They stretched out her arm so the Carver could probe it with his fingers, seeking the spaces between, divining how the meat wanted to come apart.
Use me. I got hate enough in me for who’s earned it and love enough for the rest. So use me.
She looked the Carver in the eye until he felt it, to seize his undivided attention.
“Most of me never wanted to get close enough to you to have words,” she said, and her voice didn’t quaver too bad. “But there was a little part of me that did. So’s long as we’re here …”
He raised an eyebrow, just a degree, holding his blade at the ready, but stilled. He wanted to hear. He couldn’t resist. This should be interesting.
“That Butcher Ding parable—yeah, we’re onto you, we know what makes you tick—you got it wrong, took away all the wrong things,” Annie said. “Just like you people always do.”
His brow began to knit, a ripple of annoyance across the tranquil pool.
“Bet you didn’t even know that, at the time the story came from, butchering oxen was a reviled profession. In everybody else’s eyes, a man who did that was down with the lowest of the low. Didn’t matter to Ding. He devoted himself to doing the best job he could. Until it made him wise enough that even the lord of the land felt privileged to be his student for the day.”
One of the guards snorted, impatient to get on with the good stuff. Pearls before swine, you know.
“It’s not about the glory of mastery or setting yourself apart,” she said. “It’s about the raising up of the lowly, the despised. Because they got things to teach, too.”
When his knife flashed, it still seemed to move in slow motion, as the edge honed to nothingness led the way through flesh and fat, severing nerves and slipping the gristle, finding its way through the gap between bones, then out the other side, as the chilled air flowed through her, touching places it had never been, and the lower half of her arm thudded to the stage.
Beyond the lights, they cheered.
There wasn’t nearly as much blood as she would’ve expected two weeks ago. She’d either learned to control that much, or it wasn’t her at all.
Use me.
She made her stand and looked the Carver in the eye until she saw all the rage behind it.
“Motherfucker, turn that knife on yourself next, why don’t you,” she said. “You think you’re free of pride? You got more pride than anyone here.”
He kept going, no stopping him now, and she held on, and onto as much, for as long as she could. His anger made him sloppy. She’d known it would.
~
What to call it now? Not waking up, certainly, nor coming to. Awareness, maybe that was the key. She was aware. In defiance of all the reasons she shouldn’t be, a reason for every piece of her cut from the rest, she was once again aware.
But now it no longer felt localized, her head and maybe her heart, her gut. It was over there, in that first forearm to go. And over there in the corner, the upper arm that followed. There, too, in the arm taken straight from the shoulder. In the legs, from the severed knees to the bunions that were started to be a problem. She lay where they’d flung her, good riddance, and in every part of herself she was aware … and though in the dead of night it was purely dark inside the waste bin, it didn’t matter. Not now. In a spectrum beyond the sight of human eyes—or most of them—every piece and scrap of her remained aglow with the memory of what she had been.
And she was not alone. Beneath her, around her, lay the cold fragments that had come before, many still fading, the rest gone out entirely. So many. Struggling to be heard, they knew their own.
Use me. All of them, close at hand, and farther away: Use me. Use me. Use me.
She began with herself, drawing herself back to wholeness, welding with hate, melting with love, until she was no longer aware of any distinction between what had been hers and what hadn’t. They were all one now.
Use us.
As the first light of dawn began to line the gap between the lid and the lip of the bin, she threw it open like a hatch, and clambered out behind all her arms, then rose tall on her many legs, alert to the slightest sound with her myriad ears. All this extra bone, she would figure out the most punishing ways of wielding it as she went.
Bitch, make an example out of me, and I’ll make sure you get back a nightmare.
She stooped to lower herself through the nearest doorway, so they could finally start dealing with what they had wrought.
Operations Other Than War
Nadia Bulkin
Noah Quint said that his father was a hero who had earned his medals protecting the freedoms of everyone who lived in New Birmingham in the war against Kursattar, and Noah Quint was right. His father came to his class to talk about the war and he was so noble, so calm and gentle with his rumbling voice and easy laugh. He was like every dad in every Christmas movie, the way he paused to check that his jokes were landing, when he clearly knew they were. He said it was important—very important—to know when and what to sacrifice.
Tom Mortensen’s father had made a lot of sacrifices, or so his mother said. But then, his mother said a lot of things, especially on the phone with his grandmother. When Tom saw his father, he saw a man he wouldn’t trust to protect anything or anyone, curled up like a conch shell, hands forever clenching a blanket beneath his chin as if he was the child afraid of the dark.
Tom’s father spent most of his time in a medicated sleep. But when he was awake, Tom asked him about the war, and when Tom asked him about the war, his father spoke of a monster.
The monster was a giant. A mechanical giant like the kind in Iron Force that went to war against equally giant grotesque lizard-men. A giant with dead eyes and steel limbs the size of air tankers who could reach up and crush planes, who repelled missiles like a cow’s tail swatting flies. Every time Tom’s father shut his eyes, he said, he saw the monster’s face rising out of the sea in a wash of froth, a face large enough to serve as a small helipad. The sound of its arrival, his father said, was the sound of the earth coming undone. Splitting open. Like a headache.
It confused Tom, because the mechanical giants he saw in Iron Force and other knock-off cartoons were always heroic—large, blocky heroes, wielding giant swords. They’d only been built that big because the villains they had to defend humans against were themselves so large, big enough to tear down bridges and knock over buildings. Fight fire with fire, the engineer characters always said, with brave determination. Those giants were called things like Earth’s Defender. And Tom did not know why his father would be fighting against one.
“Did you fight against a giant monster in the war?” he asked Noah Quint’s father.
“The enemy had some truly wild weapons,” said Noah Quint’s father. “Thank God our men and women were braver.”
“So the monster was real?” Tom asked impatiently, and then the teacher said that was all the time they had for questions. But Tom saw Noah Quint’s father giving him a stony look, the kind of look that he’d seen adults give each other when they were pissed but couldn’t say so.
This confirmation served as padding when Noah shoved him while he was standing in line for the bus and said that his father was a drug-addicted loser who didn’t know anything. Drug-addicted loser, he could believe. But Tom knew his father knew things. Only people that couldn’t lie about the world’s truth ended up like his father, held captive and soiled by their own thoughts in a dark room—or so his mother said. The liars, she said, ended up like General Quint.
~
By the time Tom was in college, the truth had come out—there were eyewitness accounts, declassified satellite images—that Kursattar had built an all-terrain defense system in the shape of a man. They called it SOLAT. Some technical acronym. They insisted that it was deactivated, as part of the peace treaty that they’d been made to sign. The U.S. military corroborated their accou
nt, promising that UN weapons inspectors were making regular checks on SOLAT. And then it was as if no one had been lying about anything. The existence of SOLAT became one of many things that had only been kept secret as a matter of national security, which was the one great reason that could never be questioned.
SOLAT had been forcibly disabled, they said, by an ingenious young pilot named Amy Dee, who figured out the machine’s weak spot and crashed her airplane straight into it. No suicide dives had ever worked on SOLAT before, they said—they did not elaborate on how many had been tried—but Amy Dee’s did. And then, like a spring from a stone, a monument to Amy Dee was unveiled overnight: The Purity of Sacrifice, it was called. Tom looked it up online. She looked like a child in that marble. But she was a soldier like his father.
Before it had a name, Tom used to have nightmares about the giant. He’d be on a boat, slowly rocking toward some lush green island, when the skies would blacken and the earth would moan and the water would rise to the height of mountains until, finally, dropping like a curtain in a thunderous crash, revealing a wall of metal still steadily rising behind. He assumed these nightmares had been passed down from his father, like his high school girlfriend had inherited her mother’s migraines.
So Tom was anxious to tell his father he wasn’t crazy, to vindicate his fears, even though his mother said never to raise the war with him at all. Tom hoped that by giving it a name, he’d be able to rid his father of the hold the monster had on him. SOLAT was just another weapon, after all, like stealth planes or weaponized drones. Nothing nightmares should be made of.
“You were right, Dad,” he whispered in his father’s dark bedroom. “It was real. Its name was SOLAT.” And it was then, when he heard the name, that his father started to howl.
The bomb in his father’s soul was not deactivated, even if SOLAT was. Some things, Tom’s mother said, were so contrary to the way of God that there is no amount of truth that can make them light. Black holes. Which made Tom wonder if his father, too, was one such abyss. If that room that he never left anymore wasn’t just another swallower of light.
Tom meant to heed his mother’s words and his father’s darkness, to avoid SOLAT and the war while he was at school. But he kept fixating on mentions of poor defeated Kursattar—the church kids asking for aid after yet another natural disaster, the food truck out by the gym. And he’d watch new movies with giant robots—except now, the giant roots were no longer heroes like Earth’s Defender but villains, killer contraptions made by mad scientists that threatened the freedoms of little towns like New Birmingham—and remember when those robots wielded swords of glory, held high and gleaming above their heads.
So he took a class with Professor Gordon Chalmers on the present and future world order, and waited anxiously for the syllabus to turn to Kursattar. To the war. To its weapons.
“It wasn’t a war,” said Professor Chalmers when a student asked him what lessons future war-planners could draw from the experience. “It was an assault. And we were the assailants.”
Assault. Such a loaded word. Assault, an attack with the purpose of incapacitation. Assault that was more one-sided than a fight, or a war. An operation other than war. Tom had attended enough political science lectures, by then, to have heard about those—assassinations, extractions, sanctions, embargoes. Not all displays of power are war, even if all you see from the headlines are two giant beings whaling at each other, like a pair of Punch and Judy puppets.
We were the assailants. Tom thought of his father creeping through the bushes, black paint on his face, rifle in hand. “My father was in the war,” Tom was used to saying, but if he wasn’t in a war then what was he doing in Kursattar? Some nights when Tom couldn’t sleep, he’d start seeing the monster’s ghost again: the face rising, breaking the water. A giant metal body, moving without a heartbeat. The realization that the pounding that sounded like the very pillars of the earth falling was in fact his own heartbeat.
“He was their hero,” Professor Chalmers said of SOLAT. “Their defense system. No, more accurate to say their self-defense system. It’s inappropriate to call him—and yes, I said him—a weapon. He was built to be an umbrella.”
Sometimes, Tom saw Professor Chalmers in his drab, brown coat walking past the young anti-imperialists agitating for the end of unfair trade practices. With his glasses slipping down his nose, he looked like one of those engineers in Iron Force who had to decide when to activate Earth’s Defender, who ground their teeth and said, on every episode, “This is our last chance.”
~
A semester before graduating, Tom finally went on a date with Vida Mair. They had been in the same discussion section of Political Economy and she was very sweet and smiley, but always seemed to have somewhere better to be. Always rushing ahead of him. When they ran into each other at dorm parties she was a little more chatty, a little more languid, but still folded in on herself. She always needed to care for a drunk friend, or call home. She was here on a student visa for a reason, and that reason was not love.
But they were both stuck on campus during their final winter break—him because he did not want to be in a decrepit house with his father the black hole, her because she did not celebrate Christmas anyway—and one day after walking her home from a library study session, Tom convinced her to get dinner with him at the cute little Chinese hole-in-the-wall down the road that Tom thought had the best dumplings in town.
Vida was small and dark and pretty, and looked nothing like the girls Tom grew up with in New Birmingham. She could carry on conversations about medical dramas over iced coffee like she was just another co-ed in blue jeans, but she was not; there was a panoramic, technicolor otherness about her that suffused every square inch of her skin. Vida had seen things with her black eyes few girls on campus could imagine, even if they cited it in a paper. Vida was the world—weather-beaten, delicate, colorful, hurt, wronged. And just like men are driven to climb mountains, there was a distance between them that Tom always found himself wanting to cross, because he was from New Birmingham, and Vida was from Kursattar.
She did not talk much about it, even when he asked her direct questions. All he picked up through their first month of dating was that she was from the capital city and her father was some kind of businessman and she had a younger brother who had been sent away to boarding school. She was quick to insist that she had not struggled like the children in those sad charity posters—her home had not been destroyed, she had not starved. But she did not like to talk about her mother’s death, or why she had not had the meningitis vaccine. She did not like to talk about why her father decided to send her to attend college in the land of the victorious enemy.
He asked her sometimes: Did she resent Americans? Was she homesick? Was it strange for her to walk the streets of the country that had defeated hers? Because it would be strange for him, in her position. Professor Chalmers had assigned him plenty of post-colonial theory by then, and he had read enough of it to understand post-war humiliation. He was proud of the fact that he tried to be considerate of it with Vida. To not take it into bed with them.
But Vida never seemed to find it strange. “There’s opportunity here,” she’d say flatly, as if refusing to see anything but opportunity. Opportunity was her answer for everything. Opportunity was why she was majoring in economics. Opportunity was going to save the world. It seemed woefully naïve. A product of her privileged upbringing, he supposed.
“Why are you always trying to make me angry?” Vida asked once. “You want to see me lose my temper? I know we lost the war. You don’t have to rub it in.”
“Of course not,” Tom said, surprised, although he did in fact question why she wasn’t more angry at the likes of him—if it was just the gentleness of her spirit or the brutal rationality of “opportunity” or what. The poor wounded doe. “I just want to understand. I’m just curious.”
“So I’m a curiosity,” Vida said, s
haking her head. After that she was cold to him for several weeks, and only when the thaw gave way to springtime did she return one of his calls.
“I want to explain,” he said. “I was told nothing about Kursattar when I was growing up. My father came back terrified of some monster that guarded the island, that’s all I knew.”
For an uncomfortable moment she was quiet, so still that Tom had the uncomfortable sensation that time had stopped around them, frozen Vida on the other side of the gulf. “Some monster,” she repeated, smiling sadly. That was when Tom remembered, too late, what Professor Chalmers always said—that SOLAT was Kursattar’s hero. As much a hero as our fighter jets.
Professor Chalmers was off in the Caucuses, collecting stories for a book on cargo cults. Tom had tried to beg his way onto the trip, but Chalmers opted for a PhD student instead.
Tom apologized. “Your self-defense system, I mean. The thing that keeps—kept—you safe.” A little chill bubbled down his throat at the implication: Vida wasn’t safe.
“He is a monster,” Vida said, quietly. “And he also kept us safe.” Then she straightened her spine and added: “But he’s deactivated. They made sure of it. It’s for the best.”
“So it really is that dangerous,” Tom said. Professor Chalmers always said that SOLAT’s capabilities were overblown, that its power was largely symbolic, the rare force capable of generating both inspiration and existential fear.
“Nothing scares the world more than a little backwater country with a weapon,” she said, in the first time he’d ever hear a hint of national pride in her voice. There were always rumors, always quashed, that the United States was trying to build its own SOLAT, stronger and faster and equipped to throw American-made Hellfire missiles. Religious groups were always very vocal in their objections, threatening to withhold support for any candidate who did not foreswear the idea. Idolatry, they called it. God did not suffer cheap imitations.
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