by Luiza Sauma
She spends a lot of time wandering around aimlessly, talking to people she never got to know very well. They gently ask her, with a touch of horror in their eyes, ‘You’re not … pregnant, are you?’ Iris tells them that she is, indeed. None of them knows how to respond. A few people say ‘Congratulations’ and then blush, embarrassed.
One night, she thinks she hears someone walking outside the Hub. She gets up and puts her ear to the blacked-out window. She can’t see outside. The blackout is automated; she has no control over it.
‘Hello? Who is it?’
Iris hears a voice, unmistakably human, but she can’t make out any words through the thick glass and metal. ‘Uh-uh-uh-uh.’ It sounds like a woman.
‘I can’t hear you,’ says Iris. ‘I can’t hear you, I’m sorry!’
The person stops speaking. Did she run out of oxygen and die? Iris stays at the window, sitting on Abby’s bunk, for two hours, till the blackout lifts halfway at 6 a.m., Central Standard Time. There’s no one there. There’s no body.
Iris makes new friends. One of these is Maya. They talk for hours about the men they loved on Earth, mildly aroused by their own descriptions of various shoulders, arms, eyes and sexual techniques, and revelling in the warm buzz of a brand-new friendship. The two women start living together in Maya’s room, in Block Q. Iris sleeps on the top bunk, just as she did in Block G. When she wakes briefly in the night, half dreaming, her brain tricks her into thinking she can hear Abby’s breathing. Such sweetness.
Someone breaks the door down to the control quarters. There’s nobody in there. Iris and Maya wander from room to room. Abby was right – it’s nothing special. A few dark, dingy bedrooms. An open-plan living room and cafeteria. In the men’s bathroom, someone has written ‘FUCK YOU’ on the wall, in shit.
One morning, she wakes to find that Maya has left. Iris returns to Block G.
Her tab stops working. She loses track of the days. If she had a pen, she would record them with tally marks on her arms. At first she asks other people, but then she stops. It’s nice not to know. It reminds her of being a kid during the summer holidays, when she seemed to exist outside time. Who cares what day it is on Earth?
It is … November-ish.
One afternoon, there’s a message on the cafeteria door written in a black, dripping substance: ‘No lunch today.’
There are thirty-three people left. The figure is exact because Sean keeps a list on his tab – one of the few that are still working. Every time a Nyxian goes missing, someone tells Sean and he adds another name. This nod towards bureaucracy has a calming effect over the Nyxians. Lists are a sign that everything is in order – or, at least, something is.
Iris’s tracksuit hangs off her shoulders and hips, while clinging to her belly. Not enough farmers, not enough cooks. The baby sucks all the nutrients out of her. My dear little parasite, you’ll be the end of me.
Two days later: ‘No breakfast.’ Iris goes in anyway, because she can see half a dozen people through the door, milling around, sitting at tables. She sits next to Sean and Jonah.
‘Hey, Iris,’ says Sean. ‘You all right?’
His breath smells foggy and rancid from hunger. Iris tries not to gag. Sean rolls up his sleeves, showing his jumble of old tattoos: mermaids, skulls and roses. One of them says, in smudged green letters, ‘Free Ireland’. She never noticed that one before. It looks homemade. She wonders if he’s ever been to Ireland.
‘I’m so fucking hungry,’ she says.
‘Try the farm,’ says Jonah. ‘I’ve just been walking in and eating whatever I can find.’
Iris looks at Sean. Officially, he’s still the head gardener.
He nods. ‘Knock yourself out.’
‘But my wristband won’t let me in.’
‘Oh, it will.’
The door to the farm opens easily. Inside, everything is wilting. The sun is warm and delicious, magnified by glass, and the air is heavy and damp. Iris closes her eyes and enjoys the heat on her face. Then she walks among the dying produce: fallen fruit, greenery gone brown, everything close to death. Her stomach rumbles with hunger and her baby kicks, flooding her with love and desperation, a sickly warmth that spreads through her torso to her hands and feet. It’s the same feeling she had when she was in love with Edie Dalton. What’s Edie doing now? The baby kicks again. Who gives a shit? it seems to say. Eat something, for God’s sake! Iris thinks about a bloody steak covered in salty, creamy Béarnaise sauce. The baby stops kicking and enjoys the mutual reverie.
A bright red dot stands out against the decay. Iris walks overs and bends down. It’s a tiny strawberry, an inch long, dotted with yellow seeds, just like the ones in good old England. She pops it off the plant. On Earth it would be mediocre, but here it’s sweet enough. She carries on like this, eating random bits and bobs, never fully satisfied, until she is too tired from crawling on the ground.
At least once a day she thinks: Where is my goddamn mother?
Iris thinks Norman is dead, but Jonah and Sean disagree. They reckon Norman is still in the Hub, hiding somewhere.
‘He’s one of those noble captain types,’ says Jonah. ‘He’ll go down with the ship.’
‘Like that Dido song,’ says Sean.
‘Yeah.’
The two men sing the chorus in a strangled, high-pitched tone. Iris has never liked this song, but she enjoys hearing them sing. Nobody is watching, so they can flout all the rules and sing all the songs they like.
Sean stops. ‘Holy shit. Look at that.’
He points at the air. One of the blue bugs flies past, very much alive, sparkling with light and buzzing like a tiny chainsaw.
The control room is empty whenever Iris passes it, but somehow the Hub is still working, the lights switching on and off, the oxygen pumping, water running, keeping them alive. These processes will cease when the Hub falls apart or when the sun stops shining or when someone hits the ‘off’ switch, if there is such a switch – whichever comes first.
Iris begins to see the fire-bugs on a daily basis, alive and crackling. She takes them as a good sign.
Sean goes missing. No one takes over his list.
38.
Tweet-Tweet-Twoo
Iris dreams that she is lying in bed, weak with hunger and cradling her enormous belly. Her tab beeps. It’s a message from her sister.
Hey Iris, how are you? xx
Dream-Iris is too happy to wonder how the message got through. Mona’s love pulled the words from London to the Pacific Ocean, through the wormhole, to Nyx, to the Hub, to Iris’s broken tab. Beep! She immediately calls her sister. Mona appears on the screen, sitting in front of a window. The sky is bright and white behind her, shadowing her features. The awful, glorious London sky. Mona wears a green sweatshirt and glasses, half her hair pinned back. She’s still a child.
‘I’m so sorry,’ says Iris.
‘For what?’ says Mona, mildly.
‘For being a selfish cunt.’ She begins to cry. ‘It was a mistake. You were right. I miss Earth so much. I miss all of you, so much.’ Her face is wet with salty tears and snot. ‘What’s wrong with me? Am I a monster?’
‘No, you’re my dear sister.’
Iris opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. She is swamped by a wave of love so large and powerful, it feels as though it could stop her heart.
‘I forgive you,’ says Mona. ‘I love you. We all do. We love you very much.’ She wears a blissful, affectionate smile.
‘I wish I could meet your son. I don’t even know his name.’
‘It’s –’
‘Tweet-tweet-twoo!’ sing the alarm-birds.
‘No!’ says Iris. ‘I have something else to tell you.’
Mona continues smiling as the screen gradually fades to black. ‘What is it?’ Her face disappears.
‘Tweet-tweet-twoo!’
Iris opens her eyes.
Hunger moves beyond the pain barrier. For a couple of days Iris feels clean and free, as if th
e need to eat had been a shackle, weighing her down. She goes to the farm, lets the sun shine on her face and wonders whether she could live on light and water alone, like a plant. She feels ecstatic and deranged. The baby kicks and the pain returns. She realizes she isn’t alone – Jonah is combing through half-dead plants at the other end of the farm.
They nod at each other and shout, ‘Hey!’
Iris pulls a half-grown potato out of the ground and eats it, raw and muddy – not too bad – and then munches a few random, bitter leaves. As she rakes the ground with her fingers, looking for more potatoes, she remembers eating a ‘chocolate soil’ dessert at a restaurant in London: crumbs of cake with crystals of sea salt, served on a garden trowel. It was so dumb, so delicious. She takes a crumb of soil between finger and thumb, checks Jonah isn’t looking, and places it on the tip of her tongue. It melts in her mouth, just like it did on Earth. She takes a fistful, gulps it down, and wipes her face with her filthy sleeves.
‘What are you doing?’
Iris looks up. It’s her mother, standing over her and shaking her head, still barefoot, in her white nightgown.
‘Mum!’ Iris smiles, her face dirty like a child’s.
Eleanor gestures at the ground. ‘Has it come to this, darling – eating mud?’
‘No, it just looks like mud. Where have you been?’
‘There was some kind of … glitch.’ Eleanor bends down, takes a fistful of soil in her pale, bluish hand and lets it fall to the ground. ‘It’s soil. You’re imagining things.’
‘I’m imagining you,’ says Iris, laughing.
‘Iris,’ says Jonah, from the other side of the farm. ‘Who are you talking to?’
‘No one! Just talking to myself.’
‘Oh, OK.’
Dignity. Always dignity.
Iris sleeps as much as she can, at odd hours, like a cat, because it makes hunger easier to cope with. When her body can’t sleep any longer, she haunts the empty corridors and rooms of the Hub, sometimes with her mother by her side, though she comes and goes. They don’t talk much. They just walk. The hem of Eleanor’s nightgown becomes grubby with dirt; the soles of her feet are almost black. There are grains of pink sand everywhere, piling in corners, spiking Iris’s face on her pillow. More fire-bugs, buzzing around. In the cafeteria, she sees something move from the corner of her eye. When she turns, an animal the size of a chihuahua scurries behind the counter – a shiny red blur, too quick to see. She runs after it, but it’s gone. Again, she wonders: Why have I never seen these creatures through the windows? Have I not been looking hard enough?
The outside is coming inside. The real Nyx, not this poor simulacrum of Earth.
At night, she hears distant sex sounds – laughing, sighing, moaning, teetering between agony and pleasure. It makes her smile, the idea that imminent death hasn’t entirely destroyed everyone’s spirits.
She looks through a window at the ruins of Hub 2. Its walls have now fallen and are buried in sand. Just the black frame still stands. A scrap of plastic hangs from the frame, flapping in the breeze. She envies the scrap. She wishes she could go outside, feel the wind on her face, and not die.
Her arms, in the mirror, are like stalks in contrast to the luscious roundness of her belly. Maybe the little parasite will survive, she thinks, even if I don’t. Maybe she will crawl out of my vagina while I’m dying and be adopted by an alien – one of those red chihuahua things. They will keep her safe, like the wolves in The Jungle Book. Maybe she will be happier with them. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
For some reason, she assumes that the baby is a girl.
All the cameras are off. Iris checks each one as she passes. No one is watching. When she ceases to exist, no one on Earth will know. Does it matter? She’s already dead to them. She ceased to exist seven years ago. They’ve probably mourned and grieved and got over it. Though she still wishes she could talk to her sister. What would she say? ‘Life is worth living, yada yada yada. I love you.’
Millions of people are starving on Earth. People are fighting wars and dying for their idiotic countries. People are drinking champagne in hotel rooms, getting married and making love. People are learning to walk and talk; learning to shit in a toilet. People are standing on bridges and thinking of jumping. Poor old Earth.
If Iris were there, she would walk away from the bridge, catch a bus to Clapton, slump into bed, under the duvet, and listen to the radio – the same old voices debating the same old issues. No, it would be a Sunday. On Sundays she listens to the music station. They’re playing a song she’s never heard before – something gorgeous and melancholic from Brazil, Mali or Angola, somewhere she’s never been. She can’t understand the words, but they seem full of yearning. A car goes past. The birds sing. Kiran is sleeping in the next room. Her phone beeps.
Eddie: Morning, beautiful. Hungry? Brunch?
Iris: Yessssssss xxx
Iris doesn’t see anyone for two days. A dream fulfilled. She is alone. She wants to lie in the centre of a car-free Oxford Circus, inhaling the pollution, then go to Topshop to buy a dress. She wants to see twenty pretty silver horses trot through Grosvenor Square. She wants to free the animals from London Zoo, so that tigers, giraffes, tarantulas and gorillas can take a walk down Regent’s Canal. She wants to see the sunset from Parliament Hill and then roll on her side from the top to the bottom, like she did when she was a child. She wants to stroll through the secret Edwardian pergola in Golders Hill Park, near where she lived when she had a father. With the gardeners all gone, the vines and flowers would grow around the structure, engulfing it in soft, colourful, fragrant walls. They would think: Ahhh, our time is now.
Perhaps in two hundred years, when Earth is finally ravaged by its inhabitants, humans will make another attempt to colonize Nyx. Maybe they’ll find Iris and her baby buried in the pink sand, rubbed away to skeletons, one inside the other like Russian dolls. A mother and her unborn child. How sad and fascinating! It will be like when those terrified corpses were discovered in Pompeii, cast in volcanic ash. Perhaps their skeletons will be displayed at a museum – the first one on Nyx.
No, this isn’t our time, thinks Iris. We won’t end up in a museum. My baby will be born. She will survive, just like the babies who were born on Earth before doctors, midwives and hospitals existed. She will never see Earth, but she will live. She will never eat a cheeseburger and fries, a pizza, a curry, a lamb shawarma with pickles, a steak, fresh pasta, oysters or even a boiled egg with salt – even that was heaven itself. She will know other things. She will live.
39.
This Is Where It Ends
In the middle of the night, Iris stands in her bedroom looking out of the window. The blackout has stopped working, so she can see outside. The sun is bright and soft, like always. She doesn’t know what time it is, but the shape and feel of her exhaustion seems 4 a.m.-ish. That means it’s also 4 a.m.-ish in Chicago, Mexico City, the Galapagos Islands and Belize. Most people in those places are sleeping now. Maybe not the animals in the Galapagos, but they’re not people. Iris looks out at the scenery and clicks her bare, dirty heels.
‘There’s no place like home,’ she says. ‘There’s no place like home.’
‘That won’t work,’ says her mother, standing behind her. ‘This isn’t a film.’
Iris presses her nose against the glass. ‘I’m going to walk to the lake.’
‘That sounds dangerous.’
‘It’s dangerous in here.’
‘You should think of your child.’
Iris turns to face Eleanor. ‘You should’ve thought of your child.’
‘I thought of you a million times a day.’
Iris turns back to the window, to the pink sand. ‘I came here because I wanted to be reborn, but I just carried on living.’ She rests her hand on her belly. ‘Maybe it’s time to live out there.’
Her mother says nothing.
‘I should go,’ says Iris.
‘Do you forgive me?’
I
ris turns. There are new wrinkles on her mother’s face. She still wears her nightgown and plait, but her skin is papery and thin, like it was when Iris left Earth.
‘Forgive you for what?’
‘For not being a better mother.’
‘It doesn’t make sense, forgiving my hallucination. It would be like forgiving myself for something I didn’t do.’
‘What if I’m not a hallucination? What if it’s really me?’
‘Yeah, of course, but only if you can forgive me for leaving.’
Her mother doesn’t reply, but she smiles. Perhaps she doesn’t forgive her, but that’s all right. Iris can handle it. Eleanor holds her arms wide. They hug. Iris can smell her mother’s clean, grassy shampoo, the one she used back then, when Robert died. Everything had ended – her marriage, her family – but Eleanor still managed to wash her hair, she washed her daughter’s hair, she fed her and took her to school, went to work and made money and paid the bills, even as she disappeared, bit by bit.
Eleanor touches Iris’s cheek and kisses it. ‘Goodbye, Iris.’
‘Bye, Mum.’
‘I love you.’
Iris blinks and she’s gone. The smell of shampoo lingers. She fills her lungs with it.
She puts her shoes on, leaves the room and goes for a wander, saying her silent goodbyes to the Hub. Seven years – that’s as long as she spent at St Peter’s Girls’ School. The windowless corridors are dimly illuminated, but the rest of the Hub is flooded with sunlight. Iris walks slowly. No one is watching her. Not in Chicago, Lima, Moscow or Bangkok. Not in London, nor at the Nyx Inc headquarters in Los Angeles. The cameras are off; the TV show is history. The Wikipedia page was probably updated a while ago: ‘Life on Nyx was an American reality TV show.’ Was, not is. Iris wonders whether the date of her death has already been written on the internet. Iris Cohen was a British reality TV star. She was born, she lived, she died on another planet.