Super Flat Times

by Matthew Derby

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get them to go away?”

  “Cops do love to go to baptisms.”

  Mr. Sensible was Wes’s father. They had always been in business together. Before the Child Harvest they sold bolts of fabric to military officials looking to spruce up their uniforms. They were making forty times that money in the egg trade. My own father died in the last war. He wasn’t actually in the last war, just close enough to the fighting to get killed. He died while folding a piece of paper into thirds to put in an envelope. It was a letter he wrote to my mother, who was living on the moon platform. He had not seen or heard from her in seven years. I never found out why she left and did not come back. One day she was simply gone, the house still crowded with her rich perfume. “Words fly up” was how his letter to her started and ended. In the middle were a bunch of phrases no one is allowed to use anymore. He hadn’t even gotten the letter into the envelope when he was sprayed down with Ending Gel. I know what the letter said because I was the one who sprayed him down. I tore the letter from his gnarled, dead grasp. It was an honest mistake, killing him — he was naked at the time, just lounging around in his car without a stitch of clothing on, the spitting image of an enemy soldier. Maybe it was less of an honest mistake than I am making it out to be, but I don’t like to think about it just the same.

  Wes is pure black, Mr. Sensible is pure black, but I am something else. A mixture that seems haphazard and desperate, wholly unlike my mother, whose flawless skin was two-toned, like camouflage, each lovely patch a part of the magnificent tonal map of her body. I am just sort of gray. Donna is white, see-through white, like a plastic fork.

  We all went down to the river to see if we could gather any eggs from the corpses — Wes and me in front, slogging through the bushes, Donna and Mr. Sensible in the rickshaw.

  The only tape we had to listen to on the tape player was one we’d recorded over by accident one night at Sensible’s house, which is where I’ve lived since I was eight. Instead of music there was only the sound of us doing the things we did when we did not know we were being taped, like noisily washing dishes or having an argument about coated cereals or how many legs an ant had. We blasted the thing all the way down the trail to the river, almost blowing out the speakers with the volume on ten, just trembling there, taped to the bench seat. Nobody else cared much for the tape, but it has always stirred some unfinished, primal component deep inside me. It sounds remarkably like a family edging its way around a stuffy, indistinguishable evening at home. At one point on the tape, near the end, Sensible yells at me for dropping his lucky spoon. As he shouted he pointed at me with a long, trembling hand, and I swear that on tape you can hear the finger quake violently in the air. To this day, it is the only record I have that anyone ever took more than a passing interest in my development.

  First we saw the smoke, still rising from the campfire that had been doused with water, probably by the worshipers right before they died. Then we saw the dead worshipers themselves, all laid out in a circle. Some of them had robes on, white or blue robes, filthy with blood. Their skin was dry and blistered, most likely from the Crazing Rifle that one of the officers was carrying. Everything was all rained on.

  Sensible got out of the rickshaw to investigate. He knelt by a woman who had died in a fetal position, hands covering her face. As gently and respectfully as he could, he drew up the woman’s robe and unbuttoned her uterine flaps. He fished around in the holes with a gloved hand.

  “This place has been picked clean,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Should have known.”

  A sky tent passed in front of the sun, making everything dark for a minute. The faces of the dead worshipers went sullen, like the ashes of the campfire. We took pictures of the bodies before they got erased. Sometimes a family member would pay for a photo of the deceased to bury when no body was available.

  “Next cop I see, I’m’on eat.” Mr. Sensible climbed back into the rickshaw. He lifted Donna’s slack arm, the one that didn’t work, one that she kept around simply to show off that she had been born just the same as us, and wrapped himself in it as if it were a silk scarf.

  I thought about eating the cops, which part I’d have to start on. The ass, probably, which had the sweetest meat. Didn’t it? Anyway, I would eat the ass and like it. I got real hungry for cop ass.

  “Let’s get a move on out of this,” Mr. Sensible said, waving his free hand out over the dead. “I’ve got a client at two-thirty.”

  “It’s only nine-fourteen,” I said. “What are we supposed to do until then?”

  “Good question,” said Sensible, rubbing his upper lip with a slender forefinger.

  We decided to cut through the park to see the living phone. Some scientists had been displaying it in the square for some time, but then they forgot about it, primarily because the building they worked in got smashed in the war. So the phone was left out in the square, locked in an intricate, bell-shaped iron cage. People fed it when they had food. They’d pass small crumbs of beef or corn bread between the bars. This was not the kind of food the phone was used to, so it never ate everything, but it didn’t seem upset when beggars carefully swept up the remains into their waiting food sacks with long whisks.

  The phone could not make calls anymore, but it could talk, and if you asked it the right kind of question, it would answer you and was always right. Mostly, though, it just sulked, cowering at the opposite end of the cage.

  When we reached the square we cleared the small crowd that had gathered around the phone by shouting and swinging wooden bats. One man in the retreating group mistook Wes and me for rabbits, muttering something under his breath as we ushered them away. I smashed him in the shoulder with my bat, and it stuck there because of the rusty nail I’d pounded into it a week before. The man fell to the ground like a frail paper kite, taking the club with him. Some friends of his dragged him away. Everyone else cleared out of the square quickly.

  “Look at the size of it,” Wes said. It was big, about the size of a gorilla. I’d imagined something smaller. Even while I was actually looking at the thing, I was thinking to myself that it should have been a lot smaller than it was.

  “Son,” said Sensible, “go ahead and ask the phone a question.”

  Wes looked at his father. “What sort of thing should I ask?” “Just ask it something you truly want to know. It can tell when you’re being sincere and when you’re just taking it for a ride. Go ahead — ask it something good.”

  Wes approached the cage, touching the tarnished bars with his fingertips. “How long until we run into the moon?” Wes asked.

  The phone did not respond. It was barely moving at all. “Okay. Okay. I’ve got a question,” said Mr. Sensible. “If I were a woman and this lady were a woman, and we had a child, what would the gender of that child be?”

  The phone only heaved, scooting backward as far as it could go toward the other end of the cage.

  “Damn,” said Sensible, rubbing his chin. “Donna, baby, stump this motherfucking phone, would you?” But Donna was asleep in his lap. A cold pool of mouth juice was forming on his thigh.

  “I don’t have anything to ask,” I told Sensible, who was looking at me hard.

  “Ask the phone a question,” he said.

  “I told you, Sensible, I don’t have any questions.”

  “Come on, think. What’s something you’ve always wanted to know?”

  “I don’t want to know anything. I don’t ever want to know things. If I put too much into my head, it might stop working.”

  “Damn, we came all this way?” Sensible was standing up in the rickshaw. Standing was all he had to do to get his point across. Whenever he stood up, it was as if the sky suddenly stopped and exhaled a brief, powerful biscuit of air in the shape of Sensible.

  “Fine,” I said. “Fine. Phone, please tell me what my mother is doing right now. And why did she go away, and who was in charge when my second mother got picked? Who passed that throu
gh? Was that a joke, to have my father fall for the stool sample collection student, the teacher’s assistant, no less? Was that done for my benefit? Because I don’t specifically remember what that benefit was. And what about my father —”

  “Your father?” the phone shouted, suddenly, engorged with wild rage, “your fucking father?”

  Behavior Pilot

  People kept having children, and the government kept taking them away. Then the government stopped waiting for the children altogether and began collecting eggs instead, going door-to-door with a slender vinyl hose fixed to a brass bucket. We wanted, more than anything else, to have a child. Not because we didn’t think our children would be ashamed of us, no. We knew that they would be ashamed. Like everyone else, though, we believed that whatever it was we might create as a result of the fitful, brief conveyance of our bodies onto each other could help us reclaim the dignity we had lost simply by agreeing to stay in whatever place we found ourselves. People told us not to think about it. Our neighbors, some of whom had made similar attempts, tried distracting us with rich, heavy foods and outdoor games. It was all useless; we saw this desire marked all over our bodies — little black spots in our life where children should have gone.

  Aescha was an engineer’s assistant at The Factories, her day punctuated at precise intervals by the contraction and expansion of the major bellows. I was a Behavior Pilot — my colleagues and I went up in teams, seeding the clouds with different suggestive gestural medications. To say that the world looked any better from that altitude was an incredible overstatement — the sky was brown and indignant, heavy with Fud, making a mockery of what went on below. It was easy to lose all sense of where you’d come from. Still, though, it was quite something to see, these great planes in formation, cutting a ragged swath in the air. Something close to what one might call uplifting.

  From the ground, one witnessed the fruits of our labor as a fine, burgundy mist that spread quickly in broad, tenebrous sheets and evaporated so soon after contact with the earth that it seemed as if it might never have been there at all. Aescha often woke to the tiny droplets tapping at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows along the south wall of our apartment. From the bed she could see the parking lot, where, on a good day, whoever was out there would start to move in perfect unison with everyone else, as if in an elaborately staged dance.

  The city we lived in had been recently and brutally reworked to resemble a bustling, late-nineteenth-century industrial center. Old buildings were made to look new, and the new buildings were made to look old. Certain clothing styles from that era returned vengefully and without warning on the bodies of those of us who lived there. We hobbled around in ludicrous, binding pants and topcoats, wielding elaborate, useless canes. I felt the desire to live this way less urgently than most of the people I knew — perhaps because, up in the air, we were relatively immune to the behavior we were administering. We were required to shower in the solution after each sortie, but usually we got away with a brief rinsing. I would go home afterward and find Aescha curled up inside the kitchen cabinets, head in her hands, weeping.

  We decided to have a child underneath the amusement park, where we were sure nobody would look. Aescha’s body frame, we thought, would hide a child well, at least up until the last months, when we could slip away. I worked during the day while she slept, and when she went to work at sundown I would scurry off to the manhole on the outskirts of the park to fashion a birthplace. There was a ledge and a small alcove at the stem of the slender, ribbed pipe I crawled down, night after night, carrying the essential materials I had collected during the day — sheets, a copper cauldron, twist ties, pillows, a rubber bib, and footies. I was stopped twice on the way there, but in each case the officers were my age or older, too old to qualify as Life Architects and, consequently, not overly concerned with what I was up to.

  None of the pilots were sure on any given flight what sort of behavior we were administering, or to whom. Only the commanding officer in each squadron, who carried around a sealed foil packet with the proper instructions, had any idea what we were doing in whatever area it was that we were. The officers were tall, bulky women who were required to adhere to a strict vocabulary, none of which applied, even remotely, to us. This seldom mattered, as they were stiffly unavailable to us in any way, a point driven home by the formfitting wooden girdles they wore over their uniforms. Everybody worked, more or less, in silence — we were given a set of coordinates, and when we reached them the commanding officer would peel back the rip wire on the packet and adjust the machinery to whatever specifications had been ordered. There was a clarity to our missions, an infallible protocol that was, perhaps, the only thing of true beauty in our lives.

  Aescha wrote down the days in a book, charting out in red pen a precise ovulatory trajectory. The first month we missed, as well as the second. Summer approached — I knew I would not be able to maintain an erection in the heat. “Please, don’t think about it. Don’t worry. This. . .this failure — it will give us more time to prepare,” she said, but she was old and knew as well as I did that our time was short. Night after night she knelt on the floor, attempting with great and desperate enthusiasm to wring some life into my penis, which only lay on its side, breathing heavily like a beached fish. Days, we wandered aimlessly, exhausted and ashamed. Then I heard someone say in passing that a prosthetic surgeon in the city built genital armatures in exchange for firewood. In the middle of June we discovered that she was pregnant.

  Shall I say that we were happy then, as we were, for a short time, dangerously elated by this new and sudden transcendence of our condition? Perhaps, but the dread that we might well have to follow through with the plan that we had, admittedly, thrown together with bits of loose fabric and string followed so closely on the heels of our happiness as to completely overtake it.

  Royston was once a Life Architect, but then he got too old and had to leave. He operated the rear hose assembly on our plane. He was cleaning out the drum when I approached him in the hangar.

  “I’ll tell you what I think, but you’re not going to want to hear it,” he said, lacing the steel chassis with orange gel.

  “That’s why I’m asking.”

  “I think you should do what you want.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

  Royston hoisted the drum into the felt chamber. “The fuck did I tell you?”

  “You can’t be a pal and tell me what to do?”

  “I’ll tell you right out of this room. I’ll tell you what to do.” He stood up, unfolding the extraordinary length of his body. “What I would do? I would do it.”

  “I don’t think you would.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Weeks. A month. A month and ten days.”

  “This is too long a time. Think of what’s there already — some part of your face is already taking shape.”

  “We should get rid of this thing.”

  “See? See what I said? I’m not in the business of telling people what to do. What people want, really, is for someone else to tell them what to do, and I don’t do that. I’m in the business of telling people to keep their chalky, perishable lives away from wherever I am.”

  I felt terrible, having derricked the shameful details of my situation on Royston, who, like anyone else, wanted only to be left alone. He put his bib in the plastic barrel and left. I sat as still as I could on the bench until I could no longer tell where it started and I left off.

  Aescha started to make things for the child — terribly small outfits with wide, misshapen arms and legs, little suits with club-shaped foot receptacles. She lined these articles up along the floor by the TV, where the dancing carbon light gave a convincing impression of movement. The child, it seemed, was already there in the room, watching us with its keen, box-shaped head.

  I saw two officers in the lower decks, sitting close on a bench seat. We had just doused a stretch of farmland, a duty we looked forward to for the spectacula
r show the birds put on in our wake, gathering in elaborate fractal patterns against the sky. The women were whispering to each other, and crying. The larger one unbuttoned her flight suit at the abdomen, and the other slid a trembling hand underneath, nodding her head gravely as she palmed the pale flesh.

  As quietly as I could, I went back to my seat and buckled myself in. Outside, a flock of cardinals hovered in a jagged arc, shadowing with eerie precision the flight of the plane.

  Aescha was adopted. Her biological parents, she was told from an early age, had died in a cataclysmic cloud wreck, but she suspected that the story was a lie, that they were out there somewhere, waiting anxiously not to be discovered. She often drew pictures of them in a yellow ruled notebook, giving each sketch one-half of her features. In her crude pencilmanship they took on the quality of forensic artists’ renderings. She went out of her way to point out that for all she knew, her parents could be living in the next-highest apartment, where what we heard at night, for hours and hours on end, was the sound of a metal pipe being drawn across a sheet of thick glass. In the Plaza of the Honorable Dead she would brush up against some older couple and faint, certain that they were the ones. Her anxiety worked itself over into my life — I quickly grew to hate and fear the elderly, and avoided contact with them whenever possible.

  She started to show far earlier than we had anticipated. Three and a half months in, her body began to list and sprout. The condition showed up in her face, under her eyes and around her cheeks — her ankles became thick and unwieldy. We were able to stave off some signs with heavy tape and splints, but each morning there were more. People started looking at her. I packed two identical green bags and we headed out into the night to the amusement park.

  It was dark out, the sky punctuated only by the tiny, ovular red lights of nighttime dirigibles. Aescha held my arm at the elbow for stability — her ankles were bruised and raw from the tape. We walked slowly and assuredly, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible.