We're Here, page 17
Down just below, I see the other housebeast’s front gate open, and I cuss.
Rika looks up at me, our eyes lock across the distance like they shouldn’t, and Rika’s incredulity makes it across whatever connection we have built, mind to mind.
Their beast wobbles. Moorings detaching? Rika ducks back inside. Are they whooping? They must be. I’m not sure how I can tell through the noise, must be the magic. Their beast is eager to join mine. Something draws them together. Pheromones or possibility? Magic, physics, wait maybe that newfound social context—so hilarious as to feel plausible. Wrenching really. The beast breaks loose from the ground with a crack I feel in my teeth.
“This structural enough for you?” I scream at the top of my lungs, and I laugh, laugh as my housebeast swings low and up again on a neat parabola as Rika’s housebeast gains speed and altitude as all around us the masses of cheap rentals detach from the ground, take to the air.
Every jug of water has that one last drop before it overflows, I find myself thinking. The conditions were here: the hungry beasts, the grip of control loosening its hold. I’m just one person, and the heroic deeds are for another, but out of the mess, this emerged, and maybe others can make sense of it.
The ocean’s near, so near, and all I can hope for is that when I pass out, we’ll be above water and maybe, just maybe, free once and for all.
ROOT ROT
Fargo Tbakhi
By the time I hear that my brother is looking for me, and has somehow scraped together enough credit to get on a commercial flight to New Tel Aviv, and that he’s also brought his three-year-old daughter on her first interplanet trip, my insides are already rotten. Can’t get to the doctor without citizen papers, but I know. I can feel it. Lungs, liver, stomach, whatever—they’re done for. Most days I wake up, bleed, drink, bleed, and pass out. I am fucked beyond any reasonable doubt.
When the two OSPs are finished beating the shit out of me outside Farah’s (only place in the Arab Quarter with a liquor license which means what’s happening currently, a beating that is, happens less frequently than if I was drinking somewhere else) one of them checks for warrants. I’m swaying like something in the breeze though the provisional government never fixed the generators so there isn’t any breeze this part of planet. Sometimes I blow in my own face just to remember what wind felt like.
“Hey, you got a brother?”
Word drops into me. Shakes me up bad to hear it and for a second I almost don’t process what it means. Then I do and want to die. I spit out some blood and nod.
“Posted a bulletin. Yesterday, looks like. Asks if anyone’s seen you. Want me to forward your location?”
I try to think and then try not to think, and for a second I am really still, and then that second is one of the worst things I’ve felt in years, so I stay quiet and make a gesture like I’m going to hit the OSPs and they start in again and, later, when they’ve gone and I get feeling back in my body and start to register the pain, I go back inside and then I pray and then I don’t look at anybody and then I drink until I pass out.
When I start wishing I was dead I know it’s morning. I spend a few minutes trying to work out where I am. Still at Farah’s maybe. In prison maybe. In the street probably. As long I’m not at the house. Take a few minutes and press at my body. Feet. Stomach. Throat. Eyeballs. Thighs. Feel like crying but don’t.
My fingers are crusted with blood, and I think one might be broken. For a second, I think the blood might be dirt, that red Mars soil, and I get confused and think maybe I’ve still got a job, maybe it’s years ago and I’ve just been dreaming all of this pain, and maybe I’m still handsome and unbroken, maybe Farah and I are still in love and I can still make something grow, I can still get my fingers in the dirt and hear it, and then I shift slightly and get a bomb’s worth of pain from my ribs and my vision blurs blue and when it clears I know the soil is blood. I know where I am and who and why.
I turn over and make myself puke, and it’s that familiar yellow color with the little bit of blood threading through it like embroidery. Try and see my face in it but can’t. I’m sure if I could I’d look worse than dead. Skin pale and covered in bruises, my hair falling out, a few teeth gone in the back and I swear I’m getting shorter too. Maybe if I just lay here for a while nothing will happen and then I can start drinking again.
“Get up.”
Maybe not. Guess I’m at Farah’s. He kicks me in the ribs and cusses me out until I sit up.
“Hi,” I say. Voice sounds like a bad engine and I know my breath is probably toxic. I’m struck by the hugeness of how unwantable I am. Farah used to think I was pretty when I was clean. I used to think so too. Well nothing’s inevitable but change and skyscrapers as they say.
Farah’s just standing there and his arms are folded across his chest. I want to lick it like some wounded animal, him or me I don’t know but there’s some combination of animal and wound. “Hi,” I say again.
“You can’t come back in here.”
When Farah and I were together we used to draw on each other’s chests little maps. Plots of land we wanted to live on, spots on Mars we’d go and build our freedom. He would laugh and then when things got bad he wouldn’t laugh so much. But the ones I drew on his chest were so real to me. I never laughed.
“I’m okay, I just need to rest today. I’ll be okay. I won’t come back tonight, I’ll go somewhere else and cool off and come back tomorrow.”
“You can’t come back in here, ever.”
Really detailed mine were with all the land sectioned off into what types of plants I was going to have and then I’d get so excited to tell him how I’d figured what they needed from Mars soil and sun and air and he would listen and smile or listen and look so sad when things changed and I did too.
“Okay.”
“You haven’t paid your tab in months. And when you get in fights outside it’s bad for business. Offworld Settlement Palmach fuckers are over here constantly for you and no one wants to deal with that.”
Farah was the one who was waiting for me outside Ansar VI when I got out but I didn’t know what to say and neither did he so we didn’t. And he took me back to the bar and poured when I asked and that’s it and that’s where we’ve been since.
“It’s bad for business. And it’s bad for me. They’ll take the liquor license and maybe my papers too. And I don’t want to ever look at you again.”
I sit there like a puddle and try not to think. If I keep my eyes focused on the puke I won’t let what’s happening in. It’ll stay out so I can move and breathe some. I stare at the little thread of blood in the bile and in the corner of my eye I see Farah start to go and the desperation in me rears up.
“Fathi’s here,” I say.
He stops and I can see he’s being really careful with what’s on his face. Blank like a stone wall.
“He’s looking for me. OSPs told me last night. Please don’t do this.”
“Maybe you should see him.”
“Don’t want to see him. Please. I love you.”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay.”
“You owe me too much for that. Just too much.”
“Okay.”
We both shut up and I know that we might not ever stop shutting up now. That we might be shut and closed forever and no openness ever coming back. Every day there are moments like this when whatever might have been waiting for me in the future just goes away, I can feel it just burning up. I wish I could stop drinking. No I don’t. I wish I’d never come to this planet. No I don’t.
“I’m going to code the bar’s door against your breath until you settle the tab. Maybe Fathi can help you. I don’t know. I don’t think I can anymore. If I ever could. I’m sorry.”
Yes I do.
“Please. I can’t pay. I don’t have anything left.”
Farah and I touching the dirt before this was New Tel Aviv, when it was still new. Holding seeds. Playing with gravity and dreaming of freedom. Kissing. The way I could make him laugh like the sun was out and we could photosynthesize.
“You could always sell it. You know somebody in the city will pay good money.”
It. Flash of red. Memory. Dirt. Petals. Whatever.
“Don’t have it. Confiscated. All gone,” I lie.
Farah shakes his head, really tired-seeming. Looks like he’s going to say something, maybe argue, push me to do what I should, but he doesn’t. I think I’m glad about that but I’m not really sure. It’s a long time before he talks again.
“Either pay your debts or don’t come in here again.”
“Okay,” I say. He reaches out and puts his fingers on my knee and I remember how much he used to like touching it, how he liked to feel where it’d been broken and reset. We hold still like that for too long so I say “Can I have one more drink, just to get me going, for today?”
For a second his face looks like it’s got something like pity on it, and for that I’m grateful. It’s all I ever want.
I get out and sun hits me like a missile, and if anyone outside is looking at me with any kind of anything on their face I don’t know it, I can’t see anything at all.
Getting to the other side of the Arab Quarter means going through the New Tel Aviv settlement civic center but I really don’t have a choice if I want to get some cash and keep drinking. If I had better papers and hadn’t been in prison I could drink somewhere anonymous and illegal and maybe fade away but oh well. Walking to the delineation gate I stop by the dried out water tanker (left over from when we were still trying to fully terraform the Quarter, when any of us thought this could be home) to visit the cat. She came up on the second or third rocket from somebody’s alleyway in Khalil and when things were good she was adored and we joked about making her mayor. Then we all got fucked and she did too. Once the settlements got on the Mars train and surrounded what we had we were all panicking and trying to stay free and in the panic nobody took her with them. Now she’s forgotten like me. Like all of us I guess, but me especially I like to think. I check on her when I’m sober enough to remember.
I crouch, eye the underside of the tanker. She’s there looking like I feel. We look at each other for a while and eventually I reach out my hand to try and pet her. Too far back and I’m stretching to just get a scratch, something to let her know I’m here. No luck. Oh well. Yank my hand back out and go to look at her again but she’s gone. I stay down there for a moment because it’s cool and my head hurts. The space where she was, where my hand couldn’t reach.
Closer to the delineation gate I find some kid selling flasks. I manage to convince her to take some synth watermelon seeds I found in my pockets for a flask of arak which is all I can afford since nobody drinks it anymore. It does the trick and soon I’m numb again. The thing about drinking a lot is that there’s nothing meaningful about it. Just fucks you up and you’re not in the world anymore and there’s no past or future really just one foot in front of the other if you can manage that. And sometimes you can still kind of experience what’s around you only it’s not as intense on a personal level. Like now, when the arak’s fuzzed me up, the settlement drones flashing hasbara holograms aren’t so annoying. They’re kind of like insects that aren’t biting. Just something to look at with corpse eyes.
At the gate the guard asks where I’m going and checks my papers, which are shit, obviously. I say I’m just going across to the other side of the Quarter and I’m sticking out my arm before he’s even finished looking. Window opens and the little mechanical arm comes out to stick my vein. Once they’ve got the liter of my blood they approve a fifteen minute pass to get through to the settlement. The blood loss and the arak have really messed me up but I think I can manage getting to the next gate into the Quarter in time. They’re usually pretty good about getting the blood back in once you’re there depending on the line, though once or twice I’ve gotten someone else’s liter. Probably healthier than whatever I’ve got going on, probably might have saved my life. I don’t know.
The settlement civic center looks the same as always. Clean and stupid. The glass looks terrible and it never lasts. And they’ve ruined all the landscape work they made us do in Ansar too, synthetic olive trees on every fucking corner like a postcard. And the synth poppies look as sad as I knew they would. I stop and bend down to feel them, the sickly genetic smell. None of the settlers know how to grow anything real here and none of the Palestinians have the resources even if they did know which they don’t.
Before the settlements when this was just empty planet it was so possible, just crammed to the brim with possible. It was going to be free and we were going to learn the land and find God again and all that bullshit. I believed it so deeply I left everything behind on Earth. The people who couldn’t leave I cursed and tore from my heart. I was stupid and I thought things would be different. And when the settlers followed and they liked the wide open planet so much they left the old land behind, they declared any flora from Earth contraband and put me away. Now we’ve got a provisional government I don’t know or care about and my brother’s been living in Reunified Palestine for years while I drink myself to death, which reminds me my brother is here for me, and I want to just pull up everything with roots on this fucking planet, just salt the ground and then salt myself too. But I’ve only got a few minutes before the blood loss passes me out so there’s no time for being angry or anything else.
At the other delineation gate there’s a protest on the Arab side. They’re holding signs in Arabic I can’t read. Somebody took down one of the hasbara drones and they’re passing it around like a football though it doesn’t really roll. People are dancing and something’s on fire. I don’t know what they want, not sure I can even guess anymore. Some days I’m sad about losing the language, but most days I don’t mind it. Ansar policy is to reprogram prisoner consciousness with Hebrew once they wipe the Arabic which serves me fine. I like not understanding things.
The blood bot gives me my liter back and I stand a little straighter. I’m looking at the faces of all the Arabs through the light-meshed gate and I hear myself thinking they’re idiots, they’re evil, we ought to just shut up and die and float out into space, cold and empty as every day here, all we deserve. Sometimes I don’t know what’s my voice and what’s the guards at Ansar VI and what’s the drones and what’s the drink and what’s Farah and what’s God. All I know is when the protesters make space for me to stumble through their anger, when they touch me and tell me to join them, I loathe, I loathe every cell on my body that feels and I loathe every second I’m breathing and the pit opens up in me and I want something more and I don’t know what it is. So I push them away and while they’re yelling and spitting at me collaborator coward fucking drunk I drain the last of the arak and I say thank you to the drone when it passes out an Arab in front of me and I can pocket a few loose coins that spill out from her hands like petals.
When I get to Abu Khaled’s he’s curled up on the floor and I can tell he’s soiled himself. Touch his forehead and it’s hot as an iron. Probably he’ll last a few more days and then go. I wonder if he has papers for the house or if it’ll go to the settlers. Last place I ever felt decent was in this front room of his—curled up a lot like he is now and crying nonstop while I tried to dry out for the first time in years. His hands on my head. His hands. Remembering feels terrible so I dig a nail into my palm until the pain brings me dull again. I need to get him stable and then ask for some cash. That’s it. That’s all.
I get his pants the rest of the way off and drag him into the tiny bathroom and into the tub. While I rinse him off and he’s groaning, eyes floating open-closed like a camera shutter, I look at him. Skin used to be brown but now it’s some sick grey blue. Bruises everywhere. So thin you could think he was just pastry.
When I’d stumbled in, that night I was trying to be good, he was patient. I cried and he just sat there and touched me, just a little, just to show he was there, and eventually I slept, and the next day he fed me and we didn’t say anything to each other since he only spoke Arabic and I didn’t. I was close to dead from trying to stop drinking cold, but he kept me alive and I got back to normal. I’d hated him for how kind he was and how it made me feel okay for a moment so one night I drank enough so that I knew I’d do something cruel, and I did, and so I left and knew that it was my fault that I was leaving, which was right. After that I didn’t see him again, but I went back once, late at night when I knew he was asleep, and I worked for hours until the sun was just coming up, sweating and freezing and pissed myself but couldn’t stop until it was right, until I’d made him these long wooden planters with bell peppers growing in them, real ones, part of the stash of seeds I’d hidden, or at least I hoped they were growing, but they were definitely there. I felt good, so I went and loitered near the border fence until the OSP spotted me and did what they do, and I fell unconscious feeling nothing.
Now he’s shivering in the tub all wet. It takes me a while to get him out and into the bedroom because I’m starting to shake from not drinking since the arak a few hours ago. The room is nearly empty. Only things around are socks and his paintings and cigarette butts. Get him on the bed and pull the sheet over him and it pretty quickly gets soaked in his sweat, and a little after it’s got some of mine on it too. Abu Khaled is shaking and I’m shaking and I can’t think straight, and I’m trying to ask him how he is, or if he can hear me, or if he has any money he can spare, but I can’t get the Arabic out though I really try and remember. So for a few minutes the two of us are just making sounds at each other, groaning a little like birds. He starts to sound like he’s in a lot more pain, and I don’t know what to do or say so I start crying and just touching him, his head, his neck, the soles of his feet, shoulders, stomach, just putting my hands on him the way I would put them on soil, just getting to know what it is. He starts trying to say something, and I’m listening harder than I ever have.
