The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  As the remaining colony struggles to make it to their second spring, Sladja focuses on reporting the details of crop-tending and water rations. There’s no further sign of the brief turmoil caused by the arrival of the couple, though Judy notices that over the following year, Sladja dedicates herself to the study of medicinal herbs, and her accounts of Ren are no longer limned in wonderment. But in one short passage, fitted between records of seed storage, she writes cryptically of refugees, and Judy guesses who she means.

  He tells me not to worry. My ljubavi, my own happiness, he whispered in the dark that night, laying his cheek to mine and putting his hand over my bitten fingers. We are safe. We are safe. We are safe.

  But there will be more refugees. They will always find us. And we would crack in half to harbour them all. And we would never know whom we’d let enter, what snake we had brought into our house. At night, I think of it, and how we might know the wrong ones to turn them from our door.

  * * *

  —

  By the colony’s third year, only half its original number remain, but they have found a viable way of living that seems to bring them peace. Of their cherished orchard, only a single peach tree persists, which Sladja notes will run the clock of its short life in another decade. What is left of the four-acre farm, once maintained by a dozen dedicated workers, is now overseen by Oona alone, who also prepares the nightly meal. And Judy notes that it is now Sladja, rather than Ren, who addresses the colony when extra hands are needed to harvest the garden or help must be called to repair one of the houses. She encourages the others with words that appear sincere, and there is no sign that her zeal is flagging after the obstacles they have faced. But Ren, when he is mentioned, seems to be forever away in the hills, alone, foraging whatever he can in the dying wood.

  * * *

  —

  The day Judy sees Eban again, a cold-looking rain drills the roof for hours, puddling on the floor before the broken window. She is staring out the window at the sodden snow still clinging to the ground, wondering whether this unending season is winter or spring, when she sees him.

  In this dark weather, he is little more than a shadow darting between the grey trees. But before he steps close enough for her to glimpse his face, she recognizes his shape and stance with certainty.

  She tells herself there’s no point in calling his name. And so she just watches him, trying to guess why he has appeared there.

  “What are you doing,” she murmurs as he creeps from the shelter of one tree to the next. And then she hears a snapping noise, as if something has given way, and as she watches, he lifts a trap from the ground and studies his catch. She shakes her head. He has driven some poor rabbit from its den in the rain and chased it to his trap. She wonders if he even realizes how close she is.

  Even though she knows what comes next, she watches him.

  With nothing showing on his face at all, Eban seizes the rabbit by its ears and raises it from the cage. The rabbit beats its feet frantically and struggles to lay its teeth on Eban. As Judy watches, Eban grips the rabbit’s feet in one hand, lowers a thick branch over its neck, and then, so quickly neither she nor the rabbit can quite believe it has happened, he snatches the rabbit’s body back and steps onto the branch, disarticulating its neck. When Judy uncovers her eyes, the rabbit is limp in his hands. Though she never cries, she cries then. And she blames the baby, weakening her, cell by cell. Wiping at the tears with her hands, she feels a terrible pity.

  It must be for this reason that she calls to him then. “Eban?”

  He doesn’t answer or stop. He is tying the rabbit to the branch to carry, but there is something intent and resolute about the way he moves now and she knows he hears her.

  “Eban…I wish you’d look at me.”

  With hands that appear steady, he knots the string and lifts the branch over his shoulder.

  “I’ve been reading about them,” she calls to his back. “About the people who first came here and made this place. Sladja gave me their book to read. Their history. She wants me to copy it out again. She is changing it and I don’t know why. But I’m learning what happened here.”

  He hesitates, adjusting the burden over his shoulder, or pretending to.

  She searches for the right thing to say to him now.

  * * *

  —

  In the first months and years that they knew each other, she envied Eban his talent with his pencils. She could never understand if the talent was in his hand or his eye, but he could look at a thing before him and then make its shape on the page with exactness. Or something even better—a trace of life itself. In his still images was a taut, ready vitality, so that looking at one you very nearly believed whatever he had drawn there was only temporarily still. Its next move and the onward lean of time were invisible but somehow present, strung among the pencil lines, already in wait.

  She thought he could teach her to draw as he did, but the distorted shapes she put on the page had the precise opposite quality. They were as far from life as the machines her father used to tell her about. Unnatural, somehow. An aberration.

  But Eban was patient with her. As often as she was willing to try, he would sit by her side as she drew, gently noting details she hadn’t drawn or even seen. She thought it was strange that you could not see the thing you were looking at—that is, you could see it, but not know what it was you saw.

  “It’s not about seeing,” he told her again and again. “We both see it. When I tell you, you know just what I mean. It’s not as if you disagree with me or see something different.”

  “But why don’t I see it till you tell me?”

  “I think we must be used to looking at things as if they’re only one thing. You know what a leaf looks like when it’s held up straight before your eyes, but if it’s turned on its side it might be some other shape—it might be just a line. Your eyes can see that line is a leaf, but when you draw, your hand doesn’t know how to make that leaf into a line. Your hand wants to make it look like what you already know. It wants it to look like a leaf.”

  One day when it was so hot they couldn’t bear to do anything else—nothing useful or routine—Eban had shown her a rabbit he’d caught in one of their traps. The creature was huddled against the farthest wall of the cage with its back to them, shivering. It was trying not to exist. It had done the best job it was able to do of disappearing.

  “We’ll both draw it, and then we’ll switch and see what we saw that was different,” Eban told Judy, handing her a book of paper and a piece of charcoal. She liked working with just the charcoal, even though it blacked her hands. Eban used pencils the peddlers brought him specially to make his tidy lines.

  Of course what she drew was nothing like a rabbit and when it was time for them to make their trade, she gave it over so roughly it tore at the corner.

  Eban smoothed the page with his hands till they were black like hers, and studied what she’d made.

  “It’s awful, I know.”

  “It isn’t.”

  She looked miserably at his drawing in her lap. He’d drawn the rabbit at the very centre of the page, so small it seemed to be hovering helplessly there. Unmoored. So vulnerable you almost wanted to look away.

  “Why didn’t you draw the trap?” she asked.

  He frowned. “I don’t know. I guess…I just wanted it to not be in there.”

  She looked more closely. Tiny as it was, the drawing contained everything about the rabbit. The dim, narrow lines of its form seemed tense with the same energy of the still, trapped rabbit before her. It was protesting, she understood. As the other rabbit protested the cage, this rabbit made only of pencil lines was protesting the page that bound it.

  “Can I do something to yours?” Eban asked. “Would you mind?”

  She peered over his shoulder at the dark, angry-looking smudges she had made. Drawing the bar
s of the cage had bored her, so she’d made them roughly, too thick and unvaried—with no qualifications of light or shade. The rabbit itself was out of proportion with the squares she’d drawn around it—too big, erupting from containment. She wondered if she should have drawn the cage first. But how would she have fitted the form of the rabbit between the bars?

  She was prepared for him to redraw what she had done and wondered how he would erase such dark, clumsy marks on the page. But he made only three changes.

  She had missed the way the very edge of the rabbit’s eye could be seen, even though it tried to bury its face. And that eye, she realized, looking more closely after seeing what Eban drew, was watching them.

  She had missed, too, that though both ears were turned back so far they were buried in its fur, one turned ever so slightly up at the end. She thought at first that the rabbit had cocked its ear to listen to them as well as watch, but the effect on the drawing, when Eban’s work was complete, was altogether different. With that slight change, the altered angle of the farther ear, the rabbit seemed to be not listening but resisting.

  The last adjustment Eban made was to the hunch of her rabbit’s spine. He traced above the hasty line she had made, reshaping the curve, and revealing the last thing she had failed to see: the rabbit’s head was much smaller than she had made it. She had drawn the head to be a size that seemed proportionate to its body. But the real rabbit’s head was strangely small. And all the urgent, outraged energy of the rabbit, coiled in its corner, ended there.

  “You can see it now,” she murmured as he returned her drawing to her.

  “See what?”

  “How that rabbit wants us to believe it has disappeared.”

  He smiled slowly, his pleasure in her words as plain as his confusion. “I hardly did anything, Judy. You were most of the way there.”

  “You caught it,” she said, shaking her head. “I wish I understood how.”

  * * *

  —

  “Do you remember that other rabbit?” she asks him now. “The one we drew?”

  Eban is far enough away, shuffling through the rain with his chin tucked to his chest, that she thinks maybe he really can’t hear her anymore.

  “You took my drawing from me. Remember? You drew right on the page.”

  Now he’s gone, out of her sight.

  “You made it beautiful,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  Whenever Judy had asked what happened to the world, her fathers had been too vague and Eban too specific. “Human society has its own currents and tides,” Daniel would begin. “The orbitofrontal cortex,” would answer Eban.

  Only now, reading Sladja’s history, which circles back to the past with increasing frequency, does Judy understand.

  I can’t tell when it began. Did he always talk so, or is it only these last days or weeks? He is so long in the woods—all day and sometimes overnight. He doesn’t like me to worry about him, and so I follow him when I can spare the time, and otherwise I trust, because I must, that he’ll return.

  But when he does, in those few hours that he sits by me after the evening meal, or lies with me in our bed after we put out the lanterns, he talks only of the way we lived. Before.

  “I used to take you dancing,” he said last night, waking me from sleep as though we had been in conversation all along. “I knew it was wrong but I was proud to dance with you. I mean it was wrong to take pride in your beauty, to want to show you to strangers, like a prize. But there it is. I loved it anyway.”

  “We stopped that long before we came here. We hadn’t danced in years.”

  “We should have, though. I should have taken you out so much more. Every Saturday, we should have been dancing.”

  “I don’t see how it would change a thing about where we are now.”

  “I didn’t say that. Did I say that? I only said we should always have gone dancing. When we could. You danced like a ballerina. It wasn’t really the right way to dance—even if we were only waltzing, you would point your toes and lift your elbows high like you were a little girl in dance school and your teacher was watching. You were always performing, never following like you were supposed to do. But that was okay. I followed you.”

  And then, three days ago, in the morning after he kissed me goodbye, he said, “We should have had children.” And I was unable to think how to answer him before he went off into the wood.

  Because it wasn’t my choice not to. Or not only my choice. We agreed together, and we never questioned what we had decided. If he has had doubts, he has never shared them until now. And then to say it so casually, as though it was something we’d only forgotten to do.

  We’d decided after his sister’s child was tested. Though we’d long known, as everyone did, that anyone could have a child test positive—it wasn’t a measure of weakness in you. That would have been less frightening. That, at least, you could predict, if not control.

  We worried we wouldn’t have the strength to relinquish such a child. We knew ourselves. We knew, like his sister, we might be tempted to keep such a child, whatever the risks.

  As a girl, I went to school among them, of course. We all did. We didn’t know better.

  In those early days, we were supposed to be sympathetic. We were supposed to help them understand us. Though their sickness shared a similar neurological profile to antisocial personality disorder, they had, we were told, no will to harm. They want to understand, we were told. Tell them what they need to know.

  For several years, researchers mistook the sickness for a variant of autism, because of the similar impact on emotion recognition and ability to read meaning in faces. We were taught not to attempt to show them pleasure with our smiles or grief with our frowns. We were taught to tell them, “You have pleased me.” “You have made me unhappy.” Then, we were told, they’d understand, and respond as any of us would.

  But continued testing revealed that they lacked the deep empathic capacity of those with autism, who might struggle to process emotional expression but were highly sensitive to emotion itself. For unknown reasons, the brains of the sick ones were devoid of the faculty for affective empathy. No explanation of another person’s pain could cause them to feel it themselves.

  And meanwhile they kept being born. The school-administered battery of affect recognition and autonomic response tests was soon replaced by a simple brain scan that could be performed in infancy. By the time I was twenty-one years old, the year of the first tsunami, two of three babies left the delivery room with a confirmed diagnosis.

  But for a long time we didn’t truly understand how the sickness altered those born to it. The difference between us and the sick was far greater than we first believed. It was vast and unbridgeable. In the architecture of their brains there was no chamber laid ready to receive the experience of another. They could injure without suffering or knowing the suffering they caused. They lived among us like a human sham, remaking the world to their preference, bereft of the quality that had formerly defined even the worst of our species, the innate physiological response that registered guilt, shame, pity, and was the root of all human aspiration towards goodness. Civilization relied upon refraction of emotional experience—if a victim’s pain produced no echo in the hearts of those who caused or witnessed it, there could be no remorse, no conscience, no moral foundation to human action or the laws that governed it.

  When, at last, we saw what our blindness had hidden—when we saw that imposters had made a perversion of our humanity. That all which had been ours belonged to them. That there were enough of them to run our government, and enough to vote them to power. When we understood the computers we used did their affectless work, and we were now led by their science and by their laws. By a good they defined, which bore no compassion for the liberties and lives of men and women.

  When they witnessed our suffering and
spoke only of data projections and rations. “You have made us unhappy,” we said to them. And they were no more moved to action by our words than they were moved to pity by our faces.

  When, after their arrival, the world fell dark. When drought came. And famine. And they told us water and crops would no longer ship outside the cities. When they told us resources must be centralized, and energy conserved, and didn’t regret the businesses they shuttered, the homes they left in ruin. When they rationed and then withdrew the fuel, and ceased to maintain the roads, so we could go nowhere but where they took us. When they cut off the power that we used to light our homes and cook and keep our food. When the consolidation orders were issued, and we watched communities empty like turned-out pockets, and we stood our ground and made our protest but knew we would fail because we were so few and they were so many.

  Then, finally, we came to understand that they were not the pitiable victims of chromosomal deviation, but something dire and enduring—an “evolution,” as they called it. A new and terrible world.

  And into that world, he wonders now if we should have brought a child.

  When he woke this morning, I was dressed and ready. “Do you want to go back?” I asked him. I meant it viciously, but he answered like it was an honest question.

  “No.”

  “How can I believe you? After your talk of dancing and children, and the food we ate and the people we knew, of our house and our things and our families…”

  “No,” he said again, so surely that I listened. “Even if there was nothing in those cities. Nothing to fear. Even if we could go back to everything as it was, I would stay in these woods. We should have come years ago. There is such a clarity here. I think that’s why I’m able to see now, at last, what I never could when we lived down below.”