Suicide Club

by Rachel Heng

  FOURTEEN

  The problem with visiting her father was that Lea would have to take the subway.

  “No carshares,” he’d said before they parted ways. “Anyone could track where you go.”

  “Who would want to track me?” Lea laughed, but then remembered the Observers. She hadn’t told her father about any of it, not the Observers, not WeCovery. She was afraid it would scare him off, that he would disappear again, now that he seemed to care about getting found by the Ministry. So she agreed to take the subway.

  Lea hadn’t been on the subway in decades. Part of it was wealth and status—as she rose in her job, she began taking expensive carshares wherever she went. Part of it was the advisory against being sedentary, which meant she, like most lifers, walked wherever she could. But the other part was simply that, without Lea really noticing, the radius of her life had shrunk over the years, become confined to the most central of the Central Boroughs, so most days she was able to get where she needed just by walking.

  As she descended into the subway station now, Lea wondered where the people who thronged the staircase were going. She scrutinized the chiseled chin of a smooth-shaven man carrying a duffel bag larger than his torso, the filmy eyes of an elderly woman with dark crepe-paper skin, the stubby fingers of a businessman gripping his tablet. She wondered if they too had secrets. If they too did not want to be tracked.

  The station was brighter than she’d imagined, flooded with fluorescent light. Lea bought her ticket from an aging machine, one that still had a disused slot for cash.

  Suddenly, her neck prickled. Lea turned away from the machine, looking about herself wildly.

  “Lady, you done yet? In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a line,” a man behind her said.

  Lea ignored him, eyes still scanning the crowd. She’d felt, with sudden certainty, that she was being watched. But there was no one—only a fluid crowd of strangers, streaming in and out of the station.

  “Um, excuse me?” the man said again. Lea shot him a look, and he fell silent.

  There was no one. No one was following her. Lea shook herself, grabbed the ticket, and headed down the escalators. In the train, she plugged her headphones into her ears and pulled out her tab to go through her emails.

  The train had pulled out of the station when a new email appeared, slipping in unread above the rest. It was from an unknown sender. Her father, perhaps. She tapped it open.

  The video started playing right away. Her first thought was Ad, and she moved to close it. But something about the man’s face seemed familiar, so she paused, brought the screen closer to her face.

  * * *

  “I did my best,” the man in the video said. “I have a diversified portfolio of organs, dutifully invested, enough to last me several lifetimes. But try as I might, I couldn’t ignore it. It just doesn’t seem right. It’s not right that these—these numbers are assigned at birth, that an algorithm decides who lives and who doesn’t.”

  A portfolio of organs.

  Suddenly, his face resolved into focus. It was one of the Musks, the clients whom Lea had supposedly caused LTCP to lose because of the Observers.

  “Do you think sub-100s truly are, as we say, sub-100? Who decides who gets the SmartBloodTM, the replacements, the maintenance sessions?”

  Her mind raced. Why would he send her this? Was it because they’d lost the account?

  “We think that if we can find the lifers with the right genetic predispositions, we can crack the population problem. Immortality. No need to worry about birthrates anymore. Maybe, though, maybe the solution is already here, already right under our noses.”

  The man took a long sip from a bottle in his hand. Lea’s heart sped up; her hands grew cold and clammy. But she couldn’t look away. She realized now that the video hadn’t been sent only to her, but the way he stared into the camera, the way his eyes locked with hers, it felt as if it had been. She realized that the man in the video was, in all likelihood, already dead.

  “But if we don’t fight for it, no one will. We are complicit. All lifers are complicit. You are complicit.”

  He lit a match and stared into the camera, at the millions of invisible viewers watching with suspended breath.

  “I’m not a member of the Suicide Club. I don’t always agree with their agenda. But we are united behind a common cause.”

  He brought the match to his face.

  “We leave ourselves no choice.”

  * * *

  Her father lived at the end of the subway line. Lived—a strange word, as if he had always been there, when really it was temporary lodgings he had taken up. Though how could she know? Perhaps he had always been there, a two-hour subway ride away from her mother’s apartment in Borough Three, pretending to be missing but really sharing the same water system, the same public transport, the same night sky. Perhaps he had been hiding right under their noses for eighty-eight years.

  Lea raced up the closest staircase. She wanted to leave the memory of the video she’d watched underground, wanted to get as far away as possible from the image of the Musk heir bringing a lit match to his alcohol-soaked tongue.

  When she emerged from the subway station, the sky above was pale and bright, the distant sea a shimmering mirror suffused with sunlight. She was on the boardwalk. The wind licked her cheeks and, impulsively, Lea stuck out her tongue to lick it back. For a moment, she forgot the video, forgot even the father she was here to meet. She wanted to taste the salt on the air, but there was nothing, only a scraping cold. She closed her mouth again.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Lea turned. Her father was standing by the exit, wearing dark glasses whose bottom rims bumped his cheeks when he smiled.

  “Dad,” she said. And then, without thinking, she rushed toward him and grabbed his waist, burying her face in his chest.

  He smelled of dry, crackling twigs. Of smoke and mold, of something kept in a closet all winter. He smelled different, but also, even after all those years, he still smelled the same.

  He placed his hands tentatively on her shoulders, not quite embracing her back. Eventually, Lea pulled away, embarrassed.

  “Trip here okay?” he asked.

  She started to nod, but then shook her head. “I got this—video in my email. One of those Suicide Club ones.”

  “Oh?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “You might not have seen them. They call themselves an activist group, but they’re really just terrorists. What they do—well. It’s exactly what the name sounds like.” Lea shivered, pulling her coat tighter around her shoulders.

  “Suicides,” her father said drily. He squinted into the sun.

  Lea nodded. “The thing is, the guy in the latest video. I—I knew him. He was a Musk.”

  Kaito was still looking into the distance. He showed no sign of recognition at the name.

  “Surely you remember. One of the founding Healthtech families? Anyway, we were pitching to him at work. For a while it looked like he might switch over to us. It would have been a huge win for LTCP.” Not that it would have mattered, given the video.

  “Shall we take a walk?” her father asked. He had a strange, closed expression on his face.

  “I thought we were going to your apartment,” Lea said, even though the wind whipping through her hair meant there was nothing she wanted more than to take a walk. But she had to see where he lived. She had to tie him to something, to see his furniture, his wardrobe, his toothbrush on a bathroom counter. She wanted to know how he arranged his shirts, whether he made his bed, if his fridge was full or empty.

  “We will,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you first.”

  He started down the boardwalk, Lea by his side.

  “I didn’t know—” Lea stretched one hand out toward the sea. “I didn’t know this was part of the city.”

  “Not many people do, I suspect. No one comes out here anymore,” her father said. “No idea why.”

  “I
suppose—I suppose it’s not what you think of, when you think of the Outer Boroughs,” she said.

  When had it happened? When had her life become so tightly circumscribed within the limits of her office, her home, Boroughs One through Three? They all did it, all of them, her, Todd, Jiang. That was why it always felt so crowded everywhere, even as the population numbers kept falling. It was as if the fewer of them there were, the greater need they felt to cling together. Lea looked at the wide-open space, the empty boardwalk, the large dome of luminescent blue overhead.

  “It’s so empty,” she said.

  Her father nodded. “Outside the city, it’s even emptier than you can imagine.”

  “Outside the city?” Lea said.

  Her father paused.

  Finally he spoke again. “Outside the city, you can travel for tens of miles, hundreds of miles, without seeing another person. Empty shells of entire neighborhoods, towns, the old buildings left to crumble. And then there are other big lifer cities, of course, Boston, LA, Chicago. Identical to New York. Where all the clinics are. I couldn’t avoid them entirely.”

  Lea kept walking but otherwise was very still. The last time they met, she had learned to let the silence hang between them so that her father would tell his stories.

  “When I left—absconded—all those years ago, at first, I made sure to hide my tracks. I got a fake passport—paid a small fortune for it—grew my hair out, never stayed in one town for too long. I found a new clinic, a small one, in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere. My new passport seemed to work—I was no longer Kaito Kirino, but I could still get the basic extensions and treatments, all my bio-data seemed to match up just fine to my new identity.

  “I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe that in our world of hyper-connectivity and biometric scans, I’d actually gotten away with it.

  “Until one day, I happened to glance at the screen of a Tender I was seeing. A lovely young man—well, likely older than me, but you know what I mean. Anyway, I looked at his screen, and it’s all numbers and scatter plots and trend lines, random alphabets and code. You know how it is. But then I see it—I see it in the bottom of the screen, in tiny font.

  “Kaito Kirino, that’s what it said.”

  He let out a low laugh. It was an unpleasant sound.

  “They knew who I was. They knew where I was, all along. The whole time I’d thought I’d pulled off this great escape, but they’d let me go. Then it hit me. No one cared. I wasn’t a fugitive. They never wanted me back at all. Sure, I’d been labeled antisanct, but as long as I stayed out of their cities, their great citadels of life and longevity, no one cared. The problem was solved. As long as I stayed away, as long as I wasn’t here, infecting the Ministry’s precious investments with my so-called antisanct mind-set, no one cared.”

  They stopped walking. Lea’s thoughts were spinning. She didn’t understand. If that was the case, then why had he come back? Surely coming back meant he would get caught, put on trial for the crime he’d committed all those years ago?

  “Look,” he said, pointing.

  Lea blinked. At first she didn’t understand what she was looking at. The shapes were dark against the sky, their dips and loops tessellating madly, extravagant sculptures set by the sea. Her eyes adjusted to the light and she took in the faded big top, the rusting roller-coaster rails, the stationary bumper cars.

  “When you were a girl, I always wanted to take you here,” he said, turning to Lea. He pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead, squinting in the sun. “Uju—she never let me. Said it was crazy, dangerous, that the place should be shut down. Sure enough, it was shut down a couple of years later. But they never demolished it or built anything new. The population kept shrinking, lifers started to cluster closer and closer to the center, land prices fell. No one wanted to buy it.”

  Her father was silent. When he spoke again, it was in a low voice. “Can you believe it? They never tore it down.”

  “If no one was looking for you, why did you come back? Surely—surely it’s dangerous for you,” Lea asked. “What are you doing here?”

  He contemplated the abandoned theme park in front of them. Finally he turned to her. His brow was furrowed, his eyes urgent. “I can’t tell you yet, Lea. Not yet. But it’s important that no one knows I’m here, only you. Can you promise you won’t tell anyone?”

  Lea thought about the Observers sitting on her couch, looking through her music collection, drinking tea from her mug. She thought of Jiang, who had recently implemented a new open-door policy in the office, which she knew was meant for her. She thought about Todd, who wouldn’t stop asking her where she was going whenever she left the house.

  The sky was so pale it was almost white rather than blue. She thought of her father, all those years ago, persuading her mother to let them go to the theme park.

  “Of course,” Lea said. “I promise.”

  * * *

  The studio apartment he had rented was the size of Lea’s bedroom. It was small but, thanks to a large window that overlooked the boardwalk, was also very bright. A narrow single bed was pushed against the far wall, a desk covered in papers against the window. A kitchenette containing a sink and microwave, a mini fridge under the counter. The room was dominated by the dining table, an oversized glass-topped affair that could comfortably seat four people. There was no sofa. Nothing on the walls except a poster in a black plastic frame of some bland pastoral countryside scene, the kind of thing you’d see in a clinic or a hairdresser’s.

  “Have a seat.” Her father gestured at the dining table. He hovered awkwardly by the sink, his hands crossed over his stomach. “Sorry there’s nowhere more comfortable. The landlord refuses to move this monstrosity of a table.”

  Lea pulled out one of the plastic chairs and sat down.

  “Would you like some water? I don’t have anything else to drink, I’m sorry.”

  She nodded distractedly, still casting her gaze about the room, hungry for details. The apartment was clean, almost bare. No piles of clothes lying around, no half-read books left open on the bed, no packs of crisps or half-smoked cigarettes. There was nothing in the apartment to indicate what kind of life her father lived.

  He filled the glass with water from the tap and set it down in front of Lea.

  “Just tap water,” he said.

  Lea sensed another apology in his voice, so she made a show of drinking thirstily. She wanted to tell him to stop saying he was sorry, but she didn’t know how.

  “Be right back.” Her father flicked a switch and opened a door she hadn’t noticed before, behind which lay a modest bathroom. He closed the door behind him.

  The air in the apartment was still now. Lea looked around again, more carefully this time. It was small and bare, yes, but not completely characterless. His bed was made, corners tightly tucked in, pillow plumped. On the kitchen counter was an empty beer bottle with a plastic sunflower in it. She wondered if her father had put it there himself. She wondered if he drank beer. It would not be unlike the Kaito she had known when she was a girl.

  She got up from the dining table and walked over to the desk. The papers she’d noticed earlier were mainly bills, utilities from the past six months, addressed to a name she didn’t recognize. Likely the landlord, she thought. Lea began to sort the bills chronologically, as she did with her own paperwork. She was stacking them into a pile, enjoying the neat alignment of folds and corners, when she noticed a different sort of envelope underneath the papers.

  The envelope was small, about the size of a business card. It almost fit into the palm of her hand. The powder-blue paper was fresh, childlike, a color you rarely saw in the city except on certain mornings in the spring. For something so small, the envelope was heavy.

  Lea glanced behind her. The tap was still running in the bathroom.

  She flicked opened the envelope’s unsealed flap. The card inside was the same color as the envelope. It was luxuriously thick, the kind of card that might be used for a
wedding invitation. Perhaps that was what this was. Except that it was far too small, and only printed with a date, a time, and an address. The date was next Saturday, and the address was somewhere in a wealthy part of Borough Five. She traced the embossed text with her fingernail, memorizing the street and building number. Then she placed the card back into the envelope, slipping it under the pile of bills. When her father came out of the bathroom, Lea was still standing by the desk, staring out the window.

  “Great view, isn’t it?” he said. “I got really lucky.”

  Lea nodded. “Beautiful,” she said.

  Her father’s eyes lit up. “Hey,” he said. “I have something for you.”

  She wondered if it was the card, hidden under the pile of bills. Perhaps there was a simple explanation for it. Perhaps he had been invited to a party of some kind, and he wanted her to come with him. But instead he turned, walking over to the kitchenette. He opened the mini fridge, dug around inside, pulled something out.

  “Here,” he said. “It was hard to find. Turns out the stand on Riverside Park wasn’t the only one to shut down.”

  He pressed it into her hands. It was an ice cream cone, wrapped in cheap, colorful paper, wet and cold to touch. She could tell already that the mini fridge hadn’t been cold enough, that when she tore the paper open the melted ice cream would drip down the sides, would make her hands sticky and sweet.

  “Thank you,” she said, staring at the cone. Where had he got it? She hadn’t seen one in years.

  “What are you doing next Saturday?” Lea asked. “I thought maybe we could do something again. Maybe at my place.”

  She wanted him to remember the invitation card on his desk, for his face to open up and for him to say: There’s this party. I was hoping you would come.

  But instead, something else crossed his face, his eyes seemed to shut down. He looked away.