by Rachel Heng
“And besides,” she said, with the sick feeling of being about to shatter something, “if you really wanted to die, you could have done it without coming back. If you can get black-market replacements, you can get black-market T-pills. Why bother with all this? No, I know why you’re here. You like the spectacle, you want to feel important. Like your death has some kind of … purpose. Like it’s anything other than any of the hundreds and thousands and millions of deaths before. Like it’s anything unlike Samuel’s.”
Her blood ran quick and hot in her veins. She was breathing heavily; her head hurt. She thought her father would get angry, would storm away, would disappear once again from her life. Perhaps that was what she wanted.
But all he did was shake his head, slowly and sadly.
“Yes. Maybe you’re right, Lea,” he said. “Purpose. No one comes here, comes to the Club, just to die. All of us want to feel like we’re fighting for something, something bigger than ourselves. And maybe you’re right. Maybe we just want to feel important.”
He paused, dropping his hand from his chest to his side.
“But when Samuel died, when I left, I promise you that I tried. I tried to live life to what they call the fullest. I traveled, I met people, I worked in bakeries and on construction sites and in offices. I tried to believe in it, in immortality. I really did. That’s why I got the replacements even after they cut my benefits. I thought, maybe, if I could only get myself to believe in it, then I could come back to you and your mother, then maybe we’d live together, forever, happily ever after. But the years kept going by, and one day, it was too late.”
Lea observed that her heart seemed to be wringing itself into a knot.
“And you understand. I know you do.”
Lea shook her head. “I don’t understand. I don’t get any of this. It’s unnatural and selfish. Antisanct.”
Her father stared at her sadly. “And Dwight?” he said, so quietly that she wasn’t sure he’d said anything at all. “The hospital?”
It was difficult to breathe. The crowd seemed to be hemming her in from all sides, the music deafeningly loud.
“You understand, Lea. Underneath it all, you’re just like me.”
TWENTY
“Dwight. Oh Dwight, Dwight, Dwight.” Opal’s eyes were glittering as she said his name.
Dwight looked up from where he sat, bony ankles slung together under the desk. His eyes, Lea noticed for the first time, were not actually blue but an icy pale gray, frosted by eyelashes that were so faint they appeared to be transparent. Freckles clumped together on his cheekbones, little red dots that, on first glance, could be mistaken for pimples.
The class watched in anticipation. What would Opal do today? Sometimes her insults were finely honed darts, sharpened to kill; other times they were like the edge of a blank sheet of paper, innocuous until wielded at just the right angle.
“Dwight, you have a girlfriend? Huh, Dwight?” she went on.
The atmosphere deflated. This was an old joke, one they had made many times before.
Dwight shook his head politely, as if it were the first time he’d been asked the question. Under the table, his fingers gripped the khaki fabric stretched tight over his oddly shaped knees. The pants were fastened with a brown leather belt that looked like something Lea’s father wore to work. They were folded at the cuff, revealing running socks covered in lint.
“But you want a girlfriend, don’t you, Dwight? I can tell you do. You’re a romantic at heart. You’d treat a lady well.”
Maybe because the others were no longer paying attention, maybe because of Opal’s pretty black eyes, so pretty they could almost be mistaken for being kind, maybe because he just wasn’t thinking, Dwight said in a small voice: “Yes.”
“Of course you do.” A slow smile curled at the edges of her lips. “You know who I think would love to be your girlfriend?”
Dwight shook his head, his eyes watery. His lips hung apart, revealing a set of large, clunky teeth that had not yet been forced into braces.
“I can’t believe you don’t know. It’s okay; boys are pretty oblivious, I guess.” Opal laughed. The others broke off their conversations now, looking again to the spectacle.
“I’ve seen her staring at you in class, practically drooling. It’s a wonder you haven’t noticed.”
Dwight could have looked down at his neatly completed homework. He could have excused himself, gone to the toilet until the teacher arrived, one of his most-used escape routes. Or he could have just stayed silent. But maybe he saw the greed in Opal’s eyes, sensed that for once, he wasn’t her real target, not this time. Maybe it was that note of sly complicity in her voice, the way she was looking at him, as if he were a friend. He wanted to please her.
“Who?” he said, boldly now. “Who is it?”
“She’s very shy. You’d be perfect for each other like that.”
She was no longer looking at Dwight. Her gaze cut right past him.
He turned, together with the rest of the class. Now they were all looking at Lea, who sat, still as salt, at her desk.
She looked back at them with mild interest, as if through a screen. When Lea was a child, the things and people around her sometimes felt part of an elaborate show, put on for someone else’s benefit, with an invisible logic that she could not quite grasp. This was one of those moments.
“Isn’t that right, Lea?” Opal said, her voice stronger now, crackling at the edges. “You’ve been pining for Dwight all this while. No need to thank me; I know you lovebirds would never have done anything on your own.”
Lea gave no sign of hearing what Opal was saying. Dwight’s gaze flickered back and forth between the two girls.
“Why don’t you show her, Dwight?” Opal stood up suddenly, the metal legs of her chair screeching against the polished floor. She glanced around at her classmates. They tittered obediently. Someone obliged with a wolf whistle. “Give her a kiss. A little peck on the cheek.”
Dwight was leaning back in his seat as Opal advanced. He no longer looked bold. His thin white fingers gripped the edge of the desk. His fingernails, Lea noticed, were as long as hers. They were gray with dirt.
Opal stopped in front of him.
Dwight wasn’t looking at Opal anymore. He stared at Lea, lips still parted, fishlike. His face was paler than normal, if that was even possible.
“I’m not in love with Dwight,” Lea said.
It came out more scornfully than she’d intended. As if the whole scene was ridiculous, childish. It was how she always talked, and maybe why she had no friends.
Opal whipped around. “Of course you are,” she said gleefully. Turned to the rest of the class. “We’ve all seen you making eyes at him. Come on, don’t disappoint everyone now.”
Her supporters nodded in agreement, giggling and shuffling. Opal turned back to Lea. “Besides, what with your dead sub-100 brother, we all know you could use some support.”
Dwight remained motionless. Opal grabbed his hand. He stood up obediently, letting himself be led like a farm animal toward Lea. The class was hooting now, whooping as he had never heard them whoop before. Not when they were looking at him. They never made sounds like that for him.
They were standing in front of Lea. Dwight fixed his eyes on where her shoulder broke the fall of her thick hair. They were close enough for him to smell her.
“Are you just going to stand there?” Opal hissed.
Dwight leaned forward obediently, his face drawing toward the smooth plane of Lea’s cheek, lips pushed together as he had seen in the movies. He closed his eyes, perhaps waiting for the moment of contact, anticipating the whoops and cheers that would surround them, the warm embrace that Lea would draw him into.
But then, instead of the warm touch of skin against his pursed lips, there was a loud crack.
The sound reminded Lea of a river she had once seen melting in the spring, great sheets of ice tearing away and rushing downstream. Then Dwight was falling backward, ba
ckward still, his legs tangling with metal legs, his elbow thudding into wood. He was on the floor, something wet sliding down his face.
Lea stood over the boy on the floor, her fist still clenched. The world had slowed down, as if rushing at her through the screen, pulling her into this fictional universe complete with the jeers of classmates and the hot, pungent breath of a white boy in her face. The pilot light within her, that small flame that was always threatening to flare up, filled her with heat.
And suddenly it was not enough that the boy was on the floor, blood streaked across his lips. Lea fell on him, one hand gripping a scrawny shoulder, the other held in a ball that she brought firmly into his straight, freckled nose. It was as if she could see his skeleton within him, all those intricately shaped bones joined up together, so perfect that it made her angry. She swung again and again and again. It was only when the teachers pulled her off him that she heard the shrieks and crying of her classmates, felt the wet slick of blood and tissue on her knuckles, the hard bruises on her knees.
The others shrank away from her as she was led away. Some were crying, others, silent and pale. No one would meet her gaze, no one except Opal, who was sitting back in her chair, as if calmly waiting for class to begin. Opal’s eyes met hers straight on, a satisfied smile twitching at the corners of her lips, as if something had been confirmed. As if she had always known.
* * *
The Incident—that was what Lea’s mother called it. You wouldn’t know Uju’s power just by looking at her. It was from Uju that Lea got her wiry frame and narrow shoulders, her mild, canine eyes. Uju walked lightly, as if on eggshells or water, and her movements were always measured and careful. She gave the impression of being breakable, particularly when standing in the shade of her stocky, strong-limbed husband.
But when she started talking, people turned to watch and listen. They couldn’t help it. It was something to do with her voice, deeper and slower than you’d expect, a voice that compelled the world to bend to her will. She imbued individual units of speech with whatever meaning she wished. So when she used the word Incident, tongue tripping around the three syllables as if on an obstacle course, her listeners barely registered the first syllable. Accident, it sounded like. An accident for poor, dear Lea.
While Uju did not have a Ministry job, she had the next best thing (the word next nullified by her intonation—it was the best thing, really): senior vice president at Talent Global, a human resources agency and one of the Ministry’s few preferred suppliers.
It was only years later that Lea would link the sudden slew of dinner guests and lavish parties with what had happened. She never found out exactly how Uju managed it, but somehow enough people in the Ministry agreed with her definition of the Incident for nothing to go onto Lea’s permanent record.
She said all the right things at the interviews. It was easy. Her mother had laid the groundwork. Lea said it over and over, the same story in different gleaming offices, their walls lined with the same Ministry posters and their desks stacked with the same leaflets, the doctors’ faces blurred into one solicitous, concerned blur. She told them about the bullying. She told them she felt trapped, intimidated, in danger. She told them about her brother’s death, about how she still woke up in the middle of the night calling out for him, only to realize he was no longer there.
From her mother’s warnings, she had expected the doctors to be stern-faced women with stark, windowless offices, women who would interrogate her mercilessly. But instead they were chatty young men, curly haired and with startling eye colors and bookcases filled with potted plants. They listened to her with rapt expressions, heads attentively cocked, occasionally writing down something particularly salient she had said with old-fashioned ballpoint pens. They pulled her chair out for her when she entered the room, inquired after her mother and her pet goldfish, offered her jasmine green tea.
Reactive explosive episode—these were the words offered up after months of diagnosis. When she heard, Uju clapped her hands together and raised her gaze upward, as if to thank some being that she did not believe existed.
“A Class C illness,” her mother told her with her usual manner, now that everything had gone according to plan. “That means incidental, not chronic or, worse still, genetic. Treatable, and, most important, it won’t affect your record.”
“Took them that long to figure it out?” Kaito remarked from the couch. “Lea beat up a kid trying to lay hands on her, big deal. Sure, it’s bad luck he hit his head on the floor the way he did. I still think she was well within her rights.”
“Lea put a boy in hospital,” Uju said testily. “Severe head injury, fractures, plastic surgery. He’ll need replacements at the age of eleven. He’s in a coma; they say he might be brain dead. She could have been charged with something far worse, could have been considered—antisanct. I don’t see how this is just a big joke to you.”
Antisanct. Lea rolled the unfamiliar word around in her head. She had heard it whispered in recent years, had seen women in sharp skirt suits—not unlike the ones Uju wore—discussing the rise of antisanct behavior on morning talk shows. It was a serious, adult word, one which frightened her. Antisanct, antisanct, antisanct. Lea had heard what was unsaid in her mother’s words, the shape of what could have been, if not for her connections and coaching. This alternative version of events loomed darkly at the edges of Lea’s imagination.
The doctors would monitor her for the next year, just to confirm the diagnosis. During that time, she buried the memory of her mother’s ominous words, ignored her tense optimism, reinvented her own story. She told it so many times she came to believe it—it was their fault, not hers. Her classmates were cruel, ignorant, thoughtless. She had merely been lashing out like a trapped animal. A fluffy white rabbit, fur softer than air, came to mind. There was nothing wrong with her, nothing wrong with her at all.
* * *
It seemed that everything had been taken care of, that Uju had made the problem go away. But one evening, as Lea sat with her parents around the dining table sipping their Nutripaks, Uju said she thought Lea should pay Dwight a visit in the hospital. It had been six months, and while his condition had stabilized, he was still in a coma.
Lea stopped sipping. Her hands went cold. The boy’s face, pale and smeared with blood, his nose at a crooked angle, flashed before her eyes. She did not want to see him again.
“It would be good if you brought him something, maybe a decorative fruit basket of some kind. Something you could leave behind,” Uju was saying.
“What, aren’t we done with this PR bullshit yet?” Kaito demanded. He ate with a spoon from a bowl, into which Uju had poured the Nutripak contents. Ever since the Incident, he had been trying to cooperate with Uju, perhaps because one of the reasons given for Lea’s outburst had been what the doctors called a “dysfunctional home environment.” Still, he could not bear to sip the Nutripaks from their built-in straws. Made him feel like a child drinking from a juice box, he said. He would eat with utensils like a regular human being, thank you very much.
“It would help,” Uju said, steely-eyed. “Remember, the diagnosis is conditional. She’s still being monitored.”
“The diagnosis was bull to begin with, and I don’t see why—”
“I’ll go,” Lea said, cutting her father off. “I want to go,” she lied, swallowing hard.
Kaito looked at her. “You sure, Lea? Don’t let them pressure you into jumping through any hoops, now. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”
She knew from the past few months that her father was wrong. After the Incident, she had to prove herself to everyone. She would have to keep proving herself, over and over, for a very long time.
“I know,” Lea said. “I just want to go. I want to see him—Dwight.” Saying his name made her feel slightly ill.
Her father studied her face. She felt he could see right through her.
“Okay, then,” he said slowly. “I’ll go with you. We can go to
morrow morning.”
“Wonderful,” Uju said.
* * *
They forgot the fruit basket, so they picked up an oversized bouquet of lilies in the hospital. The flowers were white and waxy—“To signal we come in peace,” Kaito joked—spitting tongues daubed with bright yellow pollen. They were beautiful and extravagant, but there was something aggressive about their cloying smell. Lea didn’t like them, but the only other option was a bunch of wilting roses, so they went with the lilies.
Lea had been to the hospital once before, to visit Samuel close to the end. So she wasn’t surprised that it looked nothing like the maintenance clinics she normally visited, did not find the stark lights and chemical smells alarming. It was the largest, most reputable hospital in the Central Boroughs, so it was no surprise that Dwight’s parents had checked him in here, just as Lea’s parents had checked Samuel in all those years ago.
It had been seven years. Lea still knew where the cafeteria was, still remembered that the toilet doors swung out instead of in. She scrutinized the faces of men and women in white coats passing urgently down the hallways, wondering if she would recognize Samuel’s doctor if she saw her again. But Dwight was housed in a different wing of the cavernous hospital. After consulting a candy-colored map, Kaito and Lea headed to the elevator that would take them to the right ward.
Lea was holding the flowers. They were half her size and towered over her head. Strangers in the hallway stopped to smile at her, to ask her kindly if she was visiting someone. She nodded and smiled back tightly, while her hands grew cold and slippery, and her arms ached with the weight of the bouquet. Still, she would carry them; she would not ask for Kaito’s help. She did not deserve the strangers’ kindness, Lea thought to herself. If they knew why she was here, if they knew what she’d done, no one would smile at her in the hallways.
She was antisanct.
Uju might have smoothed things over, and the doctors might have been fooled, but Lea knew what she had felt when she broke Dwight’s nose, when she pushed him to the floor and heard his head crack against the hard linoleum and yet, still, she did not stop. She alone knew about the tiny light that burned within her each and every day, a light that threatened to flare up at any moment, to scorch the unblemished surfaces of things and people around her. She alone knew that the feeling had not gone away after hurting Dwight but had only grown stronger.
