Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 13
“What do you want with me?” I asked.
Laughter. The laughter of keepers is not a laughter you ever want to hear. It echoes in your head like stones down a very deep cavern, over and again, until it feels that your head has been broken.
“You are so silly, Anish. Such a lovely body, but full of silliness! Don’t you know, haven’t you guessed? Why would I bring an ar- chivist here?”
“You’re dying. You want me to write your history.”
“You see? I knew all along you were not a dumb body. I would not have chosen you otherwise.”
“But I’m not an archivist yet. I haven’t been trained to write your history on bodies, or to teach them to narrate for you.”
“More intelligence. Perception. Such quickness. Why aren’t all bodies so? I have been watching you, Anish. I’ve seen the way you touch the texts. You have a reverence for our truth, don’t you?”
Did I? I wondered if the keeper could read my thoughts, or if I had to say them out loud. I kept saying them out loud. The overseer remained in the room, but paid me little attention. “It will be good to record your—”
“Do you want to know the body I’ve chosen for you to dictate upon?” the keeper said.
I thought of Chiva. Her ugly, unblemished skin.
“I prefer the more educated bodies,” my keeper said. “Best find one that comprehends truth and history, one that appears dull and animalian because it is concealing its thoughts from me, not blank and dull because it is empty. I experience too much emptiness in my own kind now. Too much death. You see us dying, do you not, Anish? But that will not save you from me. The absence of the fu- ture does not negate the past.”
“Please,” I said. “Choose another text. She’s a good archivist, and she’ll be a better librarian, when she’s finished learning.” If I unmade Chiva she would never be able to touch me again. They would lock her away into some hall where the only words she spoke were truth.
The keeper started laughing again.
“Chiva?” he said. “You are such a silly body, Anish! You thought I wanted Chiva? Oh no, oh no.” Laughter, laughter, my head throb- bing. “Haven’t you guessed, Anish? I want you to unmake yourself.”
The world the keepers created had been falling apart throughout my life, but I had not noticed it. I did not think forward, only back. That was the nature of my existence. Now, though, none of my days were spent in causal, silent observance, sprawling lazily in the present while listening to the truth of the past. Now I was told stories, stories I knew could not be truth, stories I could not silence. The stories my keeper told me did not match what all the texts narrated and illustrated. The stories it told confused and angered me, because if the texts were not truth, what was?
“Exiled us?” my keeper said. “Oh, pity no, that’s the old religious pull, you understand? The persecuted few? Your people consumed it well the first few centuries, and that’s why we’ve set that story down here in the archives. But that’s not true, of course. We went out on our own, thought we were wonderfully special, thought we could leave our dead bodies behind and live in the synthetic ones forever. Ha! All fools. The last of the synthetic bodies gave out half a millennium after we crashed here. All gone. No more bodies. At least we had enough time to indoctrinate and implant you.”
The voice in my head made me nervous. I could not halt his stream of stories. I could not ask him to be quiet, so I stole back to my little room and lay down. I avoided Chiva. My head always hurt.
“When will the sessions begin?” I asked.
“Oh, soon enough, little Anish,” he said. A long pause. Then, “Let us see Chiva.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I could make you.”
“I thought you were here to unmake me.”
“Ah! I thought we’d bred the cleverness out of you. Perhaps an- other day, then.”
But in the morning my overseer waited for me again. “It’s time for the sessions to begin,” he said.
I tried to protest, but my keeper grumbled, “Oh, it’s not me, An- ish. It’s those ancient fools back there, spouting off about mortality. They’re so old they’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a body that’s yours. Well then, since it’s already scheduled . . .”
My overseer let me into the dictation room. He shut the door. I gazed at the apparatuses on the walls—the needles, the skin graft- ing equipment, the row upon row of shiny surgical tools, glass con- tainers of narcotics.
“I can’t do this alone,” I said.
“Oh, I think you can,” my keeper said. “I’ll not ruin you so ter- ribly as the others. I’d like you to function as I would, if I had such a delightful young body. Now sit on that stool and listen. You’re not just here to tell my stories. The truth, as you call it, the stories I liked best, were the ones I had when I owned my own body. You’ve never seen mountains, have you? Lakes? River stones?”
I had never heard the terms before.
“I’m going to have your body illustrate the real truth about our kind,” my keeper said. “I want you to be a literal text. Not one of those useless globs. I want you to be able to walk and spit and fuck.
After all, what is the purpose of a body but to exert one’s power over another?”
I wondered if he spoke of my power or his own.
I spent our first three sessions learning to draw symbols. My keeper was able to direct me through the motions; he had a limited power over my body—enough so he could assist when I misplaced a stroke of the stylus.
Each night, he asked after Chiva. “Don’t you miss her terribly?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, and thought, but you do enough talking for all of us.
The fourth session, I began to write. I can think of no other
body but mine when I remember this session, this memory of writ- ing. The way the precise tool inscribed my already numbed flesh in a long series of puckered marks that reddened or blackened as I pressed the button that allowed the ink to flow into the wounds.
Afterward, I always closed my eyes. When I closed my eyes I heard the words of the woman who called herself my mother. I felt her clutch at me with her claws. “You are already our history, yes?” No, I thought. I am nothing. I am an empty canvas being filled.
I won’t be ugly anymore.
By the fifth session the markings covered my throat and shoul- ders. This will not be so terrible, I thought, watching the curious, red tattooed welts forming on my flesh.
I do not remember how long my keeper and I spent in the dicta- tion room.
One morning I awoke in my own room and my door remained locked until well past midmorning. Another overseer arrived to un- lock the door; I had never seen her before.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“The other overseer’s keeper died,” the overseer said. And noth- ing more.
With the death of that keeper came yet another purging of the texts. Piles of bodies were carted out through the corridors. I watched them with a dizzy sense of horror.
After that, I slept in the dictation room.
Finally, the day came when I stepped out of our dictation ses- sion, the one that I know now was our last, and Chiva stood in wait for me. When she saw me, her eyes widened.
“It’s true,” she said. “It must be,” I said.
“You don’t look like you,” she said.
The markings now covered my torso all the way down my right leg and up to the thigh on my left, but I had only seen the black and red marks section by section, reflected back at me from a small, round magnification mirror that let me apply the tattoos with ac- curacy.
“It isn’t so terrible,” I said, but as I watched her eyes move over me I felt a stab of fear. “I’m still the same,” I said. “I’m not going to be in one of those niches. I’m not—”
“You’re just another used text,” Chiva said. “You’ve lost your history and given it to a keeper. You’re just another dead keeper’s writing.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “You don’t know anything about it. I’m beautiful.”
“You’re so stupid, Anish. Have you looked at yourself? You said you were your mother’s text, our text. You’re just another one of theirs now. Go look at yourself,” she said. She turned and walked away from me, trailing after a trolley piled up with bodies.
I heard my keeper’s laughter.
“What did you do?” I said. I walked back into the dictation room, pushed the small mirror back into the wall, opened up the panel where the full-length mirror was. I had been too afraid to look, before.
The body that stared back at me was never mine. I had always known it was not mine. I belonged to the keepers from birth, but it was my mother’s body I spilled from, my mother’s history I had always been. But no longer.
“What did you make me write?” I said. “What do these symbols mean?” Another question I had not asked during dictation, a ques- tion I feared the answer to. They were unlike any marks on the other texts.
“Words,” my keeper said. “Not pictures of things, but symbols representing the sounds of the actual spoken words, words so old I thought I’d forgotten how to form them.”
“What do they say?” My keeper was silent. “What do they say?”
“They negate all truth,” he said. “What?”
“I wrote words that told an untrue history. One different from all those others.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not? Are you a fool? There is no truth, Anish. Only sto- ries. Only things we wished had happened. Words unmade the skin that formed so smooth and perfect in your mother’s body. And now we will finish negating the existence of the texts and the existence of all your bodies. We will finish unmaking history. We will unmake the world we crafted from lies.”
“You can’t tell lies on a body,” I said. “You can’t—”
“And what does Chiva’s empty body attest to, Anish? What truth does she tell? She is empty and free and when the last of us dies she’ll burn you, along with the rest of them, to be free of you.” “Shut up!” I said, and I slammed the mirror panel shut and ran out of the dictation room. I saw again the vision of my burning kin. “You can’t negate their bodies!” I said, and I ran down through the corridors, my keeper’s laughter ringing in my head.
Other students and archivists stared at me as I passed. I ran and ran, looking for the Hall of Unmaking. I knew the route so well, that place where Chiva and I had touched truth. Down this corridor, left, another left, and—
A steel gate blocked my path. I stopped. I stared at it.
“She likes to kill them, you know,” my keeper said. “She likes to kill them because she’s afraid of them.”
“No,” I said.
“You think that word saves you? It changes nothing. You think I can say no and go back to being an organic body? You think I can say no and cease to be a swimming mass of synthetic fluid and arti- ficial synapses?” my keeper said. “That word cannot unmake what I became. You want truth, Anish? We envy your bodies. Your beau- tiful, smooth bodies. We covet them. We have built not an archive but a shrine, not a world of absolute truth but a world that records the stories we wish were ours by destroying you. We use flesh to fantasize about that which we can never be. You bodies are so stu- pid. You lie about this place talking of how ugly you are, running around in this artificial labyrinth of our making, your unmaking. You have not seen the sun in years now, Anish. You laze about here and squander your lives, and when we’re dead you’ll still lie about here as your bodies waste away. You’ll exist only to preserve the his- tory of our death, wishing always that you were something other than what you are.”
“You’re lying,” I said. I pressed my palms to the cold steel of the gate. “These are just stories.”
“But now I’ve had you write them on your body, little Anish.
Now they’re truth, aren’t they?”
I turned away from the gate and began to run again through the halls. How long had we spent in dictation? How much had things changed? I saw more gates. Corridors ended abruptly. Those cor- ridors still open had empty niches. What had happened to all the texts?
“How many keepers are left?” I said. My legs hurt. My throat was raw. “How many have died?”
“There are five of us left. We die in groups, you know. Just as we were made,” my keeper said.
I stopped and stood still in the hall, breathing deep, gazing at the monstrous construction that enclosed us all. When the keepers died, would we be trapped in here? Trapped inside this hollow cas- ing to die as the keepers died?
No. Where did Chiva take the texts to be burned? Not inside. There had to be a way out. I remembered the way it felt to dance in the dust. I remembered sun on my skin. How had I forgotten it? I found Chiva with three archivists and another trolley heaped with bodies. When she saw me she looked away, but I grabbed her
by the shoulder. The other archivists stared at us. I did not care. “When you burn them, where do you take them?”
“What?”
“Where do you burn them?”
“Outside, of course,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? You never wanted to talk about it before. You ignored—”
“Show me,” I said. “We’re going there now.”
We ascended through a long, narrow hall, entered a cylindrical lift, and stepped onto ground covered in grayish ash.
I saw a blue sky striated in white clouds. The sun was so bright it hurt my eyes, and for a moment I was blinded. The yard was a broad, circular pit surrounded by a wall fifty feet high.
I collapsed into the grayish dust.
The archivists piled up the bodies, wet them with reddish fluid, and opened a bin of flares. The texts burned without making a sound. I watched the bodies flame, bubble, melt, and char.
The archivists did not even wait for this batch of bodies to fin- ish burning before they took the trolley back to the lift.
“Chiva?” they called, but Chiva stood in front of me. The bod- ies belched smoke behind her.
The lift closed.
“What’s wrong, Anish?” Chiva said.
I pressed my hands against my face, covering my eyes. “I’m un- made,” I said. “There is no truth.”
She knelt beside me. “Don’t you know?” she said. “There never was any truth. We’re just like these burned things.”
I reached out to her, tried to hold her body against mine. I had missed her so much. Having her close meant I was not alone, trapped within these walls with a dying keeper.
I held her by the wrist. My grip was firm.
She stared at me. She stared down at my hand on her wrist. “Anish?”
I struck her, drawing blood. I saw the surprise in her face, the betrayal, because I had dared to try and write violence upon her body. She hit me back, so hard my nose burst.
Someone was laughing in my head.
I wanted her to tell me truth. I wanted to unmake her as I had been unmade, to write on her as I had been written upon. I could not tell my keeper no when he told me to write his lies. I would not allow her to be empty anymore, empty and free as I once was.
But she struck me again, smashing my nose a second time.
Blackness smeared my vision. I fell to my knees.
I thought of the dancers, of our fire, the texts the keepers burned while I did nothing. I did nothing but watch, nothing but witness a truth no one would ever record. I wanted to silence Chiva as I had been silenced. But Chiva was not like me. She would never be unmade.
Chiva kneed me in the groin. She balled her fists and struck my face, pummeled my head. I curled into a ball in the dust and tried to shield myself against her. Then the beating stopped. I heard her walk away from me.
I raised my head and saw her walking to the bin of flares. She took one out and stumbled back toward me.
Now she would burn me.
I lay huddled in the dust, watching her approach.
She stood over me, the flare in her hand. She had only to ignite it.
“You love them, don’t you?” she said.
I did not know what she meant. “Chiva, I—”
“You think you can control the world by hurting me? They unmade you. They ruined you, but you can’t hurt them, can you? So you tried to hurt me. You think you can unmake me? You don’t know anything about unmaking. I’ll show you how to unmake the world.”
She collected more flares.
“What’s she doing?” my keeper asked, very softly.
I had almost forgotten him, this thing I could not silence.
Chiva walked to the lift with a heap of flares in her arms. The lift closed.
And I knew what she was going to do.
I ran to the lift. I descended into the archives.
I could already smell the burning bodies. A part of me hoped it was just the lingering smell of burning flesh from the yard. But then I saw the smoke. I heard the archivists screaming. I ran. I passed niches where the bodies inside were already aflame. I watched the history of Chiva’s destruction of the past.
And then I saw her, heading back toward me, smoke billowing in her wake, her arms empty.
“I need more flares,” she said, and she strode past me on her long legs, and her eyes were dark, her face grim.
“Chiva, please . . .” I did not dare touch her.
She walked away from me. The archivists ran madly through the corridors. I saw some of them huddled in the niches, weeping.
“Do something,” I told my keeper.
“What? This is your creation, Anish, not mine.”
I could do nothing. The keepers were dying. The past was burn- ing.
I could do nothing but help Chiva with its destruction.
I went back out to the burning yard. Chiva was there, piling flares into her robe. She tossed me a flare. I made the choice. I took it, three more, and a container of flammable fluid.
We descended together. We burned the world.
My mother was dead. Her history undone. The bodies were lies. My body was a lie. The world was a lie. I had hurt the one thing I knew to be real, to be true.
