by Jared Shurin
The doctor punches a code into the wall. His hands are sheathed in latex gloves, powder blue. There is a brief sigh as the door swells open at the press of a hand. They seem so small, in those gloves. Like the hands of a child.
There is darkness before us. Then fluorescent lights shudder, flicker, race along, until off in the distance, the corridor is nothing but light. The doctor leads me down the corridor, explaining that normally this area is out of bounds, but that he wanted me to understand how it worked. We walk by glass boxes in airtight recesses. In each one, a stub of muscle glistens.
“Where do you get them?” I ask.
“Donations,” he replies. “Donations. The tongue you have, now, for example, was donated by the family of someone who had recently passed. Originally from Hamburg, I believe.”
He stops in front of a case. The tongue inside seems impossibly small. I imagine it must have belonged to some sort of animal.
“This is your tongue,” he says.
I look at it. I look at it the way an animal looks at its reflection, recognising there something strangely familiar and at once completely other. How had I never seen it before, its swell, the lumps at the root, those bumps on its surface, like a secret written in Braille? Is the new tongue like this? Are all tongues the same? Even on the way through this room filled with them, I had only noticed their pinkness, their wetness, how fat they seemed, lying there disused.
“Unfortunately, it already has a buyer. A politician. Tongues like yours fetch a premium,” he says.
“What do you mean like mine?” I ask.
“People whose mother tongue is English,” he says. I am alarmed by the mistake. It feels dangerous. Like a trap about to spring shut.
“But it’s not,” I tell him. “English isn’t my mother tongue.”
He is visibly unsettled.
“But that’s what your boyfriend wrote on the application form. Mother tongue: English.”
“No,” I say, realising that in the time Thöre and I had been together he had never asked me. “He was wrong. English isn’t my mother tongue.”
“Oh,” he says, crestfallen. “Do you have any proof?”
“What kind of proof would I have? Look, wouldn’t you get in trouble if you sold him my tongue, knowing full well that, proof or not, there’s still a danger that it’s not worth the ‘premium’.”
He sighs. “I’ll tell him the situation and see what he says. He might still want it. But if not, it’s yours for the standard price.”
“Does this mean I can have my tongue back?” I ask.
“Yes and no,” he says cautiously. “As I said, we can’t put the tongue back in your head. But we can give you it back, I suppose. If the buyer no longer wants it. You’d have to buy it, of course. And take care of it. It has to be kept cool and moist. When people purchase the tongues as gifts, we supply a glass box. Technically there’s no reason that it couldn’t be kept in one long-term.”
“Please.”
The word hangs in the air for a moment, in that room of quiet tongues. I hear the rawness in it, how desperate I must sound to him. I wonder if the tongues hear it too.
The doctor nods.
We make the necessary arrangements. I fill in paperwork, declaring that I will take responsibility for the tongue, that it will be gifted to Thöre on a date to be confirmed. The doctor signs off on the lie. After the paperwork is filed, I ask him why he is helping me.
“Let us just say that I have a certain amount of sympathy for your situation,” he says. He sticks his tongue out on its side: along its underbelly I see faint arcs, like the closed slits of gills. “The marriage didn’t last long after. Like I said, sometimes things just fall apart.”
The doctor shakes my hand at the entrance. His hand seems bigger to touch, almost gargantuan. Yet it fits perfectly into mine, as if made of a piece. I turn to leave but stop, unable to shake something.
“One thing,” I ask. “Do you keep the tongues until they find a new owner?”
“We try,” he says. “But some tongues aren’t as popular. We keep them as long as we can, but if we can’t find an owner, we have to get rid of them.”
“What do you do with them?”
“Well,” he says. “You’ll have noticed this clinic is in the Grunewald. There’s a reason for that. If we can’t find a new home for a tongue, they get processed into fertiliser. It’s quite interesting, actually: the composition of the tongue, all the things that go into making it, produce a fertiliser that makes things grow almost twice as fast as normal. We sell it to a small paper mill nearby. Maybe you saw it on the way in, it has a red roof?”
“A paper mill?” I ask. An image flashes in my memory of a house with a red roof. It feels as if I had lived there, once.
“Yes,” he says. “It’s owned by a pretty famous publishing company. They make language textbooks. Die Gabe der Zungen. Maybe you’ve heard of them?”
That night in my apartment, I count tongues in my head, but can’t sleep. Each time I close my eyes I see them: all the tongues no one wanted, falling between blades, their pink meat turned to slurry, poured on to saplings. The slim frames shake with the weight of the tongues. The leaves are slick with them. From little acorns, mighty oaks. Then with an axe, down they go. Cut and pulped, pressed, printed. And the people carry them with them as they walk, under arms, wrapped in brown paper, just as I had done – the last of someone’s tongue.
I get up to fetch a glass of water. The apartment is quiet, still. Peaceful. I am growing used to its space, the hush of the cars below the window. The feeling that someone might come in at any minute has lessened.
I pour ice cubes from the freezer into a glass then fill it from the tap. Stopping for a moment, I go back and take something out of the refrigerator. Seated at the kitchen counter, the clink of the ice fills the quiet space, as I watch my warm fingerprints fade from the chilled surface of a glass box.
It lies there, under glass. My tongue. The one I can’t put back in my head. It is strange to have it there, that I should be the one to keep it. It belongs to me, but at the same time, it doesn’t. I can’t shake the feeling that I am only keeping it safe for a time, that it is something held only until it can be passed over. Like a gift. Is this how Thöre had felt, safekeeping the tongue that now moves in my head?
A car’s headlights drift through the window. Shadows dance along the walls of the apartment. Beyond the glass, Berlin glitters in the night.
He is out there, somewhere. Thöre. I will never see him again. I am sure of it. A wall has lifted itself between us, something not uncommon in this city. Our lives take place on either side of it. Any conversation would happen only through the bricks. Perhaps he has already found someone else. Perhaps he will buy them a tongue; gift it to them in a box of red crêpe, in that apartment where he had once given me a box sealed with a gold ribbon.
I still have a key. I could open that door, step between the walls, and enter. But each turn of the key, something changes. The Thöre in that room is a stranger. I do not speak the language he speaks. Though we share a tongue, now.
Under glass, a long slab of muscle. Pink, glistening. Eine Zunge. A gift, kept for the time being. One day, I will give it to someone. I will say the words: Ich liebe dich. And they will not know what to say. But, perhaps, they will respond. Somehow. In another language. One of slightest touches, of tender embraces – of hands, and lips, and tongues. One day. Eines Tages.
Velocity
Steph Swainston
My brother had driven his lap of honour slowly, savouring the rising applause, waving his golden wreath at the crowd. The cheering of thirty thousand people in the hippodrome had swollen like an avalanche and ebbed away, and then the vast muttering and rustling of thousands of conversations began, as everyone in the crowd stood up, turned around, remarking to each other, and dropped all their refreshment boxes. They shuffled among the litter like fallen leaves, along the marble stands, into the tunnels that funnelled them into the v
omitorium, down the great steps and out into Micawater town, leaving the tiered benches empty.
I closed the tower window and watched, through the grease smeared on it, where so many noses and palms had pressed, the old spiders’ webs in the corners, clogged with dust and husks of flies. The last few spectators lingered by the tunnel archway, poking over the flapping posters pasted there, idly commenting on them. One of them tried to peel off a poster of my brother, and managed it all the way around, but the glue had stuck in the middle. It tore, leaving a hole, and Gyr’s torso and chariot faring plastered to the stone. They rolled up his face, arms and horses anyway, and meandered out through the arch.
One or two cleaners, high on the tiers, started sweeping the paper debris. My brothers emerged from the royal box and bounded down to the side of the racetrack, leant over the marble barrier, and Gyr trotted his chariot alongside.
His horses were covered in blood and foam. They tossed their heads and pawed, and Gyr halted his lightweight chariot at the wall, leant out, with one hand braced on the wall top, and showed Peregrine and Besra his victory wreath. He tilted it left and right, and the sun caught it, and gleamed.
I rested my forehead on the glass for a second. Straightened up, and sighed, looking through the hazy, round patch of grease my forehead had left, to my brothers joshing and bantering below. Then I turned and limped down the stairs of the observation tower, through the carceres stinking of hay and horse sweat, fear and determination, through the open gates of the starting block, and across the sandy track to Gyr.
He glanced over his shoulder. His reins were tied on their bright brass loops.
“Oh, here’s the lightning bolt!” he cried.
Besra sniggered.
Gyr gave him the wreath to free his hands, and turned round to me in the chariot. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be away sunning yourself on the Emperor?”
I said, “I’ve got leave for the weekend. This is my home, too.”
Besra shuffled his feet and said, “The town’s ours but the track’s Gyr’s.”
Peregrine said, “Brothers, no. Give Saker the respect he deserves.”
I said, “I came from the Front, we’re fighting hard. I only have two days’ leave before I need to return to Oscen. You could be more welcoming.”
“You could have congratulated him,” said Besra.
“I missed it,” I said. “I only saw your honour lap.”
“He missed it,” Besra scoffed. “He’s too good for us, like you said.”
“I’m away at the Front because I’m fighting.”
Gyr tapped the inside coving with his heel. “One of San’s pet immortals. His super-soldiers, aren’t you special, Saker? Little brother, suddenly all high-and-mighty? You used to fit in a light-weight. Now you’d need to tow a great big cart behind, to carry your swollen head.”
I was stung to the quick. “I’m saving your wretched hide!”
“The whole court thinks you’re snubbing them,” said Besra. He was thrumming one of the jewelled peacock-feathers of the wreath. The garland wasn’t gold at all, or the plume would have bent. It was nothing but gilded bronze. That’s all we can afford, since the Insects came.
“Give me that!” said Gyr. He settled it on his head. “I hope you realise Besra’s passed you in age now. You’re becoming a younger brother all the time... I hope it gives you pause for thought because it freaks the fuck out of us.”
“I’m sorry if you’re envious,” I replied – but that was the wrong thing to say. Gyr, with victory in his eyes and the dust drying on his naked chest, glanced at Besra, and both of them sneered.
“I’m the star!” Gyr said. “Didn’t you hear the cheering? Why would I be envious of you?”
“I don’t think that’s what Saker means,” said Peregrine quickly.
“Yes, it damn well is,” I said.
Gyr surveyed with great contempt the longbow on my shoulder and quiver of arrows at my hip. “You think you’re above us mortals. Even above the undisputed hero of the races. You with your peasant’s weapon.” He glanced to the sweat-dark backs of his four horses, their docked and ribboned tails. “This is the real champion’s sport!”
Chariot racing is our greatest obsession, the nation’s passion, and Gyr is the highest-lauded hero in all Awia. His plaudits eclipsed mine of the archery field, and the vale of battle. The roar of the crowd for him drowned out the trickle they reserved for me, because people would rather be entertained than saved.
But Gyr couldn’t stand the fact that his little brother with the humble longbow had won immortality, and he had not. At the Games, five years ago, when I became the immortal Archer, he had galloped up to the Emperor, and offered to hold races to discover the best charioteer, which he knew he would win. He thought that, since he could prove himself the best, the Emperor would make him an immortal Charioteer, to join him in the struggle against the Insects. But the Emperor had rejected him, for you cannot pit chariots against the swarm. Gyr was so accustomed to being glorified that he’d taken the rejection as a personal affront.
The thick grooves embossed in the skin of his waist were returning to normal, where he’d wrapped the reins around his body, over the muscles of his washboard stomach, leaving his hand free to wield the whip. Red fillet straps held back his curly blond hair, on which the perspiration was drying, and the gold locks were beginning to shimmer. He showed off his slender legs with tight leggings tucked into the tops of his boots, the right toe scuffed where he’d hooked it inside the faring to lean out. Gyr is gilded youth, an Awian prince; he knows the value of everything and the meaning of nothing.
“Insects think chariots are fast food,” I said aloud.
“What?” said Peregrine.
“He thinks he’s too good for the court.” Gyr twirled his whip.
“You never see Mother,” said Besra. “You never put in an appearance.”
“But I’m here now,” I said.
“Very well!” Gyr cried. “Then cut a figure worth a prince, in a real man’s sport. Race me tomorrow. Three laps in the midday meet.”
Peregrine and Besra exchanged glances. Peregrine spoke up, with the crown prince’s authority he could, occasionally, muster. “Lightning has already proven himself at Bitterdale. He still walks with a limp. You shouldn’t race a wounded man.”
“‘Lightning’,” Gyr chuckled. “Go on, Saker, can you command the lightning? Zap Besra. Call down a bolt of fire, and zap him in the head.”
“It’s just a name,” I said.
“That’s all you’ve got! Immortals giving themselves airs with daft names! A label doesn’t make a man. Action does!”
“I’ll do it,” I said. I slipped the bow off my shoulder and rested the horn tip on my boot toe. The grip felt comfortable in my palm. “But aren’t all the places drawn?”
Gyr let his look of triumph float over the massive, empty hippodrome, over the forty tiers of marble seats, across the straights of the oval track that shrank us, but not him, into insignificance, at the carceres starting block with its five gates open. The compressed sand around us had been pounded and shelled-up by hooves, darker beneath, with the wheels’ shallow ruts and long skids flattening it out, down at the turn.
The Sphendone turn curves round, where lane discipline ends, and two attendants down there were picking up bits of the Green chariot and sponging blood off the marble barrier.
I swallowed. “I used to race Blue.”
“Well, tough. Blue is spoken for. You’re white.”
“I want the third gate.”
Gyr gave Besra a smug look, “Listen to him! We drew this morning. I’m in the third gate.”
“Then give me the fourth.”
“The first is empty.”
“I want the fourth.”
He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. “You’ve got the fourth. Tell Abishai. Get the word out. See you tomorrow – in the starting box.” He stared at me, until I turned and left. As I passed through the arch
he was still chatting to Peregrine and Besra, and when I reached the street I looked back, through the tunnel, across the racetrack and the spina, and up the far lane he was cantering his horses, out of the turn we call the Sphendone, the sling, for the speed of its dangerous curve. He poised, statuesque, in the chariot, with ruby studs on its gleaming chassis, and blood on its wheels.
In the bath-house of the palace that night, I sat on the blue-tiled step of the hottest pool, in the clouds of steam. Martyn’s breasts pressed softly into my back as she knelt behind me, pouring water over my hair and wings from a silver jug. The steam drifted around us, concealing us from any searching eyes or disapproving glares.
She said, “You shouldn’t have come to see me, even the battlefield is safer than here.”
“I didn’t come to see you, I came to take you away. Why –?”
“Shh –” she breathed in my ear, placed a finger on my lips, “Not now...”
She leaned back, stroked my left wing. “Go to the starting block early and check for sabotage. Turn the chariot over and look at the axle. I’ve heard that sometimes Gyr’s groom loosens a link in the horses’ bits... They say he killed Larus.”
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t think you’ll have any sleep tonight at all.”
The reins were tight in my hand and my palm was sweating. Beside me, the marble column with its cool, grey grain. Ahead, the gates of gold filigree, fret-cut patterns, almost diaphanous, and through them I saw the length of the track and the stands above it packed with crowds. Thousands were roaring!
Their noise distant. In another reality. The reins slipped a little through my hand. Sweat darkens the leather.
My horses are aligned in the tight box. A column either side separates me from the Green chariot on my left, and, on my right, Gyr standing tall in the Red one. Around me, the small sounds of tension. Concentration. The moment gels, and I force myself to breathe slowly. I calm my heartbeat. Green’s axle sighs as he shifts his weight.