Beautiful Machine

by PW Cooper

  “We know that you're involved,” he starts. “You were seen carrying messages. What I want to know is simple: who sent the messages?”

  “I don't know!” Her voice is a rough sob. “They... they never told me their names.”

  “Describe their faces to me.”

  “It was too dark. I never saw.”

  “Tell me about the messages they gave you.”

  “I don't remember. They were... little things... I didn't understand. They were just personal.”

  He resists the urge to rub his eyes. He has been awake too long. He wants to strangle this fucking liar girl. Never mind, though. She probably doesn't know anything of value. Chances are there's nothing to any of it. They are cowards at heart. Still... it never hurts to remind them that he is in control.

  He waves away the girl. The guard pushes her back out through the door between the train cars.

  When she is gone the Captain sighs heavily and rubs his eyelids. The smoke is starting to irritate him. He grinds out his cigarette, fighting back a yawn. He finds his gaze sliding lazily towards the window. The clean blue sky. This country of his is so very beautiful.

  The journey is almost at an end. The train will arrive at its destination very soon now.

  * * *

  Your burn throbs. You feel a fresh thrum of pain with every heartbeat. You lay back in your seat and you screw your eyes shut and you try to go outside of the hurt, to leave behind your body. Tears leak down your cheeks; you wipe them angrily away.

  They take Raheel. He looks at you as they drag him up and his eyes are filled with doubt, with suspicion, with fear. His eyes ask: how much you tell them? Am I being taken to my death? Did you gave me up? His eyes are an accusation. You think that he may hate you, may want to wrench himself out of the guard's arms and wrap his fingers around your throat and demand to know what you have done. You think he may blame you.

  But you didn't give anybody up. You survived and you did not betray them. You bite down hard on your tongue and glower back at him.

  And then he is gone.

  Nazmiya holds you. Murmurs in your ear. Rubs her hands up and down on your arms. The dirty brown shift in which they've dressed you moves beneath her hands, shuffling like lizard skin.

  Daniyal leans close. His thick beard looks wild and untamed in the daylight, his eyes bright with fear. “What did you tell them?” he hisses, “What did they ask?” His teeth bare. Like an animal's teeth, all gleaming.

  You wilt from him. You don't want to talk, not to anyone. Nobody can make you talk. You miss your father. You shake off the poet's hands and you hold yourself tight against yourself.

  You can feel him, your father. His weight, his breath, his touch. His gentle curving smile, his soft intelligent eyes behind the half-moon lenses of his reading glasses. You regret not having been closer to him. Not touching him, putting your hand in his hand, wrapping your arms around his waist. He was unshakable. Now that he is gone there is nothing at the center of your life. No point of revolution. All those times that you thought you had outgrown his affection, become too worldly to be cradled. You wish that he was here. They could never have hurt you if your papa was with you. He would have kept you safe.

  Daniyal and Nazmiya are arguing about you. He wants to press you, to question you. It's important to know, he says, we have to know what they know.

  She says they should never have involved her.

  He says he never thought they would take her. The girl he calls you. Why would they suspect the girl? Somebody must have said something.

  She asks who would do such a thing. Who, Daniyal?

  He tells her not to use his name.

  She says that none of them would ever give up another. You know that.

  He says all he knows is that the Captain will stop at nothing.

  The train is traveling through a vast pine forest. The wood is thick and endless. You wonder what is crawling beneath the needles. Your eyes are drifting shut. Only the pain keeps you awake now. How long has it been since you truly slept? Months maybe. Ever since they sent you away from your own bed. The retreating light is dappled through the thick evergreens. You imagine you can see monsters, sun flashing on dripping jaws and long bloodied tongues. The train has traveled beyond the realm of the earth. You have traveled into a dream.

  This world is not real.

  Time passes. Time is stretched and inexact. The sun dips low and seems to hover there on the horizon like the red pupil of some great eye, bloated and blind and unblinking. You drink in the sight of it. Every time the sun goes down it feels as though it will not likely rise again. That it will not look down for fear.

  You want to strip off the clinging brown dress and walk naked in the forest. To be wreathed in flowers and grasses, living things wrapping round your ankles like ivy climbing ivory. You want to be clean and white if it will make them love you. Why do you have to be different? Why were you born this way? You hate your body. You want to die, to peel off your skin and be free. So they will stop looking at you that way. So they will love you.

  You know what your mother would say, what your father would say, what any of the people in the train car would say: There is nothing wrong with you. You are perfect how you are, you are beautiful. But you cannot believe them. How could these things happen to you if you were not less than? What God would allow such things if he did not loath you as the soldiers do? There is a god, you are sure of it now, a god male and white. A cruel god with naked colorless hands bleached pure and holy. White face and white hair and blue eyes. You are dirty. God hates you: curl up and go into the earth you foul thing. God will eat you, will swallow you. You darkest girl-thing. He will swallow you in his gleaming white mouth, gums as white as teeth and lips of cotton. He will devour you and he will forget you. He will tear you, crush you with his broad white nails. The blue sky is the eye of god, pure limitless blue staring down, gleaming red with fury at every day and every night. The sun his pupil, and when it turns on you the whole world is red in his anger.

  The pain is too much to bear. You want to bite down on your hand, bite down hard enough to drive out the hurt.

  You claw at your skin, hating it, hating yourself. They are right to want to kill you. You are disgusting. You are beyond pity. You are beyond redemption. You wish only that you might die in the arms of your father.

  * * *

  The old man is making a radio.

  His weathered hands tug cautiously at bits of wire he has unspooled from a variety of sources, the lining of a brassier, a broken pair of bifocals, wherever he could find it. For an earpiece he has borrowed the electric hearing aide of an old man who no longer desires to listen. A little battery taken from a broken wristwatch missed by the search. The antenna was the most difficult, but he thinks that he has at last figured out something which will work.

  He builds the radio in secret, ever fearful that they will find him out and that they will destroy it, smash his creation on the floor and grind it under their gleaming black boot-heels. He hides the crude construction under his coat when the patrols pass and sleeps with it stowed beneath his seat. Every time he wakes he does so with the sinking surety that it has been taken from him in the night and he is always surprised, pleasantly surprised, to find it still present.

  He never, not even in his wildest fantasies, allows himself to think that he will actually be able to fashion a functioning radio. He had no tools, no parts, no equipment. The radio is lacking key components, pieces without which it cannot be. He feels that way sometimes. Ever since they took her. When the soldiers in red dragged her out, their guns shoved in his face to keep him from following. He does not think that he will ever see her again. He does not think that she is still living.

  Some of his fellow passengers tried to comfort him, but he could not bear that. Could not bear to be touched, to have reassuring arms draped over his shoulder, could not bear to hear the words whispered which might blunt the impact of what has happened. He cannot bear that.


  He knows that his radio will never work. There is no real point to building the thing, but it is all he knows. All his life he has built radios. To hear something conjured from the air... to him it is a kind of magic, it always has been. The wonder of it has never left him. When he was a child such things were impossible, nothing but the far-flung dreams of hackish pulp writers and feckless day-dreamers. And he grew up to build them! All the dreams of his childhood came true.

  Radio, invisible in the air, unheard and unseen and always about. A kind of deity here beneath the heavens, here humming in the wires. He was a sort of priest, reaching out to touch that god. A Promethean figure bearing the fire which gives no warmth and consumes nothing and yet illuminates all.

  The world shrinks in the age of radio.

  He did not think that such a thing as this could happen in a modern world. Radio will unite us, he said, bring us all together at last. There is nothing stopping us now, he said, we will know everyone, not just our immediate neighbors, everyone. We will truly know them, speak to them, learn from them, teach them. We are one people now. Nations mean nothing anymore, political ways of thinking are dead.

  He wonders how he could ever have been so hopeful.

  He bends his head down and he twists together another wire. The work is slow, painstaking. There are cuts on the tips of his fingers and the tip of his tongue which he bites while he works.

  A spark in the ugly machine. A hiss of breath and he puts his shocked finger into his mouth. He frowns. The thinnest thread of smoke rises.

  Useless!

  He sets the mess aside. He lays his head against his shoulder, a bird tucking its bill beneath one wing. He wraps his arms about himself, missing her, missing the child. Twice they have taken from him. Now there is nothing left but his own life, and he finds that it is of no value to him any longer.

  What sort of men would do this? It is a thought which has returned to him many times in these last few days. His mantra, his prayer. The question has been with him, burrowed deep inside, ever since the child was allowed to die, sacrificed by doctors who would not treat her because of her heritage.

  They never admitted to that, of course. They gave him words, twisted so far beyond their original meaning that he could not fathom their application, their new context. He had not wanted words. They could have saved the child, and they chose to let her die, he understood that. His child.

  It has been a ache inside for such a very long time. A dullness. An emptiness. It changed him, and her. Her more than he. She turned angry and protective, refusing to let him speak out when he saw what was happening to his country. To keep him safe in the cloak of silent compliance. And now this. This horror.

  It is better that she is dead, he thinks. Better that she died soon and does not have to endure any longer. She is with the child now. He can feel them, hear the distant echo of their voices calling down the wire.

  A sound murmurs in his palm. A voice. Her voice. He picks up the earpiece of his half-built radio. The noise issues tinny and distant from inside the re-wired hearing aid. He puts it to his head, and he is sure: it is her, it must be her. He knows that voice.

  And yet he cannot understand the words, he does not know what she is saying, what she is trying to tell him. He looks around the train car, a desperate sweat breaking out all over his body. There is a thought, distant in his head, that he has gone crazy. He does not care. What is one more crazy person in an insane world?

  He can hear her voice.

  * * *

  You are watching the old man. Tamir. You think that he has gone insane. He races about the train car, tangled in wires and clutching a haphazard bundle of electronics above his head. Like an explorer carrying precious luggage through the fetid swampland. He thrusts a fleshy little earpiece toward anybody.

  “Listen! Listen!” he cries out, near to tears, “Please, please tell me what she is saying!”

  You watch as the other passengers take the offered bit of plastic and hold it to their ears, making little shushing gestures to the quivering old man. Their faces each undergo the same transformation. From curious doubt to suspicion to wonder to brokenhearted ecstasy. They turn to one another and say something, gesturing excitedly. You catch a few scratches of whispered excitement:

  “Is it him? I know that voice.”

  “Can you hear the music? Tell me, can you hear the music? My brother used to play that song...”

  “Is... I'm sure it is! My mother's voice! Oh, thank God she's safe!”

  “The war's over, I'm sure I heard him say that the war is over!”

  Slowly, the device and the tottering man and the fleshy little earpiece work their way down the train car, moving through the bustle of sudden excitement. Moving inexorably towards you. You are afraid of the thing, of what you might hear. Your parents? Your brother? Nothing at all? You do not want to find out. The device seems to swell in its repulsive aspect, the coils of wire and the flesh like an arching proboscis seem to you horridly obscene.

  You hope that the guards will come soon, that they will restore order. You do not want to fight anymore, you do not want to break the rules. They will not hurt you if you do not rebel in your heart. There is too much movement, too much excitement. Somebody is going to die for this. And the machine is coming closer.

  Daniyal listens. His face lights up. He says something about troop movements, that he thinks the radio must be picking up military channels. He mutters to himself about divisions and supply-lines and tanks and invasions. He babbles stupidly, as though the radio has stolen a part of his mind, reduced him to this. His expression turns slowly dark, and he lowers the earpiece. “Channel cut out,” he says, “they must be jamming the frequency somehow.” If only he could have heard a little more. Sorrowfully, he passes the earpiece back.

  The old man takes it, cradling the bit of fleshy plastic in his palm. He looks at you. You knew her, he seems to be thinking, maybe you will hear her voice. He holds the earpiece out to you. There are tears in his eyes. “Please,” he says, “what is she saying?”

  You hold it to your ear. You are afraid.

  You hear something. You are not sure what it is. A faint static, a faint electricity, a gentle burble like the sound of an underground river. There seem to be voices there, coming as though from under deep water. Musical notes tinkling in the ether. You think that somebody could hear in that muddle anything they wanted.

  You shake your head. The radio dies. Tamir is holding it, his eyes shining. The sun is at the slow peak of its long fall.

  * * *

  The rebellion begins at sunset and is over by the time the last gray fingers of dusk have gone black.

  It starts when they bring Raheel back. He is blind in one eye, blood running from the ocular cavity. He grins and there are teeth cracked and broken in his smile. The guards shove him down into the seat and march away, lockstep down the narrow corridor.

  Raheel looks at you. His good eye winks. You are bonded now, you have both been questioned and you have both emerged more or less whole. He reaches out to touch you. You flinch. His hand withdraws, but he is still looking at you, still grinning. He is proud of you.

  You look away. You are still afraid of what they will do to you, but your heart swells in your chest. He is proud of you.

  Nazmiya is touching him around his broken eye, murmuring softly. Raheel grasps her arms and pulls her close and kisses her on the mouth. His arms slip around her, palms flat on the smooth arch of her back. She melts against him, her limbs twining through his. When they separate they are both breathing hard and looking slightly dazed. She licks her lips, exultant.

  “Sorry,” Raheel says, the word breathless and reflexive.

  She smiles and she touches her lips softly against his. He smiles back.

  Daniyal wraps his arms around the both of them. His teeth show white through his thick beard. “I didn't think you'd be coming back to us, brother.”

  Waa'il comes creeping down to shake his co
usin's hand. His whole body is trembling.

  Raheel pushes them all away. He is laughing. He is still alive, and he cannot understand it. His voice falls to a harsh whisper, “We have to move tonight,” he says.

  “What did they ask you?” Daniyal wants to know. “What did you tell them?”

  “They didn't ask me anything. Hardly said a word. Just got right to working me over. It was strange... One of them did let slip that the train would be arriving tomorrow. I imagine they thought me beyond listening at that point.”

  Nazmiya: “Arriving where?”

  “I don't know. Wherever they're taking us, I suppose.”

  “Are we ready?” Waa'il asks, wringing his hands. He stinks of fear. You turn away from him.

  Daniyal nods. “We're ready.” He looks down the length of the train car. “Come on, everybody back in their seats, the next patrol will be coming soon. We'll make our move at sundown. Be ready.”

  The group disperses. Everything returns to its former place, its former silence.

  You wish that you could remain on this train forever. You cannot remember a time before the train, cannot imagine a time after. You feel safe here, knowing that you are in your place. You cannot move.

  You take the poet's hand in your hand. She looks at you, a distracted cast to her features. You shake your head. Don't go. Don't do it. Don't leave me. Don't die.

  She smiles. She caresses your face. Like an elder sister. You wish that you could someday grow up to be like her. You do not think you will ever be that brave. You wonder if you are a coward.

  But you didn't tell them anything. When the time came you did not betray your friends, that is something you will always have. He is proud of you. She is proud of you too, a woman as brave as she.

  “Don't be afraid,” she says, “it will be alright.”

  “It won't.” Your voice is a choked whisper, stumbling on thick lips. “It won't. They'll stop you. They'll kill you. Don't do it. You mustn't do it. Stay with me.” There are hot and shameful tears spilling down your face when you have finished saying that. You are breathing hard and fast. There is a desperation rising in you.

  She touches your hair, your ear, your lips. She touches her mouth against your forehead. “I have to,” she says.

  You shake your head.