicked insistence that I stay closed in the office bedroom from midnight until dawn whenever I slept over.
Something makes noise in Mbuyi’s old bedroom, but I know it is not a dog.
I climbed the stairs once, to the second floor of Uncle’s apartment, when he left to buy goat meat to teach me to cook. I wanted to see what was up there, but in case he asked, the downstairs bathroom—mine for the summer—was out of clean towels, and they are stored in the upstairs hall closet. I climbed the wood stairs, black twisted railing under my hand wobbling the whole way up, and stairs creaking under my feet. I stood at the closet door with closed bedroom doors on either side of me. On the right was Uncle’s bedroom. On the left was his son Mbuyi’s room, before Mbuyi disappeared.
Now it is the dog’s room, Uncle says.
But dogs don’t bang on doors with the sound of a shoulder or a fist. Dogs don’t rasp obscenities in jagged French with a voice as sweet as sugarcane. Dogs don’t make fear rise up in your bones from somewhere so deep you didn’t know it was there. They don’t make you afraid to turn away from whatever space they could inhabit, or to sit with your back to the door they are behind, or to close your eyes—even to blink—for fear they will be in front of you when your eyes open again. They don’t fill your chest to bursting with a haze of adrenaline and sluggishness. The whispers of dogs are not meant to haunt our dreams.
I never did open that door.
That night, like every night, Uncle said, “This is an old superstition,” and he blessed me with wrinkled fingers pressed to my forehead, hung a necklace of beads on the lintel, said goodnight, and gently closed the door. That night, the summer of my freshman year at UMass, Uncle’s odd superstition suddenly held new meaning—and wasn’t enough. I locked my door. I spent that night huddled on the futon in the downstairs office, for once all too happy not to open my door until dawn, even if I had to go to the bathroom. I wait to lock it now until I hear him moving upstairs; I don’t want to seem rude. I also don’t want to sleep with the door unlocked while something lives up in Mbuyi’s old bedroom.
I often played in Mbuyi’s room when I was little. While Uncle sat with my parents downstairs, he let Mbuyi and me play mancala with his nice board, the one of polished wood with hand-carved faces of men and of women with cornrowed hair, their nimble fingers wrapped around flowering vines. Mbuyi’s scarred right hand could always hold all the beads, and he chose which hollow to scoop from faster than I did. Still, though I was younger, we were almost evenly matched. I took a long time to move each turn, but strategizing for the game came naturally to me. He was more reckless, but didn’t mind losing to a girl who was younger as long as we both had fun.
Mbuyi was my favorite cousin, and although given the name for an older twin, he remained Uncle’s only child. When I asked Mbuyi—once—why he had no younger twin, no Kanku, he rubbed his long scar. Then he left and stayed gone long past dark. When he returned and Uncle yelled at him, Mbuyi asked something in Tshiluba. Uncle immediately shut himself inside his room. No one spoke of it again. Mbuyi never explained his obsession with returning to Congo, but at twenty-three he finally did. He stayed in Kinshasa with my grandfather and boarded the plane to return to the States after seven weeks meeting family I have yet to meet, eating food I’m still not skilled enough to cook, and being exposed to a way of life my father says will “show you how some people live.” That is to say, one cannot go to Congo and return as spoiled as one left.
Only Uncle knows if Mbuyi came back less spoiled; the day after his return, Mbuyi was declared missing. None of us have heard from him since. He had no car to find by the side of the road or in a ditch or the Connecticut River. His friends knew nothing about where he’d been. Uncle was distraught and cut himself off from my family almost entirely. Not until I came out to school here, where I could take a bus down from UMass to his apartment and Uncle had to let me in because I am family, did he begin to repair the rift he had created. He welcomed me with open arms and haunted eyes when I knocked on his door, and when the banging started from Mbuyi’s old bedroom, Uncle told me he’d adopted a dog.
After the first afternoon I spent in Uncle’s house, poring over the books in his office and avoiding the handwritten journals and the room with the dog, I visited his apartment often. Determined to drag him back into our family, I brought news, helped him clean, and begged Congolese cooking lessons from this man who knew all the best dishes because he had no wife to cook for him anymore. I stayed with Uncle for Thanksgiving because it was cheaper than going home. I did homework and helped him organize his students’ papers in the afternoons, and read late into the night, then slept, in the office. And I kept the light on when I slept, because the creaks in the house sounded like footsteps, and even though Uncle’s room was right above mine, I knew they couldn’t be his noises, and I was afraid.
It has been more than a year since my first visit as a freshman, and I have yet to see what lives in Mbuyi’s old room. It is summer now, and hotter upstairs than the heat-soaked downstairs. Every night Uncle presses his fingers to my forehead and rehangs the beads above the lintel. Every night I hear him creak upstairs, and I lock the door and bundle up in pajamas that are too hot for sleeping with a blanket but just right for a surprise dash into the street for safety, and wait for sleep with open eyes trained on the floor between the bookshelf and the door, where the yellow light from the desk lamp stretches to reach. I am watching for a sentient darkness. I am searching for shapes I don’t want to see. I fall asleep every night on the lookout for what makes my heart beat too fast and my back prickle like an arching cat’s back. I don’t know what form it will take. I just know its voice, sweet like sugarcane and cruel as ice water on a slumbering child’s face.
My headphones are plugged into a tape recorder the size of a hardback book. I’m typing up Uncle’s interview with a man from Florida, and have been since just after washing the dinner dishes. The lethargy from the foufou and fish has worn off with the steady tapping of my fingers on the laptop keys, and now I am simply on autopilot, stopping the tape recorder every so often because my fingers don’t type French as fast as they type English, and the interview switches back and forth.
Clock chimes break me from my trance. My computer says it’s seven minutes to midnight. Uncle’s grandfather clock always runs fast, no matter how many times you set it back. I stop the tape and close my laptop, unplugging it from the wall and taking it to my summer bedroom, Uncle’s office with the futon folded out into a bed. I can’t believe Uncle let me stay up so late—that either of us did. He always insists I’m in bed—in the office—well before midnight.
I have learned certain things have power. Uncle taught me this, not explicitly, but through example. Midnight has power in the West: it is the witching hour, the time of night when ghosts are most powerful. It is the time when Uncle and I are in our rooms and there are footsteps in the hall and down the stairs.
I find Uncle asleep on the living room couch. I do not want him to be around for those creaking footsteps.
I call him, shake him. His eyes open. “Time is it?” He is still groggy, his voice is slurred, but he looks at me with eyes narrowed the way they were when my father and aunt told him that on the final night, when all the children were back home, they dreamed their mother had died clutching her heart.
“About five to midnight,” I say.
Uncle struggles to sit up and I try to help, but he waves my hands away. “Go to your room,” he says. “Time for bed.”
“I know.” I want to roll my eyes, but feel this isn’t the time for such casual familiarity. His back straightens slowly, he squares his shoulders, and then he takes me by the back of the neck, the way my father does when he is upset but being gentle, and herds me to my summer bedroom. He rushes me into the room, but does not rush as he places his fingertips on my forehead and rehangs the beads above the lintel.
He stops as he is closing the door and casts a tired
smile in my direction. I am standing still, heart hammering and mind eerily quiet. He opens his mouth to say something, and then he pauses. Finally he clasps my shoulder. “Isobelle. Don’t be afraid.”
He closes the door, and I am alone in the dark.
I stand there and hear the creak of his footsteps approaching the stairs. I see lights go out under the door and realize I have not turned on the desk lamp, and now it will be harder to find.
I have not yet heard Uncle creak up the steps. A faint light still shines underneath the door. He has not finished turning off the lights. But something creaks above me, and I wonder how Uncle got upstairs without my noticing. Then the sound leaves the space above me, and the stairs start their swaying creak. It is slow, deliberate. It is not Uncle’s pull-trudge-trudge-pull, railing to foot, foot to railing, step. It is a lighter sound. It presses heavy on my chest. I feel the fear of a shapeless, shifting dark expanding in the air around me with each step, until it is hard to breathe. I have had dreams like this, where the fear in me is so great, the danger I face so terrible, that I cannot make a sound louder than a whisper. I stare at the door, invisible in the darkness but for the faint bar of light spilling onto the floor beyond reach of my toes, and I am paralyzed with fear.
I want to open the door, but I have always been told not to. I am afraid to open it, to warn Uncle away from what he must know, even better than me, is coming slowly and inexorably closer. I wish now that I knew the old stories of witchcraft that Uncle transcribes himself. I wish I had not thought I would never need such information, or even, when I first heard the stories, that they were the rickety beliefs of the old, the foolish, and the ignorant. I want the protection of something, and I want my uncle to be safe.
The footsteps stop at the bottom of the stairs, and I hear a heavy thud, and then nothing but the sound of my pulse, the AC turning down, and crickets chirping dangerously loud outside.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 5