Age of Blight

by Kristine Ong Muslim

  “I have to,” she said. “I’m going to be dead forever. It’s not like I’m going to live again. I might as well try to find ways to jumpstart my eyes. I might regain my sight if I do that. Blind dead is the worst kind of dead.”

  “But that’s the only legitimate kind of dead there is. This, you, right now, it’s—” I trailed off and for a minute or two we chewed on our respective thoughts.

  “You won’t be an undead dead forever,” I added. “The world is going to end soon.”

  “Let me know if you are ready for the formaldehyde treatment.”

  It was father who said this to Beth. It was father who was schooled in the inevitable reality of irreversible entropy in classical thermodynamics. He did not look up from his morning paper, did not waver for one second from his absolute lack of empathy. He never had it in him to care about anything except for matters directly related to his personal welfare. That and boxing. He loved boxing. Beth didn’t answer him right away. I looked out the window.

  Outerbridge was particularly quiet this morning. Many parts of the world had been quieted down, too. There’s the forest near Chernobyl, for example, where fallen leaves won’t rot until forty years have passed. Had Beth been in Chernobyl, she might have a better chance at delaying the eventual corruption of her body. There’s also the town called Kalachi in Kazakhstan where people suddenly fall asleep and wake up after six days, none of them remembering anything. I sometimes wonder what the people of Kalachi dream of when they sleep for six days straight.

  Meanwhile in Outerbridge, the choir from The Church of Henry was strangely silent. Exactly four months ago, not long before Beth died, the government announced that the world was going to end on a such and such date. We did not pay much attention to it. We did not even pay attention to how the morning sun began to develop a strange yellowish sheen. When the early light struck opaque surfaces, it did so by producing oily specks. Like the light was somehow liquefying and spattering its droplets. An announcer from the local radio station mentioned something about the early stages of redshifting, something about fluctuations in the quantum level that affected frequencies of light. We did not pay much attention to that, either. Because even if we did, we could do nothing about the impending cataclysm. Happy endings are just curses told evasively.

  So we went on with our lives, what little remained of them. Then one day, Beth died and came back to life. Her dead body was wheeled out of the emergency room. Nine hours later, around the time when mother was making arrangements with the mortuary downtown and while father was insisting on cremation, Beth regained consciousness. Thing was, she did not have a pulse. Her skin still sported a deathly pallor. A physician, schooled in the science of human vital signs, pronounced her to be clinically dead and then sent her home to her family. He recommended prompt formaldehyde treatment for sanitary reasons. He also said that nearly every family had one like my sister, so we shouldn’t take it personally.

  “Besides, the world is going to end soon,” the physician, who was schooled in the science of human vital signs, said. Then he winked at my sister, who did not or could not wink back.

  “Turn down the thermostat in your room as low as it can go and stay there,” mother told Beth after father left the room, rattling the paper in his hands. “I’ll call home services for your formaldehyde treatment this afternoon.”

  Beth did not nod in agreement. She did not say anything, either. Maybe she thought she didn’t have to. Or there’s the possibility that she had lost her hearing. Sometimes, the undead are completely misunderstood. They can’t help it if the living have to keep on living; have to keep expecting something from them. That’s the one true quality that defines life—the compulsion to draw something: an essence, a lesson, anything—from others.

  Beth continued the way she was because there was nothing any of us could do, the same way we couldn’t force back the water leaking out of a cracked vase. Even if we managed to put the vase back together by gluing its cracks, the water, some of it anyway, would already be irretrievably lost. And Beth, to be sure, was cracked. And some of what Beth contained inside her had already dribbled and been absorbed by the area rug, seeped into the floorboards beneath, leached into the baseboard’s tiny cracks. Some of Beth had already evaporated into the atmosphere. And so Beth—what was left of Beth—stayed inside her room most of the time. There was no need to eat or drink. There was no need to sleep. There was no need to need anything. As expected, isolation would draw her in, because pure isolation, having no notion of emotional pain, would seek out those that belonged to its fold.

  After her formaldehyde treatment, she helped me clear her room of unnecessary objects. The undead don’t have any use for a bed, for example. Or a chair, a desk lamp, a mirror. So, we emptied her room. Of course, I did all the heavy lifting to avoid accidents that might injure her. People like Beth won’t ever heal.

  She kept on looking out of the tinted glass windows of her empty room, observing with a clinical detachment, which could be mistaken for curiosity, the children playing on the street. The children who rolled the glittery red things, the children who thought they could still live forever, the children who did not know that it could someday happen to them.

  The children could not see Beth by the window.

  Beth could not see the children.

  Beautiful Curse

  It was not an accident at all. I planned on the most opportune time for my family to find out that the removal of my tentacle had not suppressed my predatory urges. And in all this time, I also could not stop thinking about that room in our house, the one with no windows and a thick door lined with steel, a door that only locked from the outside.

  I chose a Sunday afternoon in April. April was the time of the year when the northern sky developed a loathsome purple tinge, a consequence of the early stages of redshifting. The government issued warnings about this phenomenon, warnings which were useless because they could not change the eventual course of things—that we were all headed for extinction and no one could do anything about it. That afternoon was perfect. My family deserved a little pep in their long uneventful lives.

  When my family discovered me behind the shed, I was disheveled in all ways that a person could be disheveled. I crouched in the bushes. My mouth was clamped to the neck of the bloodied, still twitching chicken. The feathers made me gag, but I kept on chomping, kept on tearing at the doomed fowl’s flesh until, at last, the animal, the prey, stopped twitching—a weakling’s ultimate recourse.

  My father restrained me, gagged me so I couldn’t bite him, and then half-dragged, half-carried me inside the house. It was probably out of shame that he ended up manhandling me. He needed to get me inside the house before anyone could see the bloody spectacle I had created. With her screeching, my sister woke the neighbors and our hibernating house pets. Oh, I wanted to snap her neck just to shut her up, eat her and my father, devour their corrupted bodies and leave only the bones for the rare scavenging birds of prey to pick, but I just could not get to them. They managed to chain me up and plug my mouth.

  My mother said that I had the peculiar maniacal look she associated with the residents of Bardenstan, the place nearest the epicenter of the 2115 fallout. Her comment was not meant to be an insult. She said it in the manner of someone expecting me to reform afterwards. My mother was a first-rate Loyal, thus the genuine kindness. My father bought her from an auction house. I never heard him complain about her expensive solar upkeep and collagen sustenance. If he did, well, that would be another story. My mother, a first-rate Loyal to the core, was wired to love me unconditionally with or without my tentacle.

  Do you know that there’s a picture of me hidden inside my parents’ safe? In that picture was the real me. It showed how I looked the day I was born. I saw it only once, when I turned twelve, the mandatory age for Truth—the government’s thirty-three-year campaign to make parents—both pre-arranged and natural—confess to their children about the circumstances of their birth. The Truth
was supposed to foster family bonding, a hazy concept that was prevalent in the nuclear families of the late twentieth century.

  I believed in it. Or I thought I did. I believed in any effort, no matter how preposterous, to be truthful.

  In that picture, I did not look human, because I had an enormous tentacle protruding from the side of my body. The tentacle was covered by bluish skin. The skin was sparsely dotted with tiny sacs. Deoxygenated blood, the doctor curtly answered, when asked why it was bluish. The tentacle allowed for voluntary movement. It was, more or less, a prodigious limb.

  “The tentacle,” the doctor went on to explain to the younger versions of my parents, “is an extension of the appendix. This anomaly is linked to predatory instincts.”

  I looked it up in an exotic biology textbook, memorized the passage that defined what scientists thought I had: the tentacle is not a simple anatomical curiosity. It is associated with the need to hunt, to assemble in packs—a behavior that has been observed in long-extinct animals like canines. If the tentacle is not cut out in time, or before the host turns sixteen, the predatory instincts may prove to be overwhelming and may lead a person to harm others, as in the harrowing case of Flynn Romero, 19, who finally had his tentacle surgically removed when he was seventeen. Romero, who attacked everyone in a department store toy section where he worked on a contractual basis, killed nine people that day.

  Ah, Romero! I thought when I first read about his case. Had they stopped moving and teasing you to hunt them, you wouldn’t have been interested in them and they would have survived, right?

  Now in that picture in my parents’ safe, I had the squelched look of defeat, the squelched look of an ancient creature that believed itself to be dangerous but had no faculties to behave as such. It looked as if something vital had been seized from me. And something, indeed, had been taken from me—albeit temporarily and not fully. In that picture, my lips had the hideous color of raw and ragged flesh, as if I had chewed them up. You see, even pre-selection and genetic engineering could ruin even the most ordinary of human stock. Something could always turn out wrong. My sister and I were deemed to be from a good batch during the recount of 2120. But look at how I turned out—sentient and disfigured, maladjusted and happy—a familiar fixture, if I had lived years ago.

  My parents had my tentacle surgically removed when I was five years old. The visible section of the tentacle was eliminated. The part that was anchored to my spine was left untouched. Removing that part could kill me.

  I missed having my tentacle around. As a child, I used to swing from it on the banister.

  Outerbridge, the only place in America where crops are still grown in soil, does not take kindly to deformities. There are towns where physical aberrations are tolerated. Bardenstan, for example. Anyway, that’s another story. (I have plenty of stories left in me. Now they’re mostly about the hunt, the hunt, the unending hunt.)

  Think about the ones who cannot be saved. Think about the ones who cannot adjust to being different. Think about all our stories and those of the ones before us. This terrible unfolding does not always see a blunt object gain shape. Sometimes, it distorts the object and the landscape that conspires to retain its shape.

  Outside, something darted across my line of vision. It looked like a bird, a real one. Flightless birds were the only real birds. I would find it soon. I would find it and then I would kill it. And you could say that this urgency was attributed to the unexcised portion of my tentacle. You could believe whatever sounded convenient, because that’s what drives people to stay sane. Father put me inside the room where there are no windows, the room with just this one door that locks from the outside. I hear them talking outside the room. They are scared. They are panicking. I sense their restlessness. My mother, the first-rate Loyal, I’ll gnaw her throat first when I get out of here, slurp whatever comes out of all her ragged holes.

  IV. THE AGE OF BLIGHT

  Day of the Builders

  This happened long before the initial signs of sickness from the outsiders rippled across my village. You should understand by now how my people were easy prey because most of us were trusting, greedy for finery, and readily distracted by new things or any semblance of finesse.

  Being the only one in my village who could converse in the language of the Builders, I helped catalyze what the learned ones called modernity. I met the Builders at the gates that day. Oblivious to the sweltering heat, one of the Builders took pictures of the towering natural rock formation we used as landmark and general lookout post. There was nothing significant about the typical karst formation, except that according to one of the Builders, it indicated how the area used to be an ocean floor.

  That’s fascinating, I said. And I meant it. I found it remarkable how one could deduce that from a rock formation.

  Their leader introduced himself by first giving his title. Doctor, he said, but of a different kind, not the doctor who heals. He had a white and unnaturally even set of teeth. He appeared sincere when he smiled. He also offered his hand to me, a gesture I found unnerving. His hands were clean, the nails neatly trimmed, while I had not washed my hands and there was encrusted dirt under my fingernails. He did not flinch when I clasped his proffered hand. Or he may have willed himself not to cringe.

  I showed the Builders around the village. They oohed at the fossilized tree trunks near the lake. They aahed at the marvelously pronounced stratified layers of rock and earth exposed by years of weathering. It is obvious to me and to the elders, however, that the Builders seemed unexpectedly at ease, as if they already knew their way around the village. For example, they weren’t surprised, or even pretended to act surprised, when I led them to the Pit of Hell—a natural hole in the rocky ground where fire had been burning for hundreds of years. It was as if they expected that I would flaunt my village’s access to the underworld.

  That’s natural gas, the doctor who claimed to be the type who could not heal, said with no hint of emotion. In the face of such fiery display and overpowering smell of rot, he explained stolidly, It must have ignited at some point. And since the area is incredibly rich in natural gas, the fires never died out. That foul odor you’re smelling—that’s sulfur.

  Devonian shale over here, a middle-aged man wearing eyeglasses exclaimed. I did not understand until much later the significance of his discovery. You won’t believe what I found in the gates alone, another whispered. He was close, so I heard him perfectly. Dickinsonia costata, intact and perfectly preserved. They must have thought to shelter it from the elements because they believe the markings have either divine or magical origins. To prevent damage, I think we should superglue it in situ and foam-wrap the rest.

  Another Builder conferred with his companion, What do you think of this, Greg? Does it look like a fossilized fern of some sort?

  I don’t think so. It looks like good old dendrite to me. See those fissures across the rock? But take some samples just to be sure.

  All the while, I marveled at their clean-looking clothes, their neatly trimmed nails, their short hair. Like many people in my village, I was used to being disheveled, with no care to whether I wore ill-fitting clothes or hadn’t combed my hair. I looked at the woman carrying electronic gear, and I felt shame. I felt ugly.

  Looking back to that fateful day, I could vouch with my life how they came in peace, with their proper manners, their familiarity of our ways. They must have studied us without us knowing. They knew not to look us directly in the eye because that would be misconstrued as a sign of aggression. They did not walk ahead of us because we would have interpreted it as a form of belittling. And the fact that they were studying the surroundings with a clinical eye while deciding where to begin their construction told me that although they definitely wanted something from us, we could also get something from them in return—an understanding of our natural world through their educated eyes, perhaps. I thought that would benefit my people. That was why I convinced everyone that they should be allowed to stay. They shou
ld be allowed to stay even if I smelled the sickness coming off their perspiration. Oh, it was unmistakable—the stench of sickness from outsiders.

  They brought out their odd-looking tripods, informed me it was for surveying the landscape. They also brandished whirring metal detectors. Two of them began the process of positioning on the ground what I recognized as the titanium struts of portable tents.

  They then explained what they could do for the village.

  We will build a hospital and a school, the Doctor said. And highways so you can reach civilization. You could build a tourism base, too. You could sell things to tourists, perform magic shows for them, whatever you want. We would build factories, so you could make more things faster. Then pumps to siphon underground water, so you need not rely on unsafe and exposed well water. Then plumbing systems. Then dams. We could also have a chemical plant somewhere in the plain east of the canyons. The chemical plant will front the fields of lavender. We’ll have our well-trained plant operators manning that part of the project.

  The doctor, the one who does not purport to heal, went on and on. I was swayed.

  I looked out to the fields and the valley we tilled for crops, imagining how they would teem in the hands of the Builders. The rough beasts of summer languished among the trees, their horns silvery in the dwindling afternoon sunlight. From afar, the forest loomed. All these would soon change, I thought. In my mind, I saw rain against macadam. I saw the feet of my people no longer barefoot and filthy against the ground. Soon, there would be no such thing as out there.

  That night, I explained to the village elders that once we let the Builders touch us, the dissolution of everything we believed in, everything we were, would begin. I gave them the consequences in black and white. I knew they understood without me having to lay it out for them. They smelled the lingering sickness of the outsiders, too, caught a whiff of the outsider’s breath, caught a glimpse of their shapely hands—the type of hands that could destroy as well as create.