The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  “It is,” Fumiko said, wiping her wet neck with her napkin. She thought about what Desiree Station would look like—the cylinder, beautiful in its simple geometry. She wanted to tell Dana about her new job, about how one day she would accompany Desiree with a beautiful creation of her own, a statement to the world of what she treasured; but she knew that would break the NDA, and so said nothing.

  Dana sighed as she stirred her tea. “Shame I’ll be gone by the time Desiree is done.”

  “You could buy a ticket on an Ark,” Fumiko said. “A half century of cold sleep, and you could see it and all the other stations.”

  She laughed. “Not on my student allowance. And even if I could,” she said, quieter, “I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Dana glanced out the window, at the rain. “I was born here. For better or for worse, this is my world, a world I’d have a hard time saying goodbye to.” She shrugged with just her left shoulder. “Besides, who else is going to build those solar farms and lightbulbs if not me?”

  “In two generations this planet’s surface will be uninhabitable.”

  “Most likely.”

  “So your point is a nonissue. Building solar farms on Terra is useless. All it would do is collect energy for the empty cities. You should put serious thought into traveling offworld. The frontier could use more good minds.”

  “It’s not useless.” Dana was frowning. It occurred to Fumiko she had had this argument many times before. “The world is billions,” she said. “At most—and I’m being generous with this estimate—twenty percent have the means to leave. Eighty percent have to stay behind. They’re going to be trapped in hell until the Arks return for a second pickup—if there’s a second pickup, and even if there is, there’s still billions left over. Maybe by then more Arks will have been built. The numbers go down but we’re still in the billions, and the odds are they won’t make it that long—will live underground for a few decades while the surface cooks, and all they’ll have left is the moisture that collects on the walls of their caves. Not everyone gets to leave. The least I can do is give them some working lights to read by.” It was then that the screen played a commercial for teeth-whitening markers. A parade of nice teeth and beautiful faces. Dana watched the screen, expressionless, her cheeks still flush from the rain. “The people who leave always forget that the world doesn’t end once they’re gone,” she said. “They forget about the decay.”

  “ ‘Useless’ was the wrong word,” Fumiko said.

  “It was,” she replied before offering up a smile. “But that’s okay.”

  They drank. The quiet that now passed between them was not the same quiet that Fumiko shared with her mother at dinner—that was a silence, a void. This was a cushion between moments. Beneath their table, Dana’s foot rested by Fumiko’s, their ankles touching. Neither commented on this. “You haven’t seen my apartment,” Dana said, with no suggestive quality at all, more as if she were observing a quaint fact about the café, how lovely the décor; but the suggestion was there, in the small, but significant, contact of their feet.

  “I haven’t,” Fumiko confirmed. She moved her foot away from Dana’s, fearing she’d sense its mad tapping.

  “We could go there, if you want. Watch a movie on the Feed.”

  “We could,” Fumiko said.

  They left the café once the rain died. The walk to her apartment wasn’t long, a few blocks east, toward the shore. Dana chatted with the doorman before calling the elevator, but Fumiko didn’t hear their conversation, her mind preoccupied—an exposed wire, sparking thought after anxious thought, terrified because she knew what was going to happen. Something new. The elevator doors shut and the box drifted up, humming. Dana leaned against her. Fumiko counted the lights. Fifth floor. Sixth floor. Her breath snagged when Dana’s hand reached up and touched the side of her face. “Is this all right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Fumiko whispered.

  Dana held her cheeks like the sides of a chalice, Fumiko’s eyes widening as she leaned forward. Their breath mixed. Their eyes shuttered. Their lips pressing together as soft as folded wings. She could taste the lemon from Dana’s tea. The doors wound open on the tenth floor, and they parted. Dana took her hand. She flicked the keycard against the reader, and the automatic circuits switched on the kitchen counter lights, the lamp by the plush sofa. She never told Dana she was a virgin. She didn’t need to. It was clear from the way she took off her clothes, the pausing before every action, looking into Dana’s eyes as if to ask, Is this too allowed? A question that repeated itself when Dana kissed the inside of her thigh, and her consciousness tunneled, until she was only aware of certain things—the rain drizzling across the bedroom window. The black screen with the digital readout of the time. Thursday, 4:30 p.m. The electric pleasure of Dana’s finger tracing circles around her nipple. There was nothing else.

  No one else.

  * * *

  —

  They spent every day together. On Friday Dana excused herself from class so she could go with Fumiko to California to see the International Bird Preserve, a place Fumiko spoke often about; it would be her first time visiting in many years and she was eager to return. The layout of the preserve was unchanged, the only proof of the passing of time the number of birds that still populated the glass enclosure, significantly fewer than when Fumiko was a child. She remembered flocks overhead, and the dizzying movement in the trees and the rivers, the cacophonous echo of squawks from the man-made gully. But now much of the enclosure was quiet apart from the manufactured wind that rustled the grass. A lone tern sat on a metal strut by the glass wall, observing its own reflection. One of the keepers told them that the last of the pelicans died a year ago. There were only geese in the river now.

  “This place used to be impressive,” Fumiko said.

  “It’s still an amazing construction,” Dana said.

  “I wish you could’ve seen it.” Fumiko placed a hand on the railing, gazing at the birdless tree branches and tall rocks. “There used to be so many of them.”

  It was then that Dana kissed Fumiko, without warning.

  A goose kicked up from the water and flew east, toward the gully.

  She was amused by how much she enjoyed Dana’s surprise kisses, and the impromptu hand-holding; displays of affection she had been averse to in other couples, finding it trite and ostentatious, as if the couple were trying to prove to the rest of the world how in love they were. But now she knew why they did it—how it was like having a secret; a language only two people shared.

  There were other less intimate surprises. When Dana returned from the canal market with a bag of noisemakers, she waited for Fumiko to emerge from the bathroom, and threw one of the noisemakers at her feet, the loud pop making her jump like a frenzied cat. Dana howled with laughter as Fumiko chased her around the apartment, grabbing the bag, each woman throwing noisemakers at the other, until the landlord called and informed them of the many complaints from downstairs. They apologized to him, killed the call, and fell into bed together, red with exhaustion. Fumiko crawled on top of Dana, hungry for her. She believed she could fall into that woman’s bed every hour of the day for the rest of her life, sustain herself on nothing but the taste of Dana’s fingers the way the starved suck water from a rock.

  They lay entwined while Dana dreamed up fantastic scenarios of the future in her arms. “A planet of our own. Just the two of us by the shore. We can take a boat out to sea on weekends.”

  “What will we do with potential invaders?”

  “Fend them off, of course. You can build the weapons. Make sure they’re automated, I don’t want to hold a gun.”

  “As you wish. But do you have a fail-safe in mind, for when they destroy our turret army?”

  “Why, darling, we’ve wired the whole place with explosives.” Dana nestled into the crook of Fumiko’s neck
and whispered, “If we can’t have what is ours, then no one can.”

  * * *

  —

  It was a month like none other. Some mornings Fumiko could barely breathe because she felt so lucky. Her heart smiled with teeth. Skin electric and giggly when their hands met and their fingers twined. Stomach cradled in a basket of feathers.

  But it was all tempered by the fact that soon she would have to make a choice: whether to leave for Umbai or stay with Dana, one of the few good things she had in this world. As Dana slept, Fumiko weighed the pros and cons of each decision. She risked losing Dana during her years of isolation if she left, but if she stayed, risked losing the career opportunity of a lifetime, and might lose Dana anyway to the natural, inevitable currents of failed relationships. They had known each other for a handful of weeks. They were strangers. There was not enough substantive evidence Fumiko could draw on to say they would stay together long-term, despite the many hints Dana dropped that she would like to continue this relationship even after Fumiko had left Okinawa, for wherever she was headed next.

  Things were made more difficult on Thursday, when Dana brought up the topic of their future together after their sixth curry dinner by the boardwalk. Dana said she felt that there was something strong between them. The hope in her eyes was too much for Fumiko. She decided to break a minor clause in her NDA that night, and told her the truth: that when she left, she would not be able to contact her, or anyone, for a long time. When Dana asked her how long this period of silence would last, all Fumiko could tell her was until the work was done. What work that was, Fumiko couldn’t tell her. Dana took in this news. Her eyes on the water. “Can you at least give me an estimate of when I’ll see you again?”

  “A number of years.”

  “A number of years,” she repeated.

  “How many, I can’t say,” Fumiko said. “That depends on how development goes.”

  “What are you developing?” But before Fumiko could say NDA, Dana held up her hand. “Right, you can’t say.” Dana stood up. She paced around the bench, her skirt whipping behind her. “If you want to break things off, I understand. I do. I won’t be happy about it obviously, but I’ll understand. Just, please, please don’t lie to me.”

  “This is a stipulation of the contract I signed with the company. On their premises, I’ll have access to research networks, but nothing in the social-media cloud—no Feed. Not until the project is finished and made public.”

  “I wish you would’ve told me this earlier.”

  “Would you have stopped seeing me if you knew?”

  There was a time when Dana didn’t answer. But soon her shoulders relaxed. “No,” she said. “I just would’ve liked to have been prepared.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I called my parents yesterday.” She laughed. She hated her parents. “Calls to the moon are expensive, but I did it anyway because I wanted to tell them I met someone special—and before you even think it, yes, I do still think you’re special, despite this wonderful surprise you’ve given me.” She sighed. “And once you go, you can’t leave at all?”

  “No.”

  “If you didn’t have this job, would you still want to see me?”

  Without hesitation, Fumiko said, “Yes.”

  Dana brightened. “Then it’s simple.” She clapped her hands. “Here’s what you do. You get in contact with them, and you renegotiate your contract. You tell them that you won’t work for them unless you have the bare minimum of time off to go do what you want, and then you can come visit me. It probably won’t be for long, but we can make do with the time we have. I have a lawyer friend we can get in contact with—he’s a bit of a jerk, but he’s good at his job and besides he owes me a favor so we can probably get him to look over your papers pro bono, and then—what? Why are you shaking your head?”

  “There is no debate with them.” She pressed her hands to her knees. “If I want the job, this is what it is.”

  “You won’t even try?”

  “There is no trying.”

  “Impossible. You’re impossible.” Scowling, she sat back down. Behind them, two teenage girls laughed at a vid on one of their Handhelds. Water lapped the struts while a dirigible whirred far above, but this time, it was more lonely than romantic. Dana didn’t look at Fumiko as she played with her chopsticks, pecking at the remnants of rice in her container. “There is a PO box,” Fumiko said. “You can send handwritten letters there. I’d get them.”

  “But you won’t be able to write back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Please stop apologizing. I know you’re sorry. I know. I know.” She rubbed her face. Then she shook her head. “I just don’t know if I can wait that long.”

  Fumiko had expected this answer, prepared for it, but there was only so much preparing she could do for the punch to her gut. As she cried, Dana wrapped her in a hug and accepted the full weight of Fumiko’s body as she leaned into her. “I won’t promise anything,” she whispered, “but when you come back out, and you find me, and the circumstances are right…then maybe. Maybe we can do this again. Properly.”

  “I want to stay,” Fumiko said.

  Dana laughed, despondent. “Words,” she said. “Those are just words.”

  * * *

  —

  On their last night, they made love. Dana asked Fumiko to wake her up if she fell asleep so that they could have a proper goodbye, but that never happened. As Dana breathed, her eyes shut, her fist curled against her parted mouth, Fumiko slipped out of bed, dressed, and left her apartment. Much like she had done when she resigned from Cybelus, she left behind a note, weighted under the saltshaker on the kitchen counter. The note thanked Dana for the past month, and left the address of the PO box, should she wish to write.

  With gratitude,

  Fumiko Nakajima

  It was the only goodbye she knew how to make.

  Back at her mother’s apartment, she packed her suitcase. Stuffed it with her clothes, her pd-console, her notebook filled with bird sketches. There were three missed calls on her Handheld, all of them from Dana. She did not return them.

  Aki was asleep, her body so small on her queen-size bed, a mask over her eyes and plugs in her ears. Though Fumiko felt no particular affection for this woman, she did feel a responsibility to make some gesture of farewell now that the time had come. She kissed her mother on the cheek, the skin soft, tender, whiskered with fine hairs. Fumiko thought it interesting, how lovely even terrible people could be when they slept. Aki stirred with incomprehensible murmurs as Fumiko gently shut the door behind her. The car waited for her outside the building.

  By three that morning, she had left Japanese seaspace. She was in Malaysia not long after dawn. Umbai Company Headquarters towered like a great tusk at the edge of a sea cliff, its many floors going both up toward the sky and tendriling down into the earth. Before she entered the glass expanse of its lobby, she called Dana’s Handheld, but there was no answer. Fumiko believed this to be karma. She made no further attempts, and pocketed the device as the greeter at the doors approached her and led her through the first security gate.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of every workday, Fumiko would go down to the lobby and ask the attendant if there was any mail, and each time the attendant would apologize profusely, as if this were some personal failing on his part. It became a routine of sorts, an occurrence so frequent that, after a few weeks, she would only have to walk past and meet his eyes to get her answer; that solemn shake of the head. Soon she stopped expecting any correspondence, finding the ritual of going down to the lobby and confirming her suspicions with the attendant comforting on its own, which was why she was surprised and even a little unnerved when, a month into the work, the attendant didn’t shake his head, but smiled with enthusiasm.

  “For you,” he said with
a dramatic flourish, handing her the sealed envelope, addressed in fine ink to one M. Fumiko Nakajima. It took all she had not to tear it open in the lobby. She returned to her penthouse on the thirty-third floor. Silhouetted against the neon-blue sky, she whittled the letter open with a pen, and read.

  Fumiko,

  I would apologize for taking so long to write to you, but you must understand that when you left without saying goodbye, I was very disappointed. No. I was fucking furious. I still feel both of those things. I hope that, wherever you are, you are refining your interpersonal skills. I do not need to tell you that they are sorely lacking. That said, I will apologize for my clumsy handwriting. My skill with a pen has atrophied drastically since primary school.

  I am not sure what I should write, considering I don’t know any specifics about what you are doing, and can’t ask you any questions, since you have no way of answering them until your “prison sentence” has been served. M. Toho asked about you the other day, asked if I had any news of where you are, what you are doing, etc. I wish I knew, so that I had something to write in this letter other than about myself…

  We are making some progress with our bulb. Right now we’re studying the properties of naturally occurring luminescence, like glow worms and fireflies, figuring out a way to extend the life span of photobacteria. Honestly, I doubt much will come of this project, not with the time we have left. In two months I will graduate. I’ve sent a work application to Arboreus, an NGO that oversees various sustainability projects around the globe. They’re not as big as the for-profit tech companies, but they’re pretty well regarded. With luck, they will hire me, and I will not be on the streets or worse, living with my parents on the lunar colony—I hear living there is like how the Vegas Strip used to be. But I’m sure things will work out one way or another.