“Do you know the power of story?” Moravas said. “It takes only a single generation to change the entire story of a people. Ten years. You take the children off to state schools. You tell them a story. You make it illegal to tell any other. People forget. The world moves on. But I don’t forget. I can’t forget what was done to the world below us.”
“Why?” I said.
“They did what they did because they don’t know how to fix things,” she said. “So they buried them and started over and told us it was our fault. They said we were lucky humanity had any future at all after they drowned the world.”
“The coven?” I said.
“Among others,” she said. “Children are easy to manipulate. It’s easy to lose your past, to lose your story.”
“I won’t believe this,” I said. “Propaganda.”
“Believe what you want,” she said, “but it doesn’t change the truth. It doesn’t change the fact that the device in your pocket is just fifty years old. It wasn’t made by a god or a sinner or saint. Just a woman. A human being like you. We can build that world again. We can have that future. But we must spread the real story.”
“Propaganda.”
“You keep using that word. But do you know it applies just as well to the stories you were told?”
“I have to go,” I said. I hauled myself up and onto the stairwell behind me. I expected her to call out, but she didn’t.
I spent most of the night wandering the lower islands, trying to dispel the propaganda from my head. A world built on lies, on stories told to children. Did Solda know? Was she old enough to remember something else? She’d never told me. No, no, I was falling for the lies.
But who would I be, if it was true? If I wasn’t the story they told me of myself? If I wasn’t the orphan of children killed in a fire, if I wasn’t special for being a boy who survived the plague, if my memory wasn’t a necessity but a convenient tool I had honed for a state that didn’t want me to understand the creeping of time?
I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t accept that the whole world was a lie, because that left me with nothing. It would leave all of us with nothing.
At dawn, I found myself on the street outside the antiquities shop. I gazed up at the tower room. The man there must have come to work early, because he was already studiously perched behind his typewriter. I could almost hear the clack of the keys. I had stuffed my scarf in my pocket, because I was afraid the Guardians were looking for me. It was only a matter of time before they found me, and I didn’t know what I was going to say to them.
Instead, I wanted to see the man, and see if the shopkeeper had bought him a hat. I wanted to know if he liked it. I wanted something real in all this pain and sin and all the gory lies.
I walked inside the shop. A little bell tinkled, one I hadn’t noticed before. The doughy woman looked up from her abacus and fixed me with a dark stare.
“What are you here for?” she said.
“I want to see the man upstairs,” I said. “Did he like his hat?”
“He’s working right now,” she said, gaze going back to her work. “Come back tomorrow.”
I stepped around her and headed upstairs. She had a lot of bulk to throw around, but I was much faster, even exhausted and sleep deprived. I took the stairs two at a time and came up into the tower room. There were crates and dusty heaps of old-world detritus, harmless trinkets and household items and other, stranger types of things like the ones Moravas had.
And there he sat at the window, still bent over his typewriter. The sun was rising bright in a clear blue sky, shining right through the window, and I squinted as I rushed forward. I saw him only in outline.
“I had hoped to find you here,” I said.
As I approached and my angle to the sun shifted, I noticed something uncanny in the way he sat. He was hunched over working, yes, but there was no liveliness to his limbs, no sheen to his dark skin. He glistened softly in the light. It was not his clothes that shimmered, but his skin, because he wasn’t a man, but a relic, an anachronism. He was one of those dead ancestors hauled up from the depths of the sea for us to gawk at and second-guess. He was not a man, not a man, not a man . . . The world is built on lies.
I sank to my knees and stared at him.
“You wish to buy him?” the store keeper said, huffing up the stairs.
“Please leave me alone,” I said softly.
I heard her breathing behind me for a moment more. Then the stairs creaked, and she headed back down.
I got up and sat on a box next to the relic. He had been frozen here in this pose, slightly hunched as if at a typewriter, and the shopkeeper had put an antique typewriter there in front of him. It might be illegal to use a typewriter, but it was fine to own one, and she probably hoped to sell the two as a pair. She had hidden this relic in plain sight, and avoided people like me who would have confiscated it.
We built this world over the bones of lies. It’s fake, just like the man in the window. It put bitter, angry, violent people in power, and now here we are, living in a whole world of lies built around a cold, hollow core.
We are sinners. And I am the worst kind. Because I did not cry out, or yell about a better story, or take up arms, or resist. I wanted my old story back, the one about the world where I was so very special, and we were the chosen of God, not the detritus of some great greedy coup. Instead, I dug around in the crates up there until I found a hat, and I placed it at a jaunty angle atop the relic’s head, and I sat there next to him as the sun rose again over the world. I thought about how I had become the worst sort of sinner. Not just one who steals relics or defies the coven.
I’m a sinner who wants his feet on solid ground.
THE WOMEN OF OUR OCCUPATION
THE DRIVERS WERE BIG WOMEN with broad hands and faces smeared with mortar grit, and they reeked of the dead. Even when we did not see them passing through the gates, ferrying truckloads of our dead, they came to us in our dreams, the women of our occupation.
My brother and I did not understand why they had come. They were from a far shore none of us had ever seen or heard of, and every night my father cursed them as he turned on the radio. He kept it set to the resistance channel. No one wanted the women here.
My brother got up the courage to ask one of the women, “Who stays at home with your kids while you’re here?”
The woman laughed and said, “You’re our children now.”
But I knew the way to conquer the women. When I was old enough, I would marry them. All of our men would marry them, and then they’d belong to us, and everything would be the way it was supposed to be.
We woke one night to the sound of a burst siren. The scream was only a muffled moan in the heavy, humid air.
My mother bundled up my brother and grabbed the house cat. My father made me carry the radio. We hid in the cellar under the house, heard the dull thumping of bursts.
“They’re looking for insurgents,” my father said. He turned on the radio, got only static. “You know they castrate them.”
“Hush, Father,” my mother said.
My brother started crying.
The death trucks and the mortar trucks came the next morning. The women loaded up the bodies. They shoveled away the facades that had come off the houses. Our house was all right, but the one next door had been raided. The yeasty smell of spent bursts clung to everything. The house had fallen in on itself.
I saw them bring out a body, but I couldn’t tell who it was. My mother pulled the curtains closed before I could see anything else. She told me to stay away from the windows.
“Why are they here?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “No one knows.”
One night, many months into the occupation, two women came to our door.
My mother answered. She invited them in and offered them tea and bloody sen. The sen would stain their tongues and ease their minds, and the tea was said to warm women’s souls. If they had them.
I stood in the doorway of the kitchen and peered out at them. My brother was at the table eating cookies.
The women asked after my father.
“Working,” my mother said. “Men’s work. He’s an organic technician.”
One of the women stepped over to the drink cabinet. She flicked on the radio.
My mother stood very still. She gripped her dishrag in one hand, so tightly I thought her fingernails would bite through it and cut her palm.
The radio played—a slow, easy waltz. Someone had tuned it back to the local station.
“Your husband’s study, where is it?” the other woman asked.
“This way,” my mother said. My mother looked straight at me. They would have to come through the kitchen.
I ducked back into the kitchen and slipped into the study. I pulled open the top drawer. My father’s gun was heavy. Blue and green organics sloshed in the transparent double barrels. I’d never held it before. I didn’t know where to put it. Father’s papers were there, too, papers about the resistance that he said we weren’t supposed to touch.
My brother had followed me in. He waddled up to the desk, stared at the gun.
“You’re in trouble,” he said.
“Quiet,” I said. “We’ll play a game. Sit here. I’ll give you more cookies.”
When the women came in behind my mother, my brother and I were sitting up on the big leather sofa by the window. I opened up Father’s screes board. My brother stared at the women.
The women went right to the desk. I tried not to look at them. They opened up the gun drawer.
The largest woman turned to me. She wore a long dark coat, even in all the heat. Sweat beaded her big face.
“Come here,” she said.
“He’s only—” my mother began.
“Here,” the woman said.
I got up. She put her big hands all over me, patted me down. She looked around the room. Looked back at us.
“Get out,” she said. “We’re cleaning this room.”
I took my brother by the hand. The three of us went to wait in the living room. My mother kept staring at me. I gave my brother more cookies. We sat and listened to the sounds of the crashing and tearing coming from my father’s study.
After a long time, the women came out. They stood in front of us and put their hats back on.
“Good evening,” they said.
“Good evening,” my mother said.
When they were gone, my mother held out her hand to me. I pulled up the back of my brother’s shirt and took out the gun and the papers. My mother cried. She pulled us both into her arms.
My father did not come home that night. Or the next night. We got a telegram from the women. They had taken my father away for questioning. He would be kept for an undefined period.
We were alone.
With father gone, we had no money. The lab he worked for wouldn’t send us anything. They were afraid that the women would accuse my father of something.
The neighbors came and brought over food and ration tickets. My mother went to each house afterward and asked if they needed laundry done, or shirts mended, but they all said the same thing. They were saving their own money. No one could help us.
“What about the women?” I said. “Who mends their shirts?”
My mother frowned at me. “Certainly not their husbands,” she said.
So my mother allowed the women into our house, and she mended their shirts. She cleaned and pressed their dress pants, their stiff white collars. My brother and I shined their boots.
It was strange, to have the big women in the house, wearing their long dark coats and guns. My mother did not speak to them any more than she had to. When they came in she held herself very stiffly. She pursed her mouth. Her eyes seemed very black.
I tried to hate the women, too. They always greeted me like the man of the house, because they had taken my father. If I was the one who answered the door, they always asked my permission to see my mother. They were very polite. Sometimes they would talk to each other in low voices, in their own language. It was soft and rhythmic, like the memory of my mother’s voice before I could understand the words.
After a month of this, one of the women said to my mother, “It will be a shame when your husband returns. We will have no clean shirts.”
My mother just stared at her. I had never seen her look so angry.
When my father did come back, red dust filled the seams of his face. His hair had gone white. The spaces under his eyes were smeared in sooty footprints, a dark wash against his sallow skin.
He had no marks or scars that I could see. He still had all of his fingers. But he walked with a limp that he had not had before, and he could not close his left hand into a fist. He became very quiet. He spent most days sitting in a chair by the big window, staring out. He did not speak to us. He could not go to work.
My mother had to keep mending shirts. When the women came, my father moved his chair into his study and shut the door. He started smoking opium.
The air inside the house was heavy all the time. My mother sent me out more often to run errands for her. She didn’t have time to go to the market herself. Father never left the house. My brother tried to go with me, but mother made him stay behind to shine the boots.
On the street, I met other boys with homes like mine. Their fathers had all been taken in as well. I went out with a group of them to throw rocks at the windows of a women’s barracks. But the women were waiting for us. They grabbed the oldest boys. They shot them in the head.
I didn’t leave the house for a while, after that. I hated the women. I hated them, and I dreamed of them.
The women were making changes. They draped their country’s colors over ours. They did it first at the police buildings, then the government buildings. Fewer trucks of bodies and mortar rubble passed through the gates. There were fewer night sirens.
After a year, I noticed something else, though my mother said I imagined it, said I was giving the women more power than they had. The summers were not as hot. The air wasn’t as humid. The women were changing the weather, too.
My mother tried to make things normal. She tried to get me and my brother to go to the new schools, the ones the women opened after shutting down ours. In those schools, all of the teachers were teenage girls. Our girls, but girls just the same.
What were we supposed to learn, from girls?
The women in our house kept coming. Some of them lived just down the street now, in houses where the owners were killed or deported for being part of the resistance. When I asked one of the women if she ever got lonely in the big house, she said no, she never got lonely.
“I live with my sisters,” she said.
“Why don’t they do your laundry?” I said.
My brother was shining her boots. My mother looked up sharply, but I didn’t care. I was the man of the house. I could say what I wanted.
The woman just laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.
Some time later, I met a girl at school I liked, and she liked me, I think. But the next year, she left school because she wanted to join the new fighting squad that the women had started. Girls were allowed to join when they were fourteen. I got angry when she told me she was going.
“What,” I said, “you want to learn how to kill people like those women do? You’ll be just like them.”
She glared at me. Black eyes, like my mother’s. “They won,” she said. “It won’t be so bad to be like someone who wins, will it?”
“Won? What did they win?”
“Everything,” she said.
I left school, even though it made my mother angry. I got a job unloading fishing boats in the bay. There were mostly men down there, though the women were posted around as guards and they had put a bunch of girls in charge of customs. Those women made a lot more money than any of us working the boats.
I once heard one of the men say some
thing nasty to the customs girls. He called them whores, and traitors, and said he could fuck the traitor out of them. He said it in front of two women working as customs guards. One of the women pulled out her gun and shot him. I still stayed on in my mother’s house. Father’s health got worse. We lost more and more of him to opium.
I sat with him one hot night during the monsoon season. All of the windows were open, letting in the rain, but he wouldn’t let me close the house up. Mother had taken my brother to the hospital. He had an infection in his lungs.
“I have such dreams,” my father said. He reached for my hand. I let him take it. His hand was cold and clammy in mine, despite the heat.
“I dream that the women came from another world,” he said. “They came on boats made of spice and spun sugar. We disappointed them. They’re too hungry for us.” He turned his blank stare to me. “They’re going to eat us.”
There was a new woman on watch at customs. She looked at me only once, but I couldn’t help but follow her with my eyes. She was big and tall like the others, and her face and hands were broad. She had a dark complexion and tilted green eyes, like jade. She looked twenty. I wasn’t even sixteen. I didn’t think she noticed me. But she caught me heading home and said, “The streets are not safe for boys. I’ll bring you home.”
She was a head taller than me, but she moved like water. We walked through the maze of deserted streets bordering the harbor and passed under a gaslight. She suddenly took me by the arm and pulled me into a dark alley. I choked on a cry. She pressed me against the gritty wall of an abandoned warehouse and shoved her hand down the front of my trousers. I struggled, but didn’t say anything. Her big body and long coat shielded me from the street. No one could see me. No one at the dock. Not my mother. Not my father.
I gripped the back of her neck, dug my fingers into her hair. She pulled me into her.
When I saw her again, she was with a group of women by the customs house. I nodded at her. She turned to the other women, said something in their language.
Meet Me in the Future Page 11
