Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

The only answer came from the pipes—a sound like steel stretching itself toward her.

  * * *

  After returning home that night, she took out her photos of the factory. With a growing sense of unease, she placed them in chronological order. The earliest photo dated back to the beginning of the plague, the most recent taken a month ago. Even in those dusk-drawn shadows, it wasn’t hard to see that she had been right; the angles of the pipes had changed. There were close-up images of the pipes that revealed a gradual change in their arrangement. Whatever was happening here, she realized, it had to be connected to the plague.

  That night, she dreamt of the factory—something was giving off light behind it. Steam coursed through its steel integuments and hissed through fractured pipes and valves; exhalations that whispered her name. And then, like a two-way Escher image, the pipes shifted between an image of Maeda’s face and the cyborg grotesquerie of Tetsuo’s.

  New mechanical rhythms could be heard, myriad machines rising to join the steam-born syllables—conveyer belts and pistons and hydraulics layered together to say, If you’re behind this, I’ll find out… One way or another…

  She woke with the image of those two faces, shaped by a haunting mazework of seething pipes lingering behind her eyes.

  * * *

  When Mai returned to work the next day, she passed by the factory again. It had been cordoned off, patrolled by a group of female security guards. Large drapes, set up like a scaffold screen, surrounded the pipes.

  At work, there was no sign of Maeda. On his desk was his usual Tetsuo mug half-full of cold coffee, a sequence of numbers scribbled into a notebook, and pages full of thumbnail drawings. These, she realized, were done in a movie-script style, with detailed scene notes written below each image. This was an expanded version of his fan-sequel to Tetsuo. But there was something else here too, and she felt a searing heat rise to her face; a sense of being watched as she glimpsed these new drawings.

  She looked around the office. Only a day had passed, but she was certain that something was different about her colleagues. Watching them work now gave the impression of gears enmeshed in a complex machine. She noticed their rhythms for the first time, like the undulations of a single organism, flowing from one end of the room to the other. Their vocal glitches and keyboard clatter had syncopated, engaged (she imagined) in some collective task of calculation. The only gap in that rhythm was Maeda, but everyone was too absorbed in their own work to notice now.

  She took Maeda’s notebook and returned to her desk.

  Although her sense of what was possible had certainly changed, she wasn’t ready for what she found. Maeda had made no attempt to hide the identity of her character in the story—this was her at the office, her leaving work, her sojourn into the altered factory. But instead of returning home, he had her move further into the steelwork maze, the pipes shifting around her like the writhing tentacles of a cephalopod. As she went deeper inside, the living pipes made room for her passage, until she reached an area where a group of plague victims were gathered. Below these hand-drawn panels, he wrote:

  The factory is ground zero for “man’s” undoing. Soon we will no longer be able to make choices of our own——words and flesh will fail us, until these pallid vessels of skin and bone will become the servants of new masters. Everything “man” made will become made of “man” and uproot themselves from their foundations… But to what use will these plague machines be put?

  She thought of the century-long change-over from high employment rates to automation and AI, so many in the world left without a sense of agency and purpose. The factories had been the starting point of that shift, hadn’t they? It was no wonder the plague had started there. But what did that final, ominous question mean—“To what use will these plague machines be put?” Perhaps Maeda was onto something.

  She knew where to go to find out.

  * * *

  There were still a few guards in place, but under the cover of night it was easier for her to make her way between the pipes. Even through the panel-coverings and scaffolds that had been placed there, she thought she could see movement. As she made her way between them, she heard a sound from the pipes—this time it made her think of digestion, of stomach acids breaking down a large meal. She followed that sound until she reached a building surrounded by plague victims—it was similar to the one Maeda had drawn. But here, beneath the factory lights, she could see them carrying their own skins. They placed them into an aperture in the wall of the building like holy benedictions at an altar. Most of them were fully transformed, but there were some who were still in a state of becoming, peeling away the last vestiges of their human selves.

  She couldn’t help but see the factory as something alive, a vast living organism waiting to consume these men. And yet they seemed almost proud and purposeful as they went.

  She heard that familiar whirring behind her.

  “I knew you’d come,” Maeda said.

  She turned to face him. Even in his transformed state, it wasn’t hard to recognize him. The sound from his head came again, and she realized what it was now. His pupils were layered like the folding apertures of a lens, irises gleaming like burnished metal.

  He wasn’t fully transformed, but she could tell what he was becoming.

  “It looks like things are coming full circle,” he said, pointing to the camera lens of his eye.

  She thought of many possible things to say just then, but she chose to remain silent.

  “Will you help me make my sequel?”

  Here it was—the reason they had broken up. She remembered the obsession, the singular focus and control that he could never relinquish.

  But this time, it would be different. There would be no phallic drills and visceral scenes of sexual atrocity. No sadomasochistic salarymen. No eroticism through iron.

  This time, it would be the version of the story she always wanted to tell.

  Carmen Maria Machado

  ONE girl. We lay down next to each other on the musty rug in her basement. Her parents were upstairs; we told them we were watching Jurassic Park. “I’m the dad, and you’re the mom,” she said. I pulled up my shirt, she pulled up hers, and we just stared at each other. My heart fluttered below my belly button, but I worried about daddy long legs and her parents finding us. I still have never seen Jurassic Park. I suppose I never will, now.

  * * *

  One boy, one girl. My friends. We drank stolen wine coolers in my room, on the vast expanse of my bed. We laughed and talked and passed around the bottles. “What I like about you,” she said, “is your reactions. You respond so funny to everything. Like it’s all intense.” He nodded in agreement. She buried her face in my neck and said, “Like this,” to my skin. I laughed. I was nervous, excited. I felt like a guitar and someone was twisting the tuning pegs and my strings were getting tighter. They batted their eyelashes against my skin and breathed into my ears. I moaned and writhed, and hovered on the edge of coming for whole minutes, though no one was touching me there, not even me.

  * * *

  Two boys, one girl. One of them my boyfriend. His parents were out of town, so we threw a party at his house. We drank lemonade mixed with vodka and he encouraged me to make out with his friend’s girlfriend. We kissed tentatively, then stopped. The boys made out with each other, and we watched them for a long time, bored but too drunk to stand up. We fell asleep in the guest bedroom. When I woke up, my bladder was tight as a fist. I padded down into the foyer, and saw someone had knocked a vodka lemonade onto the floor. I tried to clean it up. The mixture had stripped the marble finish bare. My boyfriend’s mother found my underwear behind the bed weeks later, and handed them to him, laundered, without a word. It’s weird to me how much I miss that oral, chemical smell of clean clothes. Now, all I can think about is fabric softener.

  * * *

  One man. Slender, tall. So skinny I could see his pelvic bone, which I found strangely sexy. Gray eyes. Wry smile. I had known him for al
most a year, since the previous October, when we’d met at a Halloween party. (I didn’t wear a costume; he was dressed as Barbarella.) We drank in his apartment. He was nervous and gave me a massage. I was nervous so I let him. He rubbed my back for a long time. He said, “My hands are getting tired.” I said, “Oh,” and turned toward him. He kissed me, his face rough with stubble. He smelled like yeast and the top notes of expensive cologne. He lay on top of me and we made out for a while. Everything inside of me twinged, pleasurably. He asked if he could touch my breast, and I clamped his hand around it. I took off my shirt, and I felt like a drop of water was sliding up my spine. I realized this was happening, really happening. We both undressed. He rolled the condom down and lumbered on top of me. It hurt worse than anything, ever. He came and I didn’t. When he pulled out, the condom was covered in blood. He peeled it off and threw it away. Everything in me pounded. We slept on a too-small bed. He insisted on driving me back to the dorms the next day. In my room, I took off my clothes and wrapped myself in a towel. I still smelled like him, like the two of us together, and I wanted more. I felt good, like an adult who has sex sometimes, and a life. My roommate asked me how it was, hugged me.

  * * *

  One man. A boyfriend. Didn’t like condoms, asked me if I was on birth control, pulled out anyway. A terrible mess.

  * * *

  One woman. On-and-off sort-of girlfriend. Classmate from Organization of Computer Systems. Long brown hair down to her butt. She was softer than I expected. I wanted to go down on her, but she was too nervous. We made out and she slipped her tongue into my mouth and after she went home I got off twice in the cool stillness of my apartment. Two years later, we had sex on the gravel rooftop of my office building. Four floors below our bodies, my code was compiling in front of an empty chair. After we were done, I looked up and noticed a man in a suit watching us from the window of the adjacent skyscraper, his hand shuffling around inside his slacks.

  * * *

  One woman. Round glasses, red hair. Don’t remember where I met her. We got high and fucked and I accidentally fell asleep with my hand inside her. We woke up predawn and walked across town to a twenty-four-hour diner. It drizzled and when we got there, our sandaled feet were numb from the chill. We ate pancakes. Our mugs ran dry, and when we looked for the waitress, she was watching the breaking news on the battered TV hanging from the ceiling. She chewed on her lip, and the pot of coffee tipped in her hand, dripping tiny brown dots onto the linoleum. We watched as the newscaster blinked away and was replaced with a list of symptoms of the virus blossoming a state away, in northern California. When he came back, he repeated that planes were grounded, the border of the state had been closed, and the virus appeared to be isolated. When the waitress walked over, she seemed distracted. “Do you have people there?” I asked, and she nodded, her eyes filling with tears. I felt terrible having asked her anything.

  * * *

  One man. I met him at the bar around the corner from my house. We made out on my bed. He smelled like sour wine, though he’d been drinking vodka. We had sex, but he went soft halfway through. We kissed some more. He wanted to go down on me, but I didn’t want him to. He got angry and left, slamming the screen door so hard my spice rack jumped from its nail and crashed to the floor. My dog lapped up the nutmeg, and I had to force-feed him salt to make him throw up. Revved from adrenaline, I made a list of animals I have had in my life—seven, including my two betta fish, who died within a week of each other when I was nine—and a list of the spices in pho. Cloves, cinnamon, star anise, coriander, ginger, cardamom pods.

  * * *

  One man. Six inches shorter than me. I explained that the website I worked for was losing business rapidly because no one wanted quirky photography tips during an epidemic, and I had been laid off that morning. He bought me dinner. We had sex in his car because he had roommates and I couldn’t be in my house right then, and he slid his hand inside my bra and his hands were perfect, fucking perfect, and we fell into the too-tiny back seat. I came for the first time in two months. I called him the next day, and left him a voicemail, telling him I’d had a good time and I’d like to see him again, but he never called me back.

  * * *

  One man. Did some sort of hard labor for a living, I can’t remember what exactly, and he had a tattoo of a boa constrictor on his back with a misspelled Latin phrase below it. He was strong and could pick me up and fuck me against a wall and it was the most thrilling sensation I’d ever felt. We broke a few picture frames that way. He used his hands and I dragged my fingernails down his back, and he asked me if I was going to come for him, and I said, “Yes, yes, I’m going to come for you, yes, I will.”

  * * *

  One woman. Blond hair, brash voice, friend of a friend. We married. I’m still not sure if I was with her because I wanted to be or because I was afraid of what the world was catching all around us. Within a year, it soured. We screamed more than we had sex, or even talked. One night, we had a fight that left me in tears. Afterward, she asked me if I wanted to fuck, and undressed before I could answer. I wanted to push her out the window. We had sex and I started crying. When it was over and she was showering, I packed a suitcase and got in my car and drove.

  * * *

  One man. Six months later, in my post-divorce haze. I met him at the funeral for the last surviving member of his family. I was grieving, he was grieving. We had sex in the empty house that used to belong to his brother and his brother’s wife and their children, all dead. We fucked in every room, including the hallway, where I couldn’t bend my pelvis right on the hardwood floors, and I jerked him off in front of the bare linen closet. In the master bedroom, I caught my reflection in the vanity mirror as I rode him, and the lights were off and our skin reflected silver from the moon and when he came in me he said, “Sorry, sorry.” He died a week later, by his own hand. I moved out of the city, north.

  * * *

  One man. Gray-eyes again. I hadn’t seen him in so many years. He asked me how I was doing, and I told him some things and not others. I did not want to cry in front of the man to whom I gave my virginity. It seemed wrong somehow. He asked me how many I’d lost, and I said, “My mother, my roommate from college.” I did not mention that I’d found my mother dead, nor the three days afterward I’d spent with anxious doctors checking my eyes for the early symptoms, nor how I’d managed to escape the quarantine zone. “When I met you,” he said, “you were so fucking young.” His body was familiar, but alien, too. He’d gotten better, and I’d gotten better. When he pulled out of me I almost expected blood, but of course, there was none. He had gotten more beautiful in those intervening years, more thoughtful. I surprised myself by crying over the bathroom sink. I ran the tap so he couldn’t hear me.

  * * *

  One woman. Brunette. A former CDC employee. I met her at a community meeting where they taught us how to stockpile food and manage outbreaks in our neighborhoods should the virus hop the firebreak. I had not slept with a woman since my wife, but as she lifted her shirt I realized how much I’d been craving breasts, wetness, soft mouths. She wanted cock and I obliged. Afterward, she traced the indents in my skin from the harness, and confessed to me that no one was having any luck developing a vaccine. “But the fucking thing is only passing through physical contact,” she said. “If people would just stay apart—” She grew silent. She curled up next to me and we drifted off. When I woke up, she was working herself over with the dildo, and I pretended I was still sleeping.

  * * *

  One man. He made me dinner in my kitchen. There weren’t a lot of vegetables left from my garden, but he did what he could. He tried to feed me with a spoon, but I took the handle from him. The food didn’t taste too bad. The power went out for the fourth time that week, so we ate by candlelight. I resented the inadvertent romance. He touched my face when we fucked and said I was beautiful, and I jerked my head a little to dislodge his fingers. When he did it a second time, I put my hand around his chi
n and told him to shut up. He came immediately. I did not return his calls. When the notice came over the radio that the virus had somehow reached Nebraska, I realized I had to go east, and so I did. I left the garden, the plot where my dog was buried, the pine table where I’d anxiously made so many lists—trees that began with m: maple, mimosa, mahogany, mulberry, magnolia, mountain ash, mangrove, myrtle; states that I had lived in: Iowa, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York—leaving unreadable jumbles of letters imprinted in the soft wood. I took my savings and rented a cottage near the ocean. After a few months, the landlord, based in Kansas, stopped depositing my checks.

  * * *

  Two women. Refugees from the western states who drove and drove until their car broke down a mile from my cottage. They knocked on my door and stayed with me for two weeks while we tried to figure out how to get their vehicle up and running. We had wine one night and talked about the quarantine. The generator needed cranking, and one of them offered to do it. The other one sat down next to me and slid her hand up my leg. We ended up jerking off separately and kissing each other. The generator took and the power came back on. The other woman returned, and we all slept in the same bed. I wanted them to stay, but they said they were heading up into Canada, where it was rumored to be safer. They offered to bring me with them, but I joked that I was holding down the fort for the United States. “What state are we in?” one of them asked, and I said, “Maine.” They kissed me on the forehead in turn and dubbed me the protector of Maine. After they left, I only used the generator intermittently, preferring to spend time in the dark, with candles. The former owner of the cottage had a closet full of them.

  * * *

  One man. National Guard. When he first showed up on my doorstep, I assumed he was there to evacuate me, but it turned out he’d abandoned his post. I offered him a place to stay for the night, and he thanked me. I woke up with a knife to my throat and a hand on my breast. I told him I couldn’t have sex with him lying down like I was. He let me stand up, and I shoved him into the bookcase, knocking him unconscious. I dragged his body out to the beach and rolled it into the surf. He came to, sputtering sand. I pointed the knife at him and told him to walk and keep walking, and if he even looked back, I would end him. He obliged, and I watched him until he was a spot of darkness on the gray strip of shore, and then nothing. He was the last person I saw for a year.